Higher Education LGBT
Articles Digest #141
#1
The Washington Times, August 18, 2003
3600 New York Ave., NE
Washington, DC 20002
URL: www.washingtontimes.com, email: letters@washingtontimes.com
Article: http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20030818-122317-3268r.htm
'HOW TO BE GAY' COURSE DRAWS FIRE AT MICHIGAN
By George Archibald
A course called "How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality
and Initiation," scheduled this fall, has reignited a culture war at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
A family-values lobbyist is leading public opposition to
the self-proclaimed "uncompromising political militancy" of the
professor who teaches "lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender."
The lobbyist, Gary Glenn, says professor David M.
Halperin and the university "are guilty of perpetrating a fraud against
UM students and the people of Michigan [with] propaganda statements about
so-called cultural studies and academic freedom" as they promote
"queer studies" at taxpayer expense.
Mr. Glenn, president of the Michigan affiliate of the
conservative American Family Association, first criticized the "How to
be Gay" courses three years ago. In 2000, the Michigan state
legislature fell just four votes short of passing a measure to cut off all
government funds for the courses.
Last week, he renewed his crusade against Mr. Halperin's
classes, urging Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, the legislature and
the university's Board of Regents to "stop letting homosexual activists
use our tax dollars to subsidize this militant political agenda."
The professor says critics misunderstand the "How to
be Gay" class.
"It does not teach students to be homosexual,"
Mr. Halperin says in an interview. "Rather, it examines critically the
odd notion that there are right and wrong ways to be gay, that homosexuality
is not just a sexual practice or desire but a set of specific tastes in
music, movies, and other cultural forms - a notion which is shared by
straight and gay people alike.
"The reason these courses exist is not that
homosexual teachers have hijacked the university for their own purposes;
they exist because they convey the results of research which sheds genuinely
new light on history, culture, society and thought."
However, in a course description on the university's Web
site, Mr. Halperin says: "Just because you happen to be a gay man
doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one. Gay men do some
of that learning on their own, but often we learn how to be gay from
others."
The course description says students "will examine a
number of cultural artifacts and activities" including "camp,
diva-worship, drag, muscle culture, taste, style and political
activism." Mr. Halperin's class explores "the role that initiation
plays in the formation of gay male identity."
The emphasis on "initiation" into homosexuality
is what appears to be most offensive to conservatives like Mr. Glenn.
"We don't know what [Mr. Halperin] does in the
classroom," the state AFA president says in an interview. "It is
outrageous that Michigan taxpayers are forced to pay for a class whose
stated purpose is to 'experiment' with the 'initiation' of young men into a
self-destructive homosexual lifestyle."
Mr. Glenn notes that Mr. Halperin has boasted in print
about his success in advancing a homosexual agenda.
In a 1996 article in an academic journal, Mr. Halperin
wrote: "Let there be no mistake about it: lesbian and gay studies, as
it is currently practiced in the U.S., expresses an uncompromising political
militancy. ... The emergence of lesbian and gay studies has brought about a
far-reaching intellectual transformation in the disciplines of the
humanities, arts and social sciences as well as in the social life of
American universities and in the professional culture of American
academe."
Mr. Halperin wrote that "lesbian and gay studies
scholars" were leaders in lobbying universities and governments
"to adopt and enforce anti-discrimination policies, to recognize
same-sex couples, to oppose the U.S. military's anti-gay policy, to suspend
professional activities in states that criminalize gay sex or limit access
to abortion, and to intervene on behalf of human rights for lesbians,
bisexuals and gay men at the local and national levels."
Robert M. Owen, the university's associate dean for
undergraduate education in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts,
defends Mr. Halperin's course.
"This course is not about encouraging people to
become gay, but about how individuals in our society create meaning and
beliefs about gay culture from literature and the arts," Mr. Owen said
in a prepared statement. Such a course helps students who plan to enter
careers in law, social work or other fields where they will "encounter
a large and very diverse clientele."
Mr. Owen said public criticism of Mr. Halperin's class
stems largely from "the title of the course," and said, "The
interpretation of that title is very troubling for some people."
The course is part of the university's "genuine
search for intellectually interesting and sometimes provocative subject
matters," the associate dean said. "The historic freedom granted
to pursue this search is one of the hallmarks of higher education."
