Outing T.S. Eliot.(Critical essay)

"WAS T. S. ELIOT GAY?"

Questions about Eliot's sexuality have simmered in Eliot studies for decades, coming to a full boil with the recent publication of Carole Seymour-Jones's biography of Eliot's first wife, Vivienne, which claims that the poet was a closet homosexual. (1) Distinguished critics such as Helen Vendler and Louis Menand have rushed to Eliot's defense, insisting either that he wasn't gay or that we shouldn't even be discussing his sexuality. The terms of the ensuing debate suggest that despite developments in queer theory and gender studies, we still have not found satisfactory ways to talk about the enigmatic sexuality of this elusive poet. Moreover, the sensational debate masks a more commonplace but no less crucial concern: long after Barthes pronounced the author dead and Foucault predicted the imminent demise of the "author-function," we still find ourselves writing and talking about authors, cognizant that they may be only discursive constructions to us but equally aware that the author once existed as a living, breathing, writing person. While we have acquired, via Foucault and other theorists, an extensive vocabulary for analyzing discursive functions and subject positions, such abstract terminology does not seem adequate to account for the physical, embodied life of the author, nor for his embeddedness in relationships with real, living, breathing others. It certainly does not account for our continued fascination with Eliot, the evasive, pseudonymous, multifaceted author whom Marianne Moore described as "a master of the anonymous ... the cat who could never be caught." (2) Critics and biographers endeavor to capture Eliot, characterizing him variously as the brilliant philosopher-poet-critic or the troubled hysteric, the bold innovator or the elitist reactionary, the misogynist, the racist, or the anti-Semite. (3) Seymour-Jones's effort to "out" Eliot is just another round of the same chase--an attempt, if you will, to let the cat out of the bag.

My purpose here is not to pin down Eliot's sexual orientation, nor to determine which characterization of him is most accurate. Instead, I am interested in the drive to capture "the cat"--to expose the man behind the manuscripts. In this essay, I argue that the impulse to "out" Eliot obstructs a nuanced analysis of the powerful homoerotic currents in his writings. This essay delineates the ethical and aesthetic limitations of the "homosexual reading" of the poet; alternatively, it reorients criticism toward a homoerotic reading of his poetry. I am not simply reanimating old arguments about the Impersonality of the Poet or the Death of the Author; instead, I argue that we must take into account the insights of queer theory and recognize the fluidity of human sexuality. But rather than insisting, as in the queer model, that the body is "a product of repeated discursive practices," (4) we might reclaim the body--not as a natural, unmarked site but as a formative aspect of personhood. Eliot breathed, ate, wrote, and had sex (or didn't) in a particular body Our only access to Eliot is through discourse--through his writings, which are not mirrors, fingerprints, or bodily secretions. Nevertheless, these writings were produced by and through his body and remain tangentially linked to him--that is, touching at some point in time and space, but not contiguous, nor fully aligned. The writings are also tangentially linked to the readers who interpret them. Thus, rather than blending individual subjects and texts into abstract discursive functions, we can understand the author's embodied personhood and writing in a tangential relationship to our own embodied persons and writings. To reconceive authorial identity in this way is to shift our attention from the contents of the closet to the dynamic and formative juncture between the author and reader: the text. It is also to regard the text as a tissue or texture that tangentially connects specific persons who inhabit concrete social and historical settings. (5)

My aim is thus twofold: to redirect attention to the poetry and to develop a more complex model of authorial identity. Eliot's poetry, as I will show, maps competing notions of selfhood, limning a composite, permeable, social self (in "Little Gidding") but periodically attempting to contain or reject that heterogeneity (in the editing and footnotes to The Waste Land, particularly the note that establishes Tiresias as a unifying persona). Recent biographical criticism has tended to overlook the composite self we see in many of Eliot's poems in favor of more simplistic models of the self that are either one thing (gay) or another (straight). (6) Eliot's poetry offers glimpses of an alternative model that is not consistent with reigning modernist principles of autonomy and impersonality, nor with poststructuralist and queer models of subjectivity. (7) This inconsistency may be the source of its promise.

