LETTERATURA ANGLOAMERICANA (L-LIN/11) Anno accademico: 2013/2014, I semestre Corso di laurea magistrale (30 ore, 6 CFU) Dott. Fiorenzo Iuliano

Queer Modernisms Il corso, che sarà tenuto in lingua inglese, intende analizzare una serie di testi prodotti negli Stati Uniti nei primi decenni del Novecento che problematizzano e mettono in discussione le categorie tradizionali di genere e di identità sessuale. In particolare, le lezioni si soffermeranno sui seguenti temi, esaminati in relazione ai testi letterari analizzati: (auto)rappresentazione delle donne e dell’identità femminile e crisi del ruolo maschile tradizionale nella società e nella cultura degli Stati Uniti agli inizi del Novecento; l’omosessualità come nuovo paradigma di identificazione o come stru- mento di radicale decostruzione delle categorie di gender e sessualità; rapporto tra identità sessuale e identità etnica.

Bibliografia Testi primari 1. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) 2. Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D. (1903) 3. Claude McKay, “The Clinic” (1923) 4. Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises (1926) 5. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) Bibliografia teorico-critica 1. Rita Barnard, “Modern American Fiction”, in Walter B. Kalaidjian, ed., The Cambridge Com- panion to American Modernism, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 39-67. 2. Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, “Gay, lesbian and queer theory”, in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (5th edition), Harlow, Longman, 2005, pp. 243-266. 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from “Introduction: Axtiomatic”, in Epistemology of the Closet, Uni- versity of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 1-22. 4. Eric Haralson, “‘The Other Half Is the Man’: the queer modern triangle of Gertrude Stein, Er- nest Hemingway, and Henry James”, in Henry James and Modernity, Cambridge UP, Cam- bridge, 2003, pp. 173-204. 5. Marshall Boswell, Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of American Literature. 1607 to the Pre- sent, Facts on File, New York, 2008 (le voci su H. James, G. Stein, C. McKay, E. Heming- way, N. Larsen).

Avvertenze per il corso e per l’esame a. Dato il carattere monografico del corso, la frequenza è assolutamente consigliata. Il corso si svol- gerà in maniera seminariale: per questo motivo, la partecipazione attiva di studenti e studentesse al- le lezioni sarà valutata ai fini dell’esame finale. b. I romanzi e racconti devono essere letti nell'originale. All’esame si dovrà essere in grado di legge- re e tradurre qualunque parte del testo inglese. Di tutti i testi si richiede comunque una conoscenza diretta, critica e dettagliata: vale a dire, non una generica cognizione della trama, o l’apprendimento di un commento generale. Studenti/esse dovranno mostrare di orientarsi nei singoli testi ed essere in grado di analizzarne e commentarne criticamente le specifiche articolazioni, con riferimento sia ad altre parti del testo che alia bibliografia critica prescritta. c. I testi di McKay e Stein e tutti i testi critici saranno forniti dal docente in fotocopia. d. I testi di James, Hemingway e Larsen sono facilmente reperibili in biblioteca e nelle librerie. Que- ste sono le collocazioni nelle biblioteche di ateneo: - Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”. Il testo è incluso nelle seguenti raccolte: Fifteen Short Sto- ries (Biblioteca di Scienze del Linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR JAMEH 004 I); Selec- ted Short Stories, a cura di Quentin Anderson (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; collocazione: DEPOSITO C.A1 2473); The Portable Henry James, a cura di Morton Dauwen Zabel (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; collocazione: DEPOSITO C.A1 2410) - Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR HEMIE 007 X - Nella Larsen, Passing: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio, collocazione: AMERICANO NARR LARSN 001

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RITA BARNARD Modern American fiction

Introduction There is no need for us to quarrel with Alfred Kazin when he writes in the introduction to On Native Grounds (1942) that modern American fiction is “at bottom only the expression” of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. No one cause or project can be singled out as the defining feature of this diverse body of writing. “Everything,” says Kazin, “contributed to its formation.” Its roots were “nothing less than the transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the War” and its project was ultimately a cognitive one: “the need to learn what the reality of life was in our modern era.”1 The social transformation in question has been characterized in many dif- ferent ways, both before and since Kazin’s day. The historian Warren Susman saw the period as marking a transition from a producer-capitalist culture (with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance (with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment). This broad shift, he observed, was partly the consequence of new communications media, which affected not only the distribution and circulation of goods and ideas, but altered perceptions of time and place and thereby changed consciousness itself. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy (1938) is a verita- ble archive of the technological, political, and linguistic changes that shaped the nation from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, saw these years in terms of the “crystallization” of monopoly capitalism out of an earlier, more individualistic competitive capitalism.2 But it is an older writer, Sherwood Anderson, who gives us the most vivid thumbnail sketch of the changes from which modern American fic- tion emerged. In Winesburg, Ohio (1922), Anderson observes that the read- ers of his day may already find it difficult to understand the sensibilities of people whose lives were shaped by an earlier world of harsh agricultural labor:

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The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses and . . . the coming of the automobile has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men...[He] is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.3

The “revolution” of modernity, as Anderson calls it, was not the exclusive experience of urban sophisticates: it extended unevenly but inexorably across the nation – even into the country store and into the minds of the folks who still gathered around the woodstove to chat. Now, it is easy to come up with a long line-up of writers – from Upton Sinclair to John Dos Passos, from Theodore Dreiser to Nathanael West, and from Abraham Cahan to Henry Roth – who have tackled such issues as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the rise of the mass media in their work. But to say that modern fiction takes these topics as its sub- ject matter does not fully address the way in which it might “express” its historical moment, especially given the fact that this “moment” may not be experienced everywhere in the same way, nor at the same pace. How exactly did the transformation of modern life change narrative form? And does mod- ern fiction in fact provide that special knowledge about modern “reality” of which Kazin speaks? Or is there something about modernity that disables cognition, if not narrative itself? In his “Literary Prophecy” of 1894, the novelist Hamlin Garland, tak- ing courage from what he saw as the positive evolution of society, pre- dicted the shape that the fiction of “modern man” was to take. He got several things right, even though his belief in progress now makes his essay seem like the product of a bygone age. Garland believed that the emergent literature would react against the traditions of the past and attend fear- lessly to the uglier contemporary aspects of reality. Narrative techniques, he predicted, would be streamlined: “Because the novels of the past were long, involved, and given to discussion and comment upon the action,” he observes, “so the novel of the future will be shorter” and less obvious in its method. Its “lessons” will be brought out, not by explanation, but “by placing before the reader the facts of life as they stand related to the artist.”4

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Though few modern writers, living in the wake of World War I and the stock market crash of 1929, would have endorsed Garland’s optimistic beliefs, there were certainly some who found in the speed, scale, and techno- logical inventiveness of the age a stimulus for new forms. Nathanael West, for one, also imagined that the short novel would become the quintessential American form, since it is more suited to a “hasty” people than the long “Scandinavian” tomes of yesteryear. Modern works of fiction only had time to “explode” like “cannon balls.” In a culture where “violence is idiomatic,” where a brutal crime may not even make it to the front page of a newspaper, there is no need to follow a Dostoyevsky in spending whole chapters pro- viding the psychological motivation “for one little murder.” A new kind of fiction, adapted to an environment of screaming headlines, would have to be devised, even if the writer had to turn to commercial forms like the comics for inspiration. If some American writers could, in a spirit of national bravado, dispense with traditional narrative forms (or pretend to do so), the most important European theorists of modern fiction, Georg Lukacs´ and Walter Benjamin, saw the decline of such forms as a cognitive and political crisis. For Lukacs´ the realist novel offered a way of understanding historical causality – the work- ings of the entire social process – by representing the interaction of human subjects and the objective world. When this dialectic vision is abandoned, he argues, narration loses its dynamic quality: it becomes fixed either on the subject or the object. The result is either an overemphasis on the inner psycho- logical world or an overemphasis on the external world. Antithetical though these two strategies may seem, they are for Lukacs´ identical in their presump- tion of a static world: they tend to produce series of disjointed scenes and to turn human lives into still lives. Moreover, while the traditional omniscient narrator, deploying the retrospective vantage of the past tense, was able to provide the reader with a sense of the overall direction and significance of the action, the modernist writer, often using the present tense and experimental points of view, is caught up in a flux of emotions, memories, and sense per- ceptions. In Lukacs’s´ view, this loss of an interpretive purchase on the world cannot be offset by attaching a symbolic meaning to objects or incidents. In fact, all of modernism’s technical experimentation seemed dangerous to him in that it undermined the significance and transformative potential of human action: hence the harsh prescriptiveness that characterizes his work.5 Though more sympathetic to modernism than Lukacs,´ Benjamin also despaired of drawing any “lesson” or useful knowledge from modern fic- tion. Experience itself, or so he declared in his “Storyteller” essay of 1936, had “fallen in value”: its inherent meaningfulness and narratability had been lost. Thus the soldiers who returned from the battlefields of the World War I

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard had “grown silent, not richer – but poorer in communicable experience.” But unlike Lukacs,´ for whom the realist novel represented a cognitive ideal, Benjamin regarded the novel itself as an early symptom of a crisis in narra- tion. While the storyteller, whom Benjamin locates in a pre-capitalist world of artisanal production, could readily offer advice – the proverbial “moral of the story” – to his auditors, the novelist, who emerges in a bourgeois world of mechanized production and isolated consumption, can reveal the “mean- ing of life” only at the conclusion of strenuous artistic labors. In the bustle of the modern world, even this hard-won, synthetic meaning threatens to disappear. For as mechanized production accelerates, the novel is gradually replaced by “information” – by the shards of narrative we find in the news- paper. Feeding on experiences that are in constant danger of obsolescence, the fractured format of the daily news destroys our narrative abilities and depreciates experience even further: “modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.”6 Thus brevity, the very quality that some Amer- ican writers celebrated as an exciting innovation, comes to be viewed in Benjamin’s mournful meditation as a distressing symptom of a reified world. With these initial reflections on modernist form in place, we are ready for a thought experiment. In light of the terms set up so far, let us ask ourselves what the most thoroughly “modern” American novel might be, and then consider whether or not that novel can be viewed as a representative product of the period. Or to put the question differently and more perversely: which American novel would Georg Lukacs´ have hated the most? I vote that the prize should go – why not? (we are experimenting here) – to Nathan Asch for Pay Day, published to no acclaim whatsoever in 1930. Let me briefly describe its relevant qualities, before returning to broader consid- erations. Pay Day is a compact novel: the action, such as it is, is confined to a twelve-hour period, from the end of one workday to the dawn of the next. Even so, it is episodic, lacking in any sense of cumulative significance. The desultory character of the narration (which is mimicked in the disap- pointingly plotless movie the main character goes to see midway through the novel) is presented as an effect of the modern settings from which the various chapters derive their titles: “The Subway,” “The Street,” “The Speakeasy,” “The Taxi,” and so forth. In the chapter entitled “The L,” for instance, the stream-of-consciousness narration records one trivial urban scene after another in rapid succession; it mimics the passive, spectatorial experience of the commuter, looking out at the passing cityscape from a fast-moving train. Pay Day’s modernity can also be seen in its obvious economic concerns. Though Asch’s novel is devoid of the Jazz Age glamor of, say, Fitzgerald’s fic- tion, it is similarly concerned with the emerging ethos of consumption. The novel’s antihero, a spotty young clerk called Jim Cowan, having received

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction his pitifully small paycheck, feels compelled to hit the town and blow his earnings on a date with a waitress. But since Cowan’s means are so petty, his version of “nightlife” is entirely unromantic: it merely exacerbates his sense of resentment. Indeed, the rapid oscillation of his emotions, which switch in a matter of seconds from self-satisfaction to self-pity and then to aggression is a symptom of the powerlessness of the white-collar flunkey, liable to be fired at any minute. But Pay Day, while clearly symptomatic of modernity, at times seems diag- nostic of it as well: it draws the reader’s attention to the way the distraction of urban life impedes active political involvement. The novel takes place on the night of August 23, 1927, the same night that anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Boston. Headlines, newsboys, and taxi-drivers constantly remind Cowan of this significant political event. But the barrage of sense impressions to which he is subjected make it impossible for him to reflect on the implications of the men’s deaths: he only remembers the executions at the end of the novel, when a new day dawns without bringing much insight or hope to Manhattan’s ordinary Jims and Joes. Pay Day is deeply responsive to some of the quintessential features of social modernity and to the challenges they present to conventional fictional forms. But the truth is that it is neither as apolitical as Lukacs´ would assume, nor is it a particularly typical novel of its day (if there is such a thing), even though it resembles the novels of Dos Passos and West in various ways, and seems to have influenced Richard Wright’s Lawd Today!, an equally plotless urban novel which takes place on February 12, 1936: the anniver- sary of Lincoln’s birthday. Pay Day does what failed works of fiction often do: it serves as a kind of limit text compared to which other more success- ful or canonical works might seem more traditional, less tailormade to the theorist’s or polemicist’s order. If we think of the vast body of fiction pro- duced in the United States between 1895 and 1939, the dates that frame this volume, it is clear that brevity, for one thing, did not turn out to be a uni- versal feature. Alongside the many compact novellas and the short story cycles of the period (including Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer’s Cane, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Faulkner’s The Unvanquished and The Wild Palms, Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven and Tortilla Flat, Caldwell’s Georgia Boy, and McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps), there are also many volu- minous works, like the novels of James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe. Along- side the many works that are urban in their setting and inspiration, there are also many that take place in far-flung rural places: in Faulkner’s Northern Mississippi, in Hurston’s Everglades, in McNickle’s Montana, in Heming- way’s Upper Peninsula, or in another country, for that matter – in rural Spain, on the quay at Smyrna, or in the mud of the Italian front. And alongside

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard works that are concerned with pathological states and experimental points of view, there are also many works, especially in the 1930s, which return to various versions of realism and documentary. Whole new genres concerned with action rather than inner states arose: one might think, for instance, of the many strike novels produced as part of the experiment in Proletarian Literature, and of popular genres like the Western and the hardboiled detective novel. The storyteller’s voice, finally, did not entirely disappear: Faulkner’s The Hamlet (1940) offers us the folksy narration of the loqua- cious sewing machine salesman, V. K. Ratliffe, while Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), presents itself as a life story shared between two friends as they sit on the porch one evening. And West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), while it traces the debilitating effects of the mass media on individuals’ ability to narrate their lives, also recognizes that “lessons” and “advice,” which once circulated so freely in traditional communities, had reappeared in commercial guise in advertisements and newspaper sob columns. Literary critics are fond of quoting famous authors who announce the exact moment (more or less) when social modernity transformed the char- acter of life, whether it is Virginia Woolf, who declared that “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” or Robert Musil, who observed that “there was a sudden rift” in European civilization in 1914, when “all of a sudden, the world was full of violence,” or Willa Cather, who lamented that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.”7 The reason for our attachment to these dramatic pronouncements is perhaps that they relieve us of the obligation of considering the extent to which the old and the new coexist, with varying degrees of tension, in any given period. It is important to remember that the rapid pace of social change brought with it a hanker- ing for tradition and that the revolution of modernity triggered its counter- revolutions. The “New Era” or “Jazz Age,” as the historian Lawrence Levine observes, was in many ways backward-looking: it was certainly an age of new technologies and lifestyles, of the automobile, the movies, the flappers, and the cynical “Lost Generation,” but it was also a time when many Amer- icans tried to turn the clock back from the ideas and the progressive spirit of the prewar years. Fundamentalism, nativism, and the Ku Klux Klan flour- ished, Prohibition was instituted, and Left-wing political movements were suppressed.8 The culture of the 1930s was similarly complex. Even though radical commitments were widespread and Communist Party membership was at a high during this decade, it was also a time when insecurity imposed a certain conformity and when a homegrown idea of “culture” thrived: “The American Way of Life” was, in fact, a coinage of the so-called Red Decade. And if the World Fair of 1939 celebrated modern technology (including the

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first prototype of television), it was also the year when Colonial Williams- burg was reconstructed and opened to tourists. It should therefore not surprise us that novels like Pay Day and Gone With the Wind (to reach for its polar opposite) should be produced within five years of each other. Nor should it surprise us that a novelist like Willa Cather should deploy some of the techniques of the modern novel – its spareness, its attentiveness to point of view and structure – to voice a criticism of modernity and celebrate what she saw as the anti-materialist values of a pioneer aristocracy. Anyone approaching American culture in the first three decades of the twentieth century has to untangle “a web of ambivalence” (204), a manifestation of what Levine identifies as

the central paradox of American history: a belief in progress coupled with a dream of change, an urge towards the inevitable future combined with a long- ing for the irretrievable past; a deeply ingrained belief in America’s unfolding destiny and a haunting conviction that the nation was in a state of decline. (191)

The task of offering an overview of modern American fiction is therefore a difficult one, and I would like to approach it by adopting a modernist strategy: that of reducing things to their basic constitutive elements. In the pages that follow, I will consider a number of key works under three very simple rubrics: place, time, and value (both moral and economic). But there is an additional element of narrative – one so fundamental that it often eludes discussion. That element is, quite simply, the word, which modernist writers often tried to make especially visible to their readers by techniques of defa- miliarization, repetition, or poetic figuration. Literary historians often cite the powerful passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) in which his narrator summarily bans an entire vocabulary of idealistic generalization:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain . . . [F]or a long time now I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.9

But which words were newly permissible and resonant in the fiction of the period? We might think, first, of the perfectly ordinary words (“beginning,” “interesting,” “always,” and “certainly”) that came to seem like familiar strangers in Stein’s rhythmic reiterations. Or, we might think of the spare diction of Hemingway’s best novels: the way words like “nice” or “utilize” come to seem overdetermined in the conversations of his terse expatriates.

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We might think next of the folksy vocabulary Hurston (writing “with the map of Florida on her tongue”) introduced into American fiction: not only such playful, earthy words as “woof” and “boogerboo,” but also high- toned malapropisms like “monstropolous,” “combuction,” “diasticutis,” and “freezolity.” We might think also of those ponderous adjectives like “myriad,” “immemorial,” “immutable,” and “impervious,” which, along with a few “grand, truculent indomitables,” gave the idiosyncratic flavor to Faulkner’s work.10 We might think furthermore of the many brand names that come into play as markers of consumerist know-how: Chesterfields, Wrigley, Coca-Cola, Listerine, Remington, Kodak, and Chrysler. And we might consider, finally, the grim, monosyllabic vocabulary that brought to life the world of the marginal men of the 1930s: words like “vag,” “gat,” “flop,” “bull,” “drag,” and “stiff,” which reminded readers how far America remained from the place of promise and prosperity projected by the utopian writers of the Progressive Era. For Lukacs,´ the fact that modern fiction made individual words noticeable was yet another sign of its impotence – of its failure to provide the sense of hierarchy, by which words, sentences, and paragraphs could be subordinated to the narrative’s overall revelation of the social totality. But for many Amer- ican modernists it was precisely by attending to words, by revitalizing them and by placing them in new contexts that the novel could begin to do political work. “[W]e have only words” against “Power Superpower,” declared John Dos Passos near the end of U. S. A. And at the end of Pay Day (to return to our typical-atypical modern novel), Nathan Asch puts a striking message in the mouth of a drunk who denounces his fellow subway passengers for their inattention to Sacco and Vanzetti’s unjust execution. In a world of headlines, of the easy amusements of sports page and the comics, the orator proclaims, language becomes “old, stale . . . used too much.” What is needed is “a way to wake [people] up, to make them realize words.”11 In his insistence on this need, if in no other respect, Asch is a representative voice of his times.

Place In recent years, a concern with spatiality (as opposed to temporality) has come to be regarded as the defining trait of postmodernism (as opposed to modernism). But broad distinctions of this sort are not, in fact, so read- ily made. Modernism, after all, has long been associated with a movement from the country to the city – and thus with questions of place and space. Moreover, many of the technical innovations in the modernist novel (e.g., the creation of the impressionistic, synchronous, anti-individualist form of narration that we see in a work like Manhattan Transfer [1925]) are the

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction result of an intensified interest in the writer’s immediate milieu – in what we may call the “location of culture.” The rise of a theoretically sophisti- cated cultural geography over the past decade or so suggests that critical interest in the socio-spatial aspects of modernist fiction is likely to remain strong. With its emphasis on the dialectics of subjectivity and space and the textual nature of geographical environments, the new cultural geography may enable new readings of virtually forgotten urban novels, such as Waldo Frank’s City Block (1922) and Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), both of which explore the way in which human interactions are defined by complex, but narrowly circumscribed physical spaces. But postcolonial studies too, with its profound questioning of the rela- tionship between cultural centers and peripheries, may come to provide new perspectives on the imaginative geographies of modern American fiction. In fact, the story that Malcolm Cowley tells in his memoir Exile’s Return (1934) of a generation’s cultural deracination, its exile, and its eventual reclaiming of native turf now strikes one as very similar to the creative struggles recounted some thirty or forty years later by postcolonial intellectuals (and this sim- ilarity reveals much about the dramatic shift in power between America and Europe over the course of the twentieth century). Cowley notes that the writers of his generation, the men and women born around the turn of the century, would have considered the site of their childhood – a farm in Wisconsin, a plantation house among the cane brakes, a bluff overlook- ing the Cumberland, or a Nebraska prairie – as “home.” But their formal education was aimed at “destroying whatever roots they had in the soil” and “making [them] homeless citizens of the world.” They absorbed the message that art, learning, and literature existed “at an indefinite distance from [their] daily lives” – that “[w]isdom was an attribute of Greece and art of the Renaissance; glamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna.”12 For the modernists of Cowley’s generation, as for contemporary writers like Nadine Gordimer and Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, formal education was a matter of cultural alienation, of reading books that took place elsewhere, and their intellectual self-discovery involved either a “journey back” or a rewriting of established cultural geographies – the difficult enterprise of “moving the center,” as Ngugi puts it.13 In the case of the modern American writer, however, one must specify that the “return” would not exactly be a journey home. (We need only recall Hem- ingway’s depiction of a returned veteran’s profound dislocation in “Soldier’s Home.”) The “return” was more likely to involve the discovery of forms in which a sense of being out of place or off-center could be turned to aesthetic advantage. Modern American fiction, as Kazin observes, is characterized by a sense of “alienation on native grounds” (ix).

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This structure of feeling is captured perfectly in Sherwood Anderson’s “Certain Things Last” (1920), a self-reflexive story on the difficulties of finding a place in and about which to write. The city of Chicago, where the story’s narrator lives, presents ceaseless distractions to the would-be writer: even as he confesses his problems to the reader, he hears the driver of a horse- drawn coal wagon cursing at the driver of a Ford. His boyhood home, the only place he can turn to in memory, happens to be “a dreary, lonely little place in the far western section of the state of Nebraska.” It is, Anderson tells us, the kind of place that makes a “middle-westerner” dream that he is in Italy, or in a Spanish town where “a dark-looking man is riding a bony horse along a street,” or that “he is being driven in a sled over the Russian steppes by a man whose face is covered in whiskers.” But the narrator realizes almost instantly that his imagined “Italy,” “Spain,” and “Russia” derive from “the cartoons in the newspapers” or lectures he might have attended in a church hall and the story ends with his recognition that he should write about things closer at hand: about the woman who is with him, or about a certain “moment” that “changed the whole current of his life.”14 This particular solution is vintage Anderson; but the story is evocative of the challenge confronting many modern American writers and to which they produced an immense variety of responses. Let us consider the case of Willa Cather. In contrast to Anderson’s narrator, she seems effortlessly able to discover the stuff of novels in rural Nebraska. By dint of a nostalgic recollection of her childhood on the plains, she is able to project a sense of cultural authority and normativity with regard to the period of early settle- ment, when pioneer virtue was leavened by the spirit of cosmopolitanism, contributed by large numbers of immigrants from various parts of Europe: Germany, Norway, France, Denmark, Poland, and Bohemia. Cather’s suc- cess in imaginatively “moving the center” westward is such that her cowboy- scholar Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1926) is able to compare the Aeneid to a mesa in New Mexico without the slightest sense that the cul- tural importance of the former outweighs that of the latter. But we should not therefore underestimate the initial difficulty of writing about a place where, as the narrator Jim Burden puts it in My Antonia´ (1915), “[t]here was nothing but land: not country at all, but the material out of which country was made.” This difficulty is strikingly underscored by Cather herself when she reminds us in 1931 that when she published her first novel Alexander’s Bridge in 1912, the proper setting for fiction was still thought to be a draw- ing room – and a drawing room full of “smart people and clever people” to boot.15 If Cather’s work was enabled and her sense of belonging enriched by the historical fact of mass immigration, the opposite was true for some writers

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction of Anglo-American descent. An extreme and early case may be that of Henry Adams, the son of presidents, “American of Americans, with Heaven knows how many Puritans and Patriots behind him,” who recorded in The Edu- cation of Henry Adams (1906) his mournful sense of having been displaced by the new residents of America’s cities – the energetic immigrants, “still reeking of the Ghetto” – and who likened himself to “the Indians or the buf- falo who had been ejected from their heritage.”16 The anxieties about new demographic configurations and forms of social mobility registered here were exacerbated after World War I, when they influenced the characterization, narrative shape, and symbolic geographies of some of the most celebrated novels of the Jazz Age. For all its interest in social climbing and self-invention, The Great Gatsby (1925) seems quite conservative if we attend to its treat- ment of place, in both the social and geographical sense of the term. Fitzger- ald presents New York, “with its racy adventurous feel,” as the site of a new urban poetry. But he also imagines it as the all-too-fluid location of a new kind of threat: in the novel’s “metropolitan twilight,” the pre-eminent place of a wealthy white man is challenged every time a group of “modish Negroes” in a fine limousine happens to pass him in traffic.17 The established social hierarchy is also symbolically undermined by the undifferentiated des- olation of the Valley of Ashes, the uncanny dumping ground through which commuters from the Long Island suburbs must pass on their way to the city. Critics have often remarked on Jay Gatsby’s confused sense of geography (social and otherwise), as reflected in his ludicrous claim that he is the scion of a prominent midwestern family from San Francisco. But the closing med- itations of Nick Carraway, the novel’s cautious narrator, also attach some rather idiosyncratic meanings to the “East” and the “West” of the United States. In a reactionary version of an exile’s return, Nick reclaims the West as the “warm center of the world” rather than the “ragged end of the uni- verse,” and idealizes the kind of city “where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name” (184). This resigned conclusion expresses a nos- talgic hankering for a landscape in which “Mr. Nobod[ies] from Nowhere” – the charming Gatbsy no less than the uncharming Jewish gangster, Meyer Wolfsheim – would be excluded almost automatically. The novel’s symbolic geography lends considerable credence to Walter Benn Michaels’s judg- ment that The Great Gatsby, like many of the major novels of the mid- twenties, is fraught with nativist fears that demand narrative resolution: in this case the hope that the hybrid entanglements and “gonnegtions” spawned by a polyglot metropolis may be confined, somehow, to the dangerous “East.” The quintessentially modern sense of dislocation and alienation is also a crucial theme in immigrant fiction. In these texts the protagonists’

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard development of any coherent sense of identity is impeded by a pervasive sense of being simultaneously in America and “in a world somewhere, somewhere else.”18 This peculiar self-division is beautifully captured in the rendering of the immigrants’ accented English in Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep: “Land where our Fodder’s Died” turns the anthem “My Country ‘tis of Thee’ into a par- ody and makes nonsense of its nativist geography. The confusion captured here is in no way simplified by the fact that second-generation immigrants retained little if any memory of the Europe of their fathers and mothers. In Mike Gold’s semi-autobiographical Jews Without Money (1930), the young Mikey is able to get some idea of what his mother’s beloved Hungarian forests must have been like only during a rare visit to the Bronx Park, and he can understand his father’s longing for the communal sociability of his Romanian stetl only in a neighborhood wine cellar, where a traditional musi- cian plays the old shepherd songs on the cymbalon. But, for all its old-world associations, the wine cellar – like New York itself – is a hybrid space, offer- ing confused models of identity: on one wall there is a picture of Theodor Hertzel and, on the other, a picture of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. It is no wonder that Mikey ends up dreaming a syncretic dream of “a Messiah who would look like Buffalo Bill.” The difficulty of imaginary journeys “home” makes for a paradoxically “forward-looking nostalgia” in immigrant fiction: it is characterized by a yearning for places, ideals, and forms of expression that are not yet in existence.19 The time-honored pastoral tradition, consequently, tends to play out in problematic ways in these mostly urban texts. The opposition between coun- try and city, as James T. Farrell once observed, is not particularly real to people “affected since childhood by the sights, sounds, odors, and objects of an industrial city.” But the residual power of this opposition leaves them entrapped in “a technical dilemma, deriving from...adichotomy between the objects and sensations they have sought to describe and the language and symbolism they have inherited.”20 The point is well illustrated in Jews Without Money. Though Gold denounces a teacher who preaches about nature to the children of a “petrified city” (to do so, he says, is to offer “snapshots of food to a starving man” [40]), he nevertheless represents the abandoned lots where the tenement children play as the Western plains and rhapsodizes about the clumps of grass which bravely managed to sprout from cracks in the sidewalk. Gold is ultimately unable to imagine revolution with- out recourse to the most pastoral of tropes: it is figured at the end of the novel in terms of a rebuilding of the ghetto as “a garden for the human spirit” (309). And even Farrell’s own work is not entirely free of the dilemma he identifies. His depictions of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods in the Studs Lonigan trilogy are by no means romantic; yet there are moments when he turns to

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction natural images to express the energies of an urban scene in which even his more loutish characters are, at times, able to take some pleasure. Thus, in Young Lonigan: “Studs looks about at the patches in the grass that Martin and his gang had torn down playing their cowboy and Indian games. There was something about the things he watched that seemed to enter Studs as sun entered a field of grass; and as he watched, he felt that the things he saw were part of himself, and he felt as good as if he were warm sunlight.”21 This persistence of pastoral ideas, however attenuated, incongruous, and ironic, is a mark of modernism’s difference from nineteenth-century naturalism: it is one thread in the intricate “web of ambiguity” of modern American culture. But as with all generalizations, this observation requires qualification. For in the work of Richard Wright, one of the most important American modernists, the pastoral seems to have lost all relevance, even on the level of figuration – and for good reason. For many African-American migrants to northern cities, the historical memory of slavery and the indignities of Jim Crow foreclosed on nostalgia for rural life. The sole utopian moment in Native Son (1940) is thus inspired by an urban scene viewed from a prison window: a vision of tall buildings expanding and unfolding as a result of the collective desires and longings of men. The radical intervention of Wright’s dark urban masterpiece is strikingly underscored if we relate it to a problematic moment in “Certain Things Last” that I have refrained from discussing so far. Though Anderson’s sketch ulti- mately dismisses the narrator’s dreams of discovering “simpler” milieus in foreign places, it nevertheless holds on to certain primitivist notions as a way of making the modern city more available for fiction. The narrator imagines that the song of a Negro, humming to himself as he goes along the street, might “[freshen] the air above the hot stuffy city” in the way that “a tiny stream running down a hill might freshen the plains below” (4). Such folksy fantasies of redemption are unthinkable in the relentlessly modern and secular world of Native Son. For Bigger Thomas, the novel’s protag- onist, the city of Chicago remains an airless, oppressive place. Though his mother may still hum spirituals (including “Steal away, steal away to Jesus / Steal away home”), her singing cannot mitigate the novel’s profound sense of homelessness: a homelessness that is a material rather than a metaphys- ical condition for African-Americans, inadequately housed as they are in “a prescribed corner of the city.”22 Native Son, in effect, replaces the duali- ties of the pastoral with the more intractable and volatile duality between the white world of comfort and security and the black world of fear, shame, and deprivation. Indeed, duality is too weak a term: for what Kazin describes as the disquieting “irony” in Americans’ “possession” of their native grounds (ix) is strikingly politicized in Native Son, to the point that it becomes a

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard full-blown ethical and political contradiction. The brunt of Wright’s critique of the structural violence of urban segregation is directed at the self-serving morality of the wealthy realtor Dalton, who gives millions of dollars to edu- cate and uplift “Negroes” but makes a fortune out of renting rat-infested properties to them. The dynamic of blindness and insight exposed here has crucial implications for the novel’s form and style. Ways of seeing are simultaneously ways of not seeing; and black and white characters, shaped by their radically different experiences, do not see the same city.23 This explains why Native Son, for all its grimness and interest in social causality, is resolutely modernist, rather than naturalist: though Wright was concerned to get the Chicago street map exactly right, the city is never objectively described. While the young com- munists, Jan Erlone and Mary Dalton, are able to admire the city’s grand skyline and its cultural landmarks, these things are meaningless to Bigger, who can perceive the city only as a treacherous and airless labyrinth, which permits no possibility of escape. Even at the end of the novel, when Bigger’s lawyer provides him with a sense of perspective – he gains for a moment “a pinnacle of feeling upon which he can stand and see vague relations he had never dreamed of” (782) – he cannot shake the sense that this vision, like the mendacious promises of cinema and advertising, may lead him into a blind alley. The nightmarish urban scenes of the novel’s second section (reminiscent of the gangster films of the period) are thus essentially expressionist: they reveal Bigger’s vulnerability, entrapment, and alienation. But they also hint, at times, at more allegorical interpretive possibilities. The abandoned shells of houses on the South Side, where “windows gape blackly, like the eye- sockets of empty skulls” (661) are also an objective correlative of the blind- ness of their owners: of the ruling classes, who, as Bigger’s lawyer puts it, “could not have built nations on so vast a scale had they not shut their eyes to the humanity of other men” (810). With this sweeping indictment, the implications of the novel move far beyond their immediate time and place, looking ahead to literary and critical movements still to follow: to the work of African-American writers like Baldwin and Ellison, to Existentialism, and to contemporary theory, where questions of blindness and insight, visibil- ity and marginalization, and so forth, have been of paramount concern. In Wright’s work, the great modernist discovery of point of view becomes more than a technical device for exploring individual experience. It becomes a matter of ideology, an effect of one’s location in the divisive geographies of American Apartheid. Native Son, in short, forces us to consider the rela- tionship between power and knowledge and between subjectivity and space in strikingly contemporary ways.

