Because Symonds is just that good. Here are some passages from his essay “Culture: Its Meaning and Its Uses,” which appears in In the Key of Blue and Other Essays (1893) and is one of my favorite things in the Symonds corpus.
I have no wish to enter here into the controversy which has been carried on between scientific men and humanists as to the relative educational value of their methods. Nor do I want to touch upon the burning question as to whether the classics will have to be abandoned in our schools…. Ideal culture involves both factors; and this ideal was to some extent realised in Goethe. Few men—none, indeed—can hope now to exercise themselves completely in both branches. We have to choose between the alternatives of a literary or a scientific training. Still, the points of contact between humanism and science are so numerous that thorough study compels us to approach literature scientifically and also to pursue science in a humane spirit. The humanist remembers that his department is capable of being treated with something like the exactitude which physical research demands. The man of science bears in mind that he cannot afford to despise imagination and philosophy. Both poetry and metaphysic, upon the one hand, contributed to the formation of the evolutionary hypothesis. Without habits of strict investigation, on the other hand, we should not possess the great historical works of the nineteenth century, its discoveries in comparative philology, its ethnological theories and inquiries into primitive conditions of society.
I must repeat that culture is not an end in itself. It prepares a man for life, for work, for action, for the reception and emission of ideas. Life itself is larger than literature, than art, than science. Life does not exist for them, but they for life.
True culture is never in a condescending attitude. It knows that no kind of work, however trivial, ought to be regarded with contempt. People who carve cherry-stones, dance ballets, turn rondeaux, are as much needed as those who till the soil, construct Cabinets, or fabricate new theories of the universe. True culture respects hand-labour upon equal terms with brain-labour, the mechanic with the inventor of machinery, the critic of poetry with the singer of poems, the actor with the playwright. The world wants all sorts, and wants each sort to be of the best quality.
This letter, which Symonds wrote to his sister on New Year’s Eve, 1882, is worth quoting in full. Charlotte Symonds was far more religious than her brother, and his letters to her often make use of a religious language that he doesn’t use with any of his other correspondents. I like that he takes this language—which he is certainly using not for himself, but to try to help out a sister mourning the recent death of her husband—and does something beautiful with it all the same:
Am Hof Davos Platz Dec. 31 1882
My dearest Charlotte
On this last day of the year, which has been so bitterly full of sorrow to you, and to myself has brought many sad things, I write to wish you the greater happiness which will assuredly come with time. I am not an orthodox Christian, as the word is understood. That is, I cannot cling to the historical interpretation of the Christian dogmas. But I try to cling to their spirit. And when St. Paul says that our life must be built upon faith hope & love, I cordially accept that definition. We must have faith that the world is ordered by a beneficent intelligence, a Father. We must have hope that we shall comprehend its scheme & our own trials better. We must have love for all that is so beautiful & vigorous in the world without & the human lives around us.
This creed appears to me the creed on which the earlier Church based its regeneration of society. A passionate belief in Christ was the coping-stone of their endeavour. We have lost something, possibly, of that passion. But we have lost nothing of the truth wh it contained & consecrated. The conditions of our existence are less dreadful. There is no tyrannous Roman Empire, no universal penetrating corruption of society. We understand the physical world better, & read the history of man upon this planet more precisely. And yet abide these three; by which yet let us live; & hoping believing loving wait the revelation of God’s greatness.
I am not sure; but I rather think that what I have here sketched would be in accord with what Tom [her late husband, TH Green] much more deeply felt & thought.
It has come to me from life. It came to him from life & from reflection upon life & from a far nobler experience of life than mine—less mixed with sordid passions.
But let us all arrive at it upon the paths appointed for us severally.
The end of the doctrine, the practical application of the creed, is that we should live triumphantly in faith, hope, love.
What remains of years to us upon this earth is numbered and is short. What awaits us beyond is unknown, unguessed; possibly, nay probably, stupendous. Let us in the intermediate space of time do our duty, and resign ourselves, in no sour spirit of dejection, but in joyful, God-embracing spirit of expectancy, to what the coming days shall bring us.
You say the prosperous people are rather trying. I think they are. I am not prosperous. I feel what you feel; but I try to bless God for their prosperity. It is part of the beauty of the world. We may stand aside and rejoice with them in their happiness. If they ever need our consolation, we can give it.
