2. The Uses of Extravagance in the Hollywood Musical Lloyd Whitesell 16
3. Musical Camp: Conrad Salinger and the Performance of Gayness in The Pirate Stephen Pysnik 31
4. The Camp Sincerity of Christmas Carols Ivan Raykoff 49
5. Camping the Sacred: Homosexuality and Religion in the Works of Poulenc and Bernstein Christopher Moore 73
PART TWO FLAMING LIPS AND FLAMING HIPS
6. Watch My Lips: The Limits of Camp in Lip-Syncing Scenes
Freya Jarman 95
7. Camping Out: Queer Communities and Public Sing-Alongs Sam Baltimore 118
8. “The Booty Don’t Lie” and Other Camp Truths in the Performances of Janelle Monáe Francesca T. Royster 137
9. Strauss as the Pervert? Gendered Subjectivity, Ambiguous Meaning Peter Franklin 159
10. Poulenc’s (Sub)urban Camp: L’Embarquement pour Cythère
Philip Purvis 181
11. The Straight Bookends to Camp’s Gay Golden Age: From Gilbert and Sullivan to Roger Vadim and Mel Brooks
Raymond Knapp 200
12. The Dark Side of Camp: Making Sense of Violence against Men in Christina Aguilera’s “Your Body”
Marc Lafrance and Lori Burns 220
Bibliography 241
About the Contributors 253 Index 257
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors wish to thank all of the contributors to this collection for their patience, rigorous approach, and continual enthusiasm throughout its gestation. We would also like to extend our appreciation to the anonymous reviewers who ensured that this book was as good as it could be in its nascent stages. Parker Smathers and Marla Zubel of Wesleyan University Press and Amanda Dupuis of University Press of New England deserve our sincere appreciation also, for fielding our many questions and showing such care as the collection came together. Philip would like to take this opportunity to express a heartfelt thank-you to Christopher for reacting so positively to the initial idea for this volume; Christopher would like to thank Philip in turn for his friendly invitation to collaborate and for making this camp ride such an enjoyable one.
Christopher Moore Ottawa, Canada
Philip Purvis Oxford, UK*
*According to Philip Core, if any place can be camp, Oxford must be a frontrunner thanks to the seriousness with which it takes its “doctrine of flippancy.” See Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (London: Plexus, 1984), 145.
CHRISTOPHER MOORE AND PHILIP PURVIS
Introduction
Ever since the word “camp” sashayed into the lexicon of aesthetic parlance in the early 1960s, music has tended to linger in the wings of discussions about this notoriously hard-to-define and ever-evolving concept. Early advocates of the term, Christopher Isherwood and Susan Sontag both included references to music in their pioneering descriptions of camp without, however, proposing any kind of rationale for what was so camp about it. Isherwood, in a charming fictitious dialogue, has his protagonist pronounce somewhat extravagant generalizations (“Mozart’s definitely camp. Beethoven, on the other hand, isn’t.”; “High camp is the whole emotional basis of the ballet.”) that Sontag would later imitate in her famous—but contested—taxonomy of camp’s aesthetic attributes (Cuban pop singer La Lupe, European yé-yé, the operas of Richard Strauss and Vincenzo Bellini, classical ballets such as Swan Lake, Tin Pan Alley, Pergolesi, much of Mozart, as well as the musicals 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 all inhabit her particular camp universe).1 From the beginning then, certain types of music and musicians have been seen to possess aesthetic qualities that could be profitably understood through the admittedly messy epistemological rubrics that constituted nascent camp discourses. Indeed, one need not listen terribly far to hear combinations of extravagance, excess, frivolity, theatricality, incongruity, artifice, the carnivalesque, and the epicene (all viewed as aesthetic gateways into full-fledged camp) throughout a large swath of music and musical performances. Despite this, theorists working in the fields of literature, film, and fine arts have (as has been habitually the case in the adoption of critical concepts) outpaced writers on music in examining how camp may be employed as a critical tool for understanding a wide range of creative practices and performative styles.2
Of course, “camp” would be somewhat easier to define and use if it were but an aesthetic. Yet both Isherwood and Sontag complicated that picture by rightly
emphasizing that camp is also widely understood to be a “sensibility.” (Isherwood: “You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao-Tze’s Tao.”) The prioritizing of “style over content” and the foregrounding of questions about aesthetic value led Sontag to assert that camp is a mode which is bereft of any political potential.3 This characterization of camp was one that brewed plenty of contention in the lively theoretical debates focusing on the term during the 1970s through the 1990s, and beyond.4 While Pamela Robertson’s Guilty Pleasures, which features an excellent treatment of Madonna, followed in Sontag’s footsteps by positioning frivolity as the raison d’être of a feminist camp, much post-Sontag scholarship has sought to affirm the profound political work that camp could achieve.5 In particular, by reclaiming camp as a specifically gay sensibility, gay activists and early gay studies advocates fought against the appropriation of camp by mainstream, pop-oriented, “straight” artists and media. Reacting to the “outing” of camp by Sontag, they argued for camp’s indebtedness to “genuine homosexual culture” and the social strategies that defined this culture in the age of the closet (including particular forms of humor and the theatricality of passing for straight, among others).6 As such, both as a response to Sontag’s essay and as a result of evolving social forces, camp became an important issue within gay identity politics while also emerging as a widespread aesthetic feature and critical catchall in relation to film, television, and other forms of popular mainstream media including pop, rock, and the music video.7
One important result of the conceptual rifts in the history of writing about camp is that a broad consensus about its cultural definition still remains elusive. Aware of these historical and discursive differences, we contend that camp is best identified, analyzed, and understood when placed in relationship to specific musical practices, historical contexts, and performance traditions. Avoiding any monolithic (and thus profoundly unwieldy) definition of camp, this collection of essays takes for granted the contested nature of the term, the unpredictability of camp’s reception and its political appropriations, as well as camp’s at times uneasy aesthetic relationship with associated concepts such as queer, kitsch, the closet, and so on. We recognize that camp may vary depending on the communities that use it and speak about it; it is a dynamic concept, the discursive and performative nature of which is equally subject to the particularities of time, place, culture, genre, and so forth, from which it emerged as well as from which it is observed. For this reason, we have avoided giving the reader a detailed overview of the theoretical literature on camp. In any case, an excellent account is provided in Fabio Cleto’s Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject 8 What this
x Introduction
collection provides, instead, is a series of case studies that each make use of the theoretical landscape in their own way to celebrate how camp, in its multivalent forms, can provide a useful springboard for discussion of a variety of different types of music and musical traditions.
