Eminent Victorians and the Age of Majority

Yesterday was my 21st birthday: age of majority and all that jazz. In the past year, I’ve really started to think of myself as an adult, and so I feel as if this birthday marks something real that my 18th didn’t. Of course, I’m still in the process of Becoming, and always will be—but I feel much more myself than I did three years ago, back when I lived in the suburbs and, although I knew I was an academic brat, didn’t know I would come to call the world’s great universities my home.

Now I am living in a room that looks out onto Broad Street, and I spend my days reading Victorian history. In particular, I spend a lot of time thinking about John Addington Symonds and his circle of friends and colleagues, most of whom he’d known since he was an undergraduate right here on Broad Street, at the college next-door. I spend a lot of time thinking about men who, in my mind at least, were Eminent Victorians, and how their biographers trace their success and literary acumen back to their undergraduate careers. Symonds and Wilde: two double firsts (Wilde’s was the highest first in Greats Magdalen had ever seen, if I remember correctly); two Newdigate Prize for Poetry winners. Two men who, when they were my age, walked around this town in gowns reading Plato. When Symonds was 21, he was being coached towards his first by Benjamin Jowett, one of the greatest dons of Victorian Oxford. When Symonds was 21, his world was changing as his head-over-heels love for the boys who sang in the choir at Bristol Cathedral collided with his study of Plato, and he began to see things between the Greek lines that Jowett wasn’t telling him. When Wilde was 21, he swanned around Oxford being clever, impressing his tutors and his classmates, and spending far too much money on furnishings for his room.

Yesterday, I spent £3 on postcards for my wall, which didn’t particularly strike me as extravagant. Today, I exchanged a series of emails with my advisor sorting out what I’m going to say about Symonds for the purposes of my spring junior paper. I can’t read Greek, and my poetry is shit. I don’t think I even know what a heroic couplet is.

And yet I had a chilling sense of almost-deja-vu two weeks ago, when I was sitting in the Radcliffe Camera reading Thomas Arnold’s edition of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (Arnold’s bits in English, obviously; not Thucydides’ bits in Greek, as we’ve just established the only words I can read in Greek are ones like παιδεραστια, ερως, ἐραστής, and ερωμηνος). For it is not improbable that, 150 years ago, Symonds sat in the Radcliffe Camera reading Arnold’s edition of Thucydides too, just as I know for a fact that he must have taken the same path that I do every day, east down Broad Street to the Bodleian. It’s a funny, funny thing—and it makes me wonder why I haven’t done the equivalent of reading my prizewinning poem at an honorary degree ceremony in front of dozens of dignitaries including Matthew Arnold, as Symonds did in 1860.

The comforting thing, though—and, in part, why I’m drawn to spending my days thinking about this man—is that Symonds was no Wilde. He was a well-reviewed author and scholar who held the esteem of many of the greatest intellectuals of his day, and counted heavyweights like T.H. Green and Henry Sidgwick among his friends, and Swinburne and Pater and Wilde himself among his eager readers. But when he died too early in Venice in 1893 it was not in the flames of martyrdom or in the glow of celebrity. It was quietly, of the accumulation of years of consumption and years of nervous breakdowns, with a modest but unheroic reputation which, for fear of scandal, was quickly covered up by a literary executor who knew too well what Symonds was saying behind the elaborate Hellenic metaphors of his poetry, and was one of the earliest recipients of his privately-circulated essays about what a much more famous Newdigate Prize-winner would, two years hence, loudly proclaim to be “the love that dare not speak its name.” (Symonds, rather sadly and sweetly, called it in some of his letters and poetry “l’amour de l’impossible.”) Symonds quickly faded drab, against the flashiness of Pater and Wilde, and when the critics talked and talked through the twentieth century about Jowett’s Oxford and the Greats curriculum, the texts in the back of their minds were Studies in the History of the Renaissance and The Picture of Dorian Gray, not a pamphlet printed in ten copies called A Problem in Greek Ethics.

When Symonds was 21, he may have been at the peak of the fame and glory he would accumulate during his lifetime—which seems to me all the more reason to sit and worry that I haven’t got a JP topic yet, never mind a prizewinning poem, though I have got a pretty awesome set of mentors, tutors, and advisors who I don’t hesitate to say could give Jowett a run for his money. And it makes me wonder what I will write that will be reviewed by the Walter Pater of my day in the popular literary press, and it makes me wonder what I will do to advance the discipline of cultural history, and it makes me wonder what I will privately circulate that will become the basis for my posthumous reputation. It makes me wonder how the person I am going to become will manifest herself in my work. And it makes me wonder whether I will die quietly in Venice, and whom I will die with: my long-suffering wife and cherished daughters? My doted-on gondolier?

