In this insightful cultural biography, John W. M. Hallock (a distant relative) portrays Fitz-Greene as a prophet of the literary and sexual revolution of which Walt Whitman would be the messiah. The first biographical study of Halleck in more than fifty years, The American Byron traces the path to glory and eventual radical decanonization of America’s earliest homosexual poet.
In this insightful cultural biography, John W. M. Hallock (a distant relative) portrays Fitz-Greene as a prophet of the literary and sexual revolution of which Walt Whitman would be the messiah. The first biographical study of Halleck in more than fifty years, The American Byron traces the path to glory and eventual radical decanonization of America’s earliest homosexual poet.
American Byron: Homosexuality & The Fall Of Fitz-Greene Halleck
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American Byron: Homosexuality & The Fall Of Fitz-Greene Halleck
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Overview
In this insightful cultural biography, John W. M. Hallock (a distant relative) portrays Fitz-Greene as a prophet of the literary and sexual revolution of which Walt Whitman would be the messiah. The first biographical study of Halleck in more than fifty years, The American Byron traces the path to glory and eventual radical decanonization of America’s earliest homosexual poet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780299168049 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2000 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Chapter One
Shepherds of Sodomy
There are some three thousand of them, all well to do and industrious, not a pauper among them, and all can read and write—not that they ever do either.
Fitz-Greene Halleck on the residents of Guilford
Fitz-Greene Halleck was not like the other little boys in his hometown. His sense of difference led him to distance himself from Guilford whenever questioned about his birthplace. While still a teenager, he stole away to New York, which provided psychological asylum for the next forty years. He produced almost no poetry during the first and last twenty years of his life that were spent in the Connecticut village. James Grant Wilson's life of Halleck (1869) is reinforced by Nelson Frederick Adkins's biography (1930), which shows that Halleck grew more and more estranged from the town. An insulated coastal community, Guilford preserved its puritanical ideology well into the nineteenth century. The hamlet, a half-century after it had banished Halleck, exported its granite to New York for the Statue of Liberty's base. For Halleck, exile to liberal New York proved a happy alternative to the town's propensity for persecuting homosexual activity. Had Halleck been born in an earlier generation, he would have witnessed a sodomy trial resulting in the execution of Guilford's own founding father.
The adolescent Halleck was at a complete loss in rural New England, where he was unable to discover himself in available sexual representations. Although largely subverted, histories of classicalpederasty and of British and Native American homosexual institutions were circulated throughout Halleck's lifetime. Out of tune with small-town morality, these three models all had positive aspects: Greek pederasty accompanied great learning; British mollies threw grand balls and were socially celebrated for a time; and aboriginal berdaches were mystical healers who were often elevated by same-sex marriage to chieftains. Access to these three models of homosexuality were limited, yet they were manifest throughout the nineteenth century.
Allusions to Greek pederasty abounded in literature of the period, and the North American berdache was cited by Karl Ulrichs in his 1860 argument for homosexual emancipation and by Edward Carpenter. A catalog of British Renaissance homosexuality was published by Havelock Ellis before the turn of the century. But the positive attributes of same-sex love had already been expunged in most rural American communities. The Greek model of man-boy love had become a literary allusion to the worship of the male form rather than the union of philosopher and pupil within a courtship tradition. The British mollies were ultimately repressed by campaigns and executions in England. These lusty artists of high camp had named themselves, and "molly" or "molly cull" popularly replaced "sodomite" in England by 1710. Molly was probably derived from the Latin word for "soft" (hence "mollycoddled"), and culls were criminal assistants or a crook's lover; hence, some men born a century before Halleck referred to themselves as "molly-bitches." While veering away from the effeminate self-identification of mollies, Halleck relentlessly evoked their criminal metaphors. Mollies created a notorious homosexual subculture in eighteenth-century London; four-fifths of these men never married but took "husbands." As opposed to the sacred same-sex marriage ceremonies of medieval Europe, "married" mollies gave male partners female names, inverted gendered pronouns, engaged in transvestism, and bore doll-babies, often after considerable labor and followed by mock baptisms. Unlike the pseudomarriages of mollies, the berdache or winkte figure prevalent in numerous North American tribes was encouraged to actually wed a same-sex partner.
A sixteenth-century account of Florida natives who married other men and a Russian explorer's nineteenth-century description of same-sex marriage in southern Alaska demonstrate the duration and geographical breadth of North American holy unions. "Berdache" may have been a European application of bardag, a Persian term for a boy courtesan, or might have derived from "bardash," translated from the French as "a boy kept for unnatural purposes." These tribal members were essentially tested and recognized as homosexual in early childhood and retained the prerogative of cross-dressing for the duration of their lives. Berdaches have been documented in well over a hundred different North American tribes, which uniformly accorded high honors to these men whom colonists regarded as "sodomites by profession." While early European documents assumed tribal contempt for the berdache, later nineteenth-century reports realized that berdaches were "never ridiculed or despised by the men ... but are, on the contrary, respected as saints or beings in some degree inspired." Along with platonic Greeks and incarcerated mollies, berdaches were largely quelled by colonists who reinterpreted the berdache's tribal privilege as punishment.
