Queer Glances

Amy Levy's "At a Dinner Party" and the pleasures of the closet

Amy Levy

If you read this substack, you are probably aware the election is today. Since I think I’ve said all I could on that, I figured I’d offer you all a break from political content to read while waiting for those returns.

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I’ve written several essays about the way critics sometimes ignore queer content even in poems written by openly queer writers. One of the reasons gay and lesbian subtext (or even text!) gets erased or put to one side is because the subtext (or text!) is often actually about the closet, or is playing with the way the closet is a site of silenced speech, or of silences that speak. Queer poems are often about the way they hide themselves; they speak their name by not speaking it, or vice versa.

One delightful example is “At the Dinner Party,” by Amy Levy (1861-1889). I found it in Everyman Library’s (highly recommended) anthology, Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems.  

At a Dinner Party

With fruit and flowers the board is decked,
   The wine and laughter flow;
I’ll not complain – could one expect
   So dull a world to know?

You look across the fruit and flowers,
   My glance your glances find. –
It is our secret, only ours,
   Since all the world is blind.

Levy was best known as one of the first Jewish students at Cambridge; she wrote feminist “New Women” novels about independent working women. She also, though, wrote poetry, often with lesbian themes. Several of her poems are directed to novelist Violet Page, aka, Vernon Lee, such as this sensual, bitter sonnet to love lost.

To Vernon Lee

On Bellosguardo, when the year was young,
We wandered, seeking for the daffodil
And dark anemone, whose purples fill
The peasant's plot, between the corn-shoots sprung.

Over the grey, low wall the olive flung
Her deeper greyness; far off, hill on hill
Sloped to the sky, which, pearly-pale and still,
Above the large and luminous landscape hung.

A snowy blackthorn flowered beyond my reach;
You broke a branch and gave it to me there;
I found for you a scarlet blossom rare.

Thereby ran on of Art and Life our speech;
And of the gifts the gods had given to each—
Hope unto you, and unto me Despair.

“To Vernon Lee” (barely) conceals its lesbian overtones by juuust barely skirting the more explicit implications of all that romantic blossom exchanging and sighing. If you were determined you could tell yourself that Lee and Levy are just very good friends, that the caressing of petals is absolutely not a double entendre, and that Lee’s hope is parallel to, rather than entangled with, Levy’s despair.

“At A Dinner Party” takes a slightly different tack to concealment. Rather than sidestepping queer connotations, it hides its queerness in plain sight. The rhythm foregrounds its idiosyncracy within convention; the alternating lines of four and three iambic feet have an off kilter feel even as the rhymes click shut. It’s wrong but right, or right because it’s a little wrong.

At a Dinner Party

With fruit and flowers the board is decked,
   The wine and laughter flow;
I’ll not complain – could one expect
   So dull a world to know?

You look across the fruit and flowers,
   My glance your glances find. –
It is our secret, only ours,
   Since all the world is blind.

Similarly, the love in the poem is where it should be, and yet maybe not. The poem is openly about love and the beloved. But it’s written in second person, so the reader doesn’t know the gender of the object of affection. Again, if someone were determined, they could (mis)read it as a heterosexual love poem. “I’ll not complain,” as Levy says. “– could one expect/So dull a world to know?”

Levy doesn’t expect her readers to know who she’s looking at. At the same time she does expect them to know. The poem is about queer cruising—glances that mean one thing if you know, and another thing (or nothing) if you don’t. The fruit and flowers are just fruit and flowers, or they are the lush symbols of romance, fertility, arousal. “Our secret”, too, is what you make of it—an innocuous understanding, a heterosexual promise, or…

Much of the joy of the poem is the way that it exuberantly exults in its privacy; it shouts its hidden truths to the world which refuses to hear them. That’s in part a standard dynamic of love poetry, which is always about putting an intimate emotion on display for public appreciation/identification. But it’s also a specifically queer leveraging of the closet. Levy can exchange these delicious glances openly but unknown because all the dull heterosexuals drinking wine and laughing think that they’re sophisticates, even though they’re “blind” to the best pleasures and the most sensuous possibilities.

Those pleasures and possibilities are themselves “glances”; what “the world” can’t see is sight itself. Queerness is vision; poor heterosexual readers don’t just fail to see, but fail to see that they can’t see. Levy is reveling in her dual visibility (to the one she wants to see her) and invisibility (to the fools she doesn’t care about.) She can flaunt her desire and keep it hidden at the same time, like a published love poem which really makes sense only to the person it’s written for. The person its written for, here, meaning both the particular love, and queer people in general.

Levy’s poem is, then, both a flirtatious queer love poem and a flirtatious commentary on queer love poems. “At A Dinner Party” is exclusive; you are invited if you can read the invitation correctly. Critics who miss the fun are essential to the fun; to know what everyone else doesn’t is sexy, thrilling, amusing.

In that way for Levy, and I think for many other queer writers, the erasure, or misapprehension, of queer content is itself a reinscription of queer content. Levy’s love is all the more present—“ours, only ours”—because some people say it’s not there.  When people have refused to see you all your life, there’s nothing like the electric spark when someone meets your eye.  

So are there critics who still don’t see what Levy is seeing? Well, Wikipedia insists, without citation, that “scholars continue to debate” whether Levy’s love letters to Vernon Lee were actually love letters. Levy would perhaps be pleased to know that some people at that dinner party are still burying their head in the fruit (in a way that is entirely safe for work.)

I think she’d also be happy, though, to know that people like J.D. McClatchy can see the flowers right in front of his face. He even pairs them with appropriate and complimentary blooms, as when he put this Walt Whitman poem right before Levy’s in his anthology.

Among the Multitude

Among the men and women the multitude,  
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,  
Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am,   
Some are baffled, but that one is not—that one knows me.  

Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by my faint indirections,  
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.