1 INTRODUCTION: A wilful obliteration? My aim here is to explore the phenomenon of male bonding through its particular manifestation in male homosocial desire,1 and specifically, the role it plays in the life and writings of Australian author Martin Boyd. That I am prompted to do so has little to do with the so-called ‘fashionable’ disinterment of hitherto taboo subjects best left, according to some critics, undisturbed.2 I am motivated rather by a sense of lack, or of absence, or even of the wilful obliteration of the sexual in the critical evaluations of Boyd. Although recognising in him a man of complicated and diverse identities — those of aesthete, Anglophile, expatriate, arts connoisseur, cosmopolitan, universalist and religious aspirant, to mention a few — literary critiques in the main have turned a blind eye to issues of sexual difference: by this calculus, Boyd remains, to all intents and purposes, an unequivocal heterosexual writing unequivocally heterosexual novels, give or take an oddball vicar or two. By contrast, Boyd’s deepseated restlessness and sense of dislocation, self- confessed as well as evident in his fictionalised family sagas, has attracted widespread comment. Codified by himself as ‘geographical schizophrenia’,3 it was a condition Kathleen Fitzpatrick was tempted to compare to the Jamesian ‘complex fate’4 to draw Boyd into a shared brotherhood in post-colonial angst. My object in this study is to attempt to show that Martin Boyd’s fate was yet more complex than this depiction suggests. I also hope to demonstrate the truth of my contention that, however far-reaching and inclusive the evaluation of Boyd may have been up until this point, it has by no means achieved a state of heuristic exhaustion. To put my case even more strongly, I am suggesting that much of the critical discursive practice surrounding Boyd and his work has, wittingly or unwittingly, fallen prey to the ‘repressive hypothesis’ — a legacy of bourgeois Victorianism — noted by Michel Foucault in his study of sexuality. Boyd’s expression and/or suppression of sexuality, with few exceptions, has been subjected to a modern, institutionalized puritanism which has, to quote Foucault, ‘imposed its triple edict of taboo, non-existence and silence’.5 1Designated as such by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. It is a paradigm I shall be applying to this study. Further citations from Between Men will be given by page number in the text. 2Commentator Andrew Riemer dismisses those academics ‘who confine their interests [in Shakespeare]...to the sonnets’ homoeroticism’ as having fallen into the ‘vulgar error’ of liberated political correctness and fashionable political theories (‘Let us all praise dead white genius’, SMH, 11/3/95). 3This state of mind is applied to Boyd's alter ego Guy Langton in A Difficult Young Man, Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1972, p95 (further citations from this work will be given by page number in the text). Relevant to this is Boyd's sense of Australia as 'a sinking ship', at least in a childhood where he felt he had 'missed something, and that on the other side of the world...life was brighter and full of pleasure' ('Preoccupations and Intentions', Southerly, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1968, p83). 4Fitzpatrick defined this fate as consisting in ‘having one’s physical roots in one continent and one’s cultural roots in another and distant one’ (‘Martin Boyd and the Complex Fate of the Australian Novelist’, Commonwealth Literary Fund Lectures, 1953, p2). Her definition, at least so far as Boyd is concerned, may be a misrepresentation of what is arguably a more finely nuanced cultural condition. 5Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction, New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp4-5. Further citations from The History will be given by page number in the text. 2 Although Foucault devotes his thesis in The History of Sexuality: Vol. I to debunking conventional wisdom that prohibition has been a ‘basic and constitutive element’ of the modern epoch’s historical record of sexuality — at least since the seventeenth century and the coming of capitalism — he stops short of claiming that ‘sex has not [my italics] been prohibited or barred or masked or misapprehended since the classical age’; rather, he takes the view that negative elements such as censorship and denial have played a tactical role in a transformation of sex into discourse, indeed in an increasing incitement to discourse and the ‘dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities’, through the mechanisms of the technology of power and the will to knowledge (History 12). Certainly it was censorship that motivated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s