1Tom Crewe, a former PhD. student in nineteenth-century British history from the University of Cambridge, spoke of the ‘iconoclastic enthusiasm of the ex-historian’ (Crewe 371) when his fiction The New Life came out in 2023. The novel is largely based on facts, the main characters have historical analogues, chiefly John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), a cultural historian and poet, and Henry Havelock Ellis (1837-1913), a doctor and sexologist. The work on which they both collaborated, Sexual Inversion. Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897), together with separate, individual works, Ellis Havelock’s The New Spirit (1890) and Symonds’s A Problem in Modern Ethics (1896), are the novel’s mainstay. However, notwithstanding this solid historical anchorage, the narrative relating the encounter between the two men starts in 1894, when Symonds was already dead: ‘if [readers] are expecting any significant fidelity to the facts, much of it will surprise them’ (Crewe 371). Such leeway vindicated by the author in his novel’s ‘Afterword’ is testament to the liberty Crewe took from solid historical data. Twisting facts is shown as not necessarily antithetical to a certain degree of factual accuracy.
2Crewe’s main characters, though taken from real life, are untypical by late Victorian standards through their mores. Symonds, though he was married and the father of three daughters, was what was then known as a ‘sexual invert’, who settled his lover in the family house. As for Havelock Ellis, he married Edith Lees, a writer and women’s rights activist, who was a lesbian. In the novel she has an affair with Angelica Burnham, an advocate of free love. Ellis, a sexologist, was alleged to enjoy urolagnia (more commonly known as ‘pee lust’); he was aroused by the sight of a woman urinating. Sexual Inversion, advertised as the first medical study on male homosexuality, consists of testimonies of gay men. Therefore, it was instrumental in giving some form of visibility to a minority, hitherto silenced or repressed. With the benefit of hindsight, it may thus be seen as a decisive step in a genealogy (Nietzsche, Foucault) of the homosexual condition. As Michel Foucault claims through his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, the sense of time is decisive and dictates that events be taken in the singularity of their occurrences, detached from abstract, universal ideas and the determining influence of an Origin (Ursprung) that would be foundational. This entails that genealogy is more concerned with ruptures, the accidental and chance, than with a smooth, seamless evolution destined to ultimately reveal the essence of what had been there from the very beginning of time. In other words, genealogy disclaims metaphysics to prioritise the materiality of documents which may not build up a coherent, progressive vision of the past: ‘entangled and confused parchments . . . documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.’ (Foucault 76). Precisely, Ellis’s and Symonds’s works, which are repeatedly cited, may be construed as the ‘entangled and confused . . . documents’ which Crewe scratches over and recopies in his fiction, thus redirecting history towards genealogy by emphasising the role of the affects in shaping the past:
genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history-in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. Finally, genealogy must define even those in stances when they are absent, the moment when they remained unrealized (Foucault 76).
3These few lines stake out Crewe’s project in writing The New Life as will be made clear in what follows.
- 1 The encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans history in the United Kingdom was started in J (...)
- 2 ‘Alternative history’, also known as ‘counterfactual history’ or ‘what-if fiction’, consists in ima (...)
4In writing The New Life Crewe follows in the footsteps of writers like E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, A.E. Housman, or Alan Hollinghurst, among others. Referring to the latter Jerome de Groot uses the rubric ‘Gay and lesbian historical fiction’ (de Groot 150–156), arguing that the novels pertaining to this category ‘query/queer the notion of ‘evidence’ and in doing so interrogate the ways that the past and that history have been written and constructed’ (de Groot 151). This is probably the case even if Alice Winn’s highly acclaimed novel In Memoriam (2023), described as a heartrending, gay epic story capitalises on well-known tropes by blending the official memory of World War I and more clandestine recollections of same sex love between men, by flagging up the centrality of the public-school institution. Through their sheer diversity, all these works probably contribute to enriching a history of (male) homosexuality which probably received some impetus when the LGBT archive project was launched in 2011.1 For its part, The New Life covers many facets of what in the early twenty-first century is understood as late-nineteenth gay subculture: Oscar Wilde’s trials, the male partnership between Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, the decisive influence of Walt Whitman’s ‘Calamus Poems’, and so on. Moreover, the novel documents the revolutionary, or utopian ideas that circulated amidst some intellectual circles at the time: anarchism, sexual freedom, alternative economic models etc., to such an extent that it sometimes verges on alternative history.2 Yet, at the same time, it does not take on board issues that have only cropped up more recently in the Western World, such as ‘decolonial queerness’ (Bakshi 1 17). Seen from this perspective, Crewe’s fiction remains Western-centric and limited to England coming to grips with its occluded domestic past.
