The summer had done its trick. Locke began his second year at Oxford in good spirits. Mrs. Dine, the landlady of the boarding and lodging house at 40 Beaumont Street, stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of his mother and nursed him back to health with plenty of rest, hot lemonade, and gin. She was the first of many surrogate mothers he would rely on throughout his life. A week after Mary’s departure on September 9, Locke was his old energetic self again, eager to start the new term. “I seem to be waking up from last year’s hibernation,” he announced to his mother, “shaking off the Oxford slough, and getting ready to work.”1
For one thing, he had new rooms. After a month at Dine’s, in futile pursuit of overly expensive accommodations on fashionable Banbury Road, Locke finally compromised on less-expensive furnished rooms down the street from Dine’s at 14 Beaumont Street. He described it as “the large house at the corner diagonal from Dine’s. They are finer rooms than her’s,” he boasted to his mother, “very old antique furniture and a large oil painting by D’Eychaert, a fine specimen of the genre Dutch. … The people, Mrs. Foster, of the house have been very well to do, fine Wedgewood china and that sort of thing.”2 Mary Locke did not remember the house, yet approved: “the street is such a pleasant one and so conveniently located. I know your penchant for antiques, so suppose the furniture will just suit you.”3 She was right about the street: the house stood next door to the Ashmolean Museum; across the street stood the regal Randolph Hotel, where the Rhodes Trust held its annual spring luncheon. Locke relished lavish accommodations, because “good locations have a lot to do with an entrée into social life, and then I think it more or less a duty for me to live representatively while here—few Rhodes men had such rooms.”4
Locke wanted such lavish accommodations, because as secretary of the Cosmopolitan Club he was expected to host some club meetings in his rooms; thirty or forty people generally attended. Not long after he moved in, he began to plan the club activities with an eye on their rewards. “Seme and Phillip were into dinner night before last. We are arranging a delightful series of papers for the Cosmopolitan Club this term—I shall work hard for it—I am a candidate for the presidency of it term after next.” The first meeting of the club did take place in his rooms on October 20, but was a burden to pull off. Locke had to schedule the speaker, Hamid El Alaily, send out the invitations, and secure a caterer—at his own expense. “If ever I undertake to slave for a dishful of international hash like this [again],” he complained to his mother, “may I have all the trouble I have had.” But Locke clearly delighted in such entertaining. His rooms were a museum-like exhibition of the new ideas of the Cosmopolitan Club in high style. “The meeting in the room came off charmingly well. I had Buols to cater with coffee, biscuits, fruit, cigarets, and the like. They brought in a silver urn and all I had to do was draw off and hand a cup to each one as he came in. … There were nearly 40 present, and we weren’t overcrowded—you can judge the size of my rooms.”5
The formality of the occasion contrasted sharply with the radical political content of the paper El Alaily presented. Just back from France, this young Europhile and president of the Egyptian Society of England was in an angry mood. In his paper, “Modern Egypt,” Alaily attacked British colonial rule in Egypt, especially the administration of Lord Cromer, Britain’s Consul-General in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, and demanded that England grant Egypt its independence. He rebutted British justifications for denying Egyptian self-rule, especially the charge that Egypt’s independence movement lacked the spirit of true nationalism, being led by religious fanatics. Egypt’s nationalist movement was both secular and religious, Alaily argued, a virtual “renaissance of the whole Mohammedan world [which seemed] to be entering a new lease of progressive life. It is an Islamic renaissance, based on science and freedom of thought, that has elevated the most long suffering people in the world.”6 The new cosmopolitanism was beginning with criticality toward the discourse of English colonialism.
