Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality

By Rachel Hope Cleves

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952), who was a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence, and an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t.

Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226733678

Book preview

UNSPEAKABLE

UNSPEAKABLE

A Life beyond Sexual Morality

Rachel Hope Cleves

The University of Chicago    CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73353-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73367-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226733678.001.0001

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Cleves, Rachel Hope, 1975– author.

Title: Unspeakable : a life beyond sexual morality / Rachel Hope Cleves.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020769 | ISBN 9780226733531 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226733678 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Douglas, Norman, 1868–1952. | Authors, English—Biography. | Sodomy—England.

Classification: LCC PR6007.O88 Z598 2020 | DDC 823/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020769

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my children, Eli and Maya, who’ve listened to their

mother talk way more about Norman Douglas

than they would have liked.

Let ’em write what they like, my dear—let ’em, let ’em.

NORMAN DOUGLAS

You couldn’t write a life of him without bringing up some awful episodes; but as he constantly brought them up himself the biographer can hardly be blamed.

NEIL HOGG

There are still those who ask occasionally: Who is this fellow Douglas?

PHILLIPS TEMPLE

Contents

Introduction

PART I   GEORGE NORMAN DOUGLASS

1   Crocodiles

2   Lizards

3   Annetta and Michele

4   Elsa

5   Capri

Reflection I

PART II   NORMAN DOUGLAS

6   Norman Douglas

7   London Street Games

8   Keeping Faith

9   Alone

10   Together

Reflection II

PART III   UNCLE NORMAN

11   The Pederastic Congress

12   A Hymn to Copulation

13   Diavolo Incarnato

14   Epicurus

15   Moving Along

Reflection III

PART IV   HERACLITUS

16   On the Run

17   England Is a Nightmare

18   Footnote on Capri

19   Omnes Eodem Cogimur

20   Pinorman versus Grand Man

21   Looking Back

Reflection IV

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Introduction

In 1923, when he was fifty-four years old, the writer Norman Douglas boasted that he’d had sex with eleven hundred virgins during his lifetime.¹ Those were just the girls. In his thirties, he had switched mostly to boys. No one knows how many boys there were. And by boys, I mean boys. By present standards he was a monster. During his lifetime he was considered a great man, including by many of the children who had sexual encounters with him. The people who thought him wicked often liked him for that reason. This is not the story of a child abuse scandal. It is a history of the social world of sex between men and children before the 1950s.

Pedophiles crowd our imagination. They are the villains in our headlines, but they occupy very little space in our histories. Norman Douglas was a celebrity in the early twentieth century. He was friends with Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and countless other fixtures in the literary pantheon, all of whom knew about his sexual life. Everyone did. He was a central figure in literary circles all the same. The photographer Islay Lyons predicted in 1948 that a few generations from now, the name of Norman Douglas will be known . . . when D.H. Lawrence will have been forgotten, Huxley remembered only in part, and all the contemporary trash long consigned to the pulp-machine.² Lyons was wrong. Douglas died in 1952. After his death, he was briefly infamous, then disappeared from popular memory. Today Douglas is long forgotten, while Lawrence and Huxley still crowd the bookstore shelves. His writing has not held up well to modern tastes. His sexual life has weathered even worse.

Many books about Douglas have been attempted, but almost all those attempts have failed. Writers have found the obstacle of Douglas’s sexual history insurmountable. It’s not for lack of sources. The problem is the opposite. There are too many sources that cause discomfort: explicit records of sex acts between Douglas and children; letters from children expressing their affection for Douglas; and endless remarks by Douglas’s friends describing him as extraordinary.

This superabundance of sources makes a book about Norman Douglas both imperative and impossible. There is no single figure whose life provides richer sources for examining the subject of sex between adults and children from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. And there is no way to write about the extraordinary regard in which he was once held without pitting the present day’s violent antipathy to pedophilia against the more ambiguous attitudes of the past. This is no small interpretive dilemma. Pedophilia is the third rail of contemporary culture. Writing or saying anything that might be taken as expressing sympathy for a pedophile is a surefire way to incinerate a career. Only a fool would write Douglas’s biography. Think of this, instead, as a history told through the story of a man.

