We Two Boys Together Clinging. David Hockney (1961). Its name derives from a poem by Walt Whitman and two lines from it are scribbled to the right. It also references a newspaper clipping detailing a climbing accident – ‘Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night’ which Hockney interpreted as an illusion to his idol, Cliff Richard. (Arts Council Collection)
On the life of David Hockney… A strange thing happened. I mentioned to a friend that I wanted to watch A Bigger Splash — the 1974 documentary about the artist David Hockney, in which his lover of three or four years, Peter Schlesinger, leaves him during filming.
I still hadn’t watched it, and the following day, it was announced that Hockney had died at the age of 88.
The news reminded me of a few years ago when I was given a Hockney print, Two Boys Clinging Together. I made a convincing show of being overwhelmed by it, but the truth was rather different. The print never made it onto the wall; to my eye, it looked like something I might have painted when I was four. His work never entirely won me over.
That said, I have always liked his California pool paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, although nobody has ever bought me one. My favourite is Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), which depicted the 19-year-old Schlesinger climbing from a swimming pool at the Hollywood apartment block where art dealer and gallery owner, Nick Wilder, lived.
I spent a few hours reading about Hockney — a man who, if I am honest, irritated me immensely. His dour Yorkshire monotone seemed at odds with the loud bow ties, red braces and trademark spectacles. He occupied the same corner of my imagination as the writer Alan Bennett; the two could almost have been twins. Yet it is impossible not to admire his courage. He was painting gay love at a time when homosexuality was still effectively illegal in Britain.
America held a particular attraction for him:
“I must admit, I’d begun to be interested in America from a sexual point of view; I’d seen American Physique Pictorial magazines when I first came to London. And they were full of what I thought were very beautiful bodies. I painted Domestic Scene from a photograph in Physique Pictorial, where there’s a boy with a little apron tied around his waist, scrubbing the back of another boy in a rather dingy American room; I thought, ‘That’s what a domestic scene must be like there.’”
But my favourite Hockney quotation comes from David Hockney in Paris, a BBC documentary from 1975:
“Men in white socks are very sexy. White tee-shirts are quite sexy, but not so sexy as socks.”
Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. David Hockney (1966).
Rodney Harvey (1967–1998) was an American actor, dancer, and model celebrated for his appearances in critically acclaimed 1990s films like My Own Private Idaho.
On good looking guys who died young… It is an unhealthy fascination. I have a curious interest in those young guys who left us too soon. I have a list of the unfortunates and will get to them in future posts. But the list is tragically long. There’s something mythic about it. At the height of beauty, talent, or promise, they stop aging while we keep going. They are fixed in our memory and will never change; permanently charged with youth and possibility. Although, there are too many stories where death came about due to self destruction – the doomed poet, the tragic actor and the brilliant addict. I mourn them all and kid myself that if I’d been around them their fate might have been different.
Héraklès Archer – Hercules the Archer . Antoine Bourdelle (1909) .
On a sculptor and a real-life model… I’m not entirely sure I like the sculpture, but I’m fascinated by how it was created. Hercules the Archer (1909), by the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), now exists in several versions, although it was originally commissioned by the financier and philanthropist Gabriel Thomas as a unique work.
Bourdelle modelled the sculpture in clay during the summer of 1909, using his friend Paul Gustave André Doyen-Parigot (1854–1916), a captain in the French Army, as his model. An accomplished sportsman, Doyen-Parigot possessed the physical strength and athleticism required for the pose. The dramatic extension of the body and the intense muscular tension of archery allowed Bourdelle to emphasise the model’s powerful physique.
At Doyen-Parigot’s request for anonymity, however, Bourdelle altered the head, distancing the finished figure from a direct portrait and transforming it into the heroic image of Hercules.
Paul Gustave André Doyen-Parigot modelling for Antoine Bourdelle.
On having childhood regrets… What if I had understood what was happening? What if I had been brave enough to acknowledge it? What might have become of us? Would he still have been my best friend?
