by Ian Buruma
The presence of formidable mothers is generally not a help in the battle of the sexes, to be sure, but it does not automatically drive sons into the arms of boys, either. Jeal does not say that it did. He finds stronger evidence for B-P’s desire for his own sex (in the mind, if not actually in the camp bed) elsewhere. But even there, where the indications seem most obvious, one must bear in mind that what may strike a modern reader as homosexual behavior often was not regarded as such by a man of B-P’s class and time.
Take, for instance, the case of the photographs. B-P had an old friend (rifle corps and football first XI) called A. H. Tod, who taught at Charterhouse after retiring from the army. One of Tod’s amusements was to take the boys out and photograph them in the nude. His work can no longer be seen, alas, for the pictures were destroyed in the late 1960s—supposedly to protect Tod’s reputation. But Jeal quotes one source describing them as “contrived and artificial as regards poses”—Charterhouse boys as Greek athletes, perhaps, throwing javelins, or dancing between the trees like fauns. In any event, they were much admired by B-P, and visits to his alma mater were preceded by pleasant anticipation of another peek at his friend’s art.
It is possible, of course, that B-P’s interest was purely artistic, and it is true that fondness of the male nude was as conventional among the late Victorians as, well, skirt-dancing. B-P’s enthusiasm for naked men went further than art, however. During the Great War he took great pleasure in watching soldiers “trooping in to be washed in nature’s garb, with their strong well-built naked wonderfully made bodies.” This, too, would not be necessarily significant if it were not for his equally pronounced distaste for the female body (“pinkish, whitish, dollish women”), or indeed anything to do with female sexuality. Interest in girls, which, despite his warnings, he could not fail to note among many young men in his charge, he regarded as a temporary disease (“girlitis”). It would soon pass, he was convinced, with a sufficient regimen of the flannel-shirt life. Masturbation was of course the very devil’s work, and sex to him, though unfortunately indispensable for procreation, was so much “beastliness.” No wonder he suffered constant migraines—not to mention torrid dreams of soldiers putting their hands in his pocket—during the time he dutifully cooperated in the production of three children. No wonder his headaches ceased the moment he forsook the marital bed for the more rugged quarters of his balcony.
Added up, these various horrors and fancies do indeed lead somewhere near the conclusion drawn by Jeal, that B-P was a repressed homosexual who sublimated his desires on a grand scale. There is a school of thought, gaining currency among some conservatives, that the Victorian repression of sex was not such a bad thing, since, as in the Chief Scout’s case, it resulted in prodigious creative energy. Jeal lends support to this argument:
When a gifted man’s deep anxieties about his sexual nature and his personal manliness coincide with a nation’s fear of impending decline through lack of virile qualities, the basic ingredients exist for a remarkably potent creative brew.
Indeed so. But a potentially dangerous one, too, for it is the brew from which great dictators emerge.
Which leads us to the next question about B-P, and others like him: Was he a proto-fascist? Were the Boy Scouts part of the same brew as Hitler Youth? Leftist debunkers of the Chief Scout’s mythology have argued that he was, though admittedly not a murderer, certainly a racist, authoritarian, reactionary breeder (if that is the right word) of cannon fodder for a belligerent empire. The best-known book to make this case is The Character Factory, by Michael Rosenthal. One of the aims of Jeal’s book is to debunk the debunkers, specifically Mr. Rosenthal.
He largely succeeds. B-P was no more racist than most Englishmen of his time—indeed, in many ways, less. Jeal has little trouble attacking Rosenthal’s rather conventional “progressive” view that B-P was a conservative elitist, for the Chief Scout’s ideals were far from conservative; in fact, they were rather radical, having much in common, as Jeal says, with Fabian socialism and the aesthetic politics of John Ruskin. And if the sight of uniformed boys swearing oaths around campfires strikes one as particularly right-wing, one might ponder the fact that these spectacles are most common in the few people’s republics still remaining. But Jeal’s main line of attack against the progressive debunkers is to argue that B-P did not intend to breed “militarists” so much as “good citizens.”