Locke may have been less interested in El Alaily’s militant nationalism than with the way he used the concept of a “renaissance” to imagine liberation in his country. By October 1908, Locke had heard the anti-imperialist critique of colonialism from club members. But more interesting for him was how some like El Alaily located such values as free thought, secularization, and “renaissance” in the modern Egyptian tradition, obliterating the assumption that Europeans had a monopoly on such ways of thinking. Alaily echoed that of Moustafa Kamel Pasha, cited in Alaily’s paper, who had asked a year earlier in Alexandria: “what greater honor can a man yearn for than to work for the renaissance of a nation which knew the sciences, civilization and literature before all other nations? What greater source of pride can there be for a man of noble instincts than the honor of contributing to the redemption of a nation which has been the master of the human race and the educator of the world? What greater glory can souls desire … than that of bringing forth the Egyptian people from darkness into light, and giving it the first place among those other countries which were sunk in black obscurity when our country was the fountain of all knowledge?”7 By invoking ancient Egyptian civilization and appropriating nineteenth-century language to announce their people’s exit from the “Dark Ages,” Egyptian intellectuals labeled as their own those very values the English used to deny freedom and self-determination to the colonized around the world. In a maneuver not unlike that made famous sixty years later by Malcolm X, Egyptian intellectuals fired the pride of their people by asserting that Egyptians had built astounding civilizations during a time when, as Malcolm put it, the people of Europe “lived a cave-like existence.”8
The drawback of El Alaily’s intellectual strategy was that it reproduced some of the bias toward sub-Saharan Africans who did not have Egypt’s imperial past. Alaily declared, for example, that Egypt “cannot be governed like a country buried in the depths of Africa and out of contact with Europe.” Did El Alaily mean to imply that the right to self-determination depended on the degree to which a nation exemplified European cultural values? It seemed so. Intellectuals of color in the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club tended to value their indigenous cultures to the extent that they had anticipated or assimilated European signs of culture.
Locke, of course, also denigrated African Americans who had not achieved the level of civilization that Europeans (and Africans like El Alaily) thought was required for the right to self-determination. As Locke wrote his mother:
Seme and I and a Gold Coast Negro by the name of Gibson who returned to Oxford to take both his M.A. and B.C.L. (think of that you Afro-Americans!) went to a wonderful performance of Coleridge Taylor’s Hiawatha. I had never heard it before. It stunned me. I have heard a great deal of music, but the emotional appeal and the native idiom of Hiawatha I have never felt nor expected to feel. I shall not stop long in London next time, but I must look him up. Strange too he is African extraction. The African mind and temperament is not self-divided, nor self-despising. Thank God for it. I don’t hear the call of the Liberian herd, but I’ll visit every part of Africa the climate will allow me, and what’s more I do believe it a greater field than America.9
Locke was infatuated with elite Africans as somehow more able than their brothers in America. His heart was touched by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s ability to allow indigenous peoples to sing in European music. Locke was looking for sublime music, not the entirely original modern music of ragtime that African Americans had created around the turn of the century. Ragtime jarred Locke’s nerves and destroyed his sensibility of what art music should be. Like El Alaily, Locke’s definition of success in art was constructed in opposition to Blackness, which both wrote of as the absence of civilization. But it was going to be harder for Locke than for El Alaily to build imperial cultural power out of “Afro-American” creativity, because Locke had no ancient imperialist tradition like that of the Egyptians to contest European culture. Afro-American folk forms were revising European forms, as the spirituals revised and transformed Anglican hymns. Locke wanted a home culture more nationalist, but also more sublime than what the Europeans had.
Not everyone in the Cosmopolitan Club agreed nationalism was the path forward. Har Dayal, an Indian revolutionary and a former Oxford scholar with an impeccable academic record, challenged the Cosmopolitan Club in a paper he read in November, most likely in Locke’s rooms. In “Obstacles to Cosmopolitanism,” Har Dayal argued that “tribalism,” Har Dayal’s term for nationalism, and intellectual bigotry—the demand that others conform to our ideas of group politics or be rejected—kept humanity from embracing the central idea of cosmopolitanism that we should love one another regardless of our beliefs or affiliations. What made Har Dayal’s critique powerful is that it came not from an aesthete British member of the club, but from a revolutionary. The love of nation could not be completely eradicated, though its influence could be limited, Har Dayal argued, by de-emphasizing national or racial identity and replacing nationalistic history with a world history. To oppose intellectual bigotry, Har Dayal called on his fellows to form a band of men “who should undertake the duty of preaching and living Cosmopolitanism” and travel around Europe to spread the message.10