Why was I thinking about Darren this week? Perhaps because some questions never quite leave us. When he later discovered that I was gay, he drifted out of my life. We have not spoken since.
On finding a poem about Manly Love… Douglas Malloch (1877–1938) was an American poet, short-story writer and Associate Editor of American Lumberman, a trade paper in Chicago.
Manly Love… Deep in your heart understand the love of a man for a man; He’ll go with you over the trail, the trail that is lonesome and long; His faith will not falter nor fail, nor falter the lilt of his song. He knows both your soul and your sins, and does not too carefully scan,— The Highway to Heaven begins with the love of a man for a man!
– Donald Malloch
The poem is preserved in modern literary history as an early piece of Western gay literature. It is notably featured in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, compiled by Byrne R. S. Fone. It was also collected in historic specialty anthologies such as Men and Boys (edited by Edward Mark Slocum), which curated historical verses exploring Greek love, male friendships, and same-sex devotion across different eras.
He was called Sajjad, and there was something dangerous about him. Rumour had it that he came from Baghdad and had fled to Europe to escape death threats from an armed militia. A man probably in his forties, he sat in the corner of the small bar smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking zammù — a mixture of water and aniseed. He seemed to look at nothing in particular, yet you understood that he heard everything. When he spoke, it sounded almost aggressive, and that frightened most people.
Alfio whispered in our ears: “If that man speaks to you, you must answer politely. Ignore him and he might turn unpleasant.”
And so we pretended that the threat in the corner did not exist.
“Mithli?” the man called Sajjad barked.
We hoped the word was not meant for our ears and ignored him.
“Mithli?” he shouted again, and this time there was no doubt that he was referring to us. His tone was far from friendly.
“Omosessuale? Homosexual?” he growled.
Severin smiled nervously and nodded.
The man called Sajjad looked at us with contempt, and for a moment we expected him to pull out a dagger and slaughter us. Instead, he spat on the floor. Then he slammed his fist against the table, causing his empty glass to topple over and smash on the floor. He jumped to his feet and hurried outside, but as he passed us he grunted a single phrase:
“Abu Nuwas.”
And that was the first time I had ever heard the name.
Afterwards, I wondered whether the man called Sajjad truly hated homosexuals, or whether he had been trying, in some strange way, to show sympathy. Was he imparting knowledge to us? Or was he simply a man of unsound mind?
Later, I discovered who Abu Nuwas was.
Born in Iran to a family of mixed Persian and Arab heritage, Abu Nuwas eventually settled in Baghdad during the late eighth century and became famed for his erotic verse, as well as his love of the debauched and degenerate. He was celebrated as one of the most influential Arabic poets of all time: renowned for his wine and hunting poems, but equally notorious for the profane and provocative imagery he used to subvert the authority of the caliph and mock the excesses of the court.
In one verse he called sodomy the “true jihad”. In another, two young boys fall in love and, instead of praying five times a day, fornicate five times whenever the call to prayer echoes across the city.
In the Muslim world, eroticism was regarded as sinful, while homo-eroticism was considered something beyond the ordinary boundaries of sin. Yet Abu Nuwas wrote without fear of execution or ostracism — and remarkably, that still appears to hold true today.
There is a statue of him in Baghdad, created by the renowned Iraqi sculptor Ismail Fattah Turk. It stands along Abu Nuwas Street on the banks of the Tigris River.
It took a long time for his work to be translated, and not everybody welcomed it. In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture reportedly burned around 6,000 copies of Abu Nuwas’s poetry, condemning it as homoerotic and offensive to Islam.
I have since discovered two verses that are perhaps the best known of his so-called “homoerotic” works, and, in the hands of the translator, are distinctly modern. When I read them, I imagine the man called Sajjad reciting them aloud — perhaps choking on the words and spitting on the floor.
Love in Bloom I die of love for him, perfect in every way, Lost in the strains of wafting music. My eyes are fixed upon his delightful body And I do not wonder at his beauty. His waist is a sapling, his face a moon, And loveliness rolls off his rosy cheek I die of love for you, but keep this secret: The tie that binds us is an unbreakable rope. How much time did your creation take, O angel? So what! All I want is to sing your praises.
