SOURCE: Frazier, Adrian. “Queering the Irish Renaissance: The Masculinities of Moore, Martyn, and Yeats.” In Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, edited by Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, pp. 8-38. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Frazier discusses Martyn's relationship with George Moore in an examination of the connections between aestheticism, homosexuality, and the Irish Literary Revival.]

Something interesting has been happening in recent years in Victorian studies that has not until lately made much of a dent in studies of the Irish Literary Revival. Scholars engaged in women's studies, accustomed to defining emergent forms of modern female identity against a patriarchal norm, began to question the unity of that norm, and moved from the construction of female identities to the study of the forms and transformations of Victorian male identities. At the same time, scholars engaged in gay or queer studies, often inspired by Foucault's History of Sexuality, tried to document the shift Foucault places in the late nineteenth century from sexe to sexualité: the historical moment of the medicalization of sexuality with its typologies of “inversion,” and the criminalization of something now for the first time called “homosexuality.” In the wake of Foucault's History have come studies by Ed Cohen, Christopher Craft, Richard Dellamora, Jonathan Dollimore, Linda Dowling—an entire A-to-Z of guidebooks to the “higher sodomy,” “the Dorian Mode,” “the Urnings,” and so on. Central to most of these studies are the figures of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis: the first created the theory, the second the practice and art, and the third the pathology of new ways of being male.

Now, it seems, an explanation is needed as to why these present academic interests of Victorian scholars have not hitherto been taken into account by those of us in Irish studies.¹ George Moore, Edward Martyn, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce all found themselves out in reading Pater. It is fair to say that each of these Irish writers styled himself more on the figure of Wilde than that on, let's say, Thomas Davis. And Havelock Ellis lived in the Temple when Moore, Martyn, and Yeats all lived there; while working on Sexual Inversion, he shared rooms with Arthur Symons, “boon companion,” to use Moore's term, of GM and WBY. In short, those males most identified with the deliberate creation of an “Irish Renaissance” were well schooled in the creation of alternative male identities.

Evidently the two features are connected: it is often remarked that cultural nationalism was an offshoot of London “Decadence” as much as of the Dublin “Irish Party”; begotten by an inflow of Wilde upon an upwelling of John O'Leary, Yeats's conception was of an elitist, aesthetic, and nonparliamentary movement. The way in which the dainty five-foot-three figure of Lionel Johnson floated on the arm of Yeats from the cells of Urnings to those of Fenians is emblematic: Johnson was at the center of homosexual circles at Oxford, where he was friends with Simeon Solomon in 1888² and fell in love with Wilde in 1890.³ By 1891 he had shifted to London and the Rhymers' Club, from which he became a leading “Celtic” poet who traveled four times to Dublin, on the last to speak at a 23 May 1898 rally celebrating the centenary of the 1798 rebellion.⁴ This aesthetic invasion of the Irish movement was obvious enough to people at the time: the veterans of the Irish movement, the O'Duffys and Morans, spoke sourly of the effeminate character of the new Irish literature: in the current code of deprecation, these poets “crooned” or “lisped”; real men, the implication was, shouted and argufied. Nineties cultural nationalism was, after all, susceptible to being thought of as an appropriation of the female sphere, “culture”; nationalism pure and simple, and mid-nineteenth-century Irish cultural nationalism, was male—a matter of guns behind the hedge, cigars in the lobby at Westminster, and ballads to Mother Ireland. The Celtic mist was often created by cigarettes in a parlor near the Strand.

While there is material for making the history of these Irish writers part of the history of sexuality as expressed in late nineteenth-century English literature—indeed, they are crucial to that history—to do so would not fit “naturally” into the larger narrative of Irish literary studies: the emergence and later fortunes of a national identity, as it is created or critiqued by Irish writers, in such a fashion as to make a marked difference between Irish literature and English literature (traditions, subjects, genres, styles peculiar to Ireland); in short, the national narrative. For this reason, though Victorian scholars and queer theorists such as Alan Sinfield can now speak of our age as The Wilde Century, Wilde hardly fits into the national narrative of Irish literature at all unless, as in The Field Day Anthology, Wilde and Shaw are roped back into the narrative by calling them the “London Exiles” (if the first Home Rule Bill had passed in 1886, would Wilde have found fulfillment in late Victorian Dublin?). One could put issues of male sexual identity, in the case of Moore, Martyn, and Yeats, into the nationalist master-narrative, but this should not be necessary, nor may it be desirable: is sexual desire a figuration of politics, or politics a displacement of sexual desire? The question can only be answered case by case.

Shaw says that a conquered nation is like a man with a broken arm; he doesn't like having it set, but it has to be done, and he can think of nothing else until it is put right, while “a healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones.”⁵ While this pained obsession with national identity was the central fact of life for many Irish people in the late nineteenth century, it wasn't the only pain, the only obsession, of everyone. At any rate, would it be a sign of health if it were the obsession of all scholars today? A literary history that was complicit in earlier decades in the sexualization of power is now more ready to recognize the power of sexuality, and thus to cross the national narrative with counternarratives, not of nations, but of genders, sexualities, localities, and congeries of extranational interests. Partly this dispersal of scholarly interest is the result of the ordinary scholarly desire to provide a map of the past that better fits the contours of fact, contours beyond the broad national highway so often traveled, and partly, no doubt, it results from the desire to multiply possibilities for the future by showing the multiplicity of the past. The nationalisms that seemed in the late nineteenth century to be liberationist, in the late twentieth often seem oppressive, inelastic, violently cyclical, and xenophobic.

Part of each of the forms of European nationalism after the French Revolution was an attempt to control sexuality, to establish “national” norms of sexuality, and to create a sexual dimension of its own, as George Mosse explains, “through the advocacy of beauty, its stereotypes of ideal men and women.”⁶ As nationalism was a quasi-military movement, which had to create unity by crushing forms of diversity within its borders and by entering into rivalries for spheres of power beyond those borders, it also promoted only certain kinds of masculinity: “manliness” involved excellence in the propagation of new citizens, in combat against aliens, in the expansion of an industrial economy, and in the regulation of respectability in the home—these were the duties of citizen; they went with the vote. It is this version of manliness in England, whether created by Thomas Arnold at Rugby School or Charles Kingsley in his campaign for “muscular Christianity,” that Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, and company rebelled against. The popular and political side of Irish nationalism often simply received and reinforced this rhetoric of militant manliness characteristic of other national movements, even though many of the individual nationalists, especially those in the cultural movement, might be better understood in terms of the rebellion against the Protestant, respectable, no-nonsense, muscular, married, procreative manliness of Kingsley. Like the other Decadents, some of the Irish aesthetes were “engaged in a ‘passive protest’ against an imperialist ethic that championed the principles of duty, sacrifice, and self-sufficiency.”⁷ There is consequently a richness in the possibilities of masculinity during this period—when there were multiple forms of sexual practice (and non-practice) and shifting ways of acting out gender—before the emergent model of sexual identities (as hetero-, homo-, or bi-sexual) came into force in the early twentieth century, that makes our categorical identities inadequate: the more one studies the lives of certain particular authors, the more one concludes that the categories underdetermine the life studied; they fail in explanation, and succeed in distortion. There are the gay Irish patriots like Wilde, Hugh Lane, and Roger Casement; the aesthetic, donnish revolutionaries like Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh; and also the specific, uncategorical masculinities of Moore, Martyn, and Yeats, which are the subject of this paper.