The great thing for us is to remember that the human soul contains God on this planet. It becomes a duty for us to preserve the soul, which is God’s temple and God’s revelation to the world, inviolate. Later or sooner, all of us shall surely meet in God. Of this I am persuaded. This faith gives me hope for myself and love for the most prosperous, the most abject and abandoned of my fellow-men.
If you ever want a change, a rest, come to us. I see that you have been half moved to come. I am not sure that you would find a bed of roses here. There are many thorns in our lot; not the least those thorns which our own indomitable passions thrust forth. I am irritable from ill-health and constant aspiration—kicking against the pricks of physical debility. You would find here no stagnant calm, rather the surf and surge of life in its intensity of suffering and action. I have ever doubted whether our home, with its dramatic vitality, isolated, uncircumscribed by rules and precedents, would not be more painful than restful to you. And yet I think it might be good. I think you might do good here.
God bless you. God grant us all, not peace, but activity in fuller certitude of His presence.
And as for me, my task is twofold. I must first live in hope and charity/love and faith-in-humanity with no such certainty, with no such belief in an afterlife or an eternal reward. And I must then understand another time, another way of thinking, when men like Symonds or Green looked out the window of the Upper Reading Room at the Radcliffe Camera, as I do now, and professed a faith in God that was inviolable.
It is quarter till 10 on Monday night, and I am curled up in an armchair exhausted. My nerves are frayed; I spent most of today burning with anger. It began before lunch, when, while banging out a mediocre essay for a tutorial on the question “To what extent did nationalism become a mass right-wing movement after 1870?” I realized that not a single book on my reading list was published after 1993, and not a single one was written by a woman. Of course, the first thing I did was look back at the footnotes of the essays I’ve written so far this term: in three essays, each with about 15 footnotes, I’d cited two women, neither of whom was a historian. My essay topics in both General History 1856-1914 and Disciplines, the Oxford history methods class, seem to assume that evolution in historical methods stopped around the mid-90s; General History, in particular, some chronological segment of which all history students have to take, seems preoccupied with dead white men. Of the six essay topics I’ve been given, none lends itself easily to the discussion of anything other than high-political history, and institutions to which women in the years 1856-1914 were denied access. Though I suppose this history is as orthodox as they come, it’s not what I’ve grown accustomed to understanding as the kind of history expected of me on the other side of the Atlantic, with its premium on originality, on primary-source research, on the significance of race, class, and gender, and on giving undergraduates a sense of what it is like to do history professionally today. Granted, this is probably more about Princeton, with its emphasis on independent work, than it is about the U.S.—but General History seems like a powerful step backwards in time. It’s nice to know what it would have been like to read modern history back when the subject was first introduced to this university, I suppose; but at the same time reading history in Oxford in 2011 should not be a time machine in itself. I am sure the whole café heard me at 4:30 this afternoon as, unable to get anything done for the past five hours out of stupefaction at the fact that not one of the seventeen books and articles on my reading list this week was written by a woman or in the past fifteen years, I ranted to my friends about how behind this university is, what a poor sense of what academic history is it is sending to its students, what it must be like to be a female Oxford undergrad for whom unbalanced reading lists like these are normal. I said unequivocally for I think the first time ever that I am glad I am getting my B.A. in the U.S.—that if I were doing it here, I would assuredly not only not be ready for grad school, I might not even think that it was possible for someone like me to be a historian.
And so anger fueled me back to the library from the café, anger made me stare at the computer screen and not be able to focus on the words or the ideas, and anger propelled me swiftly back and forth on my errands, through dinner, through more fierce unfocused staring. The tension didn’t dissipate until just now, when I read a pair of companion pieces in this week’s Princeton Alumni Weekly that respond to the findings of the Princeton Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership about gender inequality on my home campus. Now, as Tony Grafton pointed out in his must-read Prince column today, the situation for women in Princeton, both students and faculty/staff, has gotten only better since 1969; in many ways, it is miles ahead of what I have encountered in the academic conservatism of Oxford. But in the PAW, Christine Stansell, one of the earliest Princeton alumnae, later a faculty member in the Princeton history department, and now a very eminent women’s history scholar at Chicago, reminds us with striking eloquency of the continuities as much as the changes—shoring up the accuracy with which the report from the CUWL pinpointed issues of persistent gender inequality on campus. And my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, winner of this year’s Pyne Prize (Princeton’s highest undergraduate honor) for her work advancing the cause of feminism on campus, tells an inspiring story of her own hard work to make Princeton a better place, and her belief that as an institution it can become better. Reading the testimonies of Amelia and Prof. Stansell, I felt my anger at my reading list and the essay I spent much of today not writing melt away. Prof. Stansell, who got through Princeton at a time when it was not good to be a woman there and went on to have the kind of professional life that serves as a role model for aspiring historians like me, and Amelia, who has refused to believe that our work is done just because Princeton is a better place for women than it was when Prof. Stansell was an undergrad, reminded me something absolutely critical: that we convince by our presence.