In the Bath House In the bath-house, the mysteries hidden by trousers Are revealed to you. All becomes radiantly manifest. Feast your eyes without restraint! You see handsome buttocks, shapely trim torsos, You hear the guys whispering pious formulas to one another (“God is Great!” “Praise be to God!”) Ah, what a palace of pleasure is the bath-house! Even when the towel-bearers come in And spoil the fun a bit.
On leaving Montescaglioso… On from Montescaglioso—which I missed the moment I left on the small bus to Matera. I must return. The hilltop town exists in its own world, seemingly remote from the rest of Italy, yet it was warm and welcoming, and somehow managed to revive me.
It was really a minibus, stopping at every opportunity to pick up local women. For them, the journey to Matera felt like a day out—temporarily freed from household chores and feeding their families. They all seemed to know one another, speaking in rapid Italian, their voices rising and falling as they complained about the small details of their everyday lives. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling a quiet jealousy—that they could afford to live such ordinary, mundane lives.
There was only one other man on the journey, and he kept to himself, absorbed in his music. He looked about eighteen, and I imagined he was on his way to meet a girl in Matera. But then his phone rang, and the conversation turned to something entirely different: La Dolce Vita Orient Express, a new train service set to begin in May.
The route sounded almost romantic. It would begin in Rome, travel to Venice, then head down the Adriatic coast to Bari. From there, passengers would be shuttled to Matera—my destination—with its cave churches and underground water cisterns. Back on the train in Bari, the journey would continue towards Taormina in Sicily—which made my ears prick up—before heading on to Palermo and eventually returning to Rome.
It seemed the young man was being offered a job in Matera, one that would benefit from this new train service. He played it cool—neither accepting nor refusing—but you could tell he understood that opportunities like this don’t come around often.
The bus dropped me at Matera Centrale station, where I discovered that my train to Altamura was actually departing from Matera Sud, about two kilometres away. It required a short connecting train journey to get there. It was only once I was on that train that I learned Matera had once been derided as a symbol of poverty, yet had since reinvented itself as a creative hub—full of boutique hotels, buzzing cafés… and, of course, plenty of tourists.
On travelling to Taormina… It was surreal, but we met like lost friends—two people who shared a past, yet barely knew each other. I spotted Severin, with his blond hair and Germanic good looks, as we waited for the ITA Airways flight from Bari–Karol Wojtyła to Catania. The airport name didn’t sound remotely Italian, and I soon discovered why—it was Polish, named after Pope John Paul II.
Severin was from Bremen and had spent the last few years living in Turin. He, too, had been one of Pietro’s “lost” boys, and after Pietro’s sudden death had found himself with a modest sum of money and nowhere to live. I had been more fortunate, receiving a similar amount but allowed to remain in the Verona apartment, thanks to the generosity of Signora Bruschi. But now my home is back in England.
We hadn’t seen each other since that Christmas when Pietro had taken us out for a meal at a restaurant in Milan. It was there we met Elio, who turned out to be Pietro’s favourite—and who had inherited the bulk of his estate, enough to ensure he would never need to work again.
Severin, now in his late twenties, seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and was delighted to discover that we were both bound for Taormina. He looked thinner than I remembered, and had begun to grow a small goatee—something Pietro would never have approved of. Good on him, I thought. I noticed a bruise on his chin, and he explained he had been caught up in Turin’s May Day demonstrations, when protesters tried to break through a police cordon. I hadn’t expected Severin to have become quite such a rebel.
On the aircraft, we talked about old times, each of us offering a quiet, tentative sympathy to the other. Once, we had been adversaries; now, we were something closer to conspirators. Severin had tried to contact Elio after Pietro’s death, but had been met with a swift rebuff. He had also tried to reach me, but hadn’t known where to find me. The chance meeting at the airport had clearly delighted him.
Severin was heading to Taormina to work as a waiter for the summer season. The money Pietro had left him had run out, and now he survived by drifting from one job to the next.
