Filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity

In his memoir, Symonds mentions or quotes Dickens (43), Pindar (59), Shakespeare (63), Plato (99), Johnson Cory (109), Hegel (119), Dante (155), Whitman (189), Greek poets (231), Marlowe (240), Kant (249) and others. This enumeration itself is indicative of his unusual mental abilities and scholarly scope of interest. However, his chief interest in literary masters was strictly personal – they kept company with his lonely soul. “[…] I came to fraternize with Goethe, Cleanthes, Whitman, Bruno, Darwin, finding that in their society I could spin my own cocoon with more of congruence to my particular temperament than I discerned in other believers, misbelievers, non-believers, passionate believers, of the ancient and the modern schools” (247). They accompanied him for his whole life. His admiration was rooted in the projection of the basic need of his personality into their words. He longed for not being fragmented into subcategories of himself anymore – for being taken as a complete human. Symonds claims that he became “addicted” to the above mentioned authors because they were able to accept “the Whole” (248). They represented a strong unifying element in Symonds’ life. They were his friends, guardians, teachers, guides, fellow-sinners, and tempters. For instance, his first overwhelming erotic fantasy was caused by identification with Shakespeare’s Adonis (63), he had numerous spiritual experiences with Plato (99), and Whitman taught him “the value of fraternizing with my fellows – for their own sakes, to love them, to learn from them, to teach them, to help them and to be helped by them" (247), which is the simplest but also the deepest notion of humanity.

During the 1930s, Isherwood also maintained or developed a wide range of acquaintances that were influential in various fields and helped to form a cultural, literary, political and philosophical matrix for modern democratic society and intellectual circles in Europe and America. In stark contrast to Symonds’s bashfulness, Isherwood’s extrovert personality and natural interest in other people both easily nipped in the bud communication barriers and social awkwardness of the first encounter and reinforced his inherent skill of maintaining old friendships as well as entering into conversations and making new acquaintances and friends. The list of generally respected people, whom Isherwood either had already known before or met during his Berlin era, is long and notably impressive.

Isherwood’s best friend and constant companion since their school days at Oxford was W.H. Auden, a British master of poetry and drama. According to Isherwood, their relationship was not of a romantic character despite their habit of having sex together “whenever an opportunity offered itself” (143). In Christopher and His Kind, they both attach literally profound spiritual importance to it. They collaborated on three plays in the 1930s, and that were The Chase, The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier. They also traveled to China, a country then tormented by a war, to later write a travel book Journey to a War. Souvenirs they brought from Asia were photos of wounded or dying soldiers and “at least twenty kinds of internal parasites” (171). The first hand horrors of war and their interdependence during the travels reinforced their friendship even more. In 1939 they both moved to the United States.

Shortly after coming to Berlin, Isherwood was introduced to Magnus Hirschfeld by his friend Francis. Hirschfeld, a gay himself, was a renowned expert on homosexual issues and the head of the Institute for Sexual Science. Similarly to Symonds, Isherwood became a subject of Hirschfeld’s research on sexual abnormalities. He encountered many challenges in the Institute, where, in the museum, extraordinary sex toys and instruments for fetishistic ways of erotic satisfaction were displayed and where he had seen a transsexual for the very first time. And for the very first time, he realized that he was a part of something much bigger than his private, secret erotic games with German boys were. He started to ponder it in a wider context, although he was at first utterly embarrassed by and ashamed of being a member of such a ‘community’. We can assume that it was a crucial and eye-opening period of time in Isherwood’s life. “Up to now, he had behaved as though the tribe didn’t exist and homosexuality were private way of life discovered by himself and a few friends. […] But now he was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs. And he didn’t like it” (Isherwood 2).

During the recorded period, Isherwood encountered or knew the following people: John Layard, an anthropologist and psychologist, Stephen Spender, a poet and novelist, Edward Upward, a novelist, who was “Christopher’s closest heterosexual friend” and “literary mentor” (27), Jean Ross, a singer and writer, Gerald Hamilton, a man of a rather corrupt reputation who was even once invited to “Coburg to be present at the wedding of the eldest son of the Crown Prince of Sweden” (64) and who shared Isherwood’s fondness of “breaking the laws which had been made against the existence of their tribe” (44), Virginia Woolf, a masterful writer of her time, Klaus Mann, a writer and the eldest son of Thomas Mann, Gerald Heard, who “knew most of the leading scientists and philosophers personally and he gave BBC radio talks explaining the latest findings of science in popular language” (57), William Plomer, a poet and novelist, Berthold Viertel, a German screenwriter and director, Sir William Graham Green (Kathleen’s cousin), William Coldstream, a realist painter, for one of whose paintings Isherwood sat (150), and many other celebrities during his first stay in the United States, such as Maxwell Anderson, Muriel Draper, Orson Welles, and Kurt Weill. Isherwood also elaborates on his assumption that he could have then easily met for an interview with Gobbles, Goering or Hitler as a freelance journalist. In retrospect, he regrets not attempting it (Isherwood 68).

