Man Without a Shadow

by Colin Wilson

  The following evening—it was mid-summer, and uncomfortably hot—we again took a long walk, and ended in a rather deserted park in a nearby village. We lay in a hollow and kissed, and pressed together as we had the night before. I had no thought of allowing my hands to stray—I was afraid it might upset her. Finally, we sat up and talked, but there was a curious, unstated frankness between us; she was aware of my excitement and I of hers. We kissed again, sitting up. Suddenly, she pointed to a darker spot on the grey of my flannels, and said: ‘Oh, look.’ And with a candour that staggered me, she unzipped me, and plunged her cool hand to the source of my excitement. The episode was not as exciting as it sounds here. I felt a little apprehensive in case anyone approached us, although we were sitting in a way that concealed what we were doing. Some children began to play ball close to us, and we decided it was time to leave. All the way home on the bus, she kept her hand pressed tight into her lap (except when people walked past our seat).

  The following week was frustrating. I saw her every day at lunch time, and two or three evenings. There were feverish hours in local parks, and an even worse evening in a local cinema. Although I have been told that a great deal of sex goes on under cover of darkness in these places, I could not bring myself to believe that we were not under the supervision of the whole row; when Mary placed her hand in my lap, a woman sitting next to me got up in a marked manner and went to the end of the row. So we finally went home, without even seeing the film out to its end.

  But on the following Sunday, we decided to spend a day in the country, and accordingly packed up a great deal of food and drink, and took a bus for ten miles. We found ourselves a pleasant spot at the side of a stream, under some trees, and opened the food, and stood the bottles of lemonade in the water. And finally, after half an hour of looking around for mushrooms, we drank some dandelion wine that my grandmother had given me, and lay down in the most sheltered spot we could find. Mary always tended to take the lead in these sexual exercises; within about five minutes, she had me almost completely undressed. I now, somewhat shyly, thrust my hand inside her dress, and worked it inside the elastic round the leg of her knickers. (She was wearing the blue things that schoolgirls wear.) She giggled and said: ‘Aren’t you naughty.’ I was interested to observe my own reactions; I felt very little excitement—certainly not the maelstrom of ecstasy I had always expected. After a while, I tried, rather awkwardly, to move into a position more suitable for mutual contact; I was clumsy, and she moved away, ordering me to lie on my back. Then, to my amazement, she sat astride me. At this point, her face twisted with agony, and she gasped: ‘Ooh, don’t move.’ So I obediently lay still, aware that I had penetrated her—or had been used by her for penetration—and thought: ‘So this is what I’ve spent six years speculating about? This is the great experience?’ Although I felt enough excitement to maintain an erection, I was otherwise curiously detached. If I had been more of a romantic, I might have felt like crying: what about the ecstasy? In about five minutes, she had begun to move on me, and I was aware that I had to worry about pregnancy; so I asked her to move quickly. We then ate and drank, dozed a little, and continued in the same manner for the rest of the day—seven times in all. In the late afternoon, feeling very tired, we walked out of the field, and I felt as though half my life had been passed there. I was not disappointed. On the contrary, the elation I felt had little to do with sex. I think my feelings could be expressed like this: ‘At last I have no more reason to be curious about women. I also have no more reason to suspect that destiny intends me for a life of frustration.’ About the sexual experience itself, I felt: ‘So that was all,’ and felt the kind of elation we feel about certain kinds of disillusionment.

  After that, the affair with Mary ran a fairly smooth course, except for quarrels. We met two or three times a week. I inquired among relatives about baby-sitting, and got into the habit of taking Mary with me. As soon as we were left alone, we both stripped and lay down on the rug. She probably enjoyed sex more than any girl I have ever known. She would often say: ‘Don’t move, don’t move,’ and then lie completely still, groaning: ‘Oh god, that’s lovely.’ After five minutes like this, when she had controlled her feelings, she would allow me to move a little, still groaning.

  Even then, I was struck by the difference in our responses. Mary, like Caroline, enjoyed sex; she enjoyed the act itself in a straightforward way. The desire was apparently attached to its object in a simple relationship. I soon noticed that my own excitement was more complicated. She bought herself some more adult underwear, and took pleasure in walking around in it; I soon noticed that this excited me more than seeing her naked. Why? It is probably tied up with the male-conquest impulse, as well as with a conditioning that connects our sexual impulses to underwear advertisements. One day, she bought herself a suspender belt. I watched her dressing, her panties pulled just below her buttocks while she hooked it up; the sight instantly provoked me to take her again, with an urgency so great that I would not even allow her to undress. And yet this puzzles me when I think back on it. I suppose seeing her like that gave me a sense of seeing something forbidden, and this added to the desire (I doubt whether Mary ever felt this). This immediately connects sex with all the nineteenth-century romanticism about black magic, etc. It also reminds me of the joke about the man who cured himself of impotency by repeating ‘She is not my wife, she is not my wife’ before climbing into bed with her.

