Longer Views (44 page)

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 “Albertine” (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.

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.

If any factor contributed most to the image of Crane the lyricist-sometimes-too-ambitious, it was his prosody. Eliot—and Pound, of the quintessentially experimental
Cantos
—was half in and half out of the traditional English language iambic pentameter measure. And when they were in it, they were often working mightily to make it vanish under the hyper-rhythms of the most ordinary speech. (“What thou lovest well remains . . .,” that most famous passage in
The Pisan Cantos
[Canto 81], though written in classical hexameters, strives to rewrite itself in blank tetrameter.) Crane often used a loose pentameter, however, to flail himself as far away from the syntax and diction of common speech as he could get and not have comprehension crumble entirely beneath him.

At that time, probably few would have called Crane's poetry “experimental.” By the late fifties or early sixties (after the 1958 reprinting of his poems), Crane seemed a vivid, intense lyricist, whose poems, a little more frequently than was comfortable, lapsed over into the incomprehensible. Gertrude Stein's considerable effect was felt almost entirely within the realm of prose. Pound and Eliot were still the models for poetic experimentation among the young. And one suspected that any experiment whose rhetorical model could not be found within them was an experiment that had failed—by definition.

Once Eliot first published them in 1917's “Prufrock,” for the next fifty years couplets like

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

and

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled

astonished young writers again and again with their LaForguian bathos. Like many poets of the twenties, Crane had followed Eliot back to LaForgue; he'd early-on translated “Three
Locutions Des Pierots
” from LaForgue's French.

One of the first poems where Crane thought about responding to Eliot—one of the first to which he committed the whole of his poetic abilities and in which he first began to create lines that regularly arrived at the a-referential form we now think of as characteristic of him—was “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” But if this poem sounds like anything to the modern ear, it sounds more like a pastiche of Eliot's “Prufrock” than a critique of it.