Unintelligible Specificity and the Writing of Gay Literary History

“History gives the lie to the idea that logic is the basis of the world process. . . . Ignoratio elenchi. The beauty of history is the unintelligible specificity of the process” (107). That statement, gleaned from Gaetano Salvemini, an Italian historian at Harvard and an uncompromising antifascist refugee from Benito Mussolini’s Italy, is reported in James Lord’s World War II memoir, My Queer War (2012). It could serve as a motto for Lord’s book, which combines a generalized queerness of experience (not only a queer eros) with his singular life, a combination more charmingly specific than wholly intelligible. There is irony in Lord’s derivation of the beauty of history thus defined. For if the beauty of the process is its obscurity, even the war against fascism does not afford the clarifying explanations that a historian or a gay soldier—or anyone—might ask of it; and a mere life history is likely to be meaningful only fitfully and by chance. While not surrendering the search for intelligible truth, Salvemini, whose Historian and Scientist (1939) Lord seems also to draw on, argues for the historian’s humility in the face of his subject. “The beauty of history,” as Lord says, paraphrasing the historian, “in its infinite limitation” (107).

Perspectives similar to Salvemini’s underlie Lord’s narrative. His decency and his loves, invariably mismatched with circumstance, add up to a tragicomedy of errors. When in 1943 he joins the Armed Forces, he has no coherent explanation for his action. He wants to escape college and his homosexuality, both of which seem meaningless. Enlistment appears to promise a share in history’s meaning. But making enlistment the “fix” for his wants was, as he puts it, enough “to confound the authors of Either/Or, The Castle, and then some” (6). All the more confounding is his germanophilia. He identifies himself with Thomas Mann’s characters, not least Hans Castorp, who came down from the magic mountain to become a soldier. In the context of US war against Nazi Germany, however, Lord clings to Hans’ heights, in a way that makes him wonder—and the reader too—what on earth he is doing. The process of his entry into history becomes clownish. Once the Germans have surrendered, he discovers near Heidelberg an ancient hilltop town, where he finds a congenial bar and barroom piano. In the last of three visits, during each of which he improvises piano selections that the German barroom audience might like, he winds up rendering the music by Joseph Haydn that became the national anthem “Deutschland über Alles”! He thinks that his playing the music expresses sympathy with the vanquished, and disowns a victor’s hubris; but it also dawns on him that his audience, with cunning malice, has manipulated his good will into performing such a thing. The cunning, he figures tardily, is a symptom of the German populace’s unconfessed full knowledge of the concentration camps. Yet he also comes away from the episode feeling that it is impossible to tell specifically what happened, or what it meant. Exemplifying Salvemini’s equation of history with limitation and illogic, “I was unsure” (303), he says, of his motives, and of his listeners’.

Do the uncertainty and limitation have a beauty of their own? An odd beauty, perhaps, in the vagaries of Lord’s queer eros, and the blindly earnest moral intentions with which his queerness is interwoven. Capricious chance marks the history of Lord’s desires. Early on he falls under the spell of a brainy corporal who reads Ulysses and worships “Uncle Joe” Stalin (it is the Roosevelt era, before the Cold War). Despite his deep-seated sexual inhibitions, and without forethought, Lord blurts out...