Steve_Bamlett_blog

Two blogs on the Bensons: No. 2 of 2:

1. Writing the complexity of a family: Simon Goldhill (2016) A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press. To see this blog use: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2020/06/02/writing-the-complexity-of-a-family-simon-goldhill-2016-a-very-queer-family-indeed-sex-religion-and-the-bensons-1-of-2-blogs/
2. How then do we read novels queerly, avoiding oversimplifying categories? Reading E. F. Benson (1916) David Blaize London, Hodder & Stoughton.

In an earlier blog on Simon Goldhill’s book on the Benson family, I quoted Goldhill’s comment:

Queerness is what makes naming and the understanding that comes with naming, uncertain. (One should always hear the query in queerness.)[1]

Lots of labels are used to name David Blaize as a novel. The E.F. Benson Society has debated whether it is, as a novel, describable as homoerotic. One biography suggests that the novel describes Benson’s deep attraction to Vincent Yorke (mutually returned like that between Frank Maddox and David respectively in the novel) whilst both were at Marlborough School and with whom he’d shared a room for two years. Yorke, not long after his schooldays, married and, ‘eventually passed out of Fred’s life’.[2] But even if that biographical speculation explained the novel’s genesis, it does not presuppose that relationship in fiction or life was physically erotic or easily understood by being labelled on either side as homosexual and bisexual respectively.

The novel, after all, focuses on David, who is presented throughout as someone who only eventually gathers what his earlier friend Hughes might have wanted when, after seeing David nude, the latter sits on his bed. From the situation David is ‘saved’ by Maddox. We will come back to the problem of ‘salvation’ in this novel later in applying Goldhill’s paradigms of queerness. But here we need to note that nothing in the novel celebrates the homoerotic any more than does conventional culture itself. This suggests that the novel like conventional culture accommodates its queerness if we are to find any in it.

In the penultimate chapter David contemplates marriage, expressing his preference for a certain Violet Gray (who he also loses before the end of the same chapter to another ‘chap’).[3] An army major wrote to Benson to tell him of the pleasure the book had given to ‘very fine and gallant lads … from the trenches’.[4] Even writers associated to the Uranians, who celebrated love between older and younger men, which they saw as ‘Platonic’ cannot easily see the novel as a similar celebration. The Reverend Bradford wrote to Captain Green:

Do you know David Blaize? It always puzzles one. It pretends to be written from an old-fashioned puritanical point of view, and when David falls violently in love with a girl it is distinctly suggested that every rightminded boy does the same. Yet really I fancy that Benson inclines to platonic love?[5]

This tells us a lot about the complex reception of the novel since it chooses a central character of whom it is made clear that he is likely to end married to a woman and who never really talks the language of queer sexual desire. He is largely unconscious of what is meant by others who speak to him, though guardedly, of the ‘beastly’ behaviour of boys like the tainted Hughes. In the final chapter of the novel he spends much of twelve hours of the night hand-in-hand with Maddox whilst being physically totally unconscious, almost near to death.

It is this radical unconsciousness that enables, after Violet Gray is shrugged off, David to sleep in the presence of Frank Maddox in that final chapter and awake with Frank’s first name on his lips. This isn’t readable as a symbol of unspoken sexual desire, since David speaks openly of everything, even when others prevaricate and dare not speak the name of what they refer to. For instance, the Head of his private school, prior to David leaving it for Marchester, points to ‘worse things than smoking’, worse even ‘than stealing’ that:

“… many quite good chaps, as you would say, don’t think there is any harm in them. Do you know what I mean?”

David looked up in quite genuine bewilderment.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Thank God for it, then”.[6]

God is there for a purpose, as is the Head’s further characterisation in the continuing conversation of the unspoken vice alluded to here as: “Things that damn the soul.” It is possible for the entire novel to associate male-with-male sexual desire as precisely a damnation, one that everyone in the novel wants to avoid for David. David is a vehicle not for the homoerotic but of male love that is capable of both physical healing and salvation. In that last chapter such love is fully authorised, after all, by the presence of social authority – the school, their medical staff, and a barely concealed natural religion, of a spring-like resurrection, that sings from the prose. It’s a complex salvation: love which allows strong articulations of the desire or want for bodily presence between the two, which is also queerly validated:

“And you’ve sat here all the time?”   