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Time To take on the concept of time in modern American fiction is a risky venture. Not only is it a difficult and abstract topic, but in our postmodern academy it has come to seem like an outmoded one as well: “Time has become a nonperson,” Fredric Jameson remarks in a recent essay, and novelists, poets, philosophers, and critics alike have “stopped writing about it.”24 Yet time is not only a constitutive element of all narration, but a major thematic preoccupation in modern American fiction. Modernity, as we have already seen, is intimately connected to the idea of acceleration: in the modern world, as Benjamin suggests, Erfahrung (i.e., experience in the sense of wisdom or skills developed over a long period of time) is gradually displaced by Erlebnis (i.e., experience in the sense of immediate sensations).25 Implicit in Benjamin’s assertion is a sense that the dominant mode of production affects our most basic ways of processing the world; thus modern consciousness is shaped by the rapidity and seriality of assembly line production. But forms of leisure, too, as we have seen in Asch’s Pay Day, can affect those aspects of human experience most suited to conventional novelistic treatment: memory, desire, and hope. In his intellectual history of the period from 1880–1918, Stephen Kern identifies a discovery of interior or “private time” (the kind of flexible tem- porality we see in stream-of-consciousness narration) as one of the most important cultural phenomena of early modernist culture.26 This empha- sis on interiority and “private time,” much as Lukacs´ might denounce it, is not without a social dimension: it is, at least in part, a reaction against the increasing impact of the standardized time of factories, offices, and train schedules. Modernist time, in other words, can itself be historicized, even if the experiments of some modern writers lay in the excision of any sense of historical context and historical causality from their work. It is useful to speculate, along with Jameson, about the conditions that produced mod- ern literature’s obsession with time. Modernism, he insists, is best grasped as the culture of an incomplete and uneven modernity. Until World War II, Europe was only partly industrialized and partly bourgeois. The cre- ators of modernist literature were often men and women who had been born in small villages, but who pursued their careers in large industrial cities: they were people who lived in two distinct worlds simultaneously. Though fascinated by the new and absorbed in it in their daily lives, they were also constantly aware of the old: of residual modes of production that they themselves had witnessed or participated in. Their experiments with narrative time can thus be related to the fact that they had to negotiate in their own lived experience the disjuncture between modern and premodern

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard temporalities.27 Now, it is certainly true that the United States was by the end of the nineteenth century the most modern nation in the world (and the oldest, as Gertrude Stein perversely liked to put it, since it entered the age of mass production the soonest), but the impact of modernity was registered unevenly across its vast territorial sprawl.28 Many American modernists, like their European counterparts, had a strong sense of alternate ways of liv- ing, whether through memories of rural childhoods, through what we might loosely call anthropological experiences, or simply through an alertness to the residual cultural forms still evident in their daily lives. It is no accident, by this logic, that it was Faulkner, the Mississippian, who, of all the major American modernists, had the keenest sense of a pre-industrial mode of pro- duction (namely, plantation slavery) and pushed the experimentation with time the furthest. The obvious entry point for a discussion of the temporalities of American modernism, however, is not the work of Faulkner, but that of William James, to whom we owe that useful and flexible term “stream of consciousness.” The project of James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) was ultimately to enhance our appreciation of the richness of our experiential lives and cognitive pro- cesses. It is fair to say, therefore, that James gave certain philosophical weight to the notion of living for the moment: one of the key ideas of the emergent culture of abundance. Experience (in the sense of Erlebnis) is of immense importance in James’s thinking. Indeed, in his chapter on “The Stream of Thought,” he makes the case that each experience we have of a given fact is essentially unique. This is not to say that for him the truth is made up of raw sensory experiences, severed from the past or future: James’s concern is not to atomize time, but to “thicken” our sense of the present moment: to imagine a sustained or “specious present,” imbued with a “halo” of past experience and future anticipation. James’s interest, moreover, is not so much in our perceptions of fixed objects, but in those experiences of direction and tendency that are not readily labeled by nouns – except perhaps by strange new terms like “nextness, andness, and ifness.”29 The influence of Jamesian psychology is palpable in the early experimental fiction of his student Gertrude Stein: the short story cycle Three Lives (1906) and the sprawling, self-reflexive immigrant saga, The Making of Americans (1923). Though Three Lives takes its inspiration from Flaubert (Stein had tried her hand at translating his Trois Contes before embarking on her own stories), it shows no interest in the dense depiction of social milieu that characterizes Flaubert’s work, and very little in conventional plotting and denouement. All three of the stories (“The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena”) end with the death of the title character, but the death brings no particular lesson or emotional charge. The compositional principle,

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction as Stein liked to say, is cubist: as in the work of Cezanne,´ “everything is as important as everything else.” The moment of closure is therefore no more significant than any other moment and provides no retrospective insight; such meaning as there is, is revealed in the ongoing “habits of attention” by which “the total of character is revealed” (Stein, Selected Writings, 243). But it is Jamesian psychology rather than cubism that explains the texture of Stein’s prose. Her project (which she was later to describe as “ridding . . . [herself] of nouns”) was to devise a style that in its very syntax and lexicon draws our attention to the transitive rather than to the substantive, noun-like aspects of cognition (460). Thus Stein’s keywords, especially in “Melanctha,” the most experimental of the three stories, are participles like “feeling,” “understanding,” “beginning,” “happening,” and “living”: words which might be said to hover between verbs and nouns and which alert us to sustained or habitual states of feeling. “He was now never taking any part in this fighting that was always going on inside him” (95) is the kind of thing that counts as an incident in Three Lives. In fact, all of Stein’s narrative devices – the reiteration of “always” and “never,” the meandering reprises, the simple and tentative vocabulary, which seems to suspend any definitive naming of an experience – are intended to give the effect of what she termed a “prolonged present” (417): this despite the fact that the stories in Three Lives are written in the past tense. If the experimental effect of Stein’s early prose derives in good measure from a grammatical oscillation between verb and noun, the experimen- tal interest of Sherwood Anderson’s story cycle Winesburg, Ohio derives from a generic oscillation between the traditional Bildungsroman and a form of serial composition that owes much to Stein. Malcolm Cowley once described the aesthetic that animates Winesburg, Ohio – and, indeed, all of Anderson’s work – as one of “moments,” of brief intensities without sequel. Anderson can, to be sure, provide illuminating comments about the broader historical forces that shape his characters’ lives. (Indeed, such broader per- spectives are essential in order to emphasize the anachronistic nature of his small-town grotesques, who all yearn for things that are no longer, or not yet, possible.) But Winesburg, Ohio’s series of structurally identical stories, in which the townspeople, one after another, reveal themselves to the young reporter, George Willard, does not really allow for any development, beyond the climactic moment when the characters articulate (or fail to articulate) their desires, disappointments, or loneliness. The aim of the cycle thus seems to be something quite different from the creation of a conventional plot with a beginning, middle, and end: the stories, as Cowley puts it, “exist sepa- rately and timelessly.” And yet, the conventional notion of character devel- opment does not disappear altogether. The three closing stories (“Death,”

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“Sophistication,” and “Departure”) impose, in a somewhat contrived way, the narrative of George Willard’s acquisition of maturity onto the preceding series of fragments, so that by the end of the volume, the grotesques – the very means of Anderson’s protest against the commercialism of the modern world – threaten to become “but a background on which to paint the dreams of [the young reporter’s] manhood” (243). At the heart of Anderson’s most accomplished work lies a narrative and perhaps ideological contradiction between the fractured, lyrical temporality of Erlebnis and the more novelis- tic temporality of Erfahrung. The same could be said of Hemingway’s In Our Time, where the perva- sive irony and imagery of dead babies and unwanted pregnancies should deter readers from approaching the work as a simple Bildungsroman, fea- turing Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams. In Our Time is in fact a chal- lenging experimental work, and one that can be read, as Peter Messent has shown, as an almost point-by-point illustration of Lukacs’s´ account of mod- ernist fiction and its fall from dynamic narration to static description.30 In Messent’s reading, the most crucial aspect of Hemingway’s famous aesthetic of “leaving things out” is a temporal one: the excision of any sense of histor- ical causality and continuity. Though the collection is tightly knit in terms of recurrent motifs and striking juxtapositions, it dispenses (at least in the “chapters” or vignettes dealing with war, crime, and bullfighting) with any chronological and developmental order. Moreover, the structural disjuncture between the brief, objective “chapters” and the more intimate, subjective sto- ries expresses a stark opposition between the individual and the historical world: no interaction or mediation between subject and object seems to be possible. The vision, in other words, is fatalistic: story after story, vignette after vignette, image after image evoke a condition of being “out of season” in modern times. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the only instance in which Nick Adams enters the sequence of “chapters” (and by extension, the wider social context to which they allude) is when he is wounded on the Italian front. The rituals of masculinity that abound in Hemingway’s work in no way contradict Messent’s claim regarding the disappearance of agency from Hemingway’s early and most interesting fiction. If, as Lukacs´ suggests, the symbol imposes a kind of synthetic meaning on objects and events that have in fact lost their significance, the same kind of thing can be said of the bullfight: however brave and skillful, it is ultimately a synthetic action, removed from the historical world – the only theatre in which actions can have transformative consequences. These considerations go some way toward explaining the paradoxical effects of Hemingway’s simple paratactic prose. Though he consistently writes in the active voice and with an apparently meticulous interest in the

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction sequence of actions, the effect is curiously passive; and though the prevailing tense is the past tense, it provides none of the cognitive advantages of retro- spect. The effect is one of extreme immediacy, of what Pound would call “a rain of factual atoms,” reproduced in all their confusing singularity. Thus Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River” knows exactly how to set up camp and make coffee, and sets about performing these tasks in the proper way. But the cumulative effect of his activities is to repress, rather than enhance any understanding of, or even any thought about what Lukacs´ would have called the social totality. The purpose and effect of focusing on the present, rather than on the past or future, is therefore quite different in Stein and in Hemingway. In the case of the former, one might say, it is a quasi-scientific enterprise, and in the case of the latter, a way of blocking out broader (and traumatic) historical truths. To recognize this difference is to register something of the impact of World War I on Hemingway’s generation, and especially on the combatants. In Stephen Kern’s view, World War I condemned early twentieth- century attempts to conceptually extend the interval between past and future (including those of James and Stein) to obsolescence. The war isolated present experience from the usual flow of time. Not only did the lived moment become extraordinarily compelling, both in its shocking violence and its vast spatial extension (observers of the war needed to attend to distant events taking place simultaneously along a vast front line), but it also attenuated any sense of continuity and tradition (294). Hemingway’s In Our Time, with its ironic treatment of conventional pieties, its exclusive attention to the luminous moment, and its wide geographical range – with stories and vignettes taking place all the way from Asia Minor to the Midwest – would seem to give some credence to Kern’s broad claims. But while the effects of World War I on the techniques of modern fiction have been amply considered, not enough has been said about the equally far-reaching effects of the Great Depression, with its pervasive insecurities and sudden reversals of fortune. The poetry and prose of the early 1930s, when millions were unemployed and the old American dream of success – or even just the expectation of a meaningful career – seemed to be in tatters, is often marked by a characteristic sense of time. It can be likened to the atomistic and potentially cataclysmic temporality of gambling, of the long shot: the sense that “one minute you are sitting on top of the world the next you are sitting around a jungle fire telling about it,” as a hobo in Tom Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing (1936) puts it.31 This novel, based on the author’s personal experiences, is one of a number of novels documenting the grim lives of society’s bottom dogs, including Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here (1934), Jack Conroy’s

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The Disinherited (1933), and Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935). But the interest of Waiting for Nothing becomes evident when we relate it not to the proletarian novels with which it tends to be pigeonholed, but to the more canonical modernist works we have discussed so far. Kromer’s novel adopts not only the mannerisms of Hemingway’s early style, but also its implicit attitude toward history: one of fatalistic incomprehension and passivity. The title already draws our attention to a particular kind of temporality. “Waiting” is not entirely a suspension of time (“You do not stay young in a soup line,” observes Tom Kromer, the unfortunate protagonist [66]), but rather a suspension of meaningful, directed action. The novel’s many reiter- ations thus serve not to satisfy an aesthetic of abstract composition, but to emphasize the complete inefficacy of personal effort and initiative. Try as he may to improve his situation, Tom finds himself resorting again and again to some variation of the panhandler’s humiliating line: “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” The pressing need to find food or shelter (“three hots and a flop,” in the novel’s harsh vocabulary) renders sustained reflection impossible, and the novel’s one instance of historical interpretation is, in effect, censored. When Tom, appearing in court on charges of vagrancy, tries to explain his transgression as the result of a worldwide crisis of unemployment, the mag- istrate gavels him down, finds him guilty, and moves on to sentence the next bum. The final chapter of Waiting for Nothing offers an attempt at a retro- spective assessment, but the futile seriality of his life seems to have disabled Tom’s capacity for memory: “I try to think back over the years that I have lived,” he laments, “but I cannot think of years any more. I can think only of the drags I have rode. Of the bulls that have sapped up on me, and the mission slop I have swilled. People I have known, I remember no more . . . My life is spent before it is started . . .” (128). The present tense narration thus comes to seem not an experimental option, but an additional mark of privation. The atomistic temporality of Depression-era modernity has not only eliminated any sense of personal significance, but even the promise of religious transcendence: “[S]ince when did Jesus start keeping office hours?” Tom asks himself at the end of the novel, as he stares at the closed door of a mission, above which a giant electric sign flashes the message: JESUS SAVES (124). The politicized climate of the 1930s, when Gertrude Stein first achieved the celebrity status she craved, provides an interesting perspective on the exper- iments in narrative time with which I began this discussion. Mike Gold, the tireless Marxist polemicist, described her work as symptomatic of the decay of capitalist culture and as “an attempt to annihilate all relations between the artist and the society in which he lives.”32 And it is true that Stein had

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction little interest in history (except perhaps in the very general and abstract sense of “how everybody is doing everything”). But she was deeply interested in mimicking what she described as her period’s characteristic “time-sense” in the “time-sense” of her own composition.33 She was concerned to represent the one quality that lived history and fiction have in common: the tempo- rality and pace of human experience, which, in Stein’s view, was one of the most important distinctions between one period and another. In this respect, if in no other, Stein resembles John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy was concerned to examine and represent the speed of his- tory. It is a novel about the socio-political effects of modern technologies of production, and includes among its major personnages the historical fig- ures of Frederick “Speedy” Taylor, Henry Ford, and the Wright brothers, whose inventions radically accelerated the pace of human life. The various modes of writing that make up the trilogy – the biographies of historical fig- ures, the narratives of fifteen fictional characters, and so-called “Newsreels” and “Camera Eyes” – are all designed to be read at different velocities.34 The collage-like effects of the newsreels, for instance, slow down the pace of read- ing (thus counteracting the high speed at which the language of the media is usually devoured), while the idiosyncratic run-on words (like “pinkishcol- ored,” “nattilydressed,” “slightlybulging,” “internalcombustion,” and “fif- teenhundreddollar”) accelerate the otherwise steady clip at which we con- sume the reasonably suspenseful and realistic fictional narratives. In other words, the novel’s various experimental techniques alert us to what Dos Passos sees as the multiple and unsynchronized temporalities of twentieth- century life. Modernity in U. S. A. is not represented as a simple progression, in which everyone is swept along, but as a dangerous assemblage of unsy- chronized forces, which seldom advances the interest of the individual. It is no accident, then, that the prose poem with which the trilogy opens should represent a young man who is walking “fast but not fast enough ...to catch the last subway, the street car, the bus.” This figure is emblematic, as it turns out, of many of the novel’s characters. Even those who are innovators (like the aviator Charley Anderson and the public relations man J. Ward Moorehouse), or those who seem crafty and dogged enough to surf the trends (like the movie-star Margot Dowling), end up being anachronisms, defeated by relentless processes of acceleration and obsolescence in an economy of scale. In the novel’s closing prose poem, entitled “Vag,” the idea that America has fragmented into “two nations” (1157) – an idea that is also put forward in the stark material oppositions between the haves and have-nots of Kromer’s novel – is expressed in terms of temporality and velocity. The poem contrasts the situation of a hungry hitchhiker, who waits by the side of the road while cars and trucks pass him by, with that of a rich man, who flies overhead in a

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard transcontinental plane, and vomits a meal of steak and mushroom into his airsick bag. “History, the billiondollar speedup” has clearly left the young man behind, while the privileged air-traveler is, at least for the moment, keeping up (1240). If Stein’s experiments with time led her in the end to something rather dif- ferent from fiction, the same might be said, curiously, of Dos Passos. U.S.A is a novel without a denouement: the different modes of writing that constitute it all encompass a somewhat different span of time (the narratives seem to end in 1928, whereas the newsreels include events that took place as late as 1936). The various parts of the novel do not end, as it were, on the same beat, nor do they all permit or demand a similar sense of closure. In order to assess the meaning of U. S. A., or so Barbara Foley has suggested, the reader is forced to attend to the drama of real history – to the fortunes of American capitalism during the Great Depression – rather than to seek for any retro- spective synthesis within the novel itself.35 Dos Passos’s extraordinary effort at including history (and the mass-mediated discourses that shaped it) in the body of his fictional work requires a degree of experimentation at least as radical as that of the various modernist efforts at excluding history from the work of art.

Value I started this essay by suggesting, along with John Dos Passos and Warren Susman, that the transformations of American society in the first half of the twentieth century must be understood in broadly economic terms as a transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, or from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. It seems fitting, then, to conclude with some comments on the sometimes quite intimate ways in which the aesthetic economies of texts – the systems of values and tropes within them – correlate with actual economic conditions. After all, money, as the “material symbol of value itself” is a sign or trope; and many other financial concepts – appreciation, interest, and accounting, for instance – are readily connected to the realm of literature.36 This last connection is nicely captured in the “Storyteller” essay, where Benjamin describes the novelist as an executor of memories, of a sum of experiences, the value of which often adds up to zero (98–99). Whether or not we agree with his melancholy assessment of the novelist’s task, the conception of narrative closure as the moment when the value of the various transactions initiated in a novel is finally calculated remains an intriguing and productive one. It is therefore not surprising that the meeting ground of literature and economics should have proven a fertile

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction terrain for scholarly work, whether focused on the material aspects of literary production or the economic thematics of texts themselves. As in our earlier investigation of place, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return provides a useful entry point. If the memoir is, on one level, the record of a generation’s conversion from a spirit of deracinated cosmopolitanism to a re-invented literary nationalism or journey home, it is also, on another level, the record of Cowley’s personal conversion from the view that “the productive forces of society” were “alien to poetry and learning” to a pre- occupation with the economic conditions and impact of literary creativity (35–36). He argues, for instance, that the values of the Greenwich Village bohemians of the late teens and twenties, though on the surface antagonistic to the materialism of mainstream American culture, actually “fitted into the business picture” quite readily: the ethos of “self-expression” stimulated a demand for all manner of consumer goods from beach pajamas to cosmet- ics, while “living for the moment” often came down to buying things from radios to automobiles to houses on the installment plan (62–63). Nor were these material concerns and contradictions avoided when the writers of his cadre escaped to Europe. In search of eternal values, Cowley observes, they discovered instead “valuta” (81). The rapidly fluctuating exchange rates for European currencies not only meant that writers were able to support them- selves on the strong dollar, but sensitized them to the disjuncture between price and value, utility and worth – a matter that became a major theme in several important fictional works. An alertness to economic concerns, moreover, was not exclusive to writ- ers who went abroad. In the U.S. savings declined precipitously and debt increased during the Jazz Age. Wealth and class suddenly seemed to be a fluid matter, marked by expenditures rather than by money in the bank: a situation recorded in imaginative detail in novels like The Great Gatbsy and The Big Money, as well as less canonical works like Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). And though the stock market crash of 1929 forced a re-evaluation of the capitalist system and undermined the general faith in the old rags-to-riches dream (Nathanael West’s A Cool Million [1934] offers the period’s most brutal debunking of this theme), the nation’s fascination with consumer goods did not decline during the so-called Red Decade. Outrage at the ironic coexistence of plenty and scarcity during the Great Depression frequently animated the fiction of the period. One need only think of the striking passage in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), where Steinbeck denounces the wastefulness of a system which demands that “golden mountains” of oranges must be burned to keep up the market price, even though poor children are dying of malnutrition.37

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If one reads the fiction of this period with an eye to economics, mon- etary concerns and metaphors come to seem quite pervasive and arise in quite surprising places. For all its thinness of social representation, Stein’s Three Lives, for example, is shaped by the contrast between the two thrifty German immigrants, Anna and Lena, and the wasteful, impetuous, Melanctha, drawn as she is to speed, gambling, and the pleasures of the moment. Even Willa Cather, who, in a 1922 essay, questioned whether “the banking system and the Stock Exchange [were] worth being written about at all,” actually wrote extensively about money and even banks in her two most important novels from the 1920s, A Lost Lady (1923) and The Profes- sor’s House (1925). In the first, Captain Forrester, one of Cather’s pioneer aristocrats, finds his mettle tested when the bank of which he is a director fails, and he – alone among the members of the board – decides to refund his investors’ deposits dollar-for-dollar out of his own personal wealth. His magnificent impracticality places him and his wife at the mercy of a new generation of money-grubbing, self-seeking businessmen, “who would cut everything up into profitable bits as the match factory splinters the primeval forest.”38 The older values based on good character and trust yield inex- orably, in Cather’s elegiac assessment, to a new spirit of sheer utility and gain. The narrative crisis of The Professor’s House is, similarly, a financial one: the plot takes off at the moment when Professor Godfrey St. Peter has finally made enough money through his intellectual work to buy a luxuri- ous new house and the entire novel is structured in terms of a tension (an irresolvable one for Cather) between money and creativity, gifts and acqui- sitions, reserve and ostentation. The novel asks, in essence, how personal and historical legacies can be valued without “‘realiz[ing]’ on them” (220): without translating them into the reifying economy of the marketplace.39 While Cather (or at least her character Professor St. Peter) seems nause- ated by all forms of commercial expenditure and considers the discourse of money to be “a vulgar tongue” (50), Hemingway’s attitude, as presented in The Sun Also Rises (1926), is more complex. In the moral economy of the novel, anything of value must be paid for (hence the disdain of bankrupts, like Mike Campbell, and of people who expend money in order to avoid giving of themselves, like Robert Cohen). But payment is also intricately involved in a kind of savoir vivre or, more seriously, an ethical code for a secular age. One might therefore argue that the aging Greek count (the owner of a chain of stores in the U.S.), who knows how to get value for his money, whether in the form of good service or vintage brandy or female company, is more of a code hero in the novel than is the handsome young bullfighter. There is, moreover, a residual sense that exchange values need, in some way or another, to be in balance with use values and work: Hemingway makes

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction it clear that the fiesta in Pamplona, during which people behave as though there were no consequences to their actions, makes exorbitant demands on the Spanish peasants who attend it: it is not just that the price of wine at cafes´ seems entirely incommensurate with the value of “the hours worked and bushels of grain sold,” but that the fleeting exhilaration of the running of the bulls ends up costing the life of a man, who is gored: “all for fun,” as a sober Spanish waiter notes. In its partly serious, partly ironic valida- tion of a “simple exchange of values,” the novel seems to simultaneously endorse and recontain the ethos of expenditure and consumerism.40 It is worth speculating that the popularity of Hemingway’s work might be tied to his attempt to salvage a certain masculine austerity (or moral solvency) in a world where the locus of value was rapidly shifting from the tradition- ally masculine sphere of production to the traditionally feminized sphere of consumption and leisure. The economic crisis of the 1930s moved many writers (including Hemingway and Fitzgerald) to take a considerably harsher stance toward the emerging culture of abundance. We might think back to Nathan Asch, whose Pay Day derives whatever social implications it has through an implicit comparison of the value of the political commitment of Sacco and Vanzetti (for whom August 23, 1927, was “pay day” in a very serious sense of the term) and the trivial and questionable good time pursued by the antihero on his night out. The work of several proletarian authors, including Grace Lumpkin in To Make my Bread (1932), or Fielding Burke in Call Home the Heart (1932), has a similarly anti-consumerist message. The target of critique in these strike novels is not only the exploitative mill management, but the installment plan, which entraps the members of an idealized rural community in the snares of capitalism in a brand new guise. However, some of the most important writers of the 1930s do begin in var- ious ways to reconfigure and reclaim aspects of the ethos of expenditure and abundance (which, after all, has utopian as well as repressive implications). In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for example, the life of the heroine Janie may be read as an “education in expenditure.”41 This education does not imply subservience to the new strategies of business, or to the Keynesian view of consumption as ultimately functional: a means of jumpstarting the national economy. Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks, is devoted to an ethos of production and simple accumulation and he assesses her value merely in terms of her labor. Her second husband, Jody Stark, has begun to understand the idea of conspicuous consumption: he indulges in carefully calibrated expenditures, designed to enhance his own status in the community, and sees Janie largely as a pretty acquisition to put on display. Her third husband, whose very name – “Tea Cake” – suggests something

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard of the sweetness of living for the moment, spends money and time exces- sively and uselessly, for the sheer playful delight of it. His irresponsible acts of expenditure are certainly open to criticism (he steals $200 from Janie to throw a party and to savor the feeling of wealth), but they are not readily tied to the needs of the mainstream economy and its racialized class structures. Indeed, in the symbolic economy of the text, Tea Cake’s reckless spontane- ity, of which Janie also comes to partake, seems linked to the recklessness of God, who in his abundance can afford to unleash the destructive power of a hurricane on the world. Needless to say, this is a remarkable vision to put forward in an era when economic deprivation often fostered a spirit of caution and it helps us make sense of the fact that Hurston’s reputation only soared several decades after her major works were produced. Curiously, the writer who comes closest to Hurston in validating an uncal- culating generosity, as opposed to a spirit of cheap acquisitiveness, or self- serving accumulation, may be William Faulkner, whose novels are deeply concerned with economic issues. It is fair to say that his characters’ atti- tudes toward money are as important as their attitudes toward time and that his work always comes down on the side of those who give unstint- ingly, as opposed to the schemers and accountants, like the repulsive Flem Snopes and Jason Compson. In The Sound and the Fury, the latter obses- sively hoards money and calculates profits; and though he claims to believe that “money has no value: it’s just the way you spend it,” his interactions with others constantly reveal his instinctive equation of price and value. His miserliness is exposed, significantly, by the black characters in the novel, such as his colleague Job, who feels himself rich enough to give up his two bits in exchange for the immediate pleasure of hearing a man play the saw at a traveling show.42 Such details abound in Faulkner’s work and this is not the place to record them in any detail. I will close instead by commenting briefly on the rela- tionship between form and economics in his masterpiece, Go Down, Moses (1942), where the issue at stake is the historical legacy of slavery. This cycle of interconnected stories, which runs the gamut of money matters – from wagers, treasure hunts, bribes, inheritances, wages, gifts, sales, pay-offs, and robbery to charitable fundraising – begins, strikingly, with a dedication to the Faulkner family’s servant, Caroline Barr, whom he praises for her gift of fidelity “without calculation of recompense.”43 Though one might argue that Faulkner has difficulty in imagining a place for African-Americans in the new market economy and that this difficulty is a sign of his residual paternalism, the generosity of Caroline Barr nevertheless marks an ethical position from which to measure the full horror of the story recorded in the

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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction ledger book of the McCaslin plantation: a story about the scandal of treat- ing people – even kinsfolk – as commodities. The excessive eloquence of the central story “The Bear,” with its interminable, all-inclusive sentences, must be read as a challenge to the language and ethos of the slave owners’ ledger book, with its eccentric abbreviations and its terse arithmetic about human lives.44 Richard Wright ends Native Son with the clang of the prison door, shut- ting in the face of a condemned murderer in Chicago; Faulkner concludes Go Down, Moses by, as it were, picking up the story of the murderer where Native Son leaves off. He concludes his fictional investigation of the intersec- tions of race and economics by imagining the aftermath of an execution in Chicago: that of one Samuel Beauchamp, a descendant of the McCaslin and Beauchamp families whose intertwined fates are at the center of Go Down, Moses. Like several other stories in the cycle (most notably “Pantaloon in Black”), the final story is about mourning; but once again money matters are at the center of the action. The lawyer Gavin Stevens, out of sympathy for the criminal’s grandmother, goes around to collect the necessary funds for the transportation and proper burial of the body from various prominent whites in the local community. Whatever we make of Faulkner’s treatment of Samuel Beauchamp and his crime of “[g]etting rich too fast” (370), or of the attitudes of the whites, with their residual sense of paternalistic obligation and their muted, but clearly insufficient recognition of their complicity in Beauchamp’s death, it is clear that the funeral will not lay to rest the historical debts of the South. Nor will the intertwined, but nevertheless disjointed stories that make up Go Down, Moses yield the kind of closure Benjamin describes in the “Storyteller.” And the eschewal of such accounting is precisely the point: the complex, but elusive construction of the cycle as a whole offers a fittingly open-ended way of narrating an “injustice” that, in Faulkner’s severe but accurate judgment, “can never be amortized” (226). In its style, structure, and tragic narrative contents, Go Down, Moses protests against the reifying language of money. But it is nevertheless through the work’s various eco- nomic tropes – no less than through the more conventionally poetic symbols like the bear, the deep woods, and the fire on the hearth – that we may trace out Faulkner’s major thematic preoccupations: the persistence of the past, and the meaning and cost of modernity.

NOTES 1. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), viii, ix.

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2. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), xx; John Dos Passos cited in Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth- Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980), 286. 3. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin, 1992), 70–71. 4. Hamlin Garland, “Literary Prophecy,” in Modern American Fiction: Essays in Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 30, 32. 5. Georg Lukacs,´ “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1978), 110–148; “The Ideology of Modernism,” in Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17–46. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–84, 93. 7. Virginia Woolf, Mr.Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), 4; Robert Musil quoted in Lukacs,´ “The Ideology of Modernism,” 35; Willa Cather quoted in Susman, Culture as History, 105. 8. Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 193–195. 9. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 184–185. 10. On Faulkner’s vocabulary, see Kazin, “Faulkner in his Fury,” in Modern American Fiction ed. Litz, 170, and Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 74. 11. Nathan Asch, Pay Day (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990), 255; John Dos Passos, U. S. A. (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1,210. 12. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Penguin, 1994), 14, 27, 28. 13. Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 10–12; and Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London, James Currey, 1993), 2–12; Nadine Gordimer, “What Being a South African Means to Me,” South African Outlook 107 (June 1977), 88. 14. Sherwood Anderson, The Egg and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1998), 6, 7. 15. See Kazin, On Native Grounds, 249–250; Willa Cather, My Antonia´ (Boston: Hougton, Mifflin, 1954), 7, and “My First Novels,” in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1992), 963–964. 16. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 1931), 238. 17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Collier, 1992), 73. 18. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 23. 19. Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (New York: Carol & Graf, 1984), 190; Werner Sollers, “Ethnic Modernism,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature. Volume 6: Prose Writing 1910–1950, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2002), 482. 20. James T. Farrell, “In Search of an Image,” in The League of Frightened Philistines (New York: Vanguard Press, 1945), 156. 21. James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan (New York: Avon, 1972), 83.

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22. Richard Wright, Early Works: Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son (New York: Library of America, 1991), 682, 550. 23. My reading of Wright is indebted to Charles Scruggs’s Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 75–79. 24. Frederic Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003), 695. 25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 163. 26. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 8. 27. Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 699. 28. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings (New York: Vintage, 1990), 73. 29. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), vol. ii, 608– 609; see also Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America (New York: Putnam’s, 1977), vol. ii, 646–647. 30. Peter Messent, “Style: Personal Impressions” in Ernest Hemingway (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 5–22. 31. Tom Kromer, Waiting For Nothing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 116. 32. Cited in Sollers, Ethnic Modernism, 377. 33. Stein, Selected Writings, 513, 516. 34. See Carin Irr, The Suburb of Dissent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 45–46, 56–57. 35. Barbara Foley, “The Treatment of Time in The Big Money,” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (Autumn 1980), 460–461. 36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, i, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 221–222. 37. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992), 477. 38. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Knopf, 1923), 106. 39. Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage, 1990), 220. 40. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 152, 197, 72. 41. See Thomas F. Haddox, “The Logic of Expenditure in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Mosaic 34 (March 2001): 19–34. 42. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1990), 194, 231. 43. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1973), np. 44. For this insight I am indebted to Eric Dussere, “Accounting for Slavery: Economic Narratives in Morrison and Faulkner,” Modern Fiction Studies 47 (Summer 2001), 336.

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A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

FIFTH EDITION

Raman Selden Peter Widdowson Peter Brooker ARG_A01.qxd 9/20/07 10:44 AM Page iv

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Selden, Raman. A reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory / Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker.— 5th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-582-89410-7 (pbk.) 1. Criticism—History—20th century. I. Widdowson, Peter. II. Brooker, Peter. III. Title.

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CHAPTER 10 Gay, lesbian and queer theories

esbian and gay theories originate, like feminist and Black L criticism, not in academic institutions, but in the radical movements of the 1960s. The birth of the Gay Liberation Movement can be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 when occupants of a gay bar resisted a police raid. The event had a radicalizing effect on Homosexual Rights groups throughout the United States and Europe. Thereafter, Gay Liberation in the 1970s had two main goals: to resist per- secution and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage gay people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities. The move- ment utilized two main strategies: ‘consciousness-raising’, borrowed from Black and women’s movements, and ‘coming out’ – publicly affirming gay identity – which is unique to gay communities whose oppression partly lies in their social invisibility. Gay Liberation activists saw themselves as part of a more general move towards the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the 1960s, but in particular challenged the homophobic prejudices and repress- ive character of mainstream heterosexual society. Since then, gay and lesbian activists have employed the term ‘hetero- sexism’ to refer to the prevailing social organization of sexuality which privileges and mandates heterosexuality so as to invalidate and suppress homosexual relations. Whereas ‘homophobia’ – the irrational fear or hatred of same-sex love – implies an individualized and pathological con- dition, ‘heterosexism’ designates an unequal social and political power rela- tion, and has arguably proved the more useful theoretical term in lesbian and gay theories. It clearly owes a debt to the feminist concept of sexism: the unequal social organization of gender, and in this respect has been of more importance to lesbian feminist theory than to gay theory which developed in overlapping but distinct ways in the 1970s and 1980s. ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 244

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244 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

Gay theory and criticism

The diversity of gay and bisexual research since the 1970s reflects the efforts to reclaim literary texts, cultural phenomena and historical narratives which had remained hidden from critical attention. At the same time (largely as a product of psychoanalysis and feminism), there has been an explosion in the diversity of strategies for exploiting these materials. While there have been a number of attempts to provide explanatory models which posit defining moments in the history of sexuality (Bray, 1988; Cohen, 1989), this research generally concludes that past constructions of sexuality can- not be exhaustively understood, either in their own terms or in ours. For many critics the past offers alien constructions of sexuality in a contrasting relation to the present, rather than possible identifications or celebratory moments. Jonathan Katz (1994) draws such a lesson from his history of sodomitical sin:

our own contemporary social organization of sex is as historically specific as past social-sexual forms. Studying the past, seeing the essential differences between past and present social forms of sex, we may gain a fresh perspective on our own sex as socially made, not naturally given.

A shared interest in recent gay and historicist studies (Cohen, Katz, Trumbach) has been the construction of sexuality in a network of power relations, exercised both through the regulatory practices of church and state and the less overt yet manifold ways in which Western culture has circumscribed interpersonal relations. Two main influences on gay theory have been Freud and Michel Foucault. Already in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, detailed psychological case-studies appeared to complicate and infinitely expand the range of sexualities. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published twelve volumes on homosexuality between 1864 and 1879 (the term was first used by Karl Benkert in 1869), and Krafft-Ebing’s Pyschopathia Sexualis (in its 1903 edition) included 238 case histories (see Weeks, 1985). Such works were important to Freud in exploding the notion that heterosexuality was safely grounded in nature. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, for instance, he noted that it was not a self-evident fact that men should find a sexual interest in women. Psychoanalytic theory therefore appeared to promise a new plurality of possible classifications. Yet in certain respects Freud’s work proved to have a strictly normative effect in that of his followers, whose goal appeared to be to return the patient to an integrated, healthy state, purged of the disorienting ‘illness’ of homosexuality. Jeffrey Weeks’s criticism of ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 245

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Freud focuses on the notion that desire ‘cannot be reduced to primeval biological urges, beyond human control, nor can it be seen as a product of conscious willing and planning. It is somewhere ambiguously, elusively, in between, omnipotent but intangible, powerful but goal-less’ (1985). In so far as desire is inherently unstable, the individual’s procreative goal (or more specifically, genital sex) is threatened by perverse, transgressive forces. Freud had noted in an Outline of Psychoanalysis that sexual life was concerned primarily with obtaining pleasure from the body, often beyond the needs of reproduction. If this is the case, heterosexuality supports bour- geois ideologies to the extent that procreation mirrors production. Gay sex, in contrast, is desire deprived of this goal; it is the very negation of productive work. The second major influence upon gay theory, which has returned some critics to a re-reading of Freud, has been Michel Foucault (see Chapter 7, pp. 178–80), who has inspired the study of the multiple operations of power and set the problematics of defining homosexuality within discourse and history. In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault sees late-nineteenth- century homosexuality as characterized ‘by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself’. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior an- drogyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. ‘The sodomite’, he concludes, ‘had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’ Foucault explored how sodomy was largely determined by civil or canonical codes as ‘a category of forbidden acts’ which accordingly defined their per- petrator as no more than their judicial subject. However, the nineteenth century, Foucault argues, saw the emergence of the homosexual as ‘a per- sonage, a past, a case history, and a childhood . . . Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.’ This model has been broadly accepted, if elaborated or sometimes disputed in its details (Cohen, 1989). Nevertheless, a general problem lies in how Foucault theorizes the transition from one mode to another. As noted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985 – and see below, pp. 256–9), in Foucault’s discontinuous profile ‘one model of same-sex relations is superseded by another, which may again be superseded by another. In each case the supposed model then drops out of the frame of analysis.’ None the less, historians of sexuality have assembled models of shifting sexual categories across time influenced by Foucault, although more scholarly and less rigid or polemical than his own. The historian Randolph Trumbach, for instance, has been much more open than Foucault to the emergence of lesbianism in the eighteenth century, while ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 246

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Weeks, Greenberg and Bray, though accepting the constructedness of sex- uality, have resisted the extreme position on the dating of the category of homosexuality which was characteristic of Foucault’s work. Foucault’s influence upon gay studies, however, extends beyond the above debates to work done within the areas of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (see Chapter 7, pp. 182, 187–8). Most noticeably in Great Britain in the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, gay theory became part of a wider cultural poetics and cultural politics, focused within liter- ary studies, and as such had affinities with the work of others pursuing a similar general project (for example, Stallybrass and White, 1986). A number of categories have been mobilized in this criticism to discuss the inscription of homosexuality in texts and to reclaim aspects of gay life: ‘effeminacy’, ‘drag’ and ‘camp’, for example, or the categories of ‘the homoerotic’, ‘male bonding’ or ‘homosociality’, which have been used in the reading of non- or anti-gay texts. In this connection, the theory of ‘homo- phobia’ has also given rise to the concepts of ‘panic’ and of ‘internalized homophobia’. Alan Sinfield (1989), for instance, has shown how anti- effeminacy operated in ‘The Movement’ writing of John Wain and Kingsley Amis (among others), and how effeminacy was used as a signifier of per- version. Yet he also demonstrates that the muscular, down-to-earth writing of ‘The Movement’ was subverted in the poetry of Thom Gunn, who con- structed figures of rough young men which shifted towards homoerotic identification. The construction of masculinities has been explored further in the essay by Sinfield and Dollimore on Shakespeare’s Henry V (Drakakis, ed., [1985] 2002: see ‘Further reading’ for Chapter 7) and in Gregory Woods’ work on Ernest Hemingway. Here Woods shows how writers who have functioned as emblems of machismo need to be reassessed. What the ‘struggle against effeminate eloquence’ in this writing expresses, he argues, ‘is the nagging anxiety which is the true condition (in both senses) of masculinity’. The voice of heterosexual masculinity is ‘to be compared with that of closeted gay men, to the extent that it is terrified of indiscretion. To say too much might be to sound queer’ (Still and Worton, 1993). In the related study, Articulate Flesh (1987), Woods explores the expression of homoeroticism in D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn. Gay criticism of this kind both borrows the techniques of cultural poetics and explores the relations between culture, history and text in an increasingly politicized version of literary studies. Nicholas F. Radel, in his essay ‘Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White’, for example (in Ringer, ed., 1994), has argued that White’s novels help reveal ‘a gay subject as it responds to political pressure from the culture at large. ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 247

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Far from being mere aesthetic products, these novels about gay life both confirm and interrogate their historical milieu and its construction of sex- ual orientation as gender difference.’ David Bergman’s analysis of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room serves to illustrate its deployment of ‘internal- ized homophobia’. He seeks to position Baldwin ‘within a line he nowhere acknowledges – a line of both gay and African-American writers’ (in Bristow, ed., 1992). Increasingly, too, critics have been exploring the rela- tionship between nationalism, anti-imperialism and sexuality – in Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992), for example, and Rudi C. Bleys’s The Geography of Perversion (1996). In Foucault’s work, multiplying configurations of power are shown to be central to the production and control of sexuality. In developing this insight, Jonathan Dollimore, in particular, has explored the complex involve- ment of power with pleasure: ‘pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another’, he writes in Sexual Dissidence (1991), ‘they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by com- plex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.’ In this way, Dollimore has effectively returned gay theory to Freud’s concept of ‘poly- morphous perversity’ – the theory that the child enjoys multiple sexualit- ies before it moves to the reductive primacy of genital sex. But Dollimore moves beyond Freud, and arguably beyond Foucault, in remapping a politically subversive programme for perversity. He argues that we should think in terms of the ‘paradoxical perverse or the perverse dynamic’, which he claims is ‘a dynamic intrinsic to social process’. Both Sinfield and Dollimore, and others working within a tradition of gay cultural material- ist criticism, have drawn attention, in new ways, to the example of Oscar Wilde. In Wilde, Dollimore discovers a transgressive aesthetics:

Wilde’s experience of deviant desire . . . leads him not to escape the repressive ordering of society, but to a reinscription within it, and an inversion of the binaries upon which that ordering depends; desire, and the transgressive aesthetic which it fashions, reacts against, disrupts, and displaces from within. (Dollimore, 1991)

Such a shift beyond binary oppositions marks the transition from gay to queer theory.

