Queer Saint : The Cultured Life of Peter Watson by Adrian Clark & Jeremy Dronfield

London : John Blake Publishing Ltd., 2015

I recently found this on my shelf. I purchased it in late 2015 but had put it aside. I should never have waited so long to read it! Clark and Dronfield have crafted an amazing biography that I read as voraciously as an intensely plotted novel. It includes everybody who was anybody of the time.

After Peter Watson finished at Eton, and having significant wealth, he traveled in Europe and the Americas, mostly with Cecil Beaton. Theirs was a solid friendship but Cecil always hoped for more. In the years leading up to World War II, like most gay artists and writers in Europe, Peter spent time in Berlin with the boys in the clubs à la Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories.

He had a home in Paris with an extensive art collection, including a particularly risqué work by Pavel Tchelitchew titled Bathers. The central nude figure seen from behind and below was modeled on Charles Henri Ford, best known for his novel written with Parker Tyler, The Young and the Evil. With the invasion of Paris by the Nazis, Peter was forced to flee and his art eventually fell victim to Nazi plunder.

Having returned to Britain for the duration of the war, Peter started a new literary and arts journal called Horizon. with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. It became well known for promoting works by British artists and writers at a time when the country really needed it. Horizon was also a particularly important vehicle for promoting George Orwell and his essays on politics and the war.

After the war, Peter focused on British artists, particularly young up-and-coming ones, helping to launch the careers of Francis Bacon, John Craxton, and Lucian Freud, among others. He supported many artists with homes, studios and living expenses well into their careers. He was also instrumental and doggedly devoted to the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

The artists he was supporting weren't the only young men he supported. He had a long-standing romantic relationship with the now infamous Denham Fouts as well as Waldemar Hanson and Norman Fowler who was with Peter at the time of his mysterious death by drowning.

Peter Watson appeared as a character in two dishy novels, Lord Berners' The Girls of Radcliff Hall published in a private edition in 1932 where all of the characters are based on gay men but appear as lesbians in an all girls boarding school, and Michael Nelson's 1958 novel A Room in Chelsea Square originally published anonymously and taking aim at the relationships around Horizon (Peter Watson, Cyril Connolly, and Stephen Spender).

Desert Dreamers by Gerald Hamilton

Washington D.C. : Guild Press, 1966

Desert Dreamers was originally published in London with the imprint of At the Sign of the Tiger Lily in 1914. Appearing at that time as Desert Dreamers: a Novel of Friendship under the pseudonym Patrick Weston, it tells the story of Julian Thelluson who, against his mother's wishes, decides to holiday in Algiers instead of with her in Cannes.

Making the acquaintance of a Frenchman at the hotel in Algiers, he shares with him that he plans to continue on to Biskra. The Frenchman is alarmed and tries to talk him out of it by stating that Biskra isn't the place for an Englishman like himself.

Julian's mind, however, is made up. Upon his arrival in Biskra he runs into a friend of his mother's, a barrister named Joseph Hoxton. When he is introduced to Hoxton's guide, Tayeb ben Mahmud, a young Algerian, he is instantly drawn to him.

Hamilton refers to Julian having read The Garden of Allah as the source of his desire to travel to Biskra. The Garden of Allah is a 1905 novel by Robert Smythe Hichens (author of the 1894 novel about Oscar Wilde, The Green Carnation) about an English woman of 32 years who has yet to find love. Her parents are deceased so she travels to Algeria with her maid and finds love in the desert.

Another reference, and likely the one that the Frenchman in the novel is reacting to, is the connection of Biskra with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas, and Andre Gide. Gide has written about Wilde and Douglas traveling to Biskra and as part of their vacationing, picking up young local men. When Gide visited them, they introduced him to the lifestyle and the many young men who were available to European tourists.

Desert Dreamers would have been very bold for its time, thus the need for a pseudonym. Prior to each chapter, there is a short poem or poem fragment relating to the action of the text. They are not at all subtle. They include everything from Shakespeare to The Koran. One of my favorites is this one by Lord Alfred Douglas.

Jacinth blue and violet
  Is the radiant light that flashes
Through the tangled silken net
  When he lifts his languid lashes.

It is said that Gerald Hamilton is the source of Isherwood's Mr. Norris. In 1966, Guild Press re-released the complete text of Desert Dreamers under the author's actual name with a forward by Christopher Isherwood where he discusses this.

Bibliographies & Ratings: Young (At the Sign of the Tiger Lily edition, 4070* ; Guild Press edition, 1675*)

Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy

New York : Knopf, 2014

I don't often read non-fiction, however when I saw this title I was immediately hooked. Not exactly linear, it reads more like a collection of essays on various aspects of gay life in Berlin from the mid-1800s and stopping just short of Hitler taking power, with particular focus on the Wiemar years.

We think of the gay rights movement as it relates to the Stonewall riots but multiple organizations in Berlin were fighting for gay rights (particularly the repeal of Paragraph 175) years before. Then as now, the philosophies of these organizations were not monolithic. As well, they included members who ranged from the most liberal to the most conservative (including members of the far right Nazi Party).

It is a complicated history with strong connections to both the youth group movement and male prostitution. Along the way Beachy makes the connections to many literary works, some of which are well known ... some not so much. Isherwood and Auden spent time in Berlin as has been widely read about in Isherwood's Berlin Stories and more truthfully in Christopher and His Kind. I'll definitely want to track down the diaries, autobiographies and thinly veiled autobiographical novels from others of the time. A short list of literary works available in German at the time (André Gide's Immoralist (1902), Herman Bang's Mikaël (1904), Mikhail Kuzmin's Wings (1906)) will also make for some interesting reading. Maybe less well known are the gay silent films of the era and I'm really looking forward to exploring those.

This is a fascinating read. Let us hope that we need not wait too long for the next installment from Mr. Beachy covering gay life under Hitler.