ALLAN HEPBURN

Peter Grimes and the Rumour of Homosexuality

At the end of Peter Grimes, Auntie, the pimp who has two prostitutes working for her, looks to the sea where Grimes's boat sinks with Peter in it. 'What is it?' Auntie asks Bob Boles. 'Nothing I can see,' replies Boles. 'One of those rumours,' Auntie remarks (Britten, 504). Grimes's death, like his life, migrates through the borough as a rumour. Rumours and malicious speculation govern town talk. During a moment of delusion in act 3, Peter complains that 'Gossip is shouting, everything's said' (491). It seems that he prefers innuendo or silence to gossip. Suspicious of all verbal intercourse, Peter even accuses his second boy apprentice, John, of having colluded with Ellen: 'You've been talking! You and that bitch were gossiping! What lies have you been telling?' (381). The boy apprentice does not say a word in the course of the whole opera - shrieking just once as he falls from a cliff near the end of act 2. It hardly stands to reason that the boy gossips with Ellen. He gives no verbal testimony one way or the other about Grimes's violent nature. While John sits with Ellen on the beach, she cannot pry a word out of him. Other characters in the opera are not so taciturn. The libretto of Peter Grimes thematizes sound - whispering, rumour-mongering, hubbub, hymn-singing, prostitutes' squeals, and eavesdropping - as acoustic events that define the community. At the same time, town gossip and rumours bring Grimes into being as a homicidal, sadistic outcast, most memorably by the repeated accusation bruited among the chorus that 'Grimes is at his exercise' (284-304), meaning that he is beating his apprentices. Grimes lives out this tainted version of himself - a violent, boy-abusing loner - irrespective of its truth. Although Balstrode urges everyone to 'forget what slander can invent' (292-93) on the grounds that slander causes suffering for someone, the people in the borough do not heed this advice. Slander has a logic of its own, especially as perpetrated by Mrs Sedley, who fancies herself an amateur sleuth. She incriminates Grimes by observing him and assembling a case against him. Once raised, suspicions cannot be retracted. Grimes, who mostly sticks to his hut and his boat, is not necessarily privy to the tales that circulate about him. In act 2 and again in act 3, the townsfolk hunt Grimes down at his hut and on the beach; the manhunt scenes split spatially between Peter's solitary world set against the shouting world of the assembled townspeople. As Grimes observes about his own trial, 'The case goes on in people's minds. The charges that
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no court has made will be shouted at my head' (20-21). Despite his claims of speaking simple truth, he cannot control the negative opinions that linger around his court case. No matter how convincing Grimes's statement may be that his first apprentice died of thirst, the townspeople, and to some extent the audience, believe that Grimes is too rough with his apprentices and actively contributes to their demise. Imprudently chasing the second boy out the back door of his hut, Peter does not kill his apprentice, though he does nothing to ensure his safety either. In unison, Mrs Sedley, Boles, the Rector, Swallow, Keene, and the chorus sing with self-righteous and hypocritical assurance, 'Now is gossip put on trial, now the rumours either fail, or are shouted in the wind, sweeping furious through the land' (334-36). The townspeople look for proofs of Peter's murderous character. Their solidarity, expressed through their singing in unison, decides the case against Grimes. Rumour is not put on trial so much as validated as the means by which character is created in the opera in order to malign it, specifically to malign Peter Grimes as the town misfit. In the musicological and critical literature about the opera, the most persistent rumour about Grimes concerns his homosexuality. In A Song of Love and Death, Peter Conrad matter-of-factly states that 'Grimes the boykiller is the homosexual outcast, looking to Ellen Orford to effect his redemption, even his cure' (344). Wanting to impress Ellen, Grimes takes an unrealistic view of his ability to provide for her materially. Grimes, however, is not Sweeney Todd; he does not kill boys serially with premeditated intent. His homosexuality, although everywhere implied, is never explicit in the opera. And the desire for a 'cure' brought about by marrying Ellen may have more to do with the discursive manner in which homosexuality was originally defined as a pathology, rather than with Grimes's particular manifestation of queerness. In this interpretation, Peter Grimes, guilty of bad faith, longs to marry Ellen to allay suspicions of his homosexuality and sadism. Justifications can be made for this interpretation. Grimes throws sea-clothes at John in act 2, scene 2, and threatens to 'tear the collar off (Britten, 368-69) the boy's neck. In an earlier plan for the opera, Montagu Slater offered a more brutal Grimes. In a cancelled set of lines. Grimes with a rope in hand chases the boy around the hut: By God I'll beat it out of you. Stand up. (lash) Straighter. (lash) I'U count two And then you'U jump to it. One.
Well? Two. (The boy doesn't move. Then Peter lashes hard, twice. He runs. Peter follows.)

