The Third Sex
by Willy
Translated by Lawrence R. Scher
University of Illinois Press
140 pages, $35
IF HENRI GAUTHIER-VILLARS (1859–1931), a prolific theater critic and jack of all literary trades who published much of his work under the penname Willy, is remembered at all today, especially in the U.S., it is as the domineering first husband of Colette who locked her in a room for several hours a day until she produced the next installment of one of her Claudine novels, which he then published under his own name. (She divorced him in 1906 and laid claim to her creations.)
While he may not always have been so despotic, Gauthier-Villars published other writers’ works under his penname as well, either as joint or sole author, making a reputation for himself, or at least for his penname, as a source of sometimes humorous works that flirted with the bounds of sexual propriety. Since Lawrence R. Schehr, the author and editor of this first English translation of The Third Sex, a book published under that penname in 1927, assures us that “one is safe to assume that Willy did not write the book,” there’s no point in going on further here about Gauthier-Villars, even though he was an interesting character in his own right.
Instead, this volume left me wondering why a university press commissioned a translation of it and who they thought the market for it might be. In his introduction Schehr admits that “Willy’s text … can appear both offensive to many and simplistic or at least naïve to even more,” and that is an understatement. After a chapter on homosexuality outside France in which he ridicules Magnus Hirschfeld’s fight for gay rights in Germany and asserts that “all of Asia is tainted with pederasty,” the author turns his coruscating gaze on France, which he also finds to be flying “homosexuality’s scabrous banners.” Starting with the biggest fish, he lambastes Rousseau, who evidently had sex with whatever came along; Jean Lorrain, a flamboyant late 19th-century writer; novelist Marcel Proust; the much admired and very out actor Edouard de Max; Maurice Rostand, the effeminate playwright son of the author of Cyrano de Bergerac; and poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Then comes a chapter on gay clubs in Paris, replete with mocking descriptions of the patrons, followed by an anthology of disparaging comments on homosexuality by various undistinguished writers from the last several centuries. The book concludes with generally brief remarks on a long list of early 20th-century French novels and plays with gay characters that would be hard to find today in French and that have probably never been available in English. Who, I ask, would want to read this stuff?
The intended readers for the original edition were evidently homophobes with a taste for the salacious; it concludes with twenty pages of advertisements for books like “the only complete, unexpurgated edition of the Kama Sutra” and a novel entitled The Institute of Sexual Pleasure. I don’t believe that the University of Illinois Press publishes for such readers, however, so my question remains. Historians of homosexuality might find it of some slight interest, but only as a footnote, an aberration. In his introduction, Schehr never shows that this text had any importance or influence in its day. I don’t know how many gay readers would want to endure the vitriolic homophobia of an unknown writer ridiculing a lot of other unknown writers. As Schehr himself admits, “the book, I would wager, would not be comprehensible or interesting to most readers without an understanding of these contemporary facts.” But to acquire that understanding one has to read 32 pages of small-type endnotes for 97 pages of text, one of the reasons this book is far from a fast read.
These endnotes are also problematical. Schehr admits that Google and the on-line catalog of the French National Library were his two main references. And while they might have made editing this work easier, the results are not always felicitous. Schehr’s endnote explanation of Maurice Rostand, for example, one of the “leaders” to whom the unknown author devoted Chapter Three, should have clarified how this forgotten writer could have been viewed as a major figure in 1927. It makes no mention of the best of his verse dramas, La Gloire, however, which opened in 1921 with none other than Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, nor the fact that Rostand tried to keep alive the drama in heroic verse that his father had single-handedly revived. Another endnote refers readers to Brett A. Berliner’s article “Mephistopheles and Monkeys” but neglects to indicate where one might find it. (This happens repeatedly.) Still another endnote tells us that “Bordenave is the name of the theater manager in Nana” without informing us that the latter is a novel by Émile Zola. Schehr tells us that the play Sardanapale, mentioned in Chapters 3 and 6, is Henry Becque’s 1867 opera libretto, which doesn’t make sense, as the book is talking about plays at those points. A little searching in the French National Library’s on-line catalog revealed that Sardanapale, produced by Georges Pitoëff at the Théâtre des Arts, the director and theater mentioned in the book, was actually a play by A. Boussac de Saint-Martin. The author refers to Maurice Rose Tender and Jean Coktail, which would seem to be mocking references to Maurice Rostand and Jean Cocteau, but there’s no gloss on these usages.
Then there is Schehr’s handling of all the quotations from other books. For example, Chapter 3 contains extensive quotes from Gide’s Corydon, his defense of pederasty, but Schehr doesn’t indicate where they’re located in that classic work or whether the author quoted them accurately. Indeed, he seems to have checked only rarely the many quotations against their sources. That would have taken time, admittedly, but this book is published by a scholarly press and that is part of scholarship.
Not to be forgotten are the bad translations, which surprised me because Schehr’s English is fine. Yet here we find strange renderings like “this trial that will soon be pled”; someone’s pen paints men-women “in total detail”; the city of Limoges is highlighted on a map “with a round of the most beautiful scarlet” (he means “circle”); a man’s mother and his male lover “are only two to have loved Dominique” (the French is: “are the only two who loved Dominique”). The author assures us that “I believe to be certain now never to become the prey [of inversion]” instead of “I feel certain now that I will never fall prey to inversion.” It is difficult not to conclude that this project was somewhat rushed.
More’s the shame, perhaps. I honestly can’t imagine why anyone who isn’t already steeped in fin-de-siècle France and facile in the French language would be interested in reading this mean-spirited little book. But if I underestimate its potential American audience, those who do not already know the France of this period are unlikely to learn much from this volume, because of the editing. That sounds harsh, I admit, but this volume left me more aggravated than enlightened.
Richard M. Berrong, professor of French at Kent State University, is the author of In Love with a Handsome Sailor, a gay reading of the novels of Pierre Loti.
