Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

48 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
work that never made it into print, that is the unpublished explicitly homosexual work
Go Seek a Stranger, a work universally judged his best, by among others Virginia Woolf.
Hampson submitted this novel to the Hogarth Press in 1928, before Saturday Night at
the Greyhound and O Providence. What remains of the manuscript is somewhat fragmented—Hampson’s
nephews Mercer Simpson, author of a thesis on Hampson, and Roger
Hubank, Hampson’s literary executor, believe that Hampson destroyed certain parts of
it himself on the advice of Belfast writer Forrest Reid (an early mentor for Hampson)
and also that John’s sister Mona McEvoy (the model for Ivy of Saturday Night at the
Greyhound), in an eff ort to protect her brother, took a pair of scissors to the more explicit
passages such as the seduction scene of the protagonist Alec by his school master.
As Hubank has suggested, Go Seek a Stranger is a kind of twentieth-century picaresque
novel which follows Alec away from home after he is dismissed from his job as
essentially “unsuitable for work” after reporting an attack made on him by two co-workers
(personal communication). Th is failure to fi t in is a theme that runs across the length of
the work which sees Alec move fi rst to Nottingham to fi nd work in a hotel kitchen, then
on a brief but idyllic holiday with lover Bill, then to Liverpool, after Bill leaves for France,
then to London. Only in London does Alec fi nally fi nd the liberty to live as a gay man
in the company of Richard—with whom he is planning a trip to France as our version of
the novel closes.
Very much like Forster’s Maurice—“Begun 1913. Finished 1914. Dedicated to a
Happier Year,” published posthumously in 1971—Hampson’s Go Seek a Stranger off ers
a highly candid and sympathetic portrait of the dilemma of the homosexual man in the
1920s and 1930s. As in Saturday Night at the Greyhound and O Providence, the world
of work plays an important role in this fi rst novel. Unlike the earlier novels, Go Seek a
Stranger is stylistically complex.
It is clear that the Woolfs would have published Go Seek a Stranger, as suggested by
Leonard Woolf’s kind rejection letter to Hampson, dated 13 October 1928 (the letter is
dated just two days after the date on which Virginia Woolf’s Orlando concludes: “at the
twelfth stroke of midnight, Th ursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and
Twenty Eight” (O 329)). Th is coincidence is relevant in the sense that Orlando is a novel
often considered to have been lucky to have escaped the censors. 8 Leonard Woolf tells
Hampson that “[the work] has interested us greatly and has such merits that we should
have liked to publish.” “Unfortunately [he concludes] we do not think that this would be
possible under present circumstances.” Forster confi rms the Woolfs’ support of the work
in a letter to Forrest Reid in 1931 where he writes: “I should think [Hampson’s] unpublished
book, where he can be always himself, must be splendid…. Th e Woolfs read it and
praised it highly to me a couple of years ago: he actually submitted it to them for publication—they
were very sorry they couldn’t take it” (Selected Letters 103).
Th e Woolfs’ experience with Joyce’s Ulysses, for which they were unable to fi nd a
printer willing to risk prosecution on obscenity charges, and their involvement with Radclyff
e Hall’s Th e Well of Loneliness trial at the very moment in 1928 when Hampson’s manuscript
landed on their desks likely discouraged them from publishing Go Seek a Stranger.
Although vocal in their condemnation of censorship in their capacity as writers—Virginia
Woolf wrote a short piece with Forster entitled “Th e New Censorship” in the Nation and
Athenaeum in 1928 in which they argue that the writer cannot write good literature until