After arriving in Catania, we caught a train to Messina and got off at Taormina–Naxos. From there, we took the bus up into Taormina, where the heavens promptly opened. Inadequately dressed, we wandered through its charming maze of ancient, narrow cobbled alleyways, and along the bustling, elegant—largely pedestrianised—Corso Umberto. We dodged the hundreds of tourists clutching umbrellas, and after the calm of Montescaglioso, I found the crowds slightly overwhelming. Yet it was the smooth, endless stretch of the Mediterranean that held my gaze—and the uneasy thought that Mount Etna lay somewhere close by, hidden in the rainclouds.
It soon became clear that Severin had nowhere to stay. His plan had been to wander the streets of Taormina in search of something cheap. Until his job began—and with it, the promise of a room—the chances of finding affordable accommodation seemed slim. The town may once have existed in a kind of beautiful poverty, but ever since Victorian writers, poets, and artists had discovered it, its fortunes had changed. And soon, the La Dolce Vita Orient Express would be arriving too.
I was staying at a small hotel on Via Don Giovanni Bosco, its balconies overflowing with flowers, and—true to my nature—I offered Severin a bed until he found his footing. At the very least, it meant I wouldn’t be entirely alone as I tried to settle into a strange town.
On never trusting Mount Etna… Everybody in Taormina wants you to visit Mount Etna. It is one of the highest volcanoes in Europe, and one of the most active in the world. Alfio, who works on reception at my hotel, suggested that Severin and I take a guided tour. But we both look at Etna and feel quietly relieved by the forty-five kilometres between us and its summit. Never trust an active volcano.
From Taormina, a plume of white smoke drifts from the summit, with no immediate sign of eruption. Yet, according to Alfio, Etna has entered a new eruptive phase that began at Christmas. The crater, he says, is emitting lava, ash, and the occasional flow. He tries to reassure us that Etna poses no real threat to Taormina. Apart from the light dusting of ash that sometimes falls when the wind turns, he tells us to follow the advice of the locals—the Sicilian way is not to worry.
He recalls that, as a small child, he once saw flames suddenly shoot up from the crater, only to subside just as quickly. The same thing happened again the following morning.
Alfio doubts we’ll manage to get up at dawn, but suggests taking us to a hill above the ruined amphitheatre to watch the sunrise. Despite getting to bed at two in the morning, and waking with the lingering effects of strong wine, we let ourselves be dragged through the narrow streets.
The sun rose from the southern edge of Italy and caught the white dome of Etna, tinting it a soft, rose-pink. The colour spread quickly down the snow, deepening until the whole summit glowed like a ruby instead of pale white. Night’s shadows slipped off the slopes, giving way to a rich purple that sank into the valleys and over the orange groves, darkening as it went—until the morning light washed across everything, and the mountains returned to their steady, familiar greens and browns.
That was as near to Mount Etna as I cared to be.
On a poem about Taormina… I found a poem about Taormina on All Poetry which was written by someone referred to only as ecekaradag13, and who appears to have a fondness for Italy.
Taormina Above the Ionian Sea, this teatro of pretense where German tourists photograph Greek ruins through the lens of their prosperity, never seeing the Sicilian boys who sweep their marble steps for coins that disappear into foreign pockets. The ancient theater still echoes with tragedies more honest than the comedy performed daily by boutique owners selling “authentic” Sicily to cruise ship pilgrims seeking enlightenment at duty-free prices. Etna smolders in the distance, that honest mountain which at least admits its capacity for destruction, unlike the hoteliers who smile in four languages while their housekeepers scrub other people’s dreams from Egyptian cotton sheets. In the shadow of San Domenico, where Wilde once walked his particular exile, the local boys still gather at sunset, their beauty a currency more reliable than the lira, their bodies maps of an economy the guidebooks never mention. The bougainvillea blooms in violent purple protest against the limestone walls, while below, the working class of Giardini-Naxos send their children up the mountain to serve aperitivos to those who mistake privilege for culture, consumption for communion with the divine. This is paradise built on the backs of the invisible, where even the gods have learned to speak the international language of tourist euros.
