Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  In a strange near-reversal at the end of his essay “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” Winters finally claims for Crane a superiority, both of intellect and poetic aperception, over a generalized “Professor X,” who is cozily in love with Whitman and the American transcendentalists and simply blind to the dangers in their romantic program—dangers that polluted Crane’s poetic enterprise and drove him through (in Winters’s judgment) obscure poetry to madness and suicide. (Only a strict New England background, reasoned Winters, plus the fact that he had far less poetic talent than Crane in the first place, kept Emerson from the same disastrous ends.) Claims Winters, Crane understood these ideas in all respects except their mortal flaws and consciously pursued them as such, at least having the courage of his convictions to follow them to the end—which (says Winters) Professor X, who professes to approve them, has not.

  The irony of Crane’s reputation, however, is that many academic critics—descendants of Winters’s Professor X—who, today, have now read their Emerson, Eliot, and Mallarmé pretty carefully and would argue hotly against Winters’ reading of them, if not against his reading of Whitman, are still comfortable with the notion of Crane-as-poetic-failure: what they are blind to now is the realization that Crane’s “structural failure” is—just like Eliot’s—his modernism; as it is his continuity with the outgrowth of the romantic tradition high modernism represents.

  But how did meaning and mystery work together to communicate the existence, now and again in Crane’s poems, of a same-sex bed partner—as it did to me that afternoon in 1958?

  One cannot make too much more headway in such a discussion of Crane without some comment on “homosexual genres.” While “genre” may well be too strong a term for them, these are nevertheless forms that, in various ages, various works have taken—forms that have been readable as gay or homosexual by gay or homosexual men and women in their particular times. In various ages these genres change their form. (Indeed, to discuss them fully in historical terms is beyond the scope of such notes as these. To quote Crane: “. . . the whole topic is something of a myth anyway, and is consequently modified by the characteristics of the image by each age in each civilization.”) Most recently however—say, since the 19th Century—the aspect that might be cited as most characteristic of this genre or genres is that they are structured so that straight, gay, male, or female readers and critics can read the homosexuality out of them, for whatever reason, whenever it becomes necessary or convenient.

  One particular poetic form of this genre (of which Voyages is an example) includes treatments of love in which the object of desire is specifically left ambiguous as to gender. This allows critics of one persuasion to read it: “Of course it’s speaking of heterosexual desire—since the vast majority of desire is, and the writer has left no positive sign that this portrait of desire is any different from most.” Meanwhile critics of another persuasion may read it: “Of course it’s speaking of homosexual desire. The rhetorical lengths to which the author has gone not to specify the gender is its positive sign.” Another example of this form is, as I suggested, Crane’s “Harbor Dawn” in The Bridge.

  After the aubade of the first five stanzas, the poem, with its next line, locates itself directly with the lovers in their bed: “And you beside me, blesséd now while sirens / Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day—/ Serenely now, before day claims our eyes / your cool arms murmurously about me lay. . . .” For a total of eleven lines, the poet goes on about his beloved without once mentioning “breasts” or “tresses,” or any other explicit sign of the feminine. About the room we do not even see any of the “stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays” that were so famously piled on the divan in the typest’s bedsitter before “the young man carbuncular” arrived in The Waste Land’s (once notorious because of it) “Fire Sermon.” In the pre-Stonewall late fifties, when “homophobia” was indeed a universal, pervasive, if silent, fear, even this much explicit lack of feminization was as articulate to an urban sixteen-year-old boy as any Gay Rights flier or Act-Up poster today.

  My first response was to weep.

  Given the tears I swallowed (in order that no one else in the house hear them), that explicit lack may well have had an order of power that, in these post-Stonewall times, has no current analogue.

  The rubric Crane added to (the right of) the poem after the first printing work to heterosexualize our reading—or, more accurately, to bisexualize it: “. . . or is / it from the / soundless shore / of sleep that / time /// recalls you to / your love, / there in a / waking dream / to merge your seed //—with whom?” (“Merge your seed,” followed by the daring “—with whom?”, certainly suggests two men coming together.) “Who is the / woman with / us [possibly with the poet and the reader, but equally possibly with the poet and the poet’s lover] in the / dawn? . . . / Whose is the / flesh our feet / have moved / upon?” The woman is so clearly a spiritualized presence, even a spiritual ground, and the columnar text of the poem is so clearly of the “ambiguous” form mentioned above, that when I first read the poem as a sixteen-year-old in 1958, it never occurred to me that it was anything other than a description of homosexual love, with a few suggestions of heterosexuality artfully placed about for those who preferred to read it that way—which, after all, is what it is.

  Even today, when I read over Winters’s heterosexual reading of the poem, I find myself balking when he refers to the loved-one as “she” or “her”—having to remind myself this is not a misreading, but is rather an alternate reading the poet has left, carefully set up by the text of the poem, precisely for heterosexual readers like Winters—or, indeed, for any critic, gay or straight, who had to discuss or write about the poem in public—to take advantage of.

