[ilds] Miller's "Numinous Cock" v. Durrell's "Man-Size Piece"

[Bruce Redwine]

Recent discussions on "bisexuality and beyond" have raised important questions about sexuality/bisexuality both in LGD's oeuvre and his personal life.  James Gifford's posted article — "Reading Miller's 'Numinous Cock':  Heterosexist Presumption and Queerings of the Censored Text" — provides new insights re Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934).  I shall extend these observations to Lawrence Durrell himself, which James does not do on this occasion.  His focus is different than mine.  I urge all to read James's very intriguing essay — it's entirely worthwhile.

To set the scene, in terms of the sexual issues, I'll quote one of Martial's short epigrams, taken from the D. R. Shackleton Bailey's translation of the Epigrams in the Loeb Library, vol. II (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).  Martial lived from c. 40 - c. 104 AD.  I think it highly probable that LGD was familiar with him.  Durrell knew Horace (cf. his "On First Looking into Loeb's Horace"), who's much harder to translate.  Given Martial's subject matter and the beauty of his Latin, he's been a popular poet to translate from the Renaissance on.  The poet Peter Porter, one of Durrell's admirers, translated many of the poems.  So,

"Lascivam tota possedi nocte puellam,
  cuius nequitias vincere nemo potest.
fessus mille modis illud puerile poposci:
  ante preces totum primaque verba dedit.
improbius quiddam ridensque rubensque rogavi:
  pollicita est nulla luxuriosa mora.
sed mihi pura fuit; tibi non erit, Aeschyle, si vis
  accipere hoc munus condicione mala."


"All night long I enjoyed a wanton girl, whose naughtiness no man can exhaust.  Tired by a thousand different modes, I asked for the boy routine [illud puerile]; before I begged or started to beg, she gave it in full.  Laughing and blushing, I asked for something more indecent; the lustful hussy promised without hesitation.  But so far as I am concerned, she was undefiled; she won't be so far as you are concerned, Aeschylus, if you choose to accept this present on bad terms."

(IX. 67)

The poem is puzzling and deliberately provocative in the way that Martial likes to be.  His epigrams often end with a twist and then a slap in the face.  The "boy routine" (illud puerile) is a Latin euphemism for anal intercourse (see Peter Stothard in TLS, 26 January 2007).  Puer is Latin for a boy, one of Martial's favorite erotic interests, as well as for many older men in the Classical world.  In this episode, the girl (puellam) is being treated as a boy.  What is more "indecent" (improbius) is left to the imagination.  Today we would call illud puerile buggery and would label the puer a "punk" (American slang).  The Romans, like the Greeks, were quite open about such relationships and did not hold sodomy in opprobrium.  They did, however, make distinctions between active and passive roles, which corresponded to mature and adolescent males.  It was all right to be aggressive but disgraceful to be passive, if no longer a "youth" (see J. N. Adams on pedico, "bugger," in The Latin Sexual Vocabulary [Baltimore, 1982], 123-25).  The ancient Greeks made similar distinctions:  the submissive boy was the pais, the dominant male the erastes (the latter term is K. J. Dover's coinage; see his Greek Homosexuality [Cambridge, Mass., 1978], 16).

We know much about Classical immodesty, or whatever we wish to call it, when dealing with sex, both from the literature and from the art.  Greek vase painting is particularly revealing about numerous kinds of sexual acts and provides the evidence for many of Dover's comments.  I remember visiting Pompeii and going into the House of the Vettii, the villa of a wealthy family.  At the entrance was a painting of Priapus weighing his enormous penis against a sack of money.  Blatant pornography?  No, according to my guide, an art historian, that was the Roman way to wish prosperity on all who visit the house (see John R. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking:  Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C. - A.D. 250 [Berkeley, 1998], 175, fig. 65).  The Pompeiians did not reserve sex for darkened bedrooms.

James Gifford takes the title of his essay from Gore Vidal's review of Ian MacNiven's edition of the Durrell-Miller Letters (1988).  I read the review many years ago and do not have access to it now.  Vidal begins his essay by commenting on the book's dust jacket, which has a 1939 photo of Miller and Durrell sitting on a Corfu beach, both completely naked.  Vidal describes Miller (who is almost bald, relaxed with legs extended and penis fully exposed, and looks directly into Nancy Durrell's lens) as having a "numinous cock."  A youthful Durrell hunches his shoulders, looks away from the camera, bends one leg up, and conceals his penis.  Vidal, if I recall correctly, describes Durrell as "elfin" — who certainly appears shy, boyish, and, indeed, puerile.  Vidal was clearly fascinated by the photo — and he should know homoeroticism when he sees it — for the great author and critic is openly bisexual and frank about his proclivities and conquests.  In his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), he describes himself as a dominant male (see his depiction of a sexual encounter with Jack Kerouac, p. 233:  "I finally flipped him [Kerouac] over on his stomach . . . then he sighed as his head dropped back on the pillow.").  Vidal also knows Classical antiquity.  He wrote the novel Julian (1962), which deals with the Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate.  I think Vidal saw something sexually familiar in Nancy's photo of the two friends and comrades in (literary) arms, but he did not go further, although his choice of Latinate "numinous" is suggestive of something strange and unusual happening in the scene.