Scholarship on the relationship between music and camp has reflected these developments and has juggled the entwined pull of its aesthetic allure and political agendas. While not always consistently or thoroughly thematicized, references to camp’s relationship to music figured in texts that became landmarks in the writing on gender and sexuality which became associated with the emergence of the “new” musicology during the 1990s.9 Whereas these writings focused primarily on the Western classical tradition, their highlighting of gay, lesbian, and more broadly, “queer” responses to music encouraged others to examine camp in a more focused manner, especially within the field of popular music studies where camp’s relationship to vocality, androgyny, and performativity have been central.10 While these studies primarily engaged with camp’s relationship to self-presentation and musical style, Steven Cohan’s 2005 study of the musicals produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has persuasively argued for the centrality of camp to the genre, not only as a vector of style but also as a “sensibility” that animated the largely gay workforce of artists and craftspeople that created these works.11 Similar considerations have informed recent work on classical musicians (especially French composer Francis Poulenc) in which camp has been used as a theoretical tool to reveal the ways in which heterosexual expectations regarding musical styles have been subverted, problematized, or queered by gay composers.12
Located at the intersections of traditional musicology, queer theory, popular music studies, theater studies, film studies, and anthropology, this volume provides unprecedented insight into camp’s presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including those associated with high-art traditions (opera, instrumental music), the Broadway musical (both on-screen and off), rock, pop, as well as other popular musical manifestations such as the sing-along and the Christmas carol.
Part I, “The Saccharine and the Sacred,” proposes studies that are concerned with extravagance, excess, and religion either in combination or separately. Mitchell Morris’s opening chapter casts the spotlight on Canadian actress and singer Beatrice Lillie (1894–1989) and her gloriously outrageous performance of “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden,” filmed for a 1952 screening of the Ed Sullivan Show. Following a discussion of Lillie’s performative idiosyncra-
Introduction xi
sies, his essay segues into a meditation on the tropes of the maternal and the diva, and provides an assessment of Lillie’s camp that extends beyond a description of her trademark use of parody and double-entendre to engage with questions of child psychology and cultural communities. Lloyd Whitesell, in a similarly probing manner, addresses what he views as the oversubscription of camp intentions in relationship to the musical. Developing outward from a critical reading of Cohan, he considers examples of stylistic excess and their relationship to irony in excerpts drawn from Hollywood musicals, ultimately arguing for the importance of creative postures other than camp—especially aestheticism—as alternative tropes for probing queer intentionality in the genre. Continuing the focus on “spectacular numbers,” this time from the pen of the arranger Conrad Salinger (1901–1962), a member of Arthur Freed’s famed “Freed Fairies” production unit at MGM , Stephen Pysnik investigates camp traces in the music for The Pirate (1948). By assessing Salinger’s use of excess and incongruity, Pysnik suggests that Salinger’s flamboyant arrangements significantly contribute to the musical’s arch-camp appeal. In a move to the sacred, but without abandoning the saccharine, Ivan Raykoff examines how familiar Christmas carols chart a fine line between the hallowed and the hackneyed. Examining performances of “Adeste Fideles,” Raykoff establishes the key role of sincerity as a characteristic of camp aesthetics. The final chapter of this section proposes that the rituals and roles of the Catholic Church, as a result of their socially accepted “normality,” provided particularly powerful refuge for homosexual men, whose attachment to Catholicism sometimes prompted the creation of works best viewed through the lens of “clerical camp.” Here, Christopher Moore draws upon such works as Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) and Leonard Bernstein’s MASS (1972) to argue that the sensuous, hedonistic, and homosocial routines of the Church were particularly open to queer appropriation, while at the same time offering a normative social and cultural identity in which camp sensibilities could flourish.
Part II explores the relationship between musical camp and the corporeal: namely, “Flaming Lips and Flaming Hips.” Freya Jarman opens this section by exploring what it is about openly deployed lip-syncing—what, indeed, it is about the explicit disruption of voice from body—that makes it such a powerfully camp device. This in turn opens up the question of how camp—so commonly assumed to be allied with frivolity in performance—can access such a variety of affective agendas, and what such instances might reveal about the politics of camp. A fascination with singing lips also informs Sam Baltimore’s chapter examining the participatory act of the sing-along. From bar nights to
xii Introduction
exercise classes to the Hollywood Bowl, musical comedy songs provide those queers who sing along with material for camp participation, appropriation, and reinterpretation. Bringing Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque into dialogue with various theories of camp in queer culture from Richard Dyer, David Román, and D. A. Miller, Baltimore analyzes the sing-along as a site for the public airing of once-private camp sensibilities, a celebration of marginality, deviation, and atemporal spectacle. In the final essay of this section, Francesca T. Royster, brings the gaze down from the lips to the “booty” as she argues that for recent African-American alt-diva Janelle Monáe, the extravagance, artifice, and outsized theatricality of camp becomes a tool for political critique and social engagement, even while negotiating conventions of sincerity and transparency encoded in much commercial soul and R&B performance by African-American women. Moreover, rather than being the object of the camp gaze and ear, as has been true for African-American female performers in some corners of white gay male culture, Royster proposes that Monáe commandeers past objectifications of the black female body (especially the “booty” and the voice) through her constructed personae of android, diva, and freak.
