Re: Henry S. Whitehead-personal life
Posted by:
Gavin Callaghan (IP Logged)
Date: 19 May, 2007 08:34PM
Kipling Wrote:
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> "This can't simply be my imagination"?
>
> In reading West India Lights last summer I
> didn't notice any such "aspects."
> You gays, er, guys, are pathetic.
Right. And you probably think that Joel Schumacher’s “Batman Forever†has no homosexual subtext, too. And Michelangelo’s “David†was done as a gift for his girlfriend.
JD Worth Wrote:
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>I will admit that it has been quite a long time
>since I read much of Whitehead's work, but I don't
> recall being particularly struck by this aspect
> (any more than with a great deal of "classic" horror
>in the late Victorian-early Edwardian mode, which is what
>struck me most about his work. One thing to bear in mind
>is that such visits between older male mentors and younger
>males was by no means uncommon in the nineteenth and early
>twentieth centuries, and may bear quite different interpretations.
The question is not whether Whitehead’s relationship with his protégés was physical, but whether there is a homoerotic content to his stories. I was only interested in his personal life insofar as it confirms my own homoerotic interpretation. The difference between Whitehead and someone like M. R. James, is that Whitehead’s stories, at least the ones I have seen, seem to have a strongly homoerotic undercurrent, whereas those of M. R. James do not.
In “Across the Gulf†(1926), for example, the protagonist, a middle aged “successful lawyer†named Carrington whose logical mind rebels against the possibility of the supernatural which he has inherited from his deceased Scottish mother (WEINBERG 2), has been living alone in his mother’s house after her death, and working himself to the point of a nervous breakdown, overworking his mind and unworking his body. (Whitehead puts it this way: “Carrington…was apprized by certain mental and physical indications which his physician interpreted vigorously, that he must take at least the whole summer off and devote himself to recuperation.â€) Exceedingly nervous and strained, he decides to spend the summer at a boy’s camp run by his cousin, a “middle-aged, retired clergyman†(WEINBERG 3) and an “inelastic†and “spinsterish†magazine writer, who, like Whitehead himself, “retained a developed pastoral instinct which he could no longer satisfy in the management of a parishâ€, and who, consequently, “compromised the matter by establishing a summer camp for boys in his still desirable Adirondacksâ€. Like Carrington, too, Rev. MacDonald is still reeling from the blow of the death of a young male friend and financial advisor, Thomas Starkey, who after a six-year association and “exile†in the wilderness has finally succumbed to what Whitehead terms the “White Plague†of tuberculosis. Previously a “nervous wreckâ€, at the boy’s camp Carrington soon feels like a new man. (WEINBERG 3) (Lovecraft would earlier invoke much the same plot point in his collaborative short story “The Man of Stone†(1923), Lovecraft’s narrator being dragged to see some strange sculptures in the wilderness amid “the upper Adirondacks†(HM 201) by his friend, Ben Hayden, who, the narrator says, “had been his closest acquaintance for years, and our Damon and Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all timesâ€. Hayden, Lovecraft reveals, had been apprised by yet another friend, “Henry Jacksonâ€, “’about some devilish queer conditions up there‘â€, Jackson having discovered some “bizarre sculpture†in the woods while out hunting --this “Jackson†being, like Whitehead’s “White Plague†sufferer Thomas Starkey, a “lunger†(HM 211) who, says Hayden, “was up in a shack beyond Lake Placid for that beastly spot in his lungâ€. (HM 200)
Aside from the an apparition of his Scottish mother, who helps to save Carrington from a death from a mouthful of poisonous mushrooms, the characters are exclusively male: including the boy, “young Crockerâ€, who accidentally gives Carrington the poison mushrooms, and who Carrington likes to the extent of granting him special privileges, in the form of sending him on an errand “out of bounds†of the camp. Whether this description of the boy as “young Crocker†is a prefiguration of the later C. J. Fletcher, who, as Lovecraft observed, was a “little Crackerâ€, and who would seem to reflect Whitehead’s predilections, I don’t know. Certainly, it would seem that Lovecraft would have picked up this affectionate designation of Fletcher as such from Whitehead himself, “cracker†being a local Florida usage, deriving from the sound of the “cracking†whips of the rustic ranch herders who migrated into Florida from Georgia, and not something someone from Rhode Island would typically say.
