The two writers come together for a conversation about Crewe’s debut novel The New Life. Set in 1890s London, it tells the story of two men collaborating on a book in defence of “sexual inverts” – or what we now call gay people
does so well is to capture the spirit of progressive, scientifically-based optimism – indeed, utopianism – that was such a strong intellectual current in 19century Britain. Most obviously, the title of the book comes from the name of a group, The Fellowship of the New Life, to which one of your two protagonists, Henry Ellis, belongs, along with his wife Edith: a group dedicated to socialism, moral regeneration and what John Stuart Mill called ‘experiments in living’.
AS: Your main characters are based on actual historical people – John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis – who are in many ways similar to your protagonists. Symonds and Ellis did in fact co-author the first medical textbook on male homosexuality,; Ellis was in fact a member of the Fellowship of the New Life, as was his wife, Edith, an important women’s rights activist and lesbian; and a bookseller was in fact prosecuted for stocking Symonds and Ellis’ book.
It’s revealing that Ellis’s urolagnia made it difficult for posterity to ‘place’ him sexually, the absence of an obvious interest in penetrative intercourse rendering him indeterminate. Revealing too, that at least one biographer reached the conclusion that he must have been gay, though all the evidence points to an interest solely in women.
Just as I’m not a classicist, I’m also not a Whitman expert, or even a great lover of his work. What I was interested in was the way Plato and Whitman served the needs of gay men in the 19th century. If they misread them or read them selectively, that’s all part of the historical, human interest. There is of course an irony in the fact that these men then became inspirations for others further down the chronological chain.
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