Peter Franklin opens part III, which considers “Gender and Genitals,” by providing a reading of Richard Strauss’s 1914 ballet Josephlegende (composed to a sexually provocative scenario devised by Count Harry Kessler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal) as a significant extension of his ambivalent “decadence” in Salome. Franklin views Strauss’s Josephlegende, if not itself a straightforward example of “camp,” at least as one that seems designed to facilitate or even inspire camp responses. Philip Purvis’s essay is also concerned with the erotic. Through a reading of Poulenc’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère (1951) for two pianos, Purvis shows how Poulenc constructs a heterosexual creative alibi around the work to hide its homosexual campery. By placing topical musical analyses alongside Poulenc’s own writings on the work and situating these in their historical context, Purvis strips away the alibi to reveal a musical camp which ultimately shows that “outright obscenity” can set itself to music. In a move from homosexual to ostensibly heterosexual, Raymond Knapp maps the terrain of the straight male “bookends” to camp’s gay golden age, considering the early Gilbert and Sullivan operettas alongside key films by Roger Vadim and Mel Brooks that appropriated camp as a presentational mode and enforced a straight perspective through deploying homophobic humor allied with coded musical expression. Ultimately, he finds that in the early years of mainstreamed camp in the wake of Sontag’s “Notes,” strategies of positioning resulted in a tendency toward homophobic
Introduction xiii
Derived from the French verb se camper, camp has always involved striking a pose, an impulse toward the theatrical, and a manifestation of doubleness (of character, of identity, of emotion, of intent, of interpretation, of meaning). All of these chapters grapple in their own way with this double-sided (if not exactly two-faced) technique of camp and seek to place music as a key component of its wide-ranging expressive, political, and social purposes. Examining both pre- and post-Sontag repertories, we hope that this volume will not only go some way toward securing a firm scholarly foundation for the study of music and camp, but also that it will serve to highlight camp’s continuing relevance as a critical tool for the examination of diverse musical practices. Offering alternative modes of hearing and understanding, camp permits the questioning of established narratives, the foregrounding of alternate canons, and as Wayne Koestenbaum has written, provides “a private airlift of lost cultural matter, fragments held hostage by everyone else’s indifference.”13 For an art form such as music, which is so easily appropriated, recycled, and recast as a result of its semantic amorphousness, camp permits another technical strategy (one particularly attentive to the body, sexuality, and gender) to highlight and propose music’s possible meanings. As Isherwood’s protagonist claimed in The World in the Evening, “I never can understand how critics manage to do without it.”14 We hope in turn that this volume will entice others to add a little bit of camp to their music, and a little bit of music to their camp.
NOTES
1. See Christopher Isherwood, “From The World in the Evening,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 51. Isherwood’s book was first published in 1954 by Methuen in London and Random House in New York. For the sake of uniformity, subsequent citations will refer to the reprint in Cleto’s Reader. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 275–92. Sontag’s essay was first published in Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (Fall 1964), 515–30. For ease of reference, citations to this book refer to the corrected 1966 edition. Sontag’s essay has been republished numerous times; see also Camp, ed. Cleto, 53–65.
xiv Introduction humor and a strong predilection toward using music as a signifier of gay “excess.” In an instance of a very different type of humor, Marc Lafrance and Lori Burns examine how Christina Aguilera’s “Your Body” depicts female-perpetrated violence against men as fun, even camp. Through “Your Body,” Lafrance and Burns consider the manner in which camp can also provide an aestheticizing cover for behavior normally condemned.
2. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 310–13; Christopher Nealon, “Camp Messianism; or, The Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004), 579–602; Matthew Tinkcom’s Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
3. Sontag, “Notes,” 275–76.
4. Sontag, “Notes,” 275; Isherwood, “From The World in the Evening,” ed. Cleto, 52.
5. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). For more on the politics of camp, see Moe Meyer, “Introduction,” The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 9.
6. Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971), 141.
7. On gay camp and pop camp / rock, see Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 54–77. For an example of the use of camp in film scholarship, see Jack Babuscio, “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility),” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 117–35. Again, in the interests of uniformity, subsequent citations to this particular article will refer to the expanded and revised version published in Cleto’s Reader rather than the original, which was first published in Gays and Film, ed. Richard Dyer (London: British Film Institute, 1977).
8. Fabio Cleto, “Introduction,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 1–43.
9. See especially Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994); Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Penguin, 1993).
10. Kay Dickinson “‘Believe’? Vocoders, Digitalised Female Identity and Camp,” Popular Music 20, no. 3 (2001): 333–47; Freya Jarman “Notes on a Musical Camp,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek Scott (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 189–204; Doris Leibetseder, “Camp: Queer Revolt in Style,” in Queer Tracks: Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 59–81.
11. Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
12. Keith E. Clifton, “Mots cachés: Autobiography in Cocteau’s and Poulenc’s La Voix humaine,” Canadian University Music Review 22 (2001): 68–85; Christopher Moore, “Camp in Francis Poulenc’s Early Ballets,” Musical Quarterly 95, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2012): 299–342; Philip Purvis, “The ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de
Introduction xv
Tirésias,” in Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History and New Musicology, ed. Philip Purvis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 236–55. Outside Poulenc scholarship, see Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
13. Koestenbaum, Queen’s Throat, 85.
14. Isherwood, “From The World in the Evening,” in Camp, ed. Cleto, 52.
xvi Introduction
PART ONE
The Saccharine and the Sacred
MITCHELL MORRIS
1. On Fairies (and Mothers)
Beatrice Lillie Sings
On February 3, 1952, the popular television host Ed Sullivan presented a special episode of his weekly CBS variety show Toast of the Town (The Ed Sullivan Show).