Moore's own writing will be at the center of the following outline of the subject for two reasons, one an accident, the other a necessity. The accident is that I am writing a biography of Moore, and consequently have more to say about him. The necessity is the result of the fact that Moore was famously indiscreet: he left behind confession after confession, in which he outed himself, then outed Martyn, and finally made intriguing insinuations about Yeats. Martyn, on the other hand, in his last will and testament, delivered his bodily remains to a teaching hospital and his literary remains to the Carmelites in Clarendon Street, who employed the carefully Catholic Edward Gwynn to write a biography sanitized of names, dates, and, as much as possible, facts. And once the biography was finished by Gwynn, the Carmelites lost Martyn's papers. About Yeats, there is a great deal more to be known, but the subject is so large that it is possible here only to make a few suggestions and to direct readers to books like Elizabeth Cullingford's Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry, while they await R. F. Foster's forthcoming biography of the poet.

2

George Moore has left several accounts of his first reading of Pater's Marius the Epicurean, “the book to which I owe the last temple of my soul.”⁸ He had come up to Moore Hall in February 1885, after the “Castle Season” in Dublin, where he was doing research for A Drama in Muslin. He had promised his mother to stay with her until the buds came to the beech trees in spring, before returning to his Strand lodgings in London. While she knitted and he read reviews of A Mummer's Wife, he came across a notice for Pater's book, and having heard of Pater as a writer of beautiful books, and seeing himself despised in London as a writer of ugly Zolaistic ones, he sent off for it. Its first lesson for him, he says, was that “by helping one's mother with her white and purple wools … it was possible to win … an urbane and and feminine refinement.”⁹ He was so excited that he wanted to write to Pater, or short of that, to get back to London and hear what was said of the book in the little salon held every Tuesday afternoon by Mary and Mabel Robinson. By late April, he had broken loose from his mother, and gotten back to London.

When he went to the Robinsons, he found Vernon Lee and Henry James with Mary and Mabel. GM steered the conversation around to Marius, one of the greatest books ever written, he blustered.¹⁰ What most excited Moore in the ensuing discussion was not James's assessment that the center of consciousness was wrongly placed, but the news that Pater himself had recently become a neighbor of the Robinsons, just a few doors down at 12 Earl's Court Terrace; indeed, he often called for tea. Tuesday after Tuesday GM returned, but it was probably not until July that he finally met the author he so adored.¹¹

Lawrence Evans is correct in saying Pater met Moore's “assaults on his acquaintance with studied reserve”:¹² it was characteristic of the man. Pater had an “unhappy and even furtive timidity (so excessive that he could never look another man in the eye).”¹³ But Moore managed to get himself invited to Pater's home, and on the third visit, Pater took him for a walk in Kensington Gardens. GM was “spying on Pater,” trying to get him to drop his mask. But despite his “genius for intimacy,” GM could not get the “Vicarage Verlaine” to share his “real self,” except for a moment in the street, when he told Pater that his “Prince of Court Painters” was “the most beautiful thing ever written”;¹⁴ then Pater sighed with pleasure, “‘My dear Moore!’ He put his hand upon my shoulder and the mask dropped a little.”¹⁵

What was behind the mask of the beautiful stylist? A man who had strange desires—who conceived as a most beautiful moment the last night in the life of Flavian, when, to keep the dying man warm, Marius slept in his bed—desires, that is, not to be safely satisfied except in death, or in intimacies of understanding between men, exchanged through the perfection of phrases and sensations refined from grosser forms of fulfillment.¹⁶ After the interception of an 1874 letter to his student William Money Hardinge, signed “Yours Lovingly” (which led to Hardinge's being sent down), Pater conducted himself in life with caution, but in his work, he continued to make beautiful certain forms of masculinity and types of affection that were a great stimulus to his readers. They found that what they had done, or wished to do, was not ugly, but aesthetic, antique, refined, the very mark of an artist. And Moore was one of those inspired by Pater to believe that a boy more comfortable helping his mother with her needlework than following after his father in dueling, Arabian caravanning, and electioneering might have the true makings of the highest culture. Moore was grooming himself to become like the man addressed in Tennyson's poem “On One Who Affected an Effeminate Manner.”¹⁷

After completing A Drama in Muslin (a reviewer shocked by the lesbian ecstacies of Hilda scornfully asked, “Is George Moore a man?”), GM began a novel that was effectively an offering to Pater, A Mere Accident. The hero of the novel, John Norton, is modeled on Edward Martyn, as will be evident later in this essay. Norton had among his books at college Walter Pater's studies of the Renaissance, though Marius had been banned by the school authorities for its “realistic suggestion.”¹⁸ John Norton later reads it anyway, and recommends it to a clergyman, William Hare, for the depiction of beautiful altar boys. Norton confesses to Hare its effect on him: “It seemed to me I was made known to myself … the rapture of knowledge came upon me that our temporal life might be beautiful; that, in a word, it was possible somehow to come to terms with life.”¹⁹ It was inconceivable that anything could be more beautiful than the death of Flavian. While Norton adores altar boys and dying adolescents, he finds women hateful. There is “something very degrading, something very gross” in the idea of sexual relations with women;²⁰ besides that, they are “cunning and mean.”²¹ But his mother takes very seriously her duty to get John married, and his duty to propagate an heir. It is not good enough for her that John makes a will leaving something to all the tenants. Out of dread of his mother's plans, John considers entering the priesthood, except that he would then have to listen to women in the confession, “a kind of marriage bureau”;²² instead, he contemplates becoming a Carmelite monk—he likes the dress, the dangling rope belt, and the tonsure. Anything but marriage.

Putting aside the question of sexual proclivities, for Martyn, Norton, and, indeed, Moore, marriage meant that life had no other meaning than the perpetuation of life. In Schopenhauer's terms, it was surrender to the world as will, loss of the world as idea. In Pater's terms, it was an unbeautiful, merely natural life; the aesthetic life was against nature, above nature. For similar reasons, Yeats sometimes envied homosexuals like Verlaine, while still conceiving them to be defective or immoral. “Without some vice or deficiency,” he worried that it might not be possible to make that “complete renunciation of the world” necessary for complete self-expression.²³ Creation was set against procreation, art against nature, and perversity against normality. To be an artist, it was perhaps necessary to explore other ways of being male.

However, Norton like Martyn is really no artist; he has no “spiritual procreancy,” to use a Paterian term.²⁴ He does not have quite the same aesthetic alibi for his aversion to matrimony as Moore and Yeats possessed. Norton has scholarly, architectural, and literary projects, but they “always met with failure, with disapproval.”²⁵ As a result Mrs. Norton is able, in the course of the plot, to so contrive matters that Kitty Hare, the daughter of John's closest male friend and his confidante, is placed constantly in the propinquity of her son, until at last a kiss occurs, followed by a then-obligatory proposal: there is nothing in life for him to do, it seems, but marry. Now the crisis anticipated by readers is, What will a homosexual man actually do in a heterosexual marriage? This eventuality is astonishingly prevented when Kitty Hare is raped by a tramp on the road. She commits suicide, and John Norton, rescued by mere accident from marriage, resolves that he shall become a secular celibate: “the world shall be my monastery.”²⁶

The climactic incident of the rape, which gives the novel its title, is totally unforeshadowed on the literal level: the rapist appears and disappears from the cast of characters and from the plot with the rape. On a nonliteral, symbolic level, it may be that the rape is foreshadowed by Norton's feeling that sexual intercourse is “something very degrading, something very gross.”²⁷ Whether this feeling about penetration also covers the case of male-male relations, and Norton feels himself to have been raped, one cannot say, because not only does Moore in this hitherto naturalist novel suddenly project symbolistically Norton's feelings about sexual intercourse, but Moore also at this point shifts the center of consciousness from the hero to the violated heroine. We enter her nightmarish hallucinations; we depart from Norton's high-principled, dogmatic, but passion-driven mind.