And so if I want not only to be better, but to make things better, I need not to wallow in anger. Instead, I need to collect my thoughts, and I need to write a good, interesting, historically rigorous essay about nationalism. And then I need to walk into my tutorial on Wednesday and inquire of my tutor why my reading list is giving the impression that there are no women historians. And then I need to remember that when I have worked as hard as I can to be the best historian I can possibly be, and am still not satisfied with that, then I will be in a position to be a woman historian who stands before lecture halls of undergraduates, who mentors young women and young men who may or may not want to be historians themselves, whose books break up the monotony of male names on reading lists, who writes into the Princeton Alumni Weekly 40 years from now to remind the readers that our work is not yet done. From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs: I know what I can contribute to changing the culture of academic institutions. Sometimes there is a place in the world for teleologies—such as when day by day, step by step, slowly but surely, I can do my part to bend the arc of progress forward.
The week after I arrived in Oxford, months ago now (gosh, that’s strange to say!) I attended the first formal dinner of this whole strange experience, and a couple weeks afterward I found myself writing a long post that attempted to puzzle through and come to terms with the culture shock that dinner occasioned. As your average American academic brat, I grew up attending dinner parties and reading the kinds of books and watching the kinds of movies where the etiquettes of attire, successive courses, and too many forks are deployed. When I came to Princeton, I attended the odd awards dinner or some such thing where I put what I’d learned into practice, making small talk, using my forks and knives correctly, and agonizing too much over the ambiguities of gender-specific dress codes. But as much as I thought I knew how to navigate academic dinners, I found myself stupefied by the performance of pretentious formality that gets carried out every Friday night in Trinity’s dining hall, by sparkly dresses and port and being waited on at table by young women my own age who I felt certain loathed the posh-accented people getting drunk around them. As I processed the experience of that first “Guest Night,” as this production is known, I felt ashamed, ashamed of the fact that I had been complicit in the perpetration of the remnants of the English class system.
Time went on—a term passed—and I got to know more people in Trinity who felt the way I did, left-wingers who greeted these productions with an embarrassed ironic distance and yet managed to take them for what they were and have a good time. I went to another formal dinner, for all the history students hosted by the college history fellows; and when my father came to visit I took him to my second Guest Night. I paced myself, feat-of-endurance-like, through four-course meals; I learned to do the same for massive, by my standards, quantities of red and white and port and sherry. And I went several times a week to normal formal halls, wearing my gown and standing for the Latin grace and turning the alienating thing into something I could value, something that put me closer to understanding Symonds’ Oxford and something that got me out of the library and talking to the people sitting near me for at least an hour a day. I’d look at the portrait of John Henry Newman in Trinity hall and think about another time, another Oxford, and wonder where I as a woman academic stand in relation to it—like Guest Night itself, wanting to understand and yet feeling an irreconcilable distance all the same.
Last week, my friend told me she had an extra ticket for the MCR Gala, Trinity’s annual black-tie banquet for the graduate student body, and would I like to go? I leapt at the chance, and in the days leading up to the event, which was yesterday, I could hardly contain my excitement. I’ve been working hard; I was longing for a celebration; and parties with good friends are always fun. I went out and bought a dress, the first dress I have bought since my high-school prom—ready to play the black-tie game properly, to act the role (with appropriate sense of irony, of course) of one of those Bright Young Things in the costume dramas I’ve always salivated over. I bought my “Big Issue” magazine from the homeless man in front of Blackwell’s on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I dressed for dinner. The epithet “champagne socialist” couldn’t possibly have been more apt, I realized, as I started the evening by drinking a glass of champagne and spent the third course bonding with my friend over the large-looming role of the socialist musical and cultural tradition in our upbringings. We talked about how it had made us feel a bit nostalgic, a bit homesick, to see a little May Day trade-unions rally in front of the Bodleian last weekend, and we shared in a sense of outrage about how much sexism there still is in academia. But the ugly juxtaposition of this political sentiment with what we were doing while we said it didn’t really strike home until the President of our college made a rambling after-dinner speech that made several bad jokes at the grad students’ expense, but no reference to the idea that what they do is intellectually important and worth doing; and which in an instance of tastelessness that frankly fills me with disgust and I think is absolutely inexcusable in a retired senior British diplomat, made not only a joke about the death of Osama bin Laden, but a joke whose apparent humor rested on said retired senior British diplomat “accidentally” confusing the names “Obama” and “Osama.” I gaped, speechless and outraged, at my friends while the room erupted into laughter around us. A few minutes later, when someone in the room was, honest to God, “sconced” for supposed “offenses” including speaking in a foreign language, the compartments I’d built in my mind to rationalize my enjoyment of the idea of a black-tie dinner came crashing down. I could see, clearly, why events like these are a big part of the access and equality problems Oxford and Cambridge continue to have. I was embarrassed at myself for being complicit in this sort of nonsense, and embarrassed on behalf of a college and to some extent (though less so) a university that should really, in this day and age, know better.
