James's Homo-Aesthetics: Deploying Desire in the Tales of Writers and Artists

James's Homo-Aesthetics: Deploying Desire in the Tales of Writers and Artists by Leland S. Person, Jr., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale ' 'You bewilder me a little,' ' says the narrator of ' 'The Death of the Lion' ' to Lady Augusta Minch, "in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders and the pronouns' ' (DL 296). The occasion for this provocative confession is the anticipated arrival at Mrs. Wimbush's country estate of Guy Walsingham, the "pretty little girl" author (DL 298) of the novel "Obsessions," and Dora Forbes, the red-mustachioed, "indubitable male" (DL 274) author of "The Other Way Round." The narrator's bewilderment offers a cryptic point of entry for this essay because it so efficiently links—and problematizes—the issue of gender and writing that looms large, I want to argue, in James's stories of writers and artists. Typically , these tales feature the close relationship between an older male writer and a young male admirer who devotes himself to the older man as "the friend, the lover, the knower, the protector" (CN 87). Typically, that core male relationship is complicated in various ways—by a wife or fiancée, by other admirers (male or female), by the marketplace that James repeatedly decries.1 Examining the writing and reading between men—the interplay of male desire among "the genders and the pronouns"—I would like to explore what Eve Sedgwick calls the "asymmetries of gendered desire" (197) in three of James's stories of writers and artists: ' 'The Author of Beltraffio' ' ( 1884), ''The Middle Years' ' ( 1893), and ' 'The Death oftheLion"(1894).2 Many recent scholars (especially Sedgwick and Fred Kaplan) have brought James and James studies out of the closet to the point where we can almost take James's homosexuality for granted. "Something extraordinary began happening to James in the mid-1890s, and more frequently in the next decade," Kaplan claims in his recent biography. "He fell in love a number of times" (401)—each time with a younger man. Kaplan goes on to detail James's relationships with John Addington Symonds, Jonathan Sturges, Morton Fullerton, Hendrik Andersen, and Jocelyn Persse, among others, and these relationships clearly figure behind The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 188-203 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press James's Homo-Aesthetics 189 some of the tales about artists and writers—with Symonds providing the ' 'germ' ' for Mark Ambient's character in "The Author of Beltraffio," for example. Although Kaplan argues for the ' 'lack of full sexual self-definition' ' in these relationships (453), despite the vivid physical imagery of James's many love letters, he does emphasize James's longing for emotional companionship and convivial embraces that stopped short of full sexual expression (452). Indeed, like Leon Edel before him, Kaplan stresses the literary, or epistolary, essence of these relationships , suggesting James's sublimation of homoerotic desire in acts of aesthetic appreciation. In this essay I am not concerned with James's homosexuality or representation of homosexuality so much as with James's poetics of male desire—the deployment of male desire in acts of writing and reading between men. Rather than simply revealing the homoerotic subtext in these stories—bringing James even further out of the literary closet—I would like to examine the various paths of desire that James himself interrogates and, more important, the various gendered subjectivities that differently encoded desires construct.3 Homosexuality does not figure simply in these stories as a hidden figure in James's carpet, covered by a layer of culturally enforced, or "compulsory" heterosexuality. Instead, I think, James experiments with several forms of male desire and explores the subjective consequences, as it were, of various object choices—supporting Richard Dellamora's argument that "there is no unitary 'gay subject' just as there are no umtary 'masculine' or 'feminine' subjects" (4). Homoerotic desire figures as a vexed idea in these tales because it, too, takes several forms—sometimes represented as a kind of virtual physicaHty, sometimes mediated by women (positioned "between men," in Sedgwick's term), sometimes mediated homo-aesthetically through works of art, and sometimes circulated narcissistically through another man as a self-creating, autoerotic force.4 As James...