For the American berdache, trouble came with the first arrival of Europeans. Christopher Columbus's physician gave testimony to the prevalence of homosexual behavior among the aboriginals, which was used to justify the eradication of Native American culture. English settlers, in turn, solidly repressed berdachism in North America, although a score of nineteenth-century texts reveal a lack of sexual assimilation. Included among accounts from the 1850s, the army's surgeon general conducted medical exams to confirm that berdaches possessed normal male genitalia. As late as 1886, newspapers humorously reported the White House visit of a berdache to President and Mrs. Cleveland, who were caught off guard by the revelation of their guest's true sex.
Halleck was attracted to slightly younger men and engaged in campy humor, but he did not aspire to pederasty or to the flippant rites of mollies. Chances are that he had studied enough classical material to glean passages on pederasty, but he was probably never directly made aware of the molly subculture in London. It is also unlikely that he was acquainted with berdachism—the model of homosexual love most fitting his own romantic inclination to find a soul mate.
Prevailing sexual conceptions in Guilford were intrinsically negative. Some familiarity with the puritanical paradigm is necessary for understanding Halleck's point of view and varied attempts to reestablish mutual and nurturing same-sex ethics. The colonial American version of homosexual desire divorced such activity from its previously recognized benefits of intellectual, social, and spiritual growth between consensual partners as seen in Greek, molly, and berdache traditions. Halleck determined that Guilford was even prudish regarding heterosexual activity and complained, "They fined a man ... for kissing his wife on Sunday!"
New England provided a reconfiguration of same-sex love as a violent sex crime that frayed the social fabric. Early American sodomy laws were enacted against any sex that was not procreative; however, such laws were applied almost exclusively to homosexuality, less occasionally to bestiality. Colonists related sodomy to aboriginal conflicts, depopulation, depressed economy, physical hardships, political dependence, religious strife, and second-generation dispersal. Same-sex activity (at least the accusation of it) became an ideal scapegoat because it was able to deflect a wide array of cultural problems not faced by Old World Puritan counterparts.
American Puritans had applied new same-sex constructs to Indian sexuality, natural catastrophes, and British depravity since their arrival in the New World. A strong New England earthquake in 1638 and droughts of the early 1640s were reinterpreted as divine judgment and linked by the superstitious to the destruction of Sodom. In addition to the apocalyptic weather, British corruption gave New Englanders cause to look over their shoulders. American Puritans not only linked aristocracy to sodomy but also believed that the general populace of England had become particularly hospitable to mollies and their kind.
Eighteenth-century London's gay scene was thriving and boasted numerous clubs known as molly houses, largely ignored by law enforcement. Homoerotic literature littered the city's shelves, such as Michael Drayton's Piers Gaveston, Thomas Heywood's Jupiter and Ganimede, Richard Barnfield's Sonnets, Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and John Wilmot's poem, "Love a woman? You're an ass!" Francis Bacon's love affairs with male servants "were unapologetically public," and sodomitical scenes appeared in stage productions of Aphra Behn's The Amorous Prince (1671) and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) back home in England. Roger Thompson points out that Puritans argued that the British theater's use of boys in female roles encouraged the audience to experiment with sodomy. Hence, the New World's sacred politic was married to sexual and literary policing.
Colonialists prescribed capital punishment for sodomy for well over a century, enacting new legislation from 1610 (Halleck's ancestors arrived in 1640) until 1732 (after the birth of Halleck's paternal grandparents). Thomas Jefferson's 1777 "liberal" proposal to reduce sodomitical punishment from death to mere castration was not ratified. While a 1672 Connecticut law eliminated the death penalty for rape victims or consensual sodomy performed by those under age fifteen in favor of lesser punishments, Connecticut state law officially condoned killing homosexuals until Halleck was in his thirties. Despite previous attempts by British Puritans and Spanish explorers to squelch same-sex institutions, American sodomy did not become a social crisis until the 1640s when a rash of sodomy trials spread throughout the colonies.
William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation reported an epidemic of same-sex lovemaking in 1642: "Sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name) have broke forth in this land." His alarmist account illustrates the development of American-style homophobia that enhanced and modified Dutch and English prerogatives. Contrary to the great American myth, the Mayflower's Pilgrims did not flee England under threat of religious persecution. They sailed from Leyden, Holland, where their economic opportunities had been restricted, where assimilationism had threatened their identity, and where sodomy was a capital offense. The Dutch citizenry followed and settled New York, which consequently employed Dutch Roman Law ensuring sodomitical executions on both sides of the Atlantic. Dutch treatment of homosexual relations paralleled English persecution.