Entitled “The Beatrice Lillie Story” (season 5, episode 22), the program that night was an hour’s homage to the Canadian-born actress and singer, proclaimed by Sullivan to be “the number one comedienne of international stage.” In its structure the show was straightforward enough: a rose-tinted, flashback-filled biography followed by a series of Lillie’s most famous comedy sketches and interspersed with tributes from other luminaries of stage and screen. The ambiance was altogether laudatory. But Miss Lillie’s culminating number was her signature tune, “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.”
A clip of this performance is available online;1 most commonly, it includes a fascinating short conversation between Sullivan and Lillie, before the song commences. On its surface, the song’s occasion was plain enough—there was no way the show could exclude her greatest hit. But on this broadcast the song was recontextualized as a sweet piece of family memorabilia: Sullivan rehearsed the tale of a (Northern) Irish father, a mother who sang, a sister who composed. He then turned to Lillie’s recollections of childhood. The wording is quite sly:
Sullivan : When she was a little girl in Canada, in Toronto, she used to hear her mother do these operatic arias. And there was one that Bea, as a youngster, imitated. And I was wondering if I could get you to sing that for them tonight.
Lillie : Oh yes, our old friend “Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden.” My mother really did sing this! Also Galli-Curci, and Flagstad, and myself.2
There are equivocations here worth exploring later, but on initial experience they tend to be swamped by the actual performance. Lillie, in her characteristic cloche hat and pearls, swoops about with an ostrich fan, mannered gestures, and melodramatic reactions underlining unbearable lyrics and vocal gyrations. (Miss Lillie’s singing is an exaggerated version of operetta voice, comic singer division—much tamer than her performances on record.) The song itself is an astonishing artifact: a peculiar piece of seeming Edwardiana in which grownup fantasies of what a hyperdreamy child might imagine are filtered through impossibly precious language to near-hallucinatory effect, and then encased in a sugary setting.
For all its extraordinary qualities, Lillie’s performance of “Fairies” meets with a somewhat subdued reaction in this broadcast. The audience takes a while to begin laughing, and when they do, their reactions are distinctively patterned. Of the twelve moments of laughter during the song, only three can be related to details of the song or its vocal performance; everything else arises from Lillie’s visual performance—mugging and gesturing. Perhaps the audience was at first stunned into reverence by Sullivan’s high-minded-to-the-point-of-rigor-mortis manner and the invocation of “arias”? More likely, their ability to read the humor in Lillie’s send-up failed thanks to the shifts of conventions of the previous several decades.
The problems of an aging star . . . Lillie had been famous for years—her West End debut had been in 1914, and she had been celebrated by critics and other journalists in London and New York since the early 1920s. The transatlantic milieu in which Lillie shone was, moreover, vibrantly present in the Condé Nast periodicals such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the New Yorker—all hugely significant in the construction of that congeries of fashion, louche upper-classness, entertainment, and avant-garderie that became known in the 1920s as “café society.”3 As this flamboyant social world metamorphosed into post–World War II celebrity culture, its representative denizens became the tutelary deities of the newer performance styles, particularly those associated with television.
This meant that many famous characters of the 1920s had to clean up their acts in every sense. A peculiar kind of closet could develop around a figure such as Tallulah Bankhead, for instance. Notorious in her youth, the topic of many stories ceaselessly circulated in oral tradition (“Hello, I’m Tallulah. I’m bisexual. What do you do?”), Bankhead increasingly found work as a celebrity emcee and raconteuse, and constructed an elaborately neutralized persona to serve as her, well, televersion. Noël Coward did a similar thing when he created his cabaret
act. Nearly everyone famous from those circles in the 1920s made repeated appearances on television. And their new selves for the new mass audience were all tamer.
It’s no surprise that Sullivan encouraged Lillie to cast her song as a tender parody of her mother, a childlike imitation of high-toned voice culture at the turn of the century; Lillie’s own references to “Galli-Curci, Flagstad, and myself,” while a sharp jab at singerly narcissism, also signal this historical continuity (it’s worth remembering that aging divas were included in this grand televisual recycling as well). Lillie’s song, in 1952, is all good nostalgic fun, then, a simple jest about antediluvian sopranos and their musical worlds. And underwriting this image is Sullivan’s own signature brand of awkward, stodgy seriousness, tone deaf to anything that could be construed as risqué. In fact, the contrast between the stiff propriety of the host and the insouciance of the guest becomes part of the humor. At one point, Sullivan commends Lillie for never ever indulging in off-color humor, nothing “soiled . . . or blue.” Lillie, dominatrix empress of the double entendre, looks askance and drawls, “Wellllll . . .” At least some of the audience laughs.
Under all that beplumed badinage, then, these notorious swells are just plain folks. We see this in “The Beatrice Lillie Story,” presented on Toast of the Town. But the story is not entirely true. And much hangs on its particular inaccuracies.
MYTHING INFORMATION
To begin with the matter of her family—Lillie’s mother (Lucy-Ann) and sister (Muriel) were “distinguished” and “famous” mostly by courtesy. They were both moderately successful musicians, though neither ever became nearly as well known as Beatrice. But in any case, the relationships of all three women around music were highly fraught. Lillie’s “autobiography,” Every Other Inch a Lady (1972) is as anodyne and unrevealing a tale as one might wish from a celebrity bio. In keeping with the revisionary “niceness” apparent on 1950s TV, the elegant license associated with performers such as Lillie is muted when it isn’t explained away or suppressed entirely. But even in this auto-anti-biography, it is not difficult to locate a welter of bad feelings unresolved since childhood. Lucy-Ann comes off as a grandly humorless musician relentless in her quest to achieve fame while preserving her gentility. She also had ferocious, unappeasable ambitions for her daughters, but clearly favored her elder daughter Muriel—the “serious” musician—over Beatrice.
