Coming Out to Heaven: Dispatch from the Clouded Mountain

Coming Out to Heaven: Dispatch from the Clouded Mountain.

The first of Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, published in the original and only issue of the troublemaking Alfred Douglas’s suggestively titled magazine The Chameleon, is this: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”

I have tried for far too long and with far too many false starts to write about this particular episode. Having been reminded of Wilde and put in mind to make reference to him, I found myself repeatedly frustrated at having not read more from the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I was lacking perhaps the most important of a series of metaphors that would form the framework on which to build an account of my first experience of Heaven.

I have at last embarked upon the exercise of rectifying this appalling gap in my literary knowledge – helped along the way by Frank Harris’s excellent book on the life and confessions of his old friend – so perhaps I can make some headway.

One is reluctant – and not without reason – to attempt to act as the ventriloquist for a community. Nevertheless, if we allow that it is occasionally so tempting that it becomes unavoidable: I am fairly sure that there must come a time in the life of anyone who is anything other than straight when one is compelled, by a mixture of naive boldness, peer pressure and a stifled sense of adventure, to step out of what we stupidly call the ‘comfort zone’ and experience something new. (By the way, find me someone who would describe stagnation and boredom as being comfortable feelings. I’m not sure I’d want to meet them.)

Some embrace it, others reject it. Some find themselves huddled in a corner writing copy. But I speak with some small amount of assurance when I say that, when one has abandoned the once cosy and comfortable closet, one tends, sooner or later, to end up in a gay club.

I was tempted to draw on C.S. Lewis’s vastly overrated Chronicles of Narnia to describe the experience, but the analogy doesn’t quite work. The children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have first to enter the closet, and that is precisely the wrong way around. This left me with something of a quandary: Do I invoke Philip Pullman’s sublime His Dark Materials trilogy to attempt to describe the experience, or opt for Lewis Carroll’s inferior but better-known works.

The latter will probably serve me better. The windows cut by the Subtle Knife in His Dark Materials share an essential quality with the knife: they are subtle. They are hard to see, because they often open onto one part of another world that bears no stark or easily distinguishable difference from your own. By contrast, Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole would, were Carroll’s surrealism not quite so insufferable, have been rather more jarring. The experience of entering Heaven was certainly more jarring than it was subtle and mysterious.

I began with Wilde partly because my impression of nightclubs is that they embody that quip about the artificial, and partly because he embodies a lesson you should possess and carry with you as you take your first tentative steps into the other world, and partly because most of his Phrases and Philosophies rely on paradox which, according to Mr Best in James Joyce’s Ulysses, is... well, I’ll quote him.

“Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know. Hughes and hews and hues, the colour, but it’s so typical of the way he works it out. It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know.” Heaven is far from “the tame essence of Wilde,” but my experience of it was certainly paradoxical; something I had to hate but had to love, too. Well, “the wise contradict themselves.”

I was compelled to brave Heaven by the recommendation of another Oscar; my friend and colleague Mr. Yuill. (His excellent new blog can be found quickly germinating at oscaryuill.wordpress.com.) I say recommendation, but it was given with a caveat: “99% of the time it’s a shit night.” All the same to me; I’ve never enjoyed clubs, but, imbued with and driven on by almost forty pounds worth of scotch courage, I set off from a very poorly attended event at the Star of Kings and, via a quick stop at my flat in Queens’ Park, found myself queuing for entry.

It should have come as no surprise: I got lost as soon as I was inside. The internal geography of Heaven can be described as resembling a warren without drawing on any work of surrealist fiction, and I soon found myself wandering and wondering. Not foundering, I hope, nor quite wandering aimlessly, but wandering and wondering nonetheless, amid a cacophony of sound and seemingly pattern-less movement.

