Man Without a Shadow

by Colin Wilson

  Of course, I didn’t sleep a wink. She got into bed in a bra, waist skirt and panties. I asked her if she always slept like that; she said no, she always slept naked, but didn’t want to lead me into temptation. Then followed the usual conversation about sex; she admitted she wasn’t a virgin, but said it had only happened once, and that she didn’t want it to happen again. I asked her why she trusted me; she said she knew I had self-control from what happened the other day!

  Finally we turned back to back and I tried to sleep. Naturally, I couldn’t. I wanted to say: stop play-acting and take off those pants, since I presume that’s why you invited me into your bed. Then I dozed for a bit, and when I woke up, she was taking off her bra. I naturally took this as an invitation, and tried to kiss her, but she pushed me away, and said she was hot. So finally, rather irritably (I can’t stand teasers), I went to sleep. I woke up at about six this morning, and took advantage of her sleep to start kissing her. She let me do that all right, but very firmly grabbed my wrist when I tried to go further. My hands were allowed anywhere above the waist, but below it was strictly taboo. She even allowed me to kiss her breasts, and very obviously enjoyed it.

  Then she added insult to injury by giving me a lecture about trying to make love to her when I was supposed to be in love with Caroline. I knew she wanted me to protest that I wasn’t, but I was so irritated that I didn’t. Finally my sexual tension exploded harmlessly, and I was immediately pleased that she was still a virgin as far as I was concerned (sex is a selfish business anyway). At seven o’clock she told me I’d better get up to my own room because the landlady might choose this morning to call in. She has a damnable German coolness and a tendency to lecture, so that I was in a rage with myself for being fool enough to sleep with her. I hate these girls who pretend to offer their bodies, and then reveal that what they really want is to stuff their personalities down your throat, make you acknowledge them as minds. It makes me think of that splendid poem of Heine to an ex-mistress who wanted to carry on the relationship on a ‘spiritual plane’, which ends:

  ‘Your body’s love I still desire

  For it is young and fair.

  Your soul can go and hang itself,

  I’ve soul enough to spare.’

  So in a bad temper I came up here and made myself tea, and am now writing this at eight o’clock—the earliest I’ve been up for years!

  All the same, the night wasn’t wasted completely, for my annoyance and rejection of her has left me aware of the things I ought to be thinking about. I now open Jean Paul’s Fruit, Flower and Thorn Pieces, and feel excitement. Yes, the romantics of the nineteenth century were right; man ought to be more than man, more than a social animal. Too much association with people sickens me. This is not because I dislike people—on the contrary, I like them too much. And yet social intercourse is one thing, real ‘exchange’ another. I don’t mean intellectual exchange, but any kind of ‘giving’. This girl Carlotta is not herself a particularly happy person; that is, she’s not a particularly fulfilled person, not a grown-up person. If she didn’t have a desirable body, I wouldn’t dream of having any but the most casual relation with her.

  Because—this, I suppose is the problem—I can’t help feeling, in certain ways, a kind of ‘spiritual aristocrat’. Pride and egoism, no doubt, but it still has its element of truth. I can sympathize with snobs like Wilde and Yeats in a way, because I transpose their social snobbery on to another level. Hell, all philosophers are snobs. Schopenhauer devoted a lot of space to railing against the mob and declaring that people who made noises should be dealt with sternly by the law. . . .

  Nov. 1st.

  A typical November day; drizzle and fog. I love such weather. So do all true Englishmen. (Strange, I suppose, that I think of myself as an Englishman; yet I have a genuine love for England, and a kind of love for Germany, and a loathing for the French, who are a feeble lot.) Why? Because, I suppose, such a day as this is already half-way towards Dickens’s foggy nights with the shops filled with holly and Christmas turkeys and Scrooge on his way home through the icy rain.

