Dystalgia
Part One
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked,
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread.
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
– Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson
I have puzzled over Robinson’s grim poem ever since the late 1950s, when I first read it in an English class, as a senior at Phillips Andover Academy. The instructor, Mr. Patterson (I’ve changed his name to spare his family), was a large, bald, forbidding man who was not interested in the opinions of his students: he talked, we listened. He never spoke extemporaneously, but read his lectures from a sheaf of notes he had typed out so long ago the paper was yellow. We were expected to make notes of his notes, and if we parroted his opinions of American literature word-for-word on the final exam, we were assured of top marks.
It was the kind of rote instruction that had been obsolete in prep school English classes since the First World War, and Mr. Patterson probably should have been gently eased into retirement twenty years earlier. But in his heyday as a professor at Harvard, he had written several well-regarded books about American literature. So he was something of a catch for Andover, and the school kept him on, giving him a light course-load, and allowing him to deliver his diktats, week after weary week, to his bored students.
He was true to form with Richard Cory. “There’s no great mystery behind Cory’s suicide,” he proclaimed, and consulted his notes. “Robinson was a dyed-in-the-wool New England Yankee, a descendant of the Puritans,” he read. “He had a sinecure at the Boston Customs House, which provided him with enough money to live modestly and continue writing poetry. But he had no use for the high-living Boston Brahmins, and he despised ostentation. Richard Cory is set in the small town of Tilbury, but Cory is a misplaced Brahmin, an aristocrat parading his superiority around, while pretending to be a man of the people.”
Patterson looked up. “Cory killed himself because he had come to realize that his life was empty.”
“Yes, and?” we dared not ask.
“His life was empty because despite his wealth and charm, he wasn’t married and he had no children,” Peterson went on. There was a curious intensity to his voice, an emotional timbre that I had never heard before. He was troubled by something, and after closing the folder containing his notes and giving it a little pat, he spoke again. “Richard Cory was a homosexual, like his creator. And for homosexuals, the 1890s were anything but gay.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. The humorless Mr. Peterson had made a pun – perhaps not a brilliant one, but a pun nonetheless. And he was talking directly to us, something else he had never done before. He was even making eye-contact, looking around the table at each of us, one by one, as if he wanted to make sure he had our complete attention before he went on.
“Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s adored ‘Bosie,’ called it ‘the love that dares not speak its name,’” he said. “Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wilde’s contemporary, was also gay, but deeply in the closet, as they say, unlike the flamboyant playwright, who sported shoulder-length hair, and ‘walked down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand.’” Meeting blank looks, he added, “That’s a line from one of W. S. Gilbert lyrics in Patience, the satirical operetta he wrote with Arthur Sullivan.”
Jack Trowbridge (not his real name), a football player who was taking Peterson’s course because it was an easy A, raised his decidedly unmedieval hand. “’Scuse me, Mr. Peterson, will all this stuff about fairies be on the final?”
“Oh, shut your stupid mouth, Trowbridge. You’re probably a fairy yourself. A lot of you football players are. You love body contact, you put your arms around each other in the huddle, you pat one another on the buttocks to express affection – you’re all as gay as the March wind, but you just don’t know it.”
Trowbridge’s mouth opened again, this time out of shock, but he didn’t say anything. The rest of us were equally stunned by Patterson’s outburst, and we stared at him, mouths agape, as if he’d suddenly dropped his trousers. He took a deep breath and kneaded the back of his neck with one hand, as if he were getting a headache.
“I apologize, gentlemen,” he said, dropping his hand. “I detest the word ‘fairy’ as a term for homosexual. Fairies are magical creatures in fantasy and allegorical literature, and some of them are by no means mincing or effeminate. If you haven’t read Spenser’s The Faerie Queene yet, I suggest you do so. It’s a bit of a tough slog, but once you realize that the Faerie Queene is England’s Queen Elizabeth, and the Red Crosse Knight is Sir Walter Raleigh, the road smooths out.”
He was back in professorial mode, though he was still looking at us. “Andover is an all-male environment. The only women here are either the wives of faculty members, the infirmary nurses, or the ladies who work in the dining hall kitchen. At faculty meetings, occasionally one of the younger instructors will raise the possibility of uniting with Abbot Academy, our sister school. I profoundly hope that does not happen until after I am dead. As a visit to the public high school in this town will make amply clear, educating girls and boys together results in the students losing their concentration on their studies, and a general deterioration of the pedagogical process. This academy’s well-earned reputation as the finest preparatory school in the nation is at stake.”
