After the aubade of the first five stanzas, the poem, with its next line, locates itself directly with the lovers in their bed: “And you beside me, blesséd now while sirens / Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day — / Serenely now, before day claims our eyes / your cool arms murmurously about me lay… ” For a total of eleven lines, the poet goes on about his beloved without once mentioning “breasts” or “tresses,” or any other explicit sign of the feminine. About the room we do not even see any of the “stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays” that were so famously piled on the divan in the typest’s bedsitter before “the young man carbuncular” arrived in The Waste Land’s (once notorious because of it) “Fire Sermon.” In the pre-Stonewall late fifties, when “homophobia” was indeed a universal, pervasive, if silent, fear, even this much explicit lack of feminization was as articulate to an urban sixteen-year-old boy as any Gay Rights flier or Act-Up poster today.
My first response was to weep.
Given the tears I swallowed (in order that no one else in the house hear them), that explicit lack may well have had an order of power that, in these post-Stonewall times, has no current analogue.
The rubric Crane added to (the right of) the poem after the first printing work to heterosexualize our reading — or, more accurately, to bisexualize it: “… or is / it from the / soundless shore / of sleep that / time /// recalls you to / your love, / there in a / waking dream / to merge your seed //—with whom?” (“Merge your seed,” followed by the daring “—with whom?”, certainly suggests two men coming together.) “Who is the / woman with / us [possibly with the poet and the reader, but equally possibly with the poet and the poet’s lover] in the / dawn?… / Whose is the / flesh our feet / have moved / upon?” The woman is so clearly a spiritualized presence, even a spiritual ground, and the columnar text of the poem is so clearly of the “ambiguous” form mentioned above, that when I first read the poem as a sixteen-year-old in 1958, it never occurred to me that it was anything other than a description of homosexual love, with a few suggestions of heterosexuality artfully placed about for those who preferred to read it that way — which, after all, is what it is.
Even today, when I read over Winters’s heterosexual reading of the poem, I find myself balking when he refers to the loved-one as “she” or “her”—having to remind myself this is not a misreading, but is rather an alternate reading the poet has left, carefully set up by the text of the poem, precisely for heterosexual readers like Winters — or, indeed, for any critic, gay or straight, who had to discuss or write about the poem in public — to take advantage of.
But while a heterosexual reading may find the poem just as beautiful and just as lyrical (that’s after all, what the poet wanted) it will not find the poem anywhere near as poignant as the homosexual reading does — because the heterosexual reading specifically erases all reference to the silence surrounding homosexuality for which the heterosexual reading’s existence, within the homosexual reading, is the positive sign. But that is one reason the homosexual reading seems to me marginally the richer.
While more common in fiction than in poetry, another homosexual form is the narrative that takes place in a world where homosexuality is never mentioned and is presumed not to exist — but where the incidents that occur have no other satisfying explanation. (To use another phrase made famous by Eliot, they have no other “objective correlative” save homosexual desire.) This is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gide’s L’Immoralist, and Mann’s Tod im Vennidig. This is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Again, because homosexuality is implied in such works, not stated, a literalist reading of such texts can always more or less erase it. Such a text — also — is Crane’s “Cutty Sark.” That’s one I didn’t get at sixteen.
But by the time, at twenty-five, I’d stayed up all night in half a dozen similar situations, yes, I got it!
Still a third homosexual form is the light-hearted, good-natured, innocent presentation of rampant male (heterosexual) promiscuity: the sort of young man who’d “go to bed with anything!” The assumption here, of course, is that the young man does — only the writer has opted not to specify the homosexual occurrences. (The classic example, despite Yingling’s italics and multiple punctuation marks of surprise is, yes, Tom Jones [1749].) Often in such works the heterosexual conquests are accompanied by extraordinarily complacent husbands — presumed to be getting some from the young man off stage and on the side. Sometimes a wise or silly older woman, especially if a widow (the nickname for one of the most popular gay bartenders in New York City’s heavy hustling strip along Eighth Avenue is “Jimmy the Widow,” who has worked there more than twenty years now) is read as a satiric, coded portrait of an old queen, who briefly has the young man’s sexual favors.
The classical homosexual reading that replaces Proust’s “Albertine” (the heroine of A la recherche du temps perdu) with “Albert” (Proust’s own young, male coach driver) is a prime example of the same homosexual reading trope where women substitute in the text for men: generations of gay readers have pointed out to each other, with a smile, that Marcel’s kidnapping and detention for weeks of Albertine is lunatic if she is actually an upperclass young woman — and only comprehensible if she is a working class young man.
The male narrator to whom Willa Cather goes to such pains, in the frame story of My Àntonia, to ascribe the text recounting the narrator’s chaste, life-long love of a wonderfully alive Czech immigrant woman is another, easily readable (and wholly erasable by a literalist reading) example of a (in this case lesbian) homosexual trope.
One of the most famous — and, at the same time, most invisible — examples of such a form is presented in the closing moments of Wagner’s prologue-plus-trilogy of operas, Der Ring Des Nibelungen. The sixteen- odd hours of music (usually heard over four nights) comprising the work are intricately interwoven from motifs that take on great resonances, both psychological and symbolic — this motif associated with the completion of Valhalla, that one associated with the Ring of Power, another with the spear on which the Law is inscribed, while another represents the sword given to mortals by the gods to free themselves, and still another stands for the renunciation of love necessary for any great human undertaking in the material world. These motifs have been traced in their multiple appearances throughout the Ring and explicated in literally hundreds of volumes. At the closing of the fourth and final opera, Götterdämmerung, when the castle of earthly power lies toppled, the castle of the gods has burned down, and the awed populace gazes over a land swept clean by the flooding and receding of the Rhine, the tetrology ends with a sumptuous melody that registers to most hearers as wholly new — a fitting close for this image of a new world, awaiting rebirth at the hands of man and history.