Act 26 Henry VIII, 6 (1533) was the first civic law requiring death for sodomy and officially remained on the English statute book until 1967. Stuart England appeared more sexually tolerant, meshing charges of "religious heresy, political offenses, or violating social-class distinctions" with charges of sodomy. Jacobean sodomy laws were generally not enforced due to rumors of the king's own homosexuality. Two sodomy executions between 1630 and 1640 were apparent exceptions. Puritans, who believed they were God's elect, utilized a strict code of conduct to rationalize their migration. Bradford's peers referred to him as their Moses, and Halleck's "Psalm CXXXVII" (1821) was certainly in keeping with the colonial association between American Pilgrims in the New World and the plight of Jews seeking freedom of worship in the Promised Land. Halleck's motive for using the song, however, appears to be his identification with its narrator: a musician forced to sing in the midst of enemies. Halleck may have lived in federalist America, but he was still fighting colonial law.
Bradford had been caught up in the endeavor to preserve his colony's piety upon which sodomy "might cast a blemish and stain upon them in the eyes of [the Eurocentric] world." Biblical argument, as well as an exaggerated concern for appearances, usurped British civil law as Puritan fathers increased the pressure on sodomites. John Cotton's 1636 legal code against sodomy relied upon the English civil code, but Massachusetts Bay colonists chose Nathaniel Ward's legislation that invoked Scripture as its authority and set the pattern for all subsequent sodomy laws. Ward's Buggery Law upheld capital punishment with religious authority until 1805. Halleck had already turned fifteen.
The Puritans' strict endeavor to create a morally cohesive community added to Bradford's amazement that severe punishment "could not suppress" sodomy. Instead, others were seduced by its powerful allure. Bradford believed that the "inquisition" of sodomites may have had the reverse effect by bringing sodomy "into the light" and making it "conspicuous." As an enforcer of sanctioned sexuality, the governor helped redefine sodomy as contagious, alien, and primarily homosexual. Bradford established the sodomite as a contagion when he observed "how one wicked person may infect the many." He further stressed that the sodomite was, literally, a foreign creature. In one case, Bradford noted that the convicted man "had long used [sodomy] in old England: and this youth last spoken of said he was taught it by another that had heard of such things in England"; in another case, the governor blamed traders for transporting sodomites to America: "By this means the country became pestered with many unworthy persons." Bradford had company in his regard of the sodomite as illegal alien.
In 1629, "five beastly Sodomitical boys" aboard the Talbot, a ship transporting the second major party of Puritans to the New World, were sent back "to be punished in old England as the crime deserved," which for boys over fourteen was by hanging. Sodomites were still regarded as essentially English in Ben Franklin's "Edict by the King of Prussia," which threatened to send America's sodomites back to England. Bradford also helped to reconstruct the sodomite as theoretically foreign. The homosexual was distinguished from his heterosexual counterpart who was also guilty of sex crimes. Bradford categorized the "incontinency between persons unmarried" and fornication among married couples as separate from "that which is worse, even sodomy and buggery." The governor and other colonial legislators successfully forged an American sodomite whom all New Englanders could regard as a literal and philosophical enemy.
Sodomy had been an act that any man who wandered too far from the straight and narrow might commit. In modern terms, Puritans believed all men were potentially bisexual. In fact, the earliest Puritans feared all sins of the flesh without much regard to the object's gender. However, by the end of the 1640s, same-sex partners were identified as more than men tempted by sodomy—they were the new breed of sodomites. Therefore, Halleck would be seen as a type, separated from the rest of humanity. As such, he would become a dandy who spurned the sacred duties to family, country, and God.
Like cold war McCarthyism, the sexual hysteria created by seventeenth-century American leaders served to divert public fears. Civic ills could be purged. Same-sex intercourse, seemingly running against nature, represented disorder to the puritan mind in which symptom and disease were inseparable. Today's zealots who envision AIDS as God's verdict against sexual emancipation echo forefathers who saw sin as the cause of divine retribution. The public consequence of private conduct evolved rapidly concerning homosexual relations until execution was the order of the day. Even more than putting himself at risk of contracting disease in the 1990s, a man seeking a homosexual experience in puritan New England had to contemplate whether his partner was literally one to die for. Colonists involved in same-sex affairs who avoided being burned, strangled, or drowned employed the closet motto of Silence = Life. Chances are that there was probably no more sodomy in 1642 (proportionate to the population) than at any other time in history. The American outbreak of sodomitical persecution was not random but part of an ideological program.