Symonds was not, really, Eminent, as Victorians go. But he was a scholar who put his heart into his writing and into his many loves, who fathered three daughters, who loved the hills of Rome, of Switzerland, and of the village outside Bristol where he grew up. He also highly esteemed Middlemarch, which he read as it was published serially in 1871-2. The first time Symonds read Middlemarch, he was at the beginning of his career, barely starting on his massive five-volume cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, and only just starting to articulate what was so impossible about l’amour d’impossible. But I wonder if, later in life, he thought more about that book about ordinary people, about people whose lives are important for all their ordinariness, and who were important enough for one very talented woman to write a book about them. I wonder what Symonds would have thought of that, because I’m quite sure that he never would have countenanced the thought that there is a 21-year-old ~~girl~~woman in Oxford today who maybe will never win the Newdigate Prize or read Greek well enough to pass an exam in anything remotely related to classical studies, but who could certainly see living a quiet cultural historian’s life—and maybe, just maybe, writing a book about another quiet cultural historian who, sure enough, rests in an unvisited tomb.

QOTD (2011-02-01)

I have always considered myself somewhat conservative or old-fashioned when it comes to embracing a highly prescriptive moralist approach to grounding and guiding my life, and how much I appreciate this passage from T.H. Green’s lecture “On the different senses of ‘Freedom’ as applied to will and to the moral progress of man” reminds me of this:

The self-realising principle… must overcome the ‘natural impulses’, not in the sense of either extinguishing them or denying them an object, but in the sense of fusing them with those of higher interests, which have human perfection in some of its forms for their object. Some approach to this fusion we may notice in all good men; not merely in those in whom all natural passions, love, anger, pride, ambition, are enlisted in the service of great public cause, but in those with whom such passions are all governed by some such commonplace idea as that of educating a family.

Euphemism of the Day (2011-01-31)

Some impressive talking-around-the-homosexuality-issue from Melvin Richter’s 1964 biography of T.H. Green, The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and His Age:

In more than one sense a deviant from Balliol morality, Symonds in time rebelled, abandoned Zeller to two more obedient disciples of Jowett, and made his own mark by a prodigious number of literary and historical works, including the first extended treatment in English of the Italian Renaissance. Symonds married and lived in Switzerland with his wife and four daughters, but had another aspect to his character which led him to keep a Venetian gondolier as his personal servant. Yet Jowett never repudiated him; indeed Jowett came often to stay with the SYmonds at their villa, Am Hof, at Davos. Campbell, Jowett’s biographer commented on this. For the Master ‘had a “horror naturalis” of sentimental feelings between men (“diabolical” I have heard him call them)….’

I really like how in the course of these sentences the nature of Symonds’ moral deviance gets progressively clearer: first you have “a deviant from Balliol morality,” then “another aspect to his character,” then finally outright “sentimental feelings between men,” though that itself still a euphemism. I’m also interested by the class assumptions going on here; my understanding has always been that Angelo Fusato was Symonds’ lover on what Symonds, at least, thought were relatively equal terms. Like Edward Carpenter and other British Whitmaniacs, Symonds took seriously the notion that homosexual relationships could bridge class divides (though of course whenever he put it into practice he made himself look ridiculous, as he did when he lent Fusato and his family money and basically acted the part of the elite romantically struck by but not taking at all seriously the impoverished circumstances in which Fusato and his family lived). You could say that Symonds was unconsciously implicated in the bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, but you certainly couldn’t say that Fusato was his servant—that speaks more to how Richter understands the nature of Symonds’ particular brand of homosexuality in the context of both Symonds’ and Richter’s historical moments.

It’s also worth noting that Richter gives a fairly broad attention to Symonds (at least inasmuch as his life was connected to Green’s, which it very much was) a year before the publication of Grosskurth’s biography. Grosskurth’s biography is thought to be the first modern treatment of Symonds (and one of the few to date), but Richter in some ways does a much better job than Grosskurth of placing Symonds in the context of the Balliol world he inhabited, involved in many of the intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual questions dogging Oxford in the mid-to-late-19th century.