University officials have been "inundated" with
AFA-distributed postcards objecting to the course, says university
spokeswoman Julie Peterson. But she does not expect the postcards to affect
the university's support for Mr. Halperin.
"He is a very popular professor," Ms. Peterson
says, "and there is always a long waiting list for his courses. The
list gets longer when stories like this happen."
Mr. Glenn argues that such a statement by a university
official "mocks and even taunts Michigan taxpayers, reveling that the
more taxpayers dare protest the use of their tax dollars to teach kids 'How
to be Gay,' the more students will enroll in the class.
"Such arrogant dismissiveness toward taxpayers'
legitimate concerns is all the more reason Michigan lawmakers should exact a
greater degree of public accountability from UM officials."
#2
Associated Press, August 19, 2003
The man who became a woman
WATERVILLE, Maine (AP) - A loving
husband and father, acclaimed
novelist, respected professor at Colby College and keyboardist in a rock 'n'
roll band, James Finney Boylan had an enviable life that overflowed with
success and happiness.
Or so it seemed.
The reality, which Boylan kept secret
for decades, was that he was a
she, a woman locked in a man's body. The person who appeared to be so
blessed says she was living a life of unending torment.
Four years ago, recognizing that he
could no longer go on as he had,
Boylan set out on a transition to womanhood, emerging as Jennifer Finney
Boylan.
That journey, bolstered by the support
of family and friends, is
detailed in Boylan's poignant yet often comical memoir, "She's Not
There: A
Life in Two Genders."
Tall and willowy, with long blond hair,
Boylan, 45, says she would
have preferred to soldier on in silence as a man, sparing herself and her
loved ones much sadness and pain. But she maintains that she had no
choice
but to accept her transsexuality and deal with it.
"We can no more choose our gender
than we can choose our height," she
said in an interview in her office, where she co-chairs Colby's English
department. "You don't decide to become female; it's simply a
matter of
accepting a fact."
For people without gender issues,
Boylan says, it is difficult to
imagine "that a person's discontent within their own skin could be so
severe
as to make any other life inconceivable."
That was the case for Boylan, whose
anguish set her on a path that
went from psychotherapy to female hormones, painful electrolysis and voice
coaching before culminating in gender reassignment surgery last year.
As
author of three comic novels, including "The Planets" and
"Getting In,"
Boylan realized early on that she was in the midst of a remarkable story
that straddled humor and tragedy as it detailed her metamorphosis to
womanhood.
"In many ways, that defines the
condition," says Boylan.
Although she does not regard herself as
an activist, Boylan hopes
that her memoir will promote greater understanding of what it means to be
transgendered. Her biggest concern was to tell her story without
jeopardizing her family's privacy.
Boylan changed the names of many of the
people in her book, including
"Grace," the then-wife and now-partner whose love and support have
been
unflinching throughout. Their evolving relationship, now sexless, is a
work
in progress.
"There's not a good word for what
we are. We're certainly not
husband and wife. We're not a lesbian couple. We are co-parents,
we're
friends and we are lovers in many senses of that word," she says.
"We're
two pretty average people thrown into remarkable circumstances and we're
just making it up as we go along, trying to do the best we can."
Their two sons, now 7 and 9, seem to
take the change in stride.
Early on, they took to calling Boylan Maddy - a combination of Mommy and
Daddy - and the name stuck.
Boylan acknowledges that she is now
attracted to men - she says her
surgeon told her that his goal was to make her "sensate, mucosal and
orgasmic." But Boylan says she and Grace remain married under the
law and
neither has yet explored other relationships.
"We both want most what normal,
straight women want - which is to be
loved, to have a good family, to be respected at our jobs, to have good
friends. We have most of that. What we don't have is a marriage,
and I'm
not sure we're willing to sacrifice the other things in order to move ahead
with a new relationship," Boylan says.
Aside from appearance, Boylan says her
biggest change is a loss of
the sense of invulnerability she felt as a man. Things that would
bounce
off the testosterone-laden James now, under the spell of estrogen, tend to
get under Jenny's skin.
"I cry very easily," she
says. "I love the freedom of tears, but it
is unnerving in some ways how close they lie to the surface."
Boylan also wishes she could be less
self-conscious about calories
and body image. Still, she often finds herself choosing a salad for
lunch
whereas James would have ordered a plate of ribs.