Lesbian feminist theory and criticism

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male-dominated Gay Liberation Movement. Its focus is the interlocking structures of gender and sexual oppression. In particular, lesbian feminist theory has consistently problematized heterosexuality as an institution central to the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s oppression within it. Lesbian feminist theory, like lesbian feminism, is a diverse field which draws on a wide range of other theories and methods. While it cannot be reduced to a single model, several features stand out: a critique of ‘com- pulsory heterosexuality’, an emphasis on ‘woman identification’, and the creation of an alternative women’s community. Whether taking a Black feminist, a radical feminist or a psychoanalytic approach, lesbian feminist theory foregrounds one or all of these elements. The concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ was first articulated by Gayle Rubin (1975), and subsequently given wide circulation by Adrienne Rich in her essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980). The concept challenges the common-sense view of heterosexuality as natural and therefore requiring no explanation, unlike lesbian and gay sexuality. Rich argues that heterosexuality is a social institution supported by a range of powerful sanctions. The fact of lesbian existence, notwithstanding such sanc- tions, is evidence of a powerful current of woman-bonding which cannot be suppressed. Rich locates the source of lesbianism in the fact that girl children are ‘of woman born’ and have an original same-sex attachment to their mothers. Monique Wittig’s analogous concept of ‘the straight mind’ (1980, reprinted 1992) views heterosexuality as an ideological construct which is almost completely taken for granted, yet institutes an obligatory social rela- tionship between men and women: ‘as an obvious principle, as a given prior to any science, the straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language and all subjective phenomena at the same time.’ The discourses of heterosexuality work to oppress all those who attempt to conceive of themselves otherwise, particularly lesbians. In contrast to Rich, Wittig rejects the concept of ‘woman identification’, argu- ing that it remains tied to the dualistic concept of gender which lesbians challenge. She claims that in an important sense lesbians are not women, ‘for what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man’ and so ‘woman’ acquires ‘meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosex- ual economic systems’. Judith Butler (1992), drawing on the work of both Wittig and Rich, uses the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ to ‘designate that grid of cultural intelligib- ility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’. Butler ceases to use the term in her later work (see below, pp. 255–6) but continues ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 249

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to argue for the subversion of sexual identities and for a distinction between sex, sexuality and gender in the social ‘performances’ that consti- tute them. The concepts of ‘woman identification’ and ‘lesbian feminist com- munity’ were introduced by Radicalesbians in their influential essay, ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’ (1970), and further developed once more by Adrienne Rich. Rich (1980) depicts woman-bonding as an act of resistance to patriarchal power, and advances the concept of ‘lesbian continuum’ to describe ‘a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of woman-identified experience’. Her definition encompasses not simply sexual experience but all forms of ‘primary intensity’ between and among women, including relationships of family, friendship and politics. Rich’s own 1976 essay, ‘The Temptations of a Motherless Girl’, perfectly illustrates the concepts of ‘lesbian continuum’ and the related lesbian critical ‘revi- sioning’. It offers a lesbian reading of Jane Eyre which changes the focus from a heterosexual romance plot to a narrative of loving female pedagogy in which Jane is nurtured and educated by a succession of female mother/ mentors. Rich convincingly demonstrates and denaturalizes the ideological hegemony of heterosexuality in our reading and interpretative strategies. Barbara Smith’s essay, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’ (reprinted in Showalter, 1986), adopts a critical model similar to Rich’s in order to argue that Toni Morrison’s Sula can be productively reread as a lesbian novel, ‘not because the women are “lovers”, but because they . . . have pivotal relationships with one another’. ‘Whether consciously or not,’ she adds, ‘Morrison’s work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black women’s autonomy and their impact on each other’s lives.’ The French feminist, Luce Irigaray, explores an analogous concept of autonomous female sexuality in This Sex Which Is Not One (1985). She redefines women’s sexuality as based on difference rather than sameness, arguing that it is multiple: ‘Woman does not have a sex. She has at least two of them . . . Indeed she has more than that. Her sexuality, always at least double, is in fact plural.’ Irigaray further attempts to combine a psychoanalytic and political approach to lesbianism. In ‘When the Goods Get Together’, she advances the concept of ‘hom(m)osexuality – punning on the signifiers of both maleness and sameness – to capture the dual nature of hetero-patriarchal culture. ‘Hom(m)osexual’ discourse privileges male homosocial relations and a male sexuality of the same (whether hetero- or homosexual). Her work links critiques of both gender and sexual power relations and in its anti-essentialism chimes with the political aims of lesbian feminism. ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 250

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The concept of ‘woman-identification’ has been challenged by some lesbian feminists, especially Black and Third World critics. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981), for example, draw attention to the way the concept has been used to mask power relations among women. Rejecting a universal model of identity, they create more flexible concepts of lesbian identity – such as Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of the new mestiza – able to encompass the connections between women of different cultures and ethnicities (see Chapter 9, p. 234). Representation – in both the political and the literary senses – is a key issue for lesbian criticism. In 1982, Margaret Cruikshank identified the crucial role literature has played in the development of lesbian criticism. In the thirty and more years since its emergence, lesbian literary criticism has developed from being largely polemical – calling for the acknowledge- ment of lesbian writers, readers and texts, and the definition of these – to a sophisticated and diverse body of politically informed theoretical work which aims to explore the multiple articulations of the sign ‘lesbian’. The early agenda for lesbian criticism was set by Virginia Woolf’s analysis of the relationship between women and writing in A Room of One’s Own (1929 – see Chapter 6) which showed how literary power relations result in a textual effacement of relationships among women. It was not until Jane Rule’s Lesbian Images (1975), however, that a critical text sought to delin- eate a lesbian literary tradition. Here Rule analyses the life and work of a group of twentieth-century lesbian writers, including Gertrude Stein, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Maureen Duffy and May Sarton. Despite its focus on individual writers, Rule’s text goes beyond a celebratory biographical approach and anticipates the multigeneric and intertextual style of much later lesbian literary criticism. Lesbian literary criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was concerned to identify a lesbian literary tradition and a lesbian literary aesthetic, whether this was based on textual content, characters, themes, or the identification of the author as herself lesbian. This was aided by a number of reference works (Grier, 1981; Cruikshank, 1982; Wittig and Zeig, 1979) which con- tinue to provide invaluable source materials for lesbian teachers, students and researchers. Work of this kind also performed the valuable ‘(re)discov- ery’ of writers assumed to be heterosexual (Judith Fetterley’s essay on Willa Cather (1990) is a later example), or, in Alison Hennegan’s 1984 essay, ‘What is a Lesbian Novel?’, identified a lesbian ‘sensibility’ in a text’s ‘necessarily oblique vision of the world’. Related to this is the ‘encodement’ approach advanced by Catharine Stimpson (1988) which analyses the strategies of con- cealment (the use of an obscure idiom, gender and pronoun ambiguity, or ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 251

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a male pseudonym), or of internal censorship and silence necessarily employed by woman-identified writers in a homophobic and misogynistic culture. One example of this approach is Stimpson’s analysis of the sexual codes, use of silence, and experimentation with syntax in the writings of Gertrude Stein. Other critics have used the approach to interpret the work of Angelina Weld Grimke, Emily Dickinson, H.[ilda] D.[oolittle], and Willa Cather. Given the historical difficulty of writing lesbian, however, as well as the changing definitions of the sign ‘lesbian’, lesbian critics have progressively moved away from this search for a single lesbian identity or discourse. Mandy Merck (1985), for instance, takes issue with Hennegan’s view that lesbians share a common perspective. What Hennegan calls lesbian ‘sensibility’, says Merck, can be found in works by other writers who don’t identify as lesbian. She also questions an emphasis, such as there is in Hennegan’s ‘On Becoming a Lesbian Reader’, on the importance of textual representations in the formation of readers’ lesbian identities. A more radical approach, Merck argues, lies in the application of perverse readings which rely neither on the author’s or text’s concealment or disclosure of sexual identity but on the queer perspective of the reader who subverts the dominant interpret- ative frameworks. Bonnie Zimmerman (1986) also, in her essay ‘What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism’, offers a more sophisticated model of lesbian textuality. She cautions against reduct- ive and essentialist models of the lesbian text, and proposes the notion of lesbian ‘double vision’ drawn from the dual perspectives of lesbians as members of mainstream and minority cultures simultaneously. In a later study, The Safe Sea of Women (1991), Zimmerman advances a historically based definition of lesbian fiction, grounding this category in the cultural and historical contexts in which it is produced and read. Rather than seek an autonomous lesbian tradition, distinctive aesthetic, lesbian author or reader, therefore, more recent lesbian criticism has addressed the question of how texts internalize heterosexism and how lesbian literary strategies can subvert its norms. One such strategy is intertextuality. In an early essay, Elaine Marks (1979) argued that lesbian writing is fundamentally intertextual, and that it has drawn on historical figures such as Sappho in the rnaking of its discursive history and the production of ‘challenging counterimages’: lesbian texts ‘written exclus- ively by women for women, careless of male approval’. More recently, some of the most exciting lesbian criticism has been produced by bilingual and postcolonial/Third World lesbian writers who similarly foreground the intertextual, dialogic aspects of their texts. The Quebequoise writer, Nicole ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 252

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Brossard, and the Chicana writer, Cherrie Moraga, produce lyrical, polem- ical writings which interweave theory, politics and poetry. In Amantes (1980, translated as Lovhers, 1987), Brossard practises ‘writing in the fem- inine’ which like écriture féminine deconstructs the opposition body/text. Similarly, Moraga and Anzaldúa’s concept of ‘theory in the flesh’ (1981) elides the gap between the Chicana lesbian body and text. Teresa de Lauretis, in her article ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’ (1993), also draws on French theory, using Irigaray’s con- cept of ‘hom(m)osexuality’ to discuss the invisibilizing of the lesbian body/text. Her essay subverts dominant interpretations of Radclyffe Hall’s famous lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), by reading against the grain of sexology and drawing out the text’s ‘other’ lesbianism. In common with lesbian and queer theory, de Lauretis plays on the distinction between sex/gender and sexuality, celebrating the diversity of lesbian writing, both critical and creative, and the ways in which lesbian writers ‘have sought variously to escape gender, deny it, transcend it, or perform it in excess, and to inscribe the erotic in cryptic, allegorical, realistic, camp, or other modes of representation’. These various strategies and the resulting intersection of postmodern discourses and lesbian criticism have led to the textualization of lesbian identity, whereby lesbianism is seen as a position from which to speak ‘otherwise’ and thus ‘queer’ heterosexist discourse.

Queer theory and criticism

During the 1980s, the term ‘queer’ was reclaimed by a new generation of political activists involved in Queer nation and protest groups such as ActUp and Outrage, though some lesbian and gay cultural activists and critics who adopted the term in the 1950s and 1960s continue to use it to describe their particular sense of marginality to both mainstream and minority cultures. In the 1990s, ‘Queer Theory’ designated a radical rethinking of the relationship between subjectivity, sexuality and representation. Its emergence in that decade owes much to the earlier work of queer critics such as Ann Snitow (1983), Carol Vance (1984) and Joan Nestle (1988), but also to the allied challenge of diversity initiated by Black and Third World critics. In addi- tion, it gained impetus from postmodern theories with which it overlapped in significant ways. Teresa de Lauretis, in the Introduction to the ‘Queer Theory’ issue of differences (1991), traced the emergence of the term ‘queer’ and described the impact of postmodernism on lesbian and gay theorizing. ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 253

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Further examples which explore this intersection, and the way both dis- courses operate to decentre foundationalist narratives based on ‘sex’ or ‘rea- son’, would include Judith Roof’s A Lure of Knowledge (1990), Laura Doan’s The Lesbian Postmodern (1994), and essays in the volume Sexy Bodies (Grosz and Probyn (eds), 1995). Queer theory’s foregrounding of a politics of dif- ference and marginality has assisted gay and lesbian critiques of heterosexual hegemony and patriarchy while the development of a postmodern aesthetic has helped inspire the expression of sexual plurality and gender ambival- ence in the area of cultural production: a dynamic dialogue which has placed lesbian and gay theories at the forefront of work in the increasingly cross- disciplinary field of critical theory. Signs of this development have since appeared in the academic rise of Gender Studies and the dialogues in Gay Studies with the emerging dis- cipline of Men’s Studies, which aims to build on feminism and gay theory so as to provide a critique and reconstruction of men’s sexualities and lifestyles. There has been anxiety over and opposition to both these tend- encies, and there remains in some quarters an unsettled, even antagonis- tic, relationship between gay theory and feminism. In Joseph Bristow’s view in 1992, ‘lesbian and gay criticism does not comprise a coherent field’, but this, he argued was ‘its strength’. Bristow’s exploration of what lesbian and gay mean involves a sense of their sameness and difference: they ‘designate entirely different desires, physical pleasures, oppressions, and visibilities . . . But both subordinated groups share parallel histories within a sexually prohibitive dominant culture . . . ’. As new areas of theoretical enquiry emerge it becomes less clear how to maintain academic boundaries. Are transvestitism or cross-dressing, for example, topics for lesbian, gay or bisexual studies, or for Men’s, Women’s or Gender Studies, or for Shake- speare, theatre or performance studies? Queer studies ‘queries’ orthodoxies and promotes or provokes such uncertainties, moving beyond lesbian and gay sexualities to include a range of other sexualities that disrupt such fixed or settled categorization altogether. Some of the figures and arguments influencing the transition from gay to queer theory have been referred to above. Jeffrey Weeks, for example, while arguing that sexualities are historically constructed, sees them as none the less refusing to yield up a stable cognitive core, but ‘only changing patterns in the organization of desire’ (1985). Yet if this is true of homo- sexuality, surely heterosexuality too is also a recent construction and not a naturally grounded identity. As we have seen, the notion that sexual desire naturally and necessarily involves a gravitation towards a person of the oppos- ite biological sex was already challenged by Freud (see also Laqueur, 1990). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 254

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In a postmodern, postcolonial world, in which the object of knowledge has itself become a problematic space, queer theory seeks further to question all such essentializing tendencies and binary thinking. An elusive sexual- ity, fragmented into local, perverse particularities, is celebrated in all its deviant versions. Such ‘perversions’ are mobilized in resistance to the bourgeois con- struction of self modelled upon a rigid, patriarchal heterosexuality which has exercised its hegemony for over two centuries. In repoliticizing gay theory along these lines, queer theory has drawn on Foucault, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and in its inflection in Great Britain especially towards cultural materialism, on the work of Althusser and Raymond Williams. Here some tension has emerged between queer posi- tions and more traditional Marxist approaches. In Jeffrey Weeks’s view, for instance, capitalist social relations have an effect on sexualities (as on many other matters), ‘but a history of capitalism is not a history of sexu- ality’ (1985). His own work demonstrates that power should not be treated as single and unitary but as itself diverse, shifting and unstable, and hence as open to resistance in a variety of ways. This argument makes possible the formation, in Foucault’s terms, of a ‘ “reverse” discourse’ in which ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legit- imacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (1976). Theorists and critics following this Marxist or post-Marxist tradition must negotiate the situation summarized by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature (1977 – see Chapter 5) as one in which ‘all or nearly all initi- atives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic’. Queer theory would question the implication, apparent here and in Foucault’s work, that alternative or oppositional meanings are fully appropriated by the state. As Dollimore (1991) writes, ‘Thinking history in terms of the perverse dynamic begins to undermine that binary opposition between the essen- tialist and the anti-essentialist.’ As he discovers in the multiple resistances to Renaissance ideologies, marginality is not simply marginal. Dollimore’s and Sinfield’s work, in theoretical tandem with other examples in Cultural Materialism and New Historicism (Stallybrass and White, 1986; Bredbeck, 1991; Goldberg, 1992, 1994, progressing again beyond Foucault, especially in the area of Renaissance studies. See also Chapter 7), shows that binary oppositions become unstable in the subversive moment of queer writing. A key instance here, once more, is Oscar Wilde. Identifying a series of oppositions between Wilde and his culture, such as ‘surface/depth’; ‘lying/ truth’; ‘abnormal/normal’; ‘narcissism/maturity’, Dollimore concludes: ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 255

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‘That which society forbids, Wilde reinstates through and within some of its most cherished and central cultural categories – art, the aesthetic, art criticism, individualism.’ Wilde, he argues, appropriates dominant categories in the same gesture that he ‘transvalues them through perversion and inversion’, demonstrating how ‘abnormality is not just the opposite, but the necessarily always present antithesis of normality’. Two further figures of special importance to the emergence of queer theory are Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. At the same time, their influence extends beyond this category, Butler in fact claiming that in the first instance she wrote Gender Trouble (1992), her most influential book in this field, primarily as a feminist for feminist readers. Also, queer theory itself, certainly in versions indebted to Butler, contests the categorization which would limit it to questions of gay or lesbian sexual identities. In this view, queer theory does not name a separatist movement claiming an essence of gayness, but on the contrary emphasizes the constructedness, ambiva- lence and potential plurality of all gendered and sexual identities. As David Halperin has said in emphasizing the critical ‘querying’ aspect of queer theory, ‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it neces- sarily refers. It is an identity without an essence’ (Halperin, 1990). Butler accordingly uses the (non)category of queer to disrupt not only the author- ity of the hom(m)osexual economy but also the attribution of identity per se. In ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), she calls for a rejection of the essentialism of the hetero/homosexual binary opposition, and for the queering of heterosexist master narratives. Unlike lesbian feminists such as Wittig, she refuses to identify lesbian as a positive oppositional term, arguing that it is the absence of a defined lesbian counter-identity that enables the postmodern lesbian to queer the master discourse. As Butler puts it, ‘I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies.’ In this way, queer theory proposes a disruption of normative sexual identities and a conception of agency linked to the ‘performance’ which installs those identities. Butler’s work is known above all for her association of the idea of ‘performativity’ with sexual or gendered identities. Often this is taken to posit a theatrical self, able to freely select from a range of possible identities. Moe Meyer, for example, argues that queer theory is ‘an ontological challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts’ (Meyer, 1994). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 256

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While recognizing that there is an evident popular desire for a con- ception of improvised identity and that her own work has been seen to endorse this, Butler has explained that she intends a more philosophically rigorous and more limited popular notion of performativity which makes plain that gender is constructed, or ‘contoured’, through ‘repetition and recita- tion’, is the subversive ‘re-signification’ of normative identities – but is not a matter of free choice (Butler, 1994). Liz Grosz (1996) concurs with Butler that it is the indeterminacy of the sign ‘lesbian’ which gives it its radical potential, but she also offers a critique of queer theory’s elision of system- atic structures of power and its celebration of deviant sexual practices of whatever kind. Other lesbian feminists are critical of queer theory’s tendency to downplay the significance of gender difference. Many would argue that, although distinct, gender and sexuality cannot be completely dis- articulated. It makes no sense to claim that lesbians’ oppression, while being specific, is not connected to their oppression as women. The tend- ency for lesbian existence to be marginalized in the new queer discourses is no doubt indicative of the continuing power relations between the sexes. Nevertheless, there exists a productive tension between lesbian, gay male and feminist theory in the development of textual and intertextual strat- egies which undermine both literary norms and everyday sexual stereotypes (Humm, 1994). Butler’s recent work, in the meantime, while revisiting the themes of performativity and regulative social-sexual norms, has confirmed the breadth of her theoretical sources (Freud, Foucault, Derrida), and sought to address broader political themes. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) is a study of racist ‘hate speech’, pornography, and the discourse about gays in the military. What Butler argues, however, is that an inevitable disjuncture between intent and effect, or speech and conduct, means that injurious terms can be appropriated and re-deployed for counter purposes (the term ‘queer’, used to reverse its intended meanings, would be a case in point). The Psychic Life of Power, also produced in 1997, argues that the psyche is crucial to the formation of normative sexual iden- tities in that it is constrained to adopt the exclusionary prohibitions – upon homosexuality, for example – determined by the hegemonic social order. The result is a ‘melancholy’ loss of what is forbidden but cannot be avowed. But here again, Butler argues that this experience may be coun- tered through the unpredictable, and therefore resistant, ways in which norms might be adopted or performed. Butler’s reputation rests primarily on her earlier works. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, similarly, made her most significant contribution to gender and ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 257

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queer theory in two key early studies, Between Men (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Like Butler, she draws in these works on deconstruct- ive postmodern theory but with a more evident political intent or implica- tion and also with more direct reference to literary texts. The supposed opposition between sex and gender, she argues, seems ‘only to delineate a problematical space rather than a crisp distinction’ (1990). Sexuality has often been confused with sex, she says, adding that other categories such as race or class might themselves be important in the construction of sexuality. Just as there is no single sexuality, so there is no privileged narrative of nation. Sexualities, like nationalities, are therefore simply shaped by their differ- ences, not by something innately grounding them. Sexual boundaries are no more fixed than national ones, though they may, for a period, serve to delineate a particular discursive space. More recent work in this area has shown how sexology and colonial anthropology were linked but that one nation’s sexual classifications do not neatly equate with those of another. This has coincided with a move away from the black denunciation of homo- sexuality as something alien to black culture. At the same time, though the existence of cross-dressing and a homosexual rite of passage into manhood in other cultures have been sometimes exoticized and misunderstood, a critical reading of ethnographic literatures (such as that of Rudi C. Bleys, 1996) can provide a sense of the larger narratives involved in the construction of gay identities. Sedgwick has also deployed the concept of ‘homosociality’ as an inter- pretative tool to demonstrate ‘the usefulness of certain Marxist-feminist historical categories for literary criticism’. In her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), she begins to distance herself from determinate notions of patriarchy; male and female homosociality none the less have different historical shapes and they remain ‘articulations and mechanisms of the enduring inequality of power between women and men’. She acknowledges a debt to feminism, but increasingly, in a move typical of the deconstructive tendencies of queer theory, considers the multiple constructedness of sex, gender and sexuality. Her study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Wycherley’s play, The Country Wife, Tennyson, George Eliot and Dickens illustrates the paradoxically historicizing and dehistoricizing tend- encies of this kind of work. The book is also notable for its discussion of the Gothic as ‘Terrorism and Homosexual Panic’. In particular (building on Freud), she explores the theory that ‘paranoia is the psychosis that makes graphic the mechanisms of homophobia’. Queer theory views the traditional and prescriptive essentialist model of sexuality as failing to do the conceptual work involved in the adequate ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 258

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description of how desires function, and how sexualities are made. The range of critical terminologies, models and strategies outlined above confirms that it is no longer viable to think in terms of a single, coherent ‘sexuality’ and has effected the transition from the ‘natural’ homosexual individual, to whom rights could be attached, to the disorienting notion that all sexualities are perverse and can be reclaimed and celebrated as such. If gay or lesbian the- ory has often been defensively grounded in liberal rights, queer theory is a deeper philosophical challenge to the status quo, which at the same time aims to provide readings which at once subvert sameness and celebrate otherness. In consequence, queer theory is mobile and varied in its assault upon privileged, stable, heterosexual ‘origins’. While some, in a mood of holiday fun, seek to celebrate the carnival of style, artifice, performance and play discovered in perverse sexualities, others seek a more politicized stance, moving beyond Foucault or adopting a more materialist response to post- structuralist textualism. Jeffrey Weeks sees the ‘flux of desire’ as itself too much for capitalist society to endure, for it simultaneously encourages and abhors this chaos, and cannot live with the infinite variety of poten- tial interconnections and relationships. Sedgwick has similarly attacked the assumption that homosexuality today ‘comprises a coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflicting definitional forces’. In questioning stable, unproblematic classifications of sexuality, this seems to remove any common platform for action. However, Sedgwick urges a less systematic approach: surely, she argues, it would be sensible to work from ‘the relation enabled by the unrationalized coexist- ence of different models during the times they do exist’. Accordingly, the starting-point for ‘queer theory’ is, in Moe Meyer’s words, ‘an ontological challenge to dominant labelling philosophies’. This strategy takes up Weeks’s ‘whirlwind of deconstruction’ by contesting the binary opposition between (among other things) homosexuality and het- erosexuality, and has taken important effect in gay and academic commun- ities. In the 1980s, it was feared that the spectre of AIDS would unleash homophobic repression, that gay men would be marginalized, and the right to a diversity of sexual pleasure be strictly limited. Yet the message that sex must simply be safer, not less varied, has led to the recovery and reinven- tion of erotic possibilities. Gay groups are working with sex-workers (male and female), forcing a concern with sexuality to return to questions of class, economics and inequality. The appearance of AIDS and HIV shifted notions of identity, and brought with it new challenges, discourses and forms of representation. In a more theoretical direction, Lee Edelman, taking up ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 259

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the associations of AIDS and plague mapped by Susan Sontag (1989), argues in his ‘The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and Aids’ (in Butters, AIDS and its Metaphors, 1989), for the placing of literary theory between ‘politics’ and ‘AIDS’, since ‘both of those categories produce, and are produced as, historical discourses susceptible to analysis by the critical methodologies associated with literary theory’. His essay questions the ideological opposition between the biological, literal and real on the one hand, and on the other, the literary, figural and fictive, and concludes that a deconstructive queer theory must make its case on AIDS through a necessarily ‘diseased’ discourse. Queer critics continued in this same period to mobilize the ‘coming out’ of theory in the academic world. Silence in this regard was seen as a species of closetedness. Writing in 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recalled that, ‘in a class I taught at Amherst College, fully half the students said they had studied Dorian Gray in previous classes, but no one had ever discussed the book in terms of any homosexual content’. As this tells us, much has had to be done in learning to speak and write about literature’s and our own sexual constructedness. Fifteen years on, what would teachers and students of Dorian Gray now have to say?

Selected reading

Key texts

Abelove, Henry et al. (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, London, 1993). Adams, Rachel and Savran, David (eds), The Masculinity Studies Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2002). Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987). Bristow, Joseph (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Difference in Lesbian and Gay Writing (Routledge, London, 1992). Bristow, Joseph, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1995). Bristow, Joseph, Sexuality (Routledge, London, 1997). Bristow, Joseph and Wilson, Angela R. (eds), Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Politics (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1996). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 260

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Butler, Judith, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, in Diana Fuss (ed., 1991), below. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, London and New York, 1992). Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge, London and New York, 1993). Butler, Judith, ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, conducted by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, Radical Philosophy, 67 (Summer, 1994). Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, London, 1997). Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press, California, 1997). Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender (Routledge, London, 2004). Butler, Judith, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. by Sara Salih (Blackwell, Oxford, 2003). Cohen, Ed., ‘Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 181–217. Corber, Robert J. and Valocchi, Stephen J. (eds), Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2003). Cruikshank, Margaret (ed.), Lesbian Studies: Present and Future (The Feminist Press, New York, 1982). Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press, Boston, 1978). de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Introduction’, differences: ‘Queer Theory Issue’, 3: 2 (Summer, 1991). de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’, in Henry Abelove et al. (eds), above. Doan, Laura (ed.), The Lesbian Postmodern (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994). Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991). Dollimore, Jonathan, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001). Edelman, Lee, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge, London, 1994). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 261

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Epstein, Julia and Straub, Kristina (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (Routledge, London and New York, 1991). Fetterley, Judith, ‘My Antonia! Jim Blunden and the Dilemma of the Lesbian Writer’, in Karla Jay, Joanne Glasgow and Catharine R. Stimpson (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York University Press, New York, 1990). Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction [1976], trans. by Robert Hurley (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990). Fuss, Diana (ed.), Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Routledge, London, 1991). Gever, Martha, Parmar, Pratibha and Greyson, John, Queer Looks (Routledge, London, 1993). Goldberg, Jonathan, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts: Modern Sexualities (University of California Press, Stanford, 1992). Goldberg, Jonathan (ed.), Reclaiming Sodom (Routledge, London and New York, 1994). Goldberg, Jonathan (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 1994). Greenberg, David F., The Construction of Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988). Grier, Barbara, The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (The Naiad Press, Tallahassee, 1981). Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time, Perversion (Routledge, London, 1996). Grosz, Elizabeth and Probyn, Elsbeth (eds), Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism (Routledge, London, 1995). Hennegan, Alison, ‘What is a Lesbian Novel?’, Woman’s Review, no. 1 (1984). Hennegan, Alison, ‘On Becoming a Lesbian Reader’, in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1988). Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual Desire (Allison & Busby, London, 1978). Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1985). Jay, Karla and Glasgow, Joanne (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York University Press, New York, 1990). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 262

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Johnstone, Jill, Lesbian Nation (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973). Kopelson, Kevin, Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (University of California Press, Stanford, 1994). Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Lilly, Mark (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990). Lorde, Audre, Sister/Outsider (Crossing Press, New York, 1984). Marks, Elaine, ‘Lesbian Intertextuality’, in George Stamboulian and Elaine Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1979). Merck, Mandy, Review of ‘Girls Next Door’, Women’s Review, 1 (Nov. 1985), 40. Merck, Mandy, Perversions: Deviant Readings (Virago, London, 1993). Meyer, Moe (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (Routledge, New York and London, 1994). Moraga, Cherrie and Anzaldúa, Gloria, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Kitchen Table Press, New York, 1981). Munt, Sally (ed.), New Lesbian Criticism (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992). Parker, Andrew, et al. (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (Routledge, London and New York, 1992). Radicalesbians, ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’, The Ladder, vol. 14, 11/12 (1970). Rich, Adrienne, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs, 5, 4 (Summer, 1980), 631–60. Rich, Adrienne, ‘The Temptations of a Motherless Girl’, in On Lies, Secrets and Silence (Virago, London, 1980). Roof, Judith, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia University Press, New York, 1990). Rule, Jane, Lesbian Images (Crossing Press, Trumansberg, NY, 1975). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, New York, 1985). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 263

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (Routledge, London, 1994). Showalter, Elaine (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (Virago, London, 1986). Sinfield, Alan, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Basic Blackwell, Oxford, 1989). Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century (Cassell, London, 1994). Sinfield, Alan, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (Routledge, London, 1994). Smith, Barbara, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter (ed., 1986), above. Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Methuen, London, 1986). Still, Judith and Worton, Michael, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993). Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Homosexualities (Routledge, New York and London, 1985). Whitehead, Stephen M. and Barrett, Frank J. (eds), The Masculinities Reader (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001). Wittig, Monique, ‘The Straight Mind’ [1980], reprinted in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992). Wittig, Monique, ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’, Feminist Issues, 1/2 (1981), 47–54. Wittig, Monique and Zeig, Sandi, Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary [French edn, 1976] (Avon, New York, 1979). Woods, Gregory, Articulate Flesh: Male Home-Eroticism in Modern Poetry (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987). Zimmerman, Bonnie, ‘What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter (ed., 1986), above. Zimmerman, Bonnie, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989 (Beacon Press, Boston, 1991).