5In what follows, it is Crewe’s own take on the so-called (neo) historical novel that will engage our attention. It is characterised by a two-tier montage of discourses—a nineteenth century authentic primary source and a twenty-first recreation of the past—bearing on a marginal—largely unhistoricised reality—on the margin of Grand History By imagining the encounter between a scholar and a scientist and documenting the different steps of their collaboration, Crewe shines a light on the backstage manoeuvrings behind the inception of a ‘scientific’ project, whilst allowing the reader to share in the intimate life of both men. Such an approach is crucial to avoid any undue simplification on the societal, political and ethical stakes entailed by marginal lifestyles, and to demonstrate how the private and the public, the intimate and the collective, are always closely intertwined.
6The central question could be how Crewe, trained as an academic historian, twists the tacit or formalised rules of institutionalised historiography, to reconstruct an episode of the past, which is often passed over quickly comparatively with other events, whilst holding a particular significance in his personal experience as a gay man, situating himself within a filiation. The study will proceed by following three steps, firstly Crewe is shown as coming to terms with an unhistoricised or possibly unhistoricisable/irretrievable past and the unhistorical drive, then his aesthetic choices are accounted for through queer historicism (mostly as exposed by Jack Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman) and in a final part Crewe’s prurient sapience, i.e. his recycling of cultural and (pseudo) scientific knowledge on mostly taboo topics is contrasted with what the American Justin Torres did in 2023 novel, Blackouts, which also happens to be founded on a pseudo medical study. However, unlike Crewe, Torres opts for an aesthetics of erasure. The two men met recently on September 29th, 2024 at the ‘Festival America’, in Vincennes at a round table titled ‘Queer Stories’. Their opposed, but also possibly complementary, approaches are an illustration of what fiction can do when it bothers to tackle the history of sexual minorities, which is still often a blank page in historiography even if things have changed fast over the past decades.
7Crewe’s novel, despite its conventional format (a far cry from postmodernist historiographic metafiction), illustrates the plasticity of contemporary fiction when it revives the past. The most striking feature is probably its focus on intimacy, on whatever may have passed unnoticed or, at least, was not deemed worthy of representation, for example Havelock Ellis’s above-mentioned quirk. The tight link between the private and the public is established. What is held to strictly belong to the domain of privacy is always somehow or other, already connected to, or constructed by, ideology. The New Life straddles different ‘regimes of historicity’, which may be glossed as ‘one of the conditions of possibility of historical writing: how, depending on the way relations between the past, the present, and the future are configured, certain types of history are possible, and others are not.’ (Hartog 17). Indeed, the primary sources—Havelock’s and Symonds’s studies—have not been thought of as historical documents. Their purpose is both sanitary and ethical aiming at bettering the quality of life in the present by bringing out in the open what is still a non-subject. This is made crystal clear by Havelock Ellis’s statement in his introduction to Sexual Inversion: ‘Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence until we know how to understand sex.—So, at least, it seems to me.’ (Havelock Ellis x). The present, within the context of the late Victorian past, is therefore what counts, and the past is only briefly referred to in relation to old Catholic theological treatises, such as Sanchez’s De Matrimonio, for their candidness on topics which had become taboo by the end of the nineteenth century (Havelock Ellis viii). Yet, by returning to Ellis and Symonds, not only does Crewe retrieve precious information concerning the past, but he reconfigures the relation to time. Indeed, the content of the Victorian study is no longer interesting for the message it conveys for the present, but as a valuable source that may be adduced to any attempt to come to a diachronic understanding of same-sex love, and other so-called sexual or physiological ‘inversions’. By the same token, the scientific tone which prevailed then is eclipsed by the historical stance, so that to the notion of ‘regimes of historicity’ could be added that of ‘epistemic regimes’. For instance, the term ‘hermaphroditism’ (Havelock Ellis, Symonds 36 and passim) belongs to a nomenclature which is now largely contested and phrases such as ‘nonbinary gender’, ‘third sex’ and ‘two-sex being’ are gaining currency. This does not curtail the progressive liberatory thrust of Sexual Inversion but points to the historical context when it was written.