Sociability, Cognitive Dissonance, A Sense of Purpose, and My First Dress in Three Years; or, Here We Are At Week 3

My exchange partner was having a cup of tea in my room yesterday afternoon, and we were talking about cultural differences between Princeton and Oxford. In Trinity College, single rooms come with two chairs, one of which my exchange partner was occupying; I, from my position in the other, noted how Princeton doesn’t provide you with a second chair—it’s almost as if the university doesn’t expect you to have people over. We got to talking, the two of us, about the kinds of social interchanges different kinds of furniture setups engender. At Princeton, where, in the absence of second chairs, many students bring their own couches, they might find themselves setting up their rooms so that the couch is angled towards a television, for DVDs or video games, or so that it provides enough seating for lots of people to cradle red plastic cups at a party. That’s usually in quads, though. Most single rooms in Princeton aren’t even large enough for a second chair. In Trinity (and, I can only assume, elsewhere in Oxford—I get the impression this is something larger than my college), meanwhile, where it is considered highly bizarre that American college students usually share bedrooms, my exchange partner and I were leaning towards each other on the edge of our chairs, drinking tea and engaged in conversation. Tea and sociability are standard hallmarks of the behavior in Oxford, I have found, to an extent that they are not in Princeton. People here are constantly wandering into each other’s rooms, are constantly putting the kettle on. People here take seriously the practice of socializing and of sociability. I don’t think that in Oxford you would be likely to hear the Princeton student’s common complaint that in order to see your friends, you need to schedule socializing into your calendar. Partly this is a function of the college system, and how small communities of people who live and eat in close proximity to each other are much more central to an Oxford life than disparate ties flung across a university campus. But I can’t help thinking it is also a function of the fact that Trinity puts two chairs in our rooms, and that when I arrived here, there was a teakettle sitting on the side table.

The performance of sociability, with all its rules and its rituals, appears organically in tea-time, but it is rigidly—and weirdly—enshrined in the institution of the formal dining-hall meal, which at Trinity occurs six days a week (the last of the six being an exceptionally formal meal known as “Guest Night,” to which I’ll come presently). The process of formal hall (as well as its frequency) varies from college to college, but my understanding is that at every college it is highly ritualized. At Trinity, you wear your academic gown over your regular clothes, the gown itself playing its own part to socially demarcate according (literally) to degree. You sit down to table, where the places are laid one next to the other so that you can’t sit in a corner by yourself; you have to join the crowd and talk to your neighbors. You can’t be late: at the time the meal is scheduled to start (or maybe a few minutes late, if high table—fellows (that is, faculty) and guests—is tardy to accumulate), a gavel is banged and the entire hall, amidst a scraping of chair legs, rises to its feet. The President of the college comes to the edge of the high-table dais; a Scholar (that is, a student who’s done well in her Preliminary exams) comes to the edge of the high-table dais from the other side, recites a Latin grace, bows to the President, the President says “amen,” the rest of us mumble an echo, and then we all sit down. We’re served a meal in a brisk and itself ritualized order: first the bread roll, then the soup or salad, then the meat or fish with its accompanying vegetables in an aluminum tray at the center of the table, then the pudding (dessert), which is usually drenched in an unbelievably sweet sauce. We drink water (once in a while a kid will bring a pint up from the college bar), and eat off utilitarian tableware. After an hour, we filter out in twos and threes—some to the bar or to a pub outside college, others back to their rooms to do work and consume yet more tea. It’s a bizarre thing, which has not yet ceased to fascinate me, so utterly different is it to what the college dining-hall meal is understood to be in Princeton. Pompous traditions of the gowns and the Latin grace aside, hall dinner demonstrates some interesting things about what social values Oxford feels is important: members of the college all dine together, all stand for grace together and all are served together. And yet members of the college are still served (I rather imagine the young women about our age who bring our plates and take them away must loathe we entitled brats), and members of the college are still insistently differentiated by degree, by the length of our gowns and the height of high table. One evening two weeks ago, I completely shocked my neighbors at the long, wooden table by mentioning that at Princeton, my college master waltzes into the dining hall at any old hour in gym clothes. Really: they didn’t know what to say in reply.

So far, all this is assimilable. Though elite universities as a genre may be more alike than they are different, there are nevertheless subtle differences—perhaps attributable to what happens when the elite-university model is filtered through the British and the American cultures respectively, perhaps down to the two institutions’ comparative age, perhaps down to the two different Christian traditions (and two different understandings of the role of religion in public life, see Latin grace, above) out of which the institutions respectively evolved. So far, all this can be subject to my amateur anthropologist’s eye—as tonight, when I met and made small talk with a couple new acquaintances next to whom I found myself sitting, and kept sneaking glances at the party at high table.

