Evans Wentz and Sex May 4, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Beach has had talked about Walter and his thesis, Walter and the fairies, Walter and money, now is it is time for Walter with no clothes on: Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz’s sexual habits. At this point we better recite the ritual ‘not that there is anything wrong with that’. Beach has absolutely no interest in beating a moral tattoo out on Evans Wentz’s bones, he is just curious about what made the man tick.
Broadly speaking there are four possibilities.
a) Evans-Wentz was heterosexual.
b) Evans-Wentz was bisexual
c) Evans-Wentz was homosexual
d) Evans-Wentz was asexual.
As a life-long theosophist Evans Wentz would certainly have preferred (d). Theosophists were encouraged to rise above ‘lower’ urges like sex: theosophy and the joyless Madam Blavatsky do not distinguish between different sexual orientations, they are just rather impatient with the idea of carnal relations per se. Very possibly Walter imposed a harsh yoke on his own sexual side: he had remarkable will power.
Ken Wilker, Evans Wentz’s biographer (if you are still out there Ken Beach would love to make contact…) is extremely circumspect about what went on in Walter’s bed. Either he considered that it was none of his business or that it didn’t really matter. However, some interesting material leaks out.
First, Evans Wentz objected to the very concept of marriage from his early twenties, perhaps even his late teens. Walter’s family, it has to be said, were not very good at staying together, and so there is no need to take this as a clue to his sexual preferences. Note, too, that we might be picking up theosophical ideas here: Walter was reading theosophical books from his early, mid teens.
Second, Evans Wentz is not recorded in any long-term (or for that matter short-term) relationship by Winkler. This could have been discretion on Winkler’s part: the book was published in 1982. But Evans Wentz’s constant travelling suggests that he just didn’t have room for anyone in his life; and evidently no one came along for the ride.
Third, theosophists are incredibly bitchy: peace, love and hair pulling. If there was mud to be thrown it would have been thrown. We have one fascinating attack on Evans Wentz in 1942: sex came into it (tantricism), but not Evans Wentz’s own sex life.
Fourth, Evans Wentz’s diaries were extremely ‘elevated’ (i.e. sterile): sometimes not mentioning deaths in the family. However, when on the French Riviera before WW1 he became fascinated by the local rent boys. The following is in Wilker (23):
He also scorned the sex life of the people along the French Riveria [sic] and deplored the young boys who preyed on British homosexuals. Displaying his usual abhorance [sic] of such public displays, he set out to study it as a scholar. Evans-Wentz hired some of the young men to detail to him the problems they faced. Page after page of his diaries graphically detailed how so many of these boys were lured into the profession, how they survived and how they worked blackmail and robbery. He yearned for a more beautiful life for them and for himself. The further he traveled (to Genoa, Lugano, Milan) the more he worried over them and over the general lack of brotherhood he was encountering. ‘I am not in love with the modern world’, he wrote, ‘but rather with the Greek world.’
Now none of these points either separately or together mean anything definite or can even stand as half formed clues to what seems to have been a submerged part of Evans-Wentz’s life. However, Beach finds the intense sympathy for these young prostitutes to be both moving and suggestive, particularly Evans-Wentz’s identification with them: ‘a more beautiful life for them and for himself’. The reference to Greece is difficult to blink away, too.
A celibate homosexual?
This post has been written with some care, Beach knowing that many are easily offended by these matters or more to the point these matters being framed as questions. Yes, our sexual profile shouldn’t matter and yet if this blogger wants to get a deep picture of a complete stranger it would be what he would ask after gender, age and nationality, and before police records and voting preference.
So are there any of Evans Wentz’ old girlfriends out there: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com There is a tiny chance that one of the rent boys from Monte Carlo is still alive, though it is extremely unlikely that he will have an email account…
PC writes in, 29 Jun 2017: Actually I know very little about the private lives of the Theosophists, but that of Charles Webster Leadbeater is illuminating (the WIkipedia article is rather a whitewash). Yes, I’d say Evans-Wentz was a repressed homosexual – and Leadbeater was a scoundrel, but amusing.
Southern Man who has been helping me, 29 Jun 2017, with EW points out that in EW’s quite sparse Oxford docs….
