Orwell and the Nancy Boys
An extract from 'Orwell: The New Life' by D. J. Taylor, published 25 May (Constable)
Orwell’s dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell. In fact, ‘dislike’ is putting it mildly, for his attitude to the horde of ‘Nancy boys’, ‘pansies’ and maquerons (Homage to Catalonia’s Spanish equivalent) who mince through his private demonology is actually one of profound contempt. There is a rather revealing moment early on in Keep the Aspidistra Flying when, with Gordon standing vigilantly by his till, an obviously moneyed young man trips ‘Nancifully’ into the bookshop. All Gordon’s worst instincts are straightaway aroused: the newcomer, with his ‘R-less Nancy voice’ is instantly reduced to caricature: ‘May I just bwowse? I simply couldn’t wesist your fwont window. I have such a tewwible weakness for bookshops! So I just floated in – tee-hee!’ ‘Float out again, then, Nancy,’ Gordon thinks. The really dreadful thing about the scene is that it is so clearly personal. Orwell, you deduce, had seen someone like this stroll into Booklovers’ Corner, been revolted by him and stored up the memory for use in print.
The scent of well-nigh visceral disgust that floats over Orwell’s dealings with homosexuals turns especially strong in his reports from the English margins. There is a bad moment in Down and Out in Paris and London, at the Romton casual ward when at around midnight ‘the other man began making homosexual attempts upon me – a nasty experience in a locked, pitch-dark cell’. But the assailant is ‘a feeble creature and I could manage him easily’. Afterwards, the pair stay awake and talk. ‘Homosexuality is general among tramps of long standing, he said.’ It is the same when Orwell gets to review W. F. R. Macartney’s prison memoir Walls Have Mouths for the Adelphi in November 1936. The ‘most dreadful chapter’, he assures his readers, is the one entitled ‘Notes on Prison Sex Life’. Not only does it remind him of a conversation with a Burmese criminal, who when asked why he disliked going to jail uttered the single word ‘sodomy’, but Orwell is aghast to discover that homosexuality in prisons is the rule rather than the exception: Macartney gives a ‘horrible account’ of the way in which he gradually succumbed to it himself.
When it comes to Spanish Civil War-era politics, the atmosphere is, if anything, even worse, what with the references to ‘pansy pinks’, ‘pansy friends’ and the warning offered to the compilers of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War that ‘I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender’ – as if homosexuality were a kind of lifestyle choice guaranteed to secure you advancement. None of this is excusable, but in the landscape of late-1930s literary politicking it does at least have a context in the substantial numbers of homosexual aesthetes who migrated to Marxism and the Left Review while resolutely declining to jettison social baggage picked up in the previous decade. There is no evidence that Orwell ever met Brian Howard, whose exploits in this line are mercilessly satirised in Cyril Connolly’s ‘Where Engels Fears to Tread’ (1938), but he would certainly have heard of him – Howard was a close friend of his second wife – and the charge of being a ‘fashionable pansy’ might have been expressly coined with Connolly’s squib (‘M is for Marx / and Movement of Masses / and Massing of Arses / and Clashing of Classes’) in mind.
If the attacks on ‘pansies’ and ‘Nancy boys’ disappear from his writings by the 1940s, then there is still plenty of evidence to suggest that the fundamental revulsion kept up. A Tribune contributor who met him for the first time in 1944 remembered that Orwell’s anti-homosexual prejudice was almost the first thing he noticed about him. At the same time there are flaws in this patina of self-righteous heterosexual conviction. Orwell had several friends – Edouard Roditi, say, or Peter Watson – whose homosexuality he would have known about (a distinction worth making in an age where homosexual activity was illegal), if not necessarily approved. He was also something of a connoisseur of male beauty: The Road to Wigan Pier finds him going into raptures at the sight of near-naked miners at the coal face – ‘nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs’, etc. – and revealing that in Burma he habitually allowed himself to be undressed by a servant boy. This, Orwell tells us, was because ‘he was a Burman and therefore undisgusting . . . I felt towards a Burman almost as I felt towards a woman.’
Not too much should perhaps be made of Orwell’s Etonian gay phase, if that is what it was, and the ‘being gone’ on Christopher Eastwood – hundreds of public schoolboys (Connolly; Evelyn and Alec Waugh) went through similar experiences before becoming enthusiastic heterosexuals. But one might note Mabel Fierz’s reading of Orwell’s assault on Rayner Heppenstall in the Lawford Road flat in the autumn of 1935. A clear case of disappointed homosexuality, Mrs Fierz insisted, before dredging up a memory of Orwell ‘raving’ about the way Heppenstall tossed his hair back. Heppenstall was unconvinced (‘One thing Orwell had never seemed to me to do was rave . . . The only time we had talked about homosexuals, Eric had seemed to be very much against them’). All the same, there is a faint suspicion that in railing against ‘fashionable pansies’ and moneyed young men who can’t pronounce their ‘r’s, Orwell may have been protesting too much.
Exclusive extract from Orwell: The New Life by D. J. Taylor, published 25 May (£30, Constable) | Available to pre-order here.
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Damn, now they’ll be a movement to ban his books in college courses! I guess his publishers and scholars can sanitize his manuscripts by removing the offensive passages. Hey, maybe there’s a new cottage industry in the offing: Editing offensive terminology from published works. Cottage industry? More like the beginning of literature all over!