In spite of its interesting premise, the novel has so many tedious and inept passages in addition to these awkward surprises that there could be no argument for its success, but in a 31 December 1887 letter Moore still objected after Shaw wrote in a Pall Mall Gazette review that GM invented the psychology of John Norton. No, Moore complained, he had known the original of Norton since he was a boy; Martyn/Norton had confided to him “his most secret thoughts.” Yes, the rape was improbable, but GM chose it because it was “the most violent blow to [Norton's] character that could be imagined” (one might ordinarily have thought the violent blow was to Kitty).²⁸ By the time of Shaw's review, Moore had accepted that the novel was not the great breakthrough he imagined,²⁹ but earlier, upon its publication in the spring, he sent it to Pater, with a request for a review in The Guardian.

Pater was not about to associate himself with such a thing, neither discreet nor beautiful. In a letter of August 1887 he made GM understand that “descriptions of violent incidents and abnormal states of mind do not serve the purpose of art.”³⁰ After reading this letter, GM held out no further hope for the book: it had failed both as a gift and as a novel. And he despaired at having disgraced himself before Pater. Here Pater had revealed, by means of Marius, his desire for intimacy with men. GM had tried to show, through his own answering novel, that he was sympathetic—in fact, enthusiastic—and Pater basically acted as if he was shocked at the thought that Moore might be homosexual or might broach that unmentionable subject in print. Pater would identify himself aesthetically as a homosexual, without identifying publicly with homosexuals. Moore countered by identifying with homosexuals, but stopped short, he thought, of identifying himself as homosexual.³¹ It was a wretchedly embarrassing impasse on both sides—two men lodged in a doorway, unable to come out, or go back in.

However, A Mere Accident was not the only book Moore was stimulated to write by the disclosure of new possibilities in Marius. Within a week of writing his dismissive reproof in August 1887, Pater was reading an article in Time by Arthur Symons on Pater's recent Imaginary Portraits, and noticed in the pages of that journal some chapters of Confessions of A Young Man.³² These were chapters about the young GM in Paris, how he loved his fellow student in Julien's atelier, Lewis Marshall, of the ample shoulders and soft violet eyes, who lived off the earnings of Alice Howard, a young English prostitute. Unable to bear his failure to compete with Alice for the love of Lewis, or with Lewis for prizes in painting, GM began to think, he says, of love and death, and retreated to his mother's house in London. Returning months later, now dressed like Lewis, with manners like Lewis, he wanted only to find Lewis. They moved into an apartment together, GM paying the rent. But GM's impotent defeat as an artist left him in despair.

Having read these chapters, Pater wrote a second time to Moore, and admired his appreciation of French poets and his account of himself.³³ After the book was published, Pater wrote “My dear audacious Moore” a third time, praising GM's “Aristophanic joy” but wondering at the “questionable shape” in which GM presented himself, “‘shape’—morally I mean.”³⁴ Once again Pater was trying to disclaim his followers, but there can be little doubt that GM was trying to follow Pater and go him one better.

The portrait Moore presents of himself in this remarkably influential book is as one who came into the world “bearing no impress, like a smooth sheet of wax.”³⁵ Is he alluding to the uncertainty of his sexual identity, which he later confessed to his brother? That seems to have been the story as he develops it in the volumes of Hail and Farewell. His mother thought he was ugly; his father concluded he was stupid. He could hardly believe anyone could love him. When at a Catholic school in England, a tall, bald-headed priest, on pretense of helping him after classes with a Latin translation, tried to put his hand in George's trouser pocket; young George was irritated, older George says, and took revenge by telling tales in the confessional (a secret not kept from the headmaster: the Latin teacher soon vanished from the faculty). Later his uncle Jim Brown, a painter of vast canvases of naked goddesses, walked the streets of London teaching the boy which women were beautiful. George wanted to be like Jim Brown, a painter and amorist. GM went to Paris as soon as he reached his twenty-first birthday, and there fell in with the Lewis Marshall about whom Pater read in Time. Lewis and Alice go on a summer outing with him to Bas Meudon. Lewis is a glorious swimmer, and Alice is not, so GM remains in the shallows with her, admiring Lewis “disporting himself in midstream.”³⁶ George then nearly drowns Alice—just meant to be a friendly ducking, he pleaded afterwards. Later, tiring of the studio, he stayed in with Alice, watching her bathe and dress after Lewis went off to sketch. In the autumn GM foots the bill for a trip to a hotel in the Barbizon woods, where they all stay in one bedroom. While Lewis goes off to sleep, George poses a curious question to Alice: would it make any difference whether she had to swallow “something incredibly nasty” from the body of Lewis or from the body of George? A great deal, she said, and woke up Lewis to see if he would not feel the same way about her effluvia vis-à-vis that of George. No, a “crap was the same all the world over, and he would prefer to swallow a pinch rather than a pound.”³⁷

Eventually GM struggles out of this hopeless entrancement by Lewis. First, in a grand bivouac in Alice's apartment, with Lewis present, GM has sex with “la belle Hollandaise,” a grand demi-mondaine. Second, he wins the friendship of Manet, a far greater painter than Lewis (whose skill as a painter was as inferior to that of Manet as it was superior to that of Moore). And third, having won the attentions of a great lady of the world and a great artist, GM is confident enough to kick Lewis out of his apartment. By GM's last evening in Paris before being forced back to Ireland by the rent-strike some time in late 1879, he takes Lewis out to dinner, along with Lewis's latest amour, the model Marie. Lewis, we are told, still has his “beautiful, slim, manly figure.” In the course of the dinner, GM, with his genius for intimacy, draws Lewis into conversation, and soon they were “absorbed in one another and in art.” Marie is bored. Moore is triumphant: he has for once stolen Lewis from a woman. “It was always so,” he says.³⁸ By his own account, it never had been. But henceforth GM would not be quite so fatally enthralled with one man, and while he might continue to circulate his desire for men through women, he managed to keep the men and the women in separate pairings.

Part of the agony of this Paris period of undecided sexuality comes out in GM's imitations of Swinburne in Flowers of Passion (1877). A number of the poems have the same themes, and even the same titles, as Swinburne's most transgressive works: “The Hermaphrodite,” “Laus Veneris,” and “The Triumph of Time.”³⁹ It is a polymorphously perverse book. There are poems with straightforward references to incest, necrophilia, cunnilingus, lesbianism, and, not to be forgotten, the drowning of a woman-lover. The poems are ineptly obvious. Consider the dialogue called “Hendecasyllables,” in which Carmen and Eliane in the “absolute love time” say, basically, it is that time of day, let us go into the garden together and get away from these men; they are false anyway; we'll find someplace where there's a bed and lots of flowers; then let's have sex.⁴⁰ No wonder Edmund Yates warned readers of the World (28 November 1877) not to leave the book lying around the house; in fact, he recommended it be “burnt by the common hangman, while its writer was whipped by the cart's tail.”⁴¹ For all that, the Sapphic poems serve that function Isabelle de Courtivron discovers in the lesbian lyrics of French poets like Gautier and Baudelaire: “men whose sexual investments are in women use representations of lesbian sexuality to express dissatisfaction with conventional male gender norms,”⁴² though GM, with part of his “investments” banked in men, used them also as a currency of gender exchange, to play with the possibilities of same-sex desire.⁴³ But while androgyny and homosexuality might pass as fashionable in Paris, and—in a highly classicized, prosodically complex Swinburnean form—get by as tolerable in London, Moore's rather more gauche projections, his cheerfully enthusiastic imitation perversities, were assaulted by reviewers as “dirty, emasculate, loathsome.” This was a side of himself he had to rein in upon his return to England in 1880, at least until after reading a novel by the professor at Brasenose College. Once he has studied Pater's Marius the Epicurean, he was able to approach the subject with an ironically tender sympathy for the troubles of his own youth, now safely past.