I didn’t set out to write this book. It began with a family vacation to Italy. I had bought discount airline tickets to Naples, and a friend recommended we take a day trip to Capri while we were there. I didn’t know anything about Capri, so I did a little research and learned that it was an island at the southern tip of the Bay of Naples that was legendary for its sybaritic atmosphere, which had been captured in a famous 1917 novel by Norman Douglas titled South Wind.³ I read the novel during our visit. South Wind is a roman à clef about the eccentric community of cosmopolitan expatriates who lived in Capri during the early twentieth century. The book is very funny and completely amoral. The plot, such as it is, involves nudism, free love, adultery, bigamy, whispers of homosexuality, and a premeditated murder you can really get behind. Since I’m a historian of sexuality, I was intrigued. I wanted to know more about the real people who inspired the novel. After our vacation, I tracked down Douglas’s 1933 autobiography Looking Back, seeking the facts behind the fiction. This was totally naive.

Like every well-trained historian, I was taught in graduate school that self-interest and the passage of time make autobiographies unreliable evidence. Sometimes I overlook this lesson, but Douglas’s autobiography wouldn’t allow me to make that mistake. Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion calls attention on every page to the constructedness of memory. Douglas begins with a description of a dog-shaped incense burner that he used over the years to store the calling cards given to him by friends, then he proceeds by figuratively pulling out the cards, one at a time, and free-associating from the printed names. The resulting memories are as mixed up as the pieces of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. The book jumps from 1886 to 1912 to 1904 and so on, back and forth and forth and back. It’s not clear if Douglas has arranged the cards in any particular sequence, or whether the structure faithfully replicates the order in which he pulled the cards from the incense burner. Douglas admits to changing certain names. He denies any memory of others, following those cards with a question mark. Most pages include two or three names. Some cards spark memories that extend for several pages. At the end of the first lengthy entry, Douglas reveals that he checked his recollection of a key event against his daily diary and found that he had misremembered the day. It is a lesson not to trust one’s memory, he warns.⁴ It’s an aviso not to trust his memoir either.

Like all memoirs, Looking Back offers a very incomplete account of its author’s life. The nature of its oversights, however, are the opposite to what you might expect. Astonishingly, Douglas includes numerous stories about his sexual encounters with children, while excluding any stories about his wife and sons. He explains how he contracted with parents for sexual access to their children. He includes affectionate portraits of several of the children with whom he had long-lasting affairs. He even dedicates the book to one of his former boy lovers. But the nearest he comes to acknowledging his marriage is a single anecdote about the alcoholic lying-in nurse for his first son. I read Douglas’s autobiography looking for stories of sexual nonconformists who were disreputable in their own time but seem like visionaries today. What I found was historical evidence about a sexual behavior that is even more taboo today than it was in the past.

Today almost all of Douglas’s sexual encounters with children and youth would be defined as assaults, both in the law and in public opinion.⁵ Neither legal nor popular definitions were so clear-cut in the past. As Estelle Freedman argues, the meaning of rape is fluid, rather than transhistorical or static.⁶ There was no age of consent for boys in Britain for much of Douglas’s life, and the age of criminal responsibility at which boys could be found guilty of gross indecencies with men was fourteen. In France and Italy, where sex between males was decriminalized in the nineteenth century, the age of consent for boys was thirteen until the 1920s.⁷ Popular attitudes aligned with the law, generally treating boys as capable of consent once they entered puberty. In short, whether Douglas’s sexual encounters with children constituted assault at the time depended on a wide variety of factors including their location, the children’s age, their sex, their sexual histories, and whether physical force was involved. For this reason, I use the word encounter to describe Douglas’s sexual relations with children and youth. The word encounter is capacious. Encounters can be violent, coercive, willing, or enthusiastic. The word does not preclude assault, nor does it imply assault.

