Protesting Normalcy

Protesting Normalcy:
Norman Podhoretz, A. L. Rowse, and the

Conservative Refashioning of Homosexual Friendships
Raymond-Jean Frontain
Universit y of Central Arkansas
In Peter Shaffers Amadeus (1979), court composer Antonio Salieri, consumed with
envy of the seemingly effortless musical genius and the coarse sexual bravado of new-
comer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartand driven, as well, by resentment of the younger
mans gleeful coprophilia and exuberantly bad mannersattempts initially to contain
the professional advancement of his rival, but eventually seeks nothing less than
Mozarts annihilation. Salieris resentment, rather than being appeased by the younger
mans eventual death, grows only the stronger as Mozarts posthumous fame increases
while Salieris more immediately popular yet pedestrian and quickly-outmoded musi-
cal style buries him in obscurity even though he lives on decades longer. Finally, un-
derstanding himself to be near the end of his own life, an aged Salieri is reduced to
spreading rumors that he was responsible decades earlier for Mozarts premature death,
purportedly having poisoned his rival out of sexual and professional jealousy. He hopes
to be remembered, thus, if not for his own music, then as the murderer of the most
renowned composer of the age. His plan is thwarted, however, when, rather than see-
ing him as the evil genius that he now wants to be remembered as being, people con-
clude that he is merely pathetically insane. Frustrated to have attained no other lasting
distinction in his lifetime, Salieri is reduced to proclaiming himself the Patron Saint of
Mediocrities, and ends the play by blessing Shaffers audience: Mediocrities every-
wherenow and to comeI absolve you all. Amen! (104).
Shaffers play offers a prescient analogue to a recent cultural phenomenon: narrative
remembrances of conspicuously gay creative artists composed by their more politically
and/or culturally conservative contemporaries who were once friends with the deceased,
and who attempt to have the last word in a debate over cultural values by writing after
their more famous contemporarys death when the accuracy of their recollections can-
not be authoritatively challenged. I am not interested in the anecdotal testimony fed to
the People magazine and Entertainment Tonight gossip mills that contradicts widely re-
ported accounts of Rock Hudsons, Laurence Oliviers, Cary Grants and, even, Liberaces
homosexual dalliances, and that occasionally goes further by impugning the motive of
anyone who asserts the contraryalthough such anecdotal testimony, whether stem-
ming from naivete, homophobia, or a desperate desire to share even momentarily the
deceaseds spotlight, is worthy of study.1 Rather, I am concerned with conservative ide-
ologues who, aware of the stakes in the culture wars that they have spent their lives wag-
ing, attempt to score a posthumous victory against a powerful adversary by marshaling
Intertexts, Vol. 15, No. 2 2011 Texas Tech University Press

126 INTERTEXTS
the evidence of his life and work in order to undermine the cause that he is presumed
to represent. It is as though, having won the battle to outlive a rival who, like Shaffers
Mozart, had not recognized the power of resentment that his sexual behavior and pro-
fessional success aroused while he was still alive, the conservative memoristenraged
to see the reputation of a departed, and supposedly defeated, enemy grow even stronger
in death than it had been in lifemusters his remaining resources to fire a final volley
against the sexual and/or cultural revolution. Such memoirs prove at best a pathetic at-
tempt to insinuate oneself into, and redirect along more gratifying channels, the narra-
tive of ones cultural superior, and at worst a pathological attempt to hijack cultural
history and remake it in ones own image.
In this essay I consider how homophobia or homosexual dis-ease informs the re-
membrances of poets Allen Ginsberg and W. H. Auden written, respectively, by Norman
Podhoretz and A. L. Rowse. Each memorist, not surprisingly, uses the occasion of as-
sessing the achievement of his former friend to review his own life, writing finally far
more tellingly about himself than about his purported subject. Likewise, each is dis-
mayed at the continuing poetic reputation of his more famous rival, a reputation that
is in part dependent upon the latters sexual non-conformity. Thus, both narratives link
the kind of poetry that each subject wrote to an absence of sexual self-consciousness or
lack of shame that the memorist finds exasperating; in the process, Podhoretz and
Rowse protest, perhaps too strenuously, their own normalcy. And, finally, publishing
their narratives only after the purported subjects had died and were unable to challenge
their versions of events (Podhoretz in 1999, two years after Ginsbergs death; and Rowse
in 1987, some fourteen years after Audens passing), both memorists display something
of what the French call lesprit de lescalier in which one thinks of the witty comeback that
one should have made in an argument only after one has left the salon and is making
ones way downstairs to the street. Clearly, each narrative is written out of frustration
that the world has not taken Podhoretz or Rowse as seriously vis a vis Ginsberg or
Auden as the survivor takes himself, and the memoir is his best hope of redressing that
imbalance. Their narratives give witness to their recognition in old age when, like Shaf-
fers Salieri, they are haunted by a lifetimes accumulated evidence of their own com-
parative mediocrity, that their last hope of fame beyond the grave lies in killing (by
denigrating the reputation of) their rival. If Podhoretz and Rowse could not live as
friends with Ginsberg and Auden, their memoirs suggest, they can at least triumph as
ex-friends following the latters deaths.
* * * * * * *
A telling episode is narrated at the outset of each memoir which, because mention of it
had previously appeared in print to Rowses or Podhoretzs disadvantage, the author
feels obliged to resurrect, and in the process of offering a supposedly more accurate
version, establish the need for a longer, revisionist narrative.
Rowse emphasizes that he was three years Audens senior and already the English
Literature Scholar at All Souls College, Oxford, when Auden matriculated as an un-
Frontain: Protesting Normalcy 127
dergraduate to Christ Church College in 1925. One afternoon, following a poetry read-
ing at All Souls,
Wystan suggested that we should adjourn to his rooms in Peck and continue. Ar-
rived there, he proceeded to sport the oak (shut the outer door), pull down the
blinds and close the shutters, turn on the green-shaded light on his deskand read
to me, not poems, but letters from a friend of his in Mexico, employed in the Eagle
Oil Company, about his goings-on with the boys.
This was a quite unexpected development. After all, I have not been at a public
school, but an innocent, small grammar schoolcoeducational tooand was years
behind these contemporaries in experience of the facts of life, let alone sophistication,
everything. (It took me an age to catch up with them; Ive been competing with them
and against the advantages they had all my life.)
Ingenuous rather than priggish, all the same no fool, I recognised the situation
and was not giving myself away. The reader must recognise the immense difference
that belonging to another generation makes at the university. Wystan was my junior,
and I was already a don, very conscious of my status as such, perhaps all the more so
because youthfully attained against such odds. Anyhow, as I sank defensively back
deep in my armchair I wondered how I could get out of the situation with dignity, re-
flecting (ludicrously enough) to myself, Fellows of All Souls dont do that sort of
thing. (89)
Rowse was quite literally saved by a bell in the courtyard, whose ringing gave him an
excuse to flee Audens chambers for the safety of tea in the All Souls Common Room.
He stresses that following that encounter he held Auden securely at a distance for the
next fifty years.
This episode does several things, not the least of which is authorize Rowses stance
towards his subject for the remainder of the memoir. Most immediately, it establishes
Rowses faith in Oxford as a microcosm for the larger social world, a world of tradition
and decorum, of which Rowse is the great upholder and with which Auden will be per-
petually at variance in Rowses narrative. Rowse not only translates for the reader who
has not attended Oxford its peculiar expressions (sport the oak) and local references
(the bell named Tom), but seems to take particular pleasure in explaining how value
is constructed in the elite world of academe in which Rowse has invested his identity.
In the opening paragraph of the memoir, for example, Rowse explains the consequences
that his seniority had for his relationship with Auden: I was three years his senior. That
makes all the difference at the university: seniority draws a line, and that prevailed all
through our lives right up to his return to Oxford toward the end of his life (7), when
Auden spent part of every year in residence as Professor of Poetry. Oxford is a closed
world of highly traditional standards and values, not the least of which is seniority. Yet
as Rowse comments to himself at the conclusion of the episode under discussion, Fel-
lows of All Souls dont do that sort of thingwhether sport sexually with the boys
128 INTERTEXTS
in Mexico, write letters to others revealing the details of such activities, or share a col-
leaguess private correspondence with a third party, Rowse does not make clear.
Rowses reader may suspect, however, that Rowse was, finally, most offended by
Audens daring to treat him as an equal by inviting him back to his rooms and sharing
the kind of illicit sexual information that the prevailing code might allow one to disclose
to a fellow undergraduate, but not to a donmuch less that a don might dare to discuss
with a student. Throughout his memoir, despite Rowses protestations that Auden always
treated him with deference, one senses that Rowses amour propre was repeatedly
bruised by Audens casual familiarity, and that Rowse writes in large part to reassert his
authority and recover lost face (I wondered how I could get out of the situation with
dignity). Clearly, Auden did not value seniority to the extent that Rowse did, did not
pay Rowse the deference that Rowse felt he deserved, and so seems continually to punc-
ture the bubble of Rowses self-importance.2 I was not one of the boys, Rowse sniffs;
it was not a question of morals, but of taste and tenue, of the way to behave (9).
Indeed, the episode under discussion seems designed to highlight Audens sexual,
not simply social, impropriety. Auden apparently recognized that Rowse was, in Audens
preferred term, a homintern, so invited him back to his rooms after the poetry reading
to feel him out privately on the matter. In a series of ambivalent gestures, Auden closes
the outer door, signaling to third parties that he and his guest do not wish to be dis-
turbed. He then fastens the window shutters as well, and turns on a shaded desk lamp
all actions which he might take because, as Rowse has said, they had just attended an
outdoor poetry reading in the hot glare of summer sun (8) and Auden hoped to in-
sulate the room from the prevailing heat. But they were also actions, Rowse seems un-
comfortably to have suspected, that Auden might take prefatory to a seduction or
assignation. I recognized the situation and was not giving myself away, Rowse ex-
plains to the reader, without specifying what the situation was or in what way he might
giv[e] myself away. To the hypothetical faux pas listed above that Fellows of All Souls
dont do might be added engaging in an afternoon homosexual dalliance with a stu-
dent, however slightly ones junior.
What Rowse narratesentirely unintentionally, I do not doubtis a sex farce that
depends upon his and Audens conflicting levels of understanding or acknowledgment.
Rowse seems offended that Auden dares to presume that Rowse is homosexual. Not
because Rowse is heterosexual and resents being mistaken for something he is not; he
implicitly acknowledges his orientation to the reader elsewhere in the narrative. Rather,
because Auden is acting upon information that Rowse has not explicitly provided, and
Auden is thus boorishly violating one of those unstated rules of gentlemanly decorum
that Rowse takes delight in upholding at Oxford. In contradictory fashion, Rowse
protests to the reader that, not having been privileged, as Auden and the majority of
their colleagues at Oxford were, to attend a single-sex public school (where homosex-
ual activities were common), Rowse was sexually inexperienced and, thus, uncertain
how to respond to an easy presumption of sexual familiarity by a contemporary.3 Yet the
narrative does not establish that Auden ever made a sexual advance on Rowse; in his
naivete Rowse may have misread Audens actions entirely.4 At bottom, Audens offense
seems to have been his refusal to support Rowses presentation of himself as a dignified
andon the surface, at leastentirely orthodox Fellow of All Souls.
In Rowses concern with what is or is not done by someone of his station, the episode
establishes the Lady Bracknell-like concern with propriety and social facade that per-
meates his memoir. Rowse defines himself by his academic position and is determined
always to act as he thinks that a Fellow of All Souls should act. That role, he suggests, did
not come naturally to him because, as he repeatedly pleads in the memoir, he lacked the
advantages of social class and public school education shared by most students at Ox-
fordeven those who, like himself, subsequently enjoyed professorial appointments. In-
deed, the only reason that Rowse brings up the episode so early in his memoir seems
to be that it had already been told in both Charles Osbornes and Humphrey Carpen-
ters biographies of Auden, but in a way that suggests that Rowse may have felt a par-
ticular attraction to younger males (so would have been more interested in the letters
describing goings-on with the boys than he lets on).5 Rowse, thus, attempts to counter
existing versions of the story with a supposedly more authoritative one (It is under-
standable that the one occasion I have never forgotten is that written up in the biogra-
phies of him, though only I know the (perhaps absurd) story of it, 8), but still maintain
his dignityboth as an actor within the narrative and as the narrator who tells the story
so many years later.
The episode concludes with Rowses attempt to turn Audens own verse against him.
After quoting Audens aphoristic lines
Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places
Rowse sniffs that in my view private life should be kept private, not brandished in
publictoo vulgar and undignified. I have never had any sympathy with Wildes vul-
gar Irish exhibitionism, asking for trouble and bringing down untold (and unneces-
sary) suffering, even death, upon hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Unforgivable
(9). And here, I think, is the governing impulse of Rowses narrative: the need to justify
himself in the face of Audens sexual frankness and absence of shame. Auden is not con-
demned for having been homosexual, but for having cavorted publicly as such and,
thus, like Oscar Wilde, opening a floodgate of public hysteria in which other homo-
sexualsincluding men, presumably like Rowse himself, of intellect, taste and supe-
rior sexual self-restraintmight also be so badly compromised socially that they are
driven to commit suicide, collateral damage in a profligates assault on propriety.
Podhoretz likewise opens his narrative by recounting an episode that he hopes will
win from the reader sympathy for his own misunderstood or ill-appreciated character.
At War with Allen Ginsbergthe opening chapter in his memoir, Ex-Friendsis in-
tended nominally to refute Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumachers account of a
130 INTERTEXTS
meeting that Ginsberg, along with his lover Peter Orlovsky and close friend, novelist
Jack Kerouac, requested with Podhoretz sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s
(Schumacher is less precise than Podhoretz on the date) following the appearance in
Partisan Review of the latters essay, The Know-Nothing Bohemians. Schumacher ad-
vances the incident as an example of Ginsbergs lifelong attempt to mediate between
conflicting parties in the hope that if people sit down together and talk, tensions will be
defused, misunderstandings will be cleared up, and onetime antagonists will be able to
join forces against their common enemy, the spirit-deadening Moloch. Thus, in Schu-
machers account, Podhoretz appears as a subdued but influential member of the new
critical establishment from whom Ginsberg and Kerouac hoped at least to gain a mea-
sure of respect (Schumacher 341).
It is difficult initially to see what in Schumachers paragraph-long narrative should
have so disturbed Podhoretz as to elicit a contentious 34-page rebuttal. One must note,
however, that Schumachers summary of the episode precedes his retelling of a more ex-
plosive encounter that occurred between Ginsberg and Podhoretz at a party hosted by
novelist Norman Mailer in which Podhoretz does not fare nearly so well. As Ginsberg
later recalled, at the party Podhoretz approached him and told him that he was an in-
telligent, gifted writer who could be a valued member of the New York literary scene if
he would only dump such friends as Kerouac and Burroughs, who would never fit in
(Schumacher 342). In Ginsbergs own words,
To my eternal shame, I lost my temper. I suddenly saw myself in a B movie out of