One of the formal features of Confessions GM may have picked up from Pater is its mode of address, its attempt to call into being a new community of men. Thais Morgan borrows a term from Eve Sedgwick to describe this feature in Pater's prose: an “aesthetic minoritizing discourse,” a system of subcodes by which male beauty is “preferred and validated,” and thus a readership within the general readership is “presupposed and invoked at the same time it is being constructed in the discourse itself.”⁴⁴ This double-voiced rhetoric—art criticism for the masses, homoerotic self-affirmation for the minority—proved rather too emphatically audible in the famous conclusion to the first edition of Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), with its urgent message to be sure to spend life in passionate moments, “for those moments' sake.” In the 1877 edition, Pater was pressured into deleting it, “because it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.”⁴⁵ Moore was much more explicit still: he deliberately addressed himself, as a former young man, to other young men. He divides his readers into two groups: the hypocrites (clubbable, married men, who never acknowledged instinctual desires) and “young men.”⁴⁶ To the latter he recommends the pleasures of the “woman of thirty” as a great teacher in life: it was such a woman that finally taught him how to be a man. And once he knew, he discovered that the later nineteenth century in England was a paradise for the single young man of means: he is “feted, flattered, and adored,” women drop at his feet.⁴⁷ One may continue to contemplate the slim-hipped perfections of the male ephebe, whom GM calls “Lovelace”—not GM's subjective self-presentation, as some have thought, but the male sex object of his dreams: “clean about the hips and his movements must be naturally caressing.”⁴⁸ In 1886, a year or so before the composition of Confessions, Marc-André Raffalovich, at the time Oscar Wilde's young friend, published a plausibly homoerotic poem called “Lovelace”: in the poem, Lovelace once said “No” but now has come to love all things dangerous.⁴⁹ GM, while possibly using the name of the cavalier poet as a symbol for the male love-object, was not so in love with danger: he preached the risqué, not the risky, life.

At this point, GM's formation of his own masculinity was, by his own reckoning, more or less complete, and the despondencies of the artless, unlovable youth were gone. He was still fighting to be something other than a husband, a worker, and a dutiful subject, but his chosen form of perversity would be to see women as objects of pleasure, the intellectual always leading to the bodily pleasure; and men as associates in intimacy, the bodily desire always leading to the intellectual pleasure. Far from being ashamed of where he had come from, sexually speaking, or where he had arrived at, GM was (like Pater at least in this) setting up himself up as a teacher in the aesthetics of passionate masculinity. And the text he chose most to explicate was a liberating motto of Manet: “To be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed.”⁵⁰

3

What were the relationships among George Moore, W. B. Yeats, and Edward Martyn? In Ave Moore gives a description of his friendships that makes them sound more than homosocial, less than homosexual: they were his “boon companions,” a term he takes curious pains to define.⁵¹ A famous woman of fashion (Mery Laurent or Marie Pelligrini) had been expounding to Moore the difficulty of finding an amant de coeur (perhaps suggesting that Moore might try his luck in filling the post with credit) when he admitted he had the same problem—it was so hard to find a man who lived up to one's standards, someone who was not married, not too old or too young, someone who would stay up all night and into the morning smoking cigars and “aestheticizing,” someone who could say unexpected things. Any one of Mery's lovers would do for him as well (though the trade of George Moore for Mery Laurent may have startled the gentlemen in question), but in the British Isles finding a talented, pleasing, and devoted bon ami was harder going.

Martyn, he concedes, was a single man of means who smoked, and he had some taste in art, but not much. Furthermore, he was a clumsy, overweight person, “obsessed with a certain part of his person which he speaks of as his soul.”⁵² More seriously still, one could not talk with him about women. Symons and Yeats, however, were delicate, refined men of temperament—no gross clumsy maleness there, and no dogma. The defect of Symons was that while the good fairy blessed him in his cradle with all the literary gifts, the bad fairy took away his power to express them in conversation: he wrote beautifully of French poetry, but his talk was “as commonplace as Goldsmith”—so he failed the test of being able to say unexpected things. Yeats, on the other hand, would rise from sleep at any hour to aestheticize, and, his raven lock falling over his forehead and his beautiful white teeth showing, he talked with genius (the scene of an importunate GM waking Yeats in his bed, only to aestheticize is interesting). WBY could not get himself into his poetry, owing to the restrictions of his style, Moore claimed. But if Yeats withheld himself and his mysteries from readers, that was fine, since he kept nothing from GM, who wanted him only for blessings of male companionship.⁵³

There is a strong current of male-male desire in these relationships, expressing itself in praise not only for the beauty of the boon companion, but for his sense of the beautiful in art and life. Desire expresses itself through emulation of the style of maleness of the male beloved. Martyn, for instance, will pattern himself on many of Moore's tastes: he will collect Degas and Corot, and learn to aestheticize about them, somewhat convincingly in the opinion of Yeats.⁵⁴ He will write plays after GM writes plays, under the direction of GM. It was not an emulation in one direction only. If Martyn learned art and literature from man of culture Moore, Moore was taught music by Martyn, who dragged him to his first Wagner concert. At the time, only months after the first trial of Oscar Wilde, Moore featured his new submission to the “great sensualist” Wagner as a homosexual seduction by a dark-eyed Bohemian violinist in a European cafe: “a strange germination progressing within me, thoughts and desires that I dread … repudiation is impossible.”⁵⁵ From August 1893 onward, Moore and Martyn made several trips together to Bayreuth, as hilariously recalled in Hail and Farewell! The book portrays the two as ill-assorted art lovers, Moore always wanting to chase after women met in hotels and on trains, and Martyn trying to head him off, and keep him within the vicinity of a Church and a good breakfast. One infers the attraction between them from all the evidence of things that should drive them apart and don't; one sees how alike they are, or have become through friendship, by all the ways their differences prove annoying.

In the case of Yeats and Moore, the spirit of emulation was also at work on both sides. Moore's recruitment into the Irish cause was assisted by his desire to emulate Yeats, to collaborate in plots and be of service to him. By Yeats he was led—astray, he finally judged—into the pursuit of a “style,” in the Yeatsian sense of a single personal filter through which only some parts of life would pass. And Yeats, on his side, while finding no beauty in Moore or Moore's style, hungered after GM's power of public certainty, what he later dismissively called GM's “demagogic virtues”: his logic, courage, honesty, and ability to defy public opinion and turn it in a new course.⁵⁶ Defeated in love for Maud Gonne, ashamed of his “womanish dreamy introspection,” Yeats wanted to cultivate these “masculine” features at the end of the Nineties:⁵⁷ they certainly proved useful in the later course of the Irish dramatic movement. Yeats was always remarkably acquisitive of attributes of other men. His Autobiography is in part not only the story of the great but incomplete artistic personalities of the “Tragic Generation,” but also the story of how WBY, coming to know Wilde, Symons, Mathers, and others, came to possess their attributes and to complete their artistry in himself. In the same fashion, he was attracted to Moore, or something in him, and acquired that attribute of polemical manliness and brusque domineering public style.

This emulative form of ego identification is the way in which contemporary literary influences effectively occurred. The psychodynamics of literary influence may center on the father/son relationship when one speaks of the tradition, as Bloom does, but perhaps we need an erotics of literary influence to cover the case of contemporaries. Love of the man led to imitation of the work; the imitation revealed to the beloved one's love. Surely this is one of the dynamics behind male canon formation during the late nineteenth century, when there was a large and talented group of women writers appearing to rival males. Men with an ambition to write Literature generally did not imitate the styles of women (or at least admit to doing so) but used women to procreate images of their styles. Yeats's employment of Lady Gregory to write plays he inspired and then signed is a complicated instance of such self-transmission; Moore's coaching of Julia Davis in the composition of the naturalist Dr. Phillips (1887) is another. In any case, the homosocial bonds of the “boon companions” insured that the Masters would be men.

