London Triptych (21 page)

Afterword:
A Government of Whores

London Triptych
started out
as a short story entitled “Pornocracy” that I wrote for a competition. I had always been intrigued by the secret histories of male prostitution, and this first attempt gave me the character and voice of Jack Rose. History is all too often seen as something that only people who wield power experience or create; the powerless are seen to lead lives of no consequence. I wanted to see things from the other side: to give voice to the voiceless. I was interested in viewing the Wilde scandal from the perspective of one of the young boys involved, in imagining the lives of these bit-players, this shadowy cohort whose fleeting appearance in the history books fascinated me. Who were these “panthers” with which Wilde “feasted”?

This is the story that has the most historical grounding, in the form of Wilde’s life and the detailed accounts of the trials. Alfred Taylor’s boyhouse existed at the addresses used here, and much of his personal history is the same; he was convicted along with Wilde, receiving the same sentence. It was, however, also the most difficult to research in terms of the lives of male prostitutes. Their invisibility was the very thing that drew me to them. The transcripts of the Wilde trials were very useful, as was Kellow Chesney’s marvellous
The Victorian Underground.
I also relied on the pornography of the time, such as
Teleny
, a book Wilde was supposed to have had a hand in writing. There is no specific historical counterpart to Jack; I took his name from Jack Saul, the narrator of one of the very few homosexual porn novels of the time,
Sins of the Cities of the Plain
, published in 1881. Wilde actually owned a copy of this book, according to Thomas Wright in
Oscar’s Books: A Journey through the Library of Oscar Wilde
. So Jack Rose is a fiction; but I wanted him to do what he did out of jealousy: to kill the thing he loved, and perhaps be the inspiration for Wilde’s famous refrain.

The short story didn’t win the competition, but pretty soon I had embarked on a novel on the same theme. I was keen to explore further than Jack’s story alone would allow. I needed other voices from other times, and formed the idea of three lives spaced roughly fifty years apart but overlapping chronologically. It made sense to counterpoint Jack’s exploits with a different, more mature voice, so I developed Colin. I knew several older artists who had fascinating stories about gay London in the 1950s and their experiences were invaluable to me, in particular those of the artist George Cayford.

The early ’50s saw a great witch-hunt of homosexuals by the British press and the police, which included the arrest of Sir John Gielgud and the imprisonment of the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke (whose 1955 account of his prison experience,
The Verdict of You All
, is a wonderful read), and peaked with the 1954 scandal involving Lord Montagu and Peter Wildeblood as recounted in the latter’s book,
Against the Law
. Colin’s world view is shaped by that climate of fear. I wanted him to feel imprisoned by society, but to find, ultimately, his own way out. I wanted him to find some kind of salvation, acceptance, and recognition. And I wanted art and love to be the source of those things. Novels from the time, such as Rodney Garland’s
The Heart in Exile
and Michael Nelson’s
A Room in Chelsea Square
, provided additional inspiration and atmosphere.

These two characters then suggested a third. The work felt incomplete. It called for a more contemporary voice to offset the other two: a modern-day Jack, the voice of a man whose sexual freedoms, whilst having their precedent and forerunner in Jack, were nevertheless the fruits of late-twentieth-century gay liberation. It needed a voice from a more contemporary London, my London. This allowed me to draw from my own experiences of the city, though David’s story is by no means my own. I’ve never been interested in writing autobiography, though I’m aware that most writing is, in some indirect and alchemical sense, autobiographical. I agree with Jeanette Winterson that “there is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies.” I like to think I included a bit of both in
London Triptych
. James Joyce’s claim that memory is an act of creation resonates with me. Wilde himself said, “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.” These are my guiding lights. I think we need to believe more in the powers of fiction, to trust that some kind of truth lies in imagined stories, to believe that—to paraphrase Jean Cocteau—a lie can tell the truth. The modern-day obsession with reality is doing us no good. Wilde, certainly, would have abhorred it. It leads us to believe that there
is
such a thing as reality and that language can represent it accurately. I’m more inclined to think that language makes realit
ies
(in the plural), for better or for worse. Surely this is what storytellers do, fabricate other universes, places governed by different laws.

I’m not a historian, and I didn’t want to write history (though some history books, such as Matt Cook’s
London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914
, were invaluable). I wanted to use history to provide some kind of backdrop for the lives of these three men, and I wanted to use the city almost as a fourth character. As such, the city too needed to change. Jack’s London is not Colin’s, and David’s London is different again. Not simply because our experiences of cities are mostly subjective, but because cities themselves are fluid, impermanent entities, grounded in a historical specificity that is in a permanent state of flux. For me, cities are also profoundly sexual, and that sexuality is caught up in the anonymity they provide. I think there is a great deal of knowledge in the sexual, and it was crucial that this most sidelined and contentious aspect of urban life be central to the stories I was weaving. For Jack the city provides a way of having sex with men without needing to integrate such behaviour into his overall sense of self—and of making a decent enough living at it, too. He is uncomplicatedly libidinal—though there is little about the libido that is truly uncomplicated. Jack represents, I hope, a way of connecting with the body that is freer than, say, Colin’s: a form of sexual consciousness that is bold and blunt, not shackled by psychology, nor by religious or bourgeois morality, all of which he has mercifully escaped, though he ends up as their victim, nevertheless. I reintroduced him within Colin’s narrative because I was interested in imagining how he would change as he grew older.

