Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
the “names” James employs for “particular erotic desires and acts” and in understanding those names in James’s own terms—with connections inevitably to James’s own complex sexuality and gender identifications but also with connections to the discursive systems of identification prevalent in British and American culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
James’s thousands of letters are only now being catalogued, but many of his letters to young men are newly available and form the basis for our new understanding of James’s homosexuality.8 Rosella Mamoli Zorzi has recently published seventy-seven of James’s letters to the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen, and Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe have edited a collection of James’s letters to Jocelyn Persse, Howard Sturgis, Hugh Walpole, as well as Andersen. That James desired emotional and physical intimacy with men and expressed that in vivid, often achingly sensual terms has become indisputable. His letters to young men from the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century offer poignant, sometimes heartrending examples of Jamesian desire and his frequent worry that his desire was not reciprocated. What it meant to his self-image or for our reconstitution of his self-image to feel and express himself in these terms is a trickier matter. Consoling Andersen upon the death of his brother Andreas, for example, James famously casts himself in the role of “a brother and a lover” (Henry James Amato Ragazzo 88).
Your news fills me with horror and pity; and how can I express the tenderness with which it makes me think of you and the aching wish to be near you and put my arms round you? My heart fairly bleeds and breaks at the vision of you alone, in your wicked and indifferent old far-off Rome, with this haunting, blighting, unbearable sorrow. The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close and long, or do anything to make you rest on me, and feel my deep participation—this torments me, dearest boy, makes me ache for you, and for myself; makes me gnash my teeth and groan at the bitterness of things. (86)
When James wrote that passage in 1902, he was already feeling anxious about Andersen’s feelings for him, and he felt some frustration that Andersen did not write and visit more often. James takes advantage of the occasion, however, to express desire for Andersen in the form of consolation. In offering to take Andreas’s place in Hendrik’s life, to be “like a brother,” James extends an invitation to more than brotherly love—to a relationship in which playing the brother arguably represents the form that playing the lover will take. Conflating two roles and forms of love, James was playing upon one of the most acceptable forms that homoerotic love could take at the turn of the century—a version of “Greek love,” which James knew from John Addington Symonds’s “A Problem in Modern Ethics.”9 This is not to desexualize James’s feelings, for Symonds explicitly celebrates the sexual dimensions of Greek same-sex desire.
Consistently in his letters to young men James expresses his desire for emotional and physical intimacy, but he does so theatrically by dramatizing himself in various ways. Effusive and melodramatic, he wants to hug them, to throw his arms around them and welcome them into his arms, and again and again he signals his readiness to respond to any indication of reciprocated interest. “The least sign or word from you, or intimated wish,” he tells Jocelyn Persse, “makes me vibrate with response & readiness—so attached am I to your ineffaceable image” (Dearly Beloved 95). As lovers on the make will do, James ups the emotional ante in his letters, representing his own desire as always excessive. “Keep a-wanting of me all you can,” he ends a letter to Howard Sturgis, “you won’t exceed the responsive desire of yours, dearest Howard, ever so constantly Henry James’ (149). “I am yours, yours, yours, dearest Hugh, yours!” he signs himself to Hugh Walpole (187). Despite the genuine yearning, the heartfelt desperation, in some of these love letters, James also indulges himself in campy metaphorical play that resembles the archness we enjoy in his fiction. “Irresistible to me always any tug on your part at the fine & firm silver cord that stretches between us,” he opens a letter to Persse; “at any twitch of it by your hand, the machine, within me, enters into vibration & I respond ever so eagerly and amply! (My image sounds rather like the rattle of the telephone under the effect of a ‘call’; but I mean it well, & I mean it, above all, my dear Jocelyn, affectionately!)” (96). The image of James with a cord penetrating his body, attached to a machine that responds to “calls” from Persse almost defies interpretation because the figure is so over the top, but James can top himself, especially when he compares himself to animals.10 “I have shown you often enough, I think,” he writes to Howard Sturgis, “how much more I have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander—& in fine at the time I last heard from you pen, ink & paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while in the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) & I had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, waiting to be removed” (158). Playing the literary polar bear with sweaty fingers for Sturgis, James becomes an old elephant for Hugh Walpole. “Beautiful & admirable of you to have threshed through the tropic jungle of your 30 waiting letters to get at this elephant,” he tells the young man, “who accordingly winds round you, in a stricture of gratitude & affection all but fatal, his well-meaning old trunk. I abominably miss you—having so extravagantly enjoyed you; but it’s a great enrichment of consciousness, all the while, that we are in such beautiful, such exquisite relation” (193). I am less interested in using these passages from James’s letters as evidence for his homosexuality than in pointing out the various poses within a homoerotic discourse that James assumes. This is not quite to say that, where his sexuality was concerned, James was in a state of suspense. He clearly felt desire for other men, although he expressed that desire more openly toward the end of his life. But it would be counterproductive from a literary standpoint to reduce James’s sexuality to simple terms when it is the terms themselves that are so provocative. After all, posing himself as a man with a cord penetrating his body for Jocelyn Persse to “twitch” places James in a very different subject-object position than his self-dramatization as an old elephant who will wind his “well-meaning old trunk” so affectionately around Hugh Walpole. James obviously takes pleasure in both poses. Both seem obviously homoerotic, but taken together they reflect a complex, not a simple, eroticized self. And they hardly represent the only poses James enjoyed striking.
James delights in positioning his male characters in such ways that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple. It is important to track both gender and sexuality in James’s writing because gender deviance is so often the form that sexual deviance takes during a period in which the theory of inversion offered the dominant paradigm for understanding homosexuality. As Hubert Kennedy has pointed out, the “third sex” theory promoted by Karl Ulrichs in the 1860s and revised by other theorists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and John Addington Symonds did not last long (103), but variations of it have had a significant influence. Although Ellis explicitly rejected Ulrich’s female-soul-in-male-body theory as “unintelligible” (183), for example, he retained a more sophisticated version of that theory. Beginning with the observation of a “latent organic bisexuality in each sex” (184), Ellis theorizes that sexual differentiation occurs later—and sometimes imperfectly:
Putting the matter in a purely speculative shape, it may be said that at conception the organism is provided with about 50 per cent. of male germs and about 50 percent, of female germs, and that, as development proceeds, either the male or the female germs assume the upper hand, killing out those of the other sex, until in the maturely developed individual only a few aborted germs of the opposite sex are left. In the homosexual person, however, and in the psychosexual hermaphrodite, we may imagine that the process has not proceeded normally, on account of some peculiarity in the number or character of either the original male germs or female germs, or both, the result being that we have a person who is organically twisted into a shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both. (184)
Even as they promote a binary theory of inversion, Ulrichs and Ellis find themselves identifying subgroups within their primary groups and thus multiple homosexualities. Interestingly, gender becomes the variable. Deviations within homosexuality are marked with gender characteristics. Even the largely binary taxonomy that Ulrich and Ellis employ, however, has room for multiple homosexualities. In an appendix