Beatrice Lillie Sings 5
This leads to the next correction in our TV tale. It is highly unlikely that Lillie’s mother sang this song. “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden” comes off as a piece of Victorian (or at most Edwardian) bric-a-brac, but the poem was first published in 1917 by Rose Amy Fyleman (1877–1957) in Punch magazine. The poem, which was wildly popular, was quickly set to music by Liza Lehmann (1862–1918), an English soprano and composer known especially for songs and operetta.
Lehmann, who retired from the stage after her marriage in 1894, nevertheless continued to give occasional concerts of her own songs, and even toured North America—including Toronto—in 1909–1910. But although it is plausible that the Lillies knew Lehmann’s music and might well have attended her concerts, the song was produced too late to have been a childhood memory—by the time of its publication, Beatrice was thirteen and a veteran of the London stage.
Lillie’s careful distortion of the specifics, however, has a point: to focus attention on the song’s parodic relationship to earlier manners of performance as a question of generational rivalry. On one level, it’s a Marx Brothers comedy in a Clytemnestra/Elektra register: Mother’s grand aspirations are framed as pretentious delusions, a quest for ideals that fail in the face of inadequate technique and absent taste, a model of how easily art can be hijacked by self-regard. Daughter looks upon Mother’s grandiose warbling, hears and sees hilarious folly. And now she shows the world. All of this is true, of course. And yet . . .
“Fairies”? The song’s lyrics are also easily explained away. Late Victorian England witnessed something of a fairy craze, culminating in the famous (and famously faked) Cottingley Fairy photographs published in 1920. Although adults—especially Theosophists—took fairies seriously, the majority of fairycentered writing and art was aimed at children. Fyleman’s poem, and Lehmann’s setting of it, fall squarely within this tradition. Certainly the exquisitely cloying qualities of words and music demonstrate this.
But of course “fairy” means something else, too. And the use of “fairy” to refer to effeminate homosexual men was already established in English. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of “fairy” as a code for “inverts” as early as 1895, citing an American psychology journal that places the term among the queer subcultures of New York City. Given the dictionary’s stodgy caution about the language of sexual subcultures, this use of the term was certainly both earlier and more widespread than their record indicates.4 Just as clearly, Lillie was well aware of this potential subtext—all of her most famous routines depended on archly playing on double entendres. And this awareness further contextualizes
one of the striking moments in the TV performance, when, uttering the word “Ka-ween,” she executes the classic pansy limp-wrist gesture.
One member of the audience laughs. One. This is television in the 1950s, after all. Deniability is crucial. If the young Liberace could sashay so outrageously through the decade without fear of reprisal, then less-gaudy performances of sexual dissidence were completely secure. The more unseemly connotations of “fairy” could be disregarded—and Ed Sullivan’s comforting sobriety helped make it so. More help comes from comparing this rendition to Lillie’s classic recording of the song in 1934.
THE FIRST “FAIRIES”
Lillie’s rendition on Toast of the Town differs significantly from the first recording of “Fairies” she released.5 This isn’t much of a surprise—given nearly two decades and a significant shift in medium, musical changes of many kinds would be likely. But some particulars are worth noting.
The spoken introduction of the recording, with its pear-shaped pomp, summons up a characteristic persona. Exaggerated accent (seriously, bællade), pacing, and pitch contour synergistically evoke self-satisfaction, pretense, and a vast sense of dignity barely cloaking the vanity of the singer. The comic role of the grandiose dowager was already an established stage trope in the late nineteenth century, and the singerly persona here is clearly a close cousin. Lillie’s TV introduction was quite different, since it flowed directly from Sullivan’s commentary. Maybe the old stereotype didn’t read as well in the framework of 1950s TV ; maybe, given the show’s retrospective character, all the chit-chat about Mother seemed more narratively useful. In any case Lillie’s change in manner on the screen makes her specific gestures of performance a little more abstract and less tied to a set of meaningful conventions.
It’s worth considering what, exactly, is bad about this performance. For it must be bad—if the record’s introduction promised anything, it was a looming aesthetic failure for our amusement. Technically, Lillie’s performance is perhaps “not great.” Her intonation is relatively secure but her vocal tone is wildly uneven, even allowing for the parlante delivery. All the same, her pitch and timbre are not so dreadful as to bring derision. The fun for adroit listeners comes from the performance’s tastelessness, its inability to restrain itself. All sorts of singer tricks are invoked, and always excessively. And it is by such overexaggeration that we separate sheep and goats. The gratuitous delicacy of the pronunciation,
Beatrice Lillie Sings 7
the occasional added resonant “n,” the unbalanced exclamatories, that ghastly long portamento . . . Our language for describing these vocal intricacies is limited, but the effect of good breeding gone horribly, horribly wrong is captured in nearly every turn of sung and spoken phrase on the recording. It’s often hard to separate parody from earnest failure, of course. Compare this with another “bad” performance in a similar vein, Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, singing “If I Were the King of the Forest” as he dreams of his incipient dignity. Many of the same singer tricks are employed by Lahr, once again to make a stateliness of comic inadequacy. It’s true, in the Lion’s case his incompetence is meant to be endearing—Lillie’s grande dame might be something of a bore. But in each case, their deflation comes from over-the-topping the graces of cultivated performance practice. (And though we cannot compare body language, there are reasons to think that Lahr’s poses and gestures would be perfectly in keeping with Lillie’s 1934 performance as well.)
But the grande dame who is the ostensible persona of the singer is not the only persona on the recording. Lillie’s comic performances were often marked by breaks of character, and there are several of them here: “and beetles—brrrrr!”; “Did you know that they could sit upon a moonbeam—did you?”; “the Ka-weeen”; “now this’ll kill you . . . I hope.” Who is this? Well, it’s Lillie herself, of course. (Unless it’s the actual grande dame persona breaking what she takes to be the character she’s portraying . . . never mind.)