What I found more difficulty coping with, however, was Guest Night, to which I found myself going on the Friday of the first week of term. One of my new friends happened to have an extra spot for a guest (though you are encouraged to bring guests to Guest Night, you’re not required, and indeed you can bring or not bring a guest or two on any night), and invited me to join him; I, because I am studying abroad and therefore always open to new experiences, accepted. It was one of the most enjoyable meals I’ve ever had, and yet I have perhaps never felt so uncomfortable at a dinner’s conclusion. At Guest Night (which costs about four times as much as regular hall), there are four courses—the same as the rich, luxurious ones served at high table—and most people will bring some wine up from the college bar. There are candles on the tables, and everyone dresses formally under their gowns: the boys in suits and long ties, I—for the first time since I played my last orchestra concert in June 2008—in a dress. After two hours at table (and not one, but two, graces!) our party repaired, like most people, to the college bar, where we drank port. It was there, sitting amidst at least fifty people in suits and ties and dresses and all of us in our gowns, sipping a glass of port, that I began to feel profoundly ill-at-ease. Earlier that day, after all, I’d been reading Marxist theory—and now here I was, doing my part to enshrine social inequality, having been waited on at table for an expensive meal and now drinking port in an institutional setting where it is completely acceptable, and indeed normal, to do all these things. I had, and am still having, a hard time processing this Friday night, and a hard time knowing whether keeping my American-academic-brat-turned-study-abroad-amateur-anthropologist’s ironic distance from it absolves me sufficiently from complicity in a really problematic system. This, it seems, is the dark side to sociability—and although I have now overcome the culture shock of that night, I am still trying to fit it into my understanding of Oxford, what Oxford means, and what it means for me to be at Oxford.

Though I was profoundly worried about this problem for a couple days, I snapped out of it the Sunday after Guest Night. I was sitting in the second chair in my room (though by myself), reading John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and trying to cram my brain with enough knowledge to write an essay about the theological debates of nineteenth-century Oxford. As I sat there reading, the clock turned 6pm—and then I started to hear the bells of the Trinity clock ringing, and then more bells out southwards and eastwards across the city, as college chapels, after tradition, called their members to Sunday Evensong. Far fewer students today, of course, come to chapel on Sunday evenings before hall than they did when Newman was an undergraduate here at Trinity, but through reading Newman and hearing the bells I felt a powerful jolt of connection to the past, and a powerful jolt of recollection of why I’m in Oxford at all. I’m studying abroad for the sake of exposure to a different culture and new experiences, yes, but I have come to Oxford because I study nineteenth-century British intellectual history, and intend to make a life out of learning and making and teaching that history. I have come to Oxford for the reasons that Spanish majors go to Spain and Russian majors go to Russia and Japanese majors go to Japan: I am in Oxford because the people I study were almost all connected to this university in some way, because the intellectual debates which raged across the nineteenth century took place within its walls, and because when I sit reading Newman I hear the same sounds of the city that he could hear while he was writing. I remembered that I’m an academic—and that when at a new university, you do as your colleagues do, and at the same time make sure your students know not to take their class privilege for granted.

Since then, my schoolwork has been accompanied by flashes of the characters who populated this same place a hundred and fifty years ago. Last week, as I finished my essay a few hours before my first tutorial, I thought of Symonds doing the same, 140 years ago and just over the next wall, in advance of his tute on Plato with Benjamin Jowett. Today, while reading John Stuart Mill in the Radcliffe Camera, I thought about Wilde’s commonplace book, which is filled with notes on Greek literature and German philosophy, and how he might have sat at a desk in the Upper Camera and read for Greats some of the same things (like Hegel) I have to be familiar with now. On my bookshelf sit late-19th-century editions of Symonds, both Arnolds, and Carlyle, borrowed from the Trinity library—undergraduates must have borrowed them a hundred and fifty years ago, too, when they were new and their binding wasn’t falling to bits from a century and a half of use.

There is nothing like knowing a place by being in it, nothing like seeing the walls that demarcate the closed circle of the Oxford intellectual scene in any century, nothing like watching gowns flap behind students as they cross a dusky quad to hall, nothing like sensing that Wilde and Symonds and Pater and Arnold and Jowett and Newman and so many others must have learned to talk and to write over cups of tea in tutorials and in hall and when their friends came over and sat in their second chairs. And there is nothing like hoping, as you struggle to adapt your American-honed historian’s skills to the problem of the Oxford essay, that Symonds would have had to work just as hard for his degree, but would have got just as much eager pleasure from looking out the window of his college onto Broad Street and listening to the chapel bells sound.

