Andrew Bush
>Letters and Ideas: "Dear Mr. B."
>Recently I was at the “Literary London” conference to give a talk on Neil Bartlett’s writings particularly Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, Mr Clive and Mr Page,
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| Envelops, 1992 by Andrew Bush |
In this frustration I decided to present my talk as a letter. A letter to Neil Barlett. It seems to me that letters are now officially in the archive of Western culture, cataloged under “writings–romantic.” Just take a look at the recent spat of books about letter writing, collections of “letters to a nation” and the like and you get the sense that the letter is becoming a museum object.
But I also think of those more public letters that writers have used to be both personal and political. The form itself walks a line between intimacy and social engagement. Historians rely on letters not only for insights into personal lives, but for how the details open a curtain to a social world otherwise unknown in “official” documents of the period. In creative work, the epistolary novel has a long tradition that began in the 18th century, underscoring the complications and, perhaps, intriguing ways the letter form can be used for imaginative expression. This site recently captivated me in all the ways it gathers links to collections, history, and art of the letter.
Of course I often feel a bit criminal reading letters of the dead. Janet Malcolm in her study of Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Here’s my “Letter to Mr. B.”
Dear Mr. B.
I thought I would address you as Mr. B, since so often your characters have cryptic names like Mr. F. or O (for older man). This naming often reminds me of Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” which I always see haunting your writing. Those men lived out their secret and mysterious double lives within the crowded labyrinth of the geography of Victorian London much like many of your characters.
It was years ago when I first read your book “Who was that Man? A present for Oscar Wilde” published in 1988. It was assigned reading in a graduate seminar on contemporary fiction. I didn’t remember much of the book from those discussions. This says more about the nature of graduate seminars than the quality of your writing. But I did remember the images of London in it, and the way London emerged from those pages in compelling ways that was more than stage, more than backdrop.
I returned to this book recently after having read all of your novels that followed that book: “Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall” (you first novel), “Mr. Clive and Mr. Page” and your recent novel “Skin Lane.” Each novel comes back to the themes and ideas that played out in the early work of non-fiction when you went searching for Oscar Wilde in the London of the 1980s—but you were really searching for something else: a history, a place, and a tangible connection between Oscar Wilde’s gay London and your own.
But what intrigues me of your writings is the relationship between history, geography and sexuality. You seem to keep exploring the question that Christopher Nealon in his book on queer historical memory raised: “what does it mean to feel historical?” Nealon considers the ways that we queer folks have set out, at least in the last half of the 20th century, to craft strategies for “describing queer historical presence” that often rest on “historical and cultural reclamations that aim to uncover a sense of . . . “cultural unity” of homosexual experience in history.” (6) Your work is a part of this project. But you also tend to question this project, to wonder if a cultural, and historical unity is even possible. This of course confuses me. So I raise the question again: “what does it mean to feel historical? What does it mean for queers to feel themselves within a history, some history?”
You begin “Who Was that Man” with two curious sentences. You write: “I wrote this book in London in 1985 and 1986, and I suppose that’s what it’s about. I wanted to write a book about what it feels like, because I think that’s what people always want to know, really, what does it feel like.” What is intriguing here is the way that the book starts with a self-conscience act of writing: the process of writing IN London is itself ABOUT London. This self-conscious act of writing is something that threads through your novels. In’‘Mr. Clive and Mr. Page,” the book is crafted as a memoir, written by Mr. Page on a quiet Christmas Eve in 1956, retelling his encounters with the much wealthier Mr. Clive some thirty years earlier when they were both young in 1920s London. As he begins his memoir he writes: “The first time I ever went to eighteen Brooke Street it was in the snow.”And then, Mr. Clive asks us, “Does that sound like a proper first sentence?” What strikes me is how often the writing and the mapping of the city are intersected activities. Beginning with “Who was that man?” and continuing through your novels, the act of writing is as much an exploration as the act of wandering the streets of London. Indeed, it is not so much that your work is ABOUT London, as is an effort to WRITE about London. Your writings constantly struggle with the act of writing about what history feels like for a gay man in London in a geography that excluded more than invited such a subjectivity. And they are set in a time prior to the contemporary moment, when stories of queer London where more likely found in the crime pages of the newspapers than the literature sections of the libraries.