  Again—I digress from Mary, but the subject is worth pursuing—I notice that Gertrude, in certain ways, evokes stronger sexual emotions than Caroline, simply because she always allows me to feel a sense of violation. This came to me strongly a few weeks ago; she warned me there was no point in staying the night because she had the curse. I decided to stay, anyway. Half-way through the night, I woke up in a state of excitement. And because I knew that she would consider it horribly indecent to attempt to make love under the circumstances, I tried to, very cautiously. Luckily, she is a heavy sleeper; I, in any case, was in such a fever that I reached a climax long before my cautious manœuvres achieved their object. Again, the forbidden has this power to raise ordinary sexual excitement to an extraordinary pitch.

  To return to Mary: after a few months, and two or three pregnancy scares, I no longer felt the same excitement. It would be untrue to say that I tired of her; I was never in love with her, or even very emotionally attached, and we had very little to hold us together except the pleasure of going to bed. That August, just before our final quarrel, we went on holiday together to Wales. One windy afternoon, we climbed a hill near Leominster to look at an old ruined tower, and managed to get inside it and climb the stairs. On our way down, it started to rain; we took shelter in a wood, lay down between two ground-sheets, and stayed there for half the afternoon, until we both felt exhausted. Finally, the rain stopped, and we made our way back towards the youth hostel. The wind was terrific; it prevented us from walking direct down the hill; the ground-sheets, which we were wearing as capes, acted as sails, and threw us along in the wind. I looked at the line of hills on the other side of the Severn, and felt an almost mystical satisfaction and certainty. The life in me seemed to swell and rise to the surface—more than it ever has in sexual excitement. I felt as if I was close to Captain Shotover’s seventh degree of concentration. I felt with certainty that man is on the brink of a new phase in his evolution, that life is about to make another important concession, and give man one more degree of freedom from the perpetual imprisonment in half-consciousness. It seemed to me that I was very close to discovering a secret—another small piece of knowledge about the controls of the machine. It may be only a tiny concession—how to release the hand-brake, how to turn on the headlights—but it will be a step closer to godhead. Such moments as these seemed to justify the long misery and boredom of my teens, as if an unknown power had whispered in my ear: ‘Carry on, you’re doing well.’

  A month later, Mary and I qu
arrelled; she went off with an engineer she met at a dance while I was in London, and accepted him when he proposed to her. By that time, I had already met Geraldine, so didn’t pay much attention.

  The chief thing I remember about the Mary affair was my feeling of triumph during those first few weeks. I suppose, after six years of wanting sex and trying to imagine what it would be like, I suddenly had a great deal of surplus mental energy at my disposal. For years I had thought and analysed obsessively, but never really enjoyed being a ‘thinker’, suspecting that it separated me from life. Mary’s effect on me, oddly enough, was not to make me exult in my body, but in my mind. The sex provided long holidays from introspection; I went back fresh and full of new ambition. I also felt as if I had unmasked a confidence trickster; I felt: ‘Never again shall I sweat and lust after a woman.’ At first, this was true. After making love to Mary, I would look at women without desire, no longer curious about what they’d be like in bed, knowing already what they’d be like.

  This did not last. I thought the affair had blown away all my cobwebs, dried out all the damp spots of morbidity in me. It didn’t. The life force won’t allow us to learn much from our sexual experiences. . . .

  Besides, as I realized with Geraldine, sex is by no means my deepest impulse. There were times when I felt like raging against my body, shaking the bars of my cage. Sex can give us momentary release, but almost immediately the enormous oppression of the body descends again; we are released from one prison cell and promptly locked in another. I gain a few hours’ release in music, and then discover that I’m hungry; I eat, and discover that I’m now drowsy and inclined to indigestion. Always a new oppression to make up for the momentary sense of escape.

  And yet this is not wholly true. When I work well and think well, I have a sense of release; the opposing army is forced to retreat, and has not time to regain its lost ground while I’m asleep; I wake up with a feeling of well-being and vital excitement.

  I wonder how many other disciplines there are for contacting this power-house? I have experienced it once or twice listening to music, particularly Wagner. Tristan was the great love of my teens. I remember hearing some of it one evening on the radio—unexpectedly; I listened with total concentration, trying to keep in my mind the whole idea and feeling of the drama, the love potion that is stronger than either of them, the illusion of touching heaven in the garden; my brain began to feel hot, as if it were an engine being run properly for once, and suddenly, time stood still, the past and the present became identical, as if time were a confidence trick of my body, and I had seen through the trick. I am sure that power over the body resides in the brain. If only the brain could work at a certain intensity, the intensity it may accidentally achieve in reading some book, listening to music, the body’s power to oppress the spirit would disappear, and the body itself would become to the spirit like an instrument in the hands of an expert performer. This intensity is achieved too infrequently, and I do not have its secret, except effort, non-stop, day-by-day effort to attain power over the body. Van Gogh must have achieved this kind of intensity many times in his painting; it is visible in The Starry Night and the Road with Cypresses. I myself achieved it many times in the days when I wanted to be a ballet dancer—the days when Nijinsky was my chief symbol of the powerhouse—usually when dancing to music I associated with Nijinsky—the Faun, the Sacre, the Firebird.