I shall pursue the matter where Vidal left off.  So, remember the Greek setting and the erotic conventions of the fifth century B.C.  The 1939 photo resembles a scene on an ancient Greek vase where an erastes is in the company of his pais.  In 1974, thirty-five years later, Jill Krementz will take a photo of Miller and Durrell in bed together, presumably in Miller's home at Pacific Palisades, California (MacNiven, fig. 8).  This time the aged pair wear pajamas, are under bedcovers, and grin broadly at the camera.  The photo is obviously intended as a big joke.  But is it — entirely?

Recall that in Durrell's famous letter to Miller, the one initiating their friendship and correspondence, the younger man says, "It [The Tropic of Cancer] strikes me as being the only really man-size piece of work which this century can really boast of" (August 1935; MacNiven, Letters, 2).  "Man-size piece" is an odd way to describe a novel.  "Boast" is also odd diction and reminds me of little boys who are fond of penile braggadocio ("Mine is bigger than yours").  Joseph A. Boone in his article, "Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet" (South Atlantic Quarterly 88 [1989], 75), calls Durrell's imagery "phallic."  I agree.  Moreover, the phallus is Miller's, as Durrell envisions it, or as he sees it in his erotic "mind's eye."

The roles that Miller and Durrell play and exchange over their long friendship do not neatly correspond to the erastes-pais paradigm.  I'm not claiming that the comparison is exact.  Later, as Durrell becomes successful, he will assume the dominant part.  Initially, however, the comparison is useful to consider.

Now, James in his essay justly emphasizes the homoerotic elements, often overlooked, in The Tropic of Cancer.  He analyzes in depth the scene where Miller penetrates or stimulates Van Norden's anus, as the latter is struggling to have intercourse with a female prostitute.  Van Norden struggles, and Miller is "tickling him in the rump" and dreaming of the former's penis (Tropic of Cancer [1961], 145).  Miller's use of the preposition in indicates digital penetration may have occurred.  What we have here is a form of buggery, which Martial would have well understood, perhaps as "improbius."  James concludes, "Stated bluntly, the only sexual penetration in the scene is Miller poking his finger in his friend's bum while dreaming of his friend's penis, which needs little critical intervention to reveal subversive, queer readings" (p. 7).  I fully agree.

James, however, doesn't explore the scene further and doesn't bring up other biographical associations, which he is undoubtedly aware of and perhaps saving for another essay.  The correspondences between fiction and life are rather obvious.  While on Corfu, Durrell reads The Tropic of Cancer, and, in homage to his hero Henry Miller, he names his cherished sailboat the Van Norden (Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell:  A Biography [London 1998], 134).  Moreover, Durrell uses "Charles Norden" as a pseudonym for his novel Panic Spring (MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, 116).  The issue of a pseudonym is not a minor consideration in LGD's development, and it takes the elder Miller to encourage the younger Durrell to wean himself from the dependency of "Charles Norden."  As Miller tells his friend, "The whole thing is a question of responsibility and willingness to accept one's fate . . . [I]n the end it will be L.D. who will be obliged to kill Charles Norden" (MacNiven, Letters, 85).  Another words, like a father or mentor, Miller is telling Durrell that it's time to grow up and be a man, and being "a man" involves a break or killing off some aspect of the past.

This evolving relationship, the progression from eroticism to mentorship, reminds me of those two lovers, Leila Hosnani and David Mountolive in Mountolive.  The older Leila loves and nurtures the much younger David, and their relationship eventually requires Leila's disfigurement, which may be taken as a death of some kind.  Is Leila Hosnani really Henry Miller in disguise?  So, the obvious question arises:  Does some part of Lawrence Durrell, conscious or not, so completely identify with Miller's fictional friend that he imagines or dreams of himself as having a homoerotic relationship with his hero?  I think so.  And that may account for Durrell's adulatory reference to Miller's "man-size piece" and provide a context for Vidal's use of "numinous."

Have I gone too far?  I don't think so.  I haven't done anything more than James has already done when he notes that the Obelisk Press edition of The Tropic of Cancer has as its logo the phallic symbol of an obelisk.  So, when readers handles the book, they are "unwittingly palming Miller's 'numinous cock'" (Gifford 1).  

Am I arguing that Durrell and Miller had a homosexual relationship?  No.  Am I arguing that Durrell was in fact homosexual?  No.  I am pointing out certain patterns in their relationship, which suggest an erotic involvement or attachment.   This homoerotic affinity need not have been consummated to be valid.  I am also suggesting the obvious that LGD had a very complex personality and that any attempt to characterize him as, say, utterly and robustly heterosexual is trite and untrue.  In a personal communication, Dr. Anthony Durrell, a practicing psychiatrist, has compared LGD's personality to an onion skin of many layers, and David Green has aptly noted that the photograph of Durrell as a French onion seller fits Dr. Durrell's analogy (see Gordon Bowker, Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell, London 1997:  fig. of Durrell in London, 1985).  I agree with both of them.


Bruce








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