Balzac, with me as the distinguished provincial being tempted by the idiot worldly
bankerWell give you a career if you renounce your mother and father and your
background. It was so corny, it was like being propositioned by the devil or some-
thing. (qtd. in Schumacher 342)
Intimidated by Ginsbergs loss of temper, Podhoretz purportedly shouted out that Allen
was going to get violent, and Mailer rushed over to break up any potential fisticuffs
(Schumacher 342). In this episode Podhoretz appears as a self-important and vaguely
sinister member of the conservative literary establishment who is physically a coward
to boot.
Does Podhoretz attempt to distract attention from the later, more damning episode
by concentrating at length in his essay on the earlier one? Mailers party had been at-
tended by numerous people, many of whom were still living at the time of Podhoretzs
writing who could qualify or challenge outright Podhoretzs recollections if he made
that episode the focus of his essay, whereas both Ginsberg and Kerouachis principal
interlocutors during the first eventhad since died.6 By nominally concentrating on
his encounter with Ginsberg and Kerouac in Ginsbergs lower East side apartment, Pod-
horetz is free to represent himself without contradiction as the aggrieved party and to
use the incident to frame his bill of indictment against a popular figure who, even in
death, continued to influence untold numbers of kids (38).
Like Rowse in his account of his visit to Audens undergraduate rooms at Oxford,
Podhoretz frames his version of his encounter with his former Columbia University
classmate in terms of manners, of taste and tenue, of the way to behavethat is, of
what is or is not done, in this case by a rising member of the conservative establish-
ment. Whereas Schumacher reports only that Ginsberg, Kerouac and Orlovsky had
called Podhoretz on a whim and invited him to their apartment to try to iron out their
disagreements (Schumacher 341), Podhoretz describes having received a phone call
on Jack and Allens behalf from an unidentified girlfriend of Kerouacs, and feeling as
though he was being issued an unexpected and wholly unwelcome challenge (29).
Even though the meeting was to be informal, he self-consciously changed from the
sloppy old clothes I usually wore on weekends into a clean white shirt with a button-
down collar, a rep tie, and a three-piece charcoal grey flannel suit from Brooks Broth-
ers (22), and found his hostsKerouac exceptedpredictably and ostentatiously
scruffy (30). And in what Podhoretz took to be a sophomorically deliberate affront to
my bourgeois expectations (30), Ginsberg did not introduce him either to Orlovsky or
to Kerouacs girlfriend, neither of whom Podhoretz records as taking part in the dis-
cussion that followed and who disappear entirely from his narrative after Podhoretz
records his own arrival. Podhoretz seems to expect his reader to share his indignation
that Ginsberglike Rowses Audenbehaved so impolitely that a man in a rep tie and
Brooks Brothers suit, like a Fellow of All Souls, could not help but take offense. Clearly,
Ginsberg had not been schooled by Emily Post. But, the reader may wonder, why would
the rules of etiquette apply to an informal Saturday evening discussion among former
college classmates?
Podhoretz uses their differences in social behavior to highlight the gap between his
and Ginsbergs values. For example, in his retelling of Ginsbergs version of the event
Schumacher had noted that Podhoretz was not about to accept their invitation to
smoke marijuana with them, as if doing so were tantamount to a passing of the peace
pipe between factions of warring tribes (Schumacher 341). Podhoretz remembers the
invitation differently. I had anticipated a tense and unpleasant evening, and Ginsberg
did not disappoint me. The festivities began with his aggressive insistence that I smoke
marijuana with them. I refused. Not, as Schumacher claims, . . . but for the same rea-
son I had shaved and changed my clothes before setting out (31). Curiously, Podhoretz
does not reject as inappropriate Schumachers analogy to a summit at which contend-
ing parties are able to resolve their differences amicably; rather, even after his former
college classmates death, he cannot forget for a moment that he remains At War with
Allen Ginsberg. More curiously, Podhoretz does not assert that he failed to join them
smoking marijuana because he categorically rejected the use of any illegal substance
(elsewhere, taking a jab at then-President Bill Clinton, he acknowledges that although
his experience smoking marijuana was limited, it certainly did include inhaling, 38),
only that he refused to do so on this occasion for the same reason I had shaved and
changed my clothes before setting out. And the explanation given for those actions
earlier in the essay is that it occurred to me that if I were to arrive at his apartment
132 INTERTEXTS
needing a shave and dressed in threadbare chino pants and a rumpled old shirt, it would
be as if I were donning the enemys uniform for a foray into his own territory. Worse yet,
I might in some sense seem to be currying favor (29). Podhoretz apparently sees Gins-
bergs frayed chinos, like his own three-piece grey flannel suit, as a uniform worn to
signify allegiance to one side in a culture war in which Podhoretz will not allow his
enemy any quarter. Thus, one may infer from Podhoretzs narrative that smoking mar-
ijuana is not inherently wrong; rather, it is to be eschewed only when in Ginsbergs
and/or Kerouacs presence, lest they understand how much Podhoretz might have in
common with them or think that he is relaxing his animus towards them. Ironically, it
is the appearance of orthodoxy that matters most to Podhoretz, not orthodoxy itself.
Two attitudes seem to underlie Podhoretzs essay. First, Podhoretz resents his con-
tinuing need to defend what he terms the square way of life (or what today would be
called middle-class values) against the Beat assault (33).
At the age of twenty-six, the year Howl and Other Poems was published, I married a
woman with two very small children, thereby assuming responsibility for an entire
family at one stroke; and by the time The Know-Nothing Bohemians appeared in
1958, a third child had come along (with a fourth to follow in due course). To sup-
port this growing family, I was relying on three different sources of income: a full-
time job as an editor, freelance writing at night and on weekends, and lecture
engagements whenever I could get them. (33)
Ginsbergs refusal to dress decorously or to make polite introductionslike his prefer-

