However, the problem is not just that everyone is long dead and forgotten and in another country anyway; it’s that the people are, frankly, bloody stupid.
William Burroughs, around the same time, wrote about meeting up with the Homintern a decade earlier at Harvard (“a fake English university for graduates of fake English public schools” as he called it):
By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the international queer set who cruise around the world, bumping into each other in queer joints from New York to Cairo. I saw a way of life, vocabulary, references, a whole symbol set as the sociologists say. But these people were jerks for the most part and, after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off on the setup.232
So today’s reviewers, unless they’re personally interested in promoting “gay fiction,” are a little harsher. Here’s an online bookseller on his own wares:
Unwholesome book deals with the complex contrivances by which Patrick, a very rich and inordinately nasty queer, seeks to break the will of a silly and rather greedy young man.
It’s not clear if he thinks these are selling points, or he just can’t control his rage and bile.
And on Amazon:
I do have a capacity to endure novels even if they bore me early on. I gave up on this one. It’s just too dated—a bit like trying to read Upstairs Downstairs without the drama. Quite grating on the nerves just reading about the wealthy and their day to day worries—which gold cigarette case they should purchase for a new beau.
The problem is not simply it being “dated.” Patrick is the central character, and it’s impossible to want to spend time with him since he’s so bloody awful and boring—unless, as in the book, you’re being paid for your services, which isn’t an option for the reader.
And it isn’t that he’s a predatory homosexual—unless you’re so dotty with homophobia that you can’t stand the very idea of one, even as a plumber—since, as I’ve said, we’ve seen his hetero version time and again. After all, Hannibal Lecter is a serial killer and a cannibal, yet the whole world seems to want to spend as much time with him as they can.233
Lecter, unlike Patrick, is interesting, and that’s because, as our parents used to tell us, he is himself interested (not interested in himself); he’s interested in ideas.234 I don’t mean the way Patrick uses the set-up of an new cultural journal as a mechanism to reward his friends and discomfort his enemies—who wouldn’t, that’s the whole point of having a journal, isn’t it?—but that he seems to have no notion of anything else to do with it.
Patrick exemplifies a certain type of urban homosexual—based on F. R. Leavis’s notion of the “metropolitan cultural clique” one might call him a “metrosexual” if that word hadn’t already been taken—in whom the genuine love of ideas, playfully expressed as “wit,” found in an Oscar Wilde235 has soured and curdled into the brittle bitchiness known as “camp.”236
This shows itself on the micro level, in his conversations, which are meant, I suppose, as “camp” but actually, unlike the Wilde they ape, betray an utter philistinism; hence, they are profoundly wearying.
The conventional explanation for this conversational tic—a more politely British version of the poisonously brittle repartee immortalized in now-reviled The Boys in the Band—is to blame it on the conditions of “the closet,” but the openly though not explicitly sexual content, and the rapturous reviews quoted above, make that unlikely.
Patrick’s problem is not that he is somehow “discriminated against” as one of today’s far from predatory, marriage yearning gays would loudly whine—but quite the opposite; he’s simply too rich to have developed a real personality.237
The answer, as usual, lies with one of those healthier-minded authors from the turn of the last century, one of the leading lights of our native-born, manly Neoplatonism, our own two-fisted Traditionalism, the “New Thought” movement; in this case, William Walker Atkinson:
You must want a thing hard enough before you can get it. You must want it more than you do the things around you, and you must be prepared to pay the price for it. The price is the throwing overboard of certain lesser desires that stand in the way of the accomplishment of the greater one. Comfort, ease, leisure, amusements, and many other things may have to go (not always though). It depends on what you want. As a rule, the greater the thing desired, the greater the price to be paid for it. Nature believes in adequate compensation. But if you really Desire a thing in earnest, you will pay the price without question; for the Desire will dwarf the importance of other things.238
Making things worse, Patrick’s money is inherited, putting him in the British equivalent of what Paul Fussell has identified, in America, as the real elite, the Top Out of Sight.
The way they have their money is largely what matters. . . . The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pres, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely.
No one whose money, no matter how copious, comes from his own work—film stars are an example—can be a member of the top-out-of-sight class, even if the size of his income and the extravagance of his expenditure permit him to simulate identity with it. Inheritance—”old money” in the vulgar phrase—is the indispensable principle defining the top three classes, and it’s best if the money’s been in the family for three or four generations.