It must have struck Locke as deeply ironic that Har Dayal, one of the most incendiary leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, was now back at Oxford extolling the virtues of universal tolerance. Fourteen months earlier, this brilliant Sanskrit scholar had resigned his Oxford scholarship and returned to India to organize active resistance to the British government, values, and civilization. Born in 1884 in Delhi, the son of a reader in the British court and a member of the Kayastha, or writer caste, Har Dayal had excelled in public schools, passed numerous examinations with no mistakes, and had become the darling of the Christian missionaries at Saint Stephen’s College in India before he went to Oxford in 1905 on a full scholarship. Despite being very European in his dress, manner, and taste, he became an enthusiastic advocate of Indian nationalism—another example of the radicalizing effect Oxford had on intellectuals of color. After a brief stay in India, Har Dayal was forced by a British crackdown to flee India in the summer of 1908 and return to Oxford, where he showed up at the fall meetings of the Cosmopolitan Club. Not long after his speech before the club, he left for Paris, where he joined a group of Indian radicals; he eventually broke with them because they would not join him in advocating violent resistance to British colonial rule. Har Dayal’s “Obstacles to Cosmopolitanism” was a dress rehearsal of ideas that would emerge even more strongly later. In 1910, Har Dayal, in the United States, would caution Indian radicals to loosen their grip on their own native culture and allow themselves to “breathe the fresh air of Western intellectual, as well as political, freedom.”11
At the root of Har Dayal’s many ideological shifts was the idea that the Indian, read colonized, had something to learn from the West just as the West had something to learn from the colonized. He borrowed the term “renaissance” to symbolize the intellectual awakening he wanted to come from his people, where they would gain a sense of their history, culture, and destiny, and yet remain open to the positive influences of European civilization. Here was a much more sophisticated notion of revolution as well as self-culture—and a thoroughly pluralist one—than Kallen had advocated. In this quest for “self-culture,” Har Dayal’s Christian heritage was often more powerful than any Indian tradition. Har Dayal hoped he would find a way to meld the best of both the ascetic Indian and the rationalist Christian traditions, but unfortunately, balancing the two to his satisfaction was elusive. Consequently, he lurched back and forth between responding with ascetic transcendence to the West and responding with a violent, murderous rage.
Although Locke respected Har Dayal from a distance, they were not intimate friends; but Har Dayal may have introduced Locke to the Marxist colonial critique of imperialism and something more—the view that a truly revolutionary view of the future had to go beyond the political attack on European domination. Cosmopolitan criticality had to warn adherents that in responding in kind to rabid European nationalism, the colonized must not lose their soul to gain self-determination. Har Dayal was trying to develop a politics that reflected the sublime, transcendent spiritual existence of non-Western peoples. Indians, Egyptians, and African Americans had lessons to give to humanity beyond their rage against exploitation. A Cosmopolitan Club worth its name had to keep open the very possibility, seemingly foreclosed in Locke’s “Epilogue,” to transcend one’s traditions and become something larger. Har Dayal’s paper resonated with Locke’s earlier dream to continue Josiah Royce’s notion of a beloved community with African American culture, especially products like the spirituals, as a catharsis of passion and a rapprochement between the races. But such freedom dreams had no academic mooring for Locke at Oxford as they had with Royce at Harvard.
A couple of days after the first club meeting in his rooms, however, Locke did receive the good news that the Standing Committee of Literae Humaniores had met on October 28 and approved his request to read for a graduate degree in philosophy. That meant that he could exit the BA program in Literae Humaniores at Hertford College, end his futile effort to master Greek, and immerse himself in a program of independent study of philosophy that would culminate in a dissertation and a BSc. The board even accepted his dissertation subject, “The Concept of Value and Its Relation to Logic, Ethics, and Aesthetics,” which surprised him. “I hadn’t expected they would,” he confessed to his mother, “for it was frightfully unorthodox and really too good a subject for them to allow me to corner it, I thought. I have a year to do the thesis in, with Dr. Schiller and Prof. Cook Wilson as supervisors. Generally, even if they admit a subject, they don’t give one decent supervisor. So I am very lucky, especially as my old Hertford tutor opposed it: it cuts him out all together.”12
Locke was happy that his work would be supervised by two Oxford professors outside of Hertford, for his Hertford tutor, Rev. Williams, evidently wanted Locke to satisfy the requirements for the BA before being allowed to read for a graduate degree. Williams may have been skeptical about how hard Locke was applying himself in his first-year work. He was right. But Locke already was adept at academic intrigue and took advantage of Oxford’s idiosyncratic graduate regulations and greater latitude for Rhodes Scholars to outmaneuver his college tutor. A day of reckoning awaited Locke, however, if he should fail to get along well with his new supervisors. Oxford was letting him direct his education as he saw fit; but it was also giving him enough rope to hang himself, if he failed to make adequate progress on the dissertation by the year’s end.