8Crewe’s fiction is inflected by a whole range of discursive formations; the influence of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is perceptible throughout, especially the first volume, The Will to Knowledge, which is here inflected as the incentive to come out does not originate in an external force exerting pressure and censorship, but in a self-willed deliberate decision to come to terms with one’s own identity. This is illustrated through the fictitious John Addington Symonds’s trajectory. The more scientific, medical or even anatomical facets of Crewe’s fiction probably owe something to Thomas Laqueur’s writings on history and sexology. The genesis of Sexual Inversion whose inspiration stems from a sexual drive establishes the primacy of the somatic that characterises Laqueur’s historical approach. So, after a casual encounter with a woman with whom there is no sexual intercourse, Havelock Ellis entertains a fantasy in which his urolagnia exacerbates his lust:
In the days afterward, he dwelled on how near he had come. . . . He found that when he remembered himself—breathless from the stairs, unbuttoning, teasing an afterimage of the woman into eager liquid life, the piece of jewellery cutting in his hand—he was amazed. It intrigued him, this private, ungovernable sexual nature of his, the strange satisfactions it had invented for itself. He thought about a book he could write, while knowing that all his possible futures floated still in the unknowable aftermath of one definite event. (Crewe 263)
9Such rhetoric resonates with Laqueur’s discourse, for example when the American historian addresses the topic of ‘orgasm and desire’ in the following words: ‘Orgasm thus dovetails nicely with the economy of fluids . . . Organs and orgasms thus reflect one another in a common mirror’ (Laqueur 45). One could add that whereas Laqueur’s argument on the economy of pleasure is geared towards ‘producing the seeds of life . . . the explosive release of the seed and the heated pneuma, mimics the creative work of Nature itself’ (Laqueur 46), in Havelock Ellis’s unconsummated marriage there is no promise of a progeny, the offspring will be a book covering all possible quirks in a non-judgmental way. Finally, the emphasis on the history of male homosexuality, notably Greek pederasty, through interspersed allusions to Addington Symonds’s A Problem of Greek Ethics, echoes Alain Corbin, Georges Vigarello and Jean-Jacques Courtine’s collective work titled A History of Virility.
- 3 There are a few iterations of this idea of ‘an impossible subject’ suggesting that it spells out a (...)
- 4 ‘autotheory, autoexperimentation, auto-techno-penetration, pornology’ (Preciado 347)
10Oddly enough, this multiplication of interpretive prisms and grids of analysis suggests that ultimately the past in and of itself is fated to remain fundamentally irretrievable. This is plainly expressed by the character of Mark Ludding, a repressed gay man and John Addington’s friend ever since the time they shared in Cambridge as fellow students, when he finds out that after writing on Greek paiderastia and Michelangelo’s sonnets to Tommaso, Addington plans to embark on an investigation of sexual inverts: “’It is on an impossible subject,’ he said. . . . ‘You are going too far with me, Johnny, he said.” (23).3 Not only does the ‘impossible subject’ refer, at least for Ludding, to facts he would rather keep hidden, but it also points to an entangled reality, blending solid historical data, social factors and subjective projection. Indeed, Addington Symonds has his own axe to grind, and so does Havelock Ellis, as it is hinted several times in the novel. Therefore Crewe, in fictionalising a key moment in the history of sexuality tackles, by proxy as it were, issues that, notwithstanding societal changes, remain transhistorical. In this respect, this novel could also be read as ‘autotheory’, to take up the term introduced by Paul B. Preciado (then known as Beatriz Preciado) in Testo Junkie (347),4 i.e. a text where the autobiographical and the theoretical tesselate, and in the present case the genealogical could be added.
