My Father and Myself (24 page)

Myself as a subaltern

WHEN I HAD completed this so-called memoir, which remembers so little, a friend of mine who read it for me said I had fallen into the error of self-indulgence. The material contained in the present Chapter 12 was then rather more extensive and was divided into two chapters, for having started to examine my sexual psychology, so far as I was able, I became so interested in it that I worked it out to the end. My friend criticized this and I agreed with him; the book is
not
an autobiography, its intention is narrower and is stated in the title and the text, it is no more than an investigation of the relationship between my father and myself and should be confined as strictly as possible to that theme. I therefore removed two extraneous passages from my then Chapters 12 and 13, and telescoped those chapters into one. The book then came closer to its purpose and moved more swiftly in its pursuit of my lost and unknown father. But what was I to do with the excisions? The book had been a considerable sweat to write and they merited, I thought, a better fate than the wastepaper basket. Besides, I wanted to keep my dedication, which seems to me apt and just, and needed to state the reasons for it. For the interest therefore of psychologists in particular I have preserved these discarded pages in this appendix.

Another fact about my baffled sex life was that I was sexually incontinent, and of that I was deeply ashamed. I did not know then, as I have been told since, that it is a quite common affliction (although I must add that, to my annoyance, I have never been to bed with anyone who shared it) caused by anxiety, which I take to be a part of guilt, and might have been corrected by psychoanalysis. It was a great nuisance to me in many ways, and had a bad effect upon my conduct, if not upon my character. Whenever I was emotionally aroused, whenever I was in the presence of someone physically attractive whom I was wanting to embrace, or even when I was awaiting his arrival, I lived in a state of hot sexual excitement, the bulge of which in my trousers I was always afraid would be noticed. A kiss then, the mere pressure of an embrace, if I got as far as that, was enough to finish me off—and provide a new shame, that the stain, seeping through my trousers, might be seen. It may well have been this that, in my schooldays, sitting beside Jude in class and letting him guide my hand through the opened seam of his trouser pocket, precluded me, in my recollection, from requiring or desiring reciprocal treatment. I took to wearing tight jockey shorts to prop up against my stomach my betraying display, and later preferred double-breasted to open jackets as a further disguise.

This incontinence (to run ahead) had other deplorable results. It put an end to my own pleasure before it had begun and, with the expiry of my desire, which was never soon renewed, my interest in the situation, even in the person, causing me to behave inconsiderately to him; I have not been above putting an abrupt end to affairs with new and not highly attractive boys in whose first close embrace, and before taking off our clothes, I had already had my own complete, undisclosed satisfaction. Apart from the probability that I did not then want to go further, how could I go further and reveal to someone who had not yet reached a state of erection the mess I had made of myself? Even a little friendly moralizing at such moments as a wriggle out: “Perhaps we oughn't to be doing this,” has not been beyond my capabilities. It may well be that the final disappointing of that Cambridge boy who stayed in my Richmond home was due to this, that through a kiss and the mere thought of taking him to bed I had already had my orgasm.

If this life I am prowling about in were someone else's and I its historian (which in fact is the way I am trying to see it), I would rub my hands gleefully over some of the poems I wrote and published in Cambridge. What can these curious productions mean unless that although I regarded myself as free, proud and intellectually unassailable as a homosexual, I was profoundly riddled with guilt? Two in particular seem to me so shocking that I wonder how I ever came to publish them. One is called “On a Photograph of Myself as a Boy.” Of its five overloaded stanzas two will suffice:

The other poem is similar and even worse. It also is about a picture—“The Portrait of a Mother.” Five stanzas may be too many to stomach, but I will quote five:

What my poor mother, the last person in the world to wear a “fixed relentless look,” thought of this poem I don't remember; I suppose she must have read it. It is interesting to observe that it is, in different form, the same poem as “Millstones,” the one I published in my school magazine
The Wasp
some seven or eight years earlier. Although I wrote the two poems just quoted at Cambridge, I cannot now recall whether I was still chaste, in the sense of not having been to bed with anyone.

How much of all this did I enjoy, this long pursuit of love through sex, out of which, in the end, I emerged as lonely as I began? The moods of the past are difficult to recapture. The orgasm itself is a pleasure of course—had I not always placed it first among the pleasures?—but its pleasure has degrees. When things suited me and I felt relaxed I enjoyed it. But I was seldom quite suited or relaxed. If my prejudices were gradually ditched, my anxieties remained; experience, from which we are said to learn, has no effect upon the inner nature. A new form of anxiety, a maddening impotence, began to afflict me. I can put no date to it, it emerged in the company of my old stand-bys, my few steadies. I believe it had nothing to do with increasing age, nothing to do with sexual exhaustion; although so many boys had passed through my hands I lived with none of them, they came and went, sometimes to return, at no point in this journey did I have a feeling of stability, of more than momentary satisfaction. Indeed when, some time in the 'thirties, a friend asked me if I had any notion how many boys I'd taken to bed, I was astonished to find that those I managed to recollect got into three figures, for I never had any sense of riches, only of poverty, and at last of dire poverty. The impotence that started to defeat me was neurotic. I was still close to incontinence with new experiences—becoming rarer and rarer—with that deserter, for instance, that last, long emotional affair, who had not yet flashed upon my sexual scene; with old friends things began to go “wrong,” and with him also when he became an old friend. I looked forward eagerly in my poverty to seeing them when they could get away from their various units, to having their hands upon me and the use of their bodies; they knew what I wanted though they seldom wanted it themselves, and this hitherto I had not minded so long as I got my own comfortable satisfaction. Now I began to mind. Like the irksome, unsmotherable pea beneath the princess's mattresses, some fret would enter my head. In spite of my theories about sex, I had always found it hard to impose my wishes (further evidence of guilt no doubt), to go straight for the thing I most desired, and since these boys were normal they either had no such wishes to impose or left it all to me. The Welsh boy alone sometimes took the initiative, though, being newly married, he wanted nothing for himself. Excepting for him, and throughout my life now that I come to think of it, no one whom I wanted, from my sailor onwards, even when mutual desires were involved, ever took the physical initiative; it was always left to me who found it difficult to take, and this, no doubt, was a situation I myself had created—and because of its frustration, perhaps desired. I seemed always to be pretending not to have an erection, not to be impatient and that the quid that usually passed between us at once (the boys were always short of cash) was not a quid pro quo but a gift. Now it began to defeat me, this situation with old friends who did not desire me and whom I myself no longer desired so much as the thing they had to give, if only I could get it. The fret would enter.... Why had I taken him to the pub first? it was getting late, I must hurry.... Why had I not taken him to the pub first? he was bored, I must hurry.... Why had I let him have his own satisfaction first? he was tired, I must hurry.... I was taking too long, he was only being obliging and my sweat and the weight of my body must be disagreeable to him, I must hurry, hurry.... Then the slow collapse, and nothing that he could do, or I could do in the way of furious masturbation, could retrieve the wretched failure.

