Henry James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Fat Capon: Homoerotic Desire in The American

Henry James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Fat Capon: Homoerotic Desire in The American by Cheryl B. Torsney, West Virginia University I Jonathan Dollimore opens Sexual Dissidence, his influential examination of politics, perversity, and homosexual aesthetics, with a short narrative, ' 'Wilde and Gide in Algiers." Gide, Dollimore explains, spent considerable time in Wilde's company in Paris in late 1891, and Wilde encouraged Gide to liberate himself from the very core of the younger man's identity, which was "rooted.... in a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigour and repression which generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned" (3). Gide reports: "Wilde, I think, did me nothing but harm. In his company I had lost the habit of thinking. I had more varied emotions, but had forgotten how to bring order into them" (4) The pages from his diary in which he detailed their time together have been ripped out. As Richard Ellman remarks, "The main document about the psychic possession of Gide by Wilde is an absent one—a truly symbolist piece of evidence" (Dollimore 3). When Gide and Wilde met again in Algiers a little over two years later, Wilde procured an Arab boy, who was the agent of Gide's sexual liberation. Gide and Wilde were not the first intellectuals to have a significant encounter in the City of Light. I will argue that Paris had hosted a similarly homoerotic couple about fifteen years earlier in the persons of James and Charles Sanders Peirce and that the main document detailing their relationship is not a sequence of absent diary entries but rather chapter five of James's novel The American. Next, I will suggest that the case of unrequited love to be examined in the novel is not Newman's for Claire de Cintré but Babcock's for Newman (and perhaps Peirce's for James), that this is the love fetishized in the gift Newman gives to his comrade. Finally, I will propose that Dollimore's figuration of the Gide/Wilde relationship as the conflict between a transgressive ethic and transgressive aesthetic aptly describes the Newman/Babcock alliance, suggesting a related way to read the homoerotic subtext of The American. The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 166-178 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press James, Peirce, and Homoerotic Desire in The American 167 II The philosopher and semiotician, the scholar who coined the term "pragmatism," Charles Sanders Peirce first visited the writer Henry James on 17 November 1875 in Paris, after William James encouraged his friend Charles, who was then working for the United States Geographical Survey on a series of experiments involving pendulums, to stop to see his brother. According to Henry's letters, Peirce "took [James] up very vigorously" (HJL II, 7), but the feeling was undoubtedly mutual.1 Several weeks later, on 3 December, Henry reports on Peirce in two letters that announce the friendship but protest, perhaps a bit too much, about the incomplete nature of their affinity. First, he tells his Aunt Catherine Walsh that they "have several times dined together and gone to the theatre" but that James does not find Peirce "of thrilling interest" (HJL II, 11). Then, in a letter to William, Henry details that he and Peirce "meet every two or three days to dine together; but tho' we get on very well, our sympathy is economical rather than intellectual' ' (HJL II, 13). James writes on 20 December to his father that Peirce ' 'turns out quite a 'sweet' fellow' ' (HJL II, 16). What William's biographer Ralph Barton Perry terms "echoes of this strange fellowship" came from Peirce's side as well in several letters to William (536). Of the person he calls "a fine fellow" (21 November 1875) and "a splendid fellow" (16 December 1875), Peirce writes: "I admire him greatly and have only discovered two faults in him. One is that his digestion isn't quite that of an ostrich and the other is that he isn't as fond of turning over questions as I am, but likes to settle them and have done with them. A manly trait too, but not a philosophic one" (537). William offered his brother some revealing...