Geoffrey Clarke

The dedications which romance writers make to their homosocial friends are further evidence of homocentric trends. Others besides, in literature, have dedicated their publications to someone else, of course. The act of dedication of a work toanother has an ill documented background in the annals of English Literature. It was, however, a practice for writers in the Renaissance to dedicate work to an influential or aristocratic person in the hope of material reward or financial benefit.

Sir Philip Sidney was the dedicatee of his school friend Sir Fulke Greville's "Treatise on Monarchy" published in 1670, which work he claims had been "Written in his Youth, and familiar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney," to cite one Elizabethan example. 25. Spenser dedicated his 'Shepheardes Calender' to Sidney also.

The precursors of these dedications are numerous. Tennyson, bewailing the loss of Arthur Hallam as the heroic leader blazoned in glory, dedicated In Memoriam to his memory. The poem envisages a spiritually gifted man who, "moving up from high to higher, / Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope / The Pillar of a world's desire". 26. The title of Haggard and Lang's novel is derived from this literary source dedicated to a male bonding. Their reference to such a preeminently passionate homosocial work clearly sets the tone for the kind of novel they wish to write together.

Together Haggard and Lang dedicated "The World's Desire"to Sir W B Richmond A R A who was a fellow artist at the Royal Academy. Buchan dedicates his adventure romance to Lionel Phillips with the line: 'But in you I think the boy is not over'. While Buchan's dedication is only evocative of the boy in a man and the continuation of that perennial idea of games men play; boyishness in one's desire to play heroes and read adventures, so Lang's dedication to a friend, is an attempt to gain his love and admiration. The coolness of Sir W B Richmond's response to the original request to be a dedicatee suggests a fear of coming out into the open about his sexual proclivities, the danger of which Lang and Haggard are constantly trying to circumvent. All grist to the mill for chaps engaged in double writing on the very edge of respectability and providing for a voyeuristic public.

Haggard dedicated his novel, "King Solomon's Mines", to all the big and little boys who read it, drawing attention, thereby, to its readership; boys with men looking over their shoulder; the boyhood of many a repressed Victorian schoolboy sexually heightened by delighting in prurience.

Henley's preface to "Lyra Heroica" 27. includes the explanation that: "This book of verse for boys is, I believe, the first of its kind in English. " Henley, who salutes Oscar Wilde, the best known of all literary pederasts, as a "scholar and a gentleman", 28. defines its intended readers; boys rather than men. This may appear spurious, but Henley is the most determined of the homosexual writers. His earnest friendships are made, and passionate arguments unfold, with people as diverse as Wilde, Stevenson, Haggard, Lang and Kipling. He employs, suggestively, the notorious homophile, Ross on his journal, 'The Scots Observer' to help him escape from his family.

Andrew Lang dedicated to Haggard a collection of essays,"In the Wrong Paradise", which recalls the pleasure of boy-hood and suggests the desire to return to that state of innocence where sexual escapades are more common and, perhaps more charming: "Dear Rider Haggard, I have asked you to let me put your name here, that I might have the opportunity of saying how much pleasure I owe to your romances. They make one a boy again while one is reading them." In a characteristic remark, Lang in his dedication to Haggard attempts to explain: "We are all savages under our white skins, but you alone recall to us the delights and terrors of the world's nonage."

In the sequel to "King Solomon's Mines", "Allan Quatermain", published in 1887, Haggard dedicated the book to:

"...my son Arthur John Haggard in the hope that in days to come he, and many other boys whom I shall never know, may in the acts and thoughts of Allan Quatermain and his companions, as herein recorded, find something to help him and them to reach to what, with Sir Henry Curtis, I hold to be the highest rank whereto we can attain - the state and dignity of an English gentleman."


The name which he gave his son, "Jock", was his pseudonym for Arthur, the renowned king of fable; and by his dedication to those boys, arguably including Lang, (who contributed an overtly martial, hyper-masculine poem to the novel) who became his sons by reading it, he anticipated they might dis-cover something socially uplifting enough to help them in their journey to become little gentlemen. 29.


Questions remain: why did the authors in question dedicate; to whom were the books dedicated, and who so lovingly? In an effusive tribute written to please a 'homosocialist' Rudyard Kipling dedicated "Barrack Room Ballads" to Wolcott Balestier 30. in embarrassing verses which previously appeared in Henley's paper on 27th. December, 1890, and, on the same day in "St.James's Gazette". The title in Balestier's lifetime was "The Blind Bug" and in the "Barrack Room Ballads" version the last three stanzas have been changed as a tribute to Balestier; a tribute to the man he loved.