“Think so.”

“… And just because you thought I might want you.”

… (here a passage in which life emerging out of death like spring emerges from winter)

Frank leaned over him.

“Yes, I thought you might want me,” he said; “but also I couldn’t go away. I wanted you”.[7]

The apparent paradox in which strict normative convention antagonistic to gay sexual love lies side by side with the recognition and validation of strong and continually underlying inter-male desires is held together, as Goldhill says, by the complex image of conversion. This has two forms. First in the allegoric journey to salvation throughout the book and second by the notion of renewed life following changes of heart, mind, or quality of soul.

David’s salvation comes through Maddox. Hughes is the emblem of the opposite of salvation in which Maddox may also have been involved. Hughes was the first object of David’s hero-worship but leaves for Marchester before David to become Maddox’s ‘fag’. On his arrival David takes over this role. Hughes himself points that not only has David changed or ‘converted ‘ Maddox but that Maddox too has a different influence on David than he had on Hughes, a difference as large as that between saint and devil:

“… He asked me the other day if Maddox had become a saint, and if I’d converted him. What the devil was he talking about? I don’t like Hughes as much as I used. He told me some filthy tale in the dormitory the other night, … I supposed it was polite, but I didn’t see a hang of what it all meant. (my italics)[8]

The role of conversion of persons to a different moral type between the range of saint and devil, and the meaning of any relationship of influence between persons in conversion relationships, is heavy here. David remains ignorant, as he was with the Head, not only of sex but of the language that names it, outside of its ‘filthiness’. This is not the only place in which it is hinted that Maddox is an ambiguous character morally or that he was somewhat implicated in Hughes downfall at Marchester and perhaps might, under different conditions, have shared his fate.

Maddox … tilted his hat over his eyes till his face was invisible.

“ I might have been Hughes,” he said.

Again the memory of what David always turned his face from came to his mind.[9]

As Maddox tries to explain this, David talks away, constructing Maddox in the simple role of saviour from filthiness in numerous instances: where ‘Hughes came and sat on his bed’ and moved him to Maddox’s own bedroom. “You’ve kept that sort of filth away from me”, he says twice in his usually unthinking way. Although it is likely that this is yet another sign of David’s almost lovable dimness, he calls this escape organised by Maddox by a religious term, ‘atonement’.[10] Maddox, on the other hand, himself sees religious conversion going in the other direction:

“… I tried, instead of corrupting you, to uncorrupt myself.  But you did it ; it was all your doing. You made me ashamed.”

David gave a shy wriggle towards him.

“… it sounds rather cheek.”

“That’s what you’ve done,” he said. “And if it was cheeky, the other name of that is salvation”. (my italics)[11]

The religiose tone of the last sentence lives simultaneously with that ‘shy wriggle’ that beings their bodies together. Here, just as Goldhill shows conversion is in a pattern of diverse paths that seem to us contradictory, but not to a queer perspective in which ‘naming things’ is necessarily difficult as Goldhill says.

Similarly conversion is a kind of allegorical version of the novel’s role as a novel of development, a Bildungsroman. This is variously shown in the interest in David’s development. Sometimes that development appears to involve qualitative metamorphosis – between binaries like devil and saint as we’ve seen – but at other times it looks like the stages of physical and moral growth. That is I think the element that Reverend Bradford detected in the ways in which all goals of development get conflated in the conventional image of God, Father and The Head of a School.

Thus David’s first Head becomes the focus of queerness, wherein words, in speaking which ‘the Head’s voice changed’, become the root to a vague spirituality that is both art, nature and the spiritual. Originally a Rhadamanthus, the judger of the dead in Greek religion, he becomes a ‘man not to fear but to love’.[12] The Head’s words as he prompts the boys to ‘prepare to be men’ is an attack on unclean desire and associated with dawn and waking up without regret: ‘clean dewy grass, with birds singing in your hearts’. Thus authority gets chained to a nature washed clean of sin. We will see dawn as in this role throughout, notably when David wakes from near-death in the final chapter.

