How can somebody so famous in the gay world be so difficult to extract from his times? Because if he had lived in our times he would never have stood out, never been prophetic, and as any prophet knows being prophetic is a difficult vocation to stick to, where being misunderstood and the message being diverted comes with the job description. Where Carpenter was a prophet for the acceptance of same sex love, and where the book publishing industry of hs time was slow and often unremunerative, Carpenter, 'Chips' to his friends, did well with his inheritance, and with his education found a living as a public speaker, where his personal charisma made him well listened to. Carpenter was in the mould of some modern musicians who remain active today's music business, say Billy Bragg.
Writers in Carpenters time had to tour and lecture both for the income derived from them talking live and for them to have new material to tour with, where if it sold poorly then it pulled in audiences on the tour. To continue the rock star/famous touring author theme, it has been well known talented and thought-to-be-durable musicians who were famous died in the fifties, Michael Jackson, Jerry Garcia, and Frank Zappa each died of very different causes in their fifties, enduring many highs and lows in their public reputations over the years of applying themselves to the duty of public performance.
But get back to the author of this book Brian Anderson, he is something of a specialist in writing about figures like Edward Carpenter, who writers as they were, were well below the levels of high profile/fame of writers like Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Brian Anderson does a good job of putting some pace into the early and early adult life of Edward Carpenter, where many previous attempts by writers to get under the skin of the the early Edward Carpenter and utterly failed. I have read the Sheila Rowbotham doorstop of a book where Carpenter is thoroughly explored, but he is like a needle to be retrieved from a Victorian haystack. There is an awful lot of haystack to be gone through to find the man.
Here there is no haystack to read your way through, but as many quotes from EC that have some sort of pithiness and directness to them embedded among the ordinary modern prose of the author. The chapter titles help, 'A House of Mammon', 'A Rogue Intervention', 'The Making of a Socialist' where events are summarised briskly in the title. Some aspects of Victorian life suffer in this approach. The lack of delicacy means that the reader misses the nuance in how the opposition to the prophetic writings of Carpenter actually worked in opposing and and limiting Carpenter's effectiveness as thinker and speaker. Where Carpenter proceeded by inventing and adapting language his critics ignored how he reinvented language to broaden how life might be described. He certainly lived the broadened life and had many strokes of extraordinary good luck meeting people on his way through to settling at Millthorpe first as a market gardener, and minor local prophet.
Anderson does a good job of explaining the process of his writings. The first point is that EC writes in Millthorpe, not London, To go back to the writerly/musical analogies EC was 'getting his work together in the country' the way that band like Traffic recorded their early albums from 1967 onward. EC's work was writing pamphlets, not books. If there had been a guide to how the publishing industry worked and what got published it would have made clearer how EC got his works published. As it is what we get is a stress on how far from the mainstream publishing culture EC was as a writer, and how much a book consisted of several pamphlets and each pamphlet had to break new ground, politically, because as a minor non-London prophet Carpenter was so far from main stream London-based politics that to them he did not exist. The accretion of work that became the publishing of 'Love's Coming Of Age' amid the uproar that followed Oscar Wilde vs the Marquis of Queensberry which led to a collective press and public hysteria against homosexual behaviour took quite some charm and luck to pull off.
But Carpenter's quiet diligence was made him the the first writer in English to write and get published writings about same sex love. That librarians filed the writings under 'pornographic' or 'medical [therefore of no general interest]' was a battle against human habit that was too big for him. His finding lasting love aged 40, and after years of serious academia and friendships is sweetly told. His needing love, and the love of a working class man, to balance him as a person is made clear. What a biography of George Merrill might add and compliment the writings here about Carpenters search for the personal version of what he made it his message to say other people needed is anyone's guess. The book trails off towards the end. The author steers away from the way that the war based patriotism that attacked Carpenters conjoined twin thesis that socialism had to have a sexual and gender-based liberation element to it for the socialism to be truly redistributive.
Socialism that reinforced patriarchy property rights, and power balance, was not socialism. Wars reinforce patriarchal capitalism thus WW1 forced Carpenter and Merrill to leave Millthorpe, near Sheffield for a calmer life in the home counties. That is not commented on here, instead the reader gets the reflections that others left of the effect of Carpenter, the way he walked the walk and talked the talk, and was a comfort to many who were lonely from being unimaginatively told that marriage and property values mean you should not expect love and tenderness. His writings and others to dare to dream, and there is still the courage to dream of making empathic spaces, and not being afraid of hugs where self evident need should trump the fear of accepting our fragility.
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