It’s maybe Lillie herself inasmuch as there can ever be a Lillie herself, of course. Breaking character make things explicit. This is a performance of a performance, at the very least; if we take our fictional grande dame to be performing in the character she finds appropriate for the occasion, it’s arguably a performance of a performance of a performance; on the other end, if we remember that Lillie’s own persona as a performer does not coincide with other possible Lillies herself, then it’s maybe a performance of a performance of a performance of a performance . . . you get the point.
The layering of performances and personae accomplishes two important things. First, it ironizes or perspectivizes all the performances entailed in the representational complex: all are partial, no single one can be reliably privileged. The song’s range of meanings sits mostly in the subjunctive mood. Second, the oblique connections and resonances that result from the intertwined attitudes invite audiences into one or another sort of interpretive conspiracy, playing along with Lillie. They stand as instances of multiple coding, and like all such instances, are particularly available and attractive to audiences who experience
one or another sort of representational ban. Like Lillie’s friends the Fairies. And so we come to camp.
ON CAMP AND CONSEQUENCES
The term camp may be taken as a rubric under which an assortment of complex attitudes and responses to art objects and performances are grouped. These nearly always entail one or another form of parody, and questions of failed performance and social error are central. Camp attitudes fundamentally like things and praise them because of their defects rather than in spite of them. By long tradition it was a term circulating among queer circles, but a particular construction of camp was introduced to the mainstream intellectual world by Susan Sontag among others in the 1960s. In his novel The World in the Evening, Christopher Isherwood, perhaps Sontag’s most perceptive source for the term, had presented a notion of camp that distinguished between “low” and “high” forms. The “low,” according to one of the novel’s characters, was apparent in the spectacle of “a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich.” The “high,” however, was about grand display: “You see, true High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”6
Isherwood’s character is right to insist on the seriousness of camp; camp attitudes are often heartrendingly devoted, especially as compared to the smirky appreciations of “kitsch” or “cheese” that sometimes circulate among the wouldbe hip. Camp is not slumming, largely because camp appreciation includes a significant degree of identification. We are inclined to laughter and parodic imitation because the camp thing is so much like us, not because we experience it as other. And this is one reason why, in separating “low” and “high” camp, Isherwood’s character is wholly wrong. The “swishy little boy” is not underlyingly serious, it’s true—his seriousness is apt to be right on the surface. But to get camp about it, who said that seriousness can’t be fun as well? “Oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something pretty,” as Emory says in The Boys in the Band.
A helpful way of conceptualizing the way camp works as a queer interpretive strategy comes from the travails of the Russian intelligentsia. As anyone acquainted with Russian culture under the tsars knows, censorship was a going concern—one that continued throughout the Soviet era, for that matter. To evade
Beatrice Lillie Sings 9
restrictions on political and social commentary, Russian writers constructed discussions in which the content of the discourse was double coded: manifestly a book review focusing on characters and plot, the text was latently an argument about contemporary issues. But it was always deniable—the manifest content shielded the latent from all readers who did not possess the interpretive key.
Related to this is certainly the famous theory of carnival offered by the Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. His speculative account of carnival festivities in the late Middle Ages posited a permanent opposition between “official culture,” the modes and manners of the ruling classes, and a protean “folk culture,” almost always kept suppressed, but allowed space to overturn the established order at certain appointed times. Bakhtin’s view of carnivalesque celebration always emphasized its ambivalence: pregnant hags, fecund tombs, abundant food and waste, the high brought low, the disesteemed elevated. It is not too much to say that for Bakhtin, the complex ties of love and hatred permeated all aspects of the carnival world. And like a good Russian intelligent, his words looked in more than one direction: Bakhtin’s late Middle Ages looked a whole lot like the Stalinist world in which he was actually writing. All his readers needed was the key.
These kinds of systems bring with them several difficulties.7 On the one hand, a secret code means that discussion and representation can occur without undue risk, so long as the code is kept concealed. It’s the kind of alibi familiar to anyone who spent much time hiding nonnormative sexual identities in high school: “He’s not gay, he’s just theatrical . . . musical . . . artistic . . . religious.” Noted gay activist Harry Hay once observed that as a young man in the 1920s, he and his friends used the code word “temperamental.” On the other hand, this very deniability can prove startlingly hard to dislodge should social conditions change. In early 2014, Victor Willis, former front man of the Village People, claimed that “YMCA ” was not meant to be gay. It was, apparently, “universal.” (All due respect to Mr. Willis, you’ve got to be fucking kidding!) The magnificently lurid spectacle of Liberace proved for nearly forty years how durable the closet could be so long as there was some kind of alibi—and no better alibi could exist than the claim “it’s a show.”
In either case, camp as a way of reading multiply coded performances depends on a privileged class of interpreters, a set of insiders who know and share their methods in (semi-)private. And that points to another crucial aspect of camp practices: they create affiliations among people. A community of taste can perhaps be as vital and ongoing a concern as any other community; and it’s perhaps
all the more important since queer folk famously have little in the way of family, religion, and traditional culture to fall back on.
None of this would have been news to Beatrice Lillie. Like many of the performers in her milieu, she was herself susceptible to liaisons with men and women alike (Tallulah Bankhead and Judith Anderson were among her amours). More important, she had a durable association with Noël Coward, appearing in many of his shows and performing a number of his best-known songs. In all her performances Lillie was known for her ability to express the possibly indecorous or even disreputable connotations of the song. “My Mother Told Me So,” “Baby Doesn’t Know,” “I’m a Campfire Girl”—many of her most famous songs specialized in this faux(?) naive manner. As one memorable description had it, her skills included “the arched eyebrow, the curled lip, the fluttering eyelid, the tilted chin, the ability to suggest, even in seemingly innocent material, the possible double entendre.” Indeed: “double hearing” is exactly to the point. And what’s camp about “Fairies” comes from several kinds of doubling.
