SOURCE: "This Other Eden: Arcadia and the Homosexual Imagination," in Literary Visions of Homosexuality, The Haworth Press, 1983, pp. 13-34.

[In the excerpt that follows, Fone suggests that gay male literature tends toward a certain image of Utopia. He substantiates his view with examples from the work of several nineteenth-century writers, including Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman.]

Those who would dwell in Arcadia seek out that secret Eden because of its isolation from the troubled world and its safety from the arrogant demands of those who would deny freedom, curtail human action, and destroy innocence and love. Arcadia can be a happy valley, a blessed isle, a pastoral retreat, or a green forest fastness. Those who search for that hidden paradise are often lovers, or the truly wise, trying, as one questing pilgrim put it, to escape from "the clank of the world."¹

I would like to suggest that the Arcadian ideal has been used in the homosexual literary tradition in a fashion that speaks directly to the gay sensibility. The homosexual imagination finds a special value and a particular use for this ideal, employing it in three major ways: 1) to suggest a place where it is safe to be gay: where gay men can be free from the outlaw status society confers upon us, where homosexuality can be revealed and spoken of without reprisal, and where homosexual love can be consummated without concern for the punishment or scorn of the world; 2) to imply the presence of gay love and sensibility in a text that otherwise makes no explicit statement about homosexuality;² and 3) to establish a metaphor for certain spiritual values and myths prevalent in homosexual literature and life, namely, that homosexuality is superior to heterosexuality and is a divinely sanctioned means to an understanding of the good and the beautiful, and that the search for the Ideal Friend is one of the major undertakings of the homosexual life. Only in this metaphoric land can certain rituals take place, rituals that celebrate this mythology. These rites are transformational and involve the union of lovers, the loving and sexual fraternity of men, and the washing away of societal guilt. The symbolic events of the rituals include the offering of gifts, usually from nature, and the purification by water to prepare for an eternity of blissful habitation in the garden. . . .

In Joseph and His Friend, written by the American poet and novelist Bayard Taylor in 1869, Arcadia is described as:

a great valley, bounded by hundreds of miles of snowy peaks; lakes in its bed; enormous hillsides, dotted with groves of ilex and pine, orchards of orange and olive; a perfect climate, where it is bliss enough to breathe, and [where there is] freedom from the distorted laws of men, for none are near enough to enforce them. If there is no legal way of escape for you, here, at least there is no force which will drag you back, once you are there: I will go with you, and perhaps, perhaps. . . .⁶

The speaker, Joseph, says to his friend Philip: "We should be outlaws there, in our freedom!—here we are fettered outlaws." The two men determine that the time has not yet come for them to enter into their great valley, their Arcadia. But in the fullness of the vision, and against every canon of Victorian rectitude,

they took each other's hands. The day was fading, the landscape silent, and only the twitter of nestling birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew near and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible.

Earlier in the book, Joseph met Philip when both were in a train wreck. Joseph's response to Philip's handsome face, and the intimacy that develops between them, are at odds with the fact that the plot of the book ostensibly has nothing to do with homosexuality. Rather, it is a midcentury novel of manners, detailing Joseph's misery in a loveless first marriage and his eventual happiness in a second (with, it ought to be noted, the look-alike sister of his friend Philip). But aside from the fact that much of Taylor's poetry is specifically homoerotic, his reference to "manly love" (a code word in Whitman and the nineteenth-century British Uranian poets) and his play upon the biblical story of David and Jonathan, whose love was "passing the love of women" as Philip and Joseph's is "rarer, alas, but as tender and true as the love of woman," provide a distinctly homosexual atmosphere that is only reinforced by the lengthy appeal to the happy-valley imagery, the happy valley as a place where two men can be free and "live as outlaws." The "great valley," of course, is Arcadia, the secret garden where their love can be consummated, far from the "distorted laws of men." . . .

Scenes of boys bathing are unquestionably a genre of homosexual art and literature. Tuke's celebrated painting August Blue (1894), a picture of four boys, nude and sunbathing in a boat on the river, was the occasion of several poems by English Uranians.¹⁹ Alan Stanley's "August Blue" and Charles Kains-Jackson's "Sonnet on a Picture by Tuke" are examples; one of the best is Frederick Rolfe's melodic "Ballade of Boys Bathing." A prime example of the genre was printed in The Artist, a magazine that devoted itself, especially under the editorship of Kains-Jackson, to homosexual poetry and fiction. This was S. S. Saale's sonnet of 1890, which links the miracle of transformation by water, a kind of homosexual baptism, to legends of Greek mythology.