Like so many things I have been part of since coming to Oxford, all this is not really unique to Oxford, Oxbridge, or England. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and there are unquestionably people in Princeton who behave the way some of the people in Trinity did last night. I have often said that it may be better to be served at table rather than having the kitchen staff hidden away behind servery counters and kitchen walls as they are in the halls at Princeton, just as it may be better to have your bins emptied by someone who comes into your room, whom every morning you need to have a conversation with and whose name you need to know—in Princeton, where the bins are emptied at six in the morning, I have never been awake to ask the name of the person who empties mine. And just because at Trinity displays of wealth and privilege are events that anyone can attend does not mean that the ones that occur at Princeton behind the walls of eating clubs or in the rooms of fraternity, sorority, and certain student organization members are any less insidious. I have been fortunate in finding friends at Princeton who don’t buy into this nonsense, just as I have at Trinity, but the absurdities of last night’s dinner, and the culture shock of my first Guest Night, take me back to the inferiority I felt in my first semester at Princeton, when I was acutely aware that I was not as suave or as smooth-talking as my fellow members of certain student organizations who came from money and had been to prep school. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and if on the one hand that means that once you’ve learned the rules of academia you’re set, it also means that you will find these ugly underbellies wherever you go too. The best thing I can say for the rest of the halls of privilege is that I have never in my life heard anyone who holds academic power say anything as tasteless while speaking in an official capacity as what the President of Trinity said last night, nor do I come from a university culture where faculty and administrators are so obviously complicit in and present at their students’ excesses.
But where does that leave us? Well, it leaves me having to make the awful confession that for all this, I still get a kick out of dressing up like a woman and drinking champagne, and that I would do it again, especially if it were in an environment where I could more readily forget about the ugliness of the display of wealth and privilege. And it also leaves me thinking back to a late, humid New Jersey night a year ago, at the end of the weekend of Reunions that is Princeton’s most grandiose display of money and privilege, when I sated the nausea produced by the parade of alumni classes and their mass consumption of the second-largest annual alcohol order in America by dancing to Madonna in a dark basement with my friends. After Reunions, I got my Princeton back by going to the LGBT alumni’s party, the last event of the weekend. And it wasn’t so much that it was teh gayz, as it was people I knew and loved, and songs that a cultural tradition I adore and respect has adopted as anthems of not-belonging, of survival, and of pride. I will never forget the glowing realization on the face of one of my friends, newly come out, as he realized that he was in a room full of people who, like him, knew all the words to “Like a Prayer”—that, for reasons greater than this, he wasn’t alone. Whether I myself ever participate in Reunions as an alumna, the Princeton that can do that is the Princeton I want to remember.
And so it was late last night, after the MCR gala, when my friends and I with a sense of escape betook ourselves to a gay bar and danced until after 3 in the morning. The air humid after the first rainfall in weeks, all of us dancing as if for our lives in a dimly-lit room permeated by flashing colored lights, gave me back my university experience, my sense of what it means to be a young person, my self-constructed, adopted cultural compass. The DJ played “It’s Raining Men” that night, a song that recalls for me the youthful glee of dance-party protests against the National Organization for Marriage, of road trips up and down I-95, of seeing Martha Wash perform it at Pride that fateful summer in Washington, DC. There are no gay bars in Princeton. There is no reason I would ever have to wear black tie there. But turning my face to the ceiling and laughing aloud while shouting the words to my favorite gay anthem, still in my ankle-length dress and my jewelry and my high-heeled pumps, I felt a powerful sense of continuity. We make our own worlds, our own communities, our own senses of ownership and control. We adopt our own anthems—whether the solidarity stems from the sentiments of the Internationale or those of “I Will Survive.” Like drag queens, like the great Harlem ball culture, we can, if we wish, all make opulence and glamor into something we can understand, own, and be part of.
