#kurtfreund

Hugh Murray; Constantine Petrie; Peter Small; Signor Beniamino Bari; The Honourable Alex O’Brannigan, Bart.; Kurt Freund; Mr. John P. de Salis, M.A.; Dr[.] Solway Garr; Bonaparte Gosworth; Legs O’Hagan.

These are the names the author imagines might be his once he realizes he’s forgotten his name, though he remembers his life. Why is there no period after the “Dr” before Solway Garr? Typo? I don’t know. The other names I like very much.

Legs O’Hagan, in particular, sounds like he would be a cowardly Irish mobster who got his nickname by being the worst lookout ever, running away at even the slightest provocation.

Interestingly, Kurt Freund, whose name appears in the above list, was a “real-life” sex researcher who used measurements of blood flow to the penis to diagnose a wide variety of sexual . . . uh, proclivities, conditions, preconditions, preferences, orientations . . . whatever. Anyway, his research became the basis for the decriminalization of homsexuality in Czecholoslavakia in 1961 and in other countries later, though at first it was used to bar homosexuals from military service and to otherwise discriminate and punish. Based on his evidence, however, he eventually advocated that homosexuality was innate and not “curable.” He met resistance to these views but is widely revered today as an early advocate for LGBT rights. That said, his work has been criticized on all sides, whether for providing too easy a tool for discrimination, or for excusing perversion, or for just being general quackery. So, whether right or wrong, he can’t be said to be a politico or a crusader for either “side.”

More controversially, though, he also waded into the finer details of human sexuality by writing about and studying various “philias” that remain criminal, or that are, at least, politically questionable. His preference to diagnose rather than to condemn certain “turn-ons,” including that of active resistance by the sexual partner, remain highly controversial because they are said to turn criminal acts into diagnosable, inculpable conditions.

More interestingly still, in the late-1960s, when TPP was published, Mr. Freund’s earliest works, which first began to be published in 1958, would have been well known to those (as, say, journalists and civil servants such as the author) who could have easily accessed it. So let’s assume O’Nolan knew of Freund and his work and talked about it, maybe surreptitiously, to his colleagues. But TTP was written in 1939-40, before Freund had published anything, so if this reference is to the Kurt Freund, it would have had to have been added by the author to his manuscript for TTP much later than when it was originally written. That may seem unlikely, but it is also unlikely that the author just happened to coincidentally put a name as rare as Kurt Freund into his book. We will likely never know for certain, so let’s assume the author did intend to refer to the Kurt Freund...

Well, the author and his wife never had children despite 18 years of marriage. The author was raised in an oppressive sexual universe of Ireland in the 1920s. Little is known about his personal life. 

Further there are details such as this in TPP: 

‘Women I have no interest in at all,’ I said smiling.

‘A fiddle is a better thing for diversion.’ [Martin Finnucane]

(p. 47) This and other similar quotes from TPP could have just been in-character asides. But, is it not just as possible that the author was gay and was referencing Mr. Freund here because his work could be said to have normalized homosexuality at a time when it was condemned? Was the mention of Freund a signal to gay peers, or to himself? I don’t think the wider public would have been aware of Mr. Freund’s work until much later if at all, and such a one-off reference could have easily gone unnoticed. And perhaps that was the point. To make it obscure and unnoticeable to the point of deniability. 

Obviously, I can’t say definitively, and I am not trying to fall into a lazy, “everyone is gay”-type of “edgy” criticism. But I know there is precious little sex in TPP. There is also a strange co-sleeping arrangement between the narrator and Divney. There are also a few quotes, such as the above, which tend to be very dismissive of women, not just generally, but in terms of attractiveness and sexuality in particular. 

What’s more, in mulling this all over, you could consider the epically heterosexual and promiscuous life of many authors in the same era as Mr. O’Nolan, in contrast to the author’s own decidedly unremarked-upon personal sexual life, all in light of the mention of Mr. Freund and the other factors above, and decide for yourself whether these all carry with them any allusions as to the proclivities of Mr. O’Nolan in the sexual arena. 

Or, you could consider that he could have just been a practicing Catholic, even if not a devout one, or even a lapsed one, who did not (or only very rarely and regrettably) practiced fornication, and who happened to have had to deal with infertility on the part of himself or his wife. He may also have been an alcoholic, which can carry with it its own obstacles to sex and procreation.

Still though, the mention of Kurt Freund is a bit strange and possibly telling. 

A final note about Freund. He was a Czech Jew who married a non-Jewish Czech woman. They divorced in 1943 to protect his wife, Anna, and their daughter, Helen, from persecution by then-Czechoslovakian occupiers under anti-Jewish and anti-miscegenation laws. They remarried after the war and had a son. What a tragic and beautiful story. Also, Mr. Freund’s parents and brother were killed in the Holocaust. It is easy to forget how easy many of us have it today.