GLR July-August 2024

his captain, a handsome young man named James Darnley, known as Lord Jim. Darnley had been a midshipman in the Royal Navy, but he was court-martialed due to a serious trans gression—unnamed, but one that’s described as being common among British schoolboys. At schools such as Eton, Darnley complains, his misconduct would have been dealt with more discreetly to avoid public scandal. Now Lord Jim has been placed in complete control of the Black Swan , plotting its course, steering the ship through tides and tempests, and ad ministering the nightly morphine injections that the doctor re quires to stupefy himself to sleep. Unlike Sturgis Bigelow, Peter Alden in the novel decides to marry, albeit reluctantly. When an associate suggests that his daughter might make a good wife for Alden, the doctor contem plates the proposition with no great enthusiasm: “As to actual love, and all that, she’s a fine female, almost as fine and vigorous as a young male; a little passive, a little sad; somewhat like a blond athlete past his prime, and grown a bit fat, soft, slack and sleepy.” The chief reason for the marriage (plot-wise) is to pro duce a son and heir: Oliver Alden, the “last puritan” of the novel’s title. Having provided the required heir, Dr. Alden abandons his family and withdraws to his yacht. He has little to do with his son until Oliver is a high school student, at which time he de cides to pull the young man into his peripatetic life aboard the Black Swan . The relationship closely parallels that of Sturgis Bigelow and Bay Lodge, as Bigelow was unmarried and childless until he virtually adopted Bay during Lodge’s teenage years. George Santayana was a professor of philosophy at Harvard and in this, his only novel, he halts the narrative repeatedly for long philosophical disputations delivered as internal monologues or as authorial asides, analyzing the ethical conundrums pre sented by the twisting plot. Yet throughout the novel, there are also passages of intense homoeroticism that glint like the flashes of sunlight on Tuckernuck’s tidal pools, brilliantly illuminating for just a second, and then gone. Most center on young Oliver Alden. The first evening that Oliver is aboard the Black Swan , anchored off shore, the captain suggests a swim, but Oliver begs off, explaining that he has not brought a bathing suit. “Good Lord,” Jim replies, “you don’t want a bathing suit here. This isn’t one of your damned watering-places with a crowd of old maids parading along the front, and if there’s anyone in the village with a spy-glass, that’s their own affair. Just throw your things any where. The boy will look after them.” Oliver hesitates, embar rassed and yet intrigued, but Jim had undressed in an instant—for to Oliver’s surprise he wore no underclothes—and was vigorously swinging his arms and expanding his chest, evidently in preparation for diving. What a chest, and what arms! While in his clothes he looked like any ordinary young man of medium height, only rather broad shouldered, stripped he resembled, if not a professional strong man, at least a middle-weight prize-fighter in tip-top condi tion, with a deep line down the middle of his chest and back, and every muscle showing under the tight skin. Later, after an evening spent ashore, the two men are re turning to the yacht in a small launch when Oliver presses against his new friend: “At any rate, how assuring to lean here against an honest unpretending comrade and feel the weight and firmness of that friendly body, like a wall of strength. How per

fectly, too, Lord Jim had behaved that evening, looking so par ticularly smart and handsome in his dinner-jacket, with his high complexion and thick hair—such an image of youth and sound ness and simplicity.” Oliver was given his own berth aboard the Black Swan , but after a few days he moves into the captain’s cabin instead. “The sound of Jim moving about or whistling and humming in the bathroom had been pleasant to him, and sometimes the two had long talks in the dark, from bunk to bunk, concerning all the se crets of earth and heaven.” As their friendship deepens, Jim seems to be sending coded messages to Oliver: “‘Odd, isn’t it?’ Jim went on, not receiving any reply. ‘I suppose people aren’t ashamed of doing or feeling anything, no matter what, if only they can do it together. And sometimes two people are enough.’” The two young men separate, but meet up months later at a Harvard-Yale football game. They talk about what the future might hold for them, and Lord Jim suggests that Oliver will never meet a woman and get married—except perhaps out of a sense of obligation or family duty. “‘Of course,’ [Oliver] went on aloud, blushing a little because unaccountably he remem bered the first time he had undressed in Jim’s presence, on the deckof the BlackSwan , and how silly he had been about it, ‘of course I shall get married some day.’” This dance about their sexual attraction to one another con tinues throughout the novel, never resolved. After years apart, they run into each other on an ocean liner sailing from England to New York, and jostle playfully: “It was like a gambol of schoolboys or of puppies: though taller by two or three inches, Oliver felt like a stripling matched against a man’s strength; and something feminine in him found pleasure in prolonging a re sistance which he knew would be overborne.” As to Santayana’s own sexual orientation, to an interviewer he revealed that, looking back on his years as a Harvard stu dent, he felt he was probably “homosexual” at the time, though unaware of it. In the poems he wrote as an undergraduate, it’s clear that he felt strong emotional and physical attraction to some of his fellow students, but it appears that his sexual de velopment was stalled at an immature stage, which he labeled as “wet dreams and the fidgets.” Of the long, perhaps celibate, years that followed, Santayana would say only that without the “golden light of diffused erotic feeling falling upon it, the world I have been condemned to live in most of my life would have been simply deadly.” And perhaps that diffused, golden erotic An 1838 map of Nantucket. That’s Tuckernuck at the far west end.

TheG & LR

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