Whitehead’s “The Napier Limousine†(1933), meanwhile, is a tale in which the three main themes are Imperialism, Anglicanism and blackmail ---the two latter topics being ones which, as Douglass Shand-Tucci has shown in his study of the Anglo-Catholic Ralph Adams Cram has shown, were of great moment to gay elements in the High Anglican sect of the Episcopal church in the early twentieth century. As in “Across the Gulfâ€, above, where the narrator, Carrington, is saved from certain death via poison due to the intervention of the ghost of his mother, so too in “The Napier Limousine†does the supernatural element in this story involve a maternal female spirit, returned from the realms of the dead to save her adopted son, “a handsome young fellow of about twenty five†(WHITEHEAD 114) named Harry Dacre, who is being blackmailed due to his supposed sexless dalliance with a female nighthall entertainer. Indeed, aside from this wraith, who herself is described by Whitehead as being “a true aristocratâ€, “one born to command†(118), and who during her life was intimately connected with “the counsels of a great Empireâ€, the only other female figure in the story is a middle-aged nurse of a wealthy family (her baby carriage is “glistening†and “custom built†[108]), who is reduced to hysteria by the sight of the narrator and his friend stepping out from the ghost’s limousine, her terrified mouth hanging open “like a Greek tragic mask†(109), and who is humored by the policeman to whom she tells her story, “The policemanâ€, Whitehead writes, “a respectable-looking middle aged man, probably accustomed to the vagaries of nursemaids, and doubtless with womenfolk of his ownâ€, doing his best to reassure her, before shrugging and continuing on his patrol. (112)
Aside from these two women, the story is entirely homo-social, Canevin and his friend Rand having first met “at a small men’s dinner at St. John’sâ€(110), where Canevin had learned that Rand was considered the world’s foremost authority on “magical beliefs and practices and the occult among native peoplesâ€, and where the two had talked “too late and too continuously for courtesy to one’s host, even at a men’s dinnerâ€. This familiarity continues even afterwards, when, at the beginning of the narrative, the two of them, after meeting accidentally outside the narrator’s tailor’s shop at Jermyn Street, and learning that they are each heading “in the same directionâ€, begin “to walk along together, arm in armâ€, toward St. Paul’s Cathedral (111) ---the very heart of English Anglicanism and where, significantly , they both encounter the wraith of the story.
The narrative of “The Napier Limousine†is firmly set at the center of the most elite strata of English society; the principal “action†of the narrative takes place at “No. 12, Portman Terrace ---one of an ultra-conservative long row of solid family mansions in London’s residential West Endâ€; the narrator, Gerald Canevin, and his close friend, “James Rand, Earl of Carruthâ€, occult expert and “Chief of the British Government’s Secret Service†in India (WHITEHEAD 108), first meeting at a gathering at “Sir John Scottâ€â€™s house, the home of the head of Scotland Yard (110). At the climax to the tale, arch-Imperialist Rand, who, as Whitehead repeatedly reiterates, “had held the Indian Empire together resolutely for twenty years--†(119), threatens the “Oriental†villain by suggesting that he will kill him on the spot, and then have the whole matter covered up by “Downing Streetâ€. (116)
The ghost herself, Lady Mary Grosvernor, one of the founders of the Red Cross during WWI, is represented by Whitehead, even from beyond the grave, as a symbol of that supposed “perfection†which both Whitehead and Lovecraft found in the British Imperial order (both the narrator and his friend doff their hats in respect when they first meet her [111]). For Whitehead, it is inconceivable that her footman, even after death, “should be remiss in his dutiesâ€. (109) Her “beautifully-kept“, “custom-built†car, meanwhile, the story’s eponymous and “old fashioned“ (110) “Napier limousineâ€, in which Lady Grosvernor and her aged footman were both killed by a stray German bomb years before, is described as “soundlessâ€, stopping before Dacre’s mansion with “a jarless poise like the alighting of a poised hawk.†(108) The footman, meanwhile, salutes the protagonist “very smartly†before “snapping into his seat beside the chauffeur“, coming into position “like a ramrod, his arms folded before him with stiff precision†(111), while from the driving of the chauffeur, which “is a very model of accuracy and sound formâ€, it is very plain, the narrator observes, “that the unknown elderly lady was very well and promptly served.†Dacre’s butler, meanwhile, prepares the narrator’s scotch and soda “with admirable professional deftnessâ€. (119)