This may be missing the point, for what are good citizens? Good citizens of Sparta were not like those of Athens. B-P himself had some strong ideas on the subject. A pamphlet written by the hero of Mafeking in 1907 to promote the idea of “Peace Scouts” states, “The main cause of the downfall of Rome was the decline of good citizenship among its subjects, due to want of energetic patriotism, to the growth of luxury and idleness, and to the exaggerated importance of local party politics.” This is not a recipe for militarism, to be sure, but, like many radicals of various persuasions, Baden-Powell associated party politics, materialism, commerce, intellectualism—in short, urban life—with decadence. He sought to stop the rot by, so to speak, throwing away the books and making for the bush. Typically, he believed that the virtuous pioneering spirit of America had been destroyed by “over-civilization.”
Like Ruskin and, it must be said, many romantic fathers of political extremism, B-P had a profound contempt for the bourgeoisie—possibly because they stood for a society that forced him to suppress his most hidden desires. And so he dreamed of a premodern order of purity, self-reliance, comradeship and discipline. B-P’s Boy Scout movement didn’t have military aims: what the Chief Scout aimed at was to revive the warrior spirit in peacetime, rather like the old samurai and his Bushido. Indeed, he went further: he hoped to achieve world peace and brotherhood through the warrior spirit. Despite his old-fashioned notions of patriotism, he was as much of an internationalist as the most ardent Marxist.
In the class war, though getting on all right himself, he wanted his movement to transcend class, just as he wished it to transcend race and nation. As for Empire, his ideals led to an interesting dilemma felt by many a British adventurer in the bush. For B-P was in Africa ostensibly to civilize the natives, but in many respects he admired their customs more than the flabby ways of the white man. He deplored the destruction of “the tribal system of training and discipline” to make way for the “widespread provision of cash wages, bad temptations, and such teachings of civilization as they can gain from low class American cinema.”
Those bad temptations just won’t go away! To help his scouts resist them, he found some use for the tribal folklore he had picked up among the natives: blowing the kudu horn at morning call, handing out African amulets for special merit, that sort of thing. Perhaps The Way of the Tribal Warrior was better than that of the wage-earning, moviegoing, party-voting suburbanites back home, but surely members of the latter were closer to our definition of good citizens in a modern democracy.
It is true that much of B-P’s tribalism was boyish, not to say infantile, more than it was sinister. Pictures of the old Chief Scout in shorts, surrounded by his loyal scoutmasters (his “Boy-Men,” as he called them), roaring with good clean hearty laughter, suggest not so much fascists as outsize boys who refuse to grow up. Such refusal was a common Victorian and Edwardian affliction. B-P was apparently so moved by James Barrie’s Peter Pan that he went to see the play on consecutive nights. The kudu horn, the amulets, the campfire yards, the lusty community singing: Jeal is surely right that “for many men, Baden-Powell among them, the Boy Scouts provided a blessed illusion of reclaiming their stolen childhoods.”
But was B-P’s movement really as innocuous as Jeal says? Was it really all boyish romance “in a different moral world” from the National Socialist and Communist youth movements of the 1930s? And, if it was, was this a matter of circumstances or because “the fundamental, moral ideals of the two organizations could hardly have been more distinct”? I am not quite as sanguine about this as Jeal appears to be, for I am more
inclined to think that B-P’s brand of back-to-naturism, tribal nostalgia and youth worship always contained a kernel of noxious idealism which, if it had developed under different conditions, might well have ended up in the same moral world as the Hitler Youth or the Red Pioneers.
To be sure, despite B-P’s brief flirtation with the ideas of Hitler and Mussolini (not as unusual in the 1930s as some people like to believe), his Boy Scouts never became tools of an authoritarian state. B-P’s movement was more akin to the German Wandervögel, city boys mooning about with rucksacks, trekking through forest and dale, letting mountains echo with their soulful folk-songs. Like B-P, they rejected “over-civilization,” politics, city life: they, too, made a cult of the flannel-shirt life, of nature, of youth. They were consciously antipolitical. As one enthusiast (quoted by Joachim C. Fest in The Face of the Third Reich) observed:
Does not political activity all belong to that urban civilization of yesterday, from which we fled when we set up our community of friends out in the forests? Is there anything more unpolitical than the Wandervögel? Were not the Meissner festival and its formula a repudiation of the party men who were so anxious to harness youth to their political activities? Is not the sole task of the free German communities to educate free, noble and kind people?
