It's Always More Complicated

My attention was recently drawn, as we say, to an early C20th composer, and I thought, that name sounds familiar, so I pottered off to look at my database of notes, and yes, they were hanging out in sex reform circles, interesting, no, especially as they seem generally to be described as 'reclusive' -

So anyway, I went to look up their entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and it is all about The Music (they were also apparently a top-level performer as well as prolific composer) and nothing about this other aspect.

And some while ago I perchanced to look up the ODNB entry for an early C20th lawyer whom I had come across in those same circles, and he was all about anti-censorship, and reforming the divorce laws (and we suspect also handling these sensitive matters for his mates in his professional capacity, no doubt) -

Very worthy.

He was also, I have come across indications in correspondence and biographies, rather a Not Safe In Taxis kinda guy, or at least, the handsy menace of the 1917 Club.

I don't actually know if there's a procedure for saying to editors of ODNB 'Hi, I have Further Info', let alone 'by the way, it's dishing the dirt'.

I think most of dr rdrz have some knowledge of this: Arsenic and Old Wallpapers - I may have suggested sending specially-commissioned rolls to those people who want to live a luvverly retro Victorian life-style, since I doubt there is water to be obtained from the Broad Street Pump these days - but are we at all surprised by this:

[T]he authorities in Britain and the USA were reluctant to challenge the interests of manufacturers or to sacrifice the revenue brought in by taxes on arsenic, a situation that recalls the delays in regulating the tobacco industry a century later. Many people remained sceptical about the dangers. William Morris, for example, refused to accept that concerns about arsenic were anything more than the results of ignorance and scaremongering. Morris’s early designs, like Trellis (1864) not only contained arsenical colours, but Morris himself was also a major shareholder in Devon Great Consuls, one of the largest arsenic mines in the world.

***

I think PSC is Point Thahr Misst, here: Since I admitted to a foot fetish, my wife will no longer let me near her feet: she thought he was doing something nice for her, and it turned out it was about getting his jollies. I think it may be a little late in the day to 'Try to talk frankly and kindly with her and find ways to help her understand your needs'.

***

This is an unusual story about colonial archives, i.e. that they were not removed from Papua New Guinea to Australia: ‘Thinking in Papua New Guinean Terms’: the Sensitive Files Case of 1972 and Australia’s Migrated Archive: 'an unlikely alliance of Australian archivists and academics with PNG nationalist elites saw the removals policy reversed, thus ensuring the nation’s colonial era records remained in place'.

***

I've been, on various social media, promoting The Naked Anthropologist's London History Walks - this is a very good blogpost about the principle behind them: An Interest in the Backside of Things:

What if instead of a hierarchy low-to-high we think of sides of the story: that the version we hear of current events and history is the Front Side, the official version told from the point of view of those who have the greatest communications-power. Their view places themselves at the centre, where stated aims and values are not questioned. The facade of the palace. But for every such frontside, there are backsides, other realities, and that’s where the goings and comings of most people take place. Out of the limelight and usually out of historical accounts, too.

***

And on odd marginal happenings in history, Alice Mustian, Playwright:

This article provides the first full account of Alice Mustian, a Salisbury woman who in 1614 built a theatre in her backyard and charged an audience admission to watch a group of children perform a play that she had written about some salacious neighbourhood gossip. While the fact that this remarkable incident occurred is not unknown to scholars, the primary historical evidence about the event itself has remained largely unexamined. Drawing on unexplored ecclesiastical court records in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, we offer a more complete picture of the performance, its complex social context, and the motivations of the parties involved. We locate it within the field of study of lost plays; we consider how it relates to other forms of theatre and performance culture in the period; and we discuss Mustian as a female dramatist whose play offers a tantalizing glimpse of the kinds of voices whose dramatic works may not have survived into the present.

Two dos, both in the same Bloomsberries-associated venue on Monday and Friday this week (though oddly enough, the invites gave different addresses - but several of the houses on that side of the square are all connected, and in the event, entrance was through the same main one, both times, with some matter of emergency handwritten notices.

(I observe that the last time I had occasion to visit this Hystorick Space was over 2 years ago.)

Once was a book-launch, second time was the launch of a research group falling generally within my field of interest.

At both there were two people whom I have not seen for lo, ages, and now twice within the week. At the first were several old acquaintances besides, at the second not.

One of those whom I did know this evening communicated to me a piece of gossip about my erstwhile bestie 'Q' that gave me an inward malicious smirk and the thought of 'predictable!'.

