Jerry Flack reviewsNoble Lives
and
Prom Queen (page 7)
Bio: Jerry Flack
Jerry Flack is a retired professor of education from the University of Colorado. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his partner of fourteen years, who is also a retired educator. He loves reading, especially gay literature, and watching gay cinema (current favorites are "ROAD TRIP" and "GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN"), and traveling throughout the glorious Southwest, especially in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, and the Colorado Rockies. Contact
Noble Lives: Biographical Portraits of
Three Remarkable Gay Men—Glenway Wescott, Aaron Copland, Dag
Hammarskjöldby Vargo, Marc E.
Harrington Park Press, 2005.
In a previous IGW review of Andrew R. Gottlieb’s Side by Side: On Having a Gay or Lesbian Sibling, a first-rate reference book by Harrington Park Press (2005), this reviewer complimented the Haworth Press, Inc. and its imprints Alice Street Editions, Harrington Park Press, and Southern Tier Editions for both the quantity and the quality of the fiction and nonfiction books they currently publish.
The Haworth Press is swiftly building a library of significant GLBT volumes that first, provide both lay and academic readers with vast choices, and second, create works of superior scholarship such as Noble LivesSide by Side that could easily enable any college or university in building an exemplary and not inconsiderable homosexual library. The excellence found in the erudite research of such works as Whistling Women: A Study of the Lives of Older Lesbians by Dr. Cheryl Claassen (Haworth Press, 2005), Lesbians in Committed Relationships: Extraordinary Couples, Ordinary Lives (Haworth Press, 2003) by Dr. Lynn Haley-Banez, and Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Issues in Education (Haworth Press, 2005) by Dr. James T. Sears is of the laudable. The ever-expanding Haworth Press fiction library also continues to grow at a remarkable pace with new entries such as Cynn Chadwick’s Girls with Hammers (Alice Street Editions, 2004) and Kevin Scott’s The Boys in the Brownstone (Southern Tier Editions, 2005).
The whole of the Haworth-Alice Street Editions-Harrington Press-Southern Tier Editions catalog of titles is so comprehensive any college or university could easily build an MA or PhD degree programs on these tomes alone.
Noble Lives by Marc E. Vargo is a prime example of the high standard of scholarship to be found in Haworth Press research volumes. The collective biography is unusually well written and provides fascinating insights into the lives of three very good and talented men. Moreover, Vargo provides superb documentation including both notes and references for every chapter, a particularly insightful epilogue, recommendations for further reading about each subject, and an exceptionally thorough and useful index.
Vargo has chosen to profile the lives of three very distinguished twentieth-century subjects who lived remarkable professional lives that greatly enriched the world in general, but at the expense of completely happy or satisfactory individual lives. Each subject was insecure in his personal life. The three subjects were also men from extremely diverse fields in the arts and world affairs. Wescott and Copland conducted openly homosexual lives and both their lives and works were dramatically shaped by the public perception of homosexuality in the United States and Europe, especially France at the peak of their careers.
Glen Wescott was a notable American writer of Pilgrim Hawk (New York Review of Books, 1940) who was perhaps the first great American author to explore through his public writings, especially poetry and autobiographical fiction, what it meant to be a homosexual when the very subject itself was taboo, even as he lived and worked in the France port village of Villefranche-sur-Mer during the supposed social freedom of the so-called Jazz Age. He was particularly a close friend of such noteworthy creative people as Jean Cocteau, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Cecil Beaton, Igor Stravinsky, and Pablo Picasso.
Aaron Copland was equally out of the closet and despite suffering discrimination due to both his Jewish heritage and his homosexuality, he remains considered by many to be the past century’s greatest American composer.
In a distinctively different manner, it is the non-American subject among the three men profiled in Noble Lives who is the most Sphinx-like and fascinating as well as perhaps the most saddening man. The personal life of the great peace-maker, Dag Hammarskjöld, twice unanimously elected Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 to his untimely death in a plane crash in the Republic of the Congo while on a peace mission in September, 1961, remains enigmatic, most especially as regards his sexual orientation. The great Swede received the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously and America’s new young president, who would himself die violently within two years, John F. Kennedy, said of Hammarskjöld upon hearing of his death, he will forever “be treasured high among the peacemakers of history.” (p. 139)
There is no question about homosexuality of Wescott and Copland, but Hammarskjöld’s sexuality is a totally different issue. Although many biographers (as well as gossip columnists and political enemies) considered that the United Nation’s most successful Secretary General, Hammarskjöld, was gay, there is not a shred of evidence, even in his own private journals, that he was. Moreover, if Hammarskjöld was gay, it is almost certain that he chose a life of total sexual abstinence.
The three men were born at the beginning of the century, from 1900 to 1905, but under decidedly different circumstances. Wescott was born the first son of a poor Wisconsin farmer, but was sufficiently gifted enough to escape the back-breaking labor of working the land by entering the University of Chicago as a scholarship student at the age of sixteen. Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 as the fifth and final child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who owned and operated a small but successful department store in a building that also contained the family rooms. Hammarskjöld was clearly the privileged child of Vargo’s three notables. He was born in a sixteenth-century Swedish castle near Uppsala, the fourth and youngest son of the Prime Minister of Sweden. The Hammarskjöld family was one of great wealth and political influence in his homeland.