Further reading

Bingham, C., ‘Seventeenth-Century Attitudes Toward Deviant Sex’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1971), 447–68. ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 264

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Bleys, Rudi C., The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750–1918 (Cassell, London, 1996). Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Gay Men’s Press, London, 1988). Bredbeck, Gregory W., Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991). Bremner, Jeni, From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (Routledge, London, 1989). Burston, Paul and Richardson, Colin (eds), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (Routledge, London, 1995). Butters, Ronald R. et al. (eds), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 1989). Clark, David and Barber, Stephen (eds), Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory (Routledge, London, 2002). Cleto, Fabio (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999). Davenport-Hines, R., Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain Since the Renaissance (Collins, London, 1990). De Jean, Joan, Fictions of Sappho 1565–1937 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989). Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (Scarlet Press, London, 1993). Dynes, Wayne, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality (Gai Saber Monograph, New York, 1985). Ferris, Lesley (ed.), Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing (Routledge, New York and London, 1993). Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge, New York and London, 1992). Glover, David and Kaplan, Cora, Genders (Routledge, London, 2000). Hall, Donald E., Queer Theories (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002). Halperin, David M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (Routledge, London, 1990). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 265

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Hamer, Diane and Budge, Belinda (eds), The Good, The Bad and The Gorgeous: Popular Culture’s Romance with Lesbianism (Pandora, London, 1994). Hawkes, Terence, Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (Routledge, London, 1996). Humm, Maggie, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Theory (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1994). Katz, J. N., ‘The Age of Sodomitical Sin, 1607–1740’, in Jonathan Goldberg (ed., 1994), see Key texts, above. Lewis, Reina, ‘The Death of the Author and the Resurrection of the Dyke’, in Sally Munt (ed., 1992), see Key texts, above. Maccubbin, Robert P., ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985). Nestle, Joan, A Restricted Country: Essays and Short Stories (Sheba, London, 1988). Norton, Rictor, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (The Gay Men’s Press, London, 1992). Palmer, Paulina, Contemporary Lesbian Writing (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993). Ringer, R. Jeffrey (ed.), Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality (New York University Press, London and New York, 1994). Rousseau, G. S. and Porter, Roy (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992). Rubin, Gayle, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975). Salih, Sara, Judith Butler (Routledge, London, 2002). Saslow, James M., Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1986). Senelick, Laurence, ‘Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (1990), 33–67. Smith, Bruce, R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: Cultural Poetics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991). ARG_C10.qxd 07/02/2005 14:34 Page 266

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Snitow, Ann et al. (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New Feminist Library, New York, 1983). Stimpson, Catharine, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces (Routledge, London, 1988). Sullivan, Nikki, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003). Trumbach, Randolph, ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 9 (1985), 109–21. Trumbach, Randolph, ‘London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds, 1991), see Key texts, above. Vance, Carole S. (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Routledge, London, 1984). Whitehead, Stephen J., Men and Masculinities (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002). EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET

EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK '"

University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles P$J7q- . Hb:J s /GfCjO

Contents :I,,

I, Acknowledgments ix Credits xi Introduction: Axiomatic I

Chapter 4, "The Beast in the Closet, .. first appeared in I. Epistemology of the Closet Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex. Politics, and Science in the l.l Nineteenth-Century Novel, Selected Papers from the English v Institute. 1983-84. The johns Hopkins University Press, r; 2.. Some Binarisms (I) Baltimore/London, 1986, pp. 148-86. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. [l) Billy Budd: After the Homosexual 91 lA University of California Press 1 Berkeley and Los· Aiigeles; Califolnia 3- Some Binarisms (II) © 1990 by Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations The Regents of the University of California I of the Male Body I3I Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data -' 4· The Beast in the Closet Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the closet I Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. ') James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic 182. p. ern. ,<) Includes bibliographical references. 0 5· Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet 2.13 ISBN 0-520-07042-9 0 1. American fiction-Men authors-History and criticism. I 2. Homosexuality and literature. 3. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. " Billy Budd. 4. James, Henry, 1843-1916-Criticism and ? Index interpretation. 5. Wilde, Oscar,1854-1900-Criticism and interpretation. 6. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. Ala recherche du temps perdu. 7. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 8. Gays' writings.:..:. History and criticism-Theory, etc. 9. Gay men in literature. I. Title. PS374.H63S42 1990 813'.309353-dc20 90-35697 CIP Printed in the United States of America I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

vii Introduction: Axiomatic

Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured-indeed, fractured- by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of I virtually any aspecr of modern Wb;tern culture must be, not merely incomplete,'but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modem homo/heterosexual defini- tion; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modem gay and antihomophobic theory. The passage oftime, the bestowal of thought and necessary political struggle since the tum of the century have only spread and deepened the long crisis of modem sexual definition, dramatizing, often violently, the internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each of the forms of discursive and institutional "common sense" on this subject inherited from the architects of our present culture. The contradictions I will be !I discussing are not in the first place those between prohomosexual and I antihomosexual people or ideologies, although the book's strongest mo- tivation is indeed the gay-affirmative one. Rather, the contradictions that seem most active are the ones internal to all the important twentieth- century understandings of homo I heterosexual definition, both herem- sexist and antihomophobic. Their outlines and something of their history are sketched in Chapter 1. Briefly, they are two. The first is the contradic- tion between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an i.I issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it) on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view). The second is the contradiction between seeing I same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or !I I .J 2 Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic 3

transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting virtually every issue of power and- gender, 2 lines can never be drawn to an impulse of separatism-though by no means necessarily political I circumscribe within some proper domain of sexuality {whatever that I separatism-within each gender. The purpose of this book is not to might be) the consequences of a shift in sexual discourse. Furthermore, in adjudicate between the two poles of either of these contradictions, for, if accord with·Foucault's demonstration, whose results I will take to be its argument is right, no epistemological grounding now exists from axiomatic, that modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality which to do so. Instead, I am trying to make the strongest possible l in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized 'introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally constructs of individual identity, truth, and.knowledge, it becomes truer marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the impor- and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but tant knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western transforms the languages and relations by which we know. culture as a whole. I Accordingly, one characte,istic of the rea4.ings in this book is to attend The word "homosexual" entered Euro-American discourse during the to perforroative aspects of texts, and to what are often blandly called their last third of the nineteenth century-its popularization preceding, as it I {-"reader relations," as sites of definitional creation, violence, and rupture happens, even that of the word "heterosexual."' It seems clear that .the in relation to particular readers, particular institutional circums.tan,ces. sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities, I An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet-the denoted by the new term "homosexual" and its contemporary variants relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit already had a long, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other around homo I heterosexual definition-have the potential for being pecu- sexual behaviors and behavi()ral cll!sters. What was new from the turn of liarly revealing, in fact, about ore generally. It has felt the century was the world-mapping by wJ;lich every given person, just as throughout this work as though the ensity of their social meaning lends he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now any speech act concerning these issues- and the outlines of th

/ I. On this, see Jonathan Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New 2. This is an argument of my Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial ( York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 147-50; for more discussion, David M. Halperin, One New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). \ Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 155n.1 and ·pp. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. \ 158-59n.17. Hurley (New York: Pantheon,1978), p. 27. , -r 0 I .-,..u.. ""'!5 I 4 Introduction: Axiomatic il Introduction: Axiomatic 5 best friends, who for years canvassed freely the emotional complications Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a of each other's erotic lives-the man's eroticism happening to focus ex- mass scale for striking enforcements-perhaps especially around sexu- clusively on men. But it was only after one particular conversational ality, in modern Western culture the most meaning-intensive of human moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of activities. The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape, these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as man, in their conversation together, as a gay man. Discussing it much it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long later, both agreed they had felt at the time that this one moment had as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which constituted a clear-cut act of coming out, even in the context of years and male sexuality receives careful education)! And the rape machinery that years beforehand of exchange predicated on the man's being gay. What is organized by this epistemological privilege of unknowing in turn keeps was said to make this difference? Not a version of "I am gay," which could disproportionately under discipline, of course, women's larger ambitions only have been bathetic between them. What constituted coming out for to take more control over the terms of our own circulation. 6 Or, again, in V' this man, in this--= situation, was to use about himself the phrase ''coming an ingenious and patiently instructive orchestration of ignorance, the out" -to mention, as if casually, having come out to someone else. U.S. Justice Deparrment ruled in june, 1986, that an employer may freely (Similarly, aT-shirt that ACT UP sells in New York bearing the text, "I am fire persons with AIDS exactly so long as the employer can claim to be out, therefore I am," is meant to do for the wearer, not the constativework ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known of reporting that s/he is out, but the performative work of coming out in health danger in the workplace from the disease.' Again, it is clear in the first place.) And as 1 will diss:uss, thr fact thawilence is political context that the effect aimed at-in this case, it is hard to help f rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in feeling, aimed at with some care-is the ostentatious declaration, for the closet;dePe'nd7 on 'i_ndhighlights more broadlythe fact that ignorance is private sector, of an organized open season on gay men. 8 as potent and as ail, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field 5· Catherine A. MacKinnon makes this point more fully in "Feminism, Marxism, • of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 515-44. mobilizing the Bows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons. If M. 6. Susan Brownmiller made the most forceful and influential presentation of this case in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape {New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). Mitterrand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks-as he did lack- 7· Robert Pear, "Rights Laws Offer Only Limited Help on AIDS, U.S. Rules," New French, it is the urbane M. Mitterrand who must negotiate in an acquired York Times,June 23, 1986. That the ruling was calculated to offer, provoke, and legitimize harm and insult is clear from the language quoted in Pear's article: "A person," tongue, the ignorant Mr. R;agan who may dilate in his native one., Or in the ruling says, for "cannot be regarded as handicapped (and hence subject to the interactive speech model by which, as Sally McConneii-Ginet puts it, federal protection] simply because others shun his company. Otherwise, a host of personal traits, from ill temper to poor personal hygiene, would constitute handicaps." "the standard ... meaning can be thought of as what is recognizable 8. Not that gay men were intended to be the only victims of this ruling. In even the solely on the basis of interlocutors' mutual knowledge of established prac- most conscientious discourse concerning AIDS in the United States so faf there has been the problem, to which this essay does not pretend to offer any solution, of doing justice at tices of interpretation," it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have ' once to the relative (and increasing) heterogeneity of those who actually have AIDS and to ' the less broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice the specificity with which AIDS discourse at every level has until very recently focused on who will define the terms of the exchange. So, for instance, because "men, male homosexuality. In its worldwide epidemiology, of 'ourse, AIDS has no distinctive association with gay men, nor is it likely to for long here either. The acknowledgment/ with superior extralinguistic resources and privileged discourse positions, management of this fact was the preoccupation of a strikingly sudden media-wide discur- are often less likely to treat perspectives different from their own as mutu- sive shift in the winter and early spring of 1987. If the obsessionally homophobic focus of AIDS phobia up to that moment scapegoated gay men by (among other things) subjecting ally available for communication," their attitudes are "thus more likely to their sexual practice and lifestyles to a glaring and effectually punitive visibility, however, it leave a lasting imprint on the common semantic stock than women's. "4 worked in an opposite way to expunge the claims by expunging the vi,sibility of most of the disease's other victims. So far, here, these victims have been among groups already the most vulnerable-intravenous drug users, sex workers, wives and girlfriends of closeted men- on whom invisibility, or a public subsumption under the incongruous heading of (l) Sally McConnell·Ginet, "The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse- gay men, can haVe no protective effect. (It has been notable, for instance, that media Based manuscript, pp. 387-88, quoted in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. coverage of prostitutes with AIDS has shown no interest in the health of the women Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 264; emphasis added. themselves, but only in their potential for infecting men. Again, the campaign to provide

\ I , 6 Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic 7

Although the simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance (one much more indelible, has to be the economical way it functions here as meaning, the Capital one, of the word "stonewall") can sometimes be switchpoint for the cyclonic epistemological undertows that encompass enough to enforce discursive power, a far more complex drama of igno- power in general and issues of homosexual desire in particular. rance and knowledge is the more usual carrier of political struggle. Such a One considers: (1) prima facie, nobody could, of course, actually for drama was enacted when, only a few days after the Justice Department's an instant mistake the intent of the gay advocates as facetious. (2) Secunda private-sector decision, the U.S. Supreme Court correspondingly opened facie, it is thus the court itself that is pleased to be facetious. Trading on the the public-sector bashing season by legitimating state antisodomy laws assertion's very (3) transparent sttipidit)' (not just the contemptuous dem- in Bowers v. Hardwick. 9 In a virulent ruling whose language made from onstration that powerful people don't have to be acute or right, but even beginning to end an insolent display of legal illogic- of what Justice more, the contemptuous demonstration-this is palpable throughout the Blackmun in dissent called "the most willful blindness"lO_a single, majority opinions, but only in ,this word does it bubble up with active apparently incidental word used in Justice White's majority opinion be- pleasure-of how obtuseness itself arms the powerful against their en- came for many gay or antihomophobic readers a focus around which the emies), the court's joke here (in the wake of the mock-ignorant mock- inflammatory force of the decision seemed to pullulate with peculiar jocose threat implicit in "at best") is (4) the clownish claim to be able at density. II In White's opinion, will to "read"-i.e., project into-the minds of the gay advocates. This to claim that a right to engage in sodomy is "deeply rooted in this nation's being not only (5) a parody of, but ( 6) more intimately a kind of aggressive ·history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at jamming technique against, (7) the truth/paranoid fantasy that it is gay best, facetious.1 2 people who can read, or project their own desires into, the minds of ''straight" people. What lends the word "facetious" in this sentence such an unusual power to Inarguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which offend, even in the context of a larger legal offense whose damage will be the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of X knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance. The effect is a real one, but it drug users with free needles had not until early 1987 received even t4e exiguous state support given to Safer-sex education for gay men.) The damages of homophobia on the carries dangers with it as well. The chief of these dangers is the scornful, one hand, of classism/ racism/sexism on the other; of intensive regulatory visibility on the fearful, or patheticizing of "ignorance"; it goes with tll_e unex- one hand, of discursive erasure on the other: these pairings are not only incommensurable (and why measure them against each other rather than against the more liberating amined Enlightenment assumptions by which the labeling of a particular possibilities they foreclose?) but very hard to interleave with each other conceptually. The force as "igriorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space effect has been perhaps most dizzying when the incommensurable damages are condensed on a never quite explicit ethical schema. (It is also dangerously close in upon a single person, e.g., a nonwhite gay man. The focus of this book is on the specific damages of homophobia; but to the extent that it is impelled by {a desire to the structure to the more palpably sentimental privileging of ignorance as an public pressures of AIDS phobia, I must at least make clear how much that is important originary, passive innocence.) The angles of view from which it can look even to its own ambitions is nonetheless excluded from its potential for responsiveness. 9· Graphic encapsulation of this event on the front page of the Times: at the bottom of as though a political fight is a fight against ignorance are invigorating and the three-column lead story on the ruling, a photo ostensibly about the influx of various maybe revelatory ones but dangerous places for dwelling. The writings of, navies into a welcoming New York for "the Liberty celebration" shows two worried but extremely good-looking sailors in alluring whites, "asking directions of a police officer" among others, Foucault, Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Szasz have (New York Times, July 1, 1986). given contemporary readers a lot of practice in questioning both· the ro. "The Supreme Court Opinion. Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General of Georgia, Petition v. Michael Hardwick and John and Mary Doe, Respondents," text in New York ethical/political disengagement and, beyond that, the ethical/political / Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 15. ' simplicity of the category of "knowledge," so that a writer who appeals rr. The word is quoted, for instance, in isolation, in the sixth sentence of the Times's lead article announcing the decision (July 1, 1986). The Times editorial decrying the too directly to the redemptive potential of simply upping the cognitive decision (July 2, 1986) remarks on the crudity of this word before outlining the substantive wattage on any question of power seems, now, naive. The corollary offensiveness of the ruling. The New York Native and the gay leaders it quoted also gave the problems still adhere to the category of "ignorance," as well, but so do word a lot of play in the immediate aftermath of the ruling(e.g., no. 169 Uuly 14,1986]: 8, 11). some additional ones: there are psychological operations of shame, de- 12. New York Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 13. nial, projection around "ignorance" that make it an especially galvanizing

., 8 Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic 9 category for the individual reader, even as they give it a rhetorical potency to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual "perversion" that it would be hard for writers to forswear and foolhardy for them to or, more broadly, "decadence." Foucault, for instance, mentions the hys- embrace. terical woman and the masturbating child, along with "entomologized" Rather than sacrifice the notion of"ignorance," then, I would be more sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, interested at this point in trying, as we are getting used to trying with and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specifica- "knowledge," to pluralize and specify it. That is, I would like to be able to - tion of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual defini- make use in sexual-political thinking of the deconstructive understanding tion with epistemological and power relations. 14 True as his notation is, it that particular insights generate, are lined with, and at the same time are suggests without beginning to answer the further question: why the themselves structured by particular opacities. If ignorance is not-as it category of "the masturbator," to choose only one example, should by evidently is not-a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from now have entirely lost its diacritical potential for specifying a particular which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts, kind of person, an identity, at the same time as it continues to be true- insights, freedoms, progress, perhaps there-exists instead a plethora of becomes increasingly true -that, for a crucial strain of Western discourse, ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions about the labor, erotics, in Foucault's words "the homosexual was now a species. "15 So, as a result, and economics of their human production and' distribution. Insofar as is the heterosexual, and between these species the human spec:ies has come ignorance is ignorance of a knowledge-a knowledge that may itself, it more and more to be divided. Epistemology of the Closet does not have an goes without saying, be seen as either true or false under some other explanation to offer for this sudden, radical condensation of sexual regime of truth -these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary categories; instead of speculating on its causes, the book explores its dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and unpredictably varied and acute implications and consequences. circulate as part of particular regimes of truth. We should not assume that At the same time that this process of sexual specification or species- their doubletting with knowledges means, however, that they obey identi- formation was going on, the book will argue, less stable and identity- cal laws identically or follow the same circulatory paths at the same bound understandings of sexual choice also persisted and developed, pace.13 often among the same people or interwoven in the same systems of Historically, the framing of Epistemology of the Closet begins with a thought. Again, the book will not suggest (nor do I believe there currently puzzle. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along exists) any standpoint of thought from which the rival claims of these which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of minoritizing and universalizing understandings of sexual definition could another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain be decisively arbitrated as to their "truth." Instead, the perfonmative zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, overlap will be my subject. And, of course, it makes every difference that a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender these impactions of homo/heterosexual definition took place in a setting, of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, not of spacious emotional or analytic impartiality, but rather of urgent as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual homophobic pressure to devalue one of the two nominally symmetrical orientation." This is not a development that would have been foreseen forms of choice. from the viewpoint of the fin de siecle itself, where a rich stew of male As several of the formulations above would suggest, one main strand of algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its argument in this book is deconstructive, in a fairly specific sense. The components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions-heterosexual/homosexual,

13. For an essay that makes these points more fully, see my "Privilege of Unknowing," Genders, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 102-24, a reading of Diderot's La Religieuse, from which 14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 105, 43. the preceding six paragraphs are taken. 15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43. / IO Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic II

in this case-actually subsist in a more unsetded and dynamic tacit believe that the oppressive sexual system of the past hundred years was relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but if anything born and bred (if I may rely on the pith of a fable whose subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A value doesn't, I muschope, stand or fall,with its history of racist uses) actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and in the briar patch of the most notorious and repeated decenterings and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the exposures. .3;. supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is These deconstructive contestations can occur, moreover, only in the 2.. irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions,·definitions constituted as at once internal and external to term A. Harold Beaver, for themselves equally unstable but responding to different sets of contiguities instance, in an influential 1981 essay sketched the oudines of such a and often at a different rate. The master terms of a particular historical deconstructive strategy: moment will be those that are so situated as to entangle most inextricably and at the same time most differentially the filaments of other important The aim must be to reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is "trans- definitional ne>:uses. In arguing that homo/heterosexual definition' has parent" or "natural" and what is "derivative" or "contrived" by demon- strating that the qualities predicated of "homosexuality" (as a dependent been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same, term) are in fact a condition of "heterosexuality"; that "heterosexuality," primary importance for all modem Western identity and social organiza- far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be treated as a depen- tion (and not merely for homosexual identity and''culture) as do the more dent term.16 traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and race, I'll argue that the- now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual defin.ition has affected To understand these conceptual relations as irresolvably unstable is our culture through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories not, however, to understand them as inefficacious or innocuous. It is at secrecy I disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/ least premature when Roland Barthes prophesies that "once the paradigm femmme, maJoritylminonty, .mu"oceii"ce/initiation, natural/ artificial, is blurred, utopia begins: meaning and sex become the objects of free play, new I old, discipline/terrorism, canonic/noncanonic, Wholeriess/ deca- at the heart of which the (polysemant) forms and the (sensual) practices, dence, urbane I provincial, domestic/ foreign, health I illness, same I liberated from the binary prison, will achieve a state of infinite expan- different, active/ passive, in/ out, cognjrjon !paranoia, art/kitsch, uto- sion. "17 To the contrary, a deconstructive understanding of these bina- pia/ apocalypse, s!!!_ce_my/ sentimentality, and voluntarity I addiction.19 risms makes it possible to identify them as sites that are peculiarly densely And rather than embrace an idealist faith in the necessarily, immanently charged with lasting potentials for powerful manipulation-through pre- self-corrosive efficacy of the contradictions inherent to these definitional cisely the mechanisms of self-contradictory definition or, more succinctly, binarisms, I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be . the double bind. Nor is a deconstructive analysis of such definitional specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required knots, however necessary, at all sufficient to disable them. Quite the to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such opposite: I would suggest that an understanding of their irresolvable an incoherence of definition . .! instability has been continually available, and has continually lent discur, Perhaps I should say something about the project of hypothesizing that sive authority, to antigay as well as to gay cultural forces of this century. certain binarisms that structure meaning in a culture may be "ineffaceably Beaver makes an optimistic prediction that "by disqualifying the auton- marked" by association with. this one particular problematic-inefface- omy of what was deemed spontaneously immanent, the whole sexual system is fundamentally decentred and exposed. "18 But there is reason to 19. My casting of all these definitional nodes in the form of binarisms, I should make explicit; has to do not with a mystical faith in the number two but, rather, with the felt 16. Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981 ): 115. need to schematize in some consistent way the treatment of sociitl vectors so exceedingly 17. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and various. The kind of falsification necessarily performed on each by this reduction cannot, Wang, 1977), p. 133. unfortunately, itself be consistent. But the scope of the kind of hypothesis I want to pose 18. Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," pp. 115-16. does seem to require a drastic reductiveness, at least in its initial fonTiulations. 12 Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic '3 ably even when invisibly. Hypothesizing is easier than proving, but indeed ual panic. And Chapter 5, on Proust, focuses more sharply on the book's I cannot imagine the protocol by which such hypotheses might be tested; preoccupation with the speech-act relations around the closet. they must be deepened and broadened-not the work of one book-and In consonance with iny fihph·asis ol) the performative relations of used, rather than proved or disproved by a few examples. The collecting double and conflicted definition, the theorized_ prescription for a practical of instances of each binarism that would appear to "common sense" to be politics implicit in these readings is for a multi-pronged movement whose unmarked by issues of homo I heterosexual definition, though an in ex- idealist and materialist impulses, whose minority-model and universalist- haustibly stimulating heuristic, is not, I believe, a good test of such a model strategies, and for that matter whose gender-separatist and gender- hypothesis. After all, the particular kinds of skill that might be required integrative analyses would likewise proceed in parallel without any high to produce the most telling interpretations have hardly been a valued part premium placed on ideological rationalization between them. In effect of the "common sense" of this epistemologically cloven culture. If a pain- this is how the gay movements of this century have actually been struc- staking process of accumulative reading and historical de- and recontex- tured, if not how they have often been perceived or evaluated. The breadth tualization does not render these homologies resonant and produqive, and fullness of the political gestalt of gay-affirmative struggle give a that is the only test they can directly fail, the only one they need to pass. powerful resonance to the voice of each of its constituencies. The cost in The structure of the present book has been markedly affected by this ideological rigor, though high indeed, is very simply inevitable: this is not intuition-by a sense that the- cultural interrogations it aims to make, a conceptual landscape in which ideological rigor across levels, across imperative will be trivialized or evacuated, at this early stage, to the constituencies is at all possible, be it ever so desirable. degree that their procedures seem to partake of the a priori. I've wanted Something similar is true at the level of scholarship. Over and over I the book to be inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely non- have felt in writing the book that, however my own identifications, algorithmic. A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and intuitions, circumstances, limitations, apd talents may have led its inter- projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the pretations to privilege constructivist oVer essentialist, universalizing over semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the minoritizing, and gender-transitive over gender-separatist understandings syntax of a "broader" or more abstractable critical project. In particular, of sexual choice, nevertheless the space of permission for this work and the the book aims to resist in every way it can the deadening pretended depth of the intellectual landscape in which it might have a contribution to knowingness by which the chisel of modern homo/heterosexual defini- make owe everything to the wealth of essentialist, minoritizing, and tional crisis tends, in public discourse, to be hammered most fatally separatist gay thought and struggle also in progress. There are similar home. points to be made about the book's limitation to what may sound, in the Perhaps to counter that, it seems now that the book not only has but current climate of exciting interstitial explorations among literature, constitutes an extended introduction. It is organized, not as a chronologi- social history, and "cultural studies," like unreconstructedly literary read- cal narrative, but as a series of essays linked closely by their shared project ings of essentially canonical texts. I must hope that, as the taken-for- and recurrent topics. The Introduction, situating this project in the larger grantedness of what constitutes a literary text, a literary reading, a context of gay /lesbian and antihomophobic theory, and Chapter 1, worthwhile interpretive intervention, becomes more and more unstable outlining its basic terms, are the only parts that do not comprise extended under such pressures, the force of anyone's perseveration in this spe· readings. Chapter 2 (on Billy Budd) and Chapter 3 (on Wilde and cializeq practice (I use "specialized" here not with the connotation of the Nietzsche), which were originally conceived as a single unit, offer a "expert's" technique, but with the connotation of the wasteful, value- different kind of introduction: an through the specificity of these making partiality of the sexual perversion) could look less like a rearguard texts and authors, of most of the bravely showy list of binarized cultural defense than like something newly interrogable and interrogatory. Even nexuses about which the book makes, at other places, more generalized more is this true of the book's specification of male, and of Euro- assertions. Chapter 4 discusses at length, through a reading of James's American male, sexual definition as its subject. Any critical book makes "The Beast in the Jungle," the elsewhere recurrent topos of male homosex- endless choices of focus and methodology, and it is very difficult for these ' 14 Introduction: Axiomdtic Introduction: Axiomatic 15 choices to be interpreted in any other light than that of the categorical certain alternative, overarching periodization of definitional issues can be imperative: the fact that they are made in a certain way here seems a priori appropriately entertained. to assert that they would be best made in the same way everywhere. I The book that thkone, Between Men: English Literature and would ask that, however sweeping the claims made by this book may seem Male Homosocial Desire, attempted to demonstrate the immanence of to be, it not be read as making that particular claim. Quite the opposite: a men's same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male- real measure of the success of such an analysis would lie in its ability, in the female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature. The relation of this hands of an inquirer with different needs, talents, or positionings, to book to its predecessor is defined most simply by the later time span that it clarify the distinctive kinds of resistance offered to it from different spaces treats. This has also involved, however, a different negotiation between on the social map, even though such a project might require revisions or feminist and antihomophobic motives in .the two studies. Between Men rupturings of the analysis as first proffered. The only imperative that the ends with a coda pointing toward "the gaping and unbridgeable rift in the book means to treat as categorical is the very broad one of pursuing an male homosocial spectrum" at the end of the nineteenth century, after antihomophobic inquiry. If the book were able to fulfill its most expansive which "a discussion of male homosocial desire as a whole really gives way ambitions, it would make certain specific kinds of readings and interroga- to a discussion of male homosexualitY and h01p.ophobia as we know tions, perhaps new, available in a heuristically powerful, productive, and them. "20 (For more on that facile "as we know them," see Axiom 5 below.) significant form for other readers to perform on literary and social texts Epistemology ofthe Closet, which depends analytically on the conclusions with, ideally, other results. The meaning, the legitimacy, and in many reached in Between Men, takes up the story at exactly that point, and in ways even the possibility for good faith of the positings this book makes that sense can more accurately be said to be primarily an antihomophobic depend radically on the production, by other antihomophobic readers book in its subject matter and perspective. That is to say, in terms that I who may be very differently situated, of the widest possible range of other will explain more fully in Axiom 2 below, the book's first focus is on and even contradictory availabilities. sexuality rather than (sometimes, even, as opposed to) gender. Between This seems, perhaps, especially true of historical periodization Men focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural implied by the structure of this book, and its consequences. To hypoth- system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by esize the usefulness of taking the century from the 1880s to the 1980s as a being routed through triangular relations involving a woman. The inflic- single period in the history of male homo/heterosexual definition is tions of this system, far from disappearing since the tum of the century, necessarily to risk subordinating the importance of other fulcrum points. have only. become adapted and subtilized. But certainly the pressingly One thinks, for instance, of the events collectively known as immediate fusion of feminist with gay male preoccupations and inter- the New York City riots of June, 1969, protesting police harassment of rogations that 'Between Men sought to perform has seemed less available, patrons of a gay bar, from which the modern gay liberation movement analytically, for a twentieth-century culture in which at least some ver- dates its inauguration. A certain idealist bias built into a book about sions of a same-sex desire unmediated through heterosexual performance definition makes it too easy to level out, as from a spuriously bird's-eye have become widely articulated. view, the incalculable impact-including the cognitive impact-of politi- Epistemology of the Closet is a feminist book mainly in the sense that cal movements per se. Yet even the phrase "the closet" as a publicly its analyses. were produced by someone whose thought has been macro- intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made avail- and microscopically infused with feminism over a long period, At the able, obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay many intersections where a distinctively feminist (i.e., gender-centered) politics oriented around coming out of the closet. More generally, the and a distinctively antihomophobic (i.e., sexuality-centered) inquiry have centrality in this book's argument of a whole range of valuations and political perspectives that are unmistakably post-Stonewall will be, I hope, perfectly obvious. It is only in that context that the hypothesis of a 20. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 201, 202. Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic !7

seemed to diverge, however, this book has tried consistently to press on in has, however, faded rapidly-less because of the word's manifest inade- the latter direction. I have made this choice largely because I see feminist quacy to the cognitive and behavioral maps of the centuries before its analysis as being considerably more developed than gay male or anti- coining, than because the sources of its authority for the century after have homophobic analysis at present-theoretically, politically, and institu- seemed increasingly tendentious and dated. Thus "homosexual" and ...... ..__.- tionally. There are more people doing feminist analysis, it has been being "gay" seem more and moi-e to be tirms applicable to distinct, nonoverlap- done longer, it is less precarious and dangerous (still precarious and ping periods in the history of a phenomenon for which there then remains dangerous enough), and there is by now a much more broadly usable set no overarching label. Accordingly I have tried to use each of the. terms of tools available for its furtherance. This is true notwithstanding the appropriately in contexts where historical differentiation between the extraordinary recent effiorescence of gay and lesbian studies, without earlier and later parts of the century seemed important. But to designate which, as I've suggested, the present book would have been impossible; "the" phenomenon (problematical notion) as it stretches across a larger that .flowering is young, fragile, under extreme threat from both within reach of history, I have used one or the other interchangeably, most often and outside academic institutions, and still necessarily dependent on a in contrast to the immediatelY relevant historical usage. (E.g., "gay" in a limited pool of paradigms and readings. The viability, by now solidly turn-of-the-century context or "homosexual" in a 1980s context would established, of a persuasive feminist project of interpreting gender ar- each be meant to suggest a caiegorization broad enough to include at least rangements, oppressions, and resistances in Euro-American modernism the other period as well.) I have not followed a convention, used by some and modernity from the turn of the century has been a condition of the scholars, of differentiating between "gay" and "homosexual" on the basis possibility of this book but has also been taken as a permission or of whether a given text or person was perceived as embodying (respec- imperative to pursue a very different path in it. And, indeed, when tively) gay affirmation or internalized homophobia; an unproblematical another kind of intersection has loomed-the choice between risking a ease in distinguishing between these two things is not an assumption of premature and therefore foreclosing reintegration between feminist and this study. The main additional constraint on the usage of these terms in gay (male) terms of analysis, on the one hand, and on the other hand this book is a preference against employing the noun "gayness," or "gay" keeping their relation open a little longer by deferring yet again the itself as a noun. I think what underlies this preference is a sense that the 1 moment of their accountability to one another-I have followed the latter association of same-sex desire with the traditional, exciting meanings of path. This is bound to seem retardataire to some readers, but I hope they the adjective "gay" is still a powerfully assertive act, perhaps not one to be are willing to see it as a genuine deferral, in the interests of making space lightly routinized by grammatical adaptations. for a gay male-<>riented analysis that would have its own claims to make Gender has increasingly become a problem for this area of termi- , for an illuminating centrality, rather than as a refusal. Ultimately, I do nology, and one to which I have, again, no consistent solution. "Homo- feel, a great deal depends-for all women, for lesbians, for gay men, and sexual" was a relatively gender-neutral term and I use it as such, though it possibly for all men-on the fostering of our ability to arrive at un- has seemed to have at least some male bias-whether because of J) derstandings of sexuality that will respect a certain irreducibility in it to the pun on Latin homo= man latent in its etymological macaronic, or (. the terms and relations of gender. simply because of the greater attention to men in the discourse surround- A note on terminology. There is, I believe, no satisfactory rule for ing it {as in so many others}. "Gay" is more complicated since it makes a choosing between the usages "homosexual" and "gay," outside of a post- claim to refer to both genders :but is routinely yoked with "lesbian" in Stonewall context where "gay" must be preferable since it is the explicit actual usage, as if it did not-as increasingly it does not-itself refer to choice of a large number of the people to whom it refers. Until recently it women. As I suggest in Axiom 3, this terminological complication is seemed that "homosexual," though it severely risked anachronism in any closely responsive to real ambiguities and struggles of gay !lesbian politics application before the late nineteenth century, was still somehow less and identities: e.g., there are women-loving women who think of them- temporally circumscribed than "gay," perhaps because it sounded more selves as lesbians but not as gay, and others who think of themselves as gay official, not to say diagnostic. That aura of timelessness about the word women but not as lesbians. Since the premises of this study make it 18 Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic '9

impossible to presuppose either the unity or the distinctness of women's then, is an increasingly contested definitional interface of terms that and men's changing, and indeed synchronically various, homosexual impact critically but nonexclusively on gay people. identities, and since its primary though not exclusive focus is in fact on In this highly charged context, the treatment of gay-bashers who do male identities, I sometimes use "gay and lesbian" but more often simply wind up in court is ;!s'o hlceJY to involve a plunge into a thicket of "gay," the latter in the oddly precise sense of a phenomenon of same-sex difficult and contested definitions. One of the thorniest of these has to do desire that is being treated as indicatively but not exclusively male. When I with "homosexual panic," a defense strategy that ,is commonly used to mean to suggest a more fully, equitably two-sexed phenomenon I refer to prevent conviction or to lighten sentencing of gay-bashers-a term, as "gay men and women," or "lesbians and gay men"; when a more exclusive well, that names a key analytic tool in the present study. Judicially, a one, to "gay men." "homosexual panic" defense for a person (typically a man) accused of Finally, I feel painfully how different may be a given writer's and antigay violence implies that his responsibility for the crime was dimin- reader's senses of how best to articulate an argument that may for both ished by a pathological psychological condition, perhaps brought on by seem a matter of urgency. I have tried to be as clear as I can about the an unwanted sexual advance from the man whom he then attacked. In book's moves, motives, and assumptions throughout; but even aside from addition to the unwarranted assumptions that all gay men may plausibly the intrinsic difficulty of its subject and texts, it seems inevitable that the be accused of making sexual advances to strangers and, worse, that h 7 <, style of its writing will not conform to everyone's ideal of the p,el!.u!;!d. The violence, often to the point of homicide, is a legitimate response to any fact that-if the book is right-the most significant stakes for the culture sexual advance whether welcome or not, the "homosexual panic" defense V ,¥' are involved in precisely the volatile, fractured, dangerous relations of rests on the falsely individualizing and pathologizing assumption that visibility and articulation around homosexual possibility makes the pros- hatred of homosexuals is so private and so atypical a phenomenon in this pect of its being misread especially fraught; to the predictable egoistic fear culture as to be classifiable as an accountability-reducing illness. The of its having no impact or a risible one there is added the dread of its widespread acceptance of this defense really seems to show, to t!)e con- operating destructively. trary, that hatred of homosexuals is even more public, more typical, 1\ence Let me give an example. There is reason to believe that gay-bashing is harder to find any leverage against than hatred of other disadvantaged the most common and most rapidly increasing among what are becoming groups. "Race panic" or "gender panic," for instance, is not accepted as a legally known as bias-related or hate-related crimes in the United States. defense for violence against people of color or against women; as for There is no question that the threat of this violent, degrading, and often "heterosexual panic," David Wertheimer, executive director of the New fatal extrajudicial sanction works even more powerfully than, and in York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, remarks, "If every intimately enforcing concert with, more respectably institutionalized heterosexual woman who had a sexual' advance made to her by a male had sanctions against gay choice, expression, and being. The endemic the right to murder the man, the streets of this city would be littered with macy of the link between extrajudicial and judicial punishment of homo- the bodies of heterosexual men. "21 A lawyer for the National Gay Rights sexuaJity is clear, for instance, from the argument of legislators Who, in Advocates makes explicit the contrast with legal treatment of other bias- state after state, have fought to exclude antigay violence from coverage crimes: "There is no factual or legal justification for the use of this under bills that would specifically criminalize bias-related crime-on the [homosexual panic] defense. Just as our society will not allow a defendant grounds that to specify a condemnation of individual violence against to use racial or gender-based prejudices as an excuse for his violent acts, a persons perceived as gay would vitiate the state's condemnation of homo- defendant's homophobia is no defense to a violent crime."22 sexuality. These arguments have so far been successful in most of the states where the question has arisen; in fact, in some states (such as New York) 2.1. Peter Freiberg, "Blaming the Victim: New Life for the 'Gay Panic' Defense," The Advocate, May 24, 1988, p. 12. For a more thorough discussion of the homosexual panic where coverage of antigay violence was not dropped from hate-crimes defense, see "Burdens on Gay Litigants and Bias in the Court System: Homosexual Panic, bills, apparently solid racial/ ethnic coalitions have fractured so !Jadly Child Custody, and Anonymous Parties," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Uberties Law Review 19 (1984): 498-515. over the issue that otherwise overwhelmingly popular bills have been 2.2. Quoted from Joyce Norcini, in "NGRA Discredits 'Homosexual Panic' Defense," repeatedly defeated. The state's treatment of nonstate antigay violence, New York Native, no. 322 (June 19, 1989): 12. Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic

Thus, a lot of the popularity of the "homosexual panic" defense seems category into a structural principle applicable to the definitional work of to come simply from its ability to permit and "place," by pathologizing, an entire gender, hence of an entire culture. I used it JO denominate "the the enacrment of a socially sanctioned prejudice against one stigmatized most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century West- ...... - .... minority, a particularly demeaned one among many. Its special plau- ern men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homo- sibility, however, seems also to depend on a difference between antigay phobic blackmail"- as, specifically, "only one path of control, comple- crime and other bias-related antiminority crime: the difference of how mentary to public sanctions through the institutions described by much less clear, perhaps finally how impossible, is the boundary circum- Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of scription of a minoritizing gay identity. After all, the reason why this 'the sexual."'24 defense borrows the name of the (formerly rather obscure and litde- The forensic use of the "homosexual panic" defense for gay-bashers diagnosed) psychiatric classification "homosexual panic" is that it refers to depends on the medically mediated ability of the phrase to obscure an the supposed uncertainty about his own sexual identity of the perpetrator overlap between individual pathology and systemic function. The reason of the antigay violence. That this should be the rypifying scenario of I found the phrase attractive for my purposes was quite the opposite: I defenses of gay-bashers (as uncertainty about one's own race, religion, thought it could dramatize, render visible, even render scandalous the ethnicity, or gender is not in other cases of bias-related violence) shows same space of overlap. The set of perceptions condensed in that usage of once again how the overlapping aegises of minoritizing and universalizing "male homosexual panic" proved, I think, a productive feature of Between understandings of male homo/heterosexual definition can tend to redou- Men for other critics, especially those doing gay theory, and I have ble the victimization of gay people. In effect, the homosexual panic continued my explorations of the same phrase, used in the same sense, in defense performs a double act of minoritizing taxonomy: there is, it Epistemology of the Closet. Yet I feel, as well, with increasing dismay, in asserts, one distinct minority of gay people, and a second minority, the increasingly homophobic atmosphere of public discourse since 1985, equally distinguishable from the population at large, of"latent homosex- that work done to accentuate and clarify the explanatory power of this uals" whose "insecurity about their own masculinity" is so anomalous as difficult nexus may not be able to be reliably insulated from uses that to permit a plea based on diminution of normal moral responsibility. At ought to be diametrically opposed to it. For instance, it would not require the same time, the efficacy of the plea depends on its universalizing force, a willfully homophobic reader to understand these discussions of the on whether, as Wertheimer says, it can "create a climate in which the centrality and power of male homosexual panic as actually contributing jurors are able to identify with the perpetrator by saying, 'My goodness, to the credibility of the pathologizing "homosexual panic" legal defense of maybe I would have reacted the same way.'"23 The reliance of the homo- gay-bashers. All it would require would be a failure or refusal to under- sexual panic plea on the fact that this male definitional crisis is systemic stand how necessarily the discussions are embedded within their con- and endemic is enabled only, and precisely, by its denial of the same fact. text-the context, that is, ofan analysis based on systemwide skepticism When in my work on Between Men, knowing nothing about this about the positivist taxonomic neutrality of psychiatry, about the classi- judicial use of "homosexual panic" (at that time a less common and pub- ficatory coherence (e.g., concerning "individual responsibility") of the licized defense), I needed a name for "a structural residue of terrorist po- law. If, foreseeing the possibiliry of this particular misuse, I have, as I tential, of blackmailability, of Western maleness through the leverage of hope, been able to take the explanatory measures necessary to guard homophobia," I found myself attracted to just the same phrase, borrowed against it, still there may be too many others unforeseen. from the same relatively rare psychiatric diagnosis. Through a linguistic Of course, silence on these issues performs the enforcing work of the theft whose violence I trusted would be legible in every usage of the status quo more predictably and inexorably than any attempt at analysis. phrase, I tried to tum what had been a taxonomic, minoritizing medical Yet the tensions and pleasures that, even ideally, make it possible for a

