Volume XXVI Number 1

The Gay& Lesbian Review WORLDWIDE January–February 2019 VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 1 L I M I T ED ED I T I ON H ENRY JAMES and Queer Fili- ation is sort of a sequel to Penn State professor Michael Anes- ko’s 2012 book, Monopolizing the Master , which is an account of how enry James’ family tried to bowdlerize the Master’s letters after he died so that no one would think he might be homosexual. In this new book, the fear that James might be outed centers on a less likely ob- ject: the chiseled stone inscription memorializing him in Chelsea Old Church in London. The inscription reads: “I N MEMORY OF HENRY JAMES : O : M ./ NOVELIST / BORN IN NEW YORK 1843: DIED IN / CHELSEA 1916: LOVER & INTERPRETER OF THE FINE AMENITIES / OF BRAVE DECISIONS & GENEROUS / LOYALTIES : A RESIDENT OF THIS / PARISH WHO RENOUNCED A / CHERISHED CITIZENSHIP TO GIVE / HIS ALLEGIANCE TO ENGLAND IN / THE 1 ST YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR .” The words on the inscription were composed by anAmerican ar- chitect named John Borie, who of- fered his services to Mrs. William James, Henry’s sister-in-law, who had gone over to England to take care of Henry after he had a stroke, in fulfillment of a promise she’d made to her husband William be- fore he died a few years earlier. Borie was not only an expatriate Anglophile like James but, unbe- knownst to the James family, a ho- mosexual happily living with a society pianist and voice coach named Victor Beigel. Still, one line in the inscription—”lover and in- terpreter of fine amenities/ of brave decisions & generous loyalties”— led Henry’s nephew Harry to worry that it might be vulnerable to perverse interpretation. Indeed, given the rather abstract nouns that echo the later style of the Master, one wonders what the phrase does mean—amenities of what kind, brave decisions to do what, and loyalties to whom? Anesko doesn’t speculate. He uses Borie to begin a long chain of connections that lead ultimately to Henry James himself. It in- cludes Thomas Eakins, who painted Borie; Robert Allerton, a Midwestern millionaire for whom Borie designed an enormous country house called The Farms in the mid- dle of rural Illinois; Victor Beigel, the voice coach and pianist who became Borie’s life companion, and other “hardened bachelors” such as John Singer Sargent and the composer Percy Grainger. Not included, except in passing for some reason, is the perfect ex- emplar of the type, a half-English, half-American writer named Howard Sturgis, at whose house, Queen’s Acre (nicknamed by its familiars Qu’acre), many of these men gathered. Indeed, it’s not until Chapter 12 that James himself comes onstage, and we return to the drama of the book—which is basically the same as Mo- nopolizing the Master : the family’s determination to manage James’ reputation after he died, especially in light of the letters James wrote to the sculptor Hendrik Anderson, the writer Percy Lubbock, and other young men in whose admiration James basked toward the end of his life—letters with such effusive salu- tations and sign-offs that Harry feared (with justice) that they might imply that his famous uncle was not so very different from Oscar Wilde, whose trial had occurred only a decade earlier. John Singer Sargent, who gets a chapter of his own, lived across Tite Street from Oscar Wilde, where he liked to play the piano in his studio with the composers Percy Grainger, Léon Dellafosse, and Gabriel Fauré. If Harry James was afraid that his famous uncle might be exposed as a nance, what would he have made of the musical salons arranged by Sargent, who was called by one critic James’ “mirror image”? Ac- cording to a fellow painter, Jacques- Inscribing Henry James A NDREW H OLLERAN Henry James and Queer Filiation: Hardened Bachelors of the Edwardian Era by Michael Anesko Palgrave/MacMillan. 110 pages, $69.99