I claim to be able to sit down and write in almost any place and at almost any time, and, spotting an unoccupied sofa in the corner next to the bar, I resolved to push my way through the crowd to get to it. This I managed, but not before running into the (very drunk) deputy editor of the newly relaunched London Student; the only familiar face I was to see that night. He was barely intelligible, and the encounter proved a fruitless one. The same cannot be said of the sofa, where I remained for nigh on four hours, pausing only to restock on whiskey, and documenting anything and everything that came to mind.

My almost neurotic refusal to indulge in the whims of attraction leaves few opportunities for distraction. There was the moment when a man saw fit to drop his trousers in front of a small audience – I thought then and I think now that the description “small” applied to more than just the crowd – followed by the entrance of a not-unattractive man, sans shirt, with his arm around another gentleman dressed in a very impressive three-piece suit. But aside from that, and the sudden death of the phone I’d intended to rely on to get me home, my time in the club was fairly uneventful.

(It’s a tangent, but I’m not at all sorry to keep doing this: in Wilde’s moving letter to Douglas, De Profundis, he expresses the remorse born from a belief that his trial had been the trial of his name, and its verdict one that disgraced his family. I cannot claim anything like that level of anguish, and my comparatively inconsequential trials exist only in my head and involve only myself, but it occurs to me, having read De Profundis and now in writing this, that I’ve not ‘come out’ to my own family. So: Mum, dad, if you’re reading this, take it as a compliment that I never felt the need.)

It was pleasing to note that Heaven has, in an expression of solidarity and moral responsibility that those at the top of FIFA and the IOC have yet to show, banned Russian vodka from the premises. I believe this is a step that has been taken by all establishments owned and operated by G-A-Y, though the news media showed far more interest when they were discovered rejecting people who looked too straight. (That is a policy I have a certain amount of interest in combating, as ‘looking gay’ or, more accurately, ‘looking bi-‘ is something I’ve apparently yet to master.) 

As to whether Heaven itself is in any way cliquey; that is a subject on which I feel I am not qualified to judge. All I can say is that, in my – admittedly limited – interactions with people there (another double please, sir), I did not see anything that hints at that sort of exclusivist sentiment.

Not that the implied criticism necessarily holds true in the first place. For all we like to think we live in a tolerant, accepting, modern society, clubs like Heaven are still amongst the few places in which this culture  (if indeed culture is the right word), which used to be so completely subversive, is allowed to thrive and to express itself with relative impunity. I could be accused of being pessimistic, but name me a single ‘mainstream’ club in which you are likely to see two people of the same sex holding hands, kissing, or showing affection and attraction for each other with the freedom that was on display in Heaven.

But freedom and comfort are two very different things. As someone whose first introduction to the ‘other side’ came through the historical novels of Mary Renault and, though to a lesser extent, the Nightrunner series by Lynn Flewelling, my disquiet and uncertainty comes not from societal expectations or the risk of condemnation. It comes in part from my anti-social nature and my dislike of crowds and clubs and dancing, but also from one of my deeper, darker secrets. I am a closet romantic.

Or rather, I am and I am not. It’s another of those contradictions; praised by Wilde before his trial, regarded as a necessity by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, and certainly present in figures from Orwell to Auden and Samuel Johnson. (I may never be able to claim that level of talent, but I am already some way toward matching the description of Auden once given by Louis MacNeice: “Everything he touches turns to cigarettes.”)

It is obviously futile to hope for anything quite so romantic and quite so picturesque as the gardens of the school at Mieza in Fire from Heaven. And even if it were possible to delicately walk the line between innocence and the other on the Street of Lights in Rhiminee (a reference to the colour codes that have played such a fundamental part in the history of LGBT movements, though it is interesting to note that Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, believes the legend of the green carnation to be little more than a myth), a nightclub is certainly not the place for tentative steps and cautious emersion. I knew this before I entered Heaven and I have known this for a very long time. I did not hope or expect to be proved wrong, and yet I must acknowledge that part of me did. No one is entirely free of doublethink.