Those changes between increasingly focused, associated with bathing, as conflating religious conversion wherein boys become aware of their bodies and yet not so aware that they desire other bodies in order to develop a heightened sense of their own. Instead the ideal friend is conceptualised as a hero, whom one can worship, and take on his image in one way or another. Thomas Carlyle had traced all religion to origins in hero-worship, and Benson allows David, in a conversation with Hughes, before David becomes a paying scholar of Marchester, to make Maddox into such a hero-god.

… the mention of Maddox roused the thrill and glamour of hero-worship – a hero-worship more complete and entire than is ever accorded by the world of grown-up men and women to their most august idols.[13]

The fact that religious thrill arouses in the same way as sexual thrill might then be expected but the sex is buried in hints in the language of its description. This then is how patterns of conversion get queered. Even more so in Chapter VII, which follows this moment and in which David treads transitional and liminal ground in the holidays at home in Baxminster. There he meets his ‘Fairy Prince’, Maddox himself who happens to be visiting, with what coincidence we must guess.

This chapter set betwixt David’s change of school is the predominant chapter of ‘conversion’. David is forced by his older sister to see himself as like, ‘that green snake you used to keep, and how, when it was changing its skin, it used to lie quite still, not eating or drinking, and seeming awfully depressed? I expect that sort of thing is happening to you’.[14] The play on how things change and its effect on a boy’s cognition, affect and body runs throughout the chapter, not least in constant play with the differences such developments mark for girls and boys.

In another place Maddox meditates on his own ‘’transitional disquiet of being fifteen’.[15] This developmental concern brings back some of the patterns related to conversions that are recognisable in Simon Goldhill’s treatment of the theme. Goldhill cites Fred, writing to brother Hugh about David Blaize where Fred says quite plainly that male adolescents are, “for a time, shy and impressionable and vastly sentimental”. A boy belongs:

“to neither of the two sexes, and does not melt into his own sex for a year or two yet.” It is a transitional period. “… most are of a strange third sex, lively but quite indeterminate”.[16]

When his sister, Margery, says: “… perhaps you might have been a girl”, David says he, “couldn’t. Think of all the things girls have to do. It’s ridiculous”.[17] But other identities remain open when even this one is, for the moment rejected on a pragmatic basis. The chapter emphasises the elements of the strange in Gothic and fairy-tale ways, making it a chapter of the ‘uncanny’, the attic of his ‘home’ made up of ‘dark and doubtful corners’ and dominated by a ‘large coffin-like box’.[18] This is only one of the symbols and references of death that are associated with the liminality of transitions, conversions and other threshold experiences.[19]

When Maddox, the ‘Fairy Prince’, is introduced to this attic, he emphasises the experience of death and rebirth for David which the whole chapter symbolises.[20] Maddox says the noises of the attic hide ‘a man bleeding to death in there’.[21] The effect of this is to reinvest all of David’s childhood fantasies with a religious element bound up in the hero-worship of Maddox. Such enchantments of language and morphing of persons into the supernatural is definitively (and this word common to the English public school system at the time to denote anything unconventional) ‘queer’. But then so are Keats’ narrative poems ‘queer’ and these too are central to the chapter.[22] What is important is that queerness is ‘invested with authority.’

In all the world there was no one so instinct with romance and glory as this boy three years his senior who realized for him all he wanted to be.[23]

Where Goldhill helps us is to see some of the patterns of conversion common to the Bensons in tension here: between convention and the queer and vice-versa, from boy to a new stage of development, from child to adult, and from play to authority and the role in all this of ‘writing the self’. The pattern of development followed by the novel must not only lead to authoritative support for middle-class convention and stability – including the dominant role of the father within heteronormative life – but also find space within that norm for the alternative and queer.

