5 Morris Halliburton 2009

Richard Halliburtons Bearded Tales
Charles E. Morris III

Fusing the concept of the beard with the genre of the tall tale to theorize bearded tales
deepens our understanding of closet eloquence, or rhetorical repertories of sexual passing
in U.S. history. An examination of adventurer-writer-lecturer Richard Halliburtons
sexual provenance and bestselling travel tale, The Royal Road to Romance (1925),
illustrates how such autobiographical feints conceal and confound queer subjectivity by
proximate heteronormative apparitions that configure straight ethos. At the same time,
these fragile constructions gesture toward queer worlds inscribed between the lines for the
fourth persona while reflecting upon the exile of archives, and the queer legacy of
bearding.
Keywords: Richard Halliburton (19001939); Beard; Tall Tale; Passing; Archive
As feint, beards are calculated to give the wrong impression by virtue . . . of
giving no precise impression at all.
Melissa Jane Hardie, Rhetorical Bodies
[A] tall narrative is neither purely factual nor purely fantastic, but depends for its
effect on the ability of cultural insiders to perceive its relation to both fact and
fantasy.
Henry Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale
The more imagination one has the more travel means.
Richard Halliburton, Richard Halliburton: The Story of His Lifes Adventures
as Told in Letters to His Mother and Father
Enchantment, like passing, is always fugitive. So Richard Halliburton realized, or
reconsidered, in the summer of 1932. Enthralling stories voicing his wanderlust
Charles E. Morris III is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. An earlier
version of this essay was presented at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Seattle, May 2008. The
authors gratitude goes to Princeton and Berkeley for permission to reprint materials, and for archival assistance.
Many thanks as well to John Lucaites, two anonymous reviewers, Jeff Bennett, Greg Goodale, and Jonathan
Rossing for their thoughtful comments. As ever, Scott Rose is his sine qua non. Finally, he lovingly shares this
publication with Charles E. Morris Jr., his dad, who traveled with him to Princeton in August 2002. They had a
wonderful adventure, discovered Halliburtons beard, and returned home full of tall tales they have told and
retold. Correspondence to: 21 Campanella Way 529, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. Email: charles.
morris.1@bc.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2009 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/00335630902842061
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 95, No. 2, May 2009, pp. 123147
already had made him the raconteur of a generation, and a heartthrob. But the
narrative threads to those quickened hearts ironically bound him. On the verge of
domesticity and on deadline for his latest yarn, Halliburton momentarily lapsed into
identity crisis:
I want to write about the world as it is, and as I see it, instead of these adolescent
romantic tales spun from a few bare facts, but I know my readers wont accept
anything else. I cant write this stuff much longer; it gets harder and harder for me
to do. Why cant I just write the truth?
1
Whatever truth Richard Halliburton might otherwise have published, the answer
to his lingering question rests with the contingencies of his life and celebrity persona,
and in the circuitous discourses that constituted him. Legions of Americans
passionately underwrote his career, gave flight to his insouciant spirit:
[Halliburton was] author of seven runaway best sellers in fifteen languages and the
toast of the lecture platform in every American city whose population was sufficient
to rate a post office. He was the recipient of more praise, adulation, contempt and
ridicule than any other public figure of his time. . . . His millions of ardent fans
could recount, with the accuracy of a baseball zealot reciting batting averages, the
escapades by which he had captivated them. Like Lindbergh or Admiral Byrd, he
was a legend in his own time.
2
Spanning two decades, his dramatically recounted adventures*swimming the
Hellespont, Nile, and Panama Canal; scaling the Matterhorn, Fujiyama, Olympus,
and Popocatepetl; surviving the Sahara, a deserted island, Chichen-Itzas Well of
Death, and the French Foreign Legion; supping with kings, princesses, prisoners, and
headhunters; skinny dipping at the Taj Mahal*all in the quest for romance, made
him the irrepressible peripatetic, the innocent sort of Byron-of-his-time, a
triumph of the 1920s, and A Daring Modern Icarus.
3
Susan Sontag characterized Halliburtons work as having been a prime awakener
of my own ardor and appetite, embodiment of his assumption . . . that what will
entice and seduce are his words.
4
Importantly, those words seduced not only by
virtue of the vibrant locales and thrilling expeditions they inscribed, but also for the
ethos they performed. Halliburton was
the dashing vagabond idol of the world; a messianic sort of figure to legions of
worshipful adolescents, a dauntless hero whom women of various eligible ages
longed to marry, the flaming handsome youth all American matronhood appeared
to wish for a son. The matrons husbands gave him a certain grudging admiration
for his fame, which, fed on itself, was apparently invincible.
5
Apparent to the closeted Halliburton was just how vincible such fame and its
privileges could be. Gerry Max observed,
Halliburton promoted the image of himself, always fearful of risking the exposure
that might alienate him from a public comprised chiefly of adoring women who
swooned over him . . . and of young men who saw in him a beacon of romantic
adventure.
6
124 C. E. Morris
Understanding Richard Halliburton as a sexual fugitive, as I seek here in his debut
bestseller The Royal Road to Romance (1925), requires scrutiny of his manifold appeal.
Halliburtons tales, as do all good travel tales, resonated vicariously because they
enacted his desire for freedom, freedom to indulge whatever caprice struck my fancy,
freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous,
and the romantic.
7
The fugitive is, in this basic sense, a vagabond. Such vagabondage
accounts for Halliburtons enormous heterosexual allure, but also offered, in the
tradition of gay travel writing that does not include him, a certain queer enticement.
8
Halliburtons discourse is also fugitive in the more familiar sense of being just
beyond ones grasp, on the run, escaping detection. Because his popularity depended
so fundamentally on a heteronormative ethos, Halliburton had to pass. In doing so,
he consistently deployed beards*proximate, apparitional straight pretexts*that
bolstered and perpetuated the assumption among devotees that he was straight, and
kept at bay those who suspected otherwise and might endanger his secret. Bearding is
one common tactical mode of closet eloquence. Like most passing performances,
bearding telegraphs even as it camouflages, conveying surreptitious meanings to a
collusive audience cognizant of the wink. As such, a beard is often embedded in a
generic narrative noted for its duplicity: the tall tale. In revealing Halliburtons
bearded tales, I offer a case study that bears out Linda Schlossbergs founding passing
premise: [I]dentity is primarily a form of storytelling.
9
In what follows, I first conceptualize bearding and the tall tale. I go on to situate
Halliburtons bearded tales within relevant cultural and biographical contexts
concerning sexuality, gender, and celebrity in the 1920s. Next, I critically travel
Halliburtons Royal Road to Romance in order to map the dynamics of his closet
eloquence. Finally, by way of implication, I reflect on the exile of archives and the
queer legacy of bearded tales.
Bearded Tales
Abroad in 1921 on what would become The Royal Road to Romance, Richard
Halliburton began to hone his exceptional gift for crafting tales, and cruising them.
Tramping for a week without his Princeton travel companion, Halliburton found
himself at Cologne Cathedral chatting up an American seaman named Fred, a
conversation that inspired his purchase of double boat fare to Coblentz. In a chapter
excised from the published manuscript, he described their encounter:
As we sat feasting on this panorama my artless seaman friend told me the story of
his adventurous life, admitting affection for an Irish girl in Cleveland and swore if
he ever got home he would marry her and settle down on her sufficient income and
I, feeling it was not fair to countenance such confessions and not confide myself,
fabricated some lurid romance that was overshadowing my life and which in that
sentimental surrounding made the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice seem a burlesque
for pathos. Ive forgotten now whether my fiancee found another womans initials
tattooed on my chest or what. Anyway it was a heart rending story.
10
Halliburtons Bearded Tales 125
In miniature here, Halliburton offered his passing narrative signature. For the sake of
gaining the confidence of an artless straight audience, he fabricated some lurid
romance that unfolded in mythic proportion, sufficient by measure to rend the
heart. The beard tendered by Halliburtons tall tale, that feint hetero-inscription
emblazoned but never substantiated, afforded enduring companionship on his
adventures. Beyond its presumptive end, this tales duplicity and excision, as well as
its very form, suggest a more cunning motive and an unmentioned second audience
invited to read his assignations differently, doubly. To whom is Halliburton really
confiding, and what is really being conveyed by Freds tale? Configured by layers of
contrasting meaning, Halliburtons Janus-faced persona cuts an alluring jib.
