Cut the heat

From The Garden by H.D. [aka bisexual avant-garde modernist poet Hilda Doolittle]:

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air -
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat -
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

Heatwave or no heatwave, it's the Mid-summer Solstice, the longest day, Festa Junina, Sommersonnenwende, Uttarayana, Saint John's Eve, Majstång, Litha...

...whatever you call it, the nights start drawing in from here on, folks!

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

One hundred years ago on Friday, a genius was born - that great man of letters, wit and raconteur Mr Gore Vidal.

Born into a socialite family, Gore Vidal was destined to mix in the most erudite of circles, his early relationships included Anais Nin, and he was good friends with the Kennedy family. His ground-breaking gay-themed novel The City and the Pillar caused controversy in late 1940s America, and his later Myra Breckenridge was made into a cult film starring Raquel Welch and Mae West.

His TV clash with right-wing writer William Buckley was notorious for its evident hatred between the debaters, and on Buckley's death Vidal said: "Hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred". Ouch!

Some more examples of this deadly waspish wit:

• A good deed never goes unpunished.
• A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
• After a certain point in life, litigation replaces sex.
• Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
• Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
• Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
• As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
• By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
• Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
• Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
• I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.
• I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
• I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
• It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
• Never have children, only grandchildren.
• Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
• Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
• Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
• Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
• The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
• Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
• We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
• What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
• Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

We adored him.

Gore Vidal (born Eugene Louis Vidal, 3rd October 1925 – 31st July 2012)

I like being gay. I wouldn’t want to be straight for anything.

The inimitable Miriam Margolyes appears on the cover of British Vogue as part of its Pride 2023 issue.

In her own words:

“Gay people have the luck to be able to fashion the relationship they want. It’s much more flexible for us,” she says. “I think we have more freedom than [straight people] do. Particularly gay boys, they’re always fucking everything. It’s amazing. I don’t know how they get away with it.”

Although she loves to see the “uninhibited young enjoying themselves”, she’s never been one for Pride marches. “I actually find lesbians a bit on the boring side, because they’re a bit heavy-handed about it all,” she says, deadpan. Still, she has always been proudly lesbian. “I think gay people are very lucky, because we are not conventional, we are a group slightly apart. It gives us an edge. We’re good artists, we’re good musicians. And I like being gay. I wouldn’t want to be straight for anything.”

Amen, sister!

Read the full article. It's a hoot!

[click any image to enlarge]

Lovely in a fluffy moist kind of way

“I think it was Donald Mainstock, the great amateur squash player who pointed out how lovely I was. Until that time I think it was safe to say that I had never really been aware of my own timeless brand of loveliness. But his words smote me, because of course you see, I am lovely in a fluffy moist kind of way and who would have it otherwise? I walk, and let’s be splendid about this, in a highly accented cloud of gorgeousness that isn't far short of being, quite simply terrific. 

 The secret of smooth almost shiny loveliness, of the order of which we are discussing, in this simple, frank, creamy sort of way, doesn't reside in oils, unguents, balms, ointments, creams, astringents, milks, moisturizers, liniments, lubricants,embrocations or balsams, to be rather divine for just one noble moment, it resides, and I mean this in a pink slightly special way, in ones attitude of mind.

To be gorgeous, and high and true and fine and fluffy and moist and sticky and lovely, all you have to do is believe that one is gorgeous and high and true and fine and fluffy and moist and sticky and lovely.

And I believe it of myself, tremulously at first and then with rousing heat and passion, because, stopping off for a second to be super again, I’m so often told it.

That’s the secret really.”

- Stephen Fry, A Bit of Fry & Laurie

The godlike genius and "national treasure" that is Stephen Fry is 65 years old today!

All hail.

Perennial pansy, hardiest of blooms

The Playboy of the Demi-World
by William Plomer

Aloft in Heavenly Mansions, Doubleyou One -
Just Mayfair flats, but certainly sublime -
You'll find the abode of D'Arcy Honeybunn,
A rose-red sissy half as old as time.

Peace cannot age him, and no war could kill
The genial tenant of those cosy rooms,
He's lived there always and he lives there still,
Perennial pansy, hardiest of blooms.