negative critique of Henry James’s critics, a critique which fortuitously draws a further possible parallel between James and Martin Boyd. Her discussion of what she perceives as the ‘repressive blankness’ and ‘active incuriosity’ applied to James complies with Foucault’s paradigm of a sexual discourse founded on dissent: ‘With strikingly few exceptions...the criticism has actively repelled any inquiry into the asymmetries of gendered desire’.6 Furthermore, she states that the easy assumption (by James, society, and the critics) that sexuality and heterosexuality are always exactly translatable into one another is not only homophobic, but importantly, deeply heterophobic in its denial of the possibility of difference in desires, in objects. Where in James’s life, she argues, ‘the pattern of homosexual desire was brave enough and resilient enough to be at last biographically inobliterable, one might have hoped that in criticism of his work the possible differences of different erotic paths would not be so ravenously subsumed under a compulsorily...heterosexual model’. Most interestingly, she conjectures that It is possible that [the critics] read James himself as, in his work, positively refusing or evaporating this element of his eros, translating lived homosexual desires, where he had them, into written heterosexual ones so thoroughly and so successfully that the difference makes no difference, the transmutation leaves no residue. (EC 197) There are considerable implications for Boyd in Sedgwick’s insights and special pleading, even if they are not precisely coextensive. It is feasible to assume that Boyd’s critics, like those of James, have wished to protect him from homophobic misreadings, from marginalization as a member of a stigmatised minority, or from ‘what they imagine as anachronistically gay readings, based on a late twentieth-century vision of men’s desire for men that is more stabilized and culturally compact than [the writer’s] own’ (EC 197).7 Traditionalists might counter with the argument that it is just as feasible that critics have responded to the Eliot/Joyce dictum of ignoring the writer and concentrating on what he appeared to be saying. Yet would not the logical extrapolation from such a view be that a writer’s autobiographical works and self-explanatory prose writings are overlooked in favour of his novels? At what cost? Also, does this viewpoint assume, perhaps, that fiction is not self-revelatory? In Boyd’s case, it will be argued that it is precisely the implications in Boyd’s writing, and especially in his fictional writing — what is revealed/concealed, muted/emphasized — 6Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990, p197. Further citations from Epistemology will be given by page number in the text. 7Sedgwick offers an example of teaching at Amherst College where ‘students who had already studied Dorian Gray said they had never discussed the book in terms of any homosexual content: all of them knew it could be explained in terms of either the Theme of the Double — “The Divided Self” — or else the Problem of Mimesis — “Life and Art”’. Epistemology of the Closet, p161. 3 that have been ignored or misinterpreted. In the general climate of wilful ‘not knowingness’ I would hazard that only two commentators appear to have intuited that Boyd’s sexuality — and indeed his persona as a whole — did not consist in a limited model, but in one of bi-polar, or even multi-polar identities. In her biography Martin Boyd: A Life, Brenda Niall mentions his ‘doubleness’, his penchant for role-playing. More searchingly, Manning Clark, following his own agenda of looking everywhere for Dostoevskyan patterns, saw Boyd as ‘a deeply divided man’ attracted to both the Greek idea of ‘beauty’ and the Catholic idea of the Madonna: he was torn between sensual and spiritual love: he loved both men and women: he had a love-hate relationship with both Australia and England. One suspects that he had to live with these contradictions all his life, that he was one of those men with an eye for pleasure, and another for salvation.8 The sensual/sexual/spiritual tensions and contradictions apprehended here by Clark will form part of my general discussion. The analogy with James, however, falls short of my claiming for Martin Boyd’s life a ‘pattern of homosexual desire’. Notwithstanding, I shall be arguing strenuously that in his novels and autobiographical writings the thematics of a heterosexual male norm are frequently liable to disruption, and undermined by a more privileging and predominant thematics of homosocial desire. To enter the realm of the homosocial is to enter a volatile spectrum of possibility, as fraught with contradiction and confusion as the concept of masculinity