  Last night, suddenly impatient and bored, and also afraid that Carlotta might come and knock on my door, I cycled down to Fleet Street and went into the usual café. Bill Payne came in with another Bill—a Bill Fletcher whom I’d never met. They made an odd pair. Bill was in one of his periodic moods of contempt for all humankind, and even went so far as to advocate dropping hydrogen bombs ‘to liven people up’. His friend Fletcher was a curious type—tall, very good-looking in a clean-cut kind of way, with gentle manners and the eyes of a poet (but I gather he is an engineer—and a successful one). This man struck me as one of the types I ought to introduce to Gertrude. A pure idealist of a rather tough kind. I mean that he doesn’t seem to shrink from life; yet his theories are the most airy-fairy I’ve ever heard. At one point, he said: ‘The world is like a brass band marching by, with everybody trying to make as much noise as possible—just a blaring. The music of the spirit is gentler, like the music of violins. . . .’ He finally invited us back to his studio, where he spends his evenings painting, and we went (both rather dubiously—neither of us have much sympathy for painting and painters). He has a pleasant studio at the top of a house in Northumberland Avenue. But the paintings were more disconcerting than anything I’d expected. To begin with, all were in very pale pastel shades. Secondly, they were all very symbolic, with lots of weird angelic figures hovering in the air. The one that gave me most of a jar was a picture of a little clerk leaving his home on his way to work, carrying a brief-case, wearing his pinstripes and bowler hat. Above him hovers an angelic figure, with her arms around his neck.

  I could see what he was getting at—that the ‘mystic presences’ hover behind the world. What Blake meant when he wrote:

  How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way

  Is an immense world of delight, closed to your senses five?

  All right, so perhaps there are lots of spirit violins playing inaudibly in Regent Street, and guardian angels hovering over Piccadilly Circus; but all this feeble spirituality irritates me. Fletcher also offered to play us some of his own music (he seems to be a man with many talents). He sat at the piano and played us several pieces—all very slow and pensive. Afterwards, I asked him who was his favourite composer, and he said Delius—as if I couldn’t have guessed. What baffles me about him is that he’s no ‘sensitive plant’, no maladjusted life-hater, but an apparently contented man, married with a child. Bill and I couldn’t make him see that all this ‘sweetness and light’ made his paintings look like soap advertisements, and that no painter ought to stick symbolic angels into his canvasses and still call it painting. He just didn’t see my point of view—said Cézanne had ‘no spirituality’. Bill got very excited, and started explaining that what the human race needs is torture and crisis, not sweetness and light. He seemed to be against Fletcher’s spirituality rather as the Communists used to be against the Salvation Army—because it holds off the true revolution with false hopes and inadequate half-measures. Bill declared he will launch his new magazine with an article entitled: Bring Back the Rack, a counterblast against the anti-capital-punishment people! He said that if man won’t make voluntary efforts to achieve greatness, then he must be driven with a whip, and that the Hitlers and Stalins are the greatest friends of humanity because they have the moral courage to recognize its feebleness and drive it ruthlessly. He calls this ‘ultimate compassion’, and likens it to a surgeon amputating a gangrened leg.

  Poor Bill Fletcher was horrified—he doesn’t know about Bill’s Welsh habit of stating his case in somewhat rhetorical terms. It was amusing to see them together, but somehow futile, because they had no language in common. Bill is anyway too impatient to bother much about language—he would call it hair-splitting to stake out definitions.

  Anyway, we left around midnight, having drunk a
dozen cups of poisonously strong tea. Bill’s first comment was ‘What’s the use of talking to weak people?’ I didn’t point out that he had been doing most of the arguing—I’m too lazy when I feel I can’t communicate easily. We were both too wide awake to go home, so we went back to the Fleet Street café and sat there until three this morning, talking about the need for a new literary age, and speculating on whether it would help if we assassinated John Lehmann and Stephen Spender. After talks like this, I feel better; it seems to me that even if I’m cooped up in this room for another five years, at least I’m doing something active about changing things—planning a revolution. Probably it’s as well that I remain unknown as long as possible.

  I cycled to Caroline’s flat and let myself in with my key. She didn’t even wake up when I got into bed.

