rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (12/23/85)
LOOKING BACKWARD
I just saw Istvan Szabo's film "Colonel Redl" (German, subtitles),
starring Klaus Maria Brandauer ("Mephisto") in the title role.
Albert Redl was a talented & ambitious head of military intelligence
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the final years of the Hapsburg
dynasty preceding the outbreak of WW1, who died amidst a scandal
under mysterious circumstances. The film portrays Redl as homosexual,
originally idealistic but increasingly corrupted, and ultimately
scapegoated by the Archduke Rudolph to rally flagging morale in the
arm; Redl is forced into suicide when he refuses to cooperate in his own
frame-up. Like the earlier Szabo/Brandauer collaboration "Mephisto",
about an ambitious & amoral actor who consorts with Nazis and ends up
their victim, the direction and acting are breathtaking and brilliant:
Brandauer's simply amazing, once again. The recreation of turn-of-the-
century Vienna & Galicia is near-perfect. The movie is "loosely based"
on historical events and John Osborne's play, "A Patriot For Me." The
film must be rich with allusions to the present (Hungary continues to
slyly but carefully snip more of the ties binding them to the USSR) but
I'm not up on events well enough to interpret them. Don't miss this
film!
I just finished reading Margaret Yourcenar's "The Abyss," a meticulously
researched and elegantly written historical novel about 16th century
Europe. The book, in the writing from 1921 to 1964 (Yourcenar is 82),
is a kind of intellectual thriller, its main character, Zeno, a homosexual
Flemish alchemist, physician, philosopher & free-thinker (modeled on real
near-contemporaries such as da Vinci, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Tomasso
Campanella, Erasmus, Ambroise Pare, Cardan, etc.) crisscrossing the Flanders,
France, Austria & Italy of the reformation, counter-reformation and wars of
religion, staying one step ahead of the Inquisition and Protestant zealots
while scorning most of humankind and the follies and brutality of his age.
One of this month's NYReviews has a long article on Yourcenar's
writing. The reviewer considers Yourcenar the greatest women writer of
the century (I think this is excessive) and wonders if sexism has kept
her from winning the Nobel Prize, but also points out that most of the
the protagonists/heroes in Yourcenar's fiction are somewhat misanthropic
homosexual men, subtle, acute, & severe, while her female characters are
nearly all unsympathetic, often mindless or foolish.
The book features a lesbian Calvinist couple.
A gay historical note: in her afterword on the composition of the
novel, Yourcenar claims that Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohen-
heim), Campanella, Etienne Dolet (a famous atheistic Parisian printer who
was burned at the stake), & other alchemists/free-thinkers of the time
were homosexual, suspected of being such, and there are records of their
"companions." I remember reading somewhere a claim that the Dutch humanist
Erasmus was gay, and even possibly the philosopher Bruno. There are also
other striking similarities: eg, a number of these figures, like Zeno,
were illegitimate (da Vinci, Erasmus).
Louis Crompton's "Byron & Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England"
got a glowing review from Bernard Knox in NYR a few issues ago, a surprise
considering the Review's two-faced handling of gay issues. Crompton's
book must be one of the best pieces of scholarship on a gay topic, in a
class with works by Kenneth Dover ("Greek Homosexuality") and John Boswell
("Christianity, Social Tolerance & Homosexuality). It uses a close inves-
tigation of the poet Byron's bisexuality to illuminate homophobia in
Georgian (early 19th century) England and to reveal an incredible corpus
of unpublished writings on homosexuality by Jeremy Bentham, jurist, poli-
tical reformer & the founder of utilitarianism. Bentham wrote nearly
500 pages on topics such as homophobia, sexuality, and homosexuality
from legal, historical, scriptural, aesthetic, biological, & political
points of view, publishing anonymously a reinterpretation of the New
Testament "Not Paul But Jesus", and anticipating many of the issues,
perceptions and arguments of the gay liberation movement of the late 20th
century. Dating from as early as 1784, these writings now make Bentham
history's first gay activist.
I have only one bone to pick: Crompton is on opposite sides from
Boswell of a split in gay scholarship (to me, a rather silly, futile and
fractious quarrel that won't produce anything). Crompton espouses a
"social constructionist" view of gay history: it asserts that the category
"gay" or even "homosexual" and its associated behaviors and attitudes are
historically new, a product of changed group consciousness, so that
same-sex sexuality prior to the latter 19th (maybe now late-18th?)
century is different in kind from what we understand as "gay" or
"homosexual" (or "heterosexual", for that matter). I like this view
for its intellectual audacity, but I think it's patently false if applied
literally to the past (& incredibly arrogant & ethno/historicocentric
as well). My one criticism of the book is that Crompton thus fails
to cite Boswell's work at all, and he takes traditional homophobic
interpretations (of scripture, law, & literature) at face value, seemingly
refusing to consider Boswell's counterevidence/arguments out of mere parti-
sanship.
I urge all netters with any interest in history, gay topics, or
simply fine scholarship, to read Crompton's book.
Regards,
Ron Rizzo