Even so, Boylan says there was little
about being a man that she
misses. The one thing that came to mind was pockets. Neither her
blue
calf-length skirt nor her white V-neck shirt had any, and she prefers to
stuff her change and other items into pockets rather than lug them in a
purse.
"She's Not There" contains an
afterword by Boylan's best friend,
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo, who taught at Colby and
shared an office with her. Russo, who figures prominently in the
memoir,
initially has a hard time dealing with Boylan's transsexuality but quickly
comes around and later accompanies his friend and Grace to Wisconsin for the
surgery.
The title of the book comes from the
1964 classic by the Zombies,
which haunted Boylan at various moments in her life.
The song evokes her earlier years, when
she was spiritually a woman
but physically a man; it also speaks to the period when she became a woman
and lost a marriage, "and so the person who's not there is a
wife."
#3
Portland Press-Herald, August 19, 2003
Box 1460, Portland, ME, 04101
(Fax: 207-791-6924) (E-Mail: letters@portland.com )
( http://www.portland.com/news/news.shtml )
http://www.pressherald.com/viewpoints/mvoice/030819victoria.shtml
SITCOMS ABOUT GAYS CONCEAL REAL ATTITUDES
Victoria Mares-Hershey
Given the fact that teenage boys still
insult each other with a
common slur against gays, I am working on what I think of the new comedic
and entertainment shows on television where homosexuality is the continuous
gag line.
The disturbing part is, this exposure
on prime-time television is the
only exposure to the identity of gays and lesbians for our uptight society,
including way-out-of-town, any-state America, unless there is a national
story about violence and death. People are still being brutalized and
killed over being perceived as "gay."
A friend who works with youth in New
York brought my attention to a
story about an incident that happened at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a
men's college whose sister college is the prestigious and expensive Spelman
College.
Founded in 1867, Morehouse is the alma
mater of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., Dr. David Satcher, the former U.S. surgeon general, Spike Lee, the
filmmaker, and the late Maynard H. Jackson, Atlanta's first African-American
mayor.
It has graduated Rhodes Scholars and
CEOs, plus many other
accomplished citizens. No doubt about it, attending Morehouse is a way
to
get connected in America if you are black, male and smart. I am
definitely
a supporter of the idea of a Morehouse. As prestigious as it is,
hoever,
Morehouse, too, cannot escape America's phobias about gays. Had the
school
dealt with this condition, perhaps Aaron Price would be a graduating
Morehouse man next spring.
Instead, Price was sentenced to 10
years in prison in June for
assault and battery. He was acquitted of committing a hate crime by
using a
slur while cracking open the skull of student Gregory Love with a baseball
bat for looking at Price in a dorm shower in a way the latter man found
disturbing.
The hate-crime charge would have put
another five years onto the 10.
Love, who is straight, will carry permanent scars and health issues from the
beating. He testified, according to the Atlanta Constitution, that
without
his glasses in the shower, he looked Price's way to greet a student whom he
thought was his roommate.
Whatever the situation, Morehouse was
forced to face what New York's
Village Voice reported as a homophobic environment, where hate words, taunts
and worse are common. Price carried out in a fit of rage what other
students joked about doing if a gay man approached them, said one Morehouse
student. The national Human Rights Campaign in Washington and the
Morehouse
student group, Safe Space for All, have worked with the school to
"promote a
campus environment that is free of harassment and homophobia," said a
Morehouse College press release.
Instead of being in college, Price will
add to the statistics of
black men in America's prisons.
Being gay is not a joke, any more than
being black is a joke on
television or in real life. For a black person of whatever age,
demonizing
people who are homosexual is not an empowerment tool for meeting the
challenges of being black in America. It is a distraction from
demanding
what you need to meet those challenges and attain your goals.
We have red-faced talk show hosts,
beyond the appearance of being an
appealing human being, raging on about gay marriage and gay couples.
When do they get so enraged about 35
percent black unemployment
compared to 11 percent for whites in these bad times? Some 80 percent
of
black students say they are struggling with their bills, poor health care,
fewer summer jobs and almost no internships in their fields.
Now, these are problems worth beating
on with a political stick. To
black society, that includes people old enough to know better who are
wasting time fighting with society's mythical gay demons. They should
not
be handing that destructive pastime to their children.