As for the words boys, girls, and youth, I use them flexibly since they also have no fixed transhistorical definition. Historians of childhood argue that understandings of childhood have shifted dramatically over time. Chronological age mattered less in defining capacity or maturity during the past than did class, gender, and physical development. Twelve-year-old males were elected to the British Parliament and other offices before the eighteenth century. Ten-year-old females could legally marry. The concept of adolescence only emerged in the late nineteenth century, and the word teenager is a mid-twentieth-century neologism.⁸ Today, Steven Angelides argues, "sexuality is the most highly cherished marker delineating the boundaries between childhood and adulthood."⁹ But that’s a recent definition of childhood that cannot be projected backward. Roughly speaking, in this book, I use the words boy and girl for younger teens or preteens, and I use the word youth for older teens. I mostly reserve children for boys and girls below the age of sixteen. But I use all of these words loosely, with an eye to their historically shifting meanings.

During his own lifetime, the sex of Douglas’s boys posed a greater legal risk than did their age. Douglas was more likely to be arrested for gross indecency than for statutory rape. I didn’t know that when I first read Looking Back. I didn’t know much about the recent history of sex between adults and children, despite my expertise as a historian of sexuality. I had never read any twentieth-century English author who wrote so brazenly about having sexual encounters with children. The memoir left me far more curious about how Douglas could publish such a self-incriminating narrative in the 1930s than about the history of the hedonistic island where he once lived. So I followed my curiosity to the archives, where a second discovery persuaded me, against my better judgment, that I had to attempt a book about Douglas even if it was doomed to become more kindling on the bonfire of earlier failures.

In the Berg Collection room at the New York Public Library, I came across Norman Douglas’s transcriptions of the travel diaries of Giuseppe Pino Orioli, the publisher of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Orioli and Douglas were boon companions in Florence, where Douglas lived during the 1920s and ’30s. The two men went on numerous walking tours together in Italy and abroad. Douglas always insisted that Orioli keep a diary. Later Douglas would transcribe the diaries to share with friends or adapt for publication. Douglas’s transcriptions may have cleaned up Orioli’s questionable spelling, but they didn’t sanitize his accounts of Douglas’s paid sexual encounters with the boys they met along the way. Douglas’s and Orioli’s friends found this material funny, or arousing, or both. Orioli’s diaries used words like fuck and cock that Looking Back had avoided in order to escape censorship. A barely there scrim of ambiguity hung over Looking Back. Orioli’s diaries made Douglas’s sexual practices explicit. I had never read anything like them.

Very few historical sources from Douglas’s lifetime explicitly describe sex between adults and children. The two primary exceptions are legal records and pornography, both of which have interpretive limitations. Legal records reveal how common intergenerational sexual encounters were in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but they do a better job capturing the mechanisms of the legal system than the perspectives of the people caught up in it.¹⁰ Pornography offers a fantasy intended to arouse consumers, but says little about real-life practices. Orioli’s diaries are unique because they give firsthand accounts of adult-child sexual practices that are graphic but not pornographic.¹¹ Instead of fantasies of virile handsome men and beautiful willing boys, the diaries describe the men’s impotency, the boys’ pimples, and the crude commercial calculations involved in the majority of their sexual encounters.

Honest, graphic but not pornographic writing about historical sexuality is rare. Honest, graphic, but not pornographic writing about sexual encounters that were potentially illegal is even rarer. The fact that the diaries survived in the hands of collectors after Douglas, who was perpetually broke, sold them off is extraordinary. As soon as I read Orioli’s diaries, I knew that I had to write about them. The diaries were a one-of-a-kind set of sources that opened a window onto a chapter in history that is rarely discussed. Sex between men and children was historically common but has seldom been historicized. Sex between women and children was historically uncommon and is even more rarely discussed by historians. The specter of pedophilia is central to contemporary cultural politics. As distasteful as the subject might be, the history of adult-child sex needs to be reckoned with if we want to understand the sexual past. And we need to understand this history if we want to make sense of our present moment. There is no way to understand the third rail without grabbing hold of it.

In his 2017 book Disturbing Attachments, Kadji Amin argues that scholars of sexuality have neglected the history of sex between men and boys because it threatens the project of queer sexual liberation. In his words, modern pederasty is the detritus of Queer Studies’ orientation toward political futurity.¹² According to Amin, modern pederasty, which he defines as age-differentiated sex, was the dominant form of male same-sex practice until the mid-twentieth century. As he reminds readers:

Virtually all late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century canonical authors now remembered as gay—including Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde (whose famous love that dare not speak its name was pederasty), Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Jean Genet, and even James Baldwin—participated in and, in some cases, wrote about age-differentiated same-sex erotic relations.¹³

This history, Amin argues, has posed a dilemma to the fields of queer studies and queer history, both of which emerged as outgrowths of the modern gay rights movement.