Closet eloquence simultaneously seeks prophylactic dupe ignorance and productive
queer recognition. Toward that end, this transparent heteronormative reiteration,
or straight charade, entails overdetermined figurations of faux-hetero personae and
knowledge, sufficient to reinforce the already assumed heterosexual identity of the
passer. It also confounds those suspicions and rumors produced by non-normative
gender/sexual semiotics or hints thereof that might reroute commonsense assump-
tions and provoke troubling speculation or inquiry. Passing also operates along
parallel tracks, in elliptical mode, a double appeal that satisfies a dupe audience while
furtively facilitating further reading, beyond straight punctuation, by the fourth
persona.
11
In this rhetorical cipher, ostensible meaning contains a key to its own
deconstruction, a nuance slightly cocked that constitutes the feint gesture toward
camouflaged textual meaning. Closet eloquence, in short, consists of rich inscription
between the lines, but also an intricate interstitial map charting a path of discovery
within the breach.
During the decades in which Halliburton thrived, gay men leading double lives
trafficked in artful passing argot, grammar, and performance, including euphemism,
double entendre, inverted gender semiotics, and camp discourse. George Chauncey
observes,
The very fact that men could understand a common code emphasized their
membership in a group to whose codes they alone were wise, and became a sign
by which they distinguished themselves from outsiders . . . many men treasured the
sense it gave them of participating in a secret society. But gay codes also allowed
men to see themselves as participants in dominant culture by enabling them to see
themselves in the interstices of that culture.
12
In situating Halliburton within this shadow world, I consider a genre heretofore
unexplored in sexual passing*the tall tale.
13
Passers often construct straight pretexts
through autobiographical narratives of heteronormative association, exaggerated
stories of heterosexual desire and consummation designed to rivet straight audiences
through epistemological scaffolding known by gay audiences to be a queer house of
cards.
According to Henry Wonham, the tall tale is a rhetorical . . . game of initiation
and exclusion. It is always fantastic but plausible, an exercise in credulity that offers
antithetical meanings alluring to both incompetent listeners (victims) and
cultural insiders.
126 C. E. Morris
The tall tale is a very different form of deception, for it . . . does express a will to lie
and a contradictory will to tell the truth at the same time. The yarn spinner is not,
however, like the inept liar, divided by two wills; rather, he projects multiple verbal
meanings at once by addressing at least two audiences, and his utterance is
calculated to mean something different to each.
14
With fact or plausible invention as the point of departure, the spectacular
narrative exerts a bifurcated, fugitive (dis)enchantment to
encourage a generic mistake on the part of listeners who are unable or unwilling to
occupy the tales middle ground. The disadvantaged class of listeners makes the
mistake of either flatly accepting or rejecting the narratives truth claims, of
interpreting as either truth or lie an exaggerated narrative that stands somewhere
between the two.
15
The dexterous tale simultaneously elicits the collusion of an elite community that
includes only those listeners who are competent to receive in the spirit of fiction a
narrative that is told as fact, those capable of a process of negotiation or synthesis,
carefully refraining from overinvestment in any of the yarn spinners apparent verbal
meanings.
16
Competence in reading the middle ground derives from a deep cultural matrix,
a fund of specialized and often exclusive knowledge that constitutes the [inside]
groups common experience. The tall tale is a clandestine citation of collective life:
[T]he tellers effort to transform the groups special knowledge into fantastic
representation is not a denial of experience; rather the yarn spinners exaggerated
imagery promotes a renewed acknowledgment of actual conditions that inspired
the tale, knowledge of which binds and perpetuates the group.
17
Spun within closet culture, this tale is a declaration and dissimulation of sexual
difference that forges identity and community, and contributes to the socialization
of a spirit of resistance.
18
Given the historical exigencies that comprise passing contexts, closeted gay men
often have opted to tell bearded tales: faux-autobiographical narratives that conceal
and confound queer subjectivity through heteronormative plots and personae.
Melissa Jane Hardie observes, Beards offer the fiction of conjugal heterosexual
identity. The beard . . . is a material signifier in a complex rhetoric of disclosure and
orientation. The beard encourages us to take literally the visibility of sheer
manifestation.
19
The linkage here between visibility/disclosure and orientation is
central, for the beard functions by proximate figuration: a womans physical or
discursive propinquity to a gay man (or mans for a lesbian)*on his arm in public, in
recounts of romance and prowess, gazing from a picture on his desk*procures
heteronormative innocence by association or tactical benefit of the doubt. A beard
always concerns ethos rather than evidence: [B]eards configure a material reputation
for their companions.
20
This reputation is inevitably fragile, of course. The beard is a fugitive sexual
apparition full of transparent meaning, substantiating nothing. Even in grounding
the passers subversive enthymeme, the beard is groundless, and something about its
performance is subtly askew, conspicuous, telling. A beard is flawed contextually (no
one has seen the girlfriend, nor witnessed more than a womans mere appearance)
or bristles against contradictory knowledge (non-normative gender semiotics; he
has both a date and a longtime male friend or roommate; the story seems
somehow incomplete or compensatory). In other words, bearded tales are fantastic
insofar as they inherently stretch sexual credulity. Hardie explains, Beards . . . are
always potentially disclosing precisely what they are meant to conceal; they threaten
to precipitate the publication of a partners sexual identity.
21
The calculated risk of
exposure is favorably weighed against the inertia and distractions of hetero-
normativity*the ignorance, willful obtuseness, or indifference of a dupe audience.
If, in Wonhams terms, a dupe audience facilitates the bearded tale by means of
categorical misreading*flatly accepting or rejecting its truth claims*a queer
audience is simultaneously invited into the texts middle ground to discover and
negotiate meaning between the lines. Hardie observes, The figure of the beard is a
form of disguise which alerts us to the practices of disguising: it is a deviation of the
aim of disguise in not disguising disguise.
22
The beard tactically achieves at once
heteronormative association and dissociation, silently hearkening beyond that which
it has imperfectly erected and effaced. As the bearded tale unfolds, this ambagious
figure interpellates the fourth persona by preterition (she has been alluringly and
superficially declared, and passed over) or periphrasis (the excess of her amplification
marks a telling circumlocution), gesturing elsewhere.
23
There one discovers elliptical
material*insinuations, absences, argot*hidden in plain sight, rendered visible
through insider knowledge.
24
Halliburtons bearded tales are alluring not only for their publicity, circulating as
they did within bestselling books, scores of occasional and serialized magazine
articles, and 2000 public lectures, but because they were woven into travel narratives:
tall tales within tall tales. This doubling explains his enduring appeal for diverse
audiences despite, and by virtue of, his sexual liability. Here we find a particular
queer travel story, bringing to mind Paul Fussells appropriation of H. M. Tomlinson:
We have the idle way of allowing books of travel to pass without the test to which
poetry must submit.
25
Thus prompted, we might consider more closely how
Halliburton enacted Michael Browns principle that the closet demarcates or maps
desires and their flows between subjects.
26
Darling Richard
There were, to be sure, many desires and subjects that Halliburton generated, sought,
consummated, and foiled, all requiring intricate mapping encompassed within his
bearded tales. This mapping can only be fully reckoned in relation to the contexts that
induced, animated, and constrained it: audiences that followed or forked his narrative
trails and contingencies that (dis)oriented their sense of direction. Genealogical
consignation of provenance here equips us to approximate Halliburtons tantalizing
circuitous routes, the cartography of his closet eloquence.
128 C. E. Morris
As an intriguing figure for the cultural scene that Halliburton canvassed and
calculated, consider a gift delivered to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1931: a picture of his
friend Ernest Hemingway, curiously inscribed, To Scott from his old bedfellow
Richard Halliburton.
27
Hemingways homophobic joke would have resonated with
Fitzgerald for reasons both personal and professional. A familiar part of their
occasional banter, the queer insinuation tacitly bespoke anxieties regarding their
friendship and its reception.
28
More to the point, its punch line undoubtedly hinged
on a derisive judgment of the feminization of American culture during the Jazz
Age: mass-marketed popularity enjoyed by pandering hacks with an adoring female
readership, threatening serious literature.
29
This precarious combination of sexuality, gender, celebrity, and its discontents
forged Halliburtons passing motive, explaining why his public persona was exigent
and fragile, and therefore fugitive. Halliburton hungrily traversed a verdant landscape
expansively populated with men who shared his secrecy, his heart, and his bed.
Halliburtons wanderlust, in other words, was queer: he desired to travel and he
traveled for desire.
30
Moye Stephens, co-adventurer on The Flying Carpet (1932), said
that Halliburton appeared to have letters of introduction to gays located at major
points along our projected route and possibly picked up other letters en route.