School opens within days. When I
hear the words thrown away into
school halls, on the playground in the mouths of children not yet teens and
educators walking by, I wonder: Where did this come from and where is
it
going?
Is it a child struggling to question
sexuality, trying out a shortcut
to fitting in, or just trying out the word like a new swear word, heard in
the kitchen from an uncle or a parent, or in the classroom from a fellow
student?
With so many young people and parents
of all colors and backgrounds
watching sitcoms and laughing at so-called "gay behavior" like it
is just a
comedy, we have to take some responsibility.
The judge in Price's trial interrupted
the youth's grandfather on the
witness stand as the older man was saying he hated to see his grandson go to
prison for his actions.
"No one has yet to take
responsibility for anything. . . . What I've
listened to is the victim being put on trial for three days," said the
judge.
It's not up to entertainment programs,
but what is being pushed in
our faces now is the need to take some responsibility for our real-life
society.
. Victoria Mares-Hershey is director of
development at Portland West.
She also chairs the Maine State Refugee Advisory Council and is a founder
and the director of the Institute for Practical Democracy.
#4
Kansas City Star, August 22, 2003
1729 Grand Avenue, Kansas City, MO, 64108
(Fax: 816-234-4926 ) (E-Mail: letters@kcstar.com )
( http://www.kcstar.com/ )
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/news/opinion/6595684.htm
'UNTIL EVERYONE HAS THOSE RIGHTS'
NEW OFFICE WELCOMES STUDENTS OF ALL SEXUAL ORIENTATIONS TO UNIVERSITY OF
MISSOURI-KANSAS CITY
By Lewis W. Diuguid
Two comfortable couches, blond
furniture and computers hardly tell
the significance of this new office at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City.
On Monday when classes start, the doors
of this welcoming space will
open for the first full semester to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
students. It's called the LGBT Initiative, and it's part of the UMKC
Women's Center.
African-American, international,
Hispanic and other student groups
have office space. The facility for lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender
students springs from an ongoing effort at the university to better serve
its diverse student body.
"It's an amazing first step in the
history of this institution," said
Jane M. Wood, director of the Women's Center. "A value of the
university is
inclusiveness."
The LGBT Initiative also is occurring
at a pivotal time in the
nation's history. The Episcopal Church's House of Bishops this month
approved New Hampshire priest V. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay
bishop.
The country's first public high school
for gay, bisexual and
transgender students is to open this fall in New York. It is named
after
Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor. He was
assassinated in 1978.
Also this year, the U.S. Supreme Court
in June ruled against a Texas
law that banned private consensual sodomy among homosexuals. In
addition,
TV networks are shedding their apprehensiveness about airing shows about
people who are gay. These new programs are quite popular.
"We're in a state of
evolution," said Tobi Leuthardt, program
coordinator of the LGBT Initiative/Women's Center.
"These bits and pieces in the news
make me more excited for the
future," said Stephanie Mountain, a communications major at the
university
and work study intern who plans to use the office space. "It's
great for us
to be this age and experiencing it.
"It creates a very optimistic
feeling. This is part of a more
hopeful time. Not everything in the news is Matthew Shepard. Not
everything in the news is about hate crimes."
Mountain said colleges in other states
have similar initiatives.
UMKC has just joined some progressive
universities. The LGBT
Initiative makes a strong statement about the university valuing diversity.
"My hope is that in the long run
it will mean that our LGBT students
are successful at UMKC," said Deb Lewis, assistant vice chancellor for
student affairs at the university. It will help students know they are
welcome so they can learn and develop to their potential.
The space is where lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender and other
students can study, network, put together fliers and work on Web sites,
Leuthardt said. The office will generate programming and resources to
raise
awareness and address such concerns as homophobia, racism and sexism.
A campus group, Queers & Allies, is
expected to use the office.
"This is a safe space where they can hang out and not worry about any
form
of discrimination or harassment," Leuthardt said.
People at freshman orientations have
received information on the LGBT
Initiative. Kansas City's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
community
also has embraced the initiative and plans a benefit in October for
scholarships.
"LGBT people are standing up more
and being assertive," Leuthardt
said.
Lewis said the university has not
gotten negative feedback about
devoting space to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. In
addition to education, integrity, innovation and accountability, three other
core values at UMKC are respect, inclusiveness and diversity.