It is not that homoeroticism is either absent or present in the novel but how the ordinary in middle-class lives and institutions can be queered and sometimes sacralised by the text of literature or Scripture. Safe public spaces and roles are invented for male homosocial play, such as sport (cricket above all), bathing & choral practice in which sublimation and male physicality were never far apart. In public schools, hero-worship, romance writing and love of the hero can blend both paths for part of the way to convention and queer potentials. In Chapter XII, school authority blesses male closeness as sacred in using Parry’s choral version of Milton’s Ode. When the teacher grants bathing rights for the younger boy to join the elder, he says:

‘”yes, you blest pair of sirens,” ..quoting from Milton’s Ode which was to be sung at concert at the end of term. “And take care of David, Johnathan, and don’t let him sink by being top-heavy with pride”‘.[24]

Sirens’ tempt to sex, even the most male of males: Odysseus. And yet those sirens (which are ‘voice and verse’ in the Milton Ode, are embedded so far and deep in the homosocial that their potential to queering meaning can almost itself be conventionalised.

Hence, in every way the key to conversion is the sacralisation of an authority that is justified by literature: ‘even the juniors took an interest in all sorts of queer things like reading books which had nothing to do with school work’.[25]  In the book the range of this frame of reference to literature, which plots the relationship of Maddox to David, contains sequential movement from Keats, Romance genres, Swinburne’s queer classicism (in Atlanta in Calydon) to the gravely authoritative choric ode  by Sophocles to Oedipus’ descent to the underworld in Oedipus in Colonus. All blend authority to magical religion, voice, and verse, and tempt to a queer otherness (‘diving to wonderful translucent depths’ in Sophocles) beyond the authority they firmly also establish.[26]

Authority is so important in the novel it requires two strong themes: namely the ways in which ‘cribbing’ or plagiarism is handled in school lessons, and whether the authority of prefects needs to be legitimated by a secondary process of appeal. David may be, ‘rather given to undermining authority,’ but the effect of his actions in both themes is to strengthen it.[27] The most persistent and pertinent example is not a real father, who though respected is rather laughed at in David’s case, but avatars of the role of School Head.

We have seen already above how David’s first Head of School not only exudes authority but is a highly romanticised and rather queer version of it, associated not only with authority but poetry, ‘dim and only half-conscious.’[28] The Head of Marchester is less playful and held in ‘awed respect’ because of the ‘justness and the bigness of him, his character – a thing not definable by those whose characters are not yet formed, but quite clearly appreciable by them’.[29] It is this Head who silently hears Frank Maddox’s repeated confession that: ‘He saved me, you know. Just saved me.’ And authority is moved by error turned to salvation and presses Frank’s arm:

“Ah, that’s between you and David,” he said. “It’s not for me to hear. But I know you love him, which is the only point. …[30]

There is a lot in this moment when both absolute Godlike justice opens the gate for male-with-male ‘love’, and the knowledge that those saved have had the freedom to err. I’d suggest that far from using established authority to squash queerness, it incorporates queerness in its silent spaces and dark corners and glories in it too.

But I don’t think it is therefore a novel that can be called homoerotic or gay. It does celebrate moments that are queer, but as Goldhill says this is rendered part of an extraordinarily complex pattern where there is no absolute identity – only many in complex weave with each other for which one ‘name’ won’t do but the word ‘queer’ will.

Steve

LINK TO GOLDHILL BLOG https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2020/06/02/writing-the-complexity-of-a-family-simon-goldhill-2016-a-very-queer-family-indeed-sex-religion-and-the-bensons-1-of-2-blogs/

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[1] Goldhill (2016: 287).

[2] Palmer & Lloyd (1988: 140)

[3] Benson (1916: chapter XV)

[4] Cited Palmer & Lloyd (op. cit.: 102)

[5] cited ibid: 51.

[6] ibid: 115f.

[7] Benson (ibid: 316). Last page of novel.

[8] ibid: 144

[9] ibid: 193f.

[10] ibid: 195

[11] ibid: 195f.

[12] ibid: 88.

[13] ibid: 100

[14] ibid: 128

[15] ibid: 219

[16] Simon Goldhill (2016: 206) A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press

[17] Benson op.cit.: 127

[18] ibid: 121

[19] There is another much later when Maddox, now known to David as Frank, are involved in the story of a murdered boy cast out to sea. Ibid: c.202.

[20] ibid: 135

[21] ibid: 136

[22] ibid.

[23] ibid: 137

[24] ibid: Ch XII: 241

[25] ibid: 154

[26] Ibid: 248

[27] ibid: 262. See how authority is supported ibid: 266f.

[28] ibid: 30

[29] ibid: 176

[30] ibid: 308