Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality

by Rachel Hope Cleves

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952), who was a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence, and an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t.

U nspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.

Genres: Biography, History

368 pages, Hardcover

Published December 8, 2020

Reviews

[Sarah Schulman]

An interesting book with a great cast of well-known characters from DH Lawrence to HD, Tristan Tzara, Ronald Firbank and other libertine favorites. Cleves situates intergenerational sex as a class and gender question. Cleves articulates how poor children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were subjected to so much dangerous labor that sexual relationships with wealthy adults were not only preferable to work in dangerous factories- but specifically allowed males to transcend class limitations. This is still true today regardless of age: that males who partner with men have access to class mobility (as men still earn more than women) than men who partner with women' wages and social reach. In this way the author shows how intergenerational sexual relations in situations of great poverty were favored by parents as ways to produce income and in the case of males to achieve education and experience. The author seems clear by implication that poverty played a role in acquiescence and that the existence of class difference has great influence on the question of what we today call "consent." She also shows how the removal of stigma, based on this cultural recognition of homosexual intergenerational sex as a means for uplift-reduced expressions of trauma and abuse. She does not theorize what these relationships would look and feel like without poverty. Her thoughts on how changing age of consent laws elongated and created the concept of "childhood" are fascinating and the fluctuating attitudes of fascism towards same-sex and intergenerational sex as well as prostitution are also intriguing.

[C. B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an impressive piece of scholarship, rich in its empirical scope and linked seamlessly to diverse aspects of the secondary literature surrounding the history of sexuality, queer history, and paedophilia (sociological as well as historical). The subject is difficult, and few would find themselves undisturbed by much of what Cleves discusses. Yet the book makes such a strong case that this history — the Douglas archive — is important, and that it challenges many of our presuppositions about the history of sexuality. I think Cleves succeeds in making this book dialogic, which is exemplified by her openly inquisitive and reflective chapters placed at the end of each section; she approaches the subject with quite a unique mix of personality and academic distance. Whatever one makes of Douglas's life, it is transparent that silence does little to help us to understand.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cleves threads a deft needle between academic callousness and lurid pearl-clutching dealing with the heinousness on display here. Her goal: not to explore the life of Douglas, but to instead understand what about the world and age and circles in which he traveled allowed them to not simply overlook his brazen pederasty, but to often see it as just another symptom of his diabolical charm. All the same, the skeleton key is sitting right there, under discussed: class. It is the factor that explains all of this, both from his acceptance within his literary circles, as well as his bargaining value with the families of the boys that he’s abusing. Eh

[John Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, important and well-researched book. In particular, the author has had access to the travel diaries of 'Pino' Orioli held at the New York Public Library, which recount Douglas' sexual encounters with boys during his and Orioli's walking tours of Italy. Besides his many casual encounters with street boys and boy prostitutes, Douglas also had a series of deeper attachments. One of the most important of his love affairs was with a poor London kid, thirteen-year-old Eric Wolton. Later, he was to have a love affair with a fourteen-year-old French lad, René Mari. But he certainly liked younger boys as well, and his last great love was with an Italian lad, Ettore, who was nine when he and Douglas first met. All these affairs included sex, right from the very start. The evidence that Cleves has assembled makes it abundantly clear that Douglas' boys, on the whole, regarded their relationships with him as having been a positive experience. Far from thinking in terms of 'trauma' as they grew up and came of age, they would look back with wistful nostalgia at the times they spent with Douglas.

This is simply a fact, but the author is very well aware that telling the truth can be a rather risky business in today's cultural climate. As she says at the beginning of the volume, “Writing or saying anything that might be taken as expressing sympathy for a pedophile is a surefire way to incinerate a career.” (p. 2) Throughout the book, the author uses the voices of the children themselves to challenge modern assumptions about child sexuality – but will then herself fall into the contemporary discourse of moral disapproval. So, despite her admirable rule, explained in the Introduction, that she will use the neutral term 'sexual encounter' to describe Douglas' sexual liaisons with boys, she doesn't always stick to this rule. This gives the book a strangely schizophrenic quality. It is as though she imagines her reader as someone who is turning the pages with constant and increasing horror, disgust and outrage, and wants to assure them that she shares their disgust.

