Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  All this time I served on the altar and soon also took up the job of mowing the lawns of St Mary’s Presbytery. I would be assaulted almost every time I did this.

  Before my thirteenth birthday, Canon Fogarty started to provide me with homosexual literature to read and to talk to him about. He would reminisce about his youth in Rome and demonstrated ways in which men could have sex with each other without it being a sin. This involved taking off one’s clothes and rubbing vigorously against one another. He explained that this was how priests could have sex and yet remain celibate.

  About this time our visits to his bedroom became more frequent and the Canon would fellate and rim me, neither of which activities I enjoyed and which disgusted me. From the age of nearly thirteen Canon Fogarty started to give me a couple of glasses of sherry before we went upstairs and it is around this time that I recall being raped for the first time. This began as anal penetration with the hand and led to full-on bareback sex. Often these sessions would be accompanied by explicit material. Occasionally, the Canon would fulfil his desire with mutual masturbation, which I would try to resist, but he was very insistent that it was natural and that other boys my age engaged in it. I very much admired an older boy: the effortlessly hip William Samson. He was the sharpest guy around. I asked the Canon if he did this with William; he said never to discuss it with him, but strongly implied that he did.

  The Canon was on the canon council of the diocese and would discuss with me sexual matters on which he was the bishop’s legal advisor. Obviously I assumed that somehow Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor sanctioned what was going on. Also, the Canon owned shares in an Irish bank and implied that one day he would give me one of these shares if I cooperated, something that impressed me. I was also impressed that he read the Daily Telegraph each day.

  I have no memory of the Canon’s genitals or pubic hair, although I seem to think that the latter was white. Sometimes the Canon would say that I needed a full inspection to make sure that I was clean and this would involve examining my genitals and my anus. On such occurrences he would merely masturbate himself. One thing I found peculiar is that he enjoyed watching me urinate and would clean my genitals afterwards. The Canon taught me to shave as my father was away at sea and I lived in a family of women.

  I have mentioned my friends. The Canon would insist on knowing all about their sex lives and what I knew of them. He was particularly keen on knowing whom I found attractive and describing them in detail. He would ask me to describe their genitals and get me to procure pornographic magazines from them for him. He would talk to me about my friend Michael Rugby, a fellow altar boy. This boy was the first person to mention the Canon’s pornography to me. By this time, I was so inured to the experiences that took place in St Mary’s Presbytery that I did this, once obtaining a copy of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming-Pool Library for the Canon to read, a book he found to be dull in the extreme with its lack of intercourse. He was particularly keen on images of erect penises and would show them to me at any opportunity. This would normally lead to a sexual assault.

  When I was fifteen, I tried to leave the Church. I was very confused and disgusted both with the Canon and myself, and by what had and was taking place, but I was assured by the Canon that although it could not be talked about, it was perfectly normal. The Canon sent a nun – I think Sister Jerome or Mother John perhaps – from the convent to tell me how upset he was and to remind me that my sister’s place at the school was in the gift of the Church, the school being private. This forced me to return to my activities as an altar boy, gardener and sexual partner, albeit an unwilling one. After approximately three hundred sexual activities, I eventually thought that I had had enough and had to leave Midhurst. For this reason I applied to Sherborne School in Dorset and won their top scholarship. This enabled me to get away from the Canon and I gave up attending Church, as Catholics were allowed to do. At this time the symptoms of my mania – I have bipolar I disorder – began to manifest themselves and I became obsessive. I was living in an all-boy house and yet had no one with whom to share my experience. I therefore attempted to commit suicide by taking an overdose of medication. I only survived because the scout found a tablet under my bed and so they were able to save my liver. When the Canon heard about this, he drove down to Sherborne and gave me £50 not to tell anyone about anything that had happened between us. I had to leave the school for the remainder of the year. After a period living in an Anglican commune called Pilsdon Manor near Bridport, I returned to my parents’ house in Sussex. I discovered, to my horror, that the Canon had arranged for me to see a psychologist: his former parishioner Dr David Chance. This doctor would not believe my stories about the Canon and after a few sessions I ceased to attend.

  Returning to Midhurst was not easy. I had to walk past the presbytery to get into the town and the symptoms of my disorder had worsened considerably. It has been suggested to me by a number of eminent psychiatrists, including my current psychiatrist, Professor Charles Timmins, Anstruther Professor of Psychiatry of the University of Oxford, that the events of my teenage years may have triggered my disorder. I have since been on strong and experimental medications and attempted to commit suicide a number of times, most recently when I read about the Canon’s stroke, paralysis, and inability to communicate in the parish newsletter. I eventually decided to tell my parents and sister what had happened because my life was falling apart at the moment of its greatest triumph. I had just been appointed Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford, but things were becoming very strained at home. I don’t think I will ever understand what happened to me nor how I couldn’t get it to stop, but it has estranged me from the Church and almost from my family. My disorder has had a near-devastating effect on my life and it is only now with the correct medication and weekly psychotherapeutic support that things are slowly beginning to improve. I still have a severe distrust of people and can go out only when I am accompanied. The University of Oxford is having to make many adjustments in order to accommodate me and my behaviour and it will be difficult for me to find a permanent and suitable career, and that which I have found I excel in has been interrupted with loss of earnings, as well as spiritual loss. The incidental expenses of taking time out, paying for psychiatric and psychotherapeutic care and living at home and abroad without an income have been considerable, as have the personal costs, such as never having had a relationship or even not bearing to be touched; I thank whatever there is to thank that I have such an understanding family and group of friends who have lived with me and my disorder for the past twenty-five years.