Upon the wall, of idling boys in a row
The grimy barges not more dull than they,
When sudden in the midst of all their play
They strip and plunge into the stream below:
Changed by a miracle, they rise as though
The youth of Greece burst on this later day
As on their lithe young bodies many a ray
Of sunlight dallies with its blushing glow.
Flower of clear beauty, naked purity,
With thy sweet presence olden days return,
Like fragrant ashes from a classic urn,
Flashed into life anew once more we see
Narcissus by the pool, or 'neath the tree
Young Daphnis, and new pulses throb and burn.

²⁰

The dull boys are transformed into Grecian youths and the grimy urban Thameside into a paradise resplendent with rural and Arcadian sunlight, the same sunlight that will later shine, incidentally, on the burnished body of Paul in The Divided Path as he walks with "Arcadian naturalness." If the poet recalls the pool of Narcissus, and Daphnis in his grove, so too are we reminded of Tadzio, who in "Death in Venice" will rise from the water "with dripping locks, beautiful as a tender young god."

The homosexual content of Saale's sonnet lies not in any overt sexuality but, first, in a code that includes phrases like "clear beauty," "sweet presence," and "naked purity"; second, in references to homosexual myth (Narcissus and Daphnis); and last, in the dominant metaphor of the poem, the transformation by water, turning dull boys into lithe ephebes. Similarly, such elements of homosexual discourse can be found in poetry even less obviously homosexual in content. For Gerard Manley Hopkins, the homosexual discourse was one that exerted considerable fascination and produced no inconsiderable pain and evasion. But in his "Epithalamion,"²¹ an unfinished poem ostensibly written in celebration of heterosexual marriage, the dominant metaphor and attending imagery are concerned with just those matters under discussion here. Though Hopkins tacks onto the end of the poem a few incomplete and not entirely clear lines—perhaps fragmentary—about wedlock and spousal love, they are half-hearted and do not have the passionate force of the homosexual elements of the bulk of the poem.

To begin, Hopkins invokes the "hearer" to "hear what I do." Though the image is conventional in its invocation of a muse at first consideration, a muse is generally thought of as the inspirer, not the hearer. Not to put too fine a point on it, we might be reminded that in Greek custom and poetry the beloved youth was called the "hearer" and his lover the "inspirer." As Hans Licht, the pseudonymous Paul Brandt, notes in Sexual Life in Ancient Greece: "In the Dorian dialect, the usual word for the lover was . . . the 'inspirer,' which contains the hint that the lover, who indeed was responsible for the boy in every connection, inspired the young receptive soul with all that was good and noble. . . . with this the Dorian name for the loved boy, the 'listening, the intellectually receptive,' agrees."²²

For his hearer, Hopkins the inspirer conjures up a truly wondrous greenwood. "Make believe," he says,

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candy-colored
where a blue-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and Rocks is dance and dandled, all in froth
and water
blowbells, down.

In the river, "boys from the town" are bathing. "It is summer's sovereign good." Into this noisy scene comes a "listless stranger" who watches and is so inspired by the "bellbright bodies," the "garland of their gambols flashes in his breast / Into such a sudden zest," that he

hies to a pool neighboring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamores
wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood By.

While the boys from town bathe in the real world, the listless stranger's pool is in Fairyland, surely Arcadia, a happy valley surrounded by Virgilian forests and fragrant with Marlovian posies.

Of course, the listless stranger is one with the unhappy Corydon. And, like the boys in Saale's sonnet, and like the Reverend Beebe, he will strip and plunge into the miraculous pool.

Off with—down he dings
His bleached both and woolen wear:
Careless these in colored wisp
All lie tumbled-to; then loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over fingers teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet. . . .

Striding naked, in command of the world in sudden liberation, he dives into the water and into communion with the bathing boys and with the innocence of the happy valley:

Here he will then, here he will the
Flinty feet kindcold element let break across his limbs
Long. When we leave him, froliclavish, while he looks about
him, laughs, swims

The image is striking. In one pool the naked boys frolic; in the next, the stranger. The naked stranger is inspired by the beauty of the boys; he enters the secret garden, Fairyland, and dives into the pool of miracles. He is transfigured. No longer listless, he is "froliclavish." He laughs and is liberated, purified by water.

"What is this delightful dene," Hopkins asks. "This is sacred matter that I mean." His answer is that the delightful dene is "wedlock." "What is water," he inquires. The answer: "Spousal love." The answers are curiously out of context in a poem where a naked male stranger is revived from his spiritual decline by the sight of bathing naked boys and in which he is drawn into refreshing communion with these boys in a baptismal pool, this all taking place in our now-classic homosexual Arcadian grove.

Hopkins compounds the confusion at the end with a fragmentary observation: "Father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends? Into fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns / Ranked round the bower." This is distinctly unhelpful; in fact, I think, deliberately misleading. Yet he tells the truth when he says that "This is sacred matter that I mean." For the poem describes one of the sacred rituals of Arcadia: wedlock. The poem celebrates a moment of revelation in the greenwood where young men and boys are united in spousal love, where the listless stranger is transformed by the purifying waters of homosexual passion. The poem is an epithalamion indeed, and we are hearers to Hopkins' inspirer if we only have the ears.