In the mid-'thirties I began to keep a day-to-day diary. I had developed another of my theories—self-defensive it now looks—that there was not the slightest need to seek material for travel books, as writers usually did, by going off to foreign parts, climbing mountains, living with primitive tribes, pioneering down untrodden paths if any were left; everyone's life, said I, even the veriest bank clerk's in Manchester or Little Pidlington, was crammed with the most exciting interest and adventure if only he would observe and describe it. Let anyone keep a candid, detailed diary for a year, noting down
everything
that happened to him day by day, in his life, in his mind, and a book would emerge far more fascinating, however clumsily written, than if he had been anthropologizing among the Pygmies or sliding about on Arctic ice. My own diary lasted some six months, hastily scrawled because my nocturnal ramblings, all described, took up so much of my time. Then I got bored and discontinued it. Fifteen years later I came upon it again, read it through and instantly destroyed it, as though it were an evil thing. The evil was in the misery. It contained no single gleam of pleasure or happiness, no philosophy, not even a joke; it was a story of unrelieved gloom and despondency, of deadly monotony, of frustration, loneliness, self-pity, of boring “finds,” of wonderful chances muffed through fear, of the latchkey turned night after night into the cold, dark, empty flat, of railings against fate for the emptiness and wretchedness of my life. It also contained, the saddest thing of all, my critical comments upon my first meeting with that Welsh boy, now dead, his dullness and smelly feet.

At the time when I read this diary I was happy at last. It is, for me, the interesting part of this personal history that peace and contentment reached me in the shape of an animal, an Alsatian bitch. Is it, I wonder, of any value as a clue to my psychology to recall that in my play
The Prisoners of War
the hero, Captain Conrad (myself of course), unable to build on human relations, takes to a plant? He tells some story of another imprisoned officer who fell in love with a pet rabbit and read short stories to it out of a magazine. “Plants or rabbits,” he says, “it's the same thing.” This bitch of mine entered my life in the middle 'forties and entirely transformed it. I have already described her in two books; it is necessary to say here that I don't believe there was anything special about her, except that she was rather a beauty. In this context it is not she herself but her effect upon me that I find interesting. She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which it is in the nature of dogs to offer. She placed herself entirely under my control. From the moment she established herself in my heart and home, my obsession with sex fell wholly away from me. The pubs I had spent so much of my time in were never revisited, my single desire was to get back to her, to her waiting love and unstaling welcome. So urgent was my longing every day to rejoin her that I would often take taxis part-way, even the whole way, home to Putney from my London office, rather than endure the dawdling of buses and the rush-hour traffic jams in Park Lane. I sang with joy at the thought of seeing her. I never prowled the London streets again, nor had the slightest inclination to do so. On the contrary, whenever I thought of it, I was positively thankful to be rid of it all, the anxieties, the frustrations, the wastage of time and spirit. It was as though I had never wanted sex at all, and that this extraordinary long journey of mine which had seemed a pursuit of it had really been an attempt to escape from it. I was just under fifty when this animal came into my hands, and the fifteen years she lived with me were the happiest of my life.

One of my friends, puzzled by the sudden change in my ways, asked me whether I had sexual intercourse with her. It may be counted as something on the profit side of my life that I could now receive such a question intelligently. I said no. In truth, her love and beauty when I kissed her, as I often did, sometimes stirred me physically; but although I had to cope with her own sexual life and the frustrations I imposed upon it for some years, the thought of attempting to console her myself, even with my finger, never seriously entered my head. What little I did for her in her burning heats—slightly more than I admitted in
My Dog Tulip
—worried me in my ignorance of animal psychology, in case, by gratifying her clear desires, which were all addressed to me, I might excite and upset her more than she was already excited and upset. The most I ever did for her was to press my hand against the hot swollen vulva she was always pushing at me at these times, taking her liquids upon my palm. This small easement was, of course, nearer the thing she wanted than to have her back, tail and nipples stroked. Yet looking at her sometimes I used to think that the Ideal Friend, whom I no longer wanted, perhaps never had wanted, should have been an animal-man, the mind of my bitch, for instance, in the body of my sailor, the perfect human male body always at one's service through the devotion of a faithful and uncritical beast.