11This entanglement of the personal, the historical and the theoretical, endlessly deferring the intrinsic nature of the past, is encapsulated in the novel’s very title: ‘The New Life’. To take up Addington Symonds’s remark, there is no ‘harm in stating facts. It is historical.’ (52) Yet ‘historical’ already implies a mediation, through selection, interpretation and narration. Crewe, as a historian, has done his research, the ‘Fellowship of the New Life’, was a socialist movement founded in 1883. Its members advocated for spiritual and material reform, moral regeneration, and experiments in living: ‘It was an epoch of experiment, with some achievement and some remorse’ (Holbrook Jackson, The 1890s qtd. in the epigraph). One such experiment concerns Henry and Edith’s unconventional, unconsummated marriage and Edith’s romantic attachment to Angelica, in the novel, and her affairs with several lesbians in real life. The overlap between fiction and what has been recorded of life confuses the nature of the past. A constellation of intellectuals joined the Fellowship, at one point or another, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Edith Lees, E Nesbit even Ramsay MacDonald, prior to a split, when some of its members left for the Fabian Society. However, the historical and titular ‘New Life’ has a whole range of meanings in the novel, from what has ‘to be lived under the skin’ (33), ‘another kind of life’ (22), to ‘[a] new economy [which] entailed a new ethics’ (33). The so-called ‘New Life’ is even a mantra, sealing the bond between its members: ‘“You are wearing a new suit. That is change enough for today.” He laughed. “The New Life.” “The New Life.” She let go of his hand. . . . He laughed again, opened his arms wide: “The New Life!”’ (18). The concept’s versatility makes for generic plurality, what could have been a plain historical fiction, verges on utopia, or possibly alternative history, as it touches upon plans for another type of society, which are never fully actualised. The New Life also bears some common features with biofiction, for example by recounting dreams, the most striking instance being the opening chapter, in which Addington Symonds, pressed tight against a man in an underground carriage, is about to come, when he suddenly awakes covered in sweat. Even before it becomes blurred through a juxtaposition of discourses, the past is first shown as phantasmatic.
- 5 The term ‘infra-ordinary’ refers to Perec’s interest in the things in life that exist under the rad (...)
12Though this may seem surprising coming from a novelist who trained as a historian, there are several passages in which what defines an historical approach is denied. What might be termed an unhistorical drive is indeed perceptible through an engagement with the invisible, the unrecorded, or perhaps what Georges Perec once called the ‘infra-ordinary’.5 Indeed, if history posits the principle of recording for posterity occurrences likely to have left behind trails, or traces, The New Life also addresses what escaped all the radars. This can be shown by taking the example of two unhistorical topics: simplicity and repression.
- 6 Following the principles of the école des Annales, quantitative history proclaims itself as the sci (...)
13Edward Carpenter vaunted simplicity as a cardinal value to get rid of the hypocritical masquerade of social etiquette: the ‘jungle of idiotic duties and thin-lipped respectabilities’ (Carpenter 1887, 74) and railed ‘the nonsense manners and diarrhoea of drawing rooms’ (Carpenter 1922, 24). Crewe takes up this ideal of simplicity: ‘the Society liberated themselves from the trappings of convention, of fashion, they lived plainly and without hypocrisy, refusing servants and petty purchases. . . . They took walks, to root them in nature.’ (34). In a sense, simplicity leaves no clues, no spectacular vestiges and as such is opposed to the historical, which starts its investigation from some salient happenings, unless what is aimed at is long, quantitative history, as practised by Fernand Braudel or Pierre Chaunu.6 But this is hardly the case with Crewe who identifies characters and represents their interaction, instead of transhistorical anonymous crowds, let alone vast geographic expanses, against the background of infinite time. This creates the impression that was is targeted is what is fated to remain unremembered: ‘the perpetuation of this sort of oblivious together-working.’ (58) And there is a whole stylistic study to be made from this inscription of the unhistorical in the novel, through metaphoric strands for obfuscation, or the untellable. For example on the day following the first wedding night of a marriage that was never to be consummated, the narrator writes of Havelock Ellis: ‘Old certainties rode rampant in his mind, coldly trampling the newer: he would never perform the act, it was not in his nature; what was in his nature was not communicable, it narrowed to him alone.’ (63) The syntactic narrowing down ending on ‘alone’ inscribes Havelock Ellis as a closed book.