There you'll encounter aunts of either sex,
Their jokes equivocal or over-ripe,
Ambiguous couples wearing slacks and specs
And the stout Lesbian knocking out her pipe.

The rooms are crammed with flowers and objets d'art,
A Ganymede still hands the drinks - and plenty!
D'Arcy still keeps a rakish-looking car
And still behaves the way he did at twenty.

A ruby pin is fastened in his tie,
The scent he uses is Adieu Sagesse ,
His shoes are suede, and as the years go by
His tailor's bill's not getting any less.

He cannot whistle, always rises late,
Is good at indoor sports and parlour tricks,
Mauve is his favourite colour, and his gait
Suggests a peahen walking on hot bricks.

He prances forward with his hands outspread
And folds all comers in a gay embrace,
A wavy toupee on his hairless head,
A fixed smile on his often-lifted face.

"My dear!" he lisps, to whom all men are dear,
"How perfectly enchanting of you!"; turns
Towards his guests and twitters, "Look who's here!
Do come and help us fiddle while Rome burns!"

"The kindest man alive," so people say,
"Perpetual youth!" But have you seen his eyes?
The eyes of some old saurian in decay,
That asks no questions and is told no lies.

Under the fribble lurks a worn-out sage
Heavy with disillusion, and alone;
So never say to D'Arcy, "Be your age!" -
He'd shrivel up at once or turn to stone.

Acidly observant; we "perennial pansies" recognise this scenario immediately...

[Thanks, Dinahmow!]

The above poem was, remarkably, published in 1938 - an era when homosexuality in Britain was still very much illegal, yet is surprisingly candid in its description of such an illicit lifestyle. It's a sobering thought that despite the "fight for freedom" against Nazism that was to follow a year after its publication, life for such "perennial pansies" actually got much worse in the post-War period than it evidently was before it, and that it took a further three decades to achieve (partial) decriminalisation of homosexuality ...

On the subject of repression, today is the International Day Against Homophobia - see my regular blog Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle for more on that.

A richer and fuller life

His stories of escapades as a young gay man in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were as mischievous and comic as they were a window into an often hostile world, where as second-class citizens homosexual men had to tread carefully on the edges of society.

National Service was "fantastic" [he said] because it was filled with so many gay men.

Cambridge was equally "very, very gay", causing one heterosexual undergraduate to complain to him, through tears, that there was "something wrong with him" because he was attracted to women.

"I think you'll be alright Douglas," Prof Lockyer replied drily.

"There was this semi-secret, sub-rosa network of gay clubs we would go to," he explained.

One bar-hopping friend and ex-lover was Jeremy Wolfenden, the gay son of Lord Wolfenden, whose radical report controversially recommended decriminalising homosexuality in 1957.

"Places like the Rockingham in Soho... was for well-to-do, sophisticated people - it had its own writing paper.

"You had to give your name at the door and I said: 'Jeremy, aren't you a little worried that you give your name 'Wolfenden'?

"He said: 'Oh don't worry my dear I always give your name.'

"So I'm recorded as having a much busier social life when it was in fact Jeremy capering about town while his father made these important recommendations to the government about 'queers'."

RIP Professor Roger Lockyer, historian, writer and one half of the very first couple who became "civil partners" when the law changed in 2005 [they converted their partnership to marriage in 2014]. Of the occasion, he said:

"I think that particularly being a historian… people do know a bit about their own history and what others went through and it makes for a richer and fuller life if they do.

"I remember distinctly walking down the street after the ceremony thinking: 'I am as legal a person as anybody else. I am a full citizen at last.' It was a wonderful feeling."

And finally, when asked about the secret of longevity [the couple had been together for 51 years when he died] he had this to say:

The best way to stay in a long and happy relationship is to want to stay in a long and happy relationship! It helps a great deal if you find the other person very attractive, which of course I did in the case of Percy - he was a young, handsome man - but we also shared so much in common.

I learned quite early on that if you want a relationship to endure, you must not bridle at every possible insult. We’ve both behaved badly to each other from time to time, and I just kept on thinking to myself: “It’s not worth losing this wonderful relationship over things that don’t really count. The little things are the little things; the big thing is the relationship and as long as that’s sound, then to hell with any of the details."

