Bachelors of a different sort

Queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior in Britain

John Potvin, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781784991098
• eBook ISBN: 9781526159311
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The bachelor has long held an ambivalent, uncomfortable and even at times unfriendly position in society. This book carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor (queerness, idolatry, askesis, decadence, the decorative, glamour and artifice) comprise a contested site and reveal in their respective ways the distinctly queer twinning of shame and resistance. It pays close attention to the interiors of Lord Ronald Gower, Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Noël Coward and Cecil Beaton. Richly illustrated and written in a lively and accessible manner, Bachelors of a different sort is at once theoretically ambitious and rich in its use of archival and various historical sources.

1

Men of a different sort: the seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor

THE BACHELOR has long held an ambivalent, uncomfortable and even at times an unfriendly position in society. As late as 1977 Alan G. Davis and Philip M. Strong published what is surely one of the oddest sociological surveys ever performed in the postwar era, in which they investigate the ‘social problem’ commonly referred to as the bachelor. The authors note how the world of the bachelor – the social institutions that catered to and aided his lifestyle – had long since dissolved. As a result, the contemporary bachelor ‘experience[s] many occasions when he is alone and known in public settings’.¹ They suggest that given both the figure’s ‘biographical deficiency and the stereotypes … they must do their best to “pass” as a normal person … They cannot rely on someone who “really” knows them to help interpret the puzzles of everyday life … Given these difficulties; no one with whom to rehearse their identity; no one to explain and evaluate others’ behaviour.’² By war’s end, the figure of the bachelor had become a social pariah, an odd misfit of pity and suspicion, a figure clearly out of its depth when it concerned quotidian and social customs. Perhaps this apparent lack spoke less to the nature and condition of the bachelor than how it betrayed a social structure that privileged heteronormative companionate coupling. Their study underscored how marriage guaranteed, as it still largely does today, social knowledge, navigational skills and entrance into society. This sociological portrait is in many ways a logical extension of the one that emerged and developed in popular consciousness throughout the long nineteenth century. First and foremost, the bachelor was a lover of luxury and comfort, an aspect of his personality, which, if we were to take Davis and Strong’s characterization at face value, was the cause of his apparent social awkwardness. As a result, the bachelor was also often thought of as similar to if not the same as the connoisseur, the eccentric and free-loving globetrotter, unbound and unrestricted, unfettered by familial obligations in his search for the exotic and the novel; a man driven only by his self-centred needs, drives and pleasures.

One of the earliest and perhaps the most complete exposition of the bachelor as a distinct typological entry in the encyclopaedic quest of the Enlightenment Project remains Old Bachelors: Their Varieties, Characters, and Conditions (1835) in which its anonymous author underscores the importance of this (anti)social type. Two entire volumes were required to elucidate the type’s numerous sub-species and traits. While the homosexual was not ‘called into being’ until 1869 and the term would not gain social currency until the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bachelor was identified as a decidedly queer type, one whose gender performances and sexual identity were at best dubious and at worst immoral given how he reneged on his obligations to serve wife, home and nation. According to the tract’s author, a ‘man who voluntarily devotes himself to a Bachelor’s life, has undoubtedly a wrong estimate of humanity. There is a disposition implanted in all of us for the companionship of woman; we must have some being upon whom we can pour out our affections, and no stoicism can ever eradicate this portion of our common moral nature.’³ It is not surprising that in a social order that attempted to register and control every typological and social difference, an anatomical characterization became a necessary means to visually ascertain the bachelor’s inner character through surface bodily readings. The ‘most effeminate of his tribe’, the bachelor was a ‘poor, lanky and anatomized creature’ driven by his insatiable passions and a feverish ‘impure imagination’ which causes ‘his moral sense’ to descend ‘into the animal sense of the savage’.⁴ In a chapter devoted to the ‘Rakish Bachelor’, the author claims this sub-species to be one which indulges too much ‘in sensual gratification’ and is therefore marked as ‘one of the most brutalizing agencies that can be brought to bear upon humanity’.⁵

Bachelors were also said to be preoccupied with the chief occupations of ‘freedom, luxury, and self-indulgence’, and hence lacked a true and honourable vocation in a world in which market capitalism, bourgeois morality and the Protestant work ethic saw this idle lifestyle as anti-masculine and anti-national. In short, bachelors removed themselves from the realm of production⁶ and contributed nothing to the health of the nation. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified an important transition that occurred in the nineteenth century from the bachelor as a transitional stage in the development of adult masculinity (leading to full maturity consummated in the union of marriage) to the bachelor as an identity or typological entity; now a corporeal object to be scrutinized and monitored. This marked shift underpinned a period of crisis for hegemonic masculinity in which the transition from developmental stage to fixed identity was also collapsed into a medical discourse that progressively decried and associated masturbation as the cause for the condition of spermatorrhea, popularly referred to as the ‘bachelor’s disease’.⁷ While no such disease existed in reality, it nonetheless proved an effective discursive formation around the medical and social threat the bachelor as a type began to pose to the health and future of the nation. All and every sexual activity that did not lead to procreation became increasingly conflated with an ever-expanding definition of homosexuality, and gradually the once seemingly innocuous term bachelor was progressively deployed as an index pointing to homosexuality. In an article from 1909 in the short-lived men’s magazine The Modern Man, T. B. Johnson questioned how a bachelor should spend his leisure time. Given the associations between non-productive and non-procreative tendencies that were grafted on to the identity of the modern bachelor, the author was quick to point to the solid and socially acceptable goal of making money, even when pursuing leisure activities. In addition to this noble pursuit, all other leisure time should be devoted to ‘reading works connected with his own line of business and thus making his position more certain, his usefulness to his employer greater and his prospects better’. Clearly for Johnson the bachelor was a bourgeois – and not an aristocratic – man. The final goal of this use of time, it was clearly stated, ‘would only help the bachelor when he ceased to be one of the unattached’.⁸ As Katherine V. Snyder insists,

the bachelor disrupted the proper regulation that defined home economics throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The disorderly potential of the bachelor may well indicate the susceptibility of this home economy to elements that many would have wanted to consider extrinsic to it … Representations of bachelors at home, living in or visiting other people’s houses … the discourse of bachelor domesticity itself provided opportunities for bachelors to go out of bounds.⁹

