NORMAN DOUGLAS: A BIOGRAPHY BY MARK HOLLOWAY
Sam Hall 13 December 2021
Mark Holloway does himself great credit with this balanced portrait of an extraordinary man. But it’s interesting how he prefaces his portrait of Norman Douglas as an honorable lover of boys, with a lifelong positive influence on the lives of his loved boys, with the remark:
“One can wish, as the present writer would have wished, to keep his young sons from too great an intimacy with Douglas…”
I think Holloway is speaking honestly, without undue phobia, and it speaks to the very deep and complex and intractable problems modernity has with pederasty. For it was in Douglas's Greek love relationships of greatest intimacy where he was, as he himself said, at his creative best.
Holloway freely, almost enthusiastically, endorses Douglas’s relationship with Eric Wolton. It’s a wonderfully deft piece of psychological evaluation, where Holloway sifts the boy’s diaries to show how Douglas’s loving mentorship was inspiriting the lad’s boyish prattle, guiding and encouraging his maturation.
Perhaps Douglas was onto this modern problem in his magnificent extended essay How About Europe, where he observed, apropos England’s over-regulated society (published in 1930, mind!):
“Mr. Clive Bell, speaking of this frenzy for legislation, observes that an ordinary Englishman is, on the whole, less free than a Roman slave in the time of Hadrian. He attributes this state of affairs largely to the activities of elderly and embittered virgins; nor should I be surprised to learn that there is a correlation between sexlessness and repressive legislation, and that many of the discomforts of life in England are due to eunuchs of one kind or another.”
Lo the locked-down West. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos: the Kingdom of the Eunuchs is come.
Edmund Marlowe, 14 December 2021
Very interesting. What do you suppose were the reasons why Holloway "would have wished to keep his young sons from too great an intimacy with Douglas." What exactly did he fear would have been the adverse consequences?
A father in the last forty years, however much he realised the good a man like Douglas would be likely to do his sons through intimacy, would have a legitimate fear in the trauma and other harm that the state would inflict on them for their own supposed good if a sexual liaison were to come to its attention, but that was hardly the case when Holloway was writing, less still in Douglas's time, was it?
Sam Hall 15 December 2021
I would take his comment as referring to his own time of the mid 70’s. Partly his comment could be pre-emptive self-defence: although clearly wrong, would you look at this! But more I think it points to the deeper level of “wrongness” that homosexuality, after centuries of demonisation, has come to occupy. The FACT that Douglas’s Greek love affairs were wholly positive in a way traceable in history does not reach down to the foundational original-sin level of homosexuality. I think Holloway betrays a Christian fear that Douglas’s undeniably fine house of pederasty is built upon shifty sand.
The 60’s began a process of tinkering with and renovating this foundational fact of life, but never altered its essence. As sex emerged into the sunlit uplands of secularity, a need for revamped foundations grew. All this fizzy, newly discovered goodness of sex needed a hellish antithesis to rest on. The final sculpting of homosex, into good androphile and evil pederastic, was a creation worthy of Michelangelo: behold the secular egalitarian masterpiece and its final crushing defeat of all that is evil in man. The public square now celebrates a new monumental beheading of Goliath, not by divine David but by a busy brotherhood of bureaucrats. Mere boyish happiness and fulfilment was never gunna so much as stub a toe on that lot.
Edmund Marlowe, 15 December 2021
I find that pretty convincing as a psychological interpretation of why, deep down, he would not have wanted his sons to be very intimate with Douglas. But how do you think he would have rationalised it to himself or a trusted friend? Supposing a friend whom he trusted not to publish his answer, who had read his book and made clear his admiration for Douglas, had asked him in confidence, "But Mark, given what you know about the wonderful effect Douglas had on the boys he had affairs with, why wouldn't you have welcomed your son being one of them?" How do you think he would have replied?
Sam Hall 16 December 2021
The “Holloway” I’m postulating would have rationalised it simply and easily—without thinking, as it were. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, records a bunch of fascinating clinical experiments, showing the mind’s inbuilt facility for using the fig-leaf of rationality to cover deeper emotional promptings, a process not accessible to the conscious mind. Holloway would have told himself, and his friend, that the risks—possible gayness, emotional damage, social stigma, etc—outweigh the potential benefits; that Douglas was providing care more fitly provided by a loving mother and father. Pressed far enough, he’d simply maintain that it just wasn’t right.