The elderly Mary Grosvernor herself, meanwhile, is described by the narrator as speaking “in a very beautiful, softly modulated voice, in which was to be clearly discerned that unmistakable tone of a class born to rule through many generations: a tone of the utmost graciousness, but nevertheless attuned to commandâ€. (111) Rand, meanwhile, for his part, is described to the narrator as having “been almost continuously away from England now for more than a score of years, serving the Empire in innumerable strange corners of its far-flung extent, but chiefly in Indiaâ€, the head of Scotland Yard observing that “‘It is unquestionably due to Lord Carruth’s remarkable abilities that the Indian Empire is now intact.’†Later, young Dacre tells Rand that he’d “believe anything†that Rand “chose to say, sir, like the Gospel itselfâ€. (119)
It soon transpires that the late Lady Grosvernor has returned from the dead, and transported the narrator and Rand to the home of her adoptive son, Harry Dacre, in order to save the English gentleman from blackmail at the hand of a dubious “Oriental†gentleman, who is somehow involved in the London music hall and entertainment industries. As in Lovecraft’s earlier short story “Arthur Jermynâ€, in which Sir Philip Jermyn “ran away with a vulgar dancerâ€, Dacre has become involved, as Canevin puts it, in “‘…one of those infatuation affairs….A woman. She turns out to be mixed up, somehow, with Goddard, the impresario, or whatever he is’†(113) ---although here, unlike in Lovecraft, Whitehead is true to his homo-social context, Dacre stating quite plainly that “As a matter of plain fact, there has been, really, nothing ---nothing, that is, seriously to trouble one’s conscience’†between himself and the dancer (114) (i.e., there has been no sex between them). Here, the dancer, interestingly, is called “The Princess Lillia of the Gaieties†---this “Lillia†being yet another variation, perhaps, of the “Lilith†terminology we have been noting elsewhere, in the works of Lovecraft--- this “Lillia†working with someone known variously as “Leighton Goddard†, “Wertheimerâ€, “Abdulla Khan ben Majpatâ€, and who is described by Rand as being “A
very clever person in the heavy-blackmail lineâ€, though “his real game is deeper, and blacker†(113) ---i.e., the undermining of the English Imperialistic system itself.
Interestingly, and in echo of his collaboration, elsewhere, with Lovecraft, i.e. “The Trapâ€, with its subdued homoerotic imagery, Canevin refers to Goddard’s blackmail scheme as “a trap†(113). The setter of this “trapâ€, meanwhile, Whitehead describes in sinister, Eastern terms, there being, Whitehead writes:
“…a suggestion of richness about him, sartorial richness, an aura of something oriental which came into that Anglo-Saxon room with him. One could not put a finger on anything wrong in his really impeccable appearance. Bond Street was written upon his perfect morning coat; but I would have guessed, I think, almost instinctively, that his name was not really Goddard, even if no one had suggested that to me. He glanced about the room, very much self-possessed, and with an air almost proprietary, out of shining, sloe-black eyes set in a face of vaguely Asiatic cast: a suggestion of olive under the pale skin of the night-club habitué; a certain undue height of the cheekbones.†(115)
Rand soon reveals that Goddard, with his smouldering, suspicious, oriental eyes, is really â€a Turk†who acted as “a German spy during the Warâ€, Rand pulling a gun on the Turkish intruder then punching him in the chin, so that he “slithered to the floor†(116), afterwards setting him free with “a few crisply spoken words of warning.†(117) In short, Rand has accomplished, in young Harry Dacre’s library/study, in microcosm what he had earlier managed to do with regard to England’s “Indian Dominions†in macrocosm; i.e. the reassertion of inflexible English control over those who would blackmail the elite with purported and sordid, and, to Whitehead at least, groundless notions of sexual contamination ---Dacre’s relationship with the “Princess Lallia†being, Dacre assures us, purely sexless. For Whitehead, England’s domination of the “Third World†was, in theory at least, as businesslike as it was bloodless and sexless. The story finally ends with Rand resuming the thread first picked up when the narrator and Rand encountered Lady Mary Gorsvernor outside St. Paul’s cathedral in London, Rand telling Dacre, “I want to clear up in your mind, forever, the truth of what the religion we hold in common ---the religion of our ancient Anglican Church here in England--- teaches us about the souls in paradise…’†(120)
