The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose

Language, Identity and Performance in Interwar Britain

Charlotte Charteris

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030024147
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term 'queer' in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed 'the market value of the Odd.' Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten 'keywords' in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.

© The Author(s) 2019

Charlotte CharterisThe Queer Cultures of 1930s Prosehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02414-7_2

Begin Abstract

Part I: Christopher Isherwood and the Auden Generation

Charlotte Charteris¹

(1)

University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Charlotte Charteris

End Abstract

Whilst scholarship has traditionally positioned Christopher Isherwood firmly within a 1930s literary coterie that included Edward Upward, Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden, critics have tended to follow the example of Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation (1976) in placing Auden at its aesthetic and ideological centre, thereby perpetuating the image of the young poet as ‘the de facto leader’ of an era-defining group to which the novelist might only claim membership.¹ In spite of both Isherwood’s seniority to Auden and the fact that many of Auden’s earliest successes built upon the terms of a fiercely independent pre-existing intimacy—forged at Repton and Cambridge—between Isherwood and Upward, only recently has Isherwood begun to emerge as ‘the pivotal figure of his generation.’² A more nuanced account of the group’s dynamics resituates Isherwood at its heart, David Garrett Izzo suggesting that whilst Auden certainly ‘achieved celebrity ahead of Isherwood,’ this privileged position enabled the poet to serve as a ‘medium’ through which Isherwood’s major themes and concerns might be disseminated: younger writers ‘emulated Isherwood by emulating Auden.’³ Yet the implications of this reassessment remain virtually unexplored by scholars of 1930s literature.

There is, in fact, arguably a great deal of truth in James Berg and Chris Freeman’s assertion that ‘literary critics have not necessarily been Isherwood’s best readers,’⁴ twentieth-century scholarship having failed, for the most part, to recognize either his achievements or his legacy as a queer author. Mid-century approaches to Isherwood’s sexuality, in particular—as typified by D.S. Savage’s toxic critique ‘Christopher Isherwood: The Novelist as Homosexual’ (1979)—often amounted to little more than thinly-veiled homophobia. For Savage, the novels are merely symptomatic of ‘the homosexual regression which affected Isherwood’s entire career.’⁵ The author, as much as his protagonists, is ‘atrophied in an infantile posture’ perpetuated by the behaviours of ‘a cosily reassuring homoerotic phase’ (87). It was a view to which, as we have seen, Valentine Cunningham also subscribed, though for Cunningham, Isherwood’s sexuality was part of a wider and more sinister trend. A sexual conspiracy at the heart of the publishing industry itself, to Cunningham’s mind, an enduringly ‘juvenile homosexuality […] helped to define and motor the Old Boy racket.’⁶ Almost irrespective of merit, according to Cunningham’s theory, volumes were accepted and commissioned, and advances paid out, as ‘sexual alliances actually formed at prep school and sexual habits picked up there cemented the Old Boys together [and] helped keep them in the Permanent Adolescence’ (148). Hynes was at least willing to accord Isherwood some degree of sexual maturity, arguing that the novelist’s propulsion into the sexual mores of Weimar Berlin enabled him ‘to reject childhood and become free and adult.’⁷ Any sense of his being more sympathetic than his peers to the exigencies of Isherwood’s interwar existence, however, are irrevocably undermined by his subsequent characterization of it as ‘an idle, promiscuous, homosexual life’ (177).

In the face of such homophobic hysteria on the part of the critical establishment, recent work on Isherwood has tended to constitute a reaction against literary criticism itself, valorizing and thereby mythologizing the author as much as a ‘pioneer’ of queer activism as of queer fiction, and privileging modes—memoir, interview and documentary—that ‘address Isherwood’s life in a more personal way.’⁸ Casting Isherwood as the ‘voice’⁹ of a post-Stonewall queer community, however, has inevitably led volumes from The Isherwood Century (2000) to its sequel The American Isherwood (2015) to focus on Isherwood’s American period—dating roughly from his naturalization in 1946—to the detriment of any sustained critical engagement with his writings of the long 1930s. It also implies a faultlessness of identification belied by the works themselves. It is, arguably, one of the ironies of Isherwood’s career that even as he emerged—with Christopher and His Kind (1976)—as a representative of post-war queer America, he remained very much defined by a repressive and heteronormative interwar Englishness, his continued efforts at self-construction ‘still determined by his opposition to England and his mother,’¹⁰ and their values. Only through detailed close readings of the English Isherwood do such complexities—and contradictions—surface, however. Returning to the texts themselves with a critical eye, what follows is a concerted effort to resituate Isherwood at the heart of a formative 1930s socio-literary community from which recent emphasis on his life and work in America has seen him temporally and geographically divorced, tracing the self-conscious linguistic enactment of an alternative value system that would structure his identity—as writer and activist—in England and beyond.