31
Between adventures, as letters to his beloved friend Noel Sullivan reveal, Halliburtons
endless lecture tour reaped numerous handsome and beautiful cocktail
companions, hotel clerks, prostitutes, and boyfriends:
My gland-life this past fall has been too scandalous to report to Christians like
yourselves. But when we meet again Ill come clean*tell about the Negro parlor
in Chicago for white patrons (with big ideas) only*about the shop in N.Y.
where you chose your playmate in advance from photographs taken in a moment
of rampant-cy.
32
Like so many of his contemporaries, Halliburton understood well that such an
existence, even without celebrity scrutiny, required invention and discretion.
33
Diarist
Jeb Alexander records in 1927 Halliburtons proficiency in passing:
Isador stopped by in the evening. He told me he had been to a party at which he
met Richard Halliburton, who is to make an address at the Authors Breakfast to
be given by the Presswomens League next Saturday. Isador, who had been wearing
a royal-purple tie, asked Halliburton, who was wearing a red tie, for his autograph.
Halliburton remarked, Our ties speak a language. In Isadors autograph album
Halliburton wrote, To Isador, a good boy, from Dick Halliburton, another one.
Rather intimate from an acquaintance of a few minutes. Isador said he walked with
Halliburton as far as the house where he was staying (with the Misses Finch near
Dupont Circle).
34
Beyond cruising, Halliburton calculated the multiple audiences witnessing his closet
eloquence, and their inherent dangers. Despite shared sexual secrecy, for instance,
Halliburton was clearly unnerved when British enfant terrible Beverley Nichols
opened The Star Spangled Manner (1928) with Halliburtons purported declaration,
I am the Beverley Nichols of America.
35
Displaying similar skittishness, Halliburton
wrote in 1930 to mend a rift with beau Mario Ramirez over unwelcome rumors:
The next surprise was to learn that you believe all the slanderous gossip you hear*
and in Hollywood. God knows how many females (both menwomen) had
decorated the reports you finally heard. . . . Does it seem likely that one who has as
many sins on his conscience as I, should take it upon myself to slander you. . . . And
havent you and I known each other well enough to be sure neither is going to
defame the other[?]
36
Making matters more complicated still, Halliburton theatrically amplified his public
persona by courtly manners and somewhat coquettish airs, and especially the
dandified attire he regularly donned.
37
How, then, did Halliburton measure prospects in relation to his self-fashioning, the
attentions it attracted, and the sexual secret it risked betraying? How did he negotiate
the competing meanings of being Dick Darling? For answers, we must turn first to
the women in Halliburtons life. Despite ambivalence, he counted them in droves as
an invaluable mainstay, protection from encumbrances on his professional and
personal life. His passing depended on their constant approximation, the fantasy of
their being by his side. As John Riddell parodied in Vanity Fair, Hearken, middle-
aged suburban housewives, impressionable girl-graduates, Thursday afternoon bridge
clubs, sex-starved librarians, and the rest of my fluttering, feminine, Middle-Western
audience. Look, Im calling you.
38
Indeed, Halliburtons requisite fugitive interpellation hinged on cultivating the
ethos of a matinee idol. Given his Hollywood ambitions and socialization, and his
performances*in print, on the lecture platform, at bookstore autograph parties*
and their reception, Halliburtons celebrity persona might well be understood as
cinematic.
39
As he himself observed, [t]he American public is starved for romance.
Thats why it goes to the movies. Thats why it reads my books.
40
This parallel makes
particular sense given womens emergence as the primary figure in the consumption
of cultural forms of masculinity.
41
William Mann observes,
Throughout the 1920s, the image of the male hero on the screen became
increasingly androgynous. . . . These prettier, more effeminate male stars repre-
sented a new era, when sexual ambiguity suggested culture, culture inspired success,
and success was considered sexy.
42
These adored creatures were suave, self-consciously handsome . . . blade[s] with a
Wildean insouciance and cameo-perfect profile[s], . . . the radiant lyrical approxima-
tion of Romance.
43
Gaylyn Studlar provides a gendered explanation:
[A] sexually ambiguous, transgressive vision of objectified masculinity that
wreaked havoc with rigid gender dichotomies and with the conventional ideals
of the cult of the body. . . . was constructed in relation to a demandingly expressive
feminine desire.
44
As ambiguously gendered as male matinee idols could be during the 1920s,
however, fans expected the embodiment of heteronormative desire beyond page and
screen. Mann explains,
More than the lavish parties, more than the opulent homes and leopard-lined
automobiles, the public wanted to know about a stars love life. It was the crux of
130 C. E. Morris
the myths: Zeus and Hera, Hercules and Iole, Eros and Psyche. Without romances,
the stars wouldnt have been gods and goddesses.
45
This mandate, especially for bachelor celebrities who needed to account for their
eligibility, required the ubiquitous Marriage Question to be addressed. Early on,
this could be handled blithely or evasively, due in part to collusive sophisticated
Hollywood reporting; however, by the 1930s, glib responses faltered under
intensifying pressure, replaced by finely orchestrated publicity.
46
This pattern is discernible in Halliburtons evolving public response to fandom. A
jocular retort such as, Matrimonially speaking, I am the last of the Mohicans, must
have seemed adequate in 1928.
47
A year later, in the face of society page speculation
about the absence of women in his private life, Halliburton provided a more
substantive reflection:
When a man marries . . . he becomes domesticated, interested in making money
and he likes the smugness of his home. His wife, in nine cases out of ten, is arresting
and irresistible to other men and he is afraid to travel without her. It would be
unwise for me to ever marry.
48
By 1930, in an article for The Illustrated Love Magazine titled Prince of Lovers Talks
about Women and Love, Dorothy Dayton could write, Now what about this
particular girl he is going to marry some day*for Mr. Halliburton says that no man,
regardless of what he may say, ever really hopes to remain a bachelor all his life.
Halliburton now publicly pondered Where Ill Spend My Honeymoons.
49
This is not to say that women constituted Halliburtons sole audience; he enjoyed
male fans. Indeed, Errol Uys writes that Halliburton was
a hero to a generation of American youth. . . . The Royal Road to Romance . . .
entranced stay-at-home boys for twenty years, never more appealing than in those
dreary days of the Depression, when Halliburton lived what so many only
dreamed.
50
Gay men, too, as we shall see, adored him. Given the era, however, the dourest male
skepticism predominated; adult ostensibly straight men created lasting unease for
Halliburton.
51
The 1920s revolution assaulted longstanding strictures on gender,
sexual performance, and representation, recasting heteronormativity.
52
However, the
wages of liberation were fresh and visceral strains of homophobic anxiety. Gilbert
Hamilton strikingly concluded in 1929,
[T]he majority of American adult males probably fear their own homosexual
impulsions more greatly than they fear all other tabooed components of the human
reactive equipment taken together.
53
As Kevin White has explained, incipient liberalism and accelerating homophobia
were reciprocal forces shaping 1920s sexual culture, and its subsequent dismantling.
54
Throughout his career, Halliburton was persistently dogged by male critics who
thought him a poseur, questioning his feats, the literary merit of his writing, and the
character of his motives. Note, for instance, Vanity Fairs We Nominate for
Oblivion:
Richard Halliburton has made a glorious racket out of Dauntless Youth; because his
books are marvelously readable, transparently bogus, extremely popular, and have
made their author a millionaire; because his invariable picture of himself (patent
pending) is that of a diffident, romantic boy; because he is the most popular ladies
club lecturer in America.
55
Critics gendered imputations suggest what perhaps ineffably motivated expressions
of male disdain. Halliburton goaded American men by reflecting mutating codes of
masculinity, thus offering a facile scapegoat on which to heap their resentment of
perceived cultural feminization. That Halliburton unabashedly dressed as he did,
frequently published in Ladies Home Journal, and still apparently got the girl
would have only exacerbated the friction between them. The static of this discourse
implies something more, a sexual dissonance that could not be fully articulated or
resolved because of Halliburtons slippery persona and the reticence inspired
generally by a closet culture.
Homophobic suspicion and innuendo regarding Halliburton always lurked,
sometimes in the form of Hemingways private joke, other times in more baldly, if
never fully candid, public discourse. Humorist Corey Ford, the pseudonymous John
Riddell, in his 1928 Vanity Fair parody travelogue in the style of Mr. Halliburton,
perhaps came closest to revealing what so many men surmised, or what made them
inexplicably bristle. Confiding that he had been spell-bound by Halliburtons
exotic experiences, Riddell teased,
How, I asked myself, could I equal this dazzling record? . . . In a flash I had the
answer. I would swim the Hudson River from Weehawken to Forty-Second
Street. . . . I chose the same route that is customarily followed by all the other
ferries.
