Ronald Firbank, C or D or who the hell is...?

'His novel 'Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli' (1926) concerns the demise of a priest while chasing an appealing choirboy around the altar.'

I wonder what Firbank would have made of today's sexual puritanism, as exemplified in this article in the New York Review of Books, about the recent priestly child abuse scandals?

'A man without a wife to puncture his pomposity... easily becomes convinced of his superior wisdom', opines Garry Wills in the NYRB. So where are all the perverts, queers and dandies to go, if not the Roman Catholic church? Glitter rock is off the agenda now too... Can't we see this pedophilia thing as the modern equivalent of the hounding of Oscar Wilde?

Erik, have you read 'Hadrian VII' by the Baron Corvo? That's another classic 'Catholic queen' novel, just as perverse, though perhaps not quite as stylish, as Firbank.

(I think we also can assume that his 1924 novel 'Prancing Nigger' will not be republished any time soon under that title...)

Momus, I am so not surprised that you've read Firbank. Classic all the way, although I prefer The Flower Beneath the Foot over Cardinal Pirelli.

Search: Five Novels (published by New Directions); this volume contains the best of Firbank's work. The Collected Short Stories is also worth your time. All of his other works are interesting, just not up to the level of what Firbank achieved in Pirelli and Flower.

Momus, i know we will all regret this, but how exactly does the garry wills article exemplify the "new puritanism"? (unless yr point is that the "new" puritanism is completely the opposite of the old puritanism)

(sorry to put this on a firbank thread: firbank = cool) (so does garry wills though)

(i'm gunna reread it tonight: i tht there was some really really smart and interesting stuff in it when i looked at it two weeks ago)

off course I read Baron Corvo, sort of Firbank-meets-Huysmans, have to reread it though, i read at in highschool instead of playing football...dear me

Gary Wills' argument (somewhat boiled down):priests commit 'vile crimes' -- in the form of, eg, hearing boys confessing they've masturbated, then helping them do it better out in the woods -- and don't even feel guilty about it. This is because they are mother-fixated homosexuals who misuse their religious charisma. If only they had wives to put them in their place!

Ronald Firbank's argument (somewhat boiled down): Tra la la, isn't it fun to chase an attractive choirboy around the altar?

Firbank's irresponsibility (like, say, Jean Genet's) seems to me a lot healthier than the bitter hatred of Wills, who uses homosexuality as a stick to beat the Catholic church with. He seems to hate both 'institutions' equally. His article is a jolly good read if you're a prurient fellow who likes to see cybarite hypocrite faggots and men who wear robes getting their comeuppance. I don't think, in that sense, it's fundamentally different than the Wilde trial, although of course pedophilia is a few degrees to the dodgy side of consenting homosexual relations between adults.

similarly "boiled down", yr argument is that rape doesn't exist — ie consent isn't an issue — because women and choirboys are all gagging for it, and if they're not they're repressed and a healthy seeing-to would do them a world of good....

(where's your evidence that he hates homosexuality? i think you're projecting...)

(haha i didn't pick up on firbank = genet: that's possibly the daftest thing you've said on this thread...)

Can I ask you, Mark, if Wills had said the same thing of Jean Genet or Pier Paolo Pasolini or Joe Orton or Kenneth Williams that he says of priests, would you find him just as persuasive?

'Genet / Pasolini / Orton / Williams were mother-fixated men without wives to puncture their pomposity, without children to challenge their authority, in relations carefully structured to make them continuously eminent. They easily became convinced of their superior wisdom, and so committed vile crimes, preying on the young...'