Instead of politics there was a cult of beauty—male beauty. This was splendidly recorded in Herbert List’s photographs of blond nature boys sitting on rocks or bathing in lakes—rather similar, one imagines, to the pictures taken by B-P’s Charterhouse friend. The pure idealism and antipolitical nature of the Wandervögel movement were what made it so attractive and so vulnerable to political manipulation, for in time the celebration of youth, of nature, of male comradeship, of antiurban, antibourgeois sentiment was harnessed to a most sinister cause, which also insisted on being above party politics—though not nation or race—in the name of a beautiful new order. One figure to emerge from the Wandervögel was Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth. Descriptions of him quoted by Fest sound a familiar note:
[He was] a big, pampered boy of good family who laboriously imitated the rough, forceful style of the boys’ gang. His unemphatic, rather soft features held a hint of femininity, and all the time he was in office there were rumours about his allegedly white bedroom furnished like a girl’s.
There is no evidence that Schirach was homosexual, or that male femininity, any more than the presence of great mothers, is a clear sign of homosexuality, or that homosexuals are any more attracted to extreme ideals or antipolitical romanticism than heteros. But there is a connection between authoritarianism and communities based on male bonding, particularly when they seek to replace or at least put themselves above politics, family life, in short, the boring suburbanites. This is sometimes forgotten in our own enlightened times by those who see the bourgeois family as uniquely oppressive and homosexuality as a liberating force. It can be thus, but it can also be the other way around: family loyalty, as all totalitarian regimes well know, is a great obstacle to state control, whereas the collective loyalty of bonded males is often a help. It is also true that some of the more notorious leaders of boys’ bands (Gabriele D’Annunzio, Oswald Mosley) were not homosexuals but, on the contrary, compulsive womanizers; but this is really no more ironic than B-P’s neurotic homophobia or the vicious persecution of homosexuals in Hitler’s Reich.
The best examples of overt homosexual authoritarianism are the samurai and the Dorians. In their book, The Love of the Samurai, Watanabe Tsuneo and Iwata Jun’ichi lament the passing of the aesthetic cult of boy-love (shudo) upon which, they say, The Way of the Samurai was based. The Way of Boy-Love specifically promoted the loving submission of beautiful boys to more experienced men. What destroyed this unique system of beauty, loyalty and male nobility were those old enemies of the romantic mind, capitalism and industrialization. As they put it rather charmingly, “Modernization resulted in beauty being taken over by women!” Why? “Because in traditional societies one regarded oneself as being, while in the modern, one sees oneself as having.” Previously one was born an aristocrat or a peasant, and an aristocrat had to be more beautiful than the common man, whereas the modern bourgeois have “no need of being beautiful themselves. They relate themselves to beauty by ‘having’ a beautiful woman.”
So much, then, for the modern view of seventeenth-century Japan. What about this poem composed in Greece by Theognis, in the sixth century B.C.:
You want to buy an ass? a horse?
You’ll pick a thoroughbred, of course
For quality is in the blood.
But when a man goes out to stud—
He won’t refuse a commoner
If lots of money goes with her.
Theognis was deeply worried about modern decadence, and advocated boy-love, discipline and hierarchy to preserve the noble traditions of the past. As his translator, Dorothea Wender, put it, “He presents to us the distress and confusion of those who live in an age of transition from one set of values (based on agrarian, hereditary nobility) to another (based on money and the city).”