Stevenson hotly dedicated "Treasure Island" to "S L O, an American gentleman, in accordance with whose classic taste the following narrative has been designed, it is now, in return for numerous delightful hours, and with the kindest wishes, dedicated by his affectionate friend the author." One wonders what the numerous delightful hours entailed. The dedications were surely an attempt to capture the attention, respect, and admiration of the other and were part of that doubleness of life which collaborators knew and felt for each other in the deepest moments of their cherished collaboration.

It was a sense of privilege, patronage, clubland friendships and homoeroticism which permeated their writing. Patronage has always been a dominant social force in British life. In the nineteenth century it could extend from a means of obtaining employment in the government and the armed forces - jobs for the boys - through to the bestowal of honours and the provision of relief to the middle and upper classes.

The word 'patronage' is used in the OED sense of "the action of a patron in bestowing influential support, favour, encouragement or countenance to a person". It is in this sense that we use it in the context of male literary culture, where it is used as a means of obtaining favour - dedicating works to a superior or more influential patron, which relationship can lead to the promotion of one's literary cause or advance one's chances of publication, and the resultant sales of books. The word is used in the sense of the protection given by a Lord High Admiral or as in the extremely aristocratic case of the Lord Chamberlain's patronage of Shakespeare.

Ben'Johnson, too, who, in his relation with his patrons, was watching for a partly aristocratic milieu in which to operate. He used the aristocratic, and academic worlds, the field of medicine, as a consultant with younger people to further his ambi-tions.

The full scenario of patronage does not cease with the triumph of print, yet the notion of patronage continues as a minor script culture into the age of print. Yet it did bring about new kinds of patronage, especially State patronage, for example, licences, stipends, and suppliers to royalty etc.

John Donne, too, who in his middle years, after overcoming the shock and scandal occasioned by his ravishing of his employer's sixteen-year-old niece, and looking for employment, enters the church, emerges as a star preacher, becomes a journeyman, takes an oath of allegiance and subservience to the Virginia Company where he thrives. His attempts to look for patrons for his work result in two dedications to Sir Robert Jury, one element of which was the looking to him, through personal wants and needs, as a patron.

"It's a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little," was how Mr Vincey in George Eliot's "Middlemarch"described the emotion aroused by the use of patronage which united some families in its service. Yet, not all sections ofsociety were involved, and frequent charges of nepotism werehard to refute. Some, like Dickens, were well aware of thesocial reforms necessary to obviate a system based on friendships, alliances and patronage rather like a vast outdoor relief system run by the Cheeryble brothers.

There was an elaborate Edwardian convention of flowery and extravagant dedications. Yet, there is a contrast to be seen in Joseph Conrad who, in a complicated dedication, which has to do with Conrad's social background as an erotic writer whose bewildering courtesies can break out enormously from his Polish ethnic cultural heritage, is deeply penneated by French culture. 31.

F R Leavis was an eminent critic who perceived Conrad as a'cosmopolitan of French culture', and an even more eminent critic, Hugh Walpole, came to the conclusion that he was unmistakably 'under the influence of the style of the author of Madame Bovary' (Flaubert) particularly in Almayer's Folly. However,since the 1960s Conrad has been increasingly seen as having a'double image' and a 'dual identity', both Polish and English. This concept has been repeatedly underscored by, amongst others, R D Cunninghame Graham in a book on Stephen Crane and his relations with Conrad and by A Cedric Watts in "A Preface to Conrad" where the idea of a double identity is again raised.

Although Conrad claimed to be 'un ecrivain idiomatique en anglais', despite the full-scale attempts which Conrad made to acquire an idiomatic English prose this contention, as Yves Hervouet has shown in a painstaking article which looks at Conrad's English under three headings: lexical items, idiomatic phrases, and grammar, is not borne out, because much of his style appears to be the result of direct translation from the French.

T S Eliot dedicated to Hambro in an elaborate and exotic dedication and Eliot's dedications to Pound are a terser version of his dedications which included a tag from a foreign language to make evident his classical knowledge.