To Find a Kiss of Yours: Federico García Lorca (Translation by Sarah Arvio)
To find a kiss of yours what would I give. A kiss that strayed from your lips dead to love. My lips taste the dirt of shadows. To gaze at your dark eyes what would I give. Dawns of rainbow garnet fanning open before God— The stars blinded them one morning in May. And to kiss your pure thighs what would I give. Raw rose crystal sediment of the sun.
Renowned for his vivid imagery and emotional intensity, Lorca’s work often circled longing and desire; here, those themes unfold through a sequence of questions—each one probing what the speaker might sacrifice for intimacy.
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) This year marks the 90th anniversary of Lorca’s death. He was, by all accounts, a striking man: Iberian elegance, cultural poise, a magnetic presence. Thick, dark curls; penetrating eyes; a face alive with expression. Today, Lorca is recognised as one of Spain’s most important poets—his reputation only sharpened by the brutality of his death at just 38.
In the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested in Granada, imprisoned, and within days taken to a roadside outside the city and shot by forces aligned with Francisco Franco. The exact reasons were never formally clarified. The regime’s official statement reduced his execution to a bureaucratic fiction: he had died of “war wounds.”
His body has never been recovered, despite repeated attempts to locate the mass graves into which victims like him were cast. Ian Gibson’s The Assassination of Federico García Lorca remains one of the most thorough investigations into the circumstances of his death, suggesting that his sexuality—at least as much as his politics—made him a target. One member of the execution squad reportedly boasted of firing “two bullets into his ass for being a queer.”
Lorca’s romantic life remains partly obscured, but figures associated with him include sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo, composer Manuel de Falla, and writer Juan Ramírez de Lucas. Whether he shared a romantic relationship with Salvador Dalí is still debated.
Across his work, Lorca returned again and again to the tension between desire and repression. Male longing appears coded, fractured, and often veiled—its intensity heightened precisely because it could not be spoken plainly within the society he inhabited.
Sicilian Youth with Flowers – Wilhelm von Gloeden (1900)
He came in the glow of the noon-tide sun, He came in the dusk when the day was done, He came with the stars; but I saw him not, I saw him not.
But ah, when the sun with his earliest ray Was kissing the tears of the night away, I dreamed of the moisture of warm wet lips Upon my lips.
Then sudden the shades of the night took wing, And I saw that love was a beauteous thing, For I clasped to my breast my curl-crowned king, My sweet boy-king.
John Francis Bloxam writing under his pseudonym of Bertram Lawrence . It appeared in The Chameleon, a one-off literary magazine edited by Bloxam, in December 1894.
Mainly I strive to show by deed and word How great my love for you, how deep and strong; Daily you hear my heart’s one passionate song, And still pass on as though you had not heard; Your slightest smile, your gentlest glance can gird My suppliant life with joy that lingers long, – You touch my hand, and straight a gladsome throng Of hopes are born, and all my soul is stirred.
But ah, you do not understand nor see, And when my looks of my devotion tell You deem it but some pitiful wayward spell; Love comes not my interpreter to be, And in your eyes, because you love not me, My greatest fault is loving you too well!
From Love in Earnest – Sonnets, Ballades and Lyrics by J.G.F. Nicholson (1892)
Ignacio Martínez Moreno, in Uranian Poetry: The Homosocial and Homoerotic Paradox (2020), describes John Gambril (Francis) Nicholson as “a prisoner of his feelings, only able to express them through poetry.” Hopeless Love reveals a form of homoeroticism in which the lightest touch can unleash a flood of feeling—emotions that need not be reciprocated to ignite passion within the poetic voice.
Oh yes, I know this all too well.
I perceive beauty where others see none. I feel a desire that no one else seems able to recognise. He is the pearl concealed within a hard exterior. Through close proximity, a sense of deep familiarity takes hold, awakening attraction and affection that override his less generous qualities.