The university’s support of his new academic plans invigorated Locke, and by November he was getting down to work, although his earlier problems of concentration persisted. In November, he informed his mother:
I have just really begun serious work … and dull philosophy written in bad and involved German by Austrian Jew Professors is not easy hammock reading. If only I could be in a decent climate that didn’t take the starch out of me as the Oxford weather does. I could sleep the term out here and have seriously thought of galvanizing myself into activity with acid phosphate and that sort of thing but I feel it would react on my nerves which are already too jumpy.13
In the end, he concluded, “really what I’ve got against Oxford [is] terrible disinclination to write. I don’t mind thinking even in this fog—but writing! Oh the ideas that get lost for a bit of paper and ink.” Locke’s struggle with the weather seemed real, but just as important was his “disinclination to write” and an abhorrence of the kind of ennui that often accompanied his time alone at Oxford. Accordingly, he still found socializing his best escape from his inability to write. “You do what your neighbors wish you to do in Oxford—whether you like it or no. I have tried I don’t know how many times to set to work on several short stories … but get as far as the title or the first sentence of 1st paragraph, when I am interrupted.”14
Cosmopolitan Club friends were his most frequent interrupters. Seme was the constant companion who most influenced how Locke spent his time. Among other things, Seme convinced Locke that to be a true gentleman he must learn to ride. With Seme, Locke took riding lessons and French lessons, the latter with the daughter of a Sorbonne professor who treated both of her charges with a brusqueness that bordered on cruelty. By the end of the term, Locke had mastered riding, if not French, and went riding regularly with Percy J. Philip, who seemed by December to have supplanted Seme as Locke’s main social companion. “I have become a splendid horseman,” he announced to his mother on the eve of his Christmas vacation. “Last Saturday Philip and I rode 20 miles—I was fairly exhausted,” but “I am going out with him again this afternoon—he is a splendid figure on a horse—I look like a jockey—but for my clothes which I got particularly proper to avoid amputations that I wasn’t a gentleman after-all. … Philip has been an almost constant companion recently” and had replaced Downes as the man uppermost in Locke’s romantic affections.15
Philip also seemed responsible for introducing Locke to another new diversion of his second year, the company of two teenage boys who lived in Oxford. Philip was friendly with Mrs. Addis, a single mother of two boys, Phillip, fourteen, and Dansey, fifteen, and infatuated with another member of the family, a young girl named Margaret of undetermined age. It is not clear from the surviving letters whether Mrs. Addis was divorced or a widow, but what is certain is that the family lacked a father and that Mrs. Addis was having difficulty rearing the headstrong boys.
While Philip’s interest in Margaret was paramount, Locke’s interest, not surprisingly, centered on the boys, although to be fair it should be admitted that Philip, Locke, and Sydney Franklin, a London lawyer and Cosmopolitan Club member, all seemed to feel some responsibility “to do something” for the boys, most likely to help them gain some maturity. Locke, more than others, however, appeared to sign on to what amounted to a mentoring relationship with the two teenage boys. But a curious duality existed in his relationship with these two “youngsters”: as a father figure, he had their mother’s permission to civilize them, but as an adult child himself, he was also attracted to the opportunity to frolic in their world of innocence and playfulness. That is the sentiment that surfaces from the first letter in which Locke informs his mother of this new relationship in his life.
Seme is here often, almost every day … we go out driving fine afternoons—the Dines have got a stylish new trap—and let it to us very cheap. Its jolly good fun—particularly when I take the children out—the children, I must explain, for I am shamefully behind in my news, are two North Oxford boys the Addis’s—Philip Aetates, 14 [years old] and Dansey Aetates, 15. They are allowed to come to tea with me twice a week and if it is pleasant I take them driving.16
Later, Locke informed her he had discovered a nice lake nearby where he took the boys out in small boat and let them paddle him for a good part of the afternoon. Rather than taming wild beasts, Locke approached the “children’s hour” with the “youngsters” as a world of adolescent fantasy and escape much like Lewis Carroll found with Alice out in a rowboat on a lake during his time at Oxford.