"We cannot achieve those things
until everyone has those rights,"
Leuthardt said. "We basically want to show LGBT is a viable part
of the
campus.
"We all have to work
together."
The best education happens when all
students are learning and growing
because everyone is fully engaged, welcomed and involved.
. Lewis W. Diuguid is a member of The
Star's Editorial Board. To
reach him, call (816) 234-4723 or send e-mail to Ldiuguid@kcstar.com.
#5
Boston Phoenix, August 22-28, 2003
126 Brookline Ave., Boston, MA 02215
(Fax: 617-536-1463) (E-Mail: letters@phx.com )
( http://www.bostonphoenix.com )
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/03107053.asp
WHEN NATHANIEL MET HERMAN
Herman Melville's letters and Nathaniel Hawthorne's just-released memoir of
a summer romp with his son may hold the keys to the complex, sexually
fraught relationship between these two giants of American literature
By Michael Bronski
Americans love happy endings. Yet
in the world of great American
literature, there are so very few. That's so not only in the novels -
Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Portrait of a Lady, An American Tragedy,
The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises - but in the lives of American authors
themselves, which have often been beset by personal and economic failure,
melancholia, alcoholism, money problems, suicide, and general misery.
Maybe
that is why the recent publication of Twenty Days with Julian & Little
Bunny
by Papa (New York Review Books Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne - perhaps
America's greatest, and most depressive, genius - has generated such
enormous critical praise and popular enthusiasm.
Introduced by novelist Paul Auster,
this 72-page "lost" memoir - it
was essentially an unnoticed sketch in Hawthorne's 800-page American
Notebooks - delightfully chronicles the 46-year-old author's 20 days caring
for his five-year-old son, Julian, at home in Lenox, Massachusetts, from
July 28 to August 16, 1851, while his wife was visiting her family near
Boston. Nothing much happens here - they get up and wash, they pick
currants, Julian gets stung by a wasp, they keep a sweet (if slightly
demanding) pet rabbit named Bunny, Julian wets the bed, and Papa has trouble
curling the boy's hair in the morning - but specialists and general readers
alike are entranced by Hawthorne's loving tone and tender attentiveness to
detail. It is warm, silly, lighthearted, and charming - in short,
everything Hawthorne is decidedly not in his great novels.
But lurking within this family romance
of nature walks and berry
picking is a darker story - possible material for another version of The
Scarlet Letter - which critics seem to want to avoid: the complex,
sexually
fraught relationship that summer between Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
The
31-year-old author of the soon-to-be-published Moby-Dick (it would be
released, and critically dismissed, in November of that year) visited
Hawthorne and Julian several times over the course of their summer idyll.
But as felicitous as Melville's cameo appearances were in Hawthorne's
retelling, they were in reality complicated by the younger writer's
idealization of the distinguished author 15 years his senior. What is
only
hinted at in Hawthorne's memoir - which, after all, was intended to be read
principally by his wife - becomes more clear in correspondence. We
have
only Melville's letters to Hawthorne (the older man's responses were
destroyed or did not survive), but boy, are they letters.
The romance - there is no better word
for it - between Hawthorne and
Melville can be understood only in the context of a particular moment in
each man's life and career. In 1851 they were in quite different
places,
both professionally and domestically; they hailed from different backgrounds
too. Born in 1804, Hawthorne was the product of an old New England
family -
his ancestors were judges in the Salem witch trials. He was burdened
by
history, and all his life he was given to brooding melancholia. As a
writer
he had achieved some notice with his stories Twice-Told Tales and Mosses
from an Old Manse in the 1830s, but it was not until 1850, with the
publication of The Scarlet Letter, that he found the fame he so desired.
His renown was secured with the publication of The House of the Seven Gables
in 1851. In 1842, at the age of 38, he had married Sophia (Phoebe)
Peabody,
and by all indications it was a happy union despite Hawthorne's recurrent
depressions.
The younger Melville's life and career
was already on a more
unconventional path. Born in 1819, the son of a once-distinguished but
now-impoverished New York family, Melville went to sea as a young man.
