Researching Photographs of Gavin Arthur and Edward Carpenter, by Joey Cain
I first saw the photograph at a gathering in Northern England on “Edward Carpenter, the Man and His Spirit,” presented by the Edward Carpenter Community, a British gay men’s group.
I was immediately intrigued by the young man sitting on the floor, in the center. The other three men in the picture were easy to identify. The oldest man is the poet, socialist, and pioneering gay liberationist Edward Carpenter. On his right is his longtime companion and lover George Merrill. On the left is George’s friend and lover Ted Inigan.
The photograph was taken in the sitting room of the home that Edward, George, and Ted shared in Guildford, England, in the mid-to-late 1920s. There was something about the face of the young man in the center that made me think it could be Chester (Gavin) Arthur, the Carpenter disciple and American counter-culture figure. I had seen photographs of Arthur as a much older man but none this young.
In an interview in the journal Gay Sunshine, published in January 1973, the queer poet Allen Ginsberg outlined a “Whispered Transmission” passed spiritually and sexually between older and younger men, “an interesting sort of thing to have as part of the mythology.” The transmission Ginsberg outlined extended from his sleeping with “Neal Cassady … who slept with Gavin Arthur, who slept with Edward Carpenter, who slept with Walt Whitman.”[1]
According to Ginsberg:
“The main thing is communication. Older people have ken, experience, history, memory, information, data, and also power, money and also worldly technology. Younger people have intelligence, enthusiasm, sexuality, energy, vitality, open mind, athletic activity…both profit from the exchange of accomplishments. It becomes more than a sexual relationship; it becomes an exchange of strengths, an exchange of gifts.”
Ginsberg goes on to identify the form of sex between men involved in the transmission:
“In Edward Carpenter’s and Whitman’s theory the older person made love to the younger person, blew the younger person, and there was an absorption of the younger person’s electric, vital magnetism (according to a charming, theosophical, nineteenth century theory).”[2]
If the photograph I had come across was of Carpenter and Gavin Arthur together, it would document their meeting in Carpenter’s home, and it would an important piece of gay male history. I set out to discover if the person in the photograph was indeed Gavin Arthur, and I set out to learn what evidence existed about him sharing Carpenter’s bed.
Chester Allen Arthur III (he adopted the name Gavin later on) was born on March 21, 1901, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was the grandson of the 21st U.S. president, Chester A. Arthur. Young Gavin Arthur’s parents divorced early in his life and he was raised by his mother, the two of them developing a close and devoted relationship. It was under her tutelage that he discovered Eastern forms of spiritual practices, and it was she who sparked the spiritual questing that was to so shape the course of his life. At one point in the early 1920s both of them were members of the "Tantric Order of America,"[3] led by a "colorful, unusual and controversial figure" named Pierre Bernard, dubbed "Oom the Omnipotent" by the press.[4]
Arthur entered Columba University in 1920, but left both the university and the United States in 1922 to pursue his true passion: the cause of Irish freedom. Earlier, at age 15 in 1916, he had been deeply affected by that year’s Easter Uprising in Ireland against English rule. Arthur went to Ireland to join the rebellion and used his monthly allowance from his estranged father to buy arms and provide bail for the rebels. He spent the next four years campaigning for Irish independence, befriending many of the revolutionaries, and establishing deep, life-long friendships with them.[5]
During his time in Ireland Arthur made two "pilgrimages" (as he called them) to England in order to visit Carpenter, the man whose book of visionary poetry, Towards Democracy, Arthur found "more wonderful than the bible."[6] Since Arthur had had nothing in common with his own father, he experienced reading Carpenter's poems as "the first really heart to heart talks" he had ever had with anyone. Towards Democracy had been his close companion as he crossed the Atlantic for Ireland in 1922
He had first discovered Carpenter while at Columbia, while reading Richard Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness. In that work Carpenter is listed as one of the exemplars of a new level of consciousness, "as high above the ordinary self consciousness of humans as that is above the simple consciousness of animals."[7] Bucke’s other exemplars of cosmic consciousness are Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman.[8]
Arthur wrote three accounts of his encounters with Carpenter. In all three he presents his two visits with Carpenter as one meeting, so it’s tricky to sort out what actually happened and when.
Undated Account
The encounter with Carpenter makes up chapter fifteen in Arthur’s unfinished and unpublished triple biography, Full Circle: A Biographical Trilogy of President Arthur, C. A. Arthur Jr. and C.A. Arthur b (Gavin) III, held in the Library of Congress’s Arthur Family Papers collection.
1966 Account
The longer and more self-consciously literary of Arthur’s two published accounts appeared in his 1966 book, The Circle of Sex.