Toward the end of the Michaelmas term 1908, however, Locke, along with his friend, Sydney Franklin, seemed to develop a more adult and more romantic interest in the boys, especially in Dansey. Franklin’s letters provide the clues to a relationship that remains unclear today. Locke began to behave toward Dansey in ways that would later be his signature style of romantic involvement with young men. Indeed, it appears that Locke and Franklin became rivals for Dansey’s affection. A letter dated June 2, 1909, from Franklin to Locke indicates that at least two crises occurred that defined Locke’s attachment to Dansey. The first probably occurred at the end of Michaelmas term or just at the beginning of the Hilary term 1909: Locke decided to break off his visits with Dansey by himself in his rooms on Beaumont Street. The cause of this first break is unclear, but it seems to have occurred because Dansey failed to respond to Locke’s subtle expression of interest in the younger man. Philip already had remarked in one of his letters that Dansey had failed on one occasion to understand one of Locke’s letters; clearly, Locke’s entreaties to Dansey, particularly given the delicacy of the relationship, were too murky to be readily understood by a teenager. At that time, Franklin interceded and advised Locke that if he would just “sit still and do nothing,” Dansey would move toward Locke and respond favorably. This judgment seems to have been correct, for Locke did not end the relationship at that time. Such helpful advice was interesting given that Franklin was also interested in Dansey. “For some unaccountable reason [I have] grown extremely fond of Dansey (although I do not get the affection from him I might have hoped for),” Franklin confessed. He interceded again in the relationship early in June 1909. This time Locke did break off seeing Dansey after the latter missed an appointment, and this time Franklin urged Locke to do anything but sit still. Franklin’s letter offers insights into the complexity of Locke’s relationship with Dansey:
You do not need me to say what you should do, but anything is preferable to that course [to sit still and wait]. Even getting angry with him might serve some good, as he would then realize that he would have to mend his ways, but a cold impassive waiting attitude merely kills confidence. … Besides breaking your faith with his mother, you are abandoning for one hitch the task you voluntarily undertook. You undertook to attempt to cure him of his faults, and refuse to exercise your influence because of his faults. Is it not rather a severe punishment on him to sacrifice his future because he forgot an appointment? Have you never cut an appointment yourself; if you did, did you not make excuses and apologies which were accepted? You know quite well that what Dansey needs is the influence of one strong will, and he cannot get that influence at home. You have it in your power to give him that influence yourself by exerting your authority, and you refuse to do so for merely selfish reasons.17
Punctuality, according to several of Locke’s lovers, was a firm requisite of being romantically involved with him. A missed appointment was an early warning signal to Locke that a person could not be trusted with his heart. Careful attention to appointments was only part of an elaborate system of rules Locke imposed on lovers, for complete control of another person was a prerequisite for Locke to be intimate. The need for complete control inevitably led to the downfall of many of Locke’s relationships, since eventually everyone broke one of his “rules” and was demoted. Fortunately for Locke, Franklin intervened this time and, by calling on Locke to act in accord with his responsibility to help the boy achieve a degree of maturity, he was able to get Locke to act more reasonably. What reinforced Franklin’s position with Locke was that Franklin himself gave Locke permission to act in the boy’s interest alone, even if that meant forbidding Franklin’s own involvement. “If you think I make your influence harder, tell me so, and I will not see him again. As for his other friendships, find out what they are and forbid them too,” he continued. Emotionally, Locke had considerable control over Dansey, as was revealed in Franklin’s next comment: “You once said you could get anything out of him that was in him. I thought it, at the time, a very brutal thing to say, but now is the time to use this power. It is merely false modesty for you to deny that your friendship with him is of greater benefit to him than any other. 16 is the critical age with all children, and with a boy like Dansey, the fact is emphasized enormously.”18
Apparently, Locke relented and reestablished contact with Dansey, but he also turned the situation to his advantage and forbade Franklin from having any further contact with the boy. Locke replied to Franklin, “I shall, if allowed by Miss Addis and conceded by Dansey, assume entire and responsible control of Dansey’s time and thoughts from now until my mother arrives (June 23rd or thereabouts).”19 Hence, for the next three weeks he would attempt to get Dansey “into shape.” Locke exercised a father-like authority to teach Dansey how to act, how to behave as a gentleman, and how to comport himself with others in person and in writing. Was Locke’s mandate broader? Was Locke charged with the responsibility to make Dansey less irresponsible or less effeminate, less outwardly or outrageously gay? Locke was an authority on how to appear as if he were an Italian or Frenchman, rather than a gay Black American. Locke may have advised Dansey how to comport himself to survive in a heterosexual world, a kind of mentoring Locke would do with other gay men throughout his life. Nurturing Dansey as a surrogate father to a young, White Oxford boy may have reprised the role Locke’s father had performed—or tried to perform—with him, that of trying to drill the apparent gayness out of him.
Even more intriguing is the question of why Locke, a man with considerable access to men at Oxford and particularly in the Cosmopolitan Club, would become so involved with a much younger man. This relationship seemed to satisfy some need in his psyche not satisfied elsewhere, a need to be the father figure, a male nurturer. Or was it an attempt of the dramatically undersized Locke to become a child again?