Whilst it is an experience I would not now do without, nor one that I would never have again, I did leave at the end of the night thinking that perhaps I had come some way toward understanding, albeit in a metaphorical sense, what it must have felt like to be one of the boys hired for enjoyment by Gore Vidal and his friend, the equally fabulous Tom Driberg.

The best version of the story I know is found in Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22, the relevant paragraph of which I will republish here so that the reader might better understand what I mean:

“Through Tom I was eventually to meet Gore Vidal, and also to learn how when in Rome the two of them would hunt together and organise a proper division of labor. Rugged young men from the Via Veneto would be taken from the rear by Gore and then thrust, with any luck semi-erect, into the next-door room where Tom would suck them dry.”

I suppose I should restate the metaphorical nature of my realisation. I entered by one door on one day and I left on the next and by the other, and with a vague sense of uncertain satisfaction. It was an experience that I should have had some time ago, though if I am to venture back again I will have to make myself a little more presentable and a good deal richer. And perhaps, when I next find myself on the long and meandering road home in the early hours of the morning, I will find myself more willing to embrace the paradox.

(I close with Wilde’s poem, Harlot’s House, not because I think it a fair description of Heaven, but because... Just because.)

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.

Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,

Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing. Then, turning to my love, I said, 'The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.' But she--she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

I am, as I write this, standing at the edge of a small crowd of people gathered on the steps of the National Gallery in London. It is one of a series of such gatherings now taking place around the world; a show of solidarity with the journalists and cartoonists of the magazine Charlie Hebdo who were murdered by Muslim fanatics yesterday.

It also purports to be a demonstration in support of free speech and expression. Paris briefly became the latest battleground in the fight between free speech and the forces of jihad, and it is a relief to see people on the streets in support of right side of that dichotomy. Never mind that many of them will not have read the magazine in question, and never mind that many of those gathered here, if they had seen some of Charlie Hebdo’s more risqué cartoons and caricatures, would have, under other circumstances, decried the magazine as a racist screed not worth the paper it’s printed on. Tonight at least, the principle is the right one.

The demonstration began some time before I arrived. I overheard one reporter as she was speaking to her camera; apparently there had been as many as seven hundred people in the crowd before I arrived. And there are still over a hundred of them here now, some holding pens and notepads, some holding cartoons, and some holding signs and placards bearing the Twitter hashtag that has come to represent the movement: #JeSuisCharlie.

The reverent atmosphere here feels slightly out of place. The magazine in question, and its spiritual counterparts in countries around the world - the likes of South Park, the offices of which were attacked in 2010, and Jyllands-Posten, the Danish magazine that caused its country so much trouble when, in 2006, it printed a set of cartoons that were deemed offensive by rabid mobs in Pakistan and elsewhere – celebrate irreverence. That is the crime for which they have been deemed worthy of death and destruction, and that is the reason their offices are now, and have been for many years, under heavy police protection. These are the sorts of magazines that would shout to interrupt a vigil, and so, with that in mind, this seems to me to be a very quiet demonstration in support of free speech.

It is, though, pleasingly diverse. There will undoubtedly be people who want to excuse these attacks or misdirect the blame for them; people to whom the notion of moral responsibility is alien; people who will look at the attacks in Paris, and those that have happened before and will almost certainly happen again, and claim that they are in some way excused by our own actions. “We had it coming,” in other words, for our criminal governments and our oppression of Muslims and our drone strikes and our obsession with oil. Well, tell that the man who goes by the name of Ken, and who is one of four or five people here bearing the flags of the Kurdish YPG, and its women’s’ wing the YPJ. They have placed a sign on the floor, adding to the pile of newspapers, comic strips, pens, candles and placards, which reads: “The Kurds will never forget you.” These men and women are themselves an counterargument against the nihilists and the masochists who believe these attacks were a just response to imperialism.