In the nineteenth century the role of editors, literary friendships and camaraderie continued in the world of men's clubs, the tea houses and coffee shops, and the music hall 32. where the bondings of male homosocial passion could continue. The elemental fact of the gentlemen's clubs was that they were "men only" by definition; yet clubland has partly changed its gender classification since the 1890s - there are now some women members, a few women club secretaries, but no roaring fires nor pliant men cashiers. Only in the final decade of the twentieth century does one of the last bastions of the men's clubs, the gentlemen Members' Room at Lords, fall to the ladies, albeit without the right to vote on that most important of matters to the English man - cricket. A full century later women are still struggling to gain admission to clubs such as the Athenaeum, and even in the conceivably more egalitarian United States, cannot gain entry to the Century Club, New York, and the Ivy Club at Princeton University.

Some modem fictional heroes do not belong to clubs at all, but the gentlemen of the period in question in this survey did possess a club and their clubland membership was a factor in their behaviour. The archetypal hero was a "man's man", as I have suggested, and the club offered him a place from which to operate. But there is an essential difference between membership of a club like the Athenaeum, to which Kipling was elected under rule II which permitted special election on the grounds of distinction, and his membership of the Savile, where he felt, according to Angus Wilson, in "The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling" some unease, "where they all made him so welcome and yet saw only aesthetic beauty and humour and stirring metres in his work".

The Athenaeum with its professional class, establishment ethos was the place for Kipling to be seen with Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, and in a reference to such a meeting in a letter to Dr Conland in Battleboro he is skittish about its importance: "And talking of smashes and their results reminds me that we are going to London in a few days to meet Cecil Rhodes at dinner. I think it will be rather larks." 33. But the Athenaeum was a convenient, though forbidding place to meet, for as Kipling wrote to Stanley Weyman: "The Athenaeum (Golly what a club- I've been afraid to enter it for fear the hall porter would kick me out) is good enough for me - and London in Jubilee is unspeakable Tophet." 34.

The Athenaeum club is featured by Rupert Hart-Davis, when he recounts a characteristic description of Kipling by Walpole in his biography Hugh Walpole: "A wonderful moming with old Kipling in the Athenaeum. He was sitting surrounded by the reviews of his new book, beaming like a baby." 35.I

In John Buchanan's Half Hearted there is the first suggestion that Lord this and Lord that made their decisions on foreign policy over coffee at the club, bringing out a gazetteer in the library to decide where the next threat to the home country was emanating from. 36.

The Athenaeum club provided an opportunity, as well as of poring over maps and reference books, of reading the newspapers of the day, such as the dailies the Morning Chronicle, Guardian, Herald, Morning Post, or the Times; the evening papers, the Courier, Globe, Sun, Standard, Albion, or the True Sun and such Sundays as the John Bull, Age, Examiner, Observer, Sunday Times, News Atlas, Spectator, Alfred, or Bell's Messenger, while provincial papers taken included the Cambridge Chronicle, Oxford Journal, Dublin Evening Mail, Edinburgh Courant, or the Scotsman.

Henry James enjoyed membership of a number of London clubs. In 1878 he was elected to membership of the Reform club and he, too, joined the Athenaeum under rule II in 1882 and counted honorary membership of the Savile, the Traveller's and the St. James's among his club memberships. Montgomery Hyde explained in Henry James at Home how:

"he would repair to dinner after a hard day's writing in his lodgings, an additional advantage, since the dinner was 'good and cheap' in comparison with London restaurants whose badness is literally fabulous. For Henry the Athenaeum was 'the last word of a high civilisation'." 37.

Writers' clubs included the Omar Khayam Club, the Athenaeum, the New Vagabonds Club, the Rhymers Club, the Savile Club and the Rabelais Club organised by Walter Besant in 1880,and included George Du Maurier, Thomas Hardy, Bret Harte, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Henry Irving, Henry James, James Payn and Robert Louis Stevenson amongst its clientele.

Smoking was not generally permitted in the Athenaeum until1924, and then only in the drawing room after 1.30 pm, because members were more in favour of the habit of taking snuff. Snuff boxes were provided from which members could take their supply and if any member desperately wanted to smoke he had to repair to an attic room.

But the consumption of beer and wine was copious, there were billiards, chess and card games and it was always possible to cash a cheque with the cashier or go to sleep in its deep and commodious armchairs.

Yet any discussion of the clubland ethos would have to take into account the fact that the gentleman's club was a distinct type of aristocratic hearthland and has its origins in late eighteenth century squirearchy and developed into the middle twentieth century as the decided home of the establishment; military, civil service, clerical, diplomatic, colonial, cultural, artistic, literary, sporting etc.

