Part of the Forest
“The Seventh Square is all forest—however, one of
the Knights will show you the way.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 2
IN THE DAYS WHEN I WAS an avid reader of comic books, the line that thrilled me most, because it promised to reveal something that had been taking place beyond the more obvious bits of the plot, was “Meanwhile, in another part of the forest …”—usually inked in capital letters in the top left-hand corner of the box. To me (who like any devoted reader wished for an infinite story) this line promised something close to that infinity: the possibility of knowing what had happened on that other fork of the road, the one not taken, the one less in evidence, the mysterious and equally important path that led to another part of the adventurous forest.
MAPPING THE FOREST
Damn braces. Bless relaxes.
William Blake
In the middle of the third century B.c., the Cyrene poet Callimachus undertook the task of cataloguing the half-million volumes housed in the famous Library of Alexandria. The task was prodigious, not only because of the number of books to be inspected, dusted, and shelved, but because it entailed the conception of a literary order that was supposed somehow to reflect the vaster order of the universe. In attributing a certain book to a certain shelf—Homer to “Poetry” or Herodotus to “History,” for example — Callimachus had first to determine that all writing could be divided into a specific number of categories, or, as he called them, pinakes, “tables;” and then he had to decide to which category each of the thousands of unlabeled books belonged. Callimachus divided the colossal library into eight tables, which were to contain every possible fact, conjecture, thought, imagination ever scrawled on a sheet of papyrus; future librarians would multiply this modest number to infinity. Jorge Luis Borges recalled that in the numeric system of the Institut Bibliographique in Brussels, number 231 corresponded to God.
No reader who has ever derived pleasure from a book has much confidence in these cataloguing methods. Subject indexes, literary genres, schools of thought and style, literatures classified by nationality or race, chronological compendiums, and thematic anthologies suggest to the reader merely one of a multitude of points of view, none comprehensive, none even grazing the breadth and depth of a mysterious piece of writing. Books refuse to sit quietly on shelves: Gulliver’s Travels jumps from “Chronicles” to “Social Satire” to “Children’s Literature” and will not be faithful to any of these labels. Our reading, much like our sexuality, is multifaceted and fluid. “I am large,” wrote Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.”
The notion of “gay literature” is guilty on three counts: first, because it implies a narrow literary category based on the sexuality of either its authors or its characters; second, because it implies a narrow sexual category that has somehow found its definition in a literary form; third, because it implies a narrow political category that defends a restricted set of human rights for a specific sexual group. And yet the notion of “gay literature,” albeit recent, doubtless exists in the public mind. Certain bookstores have “gay literature” shelves, certain publishers publish “gay literature” series, and there are magazines and papers that regularly bring out stories and poems under the rubric of “gay literature.”
What then is this “gay literature”?
At the risk of committing a tautology, what is in general understood by “gay literature” is literature concerned with gay subjects. This can swing from obscure hints about “the love that dare not speak its name,” in Lord Alfred Douglas’s self-silencing phrase, apparent in some nineteenth-century writing, to explicit chronicles of gay life in our time by authors who may or may not be gay. Sometimes books dealing with nongay subjects by gay writers (E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for instance) are put on the same “gay literature” shelf as books with an explicitly gay content — Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis or Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman—as if the critic, editor, or bookseller were deliberately attempting to catalogue the person, not the person’s work. Certain writers refuse to have their work labeled “gay” (Patrick Gale, Timothy Findley) and refer to it as “books by a writer who happens to be gay.” As usual with this kind of labeling, the exceptions to any proposed definition make the process finally useless, so that every time the label is applied it must be redefined.
Claude J. Summers, in his collection of essays Gay Fictions, defines his subject as “the fictional representation of male homosexuals by gay male and lesbian writers.” This leaves out a fair number of works by nongay writers, which are thus excluded simply by reason of their authors’ sexuality. A writer’s sexual preferences probably color the text, but a reader does not require careful study of the National Enquirer to be able to read literature. Being told that D. H. Lawrence was attracted to older women may or may not inform the enjoyment of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but it is in no way essential for reading that too-famous novel. A study of Melville’s life might shed light on homoerotic elements in Moby-Dick, but is such a study essential in order to discover those same elements? And is a short story by William Faulkner on a gay subject readable only if we have proof of his experience in this field? Doesn’t the word fiction imply the creation of an imagined rather than a physically experienced world? And if knowledge of the author’s inclinations is essential to the understanding of a text, wouldn’t reading anonymous literature (and so much erotic literature is anonymous) be ultimately impossible?
PATHS THROUGH THE FOREST
The fairy way of writing which depends only upon the force of imagination.
John Dryden, King Arthur
Every genre creates its own prehistory. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, and in doing so allowed us to include in the definition tales as old as the Bible. The label “gay literature” is a recent creation, probably no older than the founding of the gay magazine Christopher Street in 1975, but it now includes much earlier work. An anthology of English-language gay poetry would feature many names from the traditional canon, from Shakespeare to Lord Byron; examples of English-language gay fiction are not as venerably old, perhaps because poetry lends itself more readily to an ambiguous reading and (as is the case in many spurious explanations of Shakespeare’s homoerotic sonnets) to a bigoted interpretation, while prose can be less easily subverted for the sake of social decorum. Thomas Hardy suggested that a writer could “get away with things in verse that would have a hundred Mrs. Grundys on your back if said in prose.”
A chronological list of gay fiction in English might begin with obscure novels such as Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1871) or Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreme (1876), or with better-known works such as Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (a short story written circa 1890); it might continue with Henry James’s almost too subtle depiction of a gay infatuation, “The Pupil” (1891), E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice (finished in 1914), D. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” (also 1914), and Ronald Fir-bank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), up to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest mainstream fictional accounts of gay life, published in 1948 — the year that also saw the publication of two other gay classics: Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Tennessee Williams’s collection One Arm and Other Stories. Similar lists could be made in the literature of other languages.