I asked Ken whether he wanted to issue his own pre-emptive response to that line of argument, and he duly obliged. He told me he believed that what motivated him to stand there, in the cold and the wet, holding his flag, was the same thing that motivated his brothers and sisters in Iraq and Kurdistan. He is not in a position to take up arms, but he felt obligated to show, in some way, his support for the values that motivate the Kurdish and Iraqi forces in their fight against barbarism. And he made the point, so often missed by idiot commentators like Glenn Greenwald, that the fight against the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State – the fight against Islamic extremism in general – is not one of foreign imperialists against beleaguered freedom fighters, as the likes of Michael Moore would have us believe, any more than it is a regional, territorial struggle between competing tribes. The Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting against Islamic State are, as Ken rightly says, fighting for us in a war that much of our own public would rather not acknowledge or engage with; the war between the civilized world and the forces of jihad who would see it all burn.

It is not a conflict in which our allies in the region enjoy the unqualified support of Western governments, and it hasn't been for some considerable time. Since the US-led intervention became a bungled and, for then-President Bush, a near impeachable farce of an occupation, public opinion in the US and the UK has been marshalled far too easily by those from the ostensibly anti-war movement; those who spoke for far too many people when, in their guise as MoveOn.org, they glibly labelled the impressive General Petraeus “General Betray Us.”

The same bold cowardice provided ammunition for much of the success the Democrats enjoyed in the 2008 election, and was still seen as a sufficient giver of momentum when the Obama administration chose to sabotage the talks with the Iraqi government over the renewal of the Status of Forces Agreement. (I have yet to see anyone make the argument that the complete withdrawal of forces from Iraq made the current crisis less likely.)

But we do occasionally see tentative shifts in the direction of good sense. The crimes committed by the likes of Islamic State have, at the very least, deprived George Galloway of some of the platforms he once enjoyed. And time will tell whether this attack – an attack that took place not in some remote part of the world but in the capital city of France – will move us toward a little righteous blowback of our own. (By blowback, I do not mean the unfortunate and all but inevitable support for Front National, or the Pegida movement in Berlin.) The response has, thus far, been a vast improvement from that seen in 1989 and 2006.

But, still, many high profile news outlets have been reporting on the story – a story generated by images, from an attack which was itself a response to those images, and which has taken place in the age of the image – without showing the images in question. I have asked the question of three different media organisations, including the BBC and ITV: Will you show the cartoons when you report on this story (as the likes of Slate magazine have, to their credit) or opt for the cowards' approach; the one taken by outlets from CNN to The Telegraph? I almost succeeded in cornering Nick Robinson of the BBC, but he was dismissing all questions with the disappointing stock response: “Sorry, I'm in a rush.” The cameramen, who were more talkative, were unable to tell me whether their employers would stand up for the freedom of speech and expression and, as it transpired, the answer was disappointing.

As I finish writing this, I am sitting on the tube. I have looked at stories on the websites of those organisations I have already mentioned; I have not seen a single cartoon.

This is not brave, and this is not 'appropriate', this is capitulation to those who, at their most moderate, believe that free speech is licensed on condition of banality; on condition that it does not offend. Well, brothers and sisters: fuck that. I hope you agree with the sentiment, but it doesn't – or shouldn't – matter either way.

Grokking a Wrongness: Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Grokking a Wrongness: Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Stranger Land.

"I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think, not to believe."

So wrote the author, Robert Heinlein, when put a question which might be fairly summarised as follows: Stranger in a Strange Land is a comment on society. But is it a fictional comment on a fictional society, or a comment on actual society made by the medium of fiction?

Heinlein’s response is disappointing. Given the opportunity to account for an exceptional novel (I do not say a good novel, for that is something else), Heinlein forgoes the certainty and the conviction that characterises his own creation, and opts instead for the stock response of a coward.

A shame. Whatever else may be said of it, Stranger in a Strange Land is not a cowardly book.

Published in 1961 (though the unexpurgated version was not printed for another thirty years), Stranger tells the story of one Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised for two decades by Martians. The book begins with Smith’s return to Earth, and follows him as he attempts to learn about and to fit in with the society of a people who, though genetically his own, are alien in every meaningful respect.