The tendency of these correspondences, dedications, teachers, interpreters, clublands, tea and coffee houses, music halls, until they were pushed out by the rise of English as a subject in universities, a quite late occurrence, 38. stems from reviewers such as Lord Jeffrey one of the founders of the "Edinburgh" which continued publishing until 1929, and other late eighteenth century reviews such as the "Monthly Review" and the "Critical Review".

The distinctive kind of literariness of the period with its chatty allusiveness to books, points towards the theme of bookiness as being a way of life; life as a literary joumey recorded in "The Bookman" and "Longman's Magazine" to which Andrew Lang contributed 1,920 quarto pages in the eighties and early nineties, "At the Sign of the Ship" and "At the Sign of St. Paul's", its erstwhile sequel in the "Illustrated London News". By the time "Longman's" ceased publication in the nineties Lang had already contributed 250 short pieces between 1891 and 1896, and a weekly 'chat-line' "From a Scottish Workshop", during most of 1896. There is a suggestion about a distinctive kind of literariness of this joumal, with its quaint "Letters to Dead Authors" which purported to be imaginary correspondence with characters in contemporaneous works of fiction, or perhaps, conversations between say, Sir Isaac Walton and the characters in The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian, Evangelist, Mr Worldly Wiseman, Goodwill, Mr Legality, Obstinate, Pliable, Interpreter, Formalist, Hypocrisy etc. 39.

Members of both literary clubs, the Savile and the Piccadilly included William Henley, Henry Butcher, Andrew Lang, Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and Henry James, but not Oscar Wilde. Wilde has been sponsored for membership of the Savile but was blackballed, ie prevented from joining by a ballot of members, whilst James insisted that he was not one of his friends, although it was he who had sponsored Wilde for membership.

C S Lewis has characterised this shared professional ethos and the directions in which it can branch where he speaks of "that gang" or "They" or "So and so and his set" or "the Caucus" or "the Inner Ring". Such categories are essential to the well-being of societies and are immediately recognisable to insiders. Late Victorian fiction is full of such inner rings and of the attempts of fictional characters to penetrate them, only to discover that they consist of - society. 40.

W E Henley was a generous and encouraging editor, and as a non-aristocrat he expected to advance the commercial aspect of a relationship. He was, as a publisher, author and editor, on exactly the same sell/buy relationship with one person as any other. We have, in the words of W B Yeats, a suggestion of Henley's secret life; a life of the literary salons. He recounts how Henley:


"alarmed me and impressed me exactly as he did those others who were called Henley's young men, and even today [when I meet] someone among them, showing perhaps the first sign of age, we recognise at once the bond. We have as it were a secret in common; that we have known a man whose powers no others can know because it has not found expression in words. I have never cared for anything in Henley's poetry except those early gay verses in the measure of Villon, and I know that their charm was the image of that other man's face." 41.


Kipling wrote an angry, violent poem after Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule party was vindicated of the crime of inciting and condoning political murder with letters to prove it. But the letters, supposedly written by Parnell to The Times about the murder of the newly appointed Irish secretary were, after some theatrical juridical events, in February 1889, exposed as forgeries written by one Piggot, who subsequently committed suicide. Parnell emerged triumphant and Kipling's poem, which supported Parnell, suggesting that he may not have perpetrated the forgeries was sympathetic. At the end of December, 1889, Captain O'Shea, the estranged husband of Mrs O'Shea, named Parnell as co-respondent in his divorce petition. The undefended case brought Parnell to ruin and he died in1891. It was an example of Kipling's poetical gratitude in such cases of secular high drama.


Patronage was all part of the 'Boy', ethos of late nineteenth century public life as exemplified by figures like Cecil Rhodes who was, if Martin Seymour-Smith's account is credible 42. a repressed homosexual whom Charles Carrington, Haggard's biographer, called a man "unmoved by women; Ruskin whom Kipling championed and patronised in Stalky, and Kipling himself who was genitally homosexual in his proclivities; men who used their sense of sexual camaraderie for the purposes of bestowing and receiving favours. There can be little doubt, even if Seymour-Smith is engaged in massive exaggeration, that the striking features of late Victorian fiction were its emotional focusing on and its homosocial featuring of boys and the public school; a fiction which engaged in a rhetoric of male chauvinism and paternalism with its romantic assertions of masculinity in all its primitive, innocent strength and virtue, but which began to show an anxiety about the next generation of men after the disastrous defeats of the Boer War.