Indeed.

Found in the "Sexual Deviancy" section

On this, World Book Day, I thought I'd revisit one of my favourite books, ever. I first wrote about it eight years ago, after our visit to an event at the Southbank Centre called The Lavender Library, featuring favourite books chosen by a marvellous array of gay talent - Julian Clary, Dave McAlmont, Andy Bell, Maureen Duffy, Stella Duffy, Paul Burston, Karen Mcleod and Rupert Smith.

In that blog in 2008, I told the story of my first encounter with this life-changing book - Queens by Pickles (which was championed on that night by Mr Burston, soon to become the overlord (along with Mr Smith, for a while) of the legendary Polari gay literary salon):

Visiting the hideous 1960s mausoleum that passed for a library in Newport in the mid 80s, I was searching for The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp - and discovered it had been catalogued by the neo-Fascist authorities that ruled the roost in South Wales at the time in the "Sexual Deviancy" section.

Outraged (and slightly intrigued) by this awful description, I made a thorough investigation of this particular area of the teak'n'gunmetal shelving and discovered the book (Queens) was part of the collection in that category. To my everlasting shame (not really!) I stole it (well, never returned it anyhow), and its tattered and well read and re-read pages adorn my bookshelf to this day (complete with added graffiti by a sexually frustrated reader, carefully Tipp-Exed out by the librarians - how very Joe Orton!)

Published in the year I came out - 1984 - the enigmatic author of Queens must have spent years observing people as he travelled through the London gay scene. His long list of characters: the Screaming Queen, the Straight-Acting Queen, the Old Queen, the Opera Queen, The YMCA Queen, the Insidious Queen, the Clone - and the scenarios and interplay between them that he portrays - are all instantly recognisable today.

Although Paul read out his particular favourite passage from the book, I have one of my own I need to share:

The girly queens flock to Heaven like toddlers to a sweet shop. They flounce about the place, giggling and shrieking, hands and arms flung about in a wild sign language embellishing phrases like "She Never!" and "Ooh Gloria - don't!". They like to call each other bitch and never ever stand alone.

Once out of the pubs and set free in Heaven's wide-open spaces, they know no restraint. Lacking androgynous beauty, they daub themselves with Boots blusher and eye-liner, and bat their eyelashes like Sixties sluts... Like so many queens they have no shame in public, but can be quite suburban and prudish in private. This is always an annoying reversal and lets them in for a lot of abuse which, because they are so desperately inadequate, they enjoy...

Although impressed by money, they are unlike rent boys, and want sex more than cash, more than stardom even. Heaven is where they hope to find love one day. Love, of course, is the same regular big cock.

I think we can identify with that - we have all met these caricatures at some stage in our lives, along with all the others in the book. I certainly can spot Pickles' "types" whenever and wherever I enter a gay bar, and have spent many an absorbing evening doing just that!

Pickles also illustrated his work with some quite grotesque sketches of grotesque people...





Queens by Pickles is a must-read book for every gay person - I cannot recommend it enough!

And that remains the case today, dear reader.

Queens by Pickles on GoodReads

The strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh

Working class boy-made-good. Misogynist. Libertine. Argumentative bigot. Modernist poet. Purple prose-writer. Smut-merchant. Outsider. Genius.

Many and varied are the opinions that have been espoused about DH Lawrence, but... homosexual? Could the man who wrote one of literature's greatest works of heterosexual "erotica" Lady Chatterley's Lover, the man who "ran off" with the buxom and flirtatious Frieda von Richthofen Weekley and spent the rest of his life adoring and battling with her in turn - could he have really been a tormented closet gayer (or at least bi)? This, in effect, was the argument that the eminent musician, author and scholar Dr Bryce Morrison posited in his talk Same-sex sacredness and D.H. Lawrence last night [at which I was, unfortunately, the only attendee] as part of Camden and Islington LGBT History Month.

There are plenty of contradictions in Lawrence's attitudes - he wrote with obvious contempt for the effete coterie that inhabited "The Bloomsbury Set", including the openly gay Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes - yet this is also the man who once wrote: "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not."