56
In the Vanity Fair parody, Riddell made ample hay of Halliburtons female fans:
So toss your heads, girls, bend your knees, fling wide your arms . . . and follow me,
follow me in a dancing, prancing, nancing line, toward the waters edge. Phneeeeee!
The easy spoofing of those adoring females, waving their handkerchiefs, tossing
roses, blowing me kisses and swooning with rapture overlays the homophobic
insinuation of his*of Halliburtons*prancing and nancing. This is further
evidenced by his commissioning Miguel Covarrubiass caricature in The John Riddell
Murder Case (1930), which depicted Halliburton on the dais at a ladies club lecture,
hand effeminately on hip, dressed in a skirt.
57
Throughout the parody, the implied queerness of Riddells playful outing cannot
be mistaken. In one later scene, for instance:
As in a dream I rose, flung my scarlet dressing-gown about my shoulders, and
tiptoed softly down to the river. . . . I reclined upon my stomach, as he had done
before the Taj Mahal Pool, and gazed into the dark, mirror-like waters. . . . Was I
man, or was I faun? And if I was a faun, where had I gotten that black moustache?
Am I the Great God Pan? I asked my reflection softly, seeking to play upon his
sylvan reeds, far from the Jersey copse*? I dont understand a word youre
sayin, replied a gruff voice behind my back, but if you dont get off my beat, Ill
132 C. E. Morris
run you in! Alas, Pan! Alas, memories of Mr. Halliburton! I turned, assisted rather
violently from the rear, and flitted into the night.
58
From his red dandified attire, to his tiptoeing and flitting, to his maladroit
moustache, to his narcissism, to police interference, not to mention the obvious
backhanded reference to anal sex, Riddell skillfully appropriates the argot and
grammar of homosexuality (and its cultural distortions), seamlessly mingled among
those more explicit criticisms that had circulated since Halliburton rose to fame.
Not surprisingly, Halliburton considered Corey Ford a pungent critic.
59
Such
criticism, steeped in innuendo, sustained
the fear that never left him*that all that stood between him and an oblivion of
total failure was the caprice of the public, that once he was unable to court the
popular fancy, he would perish like a meteorite immersed in the sea, and with
scarcely a ripple.
60
Audiences, Halliburton instinctively understood, were dangerous necessities, espe-
cially for an enchanting sexual fugitive. As he might have fathomed in his own rich
Homeric imagination, the ability to navigate the fated sexual straits between the
Scylla and Charybdis of his fame required Ulyssean ingenuity. In a published letter
written to assuage an anxious boy whose buddies had labeled his hero a fraud and
worse, Halliburton responded,
As for my being a ladies club darling, this, too, is in keeping with the rest [you
have been criticized as being merely a teller of tall tales]. Not that I never speak for
groups of women. . . . But not five per cent of my 200 lecture dates a season are for
such groups. . . . But the legend is fixed, and it will probably follow me to my
grave. . . . [M]y books are my own defense. Truth, like murder, will out, and the
eleven years since The Royal Road to Romance appeared, have been time enough to
give Fate the chance to dispose of it, and its successors, justly. . . . I hope the next
time you have trouble with your friends, the unbelievers, you can confound them,
and convince them, and convert them from the errors of their ways.
61
We witness here the key to Halliburtons persona: his bearded tales, first and
formative of which was The Royal Road to Romance.
Fugitive Fabulist
Allen Churchill, while reflecting on The Royal Road, recognized but half of the
bearded tales rhetorical dynamic: An author who wrote with a somewhat limp wrist,
Halliburton often contrived to weave pretty girls into his narratives, thus adding a
soupcon of sex to his rhapsodic prose.
62
Churchill rightly detected the contrivance of
heterosexuality, a reading that comports with those who have characterized
Halliburtons narratives as embodying a relentless compulsion to prove his
manhood.
63
What Churchill does not explain is how such a ruse marks itself within
the economy of these tales. By contrast, a more complete understanding of
Halliburtons bearding requires focus precisely on his limp-wristed inscription. This
soupc on of homo-sex was the necessary complement that, for certain readers, revealed
the numerous hetero-romantic vignettes as feint and provided a hermeneutic
compulsion to queer, even as he apparently proved, his manhood.
In the opening chapter, Halliburton enticed readers to join [a] rebellion against
the prosaic mold, one derived from a conspicuous wanderlust: All afternoon of that
day I had spent . . . lost in a volume of Dorian Gray. Notwithstanding the broad
appeal of Wildes quoted axiom*We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by
the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite
temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely
nothing in the world but youth!*this watermark for some would have signified
particular designs in his exuberant proposition.
64
Thus, Halliburton cast the
liberating lot of his imagined journey in heteronormative terms:
I hungered for the romance of the sea, and foreign ports, and foreign smiles. . . .
From childhood I had dreamed of climbing Fujiyama and the Matterhorn, and had
planned to charge Mount Olympus in order to visit the gods that dwelled there. I
wanted to swim the Hellespont where Lord Byron swam . . . make love to a pale
Kashmiri maiden beside the Shalimar . . . hunt tigers in a Bengal jungle*try
everything once. I wanted to realize my youth while I had it, and yield to
temptation before increasing years and responsibilities robbed me of the courage.
65
Queer allusions would be eyed between the lines of this tale, for Halliburton
ensconced himself in a muscular narrative that rippled with the lusty sheen of
masculine virility. By his departure from Kashmir, as we shall see, Halliburtons beard
would be full grown.
Romance, telos for Halliburton and his audiences, emerged in two narrative
currents that coursed vigorously throughout the tale. The more explicit of the two
manifested in the adrenaline-pumped adventures that gave it heft and the requisite
scars of fearless masculinity. It is likely no mistake that Halliburton scaled the
Matterhorn and Fujiyama, both dangerously out of season, as the bookends of his
journey. Harrowed enough to render himself and his readers breathless, Halliburton
translated from such sublime experience a shared motive: It all sent a surge through
our hearts. It had been a new sensation of awful power, a new element conquered, a
supreme response to the hunger for exhilaration, for motion and danger and
intensity of sensation.
66
Between these narrative summits, Halliburtons persona toughened by means of
serious obstacles in my path [that] were met and overcome with a sort of reckless
enthusiasm: imprisonment in Gibraltar, tigers in Hindustan, a cobra wrapped
around his ankle in the Siamese jungle, Chinese pirates off Macao, Russian
blizzards.
67
These episodes comprise his tactical foreground, the tallest edifices
erected for his readers, on which he gained a foothold in their imaginations. As tests
of credulity, such feats weathered audience commitments, inclining most readers
toward a categorical judgment, yea or nay, regarding his ethos, thus providing
camouflage that allowed for the queer interpretive middle ground they also forged.
Romance secondly appeared through amorous encounters that functioned as
surely, as viscerally, as did hazard to drive Halliburton and his readers along the Royal
Road. His declared intent of lovemaking in Kashmir blossomed into a full-fledged
134 C. E. Morris
romantic avowal in chapter 3, the placement of which immediately after Matterhorn
bespoke its primacy as a destination in the quest. Here we find Halliburton alone at
Castle Chillon on Lac Leman, paying homage to Lord Byron and the prisoner he
there immortalized. Having skinny-dipped in the lake, Halliburton sat on its shore
reading from Byrons The Prisoner of Chillon:
Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart*
The heart which love of thee alone can bind.
This passage expressed well Halliburtons imprisoned soul, the restless impetus for his
vagabondage, the mysterious allure of his hearts desire, as well as a restive heart
whose dream of freedom was ironically bound in love of an unnamed thee. Its
charged ambiguity would have registered only with those invited to reflect more
deeply on Byron, not coincidentally a sexual fugitive at the time he wrote Prisoner of
Chillon, as Halliburtons romantic muse.
68
Within this general disposition of daredevilry and amour we find the landscape of
Halliburtons bearded tale. Recall that beards figure by propinquity a material
heterosexual reputation, convincing to the extent that readers have taken literally the
visibility of sheer manifestation.
69
Noting atmospherically Halliburtons selected
locations*Paris, Alhambra, an evening sail on the Nile, the Taj Mahal, Shalimar,
Udaipur, Bali, Fujiyama*themselves ripe with romantic inducements (I began to
wonder if here, in such moonlight, on one of the worlds most dramatic stages, some
delightfully indiscreet adventure was not awaiting me), there is always an
intoxicating female close at hand: among them Mademoiselle Piety, the maidens of
Dhamtari, the latter-day Princess Padmini, and the Empress of China.
