2023-12-24 09:00:14
British writer Tom Crewe, in Paris, in September 2023. PATRICE NORMAND/LEEXTRA VIA OPALE.PHOTO
On June 7, 1895, one could buy in Paris, for 5 centimes, a historical issue of the Illustrated daily. In the “headline”: the drawing of a man in a convict uniform, his hands hanging from rings, his legs operating a giant wheel that legend calls “mill of discipline”. The scene takes place in an English prison. The title: “Oscar Wilde at forced labor”. The writer has just been sentenced to two years there for homosexuality.
When we think of the fight for gay rights in Britain, Wilde’s story immediately comes to mind. “She would even tend to hide the rest”, believes Tom Crewe. For around ten years, this young British author, who also works for the literary journal London Review of Books, looked for a way to shed a little different light on these 1890s that he knows like the back of his hand – he defended a thesis at Cambridge on British history in the 19th century. Crewe wanted to write a novel about homosexuality in the Victorian period, but placing this overly anticipated motif (Wilde’s trial) in a broader context. In these 1890s, in fact, “life aroused curiosity (…). It was a time of experiences with its successes and its remorse”remarks the writer Holbrook Jackson in a passage from Eighteen Nineties (1913, untranslated) which the author has conveniently placed in the spotlight of New Life.
In Paris, sitting in front of a thick hot chocolate, Crewe, 34, recounts, all smiles, the genesis of this first novel, which took a long time to mature and was crowned with the First Foreign Novel Prize. During his research, he one day came across the story of a certain John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), about whom he knew nothing. “I discovered that this man had been one of the first advocates of the homosexual cause. » English poet and literary critic, Symonds called homosexuality the« amour impossible ». At the end of his life, with a doctor, Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), he wrote a book on“sexual inversion” since Antiquity, which appeared in the United States in 1900. “Both were convinced that this revolutionary work would transform morals and lead to changes in the lawexplains Crewe. They are the ones who laid the foundations of gay culture in modern times…” The British law decriminalizing homosexuality would not be passed before 1967. This did not prevent Tom Crewe from becoming passionate about these two activists: with them, he finally got the angle he was looking for for his novel.
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