An entirely different vision of English Colonialism can be found in yet another occult story, written right around the same time, by the female English occultist Dion Fortune, entitled “Recalledâ€. Here, a Colonel Anthony Eustace and his wife, Evelyn, both “social luminaries†whose lives revolve around native-art exhibitions and vacations in Kent for golf, come to occult psychiatrist Dr. Taverner for help. Col. Eustace, like the six foot four Lord Carruth in Whitehead‘s tale, above, is tall and “bronzed by tropical sunsâ€, while his wife is, Fortune writes, “one of those women who make one proud of one’s race, slender, graceful, with the controlled fire of a thoroughbred, the fruit of many generations of refining shelter and worthy pride.“ (FORTUNE 158) In contrast with the firm, resolute Lord Carruth in Whitehead‘s story, above, however, Col. Eustace is depicted as a stunted, unemotional, underdeveloped, and unenlightened being, being described by Taverner’s assistant, Dr. Rhodes, as one of the last remnants of “a type of administrator of empire who is fast dying out.†(FORTUNE 159) Both Eustace and his wife, it turns out, are being haunted by the nightly image of “a native woman in dark blue draperies with gold sequins dangling on her forehead and many bracelets on her arms†(160), a “distressed†and “excited†Indian female who turns out to be the ghost of Huneefa, a fifteen-year-old native girl whose identity Eustace has been hiding from his wife. As Eustace later awkwardly explains it to Taverner, alone:
“I think from her description, that what she saw was a vision of a woman I kept for some time when I was stationed on the Border, and who made a good deal of fuss when I sent her away, as they sometimes do. I have often heard that if a man enters into --er-- relations with a native woman, they have an uncanny knack of laying hold of your soul by their heathen jiggery-spookery. I never believed it, laughed at it, in fact, when I saw another fellow bothered in the same way.†(163)
As his wife lies dying, Col. Eustace further reveals that Huneefa was pregnant with his child and, “a Eurasian brat†being “more than he could endure†(165), he sent her away with a sizeable sum of money, the girl, however, returning it and committing suicide. When Mrs. Eustace learns the truth, there follows this dialogue between husband and wife:
“‘You mustn’t take it so to heart, dear,’ said the man at her side brokenly. ‘Everybody does it out there. They have to. It’s the climate. Nobody thinks anything of it.’
‘I do,’ said the voice that came from so far off. ‘And so would all women if they knew. Men are wise not to tell. Women wouldn’t stand it.’
‘But it wasn’t one of our women, dear.’
‘But it was a woman, and I am a woman, and it seems to hurt me because it hurts womanhood. I can’t put it plainly, but I feel it, I feel it as a hurt to all that is best in me.’
‘What are you to do with men out on frontiers?’ said the man desperately. ‘It is the penalty of empire.’
‘It is the curse of empire,’ came the far-away voice. ‘No wonder they hate us. I always wondered why it is that we can never, never make friends of them. It is because we outrage their womankind. There are some things that are never forgiven.’†(168)
It soon transpires that Eustace’s unborn child had been “a Mahatmaâ€, a “lofty soul†who was destined to “reconcile east and Westâ€, the story ending with Col. Eustace’s wife agreeing to give birth to Huneefa’s unborn Reconciler of East and West. Like Lord Carruth in Whitehead’s story, above, Col. Eustace succeeds to a baronet’s title and becomes a Lord, as well as attainting a lofty position in the Government of India, but due to his wife’s giving birth to “a nigger†(thus; FORTUNE 169), his wife Evelyn is prohibited from taking part in the normal social activities of her position. His wife, however, angelic and holy, finds her child “wonderfulâ€, while Lord Eustace, although still uncomprehending, is not unaffectionate towards the child, and is even, Dr. Taverner hints, heading upward in the course of his spiritual evolution. (161) “Never make the mistake of confusing unripe fruit with bad fruit,†Taverner sagely cautions his assistant Rhodes.