70
These
apparitions are all the more alluring because they are sequined with commentary,
exchanges, and asides bespeaking pursuit, the sinful trend of our inspection.
71
Yet Halliburtons beards are also fragile. Closer scrutiny reveals that these romantic
encounters are never consummated, emotionally or physically*always thwarted by
age (Of course the brazen creature was only five years old),
72
or circumstance
(Gracia . . . suddenly remembered that she was due at the music-hall in ten
minutes),
73
hot temper (I was so stung by her contempt that in a moment of
rashness I . . . bid good-by to the astonished Pauline),
74
or cooler heads (My
irreproachable companions . . . delivered me perforce from temptation).
75
Some just
disappeared unrequited with the closing of chapters. These women therefore all
potentially raise eyebrows, all threaten to precipitate the publication of a partners
sexual identity.
76
Heteronormative presumption and/or the thrall or disgust of the
larger tall tale averted unwanted second glances.
At the same time, others are hailed by these ambagious female figures*through
their constitution by preterition or periphrasis*to look elsewhere. One clever
enactment is Halliburtons ultimate judgment after his snit with Pauline in Monte
Carlo: Cherchez la femme.
77
Only some would see in this bon mot a road sign: look
for the woman, for she is the (textual) problem. These readers are Wonhams
cultural insiders, who receive in the spirit of fiction a narrative that is told as fact,
who can negotiate the text and refrain from overinvestment in any of the yarn
spinners apparent verbal meanings, who can occupy the middle ground.
78
On that middle ground, hidden in plain sight, are Halliburtons numerous men.
Most appear in flashes like winks, easily missed tantalizing mentions, such as the
young Englishman of unexpected culture who hosted Halliburton on his private
island off Victoria Point or the French merchant who invited me to share his first-
class cabin between Bangkok and Saigon. Two men, however, linger. Let me preface
meeting the first by saying that Halliburton had just arrived in Barcelona from an
extraordinary adventure in which he braved the Pyrenees in November on a donkey
he named Hannibal to visit the largely inaccessible Andorra and charm its president.
Again, the taller tale forges middle ground by inducing the generic mistake of flatly
accepting or rejecting it.
Tantalizing music awakened Halliburton in Barcelona; following it, he discovered a
festive, irresistible dancing crowd. Tellingly, he twice registers the deliciousness of
taboo and fear of disclosure:
[L]ooking furtively around to be sure there was no other American on hand, I
jumped into a stepping sextet. . . . Entire circles, including my own, were made up
of men, all holding hands . . . Although I was continually uneasy for fear someone I
knew should catch me doing this, I was as disappointed as any when the music
stopped.
His stealth and unease clearly suggest a queer inference, one that might result in his
getting caught. Humorously, or in humorous distraction, caught is what he is:
As my circle broke up, I saw the young man next to me reach into his pocket and
pull out a fiery red English edition of Baedekers Spain and Portugal. Minervas owl!
What was a dancing Barcelonan doing with that! The horrible truth dawned upon
me*He was not a Barcelonan; he was an American examining his guide-book.
Didnt you feel silly doing that fool dance? I asked him abruptly. He almost
dropped his Baedeker. Why*why, of course, he said, looking unutterably
sheepish. Then, with an afterthought, he added: But see here, my lad, you were
doing it too! We agreed never to tell. Name and occupation? he demanded with
mock officiousness. Halliburton*horizon chaser. Yours? Paul McGrath*
Chicago*architecture student.
79
Handholding, panic, sheepishness, collusion, and a hint of camp: an auspicious
beginning to a fast companionship that would last four chapters. Minervas owl
references the wisdom that comes too late for Halliburton, an American in his midst
catching him frolicking among men. Consider, too, however, that Minervas owl
gleaned understanding at twilight, a betwixt and between time when most must to
squint to see, if see at all.
Abruptly, in the very next sentence, a beard appears in the form of a music-hall
dancer. This Spanish flower named Gracia, lavishly described, held the boys in
thrall until they were off to Valencia. And shortly thereafter, during a quick solitary
excursion to Madrid, we discover Halliburton flirting with three young beauties,
136 C. E. Morris
notably aged four, ten, and twelve. Then as they disappeared across the platform
they turned and waved. . . . I had fallen in love with Spain.
80
The exuberance and
evanescence of Halliburtons heteronormative romantic paeans rivet his dupes and
simultaneously, as preterition and periphrasis, rive the surface of the text, pointing in
a different direction.
That direction pointed south to storied Granada where Paul awaited me, and
where, surely, in such December moonlight . . . almost anything of a mad and
beautiful nature might happen. By contrast to Halliburtons women, his relationship
with Paul is markedly understated. He observes only, During the last fortnight of the
last month of the year the fortress belonged to Paul and me. No door was closed to
us, no restrictions imposed. Two playful weeks without a hint of Halliburtons
characteristic restlessness, without the fleeting female figures: only twice would he
find himself so sedentary.
81
But women return forthwith in a chapter titled The Sirens of Seville. This very
brief interlude shamelessly flirts with the allure and danger of sheer manifestation:
I dont understand what the senioritas see in me to inspire so much coquetry,
Paul remarked before wed been in Seville twenty-four hours. You! I exclaimed.
What brazen egotism! Its I they smile at, cross-eyed one. As a matter of fact both
of us had been peered at from beneath secretive mantillas by more than one pair of
exotic eyes*eyes whose shocking behavior somewhat surprised us, since no one
could have been less conspicuous than we. . . . But in wanton Seville there were
glances that were unmistakably flirtatious, and this gave us the smug feeling that
comes of being misogynous from preference rather than necessity.
This seems the riskiest passage on his journey, dangerous in its conspicuousness and
misogyny, an unsettling dynamic with the opposite sex. And yet, again, exuberance
and evanescence hold sway, as Halliburton exudes his rut:
But I was so sure of my position I challenged him to a duel of philandering in
which we would keep a strict account for twelve hours of the smiles that each could
inspire, and in this manner settle our dispute like gentlemen.
If amplification is a hallmark of periphrasis, then the final score of 3621 constitutes
an ample circumlocution. Paul won but was a good sport, attributing it to the fact
that he was five years older than I, and had had much more time in which to acquire
proficiency in the subtle art.
82
In our encounter with Halliburtons second longer-term companion, we must be
especially cognizant of the disposition of tall tales. Halliburton meets David Russell
immediately after what would become his most famous adventure, his strange
ecstasy of illicitly skinny dipping by moonlight in the lily-pond at the Taj Mahal,
after those heavy weary gates closed behind me, and the Lady of my Dreams passed
from view.
83
Heteronormative romantic overtones swell here (not all his beards were
breathing females), but more to the point the feat itself issued a test of credulity that
positioned readers in the chapter to follow. The Taj tale more than any other invited
such judgments. Reviewer John Maloney skeptically wrote, Now, a bag of gold
couldnt have persuaded me to plunge into that shallow bowl of warmish water*but
on the other hand, I may not be made of the stuff that best-selling travel writers have
to be!
84
Having arrived back in Agra, Halliburton met David, a made-to-order comrade:
He was twenty, a good sport, and a clever vagabond whose youthful appearance and
manners persuaded his creditors to cancel his debts, railroad officials to wink at
tickets, and chance acquaintances to supply him gratis with food and shelter. They
immediately set off together, beginning with Delhi:
David and I will not soon forget the first night we spent in the capital. . . . True, it
was spent mostly in our beds, but they were out in the lilac garden of our pension,
where the flame-of-the-forest trees in full bloom interlocked so thickly overhead
that only a few of the billion stars hanging like lamps in the heavens could be seen
through the branches. Close by a band was giving an open-air concert and the
music blown to us by the breeze made the night doubly beautiful and peaceful.
Their journey continued to Simla and back to Rawalpindi, and from there, Kashmir:
All our lives we had been attracted to this poetic vale, this Paradise of Asia that had
always seemed as intangible as heaven itself.
85
The significance of a shared attraction to Kashmir, and Davids companionship
there, is in contrast to the heteronormative fantasy promised us at the beginning of
the book: I wanted to . . . make love to a pale Kashmiri maiden beside the Shalimar.
Indeed, Kashmir would remain throughout Halliburtons career a romantic calling
card:
But when it comes to beautiful women, the most beautiful Ive seen were in the
Vale of Kashmir. But then, says Mr. Halliburton, the Vale of Kashmir is the most
beautiful spot he has seen on this earth. . . . almost any girl would seem beautiful
there, under the great tropical moon, the air scented with champa blossoms and
aloe flowers, bulbuls singing, and temple bells ringing. Here, in a houseboat on the
Shalimar, is the worlds ideal spot for a honeymoon, he says. . . . That . . . is where
I want to spend my honeymoon.