1967 Account
The second published account, written in 1967 for the poet Allen Ginsburg, appeared in 1978, in issue 35 of Gay Sunshine. This version lacks the literary embellishments of the first, but has a directness of style that rings truer. It’s also much more detailed about Arthur’s sexual encounter with Carpenter. In essential details both accounts are in agreement, but the sequence of events varies. By the mid-1960s, Arthur was writing forty years after the fact. That could certainly account for the inconsistencies and perhaps his combining two visits into one. But by drawing on Arthur’s letters and journals from the period we can get a better sense of the actual sequence of events.
First Carpenter Visit, 1923
In August 1923 Arthur set off from Ireland for Sheffield, England, where Carpenter lived. He was armed with a letter of introduction to Carpenter from his friend Mrs. Charlotte Despard. She was a women’s suffrage leader and socialist and lived with "The Irish Joan of Arc" and Yeats inspiration, Maude Gonne. Once in Sheffield, Arthur headed to the Independent Labor Party (ILP) office. There he was informed that Carpenter had recently moved south to the town of Guildford, in Surry. The fellow who informed Arthur of Carpenter’s move was traveling to Guildford the next day. He offered to put Arthur up for the night, and the two traveled to Surry, arriving in Guildford on August 31, 1923.
On arriving at the ILP rest home in Guilford, one of the people there offered to escort Arthur up to Carpenter's home, "Millthorpe, Mountside," where Carpenter lived with his long-time, working class partner George Merrill. According to Arthur’s 1966 account, when they arrived at Mountside they were greeted at the door by Carpenter himself:
“Then he took me by the hand and led me into the cozy living room. He introduced the other two men simply: ‘these are my comrades, George and Ted.’ I found myself shaking hands with two pleasant looking average men. Their hands were strong and firm and friendly and their eyes were friendly also. I thought: these are the divine average that Walt and Eddie write about, not really handsome yet certainly not ugly; and certainly not in any way ashamed that they were living with a man who in his autobiography openly avows himself to be a lover of his own sex.”[9]
It is at this point in Arthur’s narrative that I believe his experiences of his second visit begin. According to the census records for Guildford, only Carpenter and Merrill are living at Mountside in 1923. Ted Inigan does not join them until 1924.[10] So Arthur was probably not introduced to Inigan that September afternoon.
Six days after his visit to Carpenter, Arthur, back in Dublin, wrote Carpenter a thirteen- page impassioned letter about the “joy, the comfort, the awe with which meeting such a great and sweet avatar filled me.” He reveals,
"There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about--because anyone who could write my own unexpressable inner thoughts and feelings would understand all I could say, and could help where no one else in the world could help. Oh Edward Carpenter! Your book is my Bible, the solace of my woe, and the inspiration of my moments of strength. To yourself I could kneel in devotion and confess all my weaknesses and sins. I have only seen you once, and yet I love you as a knight of old must have loved some human saintly confessor; as some eager pupil in Athens must have loved old Socrates; with a pure love and veneration more calming and deeply satisfying than any love I have ever felt before."[11]
He also reveals his ambitious dream,
"a daring dream, aiming at the stars, and even falling short of them, carrying me far along the road to Paradise: I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America, and what you are to England!"
He asks Carpenter if he would accept him as a disciple, to "teach him as Socrates taught the youth of Athens." It was his fervent hope that he would "be worthy to catch fire" from Carpenter's torch "and bring it to Ireland to fire the imagination of the Gael."
Second Carpenter Visit, 1924
Nine months later Arthur made his return visit to the man he considered the greatest living prophet.
On May 4, 1924, Arthur wrote to Carpenter, presumably asking about coming for a visit. The next day George Merrill wrote back that Edward was staying with his brother in "Croydon till Friday," and suggested that Arthur go see Carpenter there.[12] Arthur did not take George's advice; instead he arrived in Guildford on Sunday, May 11, after dark, and decided to wait until the following morning to visit Carpenter. The next day, he made his way up the hill to Mountside.[13]
It would have been on this visit that Arthur was ushered into the sitting room and introduced, perhaps for the second time, to George Merrill, and for the first time to Ted Inigan. Arthur and Carpenter spent the afternoon together talking about Ireland, Walt Whitman, and Anne Gilchrist, an English woman so inspired by Whitman’s poetry that she moved to America and offered herself to him in marriage. Carpenter gave Arthur a copy of a photograph of Walt. As Arthur was readying to return to his inn, Carpenter insisted that he stay for supper. He did so, and Arthur reports in his sexually detailed account of 1967:
"After supper Ted suggested a walk in the moonlight (it was June) [sic] and we talked all the time about Carpenter and he said ‘Why don't you spend the night? It would do Eddy so much good to sleep with a good looking American like you.’"
