Sexuality’s Aesthetic Dimension
Kant and the Autobiography of an Androgyne
“I happen to be an aesthete,” averred the self-described sexual invert or “fairie” who wrote under the pseudonym Earl Lind, in his incomparable Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918).1 But, despite the rhetoric of mere accident, there appears to be a good deal more than a coincidental relationship between the aesthetic proclivities and the sexual tastes of the pseudonymous author to whom I will henceforth refer, in deference to his own stated preference, as “Pussie.”2 Pussie tells us early on in his tale that, in the provincial community where he spent his early years, he “was probably more a prey to sensual imaginations than any other boy” (47). This is in fact how he thinks of what we might (somewhat anachronistically) call his “sexuality” or what he referred to as his style of “sensual practices” (75): it is a matter of “sensual imaginations,” a specific configuration of sensuality, guided and driven by a particularly vivid imagination—which makes it, in effect, a variety of aesthetic experience. Later theorists might distinguish, say, mere “aesthetic” appreciation of the beauty of a male body from sexual desire for that body. Pussie couldn’t tell the difference. Erotic desire and aesthetic admiration were one. He had a very specific—nearly exclusive—taste for performing fellatio on handsome rough young (preferably Irish or Italian) men of the working classes, and he understood this to be an aesthetic preference, a desirable encounter with a supremely beautiful object.
The identification of erotic desire with aesthetic attraction only seems strained or counterintuitive to those of us born after the historical invention of sexuality as a distinct category of experience and personhood; since that time the supposed verity of sexuality’s existence as a separate and integral aspect of ourselves has been widely inculcated, and the distinction between erotic interest and aesthetic admiration solidified, but the alliance or identification of sexual and aesthetic interests was common sense in the West for many centuries. Since the modern invention of the categories of homosexual and heterosexual it has been in the interest of advocates of heterosexual normativity to claim that (innocent) aesthetic appreciation of male beauty can be confidently distinguished from (guilty) sexual attraction to that beauty. But under an earlier dispensation, before “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals” were routinely sorted out, there was relatively little reason to distinguish between one kind of sensory receptivity and another. And there was plenty of reason, in fact, for advocates of desensualizing moral regimes (like that of the small-town Connecticut bourgeois Protestant environment in which Pussie was raised) to treat all sensual pleasures as deeply connected to one another, potentially involving one another in causal chains.3 This is all quite evident throughout Pussie’s story because he writes on the cusp of this large historical change, the advent of sexuality as such: he was well-versed in the discourses of medico-legal diagnosis, which were growing in authority in his lifetime, and he employed their descriptive language and categories in his tale (including their discernment of a specifically “sexual” impulse or instinct), to some degree assuming a pathological identity prescribed by those discourses, but, at the same time, he routinely and preferentially characterized his erotic life in aesthetic terms.
“Estheticism and homosexuality are often linked together,” he wrote in an appendix to his text, in which he discussed “The Case of Oscar Wilde,” who was, he claimed, “the most extreme esthete (extravagant feeder on beauty wherever it is to be found, like the author) the world has ever seen” (206). This internally discordant analysis of Wilde—and of Pussie himself—is telling in several respects. On the one hand, Pussie treats “estheticism” and “homosexuality” as distinct entities that may often be contingently “linked” but are not the same; on the other hand, however, he describes Wilde’s aestheticism as a fundamental and capacious attribute, a matter of seeking beauty “wherever it is to be found,” in male bodies or art objects or delicious food and drink. This account of the relationship between Wilde’s (and his own) aestheticism and homosexuality vacillates between distinguishing (but linking) them, on the one hand, and treating them as versions of the same thing on the other. This vacillation is itself a textual trace of the historical precipitation of sexuality as such out of a more comprehensive regime of sensory protocols and structures of taste.4
Pussie’s tale incorporates an interesting account of its own formal accretion over a period of years, as he reflects here and there on how the narrative document had been written up to a certain time in his life (at that point in the text), but had failed to find a willing publisher, only to be extended again up to another present moment.5 He sought a publisher for many years without success, until finding it possible in 1918 to issue it under the guise of a case study offered to a limited professional public by the press of The Medico-Legal Journal, with the imprimatur of that journal’s editor, Dr. Alfred W. Herzog. It is possible to detect within it, then, textual traces of the history of sexuality that had transpired over the course of Pussie’s life, as sexual typologies were invented, elaborated, and promulgated, with, among other results, one view of Wilde (that his fundamental aestheticism included various kinds of allied pleasures) giving way to another view (that his aestheticism was one telling symptom of his fundamental sexual pathology).
Pussie candidly details some of his presumably many encounters with the academic and professional discourses that gradually came to frame his sexual experience and identity: around 1892, during his college years, he “came across two articles in a journal of anthropology which treated of eunuchs” (65), for instance, and in 1896 he “read Krafft-Ebing’s ‘Psychopathia Sexualis,’ besides a number of articles on inversion which had been published in American and European journals,” to be followed shortly thereafter by reading Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (116). It appears that this kind of reading introduced Pussie to the idea that sexuality or sexual desire constituted a separate aspect of himself, distinct from his aesthetic pursuits; but his prior assumption that his fundamental aestheticism—the fact that he had “a nature peculiarly susceptible to sensuality” (55), that he possessed a “delirious imagination” (58), that his “mind and body have … always been hypersensitive to all stimuli and impressions” (83)—was the source and ground of his “sensual practices” survived not only as a relic of an earlier experiential and intellectual regime but as a counterdiscourse to the emergent disciplinary medico-legal and sexological discourses with which he had become familiar. This contention between emergent sexualizing academic and medico-legal discourses, on the one hand, and residual aesthetic frameworks for understanding bodily pleasure, on the other, will be seen, as I will show below, in a wide variety of early twentieth-century American writings.
