William Peniston: William Peniston works for The Newark Museum. This review is reprinted with permission from The Newsletter of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, Vol. 12 No. 3 (Fall 1999)
In this book, Paul Robinson has written a very general introduction to the writings of fourteen different men, mostly artists and intellectuals, from England, France, and the United States, who lived between 1840 and the present. Most of these men were novelists or essayists, such as Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, J. R. Ackerley, Quentin Crisp, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Julien Green, and Paul Monette, although Robinson has also included the art critic John Addington Symonds, the educator Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the financial analyst Andrew Tobias, and the historian Martin Duberman. All of them wrote autobiographies in which their sexual development, especially in regard to their relationships to other men, was the major theme. He is interested in how these writers conceived of their identities through the process of writing their autobiographies. He wants to know about their politics as much as about their sexual experiences.
For the general reader, this book provides some interesting summaries of these autobiographies, and I hope, as I am sure Robinson does, that it will encourage the general reader to read the original works. However, for the specialist, especially for the academic historian, the modern literary critic, or the gay and lesbian scholar, this book is a disappointment. His conclusion about “the extraordinary differences in the lives led by gay autobiographers” (xii) does not seem to add much to the scholarly debates about the formation of gay and lesbian identities or the construction of autobiographical narratives, in which he claims to be interested.
Although Robinson admits that it is difficult to make general statements based upon the writings of fourteen individuals, nevertheless he goes on to do just that. These statements are all so general that he must constantly qualify them. For example, he claims that the British authors were, for the most part, preoccupied with the lower classes, whereas the French were interested in men of another race or another country. However, the experiences of the fourteen men that he has selected contradict this facile conclusion. Symonds fell in love with members of his own class while he lived in England, but he found sexual satisfaction with working-class men in England, Switzerland, and Italy. Dickinson was always infatuated with younger members of his own class, and Quentin Crisp had sex with adult men also of his own class. Isherwood and Spendler sought sexual adventures in Berlin, where they usually had relationships with working-class youths. Gide had “adventures” wherever he could find them: Northern Africa, Central Africa, the bathhouses of Paris. His partners were usually young working-class men, although his affairs with Maurice Schlumberger and Marc Allegret involved boys of his own social class. Green was an American, raised in France, who adopted the French as his people, so therefore the question arises: were his experiences in the American South all that “foreign”? It is curious to note that for Symonds, Dickinson, Isherwood, and Gide, the primary difference between them and their partners was age, and yet Robinson says almost nothing about that. In any case, the importance of class, race and ethnicity, and age is much more complicated than Robinson has implied.
Robinson also subscribes to the Whig interpretation of history, arguing that the later writers had achieved more substantial progress towards self-affirmation than the earlier ones, and yet once again the autobiographers do not back him up. Clearly, Andre Gide and Donald Vining had an easier time dealing with their sexual identities than Julien Green and Martin Duberman. Gide's autobiography, first published in 1926, was part of his defense of homosexuality which grew out of his gradual awareness of his own sexual nature, whereas Green, writing in the 1960s, almost forty years later, saw his sexual nature as a state of sinfulness from which he was unable to escape. Therefore, Green's view is hardly an improvement in sexual attitudes. Similarly, Vining had no problems in recording his sexual experiences during the 1930s and 40s, although Duberman's experiences in the 1950s led him into a decade of tortuous psychoanalysis in the 1960s. The contrast between Vining and Duberman seems to confirm George Chauncey's skepticism of the Whig interpretation of history, since he has convincingly demonstrated that the gay male world of the first third of the twentieth century in New York City was much more tolerated than the same world in the second third of the twentieth century. Robinson is aware of these contrasts, but he still believes cheerfully that progress has been made over the last century.
The inclusion of Jeb Alexander and Donald Vining is also problematic. Neither was an artist or intellectual in the conventional sense, although both were highly educated men. Alexander was a government clerk in Washington, D.C. between 1912 and 1964, and Vining was a bureaucrat at Columbia University between 1933 and 1982. Both of them wrote diaries, not autobiographies, which do not involve the same kind of narrative construction in which Robinson claims to be interested. Consequently, the inclusion of these two American diarists seems to contradict Robinson's own criteria for selection. Furthermore, if Robinson was going to include men who were not artists or intellectuals, then why did he not select other writers, such as Arthur-Louis Belorget (Secrets and Confessions of a Parisian, 1896) or the anonymous author of The Novel of a Born Invert (1896), both of whom wrote autobiographies that were published long before any of the other autobiographies selected by Robinson? In addition, if he was going to include diarists, why did he not include other diarists? For example, a comparison of Gide's journal with his autobiography might have proved quite interesting, especially in terms of an analysis of Gide's interpretative strategy.
Throughout the book, Robinson raises some interesting questions, but he frequently fails to pursue his own line of inquiry. At the outset, he discusses the scholarly debates revolving around the nature of autobiographies. For the most part, he rejects George Gusdorf's suggestion that there is no difference between autobiography and fiction in favor of Philippe Lejeune's insistence that most autobiographies are sincere attempts to give an accurate account of one's own life. I have already suggested that a comparison of Gide's journal with his autobiography would have provided insight into why Gide chose to make his sexual awakening in Northern Africa the climax of his autobiography, whereas he recorded his sexual experiences as an adult in Paris and elsewhere in his journal. In addition, Gide's “autobiographical fiction” also offers an interesting counterpoint to his “fictive autobiography.” Along similar lines, Genet's autobiography ends up as fiction, as Robinson points out, whereas his fiction is largely autobiographical, yet Robinson really does not pursue this insight.
For the most part, Robinson restricts his analysis to only one work by each of the writers, their autobiographies. In the case of Isherwood, he makes an interesting comparison between Lions and Shadows, published in 1938, and Christopher and His Kind, published in 1976, but he does not make a similar comparison between Julien Green's autobiographies or Martin Duberman's autobiographies. And although he claims to be interested in the ways the autobiographies related to the authors' other works, he rarely address those other works. He is particularly remiss in this regard when he is dealing with Gide and Genet.
Robinson is better when he is dealing with the American autobiographers, especially Tobias, Duberman, and Monette. His analysis of their autobiographies as “coming out stories,” which are similar to the conversion narratives of the Western Christian tradition, is very intriguing, and his interpretation of them as representative of the great transformation that gay lives in American have undergone in the past several decades is very insightful. Even his epilogue on the autobiographies of African Americans, such as Samuel Delany, Gordon Heath, and Alvin Ailey, and Mexican Americans, such as Richard Rodriguez, Jose Zuniga, and Rudy Galindo, provides a stimulating contrast to the three Caucasian writers to whom he devotes his last three chapters. However, his general conclusions about African Americans' tolerance of homosexuality and Mexican Americans' intolerance certainly requires further elaboration, and such an exploration would have added a deeper understanding to the diversity of gay lives, which Robinson frequently mentions as one of his major themes. Perhaps this book would have been better if Robinson had concentrated solely on the American autobiographies of the past few years. Certainly, his personal comments on how these autobiographies relate to his own life would have seemed more appropriate
Finally (and I am embarrassed to have to make this statement), neither the author nor the editor proofread this book. I did not proofread it either, but I counted over fifty grammatical mistakes, and I know that there are others that I missed. These mistakes are all minor, but they are distracting and inexcusable. It also seems to me that Robinson's failure to read his own manuscript is symbolic of his failure to engage some of the scholarly debates relating to his topic, of which I have only raised a few in this review.
commenting closed for this article