Bradford's 1642 observation of increased sexual deviancy in Massachusetts coincided with the listing of sodomy as a capital crime by the General Court of Connecticut in 1642. Sodomitical accusations in both colonies were furtive responses to three colonial crises: the onset of intergenerational friction, the 1642 Puritan uprising back in England, and the renewed threat of depopulation. Samuel Danforth's "The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into" (1674) emphasized sodomites' lack of obedience to parents and joined other seventeenth-century writings intended to silence the restless youth who did not value their parents' mission? The likes of such an intergenerational campaign would not be so clearly exemplified again until the advent of Nazi propaganda, which also fused religion, sexuality, and control of the younger generation in an effort to achieve social purity. With young Puritans turning from the parent mission and others joining the revolt, so many returned to England that procreative sex in the New World became a practical concern. Mayflower Pilgrims may have felt hope as two babies were born en route to America and upon the Great Puritan Migration of 350 people in 1629, but migration reversed itself so greatly that by the early 1640s more people abandoned New England than arrived from the mother country. Bradford was well aware that the Pequot War threatened Connecticut's population by 1637, although his antisodomy proposal required penetration for prosecution. The need for biological reproduction grew obvious to the colonists. Colonial law was swift to respond.
The responses varied only in degree. John Rayner argued that nonpenetration and nonemissive contact were capital crimes against the family and posterity. Charles Chauncy not only sided with Rayner but also made sodomy analogous to abortion. Chauncy reasoned sodomy was "equivalent to killing the man who could have been born" of the seminal emission; therefore, all stages of homosexual behavior were capital for affecting "the whole of human nature." The Puritans' meticulous hierarchy of sodomitical crimes reveals deep angst about the dwindling population of agricultural New England. Legislation categorized sodomy as masturbational, anal, oral, voluntary, forced, nonemissive, orgasmic, penetrative, and nonpenetrative. The variety of penalties for same-sex activity was further cataloged based upon the age, class, gender, and race of the accused parties. In part the result of a breeding campaign, the American homosexual was born—if only to be killed.
As in America, a puzzling and abrupt shift of homosexual typology took place in seventeenth-century Britain, which gradually transformed the rake (who was masculine, older, and penetratively active with both adolescent boys and women) into the molly. The Women-Hater's Lamentation (1707) illustrated the new breed of homosexual couple that emerged: of equal age and class, anally reciprocative, practicing transvestism, and fluent in camp. Unlike the new British sodomite, however, the new American homosexual was anything but comical. The sexual sinner was transformed from a victim of Satanic derailment into the Devil himself. The resulting personality expressed itself in Michael Wigglesworth's private prose (1631-1705). The tone of his journal, which blurs spiritual illness with individual sexuality, echoes sections of his "Day of Doom" with its lyrical raving against sodomy. Wigglesworth confided in Doctor John Alcock and John Rogers who suggested that Wigglesworth find a cure for homosexual lust in clean bowels and marriage. Praying for "a circumcized heart" not only failed to relieve him of wet dreams about male students but also aggravated his revulsion for the cravings he experienced. Within twenty-four hours, the prescribed marriage also backfired.
Sodomy had moved from spiritual catastrophe to social disease, but it was still thought to bring Holy retribution upon the entire colony. Guilford appeased an angry God with the trial of a town father.
In 1646, William Plaine (or Plane), who seven years earlier had founded the town, was executed. Plaine was the only person from Halleck's hometown ever to be executed. Plaine, "being a married man, had committed sodomy with two persons in England" prior to having "corrupted a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbation ... above a hundred times." Plaine did not appear to have been coercive, and the tone of resistance in his testimony showed no remorse for challenging either sexual propriety or theological authority. John Winthrop, himself an author of homoerotic correspondence in the Jonathan and David vein, accused Plaine of implanting young men with "the seeds of atheism," not to mention his biological seed. While sexual accusations against Plaine appear sound, "the term sodomites was used to condemn those who held unorthodox theological beliefs" as well. Even those not charged with sodomy who objected to the political inducement of colonial sodomy trials faced dire consequences by 1624. In contradictory terms, the married Plaine was also guilty of "frustrating the ordinance of marriage and hindering the generation of mankind."
In deceptively simple rhetoric, religious objection to sodomy was again fused with concerns for metaphysical deviation ("atheism"), depopulation ("hindering the generation of mankind"), second-generation dispersal (having "corrupted a great part of the youth"), and English depravity (having "committed sodomy with two persons in England"). Bradford's notation that Plaine had repeatedly committed sodomy in England before founding Guilford effectively removed the sin from the New Jerusalem established on American soil. Whether the social climate of England had indeed grown more tolerant or William Brown simply had extraordinary courage, Brown protested blatantly during his own sodomy trial in 1726: "I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body." New England did not tolerate such insolent testimony.
Although more than a century had elapsed since Plaine's execution, Halleck found his town still heavily influenced by the past. Similarly, twentieth-century gay men would find religion denying their civil rights, despite the separation of church and state guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, which was not fully ratified until after Halleck's birth.