Your soul is mine. Your body is the cat o' nine Tail's mincemeat. O! A pretty dish Smooth-skinned & young as she could wish.
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Come cat! Up whiplash! Jump my son Jump (lash) jump (lash) jump, the dance is on. (quoted in Banks, 65-66) In the final version, the lashing is reduced to a threat. Grimes sings, 'Will you move or must I make you dance?' (Britten, 385). A prototype of the Angry Young Men who thrashed across the cultural landscape in England in the 1950s, Grimes hits Ellen. He also bruises John's neck. Grimes's violence, however, is not so different from Boles's. At the Boar tavern. Boles hits Balstrode, then nearly crowns Grimes with a bottle. Grimes's cruelty has no definite rationale. After hearing the Tanglewood production of Peter Grimes in August 1946, the American reviewer Jacob Avshalomoff wrote: 'Perhaps a flaw in the libretto is that it never gives the cause for Grimes's original isolation from the community. But beyond that the piece has the quality of a Greek tragedy, wherein misfortune comes not from direct malfeasance on the part of the protagonist, but as a result of some failing in his character, in this case the arrogance which brings about his destruction' (quoted in Brett, 98).' To elevate Grimes's plight to the level of Greek tragedy, without specifying his exact failing of character, leads to the spurious conclusion that Peter harbours some secret that he cannot announce. Moreover, Peter is of the wrong class to belong in high tragedy; his is a tragedy of the ordinary individual, not of a nobly born Greek more Willie Loman than Oedipus. In Peter Grimes, the busybody and laudanum addict Mrs Sedley trills that Peter has a 'stifling secret' (Britten, 425). Mrs Sedley, having watched Grimes for days, declares him a 'murderer' (423). Mrs Sedley's slander leads to the supposition that the murder originates in the open secret of Peter Grimes's paedophilia. The least helpful statements about the opera with regard to the alleged open secret of Grimes's homosexuality come from Benjamin Britten himself. In a letter dated 12 March 1943, Britten, struggling to clarify Grimes's character, wrote, 'At the moment he is just a pathological case no reasons and not many symptoms' (Banks, 29). As a 'case,' Grimes belongs to those classifiable yet unspeakable homosexual 'cases' who infiltrate British culture prior to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain in 1967. In E.M. Forster's novel Maurice, completed in 1914 and published posthumously in 1971, the queer protagonist asks a doctor if he has ever, while treating medical cases, 'come across unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort?' (136). Wilde's name was a code word throughout the modernist period for homosexual transgression. Having begun a relationship with Peter Pears in 1937, and having been subjected to W.H. Auden's
1 Philip Brett's Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes is an indispensable compilation of sources, reviews, and criticism on the opera. Unless otherwise specified, references to 'Brett' refer to this casebook.