QOTD (2011-01-30); or, Variations on J.S. Mill

This passage is from the middle of the third chapter of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty:

It will not be denied by anybody that originality is a valuable element in human affairs. There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct and better taste and sense in human life. This cannot well be gainsaid by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that this benefit is not capable of being rendered by everybody alike; there are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already existed. If there were nothing new to be done, would human intellect cease to be necessary? Would it be a reason why those who do the old things should forget why they are done, and do them like cattle, not like human beings? There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire. Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

Thus both a suspicion of elitism and dedication to ferreting it out and critiquing it where it lies, and a suspicion of the analytical systems which assume that human history is a trajectory of self- and society-improvement, come into conflict with the principles which underpin a belief in Teaching as Vocation, and the reasons for which one answers the call. But we can solve this problem. The thing is, if we’re to believe in teaching as something we do to make our world better, and to inculcate in the next generation a desire to do the same (Mill is as emphatic as I about the power of education to instill these kinds of vague moral principles), we need to place ourself on some kind of teleological timeline that suggests the future can be better than the present and the past. But we must also in so doing refuse to allow ourselves to believe that we are in any way exceptional; that our age, our civilization, our people, our culture, our system of government, is so much nearer perfectibility than others that we close ourselves off to the possibility of further bettering. This, Mill might say (and I, though cautious with regard to his classical liberalism and its relevance to the modern nation-state in an era of late-stage capitalism, am inclined to agree), would be why we need to ensure the freedom of thought and action of dissenters—but I’m interested by the fact that he doesn’t also discuss how the dissenters (even the dissenting geniuses) and their morals and ideals might play a role in what we teach our children.

It is nevertheless true, though, that the greatest good for the greatest number comes when the greatest number of children feel called to better the world their children will inherit.

(my gratitude to JN for providing some of the framework for this post)

QOTD (2011-01-29)

I’m not certain that I actually agree with all the principles G.M. Trevelyan lays forth in his “Clio: A Muse,” but I like how he expresses them:

To recover some of our ancestors’ real thoughts and feelings is the hardest, subtlest and most educative function that the historian can perform. It is much more difficult than to spin guesswork generalisations, the reflex of passing phases of thought or opinion in our own day. To give a true picture of any country, or man or group of men in the past requires industry and knowledge, for only teh documents can tell us the truth, but it requires also insight, sympathy and imagination of the finest, and last but not least the art of making our ancestors live again in modern narrative….

[H]istory cannot prophesy the future; it cannot supply a set of invariably applicable laws for the guidance of politicians; it cannot show, by the deductions of historical analogy, which side is in the right in any quarrel of our day. It an do a thing less, and yet greater than all these. It can mould the mind itself into the capability of understanding great affairs and sympathising with other men. The information given by history is valueless in itself, unless it produce a new state of mind. The value of Lecky’s Irish history did not consist in the fact that he recorded in a book the details of numerous massacres and murders, but that he produced sympathy and shame, and caused a better understanding among us all of how the sins of the fathers are often visited upon the children, unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate each other. He does not prove that Home Rule is right or wrong, but he trains the mind of Unionists and Home Rulers to think sensibly about that and other problems….

The dispassionateness of the historian is a quality which it is easy to value too highly, and it should not be confused with the really indispensable qualities of accuracy and good faith. We cannot be at too great pains to see that our passion burns pure, but we must not extinguish the flame. Dispassionateness—nil admirari—may betray the most gifted historian into missing some vital truth in his subject.

Also, Trevelyan gives Symonds a shoutout for having “carried on the tradition that history was related to literature,” which is of course excellent.

QOTD (2011-01-25); or, Nostalgia and the Homoerotic Literary Tradition

It’s disconcerting how much I identify with a teenage Terry Castle, as represented in her memoir, The Professor:

In high school I had been almost freakishly solitary and skittish, with no idea how to comport myself in ordinary-teenager fashion…. Bizarre as it sounds, by the time I left for college I had never once called anyone on the telephone or invited a classmate over after school. Nor had I myself been so called or invited…. On the contrary: I’d been reclusive, a regular Secret-Garden-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett-Girl-Hysteric-in-Training. At seventeen, I remained passionately (if uneasily) mother devoted; frighteningly watchful, in school and out; abnormally well read in Dumas novels, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, H.P. Lovecraft, and the lives of the poets…. I began devouring certain louche modern authors in secret: Gide, Wilde, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, even Yukio Mishima, then at the height of his celebrity in the West. Sexual deviance, or at least what I conceived it to be, began to exert a certain unhallowed, even gothic allure—a glamorous, decayed, half-Satanic romance…. Not least among the attractions that such literary homosexuality proffered: some drastic psychic deliverance from familial dreariness and the general SoCal strip-mall stupor…. As for “homosexual practices”—and I confess I wasn’t exactly sure, mechanically speaking, what they were—they sounded sterile and demonic but also madly titillating…. Anything could happen, it seemed, in the fascinating world of sexual inverts. Lesbianism didn’t figure much, if at all, in these early reveries: one of the oddest parts of the fantasy, I guess, was that I was male, dandified, and in some sort of filial relationship to various 1890s Decadents. I knew more about green carnations, the Brompton Oratory, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the curious charms of Italian gondoliers than I did about Willa Cather or Gertrude Stein—not to mention Garbo or Stanwyck or Dusty Springfield.

