Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History
by Scott Herring
University of Chicago Press
278 pages, $25.
THIS SPRIGHTLY, informative book does a rare thing: it covers entirely new territory in gay literary studies. Queering the Underworld concentrates on the intersection of the fin de siècle phenomenon of “slumming”—that is, taking the bourgeois reader into the urban demimonde—and the emerging expression of gay and lesbian sexual identities. While there’s no intrinsic logic to restricting himself to American sources, Herring persuades us that his study gains clarity and perspective through such a specific prism. Both canonical authors and the marginalized suitably take their place. Among the former are Djuna Barnes and Willa Cather, whose story “Paul’s Case” (1905) has become a familiar reference point in queer fictional scholarship (Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, et al.). Here, however, it is given new life by being considered in light of Cather’s close—and not always sympathetic—interest in Oscar Wilde’s trials and travails. A contrast to her own sturdy, masculine prose style is found in what Cather calls the “driveling effeminacy” of Robert Hichens’ satirical novel on æstheticism and Wilde, The Green Carnation (1894). Much more to her taste was Wilde’s peer, the “vagabond” poet Verlaine, as Max Nordau had labeled him in his notorious 1892 breviary Degeneration.v
Herring perhaps enjoys a bit too much the political naughtiness of the project he undertakes, concluding—rather in the vein of Dr. O’Connor—that he longs for “antirevelations” that “have nothing to show you.” Certainly Queering the Underworld does not aim to consolidate contemporary notions of sexual character using evidence from the past. On the contrary, Herring argues, “theoretically speaking, a project that goes queer slumming would frustrate, mislead, misrepresent, misguide, misread, play the fool, fail to illuminate, be unoriginal, offer false testimony, give bad impressions, present bad history, improperly cite, cheat, embrace the derivative, veil itself in mystery, go nowhere fast, keep it hush-hush, be unreadable, cover its tracks. It would cultivate disappointment in readerly expectation rather than ferret out sub-cultural knowledge. … It would strive for ineptitude.” Naturally, the governing tone here is tongue-in-cheek, but the point is congruent with Cather’s portrayal of Paul, for instance, who arrives in New York City to find that “he felt now that his surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively.” Part of the nostalgic quality of Englishman E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1917) lay in its stubborn and, even for its time, reactionary harking back to the notion of a (homosexual) recluse that was not merely rural but pastoral in nature. Already by 1905, Cather’s Paul illustrates that the pursuit of deviant or marginal sensibilities will more likely and appropriately take place in the anonymity afforded by the merging masses of populous cities. It is quite a leap in Herring’s argument when, after celebrating Paul’s latency, he goes on to defend the very uneven writings of the so-called “Van Vechten School.” Here, reticence is less evident. In fact, the campily knowing novels and stories of Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Van Vechten himself were all too readily interpreted as gay—invariably by hostile peers—notwithstanding these authors’ understandable reluctance to come out as homosexual. Wilde’s fall cast as long a shadow over American sexual dissidents in the early 20th century as it did over Europeans. Queering the Underworld is a fine, compelling, and original work, a promising debut from a new scholar. There are inevitable omissions. I felt Herring might have introduced elements of Fitzgerald’s, Hemingway’s, or Faulkner’s awkward and recondite gestures toward homoerotic and homosexual character. Equally, the study contains one jarring element in an unwise, unconvincing “epilogue.” Herring pushes for the contemporary relevance of the quixotic, historic books he has considered by comparing them to the performance of J. L. King, an African-American bisexual who, “answering in repetitive monosyllables” in response to Oprah Winfrey’s questioning concerning the phenomenon of men “on the down low,” is said to have pulled off an “armchair slumming tour.” But King’s refusal to dish simply accords with thousands of years of gay self-hatred and closetry. King even summarized it himself as little more than social expediency, since “the greatest taboo… is to be black and homosexual and I refuse to be labeled and classified as this character that folks will look at me as something different.” This has little in common with the specific textual character of such idiosyncratic prose works as Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, Barnes’s Nightwood, or Jane Addams’ autobiographical curiosity, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). These books constituted “something [remarkably]different” in the literary marketplace in their day. Equally, they refused to clarify that difference in terms of rapidly consolidating sexual typographies. A much more compelling coda might have considered Edmund White’s latest novel Hotel de Dream (2007), which contains a fantastical (re)construction of the legendary—and lost, if indeed ever written—story of “The Painted Boy,” a charismatic, syphilitic teenage prostitute befriended by the unquestionably heterosexual Stephen Crane. It may be pedantic to note—since we’re slumming—but there is a formal casualness that detracts at times from the salience of Herring’s points. Too many sentences start with “which,” “and,” and “or,” for instance. But this is of little matter. In the wake of the ready, wholesale Western transformation of sexual identity politics into niche marketing for sellers of “lifestyle” products, who can argue against Herring’s desire to “ruin the business of communal visibility whose ethos guides much of the institutional labors and popular cultures of decades past and the decade present”? The real challenge now remains—in gay literature as in life—to revive the pluralist, obscure, uncertain, and heterogeneous thrills of, say, Barnes’ world of the night, without ceding an inch—legal, political, or ethical—to the feasting panthers or hypocritical legislators that accompanied it. Richard Canning’s latest book is a “brief life” of Oscar Wilde (London: Hesperus Press, 2008). He teaches at Sheffield University, England, where he can be contacted.