There is an apparent pressure to portray and explain boyhoodand nascent masculinity as mutually inclusive and of equivalentvalue. Herein we can observe definitions of appropriate sexual behaviour defining acceptable hero images of the kind valued in male orientated clublands, praising a work ethic and superiority over social and cultural inferiors, and most importantly over women.

The notion of attempting to instruct boys in masculinity is to be seen as part of the changing pattern of attitudes in late Victorian times to sexual difference. It was Ruskin who appeared to reinforce existing codes of masculinity and femininity in his lecture delivered at the Exhibition Palace, Dublin, entitled 'The Mystery of Life and its Arts' and published under the general title of Sesame and Lilies, where he observed and studied children at play in a garden: "And the children were happy for a while, but presently they separated themselves into parties; and then each party declared it would have a piece of the garden for its own, and that none of the others should have anything to do with that piece."

"Next," he went on to say, "they quarrelled violently whichpieces they would have; and at last the boys took up the thing," and here he shows his colours - "as boys should do, 'practically', and fought in the flower beds till there was hardly a flower left standing; then they trampled down each other's bits of the garden out of spite;" now out beams the revealing highlight "and the girls cried till they could cry no more; and so they all lay down at last breathless in the ruin, and waited for the time to be taken home in the evening." 43.

Such were the accepted norms of behaviour for boys (and girls) which were codified into imperial literature by authors who, like the masters in John Betjeman's highly nostalgic and richly evocative prose poem Summoned by Bells, 44. were still "big boys at heart". In life, boys were expected to trample and contend for kingdoms, as Ruskin explained in his note to the piece, and girls, it would seem, were supposed to adhere to stereotypes of rabid emotionalism and chaotic destructiveness.

More specifically, Ruskin defined man's power as "active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention, his energies for adventures, for war and for conquest." 45.

Fictively, boys were the achievers and girls the non-achievers. They were rugged and hardy and especially adventurous, while girls were sensitive and easily given to sobbing, stay-at-homes. The athleticism which these boys displayed on the rugby field and the cricket pitch was symptomatic of their general fitness, strength and team spirit. The progression to Oxbridge and the army was the natural step in their evolution into 'little imperialists'.

As the historian John Boswell explained, "boy" was the euphemistic Victorian codeword for the male lover as "lad" was in A E Housman's generation. 46. For Housman, death is the neatest solution to the 'medical' problem of male love. As he advised in A Shropshire Lad:


"Shot? so quick, so clean an ending
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:
Yours was not an ill for mending."


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, too, satisfied himself that he had achieved what he had set out to do in the field of fictive boyhood in his epigraph to the story entitled The Lost World:


"I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who's half a man
And the man who's half a boy."


The definitions of the gradations between the masculine and the feminine allows us to draw a line, if only a very thin one, between where one sex begins and another ends. There is, biologically, a signficant difference between the male and the female, but a definition which allows us to see this statement in the light of the borderline in sexuality between the consummate man and the perfect woman as being infinitesimal can be drawn from Bram Stoker in 'Dracula':


"the ideal man is entirely or almost entirely masculine and the ideal woman is entirely or almost entirely feminine. Each individual must have a preponderance, be it ever so little, of the cells of its own sex, and the attraction of eachi ndividual to the other depends upon its place on the scale between the highest and lowest grade of sex. The most masculine man draws the most feminine woman, and vice versa; and so down the scale till close to the borderline in the great mass of persons, who, having only developed a few of the qualities of sex, are easily satisfied to mate with anyone."

The concept of excessive masculinity is hard to divorce from imperial homosocial fiction. What were seen by many as the moral and physical beauty of athleticism 47. and the Spartan ideal of Stoicism, whose allegedly salutary effects are still promoted by the Headmaster of Gordonstoun school, may well have been the virtues which the public schools identified as characterising the imperial attitude.

Such formative powers were explained by Reverend Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham school as "The learning to be responsible and independent, to bear pain, to play the game, to drop rank, and wealth, and some luxury". He declared enthusiastically that "it is this which has made the English such an adventurous race; and that with all their faults... the public schools are the cause of this 'manliness"'. 48.

Dr. Almond of Loretto school, Edinburgh, delivered a sermon entitled, "The Conservation of the Body" in Christ the Protestant and other Sermons (Blackwood 1899 pp 150-151). His concept of a public schoolboy produced by public schools such as his was:


"wholesome and manly, carrying the hammer of the cross to distant lands, and with strong arm, iron will and earnest purpose winning Christian victories among the natives..."