23. Freiberg, "Blaming the Victim," p. 11. 24. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 89. 22 Introduction: Axiomatic Introduction: Axiomatic 23

writer to invest such a project with her best thought may be so different survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce from those that might enable a given reader to. taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulatim;;;_;f their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of • oppression or subordinatiorfwho hl.ve most need to know it; and I take In the remainder of this Introduction I will be trying to articulate some the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in Euro- v

of the otherwise implicit methodological, definitional, and axiomatic pean thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all r groundings of the book's project and explaining, as well, something of my women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission ofilecesSary view of its position within broader projects of understanding sexuality news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and J and gender. using unrationalized a11d provisional hypotheses about what kinds of Anyone working in gay and lesbian studies, in a culture where same- people there are to be found in one's world: 25 The writing of a Proust or a sex desire is still structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once James would be exemplary here: projects precisely of nonce taxonomy, of marginal and central, as the open secret, discovers that the line between the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident, on the one old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take J hand, and on the other hand tossing off commonplaces that turn out to to make up a world. retain their power to galvanize and divide, is weirdly unpredictable. In I don't assume that all, gay men or alJ women are very skilled at the dealing with an open-secret structure, it's only by being shameless about nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative. suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devalua- In this Introduction I shall have methodically to sweep into one little heap tion. For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure of loss in the some of the otherwise unarticulated assumptions and conclusions from a AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries long-term project of antihomophobic analysis. These nails, these scraps to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impover- of wiring: will they bore or will they shock? ishing to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to "the sentimental" Under the rule that most privileges the most obvious: one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's particularity be done some What is more dramatic is that-in spite of every promise to the contrary-every single theoretically or Axiom 1: People are different from each other. politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing of delegitirnating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and each other. This project is not rendered otiose by any demonstration of political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are how fully people may differ also from themselves. Deconstruction, pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demon- founded as a very science of differ(e/a)nce, has both so fetishized the idea strations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and re- of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most produced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best look for help in thinking about particular differences. The same thing friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, seems likely to prove true of theorists of postmodernism. Psychoanalytic lOves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our theory, if only through the almost astrologically lush plurality of its work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of overlapping taxonomies of physical zones, developmental stages, repre- our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species. Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who 2.5. On this, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). ,/'

,, HENRY JAMES AND QUEER MODERNITY

ERIC HARALSON    Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521813945

© Eric Haralson 2003

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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. 6 “The other half is the man”: the queer modern triangle of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James

Among the more overt targets of Ernest Hemingway’s neglected parody The Torrents of Spring (1926) are his former mentors Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson.1 Less obviously, but not coincidentally, the work marks Hemingway’s first notable public engagement with Henry James, both as master and as man – or rather, as something less than a man. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), drafted before but published after Torrents, James’s alleged sexual damage – or what his autobiography obscurely called an “obscure hurt” – constitutes an historical parallel for Jake Barnes’s impair- ment, with the implied distinction that Barnes had come by his disabling wound through active service in the military, unlike the already unmas- culine James (AU 415). More privately, Hemingway went on to demean the drawing-room “fairies” who languished about in James’s The Awkward Age (1899), to scorn his predecessor under the sign of emasculation (James had “no balls”) and effeminacy (one of the “male old women”), to dismiss most of James’s writing as “snobbish, difficultly written shit” – and to covet his transatlantic fame (SL 266, 673, 703). Only after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954 could he publicly concede that James ought to have received the honor, too.2 Yet like the other modern writers under survey here, Hemingway continued to feel James’s monumental presence up until the end of his career, as seen from the continued skirmishing with James in True at First Light (composed 1953–4) and A Moveable Feast (composed 1957–8).3 This chapter revisits the formative phase (1925–35) of this telling con- fluence between sex/gender anxiety and anxiety of influence, an exemplary instance of modern straight masculinity (as it seems) reading Victorian gay masculinity. At the same time, Stein’s perception that the “future feel- ing” James “felt the method of the twentieth century,” while Hemingway “look[ed] like a modern...[but] smell[ed] of the museums,” may queer considerably more than the notion of chronological sequence in the formal history of American prose (ABT 739, 873).4 James’s reading of Hemingway, 173 174 Henry James and Queer Modernity as it were, lies embedded in Hemingway’s reading of James, and especially within the thematic orbit of sex/gender politics. Stated another way, just as Hemingway (although certainly not he alone) shaped his masculinity in reaction against Jamesian interiority, aestheticism, homoeroticism, and subtle sociability, so does the Jamesian critique of overdetermined manhood (“active,” externalized, commercial, hetero) anticipate an Ernest Heming- way, with his dire performance pressures and his violent energies. In this respect, I want to keep in play Stein’s trenchant constructionism, which helped her to understand how the young Ernest’s “truly sensitive capacity for emotion” succumbed to shame under the spotlight of celebrity, forcing him to adopt, “as a shield, a big Kansas City–boy brutality.” Hemingway’s “really gentle and fine” side could not survive the condi- tioning of the market, which set its performance expectations and levied its taxes according to an author’s gender, while his “agonizing shyness” almost demanded the compensatory swagger of the manly man.5 To put this devolution in terms of James’s fiction (and thus rather schematically), Hemingway had the makings of a Little Bilham (The Ambassadors), but developed instead into a sort of Christopher Newman (The American), courting associations with femininity and sexual changings (Hemingway’s own word), but then warding them off, and indulging his “unresolved androgynous inclinations” only very late in life.6 Stein suggested that the evolved figure of “Papa” Hemingway posed for and was posed by Anglo- American culture neither more nor less than Oscar Wilde, only differently, which explained why his theatre of hypermasculinity (boxing, bullfighting, big-game hunting) failed to produce either “real brutality” or “real liter- ature.”7 On the contrary, Sherwood Anderson added, the self-conscious posturing of a work such as Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935) sug- gested a “queer bird” seeking a straight path by means of Rooseveltian rituals of “guts and dung,” but losing his way (“the whole world of men he can’t get at all”) and making a “mess” of himself in the process. Yet Anderson, too, recognized “Hemingway” as more of a cultural construction than an individual personality: “they really did destroy him” (SA 169).8 The question of which force bears the most blame for such destruction – the “enormous publicity business” of modernity, as Stein called it and as James satirized it in his mature fiction; the gender and sexual prejudices in- scribed in that “business”; or Hemingway’s own ruthless careerism – almost dissolves in the fact that these forces were interlocking and collaborative, and perhaps only the consequence matters.9 The “real story” of the “real Hem,” as Stein put it, would never get told, and therein (for both Stein and Anderson) lay the true shame: that story “would be for another audience Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 175 than the audience Hemingway now has but it would be very wonderful” (ABT 872–3).10 Almost as if troping James’s The American, Stein would make Hemingway emblematic of a national defect in the creative realiza- tion of gender: “He went the way so many other Americans have gone... [and] are still going...Heis skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other half is the man.”11 Yet Stein drew another moral from the strenuous public displays that misrepresented, then disfigured the “other half” of Hemingway: his “won- derful” story, she implied, the real one for another audience, might well have been (in his own scandalized words) “some fag story, which proved [him]...conclusively very queer indeed” (SL 387). In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway retaliated by attributing to Stein an almost visceral repugnance toward male–male love, but apparently the joke (an earnest one) was on him (MF 20). Stein would later confide: “Homosexuals...doallthegood things in all the arts, and when I ran down the male ones to Hemingway it was be- cause I thought he was a secret one.”12 The keenness of Stein’s tactic (“come out, wherever you are”) is rather beside the point, for as with James, claim- ing Hemingway “conclusively” for the closet is less interesting than asking how that closet was structured and maintained – how it worked, in this case, to keep a male author candidly tantalized by the idea of going “outside all tribal law,” in matters of sex, from ever getting there.13 Like Eve Sedgwick’s conception of John Marcher, in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), Stein’s Hemingway was “not a homosexual man” so much as he was a man confined to “the closet of imagining a homosexual secret”; what required “liberat[ing] in the first place” was his “potential for homosexual desire,” but that release, owing to his collusion with powerful norms, could never occur.14 If Hemingway, on Stein’s view, seemed fated to pass a lifetime as “a secret one” – “very queer indeed” behind his tough-guy exterior – the beauty of the system was that he kept the secret not to himself, but from himself, and that he had all the help in the world in doing so. In order to treat Hemingway’s relation to James in its full symptomatic complexity this chapter invokes several contemporary observers besides Stein and Anderson, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and the then popular, now recuperated gay author Glenway Wescott – memorialized in The Sun Also Rises as the “rising new novelist” who flirts with a disgusted Jake Barnes in the bal musette scene (SAR 21).15 As a more aggravated example of how James’s queerness troubled (and again, proleptically “read”) the literary, social, and psychic stance of modern masculinity, I also consider the experience of the important cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks, whose biographical treatise of 1925 fashioned the “Henry James” familiar to Hemingway and his cohort, 176 Henry James and Queer Modernity while also influencing the British reception of James in such authors as Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. This caucus of modern male writers huddled almost obsessively over the Jamesian corpus as part of their own self-definitional trials at the fraught intersections of gender, sexual, and national (or “racial”) identity. To be sure, one must draw some distinctions, recognizing how concert- edly Brooks tried to avoid seeing James’s gayness as a relevant factor in read- ing the alternative masculinities modeled in his work. Even Hemingway, or perhaps especially Hemingway, as a facet of his ambivalent homophobia, found “fairies” in the Jamesian picture, while Anderson, who convention- ally viewed homosexuality as a “terrible problem,” approached James with something like a gay reading practice (SAM 340). Well ahead of the critical curve, Wescott published the “secret” motive of James’s late fiction as being “the anarchist’s excitement about the rupture of conventions” and discov- ered at least one “homosexual man” in the thick of James’s plots (Prince Amerigo of The Golden Bowl), thus coming about as close to outing the author as was conceivable in the early 1930s.16 More discreetly, Spender added that it was “difficult not to conclude...that [James’s] The Pupil is a fantasy about homosexuality.”17 Yet all of these authors – along with Fitzgerald, who fostered the idea of a Jamesian “impotence” that shaded into effeminacy, and thence into same- sex desire – remained as subject to the strictures on sexual difference and its public articulation, whether dissident or conformist, as did Van Wyck Brooks.18 In this sense, Brooks’s engagement with James, which culminated in psychosis, only somatized the counterpressure of the Jamesian challenge to modern masculinities as these men wrestled with private desires and normative injunctions – a pressure sustained, as I will suggest, by Gertrude Stein, perhaps the most canny and resilient “masculinity” in this genealogy. The extremity of Brooks’s ordeal, that is, should not prevent one from seeing its tacit “moral” for Hemingway and for the gender style that he enacted for his generation: there was a high price to be paid for resisting the lesson of the Master.

Anyway I think you’ll think [The Torrents of Spring] is funny . . . you being the middle weight champion and as such not having a glass jaw. (Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, 1926) Funny is again used in the sense of diverting and disturbing. (Gertrude Stein, “Henry James,” Four in America, 1932–33) Contemporary reviews set the tone for the critical understanding of Torrents as a burst of youthful hijinks with little thematic content: sly Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 177 perhaps, but not malicious, and besides, Hemingway’s victims had it com- ing. In fact, the book signaled all the important preoccupations that would organize his “serious” fictions to follow, marking Hemingway’s first disci- plinary intervention against adolescent or unmanly emotionalism (associ- ated with Anderson), ethnic and sexual difference (literally embodied in Stein), and elite,´ expatriate effeminacy – the position in Anglo-American lit- erary culture increasingly assigned to the figure of Henry James. In this early work Hemingway was feeling out James, like a prize-fighter his opponent, and yet that testing was part and parcel of his more brazen confrontation with immediate rivals Anderson and Stein. Torrents, that is, expertly “[made] a bum” out of Anderson for his “pre- tensious [sic] fake” of a novel, Dark Laughter (1925), while strongly hinting that Stein – both as Hemingway’s literary foster mother and as a Jewish decadent – stood next in line to receive the rough stuff (SL 183, 174). The book’s section headings alone tells a story. If the first heading, “Red and Black Laughter,” announced a satirical design on the romantic racialism of Dark Laughter, the last – “The Passing of a Great Race and the Making and Marring of Americans” – yoked together Madison Grant’s infamous anti- immigration tract of 1916 with Stein’s just released saga of German-Jewish families in the United States, The Making of Americans (1925; composed 1903–11). It was Hemingway, then, who initiated the long, cagey quarrel with Stein that flashed into open warfare in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which lauded Anderson’s sensitivity as true courage while branding Hemingway “yellow”; in response, Green Hills of Africa sought to denigrate “some female” whose work of jealous “malice” (rhymes with “Alice”) had maligned both the artistic talent and the masculine credentials of “Poor old Papa” Hemingway (ABT 872; SL 387).19 “Imagination is racial experience,” Hemingway would declare in his un- published parody of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and race, in the broadest sense, also forms a focal point of Torrents.20 On this score, the book is “funny” (and serious) indeed, offering a send up of white authorial fantasies of the redemptive, primitive African or American Indian – a strain of idealizing pervasive in modernism, and found not only in Dark Laughter but also in Stein’s “Melanctha” (composed 1905–6) and in the characteriza- tion of the piano-playing “negro prodigy” Blind d’Arnault of Cather’s My Antonia´ (1918; EN 832). Hemingway, too, frequently yielded to this temp- tation, from the portrait of the “noble-looking” black boxer in Sun all the way to the very late True at First Light, which can be read as a Kiplingesque sort of “going fantee” in Africa itself (SAR 71).21 If the discourse of race or ethnicity appears slightly subsidiary to the sex/gender discourse in Hemingway, the category markers of difference continually inflect one 178 Henry James and Queer Modernity another: Stein, as I have already shown, emerges as an objectionable com- pound, the Jewish lesbian. In the first paragraph of Torrents an Andersonian na¨ıf addresses the dis- parate milieux of sexuality in the industrial backwaters of the American Midwest, on the one hand, and the fast, queer salon-world of modern Paris, on the other: “Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan ...Hisbreath made little fairy tracings on the cold window-pane...that reminded him of the gay city” (T 3). Gay “Paree,” in Hemingway’s extended joke, had been a grim scene of sexual humiliation for Yogi Johnson, causing his regression to the sort of boyish sensualism so fondly evoked in such Anderson stories as “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why”: “Well, Yogi thought, women are gone...butI still have my love of horses” (T 52). Granting Michael Reynolds’s point that Anderson’s fictional men (like Anderson himself) indulged in the very “maundering Whitmanianism” that Hemingway convicts them of, much more was at stake in the latter’s spoofing.22 In part, Hemingway believed that Anderson, who had once written “very beautifully” and “best of all about adolescence,” had started “slopping” in the formal control of his fiction – one of many terms (as Frances Kerr shows) that connoted a dreaded, feminized flaccidity for male modernists (SL 206).23 Relatedly, Hemingway strove to eradicate or to conceal in himself Anderson’s “sweet- ness” and “genius for...direct emotion” (as these qualities are described and celebrated in Stein’s Autobiography) in order for the persona of “Papa” to cohere and for the pursuit of the title “[literary] champion of the world” to commence (ABT 874; SL 673). By promoting an ethos of tough love among fellow authors such as Anderson and Fitzgerald – “Why the hell should we have to pull our punches?” – Hemingway also bullied the wimp within (SL 204, 205). Tocontextualize the personal-cultural work of Torrents, Sun (then in draft form) offers a useful figure for this kind of self-policing when Jake Barnes finds it “awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,” while reserving the contemplation of his vulnerabilities for the privacy of the night (SAR 34). Henceforth, with the growing popularity of his work, Hemingway himself would live in the glare of high noon, so to speak, and public scrutiny of his gender performance would be intense. As if to mark the juncture where personal met public policing, the poet Allen Tate chose exactly this night-time scene in Sun to task Hemingway for “betray[ing] the interior machinery of his hard-boiled attitude” and revealing the hidden “history of his sentimentality.”24 Astutely, Hemingway complained about Tate’s attempted manipulation to his editor, Maxwell Perkins – “Mr. Tate Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 179 feels so badly that I’m not as hard-boiled as he had publicly announced” – and, suggestively, he related his own genius for “direct emotion” (as it then was) to his experience of being wounded on the Italian front in 1918 (SL 240). Still, the pressure to purge himself of “sentimentality” registered, and Hemingway’s scrupulous self-regulation of sex/gender valences must be seen as coeval with his very first ventures into cultural visibility. The sympathetic contract with his readership would have to be renegotiated, too. If readers “went any deeper inside [The Sun Also Rises] they couldn’t read because they would be crying all the time,” Hemingway boasted to Perkins, but that sort of design upon his audience’s emotions steadily di- minished over the course of the 1920s(SL 226). After A Farewell to Arms (1929), as Rena Sanderson points out, the “he-man of exaggerated virility and masculine expertise” took center stage, muscling aside the lad of easy tears.25 As Tate’s example indicates, the reviewing community conspired with Hemingway in this makeover, either praising him as a peerless kudu killer and a reveler in “Peninsular [bulls’] testicle feasts” (criadillas) or alterna- tively (like Tate) peeping under Hemingway’s khakis or cape to discover an insufficient manliness. In the latter vein, the damning evidence produced by the critics included yet more “sentimentality disguised as bravado”; a fasci- nation with “abnormalities” (“Lesbianism . . . castration”) that belonged to authorial adolescence and the American cultural adolescence of the early twenties; a penchant for “sophomoric” antics and “boyish” reasoning; and most importantly (as Stein and Anderson had been among the first to dis- cern) a “very sensitive” intelligence that was caught up in romanticized violence, suggesting not the writer’s conviction of his own “red-blooded masculinity” but rather his lack of a “serene confidence that he [was] a full- sized man.”26 Hemingway defiantly prided himself on ignoring reviews, which he believed “poison[ed]” and “destroy[ed]” other male authors such as Fitzgerald: “believ[ing] the critics...made them impotent” (SL 276).27 But as his correspondence proves, nothing could be farther from the truth. Hemingway listened closely and reacted strongly (if often ambivalently) to the critics, so that by the time his career culminated with The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the writer who had started out by “pulling no punches” had attained a fitting public image as an ultra-masculine fighter, to the ap- probation of at least certain reviewers: “Like...theManassa Mauler [i.e., Jack Dempsey] battering big Jess Willard, a book by Papa [Hemingway] is front-page news.”28 Gertrude Stein shrewdly forecast this transition, and the young Hem- ingway of the 1920s, one may be sure, heard her lecture on the perils of the 180 Henry James and Queer Modernity popular artist under mass-market commercialism. Reflecting on her own struggles with public recognition, Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) cited the risks involved when readers were permitted “deeper inside” not only an author’s texts but his or her self-constitution:

It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you . . . you are not the same you . . . As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but... if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside...Iused to tell all the men who were being successful young how bad this was for them. (EA 46–8)

As Stein must have stressed to Hemingway, the market’s unresisted in- cursion into the space of personality replaced intimate procedures of self- appraisal with gross cash value, leaving the writer largely at the mercy of the cult of “image,” with its technologies for circulating that now adulter- ated commodity, the modern author. For James, whose important currency designated “identity” reappears in Stein’s analysis, the actor more than any other type of artist had figured as the “producer whose production is her own person” and who was thus most exposed to those degradations of “modern- ness” – not least a “colossal, deafening newspaperism” – that spectacularized the artist, jeopardized the principle of “quiet growth,” so essential to artistic maturation, and reduced the “real producer” to shallow “humbuggery” (it is Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse who offers this view, with campy delight; TM 375–6, 484). By the period of Stein’s “autobiographies” in the 1930s, apparently no type of cultural producer, not even the would-be solitary novelist, could escape this fate once popular success had set in. Both James and Stein allowed for the artist’s capacity to play the “image” market to advantage, either by making “an income out of the photog- raphers” (as James wrote, and as Stein and Hemingway might well have done) or by supplying the media with “floods of unscrupulous romance” and capitalizing on all the “marvellous publicity” (TM 494). Yet such a move required the artist never to forget that popularity came at a price, de- manding continual concessions to normativity. Although sex/gender norms were not alone in governing the transaction between “you” and “your pub- lic,” the institutions of heterosexism and patriarchy certainly foregrounded these norms, as the narratives (and life narratives) of James, Stein, Cather, and above all Wilde attest. In urging “successful young” men such as Hemingway to weigh the cost of fame, that is, Stein urged him to study in particular what was gained and what was lost by agreeing to act the part of “he-man” and expert in all things manly for an eager Anglo-American Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 181 audience: “After all if nobody refuses what you offer there must be some- thing the matter” (EA 47). Yet if “Miss Stein” had so instructed (to adapt a chapter heading from A Moveable Feast), not all young men could accept or implement her teaching. As I have started to show in Torrents, Hemingway resorted instead to a raillery that sought to diffuse Stein’s challenge, but that ultimately served the difference- and dissidence-containing functions of the cultural system she analyzed. His parody of “deviant” gender styles became not only a means of defining an exemplary public manhood (“Papa”) but also a way of resisting insight into the parodic character of that very construction. If gender, in Judith Butler’s terms, is a “repeated stylization of the body... that congeal[s]...to produce the appearance of substance,” with certain styles coming into dominance through “felicitous self-naturalization,” one might say that Hemingway cooperated admirably in playing the paragon of (apparent) substantiality that seemed most “naturally” to fill out the category masculinity.29 Yet the actual positions in contest were more complicated than such a summary might suggest. Insofar as Hemingway’s “gentle and fine” side warred with cultural prescriptions, it also weakened his bid to outman a competitor such as Sherwood Anderson. Moreover, although Anderson de- plored and teased his young antagonist’s liabilities of gender performance (“I hauled out big fish,” he reports to Stein from the Gulf of Mexico; “Hemingway...would have loved seeing them suffer”), neither he nor any other mainstream male author was immune from environmental condi- tioning – the interpenetration of “inside” man and “outside” market. Thus in 1927 one finds Anderson chafing under the same labels that Hemingway used to criticize (and Stein to extol) his sensitive masculinity: even in his view, there was regrettably “too much talk...ofthesweet, na¨ıve S[herwood] A[nderson] – adolescence etc.” Anderson notably joined Hemingway in calling for a “body-punching criticism” among authors as a corrective to artistic “softness” (SA 312, 174). As Ezra Pound made explicit in demeaning the gay author Wescott – “what Hemingway did, nobody could improve on . . . Tough realism. Not like Glenway Wescott. He’s soft” – the fiber of literary manhood was felt to be threatened not merely by the feminine in conventional forms (women writers, editors, and critics) but also by the effeminacy of the queer, which indicated that biological gender alone could not guarantee heteromanliness.30 In fact, Hemingway mobilizes the Wescott character in Sun (Roger Prentiss) precisely in keeping with the terms of Pound’s dismissive comparison, as well as with Fitzgerald’s evoca- tion of Wescott in person as “an effeminate Oxford fairy.”31 182 Henry James and Queer Modernity Given the internal divisions and the external influences working on both Hemingway and Anderson – not to mention their shared experience of military and sporting life, or their many marriages – one cannot simply restage them as representing oppositional masculinities. Anderson’s own store of manly credentials meant that Hemingway’s objective in Torrents – distancing parts of himself by distancing his mentor – would be no easy task. Indeed he only fully realized this objective after Anderson’s death in 1941, remembering Sherwood (in 1953) as “wet and sort of mushy” with “very beautiful bastard Italian eyes” – eyes that perhaps link Anderson to the Italian aristocrat with “beautiful manners” who had sexually propositioned the wounded young Hemingway in a Milan hospital (yet another instance of the violated body as a site of convergence for emotional, vocational, and sexual identity matters: SL 862; MF 19–20). If Hemingway could never relegate Anderson to the ranks of the desexed “male old women,” like James, or “withered old maid[s],” like Andre´ Gide, Anderson nonetheless went down in Hemingway’s book as yet another man who could not keep his sex or gender straight – a “jolly but tortured bowl of puss [sic] turning into a woman in front of your eyes” (SL 862).32 Given what Frances Kerr calls the “barely camouflaged paranoia about being feminine” among male modernists, Hemingway’s misspelling of the word pus (“puss”) performs a sort of double duty as a signifier.33 The in- tended “pus” (not unlike James’s “difficultly written shit”) belongs to an imagery of excretion that indicates not the man-making wound but rather those breaches in the female body notionally connected with the unregu- lated flow of unclean, ill-formed matter (SL 266). The spelling “puss,” in turn, identifies one of those breaches – a usage (as “pussy”) that Hemingway later foregrounds in what Charles Caramello justly calls “the homophobic account...that blots his Moveable Feast.”34 For in that memoir, “pussy” functions as Stein’s term of endearment for Alice B. Toklas (whom Hem- ingway studiously avoids naming as Toklas), and the text exploits this term or nickname to call attention to the evident irony of a woman’s anatomy that only another woman can experience in sexual pleasure: “Then Miss Stein’svoice came pleading and begging [to Toklas],saying, ‘Don’t,pussy... Please don’t, pussy’ ” (MF 118).35 Equally pertinent here, with another male author’s gendering on the line, namely Anderson’s, is the slang metonymy that makes “pussy” a slur intended to shame “an effeminate man or boy.”36 Whatever it was that formed the content of the “tortured bowl” bearing the name of Sherwood Anderson, it possessed the scary magic to change into its opposite – to become inverted or queer – right in front of one’s eyes. Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 183 By an almost predictable symmetry, Torrents also features Gertrude Stein, a woman who would eventually turn into a man right in front of Hem- ingway’s eyes. As the hapless Yogi Johnson ponders how to restore his heterosexual appetite, he conjures up a map of Paris – the same “gay city” responsible for disabling his masculinity – that in a sense highlights the address 27 rue de Fleurus, the site of Stein and Toklas’s famous salon. In the terms of Johnson’s dithery free association: “Where did it all lead? Would it help him to want a woman?...Enroute. Huysmans wrote that. It would be interesting to read French...There is a street in Paris named after Huysmans. Right around the corner from where Gertrude Stein lived. Ah, there was a woman! Where were her experiments in words leading her? What was at the bottom of it?” (T 74–5). In this passage Heming- way situates Stein “right around the corner” from Joris-Karl Huysmans, the author of En route but more significantly of the scandalous A rebours (1884). As Stephen Calloway relates, A rebours was “hailed as the ‘Breviary of Decadence’...on both sides of the English Channel,” while its protago- nist, Des Esseintes, stood for the “very quintessence” of queer luxury.37 The work had also been attacked on the same grounds – as noted earlier, James recoiled from Huysmans’s “incurable rot” in due proportion to his covert attraction – and the book’s linkage with homosexuality was firmly established when Wilde, in the dock, acknowledged A rebours as the uniden- tified panoramic survey of “the sins of all the world” in which Dorian Gray discovers the “prefiguring type of himself” (DG 155–8).38 As Hemingway would not have known (but seems almost to have intuited), Huysmans’s En route was among the books that Wilde petitioned for while confined in Reading Gaol (“vital for the preservation of my mental balance”), only to have the request vetoed by the prison warden.39 Hemingway did not need such particulars in order to exploit the asso- ciations that had grown up around Huysmans’s name and to use them to score points against Stein. By implication, Stein’s “experiments in words” constituted the new decadent breviary of the postwar generation, leading her (and susceptible readers) into an idle, narcissistic aestheticism that came trailing clouds of sexual deviance, or as he later charged: “She [Stein] wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going, never the real” (MF 25). Here Yogi Johnson’s pun (“What was at the bottom of it?”) reinforces the suggestion of a lurking deviance, for Stein’s The Making of Americans – which Hemingway knew well from copying the manuscript and correcting proofs – aspired to be an encompassing poetics of the “bottom nature” of all human types, a radically democratic compendium of the “many ways of being and of loving,” not just those ways that conformed to the 184 Henry James and Queer Modernity prejudices of heterosexist culture, but also those experienced and exhibited “in pairs of women, in pairs of men” (MOA 248, 505, 221). At the bottom of Stein’s narrative “experiments,” Hemingway hinted, was Stein’s bottom, making him probably the first reader to interpret her ambitious novel as the “spectacularly anal text” that literary scholars now take it to be. As Lisa Ruddick writes: “The notable feature of each character [in The Making of Americans]is...notmembership in the class male or female...butinstead the sort of ‘bottom’ the person has, as if Stein were unconsciously marginal- izing genital sexual difference in favor of a weird and indistinct notion of anal identity.”40 Hemingway’s jest at Stein’s expense is meant to intensify as the reader grasps that her “bottom” will be off-limits to the desperate Yogi Johnson, while his mental juxtapositions – “Would it help him to want a woman?... Ah, there was a woman!” – comment indirectly and ironically on Stein’s lesbianism. Like Anderson’s volatile masculinity, Stein’s emphatic feminin- ity (as it could seem only to a deficient mind like Yogi Johnson’s, the text implies) is perfectly ripe for degeneration and regendering. In this respect, Torrents virtually predicts Hemingway’s future course of interaction with Stein’s masculinity, including episodes such as the drastic cutting of her “lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair” that would change her, in his eyes, from the ethnic earth mother depicted in Picasso’s famous portrait into a domineering “Roman emperor” (MF 14, 119),41 and the onset of what Hemingway called “the old menopause,” which would almost biochemi- cally induce Stein’s critical politics to shift to “the idea that anybody who was any good [in the arts] must be queer” (SL 384). Indeed, the Hemingway of Torrents seems already to foresee the Stein who would become, in his words, so “patriotically goofily complete... stoppage of all sense lesbian” that she “opted for fags and fags alone” in the conduct of her patronage, trying to recruit even Hemingway (of all men) for her queer nation of the arts: “Patriotism is a hell of a vice” (SL 384, 388). By the 1920s, writes Andrew Elfenbein, “the link between homosexuality and genius was familiar,” and the idea of this linkage circulated especially within intellectual elites´ in urban centers such as New York and Paris.42 In the early 1930s Hemingway himself would demonstrate the idea’s cur- rency by assailing “those interested parties who are continually proving that Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, etc. were fags.”43 Yet when Stein appar- ently advanced this commonplace (“anybody who was any good must be queer”), Hemingway blamed her views on female biology – or more pre- cisely, on the “change of life” that definitively removed Stein’s body from the orbit of reproductive heterosexuality (SL 736). With the aging-out of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 185 her body and the adoption of a mannish hairstyle (“a turning point in all sorts of things”) would come the end of all hope that Stein (or her anatomy) might be salvaged for straightness (SL 650). Admittedly, Torrents foreruns these developments by several years, and the Stein represented in this early text could still be managed by means of a sportive rhetoric, but the broad contours of the two authors’ hostile relationship were already mapped out. Notably, that aggravated version of Gertrude Stein beginning to appear on Hemingway’s horizon – unsexed, post-menopausal, and imperiously gay – belongs to essentially the same category of magisterial “male old women” as Henry James, the third principal in The Torrents of Spring.I have characterized Stein and Anderson as Hemingway’s patent adversaries in the book, and they themselves certainly saw it that way. “One is always naturally antagonistic to one’s parents,” as Stein said of her own relation to James, but when she and Anderson felt themselves so deftly thumbed and gouged in public print by this young monster “formed by the two of them,” it made them “a little ashamed of the work of their minds” (ABT 739, 872). Yet one should not neglect the more subdued ridicule that Hemingway’s Torrents directs at James, the very tenor of which acknowledges this im- portant predecessor in Anglo-American fiction as a far more formidable quantity to be reckoned with. Hemingway was not alone in this wary estimate of James’s prestige, of course. Recall Willa Cather’s ardent testimonials to James as the “mighty master” of English prose, and even E. M. Forster’s awed impression of this “lord” of late Victorian culture, and it seems apparent why a friend of Stein’s would have written to her in 1903: “Your literature must be as good as Henry James’s – or I shall be disappointed.”44 But owing to the usual curricular construction of James, which ends with “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)or “The Jolly Corner” (1908), one perhaps forgets that this prodigious force in Anglo-American letters had just passed from the scene when the Jazz Age dawned. Hemingway bridled at reviews citing his debts to Anderson and Stein, but it was not lost upon him that Allen Tate had attacked The Sun Also Rises precisely because other reviewers were approaching the novel in “that cautiously critical spirit which the followers of Henry James so notoriously maintain toward the master.”45 As Hemingway also knew, his collaborator Ford Madox Ford had granted James literary “immortality” for “reunit[ing] the stream of Anglo-Saxon imagination with the broad stream of international culture” (1913), an opinion seconded by T. S. Eliot in “On Henry James” (1918) and then by Ezra Pound in Instigations (1920).46 As Virginia Woolf (yet another fault-finding critic of Sun) summarized the prevalent mood, with the added compliment of her Jamesian diction, 186 Henry James and Queer Modernity the Master had become “a portentous figure looming large and undefined in the consciousness” of all modern authors, who must accordingly “do homage” to his memory and example. There will be cause to revisit Woolf’s rather ominous imagery in considering the emotional fate of Van Wyck Brooks, who felt “the weighted pressures of the James cult” more keenly than others, but for now Woolf’s categorical observation will suffice: “To some an oppression, to others an obsession,” Henry James was “undeniably present to all.”47 For his part, Hemingway would long toy with (albeit always in the distancing mode of the “funny”) the “strange coincidence” that his youth- ful exposure to battlefield trauma – “something quite irreplaceable that [other authors] had missed” – had come “after the death of Henry James” (SL 768).48 Such a conjunction gives a quasioedipal spin to Hemingway’s self-positioning (as in Stein’s construction of her own case), yet this mod- ernist offspring of James suggestively went out of his way to arrive at his “coincidence”: James had in fact died more than two years before Hemingway’s wartime service as an ambulance driver. Woolf’s point, of course, is that Hemingway (or Stein) was far from unique in feeling the anxiety of a Jamesian influence, but it is worth noting that other male au- thors availed themselves of very different avenues of response. T. S. Eliot, for instance, ushered the Master safely into the past with the sanguine re- mark that “Henry James has been dead for some time,” when it had been a matter of only two years.49 In other words, the circumstances of James’s extinction seem to have played a more special role in Hemingway’s scenario of his own maturation. By extension, the question of James’s posthumous vitality also became psychically implicated in the severe wounding to which Hemingway ascribed his masculine authority – an authority complicated, moreover, by the fact that he also dated the discovery of a new emotional tenderness from that same momentous event: “I have not been at all hard boiled since July 8 1918”(SL 240). As a further key to the gravity of what was at stake in Hemingway’s ambivalence, one notes that masculine making consistently appears under the fearful figure of castration for him (“some- thing quite irreplaceable”) – a motif that would profoundly shape his stories of men, women, and romance in a fallen world. As a corollary of these psychodynamics, sexual “impotence” and the “inability to write” became highly intertwined symptoms for Hemingway.50 Not only did this association form the basis for his disparagement of Gide and James, and inform his criticism of well-known critics – “camp following eunochs [sic] of literature...allvirtuous and sterile” – but it also cropped up in moments of self-portraiture (SL 162). As is clear even in A Moveable Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 187 Feast, Hemingway often repaired to Stein’s queer domestic space (near rue de Huysmans) partly to see which of the two authors was the bigger man, performatively speaking, but more importantly to gain relief from the “severe discipline” of writing, which, if unalleviated, would “make [him] impotent to do it” (MF 12–13). At some level, Hemingway recognized how the strict regimen intended to distinguish the gendering of his work (hard, straight, true, firm, real) from the profligate, compromising fluencies of Stein and James operated within a delicate economy – an economy in which straining one’s literary-libidinal resources could lead to emasculation, or an incapacity to “do it.”51 This discomfiting recognition generated much of the malicious “joking” of Anderson, Stein, and others, but it also inspired self-satire, as in this comment on an illustration for Sun: “Bloomshield’s drawing...looks very much like a writer...saddened by the loss or atrophy of certain non-replaceable parts. It is a pity it couldn’t have been Barnes instead of Hemingway” (SL 223). As the record demonstrates, jokes of this sort set the pattern for the author’s depressive tendencies. By the same measure, Hemingway’s need to deprive James and other competitors of their “balls” was just as defensive a move as his negotiation with the moist, mushy masculinity he attributed to Anderson, but that also appeared in the “slightly wet,” sentimental well of the self (SL 666). In terms of his authorial persona, Hemingway was at pains to resemble the “valorous bullfighter... plentifully equipped” with cojones, and to this end, some version of the “cowardly bullfighter,” in which “they are said to be absent,” was always useful:52 “Mr. Henry James[,] I would...hithim once where he had no balls” (SL 673). It is no “strange coincidence,” then, that Henry James – and a dying James at that – factors in the foundational text The Torrents of Spring. Again, one needs to look beyond the text’s persistent ribaldry for what it disguises or disavows – a self-interested inquiry into masculine formation (or degradation) in which some now familiar elements recur. It amuses Hemingway to assign the story of James’s deathbed scene to Mandy, a “buxom” waitress at Brown’s Beanery, or in other words, a figure of female seduction in a setting far removed from Jamesian fictional venues (in terms of class, nationality, and social refinement) that annexes excretory discourse through the humor of flatulence (T 35). Mandy’s sentimental indulgence (“I feel very strongly about Henry James”) sexually arouses a customer who has significantly missed the “irreplaceable” experience of soldiering in the Great War. Hemingway permeates the scene with hetero desire and male performance anxiety in order to realize the comic payoff of Mandy’s in- congruent anecdote, for the dying “James” seems as prissy as the desiccated 188 Henry James and Queer Modernity Andre´ Gide (“nurse...spare my blushes”) owing largely to his mitigated lifestyle as an expatriate bachelor: “Henry James. That chap who had gone away from his own land to live in England among Englishmen...Whyhad he done it?....Wasn’tAmerica good enough for him?” (T 38–9). In fairness, the text chides such chauvinist intolerance, yet even through the filters of satire and parody one finds a decided distaste for James’s effete, sedentary life “among Englishmen” such as the homophile Edmund Gosse (explicitly named). This is not to say that Hemingway had the full sexual subtext of that friendship or of its triangulations with the figure of J. A. Symonds, which I have studied in chapter 2; it is merely to note that Hemingway’s radar for reading gayness from style (“[James’s] men all... talk and think like fairies”) was clearly switched on already by the mid- 1920s(SL 266). The text’s answer to “why had he done it?” – why had James gravitated to the England of Gosse and Symonds, which was also the England of Wilde – seems to lie in certain natural affinities among those unnatural men who went in for parlor sports, hypercultivation, and (at a minimum) latent homosexuality. Yet it is important to see that Hemingway’s fictional address of James, and the more blatant diatribe found in his correspondence, only completed the late Victorian phrase, supplying a name (“fairy”) for the type of Jamesian masculinity that earlier reviewers had also deemed “artificial” and dandi- acal – a type evincing the gender style of “strolling mummer[s]” rather than that of red-blooded Anglo-Saxon men. Similarly, in judging James a “male old woman,” Hemingway was merely embellishing a critical line of the 1890s that had viewed James as growing dangerously “careless of his literary person,” turning into a Wildean flourisher of “flashy” epigrams and dealing in subjects of a distinct “effeminacy,” such as “matchmaking and... silken embroideries” (CR 381–2). Thus Allen Tate’s public pressure on Hem- ingway’s own sentimentality (subtextually: his feminine side) had prece- dents in Victorian criticism, while Hemingway’s disdain for James’s unmas- culinity begins to appear less than original. In this respect, Hemingway’s importance lies less in what he said about James than in how he said it, with casual tacitness in his fiction and casual overtness in his letters, thereby indicating how things deemed typically “Jamesian” – mannered smart- ness, boudoir intrigue, and the interior decorating of bourgeois homes and souls – had been simply absorbed into the catalog of modern homosexuality, or matched with subcultural tastes and proclivities coded gay. But one did not have to read James or musty reviews of James to come into contact with tokens of this post-Victorian gayness. As I suggested earlier, Hemingway agreed with Pound and Fitzgerald that a living remnant Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 189 of this gender style survived in their fellow American writer Glenway Wescott, the nominal “Oxford fairy” whose fictional counterpart flatters Jake Barnes in “some sort of English accent”; if “the whole show” of conti- nental sexual diversity nauseates Barnes, it is this mannered voice of gayness that most makes him want to “throw up” (SAR 21). Yet perspective is ev- erything. For Margaret Anderson, the editor of the highly respected Little Review, Wescott’s “clipped and distinguished speech” was not a marker of deviance, but rather the tribute of a one-time poor Wisconsin farmboy for whom literature had been the only source of sustenance in a cultural wasteland: “[Glenway] loved the English language and had trained himself to speak it beautifully.”53 Interestingly, one discerns a common ground of both her admiration and Hemingway’s revulsion when one learns from Wescott’s own writing just how much his intonations of speech and prose rhythms owed to none other than Henry James: “[In] the corner of the orchard where sick but beloved snow-apple-trees ripened over a dark hog- wallow;...there, seated in a high hard-wheeled three-seated second-hand automobile...one of my sisters and I read books by Henry James, and wept.” This openly sentimental response to James’s “vast double-deckers” had acquainted Wescott with his personal “effeminacy” (his word), which later had to be toned down and “reconditioned” for everyday life in con- ventional homophobic society.54 Yet as I have shown using the example of James’s aesthete Gabriel Nash, whose conspicuously “perfect” speech linked him with the transgressive Wilde (see chapter 2), no man could “recondi- tion” himself entirely out of social history, especially with the advent of the new “semiotics of inversion” (linguistic, sartorial, and gestural) that regu- lated masculine embodiment and expression after 1895.55 For Hemingway, Wescott’s veneer of Victorian ´elan disguised nothing and succeeded only in confirming his lineage with Nash, Wilde, and other “fairies” both fictional and real – in highlighting certain stylistic continuities that homosexualized the Jamesian milieu in retrospect. By means of the living artifact Wescott, that is, as well as through a pass- ing acquaintance with other gay artists such as Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Ronald Firbank (another resented favorite of Stein’s), Hemingway effec- tively read queerness back into James – meaning both the fiction and the “blushing” biographical bachelor who wrote it. To this extent, the “high- spirited nonsense” of The Torrents of Spring (as reviewers lightly judged it) was nonsense neither in matter nor in method. For all the sparring with Anderson and Stein, Hemingway had sized up “Mr. Henry James” as the literary champion to beat, while imagining the terms of their bout as an opposition between a straight, quasimartial vigor – in both living and 190 Henry James and Queer Modernity writing – and a shameful masculine inadequacy tantamount to gayness. More generally, the body or the subjectivity that was expatriated from the realm of heterosexuality, so to speak, formed a chief concern of this first extended piece of fiction by Hemingway – whether adumbrated in Sherwood Anderson’s middle-American sentimentalism, or manifested in the “fairy tracings” and wayward erogenous zones of Gertrude Stein and the denizens of her Parisian salon, or reconstructed from the precious, effem- inate affectation (as it seemed to Hemingway) of Henry James’s Victorian London.