It is an obsessive infatuation, one in which reciprocation will never arrive—because he refuses, or is simply unable, to see the effect he has on me.
And no matter how hard I try… it is not recognised.
“I give my white-skinned boy a pearl Fair as his body and as strange As still pools veiled in mists that change Their mysteries as they wreathe and curl: — So that his visions ever be Wondrous and subtle as the sea, I give my white-skinned boy a pearl.”
This verse comes from The Seven Gifts by Edmund John, published in the May 1916 edition of The English Review. It was introduced with the following note: “Suggested by the fragment of a letter from an Athenian father to his son, in the time of Pericles, now in the possession of Sydney Oswald, Esqre.”
The note was almost certainly fiction—an artful screen to disguise the real impulse behind the poem. Edmund John liked writing about boys.
One of Britain’s most obscure poets, Edmund John (1883–1917) was never afforded the opportunity to establish a reputation. His premature death at thirty-three ensured that his name would slip quietly into obscurity. Only three volumes of poetry were published: The Flute of Sardonyx (1913), The Wind in the Temple (1915), and the posthumous Symphonie Symbolique (1919). Today, he is largely forgotten, his small but striking body of work almost entirely overlooked.
John was born in Woolwich on 27 November 1883 to a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. He studied science—particularly biology and chemistry—before turning to philosophy. With his brother, he ran a boys’ school in Crouch End, supplementing his income by coaching undergraduates.
Travel appears to have played an important role in his development as a poet. The introduction to Symphonie Symbolique suggests that Cuba left a lasting impression:
“Where the glowing colours of the South, the luxuriance of the tropics, provided his palette with a richness that it did not possess before, and gave to his verse an almost exotic warmth and splendour.”
The Flute of Sardonyx (1913). Reprinted in 1991 (The Old Stile Press) with pencil drawing by Nicholas Wilde
His first book of poetry, The Flute of Sardonyx, gained immediate notoriety upon publication. Critics were, for the most part, receptive—perhaps because many failed to grasp its implications. One who did not was James Douglas, a prominent literary critic, who launched a fierce attack on both Edmund John and Stephen Williams, author of the book’s introduction.
“Williams in the introduction of The Flute of Sardonyx seeks to justify or excuse these poems by citing Milton’s definition of poetry, and he implies that Milton meant by the word ‘sensuous’ not merely the normal, healthy, and wholesome senses of the normal, healthy, and wholesome human being, but also the debased, depraved and degraded sensations of a perverted and abnormal erotomania. I have not the slightest doubt that in a court of law an English jury and an English judge would not hesitate to condemn Mr John as being guilty of a gross offence against elementary propriety. I demand without delay the volume should be withdrawn in deference to what I believe to the inevitable and inexorable verdict of public opinion.”
One poem in particular, Salome, provoked Douglas’s outrage.
“These stanzas, I venture to affirm, are of a vileness hitherto unparalleled in English poetry. Nothing approximating to or of approaching depravity has, as far as I am aware, ever been tolerated in English literature.”
Others were scarcely more forgiving. A. E. Manning Foster, writing in The Bookmarker, observed:
“Salome is an Aubrey Beardsley picture in words, and yet it is not entirely pleasing. Mr John brings into his poem what Oscar Wilde in his play on Salome and Flaubert in his short story never did—an unhealthy, perverted strain.”
Herbert Jenkins, John’s publisher, abruptly withdrew The Flute of the Sardonyx, later reissuing it in a revised edition that was, as one commentator noted, “meeker than the Shakespeare we use at school.”
One of the few surviving biographical sketches of Edmund John appears in George Norman Douglas’s memoir Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion (1933).
“We met through his sending verses to The English Review after the publication of The Flute of Sardonyx, and it often struck me how greatly his person resembled his writings—sensuous and ornate, elaborate in manner, a little over-dressed, too many rings and tiepins, too much thought expended upon the colour of socks. He would have grown out of these incongruities had he lived. Meanwhile he was young and handsome.