Comparing this tale with Whitehead’s, above, yields a number of contrasts, not the least of which is the apparently unmarried status of Lord Carruth, vs. the married one of Lord Eustace. Whereas Whitehead’s Lord Carruth uses his occult knowledge and “remarkable abilities†to maintain control in India, Dr. Taverner uses his similar knowledge and powers to enlighten a stunted and narrow-minded English colonial administrator. And whereas Whitehead‘s concern is the constant maintenance of firm “control†on the part of Lord Carruth, whose expression, when he pulls a gun on the “orientalâ€, is one of “rigid determination and complete, utter self-confidence†(WHITEHEAD 116), in Dion Fortune’s story, Lord Eustace’s tone is one of brokenness and “desperationâ€, speaking embarrassedly about the “penalty of Empireâ€, and the sexual desperation of “men out on frontiers†(FORTUNE 167) --Lord Eustace appealing to Dr. Taverner in terms which, in this case, at least, one thinks Lord Carruth could have no quarrel, “Good Lord…what is one to do with a woman?†(168)
In Whitehead‘s weirdly homoerotic “The Trap“, the middle section of which was apparently written entirely by H. P. Lovecraft, we have yet another a tale of a middle aged-bachelor and a young adolescent boy, this time a school boy named Robert Grandison, who goes missing, an apparent runaway or a victim of a kidnapping . In this story, Whitehead’s narrator is “staying half as a guest and half as a tutor at the private school of my old friend Browne†(HM 380), and where he occupies “two rooms and a hallway†by himself, furnishing it with “an old rosewood console which had belonged to my great-grandmother†and upon which he sets an old mirror which he had found in the Virgin Islands “in an old outbuilding of an abandoned state-house in Santa Cruz.†Suffering from cold (a Lovecraftian interpolation?), the narrator chooses to tutor the boys in his rooms, where one of them, a “fifteen-year-old†named “Robert Grandison†decides to remain, and, like narcissus, studies the narrator’s mirror, fascinated by a flaw, or some “corrugations†in the glass. Touching the glass, Grandison’s “muscular action in turning†away causes him to cut his finger on the corrugations, Grandison stating embarrassedly and “shamefacedly†that “‘It-- I --felt --well, as though it were pulling my finger into it. Seems-- er-- perfectly foolish, sir, but --well-- it was the most peculiar sensation.’†(HM 301-82)
After the “fascinated†Grandison departs, the narrator makes his own experiments with the glass, and touching the glass he “grasped an impression of quite distinct suction†[emphasis Whitehead’s], which caused “A kind of chill†to run "suddenly up and down my backboneâ€. Recalling “the rather wistful expression of Robert Grandison when the gong called him to class†and remembering how he had "looked back over his shoulder as he walked obediently out into the hallwayâ€, the narrator “resolved that he should be included†in his investigation of the mirror. With the intent of “picking Robert up for a session with the mirror†(HM 383), the narrator is “astonished and pained to find him absentâ€, the boy remaining missing even as the school breaks up for Christmas holiday.
The narrator then begins to have strange dreams and nightly visitations from Grandison (HM 389), in which a “hardly recognizable†Grandison, “strangely transformed to a boy of a dull greenish dark-blue color†is “trying desperately to communicate†with him (HM 384), the narrator seeing Grandison “as though at some distance, yet queerly enough he seemed at the same time to be just beside me.†(HM 385) Soon, the narrator realizes the connection between Grandison’s disappearance, and the “whorl-like contours†of the mirror, whose “apparent illusions of suction had later exerted such a disquieting fascination on both Robert and me.†(HM 385-86) Somehow, due to this “suctionâ€, the narrator realizes, “in some outrageous fashion Robert Grandison had passed out of our ken into the glass and was there immured, waiting for release.†[emphasis Whitehead’s] Whitehead then goes on to describe Grandison’s penetration and entry into the mirror in terms alternately and disturbingly suggestive of fellatio, sodomy, and orgasmic release:
“Finding me out and knowing that I would not mind, he [Grandison] had come into my living room and gone straight to the mirror… …Then, quite suddenly, there had come to him an overpowering urge to place his hand upon this whorl-center. Almost reluctantly, against his better judgment, he had done so; and upon making the contact had felt at once the strange, almost painful suction which had perplexed him that morning. Immediately thereafter --quite without warning, but with a wrench which seemed to twist and tear every bone and muscle in his body and to bulge and press and cut at every nerve-- he had been abruptly drawn through and found himself inside.
“Once through, the excruciatingly painful stress upon his entire system was suddenly released. He felt, he said, as though he had just been born --a feeling that made itself evident every time he tried to do anything; walk, stoop, turn his head, or utter speech. Everything about his body seemed a misfit.†(HM 386-87) [emphasis Whitehead’s]
The later portion of the story, in which Grandison’s emergence into an inverted and reversed reality is delineated, would appear to be the work of Lovecraft --although the overarching metaphor of inversion and reversal, which would appear to have originated with Whitehead, would still have relevance for our homoerotic interpretation. Within the mirror, created by a 17th-century Danish sorcerer named Axel Holm, , there is a “reversal†which affects “perspective and colorationâ€, Grandison’s natural “pinkish-buff†turning a “greenish-blueâ€. (HM 387) “Desperately trying to devise a method for Robert’s release†(HM 294), the narrator hits upon the expedient of removing the whorls from the glass at the exact opposite of the hour at which Grandison entered. Overpowered by a “dusty odor†(HM 395) (apparently another Lovecraftian interpolation), the narrator faints, only to awaken “lying on the Bokhara rug with my legs held unaccountably up in the airâ€, the young Grandison “holding my legs aloft to bring the blood back to my headâ€. (HM 396) Realizing he has freed Grandison, the narrator is seized with a feeling of “triumphâ€, while Grandison,
“at last yielding to the sustained strain which he had borne through all those terrible eleven days, suddenly broke down like a little child and began to weep hysterically in great, stifling, dry sobs.