Don't be so pluperfectly daft momus: WHY NOT ACTUALLY READ WILLS'S ARGUMENT (for a change)??!! He specifically devotes several columns to the absence, in this social context, of ANY ADULT (SEXUAL) RELATIONSHIPS WHATEVER for the priests in question; this is the core of his point. (By adult I mean relationships between equals, as much as age...) This is an argument against ENFORCED CELIBACY, combined with what he points out is a very disabling SYMBOLIC mother-obsession (which in fact infantilises and disempowers women) in the version of the religion in question, ensuring that the only society these people have — unless they fight to free themselves — is a reactionary, ignorant, politically firealled homosocial ascendency, of a spectacularly pathological kind. If he put any of those folk in that sentence I would laugh in his face, since none of them can sensibly go in that sentence. The fact that YOU find it so easy to associate and interchange these totally dissimilar groups of people I find much more bizarre. Like I say, projection. Williams/Orton/Genet/Pasolini/Wilde = NOT ABUSIVE RAPISTS!! Wilde/Orton/Williams all had good intelligent adult relationships with women (did Genet?; possibly not, and actually i know zip abt Pasolini biographically — but both were passionate advocates of the notion of ABSOLUTE RELATIONAL EQUALITY, of the necessity and tribulations of being on the same footing as yr lover, for a night or for a lifetime); Wilde and Williams and Orton probably had BETTER and MORE adult friendships with women than with men (except sexually, obviously, for the second two). This is an article about the abuse of power, not about sexuality. Quite rightly he observes that an extremely dysfunctional arrested sexuality emerges from the abusive SOCIAL set up, and — I think persuasively — interprets and explains the nature of that sexuality. Wills's using "wife" as the figure for relational equality is a nice little subversive flip, in the context of a Catholic-Xtian orthodoxy which argues that wifehood is and should be a state of servitude.

Don't be so pluperfectly daft momus: WHY NOT ACTUALLY READ WILLS'S ARGUMENT (for a change)??!! He specifically devotes several columns to the absence, in this social context, of ANY ADULT (SEXUAL) RELATIONSHIPS WHATEVER for the priests in question; this is the core of his point. (By adult I mean relationships between equals, as much as age...) This is an argument against ENFORCED CELIBACY, combined with what he points out is a very disabling SYMBOLIC mother-obsession (which in fact infantilises and disempowers women) in the version of the religion in question, ensuring that the only society these people have — unless they fight to free themselves — is a reactionary, ignorant, politically firealled homosocial ascendency, of a spectacularly pathological kind. If he put any of those folk in that sentence I would laugh in his face, since none of them can sensibly go in that sentence. The fact that YOU find it so easy to associate and interchange these totally dissimilar groups of people I find much more bizarre. Like I say, projection. Williams/Orton/Genet/Pasolini/Wilde = NOT ABUSIVE RAPISTS!! Wilde/Orton/Williams all had good intelligent adult relationships with women (did Genet?; possibly not, and actually i know zip abt Pasolini biographically — but both were passionate advocates of the notion of ABSOLUTE RELATIONAL EQUALITY, of the necessity and tribulations of being on the same footing as yr lover, for a night or for a lifetime); Wilde and Williams and Orton probably had BETTER and MORE adult friendships with women than with men (except sexually, obviously, for the second two). This is an article about the abuse of power, not about sexuality. Quite rightly he observes that an extremely dysfunctional arrested sexuality emerges from the abusive SOCIAL set up, and — I think persuasively — interprets and explains the nature of that sexuality. Wills's using "wife" as the figure for relational equality is a nice little subversive flip, in the context of a Catholic-Xtian orthodoxy which argues that wifehood is and should be a state of servitude.

hah! so important i said it twice (sorry abt that: OPERA is a bit of a hair-trigger beast) (passing moderators may delete if they choose)

What I find really extraordinary in the Wills article is that, like Margaret Thatcher, he really doesn't seem to accept that there is such a thing as homosexuality. Take this para, for instance:

'The special tie of the priest to his mother was part of that infantilizing of the priesthood that has much to answer for in the current scandals—an infantilizing process that was encouraged by the old custom of beginning training for the priesthood as soon as boys could be induced to desire it, with the permission of the parents, which often meant with the encouragement of the mothers. Early applicants were set apart in "minor seminaries" (high school equivalents), where dating girls was blocked. It was a common saying that a woman never lost a son who became a priest.'

Wills is clearly saying that the 'current scandals' (ie men touching up boys) are caused by the special Catholic custom of mothers preparing their sons for the priesthood, infantilizing them, blocking their dates with girls. Well, what dates with girls? If these men are already close to their mothers, if they later go on to grab at little boys' willies, aren't they simply homosexual pedophiles? But this argument doesn't suit Wills, who wants to say that the church is evil because it 'creates' this deviant behaviour by its perverse, anti-family rituals.

It's also rather weird that he thinks mothers 'infantilize' men whereas wives make them morally upright. The only difference, surely, is that a man close to his mother is queer, and a man close to his wife is straight.