The rise of the gay rights movement during the 1970s and ’80s prompted attacks by right-wing critics who disparaged homosexuality as a threat to the safety of children.¹⁴ By the 1970s, same-sex relations between relatively equal adults had become the norm within Western countries. Under assault from reactionary critics, activists responded by drawing a strict line between homosexuality and pedophilia.¹⁵ Claims for inclusion were built on pragmatic exclusions, a common story. Richard Yuill and Dean Durber argue that the marginalization of adult-child sex was a crucial transformative precondition for the flourishing of mainstream sexual minorities.¹⁶ This marginalization was not limited to contemporary politics. The imperatives of the present also shaped the telling of the past, as a rising generation of gay and lesbian historians focused their attention on relations between adults and, for the most part, excluded age-differentiated relations from their definitions of the queer past.

The reluctance of historians to write about adult-child sex is not entirely political. It’s also visceral.¹⁷ The topic, because it is taboo, is extremely discomfiting. I’ve seen proof of that sentiment in people’s faces when I’ve given talks about this project. Elise Chenier remarks that for most people, the whole topic is either best avoided, or it arouses such a strong reaction that careful contemplation is quite simply not possible. The history of sexuality, however, cannot avoid an entire range of human behavior because it arouses feelings of disgust. The history of sexuality cannot be limited to the history of what makes historians feel sexy, as Catharine MacKinnon once snidely dismissed the field. MacKinnon criticized historians particularly for disregarding the ubiquitous history of male rape of girls. However, some sexuality scholars have argued that feminist master narratives of child sexual abuse, like MacKinnon’s, have hampered the history of intergenerational sex by imposing a desexualized and disempowered understanding of childhood that contradicts the complexities of children’s lived experiences. Angelides argues that queer studies, if anything, has offered more productive avenues than feminist studies for understanding intergenerational sex.¹⁸

Those historians who do not feel hampered by visceral disgust for the subject of adult-child sex may still be reluctant to research the topic from fear that visceral discomfort will lead readers to avoid their work. Writing about a taboo topic without breaking taboos poses a daunting challenge. As Yuill writes, from experience, the pressure to not conduct research on this topic suggests that even such research itself in some way undermines the very cultural taboos that surround it.¹⁹ Those who do attempt such research risk overt censorship.

When Yuill was a PhD candidate in sociology at Glasgow University writing his dissertation, Male Age-Discrepant Intergenerational Sexualities and Relationships, he was subjected to multiple investigations by his university, had his research materials reviewed by the police, was attacked repeatedly in the British press, and had his completed dissertation embargoed for five years. Cognitive psychologist Susan Clancy was blacklisted for her dissertation research at Harvard questioning the trauma model of child sexual abuse, and she was forced to find work outside of the country. Journalist Judith Levine couldn’t find a publisher for her work on adolescent sexuality for five years, and when the University of Minnesota signed her book, the Republican-led state legislature threatened to cut the press’s funding. Literary scholar James Kincaid’s work on the fetishization of childhood sexual innocence during the Victorian era was described as obscenity by the British House of Lords, which sought to ban its distribution in the UK. Bruce Rind’s interdisciplinary work on pederasty for a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality was removed following intense pressure from critics and wasn’t published until eight years later, in a special volume exploring the controversy.²⁰ Several editors and agents whom I spoke with about this book expressed doubt that any press would risk publishing it.

