Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (49 page)

about goings-on in countries other than the United States and cities other than his native New York.
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However deplorable—and typical—James’s attitudes toward Jews and Jew- ish culture may have been, what he thought of as his “artist’s” curiosity about the world and its ways led him sometimes beyond such limitations; one can hardly imagine Henry Adams or Edith Wharton making such a visit to the Lower East Side or seeking out Yiddish plays and playwrights. Perhaps also his fascination with theater and actors contributed to his interest in the newly emergent Yiddish stage. And we should not ignore James’s professed motive in making his visit to the Windsor Theater: to see “a young actor in whom [he] was interested.” Although James is not one of the many authors whom Daniel Itzkovitz analyzes in his groundbreaking study of relations between Jewishness and queerness in twentieth-century American literature and culture, it was Itzkovitz’s work on these imbrications that first suggested to me that James’s re- lation of attraction-repulsion to the Lower East Side might be connected with his complex and conflicted relation to male-male homoerotic desire and the subcultural formations through which such desire began to be articulated and publicized in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
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Absent from
The American Scene
, as it is from any history of the Yiddish theater that I have seen, is any consideration of the matter with which histo- rian George Chauncey opens his book
Gay New York
: the Bowery in particu- lar and the Lower East Side in general were, at the time of James’s visit and during the early decades of peak activity in the Yiddish theater, also the city’s chief (in Chauncey’s phrase) “haven and spectacle” for male “degenerates” and male prostitutes. Paresis Hall and Little Bucks, located across the street from each other on the Bowery at Fifth Street, were among the half-dozen saloons or dance halls in the area singled out by an investigator in 1899—along with Manilla Hall, the Palm Club, the Black Rabbit, and Samuel Bickard’s Artistic Club—where men gathered who “act[ed] effeminately; most of them are painted and powdered; they are called Princess this and Lady So and So and the Duchess of Marlboro, and get up and sing as women, and dance; ape the female character; call each other sisters and take people out for immoral pur- poses.”
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The full range of such performances occurred not only in these half- dozen notorious resorts, but, by the turn of the century, had gone on for years in the heart of the Jewish tenement world. Chauncey writes:

Billy McGlory had realized as early as the late 1870s that he could fur- ther the infamy of Armory Hall, his enormous dance hall on Hester Street at the corner of Elizabeth, by hiring fairies—powdered, rouged, and sometimes even dressed in women’s clothes—as entertainers. Circu-

lating through the crowd, they sang, danced, and sometimes joined the best-paying customers in their curtained booths to thrill or disgust them with the sort of private sexual exhibitions (or “circuses”) normally offered only by female prostitutes.
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It is of course doubtful that anyone would have escorted Henry James, and probably equally doubtful that he would have found his own way, to such “low dives,” but they were only one particularly pungent set of sites of possi- ble male-male erotic interaction, the lower range of what was no doubt a larg- er network of public and semipublic spaces—streets, parks, clubs, bars, the- ater and hotel lobbies, public baths, waiting rooms in train stations—where men cruised each other, sometimes with a mind to finding sex, sometimes just for the pleasure of seeing one’s interested and appreciative gaze returned.

According to Edel and subsequent chroniclers of his life, James seems in later middle age—that is, at the turn of the century, at the very time he re- visited New York—to have lost most if not all of his earlier circumspection about expressing (in letters, in physical gestures) his strong affection and de- sire for a number of his young male friends and admirers (Hendrik Andersen, Jocelyn Persse, Rupert Brooke, Hugh Walpole). But, as I shall discuss below, James manifested at many points in his writing, some of it published long be- fore the turn of the century, a highly developed and fairly outspoken appreci- ation of male good looks and erotic desirability. Part of the effect of Edel’s in- fluential representation of James as having “discovered” the possibility of having romantic relationships with other men only late in life has been to di- vert attention away from the considerable variety of kinds of male-male eros that impel much of James’s writing from well before the turn of the century.
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While James’s biographers and critics have for the most part become in- creasingly open to considering how same-sex desire may have circulated in his milieu and informed much of his writing, no such opening has yet been made with respect to the performers or playwrights of the Yiddish theater.
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Almost every account rehearses classic smoking room stories about male sexual prowess and promiscuity applied to the legends of the theater’s most popular leading men—Jacob Adler and Boris Thomashefsky. Still, it seems appropri- ate to assume that queer desire between men and between women on the Yid- dish stage occurred with its usual high frequency among a social group with significant numbers of young members, many of them recently arrived in the big city, who were often alienated and in flight from their biological families

and religious and cultural traditions.