He looked around the table again before going on. “Of course in any closed, all-male environment – a prison, say, and I know some of you regard Andover as a prison, albeit a very fancy and expensive one, in which you have to work hard to serve out your sentence and earn your release…” He waited for our dutiful chuckles, and went on: “In any closed environment where men – or boys, in your case – are deprived of feminine companionship, homosexuality flourishes. For the most part it is situational, a result of the pressure of confinement, and disappears as soon as the doors are opened, so to speak, but in some cases, being thrown together with other adolescent boys for a number of years brings out a latent penchant for what the Catholic Church used to call the sin of Sodom. Also, regrettably, all-male preparatory schools attract teachers who are inclined toward pederasty. The department heads and the headmaster try to screen against it when they consider a new master’s application, but of course pederasts are expert liars, and often the applicant’s curriculum vitae is so impressive that even if he is suspected of being gay – a word that homosexuals have claimed for themselves, more’s the pity – he’s hired anyway.”
Patterson stopped once more. His normally pale complexion had reddened, and he removed a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his Harris tweed jacket and dabbed at his forehead with it. He folded it back up carefully and returned it to his pocket. After clearing his throat, he went on: “I’ve gone into this issue in some detail, because I want to make it clear that although I do not condone homosexuality of any sort, and certainly not the predatory kind, neither do I condemn it. A man’s sexual preferences are his own business, unless he tries to seduce his adolescent students, who may feel that they have to give in for fear of failing his course. Such a teacher belongs in jail, where he will discover that his punishment will truly fit his crime.”
The bell rang, signaling the end of the class. Patterson looked visibly relieved. “Gentlemen, I trust I have elucidated Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem to your entire satisfaction. You are dismissed.” We filed out of the classroom silently, and even when we reached the courtyard, we remained quiet, parting to go our separate ways to our next classes without saying goodbye.
Mr. Patterson’s obsession with homosexuality made me wonder if he, too, was gay. He was married, with three grown children and five grandchildren, but I knew that did not preclude the possibility that he had, or used to have, male lovers. In my Classical Civilization class, I’d been taught that the ancient Athenians condoned, even celebrated, homosexuality. Men of prominence in the so-called Golden Age of Pericles were expected to marry and have children as a civic duty, but they routinely carried on affairs with younger men, even boys. And there was Socrates, or at least Plato’s version of him: the wily philosopher, who, unlike Mr. Patterson, asked his students questions instead of giving them answers, stated in his dialogues, on more than one occasion, that he loved boys. Of course in Greek, there are two main types of love. Éros is romantic love which includes physical passion; agapé encompasses everything from reverence for the gods through patriotism to intense aesthetic appreciation of a work of art, a natural phenomenon, or the perfect body and performance of an Olympian athlete. Socrates’ dialogues refer to both forms of love, but in the Phaedros, he discusses éros in specific terms. Phaedros was an uncommonly handsome youth – a 5th century BCE version of Robinson’s Richard Cory, if you will – and Socrates was clearly in love with him. Whether or not he acted on his feelings is irrelevant, but there is no mistaking the strength of them.
And homosexuality, or at least its situational form, was considered almost essential in warfare, in the age of hand-to-hand combat. The principal Hellenic battle formation was the phalanx, in which infantrymen, or hoplites, stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind their shields, advancing on the enemy with their long spears extended. At Marathon in 490 BCE, Mithridates, the commander of the Greek army, arranged his troops in a long phalanx and marched them toward the Persians. But just before the two armies clashed, he ordered his center to halt, while his left and right wings continued to advance, eventually enclosing the Persians in a deadly circle, and annihilating them. According to legend, as soon as the fight was over, he sent his fleetest runner, Pheidippedes, to Athens, some 26 miles away, to deliver the news. The young warrior ran at top speed, reached the assembled archons, gasped out, “Niké (victory),” and dropped dead of exhaustion. The battle that occasioned his run lent its name to the long-distance event in the modern Olympics, when they were revived in 1896, and its length was set at 26 miles, 285 yards. Modern marathon runners might think that Pheidippedes must have been badly out of shape if the run killed him. But he had already fought in a lengthy battle, and he ran to Athens wearing full bronze armor, greaves, and a helmet.