In “Who was that Man” you write about coming to London: “Coming to London meant moving into a life that already existed—I started to talk to other people for the first time, to go to places that already had a style, a history if you like. What I’ve done, I suppose is to connect my life to other lives, even buildings and streets, that had an existence prior to mine. This is in itself remarkable, because for the longest time imaginable I experienced my gayness in complete isolation, just like any other gay child in a small town. And now, gradually, I’ve come to understand that I am connected with other men’s lives, men living in London with me. Or with other, dead Londoners. That’s the story. “ (xx)
These other dead Londoners has been your archive of mysteries and desires for years now, trying to recover the margins of gay history, to make this history more than just a footnote, as you say. Writing is one of the ways we enter and distort history: getting the story right is always the difficult question. In researching Wilde’s life, you connect the historical project with queer experience. You write: “Entering history can feel like entering a [gay] bar for the first time; it takes your breath away. Breathless, we could assemble a whole cast of new acquaintances, a whole library of costume dramas moving from, say, a drag party in 1725 to a uniformed wartime romance put into impressive chiaroscuro by the fires of the Blitz, finding in each place glamorous evidence of gay lives to make us feel that other have been as brilliant or inventive as us. If we were all ever to meet, surely it would be a wonderful party. . . . But this history is not a record of change . .. We abolish time and distance, and difference, in exclaiming OH! He’s just like us. We refuse the task (and the pleasure) of identifying where he is like us, where he differs….We wouldn’t follow him along the street in case this familiar geography were to shift under our feet, in case we were to discover that we were not after all, living in the same city. London is not always recognizable as London.” (217)
You constantly show how the history of queer experience is constantly found in the geography. But what of this geography, this shifting world that for you so often symbolizes the ways that gay history can not be a simple, unified narrative of gay experiences. Just look at how the geography of the city changes, you seem to being tell us over and over again.
Matt Houlbrook has recently argued in his history of early 20th century queer London, that the city “is both a symbolic and experiential rupture, a productive space that generates and stabilizes a new form of selfhood and way of life.” Houlbrook continues, “London was the site of a vibrant, extensive, and diverse queer urban culture, Overlapping social worlds took hold in parks, streets and urinals; in pubs, restaurants, and dancehalls; in Turkish baths; in furnished rooms and lodging houses. By participating in this world, they were able to forge social ties and ways of being that belied their nominal exclusion from metropolitan life.” As Houlbrook suggests, seeing queer history through spatial experiences rethinks the dominant ideologies of simplified sexual identities and subjectivities that shape our current discourse about sexuality. Houlbrook links spatial experiences with sexual subjectivities—the concrete realities of London provided a fluidity of encounters across class and racial hierarchies in the city as men—gay, straight, and many places in between—met and socialized with each other. Although Houlbrook the historian would not argue this, what his work is suggesting is that the map of queer London is profoundly imagined, inscribed not through signposts and markers, but experiences and imaginations.
But then, you, Mr. B, you knew about the ways geography complicates. You once said in an interview with The Independent that “It’s hard-wired into our culture as gay men, that we have an alternative map of the world in our heads.”
But for you history is not simply geography. The spatial turn that historians have embraced in the last few years with respect to the writing of social histories, is not really what your writing is about. For what is at heart in your writings is the very struggles of writing about queer spatial experiences, and the difficulty of locating queer London. “What does it feel like,” you wrote. There is a deceptive ambiguity with this phrase: what is the “it”? London? Queer London? To be queer in London? Is this “it” a concrete reality or a social experience? Is this “it” the stuff of the imagination or history or both? What intrigues me is the very paradox of the city you craft in your writings, how London is both concrete and elusive, historical experience and imagined history.
“Sometimes when I’m reading History I stop and I wonder if I am being lied to,” says your character Mr. Page in “Mr. Clive and Mr. Page.” He goes on: “If it tells you that something happened on a particular date, say that something happened at two o’clock on the afternoon of March the fourteenth, then you want to know if that is true or not.” Mr. Page then claims that this accuracy ought also to apply to memory as well and we all should “work out exactly when things happened.” (51). Of course this whole novel is a retelling of experiences thirty years old, and you have Mr. Page constantly imagining what happened to Mr. Clive and his lover once they left London, never to be heard from again. It is the house on Brooke street that remains, and what happens in that house between Mr. Clive and his lover is what Mr. Page remembers—even as he had little knowledge of Mr. Clive. But he makes us believe that his memories are accurate, amidst his walks down Jermyn Street to shop on Saturdays, he turns his geography into memory, and memory into historical accuracy, constantly reminding us that “this isn’t the dream. This is what actually happened.” But we don’t trust Mr. Page, for you have reminded us Mr. B that geography is no more reliable than history. And history so often forgets about people like Mr. Clive and Mr. Page and other men like them.