A day after visiting an opium den together, Plomer introduced Isherwood to E.M. Forster, who was “the only living writer whom he would have described as his master” (59). As far as Isherwood’s narrative and writing skills were concerned, the Nobel Prize was of no value to him in comparison to being praised by Forster. E.M. Forster, himself a homosexual, was a strenuous advocate of same-sex intercourse. Isherwood must have been really impressed by him as he considered him to be a “great prophet of their tribe, who declares that there can be real love, love without limits or excuse, between two men” (71). However, shortly, they developed a close, long-term relationship and were in regular touch till Forster’s death in 1970. Their friendship was inspirational¹⁰ for both sides and special in many respects. “Thirty-eight years later, a friend who was present at the last meeting between them made the comment: “Mr. Forster laughs at you as if you were the village idiot.” (60)

In Isherwood’s memoir the following authors are, among others, mentioned or quoted: Goethe (3), Henry James (18), Dickens (20), Wilde and Whitman (9), Yeats (131) and D.H. Lawrence (166). Isherwood also revels in comparing situations he experienced to the scenes depicted by classic authors. His motive is simple – he expresses how he feels about a particular situation through the words of someone else that are, as he believes, more apt than anything he himself could possibly make up. This method renders more space for readers to make their own deductions and impels them to think beyond the scope of what is written. Hirschfeld delivering a speech against “Paragraph 175” in one of his educational short films reminded him of the scene from Dickens and his imagination immediately visualized Dickens himself present to it – “this is like the appearance of Dickens beside the corpse of Jo, in Bleak House, to deliver the splendid diatribe which begins: “Dead, your Majesty…” (20). Monette applies the same method in his memoir. “Roger and I groaned over that one, comparing it to the moment in Great Expectations when Miss Havisham snarls at the terrified Pip: “Play!”” (126).This strategy works excellently to the effect that there is no space left in the reader’s mind for even the smallest doubt about their intellectual background and literary awareness. The memoirists are simply fully aware of the fact that there is no need to look for proper words when suitable and expressive enough had already been pronounced (or written) in the past. Isherwood and Monette’s brilliance consists in having a precise memory of the best passages, great intuition for when to use them and a humble recognition of their uniqueness.

For Monette, intellect and the power of mind are associated with places rather than with people. According to Connor, Monette and Roger’s transformation of their remaining time together into the perception of space is a kind of inner defense to maintain sanity when facing up to the menace of near death. She also indicates that their major life pursuit was “to carve out a place where they belong” and, by means of this sacred place(s), to establish protective “boundaries – actual or mental” between them and the healthy, who became their notion of “others” (47, 51). Even though Monette and his friend travelled a lot, he chooses to reflect their happiest, virus-free moments together upon the time they spent sitting by Medici Fountain in Paris, which has been for centuries a European centre of cultural flourishing, innovative ideas and the profoundest poetry and which will forever be associated with prominent names, such as Zola, Baudelaire, Appollinaire, Monet, Verlaine, Sartre, Voltaire, Villon, which still resonate in our era (14). Monette’s relation to Greece was also exceptional. It was a mixture of mythical and mysterious consciousness, restoration of ancient and infinite truth in himself, and personal spiritual experience. In his view, as far as Greece is concerned, it is “impossible to measure the symbolic weight of the place for a gay man” (20). Together with Roger, they were examining erotic verses of boys on the ruined walls of ancient Thera, which were there years, decades or even maybe centuries before them, and relished the feelings of reciprocity through such an indisputable evidence of their tribe's history.

Intellectual backgrounds, in which the memoirists were either already born or which were later somehow attached to their personality as a shadow¹¹ by means of their own naturally acquired intellectual circles, had both beneficial and detrimental effects on them. All the renowned, impressive names pertained to theirs extensively contributed to their intellectual reputation and respectability among other intellectual circles as well as common people. Higgins assumes that “the intelligentsia (which has a limited political clout) has certain privileges, creating oases of tolerance and enlightenment in an otherwise oppressive desert” (193). And for instance, Isherwood admits that E.M. Forster was one of the names of “his highly respectable friends”, which he used while endeavoring to get permission for Heinz to live in England (140). And Monette expected (and maybe also got) better medical care for Rog because of their intellectual credit. “The PH.D in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books – you do not wear these badges on your Johnny gown” (74). On the other hand, the pressure on them to write something that would make a difference and that would make their works sui generis must have been enormous and unenviable. “[…] we have to say we have been here” (Isherwood 129).

Monette’s record of the calamity also demonstrates the intellectual circle, which had, generally speaking, an undeniable impact on his career and personal life. The ‘names’ around him were not only writers and scholars but also prominent gay and lesbian activists of the time and, of course, prominent doctors. Unfortunately, many of them lost their brave fights with AIDS during the period of time captured by the memoirist. In some cases, it was so sudden that he even did not have an opportunity to say the last goodbye. However, Monette gives the strongest impression out of the three that his chief interests in other people are set up purely on the grounds of mutual sympathy and comprehension rather than any personal advantages. Just for the illustration, a few of Monette’s acquaintances follow: Cesar Albini was one of his closest friends. His fluency in four languages made him, as Isherwood exaggerates, “the whole language department of a school” (6). Cesar dedicated his life to the search for true love – he died without finding it. Chris Adler, the composer from New York, died at 28. Sheldon, Roger’s brother, was, according to Isherwood, “the most visible gay man in California politics” (53). His friend Gordon was “instrumental in opening A Different Light, the local flagship gay and lesbian bookstore” (132).