ence for living in what Podhoretz describes as a walk-up in an aging building, sparsely
furnished, and badly in need of a paint job (30)implicitly calls into question the
image of middle class respectability that Podhoretz was struggling to maintain. (In his
description of his own uniform, Podhoretz seems purposefully to associate himself
with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suitthat is, the corporate functionary frustrated
to have become an impersonal cog in the system made famous by the 1955 novel of
that title by Sloan Wilson and by a popular film adaptation a year later). Ginsbergs very
being was a rebuke to life-altering choices that Podhoretz had made, Ginsbergs lifestyle
proving to be as loose as Podhoretzs waslike his choice of shirt collarbutton[ed]-
down. Thus, not only did Podhoretz feel that he was under attack even before Ginsberg
uttered a single word on the evening in question, but forty years later he continues to
feel the need to defend his middle-class way of lifea way of life that he feels should be
the norm, but is frustrated to find is still described pejoratively by others as square.
But if Podhoretz resents having to rationalize his behavior to culture mavens like
Schumacher who, forty years after the event, continue to write condescendingly about
him, he is incredulous that even after Ginsbergs death the media continue to promote
a false image of the celebrated poet, one that Podhoretz feels that it is his duty to expose.
The rule is never speak ill of the dead, but the obituarists [sic] and commemorators
[sic] who wrote about Ginsberg upon his death could not have broken the rule even if
they had wanted to, since they could see no ill in him to speak of at all (52). Podhoretz
boasts that he himself had never been fooled by Ginsbergs hypocrisywhether as the
latters undergraduate classmate, much less at their disputed Saturday evening confab
when they were in their mid-twenties, or in the days following Ginsbergs death. In
later life, Ginsberg would adopt a sweet and gentle persona, but there was nothing sweet
or gentle about the Allen Ginsberg I had last seen at Columbia ten years earlier, and
there was even less evidence of those qualities in the Allen Ginsberg I met again that
night (31). Rejecting Schumachers description of Ginsbergs fence-mending invita-
tion that Podhoretz smoke marijuana with him, Podhoretz emphasizes Ginsbergs ag-
gressive insistence that he do so. Far from their exchange being civil, as Schumacher
describes it, Podhoretz claims that all night long he was hectored and harrangued
by Ginsberg for his failure to recognize both Kerouacs genius and Ginsbergs own
(31). Thus, far from being conciliatory and open-minded, as the poet is generally rep-
resented as having been on this and on other occasions, Ginsberg comes across in Pod-
horetzs narrative as boorish, self-aggrandizing, and ill-tempered. The man who, in 1999,
was widely lauded as an icon of Buddhist self-control and Gandhi-like passive re-
sistence, is shown to have only been affecting an Eastern mysticism(30).
For the reader of Rowses and Podhoretzs narratives, a disquieting question emerges
from the memorists implicitly contradictory assertions in these introductory episodes:
why is so much ado being made over what, by the survivors own declarations, were
supposedly inconsequential exchanges? Rowse goes on to record numerous subsequent
encounters with Auden, none of which repeats their initial farcical misunderstanding,
from which the reader may assume that any sexual subtext disappeared altogether from
their relationship after Rowses visit to Audens rooms. Likewise, both Podhoretz and all
of Ginsbergs biographers (Miles, Morgan, Schumacher) affirm that nothing was re-
solved at Podhoretzs meeting with Ginsberg and Kerouac, and one may infer from Pod-
horetzs own testimony that nothing memorable was said, inasmuch as Podhoretz
neither once quotes his adversaries nor recollects a single specific argument that he
himself advanced that evening. Thus, on the face of things, each survivors dedicating
so much ink to an episode that had no real consequence is puzzling, especially inas-
much as the asides and digressions repeatedly made by each writer suggest that he is en-
gaged in doing something more than correcting a preexisting yet supposedly faulty
record of an event. An understanding of the larger significance that these incidents pos-
sessed for Rowse and Podhoretz can be gained from an analysis of the relation of writ-
ing to sexual identity that is established in each memoir.
* * * * * * *
Underlying both Rowses and Podhoretzs narratives is a simple assumption that the
bodys odors and fluids must be carefully contained, something that Auden and Gins-
bergto Rowses dismay and Podhoretzs exasperationseemed inherently incapable
of doing. Whereas Rowses sense of taste and tenue, of the way to behave, is offended
by Audens obliviousness to social codes, Podhoretz makes no attempt to temper his
134 INTERTEXTS
disdain for Ginsbergs sexual promiscuity. Not surprisingly, each memorist links his ad-
versarys disruptive corporeality to the kind of poetry that he wrote, concluding that by
taking the poetic low road Auden and Ginsberg were indulging their baser instincts.
By exposing in their narratives the dangers inherent in their adversarys lifestyle and po-
etry, Rowse and Podhoretz hope to save postwar culture from the apocalypse that, to dif-
fering degrees, they fear is looming. Thus, far from proving to be minor events, the
episodes of Rowses visit one afternoon to Audens rooms at Oxford, and of Podhoretzs
one Saturday evening to Ginsbergs lower East side apartment, anticipate the Ar-
mageddon that they feel they have been called to fight. For Rowse and Podhoretz (the
latter proving far more shrill than the former on this point), the celebration of Audens
and Ginsbergs gay bodies by their legions of fans marks the end of civilization.
Both Rowse and Podhoretz base their claims to a superior morality and to superior
literary taste upon their own supposedly superior hygiene. Audens squalid habits, ac-
cording to Rowse, made him singularly unlovable.
[T]he perpetual cigarette-smoking, filthy fags never away from his lips, fingers stained
with nicotine, nails bitten to the quick; cigarette ash scattered down his front, all
around wherever he wasno wonder he weakened his heart; untidiness everywhere,
he reduced any room he was in to a shambles, picking up coats and even carpets to
pile on top of his bed; then the drink, of every kind, the necessity for it, apart from a
little drug in the morning and another at night. No wonder Chester [that is, Chester
Kallman, Audens sexually unfaithful partner for over 30 years] couldnt love him,
for all that Wystan did for him; with my donnish insistence on tidiness, let alone an
aesthetes determination to have everything proper and handsome about me, I
couldnt put up with him in the house for a single day. He wasnt house-trained. How
on earth can he have got like that? No woman would have put up with it. (1617)
Rowse sustains this lament throughout the memoir: but O the untidiness, the scruffi-
ness, the positive grubbiness, the aura and aroma of nicotined unwashedness! (Eliots
neat and well-groomed prissyness for me) (43).
But at least Rowse can allude self-mockingly to his own donnish prissiness. Pod-
horetz, conversely, seems constitutionally incapable of good-natured humor, especially
when reporting his own abnormalities. A tone of censoriousness permeates his mem-
oir. At Columbia my friends tended to be straight, in both senses of that term, Pod-
horetz writes early in his essay, whereas Ginsberg, a middle-class Jewish boy from New
Jersey in the process of discovering himself as a homosexual, fell in with an assortment
of hustlers, junkies, and other shady or disreputable characters who were always getting
themselves and him into trouble (24). Podhoretz is repelled by Ginsbergs world (35),
whose physical squalor (40) is presented as an apt indication of its moral tawdriness.
Podhoretzs admittedly abnormal . . . conscious[ness] of the issue of personal appear-
ance (30) needs must put him at odds with a man who valorizes homosexuality, jazz,
dope-addiction, and vagrancy (27).7 Podhoretz takes a particularly prurient view of
Ginsbergs frank acceptance of the physiological realities of homosexual anal sex, yet
combs Ginsbergs poetry for examples of the latters writing in the dirtiest possible
way about his sexual encounters and fantasies (5354).8 Perhaps because he describes
his falling out with his undergraduate mentor, Lionel Trilling, in another chapter in his
memoir, Podhoretz does not quote Trillings wife Dianas often-repeated certainty that
the students in the audience who enthusiastically applauded Ginsbergs poetry at a
highly visible reading at Columbia in 1959 would smell bad if she ever got close
enough to sniff them (qtd. in Morgan 292). Despite his disdain for her liberal politics
and resentment of her mandarin behavior toward him that he summarizes elsewhere in
the memoir, Podhoretz shared with Diana Trilling a revulsion for the physical realities
of Ginsbergs existence.
Rowses linking hygiene with T. S. Eliots poetic (Eliots neat and well-groomed pris-
syness for me) suggests the extent to which for Rowse, as for Podhoretz, more is at
stake in an adversarys physical deportment than the niceness of bathing daily and dress-
ing neatly. To Podhoretzs dismay, Ginsberg associated professionally with the entire
world of the counterculturefrom rock musicians like Bob Dylan to hippies and yip-
pies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to a variety of gurus peddling one form or an-
other of Oriental mysticism (47). In Podhoretzs opinion, Ginsberg had foolishly
modeled himself upon American turncoat Ezra Pound, both in terms of style (espe-
cially in his letters, down to the eccentric punctuation and the use of idiosyncratic
mock-comic locutions, 41), and as a leader, an exemplar, and a mentor to other writ-
ers of his generation (the difference was that Pound had had W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and
James Joyce to push and promote . . . whereas all poor Ginsberg had to work with were
the likes of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 41). Podhoretz goes
so far as to speculate that Ginsberg willed himself into homosexuality in an effort to
inscribe himself in the great romantic tradition of the pote maudit as exemplified by
the likes of Arthur Rimbaud (36) or by Jean Genet, affectionately described by Gins-
berg as another literary cocksucker, a description endorsed by Podhoretz (35). Gins-
bergs literary associations, like his hygiene, mark him as lazy; his punctuation, like his
conversion from Judaism to Buddhism and his public displays of his homosexuality, is
mere affectation. Thus, in Podhoretzs mind, Ginsberg can ultimately be dismissed as a
member of the ragtag counter culture rather than celebrated as a member of what F. R.
Leavis had termed the great tradition.
In a similar fashion, Rowse expresses dismay at Audens choice of literary models.
I thought that French discipline, the classic standards of French literature and art, the
clarity of the language, were just what Auden-Spender-Isherwood needed. Instead they
went in for horrible German Expressionismus [sic], the indiscipline of the Weimar Re-
public, the unspeakable vulgarity of Berlin. Think of it, opting for Berlin as against
Paris! (15; see also 112 and 116). Auden and his friends all went whoring (if that is the
word for it) after beastly Berlin and Rugen Island [a popular homosexual resort in the
1930s], the theatre of the evil-minded Brecht, the ego-mania of Rilke and Thomas
Mann, who thought himself not only Goethe but God (15). Audens at best tenuous
136 INTERTEXTS
association with Mann inspires Rowses particular animus. Although Rowse lauds
Audens generosity in marrying Manns daughtera woman whom the poet had never
even metin order to facilitate her emigration from Nazi Germany to the United States,
he cannot forget that Audens onetime father-in-law is the author of that sentimental
little story, Death in Venice on which Rowses and Audens contemporary, British com-
poser Benjamin Britten, wast[ed] his genius . . . , we all know why (37). Manns novella
depicts a middle-aged writer celebrated for his classical restraint who, while on holiday
in Venice, falls victim to an obsessive passion for a beautiful ephebe. Not only had the
public expression of admiration for Manns work become in the mid-twentieth century
a culturally sanctioned way by which artists like Auden and Britten could subtlyyet,
to Rowses tastes, still too obviouslyacknowledge their own homosexuality, but Death
in Venice celebrated the very kind of sensual self-indulgence that Rowse deplored.
For Rowse, Audens preference for German culture over French carries political as
well as sexual implications. Well could Auden tastelessly favor Germany over France
(66) while true-blue Englishmen like Rowse endured the perils of the Blitz after Ger-
many started her second war this century (66). The Second World War, Rowse suggests,
was the inevitable result of the unbridled egotism and/or lack of sexual restraint that
Rowse associates with the writings of Thomas Mann, as well as with the pre-War so-
journs that Auden and his friends made in Berlin. If Racines alexandrines represented
for Rowse the heroic restraint of private passion within a tightly regulated meter, thereby
making the subject matter suitable for public circulation, German modernism signi-
fied what Rowse elsewhere terms private life rendered all too public (16)a charge
that Rowse leveled against both Isherwoods semi-autobiographical Berlin Stories and
Oscar Wildes vulgar Irish exhibitionism. Rowse twice asserts that if Auden was in-
fluenced by Manns celebration of sexual decadence, he himself looked to the poet and
classics professor A. E. Housman as the model of how the sexually abstemious man can
find satisfaction in scholarship and solitude (16, 136). These qualities make Housman
the antithesis of Auden, whom Rowse faulted for his inability to slowly, patiently, think
things through as a scholar does (12, original emphasis), and for maintaining the wide
cosmopolitan circle of friends that Rowse found undiscriminating (16).9
For Rowse, England and France had twice in his century been brought to the
brink of destruction because of what he perceived to be Germanys indigenous lack of
self-restraintthe same lack of which he found evidence of in Audens squalid habits
and fraternization with unwashed German rent boys (19). Civilization had been saved
by the heroic sacrifices made by men like Rowse who remained in England during the
Blitza restraint that, even after the war when it is no longer required for the common
good, Rowse continues to practice in his private life. Indeed, by staying safely out of
harms way in the United States during the war, Auden missed the heights and depths,
comradeship and suffering and endurance, anxiety and grief and pride (65) that might
have inspired him to write better poetryan issue so important to Rowse that he lev-
eled it against Auden in Homosexuals in History (322) as well. Yet as Rowse pens his
memoir in the late 1990s, literary historians continue to invoke the names of the sainted
Three (27) of Auden, Isherwood, and Spender as though they constitute a perverse
Holy Trinitynot to mention that of E. M. Forster, the moral mentor (53) or patron
saint of them all (55; see also 58, 68, and 70). Rowse clearly hopes that the revelations
about Auden that he provides in his memoir might yet turn the tide of scholarly ap-
probation away from Auden in the direction of the more restrained and, to Rowses
taste, superior poetry of Louis MacNiece (110) and John Betjeman (25). Rowse is not
an alarmist, and never goes so far as to suggest that a third World War might break out
if readers continue to applaud Auden. But he is uneasy that social standards have be-
come more accepting of Audens squalid style of homosexuality.
Likewise, Podhoretz writes to remind readers of a threat offered by an unclean poet,
but for Podhoretz that threat is not in the recent past, but looms perilously in the im-
mediate future. This accounts for the radical difference in tone in the two memoirs.
Rowse affects the weariness of the learned don who has seen the worlds foolishness but
whose scholarly objectivity and emotional dispassion allow him to remain above the
fray. For Rowse, World War II has been fought and Germany decisively defeated, but he
and his fellow scholars must continue their efforts to contain Audens vulgar . . . exhi-
bitionism (as consequential for his generation as Oscar Wildes had been a century be-
fore) for the good of all. Podhoretz, conversely, boasts of having issued a ringing
declaration of war (28) on Ginsberg in a series of essays in the 1950s, and of having of-
fered a scathing indictment that bothered Ginsberg so deeply that he would never get
over it. And I mean never (28). Yet, forty years after those supposedly resounding suc-
cesses, as well as several years after Ginsbergs death, Podhoretz still finds himself de-
fending normal life from Ginsbergs ideological aggression (37) and from the lax
and latitudinarian standards of our day (53). Podhoretz thus finds himself in the po-
sition of a general who, even though he has lived to see his enemy carried off the field,
understands only too well that his enemys work and its influence would still be there
and the war would still go on (22). He remains At War with Allen Ginsberg even
though the latter is dead. Indeed, Podhoretz seems to find the socio-cultural threat of-
fered by Ginsberg to be still so powerful that he cannot afford the time to reason with
his reader, but instead hurls urgent summary dismissals as though they were lightning
bolts from Olympus.10
Rowses and Podhoretzs fears of cultural contagion lead them to present themselves
in their memoirs as judges responsible for ensuring the public safety. Rowse begins his
memoir by stating that his purpose in writing is to determine whether Auden was a
great poet (8), which seems a fair task to be undertaken by a literary historian, even if
he fashions himself as both prosecutor and judge. But Rowse acknowledges a more
bloodthirsty motivation when, in the final sentence of his introductory chapter, he says
that he looks forward to the fun to be had in track[ing] down the poet in his work,
spring[ing] him out of his lair (18)that is, Rowse fashions himself as a huntsman
and Auden as an animal to be flushed out of his natural habitat and run down by a pack
of dogs. Podhoretz is even more frankly vindictive. He resents that Jack Kerouac got
off scot free (24) after helping a friend dispose of evidence in a murder while they were
138 INTERTEXTS
undergraduates, and he is apoplectic that the world continues to celebrate Kerouac and
Ginsberg for having spawned the counterculture of the 1960s with its hatred and con-
tempt for everything generally deemed healthy, decent, or normal (49)the quotation
from his own earlier essay, The Know-Nothing Bohemians, intended to demonstrate
how little his own values have changed in forty years yet in actuality revealing to his
reader how ineffective that supposedly scathing indictment had been if he must now
reissue it. Podhoretz believes, rather, that Kerouac should be remembered for having fi-
nally settled down in a suburb with his wife and mother, returned to the Catholic
Church, and also moved to the Right in his political views (49), and Ginsberg as the
man who encouraged the youth of America to opt out of middle-class life and liberate
the squelched and smothered self through drugs and sexual promiscuity(47).11
Thus, if Rowse and Podhoretz did not undertake to expose what frauds Auden and
Ginsberg were, there is a danger that others will subscribe to the liberal morality of the
detested E. M. Forster and think it normal not to be ashamed of promiscuous same-
sex relations. Podhoretz concludes his essay by arguing that, rather than honoring the
memory of the Beats, rational persons should hold them accountable for the damage
that they inflicted on the American way of life.
Orwell insisted, The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is pos-
sible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive. Instead, we were mem-
oralizing Ginsberg and Kerouac, thereby further weakening our already tenuous
grasp on Orwells saving fact, and abandoning the field once again to these latter-
day Pied Pipers, and their current successors, who never ceased telling our children
that the life being lived around them was not worth living at all. (56)
The world over which Rowse and Podhoretz see themselves as presiding must be saved
for cleanliness, decency, and normalcy.
Indeed, the threat that Auden and Ginsberg offer is so great that it makes their judges
feel that they are under attack personally, inspiring them to write in the defense of the