Thinking about the Bloomsberries, I was thinking about how very complicated these buildings are and how one would not wonder did anyone blunder into the wrong bedroom, or at least the bedroom not originally intended, but then realised that much of the confusion comes about through the knocking together of formerly separate residences by the Institutionz of Teh Highah Learninz that now occupy them.

And then thought about that epigram about 'living in squares and loving in triangles', which is neat, but isn't 'triangles' rather too neat and two-dimensional to describe the complexity of Bloomsbury relationships?

What I read

Finished the Upward book - not really a biography, more about thinking about him as a literary man, even though one might say that much of his life was one of 'unhistoric acts' as a teacher, Communist, non-Communist far left person, CND activist, etc; which might be more interesting to me, at least, than the endless angsting about whether literary art and politics were in conflict or not. And not entirely convinced that that conflict was why he wrote so little: I wonder whether agonising perfectionism - even quite late on he was constantly revising things actually in press - might have had more to do with it, but he did rather walk into the art vs politics thing with a very early article on the novel and Marxism shortly after joining the Party.

Courtney Milan, Proof by Seduction (2009) and Trial By Desire (2010), which were compelling readable even if I think she has improved in her more recent works. (Also, I am somewhat dissenting that the Victorians knew nothing about mental illness unless, presumably, it led to being banged up in an asylum or having Grace Poole swilling porter outside your door. I think Janet Oppenheim's Shattered Nerves might have somewhat to say on the subject: not to mention biographies of all those Eminent Victorians who had the pretty much standard period of breakdown over loss of faith, failure to achieve Senior Wrangler, disappointment in love, inability to marry for financial reasons, etc.)

Two episodes of Tremontaine Season 2, which I'm not getting into in the same way as season 1.

The latest issue of Slightly Foxed.

Vanessa North, Roller Girl (2016): one of a giveaway of 4 LGBT romance ebooks from Riptide Publishing. I started L C Chase, Pickup Men but couldn't get into it, but Roller Girl I found quite readable, and marked it up for some clever misdirection in the early chapters.

Heather Rose Jones, Mother of Souls (2016) - latest Alpennia novel, very good: though I did guess the authorship of the in-text scandalous novel quite early on.

Angela Thirkell, Northbridge Rectory (1941) - I've been in something of a mood for Thirkell, but didn't want to be confronted with a whingefest about the iron heel of Clem Atlee and the tyrannical despotic introduction of the welfare state, so the anxieties of the early years of the war fitted the bill. I just wish that just occasionally she would let rip a bit more with the subtle and nuanced and complex that she shows capable of in particular plot strands.

Marcia Muller, Skeleton in the Closet (2012) - novella in the Sharon McCone series. A bit slight.

Mrs Humphry, Manners for Men (1897): discussed elsewhere. Got a bit stock etiquette manual towards the end - though I liked the suggestion to make sure that the person about whose demise you are offering condolences is actually dead and that it was not actually someone else of the same name - but otherwise, amusing stuff.

John Moore, Brensham Village (1946) - read this some 50 years ago, it was in the school library, but found that various episodes I thought I recalled must have been in Portrait of Elmbury instead. I think I enjoyed it more back then. Though (on top of Ms Thirkell) I found the fact that the life of the village was under threat from a sinister capitalist syndicate buying up land and pushing down wages and 'developing' the place, rather than Red Socialism cheering (not that it was a cheering tale, just that 'faceless capitalist exploiters' was a nice change). I also thought his railways (good) vs charabancs (bad) was a dichotomy that was probably rehearsed over stagecoaches/railways, and I wonder if, more recently, charabancs might at least have been seen as communal enjoyment as opposed to the atomisation in cars.

On the go

T H White, The Age of Scandal (1950) which I am finding rather annoying, partly from the probably somewhat faux High Tory take on the thing, and partly because I am a dry and pompous adherent of Clio like what his epigraph disses on, and I don't think that even by standards of light popular history it's all that great. Also, yay blokey - I am not going to be terribly keen on an author who has an aside snark on 'Victorian bluestockings' and doesn't even mention the original Blues, except for one or two individuals in passing when they are part of some amusing anecdote. Also feel it is one of those books that anyone with access to a decentish library that would get them published collections of letters and so forth if they did not have them on their own shelves could hack together. Plus, think 'gossip' would be more accurate than 'scandal'. I have read much better books by White. (And OMG, is he really naive or trying to get something under the radar when he mentions the creepy George Selwyn's fondness for 'little girls?)

Another of the Riptide freebies, Anne Gallagher, Lead Me Not (2015) - Christian/LGBT romance fusion. Although the initial plot set up is somewhat implausible, she says with a considerable degree of litotes, I'm finding it quite readable.