Williams/Orton/Genet/Pasolini/Wilde = NOT ABUSIVE RAPISTS

They all committed statutary rape (well, I don't recall if Williams ever took the plunge, but he was certainly there in Tangier with Orton and Halliwell to FUCK BOYS) and were on the wrong side of the law of their times.

And purlease, Wills doesn't mean 'wife' in some airy fairy metaphysical way, he means, simply, wife. He's prescribing heterosexuality and the nuclear family in the same way as those right wing Christians who claim to offer 'cures' for homosexuality. Being close to your mother = you are bad. Being close to your wife = you are good. Implicit: homo = bad, hetero = good.

My problem with the article is the lack of compelexity, as far as I am concenerde there are three kinds of people who join the priest hood
1)Pedophiles who view it as easy acess, and look foreward to protection of mother church
this could be the school boards and the boy scouts
2)People who are asexual or hate sex, and therefore do not view of it as much of a sacrifice to give up desires
this is fairly close to the buddhist view of attachment

3) Sexual People who are not very good at reprerssion and let desire seep into other corners ( the arthur assumed this meant pedophillia- it doesnt,for the 25 % of priests that are gay (according to the us conference of bishops) - it often means self loathing,masterbation or the bathhouses/crusing grounds))(documentation of this include the books Gay New York , and the U of Chicago Press book on the YMCA)
The problems include not giving any credit to the second and third possiblities and assuming anecdotal eveidence is statsiscal, how common are kiddie fucking Fathers ? The other problem is that like most people who write about pedophiles there is not alot of distinction made b/w 4 and 14 or 7 and 17.

I have to go to bed now (with my choirboy, ho ho ho) but this whole thing reminds me of that joke:

A: My mother made me a homosexual.
B: If I give her the wool, will she make me one?

But in Wills' argument it's '...if I give her the Catholic church, will she make me one?'

erm, does my post two (and three) above the margaret thatcher post not answer all the questions you ask in it? (i'm sort of assuming they were simultaneously being written, rather than that you're just completely ignoring what i'm arguing)

i'm saying there's normal homosexuality, which doesn't appear in this article at all (and is a bit of a red herring) and a pathological abusive behaviour produced by the social conditions in this institution (in its vehemently anti-gay/anti-women form)

anthony's complexities are interesting, but again i don't really see that they're relevant: this ISN'T an attack on gay relationships which happen to occur between adults in the catholic heirarchy, or between teens who realise they are gay and deal accordingly, it's a study of why a particular pathology has been occurring at epidemic level => OK maybe his reasons are poor (i don't think they are, though yes they involve somewhat sweeping generalisations in places), but "oh they were born that way and therefore chose to go into the church" is a lot feebler...

Wills is arguing that this issue — despite its all-male manifestation — is NOT about homosexuality but about power; I'm going to stick with my formulation of his use of "wife" (nice old-world translation: "helpmeet") because I want you to argue with the STRONGEST POSSIBLE version of his argument... Yes of course if you're right abt wife his argument is lame and risible, reactionary and uninteresting. Well hurrah for Momus for once more defeating a lame and uninteresting argument. do you never get bored with overthrowing strawmen? Why not pick on someone yr own size for a change? I think Wills *is* yr size, actually (seeing as I've read a lot of him down the years) ­ but if I'm wrong, why are you so against me fashioning a Wills who is really *worth* arguing with? (eg my version of him eg me haha)

The fact is I only brought Wills in as an exemplar of 'today's sexual puritanism', to make a contrast with Firbank's gaiety, which I find, personally, more interesting and would much rather parse in detail.

The contrast between Firbank and Wills is also a contrast between the following schisms (with the order Wills / Firbank):

Ought / Is: Firbank is not a liberal, whereas Wills probably thinks of himself as one. But whereas Wills is stuck in the world of 'what ought to be' (in other words, a prescriptive, planning mindset -- 'we ought to discipline errant priests, reform the church, etc'), Firbank celebrates the world with all its contradictions, its moral non- sequiturs, its tangling of good and evil, crime and virtue. Unlike Wills, Firbank can hold a contradiction in his mind without demanding some resolution.