In Borrowed Time, again, the same names and similar references as in Symonds’s and Isherwood’s edited recollections appear: D.H. Lawrence (17), E.M. Forster (62), Dickens (126), Virginia Woolf (129), Thoreau (277), Milton (297), Plato (299). The only logical implications that can be deduced from this is that the link between the three is not only time and spatial but chiefly spiritual and intellectual. They lived in three different periods of time but their ideas headed in the same direction. From the following of their interwoven trains of thoughts, intellectual interconnection and concordance can be effortlessly interpreted. In fact, they were the successors of each other in many aspects.

3.4 The Notion of Carpe Diem

Horace’s message hidden in the words ‘Carpe Diem’, which are only a part of the longer passage ‘carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero’ has attracted the attention of thinkers since its first pronouncement. Urging people to live for today, for the moment, for what is now and what might not be tomorrow might seem audacious and provoking. In some sense, it is an act of rebellion against generally established unwritten rules that only future of the individual is what counts. We work hard today so that we could reap the rich harvest tomorrow. But what if we invest our physical and mental capacity today to secure the better future and it will not come? What if tomorrow never comes? The whole idea that our future selves depends on our present selves would disintegrate. The very first sentence of Monette’s memoir “I don’t know if I will live to finish this” echoes, in fact, the status quo of every single person. Nobody knows if they will live to finish this - whatever this is. The sense of own mortality is for many people so overwhelming that they consider it much easier to pretend that the threat of death is not omnipresent and imminent. On the other hand, if people suddenly quit their responsible social positions and life missions and started doing merely what they wished such as observing butterflies and picking flowers, what would be the point of all this? Appreciation for the beauty of such moments would not be any mastery as the real good ceases to exist at the same moment when the evil vanishes similarly to light losing its qualities when there is no darkness. Unfortunately, people must usually lose something at first to realize the value of what they have had.

As some point or the other of their recollections, the memoirists comment on their own mortality and the magic of the present moment. Despite having lived in times inimical for an individual with homosexual inclinations and facing many personal challenges, they all relatively succeeded in seeing a bright side of the darkest chapters of life and celebrating the immeasurable. Woods argues that “the myth of the tragic queer” recognizing “the theme of mortal danger along with carpe diem, its corollary – has recurred throughout the history of literature I have been calling ‘gay’” (370). Out of the three, the toughest fighter with the menace of death was Monette. In fact, he did not have any choice but not to surrender. Although he suffered from depressions, thoughts of suicide, and sudden bursts of self-pity, he had to be strong for his beloved Roger. To keep yourself sane when everyone around is dying is a superhuman task. “I reminded Jerry of a dinner party at his house five years earlier, he and I were the only two of the seven in attendance who didn’t have AIDS yet” (203). And he accomplished it. He went through many stages of reconciliation from anger, through the feeling of guilt to the tendencies of self-punishment. He refers to the AIDS calamity as a fierce battle and he identifies himself with a modern warrior: “Warriors in pitched battle do not make their last will, they become it” (75). This statement indicates a strong focus on today when lamenting about the future is deprived of its relevance. Monette’s idea of borrowed time is basically rooted in the general indifference of humankind to the precious moments of their lives. Because of AIDS, he suddenly becomes conscious of the time he has dawdled away and of the time he must borrow somewhere to do all the little things he has not managed to do yet. It is a common occurrence that people usually realize the value of seemingly negligible aspects of life when a turning point of life comes. And when they outlive the turning point, they will never be the same people again. “Roger and I must both get over the horror that we might die so we could begin to see we weren’t dead yet” (105). Freud supports this idea by claiming that “we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things” (Civilization 23). The principle of carpe diem encourages people not to entirely avoid everything that is painful, uncomfortable, annoying in their lives but to eliminate it by focusing on positive details instead – to assemble their lives out of numerous little moments of beauty, which would easily surpass one substantial personal catastrophe, because the personal worlds of human beings are mere reflections of their life attitudes and they themselves have a power to create them. Similarly, Freud's popular notion of the “technique in the art of living” concludes that the most significant method is to make “the subject independent of Fate,” which consequently “locates satisfaction in internal mental processes” (28-9). “We had grown so grateful for little things. Out of nowhere you go from light to dark from winning to losing, go to sleep murmuring thanks and wake to an endless siren” (183). “Things were nothing” (156). An identical attitude can be deduced from Symonds’ words: “I no longer cared for work. I ceased to be ambitious. It was enough to live. My love seemed to me more real than aught in life beside” (106). Because of having a fleeting character, love is often projected as one of the noblest reasons for living in harmony with the notion of carpe diem. If one does not grasp firmly the opportunity to love today, no other chance can occur. “We live because we love, and we love because we live. He who breaks through this circle destroys the circumscription of his own happiness and nobleness” (Warren 108). To live for the real is the secret of carpe diem and nothing is more real than what is happening now.