And really, I suppose that’s the point: there is nothing evil in wearing a dress, in having a fancy meal, in playing game-like by the rules of a kind of class culture that shouldn’t properly have a place in modern-day Britain (or America). Because simply by doing and living we can all invert, subvert, and parody these conventions until they are something which we find ourselves capable of delighting and glorying in. I had my stereotypically Oxonian debauched formal evening. I played the game. But it is the sight of half a dozen of my friends, faces glowing, bowties undone and dresses askew, all of them shouting “Hallelujah, it’s raining men!”, that I hope to remember for years to come.
In honor of Pete Seeger’s 92nd (!) birthday, here are some beautiful songs which I prefer to chanting “USA! USA!” as if the US armed forces have just won the World Cup instead of assassinating a bad guy.
I watched this live on TV in my dorm room on January 19, 2009 with tears streaming down my face. I’ll never forget it. I prefer this kind of flag-waving to what we saw the night bin Laden was killed:
Whatever the agnostic humanist’s expression is for “God bless Pete,” well, that.
I have been wanting to write a very academic post about the so-called “uncensored” Dorian Gray, an essay by Carlo Ginzburg from a 1980 issue of History Workshop Journal, Freud, postmodernism, the AIDS crisis, and the homoerotic literary tradition. There’s an outline sitting on my desktop, but I have been tired from churning out essays and painstakingly revising the present iteration of the Symonds project, and haven’t been able to marshal my resources. But I have, of course, as always, been thinking. I watched the new episode of Doctor Who tonight, and so I have been thinking about timelines, and my own timeline, and past and present and historical moments and change over time. Maybe I have been thinking about those things because I am a historian, too. Hey, maybe that’s why I feel so drawn to Doctor Who.
But I have been thinking about the strange colliding time-collapsing feeling I had when I saw Symphony in White, No. 1 in the V&A a couple weeks ago, and I have been thinking that term, officially, starts tomorrow, and I find myself realizing that two years ago, the last time I spent some number of weeks reading and writing and thinking on my own outside of an academic term, it was in Washington and I was learning how to believe in beauty. I grew so much that summer—I spent my days with myself, but I grew outside myself. So, too, do I find myself looking back on the past seven weeks spent mostly with my interior monologue (which has developed a disconcerting habit of impersonating Symonds), and being grateful for how I saw the daffodils and the crocuses bloom, and how I took long walks by the river, and how I came to love Oxford with a hurting feeling I know does not wrench my gut for just any love. In these seven weeks I went to Ireland and Scotland, and I went to London, and I made some awesome new friends, and spent time with some awesome old ones (academia: small place), and some of my favorite people in the world came to visit me from the other side of the Atlantic. Yet all the same, how have I grown? I have grown in eight- or nine-hour days in the Upper Reading Room, locked in passive-aggressive fights about whether to keep the window open with the English dons who sit near me in the southeast corner by the nineteenth-century literature reference collection, and reading my way into the mentalité of Oxford 150 years ago. I have grown in the heady enthusiasm of making discoveries, of cutting pages and discovering folios of manuscript material. I have grown in the meals of ever-increasing complexity and variety I have cooked for myself, and in the late nights when I ask the Symonds in my mind what it would mean to him to know that there are gay bars in Oxford today. (I still don’t know how he would react to this information, and I think that if I did I would have a much better JP than I do now.) I have grown because spending so much time alone is always an experiment: when I was in Washington, the interior monologue that led me to bookshops and to Pride and finally, pivotally, to the National Gallery shifted my sphere away from politics, and found for me the compass that guides my life today. I came back to Princeton and I picked a major. I came back to Princeton and I applied to Oxford. I came back to Princeton and I started to talk to my mentors about grad school. I wrote my Oxford application and I saw in it, with its personal statement and writing sample and recommendations, the echo of a grad school application. I went to the information sessions and talked to my friends who know from Oxford and heard how few class hours there are, how much of the work is my own. I learned I would have seven weeks between terms to put to good use on my own. I said to myself that I would cross the ocean, and then I would know whether it would be safe to leave me to my own anxieties, aspirations, and interior monologue for six to eight years, and perhaps the rest of my life.