Showing / Hiding: the 'liberal' Wills wants to get the priests' dirty laundry aired in the world so that the church can be reformed. (His next book is called 'Why I Am A Catholic'. I don't think we can expect 'Why I Am A Homosexual' from him any time soon.) Firbank is a child of the time where everything was hidden, and therefore permitted. Queen Victoria refused to sack her lesbian governesses because 'such things do not happen in England'. The first person to say 'Oh, but they do!' is, of course, striking some sort of blow for liberalism. But usually damaging the cause of libertarianism, because putting this stuff in the public domain usually only leads to persecution and legislation.

Investigative Non-Fiction / Fiction: The first is official discourse, taking for granted a rational, progressive world. 'We really must do something about the priests...' The second merely has to be amusing, interesting, entertaining. Being an entertainer rather than a politician, I obviously favour the latter. I don't really believe in politics and progress, but I do believe in pleasure, perception and the present.

Public Policy / Private Pleasure: We all know that what we (or politicians, for that matter) wish to do personally and what we would advocate doing before a public commission of enquiry are different things.

Puritan / Dandy: Wills is a puritan, Firbank a dandy.

Heterosexual / Homosexual: I think the point about Wills' homophobia is now proven (and Mark's counter-suit about my own 'projected' homophobia ludicrous), but if you need another example of Wills' disgust for it, check this, from the end of the article:

'Shanley defied archdiocesan efforts to make him give up living with a young male roommate ("Do you prefer that I have a female roommate?"). Allowed to go to California with full priestly credentials (he pleaded that poor health made him seek a "support group" there), Shanley duns the archdiocese for more funds, saying he is forced to make beds or act as a security guard in a hotel in order to earn money for his medicine. He does not say that he and a fellow priest are co-owners of the hotel, a gay resort.' Those final words, 'gay resort', are meant to be some sort of clincher for Wills' case. Priests with 'young male roommates'. Priests owning gay resorts! What have things come to? The Catholic church has been 'homosexualised'.

It seens to be, for Wills, unthinkable that homosexuality may be one of the core ingredients of Catholicism, from the homoerotic image of the naked Christ to the 'mother complex' of the Virgin Mary, from Michaelangelo's homosexual visions on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel to the whole institution of the priesthood, with its exclusion of women and its requirement to hear young boys' confessions of masturbation... Perhaps he'll address that in Part Two, coming soon.

part two of this article

wills is not homophobic or hostile to homosexuality in the catholic church; momus has found ABSOLUTELY NO CONVINCING evidence for this, outside of his own incompetent and paranoid reading (read the "clincher" in its context) => i accept the point abt wills wanting to reform the church, since its obsessive corrupt secrecy and denial around the issue of priests raping teenagers is something wills dislikes, for some reason

(CLUE: the catholic church, for those who weren't aware of this, is virulently officially hostile from homosexuality from top to bottom: this is an unspoken given in the first part of wills's argument, which i think allows momus to misinterpret him much more readily... making the "clincher" is evidence of official catholic hypocrisy, wills's basic target... i think wills IS disgusted by this hypocrisy)

i knew this would end in tears: as momus has yet again evaded any of the main points i made above, about abuse of power blah blah, this is my final post on this subject: if wills WERE hostile to homosexuality then momus would of course be quite correct; i just don't believe he is. I don't buy momus's interpretation of this article, which i think derives from not reading it very well first time round, then reading it selectively and prejudicially to furnish arguments againt me thereafter. I was surprised when he first cited it (i hadn't read it for a couple of weeks, but didn't recall sensing any homophobia so called him on it).

It occurs to me that momus is prickly about that "wife" sentence — read it in full, fite fans, as it really doesn't mean quite what momus thinks it means — because (either meaning) it nails HIM (or, come to that, me). Bachelors have a tendency to thinking themselves mighty superior. I don't think this is a bonkers or a reactionary claim. When I reread it last night I burst out laughing.

I liked how Part 2 started out, with a history of moral panics. But then I realised that Wills was summarising the position of Jenkins in order to dismiss it.