  Oct. 27th.

  This morning, in the second-hand shop in the Hampstead Road, I picked up a copy of Gorky’s reminiscences of Tolstoy. I have never written about this, incidentally, the intense pleasure I get from pottering around second-hand bookshops. It is not merely the bookworm’s delight. But these places are like churches in the middle of this stupid civilization; outside there is business, money-making, the commercial jungle where everything is de-valued; inside, another world that plots the secret overthrow of the world of money. I still remember my excitement on picking up a tattered copy of the first volume of Schopenhauer, and walking up the Kentish Town Road reading it, and feeling as if I’d found one of the secrets that would free me; life is all surface, hard, polished, screaming for attention. The world is like a bad-tempered and imperious housewife who wants to keep her husband under her thumb, who never ceases to nag him, make him feel in the wrong, assure him that he could go further and fare worse, etc. She also plants in him an immense guilt feeling about feeling attraction to other women. Then one day, he meets another woman who is totally unlike his wife, gentle, good-tempered, intelligent, and perfectly willing to give herself, and in five minutes feels that the whole world is changing, feels that his wife’s fits of jealousy, self-righteousness, hysteria, are completely intolerable, and that nothing but timidity and force of habit have made him endure them for so long. This is the taste of freedom. . . . I look for it in bookshops.

  I find on the title-page of the Gorky this comment by Tolstoy: ‘The flesh rages and riots, and the spirit follows it, helpless and miserable.’ This was the first thing I saw when I opened the book, the subject that has been foremost in my mind for days. Are these things chance? They incline me to believe that the world has its own secret motives and intentions.

  On the first page of the book, I find this remark: ‘He is like a god, not a Sabaoth or Olympian, but the kind of Russian god who “sits on a maple throne under a golden lime tree,” not very majestic, but perhaps more cunning than all the other gods.’

  I sympathize. We all want to create gods, to believe in godlike men. This book shows Gorky’s struggle to romanticize Tolstoy, to see him as a god, and his continual disappointment that he was only a human being—until, after Tolstoy’s death, Gorky can at last drop his image into the saturated fluid of his own mind, and bring it out encrusted with crystals.

  Yes, I know this desire to believe that men can be like gods, that Shelley’s old Jew, ‘wiser than god’, really lives somewhere in his sea-cavern ‘mid the Demonesi’. I experience it now as I turn my head and look at Nietzsche’s works on the shelf. When I bought them—found the set in a junk shop that didn’t realize their value—I brought them back greedily, stood them on the shelf and then stared at them as if I’d found the key to my salvation, a man who used language like a scalpel to cut the truth out of his own heart. And then I thought: but Nietzsche died insane. This man whose thought is so powerful and clear, whose step is so purposeful, seems to know exactly where he is weakling; it is impossible not to believe that he can lead the human race out of its moral wilderness. But he died insane.

  Oct. 28th.

  I have been thinking again about this problem of the association of sex and ‘dirt’. And yet I am not sure that it is a ‘necessary’ association. I read a case recently of a young burglar who slashed the armchairs with a razor and pissed on the carpets. The burglary expressed a power complex; it was obviously a kind of ‘rape’ of a rich person’s flat, and the rape would not be complete without this kind of indignity. The sense of freedom in a strange person’s flat had to express itself in some form of destruction. In the same way, we may associate sex and ‘dirt’ as two things that are forbidden.

  And yet it is the powers inside ourselves that are ‘forbidden’, that we know nothing about, and yet which we have a right to know about. There is no reason why sex should be associated with destruction. I think of Harry Thomas who worked with me once at Golders Green (I met him again a few nights ago in Tottenham Court Road). He had every reason to be fairly happy; he was a good-looking man in his thirties, with a pretty wife and two intelligent children, a comfortable little house in Hampstead, and a good job. And yet he never seemed happy to me; his eyes always looked strained, as if he was suppressing nervous tension. He used to come and talk to me when I was spraying toys in the shed outside the factory, and tell me how he longed to escape (we once planned a whole trip across Europe and North Africa on his motor-bike, but it never came off).

  But what interested me m
ost were his symbols of freedom. He talked to me about fighting in the Western desert against Rommel. He had a special friend named Ginger. One day, in a bombardment, Ginger looked over a heap of sandbags when a shell exploded; his head rolled to Harry’s feet. Harry said he went insane; he jumped on top of the sandbags, in full view of the enemy snipers, and began screaming at them and firing his rifle. He said he didn’t care if they shot him; he hated them so much that he wanted to kill every German with his bare hands.

  Harry also told me about the bombardments, and the tremendous noise the guns made when they opened up. He said that all the guns along the line would begin to fire together, at a given signal, and go on without pause for an hour or more. The explosions were so continuous that they lit up the sky as if it was daytime, and the noise was simply a non-stop thunder that left everyone deaf for days. But Harry told me about this with a kind of exaltation. He said: ‘It was like Hell let loose,’ but he said it with so much feeling that the cliché expressed some of his amazement, almost an admiration, for the racket.