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unsolicited come-ons (including Auden's mocking poem 'Underneath the abject willow, / Lover, sulk no more,' which Britten set to music), Britten knew about unspeakable cases of the Oscar Wilde sort. To read for the queerness in a text is to read for 'the unspoken word, the unrepresentable that may only be discerned in the silences of a text, in its evasions' (McClatchie, 67). The question pertinent to Peter Grimes, however, is to what degree unspeakability makes its way into the representation of Grimes, and whether the unspoken aspects of his particular case attest to unavowed homosexuality or whether such homosexuality is a rumour lacking proof. Lloyd Whitesell, addressing the issue of 'queer self-understanding' in Britten's operas, concludes that 'part of the riveting psychological drama Britten mobilizes in these works lies in the vicarious experience they offer of becoming queer' (686).^ Indeed, the problem of identifying homosexuality in Britten's operas arises because characters do not see themselves as queer, simply as social outcasts. Whitesell argues that listeners have to learn to hear the strange subjectivity of queer characters. Works such as Billy Budd and the War Requiem 'entertain the nascent possibility of a different ethic of male interchange, free from reproductive imperatives and the traffic in women, in which pleasure in male beauty and pledges of mutual support can provide the basis for political solidarity and an impetus for reform' (Whitesell, 652). As an earlier work in Britten's oeuvre, Peter Grimes does not exclude the faint hope of marriage, but that hope is abandoned entirely by Ellen and Grimes after the death of the second apprentice. Grimes's solo 'Now the Great Bear and Pleiades' (Britten, 196) may create a bit of sympathy for him and his romantic visions, but he never succeeds in integrating into the community that shuns him. No political reform comes to fruition in Peter Grimes, least of all solidarity with or toleration of Peter's strange solitariness, which can be construed as his crypto-homosexuality. Citing related queer cases in the Britten repertory, including Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave, and Death in Venice, Philip Brett concludes that Britten's operas 'are preoccupied with the social experience of homosexuality' ('The Authority of Difference,' 633). More often than not, that experience takes the form of solitude, oppression, and unspeakability. Trial scenes throughout Britten's operas - Gloriana, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd suggest Britten's awareness that legal discourse consolidates social judgments against the oppressed and solitary, whether homosexual or not. Legal trials, closely aligned in the popular imagination with homosexual crimes, especially after Wilde's spectacular conviction in 1895, can be read as encoded forms of queer representation. A medical case flips into a legal
2 Whitesell provides a comprehensive and useful list of queer interpretations of Britten's operas (638n3).

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case, which sums up many modernist definitions of homosexuality: a pathology categorized as a crime. Constrained by legal and medical stigmatization, homosexuals remain silent. Notwithstanding the stigmatization of homosexuality, homosexuals had acquired wide currency in literary representation by the 1940s, sometimes as comic characters. In Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love (1945), precocious children badger their parents to know what Oscar Wilde's crin\e was and why it was punished with two years of hard labour. The taboo on homosexuality incites curiosity in Mitford's novel. What did Oscar Wilde do? Why is sodomy unmentionable? Mitford, who had any number of queer friends, treats homosexuality candidly; in Mitford's Love in a Gold Climate (1949), Cedric Hampton has an affair with a French nobleman and picks up a lorry driver. It has become a commonplace in discussions of literary queerness to claim that homosexuality announces itself by indirection and codes. Yet that commonplace is sometimes fanciful, even by the standards of modernist representation. Queer characters are not necessarily cryptic. From the 1930s through the 1960s, queer characters acquired representational currency, if not, by contrast, social acceptance. In Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938), St Quentin, a writer who scrounges information from his friends, is unmistakably gay. Charles Ryder has a homosexual affair with Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) before taking up with Sebastian's sister Julia, a rather sinister case of social climbing through successive sexual liaisons in the same family. In Barbara Pym's novel A Glass of Blessings (1958), a naive housewife tries to charm a gay man who adores his boyfriend - to no avail. The bisexual author Colin Maclnnes includes a successful, older gay man in his hipster novel Absolute Beginners (1959). Maclnnes saw a performance of Peter Grimes in the late 1940s. 'The theme and tragedy of P. Grimes,' Maclnnes wrote in his notebooks, 'is homosexuality and, as such, the treatment is quite moving, if a bit watery. Grimes is the homosexual hero. The melancholy of the opera is the melancholy of homosexuality' (quoted in Banks, 76n38). For Maclnnes at least, Peter Grimes offers no mystery. The protagonist's case is self-evident for those who understand its symptoms. This tradition of reading Britten's male protagonists as closet cases continues in the later twentieth century. In his novel The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst offers two divergent views of Britten's Billy Budd as a queer opera. One character calls it 'the opera that was, but wasn't, gay' (120), whereas his best friend, who attends the same performance, sees the matter with more nuance: 'not being about love but about goodness, and the way Britten channelled what he felt about love away into some obscurer, less appealing theatre of debate' (Hollinghurst, 218). As in Peter Grimes, these interpretations are not mutually exclusive. An opera can be about queerness and goodness at the same time. In revisions exacted on the