However, rather than outing this or that star of the Yiddish theater, it would be productive to consider one of them as an example of the kind of

erotics of spectatorship, stardom, and fandom that Richard Dyer, Miriam Hansen, and other historians of film culture and female and/or queer specta- torship have taught us to recognize.
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The aforementioned Boris Thomashef- sky participated in the founding of Yiddish theater, first in Eastern Europe and then in its earliest days in New York, while still a boy soprano playing fe- male parts (women were not at first permitted onto the Yiddish stage, and boys played their roles). As the theater itself rapidly developed into a going concern, Thomashefsky became its first matinee idol, specializing in the princely heroic roles in low-budget musical-historical extravaganzas that were shund at its most intense. In the early years of the theater the problem of how to stand out from the other leading actors seemed to have simple solutions— or so Thomashefsky recalls:

If Kessler wore a big hat with a long feather . . . Adler wore a bigger hat with three feathers and a gold scarf. . . . I piled on colored stockings, coats, crowns, swords, shields, bracelets, earrings, turbans. Next to me they looked like common soldiers. . . . If they rode in on a real horse, I had a golden chariot drawn by two horses. If they killed an enemy, I killed an army.
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Thomashefsky soon distinguished himself not only by his propensity for pil- ing on the costumes but also for tossing them off—this latter move apparently enthralling his legions of fans even more deeply. Heavy but shapely in his youth, he played many of his big scenes (and posed for photographs and posters) stripped to the waist and clad in flesh-colored tights. Passing on the theatrical lore of the time, Sandrow says “respectable people” worried about the effect of the spectacle of his “luscious calves” and “his soft and luxuriant masculinity” on “the modesty of American Jewish womanhood.”
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But Thomashefsky no doubt had his male fans, too, some of them devouring his very bodily performances with no less avidity and fervor than their female rel- atives and friends. Not all the preening, peacocking, desiring, and admiring that was going on among males on the Lower East Side was confined to Pare- sis Hall.

In 1898 James had seen his first film, seventy minutes of the Corbett- Fitzsimmons world championship prizefight, and he had “quite revelled” in it, by his own testimony.
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So we need not assume that he was insusceptible to the beefy charms exhibited by performers like Thomashefsky. And James was disarmingly forthright in his theater reviews about the frank appraisals he and his fellow theatergoers made of the physical appearance of such actors as young H. B. Conway, whose “first claim to distinction is his remarkably good

looks, which may be admired, along with those of other professional beauties, at half the photograph shops in London.”
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As for the male stars of the French stage themselves, James writes, “manly beauty is but scantily represented at the Théâtre Français.” Only Jean Mounet-Sully (who had been Bernhardt’s lover a few years earlier) “may be positively commended for his fine person”; indeed, James goes farther, to say that the young actor is “from the scenic point of view, an Adonis of the first magnitude” (73).

James, it would seem, was capable of enjoying a wide range of kinds of performances of male prowess and beauty, from Corbett and Fitzsimmons to Mounet-Sully. We may not be able to discover at this point the identity of the actor James went out one “dire midwinter” afternoon to see on the Lower East Side, but it is clear from James’s account of the young man’s performance that whatever pleasures he may have taken in it were far from unalloyed in this in- stance. James’s elaborate indications in
The American Scene
of his impressions of the (to him) strange meeting of “Yankee” mechanical efficiency onstage with the exotically “Oriental” appearance and demeanor of the audience raise the possibility that it was perhaps not only linguistic crossings, mixings, and passings that may have troubled James on his visits to the Lower East Side. The “queer, clumsy, wasteful social chemistry” that bothered him about the audience at the Windsor Theater, or the “vagueness of ear as to the difference, as to identities, of idiom” that disturbed him about New York audiences in general: both these phrases suggest that somewhere in James’s attraction to- ward and repulsion from these scenes there is a sense of uneconomical, non- reproductive social relations between persons insufficiently attuned to a pre- cise knowledge of, and commitment to maintaining, separate and distinct “identities” and “idiom[s].” “Queer, clumsy, wasteful” are James’s anxious terms for the Yiddish theater, betraying a depth of disturbance on his part that may make us wonder if James’s violently mixed response to it may not have been more genuinely and powerfully an erotic response than were the rela- tively straightforward pleasures he took in watching a prizefight or the hand- some young leading man of the Comédie Française.