“He could drink like a fish and remain perfectly sober. In those days I bought my whisky in kegs, and it was alarming to see how he could put it away. Good company! At such moments he cast off that veil of precocity, though a certain refinement always clung to him; it was part of his nature.”
John’s second volume, The Wind in the Temple, published in 1915, was widely praised.
“The superb loveliness of these stanzas are beyond praise,” wrote the Westminster Gazette. “Seldom has the enhancing beauty of Greek thought so captivated the soul of a poet; seldom has this enchantment been rendered so felicitously in modern verse.” The Evening Standard noted: “Although owing much to Arthur Symons, these poems have a magic all their own, for Mr John knows the value of the leash, the most difficult of all lessons to be learnt.”
Edmund John in military uniform
Around this time, John enlisted in the 28th (London) Battalion, the Artist’s Rifles, to fight in the First World War. Founded in 1859 amid fears of a French invasion, the regiment attracted volunteers from public schools, universities, and the creative professions—painters, musicians, actors, architects.
John’s death in 1917 might easily be assumed to have been a casualty of war. Douglas, however, suggests otherwise.
“In his correspondence he told me that he had been invalided out of the army (in 1916) on account of his heart. He had also married for money, as he frankly confessed. His tastes were luxurious; coaching, and an occasional volume of verse would never make him feel at ease. It looked as if all were going well, yet I did not like the nervous tones of his letters….”
Seeking to recover his health, John travelled to Italy and settled in Taormina.
“It is a site of great distances—its soft colouring—its streets hushed at noonday as by some weird enchantment—its leaning walls in flower—its secluded gardens—its terraces—its lemon and almond groves; its crystal air, crystal and flare at noon, opal and pearl at either edge of the day; its castled crests and crumbling ruins.”
An obituary followed:
“On the 28th February (1917), at Taormina, Sicily, Edmund John, of heart failure, beloved husband of Kate Dalliba John, of Florence, and dearly loved eldest son of Thomas and Margaret John of 20 Cranley Gardens, London, aged thirty-three.”
Douglas corrected the record bluntly:
“I replied to John’s letter on the 19th of February 1917. On the 28th of the same month he killed himself. A miserable ending of which he seemed to have had a presentiment.”
From this point onward, certainty dissolves. The dead do not speak, and what remains is conjecture.
Certainly, John suffered from a debilitating heart condition and bouts of depression. But other forces may have contributed.
“Ah God, it was the Hope gave to me, Within the womb, of things unknown and fair, The Bud that blossomed into this Despair. Art Thou content, O God, with thus Thy work? Art Thou content that Thou hast planned so well? That Thy cold hands have thrust me into Hell?”
The Flute of Sardonyx. Pencil drawing by Nicholas Wilde (1991)
John’s poetry is suffused with Uranian themes—a term coined in the nineteenth century by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, before the invention of the word homosexual.
“His eyes are brothers to the sun and sky, His body’s fragrance haunts the murmuring wood, And all the flowers are singing where he stood, And all the leaves are chanting their reply.”
In The Wind in the Temple, love is repeatedly figured as adolescent beauty.
“His body is like milk edged with rose-colour rare, With vine and lure of hemlock in his red-gold hair, Night-kissed, that burns and gleams; His grave sweet scarlet lips are parted voicelessly, His eyes like stars reflected in a violet sea Of dawn and dreams.”
And elsewhere:
“Harder, press harder with your scarlet mouth; Lie close, limbs woven of the passionate South; Twine nearer, subtle satin limbs of June, Burn your gold scented body into mine, Cling to my lips with yours of Graecian wine, Cling closer till the blood come and life swoon…”
Yes, Edmund John was a Uranian poet, and he harboured pederastic desires. Men and Boys (1924) reproduced part of a letter he wrote to a “young friend”:
“I have received your adorable, illustrated letter this morning and loved it so much I immediately made an altar before it, lit by amber candles in copper candlesticks, burnt incense before it and kissed its extreme beautifulness.”
Did his homosexuality weigh heavily upon him?