Pussie characteristically thought of his own attraction to fellatio (and any other form of erotic attraction) as an aesthetic instinct, and he thought of sexual distaste under this description as well. Remembering his dutiful attempt to school himself in heterosexual practices as an adolescent, he conceded that “after months of effort, feminine beauty proved powerless to attract me in the least, while male beauty was constantly increasing its sway over me” (49).6 The unalterable fact of this attraction to male beauty eventually led him to argue, quite boldly, that “the instincts of the normal man and of the invert are on a par morally and esthetically” (32). “In general, throughout my life,” he writes, “whenever I have encountered virum [men] who appeared to me as exceptionally beautiful, a strong desire has immediately arisen membrum virile in ore recipere” (81).7 What makes it clear that Pussie’s self-understanding of his supposed “mere sexual attraction” (79) is fundamentally aesthetic in its substance—even disinterested in a Kantian way, so to speak—is that he expressly disavows any interest in orgasm, in what we might tend to believe would be his own sexual pleasure. “With me the satisfaction was practically all mental,” he claims. “I found it exclusively in the body of my associate, not at all in my own” (86).8 He took satisfaction in witnessing his partner’s physical arousal and climax, but he was an unselfish assistant and disinterested admirer, so to speak—in fact, he was disappointed and ashamed if he discovered evidence of his own orgasm at any time (via nocturnal emission, for instance) and he never wished to come when he sucked someone off. During his “fairie apprenticeship” he ejaculated while fellating his partner about once in every ten episodes, he ruefully admits, but “it was accompanied by such horrible feelings and thoughts that I used my will power to prevent it” (82).9 Even when his intimate associates treated him violently, as they often did, he says he “was so fascinated by the savagery and beauty of my tormentors that I experienced a species of mental satisfaction, being willing to suffer death if only I could contribute to their pleasure” (114). There would be clinical descriptions today for this attitude (some form of masochism, presumably), and moralizing frameworks (internalized homophobia), as well as labels in queer argot for this particular style of pleasure (a stone femme oral sub bottom, perhaps), but it is unnecessary to redescribe it in such terms when Pussie was so eloquent in his presentation of it as a matter of disinterested aesthetic appreciation. The “charm of masculine beauty” (119) held him in thrall, so that “in my sexual life, my pudenda were practically non-existent” (159).10
It may seem facetious to characterize the organization of Pussie’s sexual life in Kantian terms. Probably the Prussian philosopher had something quite else in mind—not the willful suppression of one’s own orgasm—when he argued that the essence of aesthetic judgment was its disinterestedness and purposelessness. Kant insisted that in determining an ideal of beauty it was necessary that “no sensory charm is allowed to be mixed into the satisfaction in its object.”11 My argument here is not, of course, that Pussie was a good Kantian in his sex life (whatever that might mean), but that his understanding of his own relationship to intimate bodily experience was largely organized by aesthetic categories. He appears to have been thoroughly familiar with ancient Greek concepts of the beautiful that were, as he says of Greek literature generally, “suffused with pederasty” (Female-Impersonators 27n).12 The general Platonic idea of gradually ascending to an ideal posture of aesthetic admiration through the hands-on experience of pederastic pleasure doubtless lingered in his mind, consequentially, even as Pussie became familiar, in his “university course in æsthetics” (Female-Impersonators 17), with later theorists like Kant who divorced aesthetic judgment from bodily interest. It would not be surprising to discover that Pussie’s reading had familiarized him with other aesthetic philosophers, perhaps including American contemporaries like George Santayana, who in his meditations on “the relations of sex with our æsthetic susceptibility” explicitly rejected Kantian criteria of disinterestedness and universality as requirements of valid aesthetic judgment. Santayana held that “sex is not the only object of sexual passion,” because this passion was never completely exhausted by its orientation toward specifically sexual objects of interest, but needed other beautiful and attractive objects on which to spend its attention; indeed, as Santayana argued, “the whole sentimental side of our æsthetic sensibility—without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than æsthetic—is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred.”13 While Pussie clearly had access to intellectual resources (ancient and modern) that justified his conflation of erotic and aesthetic interest and experience, there nevertheless is a constant (Kantian) pressure in his self-narrative to describe his gratification in sexual experience as strictly “mental satisfaction” (114), to emphasize his “non-sensual, wifely love” (173; cf. 78) for the young men he adoringly fellated.
One can’t help wondering if, when Pussie (presumably) read Kant’s Third Critique in college, he lingered over §17, Kant’s discussion of “the ideal of beauty.” Here, as Whitney Davis has discussed in Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, Kant elaborates on the claim that the ideal of beauty is universally valid because it is the product of a generalization of multiple singular aesthetic judgments—indeed, in principle, the product of all of the aesthetic judgments of everyone. Kant asks his readers to follow him in a thought experiment in which “someone has seen a thousand grown men” and can recall their images and shapes to mind as well as compare them to one another by means of a quasi-optical superimposition in the imagination of those thousand retained images. This imaginary superimposition will yield, Kant says, an average or standard to constitute the ideal of “a beautiful man” (118). As Davis argues, properly speaking the universal aesthetic standard of “a beautiful man” would be fully produced only by extending this thought experiment exponentially: a thousand men would each collate a thousand images, then their resultant standards would be collated with the products of each other’s collations, ad infinitum.14
It seems noteworthy that Pussie claims to have had, before the age of seven, “more than one thousand” experiences of fellatio with his boyhood friends and playmates (38) and in adulthood to have had “800 intimates” (38; cf. 22, 78) with whom he had an average of two encounters apiece, yielding a count of approximately 1,600 sexual experiences (84, 85, 107).15 Throughout this sexual career he was plainly collating his observations of various male physiques as well as specific genital conformations, noting the “variety” that existed in both cases (78) and producing for himself an aesthetic ideal of the male body in general and its genitalia in particular. Just as Kant’s thought experiment produces an ideal male body that excludes the extremes of disproportion and anomaly, so Pussie’s collation of his experiences takes careful account of “anatomical peculiarities” of the male genitalia (he specifically mentions monorchidism, “pronounced varicocele,” and phimosis) that needed to be ruled out of the aesthetic standard (108). Was this a burlesque of Kant’s thought experiment? Was Pussie traducing Kant’s exposition, which takes the male body as its exemplary experimental object-image, but only to strip it of anything like erotic interest? I would like to think so.