Unconvinced? Try these extracts from his classic Women in Love:

There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence. And they really kept it to the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness...

...the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense. He seemed to penetrate into Gerald's more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection, always seizing with some rapid necromantic fore-knowledge every motion of the other flesh, converting and counteracting it, playing upon the limbs and trunk of Gerald like some hard wind. It was as if Birkin's whole physical intelligence interpenetrated into Gerald's body, as if his fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man, like some potency, casting a fine net, a prison, through the muscles into the very depths of Gerald's physical being.

So they wrestled swiftly, rapturously, intent and mindless at last, two essential white figures working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room; a tense white knot of flesh gripped in silence between the walls of old brown books. Now and again came a sharp gasp of breath, or a sound like a sigh, then the rapid thudding of movement on the thickly-carpeted floor, then the strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh. Often, in the white interlaced knot of violent living being that swayed silently, there was no head to be seen, only the swift, tight limbs, the solid white backs, the physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness. Then would appear the gleaming, ruffled head of Gerald, as the struggle changed, then for a moment the dun-coloured, shadow-like head of the other man would lift up from the conflict, the eyes wide and dreadful and sightless.

At length Gerald lay back inert on the carpet, his breast rising in great slow panting, whilst Birkin kneeled over him, almost unconscious. Birkin was much more exhausted. He caught little, short breaths, he could scarcely breathe any more. The earth seemed to tilt and sway, and a complete darkness was coming over his mind. He did not know what happened. He slid forward quite unconscious, over Gerald, and Gerald did not notice. Then he was half-conscious again, aware only of the strange tilting and sliding of the world. The world was sliding, everything was sliding off into the darkness. And he was sliding, endlessly, endlessly away.

Or this, from The White Peacock:

I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman.

He even touched upon S&M in The Prussian Officer:

As yet, the soldier had held himself off from the elder man. The Captain grew madly irritable. He could not rest when the soldier was away, and when he was present, he glared at him with tormented eyes. He hated those fine, black brows over the unmeaning, dark eyes, he was infuriated by the free movement of the handsome limbs, which no military discipline could make stiff. And he became harsh and cruelly bullying, using contempt and satire.

Dr Morrison made a very convincing case indeed. For are not Lawrence's female characters always depicted as somehow alien, contrary and troublesome, yet the men in his prose - possessors of the much-admired phallus - always primitively heroic, always in touch with their emotions; more deserving of the reader's admiration? Did he not express, time and again, his "love" of the masculine? Even in the aforementioned Lady Chatterley's Lover, his descriptions of Mellors are ecstatic:

How beautiful he felt, how pure in tissue! How lovely, how lovely, strong, and yet pure and delicate, such stillness of the sensitive body! Such utter stillness of potency and delicate flesh. How beautiful! How beautiful! Her hands came timorously down his back, to the soft, smallish globes of the buttocks. Beauty! What beauty! a sudden little flame of new awareness went through her. How was it possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled? The unspeakable beauty to the touch of the warm, living buttocks! The life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness. And the strange weight of the balls between his legs! What a mystery! What a strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in one's hand! The roots, root of all that is lovely, the primeval root of all full beauty.

Of course, we all agree with that sentiment!

A great evening with Bryce Morrison, that continued in the pub afterwards. Solo "audience" or not, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

To conclude, of course, we return to Women In Love, and that notorious wrestling scene - as so ably portrayed in Ken Russell's screen adaptation, with the (then) sexy Alan Bates and Oliver Reed:

Alan Bates and Oliver Reed - wrestling scene from Women in Love

DH Lawrence website

A good deed never goes unpunished

"A good deed never goes unpunished."

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

"Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. Of 60."

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

"By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over."

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

"Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale."

"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself."

"Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences."

"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

"The four most beautiful words in our common language: 'I told you so'."

"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either."

"We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself."

"What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?"

"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note."

The incomparable Gore Vidal would have been 90 years old today.

RIP a bitter genius.

Enjoy it!

"Unpack your sense of humour, and get on with living and ENJOY IT."

