An accretion of accumulators

The word ‘camp’ is often used as shorthand for ‘homosexual’. Its wider cultural sense has been best defined by Susan Sontag: the sublime treated as ridiculous or the ridiculous treated as sublime. In Sontag’s first category might be Marcel Duchamp’s daubing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. And in the second? Well, suppose somebody wrote a huge, respectful, footnoted book on the St John’s Wood Clique — the group of Victorian artists which included W. F. Yeames, painter of ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ (I wrote an article on them in Apollo magazine 40 years ago. That’s as far as it went, but my father commented, ‘It may be heretical, Bevis, but I believe in studying good artists.’)

I have reviewed two of Stephen Calloway’s books in this magazine, both on camp of one kind or the other: Baroque Baroque and Divinely Decadent — the titles alone are campissimi. Calloway is a very bright historian of culture and design on the staff of the Victoria & Albert Museum. I enjoyed his previous books, but felt (and wrote) that each of them was marred by … not exactly silliness, but a curious fey quality that detracted from the deep research and intelligence of his work — as it were, stardust sprinkled on a wholesome steak pie. The Victorian songwriter Edward Teschemacher wrote the lyric ‘Where my caravan has rested…’ and Calloway’s signature tune might have been ‘Where my camp has rested…’ Indeed, his books gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘striking camp’.

Now at last, in his and Katherine Sorrell’s new book, he has found a subject ideally suited to his talents, one which only rarely (and, one must admit, entertainingly) tempts him into the old bedizenments.