However, our “Holloway” could, in the right circumstances, employ the dextrous mind in the opposite direction—if, rather than assessing an abstract proposal, he's dealing with real life. Say he had a son, 12-14yo, who had shown a marked life-improvement—mood, academic achievement—under the influence of a new friend he’d made, a rather enigmatic local chap with a hat and a cane. Holloway quite likely would cautiously and watchfully approve the friendship and leave any further speculations lying quietly in an un-trafficked corner of the mind. The instinctual promptings of what’s-best-for-my-child leading the dissonant way.
Of course, as you’ve pointed out, that was possible then, all but impossible now. Parents have in recent times been roundly pilloried for such an approach. Survival of the most-phobic is today’s Darwinian imperative.
Edmund Marlowe 16 December 2021
I agree entirely with your last two paragraphs, and I would agree with the first if it was said with reference to most fathers in Holloway's time. But if it had been, I wouldn't have thought it interesting to pose the question. Holloway wasn't most fathers. He was a perceptive thinker who immersed himself in knowledge of the lives of Douglas and his boys. If Holloway answered the friend I postulated with mention of the possible risks of "possible gayness, emotional damage, social stigma", the friend would answer:
"But you know better than anyone that not one of the many boys loved by Douglas is known to have turned out gay. On the contrary, you know that all those whose later lives you have documented thoroughly (Eric, René and Emilio) were definitely heterosexual. Equally, you found no signs of emotional damage or stigma. René died rather young, but your portraits of the other two show them in middle age well-adjusted and proud of their places in Douglas's life. You may be right 'that Douglas was providing care more fitly provided by a loving mother and father', but what if the parents weren't providing it? Emilio's were dead and Ettore's father was a prisoner of war."
Something is missing here, and I think it deserves nailing.
Sam Hall 17 December 2021
Once the friend asks “what if the parents weren’t providing it?” – isn’t he conceding Holloway’s original statement as valid? Holloway’s wish that no sons of his become intimate with Douglas is synonymous with his wish that his sons enjoy the best possible parenting—and if he’s not wishing that, he’s not the good man we’re purporting him to be.
Is the “something missing” the modern belief that good parents not only remove any need for a pederast in a boy’s life, but renders him a negative influence? I would, though, still tend to see that as a rationalisation of the deeper cultural taboo.
Or are you thinking of something altogether different?
Yes, I think you’ve got much closer to the mark now. The friend could be conceding that. Moreover, Holloway could well answer him by himself conceding that having Douglas in their lives could be wonderful for boys who were not getting the care they needed from their parents, and reminding his friend that all he had said was that he himself would have wished to keep his own sons from too great an intimacy with the great man. There would be nothing dishonest or hypocritical about this if Holloway believed he was indeed an excellent father.
However, closely related to this is a strong feeling Holloway may very well have instinctively imagined having that, if he was aware of it, he would probably have hoped not to have to explain because it sounds more discreditable than it really is, namely jealousy. I suspect the French writer Gabriel Matzneff, a highly experienced lover of boys and girls, is right in saying parents are almost always implacably opposed to their pubescent children having adult lovers because they don’t want to share their affections.
I say this is not really discreditable because I think this jealousy could only not be felt by a monstrous father, one who did not care about having his sons’ love. For a powerful and realistic depiction of the emotions involved, I would strongly recommend seeing the superlatively well-acted BBC drama, The Lost Boys (1978), about the relationship between J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys. There is a heart-breaking scene in which the dying father (unquestionably a loving one and a thoroughly decent man) comes briefly home from hospital: he is briefly greeted by his sons, but then their special adult friend Barrie appears on the scene and they rush off excitedly to be with him instead. At one point, the father confesses to the only one of his five sons who is not taken with Barrie: “no father likes to share his children with another man.” Though he goes on to say that he has learned to accept Barrie because he is convinced he is a good thing. I suspect most fathers would not be so noble, and many more would not like the situation to arise. It is of minor importance that Barrie did not have sex with these boys, while Douglas did have it with his. What matters is that both had the attribute of easily winning boys’ hearts through giving their own to them, as well as being splendid characters.
I would also suggest merely as a possibility an additional explanation, that Holloway was being a little disingenuous. In recent years, anyone who wrote such a fair-minded account as he did of a pederast like Douglas would be accused of condoning “pedophilia”, and probably worse. While the reaction in 1976 would not have been so venomous, Holloway may still have feared it enough to wish to protect himself with the statement under discussionas an appeasement. It also served to point out gently to the reader his own heterosexual credentials as a father.
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