Toward his own body Pussie took a “disinterested” aesthetic attitude as well, careful of his hygiene and exacting in his routine depilation: “I removed all the growth of hair on my body and limbs by means of a safety razor so that they were as glabrous as statuary” (105–6). His assimilation of his own body to the aesthetic ideal of cold marble sculpture took the extreme form, in The Female-Impersonators, of his modeling for nude photographs (reproduced therein) of himself in poses imitative of classical sculpture, including the ancient Greek “Hermaphroditos” (facing the title page). Pussie understood not only his own taste for certain pleasures as aesthetic matters, but others’ distaste as well; those who did not share his own fondness for fellatio—who may in fact have been disgusted by it—regarded the act as “highly unaesthetic” (112). He is not unaware that many of those who rejected his kind of pleasure did so consciously on moral or religious or hygienic grounds; but he was insistent that this disgust involved a large element of aesthetic judgment.16
There is plenty of evidence all around us, even today, that dissident sexualities have at least a contingent relationship to aesthetic pursuits and aesthetic experience, and probably something more than that. The fashion and beauty industries are well populated with gay and lesbian professionals; and the NEA under Republican administrations has told us (if we didn’t scandalously know already) that the worlds of high art and avant garde artistic practice have been arenas for challenging norms of sexuality and sexual expression. Pussie did not fail to note that “the male dressmaker and milliner, and the dilettante” were likely to exhibit the effeminate behavior that typified the androgyne (22) and that two of his “girl-boy playmates” in childhood had grown up to be “an organist and an orchestra-leader by profession when they became adult” (39), thus recognizing the affinity between aesthetically creative forms of labor in the useful arts, as well as the professionally organized fine arts, and nonnormative sexual identifications. This relationship between art (broadly construed) and nonnormative sexuality can be explained sociologically, to be sure: in a reflexive fashion, at least since the eighteenth century, the increasingly differentiated social world of self-conscious aesthetic “bohemia” has, by virtue of its professed devotion to traducing bourgeois norms, attracted sexual as well as artistic heretics; since it has served as an available haven for these purposeful reprobates it has naturally attracted more of the same. Something similar could be said of the everyday world of consumer pleasure typified by the fashion and beauty industries, interior decoration, floristry, and so forth: they have functioned as social sectors where gender-deviant and sexually dissident individuals were mostly tolerated and sometimes valued (precisely for their supposed aesthetic inclinations), and so they have continued to attract queer aspirants to their ranks. Driving this contingent and self-sustaining process of social formation may be a phenomenon Harold Beaver identified some time ago: people with socially disparaged (and often punished) sexual tastes have had to learn, by necessity, skills of social dissimulation and disguise as well as observational skills of detection and coded communication that well prepare them for artistic pursuits in which such creative and critical skills are professionally elaborated and rewarded.17
Given the confidence with which Pussie detailed the multiple relationships between sexuality and aesthetics, it comes as no real surprise that in a large number of other early twentieth-century American autobiographies, autobiographical fictions, long fictions, and novels the two phenomena—aesthetics and sexuality—are often explicitly linked, either in an historically contingent manner or, in some cases, with a strong suspicion of an intrinsic connection. In the remainder of this essay I will describe a broader archive of early twentieth-century texts that exhibit this concern for the configuration of sexual nonnormativity and aesthetic undertakings.18 In doing so, I have in mind not only the value of outlining a broader archive to contextualize what might otherwise seem to be Pussie’s idiosyncratic account but also the fact that in contemporary queer studies (as in other fields of inquiry) there is at least the beginning of an “aesthetic turn,” a swerve away from ideological critique and theoretical deconstruction. There is not space in the present essay to address the current critical situation in very great detail, and in any case I want to focus on presenting the historical archive because I note that even in as refreshing and congenial an account as David Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity, which champions the search for alternatives to the medical and psychological discourses that currently frame much discussion of homosexuality, and specifically adverts to aesthetic discourse as an alternative, the author strays far afield to find usable intellectual resources—Halperin enlists French novelists Jean Genet (who has at least been widely translated into English) and Marcel Jouhandeau (who thus far has not) as chief among the textual resources, “aesthetic in inspiration,” that he contends will aid us in resisting the “intellectual monoculture of psychology.”19 There are plenty of other models of aesthetic resistance in American literature emerging with the sexualizing of psychology and other disciplinary discourses.
Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1903) is roughly contemporaneous with the initial composition of Autobiography of an Androgyne, and it ratifies (by virtue of its setting in bohemian and sexually renegade late nineteenth-century San Francisco) Pussie’s suggestive claim that erotic culture during his years of sexual activity was much more liberal west of Kansas City.20 Stoddard’s protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, is a poet, actor, and dreamer, whose unspecified and somewhat changeable erotic nonconformity goes hand in hand with his restless aesthetic experimentation. He is at various times a poet, reviewer, editorial assistant, stage actor, and aspiring novelist—and a well-known and active member of several circles of bohemian artists and intellectuals in San Francisco proper as well as across the bay in Oakland. He has intense and intimate (presumably sexual) relations with several men, but his deepest friendship is a nonsexual one with a young woman named Miss Juno (although she prefers to be called Jack by her close friends). The very ground of their relationship is their mutual ambition to write novels: they encourage each other in this artistic endeavor, although, as it happens, their relationship deteriorates precipitately when Paul discovers that Jack’s formal conception of her contemplated novel is extraordinarily conventional in its heterosexual romantic plotting. Stoddard’s novel is largely autobiographical, and this relationship (and vexed contrast) between two novelists and their variant conceptions of queer novelistic form was drawn from Stoddard’s friendship with Julia “Dudee” Fletcher, who published (under the pseudonym George Fleming) a host of widely successful novels including Kismet (1877), the insipidity of which Paul Clitheroe (and presumably a disenchanted Charles Warren Stoddard) would have certainly disparaged. The central point here, however, is that within the diegesis of Stoddard’s novel the mutual pursuit of aesthetic accomplishment becomes, at least for a time, the basis of an experimental relationship outside of heteronormative definitions between an effeminate young man and a similarly gender-nonconforming young woman (which ostensibly mirrored Stoddard’s own friendship with Fletcher). Stoddard later redoubled this depicted implication of sexuality and aesthetics by rehearsing it in his own experimental novel—which, in its daring formal contortions, as well as its explicit disavowal of compulsory heterosexual romance, constituted a critique of the sexual and gender norms finally endorsed and embodied by Miss Juno’s fictional novel and by the real popular novels of Fletcher/Fleming.21
In Blair Niles’s Strange Brother (1931) the young protagonist, Mark Thornton, a midwesterner transplanted to New York City, living in a settlement house in Italian East Harlem and teaching art to poor children in the neighborhood, has a literary avocation (he reads widely, writes poetry, and collects in a notebook what he considers to be pro-homosexual passages from ancient and modern literature to include in an anthology on Manly Love, an undertaking he began as a personal therapeutic project, but one that he hopes eventually to publish for social benefit).22 But he is centrally a visual artist, and his various modes of drawing and painting are given detailed description. His artistic practice in the present time of the narrative is divided between two styles that have different correspondences to the conflicting dimensions of his erotic life. On the one hand, he is an exacting scientific illustrator, producing pictures for publication as an assistant to a (straight) naturalist named Philip Crane whom he admires abjectly and with whom he is, frustratingly, deeply infatuated. His social interactions with this scientist, and with Crane’s cousin June Westbrook and their sophisticated Manhattan coterie, introduce him to a world of “progressive” social thought, including new “tolerant” sexological theories like those articulated by Philip’s friend Irwin Hesse, a Viennese laboratory scientist who is investigating the endocrine system and its role in the production of sexual characteristics (including hermaphrodism and inversion). Hesse is in fact about to leave New York to attend the International Sex Reform Congress in Vienna, and he has hopes that his researches will eventually lead to the elimination of sexual abnormality; Mark is gratified to think that his psychic deformity and homosexual urges might someday have a medical cure. June Westbrook, too, hopes that “psychoanalysts and physiologists” might successfully address the problem of what her cousin Philip calls “degenerates” (54–55). Mark himself is led to read Forel, Ellis, Hirschfeld, Ulrichs, and other sexological and homosexualist theorists and investigators—books that had been left with Mark by Hesse to be forwarded to Vienna (299).
Tellingly, the “fine accurate line drawings of soldier ants and female ants and worker ants which Mark was doing for Phil,” which include a “detailed drawing of a gynandromorph, with its head, female; its thorax and legs male on the left and female on the right,” a style of illustration associated in this novel with the scientific approach to sexual abnormality, have their precursors in some “grotesquely decorative studies of beetles and grasshoppers and butterflies” (72) that hang on Mark’s wall and that date from childhood visits to his grandfather’s farm (where he had an intensely remembered friendship with a pretty boy named Luis). Even June cannot help ruefully contrasting these “decoratively grotesque grasshoppers” that Mark exhibits for his own eyes (and that constitute what he would have called an “outlet” for his fantasies) with the constrained scientific illustrations of ants he now draws for Philip (232).
On his own time nowadays, Mark produces picturesque “impressions of New York life,” including skyscrapers, tenements and fire escapes, bridges and ferries, as well as “studies of Italian boys and of Harlem types” like tap dancers, prize fighters, and musicians (72)—including many sketches of a handsome eighteen-year-old neighborhood fruit vendor named Rico with whom he has an ambiguously friendly acquaintance.23 Mark’s interest in Rico is principally aesthetic, but this aesthetic interest shades imperceptibly into the sensual: “Rico’s dark Sicilian beauty satisfied his love of the exotic. He liked to see the dimples come in Rico’s olive cheeks, and he liked the warm eager light in Rico’s black eyes, and the tumbled black hair which Rico never troubled to cover with a hat. Most of all he liked the unthinking animal happiness of Rico” (83–84). Strange Brother is unsatisfactory in all kinds of ways, but its delicate narrative of the wary attraction between Mark and Rico (and its refusal to comment omnisciently on what really was going on between them) is impressive. We learn that Rico favored Mark with discounted prices on fruit and that after Mark made a purchase Rico “stared after him as he disappeared down the street” (86). We learn too that Mark “often engaged Rico to pose for his class” (86) and that Rico, obviously, consented to be employed for this aesthetic purpose. Mark’s friend June exclaims over Rico, “What a beautiful boy!” (231), and a fairie acquaintance of Mark’s named Lilly-Marie congratulates Mark conspiratorially, after meeting Rico, “You’ve got good taste …. He’s good looking … your Rico” (285). Lilly-Marie assumes what Mark apparently cannot imagine, that Rico is an eligible sexual partner and might welcome Mark’s erotic attention; as historian George Chauncey has explained, in early twentieth-century New York City it was normal for young men in Italian and other ethnic immigrant communities to engage sexually with fairies and other submissive sexual partners (Pussie would have been able to advise Mark on the protocols).24
Eventually Rico turns on Mark viciously (he saw Mark take Lilly-Marie back to his room) and threatens him with blackmail (“I’ve been watching,” Rico says, “And I saw who came home with you last night” [314, 315]), sending Mark into despair and precipitating his sudden suicide. But Niles leaves it permanently unclear what Rico’s motives were. To Mark’s protestation, “I thought you liked me!” Rico replies, “Liked you? There wasn’t anybody else in the world for me. But you didn’t see me. I wasn’t on the map for you. And I thought it was because you weren’t that kind, even though I’d always had a suspicion that you were. And I told myself that I’d been wrong to believe that” (315). Rico—who gazed at Mark down the street—feels that he watched and saw Mark, but that Mark never saw him; is his complaint that Mark saw him (condescendingly) as a picturesque subject but not (affectionately, desiringly) as an erotic object? Did Rico understand his posing for Mark’s art class as part of a failed seduction? He evidently understood (or thought he did) that Mark’s aesthetic interest in him was continuous with sexual desire for him, and now feels rejected—having seen what he mistakenly believes to be Mark’s preference for someone like Lilly-Marie.