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16th December 1899 – 26th March 1973)

PS That picture of The Merm and The Master is the latest addition to our "Wall of Fame" here at Dolores Delargo Towers...

A tough little bitch

"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet."

"Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends."

"Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it."

"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

"If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it - it will haunt you till it's written."

"Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix."

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."

"All literature is gossip."

[On one of his portraits:] "I look like a tough little bitch in that one."

The magnificent Truman Capote, who was born ninety years ago today (born Truman Streckfus Persons, 30th September 1924 – 25th August 1984)

The handsomest young man in England

Excerpt from My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries, edited by Rictor Norton:

Henry James met Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) in Cambridge in 1909, when Brooke acknowledged "I pulled my fresh, boyish stunt" and bewitched the novelist. James's last published writing, in response to Brooke's death in the Great War, and shortly before his own, celebrated Brooke's "wondrous, heroic legend."

Brooke's war poems were already famous even before he died at Skyros in April 1915, of an infection rather than in battle. Winston Churchill consolidated the icon: "Joyous, fearless, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered."

His war poetry was popularized precisely because its rosy images denied the realities of war, and ironically drew many young men to join up and go to their own deaths. He was widely celebrated as a golden-haired Apollo - his photograph at age twenty-five is the first modern icon of beauty - and was desired by everyone, male and female, who came within the Bloomsbury magic circle.

Coincidentally (ironically) on this date, 27 years before the outbreak of World War One - his poems about which remain so lauded - the man described by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats as "the handsomest young man in England" Rupert Brooke was born. Brooke has become a bit of an enigmatic icon of WW1, particularly during these centenary celebrations, dying young as he did on his way to the front at Gallipoli and having written the classic patriotic stanza:

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.?

A bohemian in his early years, as all those high-born aesthetes drawn to the "Bloomsbury Set" were, Rupert had affairs with women and men, including Lytton Strachey's brother James (to whom he wrote the most candid letters describing gay sex - one of which is reproduced at Rictor Norton's site [see link above]) and several young men whose acquaintance he made at Rugby School. His sexual obsessions even led him to have a bit of a nervous breakdown. Many historians debate - for their own reasons - whether he was actually homosexual or not, but throughout his short life and to his death Brooke had many close friends who were gay men, and became a "pin-up boy" for many more.

Besides, anyone who can compose a poem of such magnitude as And love has changed to kindliness had an understanding of the human heart in all its complexities that was way beyond his years:

When love has changed to kindliness -
Oh, love, our hungry lips, that press
So tight that Time's an old god's dream
Nodding in heaven, and whisper stuff
Seven million years were not enough
To think on after, make it seem
Less than the breath of children playing,
A blasphemy scarce worth the saying,
A sorry jest, "When love has grown
To kindliness - to kindliness!"...
And yet - the best that either's known
Will change, and wither, and be less,
At last, than comfort, or its own
Remembrance. And when some caress
Tendered in habit (once a flame
All heaven sang out to) wakes the shame
Unworded, in the steady eyes
We'll have, - that day, what shall we do?
Being so noble, kill the two
Who've reached their second-best? Being wise,
Break cleanly off, and get away.
Follow down other windier skies
New lures, alone? Or shall we stay,
Since this is all we've known, content
In the lean twilight of such day,
And not remember, not lament?
That time when all is over, and
Hand never flinches, brushing hand;
And blood lies quiet, for all you're near;
And it's but spoken words we hear,
Where trumpets sang; when the mere skies
Are stranger and nobler than your eyes;
And flesh is flesh, was flame before;
And infinite hungers leap no more
In the chance swaying of your dress;
And love has changed to kindliness.

Beautiful.

Rupert Chawner Brooke (3rd August 1887 – 23rd April 1915)

Our previous entry for Rupert Brooke.

An insatiable search for novelty

From an article by Richard Metzger:

I won’t beat around the bush about Nancy Kates’ new documentary Regarding Susan Sontag because I loved every minute of it. For one, I’ve always been fascinated by Sontag herself, but beyond that, this is a very fine film, made with great flair, economy and emotion. There’s not a single wasted frame. It’s the Susan Sontag movie that needed to be made.