  *

  There is something magnificent in the scale of Fogarty’s achievement. He managed to make something eternal captive in the moment. At the moment of the most extreme and sustained violation and abuse, he managed to make a spiritual deed of a physical one. There are two ways of saying the word confessor in English, and both of them mean rape to me. The man to whom one confesses and the act of confession, each and both are contained in that one word: confessor, rape.

  *

  Why are there hardly any voices in this book? A great deal was said, discussed. But voices fade while their wisdom flares into a brilliant maturity, a mode of living. It is not the voices I remember, although I honour what they said in my thoughts and works and deeds. For all that, it was gaining a voice, going to the police and discussing my past that saved me. I am a man of the written word, a scholar not an actor. My voice can’t be heard, elided as it is by the detachment of a scholar. Strange, then, that in my work I give voice to the past, the dead, the brilliant, with a mind to what was unsaid, saying what was not written, the silent voiced, understood at last by an unknown young man in another age in an Oxford library. Surrounded by the fineness of the Bodleian Library’s august architecture, the confidence of the sixteenth century is made to speak down the generations. The letters of the seventeenth century, the joy and intelligence of the eighteenth are allowed to say to posterity what they could
not say to their presents: that they endure, which they did not know they would.

  Why does Fogarty scarcely have a voice? Why does he only speak the words of a priest? Surely there is something to be learned from all those hours of words, that persuasiveness, in the pulpit and in the presbytery?

  I choose not to give him a voice. To me, the words all meant nothing, were just that, words, so many words. Rhetoric that took a child and would have destroyed him with its insistent, rhythmic, plosive-suasive penile aggression.

  Fogarty cannot have a voice in this book, because he is not convincing, although he convinced me then. He spoke in a measured, ordered way, with a voice that led to irrefutable conclusions.

  But in my book almost all voices are silenced, to permit me to speak. The rabble of conversation dies and a simple truth speaks out. In the hurry of conversation, my friend Henry, who was the first to know what had happened to me before we met at Sherborne, said to me years ago that my autobiography should be called Let’s Not And Say We Did. That no longer obtains. We Did. He did. Fogarty did. Let’s say that he did.

  *

  I was only a child, a boy. The problem with childhood rape is that it smacks of the juvenile. Child abuse is wasted on the young.

  *

  ‘Facio. Facis. Facit. Facimus. Facitis. Faciunt.’

  We are seated in the study of the presbytery in Midhurst. We have been at our studies for half an hour. We have been at our studies for weeks. It is fast work. We are good at this. I am good. He is good. They are good.

  He takes my hand.

  ‘Facio. Facis. Facit. Facimus …’

  He squeezes my hand. He moves our hands around between us, as if thinking. I am thinking. He is thinking. They are thinking.

  He places our hands in my lap and moves them against my groin, rubbing. I am anxious. He is anxious. They are anxious.

  He squeezes my hand and rubs my genitals through my trousers. Then he lets go of my hand. Relief. Breathe.

  Then he moves his hand into my groin. He fiddles with my trousers. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, and in my groin. Not now. Not again. My penis retreats into itself in my trousers. I feel it shrivel.

  His hand has undone my zip. I am undone. He is undone. They are undone. His hand enters my trousers. He squeezes my penis and rubs it. I dare not look at him. I look at the small gap in the curtains. The light outside scarcely enters the darkened room. On the wall St Peter’s Basilica looks formidable. The power of the Church! How it endures.

  I am aware of the rubbing in my trousers and, without wanting to, I am responding. My penis is now semi-erect. I breathe. He breathes. They breathe.

  Time passes in this study, now, in Sussex. Outside no bird sings. The light falls in a sharp shaft through the small gap in the curtains. The books of the library, of this library of a canon lawyer, stand by, useless, as the law is broken.

  Some moments have passed. I breathe rapidly now.

  Then it stops. My penis is released. It sticks out of my trousers, useless between us.

  The Canon utters an oath. Gets up.

  ‘Stay there.’

  He leaves the room. I stay. I wonder. I hear him pass upstairs. Pass into his bedroom. The door remains open, at least he does not close it.

  Time passes.

  My penis shrinks. I remain, anxious, on the hard, embroidered sofa. I hear a noise upstairs.

  I tuck my penis into my trousers, feeling not quite satisfied, and not quite satisfied. My breathing has slowed. I look up at the light and do up my zip.

