Sucking Sherbert Lemons

by Michael Carson

  Title Page

  SUCKING SHERBET LEMONS

  Michael Carson

  Publisher Information

  Published in 2010 by Cutting Edge Press

  116 West Heath Road

  London, NW3 7TU

  info@cuttingedgepress.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Victor Gollancz Ltd

  Digital Edition converted and published by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright of Sucking Sherbet Lemons, Benson at Sixty and his new foreword to Sucking Sherbet Lemons is reserved by Michael Carson.

  Copyright of their respective introductions to Sucking Sherbet Lemons is reserved by Simon Callow and Michael Cashman MEP.

  Michael Carson has asserted his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work under the 1988 Copyright Design and Patents Act.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, now in existence or yet to be invented including electronic, mechanical, photocopying or recording without permission in writing from Cutting Edge Press.

  Dedication

  For

  Jerry Schultz

  Michael Rosinski

  Philip Harris

  “Ah, touched in your bower of bone,

  Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,

  Have you! make words break from me here all alone,

  Do you! – mother of being in me, heart.

  O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,

  Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!

  Never-eldering revel and river of youth,

  What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?”

  – from ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’

  by Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Introduction by Simon Callow

  The book you have in your hand falls into the noble tradition of the bildungsroman: the novel in which the hero grows to manhood, wiser and more aware of who he is, and what the world is. It is in all other respects virtually unique. First reading it, as I did, in manuscript over twenty years ago, I had that peculiarly gratifying sensation of discovering in print a world that I had never expected to see put on the page, that of the inner life of a plump young Roman Catholic homosexual schoolboy. In some respects it was like looking in a mirror, because Benson was in many ways me. His rites of passage, as befits a novel, were altogether more decisive and indeed more conclusive than mine: I could not, at Benson’s age, have claimed to have become the ‘calm, wild creature’ that he is by the end of the book. But I recognised every stage of his journey – his way of the cross, as he might have put it but didn’t – and could vouch for its authenticity. All this was thrilling to read, and I might have been impressed by the book on those grounds alone. But what took it into the realm of the sublime was that the voice in which Benson’s journey was recounted was funny – hilariously so. While pain, confusion and doubt were the subject, comedy was the mode. This Michael Carson, with his delicious deadpan, was evidently a natural humorist. He had created a gay Adrian Mole, a boy like any other, except that his desires were supposedly perverted. It was one more step towards the still somewhat distant goal, in 1988, of the normalisation of homosexuality.

  Even then, when I first read it, many of the references were delightfully arcane: now, I suppose they may need footnotes. The actress on whose approval Benson sets such store, Gwen Watford – now alas gone to the great Green Room in the sky – was the very embodiment of long-suffering noble rectitude; the Dansette a portable plastic record player with a terribly tinny tone which transformed many a party. In a sense, Sucking Sherbet Lemons has become an historical document, memorialising the early sixties in which the Beatles, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and the Missa Luba were all in their different ways epoch-making and epoch-breaking. Perhaps Benson himself has become an historical figure. I wonder if any adolescent in the Western world today is quite as in thrall to the all-pervading strictures of the Catholic Church, or whether any of them still strive to be so unhealthily Good as our hero? But the world Carson created has no more dated than Jane Austen’s or Evelyn Waugh’s. It is a consistent comic universe, entirely human and absolutely authentic, aswarm with characters that are both real and archetypal, the Mum and Brother O’Toole and Novvy and Clitherow and Bruno and Mrs Brown and Eric for whom Benson (now at last known to us by his first name) dances at the end of the book, which is the beginning of his life.

  Whatever strides we have made, however, the contemporary Western world is not lacking in tubby boys who are racked by desires they don’t understand and who believe themselves to be unattractive and worthless. Michael Carson’s book is a wonderfully affirmative book about growing up and coming to terms with one’s body and one’s life. No page goes by without hilarity and pain in equal measure: just like life. Why the book has never been filmed is both a mystery and a scandal. Meanwhile, you await the delight of discovering the circumstances that lead to what is very nearly my favourite paragraph in modern English literature, the essence of Michael Carson in a nutshell: Benson has been picked up, for the first time, in a cemetery: ‘ “Very nice” [said Andy], and he was undoing the buttons of his trousers. Benson stood frozen. The bodies of non-Catholics turned in their graves nearby.’ Ronald Firbank meets Just William. Delicious.

  Introduction by Michael Cashman, MEP

  Sucking Sherbet Lemons is a book from, and about, two very different decades I know well – the 1960s, when its action takes place, and the 1980s, when it was written. Growing up gay in the 1960s, Michael Carson, as hilariously related in the novel, faced a world in which he was a criminal, if he ever acted on his desires.

