The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (20 page)

So can anything positive actually be said about
Child of the Sun
? Well, it is fun to read as long as you don’t expect much in the way of literature. Like
Mandingo
and their other American historical novels, Onstott and Horner know how to tell a story in the most basic, page-turning, sometimes even mind-numbing, manner. Here is the end of Chapter Seven after Antoninus has just killed a priest making a sacrifice and is taking control of the royal palace:

As with all of the other Onstott and Horner novels there is a strong leitmotif of sadomasochism here, and they play it to the hilt. At the end of Chapter 28 Antoninus has Agrippa, a member of the Praetorian Guard, in his room and when the man refuses his advances – calling him a “bath-boy who sells himself for money” – has him tied to a rack and gagged so that he can fellate him. Agrippa is humiliated and Antoninus, who considers this a divine act, is deeply perturbed. It is all very odd, and you can’t help wondering what is going on here – emotionally – for the writers.
Child of the Sun
is relatively sexual and moderately titillating, but it has none of the deeply disturbing aggressive, deeply disconcerting, sexuality that
Mandingo
has. That is because at heart this is less of an adult novel than an old fashioned boy’s adventure book filled with essentially romantic interplay between men who are less interested in sex then in being chums and soul mates: think
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
or
Moby Dick.
For all of its sheen of depravity of ancient Rome, homosexual orgies, and sexual intrigue,
Child of the Sun
is actually fairly sweet. Onstott and Horner are intent on humanizing the horrible Heliogabalus and making him, at heart, a sort of sweet, if totally deranged, queen. This charming historical revisionism is at odds with the fact that they had no problems exploiting racism in
Mandingo
and the
Falconhurst
series. I suspect that these two, quite dissimilar novels were very different projects for Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner. While the mainstream culture of the 1960s was still, although in lessening ways, demonizing queers, they set out to reconsider and reclaim one of history’s most notorious decadent queens.

Child of the Sun
is a fascinating historical pop-culture curiosity that doesn’t really connect to the great gay novels of the 1950s; by the time Stonewall happened a few years later, it felt old fashioned. This makes it both singular and special; one more tile in the complicated mosaic of what we now call 20
^th
century gay literature.

Secker & Warburg, 1961

(1
^st
edition in English translation)

Gregory Woods

A handsome Frenchman in his early 30s meets a beautiful 17-year-old compatriot on the crest of Vesuvius in 1897. Some kind of mutual understanding is achieved, more or less, at first sight — ‘They suspected each other of having something more in common than a taste for climbing mountains; something betrayed in the fact that each had obviously selected his guide for his looks” — and is then reinforced as, looking down over the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, their conversation unearths a shared interest in classical culture and modern poetry.

On a trip across the Gulf of Naples to the ‘Siren Isle’ of Capri, they witness the snubbing of Oscar Wilde — fresh out of jail — in the restaurant of the Quisisana Hotel. The younger of the two Frenchmen sends him flowers, even while the elder counsels him against any such association with scandal. By this time, the boy has made it clear that his sexual interest is, and probably always will be, in boys younger than himself. We know already that this strikingly attractive and intelligent young aristocrat, the Comte Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen, is likely to lead an unconventional life, for, as he tells his older companion, desire has a tendency to turn into destiny.

I first came across Roger Peyrefitte’s 1959 novel
L’exilé de Capri
in a paperback reissue of Edward Hyams’s translation of it,
The Exile of Capri
, published by Panther in 1969. There were several signs that this was a book I would like. In the first place, I already knew Peyrefitte’s earlier novel
Special Friendships
(
Amitiés particulières
, 1945), the story of a platonic love affair between two boys at a Roman Catholic boarding-school. Although — or because — I had been to such a school myself, I found that book rather dull, since the two lovers never did anything more daring than swim together and kiss.