In addition to political disincentives, visceral discomfort, and cultural taboos, a final challenge has stymied historical research into adult-child sex: the limitation of sources. Although the legal age of sexual consent for boys was low, and sex between adult men and girls was common, many adult-child sexual encounters were vulnerable to criminal sanction because they involved same-sex dynamics, incest, force, payment, violence, or very young children. As a consequence, participants rarely documented their activities. But the police did. I am indebted to the handful of scholars who have used legal records resulting from arrests to piece together an understanding of sex between men and children, boys in particular, in the Anglo world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²¹ Their work has been critical to my efforts to contextualize the life of Norman Douglas, who was born in Austria but considered himself Scottish and spent many years living in Britain. Matt Cook’s work on turn-of-the-century London has been especially important for understanding Douglas’s years spent there before World War I.²²

Intellectual historians have researched pederasty using literary sources like poetry and art history. Several scholars have examined the connection between pederasty and neo-Hellenism, or the movement venerating the ancient Greeks that was popular in the nineteenth-century English public schools where Douglas was educated.²³ A few scholars have tackled how this neo-Hellenic fascination gave rise to the Uranian school of poetry on the theme of boy love, which counted among its practitioners Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Bosie Douglas.²⁴ Norman Douglas was too young, and too individualistic, to number himself among the Uranians. But he was strongly influenced by the neo-Hellenism of his youth. He liked to think of himself as a pederast in the ancient Greek sense. His life span tracks closely with the literary ascendance of this term, before its replacement by the word pedophile in the second half of the twentieth century.²⁵ He often wrote admiringly about the Hellenic legacy in Italy. It was this Greek past that drew Douglas to cities such as Naples (originally Parthenope) and Syracuse.

Douglas spent more of his adult life living in Italy than in any other country, in part because sexual relations between males were not criminalized there during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was among a coterie of privileged British and German pederasts who congregated in cities like Florence, Venice, and Taormina. Several Italian scholars have studied the surprisingly tolerant attitudes of Italian families and communities to relationships between local boys and foreign men.²⁶ Stefania Arcara’s work on the neo-Hellenist fantasies of British and German sex tourists has been especially important for my understanding of Douglas’s love for Italy.²⁷ Joseph Allen Boone has looked at the Orientalist pederastic fantasies that inspired sex tourists to travel to the Middle East, another region that Douglas visited throughout his life.²⁸

Although Douglas lived and died before contemporary ideas about pedophilia took hold, I never would have been able to imagine writing this history without the work of a handful of scholars who have examined pedophile discourse through a critical lens. James Kincaid attended the infamous McMartin Preschool trials in California during the late 1980s (prosecuting alleged satanic ritual sexual abuse of children), and then investigated the origins of the moral panic around pedophilia. According to Kincaid, the ideals of childhood innocence that emerged during the Victorian era had the double-edged effect of making children perversely desirable.²⁹ Lewis Carroll’s pinafored Alice is just one face of a coin, the flip side of which is Charles Dodgson’s erotic photographs of Alice Liddell as a beggar child, with her shift falling off her shoulder. As literary scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton writes, It’s a mistake to take innocence straight. Drawing on Kincaid, she argues that detailed narratives of child molestation, which the press is full of, allow ‘normal’ citizens what they seem to seek: ‘righteous, guilt-free . . . pornographic fantasies’ about the violation of a child’s innocence.³⁰ Expressions of outrage against pedophilia must be situated within a larger affective economy that simultaneously produces untoward emotions like desire.

Just as the fetishization of childhood innocence has had unintended consequences, so has the demonization of adults who have sex with children. The belief that pedophiles are monsters did not become ubiquitous in North America and western Europe until the late 1970s. Critics of the contemporary hysteria over pedophiles don’t argue in favor of sex between adults and children, but they express suspicion of the consequences of treating the pedophile as a bogeyman.³¹ One problem with the monster narrative of pedophilia is that it blinds us to the everyday child sexual abuse committed by people whom we like or love.³² The monster narrative can even blind us to abuse committed by people we don’t like. Since monsters by definition are not real, the narrative hampers our ability to recognize that any seemingly ordinary person could be committing acts we deem to be monstrous. If someone were a monster, surely they would not walk among us. The monster narrative effaces the prevalence of sex between adults and children.