- 7 The term ‘undecidability’ like most concepts coined by Jacques Derrida is highly complex. It is not (...)
14Crewe even goes one step further in his exploration of the unsayable, by paradoxically articulating the ‘repressed’. As is well known, Foucault ‘We “Other Victorians”’, the introductory chapter to the first volume of his History of Sexuality, rejected the so-called ‘repressive hypothesis’, according to which any discussion on human sexuality was alleged to have been censored and banned in the Victorian era. He claimed that, on the opposite, there was at that epoch a proliferation of scientific and legal discourses, whose purpose was to bind and therefore control, or pathologise, marginalised, or perverted sexualities, including homosexuality. In a sense, Foucault placed Victorian sexuality on the side of historical visibility through a whole range of biased, coercive discursive regimes. Crewe, perhaps more subtly, suggests that ‘repression’ still went on to exist within this explosion of discourses on sexuality. In so doing, he gives some form of representation to the unarticulated. First, by alluding to Havelock Ellis’s urolagnia (a sexual interest in urination), Crewe points to posterity’s difficulty in placing the sexologist sexually, as his kink did not really square with existing nomenclature. Crewe creates a character who is fundamentally ambiguous to himself, to the other characters and to the reader. So Havelock Ellis, as Crewe sees him, exerts a form of liberty residing in what remains elusive. The multiplication of scientific discourses, supposed to leave no room for repression, at a time when all sexual proclivities had to come out into the open under duress, is shown to fail to cover the complexity of human nature. Furthermore, the ‘repressed’ may also be found in the treatment of Catherine Addington, John’s wife, who was progressively confronted to her husband’s homosexuality and countenanced it, going as far as to turn a blind eye when Addington Symonds imposed the presence of his lover, Franck Feaver, in their home. Crewe strikes a delicate balance between the love between Catherine and John, which somehow persists despite many ordeals, and the destiny of the closeted gay man who legitimately vindicates his sexual orientation but who, in doing so, inflicts humiliation on his life-long partner, after having been a victim most of his life himself. So ‘repression’ here refers to what situations that are hard to put into words, let alone easily identifiable categories. As Crewe perceptively puts it ‘If the reader had been invited merely to pity him as a closeted gay man—almost axiomatic in our contemporary moment—then they would not appreciate, truly, how a homophobic society hurts women as well as men.’ (Interview with Amia Srinivasan n.p.). This may confront the novel to what Derrida once conceptualised as an undecidability,7 and historiography may not be a congenial terrain to accommodate such philosophical cruxes.
15In A Queer Time and Place Jack Halberstam states that ‘“queer time” is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety and inheritance’ (6), before adding, quoting Foucault on modernity, that queer temporality is ‘an attitude more than a period of history’(8). For her part, Elizabeth Freeman in Time Binds. Queer Temporalities. Queer Histories suggests that ‘the pleasures of queerness can be found in the interstices of national-political life, and that they are definitely worth living for.’ (10). The escape from tradition-sanctioned temporal frames, the detotalisation of time, affording interstices worth living for, and an approach to time founded more on attitude than period per se—in the present case an insistence on a sensate historical method—delineate the contours of a queer epistemology that is perfectly adapted to Crewe’s The New Life.
