American Byron: Homosexuality & the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck

Hallock performs a dual service: he resurrects a significant though largely forgotten poet and he paints a fascinating portrait of homosexual life in 19th-century America. Although praised in his lifetime by such luminaries as Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe, Halleck is little known outside of literary circles today. Hallock (a distant relative) argues that one reason for the poet's fall from grace was his homosexuality and the homoerotic themes, however veiled, in his work. Weaving literary biography with cultural history, the author uses Halleck's life and work to give greater depth to well-known aspects of the poet's era (cultural anxieties over intimate male-male relations, urban sexual and bohemian demimondes, repression and coded public communication between homosexuals). Although he sometimes deploys theory as fact (taking as a given, for example, the late John Boswell's assertion that ""same-sex unions"" were accepted and blessed by the Church in the Middle Ages), overall, his account of American attitudes toward sexuality is quite convincing. As for biography, Hallock centers on Halleck's love for a prominent New York doctor, a love that was fictionalized in the first American homosexual novel, Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend. When Hallock quotes the poet's work, he assesses his subject's words less for the purposes of literary analysis than for the bits of cultural and personal information they contain--making this book not merely a personal biography but a biography of place, time and prevailing attitudes. B&w illus. (Apr.)