Up next

I have discovered that Edward Upward's trilogy, The Spiral Ascent (1977 revised edition) is available free as ebooks from his official website. A bit daunting a prospect, though.

Further re the people who want to Speak to Somebody rather than emailing, and that young person yesterday who was spamming people via PM about their vampire-novel-in-progress, and remark in locked post on my rlist about someone who goes around connecting to people in a scholarly field rather sitting down and reading the literature...

Maybe it is possible to over-emphasise the important of Networking To Get Ahead.

Quite apart from Networking UR DOIN IT RONG - e.g. by sending quite lengthy spammy messages broadcast and scattershot to total strangers, many of whom don't even share the interest that might be piqued by your novel -

- You know, I think I've said this before, either specifically in relation to The Thruster, or more generally? -

- the messages that get passed along the network may not be wholly positive, as in -

'We were having a conversation on matters of mutual scholarly interest, and then they spotted Bigger Name in Field across the room and I couldn't see them for dust'.

(Or the one that applied with Thruster, that 'I was having conversation on matters of mutual scholarly interest with Bigger Name in Field, and Thruster came over and inserted themself into the conversation.)

At the very least, you've got to have something to offer a network rather than the perception that you are grimly determined to knot yourself into it. Just knowing people is not enough, especially if they think your work is either crap, or hasn't actually happened because you were too busy putting yourself about.

Reputation management may be important, but sometimes less is more.

Finally (at some expense) managed to get hold of a Region-2 compatible DVD of The Women (1939).

And discovered that while several of the women are nasty in assorted ways, everyone is not out to annexe somebody else's husband or put malicious gossip in circulation and there's even a fair degree of inter-female loyalty and supportiveness.

Okay, one is going to have difficulty in actually claiming as at all feminist a narrative world in which women's lives are all about hanging on to the husband you've got (in spite of any little problems of chasing other women, financial meanness, etc) or grabbing hold of someone else's. Even the Countess de Lave, who clearly is in no financial need of male support, richochets from terrible husband to terrible husband.

But if one accepts that either as an AU in which that is the premise to be accepted (in spite of the spinster ? lesbian writer Nancy Blake, who is, it is indicated, always bopping off to exotic parts to write books about them) or as a conventional stylisation of social relations for aesthetic purposes within 1930s Hollywood 'women's film' parameters, it does work.

(Even if one thinks, surely a woman as terribly morally worthy as Mary would not just be pursuing the trivial round of beauty parlour, lunch parties, etc, and would be out doing some kind of volunteer good work?)

I don't think one can claim (as I think I have seen?) that it's all about CLASS and closing ranks against wouldbe upward socially-mobile perfume-counter salesgirls, because Miriam Aarons (Paulette Goddard) is a chorus-girl who makes off with Sylvia's husband (to cheers all round) and is pretty much a good egg with the earthy wisdom derived from a hard life.

I.e. is Crystal's final vituperation justifiable, given that, as far as kennel metaphors go, she has demonstrated herself Queen Bitch throughout? Or just a final spitting of venom?

There has been some discussion, hither and yon, about perceptions that Certain People within X Field are a Cabal and you offend them at your peril.

Which gave me to reflect that for all I know there are people out there within my general academic fields of interest who are muttering about the Powerful Dr Oursin and Her Cabal of Dooooooom...

Which is, I will depose, fairly daft because, hey, it's not as though I'm even so much as in a position to say 'You'll never use archives in this town again, sonny!'

I will concede that there are loose connections and networks, and there is what I was wont to think of as the Floating Crap Game* of Historians of European Sexuality, C18th-C20th, because throughout the 90s and early 00s there was a significant likelihood that if I went to a conference in that area, or even one with just thematic sessions of relevance, I would encounter much the same people whether it was in Amsterdam, Berlin or Budapest.

So, if one was putting together an edited volume, or a special edition of a journal, or organising one's own conference, or just responding to queries about a particular subtopic within the field, these people were the ones who would immediately spring to mind.

But this was already changing - and I think I may have mentioned the jolt I got when somebody I thought of as pretty much one of the New Entry in the Field was introducing The Coming Younger Scholars at a conference session last year.

I will also concede that, without there being actual conspiracies going on, there is gossip making its way across these networks and if somebody asks me e.g. about someone whose cavalier attitude to deadlines had a significant negative impact on the completion of a particular project, I will say something to that effect. But what one picks up is also shared attitudes to particular individuals, or similar experiences of them, as with The Thruster.