values that they hold most dearscholarship and solitude, in Rowses case; heterosex-
ual marriage and sexual fidelity, in Podhoretzs. And it is Rowses and Podhoretzs un-
derstanding of, and feelings of personal assault by, the gay rights movement of the 1960s
and 1970s that is the final element of their memoirs that merits consideration.
* * * * * * *
An argumentative catch-22 dominates each memoir as the author asserts the intimacy
that he once enjoyed with his subject (and that guarantees the authority of his narrative),
even as he struggles to distance himself from that subject lest he become guilty by as-
sociation of the faults that he writes to condemn or becomes implicated in the threat that
he hopes to contain. For example, whereas Rowse dismisses Audens The Orators as hav-
ing been rendered incomprehensible by its private jokes for the group of like-minded
men that surrounded the always gregarious poet (26), he is elsewhere happy to reveal
himself to be one of those very same cognoscenti as he elucidates the private joke for
the initiated (22) contained in Audens dedication of Poems to Isherwood: he both is
and is not a member of Audens in-crowd. (Elsewhere, he emphasizes that a sexual dou-
ble entendre in Auden and Isherwoods The Dog under the Skin was not lost on me,
naughty boys, 34.) Similarly, the basic premise of Podhoretzs Ex-Friends is that al-
though politically he was liberally inclined early in life, he experienced an epiphany
that effectedas he boasts in the books subtitlea Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg,
Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. Yet
throughout his chapter on Ginsberg, he emphasizes that he hardly knew the poet, and
did not like what little he did know about him. How, the reader must ask, can one be
ex-friends with someone with whom one was supposedly never friendly? Thus, even
while asserting their moral and literary superiority to Auden and Ginsberg, Rowse and
Podhoretz attempt to inscribe themselves Zelig-like into the narratives of the literary gi-
ants of their respective generations. A passive-aggressive quality infuses both narra-
tives, as though Podhoretz and Rowse are frustrated that, like Shaffers Salieri, their best
hope of being remembered is in terms of a contemporary whose values are inimical to
their very existence; on some level they seem to understand that they are themselves
erased by the very way that they must beg to be remembered. This happens most clearly
in terms of the act of writing, as each demonstrates the pen envy that emerges as a sig-
nificant motivation for undertaking his memoir.
In a confusing conflation of multiple ideas in a single short passage, Rowse objects
both to the way in which a line in Auden functions as a piece of bravado and to
Audens exposing himself genitally in his verse. Then, in a seeming non-sequitur,
Rowse recommends the use of internal rhymes in contemporary poetry while noting
gratuitously in an aside that I favour and use them myself, nobody notices (94).
Rowses associating poetic technique with sexual exhibitionism may give pause to the
average reader, for these are not two realms of experience commonly linked.12 Fur-
thermore, Rowses final phrase, nobody notices, refers presumably to rhymes which do
not distract the reader by calling attention to themselves in the way that Rowse objects
that some of Audens poetic effects do. But the sloppiness of Rowses syntax allows the
phrase to function simultaneously as a parenthetical complaint that whereas Audens
vulgar . . . exhibitionism wins him scores of readers and international acclaim, Rowses
own subtler and more delicate poetic effects go unnoticed and unappreciated. (When
he is remembered today other than as a historian of Elizabethan England, Rowse is dis-
cussed as a regional poet of his native Cornwall, and a minor one at that.) Throughout
his memoir, Rowse complains not simply that Audens poetry commands an apprecia-
tion that Rowse feels it does not deserve, but that Rowses own poetry is unjustly ig-
nored because it does not subscribe to the supposedly cerebral and heartless codes of
modernism.
Thus, at the very opening of his memoirin only the second paragraphRowse
reminds the reader that he is himself a poet when he explains that he wrote poetry in
spite of the enormous amount of historical reading to get through as an undergraduate
140 INTERTEXTS
at Oxford (7). From the outset he wants the reader to understand that it is his nature to
write poetry, no matter how burdened he is by scholarly duties. And throughout his
narrative, Rowse juxtaposes his own literary production with the better-known poetry
of Auden and his kind. Because Rowse was himself born a member of the laboring class,
my own verse in the 1930s did not share the middle-class feeling of inferiority to
the working man supposedly evinced by Audens poetry and that of Cecil Day Lewis, the
latter later a Labour appointment as Poet Laureate (26). (The implication of this seem-
ingly gratuitous information may be that Day Lewiss affectation of a working class sen-
sibility won him the patronage of the Labour government, while Rowses own
hard-fought rise from a working class background continues to go unrewarded.) Like-
wise, Rowses continuing to subscribe to the Romantic belief that one can write poetry
only when the heart moves or is moved (114) puts him at odds with poets like Auden
and Spender.
With my view of poetry I thought that one should write as one deeply felt, since it
arises from the deepest sources within one; and that might well be in conflict with
ones intellectual stance. Stephen [Spender] contradicted this: he considered that one
should write ones poetry as and what one thought. This was in accordance with Wys-
tans life-long practice of writing poetry as an act of will. (34)
Rowse thinks of his poetry as being inspired, much as Wordsworth and Shelley claimed
their own to have been, whereas Audens is emotionally arid because it is the product
of a purely intellectual act of will. The superiority of Rowses approach is supposedly
proven by the fact that, whereas Audens and Spenders poetry eventually dried up in
them (34), Rowse continues to write poetry at age 84. Yet, Rowse seems uncomfortably
to recognize, it was Auden whom Spender emulated, not Rowseand nowhere in his
138-page memoir does Rowse cite a single poet who has followed Rowses lead. The
conclusion that Rowse hopes the reader will draw is that Rowse is the real poet and
Auden a charlataneven though the latter continues to be lionized while the former is
reduced to licking his wounds.
Rowse seems even more exasperated by Audens intruding upon his scholarly pre-
serve as the historian of Shakespeares Sonnets. Audens introduction to the 1964 Signet
edition of Shakespeares poems was quoted with far greater respect in many quarters
than Rowses several books on Shakespeare, in particular Rowses dogged insistence that
the Dark Lady of the Sonnets can be identified as Emilia Lenier (or Amelia Lanyer, as
she is now more often cited). Whereas the subtitle of Rowses Shakespeares Sonnets: The
Problems Solved (1973) betrays an assurance regarding the results of his investigations
that has been supported by few other scholars (irrelevant learning, a Times Literary
Supplement reviewer wrote to Rowses chagrin, 72), Auden argued that in the absence
of reliable biographical information readers should concentrate on the moving psy-
chology of love adumbrated in the Sonnetsa position that betrays Rowses belief in
the power of historical scholarship (14). Apparently Auden added insult to injury by re-
lying in The Enchafed Flood upon the criticism of G. Wilson Knight (90), whose ex-
traordinary sensitivity to Shakespeares imagery as an indication of the poets world
view and spiritual development exerted a significant influence on a generation of read-
ers trained by the New Critics to discount the belief of scholars like Rowse in the supe-
riority of archival research over a close examination of the verbal artefact. Wystan
should have asked the leading historian of the time about the historical information
of the Sonnets, Rowse sniffs, offended not to have been consulted; he should have
asked (107), Rowse repeats, his personal hurt breaking through his magisterial pro-
fessional detachment. Worse, when producing a documentary on Shakespeare, the
BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] asked Auden to hold forth [on the Sonnets]
they did not ask the authority who had solved the problems (108). It is frustrating
enough to see his own poetic reputation pale next to Audens, but insupportable to find
his scholarly reputation traduced by a man who, as Rowse reminds the reader several
times in his memoir, only earned a Third on his degree examinations as opposed to
Rowses own triumphant First (12, 14, 108).
Podhoretzs essay betrays a similar pique that the writing of a man whom he con-
siders to be his moral inferior should be so much more highly valued than his own. As
a freshman, age sixteen, I had submitted a long poem about the prophet Jeremiah to the
college literary magazine of which he [Ginsberg], nearly twenty and in his junior (or se-
nior?) year, was the editor, and to my great delight he had accepted it for publication,
Podhoretz boasts at the outset of his essay (23). And not only was Podhoretz three years
younger than Ginsberg and so precocious that he began his university education at age
16, but apparently he was in advance of him poetically, for instead of imitating Eliot,
who was at the time the rage on college campuses, Podhoretz relied upon my then-
beloved Whitman (23), under whose influence Ginsberg would only later come. Spec-
ulating on the source of what he asserts would be Ginsbergs lifelong animus towards
himself, Podhoretz ingenuously wonders aloud, Might he have thought that in trying
to sound like Whitman instead of Eliot, I was ahead of him and on to something new?
(23). What is more, if antagonists would later conclude that Podhoretzs first published
poem benefitted from Ginsbergs editing, the fact that early Podhoretz sounds like the
master himself to later Ginsberg supporters seems to confirm that Podhoretz was Gins-
bergs peer, if not his poetic mentor (34).13 Little wonder that Podhoretz supposedly be-
came the favorite student and (in my early days as a critic) . . . [the] most loyal disciple
(44) of Lionel Trilling, a star of the Columbia English department who remains better
known today as a personal and literary supporter of the undergraduate Ginsberg than
of the now literarily obscure Podhoretz.
Podhoretz himself acknowledges that he proved better at writing about poetry, and
about literature in general, than I was at writing poems (234, original emphasis). And
it was to him in his capacity as a professional literary critic that Ginsberg supposedly
wrote in the mid-1950s asking Podhoretz to review his recently published Howl. The
men had not seen each other since Ginsberg graduated Columbia, but evidently . . . he
[Ginsberg] had kept close enough track of me to know that I was now an established
142 INTERTEXTS
literary critic and therefore in a position to do him a certain amount of good (26). But
Podhoretz chose to do the opposite, issuing in The Know-Nothing Bohemians the
scathing indictment that, he crows, bothered Ginsberg so deeply that he would never
get over it. And I mean never (28). Podhoretz seems inordinately proud of the power
of the pen that he once wielded. He claims to have championed early on the writings of
such influential thinkers and liberal social critics as Norman Mailer, Paul Goodwin and
Norman O. Brown (42)although he also emphasizes that eventually he broke with
each of them. Likewise, he believes that his review of Joseph Hellers Catch-22 helped
his book along (50), although, following the pattern of all of Podhoretzs relation-
ships, once Podhoretz began leaning heavily to the Right, Heller cemented our new
ex-friendship with a savage caricature of me in one of his later novels (50). In his own
eyes, Podhoretz was a literary king-maker, and could have continued to exert a shap-
ing influence over American letters if his newfound conservative political convictions
did not require him to denounce the misguided darlings of the Left. In its rehashing of
past triumphs, Podhoretzs essay betrays a longing for the power that he once exerted
in a literary realm where his name has long since been without recognition.14
Rowses and Podhoretzs pen envy proves a manifestation of theirto employ a
cheap but nonetheless useful termpenis envy. And it is in their denunciations of
Audens and Ginsbergs sexual lives that Rowse and Podhoretz reveal their deepest re-
sentment of the challenges to social orthodoxy represented by their nemeses, as well as
offer the loudest protestations of their own normalcy. Perhaps the most shocking rev-
elation made in his memoir of Auden is that Rowse himself wrote erotic poetry. After
acknowledging that Auden wrote a good deal of pornographic verseafter all, one
must amuse oneself, and ones friends (116), Rowse quotes the opening lines of The
Platonic Blowjob, a manuscript copy of which famously had been stolen from Audens
Greenwich Village apartment by a casual sexual partner and published at the time under
Audens name as A Day for a Lay in a number of gay periodicals without the authors
permission. Even the venerated Eliot wrote some naughty unpublished poems, Rowse
coyly volunteers (116), demonstrating both his enlightened attitude toward naughty
writing in general and his superior knowledge as a literary insider. I have written very
few, Rowse then admits parenthetically, and, as usual, kept them to myself (116).
That is, like Auden, Rowse naughtily used his literary gifts to amuse himself and his
friends. But, unlike Auden, Rowse never indulged the propensity for vulgar . . . exhi-
bitionism that led to Audens erotica circulating as widely as it did, much to Audens
embarrassment. Rowse both is and is not, like Auden, part of a homosexual literary
coterie.
Rowses and Audens sexual differences extend to the conduct of their private lives.
While Auden was shack[ing] up with the proletariat in Berlin (19), Rowse sustained
a friendship with a German named Adam von Trott that was, he asserts, all the more
intense for being platonic (30). Rowses own close contacts . . . were more serious and
altogether more significant than the frivolous ones of Auden, Isherwood and co. (30)
another instance of Audens slovenliness paling before Rowses Greer Garson-like no-
bility, sex posing the ultimate challenge of taste and tenue, of the way to behave. Still,
Rowse notes early on with qualified admiration,
the really remarkable thing about Wystan was that he should have accepted the fact
about his own nature when he was a schoolboyquite naturally and rationally, with-
out any fuss. This was very precocious of him, and courageous; of course, he was pre-
cocious intellectually and had plenty of courage, thoughoddlythe acceptance of
what his nature was does not seem to have required much courage in his case. He was
lucky. (10, see also 44)
Unfortunately, Rowse never felt so lucky himself, but refers in a veiled fashion
throughout the memoir to the many disappointments he suffered and sacrifices he had
been called upon to make. Might these disappointments have been of a sexual nature
as, following the example of Housman, Rowse suppressed his desire for the younger
men to whom he was attracted, thereby sacrificing any real possibility of personal hap-
piness?
Rowses narrative suggests obliquely that he even fantasized about living with Auden.
As we have already seen, when complaining of Audens squalid habits Rowse con-
cludes not only that I couldnt put up with him in the house for a single day, but that
no woman would have put up with it (17). Rowse groups imself with those potential
female consorts who would have rejected a marriage proposal from Auden had one
been forthcoming. Had he, on some level, tried to imagine himself as Audens domes-
tic partner, only to recoil at the thought of Audens slovenliness? And did he see him-
self in a more reticent, supposedly female role vis a vis the more sexually robust
Auden? Curiously, in narrating the incident with which he opens his memoir, Rowse
never explains whyif he was as conscious of his seniority and professorial dignity as
he claims to have beena don would condescend to visit an undergraduates rooms.
Might the admittedly inexperienced Rowse have been tentatively hoping to gain sexual
knowledge, only to be frightened off by Audens indelicacy?15 As much as Rowse sniffs
at the tawdriness of Audens sexual life, does he wish that he might have enjoyed some
of the same?
Likewise, Podhoretz connects his frustration with Ginsbergs poetics to his resent-
ment of Ginsbergs sexuality. Podhoretz not only confirms the presence of an extralit-
erary, personal element in my opposition to his poetry (34), but is freed by Ginsbergs
death to offer a frank reason for his animus: sexual jealousy.
How could it not have been? As against the law-abiding life I had chosen of a steady
job and marriage and children, he [Ginsberg] conjured up a world of complete free-
dom from the limits imposed by such grim responsibilities. It was a world that prom-
ised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded
consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more
sex, more intensity, more life. (34, original emphasis)
144 INTERTEXTS
Quoting selectively from Howl, Podhoretz confesses that in some part of me I envied
N.C. (Neal Cassady), the secret hero of Howlthat cocksman and Adonis who had
sweetened the snatches of a million girls and brought joy to the memory of his innu-
merable lays (35), only finally to reject Cassadys compulsive Don Juanism as noth-
ing more than a rationalization [Podhoretz does not specify of what]and a morally
tawdry and intellectually dishonest one at that (35). In a similar vein, Podhoretz ex-
presses disdain for Ginsbergs relationship with Peter Orlovsky, to whom Ginsberg
would remain married for all practical purposesother, of course, than sexual fidelity
for the rest of his life (30).
Apparently, it is because Podhoretz was himself so susceptible to the siren song of
sexual freedom that he fretted compulsively over what Ginsberg was doing. In Shake-
speares Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch challenges the steward Malvolios denying other
people the opportunity to enjoy cakes and ale because Malvolio himself does not like
them. But in this case, Podhoretz would deny others the opportunity to enjoy more life
solely because, rather than allowing himself to pursue endless erotic possibility to-
gether with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new di-
mensions of beling, he forced himself to settle for the grim responsibilities of
marrying and siring children upon Midge Decter.
Thus, like Rowses memoir of Auden, Podhoretzs memoir of Ginsberg becomes a
self-portrait of the memorist himselfin particular, of his own frustrated desires. Yearn-
ing for la vie boheme, Podhoretz could daydream as a young man that he might one
day decide to take a swim in the Plaza fountain in the middle of the night (33) as a
drunken Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald once dida fantasy, he makes clear, that at age 69
he has yet to realize. Porhoretz emerges as a grim, buttoned-down figure like Richard
Nixon, who famously wore a jacket, tie, and wing-tipped shoes as he walked along the
beach (much as Podhoretz donned the uniform of a three-piece grey flannel suit in
order to visit Ginsberg one Saturday night at the latters Greenwich Village apartment),
and who expressed disdain for any departure from what he considered to be sexual
normalcy, all the while indulging an abnormal fascination with the details of other
peoples sexual lives fed to him by the equally prurient and similarly conflicted J. Edgar
Hoover. A readers eyebrows may be raised by Podhoretzs admission that he found Ker-
ouac to be even handsomer in the flesh than in the pictues of him that had been ap-
pearing for months in such mass magazines as Life and Time (30), as though Podhoretz
had been intently studying those images and would only fall further under the spell of
Kerouacs sexual charisma as they walked the late night streets of lower Manhattan to-
gether following their dispute in Ginsbergs apartment (3940). When Podhoretz ful-
minates against the current party line of the gay-rights movement that homosexuality
is always inborn and never a matter of choice (367), he probably has most immedi-
ately in mind his own eccentric theory that Ginsberg willed himself into homosexu-
ality as another way of expressing his contempt for normal life (36). But might he also
be considering his own life as a counter example, whereby he forsook his dream of
breaking out of the limits I had imposed upon myself (34) by undertaking the grim
responsibilities of marrying and remaining faithful to Midge Decter, thereby willing