“When I think of a really rich man,” says a Boston blue-collar, “I think of one of those estates where you can’t see the house from the road.” Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called “the class in hiding.” Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be “discrete, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth.” From the 1930s dates the flight of money from such exhibitionistic venues as the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue to hideaways in Virginia, upper New York State, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey.239
Now, the point of this detour becomes apparent when Fussell asks the reader which class would he like to belong to, and it gets a little tricky. You see, he says, it might seem obvious that one would want to belong to the top out of sight—where you’d never have to worry about money, and have access to the best of everything—but there’s a catch: you must resign yourself to never hearing an interesting comment or idea ever again.
Like all aristocracies . . . ye shall know them by their imperviousness to ideas and their total lack of interest in them.
“We can say of [the very topmost classes’] expectations of their children what Douglas Sutherland says of the English gentleman’s: ‘his offspring are expected to conform in all things, and academic brilliance is not an acceptable deviation from the normal.’“240
The top out of sight are not “closeted” so much as “immured” and even self-immured.241
Ideas, for Patrick, are simply foibles of other people—Ronnie’s magazine, Nicky’s job, which he so tiresomely keeps reminding Patrick about—which enable him to manipulate them.242 If some silly person insists on talking about “ideas” then one just cracks a joke and hopes he gets the message. Otherwise, one calls the attendant and has the bounder ejected from one’s club, doesn’t one?243
Thus, the “action” of the novel, such as it is, is less Nicky’s seduction—he succumbs pretty quickly and easily, the whole action of the novel taking place in a week—
Nicholas had a thoroughly miserable bath. He knew that he couldn’t evade Patrick’s advances much longer. It was no good pretending that Patrick was going to support him from purely altruistic motives. Patrick wanted his pound of flesh, he was going to make sure he got it. What did sex matter
anyway? It was a small price to pay for all the things that Patrick could offer him in exchange.
—but rather, a rather late-developing concern with his intellectual independence.
Christopher spoke slowly and with difficulty. “Nicholas, you must listen to me. You’re an intelligent person. You’ve a mind of our own. You mustn’t sell it. That would be a crime for which later you’d never forgive yourself. There continually occur moments in one’s life when one has to choose between possessions and integrity. . . . But believe me, if you choose possessions today, you’ll regret it for ever after.”
So the turning point, Nicky’s redemption as it were, occurs when he resolves, not to resist Patrick’s overtures—that ship, after only the most formal nod to Pamela-like hesitation, has sailed—but when he resolves to keep his own mind.244
Of course, there’s no tiresome “happy ending”—how middle-class!—and Nicky ignores Christopher’s advice, only to find Patrick has already tired of his balkiness and moved on—literally, to Bermuda. Ronnie, however, has a more detailed and consequential epiphany:
He had dreamed all night about money . . . he was still thinking about money. It was money that had gradually destroyed his integrity. He should never have been a fashion designer. He had given up painting for a quick return. Yet he had never made enough money, probably because he was only capable of spending it. He would have been far happier as a painter. Christopher, in spite of the incredible squalor in which he lived, would ultimately command greater respect. It was a galling thought. (pp. 204-05)
The other characters, all but one homosexual males, some married—to a woman!—or living together or single, most “protégés” that have escaped from Patrick’s clutches, all have to work to some degree for their living, and are the better for it; they are the ones who have freed themselves and have ideas.
Ronnie is apparently based on Cyril Connelly, and it’s interesting, in a sour way, to read that
According to the critics, [Noël] Coward should have faded away long ago. It was one of English theatre’s great mantras—his fame was built on gossamer-thin plots and diaphanous characters that doomed his legacy. Not even the slickest epigrams would survive. “One cannot read his plays now,” wrote Cyril Connelly, during the war. “For they are written in the most perishable way imaginable. The cream in them turns sour overnight.”245
I dare say that the reputation of Noël Coward, a man of both wit and ideas, however “slick” his epigrams, has survived considerably longer than overnight, while most of my readers have already asked, “Who’s Cyril Connelly?”
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
January 20, 2014
“THE WILD BOYS SMILE”:
REFLECTIONS ON OLAF STAPLEDON’S
ODD JOHN
“Well,” said John, “I’m thought queer because I have more brains than most children.”
After making my way through Olaf Stapledon’s The Flames, and having read Last and First Men already, I decided to press ahead in my Kindle anthology by tackling Stapledon’s third novel, from 1935. It’s a relatively short novel—Dover packages it with another short novel, Sirius—that supposedly pioneers the science fiction subgenre of spooky genetically advanced children, later to be mined by Sturgeon, Heinlein, Lem, and Wyndham.246
Blessed Wikipedia has labored to provide a synopsis, using Stapledon’s chapter headings, so I don’t have to! As you can see there, it’s pretty standard for the genre—having established it, after all—until the killing and raping.247 Now that everyone’s (re-) familiarized themselves with the narrative, I’d like to make some comments on some of the more striking features. I think we will find some interesting connections to such topics as initiatory traditions, utopian communities, and even events in the near future of Stapledon’s Europe.