I was already feeling nostalgic about high school from earlier this afternoon, when something one of my high-school friends posted on Facebook reminded me of those lonely quiet days of negotiating friendship for the very first time, bumbling step-by-step out of the world of Musketeers into the bright cloudless San Diego shopping-mall sunlight, learning for the first time at the age of 16 or 17 how to socialize. At the very same time as I was learning how to socialize, I was learning how to study sexuality—putting off the terrifying process of having to confront myself and who I was and what I wanted by discoveries no less thrilling and rewarding. I can remember where I was, how I felt, when I read “Reading Gaol” and the Calamus poems and Howl. I remember lugging around school volumes of Krafft-Ebing and Kinsey borrowed from the UCSD library, because I thought it made me cool. I remember sitting up in a dark bedroom at 3 am on a hot summer night in the dead-quiet suburbs, talking to my high-school friend on AIM while we simultaneously watched Shortbus together. I remember being trapped by the walls, by the air, by the cars we all were stuck in all the time when we drove down Interstate 15 into or out of the city. I remember reading Viola in Twelfth Night for one English class. Teaching Whitman and Ginsberg in another. Adapting and staging and deliberately cross-casting The Importance of Being Earnest in another.

Like Symonds, like Terry Castle, like me, so many of us believe in another world, a place where glamor and panache and camp and beauty take the place of gender conformity and Hollister clothing and pink stucco houses. So many of us read our Plato, read our Wilde, lived our pretentious little teenage lives in a performative effort to clap! clap if we believed in fairies! So many of us grew up and didn’t quite ever find that the real world lived up to the hazy, lilac-scented Arcadian visions of the earliest chapters of Brideshead Revisited and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (As a teenager, I was never quite able to read all the way to the ends of those books, and watch the paradise slip away into madness.) But I’d like to think we all cultivate our own gardens, all find our paradises within, happier far. I’d like to think that Symonds’ creation of a homosexual culture and his affair with his gondolier at long-last helped to put some of his demons to rest; I’d like to think that Castle’s wonderfully dry self-deprecating humor bespeaks contentment with the material niceties of her life as a successful academic, far from the barren stucco San Diegan wilderness (mentally, if not physically. But I swear, Palo Alto’s nicer than University City anytime). And I dream that someday someone will pay me to introduce the homoerotic literary tradition to the young people who desperately need a little camp and glamor in their lives. But the thing is, even if plans B through Z fail and no one ever does, I’ll still be the 14-year-old kid who strutted over the hills of a southern-California suburb one September in floral-patterned knee-breeches, black lace-up boots, a frilly shirt and doublet and a broad-brimmed hat with an enormous purple peacock feather pinned to the brim. “Notes on Camp“? Baby, who needs ’em? I’ve got the text memorized!

I’ll end this reverie on the perfect note that Madonna’s “Vogue” serendipitously came up on shuffle.

QOTD (2011-01-22); or, Today in Symondsiana

This slice of today’s research is brought to you by the Euphemism of the Day: “Aesthetical Sybaritism.”

And now the main course: Symonds to Whitman, 7 February 1872:

I have pored for continuous hours over the pages of Calamus (as I used to pore over the pages of Plato), longing to hear you speak, burning for a revelation of your more developed meaning, panting to ask—is this what you would indicate?… Yet I dared not to address you or dreamed that the thoughts of a student could abide the inevitable shafts of your searching intuition.

Have you ever seen that much focus of eroticized language on a problem of close-reading, dear reader? I haven’t. (Also, I am in a good position to appreciate now that in this letter Symonds describes Oxford as “an over refined University.”)

According to Horace Traubel, the poet reacted thus to Symonds’ letters: “Symonds has got into our crowd in spite of his culture: I tell you we don’t give away places in our crowd easy—a man has to sweat to get in.”

