Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality

"In this unnerving biography of Norman Douglas, a prolific British novelist, travel writer, and an undisguised and unrepentant pedophile, Rachel Hope Cleves grapples-at length and with feeling-with the interrelated questions of how to write the biographyof a repulsive man and why. She focuses less on defining who Douglas was than on why Douglas seems so monstrous to us when he often did not to those who knew and (yes) loved him. Cleves does more than sketch the conditions and influence of Douglas's lifeand work; she probes how changing social norms affect our aesthetic and moral assessments"--
The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British writer Norman Douglas (1868&;1952), who was a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence, and an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves&;s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment&;until they didn&;t.Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs&;including sources by the children Douglas encountered&;Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.