Strange Brother allegorizes the genetic continuity between aesthetic interest and erotic attraction, collating one style of visual art (scientific illustration) with one form of impossible desire (frustrated attachment to a straight man, Philip) and another visual style (picturesque illustration) with another form of what only seems to be impossible desire (unconfessed attraction to Rico). In the case of Rico, it is exactly Mark’s failure to connect his aesthetic interest with his erotic desire that produces the tragedy: in this rather overwrought melodrama, had Mark been less of a disinterested Kantian in his framing of Rico as an aesthetic object—had he been equipped, like Pussie, to think of his aesthetic and erotic interests as interchangeable or mutually sustaining—things might have turned out much differently.
The framing of erotic questions in aesthetic terms finds further exploration in one of H.D.’s novels. Like Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company, H.D.’s Paint It Today (written in 1921, published in 1992) is a roman à clef, derived and adapted from her friendships and associations with a coterie of modernist artists—especially her difficult relationship with the poet Ezra Pound, to whom she had been engaged as a young woman (he is called Raymond in the novel); the British novelist to whom she was later married, Richard Aldington (called Basil here); as well as two female lovers, Frances Josepha Gregg (thinly disguised as Josepha) and Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known as the novelist Bryher (who is called Althea).25 H.D. herself is called Margaret in the novel or, more familiarly, Midget. As Paint It Today’s modern editor, Cassandra Laity, makes clear in her edition, this is a text that knows about the long historical trajectory of the nexus of sexuality and aesthetics and deploys that knowledge in overt and covert—and self-reflexive—ways. For example, at a moment when Midget is reflecting on the failure of her marriage to Basil, she remembers the “jesting half-banter” of a letter Basil had written her, in which he addressed her as “sister of Charmides” (58) because she did not return his affection as he would have liked. “Sister of Charmides. Basil had read her the Wilde poem under the shadow of the extraordinarily bad statue of Verlaine in the Luxumbourg [sic] gardens. Charmides, it seems, was a youth in Greece, who fell in love with a statue” (59). As Laity’s note to this passage details (leaving the obvious homoerotic associations of Verlaine and Wilde aside), the Roman poet Lucian told a story about a young man who fell in love with a statue of Aphrodite. Basil’s deeply self-aware and arch gesture here—choosing the Verlaine statue as the place to read to Midget a Wilde poem “in which ‘statue-love’ … encodes transgressive (homoerotic) desire” (as Laity puts it, 94n41)—conflates sexual desire and aesthetic attachment vividly, making of this conflation an accusation against Midget’s wayward attractions. “H.D.’s references to Midget as ‘sister of Charmides’ refer both to her homoerotic desires and to her coalescence of eroticism with ‘cold’ aesthetic passion,” as Laity observes (94–95n41). It is true enough that H.D. is orchestrating this multilayered set of associations from queer artistic history, as Laity argues. But it should not go unnoticed that H.D. is depicting a scene in which her characters (presumably based here on her real self and her former husband) themselves are manipulating these associations; that is, it is not just H.D. making reference to a figure’s characteristic “coalescence” of eroticism and aestheticism, it is H.D. giving us an account of the way two persons living through the breakdown of their marriage because of the errant erotic interests of at least one of them (Midget) together negotiate this passage by means of the deployment of aesthetic categories and artistic references. “She knew that she did not feel as he wanted her to feel, with warmth and depth and warm intensity. She knew that if she felt at all it was not with warm but with cold intensity. She did not feel for Basil with that intensity. She was forever conscious of the fact. But the comradeship was perfect. At one time she had believed that he would accept from her that comradeship and from the world what else it had to give him, but he had changed so since his years in France” (59). It is Basil at the time who orchestrates the scene, bringing Verlaine and Wilde and a loaded reference to misdirected passion to bear upon his frustrated personal relationship with Midget; it is Midget who later remembers Basil’s wicked orchestration of this conjuncture and who tops him (so to speak) twice—by first exercising her aesthetic judgment (the Verlaine statue is “extraordinarily bad,” how could Basil have had the bad taste to make his scene there) and by expressing her willingness to form an unusual experimental relationship of “comradeship” with him (smuggling in her own allusion to Whitman, at a guess) and to allow him whatever other relationships he wished in his life (as she wished to be permitted to have relations with women in hers). He had changed and rejected this creative ethical possibility, she holds.
Basil had changed because of World War I, his years of wartime military service, and his injury in a poison gas attack; now he finds Midget’s tepid affection for him insufficient and leaves her. But in this novel there is a palpable sense of other relevant historical changes directly involving the formation and consolidation of sexual categories. In Midget’s childhood her family does not approve of her intense friendship with Josepha, whom they consider “not a good influence,” “unwholesome,” “not normal” (9)—vague rubrics signifying suspicious disapproval not yet articulated to named deviant categories. Midget and Josepha themselves feel a solidarity with each other (and a difference from others) that remains indistinct, but slowly begins to include a sense of themselves as part of a class of people that includes others like them, which is nascently both a community of the sexually alike and a group of the aesthetically superior: “She and Josepha and such as she and Josepha were separated, irreparably, from the masses of their country people” (20).