  I forgot to mention that I asked Bill Fletcher to come and meet Gertrude.

  Nov. 2nd.

  Complications continue. Carlotta came up to my room last night to ask if I was annoyed with her. When I said I wasn’t, she asked me down for supper. I refused, claiming I’d eaten (I hate ‘having supper’ like that—too sociable). But she came up at about eleven with some German drink—Steinhager, I think she called it—and she sat around talking to me about her family. As I felt bored and sleepy, I finally suggested that she get into bed. She said she wouldn’t—that it would be silly with her own bed downstairs—but made no move to go, so I simply undressed and climbed in, and after a few more hesitations she did the same. I don’t know why, because she was still sternly virginal—kept on her slip and pants as before. I suppose she may be afraid of sex, because she’s happy enough to be kissed and caressed. Or perhaps she wants to get her claws in deeper before she gives way. After half an hour of frustrations that were as shattering as braking violently in a car, I turned over and went to sleep, and slept when she got up this morning (one advantage of staying on my home ground!). She actually brought me coffee at half past nine, and sat on the bed, and behaved more affectionately than when undressed and in bed. I shall never understand women. Again, I am face to face with this stupid conjuring trick of sex. This morning, after she’d gone, I re-read my entry about the time she fell off the ladder. I can still recall my excitement at the sight of her legs. Why, then, don’t I feel anything analogous when I watch her taking her clothes off to get into bed? I remember when I first read Wuthering Heights I was irritated by the narrator’s confession of his emotional capriciousness—how he fell violently in love with a girl at a watering place, but as soon as she obviously returned his affection, lost all interest in her and fled. This seems to me childish and boring. I cannot bear such people when I meet them—and I’m always meeting them. (The other night, for example, in the café with Bill, some mincing queer called Denison came over—great expert on ballet (he thinks) and contemptuous when I said I thought Nijinsky was important in more ways than as a dancer; anyway, this Denison struck me as the arrogant, immature, capricious type, and I loathed him.) And yet, in spite of my hatred of emotional capriciousness, I find this physical capriciousness deep in me, and I can do nothing about it. Again, I suppose it’s the abstract feminine that allures us, and the personal contact spoils it. The personality blankets the sexual drive in rather the same way that sex is less satisfying wearing a preventative. I recall an interesting instance of this. When I first went to bed with Caroline—and before she visited the birth-control clinic—she insisted on my wearing preventatives, and I saw the sense of this. And yet one night, as I was making love to her, I felt irritated by it, and by manœuvring my hands I managed to get rid of the damn thing without her knowing; I then experienced a tremendous excitement as I continued to make love to her, feeling as if we were now really having sex. The feeling was so strong that I felt a compulsion not to withdraw. I realized this was stupidity, that I didn’t want her to have a baby; yet my response to this thought was: so what? It cost me an enormous effort to do the sensible thing—like Ulysses hearing the Siren’s song. This seems like a plain case of the life force trying to persuade us to perpetuate the species; yet I wonder whether the motive of the confidence trick was as simple as that?

  Nov. 3rd.

  I spent most of yesterday at Gertrude’s, helping her re-decorate the bathroom. It was another windy, rainy day, and after lunch we lay on the settee in front of the fire, listening to the rain—the pleasantest occupation I know—and ended making love. She’s funny. She obviously finds it incredibly wicked and exciting to do it downstairs in the daytime. This makes it seem quite different. She also took off her dress. Afterwards, I refused to give her the dress and her pants until she’d put on the kettle for tea. She went off into the kitchen, but some tradesman rang on the doorbell, and she came flying back in as if the Day of Judgement had arrived. Incidentally, she tells me that the Jehovah’s Witnesses suspect her of sexual immorality, and Brother Robbins gave her a grave little sermon on the subject the other day.

