Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  Indeed, it may well be because of the rumors that were circulating about Rosebery, in order to chase suspicion away, that the solicitor general was so intent on continuing to prosecute Wilde even after the first jury had failed to arrive at a unanimous verdict. For the prime minister had been named in one of Queensberry’s letters that had been read aloud in court. Even then, it seems Rosebery was on the point of intervening—until, that is, Lord Balfour said to him: ‘‘If you do, you will lose the election.’’ So he did not intervene.

  And he still lost the election.∞≤

  6

  The Truth of Masks

  The conception of the ‘‘love that dare not speak its name’’ that Wilde put forth during his trial bears the imprint of the reference to ancient Greece and to the Platonism and neo-Platonism of the Renaissance. The ghosts of John Addington Symonds and of Walter Pater loom large, as we have already said, in this discourse. In point of fact, all of Wilde’s writing is steeped in Oxford Hellenism.

  We have already seen this to be the case for The Portrait of Mr. W. H. But in The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, one also finds this mixture of a scarcely veiled a≈rmation of homosexuality and of a dissimulation in codes that are nonetheless nearly transparent and wouldn’t fool anyone. Some sentences thought to be overly explicit were cut when he revised the earlier version of the novel, published in 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, for its publication as a book. An example would be the passage in which Hallward said to Dorian: ‘‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman.’’∞ This declaration of love was replaced by a di√erent sentence which makes of Dorian the incarnation of an ideal that the artist had dreamed of: ‘‘You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.’’≤ Yet this latter sentence, which ‘‘encodes’’ a homosexual enunciation, is obviously a paraphrase of an idea developed by Pater in speaking about Winckelmann, that of homoerotic friendship appearing to us as the ‘‘reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge,’’ as the new ‘‘intellectual career’’ of someone who is reliving the past life of a Greek philosophical lover. It was in fact at the request of Walter Pater that Oscar Wilde removed the audacious sentence he had written for the first version of the novel.≥

  There are many other sentences in Dorian Gray that seem to come out of

  t h e t r u t h o f m a s k s

  ∞∫≥

  Pater. A good example would be the moment in the second chapter of the novel when Lord Henry declares to Dorian, ‘‘I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal.’’ The aristocrat’s disquisition ends with an exhortation to ‘‘yield’’ to temptations and never to deny oneself forbidden pleasures: ‘‘Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.’’ A bit further along, Lord Henry continues to explain his program of practical philosophy by speaking of a ‘‘new Hedonism’’: ‘‘Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations.’’∂

  In chapter 11, a long interior monologue of Dorian’s presented in indirect discourse, certain sentences are simply borrowed from Pater: ‘‘Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life. . . . It was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience. . . . It was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.’’∑

  Wilde’s relation to Walter Pater was not a purely literary a√air; they were quite close. Wilde didn’t meet Pater until his third year at Oxford, but in his first term there he fell under the spell of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which had been published the previous year. He spoke of it as

  ‘‘my golden book’’ and referred to Pater’s essays as ‘‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.’’∏ If Ruskin had been Wilde’s great passion during his first year at Oxford, Pater would be the great passion of the fourth year, and the years after.π Many years later, while in prison, he would once again speak of The Renaissance as ‘‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life.’’∫

  Wilde and Pater quickly became friends. Pater wrote him letters signed

  ‘‘a√ectionately yours,’’ and soon they were deeply intimate (without that implying any sexual relations). In 1878, Pater thanked Wilde for the gift of a photographic portrait of Wilde. They often took walks together or met for tea.Ω Clearly there existed a circle made up of young men and a few professors who moved within an ambit that was unquestionably homosexual.

  The situation was, in fact, perhaps too clear, given that scandals broke out and students were expelled. William Money Hardinge was one, a student to whom Pater wrote letters that he signed ‘‘Yours lovingly,’’ a fact that soon became well known. This student was also penning homosexual sonnets,

  ∞∫∂

  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f which led to him being called in by the dean and given the choice either to leave Oxford or to be brought before a disciplinary board.∞≠ Hardinge chose to leave Oxford. Wilde thus knew what risks he was running. This did not prevent him from taking up with Pater only three years after the Hardinge a√air and without taking many precautions. Marc-André Ra√alovich would later, in his book Uranisme et unisexualité, tell of Wilde boasting that he took as much pleasure in speaking of homosexuality as others took in practicing it.

  In 1877, for instance, Wilde published in a review called Kottabos a poem celebrating the beauty of a young man, inspired by a painting by his friend Violet Troubridge:

  A fair slim boy not made for this world’s pain,

  With hair of gold thick clustering round his ears . . .∞∞

  Four years later, when he reprinted these lines in his collection of verse, he would change the sex of the person referred to. At that point, the poem, entitled Madonna Mia, read as follows:

  A lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain,

  With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears . . .∞≤

  Of course, one could say that this is simply a question of a later version of a poem that has undergone revision, but perhaps we should also see here the necessary imposition of a kind of ‘‘recoding,’’ one that is the inverse of what Linda Dowling has called the ‘‘homosexual code.’’ The recoding would indicate a need to dissimulate something that had been too visible. It was no longer a question of trying to make something visible and at the same time dissimulating.