The argument that Eliot might have been gay was first put forth by John Peter in a 1952 reading of The Waste Land, which, without mentioning homosexuality, interpreted the poem as an elegy for a dead male lover. (8) Eliot had his solicitors suppress the article, which was reprinted in 1969 after Eliot's death with an additional postscript by Peter. (9) It is in this postscript that Peter associates the speaker with Eliot, identifying his beloved as Jean Verdenal, a young Frenchman whom Eliot befriended while living in Paris in 1910. In a 1978 book, T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons, James E. Miller, Jr. pursues Peter's argument further, arguing that the poem (and just about everything else Eliot wrote) is a grief-stricken response to Verdenal's death on the shores of Gallipoli in World War I. (10) Seymour-Jones's biography incorporates both Peter's and Miller's arguments, attempting to bolster their theory using newly available material from the Letters of T S. Eliot (1988) and The Inventions of the March Hare (1996). (11)

The publication of Eliot's letters and previously uncollected works provide ample evidence of the poet's lifelong fascination with the homoerotic, especially early poems such as "The Little Passion," "The Burnt Dancer," "The Love Song of St. Sebastian," as well as the obscene Columbo verses he inserted in letters to male friends. Eliot emerges in his letters as a psychosexually conflicted man, torn and tormented by conventional demands of masculinity (which he associates with a professorship in America) and the lure of the role of the poet/aesthete (which he associates with Europe); as he puts it in a letter to Conrad Aiken: "The great need is to know one's own mind, and I don't know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children's future; or save my money and retire at fifty to a table on the boulevard, regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an aperitif at 5 p.m." (12) Eliot is tom between moral obligations and hedonistic attractions, and although the table on the boulevard seems preferable to the compulsory family dinner table, placid retirement is tainted, in his description, by the smoky stench of sterile ennui. The America-Europe predicament is, as Eliot describes it, in part a dilemma of sexual orientation. Although some aesthetes, such as William Butler Yeats and Arthur Symons, were as flagrantly straight as Wilde was ostentatiously gay, Eliot's image of the aesthete at the "table on the boulevard" becomes homosexually coded by its opposition to the counterimage of normative heterosexual family life and its association with the concealment of one's true self.

Eliot's letters and poems evince psychological torment, self-doubt, and sexual confusion, but they provide no definitive proof of an affair with Jean Verdenal. As Helen Vendler asserts in a review of Painted Shadow, "There is no solid evidence" that Eliot was gay: "No male lover ever testified to having had sexual relations with Eliot." (13) By the same token, there is no solid evidence that Eliot did not indulge in same-sex liaisons. Yet the burden of proof continues to dog the debate about Eliot's purported homosexuality. Vendler is as consumed by the futile effort to prove that Eliot was not gay as certain biographical critics are by the effort to prove that he was.

The search for proof rests on the assumption that, in order to make an argument about homosexuality in Eliot's work, one needs biographical evidence of a homosexual experience--always defined, in Kinsey-like terms, as an "act." But actual firsthand experience has never been a prerequisite for effective artistic expression, or, as Louis Menand puts it, "[s]exual experience has no necessary correlation with sexual imagination." (14) E. M. Forster was homosexual but wrote great novels about heterosexual desire. The "amorous" Emily Dickinson may have been a virgin for all we know, Alfred Lord Tennyson may never have touched his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, and Eliot could have written about same-sex eros without having had a "homosexual experience" himself. Since we don't have proof one way or the other, let's move beyond the question of proof. Regardless of what happened in the "Captain's" private chambers, Eliot's poetry and prose writings display an obsessive interest in sexual corruption and a particular fascination with homosexuality Whether his writings are grounded in experience or the product of fantasy cannot be definitively known; as Patrick Query observes, "the historical-biographical facts of Eliot's sexual life ... are probably in the end, largely unknowable." (15) It is enough to know that he was psychologically conflicted and sexually troubled, to the extent that he felt he did not "know one's own mind" (his use of the third person in this confession is symptomatic of his self-estrangement). It seems rather presumptuous for critics to assume that not only can we know it, but we can also prove it.

Before dismissing the search for proof altogether, however, I want to consider some of its troubling implications--the ways in which the search obstructs a nuanced assessment of the homoerotic in Eliot's work. In the first place, the very terms of the search tend to be either homophilic or homophobic. In an essay on the current hankering to disclose the "gay lives" of great historic figures, Richard Kaye wryly observes that "[f] or every gay activist who takes pleasure in imagining Lincoln as the cuddly intimate of other men, there's a biographer eager to prove that a 'homosexual secret' is a subject's defining neurosis." (16) Seymour-Jones treats homosexuality as the dirty secret--the dark side of Eliot's brilliant career. As Hermione Lee suggests in a review of Painted Shadow, the …