4

Edward Martyn was the only one of the three Irish writers under consideration who loved men only. Not far from Coole, Martyn had a large unencumbered estate with a twelfth century tower and, by the early 1880s, a twenty thousand-pound gothic-style annex, erected at his mother's insistence in order to suit Edward's future bride. She could not admit to herself, as Moore puts it, “any more than you can, reader, or myself, that we come into the world made as it were to order.” Edward was “averse to women from the time he was born. It was not her fault; it was not his. Education could do nothing. His will to be different was helpless.”⁵⁸

When Edward went up to Oxford in 1879, many undergraduates were under the spell of Pater. They admired with Pater the beauty of the Catholic ritual; they followed Pater in believing that the wisest spend their life in art and song. But what most caught Edward's ear in the Paterian moment at Oxford was the celebration of Greek ideals of male beauty and Greek relations among men. John Addington Symonds could have been speaking about Martyn when he reproached Benjamin Jowett with the “dangers” of an education in the Greats at Oxford: the boys “discover that what they had been blindly groping after was once an admitted possibility—not in a mean hole or corner—but that the race whose literature forms the basis of their higher culture, lived in that way … derived courage, drew intellectual illumination, took their first step in the paths which led to great achievements and the arduous pursuit of virtue”;⁵⁹ in short, that homosexuality in the greatest of Western cultures was not a crime but a cultural ideal. Edward took a tour to Greece, collected replicas of Greek statues, came to believe Greek the most beautiful of all languages (including Irish), and began a poem with a Greek setting. After the ministrations of Edward Gwynn and the Carmelites, there is little evidence remaining by which one could make an informed guess about whether Martyn entered into any “Greek” relationships himself at this time.

It is true, possibly during his time at Oxford, that he made friends with another student, Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock, an eccentric Estonian homosexual, who kept a toad for a pet, carried a golden vial of perfume, and, as early as 1881, published love poems to boys:⁶⁰

And if some maiden beautiful
          Become thy love and joy,
Think on that passionate male heart
          That loved thee when a boy.

When he received the down-and-out homosexual artist Simeon Solomon, Stenbock appeared at the door in a “magnificent blood-red silk robe embroidered in gold and silver.”⁶¹ Inside, he began swinging a censer before an altar covered with lilies. Then he played religious music on the harmonium. Finally Solomon was sent off with a five-pound note. This spectacular man became Edward's close friend right up to Stenbock's death in 1895. Yeats recalls a dinner with Stenbock, “scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men,” and, previous to GM, Edward's “close friend.”⁶²

Gwynn's vigilance failed in one respect in his biography: he quotes a letter to illustrate Edward's regrettably unorthodox attitude to women and love-making that at the same time shows his preference for Stenbock. In autumn 1892 an old friend and relative planning a visit to Tillyra had written to ask Edward if he would arrange to invite at the same time “Mrs. and Miss L.”⁶³ No, Edward replies, a person of his “modes of life or oddities” could not “turn his philosophic abode into a temple of Hymen.” Surely, however, his friend would come over to meet “Stenbock and Bond.”⁶⁴ Edward had by then begun to play religious music on the organ and to collect pictures by Simeon Solomon, though not to wear Chinese silk robes; still he could, as well as the ladies, provide entertainment for his kinsman.

After Edward failed out of Oxford, his mother placed him under the manly wing of George Moore, whose only recommendation must have been that he was the oldest son of her best friend Mary Blake Moore.⁶⁵ After 1880 GM then began to spend part of his annual autumn visit to Ireland with Edward at Tillyra. When Edward confided that he could not, being what he was, marry, and so what would he do with this huge annex under construction, GM told him to leave it unbuilt and follow his instinct—Edward was “startled by the idea.”⁶⁶ Edward was despondent: “I am too different from other people, he used to say, ever to be a success.”⁶⁷ Back in London, GM tried to help him along: he brought him to the Robinsons, the haunt of Pater; and he recommended to William Rossetti the poems Edward was writing (“totally different from anyone else's poetry”).⁶⁸

It is not certain that these were the poems with Greek settings that Edward, after a terrible crisis, burned in late 1885. He told his friends poems like “Pheidas” and “Pericles,” harmless though they might seem, were dangerous to faith and morals; at least they did not “conduce to the glory of God”—and no doubt they did not.⁶⁹ At this point Edward became fanatical about his Catholicism. Within weeks he withdrew his subscription from his friend Henry Barnett's Court and Society Review because his friend George Moore might publish there a novel harmful to the faith.⁷⁰ He began to write to his bishop for permission to read books on the index—perhaps Voltaire, lampooned in his next literary work, Morgante. In GM's opinion, things had come to such a pass that “when there is any question of religion, he ought to be under lock and key.”⁷¹ In burning his poems, it was as if he tried to burn himself at the stake: the good celibate Catholic punished the bad homosexual pagan.

It is not possible to know exactly what provoked the crisis in Martyn in 1885. GM delighted in “outing” his friend, and in the last narration of the donnée at the heart of A Mere Accident, written after his friendship with Martyn had ended, GM makes the crisis not the rape of a woman but a crush on a man. In “Hugh Monfret,” the hero, pressured to marry, invites a trusted older man, the headmaster from his school, and a convert to Catholicism, to visit his home in order to intercede on his behalf with Mrs. Monfret. The schoolmaster does what he can, but he also urges Hugh to keep an open mind—perhaps he will see something different in the schoolmaster's own daughter, now at a convent. He is first joined, however, by his aesthetic son Guy, and Hugh quickly begins to fall in love. After some delightful travels with Guy, Hugh finds that the sister has become his mother's houseguest. Together Hugh and the sister translate a medieval poem for Guy to illustrate. As a result of their long hours together, and their appearance at a county ball, Mrs. Monfret tells Hugh that the girl is in a compromised position. Hugh does what he thinks is his duty, and proposes, sealing his engagement with a brotherly kiss. But, in a Calais hotel, he finds himself utterly unable to go through with what a wife expects of a husband. In despair, Hugh goes to her father and confesses the nature of his attachment for the son Guy, rather than for the daughter he married. Hugh Monfret even half-heartedly argues for the rightness of the feelings nature gave him—they spring from admiration and true affection. No other feelings were possible for him, much as he might esteem the daughter. But the father—a clergyman, one must recall—tells the unhappy, honest young man that he may never fulfill his desires; they are forbidden by the Church. While accepting that decree, Hugh suggests that lapses from what the law expects (that all sexual intercourse shall be for the sake of propagation) should not in theory be any worse for homosexuals than for heterosexuals, and, Lord knows, the latter's adulteries were common enough, both with prostitutes and within the ranks of the married and respectable. He even imagines, as the story ends, that there was probably a time in the life of the schoolmaster, perhaps in North Africa, where he could not resist the attractions of an Arab boy.⁷²

I don't know that Martyn fell in love with an aesthetic young man like Guy, or was pushed toward marriage with the sister of a boy he loved, or ever confessed to same-sex desire to such a clergyman, or what he did on his many travels in the Mediterranean. But whatever the actual events were in the crisis in Martyn's life, Martyn appears, after 1885, to have regarded himself as one who, for all his wealth, was “never able to do what [he] lik[ed],”⁷³ and perhaps he never did.

Many things about his friend fascinated GM. His “intelligence … eager as a wolf prowling for food, … ran to and fro, seeking and sniffing in all [Martyn's] interests and enthusiasms.”⁷⁴ What a testament it was to the power of literature to incite and shape desire when Martyn burned poems, canceled subscriptions, abided by the restrictions of the Index, and tried to cancel the Irish Literary Theatre performances because of The Countess Cathleen! And was it possible to renounce instinct altogether? What after all were Martyn's instincts?