“I picked him up and placed him gently on my davenport, threw a rug over him, sat down by his side, and put a calming hand on his forehead.â€
Two days later, after Grandison’s disappearance has been explained under the cover of a lie devised by the narrator, Robert, “greatly improved in strength and appearance was placing a log on my living room fireâ€, when the narrator notices “a certain awkwardness in his motions and was struck by a persistent idea.†(HM 398-99) “Without alarming himâ€, the narrator asks Grandison to “unbutton his coat†so that he can “listen to his cardiac action.†--at which point he discovers that Grandison’s internal organs have all been reversed, his heart “beating on his right side.†[emphasis Whitehead’s/Lovecraft’s]. (Lovecraft uses this idea elsewhere in his story “The Moundâ€, where a WWI veteran named Ed Clay, returns from the mound with “a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph†on his forehead, --both testimonials to his trials at the hands of the decadent subterranean society of Tsath.)
Admitting that the tutor-pupil relationship is not always homosexual, erotic, or physical, certainly the imagery and dynamics of this story suggest, if not a conscious, then at least an unconscious homoeroticism on the part of its main originator (i.e. Whitehead).
Whitehead’s story “No Eye Witness†(1932), however, is perhaps the most significant, both in terms of the homoerotic aspects of Whitehead’s works, as well as in the context of my study of Lovecraft’s use of the pagan werewolf, where it serves as an interesting contrast. Equally autobiographical, this story concerns the middle-aged Everard Simon and his older father. Like Whitehead and his aged father “The younger Simon---he was thirty seven, his father getting toward seventy†(WEINBERG 370), both live together after the death of the father’s wife. Like Whitehead himself, the fictional Everard Simon shows a marked affinity for the tropics, specifically the West Indies, “St. Thomas or Martiniqueâ€, where he spends every winter, Everard Simon spending every summer, meanwhile, as we would expect, at “his summer camp in the Adirondaks.†A travel writer, the only “problem†in this arrangement for Everard Simon is “the long ride in the subway necessitated by his dropping in to his New York club every day.†(WEINBERG 371) Suggestively, and as in Lovecraft’s own works of “mundane“ (i.e. non-cosmic) horror, the first note of discord in this lycanthropic tale is here heralded by a reference to the “subwayâ€, particularly the annoyance of rush hour, when, just as for Lovecraft, the “columns†and “crowds†are particularly irksome ---although in Whitehead’s case, at least in this instance, there is no hint of racism in its usage. As Stefan Dziemianowicz notes in his entry on Whitehead in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, however, in Whitehead’s voodoo stories “sexual intimacy between whites and blacks opens the door to a host of supernatural reprisals. This idea gets pushed to the extreme in ‘Williamson‘, a sympathetic portrait of a man whose mixed animal and human heritage arouses instinctive loathing in everyone he meets.†(PRINGLE 640)
Like Lovecraft, too, as in such stories as “The Street†and “Heâ€, Whitehead is conscious of the once-rural and rustic aspect of the Flastbush area surrounding Simon’s father’s apartment, his “frame house standing lonely and dwarfed in its own grounds among the towering apartment housesâ€, the house “like a lost child in a preoccupied crowd of adults whose business caused them to look over the child’s head†---although here, again, this nostalgia is free of any taint or hint of xenophobic paranoia. It does, however, presage the later pagan rusticity with which Whitehead infuses his story, the werewolf being associated with the pagan fecundity of nature and animality which lies in the past, just beneath the surface of the city--- a pagan animality which is not without, for Whitehead, a certain homoeroticism. (Note, too, the singular feeling for children which this metaphor of Whitehead’s, likening the building to “a lost childâ€, suggests.) After a long subway ride, Simon disembarks, the pagan atmosphere immediately being denoted by “a deep breath of the fresh, sweet outdoor air†(WEINBERG 372), infused with “a spicy odor of wet leaves about it somehow†which contrasts with the “somewhat stuffy air of the subway“â€. This infusion of pagan “odors†is simultaneously accompanied, suggestively, by a sudden darkness, allowing for a view of the stars and the moon ---the streetlight system suddenly missing, suggesting a reemergence into the primal past.