Isherwood and Symonds’ expressions of their personal carpe diems are somewhat more modest than in Monette’s Borrowed Time. The reason is, of course, that their first-hand experience with death was not so frequent and unanticipated as people dying around Monette were mostly formerly healthy and young. However, Symonds’ acceptance of the fact that life is much bigger than what we anxiously cling to is definitely worth reference:

The man, the man’s the thing. And the man in me tumultuously throbbed for the escapements from that droning lecture desk into a larger, keener, more dignified, more actual existence. Little did I care what the gentlemen in frock coats and the ladies in bonnets thought of my lectures. I did not care what they thought, because I knew that the real arena for myself and the rest of them was not in that theatre of disputation, elucidations, and plausible explications of all sorts of theories. It lay outside, inside, in a world of things which each carries about with him, and into which each penetrates when the voice of the lecturer is no more heard in the theatre. (255)

In Isherwood’s memoir, explicit hints of carpe diem are fairly seldom, but nevertheless very accurate. The whole essence of the captured decade of his life can be summarized in the following words: “Read about us and marvel! You did not live in our time – be sorry!” (105).

The notion of carpe diem can be unconditionally applied only by people deprived of fears of their own transitory existence and the air of fatalism. When people manage to disengage from the apprehension of their immediate proximity to death and begin taking death as an integral part of life, as something that is not in the background of living but in its foreground, they will never be caught unawares and they will never regret that their life does not bring them what they (or they think they) want, yearn for, deserve, are worthy of. When they realize that they all are “men with limited futures:” the men who “have only now, as they lie in each other’s arms” (Clum 657), their times will be full of beautiful moments that will be once transformed into beautiful lives. Symonds had a very healthy attitude towards the phobia of fatality: “[…] I discovered that I was almost at rest about birth and death and moral duties and the problem of immortality. These were the world’s affairs, not mine” (246). Death is our constant companion. We should talk to it, play jokes with it, flatter it and not take it too seriously.

3.5 Other common topics briefly discussed

The aim of this subchapter is to put the finishing touches to the overall picture of the memoirists. A large amount of common topics which the three men discuss from the same, similar or rarely also dissimilar perspectives can be found in their works; and the parallels between them are of a unique character. However, here I focus only on those whose impact on the reader is the most significant, of course, along with those already referred to. As they themselves mention, Symonds, Isherwood and Monette were hypochondriacs, psychosomatic personality types prone to depressions and anxieties (Symonds and Monette contemplated suicide at some point in their lives and Isherwood suffered from mood swings), admirers of literature and its tradition, oversensitive and emotionally dependent men, travelers and explorers of human souls, observers with the habit of overthinking, seekers after their own truths, fighters for unrestricted love, naïfs half living in a dreamland and simultaneously realists fully aware of the fact that such a dreamland does not exist for them, but above all they were lovers of life. The following pages will provide us with their attitudes to religiosity, marriage and children, family relationships, concept of a friend, and humanity.

Christian and Jewish religious devotion to a higher existence has had a hostile attitude towards a departure from a traditional view of sexuality and sexual intercourse, which has strictly excluded the notion of masculine love. “The Judeo-Christian tradition has consistently held that the sex act is intended for procreation” (Berliner 138). This idea, together with a consequent responsibility to have a family, which it brings with it could fall apart by the approving of the kind of relationship that can never produce a descendant and, therefore, does not mean a responsible life style related to financial support of the family. The unit of a complete family and a consequent fear of not being able to secure a livelihood for it represent a much better way to manipulate the masses. Fear of hunger has always been a powerful manipulative device. That is the reason why homosexuality, birth control and the policy of abortion have been so strictly refused by ecclesiastic authorities. If you take care only of yourself, you can easily maintain your independence; if you take care of the family, you must concern with them and you might have tendencies to yield to pressure. Freud argues that “only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life” (Civilization 23). For homosexuals, neither the question nor the answer was so simple because they were considered doomed for their perverted sexual tastes. “Many Christian homosexuals faced a wall of prejudice that began in the courtroom and ended in heaven. They lived and died with the contradiction of a God who made a certain kind of love a qualification for everlasting torment” (Robb 234). On the other hand, numerous gay men managed to find their own way to reconcile with God despite their lives in sin. The way was to grasp a personal belief in God as a self-contained spiritual authority of a human being that has nothing to do with the regulations and moral principles established by the church. They settled on the idea that between a man and God there is no need for any mediator embodied by church organizations. “A minister known to Magnus Hirschfeld saw no contradiction in his human and spiritual passions: if God had made him that way, he must have had a purpose” (Robb 233).

Symonds was brought up within the Catholic faith. However, his devotion to God had many faces as well as ups and downs. In his memoir, he claims he “did not learn to fling the arms of soul in faith upon the cross of Christ. That was not in [him]” (92). He also mentions the fact that he was not “gifted by nature with any strong sense of God” (242) – but is the intervention of nature really necessary for a believer? It probably is because only certain personality types incline to believe in the intangible, especially those who do not believe enough in their own abilities to handle life’s hardships themselves and need spiritual support. Symonds also remembers his fear of God and the commitment of sin. We can slightly exaggerate the situation to the point that he believed in God because he was afraid of him and the consequences of his own deeds. Because of the Vaughan affair, which consisted in a romantic relationship of Vaughan, the head of Harrow School, a moral authority and extremely pious man, with a student, and which might have not happened in reality according to Grosskurth, Symonds started to reckon human moral qualities and character shielded by the church “as large of hypocrisy and inconsistency” (243). He realized that was surrounded by pretentious people, for whom the faith was only a word. When reading through Symonds’ memories, one cannot simply get rid of the thought that Symonds believed much more in harmony and the unifying power of the universe than in the traditional notion of God.