Despite its problematic effects, the monster narrative exerts enormous power today. Readers are riveted by the stories of men like Jeffrey Epstein, Michael Jackson, and Larry Nassar. The topic of child sexual abuse is personalized in a distinctive way, which is why it makes sense to look at the history of sex between adults and children through the lens of an individual life. The story of how Norman Douglas could be so open about his sexual encounters with children and still be considered a great man—not despite his sexual immorality, but because of it—tells us how much the history of adult-child sex has changed since the first half of the twentieth century. By looking at Douglas’s story not as a monster narrative, one gets at the historical ordinariness of pederasty. Douglas did not stand outside his time—he took part in well-developed social practices, including boarding school relationships, concubinage contracts, and child prostitution.

If I’m not writing a monster story, how should I write about Douglas? Certainly not as a great man. The nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said that the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.³³ Even biographies that admit the moral imperfections of their subjects are often based on the premise that their subjects were great in terms of their influence within their fields of action. A lot of artists fall into this category. Picasso and Tolstoy were arguably rotten people, but few doubt their creative greatness. Many who knew Douglas considered him to be a great writer. Islay Lyons thought he was not merely one of the greatest writers of English literature alive, but one of the greatest our language has ever produced. This is no biased claim. It is a very simple fact.³⁴ Few would go so far as Lyons, but a fundamental faith in Douglas’s greatness as a writer does suffuse the handful of short biographical sketches that appeared about him during and immediately after his lifetime, as well as the only comprehensive Douglas biography, by Mark Holloway, published in 1976.³⁵

I owe a great deal to Holloway’s extensive research, as well as to the editions of Douglas’s correspondence produced by an admiring set of Douglas scholars associated with the state library of Vorarlberg, in western Austria.³⁶ These resources have been enormously helpful to my work, but I don’t share their creators’ mostly unreserved enthusiasm for our common subject. I have my favorite Douglas books. I love Looking Back and Together. I think some of the essays in Old Calabria are beautiful. I highly recommend South Wind to anyone looking to read a philosophical, dialogue-driven, light comedy about early twentieth-century sexual mores. On the other hand, I think They Went is boring and Paneros is lightweight. But these are personal preferences. This book is not grounded in any objective claim to Douglas’s greatness as an author. I stand with the reviewer for Punch magazine, who a few years after Douglas’s death summed up his career by saying he had realized himself more as a man, and a figure of his time, than a writer.³⁷ Douglas’s fans see his sexual history as a distraction from the central story of his literary accomplishments. For my part, I take Douglas’s sexuality as my main subject and treat his writing as a window onto that history. I was intrigued by South Wind, but I wrote this book because of Orioli’s diaries.

I follow more in the footsteps of A. J. A. Symons than Thomas Carlyle. Bored of reading too many great man biographies, Symons announced in 1929 that he was seeking a new way to write biography, a fresh and attainable alternative to the dry imbecility of the ordinary life.³⁸ Five years later he published The Quest for Corvo, an experimental biography of the writer Frederick Rolfe, better known by his nom de plume, Baron Corvo. Symons’s biographical endeavor began, like mine, with a novel and a set of documents, both loaned to him by his friend Christopher Millard. The novel was Corvo’s Hadrian the Seventh, which Symons read and loved; the documents were a passel of letters written by Rolfe in 1909–10, describing his sexual encounters with the young male gondoliers who plied the waterways of Venice. What shocked me about these letters, Symons explained in the opening chapter of his biography, was not the confession they made of perverse sexual indulgence: that phenomenon surprises no historian. But that a man of education, ideas, something near genius should have enjoyed without remorse the destruction of the innocence of youth.³⁹ The discovery of those letters launched Symons on his quest to understand their author (who had died in 1913).

Douglas loved The Quest for Corvo, which Symons sent him as a gift. Douglas wrote back thanking Symons and saying it was a fascinating book, written just as I think such things ought to be written. Symons had written the biography in the first person, narrating his strenuous efforts to track down former friends of Rolfe willing to tell him about the writer’s strange history. What troubles all your researches must have given you. But also—what a worthy object! Douglas wrote to Symons.⁴⁰ The worthy object Douglas had in mind wasn’t Corvo, whom he dismissed as a wicked fairy, a horrible creature, a cochon, a worm, and a canaille.⁴¹ The worthy object was the book itself, which reimagined biography as a mystery story rather than a parable, with Symons playing the role of detective.⁴² I share Symons’s suspicions of turning history into a parable, because I worry that our moralizing will prove as faulty as that of earlier generations. So, inspired by Symons, I’ve constructed Douglas’s story with the seams turned outward. I offer a full retelling of Norman Douglas’s life, highlighting the historical and interpretive questions that his life provokes, as a window onto the past.

