Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [22]
The Scot’s charms engendered idolatrous feelings among young men. “His capacity for friendship was seemingly boundless, drawing to him extremes of the most startling sort among men,” according to one description published shortly after his death. Women were also attracted to Davidson because he was one of the few teachers who treated them as equal to males. But Davidson was unable to sustain a romantic relationship with a woman. He broke off an eight-year engagement to the only woman he found sexually appealing. “I am cursed with a nature that makes all real marriage impossible. When I am physically attracted to a woman I always despise her,” he wrote. “When I love a woman spiritually, I am always repelled from her with fearful force, that is, physically.”
If Davidson was attracted sexually to men, he was not about to proclaim it. With almost no exception, men in his time did not reveal their homosexuality. On the other hand, wherever he went, Davidson left a trail of young men with broken hearts. In 1867, for instance, one young Englishman wrote to Davidson, now in the United States, “I will never forget how queer I felt about my heart when once at ‘Jacques Lorgues’ both seated on the same sofa, you put your arms round my neck and gazing fondly in my face, you pressed me into your loving arms and said: ‘Oh! If I were a woman!!’…then you rested your head on my bosom. I felt as if you had been yourself my sweet-loving bride.”
Five years earlier, another young man had been even more direct about the loss of Davidson’s companionship. “You were pure, beautiful, intelligent and good and around you the tendrils of adoration and love—the holiest and tenderest feelings of my heart became hopefully entwined,” he wrote. “The thought that you might be my wife completely filled the measure of my hopes in this world.”
Davidson himself confessed considerable emotional turmoil over his attraction to men. “I am not loose or wicked in my behavior, but I am naturally endowed with fearfully strong passions so much so that I am often driven by them to the verge of committing suicide.”
Pulitzer fell under Davidson’s spell. Over time, the two came to spend nights together in each other’s quarters where, as Pulitzer lay on a bed, Davidson would expound upon the classics, literature, and philosophy. These nights filled an emotional void in Pulitzer, a youth stranded in a foreign land, his father dead and his mother married to another man. Sharing a bed was a rare gesture for Pulitzer. Intimacy—especially physical intimacy—was not easy for him. He was very ill at ease when he was around others and not fully clothed. “From his earliest days he slept alone,” a longtime associate would later say, “save when he shared a bed with Professor Davidson, remarking after that this unwonted intimacy showed how much he thought of his learned friend.”
As when Davidson abandoned other young men, Pulitzer’s deep passionate bond with him came to the surface in pained letters. “If Faust had been such a cold-blooded heartless chap as you are, Goethe and Mephisto would have had a much harder time indeed,” a crestfallen Pulitzer wrote when Davidson left for Boston. “But I’ll have my revenge even if I have to go all the way to Massachusetts to get it.” Pulitzer promised to pardon Davidson if he wrote at least once a week while they were apart.
Davidson ignored this request. Calling him a “villain,” Pulitzer again unburdened himself. “What a fool your friend must be to cling to you still,” he wrote. “But never fear, it is my mission as it is the mission of great men to reform and perseverance like your wisdom knows no limit. Whether you go to Massachusetts, or still further north as far even the north-pole I shall stick to you—stick to you until grim death.
“Do you know what I have been guilty