Nothing but the bare thought of God-penetrated universe, and of myself as an essential part of it, together with all things that appear in their succession – ether and inorganic matter passing into plants and creatures of the sea and beasts, rising to men and women like myself, and onward form us progressing to the stages of lives unrealized by human reason – nothing but the naked, yet inebriating, vision of such a cosmos satisfied me as a possible object of worship. (246)

Isherwood also considers Christian people hypocrites and is doubtful about the idea that a religious background and upbringing automatically guarantees a spiritually pure and unconditionally loving and forgiving human being as its result. He writes that he “was utterly unable to believe in moral attitudes other than his own; he refused to admit that the Others sincerely hated adultery, homosexuality, or any of the sins they denounced” (141). Throughout the history of its existence, the church has always despised only those moral transgressions that have fitted into its calculating strategy of its own establishment as the highest moral authority. And the list of ‘sins’ has changed on a regular basis in compliance with the issues that current religious authorities regarded as the most threatening to their intentions. Isherwood holds the opinion that belief is unenforceable, and if it does not come from the profoundest roots of a being, it is superfluous. On the other hand, he also suggests the idea that no “one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it” (167). This statement indicates that only selfish reasons for becoming a follower of religious principles are typical of a human. And the most typical among them is the fear of death or physical suffering.

Monette labels himself as a pagan but during the hardest times of his life, which the last months of Roger’s life indisputably were, he developed a habit of praying before going to bed. This situation might be taken as one of the examples of Isherwood’s above mentioned theory. Monette also writes about “the cruel and soulless posture of the Catholic Church on the subject of being gay” (267) and endeavours to comprehend why the early church’s benign approach to the issue, when it even approved of gay marriage, changed so radically.

Marriage, or rather the legal status of a union, has been proscribed to gay men for a long time. The calm waters of the church’s hostility towards the official uniting rituals of gay couples were turned into troubled waters by John Boswell, a Christian-oriented historian. On the basis of his extensive research of pre-modern period, supported by a huge amount of evidence and documents, Boswell came to the conclusion that gay marriages had been a phenomenon hardly exceeding the boundary of the common till the 13th century, when the Church reoriented its policy towards procreation as the chief life role of every true Christian. Newitz attaches great importance to the fact that his books such as Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe and its expanded version Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality raised more than one eyebrow. The controversy of his works, as his detractors argue, chiefly consists in the incomprehension and misinterpretation of the uniting ceremonies and rituals which were often only a legal contract of pre-arranged possession sharing without any romantic intentions (Newitz).

Symonds, Isherwood and Monette also contributed to the discussion, although more in a resigned way than in an indignant one. They manifest their ideas about marriage and its validity via their memoirs or/as well as life styles. Symonds got married and had 4 daughters. The primordial purpose of this union was his hope that he could be transformed into an admirer of woman’s beauty via regular sexual intercourses with Catherine. Soon, he condemned the idea as an infeasible method to change the direction of his affection and started to neglect his wife and daughters both morally and emotionally. The passages of his memoir devoted to erotic adventures or love of boys reach such an intensity, devotion and passion that references to his family never do. Moreover, he remembers the date when he met one of his love objects exactly and does not remember the date when his daughter was born. Towards the end of the memoir he expresses the guilt of the survivor providing us a short list of his deceased beloveds. The list includes one of his daughters (259). Her demise is not mentioned on any of the previous pages and no further details are given. As already elaborated on in Chapter 2, Symonds writes about his relationship with Catherine in a very contradictory way. Generally, he does not disrespect the bond of marriage but he proposes the theory that the union inevitably transforms in a mere friendship in a short time if it lacks a vibrating energy of sexual attraction between the couple.

Neither Isherwood nor Monette begot any children during their lives and they never married. Their attitudes towards the status of marriage are predominantly skeptical and they do not ascribe any extraordinary value to it; however, this might be only a pose or a defensive reaction because people often develop a hatred for the forbidden. Isherwood puts into words “his rooted horror of marriage. To him, it was the sacrament of the Others: the supreme affirmation of their dictatorship” (115). Who specifically is meant by ‘their’ is not clarified. In the interview with Heilbrun, he repeats a similar opinion again. “I see it as a social trap. I find it indecent to try to protect a relationship by swearing an oath” (255). Discussing the topic of offspring, he points out that he had not “missed anything by not having children of [his] own” (256) and adds that his role in many age unequal partnerships was a little bit father-like. Unfortunately, Monette’s sickness did not let him live long enough to witness the legalization of same-sex marriage, although he could have experienced the first debates over the discriminatory character of related legislation in the early 1990s. “I always hesitate over the marriage word. It’s inexact and exactly right at the same time, but of course I don’t have a legal leg to stand on. The deed to the house on Kings Road says a single man after each of our names. So much for the lies of the law” (Monette 24).

Stable family relationships and the feeling of massive support during and after the process of coming-out are very significant factors contributing to the quality of life of gay men. Regrettably, there are kinds of people who do not hesitate to disdain their own children due to their same-sex romantic partners. The life of those disdained by their parents or siblings can turn into nightmare and profound mental suffering. The other side of the coin is the theme of parents’ responsibility for their children’s sexual orientation. Chiefly during the first half of the 20^th century, many studies considering it appeared. The father was usually seen as a mere “victim of circumstance” and the major amount of guilt was ascribed to the mother. “If she loved baby too much it was wrong; if she loved him too little it could also be wrong” (Higgins 14). Symonds, Isherwood and Monette never experienced such an extreme form of a relationship from their family members. However, deducing from their memoirs, their relationships to some of them are at least non-standard.