The genocidal policies of Halleck's heritage inevitably led to his discomfort with Guilford's faithful. He was reared on texts by the Puritan bigwigs: Bradford, Samuel Danforth, Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Thomas Shepard, Michael Wigglesworth, and John Winthrop. Halleck's formal education would have included a curriculum largely based upon these writers who distorted pre-Columbian homosexual precepts. Late colonial Guilford heavily resisted the moral moderation visible on the horizon of Federalism. In A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County, Everett Gleason Hill attests, "Never was there a settlement formed of more rigid Puritans" than Guilford. Despite being ostracized, Halleck succeeded in his art while still residing there. He moved same-sex love from Puritan crime toward a poetic ideal, just as colonial rebellion was being redressed as patriotism. His sense of being a felon incognito was reflected in the crime-love motif so common in his writings. Perhaps not grasping the full measure of his own words, Halleck risked a great deal by articulating his love for another man. Perhaps he could not help himself; he was born into an era lusting freedom.
Halleck was born in 1790. By then, the tension between nationalism and homosexual expression was evident. In 1790, the first election was held for a U.S. president and the first U.S. Copyright Act was passed, but 1790 was also the year in which several private letters were penned between two Bostonian men hoping to found "a permanent friendship" in one home and in "one our bed." Perhaps because Guilford's town records have no official report of Halleck's birth there, many miscalculations of his age were made during his lifetime; for instance, Poe shaved more than five years off of Halleck's age. Halleck's ancestry was more certain, dating to the Pilgrim era when Peter Hallock, one of thirteen Puritan leaders who left England in 1638, landed at Hallock's Neck, Southold, Long Island, in 1640. It appears that the Indians resold Peter's land when he returned to England to fetch his wife. The Puritan legacy was quickly challenged by Hallock's eldest son, disinherited for marrying a Quaker. Fitz-Greene Halleck retained a diluted sense of this prejudice against the Society of Friends, once quipping, "[Quakers] are the most dangerous of dishonest men. They will never cheat you, not they; but, by the help of plain, friendly, and apparently sincere manners, they will manage so that you will cheat yourself." Halleck found humor in his ancestors' rigorous morality as well and maintained a pet joke regarding Joshua 11:17 and 12:7, which mention Mount Halak. He was, however, more proud that his family had incurred Guilford's disapproval. Halleck's great-great-grandfather, John Eliot, a divine who preached to Native Americans, stood accused of opposing the Puritan agenda.
Nicknamed the Apostle to the Indians, Eliot recorded his life in the wilderness among Native Americans and also preached against wigs. His second son, Joseph, was a popular preacher in the Guilford pastorate he served for thirty years. John Eliot has been accused by his biographer, Convers Francis, of having "indulged the rhyming vein for his own amusement," an offense to Puritans who forbade secular poetry. With Richard Mather, Eliot cowrote the Bay Psalm Book, justified as holy poetry, which contained paraphrased Psalms set to hymn tunes. It became the standard text for generations of Calvinists and was in its ninth edition by 1698.
Eliot also translated the Bible into native tongues. This action smeared the clean line drawn between the Christian colonizers and the heathens they vanquished. His first translation appeared in 1663 and was the first Bible produced in the United States. Editions followed in 1680, 1685, and 1691, the latter being a revision written with John Cotton. Halleck appears to have inherited this family interest in coauthorship and translation in his own literary career.
Settlers differed in their opinions of the natives as inherently evil offspring of fallen man or as one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Eliot's tract, Jews in America, or Probabilities, that those Indians are Judaical, argued the godliness of the natives. Although Eliot has been portrayed as a part of the Puritanical effort to control Indians, his self-proclaimed mission in effect contradicted goals of communal purity and threatened profitable land deals that had discouraged Puritans from extending religious conversion and literacy to Indians. In short, Eliot's peers objected to his inclusive ideology. Eliot died in 1690, exactly a century before Halleck's birth, but Bryant believed that Halleck inherited Eliot's spirit of nonconformity.
A much closer influence on Halleck was his father. Israel Hallock came to Guilford as a tailor but was better known as a local comic who figuratively kept people in stitches. Still, Israel alienated townsmen by professing his loyalty to the British crown and by making known his love of dancing. Dancing, a frivolity disallowed by Puritans, had gotten Thomas Morton, "Lord of Misrule," exiled to England for leading male prancers "frisking together like so many fairies, or furies; and [even] worse practices ... beastly practices." Halleck would antagonize fellow Americans by emulating his father's unpopular positions. Fitz-Greene's sarcastic declaration of loyalty to the British monarchy lasted through the Civil War, and his chief charity was the theater. Israel Hallock was acutely aware that his own love of fine arts was best kept under wraps and literally smuggled music into his home. In addition to hosting a French musician for a year, Israel was entertained by a family friend who snuck a violin under his cloak in order to screen the instrument from "the lynx-eyes" of Guilford's pious townsmen.
Halleck's view that the small town housed even smaller minds but that the Hallock family was an exception was constantly reinforced. "Inspired by his self-educated parents," Halleck praised his mother's "particular fondness" of poetry. Fitz-Greene's cousin, Barnabas Hallock, was also a notable poet, but that was nothing to boast about in Guilford. Adkins explains, "Hemmed in geographically, the village [built on a peninsula] naturally underwent mental and moral restraint. Early prejudices remained." He adds that other nineteenth-century New England communities had relaxed while "much of the old bigotry and intolerance remained and found expression in the daily life" of Guilford. Halleck's retirement years in his hometown demonstrate that even forty years later little had changed since he had left the town of his schooling.