By now, thanks in part to Symons (who was himself a questionable person), the story of the artist behaving badly is old news.⁴³ Douglas appears to be a familiar type: the privileged man who used his personal charisma and social power to exploit vulnerable people. The puzzle is not how could such an unappealing man have created such appealing art; it’s how could such an unappealing man once have been so appealing?

What do we learn about the history of sexuality from the fact (and it is a fact) that so many of his former child lovers held him in such high esteem? Eric Wolton, the boy to whom Looking Back was dedicated, called Douglas my God in a letter he wrote when he was in his twenties.⁴⁴ Wolton never rejected his childhood relationship with Douglas. After settling in British colonial East Africa and becoming chief of police in Tanganyika, he brought his family on return visits to see Douglas, the last time in 1951. Wolton’s story provides uncomfortable evidence that there were boys in the early twentieth century who simply did not view sex with adult men as traumatic, even after they had come of age. Sex between men and boys may have been exploitative and predicated on power inequities, but so were many other types of sexual encounters in the early twentieth century, making pederasty less far outside the norm than pedophilia appears to us today. By studying Douglas’s life in close detail, we can unearth a social world where pederasty was not that aberrant.

Douglas’s appeal extended beyond his boy lovers. He also attracted many pathbreaking queer and feminist women who regarded him as a sexual role model. What do we learn about the history of sexuality from this surprising affinity? When the food writer Elizabeth David was a young woman just setting out in the world, Douglas advised her: Always do as you please, and send everybody to Hell, and take the consequences. His words became a motto by which she lived her life unapologetically. She wasn’t the only one. As David put it, there were an uncommonly large number of men and women of all ages, classes and nationalities who took Norman Douglas to their hearts and will hold him there so long as they live.⁴⁵ Douglas’s philosophy appealed to a lot of sexual nonconformists, not just fellow pederasts. By studying Douglas’s life, we can illuminate a world where the charmed circle of sexuality, as theorist Gayle Rubin puts it, was so narrow that those who were cast outside its limits shared common ground. Identity categories that are distant from each other today—like loose women, lesbians, and pederasts—were more proximate when they were all outside the charmed circle. Pederasty was less taboo before the 1950s, in effect, because so many other behaviors were disreputable as well. Pederasty was less distinct from other types of sexual nonconformity.⁴⁶

Writing in the midst of a surging moral panic during the early 1980s, Rubin predicted that in twenty years the smoke would clear and pedophiles would be recognized as victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.⁴⁷ Despite her perspicacity, Rubin’s prediction has proven just as wrong as Lyons’s prediction about the longevity of Douglas’s reputation. The taboos against sex between adults and young people have become more strenuous with each passing year, to the point that many people now profess revulsion at cross-generational encounters involving young adults and older adults, which seldom raised moral hackles in the past. Studying Douglas’s life engages a philosophical question embedded at the core of the history of sexuality. To what extent is sexual morality historically constructed? When we trace the arc of historical change from repression to tolerance, as in the expansion of gay rights, we have no problem arguing for sexual morality as a construct. When we trace the arc of historical change from tolerance to repression, as in the heightening taboo against sex between adults and young people, we are more inclined to see it as evidence of moral progress.

Douglas spent his career decrying all morality as a false construction, which is what made so many readers in the 1920s and ’30s regard him as a philosophical mentor. He made his name by ridiculing sexual morality in South Wind. The Scottish author Moray McLaren, born in 1901, recalled the effect that South Wind had on students who entered university immediately after World War I: It showed us a way of life, a philosophy of pleasure. Graham Greene, born in 1904, said that "my generation was brought up on South Wind."⁴⁸ Eventually, Greene and Douglas became dear friends, and when Douglas died, Greene was one of his fiercest defenders. During his lifetime, Douglas’s friends accepted, indulged, and even celebrated his sexual amorality. Today we celebrate the authors who adored Douglas for the radical challenges they posed to Victorian morality, but only insofar as those challenges abide by our own current moral code, which limits appropriate sexual encounters to those between two adults of roughly equal status. The story of how Douglas fit into his social world forces readers to grapple with a central tenet in the history of sexuality, by confronting what the historical contingency of sexual morality means when it comes to a behavior that we now regard as a transhistorical moral wrong.