  By the time the book was published in the late 1980s, those laws had been consigned to the dustbin of history, but the gay world faced new threats: in the form of AIDS, and the fresh life it gave to homophobia. This found official expression in ‘Section 28’, the Thatcher government’s attempt to prevent ‘the promotion of homosexuality’ in schools. Portrayed as a campaign against educational materials which some Conservatives claimed ‘encouraged 5-year olds to become gay’, Section 28 and its supporters recycled any number of homophobic myths, implying that predatory gay teachers were seeking to ‘recruit’ young boys ‘to their side’. This in turn suggested that sexual orientation is a matter of ‘lifestyle choice’, which was then used to portray gay men and lesbians as ‘selfish’ and ‘anti-family’. The political agenda was clear: the government wanted homosexuality to be presented to children as abnormal, linked to paedophilia, and clearly inferior to heterosexual life.

  Sucking Sherbet Lemons was written in the atmosphere of Section 28, a time when the Thatcher regime gave what we can only hope will prove to have been the last gasp of official homophobia on the part of a UK government. Section 28 stayed on the Statute Book until 2003 in England (the Lords twice prevented its repeal), but the campaign against it did much to radicalise the gay community, and make gay rights part of the mainstream agenda. Those of us who campaigned against Section 28 welcomed the book’s publication as a brilliant expression of a common gay experience: growing up with the official story that we were sick, barely human, outcasts from ‘normality’ and all its happy endings. This was a story that could easily have turned bitter: but Michael Carson’s humour, ranging from verbal slapstick to biting and satirical wit, leavened it out with a warmth and humanity that have not aged with the years.

  Section 28 is history now, and even many leading Tories have acknowledged it was a mistake, though it took them quite some time to do so. But homophobic discrimination a
nd violence remain part of our culture, and it often seems that what sexual tolerance there is in Britain remains skin-deep. The re-publication of Sucking Sherbet Lemons is a brilliant and timely reminder of how far we’ve come, and just how much further there is still to go.

  Like Michael Carson I too grew up in the sixties, I too felt the lash of intolerance, and like him I was fortunate enough to know myself, know what I wanted and to find the courage to go out and get it.

  This book will always be a reminder to me of the courage of purpose, the futility of the oppressor, and, above all, the power of laughter.

  New Foreword by the Author

  Sucking Sherbet Lemons wasn’t my idea. I wanted to call my book, Er ... Er ... seemed to me a title that encapsulated the confused kid Benson. It had echoes of ‘err’, which was what Benson felt he was forever doing; and, if I’m honest, it hinted at my feelings about publishing what I had written. SSL, on the other hand, just made me think of, A: the way Benson sucked that sweet, and B: Sex. Like Deborah Jenkyns in Cranford, who didn’t like oranges because one had to ‘suck’ them – not that this is necessarily so – and retired to her bedroom to perform the ‘vulgar act’, I was embarrassed to admit to my first literary fruit having a title that did not trip off the tongue – at least not my tight-arsed tongue.

  But Sucking Sherbet Lemons was to be the title. It did not seem to be open to negotiation. Anyway, I was so deeply in thrall to the good ladies of Victor Gollancz Ltd., that I would not have dared to cross them by making them cross.

  So Sucking Sherbet Lemons was published in 1988, and I flew off to Borneo to teach study skills to teenagers there. Some good reviews found their way to me – but a bestseller list was a whole different world from the one I was inhabiting. When I came back I was pleased to see my book in shops. I would inspect the stacks, like Chris Woodhead marauding through failing schools, rearranging displays and keeping a weather-eye out for punters approaching the hardback. Once, I saw someone reading the book on the tube, and went over to introduce myself. I was made up, and sick with self-love.

  My humility was not helped by the number of letters from readers Gollancz sent on to me. These I treasured and replied to at length. I met and became friends with several correspondents. Some had found ingredients from their own story in the book; others enjoyed the book because it showed them areas of experience they had not known much about. A lot of the letters came from women. All those letters pleased me much more than the reviews the book got. I wrote back to everyone, met and became friends with some. But those kind letter-writers (I had never written to an author then) taught me three things about what I wanted my books to be: a good and entertaining read; a work that reinforces and validates readers’ experience; and one that will interest and inform people about areas of experience they have little or no knowledge of. All those three little maxims are hard – but none harder than the third.

  Most reviewers commented on how funny the book was. That gave me pause. I had certainly not set out to write a book that was funny. My intention in embarrassing myself to the nth degree was to broadcast a few things which seemed so obvious to me, but were escaping the radars of pundits.

  Like many gay people – and probably a few million straight ones as well – I had found the eighties a ‘low, dishonest decade’. AIDS, though it brought out the best in many, uncovered the beast in some. I was particularly incensed by Chief Constable Anderton of Greater Manchester. He asserted that homosexuals were ‘swirling in a cesspit of their own making’. I thought that a bit thick, and was not best pleased to learn that this senior policeman was busy taking instruction in the rubrics of Catholicism prior to being received into the Church.

  But Anderton’s words kept repeating in my head as I got down to write – in longhand – Benson’s story, which, on most important matters, jived pretty closely to my own. I know that my own homosexuality was a gift of nature or nurture. It was definitely not a ‘choice’, and decidedly, not-never-nohow, ‘a lifestyle choice’.