  Doubtless this obligation to transpose the sex of one’s characters was for a long time one of the characteristic traits of literature written by gay people.

  Any gay writer would have had to ask the question: can the narrator be explicitly homosexual? If not, how can things be arranged so that the reader will not see in a physical description the expression of sexual desire? Christopher Isherwood’s 1976 autobiography has many interesting things to say about such questions. For example, he tells how, in his first novels in the 1930s, as a way of covering his tracks he gave legs that were ‘‘spindly’’ to a young character whose beautiful torso he had just praised.∞≥ Isherwood also mentions the problem of the sexual identity of the narrators of his novels. He did not dare let them be homosexual, but he could not bring himself to have them be heterosexual, so he preferred to deprive them of all desire. This

  t h e t r u t h o f m a s k s

  ∞∫∑

  meant he could not then place them in any situation in which they might need to manifest some desire.∞∂ Speaking of his mostly autobiographical novel,
Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood emphasizes that the book ‘‘fails to reveal what was the most enduring bond between Gerald and Christopher, their homosexuality.’’∞∑ Even the first volume of his autobiography, Lions and Shadows, which deals with his early years, leaves his homosexuality obscured, despite the fact that certain of the events he recounts make little sense otherwise.∞∏

  It is, alas, rather rare that an author, fifty years after the fact, takes the occasion to shed this kind of retrospective light on his previous writings. By publishing an autobiography in the 1970s that deals with the 1920s and 1930s, Isherwood is, temporally speaking, almost ideally situated to help us understand these kinds of disjunctures. Take the example of Forster. How would we be able to read or understand how to decode all his veiled allusions if the manuscript to Maurice had been lost? The question is of major importance. After all, Forster stopped writing novels once he finished Maurice (which he considered impossible to publish once it was written) because he no longer felt capable—once having decided to tell the truth—of continuing to lie. He no longer felt like writing about love between men and women or about marriage; he no longer wished to force himself to keep silent about the nature of his own feelings.∞π It’s also di≈cult to avoid mentioning in this context a poem by Auden, ‘‘The Truest Poem Is the Most Feigning.’’ There is no doubt that Proust was only able to talk so freely of what he called, in his draft from 1909, the ‘‘Race of the Aunties’’ ( la race des tantes) because he was always at pains to pretend he was describing it from the outside. Much ink has been spilt over the fact that his character Albertine is a literary transposition of his chau√eur, who was named Alfred Agostinelli. Even if we try to take into account merely the twists and turns of the plot of Proust’s novel, the idea of this transposition doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. For if that is our hypothesis, what are we to do with the exploration of lesbianism in the novel, whose mysteries (in the narrator’s eyes) produce the material for many passages? It might nonetheless be possible to say that this whole question of transpositions was initially produced out of the necessity that the narrator be heterosexual. As evidence for this, we could mention the moment at which the storyline of The Captive is interrupted so that the ‘‘author’’

  can intervene in order to o√er a justification for the important place homosexuality is given in his book, but also in order strenuously to distance himself from it: ‘‘The author would like to say how grieved he would be if the

  ∞∫∏

  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f reader were to be o√ended by his portrayal of such weird characters. . . . But it is none the less true that considerable interest, not to say beauty, may be found in actions inspired by a cast of mind so remote from anything we feel, from anything we believe, that they remain incomprehensible to us, displaying themselves before our eyes like a spectacle without rhyme or reason’’

  (rtp, 3:40). The ‘‘author’’ is here attempting to reveal to the ‘‘reader’’ (presumed to be heterosexual) the ‘‘cause’’ of all these behaviors, of these deeds and gestures, of these psychological formations that are present and visible on a daily basis, but that cannot really be understood in the absence of the right key—the key that opens the door to all the mysterious secrets of these strange people, whose ‘‘actions’’ will become crystal clear as soon as one understands their true ‘‘nature.’’

  Proust is insistent on this point: all the gestures, all the stances a person takes, however contradictory or bizarre they may seem, take on a clear meaning, become coherent, as soon as one knows that said person belongs to the ‘‘accursed race.’’ The individual’s entire personality falls into a new pattern once the ‘‘secret’’ is revealed. Yet who is it who reveals the secret, who provides the key? Proust always holds himself at a distance from the object under description. The terms in which he describes these ‘‘weird’’

  personages often function to create the impression that he has no part in the life that his novel sets out to reconstitute. His first readers and critics certainly had this impression. If it is possible to describe the pages of Proust’s novel that deal with the Baron de Charlus as, in the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a staging of the ‘‘spectacle of the closet’’—and, as we have seen, this may well be the paradigm for the predicament in which a gay person is always located—we should add that this ‘‘closet,’’ closely scrutinized by the novel’s own heterosexual characters, is also being scrutinized by the narrator and, even more so, by the author. Indeed, the spectacle of this ‘‘spectacle’’ is called to our attention, is revealed to us by someone who is working hard, by means of this very revelation, to shield his own ‘‘closet’’ from any unwanted attention, to prevent its own spectacularization.∞∫ Yet, due to a rather unsurprising boomerang e√ect, this person is in fact thereby precisely exposing himself to the danger of becoming the object of this same ‘‘spectacle of the closet.’’ He finds himself in danger of becoming the object of rumors and insinuations—a situation he described so marvelously in the case of Charlus, and yet of which he was so afraid that he asked his friends to counter those rumors and insinuations. Yet who, if not a homosexual, would have been able to describe so perspicaciously and with such a sharp and

  t h e t r u t h o f m a s k s

  ∞∫π

  intimate sense of it, that situation he claimed was hidden from general view?

