Others (certain)
See: Graves, Richard Percival. 'Richard Hughes - a biography'. London. Andre Deutsch, 1995. The book was reviewed thus...
"Like Lewis Carroll he liked little girls and was sad that they grew up." ('Times Educational Supplement', review)
"Graves suggests a Lewis Carroll-like attraction [to little girls]." ('The Independent on Sunday', review)
His paedophilia is well documented in:
Warner, S.T. T.H. White - a Biography. London. Johnathon Cape, 1967.
From a private letter...
"...I have fallen in love with Zed [ten years old]. On Braye Beach with Killie I waved and waved to the aircraft till it was out of sight - my wild geese all gone and me and lonely old Charlie [White's dog] on the sands who had waddled down to the water's edge but couldn't fly. It would be unthinkable to make Zed unhappy with the weight of this impractical, unsuitable love. It would be against his human dignity. Besides, I love him for being happy and innocent, so it would be destroying what I loved. He could not stand the weight of the world against such feelings - not that they are bad in themselves. It is the public opinion which makes them so. In any case, on every score of his happiness, not my safety, the situation is an impossible one. All I can do is behave like a gentleman. It has been my hideous fate to have been born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."
T.H. White.
A novelist ranked with E.M. Forster in his time, but now neglected. His 'Tom' trilogy was reprinted by the Gay Men's Press in the 1980s.
For a frank in-depth account of his paedophilia, see: The Green Avenue - the life and writings of Forrest Reid. Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Others (almost certain)
Walpole was a schoolmaster, witnessed the Russian revolution, and was a best-selling novelist in his time - his special subject being boyhood - he had an entry in the 'Encyclopedia of Homosexuality'. Sadly all his works are now out of print and there doesn't seem to have been a biography in the last forty years.
from 'THE ADVENTURES OF THE IMAGINATIVE CHILD'
"John flung off his clothes and appeared in the doorway quite naked, and, with the most enchanting smile on his face, cried, 'Mr Johnson, can you do this ?' and was suddenly down on his hands, and started walking, feet in air, across my room. Midway he paused, and with a most amazing little chuckle, began to turn somersaults round and round and round. I've always done my best to curb my too-tempting imagination, and I intend in this case simply to tell the truth, but something extraordinary occurred in that room as that little naked figure went tumbling from side to side. It was as though a light flashed through the air, the kind of reflection that a piece of glass, turned in his hand, throws upon the wall. He was not distinguishable as a human body. He was rather a piece of colour transmuting the whole place, as though, had I turned off the electric light, the beam would have passed glittering, now here, now there, objects in the room starting from the shadows as he touched them - strangest and most incommunicable of sensations, bringing me back, it seemed, to something I had once known, promising me some future confirmation of something for which I had always hoped. I sat staring, scarcely venturing to breath, lest the enchantment should break. He stopped; with a kind of jerk he was on his feet in the middle of the floor, an ordinary naked smiling little boy. 'You couldn't do that, I bet, Mr Johnson,' he said..."
Sir Hugh Walpole.
Others -- still being researched:
Some poems by Dowson:
from the poem sequence -- OF A LITTLE GIRL
II.
Was it at even, with the casement thrown
Wide to the summer air, I sat and thought,
Of that ideal which I ever sought,
But fruitlessly -- and was ever so fain to moan --
"Ah weariness of waiting thus alone,
With vanity of living all distraught,
To find upon the earth nor peace nor aught
Lovely or pure, whence all things sweet have gone."
And then one passed the dark'ning road along
And lit it with her childhood, that I felt
Passion and bitterness like snowflakes melt
Before the sun, and into praise and song
From the despair wherein it long had dwelt
My life burst flower-like and my soul grew strong.
IV.
Even as a child whose fingers snatch
An ocean shell and hold it to his ear,
With wondering, awe-struck eyes is hushed to catch
The murmerous music of its coilŠd sphere;
Whispers of wind and wave, soul-stirring songs
Of storm-tossed ships and all the mystery
That to the illimitable sea belongs,
Stream to him from its tiny cavity.
As such a one with reverent awe I hold
Thy tender hand, and in those pure grey eyes,
That sweet child face, those tumbled curls of gold,
And in thy smiles and loving, soft replies
I find the whole of love -- hear full and low
Its mystic ocean's tremulous ebb and flow.
