This article appeared in the April 1977 issue of Christopher Street.
NOWADAYS IT IS always interesting to observe how homosexuality is treated in the media. Previously our response to media tended to be one of unrelieved, and thus dreary, anger; today, however, when the shifting sands of social mores offer such treacherous footing, the spectacle various social and literary commentators make of themselves is often intricately puzzling and sometimes downright hilarious.
We were, for instance, enormously puzzled when we first read George Steiner’s review of Simon Karlinsky’s study, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, in the February 28th issue of The New Yorker. Having read Mr. Steiner for many years with some respect, the tortuous argument of his essay seemed at first blankly incomprehensible.
The first third of Mr. Steiner’s essay seemed an inexplicable burst of anger caused by a rather innocuous, if homiletic, paragraph in Karlinsky’s book, warning us against the temptation to explain away the prima facie evidence of Gogol’s homoeroticism, as has sometimes been done with Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Verlaine and Whitman. Mr. Steiner is severely shaken by the use, in this context, of these names (his italics). He goes on to say, “It is just possible—we do not really know—that certain absolutely preeminent achievements in Western culture, perhaps in humanity as a whole, entail some measure of bisexuality or nonsexuality.” Considering the book under review, the absence of homosexuality in this rather grudging acknowledgment is quite striking—an example of a negative implication making a strongly assertive statement. Professor Steiner then goes on to cite Plato, Leonardo, and Goethe as men of great cultural achievement who in their lives evinced “a dual eroticism,” an ability to “experience erotic involvement with both sexes.” At this point a sensible reader might conclude that Professor Steiner is willing to accept bisexuality—the old masculine-and-feminine-elements-of-the-soul argument—but is about to resolutely exclude homosexuality.
Mr. Steiner turns immediately to cleaning up the names (or these names) so besmirched. As for Shakespeare, in his sonnets there are undoubtedly professions of love to a male reader, but they are (thank God!) “infinitely self-questioning and ironically modulated”—as if those sonnets directed to “the dark lady” were not self-questioning and ironic. In Michelangelo there is “a felt mystery of the flesh, of its enthralling loveliness,” which appears “to be concentrated in a masculine rather than a feminine incarnation, or at moments, in a vision of the androgynous.” Luckily his most impassioned sonnets were to Vittoria Colonna, a bona fide female, and to God, so Steiner can conclude that if there are homosexual sentiments they are registered in a Platonic idiom (somewhat of a dodge, since Plato is the one figure mentioned who’s skipped over altogether—I wonder why) and “again we stand partly uncomprehending near a human summit.” And without any wild surmises, if you please. With Whitman, “homoeroticism is a triumphant pan-sexuality” while Verlaine’s homosexuality “was at most intermittent” (just what did that make his heterosexuality?). In short, homosexuality is for Whitman “self-love” and for Verlaine “self-hatred”—apparently anything is more acceptable than the love of another male.
Having finished with this bit of specious apologetics, Steiner attacks (apparently all) modern literary scholarship for failing to “exhibit an imperative of delicacy.” “It ranks and anatomizes,” he objects, “it shreds privacy to the winds and speaks loud” (echoes of the love that dare not speak its name). It reeks of “a vulgarity of heart.” Although he has not really discussed Professor Karlinsky’s book, at this point we are prepared for a real hatchet job; so it is with some surprise that we read that he is “not seeking a quarrel with Professor Karlinsky,” whom he considers “an admirably erudite Slavist” with a “thorough and passionate knowledge” of Russian literature who writes with “an unmistakable toughness of mind” and is “an ornament to the teaching profession.” In short, Professor Karlinsky is “in the best sense, representative of what should be the most valuable disciplines and aims in the humanities.”
If the reader is not thoroughly confused by this point, he soon will be by Mr. Steiner’s detailed discussion of Karlinsky’s study, with which he apparently agrees on all major points and evidently finds an admirable, even “masterly” work—although he is careful to mention that “there is no firm evidence that Gogol ever consummated his homoeroticism.” He asserts that “the case for the prosecution (Karlinsky’s) rests and, within its limits, rests solidly.” And here is the nub of the whole matter and here our confusion began to subside, for we doubt that Professor Karlinsky ever considered his discussion of Gogol’s homosexuality a matter of “prosecution.” It is Mr. Steiner who sees it as a “prosecution” and seeing it so, in his own muddled, tolerantly liberal and totally wrong-headed way, he leaps to Gogol’s defense. The ensuing argument is hopelessly tangled. So, it goes, Gogol’s a homosexual; in the manifestations of his homosexuality (his attitudes toward women, for instance), he’s not so different from Macaulay, Byron, Wagner, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche (all straight as nails, if a bit peculiar). Since Mr. Steiner himself has here suggested a reckless number of “links,” of “bonds of style which constitute a psychological and linguistic cluster,” with a wildly diverse group of nineteenth-century figures, it is dismaying to find him complaining that “like buckshot, the rubric of ‘psychological pathology’ is indiscriminate (and) makes it harder for us to read Gogol justly, to make our response a patient, self-withdrawing attendance to the marvelous singularity of the case.”
Of course, implicit in this objection is the unspoken acceptance of the prejudice that once you know a fag’s a fag, you know all you need to know about him (“no wonder he hated women!”). Since we do not believe for a moment that Professor Karlinsky makes this assumption to begin with, the whole essay begins to look like a tempest in the wrong teapot.
Mr. Steiner is quarreling with Professor Karlinsky because the professor has blown Gogol’s cover, and his well-intended defense of the artist forces an unusually sensible man into absurd positions. “Above all, has (Karlinsky) ever stopped to ask himself whether the vision of the role and significance of sex in human lives which is now canonic is not, will not seem one day ludicrously overblown?” Now canonic? Shades of Helen of Troy, of Virgil’s Dido, of Dante’s Beatrice, of Wagner’s Isolde! If the last 2,500 years of Western culture are anything to go by, then the answer to Mr. Steiner’s rhetorical question is clearly no. “Is sex that interesting or that important?” demands Mr. Steiner. Well, to a tortured, suppressed homosexual smothered by the homophobia of nineteenth-century Russia it is, it may even be decisive—though, and here we agree with Mr. Steiner, not as decisive as the incredible spiritual strength and creative ability that allowed Gogol to transmute his suffering into supreme works of art and, at least for a time, to surmount his anguish before it destroyed him.
But in truth we have no real quarrel with Mr. Steiner. He respects Professor Karlinsky’s work and is reverent before Gogol’s achievement. He is simply defending Gogol from being labeled a fag. Unfortunately for Mr. Steiner, in political matters, including cultural politics, it is always important to know what time it is. In a time when novels written by women were dismissed as ladies’ fiction, it was “progressive” to show that they had a significance independent of the sex of their creators; today such a stance would be “reactionary.” Mr. Steiner has landed in the foolish position of defending Gogol from an attack that was never made, on a field of battle that has become irrelevant. The case of the well-meaning Mr. Steiner should instruct us once again in the cautionary lesson of Don Quixote: in a time of rapid social change, decency is not enough to protect one from being ridiculous. ❡