Today was the last day before the start of the second, and last, term. Today the weather could not have been more perfect, and today I set out bright and early on a charity-shop crawl in search of a dress, because this is Oxford and I am going to a black-tie dinner next weekend, and if I am going to play the part of someone who goes to black-tie dinners, I am going to play by the rules. But before I found a great dress, some hours later, I happened by serendipitous accident into the best secondhand bookshop, and perhaps the most secret bookshop, in all of Oxford. It’s no Oxfam—you won’t find a book there for under £5. But you will find the third volume of Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy, the one on The Fine Arts. And you will find W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic, in lovely early-twentieth-century leather binding. And you will tell yourself that it is simply absurd to spend too much money on the collected works of Pater when the collected works of Pater will not fit in your suitcase. And you will ask for the first time in your life to please see that book behind the locked glass door, because you read the word “Ionica” on the binding and you know it’s one of of a very rare edition of William Johnson Cory’s “Uranian” verse, which was for Symonds a key pinpoint in the homoerotic literary tradition. And the shopkeeper will watch eagle-eyed as you flip through the gilt-edged pages and take in the details; and as your eyes widen when you realize that the label with the Eton crest identifying the Ionica as a prize book is inscribed to someone with the same name as the name on the flyleaf of the Symonds you’re anxiously clutching. And you will buy the Symonds and the Mallock and step out into the sunshine, wondering if you can justify charging the £65 Ionica to your research grant.
For after all, dear reader, it is the last day of seven weeks spent talking to Symonds. And (before finally going back to shopping just at the end of business hours and finding an ideal dress at the last possible minute) I spent hours trying to discover the identity of the man who wrote his name on the flyleaf of my new possession (no fruit has been borne yet, but I haven’t given up). And I spent the rest of the day in a café making my cappuccino last for hours and marking up a JP draft. In the long-shadowed, golden-glowing evening, I mixed fresh vegetables in with my pasta sauce out of a jar, and I watched the new Doctor Who, and wrote a blog post in which I, appropriately, sent tense consistency all to hell. And now I find myself called to reflect. What did I learn over my Easter vacation, dear reader? I learned that the world’s great college towns defy the expectations of minor nineteenth-century men of letters and grow up to have gay bars. And I learned that little girls defy their own self-sabotaging, anguished expectations and grow up to have research grants.
It Gets Better: brought to you by long, hard days of writing an 11,500-word essay in the sweet spring air of the city of dreaming spires. By dint of work and purpose, we make our lives into the very things we dream of inhabiting.
Was there a boy (chances are it was a boy) who lived in this room decades ago before me, and sat like me at this desk (or one like it) in the heat and sunshine and the springtime sounds of Broad Street, with half a cup full of tea gone cold and Bach crackling on the radio, and pored over the pages of Calamus, seeking in himself the words to do justice to “the tender love of comrades”?
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there were an anonymous boy whom history has forgotten, whose name was not Symonds or Pater or Wilde, who was a member of this college which has not lent its name to anything particular in the history of homoerotic Oxford, but who thought all the same about who he was and what he was reading.
I wonder what he’d think if he could imagine 2011. I wonder what he’d think if he knew there was a girl now sitting at his desk.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
The disconcerting ethical ambiguity of the moral of the story in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys did not stop me literally sobbing at the ending of the film, which I watched for the third time this evening:
Mrs Lintott: But of all Hector’s boys, there was only one who truly took everything to heart, who remembers everything he was ever told. The songs, the poems, the sayings, the endings… the words of Hector, never forgotten. Posner: Slightly to my surprise, I’ve ended up, like you, a teacher—a bit of a stock figure. I do a wonderful school play, for instance. And though I never touch the boys, it’s always a struggle. But maybe that’s why I’m a good teacher. I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy about it. Irwin: He was a good man. But I don’t think there’s time for his kind of teaching anymore. Scripps: No. Love apart, it is the only kind of education worth having. Hector: Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Pass it on, boys! That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.