By comparison, Colin represents all that is destructive about the morality surrounding homosexuality—a morality that exists not only in the shape of his parents (as superego), but also in the form of the police and doctors and other people in his social group. For him, the city is a place to scavenge for visual scraps to be soaked up and used to populate his masturbation fantasies. For him Gore represents the antithesis of what he has come to expect from life, a kind of sexual freedom unimaginable to him. Like Jack, Gore is a mirror in which we see our own desires. Through Gore, Colin discovers another London, one that unsettles him as much as it fascinates him.

For David, the city represents escape. Like many gay men of my generation who grew up in the provinces, London reeked of freedom and decadence, standing as a beacon toward which we all made our merry way, like children dancing in a line behind the Pied Piper. The appeal was primarily, for me at least, that of anonymity—not just in terms of the sex available, but in terms of confronting and constructing one’s self. One could be anonymous in London—in any big city—in a way that is unthinkable in a small town; one could wipe the slate clean and start anew if one wanted to. David’s journey, like the journey of the ego, is one of negotiating the physical world and assessing one’s place within it. I wanted it to be clear that he has learnt something from that journey, even if he fails, as yet, to see exactly what that lesson might be.

Wilde’s life and work became a governing principle as I worked on the novel. I incorporated and adapted events from his life into the narrative. For example, Wilde’s mother died during his incarceration, so I killed off David’s mother not long after he is imprisoned. All the words attributed to Wilde are mine, apart from one line. David’s story uses the second person—is addressed to the boy who was his downfall—in order to evoke
De Profundis
, Wilde’s prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. I like the way it appeals to a singular recipient, a single reader—though in this case one who will never lay eyes upon it. And, of course, just like
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, a painting is at the heart of the story: representation as the embodiment of erotic thought. One of the games I’ve enjoyed playing whilst writing the novel is to scatter echoes and nods throughout the three narratives. Nods not just to one another, but also to Wilde’s life and work.

I tried to incorporate certain constants in the three narratives. As well as the city, there is the law. The police play a part in all three stories, as they have in the lives of many gay men. Love is another constant, as is sex. Indeed, the two are the most tightly bound themes of the book. Whilst I concur with Foucault that the truth is never to be found in sex, the truth of sex is one that is often overlooked in our panicky rush to categorise and moralise. I was attempting to write about gay sex in new ways, ways more in line with writers such as Georges Bataille or Kathy Acker, or Neil Bartlett and Samuel R. Delany, where sex can become an opportunity to explore subjectivity and sometimes language.

I wrote the three narratives as separate stories—even separate files—but I knew pretty much as I worked through them where the breaks would be. Each one was episodic. It was just easier to manage that way. But they each had an almost identical dramatic arc, so that when they were intertwined they would peak and fall at roughly the same time in the overall narrative curve of the novel. What came across on reading it through for the first time after I had plaited the three narratives together were the many other ways the three voices echoed one another. Jack’s story ends with him travelling from London to Manchester, whilst David’s begins with the reverse journey. Having Jack reappear in Colin’s strand, and then Gore reappear in David’s, was not something I had planned from the start. It came late, as did the title. But once I had decided on it I enjoyed working out how it would manifest, how these characters would be as older men. In setting up Jack and Gore’s reappearances as old men, I wanted to open a space for also imagining David as an old man, as someone different again from the person we meet in the pages of his narrative. Our lives as gay men are not necessarily scripted to the level of straight people—we don’t tend to have children (though this is changing), and we tend to organize our sexual and personal lives very differently—and one thing I was trying to do was to imagine the lives of older gay men in ways that enable us to write our own scripts.

For all three men, their experience of London is, essentially, one of liberation. I repeated some locations to give a sense of different memories, different events, occurring within or upon the same geographical site, such as Highgate Cemetery or Barnes Common. The three men’s lives unfold in tandem, as if simultaneously, transcending concrete time. It is, in that sense, very much a triptych.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to my
family for their constant love and support.

To all my gorgeous friends for their years of encouragement and humour, and for never doubting I’d get there in the end, especially: Michael Atavar, Darius Amini, John Lee Bird, Helen Boulter, Pippa Brooks, George Cayford, Matthew Fennemore, Johnny Golding, Lucien Gouiran, Sally Gross, Hally, Gerry Hislop, James Killough, Louise Lambe, Sadie Lee, Clayton Littlewood, David Male, Steve Muscroft, Joe Pop, Clive Reeve, Chris Rose, Matthew Stradling, Sue Smallwood, Roy Woolley.

Many thanks to Jim MacSweeney and Uli Lenart at Gay’s the Word bookshop. Extracts from
London Triptych
appeared in
Chroma Journal
and
Polari Journal
(
polarijournal.com
). Many thanks to Shaun Levin and Pema Baker, the respective editors of those two publications. Thanks to Jake Arnott and Neil Bartlett.

Endless gratitude to my literary agent, Adrian Weston; Candida Lacey, Vicky Blunden, and Corinne Pearlman at Myriad Editions. And to Linda McQueen for her amazing copy-editing skills.

About the author

Jonathan Kemp
lives in
London, UK,
where he currently teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Birkbeck College.
London Triptych
, his first novel, was published in the UK in 2010 and won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. His second book,
Twentysix
, was published in the UK in 2011 and his third,
Because We Must
, is forthcoming.

Photo by Dom Agius