He
returned to make a name for himself writing the popular, yet controversial,
South Sea-adventure novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which deal, to no
small degree, with intensely emotional, and in some cases obviously sexual,
relationships between men. As he notes in White-Jacket (1850),
"The sins
for which the cities of the plain were overthrown still linger in some of
these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep." There's no direct
evidence that
Melville had full sexual relationships with men, but from his early novels
through his later works, such as Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, it's clear that
his literary imagination was drenched in homoeroticism.
In 1847, at the age of 28, Melville
married Elizabeth Shaw, but their
relationship was never particularly happy; indeed, there are stories of
verbal and possibly physical abuse on the part of the husband. They
stayed
together, however, until his death in 1891.
If Hawthorne was the older, brooding
intellectual writer, Melville,
was the dashing young adventurer - at least at the point in their lives when
they first crossed paths. The two writers did not meet until August
1850,
and their friendship bloomed a year later. But by November 1852, it
was
essentially over, ended abruptly - from all we can tell - by Hawthorne.
So
what happened between these two men of such different temperaments?
What
was the nature of their connection? Why did it end?
The first clue to understanding their
relationship appears in a
two-part review Melville wrote of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse in
the August 17 and 24, 1850, issues of a popular and influential magazine,
the Literary World. Melville wrote the piece after meeting Hawthorne
for
the first time on August 7, and, interestingly, did not sign his own name to
it. Indeed, the review was not only anonymous, but obscured Melville's
identity even further by claiming that it was penned by "a Virginian
spending July in Vermont" (Melville was from New York). He wrote
the review
in the voice of someone reading Hawthorne's book in an empty barn:
"A man of deep and noble nature
had seized me in this seclusion....
The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams....
But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my
soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and
further
and further shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my
Southern soul."
Even by the florid standards of
19th-century prose - for which
Melville was not known - this highly sexualized, over-the-top hero worship
is, well, excessive. Let's face it, there isn't much need for Freudian
interpretation here. The review is, by most readings, a love letter to
the
author, and a pretty steamy one at that.
At this time Hawthorne, Sophia, and
their two children, Julian and
Una, lived in a small Lenox farmhouse they had rented in June of 1850.
In
October of that year - two months after meeting Hawthorne - Melville bought
a house in nearby Pittsfield, where he lived with his wife and their son,
Malcolm. There doesn't seem to have been much face-to-face contact
between
the two men at first - Sophia Hawthorne was pregnant with their third child,
Rose, who was born in May of 1851; in January of that year, Elizabeth
Melville was pregnant with their third child, Stanwix.
In January 1851, Melville began writing
to Hawthorne in the fevered
tone of someone in love, or at least in the midst of a tremendous crush.
Here he bemoans the postponement of a visit:
"That side-blow thro' Mrs
Hawthorne will not do. I am not to be
charmed out of my promised pleasure by any of that lady's syrenisms.
You,
Sir, I hold accountable, & the visit (in all its original integrity)
must be
made. - What! spend the day, only with us? - A Greenlander might as
well
talk of spending the day with a friend, when the day is only half an inch
long....
"Fear not that you will cause the
slightest trouble to us. Your bed
is already made, & the wood marked for your fire. But a moment
ago, I
looked into the eyes of two fowls, whose tail feathers have been notched, as
destined victims for the table. I keep the word 'Welcome' all the time
in
my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold....
"Another thing, Mr Hawthorne - Do
not think you are coming to any
prim nonsensical house - that is nonsensical in the ordinary way. You
must
be much bored with punctilios. You may do what you please - say or say
not
what you please. And if you feel any inclination for that sort of
thing -
you may spend the period of your visit in bed, if you like - every hour of
your visit....
"Come - no nonsense. If you
dont - I will send Constables after
you....
"By the way - should Mrs Hawthorne
for any reason conclude that she,
for one, can not stay overnight with us - then you must - & the
children, if
you please.
"H. Melville."
By April, Melville's letters had gotten
even gushier. At one point
he could not seem to control himself and added a P.S., followed by an N.B.,
followed by a P.P.S. In June 1851, Melville wrote a long letter to
Hawthorne in which his hero worship began to blur boundaries, as he
discussed their careers in the same breath:
"Another thing. I was in New
York for four-and-twenty hours the
other day, and saw a portrait of N.H. And I have seen and heard many
flattering (in a publisher's point of view) allusions to the 'Seven Gables.'
