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  • Protesting Normalcy:Norman Podhoretz, A. L. Rowse, and the Conservative Refashioning of Homosexual Friendships
  • Raymond-Jean Frontain (bio)

In Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (1979), court composer Antonio Salieri, consumed with envy of the seemingly effortless musical genius and the coarse sexual bravado of newcomer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—and driven, as well, by resentment of the younger man's gleeful coprophilia and exuberantly bad manners—attempts initially to contain the professional advancement of his rival, but eventually seeks nothing less than Mozart's annihilation. Salieri's resentment, rather than being appeased by the younger man's eventual death, grows only the stronger as Mozart's posthumous fame increases while Salieri's more immediately popular yet pedestrian and quickly-outmoded musical style buries him in obscurity even though he lives on decades longer. Finally, understanding himself to be near the end of his own life, an aged Salieri is reduced to spreading rumors that he was responsible decades earlier for Mozart's premature death, purportedly having poisoned his rival out of sexual and professional jealousy. He hopes to be remembered, thus, if not for his own music, then as the murderer of the most renowned composer of the age. His plan is thwarted, however, when, rather than seeing him as the evil genius that he now wants to be remembered as being, people conclude that he is merely pathetically insane. Frustrated to have attained no other lasting distinction in his lifetime, Salieri is reduced to proclaiming himself the "Patron Saint of Mediocrities," and ends the play by blessing Shaffer's audience: "Mediocrities everywhere— now and to come—I absolve you all. Amen!" (104).

Shaffer's play offers a prescient analogue to a recent cultural phenomenon: narrative remembrances of conspicuously gay creative artists composed by their more politically and/or culturally conservative contemporaries who were once friends with the deceased, and who attempt to have the last word in a debate over cultural values by writing after their more famous contemporary's death when the accuracy of their recollections cannot be authoritatively challenged. I am not interested in the anecdotal testimony fed to the People magazine and Entertainment Tonight gossip mills that contradicts widely reported accounts of Rock Hudson's, Laurence Olivier's, Cary Grant's and, even, Liberace's homosexual dalliances, and that occasionally goes further by impugning the motive of anyone who asserts the contrary—although such anecdotal testimony, whether stemming from naivete, homophobia, or a desperate desire to share even momentarily the deceased's spotlight, is worthy of study.1 Rather, I am concerned with conservative ideologues who, aware of the stakes in the culture wars that they have spent their lives waging, attempt to score a posthumous victory against a powerful adversary by marshaling [End Page 125] the evidence of his life and work in order to undermine the cause that he is presumed to represent. It is as though, having won the battle to outlive a rival who, like Shaffer's Mozart, had not recognized the power of resentment that his sexual behavior and professional success aroused while he was still alive, the conservative memorist—enraged to see the reputation of a departed, and supposedly defeated, enemy grow even stronger in death than it had been in life—musters his remaining resources to fire a final volley against the sexual and/or cultural revolution. Such memoirs prove at best a pathetic attempt to insinuate oneself into, and redirect along more gratifying channels, the narrative of one's cultural superior, and at worst a pathological attempt to hijack cultural history and remake it in one's own image.

In this essay I consider how homophobia or homosexual dis-ease informs the remembrances of poets Allen Ginsberg and W. H. Auden written, respectively, by Norman Podhoretz and A. L. Rowse. Each memorist, not surprisingly, uses the occasion of assessing the achievement of his former friend to review his own life, writing finally far more tellingly about himself than about his purported subject. Likewise, each is dismayed at the continuing poetic reputation of his more famous rival, a reputation that is in part de pen dent upon the latter's sexual non-conformity. Thus, both narratives link the kind of poetry...

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