Man Without a Shadow

by Colin Wilson

  This decided me to accept an offer from Arthur Barker Ltd to publish these notebooks in full. At first, I was inclined to publish only the parts dealing with Caradoc Cunningham (i.e. the ‘Black Magic journal’), but this would have the double disadvantage of leaving the ‘sex diary’ to circulate in pirate form, and in rendering parts of the ‘Black Magic journal’ incomprehensible, since it refers back so frequently to the earlier notebook. Besides, I have been told that the duplicated copies of the ‘sex diary’ were abridged—that is, everything that would not appeal to the public that gloats over these things was cut out. These included, of course, all the ‘metaphysical discussions of sex’ that were for me the main point of the diary. It is hardly surprising that the book has acquired a reputation in certain circles as high-class pornography. I think it will be seen, from the present edition, that the intentions were anything but pornographic—that, in fact, the book owes more to Gabriel Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal than to Frank Harris or Henry Miller.

  The journals, as printed here, are unabridged and completely unaltered, except for correction of spelling mistakes and an occasional re-arrangement of words. In two places, I have been advised to omit a sentence; where this has happened, I have left blanks in the text of the same length. (These can be found on pp. 64 and 101.) I have also begun this journal with the final pages of an earlier notebook, for reasons of continuity that will be apparent. I have resisted the temptation to divide the journal into two parts—before and after I met Cunningham—because this would seem to be an apology for its lack of unity, whereas, on re-reading it, I feel that it nevertheless possesses a certain unity of idea and intention.

  One extremely difficult problem arose in connection with this book—the question of persons other than myself who are treated in it. My original intention was to change all names so that most of the people could not be identified. But in certain cases—that of Oliver Glasp or Robert Kirsten, for example—this would be nonsensical, since their names are too well known and their identities too obvious. In other cases, the problem was of whether I had a right to publish certain details of the private lives of the persons concerned. Public figures may be regarded to some extent as public property, but this is certainly not true of ‘private persons’ who prefer to remain private. So in a very few cases in this book, I have changed names and an occasional personal detail, to obscure the identity. However, it is obvious that too much of this would defeat the aim of publishing this journal by giving the pirated copies a kind of scandal value. I therefore wish to thank many of the people concerned for their permission to publish the passages in which they are mentioned.

  Finally, I wish to thank my wife for her patience in typing out these notebooks, and the publishers for their help and encouragement. At their suggestion, I have added a number of explanatory footnotes.

  Gerard Sorme,

  Corrib Cottage, Moycullen.

  THE DIARIES

  Oct. 20th.

  Today I feel a strange state of excitement and anticipation—there is a heavy, Christmassy atmosphere, the kind of thing I haven’t experienced since childhood. This is no doubt due to a heavy cold in the head that started two days ago. Last night I drank half a pint of whisky before I went to bed; my nose and throat were blazing, and my left eye felt as if it was hanging out of my head. I also took two aspirins. I slept like a rock, and woke this morning without a hangover, but feeling a strange and pleasant detachment from reality. My head is still thick, but the world feels as if I was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. The cold insulates me. I feel like Proust. I remember a line of Maurice’s: ‘The dusk is grey with longing.’ It expresses this almost musical nostalgia I experience as I write this.

  Curious. I wish I understood myself. What is it that happens in these moods—in terms of emotional chemistry, I mean? All my life I have fought the present. I simply don’t like existing ‘here and now’. Unless the world is richer—unless it has other depths and dimensions, I loathe it. My attention is like a gramophone needle; in the normal course of events it is confined in a narrow groove of the present. Things are too obtrusive. I open my eyes; I am too aware of the things I look at; they edge their way into my consciousness and push me backwards. Today, all that is changed. The world is covered with a pearl-grey mist; reality is cushioned. When I look out of my window, what I see doesn’t press itself on me, like an annoying stranger on a train; it keeps its distance, respectful, discreet. And I can be aware of all kinds of other things. Or I could compare it to listening to music. If music is too loud and stupid, it isolates you, like pain. But there is such a thing as good background music, that only makes conversation more pleasant, or forms a pleasant accompaniment to reading. This is what the world ought to be—background music. Then that other world—of feelings and memories—gets a chance to express itself. I wonder why a bad cold releases so many memories? I can sit here, on my bed, a large mug of strong tea beside me, and this notebook on my knee, and cast my mind to almost any period of my life. Usually, the images I am able to evoke are shadows or abstractions. Today they come up like heavy incense; every memory brings its distinct atmosphere.

  I believe that the brain is full of well-worn paths, rather like the scratches on a gramophone record that always make the needle jump several tracks. Under normal circumstances my mind, fuelled mainly by my intellect, is driven along paths of associative thinking. In this mood, I am freed from the ‘scratches’; I can sink into my own being, leaving my conscious self sitting contentedly here on the bed, ignored, while I clamber down a rope into the mine-shaft of myself. I used to be fond of comparing man’s being to an iceberg, with only a third (the consciousness) above the water-line; but this is nonsense; the part above the water-line is actually a tenth—perhaps a hundredth or a thousandth. Why . . .

  Blast that phone.