Homoerotic writing and misogyny combine in the aesthetic of the sub genre of Victorian adventure fiction. Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed appears to exalt Dick Heldar's masculinity and applauds a type of anti-feminism on Kipling's part. The excessive masculinity of the three painters, Dick Heldar, Torpenhow, and the strangely named Nilghai, is seen as a counter-weight to the female characterisation which demonstrates largelya proud selfcentredness. Maisie is a young woman with an unnatural heart who will not forego her desire for success as an artist to be the happy wife and mother which conventional plots demand. On the night that Dick becomes blind male togetherness replaces the need for acute sympathy and understanding by the heroine. Whilst the need to touch and hold is overpowering, there still remains, paradoxically, a military tone to the relationship which later proves fatal:


"Lie down. It's all over now."
Yes,' said Dick obediently. 'But would you mind letting me hold your hand? I feel as if I wanted something
to hold on to. One drops through the dark so.'

Torpenhow thrust out a large and hairy paw from the long chair. Dick clutched it tightly, and in half an hour had fallen asleep. Torpenhow withdrew his hand, and, stooping over Dick, kissed him lightly on the forehead, as men do some-times kiss a wounded comrade in the hour of death to ease his departure." 49.


The portrait of the red-haired girl in "The Light that Failed" does afford the occasional glimpse of a more substantial human being, as she compassionately proposes marriage to Dick after his blindness. Yet the red-haired girl is not allowed a role as an emergingly liberated woman with rights and feelings commensrate with her status in what purported to be an emergingly liberal and democratic society. Dick, Torpenhow and Nilghai are all given to misogynistic attacks. Denying that a woman can be "a piece of one's life", Torpenhow states that she cannot be and makes the astonishing claim that a woman is capable of sending round "five notes a day to ask why the dickens you haven't been wasting your time with her". In his invented 'Song of the Sea', Torpenhow, incomprehensibly, claims that men, in paying their farewells to their wives as they take to the boats, would compare them unfavourably with their salty first love and appears to believe, unfeelingly, that the women still sleep more soundly in their beds in the menfolk's absence:


"Ye that love us, can ye move us?
She is dearer than ye;
And your sleep will be the sweeter
Said The Men of the Sea."


When womenfolk are to be 'Other', that is other than normal, the choice falls either on a 'Yellow Tina' or on a Cuban Jewish Afro-American. Women are usually shown in opposition to the life of action and adventure in which they cannot, as in normal life, partner men. Mothers are a source of blame for the events which occur to men in the hurly burly of life. Torpenhow has to be sent away, drunk, from the attentions of the prostitute, Bessie, and in Kipling's aesthetic the true artist is always male; the unsuccessful, grey-clad artist, Maisie, a figure of failure and a rejecter of suitors out of mean close spiritedness.

Not all of Kipling's portraits paint a picture of women which could be considered misogynistic. The highly acclaimed Without Benefit of Clergy, as Sandra Kemp discovered in her preparatory reading for the very useful study Kipling's Hidden Narratives, 50. does not engage in such malfeasance, and is rather sensitive about the female in general.

Turning again to the question of sensitivity towards the male, in antiquity a distinction was made by the Greeks between the love between males as being divine or idyllic, thus related to the gods, and the actions between males which we term homosexual, in the sense of physical, bodily intercourse between two people of the same gender as being lewd, carnal and base.

Platonic discourses deal with the traditional questions of the relation between the loved boy and the master. However, in the final pages of the Symposium there is a reversal of roles whereby the master becomes the subject of the attentions of Alcibiades,(sic) Charmides, Euthydemus and others. They chase after him and attempt to seduce him but what they do not realise is that So-crates is submitting them to a test in a game called Eros. What is revealed by the test is that they love Socrates only to the extent by which he is able to resist their advances. This means that he is moved by the power of true love. His powers are those of physical endurance, the ability to resist sensations, and the power of extra physical sensory perception. These powers ensure the domination Socrates is able to maintain over himselfand thereby enable him to lead the boy to the knowledge of truth.