Simon suddenly notices that “Great trees stood all about him†(WEINBERG 373), and from which comes, predictably, as in Lovecraft’s association of Hellenic pastoralism with song in “The Crawling Chaos†and elsewhere, “a joyous song in a manly bass, slightly muffled by the wood of the thick trees.†Entirely too entranced by this, Simon listens “eagerlyâ€, “intentlyâ€, and distinguishing, as he does so, various Bacchanalian and Elizabethan words, such as “merryâ€, “heartâ€, and “repine†---words which would not have been out of place in Love craft’s “drinking song†in “The Tomb†--associated there, however, with growing decay and deterioration. Significantly, too, it is at this point that Whitehead’s protagonist notes that it “seemed entirely natural to be here†, while at the same time he notes the sudden incongruity between his pagan surroundings and his modern dress and other belongings. Whitehead chooses to express this incongruity in a rather startling way ---i.e. with a reference to a female figure in a drawing by arch-decadent Aubrey Beardsley--- Simon suddenly remembering “with a smile that strange drawing of Aubrey Beardsley’s, of a lady playing an upright cottage pianoforte in the midst of a field of daisies!†(Lovecraft will likewise invoke the work of Beardsley in Medusa’s Coil†with reference the hair of Madame de Russy’s as resembling that of “some Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsleyâ€, possessing an “unholy vitality†suggestive of a “Medusa or Berenice†(HM 172) --Lovecraft often using “Oriental†as a circumlocution for “Jews†and “Judaism†(qv. “Hypnosâ€, his essay “Cats and Dogsâ€, etc.) In Malcolm Easton’s biography of Aubrey Beardsley, Aubrey and the Dying Lady (1972), Malcolm Easton will write, in his chapter, “A Flutter of Frilled Thingsâ€, of the “the artist’s ambiguous delineation of sexâ€, of Aubrey’s proclaiming “from the housetops his interest in the hermaphrodite†(126), and how one is “struck by the persistence of gender confusion in Aubrey’s workâ€. (128)
As Whitehead’s protagonist rather earnestly listens, the voice of the singer ---who is obviously, Whitehead writes, “as the fresh voice indicatedâ€, “a young manâ€, gradually approaches, hidden behind a “screening array of tree bolesâ€. Revealingly, however, and just as the young man is about to appear, the singer pauses “in the middle of a noteâ€, the sudden and “primeval silence†which follows being disturbed by “a huge timber wolf†which “burst through the underbrush†toward the singer. Already, we can discern several themes which parallel those in the works of Love craft ---the pagan vegetation, the young male singer, the reference to Beardsley ---although Whitehead’s paganism is by no means as tortured, caricatured, inverted as Lovecraft’s. Decadence, there is, yes, but the incongruity of the woman in the Beardsley drawing is representative only of the protagonist’s modern maladjustment to a rustic setting. Wolves, there are, too, in this pagan wood of “primeval silenceâ€, just as in Lovecraft’s works ---but here, the wolf is opposed by the equal figure, in the form of the young pagan man who sings of “merriness†in a “manly bassâ€, and not of a Richard Upton Pickman who is on the going downhill on a fast toboggan track of “reverse evolutionâ€. This is a wood of healthy adjustment to homosocial if not homosexual orientation, and a natural fulfillment of homoerotic physical desire.
“Startled into frigid immobility†and watching as if “petrified†---both possibly images, whether consciously or unconsciously, of erection, Whitehead’s narrator hears the man make a quick “‘heh’â€, and then watches “fascinated†as a battle ensues between young man and wolf:
“…the two figures, man and wolf, came into plain sight; the singer, for so Simon thought of him, a tall, robust fellow, in fringed deerskin, slashing desperately with a hunting knife, the beast crouching low, snapping with a tearing motion of a great punishing jaw. Short-breathed ‘heh’s’ came from the man, as he parried dexterously the lashing snaps of the wicked jaws.â€
Somewhat predictably, given our homoerotic suppositions, the “young woodsman†suddenly drops his knife and “reached for the great pistol which depended from his belt in a rough leather holster. There was a blinding flash, and the wolf slithered down, its legs giving under itâ€. (WEINBERG 374) The whole scene, in fact, reads like a repressed or sublimated depiction of a homosexual assignation, with the “blinding flash†of the “great pistol†representative of the moment of orgasm, accompanied as it is by a look of “horrified wonderment on the face of the young woodsman†as he drops his “pistol on the damp groundâ€. This reading of the text is seemingly confirmed by the “eldritch change passing over the beastâ€, coincident with the marked diminution of male sexual desire during the refractory period after ejaculation, the young man watching
“fascinated†and “round-eyed†as “the hair of the great paws dissolve, the jaws shorten and shrink, the lithe body buckle and heave strangely.†Simon closes his eyes, and reopens them to see the wolf has now changed into the “body of a man, lying prone across the tree roots, a pool of blood†mingling with the earth and tree roots.
