Ellis, Havelock

O ELIOT, THOMAS STEARNS denal transcripts were published in the University Press, 1977; John Peters, "A 1988edition of thebtters by Eliot's widow, New Interpretation of The Waste Land," Essays in Criticism, 19 (1%9], 140-75. there are said to be others, which are per- Ward Houser haps franker. Eliot's first masterpiece, The ~LteLand (1922),is dedicated to Verde- nal, who was killed on military service not ELLIS,HAVELOCK long after the start of World War I. For a (1859-1939) long time critics viewed the poem as an Pioneering British writer on sex- im~asonalcomment~onthe SOW state ua1 psychology. Descended from a family of Western civilization, but it isnow known with many generationsof Henry to derive from ~ersonalexperience, espe- Havelock Ellis was named after a distin- cially Eliot's unhappy relations with his wished soldier who was the hem of the unstable first wife, Vivien. In view of this hdim Mutiny. ~~1~ in life he sAled twice personal emphasis, the dedication to his the world and spent some years in deceased male Mend may have been more Australia. h boarding school he had some telling than has usually been thought- In unpleasant experiences suggesting a pas- any event, the poem contains a homosex- sive element in his character, and his at- ual reference, when a levantine merchant tachments to women were often more invites the narrator to a "weekend at the friendships than erotic liaisons. ~t the age ~etro~ole,"that is, to a homosexual en- of 32 he married Edith Lees, a lesbian; after counter. the first year of their marriage all sexual Vehemently opposed in principle relations ceased, and both went on to a to any biography of him, Eliot succeeded series of affairs with women. By nature an in wrnpping his inner self in a cloud of autodidact, Ellis obtained in 1889 only a enigma. Ostensibly this reticence is licentiate in ~~di~i~~,Surgery, and Mid- grounded in his espousal of the doctrine of wifery from the Society of Apothecarie- poetic impersonality. It may, however, a somewhat inferior degree that always have more personal roots. Eliot's first embarrassed him. M~~~interested in his marriage with Vivien Haigh-Wood was literary studies than in the practice of undertaken quite suddenly in 19151osten- medicine, he nevertheless collected case sibly on the rebound from an unrequited histories mainly by correspondence, as his love for an American woman. There were autobiography makes no mention of clini- no children, and Vivien spent much of the cal remainder of her life in mental homes. For One of his early correspondents many years Eliot shared bachelor quarters John Addington Symonds, who dis- with another literary man, John Hayward. cussed with him the possibility of a book The "secret" of Eliot's personality, if such on wxual inversion, in which the case there be, may reside chiefly in his fear of histories were the core and empirical faun- being taken as homosexual, since he was dation. Ellis recognized two conditions: not given to manly pursuits such as ath- l~~~~~l~t~ inversion^^ (= exclusive homo- letic sports and hunting and the profession sexuality) and "psychosexual hemaphro- of PetV itself tends to be regarded with ditism" [-bisexuality). In the midst of the suspicion in the English-speaking world. writing Symonds died suddenly, and the Time will tell whether this is the case, or book first appeared in Geman under the whether there is something more that has title Das kontrzre ~~~~hl~~ht~~~ffihl been held back by the official guardians of (I,COntrw sexual Feeling"; 1896) with Eliot's reputation. both names on the title page. In the atmos- phere that prevailed diei the disgrace of BIBLIOGRAPHY. JamesE. Miller, Jr., T.S.Eliot's Personal Wasteland, Oscar Wilde (May 1895), publication in University Park: Pennsylvania State England was problematic, but under doubt- EMPLOYMENT 4 ful auspices the English edition was re- sage of all his writings was that sex was a leased in November 1897. joy and a boon to mankind that should be Sexual Inversion was the first embraced with ardor but also with knowl- book in English to treat homosexuality as edge. If many of the views expressed in his neither disease nor crime, and if he dis- work are dated, the frame of mind in which missed the current notion that it was a the author approached his subject, toler- species of "degeneracy" (in the biological ant and condoning rather than vindictive - sense), he also maintained that it was and condemnatory, served to move edu- inborn and unmodifiable-a view that he cated opinion in the English-speaking never renounced. His book, couched in world in the direction of the reforms that simple language, urged public toleration were to be realized only in the wake of the for what was then regarded as unnatural Wolfenden Report of 1957. and criminal to the highest degree. To a Parallel with Magnus Hirschfeld readership conditioned from childhood to in Germany, Ellis further distinguished regard homosexual behavior with disgust transvestism from the homosexuality with and abhorrence, the book was beyond the which it had been confounded since limits of comprehension, and a radical Westphal's paper of 1869, except that he publisher and bookseller named George proposed the name "eonism," from the Bedborough was duly prosecuted for issu- Chevalier dlEon, a French nobleman of the ing "a certain lewd wicked bawdy scandal- eighteenth centurywho habitually dressed ous and obscene libel'l-Sexual Inversion. as a woman. Man and Woman, first pub- In his defense Ellis maintained that the lished in 1894, continued to be revised work aimed at "remedial treatmentu-a down to 1927; it was a study of "secondary hypocritical line that was to be followed sexual characters," in contemporary terms for many decades thereafter by defenders the problems of gender, of women's rights, of the homosexual. The trial caused Ellis and of woman's place in modern society, and his wife much anxiety, though it ended again in a spirit of sympathy and toleration without a prison sentence for Bedborough. that has not lost its relevance to the issues The book was to appear in two debated at the close of the twentieth cen- later editions as the second volume of tury. Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex, In addition to his own insights which in its final format extended to seven and research, Havelock Ellis helped to volumes covering the whole of sexual diffuse the findings of continental schol- science as it existed in the first three dec- ars, making accessible to a broad audi- ades of the twentieth century. The most ence--one that hitherto had been sub- iconoclastic stance in the entire work jected to aliteraturemeant to inspireshame remained the calm acceptance of homo- and fear--acomprehensive body of knowl- sexuality. Ellis never endorsed the expla- edge of human sexuality. His enlightened nations offered by Freud and the psycho- approach to homosexuality marked the analytic school, so that the third edition of first step toward overcomingtheVictorian Sexual Inversion (19151, which was sup- morality that had shrouded the subject in plemented by materialdrawn from Magnus ignorance and opprobrium. Hirschfeld's Die Hornosexualitiit des Mannes und des Weibes, published a year BIBLIOGRAPHY. Phyllis Grosskurth, Havdock Ellis: A Biography, New York: earlier, presented essentially the stand- Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. point of 1904. The next in radical charac- Warren lohansson ter was the measured discussion of mas- turbation, which Victorian society had been taught to regardwithvirtual paranoia EMPLOYMENT as the cause of numberless ills. The mes- See Discrimination; Economics. .

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