Counterposed to these intimations of sexological and psychological taxonomization and diagnosis transpiring in the time of the diegesis, Paint It Today offers several alternative aesthetic protocols that evade identification as such. The lyrical opening paragraphs of the novel will serve to illustrate: “A portrait, a painting? You cannot paint today as you painted yesterday. You cannot paint tomorrow as you paint today. A portrait, a painting? Do not paint it of yesterday’s rapt and rigid formula nor of yesterday’s day-after-tomorrow criss-cross—jagged, geometric, prismatic. Do not paint yesterday’s day-after-tomorrow destructiveness nor yesterday’s fair convention. But how and as you will—paint it today” (3). Throughout the novel the act of writing is likened to the art of painting. Here there is an initial distinction proposed between a more traditional style of representation or realist portrait painting (which aims at a visual likeness to the subject and assigns a certain fixity to that subject) and a more abstract or painterly style that does not aim to be a copy of the original subject (or conspire in its fixing), but draws attention to itself as a painting and to the process of its own making. Paint It Today is self-consciously modernist or antitraditional in style and method; the author is here identifying herself with the artistic avant-garde, whose impulse is toward radical change, stylistic experimentation, and she is allying this artistic movement with the question of subjectification and social taxonomization. H.D. is plainly referencing one specific avant-garde school of painting, cubism (“criss-cross—jagged, geometric, prismatic”), and its experiments in the optical fragmentation of human figures, and she is implying that this style, while new, is also already old hat: “yesterday’s day-after-tomorrow destructiveness.” The principled modernist devotion to making it new (through aesthetic deformation) involves, here, a corollary dedication to reconceiving or reformatting the human subject indefinitely—finding again and again what is a short while later in the novel called “the door to another world, another state of emotional life or being” (12).
Midget herself is an aspiring experimental writer who adduces painterly analogues for her attempt to break aesthetic boundaries. There is an elaborate system of floral symbolism in Paint It Today, and H.D. would appear to understand that floriculture generally and the genre of popular literature denominated “the language of flowers” had a longstanding evocative relationship to transgressive female sexuality in general and specifically lesbian sexual intimacy as well.26 Thus her reflections on her literary ambitions, routinely taking various forms of flower painting as appropriate analogues, encode (to echo Cassandra Laity) transgressive homoerotic desire, but in addition encode a will to transcend the regime of sexual categorization altogether: “She, Midget, did not wish to be an eastern flower-painter. She did not wish to be an exact and over-précieuse western, a scientific describer of detail of vein and leaf of flowers, dead or living, nor did she wish to press flowers and fern fronds and threads of pink and purple seaweed between the pages of her book. Yet she wanted to combine all these qualities in her writing and to add still another quality to these three. She wished to embody, as this other quality, the fragrance of the flowers” (17). The distinction proposed here between two styles of flower painting (one scientifically exacting and “western,” the other presumably more romantic and atmospheric, i.e., “eastern”) will recall Mark Thornton’s two styles of painting and their correlations with his divided sexual impulses. Midget, standing in for H.D., however, tries to imagine a third possibility, one not tied to reductive binary sexual identifications (in Mark’s case, pathological scientific specimen or despised fairie), but opening onto improvisatory sensual freedom. The fragrance of flowers—a vivid sensory experience—cannot be conveyed by sculpture, or music, or any form of painting, H.D. goes on to concede. But writing, she hopes, can “at least attempt to express something” (17) like fragrance; that is, it can aim to pursue a utopian aesthetic practice that returns us to unmediated sensory pleasure of an elusive kind, a kind absolutely not susceptible of scientific description.
My discussion has highlighted three novels, the obscure turn-of-the-century experimental novel For the Pleasure of His Company (1903), the successful middlebrow “progressive” novel Strange Brother (1931), and the posthumously published modernist novella Paint It Today (1912, 1992). The vicissitudes of the aesthetic in these novels of erotic experimentation and transgression have many other counterparts in early twentieth-century American writing. In Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (1906) the two main characters understand their “aesthetic” predilections as telling symptoms of their homosexuality. Throughout Imre these shared aesthetic dispositions stand in marked contrast to another ground on which their secretive relationship is built, their mutual schooling in modern sexological theory and their common (failed) experiences with medical “cures.”27 Henry Blake Fuller’s protagonist in Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) is a graduate student in literature with a flair for dramatic singing, while older gay men in the novel are opera buffs and antique collectors, and Bertram’s best friend is a flamboyantly effeminate musical theater queen.28 The care with which Fuller excludes all specific reference to sexological categories in favor of characterization based in aesthetic interest and artistic bent has to be the result of a deliberate decision to demote the latter’s importance. Glenway Wescott’s main character’s conflicted alienation from his family in The Babe’s Bed (1930)—alienation at once from the stifling norms of marital respectability, domestic intimacy, and obligatory reproduction that make them all miserable—seems to have everything to do with his unspecified artistic vocation.29 The man and woman whose (platonic) friendship is at the heart of Dawn Powell’s Come Back to Sorrento (1932) form their bond through a shared sense of aesthetic superiority and exclusiveness; they improvise a miniature bohemian enclave for themselves in a provincial midwestern village.30 The Greenwich Village bohemians in Charles Henri Ford’s and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil (1933) find that avant-garde artistic endeavor and sexual experimentation feed each other in various (sometimes sinister) ways. This novel (like Stoddard’s and H.D.’s a roman à clef based on the authors’ own lives in avant-garde circles) features a speech on artistic freedom by one of the protagonists, Karel, at a “symposium” (the word seems to bear a weight of Platonic implication here), during which we are asked to imagine why two members of the audience, while listening to Karel talk about the bearing of politics on “our personal lives,” might campily ask each other “where Karel’s feather fan was.”31 In Richard Meeker’s Better Angel (1933), one of the earliest programmatically “affirmative” treatments of homosexuality, the protagonist Kurt Gray is (of course) a musical composer, who in the course of events reads “the new psychology—Brill, Jung, Freud, Ellis, Carpenter,” but they provide him with distinctly less valuable sustenance than do Wedekind, Cellini, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Shelley, and, most importantly, Plato. “The high idealism of the Phaedrus and the Symposium had captured him and engulfed him as a flood.”32 Frankie, the tomboyish protagonist of Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding, not only imagines a future of professional creativity for herself—her present penchant for writing “shows” may lead her to Hollywood, she imagines—but she would essentially like to redesign the world to allow for erotic variety. She and her friend John Henry and her nurse Berenice often play a game of overweening aesthetic ambition called “criticize the Creator” in which Frankie usually “plan[s] it so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, which ever way they felt like and wanted,” while Berenice insists that “the law of human sex was exactly right just as it was and could in no way be improved.”33 Such fictions as these by Prime-Stevenson, Fuller, Wescott, Powell, Ford and Tyler, Meeker, and McCullers, along with the novels by Stoddard, Niles, and H.D. discussed at greater length previously, recognize a sociohistorical fact (the affinity of queer persons for artistic activity in the era of the emergence and consolidation of gendered sexual identities), but they also seem to be exploring the possibility of an intrinsic relationship between sex and aesthetics. What if sexuality is essentially—they ask—an aesthetic phenomenon?