Wills' argument is that all the anti-puritans (like Judith Levine, whose 'Harmful to Minors: the perils of protecting children from sex' he's supposed to be reviewing) are being used by a rotten and corrupt Catholic church -- which condemns homosexuality -- to hide pedophile acts on the part of its priests. This doesn't mean he'd accept the liberal arguments if they weren't being used by Catholic conservatives; he clearly wouldn't. He wants everything out in the open, but not so that the whole question of child sexuality might be re-examined (see my point about the Victorian lesbians above -- 'getting things out in the open' and 'revealing hypocrisy' are not always liberal or libertarian strategies). Wills makes it clear that he thinks all child-sex is damaging, and decries the 'fake category' of ephebophiles, people who seduce adolescents, citing approvingly the view that 'abuse of adolescents is especially disorienting because it occurs at a time of challenged identity, uncertain standards, and shadowy guilt'. (By the way, how can a category be 'fake'? Surely all categories are equally arbitrary. There is no such thing as a 'true' or 'real' category.)

But I'm afraid it's still his attitude to homosexuality which troubles me. At the beginning of part one, Wills says 'there have been few reported cases of girls as the object of priestly molestation'. So, these priests molest boys. Okay, they're a type of homosexual, then? But at the end of part two he says 'There is no reason to think that homosexuality of itself, any more than heterosexuality of itself, makes a man a child molester'. So, homosexuals per se do not molest boys. So priests aren't homosexuals?

Of course, this is not really a contradiction. Priests who molest boys are a subset of homosexual, the type which does molest male children. But Wills uses this seeming contradiction ('priests molest boys' yet 'homosexuals are not necessarily child molestors') to say that these priests are not homosexuals. He then has to construct them, in the least plausible part of his argument, as heterosexuals who have been 'infantilized' by their mothers, puffed up by the lack of wives, corrupted by their own sense of infallibility, and so on.

This is a very peculiar position, and the nub of its peculiarity -- and of my problem with Wills' position on homosexuality -- lies in his phrase 'induced to desire', which he uses in a sentence about the noxious influence of mothers on future priests. It's a real tabula rasa argument, and it ties in perfectly with Margaret Thatcher's view of homosexuality: that 'crusading gays' in schools and sex ed clinics are 'inducing children to desire' the gay life.

Priests, then, are not born homosexual or pedophiliac, they are 'infantilized' and 'induced to desire' inappropriate targets. This attitude is very much at odds with the views of people like Judith Levine. (Although he's being paid to review her book, Wills fails to address Judith Levine's points at all. He's far too busy playing his own fiddle, which makes him a rather 'infantilized' book reviewer.) In fact, the kind of people who are against the idea that we are born with a sexual orientation are people like this: right wing Christians who believe that the answer to homosexuality is 'therapy'.

After he's shown the ultra-liberals and the conservatives to be in league with each other, he stakes out the 'middle ground' he sees himself occupying: 'The core of solid belief, the common sense of the faithful, the deep belief in the saving truths of the creed...'

Wills is a relic, one of those proudly unreconstructed old chauvinists who thinks he ought to get a prize for his superseded views (anti-abortion, etc.). Trading on his name and all that... God I can't stand him, but I'm prejudiced because he apparently keeps an office at my alma mater but, mysteriously (like so many academic 'stars'), never deigns to teach anything.

Debates over sexuality remind me somehow of debates over black nationalism because there become instances where admitting something PERFECTLY REASONABLE makes life more difficult, and so people with good intentions cling to stupid things. This was the case with the Apthaker/Genovese debate over slave rebellions (if they didn't happen, then black people would have low self esteem, therefore we MUST ARGUE THEY HAPPENED) and is the case with the whole gay nature/nurture thang.

Which is to say, sexual behavior CAN be in large part socially determined and this doesn't mean that it is right or wrong or whatever or that it cedes ground to anti-gay bigots. Indeed, the r-radical position used to be that it was all about choice (in the 70s) but now that's been marginalized in fear of moral reaction.

Besides, sexual abuse is its own set of power relationships more than sex relationships. Just as rape isn't based on lust.

I really like how, in defending his position, Momus has (inadvertently?) stated that statutory rape is the same thing as "abusive" rape.

Generally, consenting sex = classic.

Consent gets tricky when someone asks for a blowjob with the living authority of the lord almighty, however.

A *perfect* set-up for Dan and he fails to immediately make good on it. My faith is shattered.

The joke is implied, see. That's it.

Uh-huh.

Would someone explain to me where I say that 'rape doesn't exist' (pace Mark) and that there is 'no difference' between statutary and other forms of rape (Dan)?