Like Henry James, who felt "a strenuous conflict between his American Puritanism and his intellectual curiosity," Halleck was a voracious reader and an academic prodigy. He attended public school between the ages of six (when he was already reading Thomas Campbell's poetry) and fifteen. Although Halleck was the teacher's favorite, he was fed "pabulum" for an "intellectual diet" according to one wry nineteenth-century critic. The town library was located over Andrew Eliot's store, where Halleck would live his adolescent years as an apprentice. The library housed about four hundred volumes, mostly sermons and theology; consequently, Halleck recalled, "I fastened like a tiger upon every romance and collection of poetry that I could lay my hands on." (His mother forbade him candles for study only after he had set his room on fire one night reading until midnight.) Both Halleck and his father claimed to have read every book in the town's library. The son's literary interests provided imaginary flights from Guilford where Romantic literature, along with music and sexuality, was largely forbidden. Halleck found poetry liberating and began writing it at a young age.
James Grant Wilson states that "The Tempest" is Halleck's earliest published poem. Written at fourteen, it did not appear in Hours at Home until sixty-four years later. Other poems, however, were produced even earlier. Wilson dates "Evening" to Halleck's twelfth year and believes that his "A View of the United States," "The History of New England," and "The Fortunate Family" were written before age ten. Nelson Frederick Adkins and others disagree, dating these works to the age of thirteen. At thirteen, Halleck also wrote a poem to his sister, Maria, dated May 20, 1803. Although Poe felt Halleck's juvenile poetry had "been kept very judiciously from the public eye," Bryant disagreed. Halleck's final collected edition contained seven poems composed before leaving Guilford in 1811. "Memory" and "Lines, Written on a Blank Leaf in Ossian's Poems" were written in 1810 and appeared in the Connecticut Herald in 1811. The Herald had already published Halleck's "Ode to Good Humor" several months earlier. Halleck's futile struggle to identify with heroes of conventional romance is evident in these early works. Exemplars of justice provided the necessary inspiration, and the juvenilia consistently hails freedom fighters. His relatively early "The Pilgrims" also known as "The Pilgrim Fathers," written in 1814 but not published until 1869, grants the Puritans an impulse toward independence but credits the Bunker Hill army for attempting intellectual freedom: "But 'twas that battle's bugle-blast / That bade the march of mind begin."
Halleck also set historical fiction to rhyme in "The History of New England" and "A View of the United States," the latter of which was based on events of 1798 when French and American navies were engaged. "The History of New England" is a standard tribute to the American Revolution and "A View of the United States" further extolls revolutionaries. Halleck commemorated America's nonconformists at a time when his own dissent was being detected. His variance from expected gender roles did not go unnoticed, and his juvenile verse betrayed confusion regarding sexual difference in a chauvinistic culture. Halleck would certainly ape rigid gender distinctions (criticizing Elizabeth Barrett Browning as too masculine and Tennyson too feminine) but then undermined his own gender identification with effeminate phraseology such as in an apologetic response to a male reader in 1856: "Mine is not the Autograph of ... a poetess. I therefore cannot add as you ask, one more to your collection, but 'such as I have give unto thee.'"
From about the age of fourteen, Halleck permanently altered the spelling of his surname from Hallock. He offered no explanation to his friend Wilson and perplexed others by the act. From this period onward, the budding poet was ostracized by peers who found him effeminate, hypersensitive, and withdrawn. A solitary figure, Halleck preferred fishing and playing marbles by himself. Wilson faithfully records Halleck's dislike of "the rough sports and adventures in which most boys find delight" and notes that the young Halleck "preferred to wander alone." At fifteen, he moved into his cousin's store where he kept books in a "dainty feminine hand" for the next six years. Socially awkward, Halleck's initiation as a Son of Guilford was remarkably painful by all accounts. He recorded his distress in poems like "Invocation to Sleep," which sought release.
The first-person narrator in "Invocation to Sleep" walks in solitude along a shore, conjuring Halleck's beloved pastime. Hoping for "gay" visions from the "oblivious" and "opiate" qualities of Sleep, the speaker craves "sweet relief" that "shuts the springs of grief." The poem, rather morose for such an early composition, also provides a premier example of Halleck's crime motif. Slumber, personified as a magician who "dissolves the pris'ner's chain," gives temporary joy to the downtrodden. Sleep's refuge proves "the choicest gift of Heaven" by removing the speaker from his present life. He embraces unconsciousness: "in thy Arms my song and sorrows end." The emotional surrender underlines a strong inclination toward escapism. In addition to Guilford's athletes, Halleck hoped to evade the town's girls. He took the role of the prey escaping the huntresses' flirtations.
