Man Without a Shadow

by Colin Wilson

  A peculiar thing happened on my way home. I walked up Petticoat Lane, and stopped by the waste ground for a pee. While I stood there, a couple suddenly stood up from behind some stalls on the other side of the ground. From the way she was smoothing her dress, I imagine it had been around her waist. I walked behind them up the street. Then they passed under a lamp, and I realized it was Diana, with the flashily-dressed individual I’d seen the other day. I felt rather sick about this—or I suppose the correct word is jealous. If she’s going to have sex with other men, why can’t she go in for something more dignified than a piece of waste ground? There’s always the park. I took a short cut through the back streets and got home before she did; I didn’t want to see her. Her husband was playing himself Schumann when I came in.

  Nov. 10th.

  Have just returned from Bond Street, where I found an art gallery exhibiting Oliver’s stuff. I went into town this afternoon to look around Foyle’s second-hand section, then thought I’d take a look at a little shop I know in D’Arblay Street. In one of those back streets off Bond Street, I found a small art gallery with a large notice: Exhibition of Paintings by Oliver Glasp. I went in and inquired, but the man was very unhelpful. When I said I was a friend of the artist, he only gave me a resentful glare, and said he wasn’t allowed to give any personal information about the artist. I was so irritated that I wanted to knock him down and stamp on his face—this kind of rudeness always sends up my blood pressure—so I shrugged and went out. Perhaps he thought I only wanted to borrow money from Oliver. Anyway, I presume this means that Oliver’s back in town.

  The weird thing is that as I started to write this down, I suddenly recalled that I had dreamed about Oliver last night, and I could swear that there was something about an exhibition in the dream. However, I suppose this is coincidence, not a proof of Dunne’s serial time.[1]

  [1]J. W. Dunne’s book An Experiment with Time deals with the possibility that we can have actual visions of the future in dreams; he developed a theory of ‘serial time’ to explain his own dream-experiences of precognition.

  The exhibition, which apparently opened yesterday, was very impressive; most of it seemed to be old stuff. The centrepiece of the exhibition was Oliver’s picture of Matthew Lovatt.[1] The title in the catalogue only says: A self-crucifixion.

  [1]Matthew Lovatt: a shoemaker of Casale, Italy, who made two attempts to commit suicide by self-crucifixion. He constructed a machine that would lower a cross from a third storey window overlooking the market place, and somehow succeeded in nailing himself to it. He died of self-starvation in an asylum. Oliver Glasp passed through a period when he practised many self-torments; he made several paintings and sketches of Lovatt’s suicide attempt.

  Strangely enough, as I got off the bus at the bottom of Commercial Street, I saw Christine walking on the other side of the road. I haven’t seen her for a long time. So I ran over and caught her up. She actually seems to have grown a lot since I last saw her (I think she’s nearly thirteen). I didn’t mention Oliver’s exhibition. I didn’t want to hurt her. I shall never understand why Oliver was so shattered when he found out that Christine had slept with her cousin (incidentally, she told me that this cousin has just been sent to a reformatory).

  I gave Christine my address, and she says she’ll come and see me. But I somehow got the impression that she doesn’t intend to.

  Nov. 11th.

  Diana came up to talk to me last night, but I felt too irritated after seeing her with the bookmaker type. She wanted to talk to me about Kirsten—whether I think he couldn’t get someone to publish his music. I’m afraid I showed my annoyance, because after five minutes of lame conversation, she left.

  I have decided to sketch out a one-act opera libretto about Major Thomas Weir, whom I’ve found in Montague Summers. It will give me a chance to make it a psychological study too. Weir was apparently known in Edinburgh as a Presbyterian of unusual enthusiasm, a highly respected soldier, an upright citizen. Quite suddenly, in his seventies, he started confessing to witchcraft, to incest with his sister, bestiality, adultery, and various other offences. The respectable citizens to whom he confessed thought he was mad, and declined to act. But he was so persistent that they were forced to investigate. Finally, largely on Weir’s own accusations, he and his sister were burned for witchcraft. His house remained uninhabited for many years after, neighbours claiming that they heard strange noises and saw lights. Summers claims that one man who agreed to take the house was almost immediately driven out of it by the devil in the shape of a calf. However, Summers seems to be a wildly imaginative writer, who manages to pack more inaccuracies into two paragraphs about Jack the Ripper than most people could get into twenty pages.