That John died in Taormina is suggestive. Long regarded as a “Queer Eden” for artists and intellectuals, the town was famed for its beauty, Greek mystique, and relative tolerance—an atmosphere reinforced by Wilhelm von Gloeden’s homoerotic photographs of local youths. Oscar Wilde and André Gide had passed through; later visitors would include Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, and Roger Peyrefitte.
There is also the unresolved mystery of John’s marriage to Kate Dalliba, reportedly solemnised in Florence.
“Kate Dalliba, of St. John’s Wood. Famous for her Sunday night salon, referred to as The House of Music. Wealthy musicians in evening dress rub shoulders with poor and budding young geniuses in wrinkled light clothes and soiled linen. All here is democracy, art, Bohemianism.”
Born into a wealthy family in Cleveland, Ohio, Dalliba used her fortune to support artists such as Ezra Pound, Ida Rubinstein, Olga Rudge, and Ildebrando Pizzetti. She lived in Florence and maintained her London house as a free lodging and performance space for travelling musicians and artists.
It is entirely possible that John, described by George Norman Douglas as being poor, was drawn to her wealth. He had openly admitted that he married her for money. The rich older woman and the handsome young poet might have passed, outwardly, as a conventional May–December match.
Whether Dalliba later recognised the truth of the arrangement—and whether this recognition had consequences for John—remains unknown. She herself lost most of her fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
What remains is a handful of poems, a scandal, a life cut short, and the faint outline of a gifted, troubled poet whose voice—sensuous, excessive, and dangerous—proved too much for his time.
The Flute of Sardonyx. Pencil drawing by Nicholas Wilde (1991)
Boys will be boys. Different sorts. Different morals. Not fussed really.
I can do nice boys I can do bad boys I can do polite boys I can do charming boys I can do clever boys I can do rough boys I can do tough boys I can do council boys I can do rich boys I can do student boys I can do clean boys I can do dirty boys I can do skinny boys I can do clean-cut boys I can do athletic boys I can do energetic boys I can do adventurous boys I can do sensitive boys I can do confident boys I can do caring boys I can do unconventional boys But I can’t do golden boys
“Bambino carissimo: – Will you come and stay with me in Florence? A revederci carino.”
Players I send thee cigarettes for thy delight. Smoke my belov’d and think awhile of one Who thinks and dreams of thee from sun to sun Longing to have thee, lov’d one, in his sight; To hold to his thy lissom body tight; To press thy lips and, pressing, to surprise Thy soul and his together in thine eyes … If this be wrong, no love on earth is right!
Once, a handsome Sicilian boy, the son of Eros and a nymph, fell deeply in love with the sun, and couldn’t bear to stay another minute where he couldn’t see it. He worshipped it wherever he went, and when it wandered out of sight, especially at night, he couldn’t rest, because that object he loved wasn’t warm upon his tanned breast. For this reason, he never walked, stood, or lay in the shade, the love, in full sway, was boundless, and made his life its prey.
At one time, the sun remained under a cloud for eight days; during this period, the boy, Cylmenon, was very unhappy, and because he could not find his beloved, pined away and died. It was a tragic end for a fine young boy. When the sun shone again it found Cylmenon’s body near a fountain where he had tried to see the sun’s reflection, and so grieved was the sun, that it changed the lad’s body into a golden flower, of the first Marigold.
Study of a Sicilian boy with Passionflowers in his hair, Sicily, c.1899 – Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden
An explanation: Marigolds are known as “herbs of the sun” and represent the sun’s power, warmth, energy, and light. They are often associated with joy, optimism, passion, and creativity. This story is based on an obscure and forgotten poem from 1868 by Peter Spenser. Little is known about him other than that he was the eldest son of the Rev. Peter Spenser, Rector of Temple Ewell, near Dover. He wrote poetry for local newspapers across England and also published the magnificently titled ‘Parvula, or, a Few Little Rhymes: About a Few Little Flowers, a Few Little Birds, and a Few Little Girls, to Which Are Added, a Few Little Songs, and a Few Other Little Things.’(1863)
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 