Halleck explored romantic conventions in verses to females written at about age fifteen. When one young lady named Laura sent him a lock of her hair, he responded with five stanzas of clichés. In another poem, his metaphors of crime and emotional repression dominate. "Dear Sarah" ponders an admirer's scorn "though I know not my crime." When Eliza Capland's crime of borrowing Eliza Burr's handkerchief was atoned for by a note and white violet, Halleck volunteered his poetic services to Burr and wrote in feminine narration that the flower was "a cement of our mutual love" that will "bid me think of you." The romantic language used to describe two girls' "flame divine" of friendship would reappear in his first serious homosexual love poems, "Lamentation of David" and "Epistle to Carlos Menie." One significant adolescent poem, "Rubus, No. 2 To Miss * * *," asked the curious question, "What is that passion—can you guess, / Which I can feel, but can't express?"
While the lines above went unanswered, another poem guessed Halleck's emotion. "The Fortunate Family" is a prototype of gay fantasy literature that surfaced much later in the century. For instance, Henry James's "The Pupil" would showcase a protagonist who wins parental permission to go off and form a new family with his male tutor. Indeed, Michael Moon argues that the youngster "literally dies from the intensity of his emotional response to finally being released from his unhappy family to go make the home of his dreams." Fred Kaplan gives a homoerotic reading of "The Pupil" and notes that the sexual theme of James's "Master Eustace" still pushed "against the boundaries of puritanical American propriety" as late as 1871. "The Pupil" could have borrowed its central plot from Halleck's "The Fortunate Family."
"The Fortunate Family" was influenced by Wordsworth's Ballads and foreshadowed Halleck's deliverance from his hometown. The tetrameter couplets involve four siblings; the two sisters seem to represent Halleck's only sibling, Maria, and her alter ego, whereas the two brothers suggest his own inner conflict. Maria Halleck, who was two years older than Fitz-Greene, emulated his name change, wrote envious letters after he had moved to New York, and like her famous brother, never married. In "The Fortunate Family;" the two sisters have no avenue of escape except for marriage. The brothers each scheme on their own to leave their town. The tension lies in the legitimacy of their separate departures.
The first son is named Dick, a name that may have doubled as slang for an erect penis since the seventeenth century. He is an effeminate child, described as being like his mother, who follows social protocol when a traveling couple wishes to adopt him, pleading "'O, father! pray, pray let me go / And live with him—oh, don't say no!'" Curiously, Halleck used the singular male pronoun, inconsistent with the plural antecedent for the foster couple, husband and wife. The request is to ride off with a strange man. As in a real marriage contract at that time, only the father's permission is needed. The blissful Dick gains his father's "consent," a word further suggesting a metaphorical same-sex marriage.
The surrogate family travels away from the town, leaving Dick's brother, Bill, to declare:
... that now he would not stay, And said he did not think it fair That he should stay and Dick go there. Determined not to stay at home, He took his clothes and off did come. He reached a ship, to his great joy, And got on board as cabin-boy. Where we shall leave him for to see What happened to the family.
In an abrupt change in tone, the poem informs the reader that upon discovering what Bill has done, "his mother round the house did run,/ Screaming, yelling * * *." Here, the unfinished poem ends. The careful meter and rhyme of the poem suggest a polished draft, making the ending appear intentionally unresolved. The fraternity of "The Fortunate Family" mimicked Halleck's own situation; he fervently loved his family but was determined to flee Guilford with or without their consent.
Like modern gays, each brother redefines family for himself. The hometown, rather than the poem's pastoral region and "happy pair" of birth parents, is unsatisfactory. Dick leaves with his parents' blessing and understanding. Left behind, Bill steals away to a ship. His attraction to the male world of sailing suggests that he has chosen to inhabit a homosocial realm with all of its apparent dangers.
Bradford's "Anno Dom: 1646 [A Noted Pirate in Plymouth]" vaguely complained of "80 lusty men" who visited the colony; however, the relationship between piracy and homosexuality was anything but ambiguous. British drama was portraying pirates as presumed sodomites as early as 1713, and literary critics have explored homosexual relations on the high seas in Smollett, Melville, and Whitman. Reconstructionists are proving that "sex with another male was the ordinary and acceptable way of engaging in erotic pleasure" for buccaneers. Recent works exploring same-sex love and seafaring especially note the acceptable sexuality of "considerable affection between captains and their cabin-boys." The matelot tradition assigned captured youths to officers, and homosexual unions, matelotage, among mates could result in promotions for captives. Terry Boughner claims seventeenth-century piracy culture "is the only known example of a predominantly homosexual community ... with little or no interference from the rest of the society"; however, even members of that community did not go untried, and one Virginia shipmaster was hung for sodomy with a crew member, just as the fictionalized captain in Charles Johnson's homophobic Middle Passage receives poetic justice for raping a cabin boy. The homoerotic reading of the climax of "The Fortunate Family" is reinforced by the mother's hysteria upon Bill's departure, which was not evident upon Dick's. Though perfectly calm regarding the first son's adoption, Bill's mother is driven berserk by the unspoken perils of life for her son as a cabin boy. By the age of thirteen, Halleck's family values had transported the orthodox adventure genre into the realm of homosexual emancipation literature.