We have, later, in Spenser's "Shephearde's Calender" in a glossary to the month of January, a definition of the difference between love of a man's soul or being as opposed to carnal, lewd, bodily contact between men :


"In thys place seemeth to be some sauour of disorderly love, which the learned call paederastice; but it is gathered beside his meaning. For who that hath red Pluto his dialogue called Alcybiades Xenophon and Maximus Tyrius of Socrates opinions, may easily perceive, that such loue is muche to be alowed and liked of, specially so meant, as Socrates vsed it: who sayth, that in deede he loued Alcybiades extremely, yet not Alcybiades person, but hys soule, which is Alcybiades owne selfe. And so is paederastice much to be praeferred to before gynerastice, that is the loue whiche enflameth men with lust toward woman kind. But yet let no man thinke, that herein I stand with Lucian or hys deuilish disciple Vnico Aretino, in defence of execrable and horrible sinnes of forbidden and vnlawful fleshlinesse. Whose abominable errour is fully confuted of Peronius and others." 51.


The emergence of a homosocial sub-culture before the Restoration period is recorded by Allan Bray in "Homosexuality in Renaissance England" where he shows that there was oppression of male homosexuality before the late seventeenth century and, indeed pograms against homosexual men after 1675:


"It is not that homosexuality was more fiercely disapproved of. There is no evidence whatsoever of any absolute increase in hostility to homosexuality... The change is not absolute but rather in the extent to which people actually came up against that hostility; and the reason for the change is not in the hostility but in its object. There was now a continuing culture to be fixed on and an extension of the area in which homosexuality could be expressed and thereforie recognised; clothes, gestures, language, particular buildings and particular public places - all could be identifed as having specifically homosexual connotations." 52.


Indeed, Walt Whitman explores the difference between the louche practice of manly genital homosexuality and the idea of male coquetry with John Addington Symonds where he replies to the query on "exactly what he means by 'Calamus' and whether, in his propagation of the gospel of comradeship, he has taken into account the physical aspects of manly 1ove." His reply to Symonds was "violently reactionary - is strong and brutal for no, no, no". His final reply:


"that the calamus part has been allow'd the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible - I am fain to hope themselves are not to be even mention'd for such gratuitous and quite at the time entirely undream'd & unreck'd possibility of morbid inferences - wh'are disavow'd by me and seems damnable." 53.


This quotation has proved to be a long lasting Anglo-American definition of attitude to male homosexuality.

Andre Gide's profoundly libertarian approach to the question of homosexuality as propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre in his dialogues with Simone de Beauvoir in Adieux 54. appears to be nonchalantly prosaic about the contacts made:


"For example, I remember Gide talking to me about a Dutchman who had come to ask him for an address... He was a married man who found that he had homosexual inclinations and he came to ask me about all this, and you would have said he took me for a pederast in spite of the mistake I had made in speaking of advice, whereas it was a question of something else.

De Beauvoir: "You said to him, "Did he come to ask you for advice?" and Gide replied,"No! For addresses."


When it came to a mandate to enforce propriety in the arguably humorous situation of British bell tent night life Basil Henriques, in a manual on club leadership, was sure of his ground:


"Every responsible leader has to be alert for any signs of homosexual tendencies in his voluntary helpers. By the very nature of things, such men are often extremely popular with the boys. If the leader has the slightest suspicion of it, he must get the man out. He dare not wait until it is too late. The utmost tact has to be exerted, especially as the leader may be wrong in his surmise. When, however, there are grounds for suspicion, he must quite openly forbid the helper from entering the club or having any correspondence with any of the members. It may even be necessary to threaten further action if his wishes are not implicitly complied with.

After all, the duty of the leader is to train his helpers even as he tries to train his members." 55.


Shame be to he who evil there thinks, and yet...as Terry Eagleton has pointed out in "Literary Theory", (Oxford 1983), it is possible to read rules and regulations in differing ways. The prosaic, pedestrian notices placed near a London Underground escalator, eg "Dogs must be carried on the escalator", are open to ambiguity by only a modicum of thought; to take a different example from Eagleton's, "Stand on the Right", could perhaps be a political slogan, an exhortation to keep to traditional values, an indication that there is a place on one side to hang one's hat, or arguably the means of preventing any ascension by travellers at all: Basil Henriques' pristine, diamond like quality of moral force is open to reinterpretation if only a slight note of ambiguity is interjected, as the Ealing Film industry's productions will testify. Rules and regulations for human conduct are traditionally flaunted in liberal, democratic society on all sides while Henriques' attempts to legislate on and codify matters of the utmost privacy now seem embarrassing.