Samuel Butler
(1835 - 1902) U.K. - New Zealand
Writer, painter, and composer
Against his father's will, he abandoned the ecclesiatic career and emigrated in New Zealand to rear sheep. Back to England he studied painting and music. Butler made his name in 1872 with his satiric attack on contemporary utopianism , Erewhon ("nowheere" reversed), but is now best remembered for his authobiographical The Way of All the Flesh (written 1872-85, and published 1903).
The Fair Heaven examined the miraculous element in Christianity. Life and Habit (1877) and other works were devoted to a criticism of the theory of natural selection. In The Authoress of the Odissey he mantained that the Odissey was the work of a woman.
Samuel Butler - Erewhon Man
 Samuel Butler was born on December 4, 1835, at Langar, near Nottingham. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Cambridge and broke off religious studies. On September 30, 1859, he sailed for New Zealand, arriving some five months later. With money sent by his father, he bought land. Here he successfully ran sheep and prophetically wrote that machines would come to dominate our lives, though he had somehow managed to have a piano hauled to that remote, desolate place.
On one of his visits to Christchurch he met Charles Paine Pauli, son of a German businessman, who worked as an accountant at the Christchurch Press where Butler had articles published.
Pauli was two and a half years younger than Butler, Oxford educated, tall and considered handsome (Butler wrote that a San Francisco barman had called him "the handsomest man God ever sent into San Francisco"), though a photo shows a fairly plain flat face, pouting lips, receding hair and huge bushy Victorian sideburns.
In September 1863, Pauli visted Butler at the Carlton Hotel and Butler "was suddenly aware that I had become intimate with a personality quite different to that of anyone whom I had ever known." How "intimate" they became we can only guess.
Butler paid a substantial, regular allowance to Pauli for the next 34 years. In 1864 (Butler craving the intellectual stimulation his sheep-run failed to provide) the two sailed for England together and never returned.
Pauli did not let Butler know where or how he lived for the last 31 years of his life, though they lunched together three times a week (Butler paid) and he hinted at poverty. Only after Pauli's death in 1899 did Butler learn that Pauli had also collected for many years from the poet and flagellant Algernon Swinburne. It turned out he had lived very comfortably indeed at his two admirers' expense (he also practised law), but his will did not even mention Butler.
Butler ruefully joked that the funeral supper was his first meal even partly at Pauli's expense. Their relationship seems to have been very like Bosie's with Wilde, Adler Christiansen's with Sir Roger Casement, or many another handsome younger man with an older devotee: minimum sex and maximum support, with emotional blackmail if no other kind. Butler's notebooks refer to ten years "of very great pain" beginning in 1862.
He self-deceptively wrote:
We were two lovers standing sadly by
While our two loves lay dead upon the ground;
Each love had striven not to be the first to die,
But each was gashed with many a cruel wound.
Butler had two other strong male relationships, with butch, buzzcut Henry Festing Jones from 1878 (for some years they shared the prostitute) and the two jointly with twink Hans Faesch from 1893. He wrote a poor poem, In Memoriam to Faesch in 1895, and withdrew it after Wilde's trial, for fear of "being Oscared", though the poem is more sentimental than indiscreet:
The minutes have flown and he whom we loved is gone,
The like of whom we shall never see.
The wind is heavy with snow and the seas rough,
He has a racking cough and his lungs are weak.
Alfred Cathie, nominally his manservant, seems to have been more: "Alfred is half son, half nurse, always very dear friend and play-mate rather than work-fellow - in fact he is and has been for the last ten years my right hand."
Butler was a talented pianist and painter (with 11 paintings exhibited by the Royal Academy and one still on show at the Tate), and his early writings promoted evolution, though he later supported Lamarkism and fell out with Darwin. Erewhon, a utopian satire set in a landscape very like Mesopotamia, challenged the moral verities of its day. (Utopia is Greek for, Erewhon an anagram of, "nowhere".) His Psalm of Montreal lampoons the prudery of a Canadian museum-keeper who though the nude Greek statue of Discobolus "vulgar".
He died on June 18, 1902, after a long illness and he was attended by his loyal manservant Alfred Catie and by his companion Henry Festing Jones. He is remembered for his autobiographical Way of all Flesh, but especially for Erewhon.
Source: © Queer History New Zealand
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