Chester said he would love nothing better. When they went back into the house, Ted put "a flea in the old man's ear" and Carpenter asked Chester if he would do him a favor and sleep with him, explaining that "George and Ted need a rest."
As Arthur tells it in 1967, the other two went up to bed and he and Carpenter stayed up talking in the light of the fireplace. They talked about Carpenter's poetry, Walt Whitman, and if Carpenter had ever been to bed with a woman, which he had not; "he liked and admired woman but...never felt any need to copulate with them." The topic returned once again to Whitman and his sexuality, at which point Chester blurted out, "I suppose you slept with him?" Carpenter replied, "Oh yes -- once in a while -- he regarded it as the best way to get to together with another man." After more talk about Whitman, his sexuality, and his alleged children, Chester forced himself to ask, "How did he make love?" to which Eddy replied, "I will show you. Let's go to bed."
They went to Carpenter's bedroom and got undressed and into bed together. Carpenter held Chester's head in his hands and stared at him in the moonlight. Chester reverently thought, "This is the laying on of hands. Walt. Then him. Then me." Carpenter snuggled up, kissed his ear, and stroked his body with an expert touch, "caressing the flesh with a feather lightness." Arthur was impressed by his bed mate's "seminal smell of leaves and ferns and the soil of autumn woods" as he felt the fingers running over his body, building up the erotic electrical charge.
“I just lay there in the moonlight that poured in at the window and gave myself up to the loving old man's marvelous petting. Every now and then he would bury his face in the hair of my chest, agitate a nipple with the end of his tongue, or breathe in deeply from my armpit. I had of course a throbbing erection but he ignored it for a long time. Very gradually, however, he got nearer and nearer, first with his hand and later with his tongue which was now flickering all over me like summer lightning.... At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could no longer hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age. He did not suck me at all. It was really karezza...(but) I had not learned the control necessary to karezza.... The emphasis was on the caressing and loving. I feel asleep like a child safe in the father-mother arms, the arms of God. And dreamed of autumn woods with their seminal smell.[14]
The next morning they made love again and bathed, had a vegetarian breakfast with George and Ted, and spent the rest of the day talking together. Carpenter gave Arthur a photograph of himself and a letter of introduction to Havelock Ellis and they said goodbye.[15]
Back in London on the evening of May 13, 1924, Chester wrote to his mother,
"I had the most delightful time at Guildford. Now if Carpenter dies -- I shall at least have the most beautiful memories of him. He really is the most restful person I ever met. One expands in his presence, and goes away with a song in the heart. He has helped me more than I can tell you, and I would not have missed this trip for anything -- as I gained more by it than all my years at college."[16]
In a letter to Carpenter dated May 14, Arthur writes,
"Thanks from the bottom of my inmost heart for your kindness to me while I was in Guildford. To the end of my days I shall have the most beautiful memories of you and your comrades."
Comrade Love in Ireland
During Carpenter’s talks with Arthur, the Englishman had apparently asked about comrade love in Ireland, which Arthur felt he had not fully answered. In the same letter he wrote:
“I should have said that a handful of young Irishmen could not have stood up against the British empire if they had not been bound by the same spiritual love which bound the Theban Band. While I have never seen this love to be actually physical, it may be in many instances.”[17]
In The Circle of Sex (1966) account, Arthur states that he visited Carpenter several times, but the evidence indicates there were just two visits. The photograph of Ted, Arthur, Eddie, and George would appear to have been taken on the second visit, when Ted is known to have been living at Mountside.
Arthur's Later Life
Gavin Arthur, while not becoming the Walt Whitman of Ireland, did go on to have a remarkable life. In 1930 he and his wife Charlotte had major roles in Kenneth MacPherson's groundbreaking British avant-garde silent film Borderline. This featured the film debut of the great African American singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson.
On returning to the United States in the early 1930s, he changed his name to Gavin and helped to found an anarchist utopian arts commune called Moy Mell in the sand dunes outside of the Southern California coastal city of San Luis Obispo.
In the late 1940s Arthur moved to San Francisco, and by the early 1960s he was a well-known mystic and teacher of astrology and a close confidant of Alan Watts. It was at this time that he met the Beat Generation hero Neil Cassady and his wife Carolyn, for whom he became a spiritual teacher and friend.[18] Arthur’s communal households influenced the youth culture in San Francisco's 1960s. He was a regular contributor to the influential San Francisco underground newspaper The Oracle. And his astrological skills were employed to pick an auspicious date for a major counter-cultural event of the time, the "Human-Be In," held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in 1967.