The etymological meaning of aesthesis has to do with sense perception. Although aesthetic experience since Kant has been frequently and authoritatively described as a fundamentally disinterested (or disembodied) mode of experience, there has recently been a turn back to understanding aesthetic experience as radically embodied, rooted in and pertaining to the senses,34 having to do with the social organization of sensory experience and sensual pleasure, and best understood in terms like those proposed (for instance) by Jacques Rancière, whose phrase “the distribution of the sensible” attempts to get at the socially organized inequality of access to sensory experience and pleasure.35 It is also the case that recent work in the history and theory of sexuality has sometimes adverted to the category of the aesthetic, often through the new (old) perspective of sense experience. Leo Bersani in Homos argues that sexual identity derives from “the wish to repeat pleasurable stimulations of the body.”36 Tim Dean in Beyond Sexuality holds that sexuality involves more than just genitals or even bodies, but a whole set of protocols of aesthetic taste.37 And Michel Foucault in his late work routinely spoke of sexuality in terms of an “aesthetics of existence” or aesthetic self-fashioning.38 It seems intuitively right—maybe even obvious—that sexual experience, because it ineluctably has a sensory dimension, can be described in terms of aesthetic experience. It is less obvious, perhaps, that sexuality as such (the modern organization and consolidation of a range of sensory and psychic phenomena into a fictive unity called “sexuality”) is a product of the historical emergence of a sphere of aesthetic autonomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.39 And it is still less obvious that when, in the early twentieth century, sexualities were systematically defined and hardened into “homo” and “hetero” versions, the aesthetic dimension of this process—the ways in which sexuality, originarily (let us posit for the moment) an aesthetic phenomenon, used artistic means to consolidate itself while at the same time using aesthetic categories and artistic means to resist the psychologization of sexuality performed by medico-legal discourses and institutions—came under curious critical scrutiny by literary artists themselves. These self-narratives and novels dramatize not only the ways in which the consolidation of a new sexual system took aesthetic form, but the ways in which aesthetic means could be deployed to resist the disciplinary effects and undercut the coercive social power of the normative sexual system.
Notes
1. Ralph Werther [Earl Lind], Autobiography of an Androgyne, ed. Scott Herring (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008 [1918]), 27. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text.
2. “A strange young ruffian one day passed me on the street, and addressed me jocularly: ‘Hello Pussie!’ I cannot express how much it pleased me, and I longed to be called ‘Pussie’ always” (34). The moniker “Ralph Werther,” the author says, was patterned on what he had inferred was Oscar Wilde’s practice in phonetically altering his given name to produce “Escal Vigor,” the title of a novel by Georges Eekhoud that Pussie believed (erroneously) was written in fact by Wilde. “I have myself built a pseudonym on my baptismal name in similar fashion” (30), he stated, enjoying the associations with the celebrated painter and with Goethe’s hero along with the affiliation with Wilde and the invocation of Eekhoud’s daring homoerotic novel (34). Lind (also a pseudonym) used “Ralph Werther” as his pseudonym when he published a sequel to Autobiography of an Androgyne in 1922 under the title The Female-Impersonators. He elsewhere refers to himself as Raphael Werther, Jennie June (34), and Baby (26) as well as Pussie.
3. Pussie refers to the “Puritan circle” in which he was raised, in which he was “never vouchsafed the least sex knowledge” and therefore tried vainly to resist his venereal impulses rather than moderate them healthfully. “I believe my health and happiness were tremendously impaired by my ultra-puritan views which made me obstinate before Nature’s behests.” The Female-Impersonators (New York: Medico-Legal Journal, 1922; repr. New York: Arno, 1975), 56, 61, 71.
4. In The Female-Impersonators, which even more fully reflects Pussie’s absorption and endorsement of medico-legal discourses (he had meanwhile joined the editorial staff of the Medico-Legal Journal), he more decidedly favors the notion that sexuality is primary and inborn and that aestheticism is “a consequence” (17) of that basic sexual disposition.
5. As Pussie explains in his preface to Autobiography of an Androgyne, he wrote up his life in 1899 down to that date (when he was age twenty-five); it drew on the diaries he had been keeping since age fourteen (cf. 153). Subsequently he added to the narrative periodically, as well as inserting material in what was already written; as a result, “parts of some pages were written in different years,” and the whole waited eighteen years to see print (17). At numerous places it incorporates what purport to be unedited transcriptions from his diary and letters (e.g., 52–53). The text’s formal incorporation of its own distended time of composition, and the witness it bears to the changes in the discursive construction of sexuality over that period of time, are among its invaluable features.
6. At age thirty-three, after his voluntary surgical castration, Pussie attempted sexual intercourse with a woman for the first time, his positive aversion to the act having somewhat abated at that point; but he felt no positive desire for women either, and the “scientific experiment” was a failure (189).