  That was Caroline. I told her I had a lousy cold and that she hadn’t better come over for fear of catching it. I wish there was some other way of writing that was quicker than this. My thoughts move too fast; they’re like fireworks today, leaping, blazing, exploding, and my body feels an extraordinary sense of cat-like comfort. My body’s normally such a f—ing nuisance; it won’t let me go far without clamouring for attention, so that writing and thinking is a perpetual struggle with it. I understand why Socrates told Phaedo that the philosopher spends his life trying to escape the body.

  Today I feel free even of sexual desire. This is something. I’m afraid that, ever since my childhood, I’ve been oversexed. I sometimes wonder about this. As far as I can determine, it was born in me, for I can recall sexual excitement long before I learned the ‘facts’ about sex or began to think of sex with a certain morbid excitement. One of these days, I must try to write fully and honestly about sex . . . but it would be necessary to buy a separate notebook, and also to buy a box that will lock. I’m sure Carlotta reads my manuscripts and letters and I wouldn’t put it past that nosy cow of a landlady to read anything she can find.

  My sexual desire is undoubtedly connected with this normal ‘confinement in the present’. This warm, hazy nostalgia I feel today is exactly like sexual fulfilment.

  Oct. 21st.

  Gertrude called and I had to break off yesterday. But I shall use this new notebook for the purpose I mentioned—a kind of ‘sex diary’. This morning, I picked up a small chest in the local junk shop—the sort sailors take to sea—and bought a heavy Yale lock. It’s strange—the effect of being secretive, the joy and stimulation of it. I now feel as if I want to go on writing non-stop for ten years. Why shouldn’t I fill a thousand pages? I wish my shorthand was better, though; I’d like to keep a diary in shorthand, but can’t read it back. I wonder if Pepys could read his diary back—almost certainly not, I imagine. Bertrand Russell used to keep a diary in English, but written with Greek letters. A long job. I often wonder why I dislike Russell’s mind so much. I suppose it is because
we could both be called ‘inductive existentialists’. All my work is existential in the sense that it badly wants to stick to living experience; but it’s inductive because it wants to reason from the particular to the general. Russell’s mind is also inductive, but it’s certainly existential, because he’s always writing about marriage, education, etc. And yet somehow the two never quite manage to connect.

  There I go. That is also my problem; I’m too much an intellectual to stick to the ‘basic facts’, like sex. . . .

  Yet, since I’ve begun, I should try. I still feel this sense of distance from reality, although no longer so strongly; I am getting back to ‘the world’ I normally live in. I didn’t stay with Gertrude last night; not merely because I had a cold, but because this strangely distant mood makes me feel already as I occasionally feel after an orgasm—serene and awake, as if the power of my thought had been magnified tenfold—or perhaps merely that my bleeding nuisance of a body is temporarily satisfied. I wonder if it will become less of a nuisance as I get older? I recall one occasion, eight years ago, when I experienced this total serenity through sex. Donald Baumgarten invited me to go with him to Birmingham one Christmas; he was working with another Jewish bloke called Morrie, selling all kinds of things in the market. I enjoyed it all; I liked the crowds and the excitement, and the lights in the market late at night—even the cold in the air. At one point, I was standing in front of the market stall, jammed forward by the crowd. Behind me stood a girl—probably a young married woman, on the plump side. She was watching Donald over my shoulder, and her thighs and belly were pressed very tight against my behind. After a few minutes of this, I began to feel an intense sexual excitement. But the delightful thing was that time seemed to have stood still—or rather, my desire stood still, quiescent, neither vanishing nor overflowing. She couldn’t have been pressed more tightly against me if I’d been lying on her in bed. I could feel the hardness of her suspenders against my legs. She must have been wearing a thin dress, because I was soon conscious of her warmth against me. The curious thing was that she kept making very slight movements, each one of which made my excitement rise like the mercury in a thermometer. I still don’t know whether she was aware of my excitement, and experienced it herself, but her movements seemed calculated. After what seemed about a quarter of an hour (but must have been less) I could bear it no longer; I pretended to make a movement to get a handkerchief out of my pocket; this pressed me against her even more tightly and also pressed my overcharged loins against the table.

  I stood there, very still, watching Donald selling off a case of alarum clocks at what he claimed was a fraction of their market value, and feeling as full of sweetness as a barrel of treacle. It lasted all the time I stood there—only a few minutes longer, because the selling stopped and some of the crowd dispersed. The woman behind me went. I didn’t turn to look at her—I suppose I felt ashamed. And yet I felt no guilt, not a shred—and all the way home that night, driving in the lorry and watching the cats’ eyes coming out of the dark, there was the same complete serenity inside me. I was a virgin then; I sometimes felt guilt about masturbation (although never much); but this was different; it had taken place out in the real world, and yet it was like a sexual daydream. I always feared that the world of imagination and the ‘real world’ would prove to be completely incompatible, would simply never connect, so that I’d be doomed to a lifetime of ironic frustration. This occasion seemed like a promise of something better, of fulfilment. It also raised the question: How far are men capable of absolute fulfilment? Of expressing everything they have in them? More of this later.