Game

It is unsurprising, given Isherwood’s early immersion in the English preparatory- and public-school system, that in his earliest work the term game features prominently in its plural form, as a synonym for ‘sports’ evocative of the athletic traditions of school and college. Yet the contexts within which the term appears are revelling. In All the Conspirators (1928) aptly-named sportsman Victor Page complains to protagonist Philip Lindsay of Cambridge’s ‘super-aesthetes’ who are ‘no earthly at games or anything,’ his tone contemptuous.¹¹ When he finishes speaking, the narrator wryly notes: ‘Victor paused, appealing for Philip’s agreement, charmingly unconscious that he was within miles of the personal’ (26). This ironic exchange supplies the first printed use of the term games in Isherwood’s oeuvre and, in engaging our sympathies for the artist rather than the athlete, it anticipates an authorial attitude to organized sport typical of the later work. This seemingly straightforward sense of the word dominates usage in his second novel—unconventional family saga The Memorial (1932)—in which each of his principal male characters feels himself judged according to his athletic abilities: middle-aged war veteran Edward Blake was, we learn, ‘accused of playing games selfishly’¹² as a schoolboy; Eric Vernon, a generation later, is acutely aware that he is ‘bad at games without any sort of skill or elegance’ (166); and his cousin, Maurice Scriven, is not ‘allowed by the doctor to play games’ (190) whilst at Cambridge, an institution at which, as Isherwood himself reflects in autobiographical novel Lions and Shadows (1938): ‘Literature had its recognized place—as long as you weren’t highbrow about it and could play some game as well’ (53).

For young men schooled in an ‘imperial masculinity’¹³ that privileges physical strength and sporting prowess over intellectual achievement—a ‘masculinity of the games field’¹⁴ that had its roots in the English public-school tradition but was establishing itself as the model for acceptable masculinity throughout Britain and the Empire—to be ‘bad at games’ is not simply to betray physical and even moral weakness. It is to bring into question one’s identification as male, to risk accusations of effeminacy, and even deviant sexuality. We are reminded of Auden’s The Orators (1932), its ‘Address for a Prize-Day’ asserting that boys guilty of excessive love of self are easily identified, since ‘at games they are no earthly use.’¹⁵ Yet, if inadequacy on the sports-field is symptomatic of sexual inversion, both Auden and Isherwood are ready to adapt this stereotype to their own subtly subversive ends. By deploying the ‘poor sportsman’ motif they might insinuate the sexual ‘otherness’ of a character without recourse to what Cunningham sees as a ‘homosexual jargon’ (153) intended to exclude the uninitiated. Indeed, it proves a convenient short-hand between the characters themselves. In Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) Arthur Norris is a little shocked to hear protagonist William Bradshaw express relief at being ‘spared’¹⁶ the horrors of the winter games in Switzerland, but is astute enough to see through William’s contempt: ‘Really, my dear boy, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you carry your disdain of athleticism too far, […] isn’t it all rather a pose?’ (158). In imitation of his author and namesake—Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood—William actively distances himself from games because he knows what people will infer from this—he wants his difference recognized.

The youngest of the Isherwood circle at almost five years the novelist’s junior, Spender also recognizes the implications of an unwillingness or inability to participate in sports, but he is characteristically more ambivalent on the subject. Of the stories that constitute The Burning Cactus (1936) it is in ‘The Cousins’ that this is most apparent. Visiting his extended family for the first time ‘half-German’¹⁷ protagonist Werner is shy but eager to respond to the questions of his two athletic-looking cousins:

Tom now stepped into the little group by the window. ‘I say, what games do you play?’

‘Well, I play chess.’

At this they all laughed, with relief, as though they had been wanting to laugh for some time. Although they laughed at him, they seemed to invite him to begin playing at once the little game of family catch that they were so enjoying.

Bob twisted his feet slightly, standing back on his heels. He seemed to stretch, and as he did so his smile also stretched a little wider.

‘Of course,’ he grinned, ‘like all his family, cousin Werner’s ghastly mad!’

Werner drew himself up stiffly and said plainly and with dignity: ‘If you mean that my stepfather has had to be shut up, that is so.’ (105)

It is typical of the family that even their conversation resembles a game of catch—in the space of his first twenty-four hours in the house Werner is asked twice if he’ll ‘go out and play tennis’ (106), forced to enter into table-talk about ‘big-game hunting’ (111), hears ‘a game of billiards’ (116) suggested by his uncle moments before his aunt cries ‘Let’s play rummy!’ (117), and is taken out hunting by his cousin, whom he nervously follows at a discreet distance, trying desperately ‘not to disturb any game that might happen to be flying or walking around’ (121).

Werner’s admission that he plays only chess provokes laughter from the family but it is implied that their guest is also amused by the discrepancy between Tom’s definition of game and his own: they ‘all’ laugh. It would appear that Werner is ashamed neither of his intellectual bent—indeed, he has just recited Hölderlin from his own translation, and pooh-poohed his cousin’s interest in detective novels—nor any ‘weakness’ it might imply There is none of the brutality here that characterizes the interrogations undergone by Geoffrey Brand at the hands of his school-fellows in Spender’s The Backward Son (1940). Much like Werner, Geoffrey is early described as being ‘different from the others’ and he too comes to identify his difference with the apparent contradictions of his Anglo-German descent during a period of keen anti-German feeling in England.¹⁸ When he announces that his brother is to join the school, the inevitable questions are asked of Geoffrey:

‘How old is he?’

‘Ten.’

‘Only a year younger than you. Gosh, your parents must have enjoyed themselves. What’s he like?’

‘He’s very clever.’

‘Clever! We don’t want clever chaps here. […] What games does he play?’

‘He’s never played any games. Besides, he’s not very strong.’

‘Not very strong! We don’t want any weaklings here!’ said Fallow contemptuously.

Suddenly he had a vision of them all, like a pack of dogs, let loose on his brother, and […] he felt an anxious pity.

‘Perhaps he won’t be able to play games at all, […] his sight is bad. […] Hereditary. The doctors say that we Schroeders all have ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Language, Identity and Performance
• Part I: Christopher Isherwood and the Auden Generation
• Part II: Evelyn Waugh and the Bright Young People
• Part III: Patrick Hamilton and the Fitzrovians
• Afterword: James Hanley and the Liverpool-Irish
• Back Matter