The editors seem to have been taken in by the illusion of that totality as much as anyone. One senses it all through their astute and often revealing commentary. In the “Biographical Introduction” we find them writing, “Gustavus Bosanquet [Symonds’s adolescent playmate] readily saw the humorous and the comic in life, a capacity which in Symonds seems deficient in his published work no matter how often personal accounts in other people’s (like H. G. Dakyns’s and T. E. Brown’s) letters have stressed it” (p. 31)… as though a man may not be jolly in person and serious when he writes — even letters.
Or, again, when pooh-poohing Symonds’s later protestations that he was miserable during his school days at Harrow because “[t]he letters to his family written during this period contain fewer complaints than letters written by most adolescents away from home for the first time,” and thus (they decide) it was only in retrospect that Symonds’s Harrow days seemed miserable to him (p. 32)… as though a brilliant, sensitive, gay child must of necessity commit all the details of his misery to the letters he writes to his father and sister at home.
As a child, I went to a summer camp where all outgoing letters were read by the camp director and all incoming letters were read to the campers by this same tyrannical woman — which simply made it impossible to communicate to parents about either the emotional or the material horrors of the place; and I can recall as an adult in my thirties writing a letter to a very good friend, while a somewhat deranged lover of mine wandered about the apartment wrapped in a sheet and threatening suicide — I had to stop writing to argue a knife out of his hand. But, when, a day later, I resumed the letter, the incident did not go into it, because the letter had begun — and therefore, even though I was writing to a very good friend, was obliged to end — concerned with other things. The incident of the sheet and the knife never made it into my most personal journal, either — because the same lover had a habit of browsing through those notebooks and, if he found any reference to himself, became furiously angry.
The incident has never ended up, through any transformation, in my fiction — because the man dreaded both the publicity and the distortion such a transformation represented as much as he dreaded anything else in the world, and he repeatedly drew promises from me that I would never use anything in his unhappy life in a fictive rendering.
But the conversations we had that day shook me to the bottom of my being; and they informed me about depths of human misery I have never been able to forget; and that meant that I who finished that letter was not I who had begun it. But though it was a most personal letter, I doubt any of what I learned in the midst of writing it showed in its text — although what I learned of personal despair and fear that day still informs the whole of my life, more than a decade on.
This is as close as the incident has gotten — or will ever get — to becoming a text… far closer than it ever got to any text written at the time.
The larger point is, however, that letters — especially the letters of someone who writes a great many of them — only play in one section of the personal spectrum (different, of course, for each of us).
But when they play there as deftly and articulately as Symonds’s letters play, perhaps the editors can be forgiven for feeling they have been privy to the range, harmonies, and scale of the “whole” man, and that all claims that he was other than the letters present him (even at the very hour of their writing) must be taken as errors — rather than as additions or expansions.
As letters play in one range, journals and diaries play in another; and the material of fiction plays in another still. It is hard to explain to any researcher — whose relation to writing is often very different from the titanic relations to the written held by the researched subject — that precisely in the real and obsessive writer, none of these ranges is privileged.
To be sure, overlaps between ranges occur.
But even that does not mean the whole scale is ever completely — is ever any more than partially — filled in.
For even with the most assiduous practitioner of all the intra- and extra-literary genres (letters, journals, memoirs), he or she still experiences the vast majority of her or his life outside language written to friends, spoken to friends, to the self, or to the public. Thus the researcher must never forget that the researcher’s purpose, no matter how much material present itself, must always lean toward an understanding of something in excess of the material.
Should we call it discourse…?
18. Yesterday, to make sense of a Sherlock Holmes story, my daughter had to look up the word “beeswing” in the OED, and discovered it meant the film forming on wine after it’s stood out a goodly while.
19. Essex Hemphill notes (in Ceremonies, p. 39) that when viewing Mapplethorpe’s “Man in Polyester Suit,” it is impossible “to avoid confronting issues of exploitation and objectification.” That body without a head, in which the hands alone tell us the body is black, with its big, flaccid cock loose from its fly, masked in a suit that, through the title, carries the connotations of white working class tackiness, if it cannot call up such questions, is just not doing its job. The disingenuously cool, racially neutral title works to that end: You bring up the racial questions, it all but instructs the viewer. Some thoughts, however, after reading Kobena Mercer on Mapplethorpe in Transition 51: what Mercer misses (or doesn’t quite hold on to) is that Mapplethorpe’s photos, especially in The Black Book, sit on a particularly troublesome border. They are art photographs. But they are saturated with the visual rhetoric — smooth studio backgrounds, high contrast lighting, and compositional fragmentation — of advertising photographs. Much of the disturbing quality of these erotic images comes from their generic ambiguity.
The advertising photograph always makes a coherent statement: “I’ve got it. You want it,” it says. But the rhetorical configuration by which it says it renders such a message completely different from, say, the message of Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s photographs of rural Depression men and women.
The art photograph says merely: “Look at this carefully — for its esthetic aspects.” And, so, Mapplethorpe…?
To place the erotic into the frame of art is a standard Western move that goes back to the very beginnings of representational art, if not before. Precisely to the extent we are familiar with the tradition, Mapplethorpe’s photographs, both in The Black Book and in his other homoerotic collections, shift between these twin, insistent statements, to all their viewers, male, female, gay, straight, black, and white. The problem is: What does such an interplay of messages mean, when the speaker of the messages is a white southern gay photographer, dead of AIDS, and the objects advertised/presented are a series of beautiful and intensely phallocised black male bodies?
The picture is ironic, outrageous — shocking? It is that last alone that renders it banal. It is only there that, as a black viewer (and a black gay viewer at that), I am back at the realization that white artists constantly use blacks to represent the extremes they refuse to picture about themselves, i.e., to invent their own normalcy. Whether it is black singer Jennifer Holliday’s over-the-top performance of “And I Am Telling You” under white director Michael Bennett in Dreamgirls, or the jaw-dropping violence of the forced separation scene of the two black sisters in white director Spielberg’s Color Purple; whether it is the black female nudity that the white producers of Les Ballets Africains wanted to (but were not allowed to) put on Broadway in the fifties, or indeed “Man in Polyester Suit”: all suggest the oddly childish scenario of the white kid urging the black kid to go a little further, to violate expectations, to break accepted boundaries just a bit more than any comparable white singer/actor/ model has done till now. Is it collaboration? Is it exploitation? The effects are indisputably powerful for both white and black audiences. At the same time one notes that it is not what black directors Isaac Julian or Spike Lee are doing with their white actors — pushing them to outrageous, electric, audience-paralyzing depictions of whatever.