God knows Ernest was getting hit with James from all sides. (Michael Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones”)

According to Michael Reynolds, his most thorough biographer, Heming- way “read more Henry James than we have credited him with,” under the “excellent tutelage” of the odd couple Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.56 Linda Wagner-Martin even finds it “plausible” to interpret The Sun Also Rises as a “recasting” of The Ambassadors, with Jake Barnes in the place of Lambert Strether, renovating the latter’s famous injunction to “live all you can” while criticizing Strether’s (or James’s) “passivity.”57 Undeniably, Hemingway was “getting hit” with James before the mid-1920s, and not only in the form of public encomiums from the arbiters of modern taste, but also in the more private applause coming from Stein, her brother Leo, and especially Alice B. Toklas – a self-proclaimed “great admirer” who had gone so far as to write to urge James that The Awkward Age (the text overrun by “fairies”) would make “a very remarkable play” (ABT 659). James also invaded Hemingway’s domestic sphere after 1921, being a favorite author of two of his wives in succession, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer; in A Moveable Feast Hemingway would still be distancing himself from Hadley’s critical standards (“her idea of a good writer was Henry James”), and it was Pauline who read The Awkward Age aloud to him in December 1927 (“it seems to me to be the shit”) during his recuperation from a serious eye injury as well as a case of hemorrhoids (MF 156; SL 266). Yet was getting hit with James, in the years before 1928, the same thing as actually reading James? Or might one speculate that an ambitious but untried young author would have shied away from the so-called “Master” exactly because of all the hype?58 Whatever the facts, Hemingway’s radical gesture of “know[ing] nothing about James” before this time (the very end of 1927) makes a strong bid for critical attention. James had already assumed a detailed biographical presence for Hemingway,59 but his early invocations of James as “quite a writer” (in Torrents) and as “a good writer” Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 191 (in Sun) seem to represent not an informed view (either sincere or ironic) so much as a gross measure of his predecessor’s hefty reputation. Meanwhile, Hemingway’s anecdotal take on his illustrious forebear in American fiction shows an interest at once deeper and more specialized (T 39; SAR 116). Being relatively unfamiliar with James’s work, that is, did not prevent Hemingway from knowing what was supposedly “generally known” about his manhood – namely,that a youthful injury incurred while helping to fight a fire at a Newport horse barn had sexually incapacitated James (SL 209). The biographical consensus now concurs with what James’s autobiography clearly suggests, that the “horrid...obscure hurt” he suffered around the outbreak of the Civil War was nothing so lurid as castration, but rather a sprained back, the result of pumping an ancient fire engine for “twenty odious minutes” while “jammed into the acute angle between two high fences” (AU 414–15). Shortly, I will want to consider how the so-called general knowledge (or more accurately, the disinformation) about James’s sexual impotence became “generally known” among Anglo-American male authors, besides Hemingway, and how this powerful rumor interacted with James’s iconic pressure on these young writers in his guise as “the Master.” For now, it should be noticed how this “knowledge” informs the scene in Sun in which Barnes and his writer friend Bill Gorton prepare for a fishing excursion in Spain, bantering about a “hurt” of Barnes’s that is equally as obscure – and equally as central, in narrative terms – as James’s. While it is hardly news among scholars that James is the “Henry” they discuss, whose genital or sexual damage is invoked to parallel Barnes’s, the importance of this unmanned “James” to Hemingway’s breakthrough novel and to the general cultural conversation about Jamesian sexuality remains seriously underestimated. For all their seemingly aimless bonhomie, Barnes and Gorton sugges- tively fixate in their exchanges on such topics as gender inversion (“Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave”), unmanliness by way of ethnic stereotype (the emotional Jew, Robert Cohn, emblematizes the “pitiful”), the complicating institution of marriage (Gorton deforms a pop- ular wedding song), and the bodily mechanics of sex, with byplay about a woman’s “jam” and a man’s “joystick” (SAR 114–16). According to one review, Hemingway intended to set this “healthily and naturally mascu- line” pastoral chumming against a diseased urban modernity, represented by the “neurotic triangle” of Cohn, Brett Ashley, and her fiance(´ CR 50). But these chummy exchanges also point toward and test the limitations of “Irony and Pity” as a means of coping “when you’re feeling [shitty]” (the rhyming word was elided for editor Perkins’s sake) in a social order whose systematic suspicion constrained both the expressivity of men (pity 192 Henry James and Queer Modernity uncontrolled by irony) and the acceptable range of male–male intimacies. When Gorton declares his “fondness” for Barnes, his riff bristles with all the defensive-aggressive humor already observed in Torrents, only now the mockery is directed at sexological discourse, with its overreaching theories and its tendency to find the prime motive of history (both individual and collective) in same-sex desire: “I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot...in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis...Sexexplains it all. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skin” (SAR 116). Oddly anticipating the campy speeches in Terrence McNally’s recent play Love! Valour! Compassion! (see the introduction above), Gorton’s ver- bal sport – or rather Hemingway’s – turns on an updating and indeed a queering of Rudyard Kipling’s lyric “The Ladies,” in which a cockney sol- dier concludes his romantic researches with the finding that “the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady / Are sisters [not “Lesbians”] under their skins!”60 Yet Gorton’s sharp-edged humor here (or Hemingway’s) betrays uneasiness about the psychosexual complexity of life after Kipling, both as a matter of sexological speculation (by Havelock Ellis, for example, or by certain psy- chologists whom Hemingway called the “discards from Freud”) and as a matter of irrefutable embodiment in persons familiar to the author (such as Glenway Wescott; SL 751). Gorton resembles the Hemingway who delved into Ellis’s writing on sexual difference with relish, yet who made sure to treat it publicly as “a running joke” (“you’ll find your case analyzed on page . . .”).61 Meanwhile, the capital-L “Lesbian” who was most responsible for inspiring this lively tirade in Sun was clearly Gertrude Stein, whose “splendid bombast” (“You are all a lost generation”) served as the novel’s epigraph and generated its main argument (SL 229). But whether as a postulate of science or as an observable feature of contemporary society, same-sex love emerges here as pervasive, the nominal engine of all experience and the germ of all narrative. If “sex explain[ed] it all,” and “sex” was synonymous with homosexuality, then not only the grand public dramas of the past (such as the Civil War) but the most personal minutiae of the present and future stood in bondage to the queer. Outside the space of the homosocial idyl something as subjective as “talking like a fairy” (to put Hemingway’s scornful phrase to better effect) could call into question a man’s sexing, while expressing warmth for another man could “mean [one] was a faggot”; a semantic fuzziness leaves it unclear whether Gorton’s worry is primarily for surveillance and scandal (expressing fondness would be taken to mean one was gay) or, more disconcertingly, for the implications of speech for sexual identity (expressing fondness would Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 193 make one a “faggot,” or confirm one as such). Yet Hemingway’s punch line lies in the irony that male sexual orientation has been rendered irrelevant, since modern women, unlike their Victorian “sisters,” secretly reserve their bodies (or bottoms) for other women. The Stein of Torrents – the particular lesbian under Hemingway’s skin – had become epidemic. Like his creator, Gorton could laugh at, but could not laugh off, the prospect of a world in which, for both genders, heterosexuality was only skin deep (dark laughter indeed). But Stein was not the only figure to make a repeat performance in The Sun Also Rises. The Barnes–Gorton relationship also alludes to Sherwood Anderson’s extraordinary tale “The Man Who Became a Woman” (1923). In fact, Hemingway essentially steals (to deliver in a more sarcastic “adult” register) what the narrator of Anderson’s story says about his youthful infat- uation for another boy: “I got to love Tom Means...although I wouldn’t have dared to say so . . . A man . . . don’t dare own up he loves another man . . . [Men] are afraid to admit such feelings to themselves even...It may be taken to mean something it don’t need to at all.”62 If Hemingway intended Sun as a “gesture of farewell” to Anderson, this was hardly the way to make a clean break.63 Both authors’ texts, that is, regret the loss of a cultural space for the enactment and acceptance of what Anderson movingly (yet also defensively) called “the idea that love could grow as be- tween man and man, a thing outside sex...founded upon brotherhood, realization of self in another man, your own curious loneliness...inhim too” (SAM 286). In other words, the nostalgia that informs both texts – more “senti- mental” in Anderson, more caustic in Hemingway – attempts to fence out the possible implication of gay genital expression (“a thing outside sex”), along with meanings that “don’t need to [mean] at all” what they other- wise might mean if permitted to. Like Hemingway – as well as Cather and even like Stein – Anderson resented the encroachment of “the great Sigmund Freud passion,” with its “inclination to suspect” homosexuality in all same-gender friendships of any intensity or duration (SAM 473). Both Hemingway and Anderson were reacting, in effect, against Freud’s finding that “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious.”64 Or in the terms of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s familiar continuum, both authors seek to cordon off buddying or “brotherhood” from male–male desire, so that the “potential unbrokenness” between the homosocial and the homosexual cannot even be envisioned.65 As I have shown using Cather’s example, this resistance to sexual im- plication was not limited to male American authors, and the point can 194 Henry James and Queer Modernity be extended to include a gay British writer such as James’s friend Hugh Walpole. In 1920 Walpole commended the theme of “male friendship” in fiction but warned of the risks inherent in this “dangerous...subject”: “So many people see [a same-gender relationship] only as homosexual, which is the last thing it generally is.”66 The comment may be slightly evasive, but it also expresses a veiled objectivity about how homophobia and sexual panic conspire to curtail same-sex indulgence. In any event, none of these vari- ous authorial caveats (whether American or British) against a proliferating sexual discourse could quite explain why “so many people see” queerness as the rule in other same-sex friendships when it was purportedly “the last thing” imaginable in their own. In Anderson, as I have shown earlier, homosexual possibility is attenuated by a calculated na¨ıvete,´ yet his haziness also covers for a greater sensitivity to “other,” more dissident masculinities. Hemingway, on the other hand, stifles the drift of male bonding into gay meaning by the strategy of brusque address. If Gorton and Barnes speak the unspeakable extravagantly (“faggots”), it is precisely to banish it from the field of interpretation, both for themselves and for readers. In Sun, then, one encounters a work energized by an ambivalent, con- testatory history with Gertrude Stein and partially indebted to the same Anderson whose writing Hemingway had disparaged in Torrents.Soone is not unprepared to find the figure of Henry James mobilized again as well, in this very segment centered on masculine camaraderie, potency, and desire. The outright naming of James in manuscript drew an objection from editor Perkins, and Hemingway’s self-defense gives an inkling of why he might have linked James with “Barnes’ mutilation”: “Henry James... left no descendants...nor any wife, and therefore...he is as dead as he will ever be.” Ostensibly an argument that James’s death made him fair game – “as historical a name as Byron” – the remark also circumscribes the concept of literary posterity, and the question of who may or may not become a member of the writers’ hall of fame (SL 209). A male author’s long-range reputation, it is implied, hinges appreciably upon his degree of heterosexual investiture. “Mutilation” could thus have a more far-reaching figurative resonance: as a nonreproductive bachelor whose “great knowl- edge of drawing-rooms” originated in a great dread of bedrooms (again, the note of Torrents), James could not be more beastly dead (SL 266). Yet as this instance attests, James remained very much alive to Hem- ingway, not at all “historical.” Tellingly, Hemingway’s license, in Sun, with the occasion of James’s famous accident obeys the need to infantilize James (“I heard it was a tricycle”), and then makes an in-joke about his apparent masculine incompetency: the accident occurred while “riding horseback” Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 195 (James was in fact rather adept at riding; SAR 115–16). Aesthetic rather than athletic, this version of “Henry James” might as well be the “man on her horse” of Bill Gorton’s gender-switching patter. Both by his queer nature and his early unmanning, James seemed almost predestined to write an overrefined prose, and to offer a fictional universe populated by femmy “fairies”: how much more aggravating, then, for Hemingway, to have to witness James’s perversely growing fame.

The other things . . . are all fixed up. We’ve . . . made Henry James Henry, made Roger Prescott [Glenway Wescott] into Roger Prentiss and unfitted the bulls for a reproductive function. (Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, editor of The Sun Also Rises)

My experience in teaching The Sun Also Rises suggests that Perkins’s inter- vention achieved its goal: even for many graduate students, the identity of the afflicted, unmanly “Henry” has now become lost in a clutter of other period references. In the mid-1920s, however, with the Master only recently deceased, the reference was not at all mysterious. Leon Edel went so far as to stake his claim for Hemingway as the “creator of the legend that James was impotent” on the Barnes–Gorton exchange.67 But in fact the broad trend that permitted Glenway Wescott, by the early 1930s, to subsume James under the succinct conjunction “expatriation and castration” had begun more than a decade earlier, when Van Wyck Brooks published part of The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) in the important journal Dial in May 1923.68 Brooks warrants close attention in this section, for his Henry James be- came the Henry James of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and other male authors struggling to position themselves in the shadow of the Master’s prestige and stylistic presence, which were so densely interwo- ven with evolving sex/gender norms. “I read the James book,” Fitzgerald notified Brooks in June 1925,and“sodid...Ernest Hemminway [sic]” – a fact independently verified in Sun, which rehearses Brooks’s primary thesis, no doubt with the example of James in view: “Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing...You get precious... [with] fake European standards” (SAR 115).69 Yet if Brooks laid the ground- work for linking James’s removal to Europe and his “preciousness,” on the one hand, with his “castration” or demasculinization, on the other, it bears noting that The Pilgrimage of Henry James makes only passing mention of the “accident” or “invalidism” that Hemingway and others found so com- pelling.70 As I will shortly show, Brooks had his own constitutional reasons 196 Henry James and Queer Modernity for soft-pedaling this event in James’s life. The key point for now is that the project of making “expatriation and castration” (or cognates such as fem- inization and sexual inversion) appear all but synonymous in James’s case was a group project among Anglo-American authors, for which Brooks’s study merely served as the catalyst. Apart from Hemingway’s contributions, one might pursue what Fitzger- ald meant by complaining to Brooks about his sin of biographical omission – “why didn’t you touch more on James [sic] impotence (physical) and its influence [on his work]?” – or by implying that both James’s for- eign relocation and his “feminine” impress on the Anglo-American novel had roots in a sexual identity less than straight. Elaborating a subtext in Brooks’s book, Fitzgerald tried to imagine how different modern literary history would look if James had not expatriated but had instead been held back by a “poignant emotional love affair with an American girl on American soil”; that Fitzgerald wrote this passage under the sign of farce is clear enough from his concession that such an Americanized, heterosexual- ized James, with “the picaresque past of Huck Finn,” was inconceivable.71 Alternatively, one might examine Wescott’s distinctive line of interpreting his beloved, Anglicized James also in light of physical impotence – a rhetor- ical movement that carries Wescott from James’s “rumored” inability to produce children and his fortunate expatriation to the insight that homo- sexuality explained a good deal about James’s life and work, especially his anarchistic enthusiasm for “the rupture of...inhibitions.”72 But it is Stephen Spender who provides the most revealing evidence of how the James-as-castrato legend came to dominate transatlantic discourse. Writing to Christopher Isherwood in 1933, Spender spoofed the idea, ini- tially suggesting that his forthcoming book on James would be about boy love (“his friendships with Boston lads between the ages of 7 and 17”) and then purporting to have found that James was castrated at age 40 “by an accident which happened to one of the earliest central heating radiators.” Confidentially, that is, Spender joked away all such speculation, while as- sociating the famous accident with a sedentary, middle-aged, and slightly chilly Henry James; the book’s cover, he further pretended for Isherwood’s sake, would feature the culprit in the plot, “a trellis of hot pipes with little jets of steam peeping out.”73 Yet when the book appeared, Spender bowed to consensus, duly citing Wescott’s theories and borrowing yet another hy- pothesis (unsupported in James’s account) that the Master’s privates had been “very severely scalded.” This might well explain the “attitude to sex” in James’s writing, Spender agreed, as well as some of the grimmer endings in his works: “Castration...issupposed to preoccupy the mind with ideas of suicide and death.”74 Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 197 To judge by Fitzgerald, Wescott, and Spender, then, the anomalous view of James’s sexuality at this time belonged not to those who read him as a queer, damaged expatriate but rather to a lesser author like Gamaliel Bradford, whose appreciation of James in American Portraits (1922) had in fact provoked Brooks’s attack in The Pilgrimage. According to Bradford, James’s “love-letters would have been one of the curiosities of literature,” given his stylistic queerness (decidedly in the old sense of the word), but then: “Who can say? Unless some woman still lives who has some of his letters.”75 (This lament for the missing proof of James’s heterosexuality is humorously, but tellingly, reversed in a recent anthology that includes his work in the “hidden tradition” of gay writing yet resists the biographical claim: “Failing the discovery of love letters to a young man...[James’s] homosexuality must remain theoretical”;76 the further humor, in turn, of this reluctance to call James’s gayness anything more than theoretical becomes clear from perusing Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe’s excellent compilation of James’s “love letters” to younger men.77) For the avant-garde male modernists – gay or straight, American or British, impotence theory or no – James increasingly appeared under the auspices of queerness, implying a distinct name – homosexuality – for those “thicker traces of another sort” that James’s intimate friends such as Constance Woolson had detected in his nature and in his work (L iii: 559). Next to Hemingway, however, it was Sherwood Anderson who became Van Wyck Brooks’s key interlocutor on the question of James. The first se- rialized portion of Brooks’s The Pilgrimage proved so seductive to Anderson (“you have a kind of power over my mind, Van Wyck”) that he embarked on several “solid weeks of James reading” in 1923. Anderson came to sym- pathize with James as a man who “did not dare love” (hinting perhaps at a love that dared not speak its name), but still he found the experience of reading James emotionally privative, writing to Brooks: “I really can’t care much for any character after he gets through with it; he, in short, takes my love from me, too” (SA 102). At the same time, Anderson strongly urged Brooks, in developing his book’s thesis in further installments, to factor in the “struggling side of James” and treat him not like a “judge trying a criminal” but rather as a “sympathetic friend or lover”: “Can we under- stand at all, ever, where we do not love?...Giveyourself wholly to James” (SA 104). The recurrence of the word love here, with its linkage to understanding, is extremely striking. As suggested earlier, there is no need to romanti- cize Anderson’s sexual politics (as Stein sometimes did, both genuinely and strategically). If Hemingway honed his masculinity by grinding against Jamesian effeminacy, Anderson similarly wrinkled his nose up at a “very 198 Henry James and Queer Modernity womanish” portrayal of Oscar Wilde on Broadway (1938), objecting espe- cially to the play’s suggestion that “perversion has in it some beauty and meaning that is not in the natural flow of life” (SA 418). Furthermore, even Anderson’s sensitive-male characters issue self-protective disclaimers (“I’m not any fairy”78) that also echo in the author’s memoirs (“[my friend] Luther was no fairy”), which unabashedly associate his encounters with urban homosexuality or transvestism with a sort of gothic horror: “a kind of door opened, as though I looked down...into a dark pit, a place of monstrous shapes, a world of strange unhealth” (SAM 285, 340). Yet again, Anderson’s resistance to seeing same-sex desire as such (as op- posed to fraternal or sororal bonds “based on natural loneliness”) mainly reflected a wish to harbor human relationships from the incursions of the modern sex police. Anderson’s well-known story “Hands,” which features an effeminate schoolteacher run out of town (indeed nearly lynched) for al- legedly fondling schoolboys, resolutely argues against homophobia, perhaps because Anderson himself had flourished as a journeyman printer under “sudden caresses” bestowed by older men whose guidance he remembered, positively, as “a kind of love making.”79 If to his view homosexuality re- mained a “terrible problem,” Anderson openly welcomed what might be called early gay pride readings of his work, as when an elderly gay man paid him this compliment: “I myself often read [“Hands”] . . . aloud to young men among us...Itisan effort to bring a little nobility into our relationships.” Surely one personal strength that Stein valued in Anderson (and missed in Hemingway) was the capacity to trace his homophobia to its foundations, uncovering, as it were, the sexual invert within: “Why, I was myself, unconsciously, one of them. The thing was in me too and the fear I had expressed was a sure sign of its presence” (SAM 285–6, 340, 473). Suggestively, Anderson’s admonition to Brooks to “give yourself wholly to James,” especially before writing critically about him, resembles the argument put forth in the tale “Hands” for broadly circulating the account of its queer character: “Sympathetically set forth [his story] would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men” (WO 29). A queer reader before the fact, Anderson coaxed Brooks toward what would now be called an “identificatory standpoint” receptive to the “sentimentally attaching power” of the Jamesian text, with its subdued eroticism,80 encouraging Brooks to recognize “the access to ‘perverse’ energies that [James’s] writing frequently affords.”81 By further implication, the reader/author who went into James’s texts looking not for strange beauties in obscure masculinities but only for heterosexual success stories, was likely to find precisely what Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 199 Brooks ultimately found, a host of characters who seemed disappointingly averse to normal (straight) emotions, “shadow-like passionless women and fish-blooded men” (a variant, one might add, on Lionel Trilling’s response to Willa Cather, discussed in chapter 5).82 Anderson’s mediation failed miserably, that is, and not only did Brooks not yield to James’s queerness, but he assailed it. For Brooks, too, was edgy about the feminized aura that had gathered around a form of cultural au- thority that should have been, just as authority, the province of men; and he only later realized what Hemingway would never fully accept: that he was “quarreling with myself” by way of quarreling with the Master.83 As James Hoopes remarks, Brooks’s “strenuous, lifelong insistence” that liter- ature be rooted in native soil and express American practicality – the main basis of his attack on James – was also a rearguard “defense of his masculin- ity,” obstructing his appreciation of other gay writers as well, including those whom he admired, such as Walt Whitman and J. A. Symonds.84 For instance, Brooks labored to refute what he called the “crass misunderstand- ings” that had grown up around Symonds’s “passion for ideal [male] beauty” (a sorry project given what is now known of the English author’s brave, if cautious, gay advocacy), and Brooks was accordingly “greatly perplexed” by Symonds’s famous attempt to enlist Whitman in support of Greek love.85 Leaning not on the Whitman of manly comrade love but on the masculinist, nationalist Whitman of Democratic Vistas, Brooks argued that James’s deviance began with imitating the “spare, withdrawn” (read effeminate) aesthetes of Europe. Inevitably, James’s long sojourn in mod- ern London, the capital of Anglo-American decadence and the scene of Wilde’s disgrace, had led to “the gradual decomposition...of his sense of human values,” and his “sterilizing” influence on the next generation of writers could be seen in the work of those American exiles in Paris (naming Stein would have been superfluous) who pursued “the so-called expatriate religion of art.” Given the organizing terms of this narrative of James’s degeneration and his incomparable agency in a much broader cultural decline – not coincidentally, the very terms of Hemingway’s vi- gnettes involving James – one readily grasps Brooks’s difficulty in keeping homosexuality out of the picture. Brooks all but identifies queerness as the origin of “the style that was the man Henry James had become” – decora- tive, sensualist, ceaselessly hedging – unconsciously isolating the queerest of his works (The Tragic Muse, “The Altar of the Dead”) as evidence of how James’s aberrant personal “texture” had “infected the creatures of his fancy,” making them behave “in violation of the nature of things.”86 As in Anderson’s more conscious and conspicuous appeal to “the natural flow 200 Henry James and Queer Modernity of life,” and its fundamental opposition to Wildean perversion, Brooks implied more than he knew in setting James and his characters “against nature.” Put otherwise, the strain of sexual dissidence in the Master’s voice vibrated in Brooks’s mind, even as he sought to neutralize and castigate it as a debased expatriate cosmopolitanism. As Hemingway proved in other dire ways, taking on Jamesian gay mas- culinity could exact penalties, especially when such a confrontation involved aggressions toward unacknowledged parts of the self. In the words of his own later account, Brooks became so “drugged” with his protagonist Henry James that he feared he would “never be sane again” until released from the grip of his book project. Describing the deliverance that came with the publication of The Pilgrimage, Brooks interestingly genders the body of his metaphor: “Henry James...came alive...inside of me,” and “the infant monster, kicking...hardatthe walls of my psyche” entered the world.87 In the natural flow of life, postpartum depression followed. “Pursued... with nightmares in which Henry James turned great luminous menacing eyes upon me” – as it were, Woolf’s hauntingly “portentous” James run amok – Brooks was especially beset by the fantasy of being buried alive by a decree of Parliament (not coincidentally, the law-making assembly of the American-turned-British subject Henry James). When consulted on the case, Carl Gustav Jung diagnosed the patient as beyond help, and Brooks passed the remainder of the 1920s in a sequence of American and English hospitals, or what he called “houses of the dead” (including one annexed by Harrow, where the schoolboy Symonds first encountered the homosexuality that Brooks refused to see.88) To insist upon the workings of ironic retribution here would perhaps smack of gothic fatalism, yet the gothic intensity of Brooks’s breakdown measured the psychic costs of denial in engaging Henry James under the sign of gender, sexuality, and nation. Hemingway and others, one might say, got off easy.

