Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001
Subject: Re: Timothy McVeigh's face

 

Dodie/Kevin:

Apologies for the lengthiness. A pamphlet-in-the-making.

Some quotes about William Ernest Henley, the poet behind Timothy's
valedictory, "Invictus" (correct title: "I. M. R. T. HAMILTON BRUCE (1846
- 1899)," a requiem for a life-long friend of Henley's):

----------------------------------------------------

Tantalizing excerpts, from below:

"LONG LISTS OF UNPRINTABLE SYNONYMS
FOR THE HUMAN ORGANS OF GENERATION"

"THE SWIRL AND SCENT OF APRIL BLOSSOMS, THE BLUE SKY, AND
THE TWO YOUNG MEN IN THE HIRED CAR"

----------------------------------------------------

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, William Ernest Henley: A Study in the
'Counter-Decadence' of the 'Nineties' (Princeton: 1945):

After the end of their friendship, Henley called Stevenson the "Shorter
Cathechist of Vailima," an "artist in morals."

". . . despite its truculency as an aesthetic unit, 'Invictus' attains all
the emotional and intellectual impact of true poetry . . .

. . . an inversion of Victorian defeatism in terms of a personal assent.
It proclaimed the militant optimist . . . an Everlasting Yea . . ."

Robert Louis Stevenson's dedication to Henley's copy of "Virginibus
Puerisque" (Stevenson was a close friend of Henley's [more below, on
innuendos that theirs was a homosexual friendship]):

". . . this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sun-bathing, and
horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues . . ."

Connell, John, W.E. Henley (London, Constable: 1949):

Leslie Stephens' 1875 visit to Henley's sickbed, while in Edinburgh to
lecture on the Alps:

"I had an interesting visit to my poor contributor. He is a miserable
cripple in the Infirmary, who has lost one foot and is likely to lose
another . . . and he has a crippled hand besides. He has been 18 months
laid up here and in that time has taught himself Spanish, Italian and
German, and he writes poems of the Swinburne kind."

PLAYED DOMINOES ON THE COUNTERPANE WITH THEM

Robert Louis Stevenson:

"in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the
other bed; a girl came in to visit the children, and played dominoes on
the counterpane with them . . . the poor fellow sat up in his bed, with
his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been
in a King's palace, or the great King's palace of the blue air. He has
taught himself two languages since he has been lying there."

Connell, on the friendship between Henley and Stevenson:

PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN

". . . quotation is it is usually followed by the observation that 'thus
began one of the greatest literary friendships which history records' . .
. It was a romantic friendship, in the strict sense of that term . . . its
deep emotional facet . . . sides of it which were sordidly practical . .
. its undertones and echoes, its major insistence and its minor
plaintiveness, are a dominant factor in all that either of them, from this
day onward, did or wrote or said or suffered. . . . For between them there
was a strong, bitter, binding love, passing the love of women. . . ."

WHIBLEY TITTUPPED DELICATELY

"Charles Whibley tittupped delicately round the truth about that
friendship when he said that it brought both men something of the warmth
and romance of youth. Boys at boarding schools pass ordinarily through
this phase between fifteen and eighteen.

Neither Henley nor Stevenson had been to boarding school.

Henley's awakening affections . . . Stevenson's brief and transient . . .
no development of romantic affection with boys of his own age . . ."

BOYS . . . HAD PLAYED TOGETHER --- UNDER CUMMY

"Stevenson . . . thought of the men . . . who had been boys with him as
brothers. There was nothing in the least exotic about them; they had
played together --- under Cummy's supervision . . . He loved them dearly;
but romanticize his relation with them he could not."

DELICIOUSLY UNEXPECTED . . . DELICIOUSLY RIGHT

. . . the element of strangeness, of the deliciously unexpected which was
so deliciously right. Each found in the other something of the
long-dreamed of part of himself, . . ."

NARCISSUS

". . . the dim Narcissus evocation . . . In the lives of some he never
turns and steps into reality. Others, looking up from brooding over a
book of poetry, or walking home in the dark after a school match, or
listening to music, are suddenly troubled with recognition and longing.

If it happens at sixteen or seventeen, it passes without losing the
tenuous, fragile quality of a dream. When it happens on the edge of or in
manhood it is much more disturbing or scarring . . . "

DOOMED AND BOUND . . . MEN, NOT BOYS

. . . the presage of inevitability. From that first moment they were
doomed and bound. They were men, not boys; and some part of their natures
made them act and think and feel as boys. . . ."

ALL THE MORE DELECTABLE

"all the more delectable . . . come to them in the time of marbles,
moonshine and pimply necks. . . ."

THEIR LITTLE BOY WAS NOW FULLY A MAN

"Stevenson, delicate mollycoddle . . . bewildered but loving parents that
their little boy was now fully a man. Each, agonized by manhood's
demands . . . could --- in their friendship --- become a boy again."

GLORIOUSLY . . . OUT OF SIGHT OF CUMMY

"Spiritually knickered and jerseyed (and, gloriously enough, out of sight
of Cummy), they would roam and romp and tease and giggle and play pranks .
. . or, halted on the blissful, mist-wrapped summit . . . they could argue
portentously and write each other poems. They could both be utterly
irresponsible."

Henley was the editor who printed Wilde's rebuttals during the Wilde
scandal. Wilde reviewed Henley's poetry, calling it

half-Marsyas, half-Apollo.

Connell:

". . . the tattle of twilit London . . .

That at exactly this time Henley and Whibley were engaged in the
industrious correction of long lists of unprintable synonyms for the human
organs of generation, in order to help Farmer in his Dictionary of
Slang, was a fact of which Wilde was unaware . . .

. . . under the pseudonym 'H,' which was mistaken for a disguise of
Henley's . . ."

Henley was the source for the character Long John Silver in Stevenson's
Treasure Island.

He worked on the research staff building the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

"THE FIXED POLE" & "THE FLICKERING NEEDLE"

"His was the fixed pole to which the flickering needle of Stevenson's
personality was pulled back again and again.

Many years later, . . . after he and Stevenson had quarreled, he made a
sentimental pilgrimage . . . Then it was not spring; and there was no
spring in Henley's heart, but nostalgia. . . . Henley remembered the swirl
and scent of April blossoms, the blue sky, and the two young men in the
hired car."