Reader, read that line carefully a few times and then tell me it isn’t one of the most interesting lines in the entire Symonds-related corpus. The implication that there are two, competing, cultures of emerging homosexuality here—one in which you read Plato, one which you “sweat to get in”—is very interesting. One of the themes various advisors have suggested I explore in this project is Symonds’ relationship to Culture with a Victorian capital C, and where his efforts to define culture and to write cultural history fit into broader ideas about Victorian culture, such as Matthew Arnold’s. In A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, Symonds pulls together a lot of different threads in order to create a representation of a unified homosexual culture; by distributing those essays and corresponding with a wide network of fellow intellectuals about them and about related themes, he does a lot to further the instantiation of the interpersonal networks that themselves constitute a society and a culture. It’s really interesting to think of someone like Whitman resisting not just Symonds’ efforts to label him as an endorser of παιδεραστια but also a lot of other trappings Symonds brings with him, like the tendency to write “παιδεραστια” without transliterating it (see, even when I do that here, it looks exclusionary!), and an education at “an over refined University.” Symonds’ efforts to be embarrassed about his bourgeois upbringing and his enthusiastic endorsement of the Whitman-and-Carpenter model of homoerotic democratic socialism don’t really erase the fact that he’s coming from a really different place from Whitman, and nevertheless trying to assimilate Whitman into his admittedly quite bourgeois understanding of what the love of comrades is.

So yes, as I’ve been saying for about the past two years, Whitman’s “I have six illegitimate grandchildren” line isn’t a disavowal of his love of men, or, in 1970s terms, a self-closeting. It’s a counterattack in a battle about what homosexual literary and intellectual culture is going to be, heading into the last decade of the 19th century. I guess the interesting thing, then, is that Whitman dies in 1892 and Symonds dies in 1893, and then the Wilde trials are in 1895. Wilde’s love-of-comrades speech from the witness box pretty well eclipses, in the public and newspaper-reading eye, anything Edward Carpenter et al. are running around saying about Urningliebe and socialism. The question is, then, how Wilde read Symonds, how Wilde read Whitman, and whose understanding of the meaning of “Culture” he is disseminating when he introduces the British public to the love that dare not speak its name.

Settling In; or, In Which We Discover the Constancy of Academia

It’s just a few hours short of a week since I left America, and already my last glimpse of suburban New Jersey as friends waved me goodbye from the train platform seems years away. I took my last Princeton exam this morning, had my first Oxford class yesterday, and now I sit in a chair in my bedroom, procrastinating on reading Marxist theory and making yet another cup of tea (the fourth since lunchtime) in order to fight off impending exhaustion—my last Princeton exam, after all, was at 9am, a fact which I remembered when I went home at 4:30 because I was dozing off in the Upper Reading Room of the Radcliffe Camera while struggling through Gramsci.

The instant I got over the jetlag, everything here began to seem so absurdly normal that all the little superficial differences very quickly faded into insignificance. Yes, we wear academic gowns to dinner and stand for a Latin grace before we get served three courses at table. Yes, all the buildings are old, and many of them are quite beautiful. Yes, I have to write an essay or two a week, and read them to my tutors. Yes, I now live in one of the strangest cities in the world, in which dreaming spires abut supermarkets and overpriced coffeeshops and ordinary people’s houses. Yes, everyone drinks a lot, and (as my Princeton advisor said in his parting advisory speech to me) drinking to excess is not correlated with anti-intellectualism the way it is in America. Yes, English dessert is very weird. Yes, I’ve met people who went to Eton and Harrow and Winchester. Yes, I still keep forgetting to look right then left when crossing the road.

But for all this, I look back on a day like today (after I finished my exam) and think fondly on the lazy scholarship that has characterized every one of the past six first weeks of term, and to which this first term away from America is no exception. At lunch, I talked historical theory and academic gossip with a graduate student; at dinner, I adjudicated the high-spirited and frivolous arguments of a gaggle of freshers (18-year-olds seem younger and younger every time I interact with them). Between, I watched the sun break out from behind the clouds and stream in glistening stripes through the enormous windows of the Radcliffe Camera, and I bumbled my way through Gramsci and Lukacs and kept running back to college for tea breaks. People keep asking me about America, expecting me to tell them how different my life there is. But what has this blog been for the past two years but a record of books read and dining-hall meals had?

