Deducing what actually seems to have been going on in the mind of the author of the famous review trashing The Lord of the Rings: my latest Tolkien Society blog post.
There are places in Mitchison's autobiographical writings where she seems to imply that she was at least conscious of bi leanings, or maybe just homoromantic feelings: but would not Wilson have dismissed any critical opinions of hers from serious consideration on the grounds of her gender anyway?
But it's a particularly bizarre argument to begin with.
Taking Wilson's inane worldview for purposes of discussion: whatever bi leanings Mitchison may also have had, she was certainly very active in her heterosexuality, which would qualify her for the “rapture and despair … heroisms and excesses” that Wilson thinks heterosexuals have but homosexuals don't.
I should have added that it appears that Wilson doesn't think women count, as he describes (hetero)sex as men's quest to pork women, who are evidently the passive vessels of this. If he'd chosen to chive Mitchison individually the way he chived Auden, I would have gotten into this in the post.
Ursula Le Guin once had a good sarcastic response to somebody's (Freud's?) claim that writers write for fame, money, and the love of women.
I have read a great deal of Wilson over the years (I started in the late seventies, as part of my Alien Minds project, that is, trying to see through the eyes of someone I fundamentally disagree with. Evelyn Waugh was another of my projects.)
I found, at least, Wilson's most passionate work being TO THE FINLAND STATION. He was one of those idealistic communists, at least in his early years. Later, yep, he became more curmudgeonly.
He definitely had problems with women--cf his marriages, and the way he talks about his affairs in his journals. Some of it is pretty stomach turning. His fiction, on the prose level, is controlled but the whole is . . . the only word I can think of is constipated.
I don't want to say that I think he was incapable of passion--it's there in his earlier political writings--but I do think he was one of those incapable of wonder.
As I turned the pages of his 1960s diary, in which the quote about homosexuality appeared, it seemed to me to consist mostly of recountings of a brittle social life among brittle people, not very pleasant-sounding.
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But it's a particularly bizarre argument to begin with.
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Ursula Le Guin once had a good sarcastic response to somebody's (Freud's?) claim that writers write for fame, money, and the love of women.
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I found, at least, Wilson's most passionate work being TO THE FINLAND STATION. He was one of those idealistic communists, at least in his early years. Later, yep, he became more curmudgeonly.
He definitely had problems with women--cf his marriages, and the way he talks about his affairs in his journals. Some of it is pretty stomach turning. His fiction, on the prose level, is controlled but the whole is . . . the only word I can think of is constipated.
I don't want to say that I think he was incapable of passion--it's there in his earlier political writings--but I do think he was one of those incapable of wonder.
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