I have to . . . deny myself...many of the little comforts like toilet paper, semi- colons, and soles to my shoes . . . [Otherwise] people begin to shout that old Hem is just a fairy after all and no He man ha ha. (Hemingway to Fitzgerald, 1927) As Brooks’s case is only the most dramatic to confirm, it will not do to construe Hemingway’s anxious masculinity as too exceptional. Fitzgerald fretted that The Great Gatsby would show the “feminine” influence of James (as reviewers later claimed it did) rather than the virile influence of Dosto- evsky.89 Ezra Pound (as Kerr quotes him) was obsessed with keeping a “hard- ness of edge” in creative writing in order to remasculinize the “perpetual Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 201 mother’s meeting” of a “Eunuchated” American culture.90 Less invidiously but in the same vein, Stephen Spender, who presciently noted a “hint of the androgynyous” in Hemingway’s work, cited “the often feminine presence of a second Henry James” throughout the entire Jamesian canon, as if inscrib- ing a man who had “lived the life of...hisRowlands” (referring to Rowland Mallet of Roderick Hudson) and his Lambert Strethers – passive observers rather than real men of action.91 Even Anderson, although less fearful both of James and of things feminine, reacted to Hemingway’s “completely pa- tronizing” challenge to him as a man and an author in the challenger’s own masculinist idiom: judging as “a pretty good middle weight” himself, Anderson predicted that Hemingway would never “make the heavy weight class” (SAM 464). From another direction, but equally symptomatically, the critic Edmund Wilson felt moved to a public defense of Hemingway’s manhood against the most punishing pugilist of all, Gertrude Stein; after being “waspish” toward Pound, Wilson wrote, she had beat up on Hemingway “pretty hard” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which retailed the “endlessly amusing” gossip (in the gay city of Paris) about Hemingway’s debility and “yellow” cowardice (ABT 875).92 Even Glenway Wescott, whose own masculinity had been ridiculed in The Sun Also Rises, perceived Stein’s treatment of Hemingway as “odious,” while her ally and ideal man Anderson found that his “great joy” in reading The Autobiography was tempered by Stein’s move (figuratively, either savage or castrative or both) to take “such big patches of skin off Hemmy with [her] delicately held knife” (SA 295). Yet as this turbulent body of response further indicates, Hemingway had elected himself, or had agreed to his election, as the primary icon-cum- target of insistently straight hypermasculinity in Anglo-American culture. As such, he had also become the foremost victim of the post-Victorian practice of reading (and self-reading) that assumed a tight fit between person and persona, collapsing masculine and artistic authenticity or inauthenticity in the process. In calling Anderson’s work a “pretensious fake,” Wescott’s work a “literary fake,” or James’s work “an enormous fake,” Hemingway self- evidently implied an author whose manhood, too, was artificial, a man who was perhaps both “a phony and a buggar [sic]” (SL 195, 266, 413). By the same token, when Hemingway became rattled by Virginia Woolf’s “imputation that I faked” in The Sun Also Rises, the insult fell into essentially the same category as charges that his boxer’s crouch was an imitation of Anderson’s (thus Stein), that his bullfighting enthusiasm was “all simulation” (Margaret Anderson), and that his masculinity in toto was as “phony as a rubber check” 202 Henry James and Queer Modernity (Zelda Fitzgerald). The sting in these formulas of detraction must have been all the worse for their having come from women (SL 265, ABT 873, SL 388).93 The best index to how the modern regulation of gender and sexuality worked, that is, came in the form of Hemingway’sbrittle susceptibility when the tables were turned, and his own masculine prose, as well as his own pose, was pronounced “fake.” Finding no quarter in which to laugh off such imputations as groundless or irrelevant (“no He man ha ha”), Hemingway self-consciously redoubled his manly displays, battling swordfish in the gulfstream (“poor fragile old Hem posing as a fisherman”), hunting in Africa (where “Gertrude’s feathered friends,” he predicted, would quickly perish), and boxing against all comers, including an unfortunate, inebriated Wallace Stevens: “Gertrude Stein ought to give all these people who pick fights with poor old papa at least their money [back]” (SL 388, 403, 439). In accordance with the harsh binary logic of the modern gender system, which was extended and compounded in the equation of effeminacy with homosexuality, Hemingway’s internalized fear of being no “He man” (all kidding aside) harbored the deeper fear that his audience would proceed to deduce the very worst about him: “old Hem is just a fairy,” no different from the noxious male creatures that he reviled in James’s fiction or found embodied in literary competitors such as Glenway Wescott. As always, Stein emerges as the keenest analyst of what went wrong for Hemingwayesque masculinity and its manifestation in Hemingway’s art. Owing largely to a more stable patriarchy, “nineteenth-century men were confident,” she observed in Everybody’s Autobiography, and thus Victorian male authors were able to “invent all kinds...ofmen”in their fiction (a generalization that holds even for the putatively “feminized” James). With the weakening of patriarchal privilege, though, male modernists became defensive, “hold[ing] on to themselves” in their fictional representations and trying to make themselves appear “more beautiful more intriguing more everything” (EA 3–4). Hemingway exemplified the “more everything” category – staging a campaign, at once quixotic and pathetic, to recover lost ground for modern men by main force – whereas Anderson’s “perfect fresh- ness” derived from his relative indifference to being “small in the world’s eyes.”94 In other words, Stein promoted much the same type of masculin- ity that was complimented and revalued throughout James’s work; it was also of the kind that Willa Cather advanced in her writings, including what Hemingway saw as the pitiful simulacrum of manhood, cribbed from Hollywood movies, that had betrayed Cather in the prize-winning novel One of Ours: “Poor woman she had to get her war experience from Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 203 somewhere” (SL 105). In the long run, as both Stein and Anderson in- tuited, Hemingway himself would be betrayed by the constant exertion and self-vigilance required in playing the big, strong, straight man for “the world’s eyes.” In that regard, perhaps a poignant symbolism can be read in Hemingway’s unsuccessful struggle with a piece of fiction entitled “The Faker”; as D. T. Max writes, it was to be “the story of a man returning from . . . war pretending to be a hero...[but] he never finished it.”95

Farewell is about the best word I know in English. (Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1932)

If nobody refuses what you offer there must be something the matter. (Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937)

In his impressive study Libidinal Currents, Joseph A. Boone sums up the recent trend in American literary and cultural studies that has seen “concepts of canonicity...fiercely debated...resulting in the dethroning of certain authors (farewell Hemingway) and the rise of hitherto neglected ones,” such as Djuna Barnes.96 Although Boone’s incisive readings contribute much to this pivotal recovery project, one senses that he may be premature in bidding Hemingway, in particular, a fond farewell. Nor is it the first time that Papa Hemingway has been shown the door without his having taken it. Indeed, more than half a century after Fitzgerald agreed with Stein’s assessment that his friend’s work was bound for “the museums,” and long after Alice B. Toklas also dismissed that work as “hopelessly 1890,” Hemingway is not only not being “refused,” he is being positively embraced.97 In 1999, to honor of the centennial of Hemingway’s birth – only coinci- dentally the anniversary of James’s publication of The Awkward Age – the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, mounted a major exhibition dedicated to Hemingway, with Yale University Press publishing the exhibi- tion’sphotographs of this “emphatically virile...American legend.”98 Popu- lar magazines from People to Cigar Aficionado featured Hemingway on their covers. Meanwhile, Hemingway’s offspring (the lucky Henry James did not have any) have continued to flood the market with spurious posthumous “novels,” such as True at First Light, as well as with a line of “Hemingway” furniture.99 At the risk of reproducing what James Kincaid calls the “narra- tives of fierce causality” that marked and marred Victorian conceptions of sexual identity, it is perhaps worth noting that the Hemingway descendant who testified most candidly to the author’s self-damage and its ramifica- tions for others around him was his transgendered son Gregory/Gloria, 204 Henry James and Queer Modernity whose difficult life ended recently in the women’s section of a Miami jail.100 More to the point of Boone’s argument are the results of a poll con- ducted, also in 1999, by the newsletter of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, which is conceived as the avant-garde multiculturalist teaching anthology of our time. Having asked their sizeable constituency of college educators to name the twentieth-century works in English most essential to the millennial curriculum, the newsletter’s editors reported that two Hemingway novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, were voted into the “top twenty-five” list, thus tying the American author with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf for second place; the only writer who placed three works in the top echelon (and here one may imagine Hemingway spinning in his grave) was William Faulkner.101 To all appearances, then, whether in academe or in popular mass media, the figure of “Hemingway” does not plan on departing anytime soon, leaving us to confront the troubling implication that perhaps Anglo-American culture itself has become the “museum” of Stein’s prediction. (Although the year 1999 was also the birth centennial of the gay American poet Hart Crane, author of The Bridge, his image was nowhere to be found on the cover of People or elsewhere.) As for the other Hemingway, the “other half” of the man that did not really factor into these recent festivities and celebrations, a diary entry from the 1950s – involving sexual role-playing with his fourth wife, Mary – provides a remarkable glimpse into the possibilities, both personal and artistic, that Stein had once seen, before the overdetermined masculinist persona of “Papa” was superimposed: [Mary] loves me to be her girls [sic], which I love to be, not being absolutely stupid. Mary has never had one lesbian impulse but has always wanted to be a boy. Since I have never cared for any man and dislike any tactile contact with men except the normal Spanish abrazo, I loved feeling the embrace of Mary, which came to me as something outside all tribal law.102 Although the armor of negation remains firmly in place for Hemingway (“never . . . never”), this fantasy of sexual inversion, resulting in something bordering on same-sex intimacy, leads one to wonder just how far outside of tribal law this brave, manly man might have ventured, if only his “inside” had not become “outside” all too soon.103 234 Notes to pages 165–175 as in One of Ours, the attempt to map out a new order of relations between men or between women becomes entangled in the very structures it seeks to subvert. 62 Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” p. 471. 63 Abraham, Are Girls Necessary?,p.52. 64 Rowe, Other Henry James,p.108. 65 Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” p. 473. 66 Goldberg makes a strong case for Louie Marsellus, the Professor’s son-in-law, as the texts Wildean figure, and some of Marsellus’s penchant for sensualism rubs off on the Professor. St. Peter’s taste coincides with “Louie’s taste” as he “strokes . . . with evident pleasure” the furs that Louie buys for his wife (PH 67). The furs that link Louie, Tom, and the Professor clearly correspond with the fetishized blanket that brings the bodies of Roddy Blake, Tom, and St. Peter into relation; see Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” pp. 470, 473. 67 Forster, Maurice,p.209.

6 ‘‘THE OTHER HALF IS THE MAN’’: THE QUEER MODERN TRIANGLE OF GERTRUDE STEIN, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND HENRY JAMES 1 As a measure of the status of The Torrents of Spring in the Hemingway canon, the 300-page Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson, Cambridge University Press, 1996, contains only three passing mentions of the text. 2 Harvey Breit, The Writer Observed, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1956, p. 276. 3 Hemingway scholars will recognize my renovations of Philip Young’s Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966. I have benefited particularly from Comley and Scholes’s thoughtful study, Hemingway’s Genders. 4 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, New York: Random House, 1935,p.52. 5 John Hyde Preston, “A Conversation with Gertrude Stein,” in Linda Simon (ed.), Gertrude Stein Remembered, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994, pp. 159–61. 6 Rena Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,” in Donaldson, Cambridge Companion to Hemingway,p.171. 7 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 160. 8 Anderson’s Love Letters, pp. 306–7. 9 Gertrude Stein, “Transatlantic Interview,” in Robert Bartlett Haas (ed.), A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1971,p.22. 10 Joseph Allen Boone argues, on the basis of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil (1933), that another audience did exist, as well as other types of authors, in whose shared world Jake Barnes’s “sexual dys- function and Brett’s ‘faghag’ propensities” would have “fit right [in]” rather Notes to pages 175–177 235 than “wreaking the havoc” that Hemingway depicts. But The Young and Evil, consciously modeled after The Sun Also Rises, circulated mainly in Paris (with Stein’s support), having been “instantly seized by English and American cus- toms” before sinking out of sight altogether – a prospect hardly to be risked by Hemingway, or very many others; Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998,pp.225, 471,n.104. 11 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 159. 12 Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ed. Samuel M. Steward, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977,p.56. 13 Hemingway quoted in Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987,p.533. 14 Sedgwick, “Beast in the Closet,” pp. 205, 207. 15 Introducing the welcome reissue of Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk, Michael Cunningham joins Edmund White and many other readers in attributing a Jamesian quality to Wescott’s prose: “It is James... whom Wescott most nearly resembles . . . produc[ing] all his sparks from within: what fascinates him are devastating events that spring directly from char- acter”; The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, New York: New York Review Books, 2001, pp. xviii–xix. This reception history reverses the invidious take on the James–Wescott relation, treated at length here, seeing it more as one of inter- generational gay “influence” in both style and subject matter. I am indebted throughout this chapter to Jerry Rosco’s valuable new study Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 16 Glenway Wescott, “A Sentimental Contribution,” in Homage to Henry James, 1843–1926, Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1971, pp. 186–7. 17 Spender, Destructive Element, pp. 34–5. 18 F.Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994,p.123. 19 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935,pp.65–6. Linda Wagner-Martin argues that Stein’s motive in counter attacking was “guilt over her sponsorship” of Hemingway after wading through the “scathing undercurrent of anti-Semitism and homophobia” in The Sun Also Rises;“Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and her Family, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995,pp.186–7. Caramello reads The Autobiography as a preemptive strike against the “symbolic matricide” that Stein expected from her proteg´ e,´ but also as a sign of resentment toward a patriarchal spoils system that honored Hemingway’s labors (and Picasso’s) while neglecting her own; James, Stein, and the Biographical Act,p.161. 20 Ernest Hemingway, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway,” unpub- lished MS, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Columbia Point, Boston, MA, no pagination. 21 For a further example, here is Sherwood Anderson, writing in 1923: “Horses and Negroes seem to be the two things in America that give me the most ascetic [sic] pleasure . . . In the horse what a noble bearing. No lousy inferiority complex there” (SA 101). Stein’s variant form of romantic racialism, and its role in her 236 Notes to pages 178–183 emergent sense of sexual identity, is well discussed in Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 32–3, 120, 21. For sociohistorical context, see David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) and Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 22 Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 335. 23 Frances Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine’: Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in The Great Gatsby,” American Literature 68, no. 2 (June 1996), 405–31. 24 Allen Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” in Robert O. Stephens (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception, n.p.: Burt Franklin & Co., 1977,p.43. 25 Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,”p.182. 26 Stephens, Hemingway: The Critical Reception, pp. 127, 142, 145, 131, 155. 27 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, pp. 23–4. 28 Breit, Writer Observed,p.263. 29 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 32–3. 30 Ezra Pound quoted in Robert McAlmon, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self-Portrait, ed. Robert E. Knoll, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1962,p.353. 31 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 119. 32 Hemingway’s description of Gide, from Death in the Afternoon, is quoted in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders,p.120. The passage praises the painter El Greco for “redeem[ing], for the tribe” of “fairies,” not just the “prissy... moral arrogance” of Gide, but “the lazy, conceited debauchery of a Wilde who betrayed a generation” – a judgment curiously akin to James’s and Cather’s – and “the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whit- man”; Comley and Scholes argue that these are not “blanket condemnations” of homosexuality but rather objections to a “way of textualizing that sexuality that allies it with the sentimental and moralistic”; pp. 120–1. The fine dis- tinction is untenable, however, given the powerful cultural logic by which the sentimental and moralistic get routed back into the discourse of effeminacy: a condemnation of this sensibility in men is perforce a condemnation of the queer. 33 Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine,’ ” p. 405. 34 Caramello, Biographical Act,p.120. 35 See Susan M. Griffin’s insightful treatment of James’s recurrent narrative in- terest in “laceration” and “mutilation” in “Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of Jamesian Masculinity,” Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 4 (winter 1977), 61–82. 36 Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd supplementary edn, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975,p.413. 37 Stephen Calloway, “Wilde and the Dandyism of the Senses,” in Peter Raby (ed.), The Companion to Oscar Wilde, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 47–8. Notes to pages 183–184 237 38 On Huysmans’s impact on Wilde and on European aestheticism generally, see also Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 252–3. 39 Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters of Wilde, pp. 660, 656. 40 Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein,pp.77, 83. The use of “bottom” or “bot- tom nature” is pervasive in Stein’s text; for example, describing a partner in one of the work’s “pairs of women”: “Mary Maxworthing . . . had not a very large bottom in her to her, she had a little sensitive bottom in her” (MOA 215). In the “repetitive, almost drugged” cadences of The Making of Americans, Ruddick discerns a deeper logic where readers like Hemingway found the formal slovenliness of the eternal feminine: Stein’s “strange style reflects not absentedmindedness or self-indulgence but self-exploration” of complicated “primitive fantasies” in the working-out of her identity and sexual politics; pp. 72–3. Similarly, when Hemingway later dismisses Stein’s work as the “manure” of “contented cows,” he again shows his (allergic) insightfulness into the lesbian thematics and excremental metaphorics of a piece such as “As a Wife has a cow a Love Story”; “Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway.” As Kay Turner’s archival research shows, “cow” was Stein’s codeword for Toklas’s stools, constituting a sort of “hallmark of married intimacy” and mutual nurture : “Gertrude’s devo- tion to Alice’s ‘cows’...combines a heightened and freely discursive eroticism with the desire to make art. Both in lovemaking and in defecating...Toklas’s body provided the sensual, corporeal model...[for Stein’s] writing pushed out on the page in all its rhythmic, repetitive, regressive and erotic glory”; Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 33–4. 41 Men of other stripes saw Stein’s new hairstyle otherwise. To Samuel Steward, she resembled “a Roman senator about to break into voluble Latin”; Dear Sammy,p.7. Anderson found, approvingly, that the tonsure made her look “like a monk” (ABT 907), while the aesthete Harold Acton thought of her in the guise of a priestess of the “Aztec Mexicans”; Simon, Stein Remembered, p. 113. The challenge Hemingway faced in absorbing Stein’s physical trans- formation rehearsed the challenge to narrative management that earlier male authors, including James, confronted in the hystericized female body. Ender observes: “what produces the fiction . . . of sexual difference is surely a sys- tem of representation where (masculine) knowledge or consciousness overrides (feminine) passion and maintains the separation between spectator and specta- cle.” Yet this “fiction” collapses, for sexual identity proves to be, on the evidence of the male-authored text itself, “an inherently deconstructive construct”: “the attempt to master sexual difference...ends up producing not knowledge, but some hysterical enactment of the impossibility of distinguishing”; Sexing the Mind,p.95. 42 Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role,New York: Columbia University Press, 1999,p.2. 43 Ernest Hemingway, “Explanatory Glossary,” Death in the Afternoon, quoted in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders,p.107. 238 Notes to pages 185–189 44 E. M. Forster quoted in P.N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols., New York: Harcourt, 1977/1978, volume i,p.164; Emma L. Erving’s letter to Stein quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996,p.205. 45 Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” p. 43. 46 Ford Madox Ford, Henry James: A Critical Study, New York: Octagon Books, 1964, pp. 170–4. 47 Virginia Woolf, “The Method of Henry James,” in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf , volume ii, 1912–1918, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987,pp.346, 348; Gladys Brooks, If Strangers Meet: A Memory, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967,p.53. 48 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa,p.70. See also Marilyn Elkins, “The Fash- ion of Machismo,” in Linda Wagner-Martin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000,pp.93–115, which is valu- able for understanding the sartorial elements and stage props involved in Hemingway’s self-conscious pose as a man with the military bona fides that Cather and James lacked; it must be said, however, that the general argument – having had “no literal war experience... Hemingway had never earned the right to wear” a soldier’s uniform – rehearses the culturally charged opposition between authentic and fake (or vicarious) masculine credentials that seems to have motivated Hemingway’s aggressive virility in the first place; p. 99. 49 T. S. Eliot, “On Henry James: in Memory,” in Dupee, Question of James, p. 123. 50 The full formulation, from Hemingway’s 1936 correspondence, reads rather chillingly: “Thought I was facing impotence, inability to write . . . and was going to blow my lousy head off”; quoted in Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,” p. 184; or to take a later, kindred example from a 1949 letter: “Can fuck better than when I was 25 and write good afterwards which was never true before” (SL 668). 51 Here I take exception with Jamie Barlowe’s useful “Hemingway’s Gender Train- ing,” in Wagner-Martin, Historical Guide to Hemingway,pp.117–53, which argues that we lack evidence that Hemingway was “consciously aware of the consequences of his notions of gender...[or] of the connections between his guilt-ridden bouts of depression and his refusal to reconsider his ideas about gender”; I contend that his awareness on this score was almost too acute, if powerfully resisted, adding another level of pathos to his trials of masculinity; p. 130. 52 This passage from Death in the Afternoon is quoted and well discussed in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, pp. 109ff. 53 Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography, London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930,p.140. 54 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” pp. 179, 181. 55 Chauncey, Gay New York,p.50.InSun a single overture to another man (“Oh, how charmingly you get angry”) marks the speaker – the fictionalized Wescott – as gay (SAR 21). The subcultural signifiers of gayness in Sun (hair, Notes to pages 190–195 239 dress, gesture, voice, mannerism [e.g., SAR 20]) show how attentive Hem- ingway was as an ethnographer, bearing out as well Chauncey’s claim for a hermeneutics of suspicion that construed “an inversion of any one aspect of one’s prescribed gender persona” as being “symptomatic of a much more com- prehensive inversion”; pp. 55–6. In other words, Hemingway was, like most modern men, at once a subject and an agent of sexual surveillance. 56 Michael S. Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones,” in Hemingway’s Reading, 1910–1940: An Inventory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 23. 57 It seems backwards to label Strether’s fate a “tragedy,” as Linda Wagner-Martin does (see my chapter 4), while at the same time discounting the ways in which Barnes’s experience, and that of his social set, appears to be just what Heming- way called it, “a damn tragedy” (SL 229); “The Intertextual Hemingway,”in Wagner-Martin, Historical Guide to Hemingway,pp.175–6. Lynn also asserts that Strether’s best-known speech “left a deep impression” on Hemingway, “echoing” not in Barnes’s dialogue but in Robert Cohn’s; yet he cites no con- crete evidence that Hemingway had yet read The Ambassadors; Hemingway, pp. 328–9. 58 Although Hemingway could be tendentious about the biographical record, I take at face value his claim that The Awkward Age marked his first meaningful encounter with James’s novels. His air of startled discovery seems genuine, and when he subsequently reproached Pound for his high estimate of James, the latter replied (in early 1928): “I never suggested that you read the Awkward Age.” Pound only then referred Hemingway to his own “nice little map of Henry,” which does not seem to have included The Ambassadors on its itinerary; Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading, pp. 22–3. 59 For example, James’s appeal to “spare my blushes” was not invented but rather selected by Hemingway for effect; see Kaplan, James: The Imagination of Genius, p. 565. 60 Rudyard Kipling, “The Ladies,” in The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling (poetryloverspage.com). 61 Hemingway quoted in Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones,” p. 18. 62 Sherwood Anderson, “The Man who Became a Woman,” in Maxwell Geismar (ed.), Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories, New York: Hill & Wang, 1966,p.60. 63 Wagner-Martin, “Intertextual Hemingway,” p. 177. 64 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1915), quoted in Bech, When Men Meet,p.17. 65 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 1–2. 66 Walpole’s letter quoted in Hart-Davis, Walpole: A Biography,p.193. 67 Edel, James: A Life,p.721. 68 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” p. 179. 69 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 122. 70 Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925, pp. 32–3. 240 Notes to pages 196–203 71 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 123. 72 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” pp. 179, 186. 73 Stephen Spender, Letters to Christopher, ed. Lee Bartlett, Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1980, pp. 62–3. 74 Spender, Destructive Element,pp.36–7. In the fine print of a footnote, Spender concedes that “the rumour of [James’s] castration seems exaggerated and im- probable”; p. 37, n. 1. 75 Gamaliel Bradford, American Portraits, 1875–1900 (1922), Port Washington,NY: Kennikat Press, 1969,p.187. 76 Mitchell and Leavitt, Pages Passed,p.220. 77 Gunter and Jobe, Dearly Beloved Friends. 78 Anderson, “Man who Became a Woman,” p. 73. 79 Anderson’s narrative treats the abjected ex-teacher Biddlebaum with compas- sion as “one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men” (WO 31). 80 Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading, pp. 44, 48, 50–1. 81 Moon, Small Boy and Others,p.27. 82 Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965,p.429. 83 Ibid., pp. 432–3. 84 James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977,p.303. 85 Van Wyck Brooks, John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study,NewYork: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914,pp.19–20, 47, 57–8. For a valuable treatment of the Symonds left out of Brooks’s account, see Robinson, Gay Lives, pp. 7–26. 86 Brooks, “Two Phases of James,” pp. 138–40. According to Stevens, “The Altar of the Dead,” which revolves around one man’s mourning rituals for another, marked a turning point for James (as Brooks apparently perceived), establish- ing “a queer context for melancholia” and dramatizing the sociopolitical “ills attending any construction of sexuality depending on repudiation”; James and Sexuality, pp. 162–3. 87 Brooks quoted in Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks, pp. 156, 158, 159. 88 Brooks, Autobiography, pp. 439, 441. 89 Correspondence of F.Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, New York: Random House, 1980,p.168. 90 Pound quoted in Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine,’ ” p. 408. 91 Stephen Spender, Journals 1939–1983, ed. John Goldsmith, New York: Random House, 1986,p.416; The Destructive Element, pp. 27–8. 92 Wilson, Shores of Light,p.577. Wescott quoted in Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence of Fitzgerald,p.331. 93 Zelda Fitzgerald quoted in Lynn, Hemingway,p.286. 94 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 158. 95 D. T. Max, “Ernest Hemingway’s War Wounds,” New York Times Magazine, 18 July 1999,p.29. Notes to pages 203–210 241 96 Boone, Libidinal Currents,p.202. 97 Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Toklas,p.210. 98 Yale University Press catalog (spring 2000), p. 12. 99 True at First Light still finds Hemingway preoccupied with contrasting the authorial type of the aloof, sterile bachelor, epitomized in James, whose troubles are purely aesthetic (“line of departure problems”) and the male writer of experience, celebrity, and romantic entanglements that “Henry James was not faced with” (SL 709). At the same time, his weird fantasy of snatching away James’s “consolatory cigar” (smoked on a balcony overlooking Life) and giving it to a young African woman whom he desires contains the recognition that he has authorized himself as both man and artist partly through a history of aggression against James and his supposedly vestigial masculinity; New York: Scribner’s, 1999, pp. 232–3. 100 Kincaid, Child-Loving,p.134. 101 Paul Lauter, “The Heath Top 100,” The Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter, no. 19 (Spring 1999), p. 1. The survey does confirm Boone’s point about canon reformation to the extent that the top two vote-getters were not Faulkner and Hemingway, but Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. 102 Hemingway quoted in Lynn, Hemingway,p.533. 103 Ironically, Hemingway’s fantasy role-playing provides evidence for Gide’s claim about “male Lesbians”: “many heterosexuals [i.e., straight men], either through diffidence or self-impotence, behave in relation to [women] like women and, in an apparently ‘normal’ pair, play the role of true inverts” (GL 421).

CODA ‘‘NOBODY IS ALIKE HENRY JAMES’’: STEIN, JAMES, AND QUEER FUTURITY 1 Gertrude Stein quoted in Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice, London: Pan- dora, 1991,p.12. See also Turner’s superb account of the Stein–Toklas marriage in the introduction to Baby Precious Always Shines. 2 Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Toklas,p.357. 3 Ibid. 4 Wineapple, Sister Brother,p.120. 5 Gertrude Stein quoted in Caramello, James, Stein, and the Biographical Act, p. 171. 6 Ibid., p. 179. 7 Ibid., p. 172. 8 Ibid., p. 198. 9 Ezra Pound, “A Brief Note,” in Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 28–9. 10 See Bruce Kellner (ed.), A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example, New York: Greenwood Press, 1988,p.33. 11 Phelps and Rosco, Continual Lessons: Journals of Wescott,p.52. 12 Ernest Hemingway quoted in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, p. 107. Encyclopedia of American Literature

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. 590 entryJames, Alice abolitionist Cornelia Grinnell Willis (1825–1904) raised funds to purchase Jacobs’s freedom. At the suggestion of the feminist abolitionist Amy Post (1802–1889), Jacobs began to write her memoir in 1853. Ja- cobs resisted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s suggestion that her story be integrated into Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) as fic- tion, and with the editorial help of the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published her autobiography, one of the earliest slave narratives to be written by a woman, in 1861. The book, titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, was originally published under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

Sources Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 1986. Johnson, Yvonne. The Voices of African American Women: The Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas, 2004.

James, Alice (1848–1892) diarist Born in New York City, Alice James was the fifth child and Henry James, 1906 only daughter of Mary Robertson Walsh and Henry James Sr. The sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher Wil- liam James, she was denied the education granted her sib- lings and discouraged from pursuing a profession. As her brother Henry once remarked, “in our family group girls seem scarcely to have had a chance.” James, Henry (1843–1916) short-story writer, novelist, From about the age of nineteen onward, Alice James suf- critic fered from repeated mental breakdowns and depression. In 1889 she started a diary that spoke in plain and vivid terms We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give about her interior life and about the world around her—a what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our task she undertook with the apparent intention that it be passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. published. She was also an avid correspondent, and her letters —“The Middle Years” (1893) are among the most memorable written during her time. In 1873 Alice James met another single woman, Katherine Lor- Henry James Jr. was one of four children fathered by Henry ing, with whom she formed an intense bond of the sort re- James Sr., a prominent writer on religion and philosophy. ferred to at the time as a Boston marriage. James succumbed Born in New York City, Henry Jr. grew up abroad. He was to breast cancer in early middle age. greatly influenced by his father’s cosmopolitan outlook and exposed at an early age to his father’s intellectual friends. He Sources also had the example of his older brother William James, The Diary of Alice James, edited by Leon Edel. New York: Pen- who became a distinguished philosopher and psychologist. guin, 1964. Educated by tutors, Henry spent his time in Newport, Rhode Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Far- Island, and in Europe. In 1862 he entered Harvard Law rar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. School, but he soon concluded that writing was his métier Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. London: Cape, 1980. and that America was unlikely to foster his talent. To James, Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. The Death and Letters of Alice James: Americans seemed too intent on commerce and lacked the Selected Correspondence. Berkeley: University of California sophisticated social structures and manners that he found so Press, 1981. attractive in European culture. James, Henryentry 591

James began his literary career by writing articles, sto- Episode (1879) presents Americans in England as well as ries, and reviews. “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), his first Englishmen in America for a simultaneous exploration of story to be characterized by an international theme, exam- aristocratic and democratic values. James returned twice ines the confrontation between American and European more to American settings for his stories, in Washington culture. By 1875 James had settled permanently in Europe Square and The Bostonians. Both novels, however, show and published Transatlantic Sketches (1875). Roderick Hud- that he had become increasingly distanced from the Ameri- son (1876) was his first novel to employ the international can scene, to which he later returned only in his nonfiction. theme, telling the story of an American sculptor who can- The Portrait of a Lady (1882) marks the major phase not adjust to Rome. Similarly, The American (1877) de- of James’s creativity. A portrayal of a young woman who scribes the struggle of a man as he attempts to negotiate mistakes European sophistication for moral sensitivity, the the intricacies of French life and to fathom standards of book is James’s first prolonged exploration of the American conduct different from his American values. The Europe- mind in Europe. ans (1878) reverses James’s angle by importing Europeans James’s novel The Princess Casamassima (1886) was a de- into a New England setting. parture for him because it dealt so directly with politics. Al- Of the novels and stories of this early period, Daisy though his treatment of radicals in London is more a study Miller (1878) is the most representative of James’s idea of than a full-blown dramatic account, he anticipated the politi- the nobility possible in innocence and of the value in not cal novels of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) in portraying the being spoiled by too much culture. It is the story of a young, futility and absurdity of fanatics who believe they can change naive American woman who pays with her life for her ig- their world with narrow but fervent ideas. More typical of norance of the European milieu, but whose life is also an James’s work is The Aspern Papers (1888), a novella that affecting rebuke of European corruption. An International deals with a biographer’s efforts to obtain the papers of a no- table poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the reluctance of the poet’s beloved to yield them. Set in Venice, the story provides an example of the way in which James—often thought of as one of the world’s great psychological novelists—characterized conflicting points of view. James continued writing into the 1900s, publishing A Lon- don Life (1889), The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893), The Private Life (1893), The Wheel of Time (1893), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). His work represented acute statements on the subject of human relationships and cultural settings, and it brought to American fiction a de- gree of sophistication not seen before. In theme and tech- nique—his studies of European and American societies and his experimentation with point of view and exploration of states of mind—James brought American literature into the world arena. He influenced poets as well as novelists. The early work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot show James’s influ- ence, particularly in dramatic monologues like Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady. James also made an incalculable contribution to the criti- cism of American fiction and to the American writer’s sense of himself as pursuing a disciplined craft. James advanced the art of the novel not only through the brilliant prefaces to his novels, collected as The Art of the Novel: Critical Pref- aces (1934), but also in works of literary criticism. James is also an important figure in the history of American travel writing. His works in this genre include Portraits of Places (1883), A Little Tour in France (1885), English Hours (1905), The American Scene (1907), and Italian Hours (1909). James wrote several volumes of autobiography: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Front cover for the 1905 collection of English travel sketches Middle Years (1917). 592 entryJames, Henry

James’s revisions of a page of his 1886 novel for publication as volumes seven and eight of the New York Edition, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1907–1917. James, Henryentry 593

Principal Books by James A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales. Boston: Osgood, 1875. Transatlantic Sketches. Boston: Osgood, 1875. Roderick Hudson. Boston: Osgood, 1876; revised edition, Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882. The American. Boston: Osgood, 1877. French Poets and Novelists. London: Macmillan, 1878. Watch and Ward. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878. Daisy Miller: A Study. New York: Harper, 1878. The Europeans. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879. An International Episode. New York: Harper, 1879. The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales, 2 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1879. Hawthorne. New York: Harper, 1880. Confidence. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880. A Bundle of Letters. Boston: Loring, 1880. The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters. New York: Harper, 1880. Washington Square. New York: Harper, 1881. Washington Square, The Pension Beaurepas, A Bundle of Letters, 2 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1881. The Portrait of a Lady. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882. The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View. Boston: Osgood, 1883. Daisy Miller: A Comedy in Three Acts. Boston: Osgood, 1883. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of James, 1913, three years Portraits of Places. Boston: Osgood, 1884. before his death Tales of Three Cities. Boston: Osgood, 1884. A Little Tour in France. Boston: Osgood, 1885; revised edition, Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900. The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina’s Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings. Boston: Osgood, 1885. Essays in London and Elsewhere. New York: Harper, 1893. The Art of Fiction. Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1885. The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits. New York: Harper, Stories Revived, 3 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1885. 1893. The Bostonians: A Novel. 3 volumes, London: Macmillan, 1886; 1 The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. New York: volume, London & New York: Macmillan, 1886. Harper, 1893. The Princess Casamassima: A Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1886. Theatricals, Two Comedies: Tenants, Disengaged. New York: Partial Portraits. New York: Macmillan, 1888. Harper, 1894. The Reverberator. New York: Macmillan, 1888. Theatricals, Second Series: The Album, The Reprobate. New York: The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning. New Harper, 1895. York: Macmillan, 1888. Terminations: The Death of the Lion, The Coxon Fund, The Mid- A London Life, The Patagonia, The Liar, Mrs. Temperly. New dle Years, The Altar of the Dead. New York: Harper, 1895. York: Macmillan, 1889. Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet, Glasses, The Next Time, The Tragic Muse, 2 volumes, Boston & New York: Houghton, The Way It Came. New York & London: Macmillan, 1896. Mifflin, 1890. The Other House. New York & London: Macmillan, 1896. The American: A Comedy in Four Acts. London: Heinemann, The Spoils of Poynton. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891. 1897. The Lesson of the Master, The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith, What Maisie Knew. Chicago & New York: Stone, 1897. The Solution, Sir Edmund Orme. New York: Macmillan, 1892. In the Cage. Chicago & New York: Stone, 1898. The Real Thing and Other Tales. New York: Macmillan, 1893. The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End. New York Picture and Text. New York: Harper, 1893. & London: Macmillan, 1898. The Private Life, The Wheel of Time, Lord Beaupré, The Visits, The Awkward Age. New York & London: Harper, 1899. Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, The Soft Side. New York: Macmillan, 1900. 1893. The Sacred Fount. New York: Scribners, 1901. 594 entryJames, Henry

The Wings of the Dove, 2 volumes. New York: Scribners, 1902. James’s fictional works are complemented by reading his The Better Sort. New York: Scribners, 1903. critical writings, especially those collected in The Art of the The Ambassadors. New York & London: Harper, 1903. Novel, edited by R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner, 1934). William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 volumes. Boston: Tony Tanner’s Henry James: The Writer and his Work (Am- Houghton, Mifflin, 1903. herst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1985) and D. W. The Golden Bowl. New York: Scribners, 1904. Jefferson’s Henry James (New York: Grove Press, 1961) both The Question of Our Speech, The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures. provide excellent surveys of James’s career. Roger Gard’s Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905. Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & English Hours. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905. Kegan Paul, 1968) collects reviews, letters, and essays on The American Scene. New York & London: Harper, 1907. James’s work by his contemporaries. Views and Reviews. Boston: Ball, 1908. James’s early fiction is marked by a dependence on real- Italian Hours. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. ist techniques. Lyall Powers’s Henry James and the Naturalist The Finer Grain. New York: Scribners, 1910. Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, The Outcry. New York: Scribners, 1911. 1971) and Philip Grover’s Henry James and the French Novel: A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribners, 1913. A Study in Inspiration (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973) both Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Scribners, 1914. demonstrate James’s indebtedness to French sources. Corne- Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes. New York: Scribners, lia Kelley’s The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana: 1914. University of Illinois Press, revised 1965) outlines the writer’s The Middle Years, edited by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribners, development from Romanticist to realist, showing how his 1917. early work emerges from his engagement with contemporary The Complete Plays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel. Phila- European as well as American fiction. delphia & New York: Lippincott, 1949. James’s mature works of psychological realism are ana- Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Edel and Mark Wil- lyzed by F. O. Matthiessen in Henry James: The Major Phase son, 2 volumes. New York: Library of America, 1984. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). More-advanced The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Edel and Lyall students will find the same subject treated by Donna Przy- H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. bylowicz in Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James (Tuscaloosa: Univer- Letters sity of Alabama Press, 1986) and Sharon Cameron in Think- Henry James: Letters, edited by Edel, 4 volumes. Cambridge & ing in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, London: Harvard University Press, 1974–1984. 1989), the latter of which argues that James’s prefaces radi- cally oversimplify what is represented in the novels—a claim Studying Henry James that other recent critics have advanced. Critical attention has Widely considered one of the most important writers of also lately turned to the subjects of race and gender in the American fiction, Henry James produced novels, stories, novels. Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and travel writing, and essays on the art of fiction. Although he Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and wrote fiction and nonfiction of very high quality from at The Other Henry James by John Carlos Rowe (Durham, N.C.: least the mid 1870s, James was not widely recognized as a Duke University Press, 1998) are important studies of these major writer until near the end of his life. In 1905 Joseph subjects. Students seeking an introduction to James criticism Conrad published an appreciation in which he asserted “the will be well served by the essays collected in Henry James, magnitude of Mr. Henry James’s work,” but James’s central edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987). place in the American literary canon was not secured until James was once quoted as saying “Nothing is my last word the 1940s. His development of the modern psychological about anything,” and this statement is borne out by his habit novel, together with his critical prefaces, exercised a pro- of revision. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by found influence on the writing and criticism of twentieth- Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University century fiction. Press, 1987) show how James’s stories developed through the For a good firsthand survey of James’s oeuvre—from process of writing. James also made considerable revisions to its beginnings in Romanticism-inflected realism through his previously published works (most notably, Roderick Hud- naturalism to its culmination in psychological realism— son, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The students are advised to read a selection of his short novels Aspern Papers, and The Lesson of the Master), changes which or “nouvelles” (as he called them): Daisy Miller (1878), have prompted some critics to argue that the earlier versions The Aspern Papers (1888), “The Turn of the Screw” were better aesthetically. Avoiding this dispute, Philip Horne (1898), and The Beast in the Jungle (1903). Students inter- offers a penetrating look at James’s method of revision in ested specifically in James’s novels should begin with The Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (Oxford: Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903). Clarendon Press, 1990). James, Henryentry 595

James’s subscription to the Wilkie Collins memorial, which resulted in a library housed briefly at the People’s Palace in London, East End. The subscription is the equivalent of over $1,000 in 2007 U.S. dollars. 596 entryJames, Henry, Sr.