And I have seen 'Tales,' and 'A New Volume' announced, by N.H. So upon
the
whole, I say to myself, this N.H. is in the ascendant. My dear Sir,
they
begin to patronize. All Fame is patronage. Let me be infamous:
there is
no patronage in that. What 'reputation' H.M. has is horrible.
Think of it!
To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a 'man who
lived among the cannibals'!"
On July 22, 1851, Melville wrote of
finishing Moby-Dick, as he made
plans to visit Hawthorne.
"My dear Hawthorne:
"This is not a letter, or even a
note - but only a passing word said
to you over your garden gate.... I am now busy with various things -
not
incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkerings; and this
is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging me home his
winter's dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am not
yet a
disengaged man; but shall be, very soon. Meantime, the earliest good
chance
I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing we - that is, you
and I, - must hit upon some little bit of vagabondism, before Autumn comes.
Graylock - we must go and vagabondize there. But ere we start, we must
dig
a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils, there to abide till the Last Day.
"Goodbye, his X mark."
On July 28, Sophia Peabody left Lenox
to visit her parents in West
Newton. Four days later, on August 1 - how did he wait so long? -
Melville
showed up unexpectedly. As Hawthorne and Julian were out romping in
the
part of the countryside known as "Love Grove," Hawthorne wrote in
"Twenty
Days":
"While thus engaged, a cavalier on
horseback came along the road and
saluted me in Spanish; to which I replied by touching my hat, and went on
with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewing his salutation, I
regarded
him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville! So there
upon,
Julian and I hastened to the road, where ensued a greeting and we all went
homeward together, talking as we went."
Melville stayed for dinner and the two
men spent much of the night
speaking of "time and eternity, things of this world and the next,
books and
publishers, and all possible and impossible matters," according to
Hawthorne.
It is possible to read this as a
19th-century version of guys' night
out - they even smoke cigars together "in the sacred precincts of the
parlor" - but there is a comfortable eroticism here that is absent in
Hawthorne's fiction and other letters. Never in his work do we ever
sense
that he is, well, comfortable with anything in his life. Is it
possible
that Melville was finally getting through to him? That the younger
man's
constant attention was melting Hawthorne's harsher, more-guarded emotional
shell? Notable, too, is that August 1 was Melville's birthday - a fact
Hawthorne never mentioned, possibly because he didn't know - and that the
younger man chose to spend it with his idol rather than with his wife.
Melville persisted. On August 8
he joined Hawthorne, Julian, and his
friends George and Evert Duyckinck - publishers of the Literary World - for
a picnic, after which they visited the Shaker village in nearby Hancock.
In
the midst of what had been a nothing-but-happy time since Sophia had been
away, Hawthorne suddenly had a fit of anger. He was appalled by the
Shakers, calling them a "filthy set" because of their communal
living and
bathing facilities. But his anger seems to have had a sexual undertone
-
which was darned peculiar, given that the Shakers were committed to
celibacy. He was appalled by the separation of the sexes and the fact
that
two people of the same sex were forced to share "particularly narrow
beds."
He railed away at this "close junction of man with man," stating
that "the
sooner the sect is extinct the better - the consummation which, I am happy
to hear, is thought to be not a great many years distant." It is
revealing
that Hawthorne - a man who carefully chose each word, even in light
sketches - would write "consummation," a word with a clear sexual
connotation. Can it be that this was a moment of homosexual panic?
Had
Melville pushed too much? Was their relationship - in the absence of
Sophia - becoming too threatening?
On August 9, Hawthorne wrote:
"Julian awoke in a bright
condition, this morning; and we arose at
about seven. I felt the better for the expedition of yesterday; and
asking
Julian if he had a good time, he answered with great enthusiasm in the
affirmative; and that he wanted to go again, and that he loved Mr. Melville
as well as me, and as mama, and as Una."
Maybe Julian's love of Melville - too
obviously a reflection of his
own? - had contributed to Hawthorne's agitation. On August 10, he
wrote a
nearly hysterical passage in his journal - so different from everything else
that it stands out as a cry for help and understanding - declaring his love
for Julian and his family:
"Thank God! God Bless him!
God bless Phoebe for giving him to me!
God bless her as the best wife and mother in the world! God bless Una,
whom
I long to see again! God Bless little Rosebud! God Bless me, for
Phoebe's,
and all their sake! No other man has so good a wife; nobody has better
children. Would I were worthier of her and them!"