James’s professed unhappiness about the supersession of English by other languages in New York or in the United States sits oddly with the rich and complicated relations of his own writing to any monolingual or monocultur- al model of language, English in particular. In his private correspondence, and to a lesser but still substantial degree in his published fiction, a host of (most- ly) French terms perform such a crucial expressive function that the reader de- void of a knowledge of upper-class French and English slang at the turn of the century may often be “left hanging fire” as to what a sentence or a passage in James’s writing is about, or what its exact tone may be; indeed, many students

of late nineteenth-century Franco- and Anglo-American cultural hybridity have picked up as much of this long since vanished argot as we have princi- pally from reading James.

Nor was James’s visit to the Cafe Royal by any means his first or only ex- perience of polyglossia. Reviewing a performance by the Italian tragedian Tom- maso Salvini in the March 1883
Atlantic Monthly
, James deplored—in an oth- erwise admiring review—that the great actor had performed the respective title roles of
Macbeth, Othello
, and
King Lear
in Italian while the entire supporting cast “answered him in a language which was foreign only in that it sometimes failed to be English” (169). James’s formulation here anticipates his criticism of the Yiddish performers twenty years later for performing “in a language only definable as not in
intention
Yiddish.” Interestingly, some years earlier, in a re- view he wrote for the
Nation
, James had mentioned without negative com- ment that when Madame Ristori appeared in the United States in 1875, she performed (excerpts from?) her most famous roles (Medea and Schiller’s Mary Stuart) in her native Italian (29). Four years later, reviewing for the same jour- nal a series of performances by Sarah Bernhardt and the Comédie Française, then making a short visit to London, James writes:

The appeal has been made to a foreign audience, an audience whose artis- tic perceptions are the reverse of lively, whose ear does not respond quick- ly to the magic French utterance, and whose mind does not easily find its way among the intricacies of French sentiment; and yet the triumph has been perfect, and the Comédie Française and the London public have been thoroughly pleased with each other.
(125)

Unlike the “Oriental public” and the “wonderful folding bed” onstage at the Windsor Theater, which join to produce what James calls “a queer, clumsy, wasteful social chemistry,” this time the theater and its imperfectly compre- hending audience form a perfect match.

At least, that is what James begins his extensive review by announcing. But a troubling excess soon manifests itself in his account of the success of the Comédie. That is “the extraordinary vogue of Mademoiselle Sarah Bern- hardt.” James had first reviewed Bernhardt’s acting in 1876, in a letter from Paris to the
New York Tribune
, when he saw her play a mixed-blood heroine (“the daughter of a mulatto slave-girl and a Carolinian planter”) in
L’Etrangère
by Alexandre Dumas
fils
. James frequently mentions Bernhardt’s performanc- es at the Comédie over the next several years, and his comments are extreme- ly mixed: she possesses “extraordinary talent” (63) and “extraordinary intelli- gence and versatility” (64), but she is “rather weak” in some aspects of her art

(78), which is itself only “small art” in comparison with an older and greater actress, Madame Plessy (63). In his review of her performances in London, he seems finally to articulate the reason for his strong reservations about the ac- tress: while she is an “artist” in James’s view, she has also become a “celebrity,” but not of the ordinary sort. She has a positive genius for generating publici- ty about herself; “she may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper” (129). Her most recent publicity concerns her decision to resign her official membership in the Comédie Française and to begin planning what would turn out to be the first of her tours of the United States. James predicted for her, with blinding accuracy, a “triumphant career” in the States exceeding any- thing she had previously done: “She is too American,” he wrote, “not to suc- ceed in America” (129).
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