Moore did discover and divulge the specific nature of Martyn's desires for men. In the always transgressive Hail and Farewell, GM portrays himself standing below Edward's window in Dublin, his heart “faint as a lover's,” whistling a Wagner motif as his secret signal for “dear Edward” to descend, touch, and allow him to enter. Alarming as this regular serenade was to the men leaving the pub opposite Martyn's, GM soon makes it clear that Edward, sitting on the couch in all his fat, is not really GM's type; nor does Edward care for men like George. What then? Inside, Edward keeps a small harmonium, Salve continues—“one can only think it serves to give the keynote to a choir-boy.”⁷⁵ Every Saturday night, before the Sunday performance of his Palestrina choir, Edward takes a boy home to listen to his singing:

In his first publication of an essay on the beauty of Palestrina's music as performed at Cologne, Edward had drawn particular attention to “the little altar-boys flitting hither and thither like the child angels of Meister Stephan” (The Speaker, 23 February 1895). He began to study the work of choirmaster Charles Bordes in Paris, and claimed that all the beauty of his services at St. Gervaise was owing to the exclusion of women and the beauty of the boys' voices.⁷⁶ By 1900 Martyn had begun a campaign in the Leader to rid the Catholic churches of Dublin of all female singers. It was “unecclesiastical and unaesthetic” to allow women to sing the liturgy: their voices were too passionate; only boys had that “short-lived,” “evanescent” beauty in their voices that gives the listener “cerebral fervour exalted above earth.”⁷⁷ For this extraordinary project to eliminate women from choirs and bring in prepubescent boys, Martyn found complete support in Archbishop Walsh. It appears that the plain-chant movement in Europe was, for some, an expression of a widespread antimodernist, antifemale movement in the Church. By November 1901, Edward had created a ten thousand-pound trust establishing in perpetuity a Palestrina choir at the central Catholic church in Dublin, with the specific proviso that “on no occasion shall females be employed.”⁷⁸ Edward was pleased, but the parishioners were not: receipts from the collection plate plummeted.

GM believed it was not only wrong to renounce instinct, but impossible.⁷⁹ In Ave, Moore provided a way to read Martyn's plays as involuntary coming-out stories. In Martyn and his plays, one could find “a Greek marble … enfolded in a friar's frock,” Martyn's Catholicism serving him—as it served Gray and Raffalovich—as an aesthetic male sanctuary from the persecutions of a homophobic world.⁸⁰ Moore reads The Heather Field, Maeve, and An Enchanted Sea as centered on a “craving” for a love beyond the love of women—expressed in Carden Tyrrell's love of his younger brother, Maeve's longing for a faerie, and, especially, Lord Mark's despair after the drowning of “the beautiful boy Guy.” One wonders if Moore ever saw the poems Martyn published in The Leader in 1910, such as “The Singing Angels of the Nativity”: “You choristers of God … How strange, unearthly are your charms. …” Or the sonnet on the young acolyte, where part of the charm of the prepubescent boy seems to be that he is preheterosexual: “He passes, like an apparition, white, / And stepless through the sanctuary's space … Such grace / Of shape and movement haunts the acolyte … Child of earth or heaven, mysterious child / Oh would thou couldst live on undefiled! / Gross manhood with such angel genius wars. / Thou'lt change—alas! Yet thy boy memory / Fair-haired and white, will flutter to the sky—/ A beauty among the children of the stars!”⁸¹ These Uranian verses would have fit quite nicely in the pages of the homosexual coterie literary magazines of the Nineties, such as Lord Alfred Douglas's The Spirit-Lamp or Charles Kain Jackson's The Artist and Journal of Home Culture.

Martyn put up with a lot from Moore, but he could not put up with Hail and Farewell. Nevill Geary, Martyn's Temple roommate, seems right when he says that “Every word Moore wrote of Martyn makes one love Martyn more, and that is a noble tribute to a friend.”⁸² However, the way one takes the outing of Martyn may be homophobic for homophobes and sympathetic for those who sympathize. Edward took himself seriously as Sinn Fein's first president, as Gaelic League board member, and, especially, as perfectly pious Catholic; no reader of Hail and Farewell! will be unlikely to laugh at “dear Edward,” and the laughter of men at the homosexual in the closet cannot be good to hear. Years after Martyn's death, Yeats might rhetorically ask, “What drove him to those long prayers, those long meditations, that stern Church music? What secret torture?”⁸³ But how could Martyn's old friend George Moore show off Martyn's secrets in that way during Martyn's lifetime?

Martyn tried to take his revenge by his satirical portrait of “George Augustus Moon” in The Dream Physician (performed in 1914). Moon is a hideously unpleasant character, egotistical, vain, ugly, rude to servants, stupid, delighting in annoying other people, pompous, and gullible (when his typist says, “Your genius is as great as your beauty,” he's flattered). One cannot read it without disliking Moore, and Martyn too. Some say the performance, with Thomas MacDonagh's brother John playing GM, was funny; the text is not—there is too much hate, too little design. And Martyn could say nothing worse about Moore than Moore, with greater art, had said about himself.

One feels sympathy for Martyn. Prevented by his sexual formation from begetting an heir to Tillyra and by his religion from fulfilling his desires for young men, Martyn spent and spent and spent again on what he saw to be improvements of Irish “culture.” He endowed an Ireland of his desire—Catholic, masculine, and aesthetic. He funded churches, choirs, nationalist journals, Irish craft workshops, concerts by Irish composers, and several Irish literary theaters. While he was not much of a writer, these sublimations were a generous form of “spiritual procreancy” in their own right.⁸⁴

5

In Elizabeth Cullingford's subtle account of Yeats's relations with women, the adolescent poet took a passive role and projected on the woman (first Laura Armstrong, then Maud Gonne) the active part in life. Aware of the woman in himself, he seeks the man in his Beloved, conceived of as a courageous, virile, warrior-woman. He was caught up, by his own account, in a style of heterosexual love inherited from the Romantics—a sort of doomed devotion to the Muse, embodied in an unattainable woman—a Romanticism qualified by Yeats's male anxieties: he was sufficiently insecure to be unable to employ, Cullingford says, “the sexually cynical poetics of the carpe diem mode.”⁸⁵ That is the early Yeats; the middle Yeats, praiser of Don Juan and his sweaty thigh, achieves that missing sexual confidence and shuns his youthful effeminacy. One thing that precipitated this transition was his reading of Nietzsche in 1902.⁸⁶ I would like to be able to supplement this account of Yeats and women with a tale about Yeats and men during the 1890s up to the important transition in 1902, but the forthcoming volume 2 of Yeats's Collected Letters edited by John Kelly, Warwick Gould, and Deirdre Toomey, and the much-awaited biography by Roy Foster will add so much to our knowledge of this phase of Yeats's life as to make any account now given obsolete. What I would like to add, however, are a few remarks about the role of Moore's Evelyn Innes and the Moore/Yeats collaborations.

Evelyn Innes is a story about a Wagnerian diva with two lovers, and one of those lovers, Ulick Dean, is a portrait of Yeats, recognizable to London reviewers—one of them pointed out that the only difference between Yeats and Ulick Dean is that the first is a poet and the second is a composer of operas.⁸⁷ Moore wrote the novel at the height of his infatuation with Yeats, and he often sees the poet through the eyes of his heroine Evelyn. After Evelyn has begun to desire Ulick, she leads him into a conversation about chastity: if he were to become her lover, would he have to surrender his spiritual life? Dean says that a sect of mystics in which he is involved advises the married state, but for partners “to aid each other to rise to a higher spiritual plane.”⁸⁸ This is not what Evelyn had in mind. She is not sure he likes women at all, but he is very sympathetic to her, and his magic arts, mental abstractedness, and spiritual airs fascinate her. Carried away by the “strange rhythmical chant of his about the primal melancholy of man, and his remote past always insurgent in him,” she wonders, why won't he kiss me? He could kiss me now. But Ulick was “a thousand miles away.”⁸⁹ Finally, they do make love when she seizes the initiative between the acts of Tristan and Isolde. He assumes that once they have made love, she will be his and his only, forever. That is not her plan.

