Whatever Happened to the Eccentric?
Horace Walpole liked to get dolled up as an old maid, though as many noted, he did not need clothes and makeup to achieve that effect.
I cross-dress. I have cross-dressed since forever. I think I had barely stopped eating crayons when I first slipped into something I probably wasn’t supposed to be wearing. In fact, I have the vaguest memory of going over to a friend’s house at about the age of five and ending up in a very pretty yellow summer dress, though I am not entirely sure how it happened. No matter. Why I continue to do this is a different question. Creative expression, perhaps, or escapism, or maybe because I have great taste (or — and I have this on excellent authority — great legs). Who knows? And really, who cares? I don’t need to justify myself since I have no particular need to please anyone. I am not running for office. Yet.
I will not bore you with stories of—that greatly overused word—‘trauma’. Yes, there was the period of youthful insecurity. And yes, there were the sometime, slightly dicey and unwanted meetings with men who were not on great terms with their own sexual tastes and feeling quite cross at the world about it. (Once, realising I was being followed, I spent almost the entirety of a forty-minute walk home wondering if a high heel could make a workable shank. Rather blandly, I finally lost my pursuer thanks to my superior knowledge of the one-way system). And yes, in my twenties, there was a spell during which I tried on various identities, like a good postmodern liberal. But in the end I resolved that, tragically, I was what I had always known deep down I was (and am), which is: a bit eccentric.
Realising I was being followed, I spent almost the entirety of a forty-minute walk home wondering if a high heel could make a workable shank.
Now, I realised recently that this practically makes me a trope, which hurts my feelings. The ‘eccentric Englishman’ is almost on the same level as the unflappable aristocrat, sipping his tea while bombs fall around him, or — rather less attractive — the boorish yobbo, fighting foreign cops after football matches. And he been around for quite a while. Since at least the 17th century and probably before, both the English themselves and sundry continental onlookers have noted the worryingly high propensity and tolerance for eccentricity among the English. The very entertaining Earl of Rochester, a gifted poet who resisted the Puritanism of the late 1600s, was notoriously quirky—helped, I imagine, by his going at the age of 12 to Wadham College, Oxford, which was known at the time for ‘cross-dressing, lewdness, bisexuality and sodomy’ (sounds like a good party if ever there was one). The satirist Horace Walpole, moreover, apparently liked to get dolled up as an old maid, though as a number of onlookers noted, he did not need the clothes and makeup to achieve that effect.
Some commentators connect the English tolerance for eccentricity with the country’s tradition of personal freedom, the English (and Scottish) having laid down the foundations for political liberty several hundred years ago through Locke, Mill, Milton and Smith. Others still believe it has something to do with the language: the way it jumps into bed (so to speak) with every new word that happens to come along and bat its eyelashes. (French is fussy and prudish by contrast, causing Joseph Conrad to say that to write in French, you would have to be ‘an engineer’.)
Some commentators connect the English tolerance for eccentricity with the country’s tradition of personal freedom.
Of course, there are eccentrics who deliberately chuck rocks at the ruling order. The Anglo-Irish satirists stand out in this respect: Oliver Goldsmith and Jonathan Swift are worth a mention, but naturally, Oscar Wilde is the exemplar, taking shots at Victorian middle-class conformity in plays like The Importance of Being Earnest, (which the humourless theatre owners shut down after 86 performances when it was revealed that Wilde was gay). By having one foot inside and one foot outside of society, as it were, Wilde et al. were able to see things others could not.
But I am slightly concerned that the eccentric is a dying breed. For eccentric (literally, ‘out of centre’) implies a centre — that is, a norm. The eccentric is one who has at least one foot outside of the mainstream, which necessitates a mainstream. And it seems to me that we are trying very hard to abolish such a notion. Nothing is true, all is permitted. We are all just good little consumers, bags of meat wandering around by ourselves, tied to nothing, anchored by nothing. God forbid we might in fact be a part of—indeed, a product of—a surrounding culture, however imperfect. And God forbid we might be able to stand outside that culture and make fun of it without severing all our ties with it or dismissing it as fundamentally unjust. But, per Montaigne, what do I know?