  I listen to the noises of the house.

  Time passes. I sit deeply in the sofa, withdrawing into its unforgiving hardness. There is no comfort here.

  Then I hear him, descending the staircase. He enters the room and sits down next to me. I do not look at him, but at the books in the library.

  ‘Facio. Facis. Facit. Facimus. Facitis. Faciunt.’

  I think of upstairs and what happened there, and here. At least we did not go upstairs (I think). Not that once, not that time. There will be others. There will be small satisfactions in this place. Small satisfactions.

  *

  What makes a good rape? You’d think intelligence, by all accounts, but that may be wishful thinking. It’s not the gift of the literati. It’s not unthinking though either, for all its animal qualities. I think a good rape has to be really thoroughgoing, both bodily and mentally. To do it properly you have to get into the individual in two senses. Was Fogarty a good rapist? By all accounts he had beginner’s luck, but the Church doesn’t like to show the workings out and perhaps he’d had practice. Maybe he just had a natural flair for it. If anything, it was effective.

  I am now forty, and these events occurred quarter of a century ago, which may not seem long but it is all my adult life.

  *

  Each day I construct the self. Today I construct the self. I wake. And the world is a mystery to me. Not wonderful, although I wonder at it, and at myself. It is like having Alzheimer’s (I imagine). Not knowing quite who I am, what I am doing, what I am doing in the world. I do not know the self. From when I wake up I construct the self. Not every day, although when I am like this it seems like every day. I look for clues around me as to who I am and where I come from. What I am doing. What I am doing in the world.

  My academic work is not a mystery to me, although my academic self is. I look myself up online and there I am: Dr Stephen Bernard, of the University of Oxford. Author of a number of books and many articles in the UK, and Germany, and the United States. So far away! And yet I am out there, over there, part of their culture, speaking to itself.

  The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe is the work of the past ten years, now complete. The work of many people, taking care and time to make it excellent, to make it important, to make the past speak to the present, again. I hold it entire in my mind. Even when I do not know the self, I know that. It is part of me, of who I am and what I do. I construct Nicholas Rowe as I construct the self.

  *

  I am not interested in rape academically, which is both true and an understatement. First there was Ovid, then there was Shakespeare after him: the Rape of Lucretia. Samuel Richardson followed. He had clearly forgotten his Shakespeare: there is small Latin and less Greek in his etiolated rape. In the twentieth century there is J.M. Coetzee. His character the jobsworth of rapists, crossing his ‘t’s and dotting his ‘i’s. Edward St Aubyn is the true artist of rape. Clarissa Harlowe was raped by someone she trusted; Coetzee’s rapist is a teacher; St Aubyn’s rapist is the writer’s father. This rape is for connoisseurs. Fine and beautifully expressed, it preaches to the converted. It promises much and delivers more. But perhaps that’s the tint of nostalgia for me. Can I be raped better? I can only do my best. But a worker is only as good as his tools. Can Fogarty do better? Did Fogarty do better? That I leave to the reader to decide. He tried, bless him.

  I like my rape to come with trust, but I can see why some people prefer it without. It’s a matter of taste, for some the best rape comes, is sudden, a violation which comes from nowhere. For me, I prefer to know who and what I’m dealing with. Rape is a war won by inches. It’s as simple as that.

  *

  It is eleven o’clock and the Library is getting into gear for the day. The American academics on research visits arrive at nine, when the Library opens, eager to make the most of their time in Oxford, but eleven is when the native scholars arrive from their colleges, having checked their pigeonholes and dealt with the administration of the day, the letters from the Master of the college and the Chair of the Faculty.

  A few colleagues come in and nod politely. I’m distracted. I look at my watch again. Two minutes past eleven. I think I will go and have a coffee in Blackwell Hall over the road. I can come back to this later. Soon enough.

  *

  From Sherborne School I went to Prague and Paris to live, to be away from my family and Midhurst. I did not know what to do, having failed as an historian. I asked my old
housemaster Peter Prior what to do. He knew immediately: to do what he did and read English at Christ Church, Oxford. I bought an Old Shirburnian tie, deep blue and red and gold, and a new pair of shoes, and thus it was that I found myself having tea in the college rooms of a Student of the House, which is what the fellows of the college and the college itself are called: Richard Penrose Negus.

  Richard Negus was an old-school Oxford fellow. Without a doctorate, as they were thought somewhat vulgar in the middle of the twentieth century – they still are, although they are the meal ticket to an academic life, the life of the mind – Richard Negus had rooms in Kilcannon. On his wall was a single oil painting in earthy colours of a young man. It was our first meeting – at Peter Prior’s suggestion he had asked me for afternoon tea – and I asked who the young man was.

  When Richard Negus was a young Student of Christ Church – he had been an Oriel man – he lived in other rooms in the nineteenth-century Meadows Building. Richard Negus used to sit on his balcony with his cello, playing to the nightingales.