The Exile of Capri
looked more promising. On the front cover, it had been given the subtitle
An Elegant Study in Decadence
. This was coded, but it was a code I already knew how to read. The back cover spoke of Capri as the ‘ISLAND OF STRANGE DESIRES’ and as ‘a refuge for the sexually persecuted of all tastes.’ The blurb promised ‘a superbly scandalous picture of a colourful bygone era.’

However, just as my attention had first been drawn to
Special Friendships
by the cover illustration on my second-hand paperback edition (Panther, 1968) — the superimposed photographs of two shirtless boys, one dark and one fair — so too was the main attraction of
The Exile of Capri
its peculiar cover photograph: a man in full-body striped underwear, a boy in nothing but a towel, and a potted plant on a wooden pedestal. Although the man's underwear now seems to me interestingly full, in those days I was more interested in the boy. He is looking up at the taller man from behind and to one side. What I could see of his smooth, pale chest endorsed all of the cover’s other promising clues. I bought the book.

This in the early 1970s, in what was then the best second-hand bookshop in Norwich, where I was an undergraduate. The man who ran this reassuringly Dickensian establishment, the Scientific Anglian on St. Benedict Street, was an irascible old devil who, despite the fact that I was a regular customer of his for almost a decade, would never show any sign that he recognized me. He showed his disdain for paperbacks — and, I think, for those of us who could not afford to buy anything better — by writing their prices in hard-pressed ball-point on their front covers. My copy of
The Exile of Capri
cost me 18 pence; someone else had already bought it second-hand for three shillings. (The publisher’s price on the back cover is six shillings or 30 pence.) I must have been more impressed by the book than its (at least) two previous owners, for I have kept it. My modest initial outlay has been good value over the years.

The novel’s central character Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen (1880-1923) is no invention. Like most of the other characters in Peyrefitte’s novel, he really existed. Nor was this the first novel based on his life on Capri: that honor belongs to Compton Mackenzie’s
Vestal Fire
(1927), which resulted in its author’s banishment from the island in a hypocritical response to his satirical depictions of certain prominent local citizens. Yet Peyrefitte’s later novel is a lot more forthright. He imagined all, but invented very little. He was well placed to research his narrative, both by consulting the relevant written records and by gossiping with all the right people. Fersen was a boy-loving man destined for a golden career in the French diplomatic service until scandal intervened. A writer of aesthetically derivative but thematically daring poetry, he never needed to earn his living — always an advantage, if you are going to behave in ways that are likely to risk your reputation in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Being forced out of your country is obviously much less of an inconvenience if you can afford to cushion the shock of exile with a luxurious home and beautiful companions.

It was in 1903 that Fersen was fined in Paris and briefly imprisoned for the corruption of minors, his crime being all the more scandalous for having involved not mere street urchins or rent boys but well-born schoolboys whose half-formed bodies and minds were of much greater potential value to the state. On his release from prison, Fersen made his way down to Capri; but that was not by any means the last they had heard of him in Paris. In 1909 he founded an arts periodical called
Akadémos
, pretty much dedicated to the celebration of pederasty. He was not going to allow the fear of further trouble to gag him. Indeed, now that he no longer had much of a reputation to protect — other than on behalf of his unfortunate family — he could take even more risks than before.

Roger Peyrefitte (1907-2000) turned to writing after leaving the French corps diplomatique, under a cloud, in 1944, when he was 37.
Amitiés Particulières
, his first novel, which came out the following year, secured his unsuitability for public service. Not only was its story of love between boys set in a Jesuit boarding school like the one in which the author had himself been educated, but its juvenile lead, Georges de Sarre, partly based on himself, was of the governing class, precisely the kind of boy who was destined to become a politician or a diplomat. Indeed, in two subsequent novels, Les Ambassades (1951) and La Fin des ambassades (1953), Georges follows the author into the diplomatic service, thereby allowing Peyrefitte to satirize his erstwhile profession and the scandalous goings-on behind the scenes of national public life. Further satires followed, mainly on the Roman Catholic church. Peyrefitte’s fiction often indulges in point-scoring. His consciousness of himself as an insider who had become an outsider seems to have given him a lasting need for revenge by scandal-mongering. If the resulting tone were merely neurotic or monotonously embittered, his work would probably be unreadable. But Peyrefitte always leavens his anger with glee. His vengeance is taken with a lightness of heart.