16At the diegetic level, there are obviously the unconventional family models; the childless couple formed by Havelock Ellis and his wife Edith, with her lover Angelica, and Addington Symonds who eventually leaves his wife Catherine for his lover Franck Feaver. Besides, the novel ends up on a non-resolution; Sexual Inversion co-authored by Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis will not be published. So, in retrospect, the whole point of the novel is to follow the steps of a liberating project that finally aborts. But this failure does not call into question the revolutionary impetus that was there from the start. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman explains how she has gradually given up on the iconoclastic thrust that drove a first generation of ‘queer queers’, as she calls them, who claimed ‘to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities’ and ‘would dissolve forms, disintegrate identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, and even repudiate politics altogether’ (13). Instead, she came to valorise ‘the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless.’ (13) To a large extent, her stance squares with Crewe’s own literary project, especially when she remarks: ‘I find myself emotionally compelled by the not-quite-queer-enough longing for form that turns us backwards to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being and belonging that seem, on the face of it, completely banal.’ (12) Freeman’s words seem especially well-adapted to Crewe’s novel because the novelist who is hardly a gay activist returns to a moment of the past, the 1890s when, just before the Oscar Wilde trials that were going to unleash a lasting wave of homophobia, there was room for optimism. Crewe’s ‘turn backward’, however, is in no way reducible to nostalgia, a notion which has sometimes been used to label neo-Victorianism. Derrida in Specters of Marx remarks that nostalgia, the crave for a return to the past is acceptable only if ‘the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back.’ (38). Crewe, on the opposite, attempts to revive the energising force that animated these living experiments and utopian projects, implying that they place responsibility on us today, at a time when there is a commodification of gay and queer culture that likely creates other forms of exclusion. As Crewe puts it: ‘now, to be a “queer writer” is for some a blazoned identity and possibly a sign of sales potential, and there are more shelves dedicated to “queer” fiction than ever before.’ (Interview with Amia Srinavasan n.p.). The antidote to this current ideology of would-be emancipatory progress, obviously not progress for everyone, could be to ‘min[e] the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’ (Freeman 16). This is precisely what Crewe does, by excavating a sociological medical textbook from the late nineteenth century, a study which is presumably no longer, or hardly ever, read nowadays. This is an instance of what Freeman calls ‘temporal drag’, consisting in giving a new lease on life to a cultural throwaway: ‘this “temporal drag,” with all the associations that the word “drag” has with retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past on the present’ (Freeman 62). This gravitational pull asserts the agency of the past (its combats and experiments) over the present, a far cry from reactionary nostalgia. Sexual Inversion is at best an archived document in library storage rooms when it is not destroyed. And yet, this is Crewe’s contention, it still holds the potential to instigate and feed legitimate struggles to be fought in this day and age.
- 8 See in particular her two recent articles which explore the nineteenth century through the prism of (...)
17Crewe also ‘binds time’, following Freeman’s acceptation, in The New Life, firstly by creating a logical temporal coherence between events, even if it involves anachronisms. For example, he dates the beginning of the collaboration between Addington and Ellis to 1894, the time of novel’s opening section, when in fact Addington died in 1893, but this allows the author to bring the turmoil around Sexual Inversion’s publication in resonance with the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895. This orchestration of a momentous context for the inception of gay rights bestows a form of convergence and coherence on more scattered events in real life. But this binding of time also triggers unbinding, in so far as the erotic relations and bodily acts, which are fictionalised, unbind time and history from capitalism’s regulated tempos, in creative ways, and sever some destinies from historical determination. Concerning the novel’s pace, this has a direct repercussion: the choice of dilating, or drawing out, moments if intimacy, which afford escapes from chrononormativity, i.e. the social regulation of time predicated on work and production. The previously mentioned erotic dream, on which the novel opens, is a case in point, as are the love scenes between Addington Symonds and Franck Feaver, or Havelock Ellis’s prurient contemplation of a tramp woman peeing on the pavement, on the morning of his wedding. As Freeman remarks queer historicism does not shrink from ‘risking a certain vulgar referentiality’ (11). Put differently, it does not