Lillie’s renditions foreground the actual work of performance when she so carefully sets up her hilarious infelicities. Performances are not ever natural, but they are not usually so obvious about their artifice. Making the work as work so central to the impact of the performance, and arranging things so that the layers of performance might themselves be supplemented, Lillie implicitly offers her audience a chance to get further involved. In a way, Lillie’s song is already a kind of lip-synch; to add a live lip-synch to the recording wouldn’t be much of a stretch. (One major form of camp appreciation entails the making of new parodies; this song nearly throws itself into the parody machine.)
The use of “fairies” as code for effeminate gay men was long current when the song was written, though undoubtedly Fyleman and Lehmann were unaware of this. But Lillie knew, as seen on TV. And in a gay context, the complicated invocation of the grande dame is even campier, a drag staple since the eighteenth century at least.
But one more, rather substantial issue bears importantly on camp and how it often deals with the negotiations between mothers and daughters (or sons). Camp is ambivalent, to be sure. It wishes to love its objects and situations without becoming blind to their flaws. In fact, it seeks out those flaws. (One of the reasons camp likes outmoded styles is because the conventions have worn away to the point that they can no longer seem natural. The seams show badly, and that’s a plus.) Is this jocular diminishment a way to shrink the object’s authority so that it can be more closely approached? If you mock or talk back to your
Beatrice Lillie Sings 11
mother, is it possible your affection for her could grow rather than diminish? What about music, grounded as it is in the maternal sound world that is part of our first experience?
MOTHERS OF INVENTION
What can it mean if by taking a camp position as a performer/experiencer you’re in some sense performing your mother? There’s a world of psychic complication waiting in that scenario. (Not all of them lead to Norman Bates.) Psychoanalysts would assure us that we all perform our parents in multiple ways, but the extreme self-consciousness required to pull off the kind of performance Lillie manages suggests an elaborate kind of engagement. Here is one way to imagine some of the implications.
Of the major psychoanalysts contemporary (temporally and geographically, in fact) with Lillie, Melanie Klein might offer the most helpful ways of thinking about this ambivalence. Klein’s work strongly emphasized studying the earliest, preverbal stages of childhood, and she developed innovative ways of conducting analysis through play. In her model of the mind, there was always frequent movement between psychic poles she referred to as positions: the “paranoidschizoid” and the “depressive.” Rather cheerless terms, maybe, but useful when slightly unpacked.8 By “paranoid-schizoid” Klein sought to emphasize mental characteristics such as “splitting”—sequestering good things from bad, seeing them as all or nothing, making little boxes of the isolated absolute; by “depressive” she aimed to foreground notions of wholeness. In each position, the mind would favor one practice over the other; but the constitution of this matrix would always fluctuate. For Klein, this coming apart and together constituted the basic state of the psyche. And its first object was Mother. (Not just Mother the breast, mouth, hair, voice, and so on, the assorted parts, but also Mother the whole person.)
In any case, Klein’s perspective might suggest that not just the psychic, but also more broadly the cultural images of Mother could as easily take on the stylizations of some paranoid-schizoid position as those of a depressive one.9 That is, the cartoonish good and bad Mommies are in their own ways as verisimilitudinous as those of the whole Mother, in that they evoke a piece of old experience. And if music and para-music are indeed central to our experiences before our words come and change things, it seems particularly likely that a complex wavering of sundering and joining resonant with this psychic life will matter to how we think about singers and their songs.10
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The Stove Takes the Place of an Electric Stove Where There is Only a Gas Supply
A piece of sheet metal, B, is cut to fit the space between the wires, allowing projections at the upper and lower outside edges for bending around the upright twisted wires. The entire stove can be nickelplated if desired. It can be used in the same manner as an
electric stove and for the same purposes where a home is supplied only with gas.—Contributed by E. L. Douthett, Kansas City, Mo.
Castings without Patterns
The sketch shows a method of making small castings that I have used for several years and the castings so produced are strong and very durable, almost equal to the ordinary casting. The idea may be of considerable value to inventors and home mechanics.
A Mold Made in Plaster without a Special Pattern and Run with a Soft Metal
The mold is of plaster of Paris, held in a wood frame or box, and all that is required in the way of a pattern is a plain block or anything that will produce an impression of the general outline of the casting, as shown in the sketch. After the impression is made the mold should be dusted thoroughly with black lead. The journal bearings
are then located, holes drilled in the hardened plaster and wood pins set as shown. These pins must be of hard wood and of a diameter to suit the finished size of the bore. Brass tubing of a suitable size is cut off to the length required and placed on the wood pins. These pieces of tubing will be the brass bushings in the finished castings. Babbitt metal is melted and poured into the mold. Before pouring the metal it is well to be sure that the plaster is thoroughly dry.
The mold is as shown, and the upper side of the metal is at all times exposed to the air. This makes it necessary to have all core prints on the under side, as this side will be the one in view when the casting is finished, and the upper side, as the casting lies in the mold, will be the inside or unexposed side. In case of curved work, reinforcing strips of sheet brass should be placed in the mold and imbedded in the casting, as shown in the sketch by the dotted lines.
A little practice will enable anyone to produce very neat cored castings. and when the brass bushings are fitted to size and faced off, and the casting painted, a piece will be produced that will compare in finish and general usefulness with anything of the nature that could be bought. Do not treat the brass tubes with soldering flux unless necessary, for they should be removable so that they can be replaced when worn.—Contributed by J. B. Murphy, Plainfield, N. J.
A Developing-Paper Printer
Having a rush order for a large quantity of post cards, I was compelled to adopt some way of making the prints quickly. As I was in a place where a printer could not be secured for several weeks, I set about making one, with good results, as shown in the illustrations.