Symonds’ mother died when he was only a four-year-old child and her funeral was one of his earliest memories. It certainly left its mark on his character as, later in his life, he missed her very much. “A boy wants a mother at such a period of uneasy fermentation” (82). This unhappy event probably led to his later unhealthy fixation on his father’s figure and his life-long longing to be recognized by him. Grosskurth notices in his memoir that “the only person who is depicted in any depth is his father” (24) and she is right. Symonds’s admiration of own father was boundless. Some passages of the book indicate nearly God-like idolization and dehumanization of his personality. Mr. Symonds is labeled as the “eagle born in the hen coop” (53), which resonates with the idea that he was too good for this world. There is no explicit remark of his awareness of his son’s same-sex attraction, but the following passage insinuates that he knew about it rather well: “I grew to be an intimate friend with my father. No veil remained between us. He understood my character; I felt his in sympathy and relied upon his wisdom” (116).

In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood never mentions his father. On the other hand, his mother is regularly referred to. Kathleen is a typical representative of English nobility and conservatism. She knows about her son’s male partners and is also introduced to some of them, but she treats them mostly as servants, who do not reach high levels of her social status. Because of her aristocratic manners, which Isherwood condemns, his favorite activity is mocking and embarrassing her. “Deep down, his attitude toward her was sadistic. Let her suffer a bit of anxiety and embarrassment, as a punishment for her condescending attitude to Heinz” (139). He also adverts to the fact that his mother “refused to admit that it [homosexuality] existed” (91). As far as a huge amount of moral values and life attitudes are concerned, they do not see eye to eye with each other at all. Similarly to Monette, he describes the distance between himself and radically opposing views of conformist England and English people, including his mother, via the comparison “people on the moon” (21). Exaggeratedly, we can say that Isherwood prefers to find his mother by himself because his friend, Olive Mangeot, was “a mother figure in Christopher’s life” (57).

Monette writes that he has never had as mature and outspoken relationships with his parents as Roger. Their chief reaction after the publication of his first novel deeply disappointed him. They told him that “they would have to sell their house and leave town, that [he]´d never hold a job again with this infamy to [his] name” (54). At first, his mother was firmly convinced that he “wasn’t really gay” and that “Roger was just a phase” (54). Having learned not to mention labeling words for various sexual orientations, the family later warmly welcomed Roger. Monette’s brother Bob and his open-mindedness sufficiently compensates initial hostile atmosphere caused by his parents’ failure to be sympathetic. Bob “had been the buffer zone between [him] and his family, the one who understood being gay, who understood being a writer” (69).

Symonds, Isherwood and Monette share an opinion on the ways of addressing people who are connected via mutual affection. Their preferred way of addressing their partners carries a typical pattern of a shortage of appropriate terms for the gay environment because the expressions were predominantly coined by heterosexuals whose awareness of gay culture has always been rather limited. None of them feels comfortable referring to their beloved as boyfriends, lovers, mates etc. because of the unsuitability of the words resonating with general relational clichés. All the three propose the same solution to the awkward situation – the concept of a friend. In 1903 – a dark era for people of homosexual persuasion, Weininger suggested that men’s friendship is never completely deprived of the factor of sexual affection as he writes that “there can be no friendship unless there has been some attraction to draw the men together” (qtd. in Higgins 127). Monette explains that, in his view, everybody can become a lover for a single night but the position of a friend must be deserved and confirmed by a long-term attachment. Monette regards a term lover as smacking “too much of the ephemeral” and shallow (25). He further proceeds with the following passage “Friend always seemed more intimate to me, flush with feeling. Ten years after we met, there would still be occasions when we’d find ourselves among strangers of straight persuasion, and one of us would say, “This is my friend.” It never failed to quicken my heart…” (25). Isherwood is fully aware of the fact that the notion of a friend can be equivocal. He admits that in his case ‘friend’ covers relationships varying hugely in character as it includes people who he goes to bed with only for sexual purposes and to whom he does not feel anything, people whose presence he likes but with whom he has no sexual relationship at all, and long-term partners in the classic sense of the word. “Nevertheless, when a male friendship includes sexual love, I dislike referring to either of the friends as a “lover” or a “boyfriend”. Except in the plural, “lover” suggested to me a one-sided attachment; “boyfriend” always sounds condescending and often ridiculously unsuitable” (118). Symonds put his two cents in the debate claiming that the ”ideal of a passionate” is “pure love between friend and friend” (105).