  But while a heterosexual reading may find the poem just as beautiful and just as lyrical (that’s after all, what the poet wanted) it will not find the poem anywhere near as poignant as the homosexual reading does—because the heterosexual reading specifically erases all reference to the silence surrounding homosexuality for which the heterosexual reading’s existence, within the homosexual reading, is the positive sign. But that is one reason the homosexual reading seems to me marginally the richer.

  While more common in fiction than in poetry, another homosexual form is the narrative that takes place in a world where homosexuality is never mentioned and is presumed not to exist—but where the incidents that occur have no other satisfying explanation. (To use another phrase made famous by Eliot, they have no other “objective correlative” save homosexual desire.) This is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gide’s L’Immoralist, and Mann’s Tod im Vennidig. This is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Again, because homosexuality is implied in such works, not stated, a literalist reading of such texts can always more or less erase it. Such a text—also—is Crane’s “Cutty Sark.” That’s one I didn’t get at sixteen.

  But by the time, at twenty-five, I’d stayed up all night in half a dozen similar situations, yes, I got it!

  Still a third homosexual form is the light-hearted, good-natured, innocent presentation of rampant male (heterosexual) promiscuity: the sort of young man who’d “go to bed with anything!” The assumption here, of course, is that the young man does—only the writer has opted not to specify the homosexual occurrences. (The classic example, despite Yingling’s italics and multiple punctuation marks of surprise is, yes, Tom Jones [1749].) Often in such works the heterosexual conquests are accompanied by extraordinarily complacent husbands—presumed to be getting some from the young man off stage and on the side. Sometimes a wise or silly older woman, especially if a widow (the nickname for one of the most popular gay bartenders in New York City’s heavy hustling strip along Eighth Avenue is “Jimmy the Widow,” who has worked there more than twenty years now) is read as a satiric, coded portrait of an old queen, who briefly has the young man’s sexual favors.

  The classical homosexual reading that replaces Proust’s “Albert
ine” (the heroine of A la recherche du temps perdu) with “Albert” (Proust’s own young, male coach driver) is a prime example of the same homosexual reading trope where women substitute in the text for men: generations of gay readers have pointed out to each other, with a smile, that Marcel’s kidnapping and detention for weeks of Albertine is lunatic if she is actually an upperclass young woman—and only comprehensible if she is a working class young man.

  The male narrator to whom Willa Cather goes to such pains, in the frame story of My Àntonia, to ascribe the text recounting the narrator’s chaste, life-long love of a wonderfully alive Czech immigrant woman is another, easily readable (and wholly erasable by a literalist reading) example of a (in this case lesbian) homosexual trope.

  One of the most famous—and, at the same time, most invisible—examples of such a form is presented in the closing moments of Wagner’s prologue-plus-trilogy of operas, Der Ring Des Nibelungen. The sixteen- odd hours of music (usually heard over four nights) comprising the work are intricately interwoven from motifs that take on great resonances, both psychological and symbolic—this motif associated with the completion of Valhalla, that one associated with the Ring of Power, another with the spear on which the Law is inscribed, while another represents the sword given to mortals by the gods to free themselves, and still another stands for the renunciation of love necessary for any great human undertaking in the material world. These motifs have been traced in their multiple appearances throughout the Ring and explicated in literally hundreds of volumes. At the closing of the fourth and final opera, Götterdämmerung, when the castle of earthly power lies toppled, the castle of the gods has burned down, and the awed populace gazes over a land swept clean by the flooding and receding of the Rhine, the tetrology ends with a sumptuous melody that registers to most hearers as wholly new—a fitting close for this image of a new world, awaiting rebirth at the hands of man and history.

  But, as many commentators have now noticed and pointed out to each other so that others would hear, that closing melody is not completely new. Clearly it’s based on some five or six seconds—no more—of what, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1896), George Bernard Shaw called “some inconsequential love music” that first sounded toward the middle of Die Wälkure’s Act III. What makes it “inconsequential” is, of course, that it is not music from any of the passionate, incestuous, heterosexual loves that shake the quadrature of operas and—often—the audience unto the foundations. The music Wagner uses for Götterdämmerung’s terminal D-flat melody are not some moments from the searing, sun-drenched love of Siegfried and Brunhilda (or, indeed, the possibly more searing, moon-drenched love of Sigmund and Siglinda). Rather, this music accompanies Siglinda’s profession of love to Brunhilda, who, after Sig- mund’s death, protects Siglinda (and the as-yet-unborn Siegfried) by sending them into the uncivilized wood where Wotan will not follow. A 19th century tradition holds that the love of two women is the single purest love—a tradition going back at least as far as the biblical tale of Ruth and Naomi. This purity is certainly part of what Wagner wished to evoke in his closing. Still, he chose this clearly Sapphic moment when, because a daughter defies her father for love of another woman, the other woman declares her love in return.

  No critic overtly mentioned this sapphism during Wagner’s lifetime. Possibly that emboldened him to write his next opera, Parsifal, surely and famously—it has been so called repeatedly throughout our century—the most blatantly homoerotic of operas in the repertoire.