The best full-length biography remains Edel’s five-vol- Margolis, Anne Throne. Henry James and the Problem of Audi- ume Henry James (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1953–1972), later ence: An International Act. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press, abridged in one volume as Henry James: A Life (New York: 1985. Harper & Row, 1985). For a critical biography and overview of James’s canon, students should begin with F. W. Dupee’s Henry James: His Life and Writings, second edition (Garden James, William (1842–1910) philosopher, psychologist City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956). Though incomplete, the twenty-six-volume The Nov- As the brain changes are continuous, so do all els and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition (New York: these consciousnesses melt into each other like Scribners, 1907–1909, 1918) is valuable insofar as it suggests dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted to some extent which works James most desired to see pre- consciousness, one unbroken stream. served (among other works of fiction, it does not include —Principles of Psychology (1890) The Bostonians, Washington Square or The Europeans). The Library of America has recently published a nearly complete William James was born in New York City, but he spent much multivolume collection of James’s fiction, travel writing, and of his life abroad. His father, Henry James Sr., was a writer on literary criticism. Edel’s and Dan H. Laurence’s Bibliography religious, social, and literary topics, and his brother was the of Henry James, third edition (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Claren- novelist Henry James. Although interested in art, especially don Press, 1982) is the standard Henry James bibliography. painting, William studied medicine at Harvard and obtained —Student Guide by C. Love an M.D. in 1869. In poor health and apparently suffering from doubts about his abilities, James became interested in psychol- ogy as a discipline that had the potential to liberate the mind. James, Henry, Sr. (1811–1882) essayist James began teaching at Harvard in 1872, drawing on the Father of Henry James, William James, and Alice James, thought of both Charles Darwin and the philosopher Herbert Henry James Sr. was born into a Calvinist family in Albany, Spencer. His shift from medicine to philosophy and psychol- New York, but rebelled against the strictures of orthodoxy. ogy led him to establish the first laboratory for psychological An accident in childhood cost him a leg and inspired a studies. Principles of Psychology, his first important pub- turn toward intellectual pursuits. In 1835, after two years lished work, appeared in 1890. This landmark work relied at the Princeton Theological Seminary, he withdrew, find- on James’s understanding of physiology, which he had taught ing religious orthodoxy incompatible with his beliefs. Two at Harvard, to explore the nexus between emotions and the years later, during a trip to England, he encountered the human body. James traveled widely in Europe, meeting with works of Robert Sandeman (1718–1771), a Scottish anti- philosophers and psychologists and participating in the So- Calvinist whose ideas James adopted. (James also edited ciety for Psychical Research. The result of this experience is one of Sandeman’s books in 1838.) In 1839 James was in- evident in The Will to Believe (1897), in which James showed troduced to the philosophy of Swedish theologian Eman- considerable sympathy for the way science and faith might uel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose mystical approach be combined to offer a better understanding of the human to Christianity had a profound effect on him, as it had on personality. Although he never abandoned his belief in em- other nineteenth-century idealists. piricism, he vigorously investigated the claims of spiritual- An intimate friend of Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) and ists and the practices of Christian Scientists. This desire to George Ripley, James came to embrace many of the doc- reconcile the ideas of science and religion culminated in his trines of Fourierism. Most of his writings, however, were masterpiece, Varieties of Religious Experience, which devoted to religious philosophy and an exploration of the explored the psychological and practical bases of religious Swedenborgian concept of “divine-natural humanity,” or experience without denigrating the idea of faith itself. “the immanence of God in the unity of mankind.” Among James’s great contribution to American philosophy is the James’s most important works are Christianity, the Logic of concept of pragmatism, a term first used by the philosopher Creation (1857); Substance and Shadow; or Morality and C. S. Peirce and developed by James in Pragmatism (1907). Religion in Their Relation to Life (1863); The Secret of Swe- This book advanced the argument that ideas have signifi- denborg (1869); and Society, the Redeemed Form of Man cance only insofar as they have an impact on the world of (1879). experience. Pragmatism has often been cited as the only original contribution to philosophy made by an American. Sources The concept has been discussed as an example of the Ameri- Bell, F. A., ed. Henry James: Fiction as History. Totowa, N.J.: can devotion to practicality: that is, no idea is important if Barnes & Noble, 1984. it is not useful. James also wrote essays, most notably “The Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), which reflects his liberal- York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. ism, his dedicated search to find alternatives to the inhuman- 1036 entryStearns, Harold E.

Stearns, Harold E. (1891–1943) critic, journalist for six years in East End, Saskatchewan, and for eleven years A graduate of Harvard, Harold E. Stearns began his long ca- in Salt Lake City, Utah—settings that became important in reer in journalism by writing book reviews for the Boston his writing career. Stegner graduated from the University of Evening Transcript before he even entered college. He was Utah, where he studied with Vardis Fisher, and earned grad- the editor for The Dial (1917–1918) and helped to articu- uate degrees from the University of Iowa. In 1935 he began late the attitude of the post–World War I generation in his distinguished teaching career, which in 1945 led him to America and the Young Intellectual (1921) and the collection Stanford University, where he directed the writing program of essays he edited, Civilization in the United States: An In- until his retirement in 1971. quiry by Thirty Americans (1922), which included essays by Stegner has often been called a regional writer (see Re- Conrad Aiken, H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, George gionalism) because of his close identification with the Jean Nathan, and Ring Lardner. These books expressed Rocky Mountain region of the West. His work is frequently a profound dissatisfaction with the culture and politics in concerned with the way place and culture shape human char- the country and inspired many young Americans to travel acter. His first book of fiction, the novelette Remembering abroad. Stearns experienced some difficult years in Paris and Laughter (1937), examines a love triangle and bitter rivalry was portrayed by Ernest Hemingway as the indigent Harry involving two sisters on an isolated Iowa farm. Stegner set his Stone in The Sun Also Rises (1926). His later work includes first full-length novel, On a Darkling Plain (1940), on the Sas- his autobiography The Street I Know (1935) and America: A katchewan prairie, where a World War I veteran unwillingly Re-Appraisal (1937), in which he defends the country against becomes involved with the concerns of his fellow human be- Marxist critics. ings in the flu epidemic of 1918. One of his most memorable novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), is in part based Source on his family experience. Like Stegner’s father, Bo Mason, the Ford, Hugh. Four Lives in Paris. San Francisco: North Point tyrannical head of his family, is inspired by the myth of the Press, 1987. West and searches for a pot of gold that forever eludes him. In addition to his work as a novelist, Stegner is also re- spected for his nonfiction and short stories. He has written of Steffens, Lincoln (1866–1936) writer, editor the culture of the Mormons in Mormon Country (1942) and Lincoln Steffens was born in San Francisco and graduated The Gathering of Zion (1964). His biographies are about a great from the University of California in 1889, after which he naturalist, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell studied for several years in Germany and France. He began and the Second Opening of the West (1954), and a literary critic, working as a reporter at the New York Evening Post in 1892, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974). He and from 1897 to 1911 served as an editor at the New York published two collections of short fiction—The Women on Commercial Advertiser, McClure’s Magazine, The American the Wall (1950) and The City of the Living and Other Stories Magazine (which he cofounded with Ida M. Tarbell, Ray (1956)—and collected the most important of his essays and ar- Stannard Baker, and others in 1906), and Everybody’s Maga- ticles in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969). Stegner received zine. Steffens’s progressive political beliefs led him to focus critical acclaim in the 1970s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for on exposing corruption in government and industry, for his Angle of Repose (1971), which concerns a retired University which Theodore Roosevelt labeled him and like-minded of California history professor who must cope with a degenera- writers “muckrakers” (see Muckraking Movement). Stef- tive disease and his wife’s abandonment, and a 1977 National fens’s books include The Shame of the Cities (1904), The Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976), about a New York Struggle for Self-Government (1906), Upbuilders (1909), literary agent who retires to the West Coast. and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931). Sources Source Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Kaplan, Justin. Lincoln Steffens: A Biography. New York: Simon Viking, 1996. & Schuster, 1974. Colberg, Nancy. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography. —Alex Feerst Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990.

Stegner, Wallace (1909–1993) novelist, short-story Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946) fiction writer, poet, writer, historian, biographer playwright, critic The Iowa-born Wallace Stegner experienced an often unset- tled childhood as his father, a restless spirit whose activities Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare included wheat farming and bootlegging, moved his wife and and think of me. two sons across the Midwest and the West. The Stegners lived —The Geographical History of America (1936) Steinbeck, entryJohn 1037

Gertrude Stein always thought of herself as an American, other two texts of her memoir trilogy, Everybody’s Autobiog- despite the relatively short portion of her adult life that raphy (1937) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). she lived in the United States. She was the youngest child Always striving to create a “continuous present,” Stein ex- born to prosperous German Jewish parents in Allegheny, perienced a tension between narrating and creating, between Pennsylvania. Her family settled in Oakland, California, writing for an audience and writing self-reflexively for its when she was five. Stein attended Radcliffe College, where own sake. Stein’s more experimental texts sought to deploy she studied with William James. In 1903, just short of the language in unconventional and nonrepresentational ways, coursework required for a medical degree from Johns Hop- and her use of time tended to be circular and repetitive rather kins, Stein left for Paris. She did not return to the United than chronological. Although she appreciated the money and States for a visit for more than thirty years and never lived popularity that her autobiographies garnered, she was not in- there again. terested in writing additional best-sellers in the same mode. In Paris, Stein at first lived with her brother Leo, who Throughout her career she remained as interested in sound introduced her to modern art, one of the inspirations for her as sense, and she never stopped experimenting and playing writing (see Modernism). In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas with words. (1877–1967), who traveled abroad after the earthquake in Before the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her native San Francisco. By 1910, Toklas had moved into Stein was better known for her personality, lifestyle, artistic the Steins’s residence at 27, rue de Fleurus, which the two milieu, and for her influence on other writers than for her women then shared after Stein and her brother had a falling- own work. She coined the term “Lost Generation” in refer- out. Toklas encouraged Stein’s writing and became her life ence to the Paris expatriate community in a conversation partner, or “wife,” assisting her with the typing and prepara- with Ernest Hemingway, which he used as an epigraph for tion of her manuscripts for the next forty years until Stein’s his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). She was prescient in death. Stein became a central figure in an avant-garde literary her tastes and groundbreaking in her refusal to accept con- and artistic community that included Cubism pioneers Pablo temporary bounds on gender and sexuality, but more and Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Juan Gris, along with American more her work is gaining acclaim on its own terms as readers expatriates. Her residence evolved into a gathering place for are more willing to engage with her texts even as they must the literary and artistic set, as she described in The Autobi- struggle with her use of language. History seems to have at ography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). least in some measure confirmed Stein’s prediction that she Stein’s work crossed genres and frequently defied cat- would “some day . . . be the acknowledged grandmother of egorization, encompassing poetry, fiction, drama, essays, the modern movement”—and perhaps the postmodern speeches, and even an opera libretto. Critics generally movement as well. divide her work into narrative and experimental writing based on the extent to which a text has or lacks an easily Sources discernible and coherent plot. Some suggest three phases Gallup, Donald, ed. The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to for Stein’s work: early writings that focused on conscious- Gertrude Stein. New York: Knopf, 1953. ness, perception, and the representation of the perception Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and of the present; 1920s radical avant-garde experimentalism; Her Family. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, and 1930s audience-friendly memoirs and narratives. But 1995. such divisions fail to effectively trace Stein’s literary trajec- —Jessica G. Rabin tory, since her preoccupations and techniques transcended time periods and her works were not always published when they were written. (The Making of Americans, for Steinbeck, John (1902–1968) novelist, short-story example, was written by 1908 but not published until 1925.) writer Stein did not find a publisher for her work until 1909 with Three Lives, a collection of three novellas that explore the A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and nature of human consciousness. While her work could be cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering philosophical, it could also be playful, as seen, for example, thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy in the poems of Tender Buttons (1914). mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing Stein went on the lecture circuit in England in 1926; her and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm Oxford and Cambridge lectures were collected in Compo- too near the sun. sition as Explanation (1926). Popular success eluded her —“On Publishing” (1977) until the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Tok- las, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which led to her John Steinbeck wrote more than thirty books from 1929 to return to the United States in 1934 for a highly successful 1966, ranging from social criticism in his Pulitzer Prize– nine-month tour. Readers responded favorably, as well, to the winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to witty com- 736 entryMcKay, Claude publications are The Mortgaged Heart (1971), a collection of tering along the way Ray, an intellectual from Haiti generally essays; Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1987); and Il- seen as a spokesman for McKay. Ray reappears in Banjo: A lumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Story Without a Plot (1929), set in the French port of Mar- Carson McCullers (1999). seilles, to praise the intuitive creativity and spirit of the black characters. McKay also used Harlem and Marseilles as set- Sources tings for the stories published in Gingertown (1932). His next Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Car- novel, Banana Bottom (1933) continues to develop themes son McCullers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. on the values of African identity as it follows Bita Plant, a Ja- Carr. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of maican woman raised in Europe by white missionaries, who South Carolina Press, 1990. reconnects with her racial roots after returning home. While Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays McKay’s poems were generally well received and some were on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. widely reprinted, his novels were published to mixed reviews, and only the first sold well. After he returned to the United States in 1934, McKay focused on racial nationalism rather McKay, Claude (1890–1948) poet, novelist than broader class conflicts. His autobiography A Long Way from Home (1937) offers anecdotes and opinions about his I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have literary and political experiences. been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. Sources —A Long Way from Home (1937) Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, Born in rural Jamaica, Claude McKay became one of the most 1987. versatile and forceful voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Maxwell, William, comp. “Claude McKay.” Modern American His early influences include his brother, a teacher who intro- Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. . McKay to write about his land and people. In the poetry col- Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Iden- lections Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), tity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. McKay employs the voices of farmers, street constables, and —Michael Schroeder other common people to express in their native dialect the joys and pains of human relationships and the love of the simple country life and the countryside of Jamaica. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank McKay first encountered the intense racism of the segre- Norris (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899) novel gated United States when he attended Tuskegee and Kansas McTeague, Frank Norris’s most influential novel, is an im- State College. In 1914 he moved to New York City, where he portant example of Naturalism. The title character is a published two of his best-known poems: “The Harlem Dancer” practicing dentist in a poor section of San Francisco, a thick- (1917) and “If We Must Die” (1919), a protest poem written headed, strong man with a pathetic urge toward aesthetics about the race riots of that year. From 1919 to 1922 McKay (he plays the concertina). He marries Trina Sieppe, a patient worked for socialist publications, The Liberator in New York whom his “animal” nature has led him to kiss while she is and Worker’s Dreadnought in London. The poems he collected chloroformed. After Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery, her cousin in Harlem Shadows (1922) demonstrate his continuing affec- Marcus Shouler, who had hoped to marry her and feels that tion for his homeland and common people, but in sonnets such he should have some of the money, exposes the unlicensed as “America,” “The Lynching,” and “If We Must Die,” he voices McTeague, who can then no longer practice his trade. Trina outrage and defiance over American racism and violence. becomes possessive of her money; McTeague then deserts her After the publication of Harlem Shadows, McKay trav- but returns to murder her. He flees to Death Valley, pursued eled to the Soviet Union to attend an international meeting by Shouler. Although McTeague manages to kill his neme- of socialists. He remained abroad for twelve years, living in sis, before he dies Shouler handcuffs himself to McTeague, France, Spain, and Morocco, often in tight financial straits, dooming him to a slow death in the unremitting heat of the and began publishing fiction. His first two novels are epi- desert. Chance, circumstance, and nature control the actions sodic, with the central character embodying simple, natural of all these characters. urges and a spontaneity that is favorably contrasted to the The dominant theme of the novel is the pervasive power sterility of middle-class black characters who have assimi- of money. Distributed haphazardly, money comes to rule the lated into white culture. Home to Harlem (1928) follows Jake passions not only of secondary characters but also of Trina as he roams from bar to bar and woman to woman, encoun- and McTeague. Trina controls her husband by denying him Hemingway, Ernestentry 523

Principal Books by Hellman Un-American Activities, is a faulty account of the communist The Children’s Hour. New York: Knopf, 1934. scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Days to Come. New York & London: Knopf, 1936. There are at least seven biographies of Hellman or bio- The Little Foxes: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random House, graphical accounts by people associated with her. The best 1939. is Joan Mellen’s Hellman and Hammett (New York: Harper- Watch on the Rhine: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random Collins, 1996). Carl Rollyson’s Lillian Hellman, Her Legend House, 1941. and Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) should also The North Star: A Motion Picture about Some Russian People. be consulted. Hellman’s literary executor and intimate friend New York: Viking, 1943. Peter Feibleman wrote a casual memoir about her last years, The Searching Wind: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Viking, Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1944. 1988). Robert Newman’s The Cold War Romance of Lillian Another Part of the Forest: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Vi- Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North king, 1947. Carolina Press, 1989) is a solid account covering an impor- Montserrat: Play in Two Acts, adapted from Emmanuel Roblès’s tant period of her life. play. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950. Students should consult Conversations with Lillian Hell- The Autumn Garden: A Play in Three Acts. Boston: Little, Brown, man (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) early 1951; revised acting edition, New York: Dramatists Play Ser- on, especially the Paris Review interview, which is included. vice, 1952. Good general bibliographical references can be found in Bar- The Lark, adapted from Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette. New York: bara Lee Horn’s Lillian Hellman: A Resource and Production Random House, 1956. Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), Mark Candide: A Comic Operetta Based On Voltaire’s Satire, book by Estrin’s Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, and Memoirs: A Refer- Hellman, score by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard Wil- ence Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), and Steven H. Bills’s bur, John Latouche, and Dorothy Parker. New York: Random Lillian Hellman: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Gar- House, 1957. land, 1979). Toys in the Attic. New York: Random House, 1960. For a general critical overview, Katherine Lederer’s Lillian My Mother, My Father and Me, adapted from Burt Blechman’s Hellman (Boston: Twayne, 1979) and Critical Essays on Lillian novel How Much? New York: Random House, 1963. Hellman, edited by Mark Estrin (New York: G. K. Hall, 1989), An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. are good places to start. Bernard Dick’s Hellman in Hollywood Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. (Rutherford, N.J. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1982) covers Hellman’s Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. screenwriting, an important aspect of her career. Maybe: A Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. —Richard Layman Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections, by Hellman and Peter S. Feibleman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961) novelist, short-story Studying Lillian Hellman writer Lillian Hellman was the most successful woman playwright of the twentieth century. She was significant both as a lit- A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the erary figure and as a cultural celebrity. Her career falls into people all die and none of them were of any importance two periods: from 1934, when her first play, The Children’s permanently, except those who practiced the arts, Hour, was produced, to 1960, the date of her last original and these now wish to cease their work because it is play; and from 1969, the date of her first memoir, to her death too lonely, too hard to do, and it is not fashionable. A in 1984. The first period roughly corresponds to the dates of thousand years makes economics silly and a work of her intimate friendship with Dashiell Hammett, who died in art endures forever, but it is very difficult to do now and it is not fashionable. January 1961. During the last period she wrote four volumes —The Green Hills of Africa (1935) of memoirs, mostly well received, but often faulted for their self-serving versions of the events of her time. The study of Lillian Hellman’s plays should begin with The second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born the Rhine (1941), and Toys in the Attic (1960). They are col- in the affluent, conservative community of Oak Park, Illi- lected in Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (1979). Of her memoirs, nois, on July 21, 1899. During his youth Hemingway spent the two most significant are An Unfinished Woman (1969) summers at his parents’ house in northern Michigan. There and Pentimento (1973), which includes the chapter “Julia,” his early hunting and fishing experiences, his associations made into an award-winning movie. Scoundrel Time (1976), with the Ojibway Indians, and his observations of discord an account of her testimony before the House Committee on between his parents provided material for many of his Nick 524 entryHemingway, Ernest

buy a thirty-seven-foot fishing cruiser, and go on an African safari. In March 1937 Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance along with journalist/novelist Martha Gellhorn, with whom he began an extramarital affair. By the end of 1939 Hemingway’s mar- riage to Pauline was over, and he moved from Key West to Cuba. He divorced Pauline in 1940 and married Martha Gell- horn. During most of the years of World War II Heming- way produced no significant work. He drank heavily and remained at home, using his fishing boat to serve as a spotter for German submarines while Martha was away reporting on the war. His third marriage disintegrating, Hemingway left Cuba in May 1944 on assignment for Collier’s to cover the war in Europe and in London met correspondent Mary Welsh, with whom he also had an affair. After covering the D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris, Hemingway re- turned to Cuba in 1945, divorced Martha Gellhorn, and mar- ried Mary Welsh in 1946. As long as his health permitted, Hemingway continued to visit the places he loved, while also embellishing his already larger-than-life persona. In 1958 revolutionary actions mak- ing Cuba an undesirable residence, Hemingway left behind the country in which he had lived for twenty-eight years and moved to Ketchum, Idaho. Although he seemed indestructi- ble, having survived two near-fatal airplane crashes in Africa Ernest Hemingway, 1939 in 1954, his physical condition steadily declined, and he suf- fered increasingly severe depression, for which he was hospi- talized and given electroshock therapy. His creative powers gone, Hemingway killed himself with one of his shotguns in Adams stories. Following graduation from Oak Park High his home on July 2, 1961. School, Hemingway worked as a cub reporter on the Kansas Following the publication of two Paris small-press books City Star, and in the spring of 1918 he joined the American (actually pamphlets), Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923) and Red Cross, which sent him to Italy to drive ambulances for in our time (1924), a collection of vignettes, Hemingway pub- the Italian Army. On July 8, 1918, he was wounded by an lished his first American book, In Our Time (1925), a short- Austrian trench mortar shell. After recuperation and an af- story collection that brought his work needed attention, and fair with his nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway re- The Torrents of Spring (1926), a satire of Sherwood Anderson turned home, worked briefly for the Toronto Star, and moved and Gertrude Stein. However, his career was really launched to Chicago, where he met Sherwood Anderson and Had- by his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which he de- ley Richardson, whom he married on September 3, 1921. picted in hard, spare, unliterary prose and original dialogue Hemingway sailed for France in December of that same year members of a post–World War I generation whose psychic to pursue a literary apprenticeship. wounds bore evidence of a subsurface malady. A Farewell In Paris, Hemingway met people influential in his career, to Arms (1929), a story of love, war, and death set during the including his three greatest influences: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great War, established his reputation as a major American Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, who served not only as a writer. mentor but along with Fitzgerald facilitated the publication During the decade of the 1930s no significant Heming- of his work. As a stringer for the Toronto Star Hemingway way novel appeared. He published Death in the Afternoon traveled widely throughout Europe, covering major news (1932), a bullfighting manual; Green Hills of Africa (1935), events and acquiring material for his fiction. In Spain he a book about big-game hunting with observations about was also introduced to bullfighting, a sport he studied pas- writing; To Have and Have Not (1937), a flawed novel set in sionately. Divorced from Hadley in 1927, he married Pauline Key West and Cuba during the Depression; and an unsuc- Pfeiffer and in 1930 moved to Key West, Florida. Although cessful play, The Fifth Column, in his major story collection, the Great Depression had begun, Pauline’s wealth and his The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). For own growing income enabled Hemingway to travel widely, Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway’s book about the Hemingway, Ernestentry 525

largely in the south of France treating effects of sexual con- flicts upon the lives of a writer and his wife; True at First Light (1999), an abridged version of Hemingway’s “African book” recounting his 1953 safari; and Under Kilimanjaro (2005), an unabridged version of the same text. Following the publication of The Sun Also Rises Heming- way was regarded as one of the most promising writers in America, and he became also one of the most imitated. Soon after the publication of his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, many critics and reviewers acknowledged him as a master. However, during the 1930s, when Marxists and far-left critics called for literature to become a weapon in the struggle of the proletariat, Hemingway’s work was often attacked for his failure to address the needs of the masses.

Dust jacket for the first book by Hemingway to be published in the United States (1925), which includes seven stories about Nick Adams, his autobiographical hero

Spanish Civil War, reaffirmed his commitment to truth over propaganda and was regarded as evidence of the return of Hemingway the artist during a highly politicized era. Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), a novel set in Venice in 1948, balancing the cynicism of a dying colonel with his love for a young Venetian woman, was a critical failure. Although Hemingway had been at work on an ambitious project about “the land, sea, and air” since 1945, only one work from that effort appeared during his lifetime, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), his all-time best-selling book. Hemingway’s posthumously published works include: A Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1926 novel about a group of Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir of the Paris years; Islands post–World War I American expatriates. The title is taken in the Stream (1970), an unfinished novel about German from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and submarine hunting in Cuban waters; The Dangerous Sum- another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . . mer (1985), a nonfiction account of Spanish bullfights in The sun also ariseth , and sun goeth down, and hasteth 1959; The Garden of Eden (1986), a heavily edited novel set to the place where he arose. . . .” 526 entryHemingway, Ernest

Principal Books by Hemingway Three Stories & Ten Poems. Paris: Contact Editions, 1923. In Our Time. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924. In Our Time. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. Revised edition, New York: Scribners, 1930. The Torrents of Spring. New York: Scribners, 1926. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribners, 1926. Men Without Women. New York: Scribners, 1927. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribners, 1929. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribners, 1932. Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribners, 1933. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribners, 1935. To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribners, 1937. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. New York: Scribners, 1938. Republished as The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribners, 1954. The Fifth Column: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Scribners, 1940. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribners, 1940. Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Scribners, 1950. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribners, 1952. Hemingway: The Wild Years, edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. New York: Dell, 1962. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 1964. By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, edited by William White. New York: Scrib- ners, 1967. The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. New York: Scribners, 1969. Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1929 novel, in which Frederic Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories, edited Henry tries to escape the carnage of World War I with nurse by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Catherine Barkley. Hemingway disapproved of the jacket il- Press, 1970. lustration, referring to it in a letter to editor Maxwell Perkins Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribners, 1970. as “The tragedy of the Broken Axle.” Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916–1917, edited by Bruccoli. Washington, D.C.: Bruccoli Clark/NCR Micro- card Editions, 1971. The Nick Adams Stories, edited by Philip Young. New York: Scribners, 1972. But by 1940, when the Soviet mystique had begun to wane, 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis. New York & London: many American critics highly praised For Whom the Bell Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1979. Enlarged as Tolls. However, the most productive period of Heming- Complete Poems. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska way’s literary career was behind him; he had written three Press, 1983. of America’s best novels and several of its greatest short Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips. New stories. In 1952 the publication of The Old Man and the York: Scribners, 1984. Sea refocused the world’s attention upon Hemingway. His The Dangerous Summer. New York: Scribners, 1985. novella about a Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin was Dateline, Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920– awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it was instru- 1924, edited by William White. New York: Scribners, 1985. mental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribners, 1986. in 1954. Hemingway crafted a distinctive and recognizably The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: American style whose simplicity, understatement, and ob- Scribners, 1987. jective tone had a lasting influence upon American fiction. True at First Light, edited by Patrick Hemingway. New York: At the time of his death he was the most famous writer in Scribners, 1999. Re-edited and republished as Under Kili- America—and possibly the world. manjaro, edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. —John C. Unrue Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005. Hemingway, Ernestentry 527

Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Let- ters, Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and Endorsements, edited by Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

Studying Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway’s career spanned four decades. During his lifetime twenty of his books were published, including one unauthorized poetry collection. Seventeen additional Hemingway volumes have been published since his death. His literary career is often divided into periods associated with his primary residences. Biographer Michael Reynolds has designated them: The Paris Years (1921–1929), The Key West Years (1930–1939), The World War II Years (1940– 1945), and The Cuban Years (1945–1961). A study of Hemingway’s fiction should begin with his early work, the miniatures or vignettes in in our time (1924) reprinted as interchapters in his first story collection In Our Time (1925) and in particular “Big Two-Hearted River,” works that reflect Hemingway’s evolving style under the in- fluence of modernism. Hemingway’s three classic novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), should be read next along with his major short stories, in particular “The Kill- ers” (1927), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936). Although The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is Hemingway’s best-seller, Hemingway’s major work was completed by 1940. The standard Hemingway biography is Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1966). Michael Reynolds’s comprehensive five-volume biography (1986–1999) supplements Baker’s book and thematically links Hemingway’s Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1940 novel, in which American life and works; Reynolds’s brief biography, Literary Masters: Er- Robert Jordan fights against the Fascists in Spain. Hemingway nest Hemingway (Detroit: Manly/Gale, 2000), provides a good took his title from John Donne’s Meditation 17: “Any man’s introductory overview of Hemingway’s life and work. Also death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and recommended is Ernest Hemingway: A Documentary Volume, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; edited by Robert W. Trogdon (Dictionary of Literary Biography, it tolls for thee. . . .” volume 210. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/The Gale Group, 1999), which is available in paperback as Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002). Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) contributes perceptive (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994) analyzes the troubled rela- and credible readings of Hemingway’s fiction, including the tionship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970). Paul A. as demonstrating Fitzgerald’s role in Hemingway’s career. Con- Smith’s A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Heming- versations with Ernest Hemingway, edited by Bruccoli (Jackson: way (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989) is the best reference for criti- University Press of Mississippi, 1989), provides informative cism of Hemingway’s stories. Those interested in observing comments by Hemingway about writing and events that in- how Hemingway incorporated researched material about the formed his work. Italian front of World War I into A Farewell to Arms should Not all of the large number of books and articles on Ernest see Reynolds’s Hemingway’s First War (Princeton, N.J.; Princ- Hemingway are worthwhile. Among critical studies Charles A. eton University Press, 1981). Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York: to Arms: A Documentary Volume, edited by Charles M. Oliver Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954) provides an excellent background (Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 308. Detroit: Bruc- for Hemingway’s earliest writing and newspaper training, and coli Clark Layman/Thomson Gale, 2005) chronicles the mak- Carlos Baker’s Hemingway, The Writer as Artist (Princeton, ing of the novel and traces its popular and critical reputation. 528 entryHerbst, Josephine

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by best-known novels are Java Head (1919), a study of the trade Carlos Baker (New York: Scribners, 1981), should be read with China in the New England of the 1840s that deals with along with Hemingway’s work. The Only Thing That Counts: miscegenation, and Linda Condon (1919), a portrayal of an The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, intense woman that shows the author’s growing distaste for 1925–1947, edited by Bruccoli, with the assistance of Trog- contemporary American culture. Hergesheimer’s later books don (New York: Scribners, 1996), provides a record of the forsake Realism for romance. He favored exotic settings— professional relationship between Hemingway and his leg- the West Indies in The Bright Shawl (1922), Cuba in Balisand endary Scribners editor, Maxwell Perkins. (1924), Mexico in Tampico (1926). From an Old House (1925) Audre Hanneman’s Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive is an essay-memoir. Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967) and her Supplement to Ernest Hemingway: A Compre- Source hensive Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Gimmestad, Victor E. Joseph Hergesheimer. Boston: Twayne, Press, 1975) are the standard Hemingway bibliographies 1984. and indispensable research tools. Kelli A. Larson’s Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991) lists writings about Hemingway and his works from 1974 Heyward, DuBose (1885–1940) playwright, novelist, to 1989. Students should also consult the Modern Language poet Association bibliographies on-line and current bibliography DuBose Heyward is chiefly remembered for the folk dramas in The Hemingway Review, which since 1981 has provided of African American life in the early twentieth century that he a forum for scholarship and criticism, following the Fitzger- based on his novels. A South Carolina native descended from ald/Hemingway Annual (1969–1979). The principal research Thomas Heyward Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Indepen- archive is at the Kennedy Library. dence, Heyward worked as an insurance and real estate sales- —John C. Unrue man in Charleston before he began to publish poetry and short stories in the early 1920s. His first books were poetry collec- tions: Carolina Chansons; Legends of the Low Country (1922), Herbst, Josephine (1897–1969) novelist written with Hervey Allen; and Skylines and Horizons (1924). After graduating from the University of California in 1918, With the collaboration of his wife, Dorothy, who is cred- the Iowa-born Josephine Herbst left for New York City to ited with providing dramatic structure to his writing, Heyward begin her career as a writer. By the 1920s she was in Paris, scored his greatest theatrical success when their adaption of associating with the important American writers there. She is his first novel, Porgy (1925)—about a crippled black beggar’s regarded as a proletarian writer (see Proletarian Litera- doomed love for a faithless woman in the fictional slum Catfish ture) because she was a hard-line Marxist and her fiction Row—was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1927 and won treats the social, economic, and political issues that affect the a Pulitzer Prize. Heyward subsequently collaborated with laboring poor. Herbst is best known for her trilogy on the Ira and George Gershwin, who composed a folk opera, Porgy Trexler family: Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner and Bess (produced 1935), adapted from this play. The endur- Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). This saga, based on ing popularity of the Gershwin opera eclipsed that of the origi- her own family, follows the Trexlers from the late nineteenth nal play and made Heyward’s story and characters a permanent century to the 1930s, exploring their troubles after they lose fixture on American stages. their money, grapple with the fast-changing period of the Heyward continued to be productive in the latter half of the 1920s, and then confront bleak economic times during the 1920s through the 1930s, as he published six more novels and a Great Depression. Her memoir of her days in Spain during third collection of poetry. In 1931 Brass Ankle (produced 1931), the Spanish Civil War, originally published in a periodical a play Heyward wrote directly for the stage about a woman who in 1960, is the title piece of The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, plans suicide when she learns of her Negro parentage, flopped. and Other Memoirs (1991). In 1933 he wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Eu- gene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. His play Mamba’s Daugh- Source ters—an adaptation of his third novel, published in 1929—was Langer, Elinor. Josephine Herbst. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. well received when it was produced in 1939. A tragic melo- drama depicting the tribulations of three generations of a black family, Mamba’s Daughters was praised as a realistic portrait of Hergesheimer, Joseph (1880–1954) novelist, African American life. Much of its success was attributed to the short-story writer compelling performance of Ethel Waters in the lead, the first Hergesheimer was a best-selling and well-respected novel- starring role for a black woman in a Broadway drama. Heyward ist of his day, whose work was often first published in The also published a popular children’s book, The Country Bunny Saturday Evening Post before appearing in book form. His and the Little Gold Shoes (1939). The Last Tycoon/The Love of the Last Tycoonentry 667

Ring Lardner (New York: Ungar, 1979), Otto Friedrich’s Sources Ring Lardner (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renais- 1965), and Patrick Walton’s Ring Lardner (New York: sance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State Twayne, 1963) that might be useful starting points. University Press, 1994. Critical study of Lardner begins with context—both his Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing, edited by Deborah Mc- place in the tradition of the American fiction and in the tra- Dowell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, dition of American humor writing. Maxwell Geismar’s Writ- 1986. ers in Crisis: the American Novel 1925–1940 (1941; reprinted, Rabin, Jessica. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity New York: Hill & Wang, 1961) is a good place to start on the and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. former; Norris Yates’s The American Humorist: Conscience of New York: Routledge, 2004. the Twentieth Century (Ames: Iowa State University Press, —Jessica G. Rabin 1964) is a good place to start on the latter. —Richard Layman The Last Adam by James Gould Cozzens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933) novel Larsen, Nella (1891–1964) novelist The main character in this novel is George Bull, a small-town doctor in Connecticut during the 1930s. He is barely compe- This, then, was where she belonged. This was her tent and is not greatly concerned about his patients. Yet, he is proper setting. She felt consoled at last for the spiritual the doctor who diagnoses the typhoid fever epidemic in his wounds of the past. town—for which he may be partly to blame because of his lax —Quicksand (1928) inspection of the water supply. The main subject of the novel is the social structure of Born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Larsen New Winton, as James Gould Cozzens examines the strati- studied at Fisk University and later obtained a nursing de- fication of the characters in terms of their intelligence and gree. In 1919 she married physicist Elmer Imes and became a class position. member of the black elite in New York City, socializing with —Morris Colden other Harlem Renaissance notables. Her literary reputa- tion rests on two novels she published in the 1920s. Quicksand (1928) is a semi-autobiographical text about “The Last of the Belles” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1929) the travels—physical and psychological—of a biracial short story woman trying to find the place “where she belonged.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote important stories set in the South Helga Crane leaves her job at a New Negro school in the drawing upon his experiences during World War I and his South, seeking a fulfilling identity. When she does not find marriage to a Southerner. The narrator of “The Last of the what she seeks in Chicago, New York, or Denmark, Helga Belles” is Andy, a Yankee who tries to understand Ailie Cal- experiences a moment of spiritual enlightenment or weak- houn, a popular girl he meets while stationed in Georgia: “It ness and ends up married to a southern preacher in back- was a time of growth and war, and there was never so much woods Alabama, trapped in a cycle of childbirth. Larsen’s love around.” Six years later when Andy returns to Georgia second novel, Passing (1929), focuses on an upper-middle- to visit Ailie, he realizes that he will never be able to recover class African American woman, Irene Redfield, and her in- Ailie or his youth. The South and its women are lost to him. creasingly disturbing encounters with a childhood friend, The story was first published in The Saturday Evening Clare Kendry, who is passing for white and pursuing rela- Post and collected in Taps at Reveille (1935). tionships in Harlem behind her bigoted husband’s back. In 1930 Larsen became the first African American woman Source to earn a Guggenheim Fellowship, but that year she was also Bruccoli, Matthew J. Classes on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Columbia: accused of plagiarizing a 1922 story from Century magazine Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, 2001. for her story “Sanctuary,” which appeared in Forum in 1930. —Morris Colden The charge, though unsubstantiated, along with her 1933 di- vorce led Larsen to withdraw from society and to stop writ- ing. From 1934 until her death thirty years later, she worked The Last Tycoon/The Love of the Last Tycoon by as a nurse, lived as a recluse, and never published again. Al- F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1941) novel though her literary standing faded during her lifetime, Larsen At the time of his death in December 1940, F. Scott Fitzger- has recently been reinstated among her Harlem Renaissance ald had written seventeen of the thirty episodes in the plan peers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston, for his Hollywood novel with the working title The Love of and her work is the subject of renewed critical interest. the Last Tycoon: A Western. Edmund Wilson assembled the