himself into heterosexuality? Like Rowse, Podhoretz had resisted the call to more life
and willed himself to appear normal.
The occasionally virulent tone that on occasion mars each memoir seems, thus, the
result of the identification that Rowse and Podhoretz resent feeling with their subjects.
The memorists identify with, yet are eager to distance themselves from, the seeming
abnormality of their ex-friends. Each is unsettled to have so much in common with,
yet to have followed such a different trajectory in life than, the socio-sexually disrup-
tive Other.16 In psychology, the term transference reaction describes the phenome-
non by which one person sees in another what he is most frightened of finding in
himself, the resulting irrational hatred of that other person proving to be the attempt to
exorcize the demon within. The memoirs of Auden and Ginsberg seem the product of
a peculiar sort of transference reaction in which the author resents his nemesis for hav-
ing taken a road in life that the memorist might himself have taken, the nemesiss de-
cision calling into question the option that the memorist did pursue.
The reader cannot be surprised, then, to find each memorist determined to uncover
a veiled, slighting reference to himself in his nemesiss poetry as though Rowse and
Podhoretz needed to believe that they were being attacked for their aura of normalcy
by the sexually disruptive Other. Rowse is defensive about Audens generic reference
in one poem to the Oxford Don who doesnt feel quite happy about pleasure (27),
and suspects that Audens warning to Beware of those with no obvious vices might
be me, I reflect; but could reply that one should keep ones vices to oneself, not flaunt
them in public (36). Likewise, after reading Ginsbergs reference in Howl to those who
were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits, Podhoretz suspected that he [Gins-
berg] might have been thinking of me (29). Podhoretz seems to have carefully combed
every interview that Ginsberg ever gave, no matter how obscure, to document the sup-
posedly sinister role I played in his paranoid fantasies (42), although finally it is Pod-
horetzs compulsive efforts in this regard that make him appear to be the more obsessive.
And little wonder, then, that both Rowse and Podhoretz record their surprise at
Audens and Ginsbergs cordiality, as though the memorist is uncertain how to account
for this evidence of a lack of animosity on his coevals part. Rowse seems genuinely
moved, although still embarrassed, by Audens generous inclusion of his name in a toast
that the poet made in verse late in life at an Oxford function (127), and seems in retro-
spect to regret not having reached out to Auden socially when the latter returned to
Oxford as Professor of Poetry (136). Podhoretz, however, discounts the warmth of the
greeting that he received from Ginsberg when they met unexpectedly on the street in
Paris in the mid-1960s (4546), and seems disappointed that instead of being angered
or offended by Podhoretzs later dismissal in print of Kerouacs writing, Ginsberg
spoke of me in respectful and even affectionate terms (51). Determined to keep open
the breach between them, Podhoretz unhesitatingly declined when he received from
Ginsberg a handwritten note very warmly inviting me to a seminar at the Naropa In-
stitute that Ginsberg helped found and at which he taught summers until his death (51).
146 INTERTEXTS
A critical reader must wonder if the supposed animosity in each relationship didnt
exist solely on one side, and if the battle that the conservative memorist waged with
his demonic doppelganger wasnt more with some disdainful part of himself than with
the disdain that his more famous contemporary supposedly manifested toward him.
* * * * * * *
Following the death of Thomas Carlyle, his executor, James Anthony Froude, published
a biography of the Victorian sage that drew upon reminiscences by the writer that Car-
lyle had earlier made clear that he wished suppressed. From these autobiographical
notes, Froude inferred that Carlyle had been sexually impotent. Angered by Froudes be-
trayal of the great man, Charles Eliot Nortonthen the dean of letters in the United
Statesasserted accusingly that portions of every mans life are essentially private, and
knowledge of them belongs by right only to those intimates whom he himself may see
fit to trust with his entire confidence. Vulgar curiosity is, indeed, always alert to spy
into these sanctities, and is too often gratified, as in some memorable and mournful in-
stances in recent years, by the infidelities of untrustworthy friends (qtd. in Haskin 191).
The boundary between the kinds of revelation made by a genuine friend and by an
untrustworthy friend (or, to use Podhoretzs term, an ex-friend) was perhaps more
clearly marked in the Victorian Age. The growing popularity in the first half of the twen-
tieth century of the theories of Sigmund Freud has since made it impossible for liter-
ary critics to ignore recurring themes and images in a writers work without considering
the biographical basis for such concerns. Nor is it possible for biographers to ignore as
an essential component of a subjects personality his or her sexual imaginationthat is,
the portion . . . of every mans life that since the decline of commonly shared sleeping
quarters and the advent of the water closet have come to be considered the most private.
Diaries, letters, and even intimate photographs are now routinely scoured for evidence
of the workings of a writers inner life, creating moral conundrums for archivists
(Gomez-Rhine). As Ive discussed elsewhere (Frontain, Sexual Privacy), the issue is
particularly complicated for the biographer of a gay subject inasmuch as, since 1969s
Stonewall Revolution, the action of a gay persons coming out has valorized frankness
about ones body and desires, driving a poet like Ginsberg to pose naked for photogra-
pher Richard Avedon and to deal in explicit terms with the physiology of sex in his
writing. As a result, a circus-like atmosphere now often accompanies the appearance of
new biographies of personalities like Thornton Wilder, John Cheever, Lorenz Hart,
Stephen Sondheim, Noel Coward, and even Henry James, as theorists like Eve Kosofsky-
Sedgwick analyze the epistemology of the closet in a text like Jamess The Beast in the
Jungle while the prurient salivate over the details of a famous persons sexual adven-
tures, predilections, or inadequacies.
Identity politics influence how the author of a memoir represents both himself and
his subject, particularly in terms of how the authors sexuality will be perceived in rela-
tion to his subjects by the reader. For example, in his memoir of poet Frank OHara, Joe
LeSueur defends his late friend and former roommate from the sexual politics that col-
ored playwright Leroi Joness reinvention of himself as Amiri Baraka. After reviewing
Barakas evolution from an Uncle Tom in the 1950s to a black militant in the 1960s,
LeSueur condemns Barakas repaying OHaras many kindnesses to him early in his ca-
reer by explaining to a fellow black playwright his supposedly subversive reason for ac-
cepting the hospitality of gay white men for so many years: I was just pissing in their
beer (LeSueur 248). Yet, LeSueur suggests, at one time, even though Baraka was mar-
ried and supposedly straight, he and OHara were bed partners (LeSueur 246). Clearly,
as he grew more radical concerning the politics of race, Jones felt the need to rewrite
his past relationships to suit his current narrative as the Afro-centric Amiri Baraka. But
in the process of refashioning his image as a strong-willed, independent-minded indi-
vidual who could survive without a white gay mans support, Jones/Baraka seems to be-
traypossibly even sexuallythe truth of OHaras relationship with someone whom
OHara had considered a friend.
The desire to redirect perception of ones emergent sexuality seems to grow stronger
in later life, after the patterns of ones relationships have been more firmly established
and ones identity is more secure. Poet Stephen Spenderso casually grouped with
Auden and Isherwood as a gay Holy Trinity by Rowsereinvented himself as hetero-
sexual in mid-life and brought a surprising legal action against the much younger David
Leavitt for supposedly having based part of his novel, While England Sleeps (1993; rev.
1995) on Spenders relationship with Tony Hyndmana relationship that Spender de-
scribed in his autobiography, World within World (1951), and made use of in his novel,
The Temple (written in the early 1930s, but not published until 1988).17 But as Alan Sin-
field points out, the queer literary gent and his bit of rough were not an individual ex-
perience, but a historical pattern of relatingone that survived into the 1960s
becoming, indeed, a subcultural myth (63). It is, thus, difficult to understand how
Spender felt that he had the right to claim the story as exclusively his own. Rather,
Spenders biographer, John Sutherland, hints that Spender particularly did not want to
be claimed by the thriving gay literature movement in the United States in which Leav-
itt continues to be a prominent figure: he had fought too long and too hard to win the
image of heterosexual normalcy to have his early life used to advance a political agenda
of which he now disapproved.
Little surprise, then, that both Podhoretz and Rowse waited until after the death of
Ginsberg and Auden to promote their own normalcy at the expense of their ex-friends
reputation. But sometimes the death of ones subject is not enough to save the conser-
vative memorist from criticism of his revisionist narrative. Perhaps the most troubling
recent instance of a survivors seizing control of the life narrative of a dead gay friend
must be Saul Bellows representation of his likewise ideologically conservative colleague,
University of Chicago professor of political philosophy Allan Bloom, as a flamboyantly
self-indulgent homosexual given to sexually exploiting poor street youths, in Ravelstein
(2000). Bellows case is complicated by the fact that his memoir, although a novel, is
a transparent roman clef in which Bellow betrays the secrets of not only the closeted
Bloom, whom Bellow suggests had died of AIDS, but of other late University of Chicago
148 INTERTEXTS
colleagues, such as world-renown historian of religions Mircea Eliade and sociologist

