[ilds] Mention of the Alexandria Quartet in an Interesting and Controversial New Book

[Bruce Redwine]

James,

A few comments on your thoughtful response.  Kerouac did have at least one homosexual experience, as Gore Vidal reports firsthand in Palimpsest (1995).  Probably more.  The New Critics, particularly Wimsatt and his Verbal Icon (1954), wanted to isolate a text and remove it from any outside considerations — social context, as you note, and biographical information also.  This I find uninteresting and willful negligence.  We have before us a couple of models of authors whose works beg for comment re their own personalities.  I've already mentioned the fairly recent reassessment of Thomas Mann.  Then there's Ernest Hemingway, who was always considered the archetypal "man's man" — in part by his own making and persistent propaganda.  But Kenneth Lynn's Hemingway (1987) makes a strong argument for EH's highly confused sexuality.  Comley, Scholes, and Spilka follow this same path.  Hemingway's problems were quite obvious from the posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden (1986).  It would be hard to read that novel and not to think something very amiss with the author himself.  I don't think Lawrence Durrell benefits from any effort to ignore some of his failings — the problem of incest being one and the propensity for violence another — and now the issue of sexuality or "modern bisexuality" (which he couldn't get published in the preface to Balthazar).  With respect to how this discussion about Durrell's sexuality is conducted, I think anybody can say anything they want and however he or she pleases.  Calm and rational discourse is always appreciated, of course.  William Styron, whom no one would say was gay, once wrote that there was a period in his life when the could have gone either way.  I think something like this was probably going on with Durrell.  Confirmation, however, requires the kind of evidence and analysis Lynn uncovered and used.

Bruce


On May 31, 2014, at 4:40 PM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all
> 
> On 2014-05-31, 3:36 PM, William Apt wrote:
>> I don't recall there being a great number of homosexuals in LD's
>> inner circle. In fact most were quite straight and anything but asexual.
> 
> Rather than his personal network, what about his characters?  The percentage jumps...  He was close with George Barker, Elizabeth Smart, and a number of other non-writers of the 30s and 40s who had bisexual lives.
> 
>> Contrast this with the highly closeted Jack Kerouac, almost all of whose
>> inner circle were gay, despite his life long cultivation of a solid
>> heterosexual public image.
> 
> But was Kerouac a repressed homosexual?  I'm suspicious of elements of the notion itself.  He seemed to be sexual, period, and not strictly limited.  Then again, I'm not a Kerouac scholar and may be quite wrong on this -- Kerouac was certainly in an "out" milieu.
> 
>> Finally, LD got involved with some beautiful, sexy women, and had as
>> friends others. If he was gay, he certainly had a great heterosexual
>> picker!
> 
> I don't want to sound glib, but many gay men were married, even to very attractive women.  It's too easy to speculate.
> 
> Bruce adds
> 
>> the big objection is what literary critics are fond of making —
>> namely, don't confuse the author with his or her writings!  There's
>> some validity to this, but I don't always buy the objection and
>> attribute it to the prejudices of New Criticism, whose ideas still
>> linger and influence.
> 
> The racial issues with the New Critics, who wanted to set aside social context, is certainly open to critique.  But I also don't think we can conflate the text and the author.
> 
> I would, however, very much in this vein point to the importance of sexuality for content in Durrell's books as well as their formal traits and textuality.
> 
> And now to run!
> 
> Best,
> James
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