Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality by Rachel Hope Cleves (review)

Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality is a captivating book about the life of the infamous British writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952). The work is organized chronologically in four parts. Each one of them ends with a "Reflection" where Rachel Hope Cleves contextualizes and problematizes Douglas' life. These "reflective" sections are an ideal solution that allows the author of the book to interpret and engage with theoretical and ethical issues without interrupting the narrative flow. Rather than a standard biography, as Cleves explains, her latest monograph is "a history told through the story of a man" (2). Douglas's life is "a window onto the past" (12), a lens that allows us to see the "ordinariness" of a pederastic sexual system which, though alien and disturbing to many of us today, was far less scandalous in the first half of the twentieth century. By analyzing the life of a notorious pederast, who searched for child sex in Russia, Great Britain, the Middle East, and particularly Italy, Cleves successfully demonstrates the constructedness and historicity of morality, sexuality, and childhood. The historian emphasizes that our difficulty today in imagining "the appeal of a notorious pedophile" is "a reflection of how sexual morals have shifted since the 1920s" (182).

Norman Douglas was born in a world in which German and British literati glorified neo-Hellenic pederasty and regularly visited Italy—where same-sex practices had been decriminalized in 1889—to fulfil their erotic fantasies. Douglas, we read in the book, "was very much a man of his time" (281) who "took part in thriving markets in child sex" (281). Douglas's sexuality somehow enticed friends and fans who ambiguously engaged in a behaviour described by Cleves as "active non-knowing" (61). His pederasty was not a secret, and he wrote freely about his erotic encounters with boys. In his books and everyday life he unashamedly advocated the legitimacy of intergenerational sex. The British writer relentlessly pursued his sexual appetites throughout his life, and Italy was his favourite place for searching for lovers and partners.

In recounting Douglas's life, Cleves offers an insight into a sociocultural system that did not recognize child prostitution as a horrendous crime, but rather as an activity that financially supported many poor Italian families. Unspeakable is not the first work to reveal how Northern European men felt themselves seduced by the streets of Venice, Florence, Capri, and Taormina. But, by dissecting sources such as Pino Orioli's diaries, Cleves successfully exposes Douglas's real-life practices. She emphasizes how these firsthand accounts allow us to move beyond the pornographic "fantasies of virile handsome men and beautiful willing boys" (5) that constituted the cliched images produced by other nineteenth- and twentieth-century pederasts. These diaries clearly "describe the men's impotency, the boys' pimples, and the crude commercial calculations involved in the majority of their sexual encounters" (5).

Writing the history of intergenerational sex is a complicated matter. It is hard to reconstruct the lived experiences of the youth and make their long-silenced voices heard. Instances where boys and adolescents involved in paid sex activities speak or represent themselves directly are rare. We often lack precious documents that would allow us to comprehend how these children and adolescents gave meaning to their experiences and behaviour. Young prostitutes, as historical subjects, have often been silenced, and their lives have remained opaque and unintelligible most of the time. Middle-and upper-class intellectuals, writers, and diarists told us who these prostitutes and young lovers were, how they looked, what they did, what they liked, and what they did not like, but, most of the time, the voices of these boys and young men remained hopelessly unheard.

Cleves, by examining the letters written by Eric Wolton, René Quilicus Mari, and Emilio Papa, was able to recover the voices of some of the boys who had long-term relationships with Norman Douglas. But the majority of Douglas's...