To conclude this subchapter, we will briefly focus on the sense of humanity of the memoirists. They did not deny their bad characteristic features, bad life decisions, and often emotional turmoil. They were all men of note and their works will not be forgotten; but they had never regarded with contempt others less intelligent and working manually. More often, they celebrated them and sometimes begrudged their unpretentious ways of life, too. Nevertheless, it was people and their fates who supplied them with endless inspiration for their works. The idea of humanity can be found in Symonds’ memoir in the least abstract presentation out of the three:

I have discovered the best society and finest courtesy in cottages, the most lovable comrades among peasant folk, the soundest wisdom in those who never heard the name of culture. What essential difference indeed is there between making books or boots, manoeuvring for a mayorship or a premiership, driving in a donkey-cart or a barouche, embracing a duchess or a dairymaid, dining off ortolans or porridge? Struggle for place, contention about title, strivings to eclipse our neighbours in wealth or fame, appear to me essentially ignoble and subversive of man’s equipoise. It is the duty of each to perform his own function as faithfully as he can; his privilege to obtain his pleasure where he finds it; his dignity to suffer pain as cheerfully as he is able. (219)

Because of a much narrower focus of their memoirs, Isherwood and Monette’s humanist tendencies are not expressed in such an overt way but they are also worth mentioning. In Isherwood’s case, the example is derived from the Wilson’s essay “An Integrity Born of Hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood”. She suggests about him that “he has succeeded in remaining a living, warm human being, and in imparting this humanity to his novels. His is truly an integrity born of hope” (331). Monette prefers exemplifying the kindness of other people, which confirms his own. “She [one of the nurses] told me her son was gay, in his mid-twenties, and she considered it her duty to work lovingly with AIDS patients, ’so maybe if someone ever has to take care of him, they’ll treat him like a son‘” (340). In Borrowed Time, Monette depicts his friend Roger as a man with a heart of gold who provided a legal service for free to Jill Halverson’s Downtown Women’s Center, which was designed for homeless women with mental illnesses, and valuable bits of advice to his friends. “Over and over I’d hear from friends who talked to him in the last weeks – how they would call to try to stumble something out, and Roger would turn in around and want to help them with their problems” (325).

4. Conclusion

The aim of this work was to compare three landmark autobiographical works portraying homosexual men – Symonds’ The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds –The Secret Homosexual Life of a Leading Nineteenth-Century Man of Letters, Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind and Monette’s Borrowed Time, and to argue that these memoirs contain more connecting elements than dissimilar ones. Connor assesses the potential of Borrowed Time to approach the reader and suggests that Paul and Roger “try to carve out a place where they belong” (47), which may be labeled as the main message not only of Monette’s memoir but of all of them. In their quest for an ideal place, Isherwood settled in Germany and Symonds became absorbed in the culture of ancient Greece. Monette’s concept of own place was more abstract and consisted in an unrelenting effort to overcome the distance between him, Roger, his fellow sufferers residing ‘on the moon’ and the earthlings. A certain pattern of mental processes and personal analysis of countless life obstacles can be followed in the memoirs.

The chief argument of my thesis was the idea of unforeseeable continuity and successorship of the memoirists. As I argue, there is an exceptionally strong link intertwining through the books, which is indirectly related to the amount of inner strength that they must have expended to maintain their sanity, while encountering oppressive and biased moods as the reactions to the respective social changes and subsequent anxieties. One of the Symonds’ comments on his “forcible repression of [his] natural inclination for the male sex” (166) indicates how enormous that amount must have been sometimes: “Asleep, dead, deaf, deeper than the deepest shine of the Atlantic, lies my soul” (175).

The first part of the work focused on the extent to which the reader can believe the veracity of autobiography, the general role of sex in literature, the motives of the authors to make personal events and thoughts public, unusual literary devices which can be observed in the memoirs, and the tendencies of the memoirists to use opposing statements in their works. Drawing on the interpretation of Waxman and Byington, it was suggested that autobiographies are “fictive constructs” because “life stories are shaped, events are consciously selected and selectively remembered, sometimes for conscious reasons and other times for tricks the psyche plays on us” (165). As was noted, the atmosphere of events – the way we remember them - can leave a deeper impression on one’s mind that factual aspects of it. Following Waxman and Byington again, it was suggested that sexuality should be neither concealed nor intentionally promoted as the central aspect. It provides the reader with the context of the author’s life but intimate details and specific circumstances of one’s sexual life are not always desirable. The motives of the authors for diary keeping and the later transformation of diaries into memoirs, such as a personal therapy or a pronouncement of the unpronounceable, are listed and the respective examples from the memoirs are included. Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind is used as the most emblematic example to clarify the fact that the features of a novel and a memoir can successfully intermingle to create an unusual symbiosis of the two seemingly completely different genres. A novel-like narrative method is here ensured by his third person narration and frequent references to himself as a fictitious literary protagonist ‘Christopher’. In the chapter, it is also suggested than contradictory ideas and statements, examples of which can be found in the memoirs, are a part of a natural process of personality development and merely indicate the authors’ frankness with the reader.

The second part of the work is Chapter 3, which contains 5 subchapters. The first subchapter dealt with socially constructed categories of nearly all the aspects of a human life that were proposed to distinguish what is normal from what is abnormal according to distorted parameters determined by a few chosen individuals and their own perspectives. Sexuality, along with race, gender, social background etc., is one of those aspects. Social hegemony is suggested as the chief purpose of establishing categories; and the decay of classifying tendencies that have appeared during the last few decades and the related term queer are also mentioned. I suggest the notion of queer as a potential topic for further research because numerous different, if not opposing, theories and scholastic studies referring to it are available today. The subchapter also elaborated on particular characteristic features of the eras during which the memoirists lived, which includes criminal sanctions of homosexuality but also first scholars (Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing) defending its naturalness in Symond’s Victorian England, the sickness theory, Hirschfeld’s concept of ‘the third sex’, Freud’s findings and Nazi ideology of racial purity in Isherwood’s Berlin during the 1930s, and the horrors of AIDS in Monette’s 1980s.