Thus on page 5 of the book, she describes the study of the history of adult-child sex as 'distasteful'. She has a right to her view, of course, but I don't find it in the least distasteful. I find it fascinating. After describing Eric Wolton's positive evaluation of his own childhood sexual relationship with Douglas, the author writes “Wolton's story provides uncomfortable evidence that there were boys in the early twentieth century who simply did not view sex with adult men as traumatic, even after they had come of age.” (p. 12) But why “uncomfortable”? At the end of the Introduction the author rather presumptuously asserts that “we” regard behaviour like Douglas' as “a transhistorical moral wrong” (p. 14). The fact that Douglas sought sex with children and youths as an adult is said by the author to cast his earlier romances in a “dark” light. (p. 34) The letters of the Russian teenage girl Anyuta Ponomareva to Douglas, which Mark Holloway thought “charming and affecting” in his biography, are characterised as “disturbing” by Cleves. (p. 45) The strange thing is that after expressing this value judgement, Cleves immediately goes on to undermine it: “[H]istorians should be cautious about imposing their own attitudes on their historical subjects. It's possible that Ponomareva's expressions of affection were sincere as well as utilitarian, and that a girl raised in a culture where contractual relations, like the one she had with Douglas, were typical might have positive feelings for her partner, especially when those relations were sanctioned by her family.” (ibid.) The fact that sex between young people and adults fitted into a cultural norm during Douglas' youth is described by Cleves as an “unpleasant truth”. (p. 86) And yet, as the author herself says, “The Douglas archive is extraordinary because it includes the voices of children who described their encounters with Douglas in terms that challenge protectionist discourse and force a reckoning with the history of children's agentic sexuality.” (p. 87) Later, she writes that: “Judging by what they wrote, many of the children who had sexual encounters with Douglas adored him. They adored him because he was old and a mentor and maybe because they enjoyed the sex. They adored him when they were children, and they continued to adore him after they had grown up, when their relationships had transformed into friendship or kinship.” (pp. 103-4)

This peculiar schizophrenia – on the one hand characterising Douglas' activities as disgusting or disturbing, and then immediately suggesting that perhaps we should after all listen to the children who thought otherwise, runs throughout this entire volume. Expatiating on the subject of Douglas' affair with Amitrano, Cleves writes that “It's easy to be sceptical about Douglas's claim to have fallen in love with Amitrano and the boys who followed. Contemporary sexual morality views love as incompatible with child sex abuse.” (p. 100) But again, why “abuse”? Cleves herself notes that “Amitrano, like many of the boys with whom Douglas grew close, remained a friend for long afterward” (ibid.), a fact that would seem inconsistent with the author's language of moral disapproval.

Eric Wolton certainly believed that “Norman Douglas was the best thing that ever happened to him.” (p. 104) Talking about his trips with Eric in Italy, Douglas said they had more fun than seems possible for the present generation. Cleves then writes: “One would expect Wolton to remember the trips differently, as passages of extended abuse.” (p. 115) Again, the author assumes that we all agree with contemporary sexual hysteria. But, as it happens, “Wolton shared Douglas's perspective. Writing from his hospital bed in Dar es Salaam in 1922, while he was recovering from typhoid, Wolton waxed nostalgic about the good times he and Douglas had once shared. 'Doug, I have wanted Italy and you as bad as anything last week. All the old times flash back in my memory.' … 'How I should love St Agata now, the walks and all the happy times,' Wolton reminisced. When Wolton wrote 'all the happy times,' he meant the sex as well as the sightseeing. He knew that his childhood sexual relationship with Douglas was considered immoral, but he refused to condemn their relationship. 'They were happy times too Doug wer'nt they, I have no evil thoughts about them although I am different today than I was then,' he wrote, several weeks later.” (ibid.) He was “different” in that he was now pursuing sexual relations with the opposite sex. Cleves doesn't quote the whole letter, but it continued, “You were my tin god and even now you are. I do really love you as a great friend and even now I know that if I live to be a million never shall I harbour the same feeling that I have for you... I am afraid that I have expressed myself very badly but I want you to understand Doug that you are more to me than ever you were. The difference is now that I am old enough to realise it.” (From 'Norman Douglas Selected Correspondence vol. 2', ed. by Arthur S. Wensinger and Michael Allen, Neugebauer, 2008) As Cleves explains in her volume, “Wolton's positive adult memories of his childhood sexual relationship with Douglas were not that unusual. Sociologist Bruce Rind has argued from his review of the social science literature that many adult men have positive recollections of unforced boyhood sexual experiences with adults. For example, a 1988 study of Dutch male subjects found 69 percent positive memories for 'willing participants'.” (p. 115) Cleves concludes that “Wolton swore to the end that Douglas had been the most important relationship of his life. One must at least consider taking him at his word.” (p. 116)