When Moore read to Symons and Yeats from the proofs in April 1898, they told him his latest novel was wonderful, on even a higher plane than the phenomenally successful Esther Waters.⁹⁰ However, early in June, after Moore gave them presentation copies of the published novel, Yeats (who knew that he was the model for Ulick Dean, and would be understood by many as the original for this character) indicated that there was a flaw in the narrative: how could his heroine have loved someone so effeminate and unassertive as Ulick Dean? The moment was propitious for throwing Moore into a panic … it was just before the reviews arrived, and Moore never had the least idea whether he had written a masterpiece or a laughable flop. He had been thinking that with Evelyn Innes he had run Balzac a close second and knocked Huysmans into a cocked hat, but now he immediately agreed with Yeats. Yes, surely he had failed to come up to his original, and he had made the narrative simply illogical: no one like Evelyn could have fallen in love with anyone like Ulick. Although when the reviews did come out, they were really very good and sales were excellent, Moore immediately set about revising the novel and demanding of his publisher, Fisher Unwin, that the changes to Ulick go into the second printing. Next he demanded a complete resetting for another edition with still more changes made with the help of Yeats, at last changing Ulick entirely and remodeling him on George Russell instead of Yeats.

There never was anything wrong with the novel that the correction of Ulick, making him more passionate and less mystical, would fix. Almost all the revisions, therefore, were useless and damaging. The problem was not with Ulick as a character; it was with Yeats as a man. GM had shown up the poet in prose, revealing, as only a talented realist novelist could, just how the mystifications of WBY's personality beguiled women, and men too. Yeats comes off as the consummate sexual tease, attractive to many of both sexes, but unable to satisfy the one woman he loves. When it came to love, he was a young boy in the arms of Evelyn—frightened before, doting afterward, and ultimately lovelorn. This is not how Yeats wished to be seen; thus, the advice and Moore's wild goose chase.

Later, Yeats and Moore collaborated on two and a half plays: The Tale of a Town, Diarmuid and Grania, and the abortive plan for a play that became Yeats's Where There Is Nothing. An analysis of this period of collaboration along the lines of Wayne Koestenbaum's Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration would be useful. More generally, one can say that the construction of the first play—which Moore took over from Martyn and rewrote with Yeats, leaving Edward brokenhearted, is an emblem of a particular male love triangle in which Edward is the loser. In Diarmuid and Grania, there is a struggle about sex roles between Yeats and Moore, focused on who will do what when: Yeats finally concedes to Moore's experience, constructive power, and stage logic, but allocates to himself beauty, style, Irishness, and the final edit. And who would have the last word is what finally mattered most; it signified dominance for the one, passivity for the other. After the implied insult to the older author's virility, a general breakup was inevitable.

AE offered both of them a plot he could not finish in May 1901, a real apple of discord. In July 1901, WBY and GM had a plan for collaboration on the scenario.⁹¹ A year later, after the success of Lady Gregory's Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats wanted to avail himself of the still undeveloped scenario for the new Irish National Dramatic Society, with the Fays as actors, Yeats as president, and Moore as odd man out. Moore threatened an injunction—“engaged in one of his little jokes at Willie's expense,” as AE put it. Yeats went off to Coole, and with the help of Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, rushed out a play that John Quinn had copyrighted for him. Through a flurry of letters, Yeats put together a conspiracy among their set to keep Moore in ignorance. The play was published in The United Irishman 1 November, and Moore “was beaten.”⁹² Friends took sides as they do in a divorce: was Yeats right that Moore was a “plagiarist” and a bully? Or was Moore right that Yeats had behaved like one who is invited to dinner and then steals your spoons?⁹³ The immediate victory went to Yeats, who isolated Moore socially by his conspiracy to pirate the scenario and keep Moore in the dark. In the long term, however, Yeats regretted the incident: he and Moore “were never cordial again; on my side distrust remained, on his disgust. I look back with some remorse … but I was young, vain, self-righteous, and bent on proving myself a man of action.”⁹⁴

It seems possible, after a review of Evelyn Innes and the collaborations with Moore, that Yeats's new masculinity is not just the effect of reading Nietzsche, or losing Maud Gonne for the umpteenth time, or wanting to be more the man of the house at Coole. As novelist and mentor in the art of controversy, as first friend and then enemy, Moore provoked Yeats to a reinvention of himself as “a man of action.”

6

One of the most common ways of writing as a homosexual or about homosexuals is through a “coming out” story, in which the subject/author tells his or her life story as the discovery of a gay identity, a type of social identity that is both produced and reproduced, as Ed Cohen says, just by the author/subject “pronouncing this story to be his or her own.”⁹⁵ A late Victorian example of such a story would be The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, now much discussed. What gets somewhat less attention are the stories of those who do not come out, those who, either for instinctual reasons or reasons having to do with historical phases of oppression, cannot come out as homosexuals. In fact, a homosexual is what they are not. It could be said that one was only homosexual in feeling and maybe never so in practice, that another sometimes posed as a homosexual but wasn't that only, and that the third only inspired homosexuality in others. But such a formulation in terms of clinical categories of sexual identity conceals more than it reveals of the complex and mobile temperaments of these three authors. Their specific sexualities are underdetermined by the categories: something over and above, across and around these categories is left unexplained by the insistence on fixed models of personality determined by certain specified sexual practices. There is no evidence that Moore, Martyn, or Yeats kissed one another, on the lips or elsewhere; there are no dirty sheets like those displayed in the trial of Oscar Wilde. But that does not mean that there is no story here. The sexological terms “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual” are, to put it another way, deceptively exhaustive: the significant varieties of masculinity within and across these categories remain for the most part unnamed. Nonetheless, the uncategorical vagaries of male-male desire tell upon the urgencies of each author's life; they feed the lyrics and narratives of their works; they structure the collaborations in a literary movement; they sometimes dictate the character of literary influence; and they may even affect the nature of Irish cultural nationalism.

It was hard work for an Irish author to get accepted in England, though not as hard as for a homosexual. Still, the difficulty of qualifying, the demand to meet an alien standard, the condition of always being regarded with doubt, was an accusation against one's manhood: one wasn't, if Irish, a man of quite the right type. So it was attractive to enter into a cabal with men equally estranged, with the aim of interrogating the justice of the whole manly military rule of Ireland. One could aim to create a new republic where one would be at home, whether it was the high-cultured Catholic Greece of Martyn's imagining; Yeats's castle of heroes, romance, and primal mystery; or Moore's deCatholicized, deVictorianized Paris of the mind. Ireland would be that place, for each, where one could be as unconscious of one's manhood as a healthy man is of his bones.

Notes

1. One exception known to me is Declan Kiberd's essay in the 16 December 1994 Times Literary Supplement, “Wilde and the English Question” (13-15). Kiberd writes of how Wilde “inveighed against the specialization deemed essential in men fit to run an empire, and showed that no matter how manfully they tried to project qualities of softness, poetry and femininity on to their subject peoples, these repressed instincts would return to take a merry revenge.”

2. Ian Fletcher, ed., The Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson (New York: Garland, 1982), xxii ff.

3. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1988), 308.

4. Fletcher, Collected Poems of Johnson, xxxi.

5. George Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island with How He Lied to Her Husband and Major Barbara, rev. ed. (London: Constable, 1931), 40.

6. George Mosse, “Nationalism and Respectability: Normal and Abnormal Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 223.

7. Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 21.

8. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, ed. Susan Dick (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972), 165.

9. George Moore, Avowals, rev. ed. (London: Heinemann, 1924), 170.

10. Ibid., 172.

11. Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 125.

