He has published books on topics ranging from Freud to opera. But it's a personal essay he wrote for the history department newsletter in 1995 that Paul Robinson's colleagues remember most vividly, often quoting it verbatim.
In the essay, the Stanford professor described how it felt to be stricken with hepatitis and undergo a liver transplant at age 47. Robinson, whose new liver came from a teenage boy killed in a truck accident, wrote that "the very idea of the self may have suffered a ruder shock from transplantation than it ever has from David Hume or Michel Foucault." However shaken his sense of self, Robinson's devilish wit stayed intact. The doctors, he later observed, "gave me a new liver but left me with my old spleen."
That spleen appears robust in his latest book. The new work is trademark Robinson -- a polished, provocative treatise exploring intimacy and self-identity. Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette dissects sexual memoirs written by 14 gay artists and intellectuals over the past 100 years. Robinson, the Lyman Professor in the Humanities and a specialist in European intellectual history, finds that "the progress toward self-affirmation has been neither smooth nor inexorable" for gay men in the 20th century.
To select the writings, Robinson read hundreds of memoirs in search of "stories that were very gripping, very powerful, moving and funny -- stories about compelling human relationships." Some are agonizing, such as the saga of American historian Martin Duberman, "emotionally crippled" by Freudian therapists who tried to cure him of homosexuality. Others are heartening or even comic, as in the case of English writer Quentin Crisp (see excerpt). Together, the stories shake any notion of an archetypal "gay autobiography."
Robinson found himself "impressed by the extraordinary differences in [these men's] sexual behavior, their desires, the meaning they attribute to their predicament, the happiness or misery it brings them, and the implications they draw from it."
Truth, Dignity and Sexual Identity
Quentin Crisp came to think of his life as a performance. From early on, the performance was ideologically motivated: it was an act of transgression, of defiance, through which, almost singlehandedly, he did public battle with the heterosexual prejudices of English society.
But Crisp's comedic aggression was as often directed against himself as against society. His deeply ambivalent wit came to focus above all on his effeminacy, which was at once a militant cause and a huge gag. His dyed hair, his plucked eyebrows, his jangling jewelry and his wicked sashaying were, to be sure, serious and intentional affronts to the heterosexual establishment, but that did not prevent Crisp from milking them for laughs. Both the truth and the dignity of his sexual identity were thus put at risk.
-- from Gay Lives
A New York Times reviewer praised Gay Lives for "drawing our attention to some works of real beauty." The critic also applauded Robinson for throwing some well-deserved critical punches -- for instance, tagging English poet Stephen Spender's philosophical musings on homosexual love as "sub-Sartrean existential blather." "Paul has a wonderful feeling for nuance that sets him apart from most people in his field," says longtime friend Herbert Lindenberger, the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities.
Robinson admits to taking "enormous amounts of time" with his writing, which "always means making sentences shorter, clearer and more efficient," he says. "My philosophy is that you must not treat the reader as if he had all eternity to read your blessed books."
In the classroom, his concern for both style and substance has led him beyond the traditional sources of intellectual history. Robinson's students examine novels and music along with the more usual political and philosophical treatises. A 1962 Yale graduate with a Harvard PhD, he has won plenty of teaching awards and academic honors during his 32 years at Stanford, building an international reputation as a scholar of Freud and the history of music. And then there's sex.
"What holds much of his work together," Lindenberger says, "is a concern with the history of sexuality."
Students have a similar take. "Ask any graduate student what Paul is known for, and you'll get a one-word answer: sex," says J.B. Shank, a doctoral candidate and lecturer in the required freshman humanities program. "He's fascinated by sex and is a constant, funny critic of puritanism."
"How we have thought about our sexuality is just as clearly part of our intellectual history as the history of political, economic or social thought," Robinson asserted in 1976 upon the publication of his first book on the subject, The Modernization of Sex. In that work, he suggested that as a result of the "mechanistic materialism" of '50s sexologists Masters and Johnson, "we may have saved ourselves anxiety but lost ecstasy."
Robinson began to think about writing Gay Lives soon after finishing a fourth work, Freud and His Critics, in 1993. He took time out to complete Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio in 1996, then spent a year on sabbatical at the Stanford Humanities Center working on the new manuscript. Robinson recalls doing all his reading for the book stretched out on a couch in the campus home he shares with his longtime partner, Steve Dunatov, a financial analyst at the Medical School.
He doubts he'll ever write a book about his own romantic life. Gay Lives touches only briefly on his past, mentioning that he became a "serious Roman Catholic" after several homosexual experiences in high school and that he was married for three years before moving from Boston to San Francisco with a male lover in 1967. "Being in the closet was no picnic," he writes, but "it did not reduce the rest of my life to a desert of nothingness; it did not blot out the pride of academic success, the joy of music-making, the pleasure of friendship." And coming out of the closet was "not only gratifying but remarkably easy -- managed without any thought of seeing an analyst."
His marriage produced a daughter, Susan Robinson, '87, who lives in Alabama. He delights in her teasing description of his new book as "academic porn."
He also is clearly amused by a write-up of Gay Lives that ran in Kirkus Reviews. It was a rap on the knuckles that might have cowed some authors. "'Robinson dives for the genitals with unseemly relish,'" he crows, reading from the review. "I think we're going to put that on the cover of the paperback edition. Because listen, bub, genitals are what it's all about."
Diane Manuel covers arts and humanities for the Stanford News Service.