  Such an impression of the narrator is only reinforced by the fact that when it is a question of male homosexuality, the narrator is forever demonstrating that what remains hidden to the eyes of others is all too obvious to him; yet he frequently insists that lesbian life and the world of lesbians remain mysterious and impenetrable to him.

  What we can learn from Isherwood is that literary texts do not necessarily reveal to us the ‘‘truth’’ about the sexuality of a given moment in time. One must always take into account the work of encoding, of feigning, of dissimulation in order to ascertain whether or not the discursive categories in question, the descriptions, the judgments, and so on, correspond to real practices. It is probably wiser, when dealing with the subject matter at hand, to begin with actual historical studies before moving on to the study of literary texts rather than, as is the case with too many scholarly works, moving from the study of literary texts to an interpretation of history.

  Here again, André Gide (whose lucidity in these matters is quite modern) has some helpful things to say. In his Journal, Gide protested against the idea put forward by André Maurois, to the e√ect that Oscar Wilde’s sexual morals were nothing more than a kind of accessory to his aestheticism:

  I believe quite on the contrary that this a√ected aestheticism was for him merely an ingenious cloak to hide, while half revealing, what he

  could not let be seen openly; to excuse, provide a pretext, and even

  apparently motivate; but that very motivation is but a pretense. Here, as almost always, and often even without the artist’s knowing it, it is the secret of the depths of his flesh that prompts, inspires, and decides.

  Lighted in this way and, as it were, from beneath, Wilde’s plays

  reveal, beside the surface witticisms, sparkling like false jewels, many oddly revelatory sentences of great psychological interest. And it is for them that Wilde wrote the whole of the play—let there be no doubt

  about it.

  Try to let some understand what one has an interest in hiding from

  all. As for me, I have always preferred frankness. But Wilde made up

  his mind to make of falsehood a work of art. . . . That is what made him say: ‘‘Never use I. ’’ The I belongs to the very face, and Wilde’s art had something of the mask about it, insisted on the mask. . . . Always he managed in such a way that the informed reader could raise the mask

  and glimpse, under it, the true visage (which Wilde had such good

  ∞∫∫

  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f r
eason to hide). This artistic hypocrisy was imposed on him by respect, which was very keen in him, for the proprieties; and by the need of self-protection. Likewise, moreover, for Proust, that great master of dis-

  simulation.∞Ω

  Already in 1921, Gide had recounted a conversation with Proust who had said more or less the same thing to him. During a conversation in which Gide was telling him about his project of writing his memoirs, Proust replied: ‘‘You can tell anything . . . but on condition that you never say: I. ’’ To which Gide’s reaction was: ‘‘But that won’t suit me’’ (2:265).

  Gide wrote these journal entries in 1921 and 1927. Yet had he not himself practiced various forms of ‘‘dissimulation’’ at earlier moments? After all, in 1911 he only published a few copies of Corydon, with no author’s name provided. And what might we say of The Immoralist or of Fruits of the Earth?

  Even if they do mention homosexuality explicitly, still the play between revelation and dissimulation that one finds in them is closer to Wilde than the author seems to remember. Moreover, contrary to what Gide might think, it was perhaps not only a sense of social niceties that encouraged Wilde to dissimulate. There were social constraints involved, and there was the matter of prudence, to which many of his friends were constantly exhorting him—

  just as Gide’s friends would do in attempting to convince him not to publish Corydon.

  When The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared, it was without a doubt perceived as a homosexual manifesto—both by homosexuals and by others. That is

  why, when Wilde applied for admission to the Crabbdt Club, one of his former classmates at Oxford, George Curzon, used his reputation as a sodomite and his manner of treating the subject in Dorian Gray as grounds for opposing his admission. Wilde defended himself with a certain ease and malicious wit, but he never returned to the club.≤≠ Dorian Gray quickly became a reference and a rallying point for English homosexuals: Wilde’s young friends were amazed at his audacity. In order to celebrate the book, Max Beerbohm wrote his ‘‘Ballade de la vie joyeuse’’ and Lionel Johnson wrote a poem in Latin which described Dorian as someone who ‘‘avidly loves strange loves . . . and plucks strange flowers.’’ The poem addressed Wilde with these words: ‘‘Here are the apples of Sodom, here are the very hearts of vices, and tender sins. In heaven and hell be glory of glories to you who perceive so