All of the elements of the Arcadian metaphor come together in two poems by Whitman, "In Paths Untrodden" and "These I Singing in Spring." Like Corydon, who seeks out his "beeches with their shady summits" to sing his passionate song, or like Hopkins' "listless stranger" who seeks out the "sweetest, freshest, shadowiest" pool, Whitman, who elsewhere is the "solitary singer," seeks out "paths untrodden, / In the growth by the margins of pond waters." His purpose in finding this isolated retreat is to "escape from the life that exhibits itself," and "from all the standards hitherto published, from the pleasures, / profits, conformities, / Which too long I was offering to feed my soul." In this place he is alone, "away from the clank of the world."

Two elements are present here: the world of real life, which demands a certain conformity of appearance, and the world of the spirit, which is ill fed by the standards of that world. Physical and spiritual yearnings, then, call Whitman to his untrodden paths, his hidden pond waters. The typical Arcadian paradigm is again established: the lonely retreat, and the miraculous pool. Why does he come here? Like all the others, "in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere." But what is it that he would not dare to speak of amidst the conformity of the real world? Three things: "standards not yet published," the fact that he "rejoices in comrades," and that "strong upon me" is "the life that does not exhibit itself." That all three of these are references to homosexuality has been ignored by many critics, denied by several, and should be perfectly clear to all. The most obvious phrase, "rejoices in comrades," had such a general homosexual use in the nineteenth century that its meaning is almost unavoidable, even if Whitman did not make it even more clear at the end of the poem and in other poems in the "Calamus" group, such as "For you O Democracy," with its refrain "by the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades." More oblique than this are "the standards not yet published" and the "life that does not exhibit itself." Obvious to any gay person, the standards not published are the standards of homosexual life and all its works, manners, and feelings. The "standards hitherto published," standards of heterosexual morality, are not useful to the soul of a man like Whitman. The standards of his own soul, the qualities that make him homosexual not only in sexual orientation but in sensibility—what we now call gay—are not, indeed cannot be, openly published. Similarly, the "life that does not exhibit itself is certainly Whitman's phrase for the hidden gay sensibility, and it is the life, necessarily secret and secretive, that any nineteenth-century homosexual had to lead. But not only that, it must also be the life of the spirit that Whitman has had to conceal, and which he reveals in his poems, especially in this poem, a manifesto declaring his homosexuality and its purpose. This hidden life, he says dramatically, "contains all the rest," a singular statement revealing Whitman's deep awareness of how homosexuality informs, and becomes a dominating metaphor for, each individual life. That all this cannot be spoken in the real world demands that he repair to this secluded spot.

Like Corydon inspired to song in his fastness, Whitman is "resolv'd to sing no songs to-day but those of manly / attachment." Here, surrounded by "tongues aromatic"—the calamus—and of course all that other fragrant verdure we have seen in so many other Arcadian moments, he discovers the purpose of his life and the reason for his homosexuality: to bequeath "hence types of athletic love." (These types are of course his poems about homosexual love. "Athletic love" was to become another nineteenth-century commonplace standing for homosexuality.²³) His mission is to sing the songs of manly attachment and, like the Grecian inspirer, to "proceed for all who are or have been young men," that is, to be the spokesman for all those who have not dared to speak, to educate them into the proper meaning of the virtuous homosexual life. To do this, he determines to undertake the breathtaking task of telling the "secrets of my nights and days," to be the celebrant of the "need of comrades." For Whitman, the experience in the garden frees him and sets him upon his appointed path: a creator spirit, come from paths untrodden to sing the most remarkable coming-out poem in our literature.

But if Arcadia serves as the scene for personal discovery and revelation, we have seen that it is also the place where a spiritual voyager can find a safe haven with others like himself and celebrate their common rites. So, in "These I Singing in Spring," we find Whitman talking of what Hopkins called "sacred matter," what Forster described as "a holiness, a spell, a momentary chalice of youth." Whitman begins the ritual by collecting tokens "for lovers." He asks: "Who but I should understand lovers and all their sorrows and joy? / Who but I should be the poet of comrades?" The search for tokens, we recall, is common to many of the works we have examined; the tokens are the wedding gifts that Corydon, the passionate shepherd, and Daphnis collected. His search for tokens leads Whitman into the "garden of the world." And soon, he says, "I pass the gates" into the world of the greenwood. The magic of pastoral rules, "along the pond-side . . . far, far, in the forest." He had thought himself alone, but "soon a troop gathers round me." This is his troop of bathing boys, his ideal friends. He distributes his tokens to them, moss from the live oak (which, as he has noted elsewhere in "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," "Makes me think of manly love"), lilac, pine, and sage, tokens like those Corydon brings to his Alexis. The significant moment, the moment of revelation—here nearly a eucharistic climax—comes when he draws from the water the aromatic calamus root, symbol of phallic homosexuality, physical and spiritual. Whitman is reminded now of his lover, "him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me." Memory and desire flood in as he offers the calamus to his troop of young men in a sacred ceremony. This calamus is the "token of comrades. . . . Interchange it youths with each other! never render it back." So complex is this moment that it combines communion in both a spiritual and a religious sense—in wedlock, of Whitman to his troop of young men and of Whitman to his lover who will soon return, and in a plighting of vows: "Interchange it youths! never render it back." The vow is to eternal fidelity not only to one another but to the homosexual life itself, for the calamus is the symbol of that life.