When, at the end of the first Part, Cleves comes to write about Douglas' divorce from his wife Elsa, she seems almost relieved to uncover evidence of what she regards as villainy on his part. She thinks he was callous in his determination to gain custody of their sons and to separate them from their mother. But Cleves also has another charge to bring against Douglas. According to Elsa, Douglas treated Archie “in an immoral way”, and Cleves quotes a passage that could be interpreted as an admission by Douglas that Elsa had been right. From this, Cleves concludes that he probably “did molest Archie, as Elsa alleged.” (p. 71) The author here translates Elsa's accusation of “immoral” behaviour to the equally pejorative “molest”, but a more neutral characterisation would be to say that Douglas had maybe been physically intimate with his son in a way of which Elsa disapproved. But so what if he had? Provided he did not cause his son any pain or distress, why should this be a ground for condemnation? Anyone who has researched the matter will know that contemporary norms about acceptable behaviour between parents and children are as historically contingent and mutable as any other social norms, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that Douglas' behaviour was a source of later trauma for his son. As Cleves herself concedes, both of Douglas' sons “venerated their father, for what it's worth. Archie never mentioned any memory of sexual abuse by his father. As an old man, he refused to condemn his father's proclivities.” (p. 73)

As for the divorce, I am inclined to agree with Constantine FitzGibbon that Douglas and Elsa “were two strong characters, and when the marriage soured they nearly smashed each other to pieces.” (p. 69) His behaviour towards Elsa at the time of the breakdown of his marriage seems to indicate that he was consumed with hatred; and this certainly shows him in an unattractive light – as he himself must have realised subsequently, given that at the end of his life he destroyed all evidence of his relationship to Elsa from among his own papers. Overall, though, Cleves' evidence is hardly sufficient to show Douglas to have been a monster.

Cleves claims that she too rejects the notion that Douglas was a “monster”. Douglas was what we might now call a 'sex tourist', but, as Cleves says, “In a context where children performed all sorts of dangerous and backbreaking labour, sex work did not stand out as unreasonable.” (p. 208) We learn that “poor boys competed over access to Douglas and Orioli [Douglas' travelling companion].” (p. 209) This competition could get pretty fierce: “When Salvatore [one of the poor boys whom Douglas and Orioli had picked up] accompanied the men on a hike from Nerano to Termini, a couple of scugnizzi, or street boys, began to follow them down the path. Salvatore stoned the smaller boy, who turned back, but the men had to promise the older boy that they would come back another time before he agreed to stop following.” (ibid.) There is no evidence that, in this very different culture, these boys subsequently suffered any sense of trauma. Anyone who has seen Aurelio Grimadli's 1992 film “La discesa di Aclà a Floristella”, which is set at about the same time as Douglas' travels, will be aware that children of poor families had to do far worse than sex work. I suppose modern sex puritans would prefer the kids to have worked in sulphur mines, or to starve, rather than compromise their 'innocence'.