Numerous parallels have been drawn between Stranger and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and The Jungle Book. These may or may not be deliberate on the part of the author. Though I have yet to find any first or even second hand testimony to the fact, one of the most frequently recounted tales of the origin ofStranger involves a discussion between Robert and his wife, Virginia Heinlein, in which it is suggested that a science fiction adaptation of Kipling’s classic (The Jungle Book) might be an interesting project.

(This kind of transliteration is more common than one might think. Isaac Asimov’s infinitely superior Foundation series was conceived as something like an adaptation of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire whilst Asimov was working alongside Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.)

The comparison only goes so far. Prone to fits of jingoism, Kipling would almost certainly have found more to like in Heinlein’s earlier novel, the hysterically militaristic, slightly racist and thoroughly anti-democratic Starship Troopers, published in 1959.

Starship Troopers made Heinlein a popular figure amongst the worst elements of the American Right, and it was eventually placed on the reading lists of three of the five branches of the United States military. But, only two years later, Stranger in a Strange Land was earning him plaudits from hippies, libertarians, and other factions in the early 60s counterculture movement. Guns in Stranger are 'grokked' by Mike to be a “great wrongness.” The drastically restricted franchise in Troopers, where only veterans and civil servants are classed as citizens, is replaced by a firm commitment to a universal, ostensibly fair society in Stranger. In his brief departure from a steady shift toward the Right, Heinlein leaves the nest of a hawk and takes flight as the most opulent of doves, preaching the desirability of free love (especially polyamory) and criticising the corruption in and of politics and organised religion. It forms a central part of his wider campaign to challenge, in his own words, the “public mores,” without going to the extremes found in later books, such as Farnham’s Freehold, which disturbed even some of Heinlein’s most devoted fans with arguments apparently favourable toward incest and ‘self-creation’. The latter art is explored in Heinlein’s 1970 book I Will Fear No Evil, in which a 94-year-old billionaire has his brain implanted in the body of a 28-year-old black woman, and then has that body impregnated with the frozen sperm of the previous body. (Not to overuse the comparison, but in The Light That Failed, Kipling has one character opine that “Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad.” This maxim certainly applies to Heinlein.)

Stranger in a Strange Land is a novel which reformed its genre, introducing – or at least emphasising – a split between “hard sci-fi” and other, more readable variants. But its problems – and there are many – mirror those of Heinlein's life and career.

There are few better openings in science fiction. Michael's return to earth sees him overawed; a child thrown through the wardrobe into Narnia. He is kidnapped by a government that would use him for its own purposes, and held prisoner as his would-be protectors wonder how they might go about rescuing him. He is oblivious as one of them, a journalist, is attacked and kidnapped himself, and withdraws into himself as he is hidden in a suitcase and dragged to safety; the home of the ageing doctor, writer and philosopher, Jubal Harshaw.

Their efforts to protect him and help him grow lead to numerous intriguing encounters, from a meeting with the Secretary General (head of the United Nations which, in this world, could easily be a precursor to one of the superstates in Orwell's 1984) in which they must defend Michael's claim to sovereignty over the planet Mars, to a visit to the Fosterite Church, via damaging and destructive encounters with the police.

But one can detect the first hints of nonsense very early on. When his friends are accosted by the police, Michael makes them 'disappear', an ability he will reuse several times throughout the novel. Guns are a “great wrongness,” but making your enemies disappear is not a problem. Disappearing a policeman is, I would argue, not worthy of much praise. Disappearing a priest for his evangelism gives one a certain guilty satisfaction, but is a morally suspect act. Heinlein almost succeeds in circumventing this moral quandary by explaining that death, which Martians call discorporation, has a very different meaning for Mike. (Martians are known to voluntarily discorporate at moments of intense emotional suffering, or by committing minor offenses against society.) But the fact that Mike soon 'groks' the difference does not stop him condemning enemies and inconvenient people to summary disappearance.