The distress and confusion of Victorian gentlemen, particularly those on the fringes of nobility with aspirations of getting on, were just as acute. Likewise with Japanese dandies pining for the samurai past, or even perhaps aesthetes falling in love with one another and Stalinism in Cambridge. In Plato and the Platonists, Walter Pater, one of Oscar Wilde’s mentors, drew the comparison between the Dorians and Victorian England. Dorian youth, he wrote, left early the mushy comforts of the suburban home to be educated in public schools:
It involved however for the most part, as with ourselves, the government of youth by itself; an implicit subordination of the younger to the older, in many degrees.… [They ate] not reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes, the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches.… [They] “became adepts in presence of mind,” in mental readiness and vigour, in the brief mode of speech Plato commends … with no warm baths allowed; a daily plunge in their river required.… Youthful beauty and strength in perfect service—a manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own English schools.
This, much more than the Teutoniuc earnestness and racism of the Hitler Youth, would have appealed to B-P and his Boy-Men. “Youthful friendship ‘passing even the love of women’ … became an elementary part of their education. A part of their duty and discipline.” Indeed, indeed. And if such a system weighs heavily on individual freedom and, in times of peace, “may be thought to have survived the original purpose,” well, says Pater, “An intelligent young Spartan may have replied: ‘To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus into the eyes of all Greece.’ ”
B-P was himself a work of art, in the eyes of his mother, in the eyes of all the world. And in being so he gave many boys much innocent pleasure. He never was a fascist, but his ideals lent themselves to fascism elsewhere. Britain was too bourgeois to turn into a Sparta, and the aggressive energies of youth had a ready outlet in the empire. As B-P observed:
This nation does not need more clerks in the overcrowded cities of this little island.… No! The nation wants men and wants them badly, men of British blood who can go out and tackle the golden opportunities, not merely for benefiting themselves, but for building up and developing those great overseas states of our Commonwealth.
Those days are over now. We live in meaner times. One shudders to think what might happen if the energy of British youth—jobless, ill-educated, ready for any action—were to be turned to some great cause, against clerks whom B-P so despised. One can already hear the words of salvation in the mind of some future Spartan: discipline, sacrifice, comradeship—Be Prepared!
1990
Louis Couperus
THE EURASIANS OF
THE DUTCH EAST INDIES
In 1900 Holland seemed to be at the height of its colonial power in the Dutch East Ind
ies, today’s Indonesia. In 1899 the sultans of Acheh had been defeated and the whole island of Sumatra had been brought under Dutch rule. The smaller islands, such as Lombok, the Moluccas and the Lesser Sunda Islands, were subjugated in the 1880s and 1890s. And Java had already been colonized for some time before that.
As it turned out, complete Dutch control over its Asian colony was only to last for about fifty years. But of course nobody could have known that in 1900. To the Dutch governors, planters, businessmen, administrators, police officers, scholars, geographers, soldiers, bankers, travelers, railway engineers, schoolteachers and their wives, 1900 must have felt like the best of times.
It was also just then, at the very peak of Dutch control, that an idea of nationhood began to emerge among native intellectuals. Radeng Adjeng Kartini advocated—in Dutch writings—education for women. And in 1908 young Javanese intellectuals founded the Budi Utomo, the first nationalist association. National independence was not their immediate aim: they wanted a bigger say in the way they were governed. And there was growing sympathy for this view in Holland. The “liberal” policy, which meant the liberty of Dutch planters to exploit the colonies as they saw fit, was replaced by the “ethical” policy, which took a fuller account of native interests. But full independence would come only after a world war, during which the Japanese shook the foundations of European rule, by showing the white imperialists, sometimes literally, without clothes.
In fact the Europeans always were vulnerable. Colonial rule, in Indonesia as well as, say, India, had to be based to some extent on bluff. The idea of European supremacy had to seem natural and, for it to appear that way, the Europeans themselves, as much as the native populations under their control, had to believe it to be so. As soon as the colonialists lost faith in their natural right to rule—a loss that Nirad C. Chaudhuri, speaking of the British in India in Thy Hand, Great Anarch! memorably characterized as “funk”—the colonial edifice, built over time, often haphazardly, would begin to rot: slowly, at first imperceptibly, but relentlessly, until the whole thing came toppling down. Perhaps it is so with all authoritarian systems. Loss of nerve was certainly a factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire. So perhaps Mountbatten and Gorbachev had something in common.