Edward Shils (Romano). As a portrait of Bloom, Ravelstein evinces the same contra-
dictory attitudes that biographer James Atlas finds in an early Bellow letter, at once a
fervent expression of friendship and an exercise in self-exoneration (Atlas 106). Thus,
Bellows disdain for fairies and the inverted (Atlas 150) shines through even while
the narrator reveals his own weaknesses as a heterosexual. (While brooding over the dis-
integration of his last marriage, which had been to a sexually bedazzling yet frigidly
ego-maniacal scientist, the narrator ponders his current marriage to a self-effacing for-
mer graduate student.)
Bellows Ravelstein raises the question of who gets to tell someone elses sexual se-
cretsor, in Charles Eliot Nortons terms, of the point at which a friends infidelities
reveal him to be untrustworthy.18 Like the reader of Rowses and Podhoretzs texts,
Bellows reader must wonder what the memorist hopes to accomplish when he protests
his own normalcy at the expense of someone elses privacy and reputation.
Notes
1. What, in the economics of gossip, is offered, what received? asks cultural historian
Patricia Meyer Spacks. Points of view, information; also reassurance. Participants assure one
another of what they share: one of gossips important purposes. Gossip may involve a torrent
of talk, yet its most vital claims remain silent. Seldom does anyone articulate the bonding that
it generates or intensifies. The sensibility that gossip helps to create is dual: a mode of feel-
ing and of apprehending which rises, as it were, in the space between the talkers, envelop-
ing both (22). This, says Spacks, is the constructive or creative pole of gossip. Conversely,
gossip lends itself as well to character assassination, making it finally an ambivalent force re-
sponsible for the destruction and the sustenance of human ties (25). Thus, gossip about a
public persons sexuality is often informed by an Us versus Them mentality in whichas in
the examples considered in this essayeither gays wish to strengthen their sense of community
by publicly claiming a member hitherto not widely known to them, or conservatives attempt
to reassure themselves that an Other had not been passing unperceived in their midst by re-
sisting the identification of someone like Rock Hudson or Cary Grant as gay or bisexual.
2. A telling episode occurs when, attending a cocktail party in New York City, Rowse is
insulted to be greeted by Auden as a fellow limey (93). In his memoir Rowse complains
specifically of Audens postwar habit of peppering his Oxbridge English with Americanisms,
making their exchange an issue of the decorum of self-presentation, speech being the pri-
mary marker of social class in England. But one senses that Rowses disgust stems addition-
ally from Audens presumption in drawing him publicly into a colloquial intimacy as a fellow
limey when Rowse is determined to maintain his dignity among the wealthy but vulgar
Americans. As in the episode in Audens chambers at Oxford, it is Audens casual presump-
tion of intimacy and assertion of their essential sameness that Rowse finds threatening.
3. Although he focuses upon an earlier period, Chandos (chap. 14) offers an excellent
analysis of the dynamic of English public school sexuality. Novels like E. M. Forsters Mau-
rice (begun around 1913 but only posthumously published in 1971) and Evelyn Waughs
Brideshead Revisited (1945) portray the romantic, and oftentimes sexual, attachments that
formed in the almost exclusively male world of the British university in the Edwardian and
Georgian eras.
4. It is possible, of course, that Auden was indeed sexually interested in Rowse. Carpen-
ter reports Audens blunt presumption of potential partners sexual availability: those who
were prepared to have sex with him were usually undergraduate acquaintances or friends
whom he liked for whom he had little or no romantic feeling. His technique with them was
to arrive in their rooms, lock the door, and say bluntly: You know what Ive come for (Car-
penter 49). Even in middle age, Auden could be disconcertingly, even grotesquely, pre-
sumptuous in sexual matters, as Harold Norsea fellow poet and the one-time roommate
of Audens partner, Chester Kallmanwas dismayed to learn (Norse 15051).
5. At the time, Auden and his lifelong friend, novelist Christopher Isherwood, were com-
piling a volume of confessions of public school sexual involvements, which included let-
ters from a graduate of Sedbergh School in which the author described his passion for small
boys. Auden copied out these letters, and one day read them aloud to A. L. Rowse, by then
a newly-elected Fellow of All-Souls, probably with the intention of making Rowse admit his
own sexual feelings. Rowse, however, was merely embarrassed, and swiftly brought the pro-
ceedings to a close (Carpenter 78). Carpenter does not indicate the source of his informa-
tion concerning this incident. However, a more detailed version of the same encounter
appears in Osborne, which not only bears a remarkable resemblance to Rowses own later
memoir (might Rowse have discussed the incident with Osborne, or allowed Osborne to
read a draft of his manuscript a decade or more before it was finally published?), but which
admits the possibility that Auden was attempting to seduce a highly embarrassed and ner-
vous Rowse who was conventionally guarded on the subject of his own sexual idiosyn-
cracies (Osborne 38). Osborne does not suggest what those sexual idiosyncracies might
have been. However, a reader who compares the two accounts might infer that Auden sus-
pected Rowse of possessing a predilection for ephebe-like males. In Homosexuals in History,
Rowse notes curtly that when Auden attempted to relate some of his shameless prosaic an-
ecdotes, Rowse shamefully withdrew into retreat (323).
6. Peter Orlovsky was still living, but Podhoretz neutralizes him within the narrative by
commenting only that he was particularly . . . scruffy [30] and never mentioning his pres-
ence again. Plus, Orlovskys never having engaged in formal polemics made it unlikely that
in 1999, at age 66, he would begin by refuting Podhoretzs attack on Ginsberg. It should be
noted that in his memoir Podhoretz does indeed refer to his exchange with Ginsberg at
Mailers party. But unlike his emphatic refutations of Schumachers version of the meeting
at Ginsbergs apartment, he writes in hypothetical terms, relying upon the readers acceptance
of him at his own word as a rational, even-tempered person. (It is inconceivable that I could
actually have said this to Ginsberg, let alone in the words he put into my mouth. After all,
through still controversial in some literary circles, he was already a very well known and
widely acclaimed poet, and even if I had been as great a fool as this story makes me appear,
I would also have had to be completely crazy to imagine that I was in a position to further
his career, 40.)
150 INTERTEXTS
7. Ironically, when meeting Jack Kerouac for the first time, Podhoretz is amazed to find
him as clean-shaven as I myself was (3031) and wearing clothes that, though casual, were
neat and clean (30). This leads him to speculate that Kerouac had perversely cleaned him-
self up for this meeting, just as I had done (31). Does it not occur to Podhoretz that his pre-
conception about Kerouac might simply have been wrong? The episode is representative of
a pervasive element of Podhoretzs Ex-Friends, his inability to reconsider objectively his own
point of view. For example, he repeatedly attempts to categorize his ex-friends as high-,
middle- or low-brow, only to admit his surprise at how well their ideas were received. This
might lead a more objective person to reexamine the basis of his own opinions, but Pod-
horetz is simply irked that the world refuses to conform to his will. What emerges from the
memoir, finally, is the self-portrait of a man too arrogant, defensive, and self-centered to be
able to admit that he has ever been wrong.
8. On Ginsbergs construction of an alternative culture around dirt, nakedness, and the
open body, see Frontain 1999 and 2010.
9. What Rowse does not acknowledge outright is that unlike Audens, Isherwoods, and
Wildes public exploration and/or performance of their sexuality, Housman had been taught
early in life about the dangers of giving way to sexual desires (Graves 21), which filled him
with guilt as an adult about his homosexuality (Graves 1023, compare Page 523). Thus,
Housman had been careful never to allude publicly to his private desires but instead chan-
neled his homoerotic yearnings into classically inspired lyrics like To An Athlete Dying
Young. No doubt Rowse thought commendable such discretion, even if it led to injurious
self-repression. Not surprisingly, Auden seems to have had little respect for Housman. Auden
speculated that Housmans private lust had something to do with violence and the poor
that is, was hypocritically satisfied by exploiting economically disadvantaged members of
the working class (qtd. in Page, Auden and Isherwood 14). In a related vein, Rowse states
elsewhere that he prefers John Betjemans poetry to Audens (Rowse 25). Betjeman and
Auden apparently enjoyed sexual relations while they were undergraduates, and Betjeman
campily referred to his homosexual inclinations in private settings with friends, yet appar-
ently never acted on those inclinations as an adult (Wilson 30003). Betjeman thus offers an-
other example of the kind of sexual repression that Rowse thinks appropriate for literary men.
Norman Page analyzes the promise of artistic and social tolerance that Berlin offered
Auden and his compatriots: Berlin around 1930 was not just an enticing destination for sex
holidays or fieldwork in the study of decadence. It was the most exciting city in Europe, per-
haps in the world, for anyone sympathetic to experiment and innovation in a wide variety
of art forms, high and popular, pure and applied: a vital city that in a surprisingly short time
had become a magnet for gifted young artists and artistes (Auden and Isherwood 3). Thus,
Rowses preference for both traditional poetic forms and for the appearance of sexual nor-
malcy would have made Berlin doubly offensive to him.
10. Others have commented upon the ways in which Podhoretzs self-righteousness leaves
him unable to wage a logical argument. In a 1977 letter to Podhoretz, composer and diarist
Ned Rorem objected that the commentator put[s] forth opinions as absolutes, then draw[s]
conclusions as laws (Rorem 103). Likewise, analyzing novelist and political essayist Gore
Vidals own war with Podhoretz, biographer Fred Kaplan concludes that Podhoretzs habit
was to disguise gut feelings as rational presentations relentlessly repeated as if repetition