The three profiles are remarkable first of all because Vargo is a fine scholar who manages to survey the lives of his subjects with remarkable clarity and conveys so much fascinating information about both their professional lives and the personal sex lives (or the choice not to have one in Hammarskjöld’s case) in relatively brief profiles. Each biographical narrative provides a complete picture of the subjects from birth through boyhood and on to very different lives as adults. The complete portraits, especially in the cases of Glenway Wescott and Aaron Copland, allow readers to note how they dealt with the later years of their lives as well the periods of productivity when they were clearly prominent names in the arts, gay studies, and world affairs. Westcott, for example, after many turbulent love affairs and an extraordinary love and friendship with Monroe Wheeler, who was himself both a distinguished publisher (Harrison of Paris) and a critical leadership figure of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), became a major figure in the arts and letters within the United States in the post-World War II years and particularly fought censorship issues on behalf of American writers. Intriguingly, Wescott also became a close personal friend of Indiana University sexual behavior researcher Alfred Kinsey, even to the point of staging gay sex parties where Kinsey could be an observer of homosexual practices. He smuggled male nude art from Europe into the United States for Kinsey’s archives and secured professional photographs of male nudes for Kinsey’s research created by his close friend and brilliant photographer, George Platt Lynes. After Kinsey’s untimely death, Wescott continued to support Kinsey’s wife in furthering the work of her late husband. Regardless of literary form, scholarly research, or his own everyday life, Wescott had a life-long interest in the phenomenon of homosexuality. As Vargo points out, even in late middle age, the author “held firmly to his belief in the need for objective research into gay sexuality.” (p. 36)
Hammarskjöld was born into a politically powerful family and was also brought up in a strongly religious tradition that shunned homosexuality. Further, he was schooled much as a future king or queen might be taught to put leadership and service to country far above anything else such as personal expression of needs or self-satisfaction. Indeed, he believed strongly that his life should be one of self-sacrifice. Hammarskjöld was an extremely private man and apparently believed he had no right to any sexual desires he may have felt. Vargo is as convinced as most other biographers that although the influential leader of the United Nations was most likely a homosexual, he totally sublimated any sexual desires to his work. One example of the nature of his over-all self-effacement and personal denial was that in order not to presume upon the hospitality of his prominent U.N. colleagues, he ate Christmas dinner with the janitors in the basement of the U.N. building! One final example that Hammarskjöld was a deeply religious man and particularly one who believed that he must give his life in service to the world is that his bedside reading on the final night of his life was a book about the Crucifixion. He never addressed personal issues, most especially sexual ones, even in his private and remarkable journals, Markings (Alfred Knopf, 1964) that were published posthumously and that remain in print more than forty years after his death. The great peace maker solved international conflicts at a particularly difficult point in history (e.g., the Suez Canal Crisis, the Cold War) with amazing composure and brilliant success, but he was never able to lead a full life that included any concession to sexual gratification. Hammarskjöld was a deeply religious man whose devout belief system simply could not accommodate any sexual desires or behaviors not condoned by his faith and rigid Swedish Christian doctrine.
Wescott and Copland both carried out what many would consider unusual sex lives. Wescott wrote that his first sexual encounter was at a very early age and conducted in a bed with two other boys (one asleep). For the rest of his life, he appeared to prefer threesomes in his sexual life. He was even referred to as a “triangular man.” Ultimately, the most notable “ménage a trois” of his sexual and social life was carried on for nearly a decade solely with Monroe Wheeler, his first serious lover, whom he met at a poetry reading while a teen-age student at the University of Chicago and who became his soul mate for seven decades. The two were later joined by George Platt Lynes as well who was to become internationally renowned as a portrait photographer. (Indeed, a superb book of photography is Anatole Pohorilenko’s When We Were Three: The Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Glenway Wescott, 1925-1935
With very different sexual appetites, according to Vargo’s research, Aaron Copland exhibited a decided appeal or longing for men considerably younger than himself. Also, while Wescott was a decidedly handsome man by any standards, Copland felt his looks were unappealing, causing him to be self-conscious and also somewhat suspicious of the true affections of younger lovers. He was not alone in this concern. His affairs with young composers and musicians particularly brought forth charges from non-gay musicians that young gay music artists received preferential treatment from Copland as a conductor as well as in such influential groups as the League of Composers and the Young Composers’ Group.
Westcott fought for the freedom of speech for other writers but was apparently never the target of witch hunts himself. The same could not be said of Copland who suffered insult and professional losses, especially at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his particularly odious Senate hearings of 1953. One example: the conducting of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait that was to have been performed as a centerpiece of the inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower was abruptly cancelled due to McCarthy’s strong-armed tactics, and Copland was even forbidden to travel abroad for a time.
Three lives, three very different ways and means of existence as homosexual men, most especially in the first half of the twentieth century. There are many tiers of fame in any century. When one looks at the immediate past century, there are individuals such as Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Albert Einstein that are clearly recognizable to any well-informed adult living today. On the second tier are people who achieved remarkable triumphs yet are not such “household names” as those giants named first. It is fitting that young people, particularly GLBT youth, come to know some of the truly great homosexual subjects—in this case—men (There is a critical need for a companion book of equally gifted lesbians.) who gave the world beautiful words, music, and most especially, world peace. Noble Lives is a gallant effort to do precisely that. Marc E. Vargo delivers a distinguished collective biography that should be widely read and appreciated. and (Arena Editions, 1998). Wescott did not believe in monogamy for gay men, but he was an exceptionally loyal friend. Long after he had ceased to have sexual relations with both men, he stood at George Platt Lynes' bed side when he died, and he left his entire estate to Monroe Wheeler, his life-long friend and companion.
—Jerry Flack, Denver,
Colorado