In phalanx combat, it is essential that the line of battle be maintained, so each soldier must trust his neighbor not to fall out unless he is wounded or killed. Under such circumstances, it is a great advantage if the adjoining men are lovers, for they will fight ferociously for one another. Even today, combat veterans say that they didn’t fight for their country, or for any abstract cause, but for their buddies. Only politicians, few of whom have ever seen combat, blather about fighting for Freedom, Truth, Justice, or The American Way. And mercenaries fight for money, which is why they can’t be trusted to hold the line when things begin to go sideways.
Today however, the advantage of homosexual bonds between soldiers, explicit or suppressed, is moot, since wars are increasingly being fought by robots controlled by human operators who may be thousands of miles away from the combat zone. With the continuing development of artificial intelligence, it may be possible in future that such robots will develop some sort of affection for one another, like the one between C-3PO and R2-D2 in the Star Wars movies. And as the Japanese go on refining sex droids… you get the picture.
To get back on track, in Homer’s Heroic Age, the siege of Troy came to a standstill when Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, dropped out of the fight because Agamemnon claimed Briseis, a captured native of one of Troy’s subject cities, for himself, reneging on his promise to give her to the formidable Myrmidon. As a result, Hector of Troy led his forces out of the walled city and almost drove the Greeks into the sea. It was only when Achilles’ lover Patrocles put on Achilles’ armor and face-concealing helmet, led the troops in a counterattack, and was killed by Hector, that the leader of the Myrmidons, raging with grief, returned to the fray and vanquished Priam’s son in single combat. So more than five hundred years before the time of Socrates, the Greeks had already developed a flexible approach to sexuality.
It wasn’t until the rise of the Catholic Church that homosexuality became a sin. And it can be argued that Jesus Himself had special feelings toward John, the “Beloved Disciple” who is depicted in Leonardo’s painting of the Last Supper as a young man with almost feminine features, sitting next to Christ and embracing Him. Leonardo himself was gay, so the relationship between the pretty disciple and the Son of God shouldn’t surprise us. No agapé here: this is pure éros.
Nor should anyone be surprised by the current scandal involving Catholic priests and their acolytes. Priests who have pledged themselves to celibacy have always had trouble keeping their vows. Consider the story of Abélard and Héloise: the brilliant canon, who although not sworn to celibacy, was forbidden to marry on pain of losing his position, and his equally brilliant pupil, jumped one another’s bones and eloped. They were tracked down in Normandy; Héloise was clapped into a nunnery, and Abélard was castrated. He spent the rest of his life in the abbey of St. Denis, but he and Héloise continued to exchange letters celebrating their love (now agape, by default), and discussing fine points of theology.
Teachers and students again, and we’re back at Phillips Academy. I have already written about Rafe Symonds, a French instructor and my first stage director, who hit on me until he realized I was “hopelessly hetero.” He found other boys who were vulnerable to his advances, and maintained an apartment in Boston, where he took them after treating them to a play at the Schubert or a concert at the Boston Symphony. Rafe (his real name; he’s dead, and while he was alive, he didn’t give a damn about his reputation, but was gentlemanly enough to take no for an answer) did me a favor by confirming my taste for girls.
I’d caught the acting bug at Andover while performing in two plays. The first was something of a travesty. Rafe decided to do T. S. Eliot’s verse drama “Murder In The Cathedral” during my junior, or upper-middle year, and absurdly cast me as the 52-year-old Thomas Beckett. Eliot himself was in Boston, delivering one of the Norton Lectures on poetry, and Rafe brashly invited him to a performance of it. After seeing it, Eliot was diplomatic, saying that the production reminded him of what one of Shakespeare’s later plays might have been like after the Globe was closed, and it did its run at Blackfriars Theatre, where all the roles were played by boys.
But in senior year, Penn Hallowell (also a real name; he was a wonderful English teacher who never hit on his students) cast me as Hamlet. Again, I was too young to play the 30-something Prince of Denmark, but the production was a success, and I was hopelessly hooked on acting.