You said said in that same interview in The Independent: “I think my job is to lead the unsuspecting reader up a dark alley . . . and show them a good time.” I like this metaphor of writing. Here again, spatial experiences and the pleasures of reading and writing are linked. Geography becomes a way of writing. You set “Skin Lane” in the summer of 1967, during the intense debates in Parliament on the Sexual Offense Act. The bill ultimately won passage decriminalizing some consensual homosexual relations. Mr. F., the novel’s middle-aged protagonist lives a well governed life organized by the two poles of a neatly organized apartment and his work as a cutter for a furrier. But in that summer of 1967, he is haunted by a constant dream of finding a young man, naked and bloody hanging in his bathroom. This dream slowly unsettles his life, it gets under his skin, a you said once. Though I did think that reference was a bit too much.
There is a pivotal scene that begins when a man bumps into Mr. F without apology and Mr. F. decides to follow the man through the crowds of commuters because “he was the only person who was walking the other way, the wrong way, you might say, against the westward tide of early morning faces.” Mr. F pursues this man, through the streets, through dark tunnels, down back alleys, but always hundred yards away from him. You write: “His quarry was now at least a hundred yards ahead of him, and was turning left up Arthur Street. This is the street that curves up and away from Upper Thames Street, back up to where the north end of London Bridge becomes King William Street, and at ten to eight on a Monday morning, people literally pour down it. . . . All the time, he keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the man’s back and on the back of his neck, hoping for him to look left or right, so that he can at least catch a glimpse of his profile.” Mr. F pursues this man through the morning crowds and ignores his rational voice that tells him he should abandon this journey for he will be late for work. As you write, “he doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t think.” But in the end, Mr. F. loses this man and emerges from his frenzied pursuit in the center of Leadenhall Market next to the eight silvered, snarling dragons, the mythical wyverns of the City of London. You write: “All of the guidebooks tell you, they are one of the sights of London—but Mr. F has no time to look up at the Victorian wonders or a market roof. He’s searching . . . for some glimpse of that tell-tale dark hair and white neck and retreating back. . . but it’s hopeless.” (114)
It is this moment that is more than a simple chase through crowded London streets. This was Mr. F embracing some boxed up desire that he worked so many years to control, and it was there, on a warm summer day, when Parliament was beginning to consider changes in law that criminalized such desire, that Mr. F goes rushing along anonymously through the crowded London streets in pursuit of a young man’s white neck. Once Mr. F loses his object of scorn and attraction, he finds himself in one of the iconic geographies of the city, amidst a symbolic order of the city’s origins. And it is this movement of your characters between internal desires and external realities that composes a geography that is more than maps. Rather, the city you imagine in your novels is so often resting between a mental map and a concrete reality, where a iconic marketplace, a crowded street of commuters can also be that alternative geography of desire that is unmarked and unnoticed—as secret map of London.
As this scene of Mr. F’s chase shows, throughout your writing, there are two or more realities always existing in your queer London—the geography of London next to the imagined geography of queer London. A London that is more than metaphor. And this is the intriguing connections you make (whether you know it not. I’m an academic and writer, these uncoverings are the stuff of our labor, so bear with me here). For so often in your writing, the imagined Queer London is precisely the reality of London—the imagined is the experienced. This is why the writing is so self-conscious throughout your books: the act of writing about the lives of ordinary queer Londoners set in the past, incorporating actual historical materials into these stories, inscribes the imagination with more force than any writing of history. Queer London is brought to us through various narratives of imagination, history, memoir. Writing, you keep reminding us, is the way that this imagined, alternative London materializes.
In reflecting back on this question, “how do we feel historical?” your novels tell us that geography is the primary mode of inquiry—but a geography that mixes imagination and stone. To conflate time and space in recovering a queer history of London you say in “Who Was that Man?” is a mistake. You write: “ We are able to consider our history like this only if we imagine history is at an end. History ends here. It is resolved, and dissolved in our present.” Indeed, to consider how we are historical is to embrace a moment where our ideologies are in process, where sexuality shifts and changes like a rushed journey down crowded streets in search of a desire that you have little language for. But if geography is sexuality, than where are such force a police power? Or homophobic violence? Of attacks on bodies in public? The geography of London can be an unforgiving place of blood as you show in “Ready to Catch Him if He Falls,” where you intersperse narratives of violence with the growing relationship between two men. But what do we do when instead of emancipation, a geography holds us captive?
These questions I’ll hold for another letter.
Sincerely,
James
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