Through his friendship with Neil Cassady (with whom he had a sexual relationship), Arthur met Allen Ginsberg. In 1966 Arthur introduced Ginsberg to Edward Carpenter’s poetry. This struck Allen "as the combine of Blake-visionary and Whitmanic-direct-notation nearest my own intuition that I'd ever stumbled upon."[19]
Researching Photographs of Gavin Arthur
Because I had only seen photos of Gavin Arthur from the late 1960s, I could not be absolutely sure that the man in the 1924 photograph with Carpenter was Arthur. So I went off to see what photographs there might be in the Arthur Family Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The photographs I found there of young Arthur did make his face look as long as that the young man in the 1924 photograph. I viewed the film Borderline and was almost convinced, but not quite fully.
Then, while looking through the Charles Sixsmith Collection at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, I hit the jackpot: a second photograph taken at the same time as the photograph in the Sheffield Archives collection.
In this second photograph George Merrill is not in the photo and the young man is sitting on the left arm of Carpenter's chair, thereby allowing him to be shot at a much higher angle. Now I was absolutely sure it was Chester Allen (Gavin) Arthur III, since he looked the same as in the other images I had found of him.
That second photograph, which sent me on my exploration into Gavin Arthur's life and his visits to Edward Carpenter, resonates with historical and cultural significance:
---It is pictorial documentation of the open, non-monogamous, loving male ‘family’ that Carpenter, Merrill, and Inigan had together in 1924.
---It bears witness to Arthur's visit to Carpenter and their relationship.
---It provides a significant illustration of the beautiful “Whispered Transmission” tale told by Allen Ginsberg connecting our present queer selves to Walt Whitman's body, sex, and spirit.
---The look Carpenter and Arthur are exchanging with each other suggests that this photograph documents two gay men’s pre-sex or after-sex glow!
NOTES
1 Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Interviews, Volume One (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1978), 106.
2 Ibid,107.
3 Gavin Arthur, Full Circle: A Biographical Trilogy of President Arthur, C.A. Arthur Jr. and C.A. Arthur (Gavin) III, Box 57, Folder 1, Arthur Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress: Washington, D.C.
4 Hugh B. Urban, "The Omnipotent Oom: Tantra and its Impact on Modern Western Esotericism," Esoterica: The Journal of Esoteric Studies 3 (2001): 218-259. For more on The Omnipotent Oom, see Robert Love, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga In America (London: Viking, 2010) and http://omnipotentoom.com.
5 Norm Hammond, Dunites (San Luis Obispo: South County Historical Society, 1992), 27-28.
6 Chester Arthur, letter to Edward Carpenter, September 8, 1923, MSS 271-187, Edward Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Library and Archive, Sheffield, England.
7 Gavin Arthur, The Circle of Sex (New York: University Books, 1966), 127.
8 Chester Arthur, letter to Edward Carpenter, September 8, 1923, MSS 271-187, Edward Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Library and Archive, Sheffield, England
9 Arthur, The Circle of Sex, 128-131.
10 Sheila Rowbotham, personal conversation with author, 2007. Rowbotham is the author of Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008).
11 Chester Arthur, letter to Edward Carpenter, September 8, 1923, MSS 271-187, Edward Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Library and Archive, Sheffield, England.
12 George Merrill, George, letter to Chester Arthur, May 5, 1924, Box 37, Folder 1, Arthur Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
13 Gavin Arthur, Gavin, letter to Myra Fithian Arthur, May 11, 1924, Box 33, Arthur Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
14 Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Interviews, Volume One (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1978), 126-128. I have drawn on this version of Arthur’s encounter with Carpenter for the preceding quotations.
15 Arthur, The Circle of Sex, 136.
16 Gavin Arthur, Gavin, letter to Myra Fithian Arthur, May 13, 1924, Box 33, Arthur Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
17 Gavin Arthur, Gavin, letter to Edward Carpenter, May 14, 1924, MSS 386-397, Edward Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Library and Archive, Sheffield, England.
18 Caroline Cassady, Off The Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 330-336.
19 Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Proses: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, ed. Bill Morgan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 259.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ginsberg, Allen, to Jonathan Ned Katz, August 8, 1990.
Hammond, Norm. Dunites, San Louis Obispo: South County Historical Society, 1992, 27-28.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. “’Gavin Arthur Recalls Edward Carpenter,’ 1967.” OutHistory, August 14, 2011, http://outhistory.org/oldwiki/Jonathan_Ned_Katz:_%22Gavin_Arthur_Recalls_Edward_Carpenter,%22_1967
Katz, Jonathan Ned. “A Much More Intimate Communion.” In Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 321-329.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. “Splendor in the Leaves of Grass: Tracing the Links in a Historic Daisy Chain." Advocate, January 2, 1990, 40-41.
Longo, P. (2022). “Between the Sheets: Gavin Arthur's Sexual Circulation.” In Rhodes, J. and Alexander, J.(Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2022, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003144809-19.