Subchapters 3.2 and 3.3 focused on the intellectual and literary traditions which the memoirists follow. The former underlines the intellectual and aristocratic circles of family and friends that surrounded them and to which they might have felt obliged to write such works that would leave a mark in world literature and fulfill the expectations of their potentials. Their frequent references to other world authors are not neglected and a special space is devoted to Symond’s letter cooperation with Havelock Ellis on the project known as Sexual Inversion - one of the first studies concentrated on this issue. The latter concerned with Platonic concept of love depicted in Plato’s dialogues “Symposium”, “Phaedrus” and “Apology of Socrates”, whose position as a bible for homosexuals is unwavering, and which belong to “the most influential traditions of love in the Western world” (Amir 6). The ambiguity of Plato’s theory of love is suggested in compliance with Dover’s interpretations that appeared in the 1950s and that completely denied almost all other existing studies of Platonic texts because he especially criticized the idea of mere spiritual connection of two creatures where the absence of sexual intercourse is taken for granted. Dover’s detractors are also presented, for instance, Davidson’s assumption that Dover’s perspectives endeavoring to disprove the idea of purity of Platonic love might have had negative effects on the texts themselves. The attention of the reader is also drawn to the distinction between a lower and a higher form of love, as proposed in the “Phaedrus”, and the idea of a perfect couple of the lover and the beloved with a substantial age gap and a student-teacher relationship. Naugle interprets the ideal union as the one where the beloved is “a young boy approaching manhood” (15).

The fourth part of Chapter 3 searched for the messages of ‘Carpe Diem’ hidden between the words in the memoirs. Despite experiencing many hardships and inner conflicts between the rules established by society and their homosexual persuasion, Symonds, Isherwood and Monette did not lose hope. Due to their perfect observational skills, they managed to find the wholeness of being in a single detail of an everyday event and to capture the beauty of the moment in a single sentence. And they did not use only their eyes to see. As was suggested, the sense of mortality is for most people very paralyzing because they simply too much count on tomorrow. The introductory sentence of Borrowed Time: “I don’t know if I will live to finish this,” in fact reflects the situation of all of us, and that is why we should live to the fullest.

The last subchapter 3.5 was designed to acquaint the reader with other minor common topics discussed in the memories of Symonds, Isherwood and Monette to make the picture of the parallels between them complete. The subchapter provides us with their attitudes to religiosity, marriage and children, family relationships, the concept of a friend, and their sense of humanity. As was noted, Freud’s argument that “only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life” (Civilization 23) is not applicable to every human being because gay men have always (or at least from the 13^th century) been excluded from the privilege of being religious. And that was because their inability to procreate. The memoirists considered the Church a hypocritical institution and a sophisticated system of buck-passing. Other above mentioned topics are only discussed from their own points of view and supported by the examples from the texts; and their attitudes are compared and further elaborated on.

Works Cited

Amir, Lydia. "Plato's Theory of Love: Rationality as Passion." Practical Philosophy (2001): 6-14. The Society for Philosophy in Practice. Web. 7 Jan. 2016.

Bailey, Douglas, Gabby DeVinny, Care Gordon, and Paul John Schadewald. “AIDS and American History: Four Perspectives on Experimental Learning.” The Journal of American History 86.4 (2000): 1721-33. JSTOR. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.

Berliner, Arthur K. “Sex, Sin, and the Church: The Dilemma of Homosexuality.” Journal of Religion and Health 26.2 (1987): 137-42. JSTOR. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.

Bolton, Jonathan. “Mid-Term Autobiography and the Second World War.” Journal of Modern Literature 30.1 (2006): 155-72. JSTOR. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.

Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. 2nd ed. Boston: Gay Men’s Press, 1988. Print.

Bristow, Joseph. Sexuality. London, Routledge: 1997. Print.

Clum, John M. “The Time before the War: AIDS, Memory, and Desire.” American Literature 62.4 (1990): 648-67. JSTOR. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.

Connor, Kimberly Rae. “A Common Geography of the Mind: Creating Sacred

Space in the Autobiographical Writings of Paul Monette and The NAMES

Project.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68.1 (2000): 47-

68. JSTOR. Web. 29 Dec. 2015.

Dannecker, Martin. Theories of Homosexuality. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1978. Print.

Davidson, James. “Dover, Foucalt and Greek Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex.” Past & Present 170 (2001): 3-51. JSTOR. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.

Dixon, Joy. “Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1987).” Victorian Review 35.1 (2009): 72-77. JSTOR. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.

Eisenbach, David. Gay Power: An American Revolution. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006. Print.

Eisner, Douglas. “Liberating Narrative: AIDS and the Limits of Melodrama in Monette and Weir.” College Literature 24.1 (1997): 213-26. JSTOR. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.

Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, Volume II. Internet Archive. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company, Publishers, 1915. Web. 29 Dec. 2015.

Endres, Nikolai. “Kertbeny, Károly Mária.” 2015. GLBTQ Archives. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.