sanitise the messiness of life. Similarly, it also posits the centrality of pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, in encountering and documenting the past. In this respect, Crewe’s erotic scenes of male love are reminiscent of Hollinghurst’s survey of England’s history through a gay genealogy. The many signifiers for ‘gay’ across time, which Crewe recaps, almost incidentally bear witness to this diachronic stance: ‘Invert, Uranian, Urning, homosexual’ (97) and, of course, Carpenter’s ‘intermediate sex’. Through prosopopoeia, Crewe has Carpenter define this third gender: ‘“The intermediate sex is my phrase. Our role in the New Life will depend on the blend within us—the body of a man and the soul of a woman, or the body of a woman and the soul of a man. We are a kinder race, unconcerned with propagating ourselves. We see differently.”’ (97). Binding time entails returning to the past in order to vaticinate and Carpenter’s words herald the reflections on ‘transness’ which a young researcher like Mary Mussman applies to transhistorical literary studies.8
18Finally, queer historicism extolls the value of close reading, understood as lingering, dallying, tarrying over past sources which, even though they may be regarded as obsolescent by today’s standards, they nevertheless offer points of resistance. In this respect ‘queer reading’, as a generative and disruptive practice, affirms the usefulness of anachrony as testament to the pull of the past on the present. The lingering persistence of bygone events inscribing the symptom of transgenerational traumatic episodes is a characteristic of queer affect: ‘If identity is always in temporal drag, constituted and haunted by the failed love-project that precedes it, then perhaps the shared culture making we call ‘movements’ might do well to feel the tug backward as a potentially transformative part of movement itself.’ (Freeman 93). In many ways, the plagiaristic repetition of passages from Sexual Inversion acts a catalyst for temporal drag, as can be shown in a last part.
19Both in chapters 16 and 31 Crewe cannibalises passages from Sexual Inversion to give some material presence to the book which is, in many aspects, his novel’s raison d’être. What was originally a medico-psychological textbook is turned into a foundational primary source. An idea of the plagiaristic practise at work can be given by juxtaposing an extract from Addington Symond and Havelock Ellis’s scientific investigation with the reading at the tribunal of the same passage in the contemporary fiction:
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Case XXI.—An Englishman, aged 34, of no profession. The family history shows nothing abnormal. . . .
He has had intercourse with three women in the course of his life, but simply as a matter of duty in order to see if he could be like other men. He did not like it, and it did not seem natural to him. He likes women as friends, and has a very high opinion of their usefulness and goodness, but he never feels inclined to kiss, and still less to take liberties with them. It is scarcely necessary to add that he is unmarried.
He prefers the educated to the uneducated, as the limited range of the interests that appeal to the latter make association difficult.
The age preferred is from 18 to 45, or even up to 60. He likes paedicatio to be practised on him, but he does not himself care to practise it; fellatio, however, he likes either actively or passively, and is also able to satisfy himself by intercrural connection.
While preferring the educated, he makes the following interesting remarks concerning the instinctive impulses: “I like soldiers and policemen for the actual sensuality of the moment, but they have so little to talk about that it makes the performance unsatisfactory. I like tall, handsome men (the larger they are in stature the better), very strong, and as sensual as I get them to be, and I like them to practise paedicatio on me and I prefer it done roughly, and I rather prefer men who are carried away by their lust and bite my flesh at the supreme moment, and I rather like the pain inflicted by their teeth, or elsewhere.” (Volume 1, Chapter III, “Sexual Inversion in Men”, 66-67)
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Case Eleven—An Englishman, aged 34, of no profession. He has had intercourse with three women in the course of his life, but simply as a matter of duty in order to see if he could be like other men. He did not like it, and it did not seem natural to him. With men, the age preferred is from eighteen to forty-five, or even up to sixty. While preferring the educated, he makes the following interesting remarks concerning the instinctive impulses: “I like soldiers and policemen for the actual sensuality of the moment, but they have so little to talk about that it makes the performance unsatisfactory. I like tall, handsome men (the larger they are in stature the better), very strong, and as sensual as I get them to be, and I like them to practise paedicatio on me and I prefer it done roughly, and I rather prefer men who are carried away by their lust and bite my flesh at the supreme moment, and I rather like the pain inflicted by their teeth, or elsewhere.” (294-295)