I also think of Person Who Nearly Destroyed The Listserv, and who appeared to believe that there was a much more coherent and much closer 'Inner Ring' than actually existed and that everyone else on the list was in a much more privileged position than they were, and I cannot help flashing on my darling Dame Rebecca's apercu (it's in The Fountain Overflows, and I've probably cited it before - I certainly commented with it somewhere yesterday):

She had reached the stage through which many artists pass, when they feel themselves lone beasts persecuted by the herd and take such fierce defensive measures that presently the herd itself feels like a lone beast persecuted by a monster.

*I use this in the sense of not a stable static bunch of people, but a group where you almost certainly need to know someone who already knows about the FCG to get in on it.

Reading this excellent post on how to deal with harassment over at Geek Feminism, I am entirely in accord with the view that this is not a problem for the individual, it's a wider social issue.

I'd also like to point out that the people who are advocating women expressing their response to creepy behaviour by violence, physical or verbal or just by forceful repudiation, don't seem to have any idea about how social life works.

This doesn't just apply to this kind of sexual harassment situation or in the sphere of gender relations - the person who lets their feelings burst out in other scenarios (as it might be, political arguments) is seen as having committed social fail and inability to control their emotions. Losing their cool, tut-tut.

There are, indeed, occasions in which one has more than a suspicion that one party is deliberately trying to goad the other into an outburst.* (Am now trying to remember novel I read in which woman is resisting 'seduction' and does so by bursting into tears, and comments something like, he was looking for some reaction and making a woman weep worked as well.)

While harassment often works on assumptions about women's social conditioning, breaching that conditioning in order to protest does not necessarily accrue sympathy. If this sort of thing happens within a social setting, it's the person who reacted in a way that disrupts the sense that we are all here having an agreeable time who gets looked at askance if not accused of over-reacting and causing offence. In fact, the person who reacts may be marked down for failure of poise in not cutting off the interaction earlier or dealing with it with more grace.

I.e. it's condemned in terms which are based on standards of appropriate womanly conduct or general social etiquette. Harassers are manipulating these, like the guy at a work-related party who complained of my unfriendliness to my then line manager, because I had been unwinding his arm from around my waist throughout a conversation. And would not have done this to line manager, because she was visibly partnered with his immediate boss. I don't think party spirit required standing still for this, any more than it required acceding to belief of one of his colleagues that anyone would consider a smooch on the cheek from him more than adequate recompense for assisting with the post-party clear-up.

But there are, of course, consequences in terms of reputation. I didn't mind being considered the local stroppy feminist, and neither of these men had direct influence over my workplace situation. Or even my academic activities, particularly. But the costs for other people in other situations may well be higher.

Difficult, touchy, and liable to inappropriate outbursts in social situations are not good things to have being bruited about about one. Whereas the female gossip network of necessary information such as tagging certain men as 'Not Safe in Taxis' has traditionally not had much clout, however much pragmatic survival strategy it supplied.

Disturbing even the small and temporary universe of a social situation is not a particularly low-risk strategy.

*Okay, am thinking here of the situation with Q who rather than discuss any issues that may have been going on within our friendship, persistently niggled away at me in an annoying and passive aggressive fashion on unrelated matters at a party, and when I finally snapped and said something, was able to create a narrative that I was a mean person who had insulted her and she did not want to see me any more. No, we were not 6 years old any more and this was not the school playground, srsly.)

Thoughts which probably don't particularly cohere brought to you by reading an article by someone researching the history of 70s feminism (nope, still no mermaids singing to me... perhaps I should roll my trousers a bit more) and improving the cataloguing of a collection of correspondence at work.

The researcher mentions that a number of the publications she was using had up front warnings like 'For Women Only'* and even 'For Lesbians Only' or 'For Black Women only'** and that this made her uncomfortable.

I will concede that although in the course of my own research I have had occasion to read a number of publications which were marked upfront 'For Married Persons Only' or 'For Members of the Medical and Legal Professions', this is probably not quite the same thing, as those provisos were to avoid prosecution for disseminating obscene and immoral ideas (like birth control, or that possibly homosexuals were not evil sinners &/or criminals).

I do wonder to what extent anyone who was not a member of the intended audience for 1970s feminist newsletters would have been bothered about reading them anyway***: and the sort of person who would be reading them to mock or because they considered the authors a serious source of social subversion would not exactly have been deterred.

I was also given to think about the question of the declining curve of confidentiality.

In the course of my long career in archives, I have several times confronted the idea that something in the papers of an individual or organisation is highly sensitive and should be kept confidential for some extensive length of time.