AD DOMNULAM SUAM
Little lady of my heart!
Just a little longer,
Love me: we will pass and part,
Ere this love grow stronger.
I have loved thee, Child! too well,
To do aught but leave thee:
Nay! my lips sould never tell
Any tale, to grieve thee.
Little lady of my heart!
Just a little longer,
I may love thee: we will part,
Ere my love grow stronger.
Soon thou leavest fairy-land;
Darker grow thy tresses:
Soon no more of hand in hand;
Soon no more caresses!
Little lady of my heart!
Just a little longer,
Be a child: then, we will part,
Ere this love grow stronger.
GROWTH
I watched the glory of her childhood change,
Half-sorrowful to find the child I knew,
(Loved long ago in lily-time)
Become a maid, mysterious and strange,
With fair, pure eyes-- dear eyes, but not the eyes I knew
Of old, in the olden time!
Till on my doubting soul the ancient good
Of her dear childhood in the new disguise
Dawned, and I hastened to adore
The glory of her waking maidenhood,
And found the old tenderness within her deepening eyes,
But kinder than before.
Ernest Dowson.
from 'LESBIA BRANDON'
[ Synopsis: In preperation for Eton, Bertie is given a personal tutor, Denham. Denham canes the boy, but Bertie soon begins to court such punishment and gains a state of erotic exhilaration through it. After one such punishement, Bertie swims in the sea... ]
"...he panted and shouted with pleasure among the breakers where he could not stand for two minutes; the blow of a roller that beat him off his feet made him laugh and cry out in ecstacy: he rioted in the roaring water like a young sea-beast, sprang at the throat of the waves that threw him flat, pressed up against their soft fierce bosoms and fought for their sharp embraces; grappled with them as lover with lover, flung himself upon them with limbs that yeilded deliciously, till the scourging of the surf made him red from the shoulders to the knees, and sent him to the shore whipped by the sea into a single blush of the whole skin, breathless and untired."
Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads' was the only book of poetry in Wilfred Owen's kit after his death.
His Diary (London. Garnet, 1993) contain a few references to his love of boys. He also wrote a small number of poems, of which this is one:
A PHOTOGRAPH FROM CARCEMISH
I gaze at you now, my darling, my brother
the pistol asleep in your young groin,
your lips pulled back in a mighty grin.
My little Hittite, after you there can be no other.
In your dark eyes, my darling, my brother,
The world was created from the waters of Chaos;
now black waves of tears
crash upon the beaches of my sleep
and drown my dreams forever.
T. E. Lawrence.
This poem was probably about a boy called Dahoum, who was then around fourteen. Lawrence "was devoted to the boy", according to one biography, and taught him to take photographs.
Evidence:
from: Collins, H.P. John Cowper Powys - old earth man. Barrie and Rockliff. London, 1966.
[One of his great fears was] "...his terror of the police..." [p.12]
"He delighted in children and would not suffer Harry Coombes to visit him without taking the entire family." [p. 190]
"His 'sylpholepsy', his almost de-sensualised lust for slim, girlish, anonymous limbs, really developed during his schooldays. It seems to have been the only 'vice' he really enjoyed, but that enjoyment was later, after he left Cambridge." [p, 19]
[After leaving Cambridge at 21] "on journeying to Brighton with an introduction to Gabbitas & Thring he at once secured a post as a visiting lecturer in literature to a girls' school. He proceeded to several similar lectureships," [...] "Wild, ecstatic dreams of sylph-hood filled his mind, fortunately unsuspected by the directors of the young ladies' schools: though he was to derive little pleasure from these pedagogic contacts." [p. 25] "More satisfying than the fair learners were, in a remote way, the 'hundreds and hundreds of beautiful girls I stared at as they bathed in the sea or as they lay prone for my delight on the beach!." [p.26 - how much would he have seen of 'adult' girls in the late 1890s ?] "It is interesting to conjecture what scope his rhetorical genius had already found in those lectures - were they much more than lessons ? - directed at the daughters of gentlemen in Victorian Brighton and Eastbourne. The pupils can hardly have been responsive to Pater or Remy de Gourmont. Those were not yet the days when 'literary appreciation' is systematically fostered or blighted among children."