86
Strangely, in lush chapters devoted to two stays there, no women are to be found.
Instead, Halliburton and David during their first stay made the acquaintance of
Mr. C* of New York, a man of benevolent spirit and understanding heart, who
hosts them on his palatial houseboat named Lucky.
87
In what he described as their
Elysian existence, they spent days drifting on gondolas up and down the Jhelum,
and luxuriating in Shalimar, about which Halliburton wrote,
After our first moonlit night in the playground I found new beauty and new
poignancy in the most famous of Laurence Hopes Indias Love Lyrics*the lament
of a broken-hearted lover, who, abandoned by his faithless mistress, cries out in his
distress: Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies
beneath your spell? Whom do you lead on Raptures roadway, far, Until you agonize
them for farewell? Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now?
Where are you now?
88
Six weeks later, for ten idyllic days, they rented their own houseboat, enjoying a
life of unmitigated, conscientious Epicureanism. We dined and we drifted and we
dreamed.
89
138 C. E. Morris
The Kashmir episode exemplifies the limp-wristed inscription found in the middle
ground, between the lines, of his bearded tale. Intoxicated by the perfumed,
heteronormative enchantments of the scene, or soured by disbelief in the larger
tale of the Taj Mahal (or, between Kashmiri stays, by the hazardous climb to Leh in
the Himalayas to witness coincidentally a once-in-a-generation inauguration of the
child incarnation of the deity Skushok), one might likely fail to note the striking
absence of a woman as love interest or that, hiding in plain sight, was a bachelor host
and a companionate blond man who may well have been the pale hands I loved
beside the Shalimar. Only for some would the anticipation and amplification of
Kashmir have registered as a sleight of hand, a delicate and daring circumlocution
gesturing toward veiled queer embodiments.
Let me close with Halliburtons fourth persona, those queer cultural insiders who
would have understood that fantastic representation is not a denial of experience;
rather, the yarn spinners exaggerated imagery promotes a renewed acknowledgment
of actual conditions that inspired the tale, knowledge of which binds and perpetuates
the group, those capable of acknowledging and no doubt eager to acknowledge his
rhetorical winks.
90
Jack Gibson of Ohio, Illinois, wrote Halliburton a fan letter in March 1927. Like
many young men inspired by Halliburton, Jack considered himself a vagabond and
harbored a desire to start out this summer, and travel to every Country in the
World. And like many young men, Jack requested that Halliburton join him: I am
looking for a Pal to make this trip with me, and have you enough of the adventures in
you to take that chance with me? Unlike many young men, however, Jack included
his picture and propositioned Halliburton. In his sweetly moving postscript, Jack
wrote,
Dick do you believe in caring for a fellow that you have never seen[?] I have only
your picture but you seem now as a Pal to me. I am hoping you will be. You see my
former Pal I lost during the War. We went together for eight years, and I thought I
would never hook up with another fellow again. You are the first one I have asked
of such a request. You and I are ones willing to take a chance. Is the chance too
much for you?
91
Within the closet culture of the 1920s, Jacks directness might seem anomalous,
reckless even, unless he had gleaned something solicitous in Halliburton*an
invitation.
Much less mysterious is Paul Mooney, who would spend the better part of a
decade, his last, as Halliburtons lover, ghostwriter, partner, beneficiary, and faithful
co-adventurer aboard the Sea Dragon as it went down at sea in 1939. Years earlier, in
1927, twenty-three-year-old Paul published Seven Poems, one of which was titled
Blondel to Richard Coeur de Lion:
Look, Richard! It is I, thy singing boy,
Have followed thee and found thee, where thou art
By prison chains compelled, and walled apart
By dungeon stone from freedoms sunlit joy.
My sharp sword gleams beside my harp; I vow
These sounding cords, this cutting edge, will charm
Or slay the fouls who would thus work thee harm*
My lord, my prince, my loving comrade thou!
92
We do not know for certain whom Paul had in mind, although followers of the Royal
Road can hear echoes of Halliburton reading Byrons The Prisoner of Chillon, and
recall his foiled attempt to visit Fontevrault where lay the body of Richard the Lion-
Hearted, foremost of my boyhood heroes.
93
Gerry Max observes,
Paul . . . may have met Richard Halliburton first through his books. . . . It is not so
unlikely that Paul, a fan of Halliburtons, pursued him, placed himself where
Halliburton might be, even stalked him, as a hero worshiper might chase a hero.
94
Archival Exile
In retrospect, it seems romantically fitting that my own father accompanied me to
Princeton in 2002 on my hunch that there might be something queer in the
Halliburton papers. Halliburtons father, Wesley, served as executor of his estate,
which bequeathed the bulk of extant writings, letters, photographs, and memorabilia
to his alma mater. From over a thousand letters home, Wesley published
Halliburtons (auto)biography in 1940. The publishers note states,
The principle followed in choice and arrangement was to present those things that
would disclose the man and tell with unity and continuity the story of Richard
Halliburtons life. All else, as far as might be feasible, all that might interfere with
progressive development and totality of effect, would be excluded.
95
Elbow deep in files before me at Princeton, I discovered another principle of
exclusion at work: a fathers homophobic love inscribed in penciled excisions of Paul
Mooney and others that for half a century governed his sons sexual exile. Ironically,
because Wesley edited in pencil, Halliburtons men as ever were hidden in plain sight.
However, they remained largely sequestered at Princeton, locatable only without a
roadmap, visible only beneath the lines. From that exhilarating and appalling
moment of discovery, I frame this essays implications.
Insofar as the bearded tale, indeed closet eloquence generally, is about sexual
disposition*that is, orientations and their placements, proximities, punctuations*I
offer a few methodological provocations. One is re-emphasis on Derridas notion of
consignation, the process and politics of assemblage and (re)configuration in
constructing history and memory.
96
Inherently an enactment of archontic power
and its ongoing struggle, consignation should be central to our understanding of the
archive as manifestly and in manifold implication rhetorical.
97
Judith Halberstam
observes,
The archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a
construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity. In order
for the archive to function it requires users, interpreters, and cultural historians to
140 C. E. Morris
wade through the materials and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of queer history in
the making.
98
Halliburtons bearded tales challenge us, in struggling to make our own closet archive,
to figure out and reconfigure the multiple layers of queer and homophobic
consignation performed by Halliburton, Wesley Halliburton, Princeton, and others.
In this regard, I underscore the passe notion that academic archives remain critical
sites of consignation; their exile in favor of theoretical and political vanguards of
popular archives and memory diminishes an important resource . . . for future queer
historians who want to interpret the lives we have lived from the few records we have
left behind.
99
At the same time, there is no gainsaying that the longtime victim of
official consignation, namely vernaculars of various sorts, their performative
embodiments and locations, must figure centrally in any queer consignatory
project.
100
As a corollary, I foreground what is perhaps taken for granted, that rhetorical/
historical criticism, especially of a queer sort, must be rigorously genealogical. I mean
this in two senses. First, there would have been no discerning Halliburtons bearded
tales without recourse to provenance, deep contextualization inside and outside
textual fragments that allow deriving of descent and emergence that locate someone
elses direct experience on a cultural map.
101
Second, passing theory should
necessarily entail such genealogical work, drawing our attention to an under-
recognized nexus that links historical-critical labor with theory building in the
field.
102
As I drafted this, the Internet abounded with chatter about Florida governor
Charlie Crists engagement, sexuality, and class in relation to John McCains selection
of a vice-presidential candidate. As the discourse copiously attested, with Crists
nuptials came a renewed consideration of bearding.
103
I can imagine a future article
consigning from this case a new archive of bearding in the service of queer theory,
one likely missing the deep texture derived from a lineage that extends back into U.S.
closet culture, to the closet eloquence of Richard Halliburton.
104
Here, too, we would
be remiss without considering consignation, as politics of context-text constructions
benefit from the theoretical revelation of ideological investments. Quare critiques are
instructive in this regard, and serve as a critical interruption of my own operative
assumptions in this analysis.