7. The editor of the edition from which I cite provides an interpolated bracketed translation of Pussie’s coy Latin phrase: “[to perform oral sex on them]” (81). It seems dubious to me to substitute a fussy contemporary locution that is distinctly less direct and raunchy than a more literal translation would be: “take the cock into my mouth.”
8. In the sequel to Autobiography of an Androgyne, Pussie mentions that he had taken a “university course in æsthetics,” in which the professor seemed to suggest something about “the notorious frequency of homosexuality among æsthetes.” Pussie also speculates that Kant had been what he calls an “anaphrodite,” someone coldly indifferent to all sexual experience (The Female-Impersonators, 17, 14n). Here again he claims that for those like himself, the “ultra-androgynes,” sexuality is informed by a kind of Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness: “the individual’s genitalia [are] entirely divorced—as a rule—from the sexual life” (20).
9. Pussie makes it clear repeatedly that he did not like being penetrated anally, but again he has a (distorted) Kantian rationale for enduring and even relishing the experience occasionally: “I later enjoyed it somewhat only because I enjoyed witnessing all kinds of amorous conduct on the part of ultra-virile young men. I had a craze to see them sexually excited” (85).
10. Pussie’s inadvertent orgasms, he reports, were “always prompt and complete” but somehow “disagreeable” (108).
11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 120. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
12. “I read Greek six years in ‘prep’ and university. My observation is that androgyne scholars have a penchant for that language and drift into teaching it. Prior to the twentieth century, the Greek and Latin masterpieces—in all ‘preps’ and colleges read unexpurgated because the sexually full-fledged have not generally understood the homosexual inscriptions—were the only publications affording androgynes an inkling of the secrets of their sex life” (The Female-Impersonators, 27n).
13. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Scribner’s, 1896; repr. Dover, 1955), 37, 40, 38.
14. Here I refer to chapter 1, “Queer Beauty: Winckelmann and Kant on the Vicissitudes of the Ideal,” in Queer Beauty: Seuality and Aesthetics from Wincklemann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23–50. As Davis argues, Kant’s protocols for making collective (hence valid) aesthetic judgments were remotely derived from Winckelmann but suppressed the homoerotic context that was integral to Winckelmann’s aesthetics (see esp. 39–41).
15. Pussie also keeps tabs on the specific favorite subcategory of sex with soldiers: he engaged in “flirtation with at least two thousand professional soldiers, only about four hundred of whom, however, went to extremes” (101).
16. In The Female-Impersonators he continues to characterize strong aversion (on the part of normal men) to same-sex sexual acts in such terms: “Do they not offend the æsthetic sense of the majority of mankind?” (51). Cf. 23, “those who dare to offend his æsthetic sense.”
17. Harold Beaver, “Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes),” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 99–119.
18. I have previously discussed a number of these texts from the perspective of the history and generic form of the novel; see “The Gay Novel in the United States 1900–1950,” in John T. Matthews, ed., A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 414–36.
19. David Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 105
20. Charles Warren Stoddard, For the Pleasure of His Company: A Tale of the Misty City, Thrice Told (San Francisco: Robertson, 1903). To be precise, Pussie claimed that, having traveled extensively in the United States and in Western Europe and having “explored the Underworld in many cities of both continents,” he found that “in America’s smaller cities west of the meridian of Kansas City, the sexual Underworld is more bold and wields more political power than anywhere else in the United States or Europe” (Female-Impersonators, 6).
21. Stoddard’s spiritual autobiography, A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted at Last (Notre Dame: Ave Maria, 1885), relates the story of his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, and candidly presents his spiritual regeneration (which he found to be in no way incompatible with his adventurous and largely pederastic sexual relations—not, of course, detailed therein) as grounded in the seductive aesthetic appeal of the Catholic mass. For Stoddard’s life see Roger Austen, Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard, ed. John W. Crowley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
22. Blair Niles, Strange Brother (New York: Liveright, 1931). Page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
23. For an incisive account of the “picturesque” and its relationship to ethnic and racial difference, among other matters, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Kendall Johnson, Henry James and the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
24. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 75–86.
25. H.D., Paint It Today, ed. Cassandra Laity (New York: New York University Pres, 1992).
26. See Dorri Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambrudge University Press, 2010) on the flower imagery in “highly-wrought” fiction by nineteenth-century American women, esp. chapter 1, “Florid Fantasies: Fuller, Stephens, and the ‘other’ language of flowers” (37–81); also Paula Bennett, “Critical Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory,” Signs 18, no. 2 (1993): 235–59.
27. Edward Prime-Stevenson, Imre: A Memorandum, ed. James J. Gifford (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003 [1906]).
28. Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope’s Year, ed. Joseph Dimuro (Peterborough: Broadview, 2010 [1919]).
29. Glenway Wescott, The Babe’s Bed (Paris: Harrison, 1930).
30. Dawn Powell, Come Back to Sorrento, in Novels 1930–1942 (New York: Library of America, 2001), 204–369.
31. Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, The Young and Evil, ed. Steven Watson (New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1988 [1933]), 119.
32. Richard Meeker [Forman Brown], Better Angel (Boston: Alyson, 1987, 1990 [1933]), 84–85.
33. Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding, in Complete Novels (New York: Library of America, 2001), 547.
34. See, for example, Peter Osborne, ed., From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000).
35. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 7–45.
36. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 60.
37. Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 277.
38. See Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? 8.
39. I have addressed this general historical transition speculatively in “Strange Sensations: Sex and Aesthetics in ‘The Counterpane,’” in Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, eds., Melville and Aesthetics (London: Palgrave, 2011), 65–84. Rancière calls this the “aesthetic regime of the arts,” which he dates to the beginning of the nineteenth century and associates with Schiller’s notion of the “aesthetic state” (The Politics of Aesthetics, 23–24).