The ambiguity arises because Locke seemed to be under Dansey’s sway as much as Dansey was under his. The master-slave relationship always contained, as Hegel observed, the likelihood that the slave would one day become the master. In this as in other intimate relationships, who was in charge was contested and changeable, as each jockeyed for psychological position with the other. At just below 5 feet tall, Locke must have felt a greater parity in size with the diminutive, but still growing teenager, Dansey, than he could ever have felt with men his own age, like the almost giant Philip. Locke found himself rather helpless in being so powerfully attracted to someone so obviously unsuitable. His subsequent overreaction to the young man’s one missed appointment suggests how powerful that obsession had become and how important it was for him to protect himself in a relationship that potentially might end up controlling him.
Locke’s compulsion also helped him to avoid facing the moral implications of what he was doing. He was clearly acting unethically when he exploited the mother’s mandate to groom the young man by pursuing a clandestine, romantic relationship with Dansey. Locke knew that Mrs. Addis had not intended him to romanticize her son; and yet, the same Victorian society that condemned such romantic attachments in public also created the space for them to occur in private. Mrs. Addis seems not to have seen that Locke’s relationship—really the relationships that several men had—with her children was sexual, or at the least sexualized, and accordingly, Locke exploited that blindness. Was it his race, his diminutive size, his Oxford standing, or his winning smile that convinced her he was safe?
Despite such private escapades, Locke eschewed any public discussion of homosexuality, even in the protected atmosphere of the Cosmopolitan Club. At the end of the Michaelmas term, a mild controversy emerged when Marsh Roberts, a graduate of St. John’s College, proposed to read a paper titled, “Oscar Wilde’s Place in Literature.” Locke asked Sydney Franklin to speak with Roberts about his paper. Franklin replied on January 31, 1909, “I took your advice and went round and worried M-R again. Results 1: He has promised to make it the dullest and most insipid thing imaginable. 2: I am to have a censorship over the paper, and he hopes I will be sure and cut out any passage which could possibly hurt the feelings of a maiden Aunt. Will this satisfy you? He says he knows we all want to withdraw his paper and he would gladly have done so if they asked him straight out.”20 Like other Oxford homosexuals less than ten years after the Oscar Wilde trial, Locke worried public discussion of Wilde would bring scrutiny and repression down upon him and the club. That Roberts knew “we all” wanted the paper withdrawn suggests Locke was not alone in this worry. Unlike criticism of imperialism and non-Western nationalism, which was inflammatory but still permissible in the club, even literary discussion of sexuality was verboten. Yet this was precisely the issue that drew many of the club members together.
Tension over sexual issues was not the only conflict in the Cosmopolitan Club. At the end of the Michaelmas term 1908 a power struggle erupted between Locke and Roman Biske, a strong-willed German who was a member of the club and editor of the magazine. Biske was a major radical voice in the organization, and though it is unclear what started the dispute, it seemed to center around a disagreement among members over a question left unresolved by many of the papers, including El Alaily’s: how were the members of the colonial world to effect change, to break the yoke of imperialism, and to lead their people from under European domination? On one side of the question stood Roman Biske, a revolutionary thinker and student of Marx, who argued vociferously that only a colonial revolution would bring about the new world order of cosmopolitanism. Har Dayal, it can be presumed, agreed. On the other side stood Locke, Mukerjea, Philip, Seme, and de Fonseka who believed that a revolutionary challenge to Western imperialism was suicidal and believed a cultural struggle was the best approach. Colonized people ought to resist by preserving their own indigenous art, culture, and sense of self-respect, an agenda Mukerjea had endorsed in his paper on Bengali literature, and Locke had implied something analogous in his early paper on Dunbar. But that position was being challenged by a group of radicals who advocated cultural assimilation and political rebellion for underdeveloped peoples. The conflict between the two camps came to a head at the end of the term, as Locke had reported to his mother on December 15: Biske “is a hair brained intriguer—we had quite a horrible clash in the last meeting of the Cosmopolitan Club and to spare the indignity of a personal issue I withdrew from next term’s election list.”21
Biske won the presidency of the club for the Hilary term, but Locke counterattacked the following term. He encouraged Mukerjea to make a special trip up from London to join Philip, Locke, and Seme in passing a vote of no confidence on Biske and his slate of Cosmopolitan Club officers. The vote was a ringing defeat of what Locke termed “intellectual radicalism of the worst kind.” Such a maneuver exhibited what later would become Locke’s trademark in conflicts: he would withdraw in the face of conflict, especially when challenged by superior force, only to return to counter-attack later with deadly force.