105
I also insist that queer applications of consignation and genealogy are meant for
rhetorical studies generally, not merely for those engaged in queer critical labor; or,
put differently, all critics should be engaged in queer critical labor. Despite
unmistakable proliferation in GLBTQ scholarship in the field, it is not inaccurate
to claim that queer rhetorical studies have been provincially consigned, which is to
say that the full import of queering rhetorical criticism has yet to be recognized,
much less implemented. Stephen Browne observed of authoritative statements on the
state of the art of criticism that context is a necessary category for the work of
interpretation . . . it can function to advance, enrich, and ultimately redeem the
practice of rhetorical criticism.
106
We would do well to extend Brownes meaning
here to include heteronormativity as a context for disciplinary critical practice, its
genealogy and habits of consignation. In doing so, we might better recognize that
beyond interest in Halliburton as text or bearding as rhetorical action, such a queer
project necessarily wrestles with relevant vexing issues of archive, provenance,
evidence, tradition, authority, identity, and circulation.
107
Beyond object domain, in
other words, sexuality provides an invaluable critical vantage and mode of critical-
historical engagement. This is not news but re-orientation (exclamation!), rather like
the moment at which one recognizes that the redolence of Oscar Wildes green
carnation is not an olfactory matter, but about how one puzzles the boutonnie`re*the
critical inducements and indirections of hermeneutics and history, of rhetorical
pasts.
108
Finally, I close by pressing one more passe notion, namely recovery. If we learn
from Halliburton that sexual fugitives are both on the run and desirous of being
located, and imagine that between the lines we might discover queer history in the
making, then as rhetorical/historical critics we should fan our wanderlust and hit the
road, tireless[ly] cruising in vexed pursuit of the elusive artifacts of our queer
histories.
109
Along those circuitous routes, among the cultural topographies that
reveal them, we are apt to consign for ourselves archives robustly constitutive of queer
presents and futures.
Notes
[1] Quoted in Jonathan Root, Halliburton: The Magnicent Myth (New York: Coward-McCann,
1965), 204.
[2] Root, Halliburton, 18.
[3] Mr. Halliburton Plays Robinson Crusoe, New York Times, December 15, 1929; Innocent
Abroad, Time, July 8, 1940, 71; George Weller, The Passing of the Last Playboy, Esquire,
April 1940, 58; Inscription on Memorial Tower, Rhodes College, quoted in James Cortese,
Richard Halliburtons Royal Road (Memphis, TN: White Rose Press, 1989), 171.
[4] Susan Sontag, Homage to Halliburton, in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2001), 25657.
[6] Gerry Max, Richard Halliburton and Thomas Wolfe: When Youth Kept Open House,
North Carolina Literary Review 5 (1996): 92.
[7] Richard Halliburton, The Royal Road to Romance (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 4.
[8] By the time Halliburton began publishing, the travel tale was already well established as a
proto-gay genre in Britain and America, quasi-ethnographic narratives that gave vibrant
form to homoerotic desire. However troubling their various invocations of exoticism and
primitivism, imperialism, and colonialism, these narratives functioned signicantly as
fugitive and emancipatory sexual discourses, a means of permitting the forbidden . . . a
means of conveying their search for an escape from conventional sexual morality. I nd it
striking that Halliburtons books have not been included in this canon. Robert K. Martin,
Cruising the Exotic, Gay Studies Newsletter 10 (July 1983): 13. See also Edward Chaney, The
Grand Tour and Beyond: British and American Travelers in Southern Italy, 15451960
(London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger:
Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Parminder Kaur Bakshi,
Homosexuality and Orientalism: Edward Carpenters Journey to the East, in Edward
Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism, ed. Tony Brown (London: Frank Cass, 1990),
142 C. E. Morris
15177; Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual
Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 1993); G. S. Rousseau, Travel Literature, in The Gay and
Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Readers Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from
Antiquity to the Present, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 7015;
Richard Phillips, Writing Travel and Mapping Sexuality: Richard Burtons Sotadic Zone, in
Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 7091; Justin D. Edwards, Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S.
Travel Literature, 18401930 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001).
[9] Linda Schlossberg, Introduction: Rites of Passing, in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in
Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. Maria Carla Sa nchez and Linda Schlossberg (New York:
New York University Press, 2001), 4.
[10] Richard Halliburton, Rambling Down the Rhine, Richard Halliburton Papers (C0247),
Box 17, Folder 25, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library; hereafter, Halliburton Papers.
[11] Charles E. Morris III, Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoovers Sex Crime
Panic, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 22844.
[12] George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 18901940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), chapter 10, 155, 287.
[13] Blair Niles, Strange Brother (1931; repr., New York: Avon Publishing, 1952), 99, 205.
[14] Henry B. Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale (New York: Oxford Universtiy
Press, 1993), 28, 31.
[15] Wonham, Mark Twain, 2324.
[18] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990), 164.
[19] Melissa Jane Hardie, Beard, in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowely
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 276.
[20] Hardie, Beard, 277.
[23] Hardie, Beard, 28081; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 2015.
[24] I have in mind here, too, what Sedgwick describes as camp-recognition. Sedgwick,
Epistemology of the Closet, 156.
[25] Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980), 214.
[26] Michael Brown, Travelling through the Closet, in Writes of Passage, 187.
[27] Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd rev. ed.
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 284. Fitzgerald and Halliburton did
not know each other as fellow Princeton undergraduates but met briey in 1926. In 1927,
Halliburton sent Fitzgerald a copy of his recently published second book, The Glorious
Adventure, to which he replied, I hope this will reach you before you disappear into
Brooklyn to imagine and write another travel book*because dont think I really believe
youve been in all these places and done all these things like you say. Scott Fitzgerald to
Richard Halliburton, June 30, 1927, in Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J.
Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan (New York: Random House, 1980), 207.
[28] I really loved him, Fitzgerald wrote in his Notebooks, but of course it wore out like a love
affair. The fairies have spoiled all that. James Mellow observed of Hemingway, He would
pepper his published texts and letters with slurring references to homosexual writers.
Nobody but Fairies can write Maspertieces or Masterpieces consciously, he assured
Fitzgerald. Bruccoli, Some Sort, 284; James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life without
Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifin Company, 1992), 397.
[29] See Rena Sanderson, Women in Fitzgeralds Fiction, in The Cambridge Companion to F.
Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 161.
[30] On gay travel as cruising, see Martin, Cruising the Exotic; Edwards, Carl Van Vechtens
Sexual Tourism in Jazz Age Harlem, in Exotic Journeys, 14255.
[31] Michael Blankenship, A Fellow Traveler, Advocate, July 18, 1989, 40.
[32] See Richard Halliburton to Noel Sullivan, February 11, 1928 [?]; February 12, 1929; April 25,
1929; December 15, 1930; Wednesday Night, 1934; Chateau des Fleurs, Hollywood,
Monday, 1934; April 20, 1936; December 26, 1936; Ben Franklin Hotel, Philadelphia,
Sunday, 1936 [?]; Again good-bye, n. d.; Richard Halliburton to Noel Sullivan, December
27, 1937, Box 34, Noel Sullivan Papers (BANC MSS C-B 801), Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley; hereafter, Sullivan Papers.
[33] See Chauncey, Gay New York, chapters 7 and 10; John Loughery, The Other Side of Silence:
Mens Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Henry Holt, 1998),
chapters 24.
[34] Ina Russell, ed., Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 19181945 (Boston: Faber and Faber,
1993), 94. On red ties as signiers of homosexuality, see Chauncey, Gay New York, 52;
Michelle Ann Abate, Reading Red: The Man with the (Gay) Red Tie in Faulkners The Sound
and the Fury, Mississippi Quarterly 54 (2001): 293312.
[35] Halliburton wrote, I didnt object to Beverley Nicholss opinions of me, but most violently
to the invented words he puts in my mouth. Richard Halliburton, Richard Halliburton: The
Story of His Lifes Adventures as Told in Letters to His Mother and Father [hereafter Letters]
(1940; Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishers, 1942), 298. Nichols, The Star Spangled
Manner (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1928), 1.
[36] Richard Halliburton to Mario Ramirez, Friday Morning, 1930, Box 34, Sullivan Papers.
[37] Root, Halliburton, 136, 115. See also Blankenship, Fellow Traveler, 43; Root, Halliburton,
25859; Halliburton, Letters, 50.
[38] John Riddell [Corey Ford], New Ladies Clubs to Conquer, Vanity Fair, September 1928,
73.
