(personal underlines)
The queer traditions of King’s College, Cambridge
Simon Goldhill describes how intimate friendships between students and teachers were actively encouraged, with the college providing a refuge for gay men and helping them define their sexuality
Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In this svelte and sprightly book, Simon Goldhill (himself a Fellow of King’s) traces this tradition over some 140 years, and describes the part it played in the creation of a remarkable, ever evolving community of gay men.
He begins his story in 1885 when J.K. Stephen, the future tutor to Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, became a Fellow of the college. As Goldhill notes, this was also the year in which the Labouchère amendment made all sexual acts between men illegal, and thus criminalised not only Stephen but most of the book’s other leading characters. Like many Kingsmen, Stephen had been educated at Eton, where his tutor was Oscar Browning, who had himself been a pupil there, gone on to King’s, and then went back to the school to become a popular teacher. Browning’s closeness to certain boys had led to his being sacked; but this proved no bar to his returning to King’s as a Fellow, where intimate friendships between teachers and students were not merely accepted but encouraged. ‘The young men who came from school to university, to be met and educated by older dons, became those older dons in turn, or returned to college as friends from outside,’ Goldhill writes.
This resulted in a community created by ‘intergenerational passing on – of stories, possessions, values’ that evolved ‘at the same time that homosexuality as a developed idea was coming into being’. Goldhill’s contention is that King’s has not only over the years provided a welcoming refuge for queer men, but from the late 19th century onwards helped them define their own and each others’ sexuality.
It was not until 1892 that the word ‘homosexuality’ appeared in print in Britain, and it took another two decades for it to pass into general English usage. While Browning was not shy of shouting from the rooftops the love that elsewhere dared not speak its name, other dons had a less clear understanding of their sexuality. M.R. James enjoyed the company of handsome younger men, but deflected any investigation of the nature of such relationships and was probably celibate. This did not prevent those who knew him from being ‘fascinated by the question of what sex he wasn’t having’, as Goldhill nicely puts it. Among them was A.C. Benson, who was also celibate, but whose diaries reveal someone consumed by a desire for other men that he is unable or unwilling to name.
Their contemporary Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson helped matters along with his popular 1896 book The Greek View of Life, in which a ‘careful discussion of homosexuality is embedded in a history of Greek culture and values’. His sly observation in the Dictionary of National Biography that when Browning retired to Rome he ‘assisted young Italians, as he had young Englishmen, towards the openings they desired’, suggested that he at least had no difficulties in placing people, including himself, on the sexual map.
Dickinson was also a committed pacifist and internationalist, who was instrumental in the forming of the League of Nations, and Goldhill submits that his view of the world was ‘explicitly informed’ by his experiences as a gay man. The same might be said of his close friend and biographer Forster, whose celebrated 1929 essay ‘What I Believe’ champions the moral values and ‘personal relationships’ he had found at King’s.
Several of the other gay men Goldhill features also had an influence far beyond the college gates, notably the economist John Maynard Keynes, the architect and designer C.R. Ashbee and the leading musicologist Edward Dent. Indeed, the book teems with extraordinary characters and amusing anecdotes but it is not, Goldhill insists, ‘an idealised or idealising narrative’. He allows that there are ‘many recorded memories of beautiful young heads resting on old knees, while books are real aloud’, but he also recognises that the behaviour of several of his subjects left much to be desired. While we may expect no better from such as Keynes, Rupert Brooke and the nevertheless beguiling J.T. Sheppard, it is refreshing to see the manifest personal failings of the sainted Dadie Rylands, who taught several generations of leading actors to speak Shakespearean verse, being given a very thorough airing.
Goldhill fully acknowledges that most of his characters come from the world of white male privilege, but he also emphasises that their aims included striving for a better society, one that among other things would find an accepted place for the homosexual. ‘For all their narcissism, triumphs, foolishness, brilliance, arrogance, privilege, love, despair, these men shared a will to imagine the world otherwise,’ he writes.
He concludes sadly that universities currently reflect the ‘polarising social and cultural forces’ of the wider world, and ‘are finding it harder and harder to maintain the open-minded, explorative, critical space that [King’s] provided to the figures of this history’. That, as he says, is why this fascinating story is now so worth telling.
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