The author of this work, however, continues to assume that her readers will look on Douglas as a monster. So a tale of Douglas' sexual encounter with a thirteen-year-old named 'Bebé' is described as “disturbing” (p. 210). However, we are told that “Bebé didn't raise any objections. The following day he brought his little brother Manizza to meet the men.” (ibid.) When, years later, Douglas and Orioli would meet some of the boys with whom they had earlier enjoyed sexual encounters, “the men and the boys treated each other as old friends. … The fact that the boys, now grown into men, welcomed return visits from Orioli and Douglas suggests that they did not view their earlier sexual encounters as monstrous.” (pp. 210-211) Nevertheless, when recounting a series of occasions when a boy was coaxed or bribed by Douglas or Orioli into a sexual encounter, the author writes “What degree of coercion Orioli or Douglas exercised in these sexual encounters is impossible to know.” (p. 212) But what reason is there for thinking that any coercion was involved at all? Later, she writes, “As upsetting as the endless litany of sexual encounters in Orioli's diaries may be, they took place within established norms.” (p. 213) I personally do not find these accounts in the least “upsetting”, but I do find it irritating that the author is so presumptuous as to think that she knows how I feel. Cleves never seems to consider the possibility that some of her readers, far from being outraged, might think the southern Italy of Douglas' day a more enlightened and civilised place, in certain respects, than the present.

Douglas' last great love affair was with nine-year-old Ettore. Douglas wrote that “When I found him in Naples he was a mere skeleton, and so pale that he seemed to be transparent, or at least translucent.” (p. 243) Douglas fell in love with Ettore and promised to look after the kid's education. The author repeats quite uncritically some gossip that Ettore was “a scheming delinquent who had gotten his hooks into Douglas and wouldn't let go until he'd shaken the last penny from the deluded old man's pockets.” (p. 244) (Presumably these commentators would have preferred Ettore to do the respectable thing and die of starvation in a gutter.) But she soon returns to the “Douglas-as-monster” narrative: “His [Ettore's] ongoing sexual exploitation by Douglas surely compounded his suffering.” (ibid.) But evidence to support this claim there is none, and photos of the two together (included in this volume) suggest warmth and tenderness rather than suffering. The author then writes that, towards the end of Douglas' life, his son Robin would evince “no sympathy or concern for the boys Douglas molested.” (p. 255) Again, why have we all of a sudden dropped 'sexual encounters' for the pejorative 'molested'?

In the last of the author's 'Reflections' (pp. 281-283), we finally get the answer to why the author cannot escape all this moralism: “Throughout the writing of this book, my fear has been that people will judge me for being too sympathetic.” (p. 281) She admits to being worried by “accusations that I have...been too sympathetic to a man who deserves no sympathy.” (p. 282) It is this terror of being 'cancelled' by the mob, and the consequent genuflections before contemporary moral puritanism, that mar this otherwise fascinating volume.

Despite the foregoing criticisms, Cleves' volume is still very much to be welcomed for the light it shines on Douglas and the epoch in which he lived, and the challenge that this presents to contemporary narratives about child and youth sexuality.

[David Corvine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched. Balanced. In the current climate, quite courageous to take on this subject.

[Dasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality (2020) analyzes the life and social context surrounding English writer Norman Douglas. Douglas's writings, famous for the time, fell into relative obscurity after his death in the mid-twentieth century, potentially because of his want to brag about his sexual relations with children, mostly boys but also girls. Through her analysis, she challenges the post-1970s narrative that labels pedophiles as purely “monsters.” Such labelling pushes these individuals to the edges of society and exculpates ordinary adults from suspicion, which fails to actually protect children and promotes a sexual hierarchy that permits intergenerational exploitation of children (p. 86). Cleves demonstrates how Douglas was a well-liked author and, even people who did not like him, respected his sexual encounters with youth, particularly his pederasty. Yet, by the time of his death in 1952, when such Hellenistic language fell out of use, this grandiose sexual reputation began to turn sour within the western social world. Moreover, Cleves demonstrates that, as today, Douglas maintained his way of life due to his celebrity status and connections. As Cleves notes, this is similar to people such as Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Jackson who intrigue us and use their class status to operate in open secret.

[JamesK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uncle Norman has been overdue for fresh assessment, but given the change in the cultural climate since Mark Holloway's biography of him, this was always going to be difficult. However, after all the to-be-expected passages about walking on broken glass, the author does an outstanding job of it – although asking why his bohemian friends accepted his sexuality is fatuous – they wouldn't be bohemians otherwise! The book has garnered very few reviews, which is a shame, as the intriguing Douglas is deserving of meaty intellectual discourse beyond his fanbase in das Vaterland. The title encapsulates the book, but unfortunately, also works against it.