[39] Halliburton rst visited Hollywood in 1926, attempting unsuccessfully to sell The Royal
Road. He returned in 1930 during a period of sluggish book sales to a markedly different
reception. Fox bought his script (though never produced it), he lectured successfully, and he
became quite popular among posh social circles. His relationships with Ramon Novarro and
Rod La Rocque, along with his references to female (i.e., queer) gossip and Billy Haines,
also suggest that he knew well gay Hollywood. Halliburton, Letters, 3047, 34243; Root,
Halliburton, 122, 125, 166, 16974, 20914; Richard Halliburton to Mario Ramirez, Friday
Morning, 1930, Box 34, Sullivan Papers; Halliburton to Noel Sullivan, December 15, 1930,
Box 34, Sullivan papers; Blankenship, Fellow Traveler, 40, 42; Andre Soares, Beyond
Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro (New York: St. Martins Press, 2002), 16364.
[41] Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 92.
[42] William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 19101969
(New York: Viking, 2001), 9091.
[43] Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 98, 118, citing Michael Strange, Who Tells Me True (New
York: Scribners, 1940), 154.
[44] Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 94.
[45] William J. Mann, Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywoods First Openly
Gay Star (New York: Viking, 1998), 111.
[46] Mann, Behind the Screen, 2426, 99107, 14952.
144 C. E. Morris
[49] Dorothy Dayton, Richard Halliburton, Prince of Lovers Talks about Women and Love,
The Illustrated Love Magazine, March 1930, 41; Lillian G. Genn, Crown of Beauty Handed
to Persia, Washington Post, August 7, 1932; Halliburton, Where Ill Spend My
Honeymoons [n.d., no publication information], Box 17, Folder 35, Halliburton Papers.
Condence in this bearding PR must have been strong, because a contemporaneous ad for
Chase and Sanborn coffee included all well-known bachelors*Halliburton, Henry Sleeper,
Alexander Woollcott, Gary Cooper, and William Haines*male celebrities described as being
surprisingly domestic, a seemingly dangerous constellation brightened by double
entendres. Womans Home Companion, April 1930, n.p.
[50] Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move during the Great Depression (New
York: TV Books, 1999), 1920. See also R. C. Phelan, Halliburtons Banana Peel: A Texas
Memory, Vogue, February 1, 1960, 80.
[51] Playboy, Time, May 30, 1927, 37.
[52] See Charles E. Morris III, Passing by Proxy: Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of
Leopold and Loeb, Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 26490.
[53] Gilbert Hamilton, A Research in Marriage (New York: Boni, 1929), 478, quoted in Kevin
White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America
(New York: New York University Press, 1993), 15253.
[54] White, First Sexual Revolution, 15253.
[55] We Nominate for Oblivion, Vanity Fair, June 1930, 49.
[56] Riddell, New Ladies Clubs to Conquer, 73. The essay also appeared in John Riddell [Corey
Ford], Meaning No Offense (New York: John Day Company, 1928), 1019. In addition to the
double entendre of ferries, 42nd Street was the epicenter for fairy prostitutes and gay
male cruising during the 1920s. Chauncey, Gay New York, 191.
[57] Riddell, New Ladies Clubs to Conquer, 73. For the caricature, see John Riddell [Corey
Ford], The John Riddell Murder Case: A Philo Vance Parody (New York: Scribners Sons,
1930), 212. An advertisement for the book featuring this image appeared in Vanity Fair,
January 1931, 81.
[58] Riddell, New Ladies Clubs to Conquer, 73.
[59] Halliburton, Letters, 344; Root, Halliburton, 117.
[61] Richard Halliburton Answers His Critics, n.d. [1936?], Box 17, Folder 26, Halliburton
Papers.
[62] Allen Churchill, The Literary Decade (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 266.
[63] Root, Halliburton, 18; David M. Schwartz, On the Road to Adventures with Daring Dick,
Smithsonian, March 1989, 172.
[64] Halliburton, Royal Road, 3. Joseph Allen Boone observes, Indeed, in artistic circles of the
1920s and 1930s, mention of the name Wilde often served as a code word to signal
homosexual propensity. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 227.
[65] Halliburton, Royal Road, 45.
[67] Halliburton, Royal Road, 43, chapters 10, 15, 26, 31, 33.
[68] Halliburton, Royal Road, 2326. Byron ed England ostracized because of rumors
concerning incest and homosexuality. See Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love:
Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
chapter 5. Sex reformer William Robinson observed in 1925, The thing that struck me
peculiarly in almost all homosexuals is their pathetic eagerness to claim . . . Shakespeare,
Byron and Whitman as belonging to their class, as if their homosexuality . . . were a well-
established historical fact. Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), 424.
[73] Halliburton, Royal Road, 62; see also 253.
[78] Wonham, Mark Twain, 2324, 3136.
[81] Halliburton, Royal Road, 6674. In correspondence, Halliburton was more demonstrative
about Paul, his splendid company and his comforting presence, and while separated in
Madrid, I miss Paul. Letters, 10622.
[84] John W. Maloney, Footloose and Free, Washington Post, December 15, 1935. See also
Weller, Passing of the Last, 111.
[86] Dayton, Prince of Lovers, 40.
[90] Wonham, Twain, 24.
[91] Jack Gibson to Richard Halliburton, March 14, 1927, Box 25, Folder 23, Halliburton Papers.
[92] Gerry Max, Horizon Chasers: The Lives and Adventures of Richard Halliburton and Paul
Mooney (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007), 235.
[93] Halliburton, Royal Road, 2326, 3536.
[94] Max, Horizon Chasers, 6566.
[95] Halliburton, Letters, ix.
[96] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998). See also Barbara Biesecker, Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as a Scene of
Invention, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 12431; Nathan Stormer, To Remember, to
Act, to Forget: Tracing Collective Memory through A Jury of Her Peers, Communication
Studies 54 (2003): 51029; Helen Freshwater, The Allure of the Archive, Poetics Today 24
(2003): 72958; Michael Lynch, Archives in Formation: Privileged Spaces, Popular Archives
and Paper Trails, History of the Human Sciences 12 (1999): 6587.
[97] See Forum: The Politics of Archival Research, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 11352.
[98] Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New
York: New York University Press, 2005), 16970. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),
23971.
[99] Halberstam, In a Queer Time, 46. My anxiety here derives from now-typical variations on the
refrain its more than a repository, leading beyond the archival space itself into the public
realms of rhetorical invention and action. The danger is that valuable theoretical
advancement potentially stymies exploration and critical engagement with those old-
fashioned repositories that have yet to be fully mined for their valuable fragments of queer
history.
[100] See, for example, Isaac West, Debbie Maynes Trans/scripts: Performative Repertoires in Law
and Everyday Life, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 24563.
146 C. E. Morris
[101] Stormer, To Remember, to Act, 517. See also Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald
F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 13964.
[102] I envision valuable linkages between historical-critical work on passing and recent excellent
readings of contemporary passing performances. Catherine R. Squires and Daniel C.
Brouwer, In/Discernible Bodies: The Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,
Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 283310; Jeffrey A. Bennett, Passing,
Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Inltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation,
Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 2343.
[103] See, for example, Chris Kelly, Charlie Crist Isnt Gay, OK? Hufngton Post, July 4, 2008,
http://www.hufngtonpost.com/chris-kelly/charlie-crist-isnt-gay-ok_b_110890.html/.
[104] This genealogical challenge also requires that we take seriously the relationship between the
archive and repertoire, documentary and embodied memory. Scholarly emphasis on Diana
Taylors concept of repertoire has not done justice to her argument that the archive and the
repertoire exist in a constant state of interaction. Acknowledging the archives historical
privilege, nevertheless we should not ignore her discussion of the dynamic cultural and
political interplay between them. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 21, chapter 1. For
useful guides, see Della Pollock, ed., Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Touring
Cancer Alley, Louisiana: Performances of Community and Memory for Environmental
Justice, Text and Performance Quarterly 23 (2003): 22652.
[105] See E. Patrick Johnson, Quare Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer
Studies I Learned from My Grandmother, Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (2001): 125;
Julie M. Thompson, On the Development of Counter-Racist Quare Public Address Studies,
in Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris
III (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007): 12146; Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr.,
Out in the Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and the Architexture of Black Masculinity,
Text and Performance Quarterly 28 (2008): 298314.
[106] Stephen Howard Browne, Response: Context in Critical Theory and Practice, in Special
Issue: Rhetorical Criticism: The State of the Art Revisited, Western Journal of Communica-
tion 65 (2001): 330.
[107] See, for example, John D. Wrathall, Provenance as Text: Reading the Silences around
Sexuality in Manuscript Collections, Journal of American History 79 (1992): 16578; Gavin
Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 19481963 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Claire Bond Potter, Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and
Political History, Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (2006): 35581; Morris, Queering
Public Address.
[108] Every critic should read Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde
(London: Serpents Tail, 1988).
[109] Charles E. Morris III, Archival Queer, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 148.

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