Academically, Locke seemed to do much better his second year at Oxford. Toward the end of Michaelmas term, his reading picked up and he reported to his mother that he had had a good term. He impressed his tutors during his “collections,” a term-end oral examination on his progress in his thesis reading, although he still had to tolerate criticism from his college dean. His work the following term was even better, in part because he did not do as much traveling as the preceding Christmas vacation. Instead of going to Paris with Seme and then to the south of France and Rome to meet Franklin, Locke took a short tip to London and returned early to Oxford to continue his studies. After a fall term of attempting to live up to the standard of his friends, lack of funds was as much a factor as interest in his studies for his not traveling to the Continent. Yet Locke was not greatly upset, as he seemed pleased to stay in London. He roomed mainly with de Fonseka in Soho and particularly enjoyed their afternoon strolls in Piccadilly.
Locke also welcomed the opportunity to explore the London cultural scene, especially after he was elected to honorary membership in two prominent London clubs—the United Arts Club on St. James’s Street and the Union Liberal Club. Although such memberships were automatically conferred on Rhodes Scholars, Locke appreciated gaining access to the United Arts Club, an arts organization that maintained a permanent exhibition of paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative art in its galleries. Hobnobbing around London with the cultural elite was just what Locke wanted, especially if he could do so in the company of de Fonseka, fast becoming one of his favorite Oxford friends.
Back at Oxford for the Hilary term, Locke threw himself into reading and writing. It was not easy. He complained to his mother that his subject was a very difficult one. His mother responded that he had always chosen the most difficult subjects to research. That predilection was an intellectual strength, but it imposed a special burden on him now. Value theory and classification was not only a difficult topic, but also not well developed or understood at Oxford. Most of the work in this abstract field had been done in Germany, and the work was available only by translating German texts, which slowed the process for Locke: by 1909, he was still a novice reading in German. With such an esoteric topic, Locke was limited in the number of tutors who could help him. In the case of Schiller, problems developed early in Locke’s second year in the form of compensation that Schiller received for his work with Locke. Schiller was a tutor at Corpus Christi College, and because Locke was a student of Hertford, he had to pay Schiller supervisory fees during Michaelmas term, at the same time that he paid his college tuition. In December 1908, Locke petitioned Hertford to be excused from paying tuition, because he was working for a BSc outside of the college, but Hertford ruled instead that it would pay Schiller’s supervisory fees.22 The upshot was that by the end of his second year at Oxford, Locke would be working mainly with Wilson instead of with Schiller.
In Cook Wilson, Locke encountered a logician who was not sympathetic to pragmatism and not particularly sympathetic to the kind of aesthetic philosophical interest that lay behind Locke’s formal study of value theory. Wilson was a rigorous tutor, however, and at the end of the Michaelmas term, he asked Locke to prepare some notes on his reading of Ehrenfels. That evidently was the “work” that he had to get back to Oxford to do. When he turned it in, Wilson was less than completely satisfied. He noted that Locke had a tendency to mix in his own critical reflections with quotations taken directly from Ehrenfels that were not set off in quotation marks. Locke needed to be more careful with his citations, Wilson commented. While the seamless quality of Locke’s exposition of Ehrenfels shows that he was finally getting into the value of theory work, it also suggested that Locke was veering hazardously close to plagiarism. Wilson did praise Locke for beginning to move beyond simple descriptive exposition of Ehrenfel’s theories to some critical evaluation of their limitations. But Wilson’s comments also suggested that Locke was not yet doing first-rate philosophical work.
Locke began to think seriously about the possibility of taking a year off from Oxford and spending it at the Sorbonne, where he might study with the eminent French philosopher Henri Bergson. “I am tiring of Oxford,” he informed his mother in a February 10, 1909, letter. “It is too relaxing mentally and physically. To return to it for a year after having been away on the continent a year (would) be an enormous advantage in every way. There is in Paris too Henri Bergson—the truest master in philosophy Europe can boast of, that is to say a truly original thinker who has not yet had time to fossilize or grow academic.”23 That plan, however, never materialized, and instead he stuck it out with Wilson and Schiller. Yet even in this environment, he could report at the end of the Hilary term that his oral examinations before these tutors had gone well. He seemed on the right track, if not tremendously inspired.