  Some commentators (e.g., Shaw) have gone so far as to claim that the recall of those few moments of melody from Die Wälkure at the close of Götterdämmerung is an oversight on Wagner’s part. It’s the single “motif” that appears only twice in the work: surely Wagner must have forgotten his first use of it, or at least assumed no one would recognize it. But, besides the fact that such recognitions, blatant and hidden, comprise the entire structure of the Ring, critics who claim such have simply never composed an opera. Such things are not forgotten; endings are much too important; and the single previous appearance makes it that much more certain it was a considered and conscientious decision.

  More recent critics have taken to calling it the “praise Brunhilda” motif—which, yes, covers the situation: when in Die Wälkure’s Act III mortal Siglinda sings those moments of melody, she is, indeed, “praising” Brunhilda, her then still immortal half-sister. Nevertheless it sidesteps the yearning, the desiring, the straining for the other that inform that wondrous melody almost as powerfully as they do the “Liebestod” of Tristan und Isolde.

  They are not subtle, the tropes characterizing the “homosexual genres.” Often, they are based on the most stereotypical heterosexist assumptions about homosexuality as an inversion of the masculine or of the feminine, or of homosexuality as the replacement of one by the other, or of homosexuality as a third, neuter (i.e., unspecified) sex. Because they are generic (or very close to it), they represent the gross forms of the particular work. But that’s why they are as recognizable as they are, by isolated adolescents with only the most fleeting and hearsay knowledge of a homosexual community—and, I’m sure, were quite accessible to straight readers who were interested enough to pursue them. But, at the same time, their coding is always in an erasable mode: They register as an absence, an oversight, a formal arrangement in which the homosexual reading can always be dismissed as an over- reading. That’s what makes them, as it were, safe in a profoundly homophobic society—in which even to mention homosexuality is to risk contaminating oneself with it.

  One could go so far as to argue that these forms were only visible to those (of whatever sexual persuasion) in the work’s audience who saw form itself as an articulating element in art—and that, by the same token, they remained invisible to those who saw only manifest content as defining what a given work of art was “about”; as such, they are part of a code whose complexities are certainly not exhausted by the simple signaling of a possible sexual preference. They have, rather, to do with the figuration of a formalist conception of art itself.

  Even Loveman’s characterization of Voyages (“Whether it be addressed to normal or abnormal sexuality matters little”) is simply an articulate characterization of the erasability of the homosexuality built into the form of the six individual poems in the sequence—just as Loveman’s subsequent citing of Sappho and Shakespeare as his first two writers for comparison—two writers in whom homosexuality may be read in or read out at will and according to a long tradition—implicates his statement within the very genre he is, with the quoted phrase, (dis-) articulating.

  But seldom, of course, are these genre forms or their tropes as pure as I have presented them here. Seldom, indeed, are they as clear as the ones I’ve already located in Crane. The problem with trying to read these texts in the light of current “gay” politics is, however, that they are already figures of an older “homosexual” politics—which, as they metaphorize the silence and the yearning behind the social silence enforced around homosexuality, are (if read “literally” and not “figuratively”) precisely limited, by their writers’ most carefully crafted presentation of the formal conventions, to an articulate statement of homosexuality’s existence—but often of almost nothing more.

  What I’ve described is not the particular form of Whitman’s poems or Melville’s novels—of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Sappho’s fragments. These are not the form of Musil’s Young Törless, of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, of Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. These are all works in which the content is manifestly homosexual—though, in the case of the older works, the same erasural reading of homosexuality congenitally links them, as it were, to the ones described; and in the fifties, occasionally critics tried to dismiss the more recent ones as cautionary case histories, rather than accept them as rich and moving statements—which may well have been the start of a similar dismissive move. But these genre forms do cover, say, Thomas Beer’s 1923 biography Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters.

>   We have gone into this genre (again, if that is what it should be called) in this much detail because Crane from time to time employed it: again, Voyages, “Harbor Dawn,” and “Cutty Sark” (not to mention “This Way Where November . . .” [“White Buildings”] and “Thou Canst Read Nothing . . .” [“Reply”]) are all examples.

  Paradoxically, the existence of such a homosexual genre and its forms as I have described (gay is the last thing one should call them), as well as their problematic, even mythic, status (they could not be talked about for what they were and remain effective in any way; whether or not they actually existed had to be kept in a state of undecidability), may represent one of the largest obstacles in the development of a historically sensitive gay studies faced with the task of diligently teasing out what, in specific examples of such genres, is in excess of their simplistic conventions.

  But today—if only because they are unsubtle and generic—there is no reason for the heterosexual critic, male or female, not to have access to the homosexual reading of the work of a poet such as Crane. If anything, it behooves us, in our enthusiasm as gay critics, occasionally to recall just how much rhetorical energy such writers expended in the employment of these forms to ensure that a heterosexual reading was available for their texts.

  III

  From some thirty years ago I can recall a conversation in which a young poet explained to me how practically every rhetorical aspect of then-contemporary experimental poetry—it was c. 1963—had been foreshadowed forty to forty-five-odd years earlier by T. S. Eliot, either in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” or in The Waste Land. With much page turning and flipping through volumes, it was very impressive.