proved his point (Kaplan 724). Kaplans statement might serve as a fair description of Pod-
horetzs modus operandi in his essay on Ginsberg, even though Podhoretzs essay was pub-
lished the same year as Kaplans biography, and presumably could not have been read by
Kaplan.
11. That Kerouacs late political conservatism and attempts at sexually orthodox bourgeois
normalcy resulted in his drinking himself to death at age 49 is an irony lost on Podhoretz.
Nor does Podhoretz seem to appreciate the implications of his own admitted heavy drink-
ing (38) relative to his marriage to Midge Decter.
12. Nor, after rereading multiple times the passage in question, have I been able to grasp
exactly how Rowse thinks that Auden is exposing his genitals in his poems. Despite Rowses
repeated claims concerning a scholars painstaking carefulness, I do not believe that The Poet
Auden will ever be commended for its precision of thought or expression. Flabby syntax and
exasperating non-sequiturs make the narrative painful to read. Similar problems inhere in
Podhoretzs essay on Ginsberg. On the basis of these productions, the reader has little diffi-
culty understanding why the literary reputations of Auden and Ginsberg are so much more
secure than those of Rowse and Podhoretz.
13. Rowse betrays a similar literary folie de grandeur, asserting that he provided T. S. Eliot
with the source of Murder in the Cathedral (Rowse 39).
14. Podhoretzs essay, The Know-Nothing Bohemians, seems to have gained a place in
literary history similar to J. G. Lockharts On the Cockney School of Poetry. Like Pod-
horetz, Lockhart wielded a certain influence as a reviewer in his day, but his most famous
essay is now cited as an example of the egregious failure of conservative culture to appreci-
ate the poetry of John Keats in his lifetime. I suspect that just as Lockhart is today remem-
bered but in a footnote on the contemporary reception of Keats, Podhoretzs essay will
continue to be read as an example of the resistance to social and literary change that the
Beats represented, rather than for any real insight it possesses into the Beat movement.
15. Although Rowse casts himself in the role of a woman who cannot endure a mans
beastly sloppiness, Rowse elsewhere makes an attempt to emasculate Auden. For example,
he emphasizes that at Oxford Auden studied English literature, which was then perceived as
being a soft option taken mainly by women (7), whereas Rowse had completed his degrees
in history, a more intellectually demanding discipline. Likewise, the extent of Audens sex-
ual conquests is the more surprising to Rowse considering the size of Audens phallic en-
dowment (not very well equipped for love, 57; over-sexed desire, while under-equipped
for it, 130). Podhoretz similarly denigrates Ginsbergs virility when, defending himself from
the suggestion that hed been physically intimidated by Ginsberg at Norman Mailers party,
he boasts that
the idea that I would be afraid of trading punches with Allen Ginsberg reminds me
of what James Cagney (a former street kid like me) once said about a similar possi-
bility involving Humphrey Bogart (who, like Ginsberg, was raised in the middle class,
albeit on a higher economic rung): When it comes to fighting, hes about as tough
as Shirley Temple. (42)
152 INTERTEXTS
16. The refrain of each memoir is that the author has had a more difficult life than his an-
tagonist. Rowse juxtaposes Audens having been spoiled in comfortable circumstances by
doting parents (10) with the working-class squalor of my youth (24); little wonder, then,
that Audens poetry betrays a middle-class nostalgia for union with the working class (25)
that is reflected as well in Audens sexual relations with street trade who come from the same
proletarian (9) class that Rowse struggled to escape. Likewise, ignoring the severe eco-
nomic distress into which Ginsbergs lower middle-class family was thrown by his mother
Naomis schizophrenia, Podhoretz describes Ginsberg as a middle-class Jewish boy from
New Jersey (24) while boasting that he himself was a former street kid from Brooklyn
who, unlike Ginsberg, had to learn to defend himself physically (4142). Ginsbergs dis-
missal from Columbia after becoming involved with shady and disreputable characters
proved as great a source of outrage to the hard-working Podhoretz as the intellectually pre-
cocious Audens failure to earn more than a third class degree was to the industrious Rowse.
Audens and Ginsbergs failure to take advantage of the superior opportunities offered them
offends their coevals sense of justice. And Rowses and Podhoretzs sensibilities are further
offended by the fact that their adversary openly rejected what the memorist valued most. Like
Ginsbergs rejection of bourgeois, Jewish heterosexual normalcy, Audens rejection of schol-
arly objectivity and a more socially respectable platonic homoeroticism challenges the val-
ues on which each memorist has built his own life.
17. John Sutherland no doubt overstates the case when he claims that the relationship
between Stephen Spender and Tony Hyndman has been more exhaustively depicted and
mulled over in print than any since Bosie and Oscar (Sutherland 205). Still, as Sutherland
points out,
it forms the nucleus of Cuthbert Worsleys Fellow Travellers (not a novela memoir,
he insists in his Authors Notenot always a reliable memoir, one should add). It
features centrally (and courageously, given the date of publication) in World within
World. It is gone over in Isherwoods Christopher and His Kind. And it is distorted in
David Leavitts While England Sleeps (in both the suppressed and unsuppressed ver-
sions). The relationship is discussed by any number of critics, biographers and an-
nalists of the 1930s. Hyndman himself intended, at one point, to write a full-length
account but only managed a summary in his chapter for Philip Toynbees The Distant
Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War (1976). (Sutherland 205)
Sutherland (54748) summarizes Spenders objections to, and legal actions concerning, Leav-
itts novel, but curiously does not draw a parallel to the ways in which, earlier in life, Spender
felt that Ernst Robert Curtius had overreacted to Spenders treatment of him in Rhineland
Journal (Sutherland 31112). For an alternate analysis of the reasons for Spenders dis-
comfort with Leavitts novel, see Sinfield 6168.
18. Donald Windham reports that, when coming to the defense of Truman Capote after
Stanley Kauffmann had published a hostile review of In Cold Blood, Windham wrote in a let-
ter to the editor of The New Republic that Stanley Kauffmann has green eyes. Windham
then notes that it had to be pointed out to me that people are jealous of what they have and
fear losing. I certainly had not meant to suggest that Kauffmann possessed anything to lose,
or indeed anything other than envy (80). Windhams distinction applies nicely to Podhoretz
and Rowse inasmuch as neither had anything to lose because of Ginsbergs or Audens suc-
cess, yet clearly they envied the comparative sexual freedom with which Ginsberg and Auden
lived their lives. Windhams memoir of his lost friendships with Truman Capote and Ten-
nessee Williams bears comparison with Podhoretzs and Rowses memoirs of their ex-
friends in that, while clearly frustrated never to have achieved the success enjoyed by Capote
and Williams, Windham seeks to assess their reputations as he reveals their secrets. Yet
Windham seems genuinely to miss their company and writes of them with respect. The dif-
ference between the two styles of memoir may be the result of the fact that, as Windham
frankly reminds the reader several times, Capote and Williams rejected him; if they were
ex-friends, it was not by his choosing. It is as though, conversely, Rowse and Podhoretz
could regain their composure after evincing their envy only by emphasizing that they had
broken with Auden and Ginsberg, respectively.
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Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Chandos, John. Boys Together: English Public Schools 18001864. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.
Frontain, Raymond-Jean. Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass: Allen Ginsberg and the Open Male
Body of the Beat Revolution. CEA Critic 61, 34 (Spring/Summer 1999): 8398.
. Sexual Privacy and Gay Literary Biography. Gay and Lesbian Review 16, 3 (May
June 2009): 2224.
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Gomez-Rhine, Traude. Who Decides Whats Private in the Papers of Authors and Celebri-
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Contributors
Catherine S. Cox is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburghs Johnstown