NB this hardly ever maps to the concerns of the Data Protection Act and legal requirements thereunder.

In most cases the sensitivity related to something that was So No Longer An Issue likely to disturb anyone at all. There are questions also about internal and external matters. Some things are legitimately internal issues that very likely to do need to be thrashed with a certain degree of privacy, if not actual confidentiality, in ways and formats and modes that differ from those being used for communicating to a broader external audience. But while something may have been an exquisitely touchy matter at the time, it has probably quite shortly all gone well past its use-by date for causing angst and hoohah.

(This apercu of a declining scale of need for confidentiality may, I say, also pertain to the records of a certain subsection of A Certain Government Department the files produced by which it was proposed to close for really paranoid periods of time. Ahem: the Great Game has been declared, folks. Plz 2 check with Last Great Scorer.)

Anyway: I am now doing some much needed indexing of files of correspondence of a scientist-type person who kept letters in alphabetically arranged files. Including both interaction with colleagues, administrative stuff of the institution, personal letters, etc etc. It includes some things, like references, which were clearly formally written under the expectation of confidence and probably should be closed under Data Protection for a suitable period. It also, however, includes those letters to colleagues which include some material of professional import, a little personal chitchat, and gossipy speculations about some other person's likelihood of some honour.

It also includes letters to and from the object of a late-life passion living in a distant country (who may still be alive), who was also a professional colleague.

While this illustrates the extent to which people didn't actually draw boundaries between the strictly public and the definitely private in their communications (even in the pre-internet age) it does raise certain ethical questions.

*Which I am pretty sure was being defined in an exclusionary rather than inclusionary way, from the sort of things that were being said in those circles at that time about transpeople.

**Which the author of the article does remark raise problematic issues of who qualifies.

***After all, lads' mags like Zoo don't actually say 'This is not for North London Guardian reading women'...

Cannot help but think that it is The Old Pals Act swinging into action on the Polanski-Is-Much-Wronged front: he is One of Them and any idosyncrasies of his are Only Pretty Fanny's Way.

(I'd note that quite apart from the whole male-bonding aspect to actual gang-rape, there is a male-bonding involved in pleas of 'but that wasn't really Rape', except that, ickily, in this particular case there are women getting on the act.)

But the 'Only Pretty Fanny's Way' is a justification or exculpation that often gets made in the cases of high status individuals (predominantly males) for behaviour that in lesser mortals who have them banged up for life without appeal and shunned by all decent thinking folk.

Have been given to recall the case of Arthur Koestler - I will not link to the Wikipedia entry, as it does not mention it at all, although the ODNB entry for him goes on record as believing its truth - who was revealed in a posthumous biography to be a serial sexual harasser and rapist of considerable violence of women whom he came across, including the wives of friends.

I came across this in the bio of Jill Craigie (wife of Michael Foot), who invited him in and made him supper one evening when he called and Foot was out, with the consequence that Koestler raped her. She kept quiet about this for years.

Understandably, because this was the 50s and I doubt that courts would have been altogether sympathetic to a married woman who admitted a man to the house while she was alone, etc - this was probably not unexceptionable in the sophisticated and civilised circles in which she herself moved, but the underlying assumption in those circles would be, I think, that making a man an omelette did not constitute an invitation to bed.

Plus, quite apart from the ordeal of taking it to court, one can imagine that she might have shrunk from the kind of debacle speaking out would have caused in those circles, because of the he-said, she-said thing that still applies. And the woman is always the one who is much more likely to get designated hysterical/neurotic/vengeful/delusional/attention-seeking.

Numerous women found Koestler mesmerically attractive, but clearly that wasn't enough for him.

(I just hope that there was at least a subversive network of female gossip warning other women to avoid being along with him.)

I also find this resonates with Mr 'Lust' the Vice-Chancellor of the recent ill-judged column in THE, with its proprietorial view of young women, its 'what-do-they-expect' comments, etc etc.

Rape - it isn't just a crime against individuals. There are reasons why it is a crime against the state and prosecuted as such. However, I suspect that ideas about it still carry huge amount of baggage from the days when it was a property crime against the men of the kinship group to which the woman belonged.

Plus, from reading the various historical studies, there has long been a reluctance to believe that anyone except a male clearly, preferably visibily, defined as practically subhuman, could actually perpetrate it, whereas 'respectable' 'decent' men - of course they wouldn't/couldn't/didn't... Which comfortably redefines anything that doesn't involve a drooling monster as 'oh, but that's not really rape'. And their mates or men like them aren't monsters.

Except, you know, that they really did look like a monster to the women involved.