True to its roots in the author’s classical education,
The Exile of Capri
often veers into didactic digressions — if yet another paragraph on the history of gay culture can be regarded as a digression at all, within a novel whose main theme is the history of queer culture. One character, usually the older, will enlighten another (and the reader) with a mini-lecture on some scandalous detail of European history, ancient or modern — not merely for the sake of the accumulation of knowledge, but as an encouragement to the life of informed queerness. I have no objection to these passages, because I have always complained about the silences surrounding queer experience, the absence of queer lives from school and university curricula. Throughout my life, but especially when I was much younger, I have compensated for these silences by seeking out the queerness in literature. Hence my career as a professor of gay and lesbian studies; hence, also, my
History of Gay Literature
(1998). Lacking a queer pedagogue of my own as a young man, I educated my queerness by reading appropriate books. The Exile of Capri was, and remains, one of these. It is not a great novel in aesthetic or technical respects. Its prose is, to be frank, stodgy at times and its characterization is not always complex or subtle. But of how many more famous gay novels is this also true? In this case, the dullness of the style is more than mitigated by the sheer nerve of the narrative. No reputation is left undamaged.

I read the novel for the second time, in a copy I had picked up in Naples, in the original French. Again, this copy was second-hand. I assumed it had been left in some hotel room by a departing French tourist, a gay man perhaps, who had brought it down to the Mezzogiorno to use as a guide to the pleasures once — and some still — available in the searing south. The year was 1982 and I was now living in Italy, teaching at the ancient university of Salerno, once the haunt of the medieval alchemists. I was sharing a flat on the beach at Vietri on the Costiera Amalfitana, one of the most beautiful stretches of coast in the world. From here, I could get into Naples in an hour by bus or train. Also, in season, I could catch the early morning ferry along the Costiera from the industrial port at Salerno to Capri. This was a three-hour journey, with stops at Amalfi and Positano, before the boat threaded its way through the Isole i Galli — one of them owned by Rudolf Nureyev and, before him, by Léonide Massine — and, opposite Sorrento, crossed the narrows to the Siren Isle itself.

With the Peyrefitte in my shoulder bag on these occasional trips, I was able to visit a Capri that was in none of the official guide books. Queer Capri, you might call it. No topographical or architectural feature with the slightest relevance to the island’s queer cultural history is overlooked by Peyrefitte. Every rock and cavern, every shrine and villa, seems allocated its significance on his map of the island, its every contour outlined with gossipy threads of scandal. I could labor my way up an overgrown path to Fersen’s Villa Lysis (then a virtual ruin, but today re-inhabited) or even further up to the Villa Jovis, teetering on the cliff from which those who aroused the emperor Tiberius’s displeasure had been thrown to their deaths. I never managed, though, to eat in the restaurant of the Quisisana — my salary as a young academic, although numbered in millions of lire, would not stretch to that.

It was when using the novel in this way, as an intelligent guidebook, that I really felt the benefit of its didactic streak. It gave me some of my life’s most engrossing touristic experiences. But I measure its generosity by the fact that it never completely absorbed me: often enough, I was distracted from it by queerness in the flesh. I have always read books in the open air. But one of my fondest general memories of Italy is of how often I was interrupted by boys in need of a cigarette, a conversation, or more. I think of such encounters in the grounds of Catullus’s villa on Lake Garda, in the park beside the Salerno opera house, on a bench beneath a naked Apollo alongside the Naples aquarium, on the ramparts of Mantova as an eery mist was coming in from the marshes, in searing heat among the ruins of Paestum.