Hector, in his small unhistoric way, is the tragic hero of Bennett’s play (not, as some Americans apparently presume, Irwin), and in sympathizing with this poor old man who, other than touching the boys, does everything absolutely pedagogically right, we find ourselves negotiating the minefield of what the Platonic eros is, and whether “other than touching the boys” is a phrase we can allow ourselves to utter while giving Hector an otherwise good review. I, at least, want to say that Hector is wrong to make that a part of his programme; and I want to cry out to Posner and let him know, as glad as I am that the fruit of learning your lessons well, in Bennett’s mind, is becoming a teacher, you do not have to desire your students, to sublimate your sexual energy, in order to teach them well. But I also regret that this is a conversation we need to have, in order to rationalize the fact that I broke down and sobbed and sobbed in my room in the sunlit Oxford springtime evening, thankful that this character in a play learnt something from his sad and troubled teacher. I regret that this is a play that I don’t feel as if I could ever put up in front of a family audience, as ably as I think it teaches the lesson of teaching and learning for itself.
Yesterday came the news that Dharun Ravi, the roommate who videotaped Rutgers student Tyler Clementi’s hookup last fall immediately before Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge, is being charged with a hate crime. Those who grope, when a suicide happens, for someone to blame it on will I suppose have their closure, though as my friend Katherine wrote when I posted the news story on Facebook, “Nobody wins.” Clementi is still dead, and Ravi’s life is probably not going to go too well from now on. For this teenager, unlike (we might assume) the many LGBT teenagers who have been targeted by Dan Savage’s viral campaign in the wake of Clementi’s suicide, it will not “get better.”
Though a woefully poignant note, this seems an appropriate one on which to take a moment to reflect on what “It Gets Better” means. The immense popularity of the campaign, in which thousands of people all over the world—from these sweet older men to President Obama—have posted videos on YouTube, has led to the elevation of teen suicide as one of the causes les plus célèbres of the LGBT rights movement. It is a cause which has demanded the attention of not only the representatives of several departments of the U.S. government and the employees of several major international corporations, but also of pop stars such as Lady Gaga, whose “Born This Way” was written to be marketed as a gay anthem, and to encourage the positive-thinking, neatly-packaged Pride attitude that seems to have worked so well for the “It Gets Better” stories. When the Fox TV show Glee, which has also focused a lot of attention on what it is like to be a white gay male teenager in a school environment, premieres a 90-minute special episode written around “Born This Way” next week, it will become the latest addition to this mega-narrative promising salvation to LGBT teenagers that has responded with such commercial—as well as heartfelt—force to Tyler Clementi’s, and other young people’s, suicides.
Ostensibly, it is a narrative which offers so much hope and promise—stay alive; everything’s gonna be okay—but as the months have ticked by, my feelings about it have gotten ever more complex. My acceptance of it as something which I can both relate to and believe in has faded since I wrote my first response to Clementi’s death, and since I contributed to Princeton’s “It Gets Better” video. As I go to Holy Week services this week and get hung up on the degree to which the words, and the acts of devotion they demand, make no sense since I was raised without a promise of salvation as part of my worldview, so do I hesitate more and more to hurtle headlong for “It Gets Better.” Justification by faith is no more sensible to me whether we’re talking about how God sent his Son to die for us or whether we’re talking about a telos in which anonymous gay (yes, usually gay) kid from flyover country realizes he (yes, usually he) was “Born This Way,” and therefore has the impetus to move to a city and go to Pride and dance to Gaga at the clubs and eventually get gay-married and live happily ever after. I speak facetiously, of course, but this is not to elide the comparison between religious faith and “It Gets Better” faith. I’m getting a sense now that this is what’s been lying behind my hesitation to embrace the IGB narrative over the course of the past several months. I think I’m just not a person who has faith.
But I am not without belief, and not without causes, and not without spirituality, of a certain sort. If I am anything, I am a believer in good works, and in the quasi-Transcendentalist belief in God-as-metaphor, as a divine presence in all things that are good and virtuous that we can experience at the best of times as a shiver of pleasure. And it’s these things I think of when I think of getting better: of developing oneself to be more virtuous, and to be able to feel that shiver when confronted with beauty. My God is not externalized, in the promise of salvation nor the promise of Pride, but is something I may perceive in swift glimpses if I play my cards right, if I do my reading and practice my vocation of being a teacher. And this is something that does not happen without good works—without those of oneself and one’s daily self-fashioning, and most critically without those of the bettering influences around one, the dearest friends and most caring mentors, the families biological and adopted, and even the anonymous donor who means you get paid for doing what you love for the first time. For me, coming into this world without faith, it does nothing to believe that “it gets better” first, and then proceed from there. It is only through the daily Pilgrim’s Progress of psychological labor that I have even so much as come to appreciate the goodness of my life, how fortunate I am, how much better my life is now than it was just three years ago, and how much I now have to give that it is my duty to pass on to those whom I believe need to be told not “It Gets Better,” but how to help themselves—just as my teachers, slowly but surely, brought home to me.