Halleck also found same-sex applications for Scripture during his adolescence. He used Christian arguments in verse to support his position against slavery shortly before the importation of slaves to the United States was officially banned in 1807. With more immediate self-interest, he ignored Sodom and Gomorrah and concentrated on Jonathan and David, whose story "has long been a source of inspiration for Western homoerotic art and literature, and has been construed as the one episode in the Judeo-Christian scriptures which affirms ... [a] homosexual relationship." The biblical pair have been called upon for centuries to both conceal and expose same-sex desires. Robert K. Martin explains that Halleck's "Lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan" (ca. 1805) was sanctioned by its subtitle, "paraphrased from 2 Samuel i 1-19," and was a striking choice out of all available Bible stories. Martin also proposes that Halleck embellishes David's feelings, choosing the story solely for its emotional content. The poem also foreshadowed Joseph Drake's death, asking,
Is my loved companion gone
And left me friendless and alone?
A wound that time can never heal.
A mutual flame our bosoms fired,
A mutual love our breasts inspired,
Our pleasures and our cares the same;
We felt sweet friendship's hallowed flame,
... Affection twined our souls around
The poem elevates platonic love above the superficial love of women, a tactic Halleck would repeat in his mature lines to Drake. The premonitory parallel between the passionate biblical friendship and Halleck's love for Drake has not been missed by twentieth-century critics such as Everett Gleason Hill: "Whether [Halleck] was David or Jonathan, that was the nature of his friendship for Joseph Rodman Drake, for whom his love surpassed the love of woman." Only four of Halleck's boyhood poems are biblically based; two are concerned with David and two with Job.
Feeling stuck as a clerk in Guilford, Halleck's biblical usage focused on a same-sex relationship and the epitome of a man whose trials are tests of patience. "Versification of Job, 14th Chapter" is based upon an Old Testament section wherein a victimized hero awaits a new life. Halleck, however, did not have long to wait before New York alleviated his lamentations.
Still, not all memories of Guilford were bitter ones. The town was also the setting of his first same-sex love. At nineteen, Halleck became infatuated with Carlos Menie, a handsome young Cuban whose father had sent him from Havana to Guilford for a year to study English. While Menie's physical description comes from Adkins, the more progressive account of Halleck's affection for him comes from Wilson. Adkins entirely dismisses the intense friendship and retreats to more comfortable territory: Halleck's trite responses to Guilford's young ladies. Adkins excludes entirely from his analysis of Halleck's early verse the poems to the Cuban, "Lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan" and "The Fortunate Family," which he only mentions as "a tissue of banalities."
Wilson says Halleck's attractive Cuban visitor was intimate with the poet and publishes one of an unspecified number of untitled poems sent to Menie after his departure. Eighteen quatrains follow in which "days and months have rolled away" since "the parting tear" yet Halleck recalls Menie's "pleasing form" and traces "every gesture" of his body, confessing:
Oft in the stillness of the night,
When slumbers close mine eyes,
Your image bursts upon my sight;
I gaze in glad-surprise!
The epistle asserts that time has not effaced the pleasing body mapped out in the speaker's memory. He follows fancy as "her wild, romantic flights unfold / Events of former days" when the two young men's smiles "caressed" one another. The pensive narrator questions Menie's emotional fidelity and wonders if thoughts can "a rapturous charm impart" before three climactic quatrains:
Ah, yes! that gentle heart I know,
At friendship's touch it beats;
I feel the sympathetic glow,
My breast the throb repeats.
Then let us cherish well the flame
Of friendship and of love;
Let peaceful virtue be our aim,
Our hopes be placed above.
There, in affliction, may we find
A refuge ever nigh;
May time our friendly union bind,
And years cement the tie.
Like Halleck's other homoerotic juvenile poetry ("The Fortunate Family" and "Lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan"), the Menie poem does not appear in any collection of Halleck's poetry. Except for the one preserved by Wilson, the other epistles to Menie appear to be either lost or destroyed. Along with the hallowed flame from his "Lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan," the "cement" phrase recycles Halleck's lines for Eliza Burr and Eliza Capland. Apparently, Halleck borrowed his prime phrases from earlier works to achieve his strongest love poem to that date. The physical idealization of Menie, however, is tempered.
(Continues...)
Table of Contents
| Illustrations | ix | |
| Introduction | 3 | |
| 1 | Shepherds of Sodomy | 17 |
| 2 | Love and War | 42 |
| 3 | The Widow Halleck | 67 |
| 4 | Conquer and Divide | 92 |
| 5 | A Return to Ganymede | 121 |
| 6 | Halleck and His Friend | 151 |
| Notes | 177 | |
| Bibliography | 196 | |
| Index | 217 |