12. Lawrence Evans, ed., Letters of Walter Pater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 79.

13. Richard Aldington, ed., Walter Pater: Selected Works (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1948), 3.

14. Moore, Avowals, 183.

15. Ibid.

16. For Tennyson's similar fantasies of homosexual release after death, see Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 170-71, 178-79.

17. Discussed in Bristow, Effeminate England, 7.

18. George Moore, A Mere Accident (London: Vizetelly; New York: Brentano's, 1887), 65.

19. Ibid., 66.

20. Ibid., 103.

21. Ibid., 111.

22. Ibid., 147.

23. William Butler Yeats, Autobiography, rev. ed. (New York: Collier, 1965), 347.

24. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 154.

25. Moore, A Mere Accident, 172.

26. Ibid., 282.

27. Ibid., 103.

28. Robert Becker, ed., “The Letters of George Moore, 1863-1901” (Ph.D. diss., University of Reading, 1980), 482.

29. Ibid., 444.

30. Moore; Avowals, 196.

31. Ibid., 62.

32. Ibid., 197.

33. Evans, Letters of Pater, 81.

34. Ibid., 75.

35. Moore, Confessions, 49.

36. George Moore, Vale, vol. 3 of “Hail and Farewell!” (London: Heinemann, 1914), 56.

37. Ibid., 500.

38. Moore, Confessions, 129.

39. Jean C. Noel, George Moore: L'Homme et L'Oeuvre (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1966), 47-49.

40. George Moore, Flowers of Passion (London: Provost and Co., 1877), 90.

41. [Edmund Yates], “A Bestial Bard,” The World (28 November 1877): 18.

42. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 69-70.

43. Moore told a story of going to visit Swinburne in 1879. He found a naked man lying on the bed whom he thought for an instant was his other self; he blurted out, “Does Mr. Jones live here?” and ran away [Joseph Hone, The Life of George Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 76]—a classic case of homosexual desire and homophobia wedded, and confessed with a kind of giddy awareness of all that is implied.

44. Thais Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater,” Victorian Studies 36 (1993): 316.

45. Walter Pater, N. Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 217.

46. Moore, Confessions, 25-26; Jean C. Noel, “George Moore's ‘Pluridimensional Autobiography,’” Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Irlandais 5 (1979): 49-65.

47. Moore, Confessions, 176.

48. Noel, “Pluridimensional Autobiography,” 55.

49. Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 199.

50. Moore, Avowals, 266; Vale, 103-4. After Lord Alfred Douglas's poem “The Two Loves” became an article of evidence in the Wilde trial, the term “shame” took on a specifically homosexual connotation. Of the “two loves” in a garden, one says the other is not named “Love” but “Shame.” Sighing, the accused imposter says, “Have thy will / I am the love that dare not speak its name” (Reade, 362). When Moore gave a 1904 lecture on Hugh Lane's impressionist pictures and declared their principle was “to be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed,” Martyn told him that “detestable phrase” was like a “pin in the very quickest part of my body”; it ruined his pleasure in the paintings. Moore and Martyn had completely opposed attitudes toward the instinctual life.

51. George Moore, Ave, vol.1 of “Hall and Farewell!” (1912; London: Heinemann, 1937), 43.

52. Ibid., 47.

53. Ibid.

54. Yeats, Autobiography, 259.

55. Moore, “A Reaction,” The Speaker (13 July 1895): 43.

56. William Butler Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography—First Draft, Journal, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), 270.

57. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 78; William Butler Yeats, The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. by Allan Wade (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1954), 434.

58. Moore, Ave, 183.

59. John Addington Symonds, The Letters, Vol. 3 ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne St. University Press, 1969), 346.

60. Timothy D'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English “Uranian” Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 36.

61. Reade, Sexual Heretics, 37.

62. William Butler Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), x; Yeats, Memoirs, 118.

63. For the probable date of this letter, I am grateful to Gerald Nolan, a postgraduate scholar of Trinity College Dublin writing a study of the works of Edward Martyn, and planning a biography of Martyn as his country's benefactor. He gave me a copy of Martyn's brief diary of travels and life events, covering the years from 1859 to 1921, and pointed out that Stenbock had been one of Martyn's visitors. Nolan, I should add, finds no proof that there was “anything between them,” or between Martyn and any other man. Should daguerrotypes turn up of Martyn and Stenbock, or Moore, or altar boys, caught in the act of anal or oral intercourse, that most unlikely event would certainly add to our knowledge, but it might also have the unfortunate effect of making us think our knowledge complete. A whole life would be categorized because of a single act. What is sufficiently interesting and worthy of study is the way in which Martyn took pleasure in traveling with men, in having men of a certain kind pay long visits to Tillyra, in listening to opera with men, in collaborating with men on plays about his own frustration of desire; it is also interesting that Martyn took no pleasure at all in the company of women. The nature of the pleasures we know he took, and did not take, are fundamental to who he was, and who he must be represented as being, if we are to understand the man.

64. Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival, rev. ed. (New York: Lemma Publishing Corporation, 1974), 50-51.

65. Marie Therese Courtney, Edward Martyn and the Irish Theatre (New York: Vantage Press, 1956), 18-19.

66. Moore, Ave, 181.

67. Moore, Salve, vol. 2 of “Hail and Farewell!” (London: Heinemann, 1913), 94.

68. Becker, “Letters of Moore,” 284.

69. Gwynn, Edward Martyn, 76.

70. Drama in Muslin, admittedly, contains a devastating portrait of the Martyns' parish priest, for which Mrs. Martyn banished Moore from Tillyra for as long as she was alive.

71. John Eglinton, trans., Letters from George Moore to Ed. Dujardin, 1886-1922 (New York: Crosby Gaige, 1929), 21-22.

72. George Moore, In Single Strictness (New York: Boni and Liverwright: 1923), 47-201.

73. Gwynn, Edward Martyn, 70.

74. George Moore, Mike Fletcher (London: Ward and Downey, 1889), 4.

75. George Moore, Salve, 129.

76. Moore twitted Edward about this obsession: on their visit to Paris for the Christmas Eve Mass in 1893, after Edward praised the boys' singing of the plain chant “Adeste Fideles,” Moore says Bordes replied that it was not a plain chant and it was sung by a woman of fifty. There was no boy in the choir at all (Moore, Vale, 182-83).

77. Gwynn, Edward Martyn, 182-86.

78. Ibid., 207-8.

79. In the irresolvable debate over whether sexual orientation is something we are born with or something we learn, whether gender is something we perform or something we are, Moore had a slightly dodgy but persistent answer: we come into the world made to order, not as either homosexual or heterosexual, but with extremely individualized instincts. There is something that it is “natural” for each of us to be; if we are taught, it is simply to be taught not to be what we are; if we try to behave, we can only act against ourselves. In any case, our instinctual being will make its appearance, either beautifully as what it naturally is, or ugly as made by education or social convention.

80. Moore, Ave, 149.

81. Gwynn, Edward Martyn, 323ff.

82. Hone, Life of Moore, 122.

83. Yeats, Autobiography, 259.

84. Martyn's misogyny and sectarianism (more acceptable to the Church than his homosexuality) not infrequently played a part in his cultural interventions, so his philanthropy was not entirely positive in its consequences.

85. Cullingford, Gender and History, 24

86. Ibid., 78.

87. A.M., “Evelyn Innes,” The Bookman (July 1898): 103-4.

88. George Moore, Evelyn Innes (London: Fisher Unwin, 1898), 338.

89. Ibid., 263.

90. Becker, “Letters of Moore,” 1132-33.

91. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 86-87.

92. Ibid., 228ff.

93. Ibid., 243-44.

94. Yeats, Autobiography, 305.

95. Ed Cohen, “The Double Lives of Man: Narration and Identification in the Late Nineteenth Century Representation of Ec-Centric Masculinities,” Victorian Studies 36 (1993): 355.