  Once the ire was upon me, the novel pretty much wrote itself. There are some writers who need an issue to get them going. I am definitely one of these, and I make no apology for that fact.

  At its nub, the book is about secrets. You’re as Sick as Your Secrets, as Alcoholics Anonymous literature has it. If that is the case, Benson is very sick indeed. If the book attacks anything head-on, it is those forces that cause a child to live lonely and locked into the things that are happening to him; to have no friendly and mature ear to give a judgement-free listen to problems, followed perhaps by sage advice. And Catholicism was rather good at not providing that. Confession might be good for the soul, but, in my experience, it was the last place to go for kindly advice and consolation. Benson’s conundrum is that he wants to be a good Catholic. But he also wants to play about with other men’s dicks. They obsess him, just as – one presumes – the majority of men are attracted by women’s sexual parts. There is no breathing space for Benson. Throughout the course of the novel he is aching for sunlit uplands of the spirit, free from guilt and temptation. He goes through all sorts of adventures in search of this freedom, but it is not until the last third of the book that he comes anywhere close to finding it.

  In many ways Sucking Sherbet Lemons was a ‘period piece’ when it first came out. After twenty years, ten of which the novel has been out of print and Benson living a seedy-appeal underground life on Abebooks and at the back of bookshops in Hay, it should be even more of a period piece. After all, we live at a time when same-sex partnerships are sanctioned throughout the EU; gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts and Oregon. Personally, I find it hard sometimes to realise that this is all happening in front of the same eyes that devoured (behind plain wrappers) books like Peter Wildblood’s Against The Law, or got James Baldwin’s Another Country out of the permanent reserve of the Wallasey public library. As the Virginia Slims advertisement (a period piece itself) used to proclaim – re the rights of women: ‘You’ve come a long way, Baby!’ (And the graffiti addition on the New York subway that added: ‘And we’ll go a whole lot farther, Fucker!’).

  You see, I am by no means sure that kids growing up feeling the way Benson felt are any better served now. Sure, there might be more openness, and more role models – though what ‘roles’ and what ‘models’ some of the more tiresome examples of the new gay establishment present I am not quite sure. But ‘gay’ is still a term of abuse among the young and, I hear, the level of overt homophobia in schools is high. Ironically, the political correctness – that council-funded replacement for a moral code – might well be working against the openness that young gay people require. Men are increasingly reluctant to work around kids. Scoutmasters, clergy, choirmasters, teachers, all are emasculated, or at the least inhibited, by the fear of being thought to be paedophiles if they are too intimate with children. Parents seem as inept at talking about sex as they ever were. One hand slaps the other. The authoritarianism of organized religion is replaced by that of society’s thought police. Scratch the surface and I fancy a few thousand Bensons are still growing up totally bewildered, terrified of their sexuality, and busy – because of the lack of a steadying hand on the tiller – turning Gay Theory into Queer Practice.

  I saw the film Doubt recently, and was greatly moved by the scene between Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) and the maybe-abused-boy’s mother. She did not understand why the Meryl Streep character was making such a fuss about a priest giving extra attention to her boy. Any attention was better than none. The boy’s father could not stand the child because of ‘His Nature’. I came away from the film worrying not about Father Flynn or Sister Aloysius, but about the future of the boy. The scene neatly encapsulated many of the issues that Sucking Sherbet Lemons explored.

  Secrets are still with us. A year ago the Merseyside police mounted a complex surveillance operation on one of the few remaining public lavatories in my home town. Over a period of months tiny cameras were
set up strategically to photograph every user of the place at face and groin level. A bumper haul of men behaving badly was the result. Some received a caution, others were brought before the courts and fined. The names of some – though not others – were printed in our fit-only-forfire-lighting local press.

  I wrote to the Press Complaints Commission about the selective and intrusive press coverage. One man, married with two young children, was named and shamed. The normally newsless and careless paper went so far as to name the road in which the man lived, thereby alerting all and sundry to the fact that the father of the house was guilty of lewd acts in a public place.

  An exchange of letters resulted, but came to a dead end when the PCC asserted that one of the injured parties mentioned in the story would have to complain. I was merely a third party. I made a final hopeless swipe by writing that no man is an island. We are a part of a community. It did not take much in the way of imagination to understand the possible implications of the press coverage for the man and his family. Were the kids not being laid open to bullying and humiliation?

  I don’t know what happened. All those humiliated men – a Liverpool police officer (unnamed) among them – have faded out of public consciousness. What stories they take with them are closed to everything but the imagination. Their children are merely collateral damage.

  Of course, I can identify with those captured cottagers. I understand and feel their need. While a quick grope in a public place might – rightly – provoke public ire (I accept the gay contribution to closing up the convenience network which the passing years renders the more necessary to me), it has been part of the underground ‘culture’ of gay repression for decades ... perhaps for centuries. That over a hundred men could be caught on clever cameras one short summer indicates to me that something is amiss. We still have a lot of growing up to do before we can use the word ‘Community’ and put ‘gay’ in front of that profound word.