  She told me she had a letter from Oliver Glasp;[1] apparently he’s in Lancaster. I can’t imagine what he’s doing there. Gertrude says he’s got the Preston Art Gallery to give him an exhibition, and they’ve bought two of his paintings. He inquired about Christine, but not about me. I asked her not to mention that I’ve brought Christine here. He’d probably suspect my motives! It’s a pity that Christine’s father stopped her coming to see me; she’s one of the brightest children I ever met. There was even a time when Gertrude thought of adopting her and sending her to a university.

  [1]Oliver Glasp, the well known painter, had also been a friend of Austin Nunne and of Gertrude Quincey. In 1954 he met the girl whom I have called Christine, and who was then ten years old. His curious emotional relationship with her led to a nervous breakdown, and he left London suddenly in November 1955. At the time of writing. I had heard nothing from him for over a year.

  We had a curious evening. I had asked Bill Fletcher to come over to meet Gertrude. But she told me she’d agreed to let a Yugoslav friend use her sitting-room for a meeting. There was nothing for it but to sit through the meeting. This proved to be unexpectedly interesting. Fletcher arrived at half past seven and had supper with Gertrude and myself. Finally, the Yugoslav came, a man called Georgi—I can’t pronounce his surname. Apparently he is changing houses this week, and can’t hold the meeting in his own place. He proved to be a middle-aged man, obviously Jewish, with a gentle, broad face, brown eyes with the liquid expression of a spaniel, and a large waist-line. He was thrown out of Jugoslavia years ago for Red sympathies, then out of Germany in the thirties. He seemed to love music, which recommended him to me, and we immediately got into a discussion about Bruckner and Mahler. At eight o’clock, the rest of the meeting began to arrive—all very young men, and a couple of girls, pleasant, naïve young chaps, but they didn’t strike me as particularly bright. Finally, we settled down to the meeting. Georgi talked of tolerance and universal love, and advocated complete anarchism, with everybody ‘doing as they pleased’. The young men all listened with complete seriousness, their chins in their hands. After half an hour of this kind of thing—all very vague—we had coffee, and Georgi threw open the discussion. Bill Fletcher started in, very enthusiastic, by asking about the role of the spirit in this ideal community. He got the shock of his life when Georgi scornfully dismissed the idea of spirit as a trick of the priests (it was obvious they were talking at complete cross purposes). Georgi now launched into a lengthy denunciation of religion, calling priests ‘black vultures’ and scavengers, and declaring that the free man can live without such illusions. Fletcher gently insisted that he meant spirit in the sense in which you would talk of the spirit of Beethoven or Mahler. Georgi retorted that in that sense, they would do better to discuss Beethoven’s music—or better still, listen to it—rather than talking as if ‘spirit’ were something that could be sold in bottles for the nourishment of his Utopia. (At this point I got rather tired, didn’t feel inclined to sort out their beautiful
linguistic tangle, and sneaked off into the kitchen to have a little of the kind of spirit that comes in bottles.)

  When it was all over—well after midnight—and we were in bed, I asked Gertrude what she thought of Georgi’s denunciation of religion. She said mildly that she thought he was a ‘good man’, so it didn’t matter much how he expressed himself; she then turned her attention to love-making. I’m convinced that, like all women, her world is all ‘personal’; she wants love and security, and she’d cheerfully fix her affections on the devil if he could give her these.

  But I left here this morning feeling irritable and oppressed. What do I care about Georgi and Fletcher and their silly wrangles that spring out of a desire to talk and be sociable rather than any need to arrive at results? I’d like to be away from here—at least away from this area. I think of Oliver with a kind of envy, remembering his old room in Whitechapel, his obsessed pictures; he somehow succeeded in living like a monk. I want to live like a monk in theory. In practice, I keep getting overdoses of people, which is rather like getting yourself blind drunk on rum. The taste of it stays with you for weeks afterwards, and the mere thought of its taste is enough to make the stomach lurch. You can make yourself sick on an overdose of almost anything. Well, I’ve got people-poisoning at present, and I’ve been suffering from a mild case of people-poisoning for what seems years.