Of all the moments of climax and communion that we have seen in various manifestations in the Arcadian garden, this is the most intense because it is the most highly charged with ritual and myth. There, in the greenwood, in the "far, far forest," which Whitman describes as redolent with "twigs of maple and a bunch of wild orange and chestnut, / and stems of currants and plum blows, and aromatic cedar," this natural incense rising to heaven, Whitman celebrates his erotic communion. Like Hopkins' "riot of . . . boys from town," Whitman's acolytes are a "thick cloud of spirits." They stand in Arcadia at its altar, next to the water of calamus, Whitman's Ladon. Whitman distributes his sacred token, the sacrament of calamus. Hopkins was specific: this cleansing by water means wedlock and is sacred matter. Whitman is equally clear: the calamus he draws from his pond-side is given "only to them that love as I myself am capable of loving." The poet has bound himself and his troop of friends by tokens and sacred oaths to the love of comrades. His words are the testament; calamus is the symbol and outward sign of that inward grace which can only be found in the leafy greenwood bower of a secret Arcadia.

I hope that this paper will suggest to other students some areas for exploration in the examination of that term which seems to be so real to all of us who engage in the pursuit of gay history, but which so often seems difficult to define precisely: the gay sensibility. For surely the mythology and the symbolic acts of our literature contribute not only to the texture of that sensibility but to its definition as well.

Concerning the subject of this essay, it may be said that the myth of Arcadia is almost a quasi-religious requirement of the human psyche, in all climes and cultures, and whatever the sexual preference. But for gay people—or homosexuals, or Uranians, or whatever name we have used for ourselves at various times in history—Arcadia has seemed to be a special kind of metaphor, relevant to the conditions of our lives and spirits. We have adapted it to our own needs, to express the yearnings and secret desires of a sexual, emotional, and intellectual minority, embellishing it with the products of our pen. Thus, while the Arcadian myth is only one element in the much larger tapestry of the homosexual imagination, it is a myth that speaks directly to our minds and hearts.

¹ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett (1965; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973). p. 112. All references to Whitman here-inafter are from this edition.

² Sometimes the implicit approaches the explicit. For example, in 1873, Walter Pater included an essay on Johann Winckelmann in his book The Renaissance. In what is one of the earliest, if oblique, references to the homosexual imagination, Pater notes that Winckelmann's "affinity for Hellenism was not merely intellectual. . . . The subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, as proved by romantic, fervent friendships with young men" (Walter Pater, The Renaissance [1873; rpt. New York: Modern Library, n.d.], p. 158). As an epigraph for this essay, Pater inscribed: "Et ego in Arcadia fui" (p. 147).

Some years before, John Addington Symonds had found himself involved in a fervent friendship with a young man. The youth was named G. H. Shorting, and we are told he had long and curling yellow hair. Symonds pursued Shorting, as he said, because he detected that they both shared similar tastes. "Arcadian tastes," he called them (Phyllis Grosskurth, The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John Addington Symonds [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964], p. 58). Oscar Wilde, writing to Douglas from his prison cell, referred to "Sicilian and Arcadian airs" to get around the censors (Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962]). See Wilde's remarkable letter to Douglas (pp. 423-511), which is an evocation of the themes of the homosexual sensibility. . . .

⁶ Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend (New York: 1870), p. 216. All reference to the novel are to this edition. For an excellent discussion of Taylor's presumed homosexuality, see Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin; Univ. of Texas, 1979), pp. 97 ff. . . .

¹⁹ The best book on the English Uraninan poets and prose writers is Love in Earnest by Timothy d'Arch Smith (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).

²⁰ S. S. Saale, "Sonnet," quoted in Sexual Heretics, ed. Brian Reade (New York: Coward McCann, 1970), p. 228.

²¹ Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose: A Selection, ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 85. All references to Hopkins are to this edition.

²² Hans Licht [pseud. of Paul Brandt], Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932), p. 415.

²³ The phrase appears often as a euphemism for homosexuality. Pater's essay, "The Age of Athletic Prizemen," from Greek Studies (1895) suggests it, and Forster in Maurice has Maurice know the "impossibility of vexing athletic love" (p. 111).