The character of Harshaw, who is one of the most likeable characters throughout the novel, quickly reveals another problem: Heinlein is fond of speeches, and often treats his characters as puppets in order to put his own views across. This is tempered by the knowledge, or rather the hope, that his characters cannot always be presenting his own views as the overarching morals of Stranger are very different to those in his other books. Nevertheless, it is often the case that his characters have no characteristics or personalities of their own; rather, they are extensions of a single narrator. (The closest modern equivalent is Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and the deservedly maligned The Newsroom.) Harshaw, for all one might find him agreeable, is seldom anything but a vehicle.

His lifestyle, too, cannot be relativized out of trouble, especially as Heinlein's fans will often claim that he is a remarkably progressive writer. They are right, to an extent. Heinlein made a point of including protagonists and key characters who are black, and some of his strongest characters are women. (Though it should be remembered that Farnham's Freehold has a premise that is not all that dissimilar from Michel Houellebeqc's new novel, Soumission, which is garnering a good deal of deserved criticism for its treatment of Muslims.)

Nevertheless, Harshaw lives with a concubine, or a sexless harem, of four female secretaries. Though Heinlein gives them a veneer of independence, their sole purpose in the novel is, first, to wait upon Harshaw (albeit with no small amount of back-chat and good natured joshing) and then, later on, to fall pregnant, and then, later still, to serve as members of Mike's new church.

Lines like “Nine out of ten times if a girl gets raped it's partly her fault” are not made any more acceptable because they are spoken by a woman, even one as ostensibly powerful and independent and important to the story as Jill, Mike's first protector, teacher, and the first of his many lovers. Jill is also implicitly homophobic, which is a subject on which the book otherwise makes no mention.

(Again, Heinlein's position cannot always be derived from the character's opinion. One can see from his letters that he was not strictly straight, and his comments on homosexuality are almost uniformly accepting of it. His criticisms of the gay rights movement mirror those of Mary Renault, whose novels The Charioteer and The Alexander Trilogy are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of homosexual love and relationships one can find.)

The creation of Mike's church, which is formed toward the end of the novel, represents the departure from good writing and the advent of the novel's ridiculous final section.

The Church of All Worlds still exists today as a neopagan religion which regards Heinlein as something of a prophet. Though the story of a bet between himself and L. Ron Hubbard over who would be the first to found a religion appears to be apocryphal, it is nevertheless true that Heinlein convinced his first wife to accept the creator of the Church of Scientology into an open relationship; a decision which is thought to have contributed to her later battle with alcoholism. (To this day she is the subject of no small amount of vitriol and unjust criticism from members of the Heinlein Society and the devotees of the Church.)

Like the fictional church from which it is derived, the Church of All Worlds involves its members in water rituals (water being of particular significance to the Martians) and polyamory. And, like its fictional counterpart, its theology does not and cannot address the bizarre 'realisation' - made by Mike in one of the book's most egregiously pseudo-prophetic passages - that all religions are wrong and all faiths are right. Their vague devotion to the 'Old Ones', who can be made to exist in the book (in another of its more childish scenes) but not in reality, shows us little except what we already know: that New Age spirituality is not particularly new or revolutionary. Mike's apparent sacrifice, which is an allusion to Jesus that Heinlein does not bother to hide or to make subtle, also serves as testimony to this fact.

The book has much to recommend it, and not only to those who are familiar with science fiction. (It suffers as a genre because, for every Foundation or The Forever War there are ten books as bad as Hyperion.) There is just as much for which is worthy of condemnation, and I cannot deny that I stuck with it primarily because I enjoyed criticising it. Nevertheless, it is reasonably well-written, and it offers an insight into what we might vaguely term 'the spirit of the '60s', and it occasionally serves to make one think. With that in mind, I encourage the reader to pick up a copy. It can be found for as little as £2, and it is worth that much, at least.