Well, it's hard to see how Hawthorne's
affection for Melville -
whatever its nature - could survive such an outburst of familial devotion.
Luckily for Hawthorne, Sophia returned
on August 16. But something
had changed. On November 14, at a dinner, Herman Melville presented
Hawthorne with a copy of Moby-Dick, which was to be published the next day.
The dedication read "In Token of my Admiration for his Genius.
This book is
inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne." In a lost letter Hawthorne
responded
favorably to the book, which prompted yet another effusive reply from
Melville. In a long letter dated November 17, he wrote:
"Your letter was handed me last
night on the road going to Mr.
Morewood's, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat
down
at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous
and
instantaneous - catch them while you can. The world goes round, and
the
other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I
felt
pantheistic then - your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in
God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on
account of
your having understood the book....
"Whence come you, Hawthorne?
By what right do you drink from my
flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips - lo, they are yours and
not
mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the
Supper,
and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.
Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page.
You did
not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you
understood the pervading thought that impelled the book - and that you
praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the
imperfect
body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because
you
saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, - the
familiar, - and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own
solitudes....
"Lord, when shall we be done
changing? Ah! it's a long stage, and no
inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a
passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I
feel,
with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you
persuades
me more than the Bible of our immortality....
"Herman.
"P.S. I can't stop yet.
If the world was entirely made up of
Magians, I'll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill
established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of
foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should
write a thousand - a million - billion thoughts, all under the form of a
letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds.
Which
is the biggest? A foolish question - they are One.
"H.
"P.P.S. Don't think that by
writing me a letter, you shall always be
bored with an immediate reply to it - and so keep both of us delving over a
writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sh'n't always answer
your
letters, and you may do just as you please."
Again, there is no mistaking the sexual
overtones.
Nineteenth-century writers knew their Hebrew Bible, and Melville, in fact,
had carefully chosen the names of his characters in Moby-Dick for their
biblical allusions. So when he wrote, "I shall leave the world, I
feel,
with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me
more than the Bible of our immortality," the biblical meaning of the
word
"know" - to consummate sexual passion - is unmistakable.
We have no record of how Hawthorne felt
about or responded to this
letter. We do know, however, that five days later, on November 21, he
and
his family left their home in Lenox to move back to Boston. Whatever
happened in the Berkshires that summer - aside from the details recorded in
Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa - we will never know.
Clearly, Melville's romantic enthusiasm
for Nathaniel Hawthorne grew,
and may even have been encouraged. But only up to a point. A few
more
letters were exchanged between the writers in the fall of 1952; Melville
tried to get Hawthorne to write a novel based on a tale he had heard of a
wronged woman named Agatha. The tale, significantly, turns on the
betrayal
of a betrothal vow. Hawthorne refused to write the story, claiming to
have
no interest, and suggested that Melville write it himself - but they were
never really friends again.
One standard scholarly explanation for
their disaffection is that
they simply went their own ways, that temperamental artists rarely remain
friends forever. Others claim that Melville's desperate attempts to
convince the older man to write a novel based on the Agatha story had caused
the separation. And it's true that, at times, Melville's sense of the
psychological boundaries between himself and Hawthorne seemed shaky at best.
But whatever caused their break, it is
clear from Melville's letters,
as well as from Hawthorne's words about Melville in Twenty Days, that the
younger man was - what words to use here? "in love with"?
"smitten with"?
"in deep admiration of"? - the older Hawthorne. Melville was
no stranger to
love between men - even physical love between men - but he was clearly naive
and overly incautious when expressing his feelings to Hawthorne. What
is
finally so charming about this tale is the poignancy of Melville's unabashed
emotional enthusiasm for the older man. The intensity of such a love
can be
frightening, and frighten it did. Is it any wonder that Hawthorne not
only
pulled away from his friend, but actually moved?
In the summer of 1851, depressed,
melancholy Nathaniel Hawthorne may
have discovered more than the fun of cavorting with his son Julian.
And to
a man already wracked with guilt and gloom, that discovery may have been
simply too much to bear. Unlike his noble and magisterial heroine
Hester
Prynne, he wasn't ready to take the next step and act upon his feelings.