Susan Sontag was a “social critic,” film-maker, novelist and political activist, although she is mostly referred to as an “intellectual,” a sort of rock star writer who emerged in the early 60s pontificating on a dizzying variety of subjects that no one had ever really thought of taking seriously before her. Sontag offered the readers of her essays opinions on “camp,” the hidden cultural meanings behind low budget sci-fi films, photography as an unlikely impediment to understanding history, Pop art, wars, the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and much, much more. There was seemingly nothing that didn’t fascinate her and this unceasing, insatiable search for novelty and new experiences is what fuelled Sontag’s life on practically every level, including her personal relationships, which often didn’t run very smoothly.

Although she often came across as brash, even imperious in her interviews, Sontag was someone who privately felt that she was a bit of an underachiever, always writing about artists and culture, but not taken as seriously as an artist herself for her own films and novels. Gore Vidal famously trashed her talents writing fiction, which apparently wounded Sontag deeply.

Obviously it was Sontag’s right to have held this rather morose opinion of her life’s work, but it seems so cosmically unfair considering the literary gifts she left behind her. “Susan Sontag’s brilliance”—in a nice turn of phrase I’m pulling straight out of the press release—“gave form to the intangible.” No minor achievement, it is for this that she will be best remembered.

Remarkably, the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag receives its world première at the "DocFest" at (of all places) the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield (a venue most famous for hosting the World Snooker Championship) tomorrow (Tuesday 10th June 2014)...

And here is a trailer for the film:

Regarding Susan Sontag trailer

It is fifty years since Susan Sontag published her fantabulosa essay Notes on Camp - read it in full here.

Don't call him "a National Treasure"

“Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”

“Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”

“Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.”

"Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall."

"If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging."

Alan Bennett - "don't call him 'a National Treasure'; he won't like it," as Frances de la Tour says - is a man Francis Wheen once described as “the nation’s favourite teddy bear”. He (and the nation) celebrates his 80th birthday today.

Tom de Lisle in Intelligent Life described him perfectly:

A founding father of modern British satire in Beyond the Fringe, a master of the television play with Talking Heads, a pillar of the National Theatre with The History Boys, an affable memoirist with Untold Stories and a sardonic diarist on the London Review of Books.

He was a bright boy - a butcher’s son from near Leeds who went to Oxford, got a first and taught history - but a shy one. He was 26 when he took up comedy (via cod sermons) and 34 when he wrote his first play, Forty Years On. The history never melted away: he has turned George III, Auden, Britten, Burgess and Blunt into drama, and led the way in putting words in the Queen’s mouth. He has survived cancer, recorded Winnie the Pooh, given his papers to the Bodleian ("in gratitude to the nanny state") and campaigned for less famous libraries. He is an old leftie beloved of conservatives, a cosy uncle whose pen is a double-edged sword.

When asked by Sir Ian McKellen in 1997 whether he was heterosexual or homosexual, he famously said: "That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water." Nonetheless, he and his partner of twenty years (journalist Rupert Thomas, editor of World of Interiors) "tied the knot" once civil partnerships became law. From an article by Mark Lawson in the Radio Times:

As with much in his life, Bennett’s own civil partnership provoked a comic anecdote. “I’d written about how my parents got married at eight in the morning and then my dad went to work and my mam went home. And I think they went to see The Desert Song in the evening.”

Eight decades later, although Alan and Rupert were among the couples making social history, family history weirdly repeated itself - minus a screening of the movie. “There were just one or two people there, relatives of Rupert. And we couldn’t think of what to do afterwards so we were going to have some coffee and we couldn’t find anywhere. Eventually, we did get some coffee, but that was it. So it was a replay of my parents’ marriage. But it wasn’t a landmark because sometimes we can’t even remember the date of it. At Camden Register Office at that time they were trying to jazz things up a bit. They said, ‘Do you want flowers?’ and we said not really. ‘Do you want music?’ Not really. Disappointment on every score.”

Alan Bennett will be celebrated in a special interview with Sir Nicholas Hytner, to be broadcast at 9pm on BBC4 tomorrow (10th May 2014). A direct clash with the Eurovision Song Contest. Alan probably loves that idea.