PART I

George Norman Douglass

CHAPTER ONE

Crocodiles

In 1941, when Norman Douglas was seventy-two years old, he cobbled together an almanac of aphorisms from his earlier writings. Age was taking its toll. He had rheumatism and a heart condition that made him dizzy. His creative capacities were exhausted. But he had plenty of old writing he could recycle, including pithy observations like you may cram a truth into an epigram; the truth, never, which he assigned to December 29. For his birthday, December 8, Douglas selected the line: "Give love to the young, who requite you with kisses; take no thought of hic iacet, which takes no thought of you."¹ The extract suited him. Even in his old age, Douglas paid little attention to death. He was too consumed with childhood.

Douglas loved children. He loved the idea of childhood, as well as children in the flesh and blood. He affected a world-weary tone about most matters, but he was earnest about youth. A child is ready to embrace the universe. And, unlike adults, he is never afraid to face his own limitations, he wrote in his 1921 book Alone, recounting his travels through Italy at the end of the First World War. The title, he admitted, was a misnomer since he devoted much of the book to describing the children he met along the way. Children, he wrote, are more generous in their appreciations, more sensitive to pure ideas, more impersonal. Their curiosity is disinterested. Children had the passionless outlook of the sage. But Douglas’s interest in children was not passionless. He loved their bodies in addition to their spirits. To be in contact with physical health—it would alone suffice to render their society a dear delight, quite apart from the fact that if you are wise and humble you may tiptoe yourself, by inches, into fairyland.²

Lytton Strachey, a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, had a special love of Alone.³ Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, preferred Douglas’s 1923 book Together, about his travels through Vorarlberg.⁴ Douglas went to Austria with a young lover named René Mari, who was around eighteen at the time. Douglas delighted in depicting Mari’s boyish exuberance, his bottomless appetite for milk and eggs, his innocent flirtations with innkeepers’ daughters, and his affinity for wild spaces. Reflecting on an afternoon spent exploring a ruined castle in the woods, Douglas wrote, These are the surroundings in which children ought to grow up. Fields, gardens, orchards, meadows, forests, rocks, and rivulets. Keep them off the street-pavement. Impermanent things, like pavements and what they stand for, stimulate the adult; they overstimulate children, who should be in contact with eternities.⁵

The quasi-mystical tone of Douglas’s prescriptions for a healthy childhood could have come from the pen of another Austrian writer of the same generation, Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf education movement. Both Steiner and Douglas shared the belief that nature was the best school for children’s self-development. Douglas thought it was harmful to withhold from our children the contemplation of woodland marvels, with their tender symbolism of leaf and flower, birth and decay. But he was not a programmatic thinker, like Steiner was. Douglas opposed the standardization of youth.⁶ He was fiercely dedicated to individualism. Douglas had no interest in pedagogy beyond the instruction of the boys he loved.

Much of what we know about Douglas’s early years comes from Together. He wove memories of his childhood into the narrative, taking Mari to visit places that had been important to him, such as a streamlet that used to be dammed in the summer to water the fields. Douglas remembered a hot day when he and his younger sister, Mary, chased butterflies through the field, getting so sticky that Mary decided they should wade into the flooded river to cool off. Afterward they went to the house of the gardener, who lighted an immense fire at which our scanty summer garments were dried, one by one. The combination of nostalgic and erotic undertones in passages like this seduced Douglas’s readers. The novelist E. M. Forster thought Together very beautiful, and unlike anything that you or any one else has done. Lytton Strachey wrote to Douglas, after reading Together, that the slightest of your phrases gets me into the right key at once, and the thrill that only you give me goes down my back. Strachey’s

Reviews for Unspeakable

[alba m · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent biography of a forgotten author with a very controversial life.