Late last night, a bout of insomnia had me reflecting on what it is to be a 21-year-old Canadian-American academic brat living alone on another continent (or, well, an island in the North Sea), for whom going to work every day means going to the Bodleian Library to write about John Addington Symonds, which work is (or will be, this summer) subsidized in part by a grant because some members of her department thought what this 21-year-old Canadian-American academic brat does with her life is worth paying her for. Three years ago, when I was an 18-year-old gazing rapt at the light at the end of the long, dark, horrible tunnel of high school, and looking ahead to a summer working at the local cinema and who-knows-what to follow in September at a university I was convinced I hadn’t deserved to get into, I could never have imagined living in a room in Broad Street, writing original scholarship by sunlight in the Upper Reading Room. I could never have imagined being the one to discover Symonds’ letters to Roden Noel in the Bodleian’s English literary manuscript collections, or the one to cut the pages on nineteenth-century books no one has ever opened for a hundred years. I could never have imagined having mentees of my own. I could never have imagined having a pint at the pub with friends, or using Facebook to keep in touch with other friends on the continent I came from. I could never have imagined living in a world in which what I do, and what I value, is valued. I no longer hate myself. And if there is any evidence of bettering, surely this is it.
But I did not come to realize that my life is better because someone in a YouTube video told me; I came to realize it through dint of purpose and the gentle guidance of teachers who taught me how to read and how to write, how to love, how to teach; who took seriously what I said to them and responded in kind; and, whether eminent chaired professors or my parents, have given me guidance when I needed it. My teachers have taught me not that I will be their colleague someday, but that I am worth working towards that goal, and moreover that such a specific goal (rather like that of the gay-married coastal-city-living IGB gay, I suppose) need not define who one is or what one can contribute. My teachers have taught me that even if it doesn’t get better, we shouldn’t stop trying. And for me it’s that purpose, not the faith, that is so much worth living for.
One last thing: if things have gotten better for me, and if I remain resolved to continue my Pilgrim’s Progress, it has nothing to do with moving to a city (after all, I have nearly always lived in or near cities) or knowing the words to every song Lady Gaga has ever released (which I probably do). For me, there is no gay marriage on the horizon. And while this is in part because this narrative does not even begin to map onto my life, and its whitewashing of the queer experience strikes me as incredibly problematic, it is also because sexual orientation is not at the center of my struggle, and because my self-loathing of past years was far displaced from a closet. Gaga notwithstanding, I live in a Victorian world, before a certain Symonds set the word “homosexual” to paper, and the competing discourses with which people of all kinds struggled to express inchoate desires didn’t always cohere around sexual object choice and the mechanics of what someone then might have called “voluptuousness.” My discourse is one in which the language of passion speaks as much, if not more, to the cults of truth, of good, and of beauty as it does to the cult of the body.
And so I ask that anyone who speaks a language in common with mine feel free to reclaim the words “it gets better” from the neatly-packaged narrative that those words have been sold as. And as we labor onwards, suspecting that the Celestial City is nowhere to be found, but that we ought to keep on towards it anyway, let us please make sure that we say an atheist’s prayer for the poor lost souls of all those people who take an action like jumping off the George Washington Bridge—regardless of whether their torment was the homophobic taunts of a schoolyard bully.
… to my knowledge, nobody professes to doubt that, so far forth as we possess a power of bettering things, it is our paramount duty to use it and to train all our intellect and energy to this supreme service of our kind. Hence the pressing interest of the question, to what extent modern progress in natural knowledge… is competent to help us in the great work of helping one another?”
—T.H. Huxley
Not a great deal has changed in sex education since Symonds wrote his Memoirs:
Truly we civilized people of the nineteenth century are more backward than the African savages in all that concerns this most important fact of human life. We allow young men and women to contract permanent relations involving sex, designed for procreation, without instructing them in the elementary science of sexual physiology. We do all that lies in us to keep them chaste, to develop and refine their sense of shame, while we leave them to imagine what they like about the nuptial connection. Then we fling them naked into bed together, modest, alike ignorant, mutually embarrassed by the awkward situation, trusting that they will blunder upon the truth by instinct…. I have known cases of marriage spoiled form the commencement by this idiotic system of let-alone education.
Samuel Rutherford 
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