Alan Bennett (born 9th May 1934)

None but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate

From Strange Flowers blog:

The key to Firbank’s life as well as his art is a sense of never quite belonging. He was born into wealth but it was only two generations old and thus socially suspect. His delicate health led him to constantly seek out more sympathetic climes, and his friends knew of his comings and goings largely from notices in The Times. He was also a Catholic convert, like Waugh in the following generation and Frederick Rolfe in the previous...[though he was] rejected from the priesthood and ever after maintained a strange, Oedipal love-hate relationship with Catholicism.

All of these things, as well as his homosexuality, gave Firbank a privileged vantage point to observe the rituals of his circle as well as its hostility to outsiders, but the barbs in his writing are sometimes so subtle that they only become visible on a second reading. While his plots and dialogue can occasionally seem as precious and overstuffed as a Victorian salon, Firbank was also remarkably forward-looking, such as in the impressionistic passages in Valmouth which record fragments of conversation, out of context, or his regular deployment of characters who were gay or lesbian or otherwise alienated.

Some examples of these are neatly summarised in the GLBTQ Encyclopaedia:

In the utopian world of Valmouth (1919), an imaginary health resort presided over by the black masseuse Mrs. Yajnavalkya, the characters engage in an intricate arabesque of secret amours and are eventually revealed to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.

After the war, Firbank further developed the theme of gay-lesbian utopia in his one-act play, The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), which creates a pastoral "green world" of homosexual freedom and explores the advantages of social arrangements in which the sexes live apart. The happy, middle-aged Lord Orkish is Firbank's portrait of the Oscar Wilde who might have been had Wilde gone into exile rather than facing his persecutors in England.

His last and most explicitly gay work, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, appeared in 1926, the same year as Firbank's early death at the age of forty. The book begins with the cardinal baptising a police puppy named Crack, and ends when the naked cardinal ("elementary now as Adam himself") drops dead while pursuing a choirboy named Chicklet around his church.

Excavating the homosexual meanings in everything from St. Sebastian to Egyptian statuettes, butterflies to orchids, and Priapus to Ganymede, his use of inverted word order, dashes, exclamation points, ellipses, and innuendo shows his characteristic "Sapphic" mode of presenting material in fragments in order to articulate the love that dares not speak its name.

His description of Monsignor Parr in Vainglory as "something between a butterfly and a misanthrope, [who] was temperamental, when not otherwise...employed," gives some indication of his masterful use of indirection.

Committed to the preservation of gay and lesbian culture in an era of political backlash, as well as to the unfettered expression of his artistic self, Firbank himself may be fittingly characterized by the comment of Lady Parvula de Panzoust in Valmouth that "None but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate."

There are numerous accounts of Firbank’s personal eccentricity, such as presenting the Marchesa Casati with a bunch of lilies and suggesting that they embark immediately for America, sending his cab driver to smooth the way before his first meeting with Augustus John, or his unlikely participation in sports. While at Cambridge, Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland recalls seeing the effete Firbank incongruously dressed “in the costume of sport”. Confounded, Holland enquired what he had been doing, and learning that he had apparently been playing football, further enquired whether it was rugby or soccer. “Oh,” replied Firbank, “I don’t remember”.

Nancy Cunard recalls a meal in London in 1922:

"A charming, but at that moment insufferably drunk, young man was with me and we were about to have dinner. Noisily and lengthily captious at the menu’s many suggestions, he had finally reached the point of announcing ‘I’ll have…I’ll have a…’ while the waiter stood by looking more than weary. At that moment Firbank swept in, ecstatic, and came dancingly towards us. As I tried to introduce them my companion scowled at him, muttered something about ‘fairies’ and reached the end of his thought: ‘A beefsteak’. ‘And what with, sir?’ asked the waiter. ‘What with, what with?’ groaned the angry man, ‘with…’ Firbank stood poised above us. With a swoop over the table and an ingratiating giggle he suggested clearly and winningly: ‘Try violets!’"

"The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain."

"To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating."

Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank (17th January 1886 – 21st May 1926)