Bachelors like Joris-Karl Huysmans’s infamous anti-hero Jean Des Esseintes commit to, reside and indulge in the realm of the sensual, excess and artifice; a queer use of time and space. Within the interior worlds men like Des Esseintes designed, it was held that too many of the senses were activated simultaneously, a destabilizing force to a healthy human body and pure soul.¹⁰ The figure of the bachelor precipitated a cultural and moral war that privileged mind, reason and intellect over pleasure, delight, the senses and the body itself. For, as the anonymous author of Old Bachelors claimed: ‘Men who give themselves over to these kinds of enjoyments lose sight of the great truth that the body is but the slave of the mind:-- with them the body is omnipotent; the mind is the servant’.¹¹ In this light, the bachelor was the anti-hero in the Cartesian cogito, which pits mind against body, the latter a vacant and flawed handmaiden to the former.¹² While not all aesthetes were homosexuals, nor were all homosexuals bachelors, the associations were at times so profound and easy to construe that the figures became one and the same in the threat to social, cultural, economic and racial stability. By the end of the nineteenth century, through their perceived excessive, immature, unnatural and antisocial needs and desires, the twin figures of the bachelor and the homosexual were all too often conflated as equally deviant and queer characters. Bachelors, not unlike homosexuals, were seen to occupy ‘remarkable bedrooms and other spaces [that] were often located either dangerously close to or threateningly far from, sometimes, even simultaneously within and beyond, the “civilised residences” of married people and families’.¹³ The real threat, then, was that they lived among everyone else. They were the threat from within.

This book carefully considers the myriad and complex relationships between queer male masculinity and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957 – that is bachelors of a different sort – through rich, well-chosen case studies. The domestic, and not the public domain, I suggest, was the landscape in which the battles over masculine identity and male sexuality were waged. The cases as I have positioned them here affirm a commingling of sex, gender and design as it cuts across fictional, embodied, performed and lived-in spaces. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor, as I have identified them and to be discussed later in this chapter, comprise a contested site freighted with contradiction, vacillating between and revealing the fraught and distinctly queer twining of shame and resistance. In a more recent context, gay shame for David Halperin and Valerie Traub refers to those ‘queers that mainstream gay pride is not always proud of, who don’t lend themselves easily to the propagandistic publicity of gay pride or to its identity-affirming functions’.¹⁴ However shame is neither new nor particular to contemporary internalized expressions of disgust and sexual identity. Rather, like discursive and community-based practices they boast long and storied histories. Compromising a separate chapter, each case study provides evidence of unique and parallel queer expressions of sexuality and masculinity within the spaces of the modern interior. Given I view queer as multifaceted and polyvalent, in no way do I wish to conclude that one queer mode of expression is either better, ‘good’ or even queerer than another. Importantly, the bachelors I discuss, whether in a long-term stable or open relationship or non-committal series of relationships, developed entire material and aesthetic programmes as a result of or by way of their queer masculinity.

All the bachelors whose aesthetic lives comprise this book were middle- and upper-class men of the creative arts, whether as writers, collectors, playwrights, actors, designers, antiquarians, sculptors, painters, photographers and/or illustrators. In each and every case, the domestic realm and interior design, that is, the material conditions and products of these men’s creativity, have largely been ignored in traditional surveys of their work, with the notable exception of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts (the subjects of Chapter 3). In her thoughtful investigation of the domestic conditions of some key literary figures Diana Fuss cogently states that ‘creative genius is idealized as unfettered imagination, transcending base materiality, something cut loose from the mere bodily act of putting pen to paper – a mechanical gesture’.¹⁵ With an eye toward a post-Cartesian blueprint that seeks to recognize that creative, intellectual minds require and are products of embodied praxis, the projects and projections of interior space also become inseparable from cultural production itself. Following from Fuss’s conclusion that domestic interiors form a vital force in the creative processes of writers, I too wish to question how domestic space and interior design inhabit the work of these men as much as to explore the phenomenological and sensory affect engendered by the men who created, lived and loved in these spaces.¹⁶ In this connection I summon the posthumous publication of E. M. Forster’s recollection of the sensory affect his visits to the home of homogenic, socialist activist Edward Carpenter and his long-term companion George Merrill had on the writer, which by his own admission led directly to the creation of his beautiful and highly acclaimed novel Maurice (1971). Here it is worth quoting his interactions, sensations and conclusions at length as they reveal much in the way of the complicity between space, sensual physicality and creativity for the queer bachelor. Of his time with the two men, Forster wrote:

It must have been on my second or third visit to the shrine that the spark was kindled and he and his comrade George Merrill combined to make a profound impression on me and to touch a creative spring. George Merrill also touched my backside...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Men of a different sort: the seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor
• I Wilde spaces
• II Country living
• III Stage design for living
• Select bibliography
• Index