Released somehow from his own “strange spell of quiescenceâ€, Simon suddenly flees the scene. As in Lovecraft’s works, the moon plays a pivotal, if equally unexplained, role, seeming to “increase in size, to give a more brilliant light†“above the treesâ€, while the trees themselves grow “pale†and vanish, replaced by the streetlights of Simon’s Flatbush neighborhood. Stopping at the local drugstore, where he had intended to buy cigarettes before his strange experience, Simon finds the entrance blocked by a crowd; a “young man†nearby informing him that someone was shot and killed in that very drugstore, as part of some gangland killing. Simon retires that night, musing on the apparent coincidence between this shooting and his own “imaginary†experience, associating his seeming hallucination with the (pagan) “treesâ€. (WEINBERG 376) The next morning, Simon learns from the newspaper that the criminal killed was known as “‘Jerry the Wolf’, a notorious gangster with a long prison recordâ€. Putting on his shoes, meanwhile, Simon notices that his shoes are “caked with black mold, precisely like the mold from the wood paths about his Adirondak camp.â€
Taking the subway to see a fellow Harvardian who now works in the D.A.’s office ---and who is, suggestively, named “Forrestâ€--- Simon inquires as to the background of “Jerry the Wolfâ€. As in Dion Fortune’s lycanthropic story “Blood-Lustâ€, in which the werewolf is revealed to be a Hungarian parasite, Forrest replies:
“‘That’s a very queer thing, Simon. Such a name is not, really, uncommon. There was that fellow, Goddard, you remember. They called him ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’ There was that fiction criminal known as ‘The Lone Wolf.’ There have been plenty of ‘wolves’ among criminal ‘monikers’. But this fellow, Jerry Goraffsky, was a Hungarian, really. He was called ‘The Wolf’, queerly enough, because there were those in his gang who believed he was one of those birds who could change himself into a wolf! It’s a queer combination, isn’t it? ---for a New York gangster!’
“‘Yes’, said Everard Simon, ‘it is, very queer, when you come to think of it…’†(WEINBERG 376-77)
Forrest goes on to state that “‘That isn’t the only queer aspect of this case however---’†a statement with which this critic also quite agrees--- Simon’s friend revealing that the bullet used to kill Jerry the Wolf is an antique, “the kind of ball Fennimore Cooper’s people used ---’Deerslayer!’ It would take a young cannon to throw that thing.’†(WEINBERG 377) Who the “young cannon†was that inspired this strange homoerotic fantasy, I do not know, whether he was imaginary or actual. But that it was intimately connected with that communion with nature which Whitehead experienced as part of his work with boy’s camps, and whose mould coated his protagonist’s shoes as far away from the Adirondaks as Flatbush, New York, cannot be doubted.
Martinus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Look at the context: That's just Price's
> charmingly vulgar way of saying "fandom could go
> to hell." Price had just got a female acquaintance
> of Whitehead's to write a memoir of Whitehead for
> the benefit of fandom, when he (quite
> inappropriately and less than diplomatically) let
> slip the gossip that he got from August Derleth,
> about said female acquaintance having been
> Whitehead's mistress, whereupon he could kiss the
> memoir good-bye. Not only was fandom screwed, it
> was "buggered through its oilskins, and with a
> marlin spike".
Price‘s story is fascinating, firstly for illustrating the curiosity which apparently surrounded Whitehead’s private life, specifically his sexuality, in sci-fi fandom, but also for Price’s final comment. Certainly, one would expect a woman from Whitehead’s elite and lofty social strata to be offended at some rumors of a liaison, no matter if they were true or untrue, but Price specifically goes on to call “Madame de Margny†Whitehead’s “un-mistressâ€, as if he specifically knows that it is NOT true, before going on to invoke the images of “buggeryâ€, “oilskins†--a type of clothing specifically worn by sailors ---and not only buggery, but sodomy “with a marlin spike†--the marlin spike being a sailor’s tool, as well as a sailor’s name for a tropic bird (the Phaethon). One thinks that Price was having a rather elaborate joke at fandom's expense with this reference to “buggery“ and “sailors†in association with Whitehead‘s private life, and that, as Price himself put it, Whitehead was “one who knew what he was talking about, particularly when he wrote of the Virgin Islands.â€
Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 19 May 07 | 09:05PM by Gavin Callaghan.