F . 1
F . 3
F . 2
F . 4
Parts for Making the Switch So That It will Operate Automatically as the Cover is Moved
I first secured an ordinary soap box and took it apart, being careful to keep the boards whole, then rebuilt it to make a box with ends measuring 12 in. square, and 14 in. in length. In one end I cut a large hole to admit a 60-watt tungsten globe, then, taking another board, I fitted a knob and hinges to it and used it for a door. The other end of the box was centered and a hole bored large enough to admit an
ordinary socket. Another hole was bored, 4 in. to the right, for another socket. A much heavier material was used for the lid than for the box, being at least ⁷⁄₈ in. thick. A piece of double-strength, clear glass, 8 by 10 in. in size, was procured and set in a hole cut in the cover so that its upper surface would be flush.
The Printer may be Set in the Table Top or Used Separately, as Desired
An ordinary single-pole switch was secured, as shown in Fig. 1, also a small mousetrap, as shown in Fig. 2. The front part of the trap was sawed off so that only the spring was utilized. The base of the trap was then cut out to fit snugly on the base of the switch, into which two corresponding holes were bored for the screws. The next
thing was to secure several clips, which were cut from sheet brass, to operate the switch, and a lever to control the switch, as shown in Fig. 3. The lever is 1 in. wide and 4 in. long, having a slot at the bottom, to slip easily over the lever handle in the switch, and a hole, drilled 1 in. above the slot, to admit a nail to keep the spring from throwing it out of position. The clips for holding the films, or plates, are shown in Fig. 4.
After securing a double socket, of which there are many types, a few yards of lamp cord, a piece of felt, 6 by 8 in. in size, and two
Side View of the Printer, Showing Parts Assembled and the Main Line Connections to the Globes
ordinary lamp sockets, I was ready to assemble the printer The switch was then placed on a board of the same width, the spring of the trap placed on top of it and then fastened with screws. This board was then cut off the length of the inside of the box and fastened in place, with the switch and trap spring on top.
The ruby light A burns all the time, acting as a pilot in placing the negative. When the cover B is lowered, after placing the paper, the felt pad on the under side holding it secure, the projecting arm C comes in contact with the switch lever D and makes the connection to the tungsten light E. After the proper time for the exposure has been given the cover is raised and by this action the tungsten light is automatically shut off, leaving only the red light burning. With a 60watt lamp I secure a print in about 3 seconds, which is fast enough. Of course, by using a larger lamp, the time could be reduced to a second or more, according to the size. The time given was obtained by experience in using ordinary brands of papers.—Contributed by Harry Marcelle, Honolulu, H. I.
Transposing Temperature Readings
The Readings can be Transposed from Fahrenheit to Centigrade or Vice Versa Instantly by the Use of This Scale
It is often necessary for the amateur scientist to transpose a temperature reading from the Fahrenheit to the centigrade scale, or vice versa. This is easily accomplished by means of the diagram without the use of a formula. The centigrade readings are given on the horizontal axis and the Fahrenheit readings on the vertical axis. The temperature readings are the same at minus 40 deg. and from that point on the Fahrenheit readings equal nine-fifths of the centigrade plus 32. This reading is instantly seen by the scale.— Contributed by James F. Boyd, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Protecting Plans in a Shop
The magazines I used in the shop, for making a few things from plans, became so soiled that they were unfit for the library. I now keep them clean by using a covering made of an old picture frame from which the back was removed and a plain glass inserted in its place. This is placed over the magazine or other plans on the bench and keeps them clean, dustless, open and flat.—Contributed by H. J. Blacklidge, San Rafael, Cal.
Homemade Eyebolts
Many times one has use for an eyebolt when there is none at hand. Eyebolts of almost any size can be quickly made of a spring cotter. Simply thread the end, as shown, and use a nut and washer. —Contributed by Chas. G. England, Washington, Pa.
To Keep Tan Shoes from Turning Dark
Tan-shoe polishes seem to rub the dirt into the leather and to darken it in a short time. Tan shoes can be kept clean and well polished without losing their original bright tan color if treated in the following simple manner. Instead of using tan polish on a new pair of shoes, dampen the end of a soft clean cloth, and rub a small portion of the leather at a time with the moist end and then rub briskly with the dry end. In this way tan shoes can be kept clean and nicely polished like new.—Contributed by John V. Voorhis, Ocean Grove, N. J.
A Finger-Trap Trick
It is easy to fool one’s friends with the little joker made to trap a finger. It consists of a piece of paper, about 6 in. wide and 12 in. or more long. To prepare the paper, cut two slots in one end, as shown, and then roll it up to tube form, beginning at the end with the cuts, then fasten the end with glue. The inside diameter should be about ¹⁄₂ inch.
It is Easy to Insert a Finger in the Tube, but to Get It Out is Almost Impossible
When the glue is dry, ask some one to push a finger into either end. This will be easy enough to do, but to remove the finger is a
different matter The end coils tend to pull out and hold the finger If the tube is made of tough paper, it will stand considerable pull.—
Contributed by Abner B. Shaw, N. Dartmouth, Mass.
¶When mercury is spilled it can be picked up with a medicine dropper.
Homemade Roller Skates
Wheels Fitted into the Ends of a Long Board, to Make a Roller Skate
The long wheel base of the roller skate illustrated makes it quite safe and will prevent falls. The construction of these skates is simple, the frame being made of a board, 2 ft. long, 3 in. wide and 1 in. thick. Holes are mortised through the ends to admit the wheels. A small block, cut out on one side to fit the heel of the shoe, is securely fastened centrally, for width, and just in front of the rear wheel on the board. Two leather straps are fastened to one side of each board, to fasten the skate onto the shoe. The wheels can be turned from hard wood, or small metal wheels may be purchased, as desired. The axle for the wheels consists of a bolt run through a hole bored in the edge of the board centrally with the mortise.—Contributed by Walter Veene, San Diego, Cal.
¶The screw collar of a vise should be oiled at least once a month.
How to Make a High Stool
The cast-off handles of four old brooms, three pieces of board, cut as shown, and a few screws will make a substantial high stool. The legs should be placed in the holes, as shown at A, and secured with screws turned through the edge of the board into the legs in the holes. The seat B should be fastened over this and the legs braced