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20Crewe copies out almost verbatim Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis’s original text. The only difference resides in the attitude towards the medical record. In one instance the passage is within a thick book, that is most likely to be only perused by specialists. In the second, the same passage is fictionalised, or better dramatised, to be fictionally performed at a court hearing, in front of a disapproving audience. It is given to understand that the scene is sending shockwaves and eliciting revulsion, but Crewe’s strategy is to get contemporary readers to side with Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis for having brought out in the open a human experience which had up until then been regarded as both monstruous and unnatural, when it could be conceived of. The violation of these men’s candid confessions, instrumentalised in a trial, which, in reality, never ever took place, resonates with Oscar Wilde’s trial and partakes of a gay martyrology, which is foundational for a Western-centric history of male homosexuality. This theatrical episode is crucial in the novel’s economy which relies on the constant alternation between obfuscation and revelation. With the Wilde trials in the background, it also inscribes the thespian as central to gay genealogy or martyrology, which is precisely what Alan Hollinghurst does in his last novel, Our Evenings (2024). However, this is by no means the only way to go about writing a history of the gay experience. Interestingly, on the other side of the Atlantic, at the same time as Crewe published his debut novel, an American writer, Justin Torres, also published a novel based on a pseudo-medical essay of homosexuality, Blackouts (2023) which twists, or skews Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941).
21Torres’s stance is diametrically opposed to Crewe’s strategy of textual outing. The American writer suggests that queer history may only be retrieved from hushed and hidden places, omissions, or subtext, when the English one gives visibility or renders audible testimonies which had fallen into oblivion. One believes in a foundational moment for gay history—the late Victorian period with Carpenter, Wilde, Addington Symonds and so on—the other shows how queer memory has to grapple with erasure, effacement: both institutional and mental. The book Sex Variants by George W. Henry was a pseudo-scientific, eugenicist study, and a bowdlerised version and total reinterpretation of a wide scale investigation conducted by one Jan Gay, a lesbian activist, influenced by the works of Magnus Hirschfeld. Gay’s pioneering inquiry, giving free expression to both gay and lesbian people, had been turned down by all the publishing houses in the inter-war period, before it was rewritten to suit the homophobic agenda that prevailed then. In Torres’s novel, an old Puerto Rican, named Juan Gay passes on to a young man, Nene for ‘baby boy’ or ‘darling’ in Spanish, whom he had previously got acquainted with in a mental institution, his copy of Sex Variants. It turns out that Juan Gay has blacked out whole passages, those with pathological connotations, to only preserve random words as a starting point for a new narrative. His copy also contains snaps to open the scope of interpretative possibilities. Nene suffers from occasional memory losses, he blacks out, hence the flimsiness and vulnerability of a hypothetical transmission are underscored:
The grand project, which I was to complete after Juan’s death, involved a file folder stuffed with scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, and scribbled notes, along with two massive books whose pages had been mostly blacked out. The books comprised a research study, published in two volumes and titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. (Torres 11)
22Tom Crewe’s repurposes a fin de siècle medical study to make it into a tell-tale historical source catalysing a multifaceted reflection on the queer condition. Although it is primarily geared towards documenting a gay genealogy, it opens up on other sexual orientation or gender choices. On several instances the possibility of extending the study to sexual inversion amongst women is evoked by Angelica Burnham. Crewe’s original contribution consists in keeping up a subtle balance between contradictory commitments, outing a forgotten primary source, through a display of prurient sapience, whilst striving to render the unformulated, repressed condition of those who dared not confide an embarrassing, unavowable condition, or speaking of victimhood when the victim also perpetuate collateral damages turning a life-long partner into a second-degree victim. The responsibility, as readers infer, rests with a bigoted and homophobic society which produces chains of responsibility for perfectly innocent acts, for hazarding one’s freedom and reputation for short periods of abandon, sacrificing all the comforts of a home, the dignity of a marriage for a surrender to sincere passion. If anything, The New Life demonstrates how the gay condition is inherently historical because society then, and perhaps still now, requires that homosexuals do account for the origin, aetiology and development of their natural inclination, in a way the majority of the population is never expected to.
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