  I found it curiously difficult to write the above paragraph—as if I was writing dirt, I suppose. No doubt I was, by certain standards. And yet are our sexual experiences to remain perpetually confined to this limbo? Either never mentioned at all, as in Trollope, or mentioned with an awful degraded gloating, as in De Sade or Frank Harris?

  An Hour Later: Gertrude came in and brought me a small bottle of rum, which she insisted on heating with lemon and sugar and watching me drink. This kind of thing worries and embarrasses me. I know that by normal standards, I’m a swine. I also know that if she found out I was still seeing Caroline, she’d never forgive me. Yet I can’t quite convince myself that I’m in the wrong. I feel obscurely that there’s something I should learn from all this.

  I’m sometimes astounded at Gertrude’s capacity to close her mind. For example, when she speaks about Austin,[1] she mentions him casually, as if he was a member of the family who is away in another country. My attitude, I know, is morbid. And yet I can’t help brooding about the women he killed, and trying to make myself feel as if I was the murderer. Austin’s father came to see me a few weeks ago. I’d never met him, never heard from him before. He turned out to be a curious man—very tall, like Austin, with a bald head and thick lips, and an unpleasant air of power—ordinary material power, mostly used for evil. Gertrude tells me that he is one of England’s six richest men, and that he gives a lot to charity—with one eye on a peerage. That may be true, but I know that in an enlightened country, his kind would be exterminated, quickly and painlessly. His ostensible excuse for coming to see me was to ‘thank me’ for standing by Austin, and to give me a cheque for £250 (I know I should have refused this, but when you’ve been living on £5 a week for two years, it represents so many luxuries that you’d almost forgotten). What he really wanted was to find out if I was Austin’s pathic, and if I shared Austin’s taste for beating people. I think that, in a way I can only sense, Austin fascinates him. Are all these men—the power-men—driven by a kind of sadism, I wonder? He can’t help feeling—I know this—that in a funny sort of way, Austin has ‘made good’ by becoming a sex killer. He tells me, incidentally, that Austin has become far more openly ‘dotty’ since he’s been under confinement, and that it is difficult to make him take any interest in anything. God knows how much it’s costing him to keep things hushed up. The newspapers haven’t mentioned the Whitechapel killer for two months now. I would have thought this kind of thing was impossible. Or perhaps he’s not really having to exert influence; perhaps the police and the newspapers have come to a kind of agreement not to refer to the case ‘for the public good’. I read that an old lady in Bow had committed suicide because of the murders.

  [1]Austin Nunne. Between July and November, 1955, Nunne murdered seven women in the Spitalfields district of East London. A homosexual with strong sadistic tendencies, he was certified insane at the request of his own family and interned in a private mental home near Ascot; the murders were officially ‘unsolved’ at the time the above was written.

  And yet, in a strange way, I can’t help envying Austin the experience of murder. No, I don’t mean that I want to commit a sex crime (and I’d certainly have no interest in committing any other sort of murder). And yet I wish my imagination was powerful enough to tell me exactly what it would be like to commit a murder. Why are we such miserably inefficient machines? I am perpetually aware of my tremendous limitations. For some odd reason, it suits the gods, or destiny, to have us inefficient. I often feel as if I’m driving a car with the brakes on when I try to use my imagination to solve a problem. Or as if I’m trying to light a fire of wet wood with damp matches. The resources of the brain are enormous. It is undoubtedly the most complicated machine ever invented. In comparison, all other machines are incredibly childish. It can store a hundred languages, knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, science, philosophy. And it can do all this simultaneously. Sherlock Holmes was talking rubbish when he told Watson that he couldn’t care less whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa, because the mind can only store a limited number of facts. The brain could hold all the knowledge of all the libraries in the world, and a human being could still live a full sex life and social life, without losing an atom of human sympathy or physical well-being. All this I know. In occasional moments of vision, I have seen that ther
e is no reason why a man should not be a god.

  And yet what actually happens? I sometimes wake up at midday, make tea, try to write, and fail, try to read, and lose interest, do the shopping, get a meal, and feel totally exhausted by six in the evening. Why? Because in some way my body is working at minimum efficiency. Imagine that a tribe of ignorant natives find a motor-car, and decide that it makes an ideal storage room for food. So when they set out on a journey, they load it with food, attach ropes to it, and pull it through the jungle as if it was a cart. One of them fiddling about inside it, discovers the hand brake and releases it. Immediately, they find the car much easier to pull. They congratulate the discoverer, tell him he is a genius, and convince themselves that they now know the purpose and use of the car.

  This is how I feel with my body. Occasionally, as I am dragging it along, it accidentally gets into gear; there is a roar, and the engine starts for a moment. Then, just as quickly, it cuts out. But I know that this body is not merely designed for this boring, irritating, two-dimensional life that so easily becomes a burden to me.

  This, I suppose, is the reason for my sympathy with Austin. Since last year, I’ve read books about various sex killers—Heath, Christie, Kurten, and they repel and horrify me. And yet I still feel that Austin was dimly, vaguely trying to follow his own deepest nature to some unheard-of form of self-expression. It is strange that he always makes me think of Nijinsky. . . .