But just as Locke was gaining academic stability at Oxford, America reminded him he did not belong. Along with the rest of the Rhodes Scholars, Locke was invited to a lunch with the American ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, and his wife at their London residence, Dorchester House, on March 15. Locke accepted, but then Reid learned to his surprise that one of the scholars was a Negro. Almost certainly the southern Rhodes Scholars informed Reid of Locke’s race as part of continuing their efforts to segregate him. Reid reacted hysterically and dashed off a letter to George Parkin decrying the impropriety of asking southerners to lunch with a Negro. “The question of social relationships, particularly at the table, with such people in the houses of American officials has been a burning one,” perhaps referring to the tidal wave of southern outrage after President Theodore Roosevelt dined with Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901. Reid continued: “to a certain extent the same thing is true in this country, and I have had occasion to see quite strong manifestations of feeling on the subject here as one ordinarily sees either in New York or Washington.” Reid wished that Locke had not been invited, but concluded that under the circumstances, there was nothing that could be done except to “go through with it, receiving the gentleman himself with all proper courtesy and trying to avoid the possibility of either any incident unpleasant to him or to others, or any unpleasant publicity.” He asked Parkin to give him the names of Rhodes Scholars who were friendly with Locke so that he could be seated next to them; the southerners would then be placed on the other side of the room.
The Rhodes Trust had another plan. Wylie visited Locke’s rooms Saturday before the luncheon and asked Locke to withdraw his acceptance of the invitation. Locke refused. Wylie returned again that Sunday and asked Locke to provide names of scholars with whom he was friendly so that Wylie could seat Locke next to them. Again, Locke refused. The next morning, Locke rose early, took the train to London, changed into his formal dress clothes in the train station, and took a cab to the luncheon. Locke had his own strategy for dealing with the situation. “It was an elaborate function,” he wrote to his mother, “tea courses, absolutely high watermark of all my gastronomic experiences [and] a perfect palace, Dorchester House. The southerners were sore but attended. They even asked the Rhodes authorities to urge me to recall my acceptance. I gave them to understand I attended in merely a representative capacity—was seated as it chanced by a friend.” Most likely, the Rhodes officials had researched his acquaintances, and he was seated next to Chester Haring, the Massachusetts scholar and a friend of Locke’s. “I conversed formally only with the hosts and a few Rhodes scholars whom I know and was the first to take leave of the hostess. I did the last quite premeditatedly, and I think it had quite an effect. They were sore I came, but sorer still that I should be the first to leave.”24
At the time, Locke only hinted at how he felt. “After the Rhodes luncheon I simply went to see Seme—had dinner with him and left the very next day for Paris.” After a racial confrontation that required all of his self-discipline, Locke needed to commiserate with someone who understood instinctively what the incident had meant.
Just at that point in his academic career when he was beginning to settle in, feel comfortable, and gain traction in his studies, Locke was told again—by the cowardly Wylie, no less—that he should absent himself from the American community in England. In one sense, it was a simple little luncheon that any strong-minded African American could move on from. But Locke had more difficulty moving on than he could admit. These social occasions meant a lot to him. And this time, unlike the Thanksgiving incident, the Rhodes Trust officials had openly supported the claim of the southern Rhodes Scholars that he should not break bread with other Americans.
Much later, perhaps when Locke contemplated writing an autobiographical essay on the incident titled “April 1909, Southern Rhodes Scholars vs. English Tory Allies,” he made a brief note to himself that revealed what it had meant to him. “By this experience, and its [undecipherable] prejudice, I was converted from an individualistic aesthete into an ardent but I hope not bigoted racialist.”25
No concrete way existed for Locke to express his anger or to heal. He had his friends at the Cosmopolitan Club, but it was questionable whether most would really understand how the incident affected him as an American. Kallen described Locke as “sensitive,” and he was, in part because at some level he believed in America as something more than the land of his birth. To be an American to a philosopher like Locke meant allegiance to an idea, codified in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” The English never claimed anything so widely democratic as the basis for Englishness. But to be an American was supposed to mean one was part of a community, because one “held these truths to be self-evident.” The Reid luncheon reminded Locke of the deep hypocrisy of the American identity he could never claim as fully his.
Connecting with Seme suggested one way out—to bond with an African Diasporic sense of transnationalism. But that did not solve Locke’s emotional problem. He was an isolated African American in another country, and more than ever before, he knew it. And so, with Seme’s heartfelt understanding, Locke left London in the spring of 1909 and threw himself headlong into what he knew best, his personal pursuit of beauty on the Continent. With Downes gone and his mother thousands of miles away, the love of beauty remained his one remaining bulwark against the growing list of cruelties at Oxford, a slender reason to go on when precious few remained.