[Note: Collins is interestingly evasive on the precise age of these girls or the status of the schools/colleges - suspiciously so. Were Cowper's students 'children', 'girls', 'pupils', or 'young ladies' ?]
"It was in these [early] years that his almost passionate intimacy with the growing boy Llewelyn [his younger brother] began to take an important place in his complex life. The attractive child, so different, so Pagan, was equally devoted to 'Daddy Jack' and with all the fascination of extreme contrast they became, in the elder's words 'like spokes of the same wheel'." [p. 29]
"John Cowper's satyrish passion for 'anonymous ankles' did not leave him when he became a husband and father. Long into the new century he would journey eagerly from Burpham to Littlehampton or Brighton beach, drawn as by an irresistible magnet. What survived in him of the paternal conscience reproached him perpetually for this. There is no doubt that he strove to achieve sexual normality (for which he had a exaggerated admiration) both in marriage and in casual encounters, but he was singularly unsuccessful." [p. 31]
The Novels:
[In his novel 'Jobber Skald'...] John Cowper's persistent weaknesses appear more obtrusively than in his earlier fiction - for example, his perverse love of childishness for its own sake in adults and children," [p.111]
The machinery of the story [of the science-fiction novel 'Porius']... "...is simple enough. It opens by introducing us to a typical late Powysian world centred on Gor and Rhitha, a pair of boy-and-girl lovers now married, full of Cowperian ideas and in fact scarecly distinguishable from the young 'inamorati' of 'The Inmates' and 'The Brazen Head'." [p. 185]
[In his working out in his novels of a super-psychology...] "he was strengthened in this by his unflagging interest in every minute working of every mind and by his tempremantal nearness to the child. He saw men and women with strange, intimate affection as grown up children - " [...] "his relish of the childlike could indeed be indulged to the verge of perversity. He could never assume or accept, as Henry James or Proust would, that men and women are plain adult; in truth in his more intense, creative mood he could not have liked a stark uncompromising adult. But this seeing of adults always as grown-up children, this assumption of a ubiquitous sponteneity and simplicity, is a crucial element in his originality." [p. 209] "In some curious way this almost childlike (and very Powysian) interest in the child element, the socially innocent element in living, lies near the heart of his contribution to imaginative psychology ." [p. 210]
Some poems:
WHITENESS
White roses set in ivory urnsWhite violets wreathed in silver cups;
White marble founts whose moss and ferns,
The shadow of the moon drink up.
Since I have known you and your ways,
Things such as this are my delights.
A whiteness glimmers on my days,
A whiteness hovers o'er my nights.
White dews, white crescent moons, white dawns,
White flickering feet, white-gleaming hands,
White limbs that dream on twilight lawns,
White limbs that dance on shimmering sands.
O child, O maiden-acolyte,
Whose censer breathes such silvery breath,
Pour wine white as the flesh of Christ
Upon the alter of white death!
Then all red things shall fade away--
Red flame, red roses, and red blood,
And we shall voyage night and day
The white sea of the tears of God.
IN THE NIGHT
A cry like a child's cry lost in the rain
Came to me out of the mist.
I rose and answered that cry again,
But it went sobbing over the plain
And died into the mist.
And where it had been came the scent of flowers
Out of a world's distress,
With a moan of gathered thunder-showers
And a gasping loneliness.
And the gods with their faces wet with crying,
The old gods strange and wild,
Swept out upon us across the night,
And -- oh mystery, mystery infinite!
The gods and the weeping child and I
Laughed and kissed in ecstacy!
BLASPHEMY
O fairy form, O flower-like face,
O piteous tender breast,
Why did you come with your childish grace
And trouble my heart's rest ?
The tide, my darling, is bitter and deep
That washes that cruel shore.
The happy lovers are those that sleep
And love not any more.
Calm filmy dreams thro' each tired head
Flow softly, mingle and flow.
The happy lovers are those that are dead,
That died full long ago.
O child, forgive me; I lie, I lie
With an evil blasphemy!
I lie to the clouds in the air above!
I lie to the earth and the sea!
The living, the living must worship love!
The dead, the dead must be.
John Cowper Powys
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