What links all this, I think, is that John’s advanced genetics results in a prolonged kind of adolescence, while his intelligence advances by leaps and bounds. By the time of his death in his mid-20s, he could be mistaken for a teenager, yet he is part of a group mind contemplating the meaning of the Universe.
John’s initial sexual exploits are detailed in an early chapter entitled “Scandalous Adolescence,” which hints at a kind of Moll Flanders or even Fanny Hill kind of titillation—we’ll see Stapledon’s taste for “ribaldry” come up again later—but the activities described—first turning his attentions to the most socially dominant boy in the neighborhood, then using his new-found techniques to rather cold-bloodedly seduce the prettiest girl around, and even the broadly hinted-at relations with his mother—all suggest something more serious: the socializing and ultimately initiatory activities of the Männerbund.248
While not necessarily, or exclusively, homosexual,249 the Männerbund, as a band apart, withdrawn though not necessarily hostile to “family oriented” society,250 is naturally associated with such ‘deviance’, and both are easily assimilated as metaphors for social and evolutionary advance.
The appropriation of the word ‘queer’ is relevant here. Although some may carp that a “perfectly good word” has been, well, queered, there is some rationale here.251
It is striking, then, that even granting the word “didn’t mean that” back then, Stapledon seems to use the word ‘queer’ almost reflexively, in all kinds of situations. Using my Kindle’s handy highlight function, I’ve taken the liberty of collating his usages, which make for an interesting list.
This from a queer child to a full-grown man.
Altogether, his eyes were the most obviously “queer” part of him.
Here, within a single page:
When I arrived, John was already settled in the corner opposite to the great man, who occasionally glanced from his paper at the queer child with a cliff for brow and caves for eyes.
“Oh, my name’s John. I’m a queer child, but that doesn’t matter. It’s you we’re going to talk about.”
We all laughed. Mr. Magnate shifted in his seat, but continued to look his part.
“Well,” he said, “you certainly are a queer child.” He glanced at his adult fellow travellers for confirmation. We duly smiled.
“Yes,” replied John, “but you see from my point of view you are a queer man.” Mr. Magnate hung for a moment between amusement and annoyance; but since we had all laughed, except John, he chose to be tickled and benevolent.
“Surely,” he said, “there’s nothing remarkable about me. I’m just a business man. Why do you think I’m queer?”
“Well,” said John,” I’m thought queer because I have more brains than most children. Some say I have more brains than I ought to have. You’re queer because you have more money than most people; and (some say) more than you ought to have.”
John uses it himself:
I had a queer notion that if I pricked any of you, there would be no bleeding, but only a gush of wind.
More:
But when he was sixteen, and in appearance a queer sort of twelve-year-old, he turned his attention to woman.
As we’ll see, some find his kind rather attractive:
Out of the water and played ball with his companions, running, leaping, twisting, with that queer grace which few could detect, but by which those few were strangely enthralled.
John withdraws to the forest, clearly a shamanic, initiatory period:
There was a pause, then Norton laughed awkwardly, and said, “Well, when one tries to describe it in cold blood over a cup of coffee, it just sounds crazy. But damn it, if the thing didn’t happen, something mighty queer must have happened to us, for we both saw it, as clearly as you see us now.”
Certain fungi, too, contributed to his diet on that day, and indeed throughout his adventure. On the second day he was feeling “pretty queer.”
Moreover, he coveted the huge material wealth that the slaughter of one stag would afford him. And he had apparently a queer lust to try his strength and cunning against a worthy quarry.
After his queer diet of mushrooms, h
e acquires shamanic, or “mighty queer,” powers:
And I had made queer little visits to events in my own past life. I just lived them again, with full vividness, as though they were ‘now.’
Well, in Scotland, when I began to come into all those queer powers that I mentioned just now, I was tempted to regard the exercise of them as the true end of my life.
Using his queer powers, he finds others of his kind—some kind of gaydar?
I told you before that when I was in Scotland I used to find myself in telepathic touch with people, and that some of the people seemed queer people, or people in a significant way more like me than you.
Most music, ordinary music invented by Homo sapiens, seemed at once to interest and outrage him; though when one of the doctors played a certain bit of Bach, he was gravely attentive, and afterwards went off to play oddly twisted variants of it on his queer pipe.
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 10