Of course, many of the reasons the two worlds mirror each other so closely have to do only with elite education systems and with nothing else. Princeton is to America as Oxford is to England; in some sense, elite education has nothing whatever to do with the rest of the world, and the cast of characters and ways of life are much the same. There are the dryly humorous grad students, there are the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed freshers, and there are the boatloads of students from privileged backgrounds with little self-awareness who spend a lot of time partying, very little time studying, and plan to go into investment banking the instant they can tick the boxes of the rigamarole that is this silly little liberal arts education. Though I shouldn’t in the least be surprised by it, I have to confess I hadn’t expected to find this last category to quite such a degree in Oxford. I had forgotten how sealed-off my circle in Princeton is from most of the rest of that university, and I hadn’t realized just how constant the cast of characters is that makes up the whole of a university, not just the most alabaster stones in the ivory tower (if you know what I mean). I am quite sure I have spent more effort in the past week brainstorming just how to sift through these sets to find the students with whom I want to be friends than I have on my schoolwork. It took me almost a year to do the same in Princeton, and I don’t have that much time here. I’ve been fighting with all my willpower against my natural shyness, employing all the social skills I’ve learned in the past two and a half years to seek out like-minded people—from gentle small-talk questions to my best attempts at humor to the tried-and-true strategy of gravitating to LGBT social events. I’m working hard at this—friending people on Facebook to make sure I learn their names, plopping myself down next to new people in hall—and I find it starting to bear fruit.

But these efforts to make friends have also begun to teach me a larger lesson, which also returns us to the point of the nature of the academic world. You see, if I have discovered anything in the semester that ended this morning when I sat my last exam, it is that I am a teacher in my own right, one with real academic identity and ability, who is going to live a life of teaching and research forever. This sense of identity and of vocation seems, recently, to have done something I would never have thought possible a few months ago: it has eradicated the gnawing torture of self-doubt which once characterized my inner life. Suddenly every moment I spend in my room is not wasted; suddenly every moment I spend frustrated with an ignorant, sexist, and homophobic Oxford-version-of-a-bro becomes a teaching moment; suddenly I am always loving what I do, because I need not constantly have everything be perfect to know that I am still a good person who is doing the right thing for me and for the bits of the world which I have the power to affect.

I spent my last couple weeks in Princeton desperately trying to discern where I would find the culture shock in Oxford. In a sense, I have found it in the sameness—and in a paradox: for Oxford both is and is not an academic paradise, and like at Princeton, I will have to work very hard to ensure that I can make it be one for me. The wonderful thing is that now I know how to do this. The last time I landed in a new university, I was 18 years old, had never lived away from home, and had no inkling of how I would relate to the world as a grown-up. A very great deal has changed since then, and now I land in Oxford able to appreciate the air of desultory scholarship and the tea and sociability; to negotiate just the right amount of amused detachment from the pomp and circumstance of gowns and grace; and to transform alienating social situations into ones I can control.

It is far too early yet to say what the outcome of all this will be. But I am certain that even in the same old routine of bedroom, library, and hall there is a great deal of potential waiting to be realized, and that I am certain to be learning now the skills of academic self-sufficiency I will need for the rest of my life.

Besides, getting to spend so much time in old buildings is wicked cool.

Euphemism of the Day (2011-01-17)

In the study of “Greek love,” one comes across many euphemisms. I like this bit of how Symonds talks around a particular issue, in an 1869 letter to A.H. Clough’s wife Blanche:

I like your MS. on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The analysis of the gradual improvement in stability and elevation of feeling is very good. You quote rather awkwardly and do not enough comment on the passage quoted. What makes you credit [Shakespeare critic Richard] Simpson with ‘authority’? He has only stated an ingenious hypothesis; and in his attempt, I fancy, to screen Sh. from a vile imputation has not noticed the palpable intensity of personal, historically biographically personal, emotion the sonnets contain. I think he has written the best book on the subject. But you have detected one point which, I think, he forgets and which rather breaks down his argument—the low opinion expressed for women. Now if Sh. had meant only to follow the Italians, he would not have addressed a man and shown coldness to women. He took their form of art and their subtleties of emotional analysis; but what he felt was radically different—a passion which, as in Greece, bred a contempt for the weaker sex. At least, I cannot help thinking this. At the same time he is not the mouthpiece of Platonism. It is all original, fresh sentiment. The great problem is: how near was he after all to his idol? Were they real companions? Or did Sh. worship at a distance? This, alas! we shall never know; and the sonnets must always be a mystery to us.

I am, as regular readers will no doubt know, continually fascinated by the language Victorians writing about sexuality use to disguise or elide the fact that they’re writing about sexuality. This is still more interesting because Symonds is writing to an older woman, and yet it is quite easy to read between the lines and see that he is being as frank as he feels he can be to Mrs Clough about the nature of the Sonnets and their mysterious dedicatee.

As the Oxford system is giving me a lot more time to sit around in reading rooms mulling over Victorians, expect more posts of this nature to come, at least until I need to start writing about the Victorians as well. I find it useful to try out brief readings and explications as I figure out what my Symonds project is actually going to pursue, and I hope this won’t prove uninteresting to the reader.