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libretto, Britten moved the queer material away from Grimes's pathology and into the realms of justice and the communal creation of identity. A 'discreet' homosexual (Carpenter, 257), Britten tentatively explored the confines of the closet throughout his career. He sought texts by queer writers as sources, and he collaborated with queer writers on libretti: Auden was his librettist for Paul Bunyan; Lytton Strachey's skewed history, Elizabeth and Essex, is the source text for Gloriana; E.M. Forster collaborated on the libretto for Billy Budd; Henry James supplied the source text for Britten's rendition of The Turn ofthe Screw. Auden, Strachey, Forster, and James are all, of course, gay writers. In a letter to Britten on 11 March 1944, Peter Pears writes about Peter Grimes, 'The more I hear of it, the more I feel that the queerness is unimportant & doesn't really exist in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn't do so in the words. P.G. is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem is expression, self-expression' (Banks, 33). Musicologists interpret this letter as an indication that Britten and Pears hid queerness in Peter Grimes. I would suggest, however, that Britten thought he was writing an opera that conforms to the allegorical expectations of late 1940s art. After all, being queer is an orientation, not a profession. Peter Grimes has other existential qualities that interact with and complicate his queerness, which is why, perhaps, Peter Pears identifies him allegorically as an introspective artist who happens to be a fisherman and an outcast. Britten's early stage works, including Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes, and Gloriana, all have an allegorical dimension. They point to meanings beyond the literal. Paul Bunyan, for instance, invokes the mythic lumberjack as an allegory about nature and the American frontier. 'In writing Peter Grimes,' Britten claims in a statement for the 1945 premiere at Sadler's Wells, 'I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea - difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form' (Brett, 149; emphasis added). Taken in one way, this statement seems relatively naive, as if Britten were emphasizing struggle and universality at the expense of Grimes's particular social problems. Taken another way, this statement suggests that Britten is working within an aesthetic of working-class conflict and late modernist universalism. In Peter Grimes, Britten deals with the forms of alienation itself and how it comes into being through social, legal, psychological, heteronormative, and other means. Britten consistently treats the character of Peter Grimes as an Everyman, whose actions as an individual are freighted with larger significance. Whereas British culture in the 1930s cast the Common Man as hero, and poetry and drama extolled the common denominators of humankind as the foundation for political thinking and social reform, Peter Grimes, as a work completed in the last months of the Second World War (Britten finished scoring the opera in February 1945), rethinks the Common Man for the

