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Britten’s Century
homosexual pacifist ideals, it puts personal relations above allegiance to institutions; it puts the individual before society; it tends to show institutions such as the law, the military and the church as hypocritical, unjust or simply evil; it favours erotic relations and exposes marriage; the patriarchal family it portrays as shallow and oppressive; justice for the victim and the victimized are passionately argued; and the difficulty of homoerotic relations is presented as a legacy of this society. In much work that has been done on the politics of marginality in recent years, it has been observed that the centre needs the margin to supplement or, in other terms, to act as a symptom of what is lacking in the centre. Thus a certain contained use of the marginal is necessary for the maintenance of the centre. For instance, what if Britten had been forced out of his already transparent closet by some unthinkable event? It is hard to believe that any public exposure of his homosexuality would have harmed his career greatly. When Sir John Gielgud was convicted of importuning in a Chelsea mews in 1953, I remember my mother’s phrase, ‘idols with feet of clay’, as we drove off to Stratford for yet another dose of his Prospero’s vocal elixir. Even Michael Jackson does not seem to have been placed beyond the pale by his fans, and since most humans live with a sense of the complexity of gender and sexuality, it is quite likely that not only pop stars but also artists of all sorts gain from projecting their sexuality as ‘simultaneously provocative and reassuring’, to borrow a phrase from Dave Marsh quoted by Martha Nell Smith in the context of a discussion of the ‘blatant homoeroticisms’ evident in Bruce Springsteen videos. Britten surely understood this, if only intuitively, since the unspoken non-mystery of a sexuality marked by his constant appearance with Peter Pears in every context (a gesture hiding the deeper complication of his sublimated pederasty) was as much part of his image as the constant presentation of his own childhood, of his pacifism and of his regional affiliations. In a recent book, John Champagne discerns the two critical responses to what he calls the Other, or the marginal. One, the liberal humanist response, grants the Other great subjectivity by trying to remake it in the image of the dominant or centre: for instance, this process has been at work in white responses to African-American music, or in the male canon’s tentative acceptance of women composers. The second valorizes or privileges the Other, not by extending great subjectivity to it, but by making a resistant and transgressive use of the very lack at the
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