Gay dogs
Benny Green
The Cleveland Street Scandal H. Mont- gomery Hyde (W. H. Allen £5.95)
A Casebook of Jack the Ripper Richard Whittington-Egan (Wildy and Sons The soft underbelly of Victorian sexual Constraint has been revealed to us more thoroughly than even the most cod-eyed voyeur could desire, and if from the whole business there is any conclusion to be drawn Which is elevated and coherent enough to be described as a lesson, it is only the hoariest of all platitudes—that nothing much chan- ges. Psychopathic intent and sexual eccen- tricity remain much of a muchness in any age, and the most striking difference be- tween our own times and those of the Emi- nent Victorians seems to be that while the Victorians maintained a feeble pretence of being shocked by everything, we insist on an even feebler one of being shocked by nothing. I am not sure which of these twin hypocrisies is the more ridiculous, but cer- tainly if you are looking for a good juicy tale of sexual melodrama then the High Victorian is your man. Montgomery Hyde is one of the most reliable of contemporary guides through the labyrinths of Victorian high jinks, cloaking the most salacious of revelations with the dispassion of a solicitor's clerk. According to the dust jacket of his latest investigation, HYde is a cousin of Henry James; an exam- ination of his prose style suggests that per- haps it was Henry who scooped up all the syntactical chromosomes, leaving his cousin to split infinitives and transfer epithets with an indifference strange in a researcher so tireless. There is another unexpected slip in ,Mr Hyde's new book. He says that Cleve- land Street, the scene of the scandals he is describing, is situated 'between Middlesex Hospital and Tottenham Court Road', Which is about as accurate as saying that Matrimony is situated between birth and betrothal. My own researches into the topo- graphy and psychology of Cleveland Street are much more extensive than Mr Hyde's; lived in the place for thirty years, and can Promise you that it is situated not between the Middlesex Hospital and Tottenham Court Road, but between Euston Road and "xford Street. A tiny point perhaps, but then the one thing we demand of our liter- ary detectives is absolute accuracy. In fairness, his account of the discovery of homosexual brothels in Cleveland Street at the tail-end of the 1880s is sober, easy to follow, and free of either of the two beset- 'Ing sins of such accounts, scopophilia and outraged virtue. Mr Hyde drones on in an °ddlY engaging way about the comical
dance played by high authority the moment that Lord Arthur Somerset was implicated in the scarlet sin of dalliance with telegraph boys. Lord Salisbury was not exactly Mer- cury the winged messenger of the gods when it came to prosecuting Lord Arthur; perhaps his knowledge of what had been going on is more worldly than Mr Hyde lets on.
After all, the Prime Minister lived for a time round the corner in Fitzroy Square and must have known of the eccen- tric uses to which the local real estate was being put; when during the last war I stud- ied the history of a Fitzroy Square youth club of which I was a member, I found it had been converted from a brothel in 1898, and that the first thing the do-gooders had performed on capturing the building had been to block up secret passages giving egress on to Maple Street and Fitzroy Street.
Cleveland Street crops up again in a lengthy, not to say exhaustive review of every theory, plausible and lunatic, ever offered as to the identity of Jack the Ripper. Readers of Osbert Sitwell's memoir of Wal- ter Sickert will remember that in his devo- tion to a good story, Sickert perpetrated the old chestnut about the deep secret scribbled on a piece of paper which the skivvy throws out. Sickert claimed to know the name of the Ripper and to have lost it; the review of the Ripper theories implicates Sickert more directly, in connection with the Duke of Clarence and the Cleveland Street connec- tions of one of the Ripper's victims. As to comic effects, the compiler opens his analy- sis with a paragraph of the most wonderfully prolix pomposity, and later on, having quoted at length the details of a horrific murder so remote from the Ripper files as to have been committed in 1959, actually adds, 'This digression has, I fear, occupied considerably more space than I had inten- ded'.
Writers have been disembowelled for less than that.
The book ends with a suitably Victorian invocation to the forces of cruel destiny. Naming the Ripper's five victims, the author then adds, somewhat extraneously, I would have thought, 'Dead. All dead'. Resisting the temptation to add 'and never called me Mother!', I should say that to anyone ob- sessed by the Ripper mystery, the review is well-intentioned, thorough, and, if a shade too solemn for its own good, at least makes no attempt to find a 'solution'. My own favourite suspect is neither the heir to the throne of England, nor Virginia Woolf's cousin, nor Rasputin, nor Charley's Aunt, but Montague Druitt, not necessarily be- cause of the evidence, but because he was an active member of the MCC. The thought of a man performing late cuts in the morning and other cuts of a more recondite nature after close of play is too hilarious to resist. Perhaps someone will commission Graham Greene to write a play about it.
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