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postwar period. As a fisherman. Grimes belongs to the representational conventions of the 1930s: a worker whose anguish should not be overlooked. As a despised man living on the edge of town. Grimes belongs also to the emerging representational conventions of the late 1940s: an outsider who reacts with violence to his social alienation, Grimes's self-hatred and arrogance, his cruelty to Ellen and to his apprentices, forbid sympathy. The working man is not championed simply because he works. Grimes's inability to listen to Balstrode's or Ellen's advice, coupled with the physical abuse of his apprentices, makes him a disagreeable protagonist. The opera therefore calls into question the 'stock liberal antithesis' that positions the individual 'as the victim of the uncomprehending collective' (Arblaster, 300), Neither Peter nor the townspeople attract admiration. Neither offers a viable model of redemption. The audience, confronted with an unsympathetic anti-hero, is encouraged to rethink the political dimensions of the opera. In Peter Grimes, the oppression of Peter through rumour and shunning bears the 'universal' theme of oppression even as Grimes oppresses others. In this sense, the opera makes a plea for tolerance, notwithstanding the disagreeable side of Peter Grimes's character, Edmund Wilson, who saw the opera in 1945, understood it as a product of the war. According to Wilson, Britten succeeded in harmonizing 'the harsh helpless emotions of wartime' (Brett, 161). Indeed, the town provokes Grimes into violent resistance that might be interpreted as an allegory about antagonism on a global scale. Writing in 1952, Hans Keller attributed the universality of the opera to our unconscious identification with Grimes the misfit: 'we do identify him, and ourselves with him, unconsciously, which is one reason for the universal appeal of this work' (Brett, 105). Although the current tendency opposes the universalizing of any artwork, we should not ignore that the aesthetic assumption of the late 1940s, an assumption shared by composers, poets, and painters, was to convey universal truth through a particular image or drama. The universalizing tendencies oi Peter Grimes may have something to do with its being written for the Sadler's Wells company, which had its origins in working-class theatre. Before the Second World War, Sadler's WeUs had attracted new audiences to opera with productions of The Bartered Bride and Gosifan tutte, then shut down during the war. Dale Harris notes that 'The premiere of Grimes ... marked the reopening of Sadler's Wells Theatre, and therefore the return of the company to its proletarian origins. In cheering Peter Grimes, the audience was asserting its support not merely for British opera but for a people's theatre' (20). Montagu Slater, the librettist of Peter Grimes, had Marxist commitments. As such. Slater presumably felt the necessity of representing alienated labour and the need for social change. The struggle of Grimes against the villagers is also a struggle against the confines of class. Grimes repeats his intention to 'get money' (Britten, 371),
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either to put the burghers in their place or to marry Ellen. In the opera. Bob Boles claims that Grimes has 'sold [his] soul' (202), as if such a transaction were not only diabolical, but also commercial. The profit motive leads Grimes to try to sail to London with a large catch of fish - an act of folly that causes the first apprentice's death. More insidiously, the libretto dramatizes an ostensible conflict between work and sexuality. Grimes buys boys from the poorhouse to work for him, with the insinuation that these boys - whom he hustles off to his hut even in the midst of gale-force winds - have to do his many biddings. The working body is a sexual body. The two prostitutes who work for Auntie reinforce this notion. Their sexual bodies are a resource that positions them within capitalism. The spectacle of exploitation in labour, therefore, is not exclusively homosexual in the opera. Nor is it exclusively male. Benjamin Britten's 'sensitivity to injustice' (Kildea, 7) manifests itself in the portrait of Grimes as existential sufferer. In this sense. Grimes, who cannot articulate his 'fiery visions' (Britten, 119), belongs among the displaced heroes of late 1940s drama and literature. Pressured into fishing day in and day out in order to earn his livelihood. Grimes dreams grandly of setting up 'household and shop' (121). Like the Angry Young Men who come after him in the 1950s, Grimes succumbs to a material notion of success that he can never fulfil. His inability to achieve success piques his rage. Violence results from the multiple injustices inflicted on Grimes. He asserts his innocence by lashing out at others. The libretto, the first production of the opera, and the aesthetic parameters within which Britten worked allow more than one interpretation of Grimes as a misfit: as a queer character who cannot envision himself married to a woman; as a labourer who cannot work his way into the good graces of the townspeople; as a victim of oppression who cannot counteract the rumours that circulate about him.

WORKS CITED ^'Arblaster, Anthony. Viva la Liberta: Politics in Opera. London: Verso 1992 Banks, Paul, ed. The Making of 'Peter Grimes'. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell 1996 Brett, Philip. 'The Authority of Difference.' Musical Times 134:1809 (1993), 633-36 Brett, Philip, ed. Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983 Britten, Benjamin. Peter Grimes. Libretto by Montagu Slater. London and New York: Boosey and Hawkes 1945 Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1992 Conrad, Peter. A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera. 1987. St Paul, Minnesota: Grej'wolf 1996
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Forster, Edward Morgan. Maurice. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972 Harris, Dale. 'In That Dawn: The Birth of Peter Grimes.' Opera News 60:1 (1995),
18-21

HoUinghurst, Alan. The Swimming-Pool Library. New York: Random House 1988 Kildea, Paul. Selling Britten: Music and the Market Place. Oxford: Oxford University
Press 2002

McClatchie, Stephen. 'Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave and the Politics of the Closet: or, "He Shall Be Straightened Out at Patmore.'" Cambridge Opera Journal 8:1 (1996), 59-75 Whitesell, Lloyd. 'Britten's Dubious Trysts.' Journal ofthe American Musicological Society 56:3 (2003), 637-94

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