campus. She has published numerous articles and several books on topics of gender,
religion, and culture, most recently The Judaic Other in Dante, the Gawain Poet, and
Chaucer (University Press of Florida, 2005). She is currently working on a study of queer
subjectivity in relation to ethical dilemmas in literature.
Tasia M. Hane-Devore completed her doctorate at Case Western Reserve University,

where she is a lecturer in English. She has published widely in literary and creative jour-
nals and is currently working on a critical study of autothanatographical writing of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas

and editor of ANQ: American Notes and Queries. The editor of Reclaiming the Sacred:
The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (second ed., 2003), he has published widely on gay
literature. He is currently working on a critical study of the plays of Terrence McNally
and preparing an edition of McNallys occasional prose.
Michael Groden is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at

the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Ulysses in Progress (Princeton
University Press, 1977) and Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views
(Florida James Joyce Series, University Press of Florida, 2010), general editor of The James
Joyce Archive (63 volumes, Garland Publishing, 197779), compiler of James Joyces Man-
uscripts: An Index (Garland Publishing, 1980), and co-editor of The Johns Hopkins Guide
to Literary Theory and Criticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; 2nd edition, 2005)
and Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Kristen Lynn Majocha is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of

Pittsburgh in Johnstown. She is the Editorial Assistant for the Pennsylvania Communi-
cation Annual and has published essays regarding the pedagogy of teaching diversity
and social justice in the communication classroom. Kristen also participates in the Safe
Zones program at her campus, a program designed to identify faculty members who are
sympathetic and supportive of students dealing with issues regarding their gay identity.
Elizabeth Scala teaches English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author
of Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality and Literary Structure in Late Medieval En-
gland (Palgrave, 2002), a book focusing on Chaucer and medieval manuscript culture,
and a collection of essays exploring the future of medieval literary studies after the dom-
inance of historicism, The Post-Historical Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2009). She co-edits Ex-
emplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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Protesting Normalcy:

Norman Podhoretz, A. L. Rowse, and the

Intertexts, Vol. 15, No. 2 2011 Texas Tech University Press

Private faces in public places

To my eternal shame, I lost my temper. I suddenly saw myself in a B movie out of

Ginsbergs refusal to dress decorously or to make polite introductionslike his prefer-

responsibilities of marrying and remaining faithful to Midge Decter, thereby willing

colleagues, such as world-renown historian of religions Mircea Eliade and sociologist

was to disguise gut feelings as rational presentations relentlessly repeated as if repetition

Catherine S. Cox is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburghs Johnstown

Tasia M. Hane-Devore completed her doctorate at Case Western Reserve University,

Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas

Michael Groden is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at

Kristen Lynn Majocha is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of

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