  The main charges against Weir were sexual. He slept with his sister Jane from the time when she was sixteen until she was fifty (when he lost interest). He also slept with his stepdaughter and with several maidservants. He attempted to rape his sister when she was ten. He made a habit of having intercourse with mares and cows; on one occasion, he was seen by a woman in the act of bestiality with a mare, but when she reported him, no one believed her, and she was whipped through the town for slander of such a holy man! Weir was burned alive in 1670.

  Even Summers, who seems to believe in witchcraft, makes very little attempt to present Major Weir as a sorcerer, and admits that the principal charges against him were the sexual ones. Add to this that Weir refused to petition God for pardon, claiming that he was certain he was damned. All this, I think, indicates a case of overwhelming sexual guilt. Weir was obviously a man of intense sexual desires, born into a community where sex was regarded as sinful. The only parallel I can think of was the case of Peter Kurten, the Düsseldorf killer. Kurten also attempted to rape his sister when he was very young, and committed bestiality. I suspect that when sexual desire reaches this kind of intensity, it turns automatically to sadism.

  So we have a picture of young Thomas Weir, born into a family of respectable Presbyterians about 1600, and later fighting with the Puritan Army and being made commander of the forces in Edinburgh—a post that he owed to his reputation for piety as much as to his prowess as a soldier. But from a very early age, he is obsessed by sex; it haunts him all the time, so that there is hardly a moment of any day when he is not aware of an urgency in his loins. When his sister is sixteen, he succeeds in having intercourse with her. This could hardly be called rape, because if she had really objected, she only had to complain to her parents. But Weir also lives in a country where religion has assumed particularly nasty forms of superstition. He believes in the devil, naturally. But as he walks through the streets of Edinburgh, he is continually aware of a desire to grab every attractive girl he sees and heave her skirts over her head. This sense of strange forces working inside him must have convinced him that he was close to the devil. I take his bestiality to be a further corroboration of this idea. After all, what man in his right senses wants to have intercourse with a horse or cow? A moronic farm-hand in a country district might do it out of frustration, or a shepherd who sees no one but his sheep for weeks at a time. But for most people, the idea would be as unattractive as eating the cow’s dinner. Only a sense that it was wicked and forbidden could possibly stimulate a man’s appetite to overcome his normal revulsion—particularly if there were women available, as apparently there always were for Weir (if only his sister).

  It seems peculiar, but the idea of the forbidden has the power of channelling and concentrating the sexual desires. In Thomas Mann, for example, there is an obvious obsession with incest between brother and sister; it appears in Blood of the Walsungs and again in The Holy Sinner. But why? Only because it is supposed to be forbidden. Imagine a country where it is regarded as highly moral to keep sex within the family, but horribly daring to touch someone else’s sister! This is surely more like common sense? For after all, our own flesh does
not excite us; therefore, someone else’s sister is far more strange. Why do I take only the most casual interest in a girl dressed in a bikini, yet feel a tremendous twinge of lust if I happen to see the same girl in her panties and bra, although these may conceal far more than the beach clothes? It is this curious focusing-power of the forbidden. So you get a fool like Baudelaire claiming that the element of sin must be kept in sex. To me, this is only to say that he believes sex to be entirely an illusion, and that the illusion should be preserved or even intensified. I’m not sure. There’s a strong streak of original Rousseau in me. I can’t help feeling that if the climate was temperate enough for us all to live as nudists, and if we were as promiscuous and frank as the South Sea Islanders, we’d discover that the sexual impulse doesn’t need intensifying by guilt and sin.

  Anyway, to return to Major Weir. I imagine his final confession was almost a gesture of disgust with life, like suicide—a self-divided life when he could never feel completely at one with himself because he never felt he had a right to inner peace. And yet I cannot agree with Summers when he says that Weir was a monstrous hypocrite who used his acting abilities to deceive everybody. Weir didn’t have to be thought more pious than anybody else; he didn’t have to pray so fervently that people would come for miles to hear him extemporize. Plainly, he had a genuine talent for this kind of thing, for praying and talking about religion. He was an oversexed man; but in a less superficial culture he might also have become a saint, since he possessed strong religious feelings as well as strong sexual urges. If he could have been franker about them, got into the habit of letting other people know about them—if only a priest—he might have dared to allow his ‘opposing selves’ to wrestle openly. He was like a frightened old maid who keeps her dog and cat in separate rooms because she is afraid they’ll fight and disturb the other tenants; but in consequence, the dog and cat never have a chance to get used to one another.

  I wonder . . . if we could finally destroy the idea of guilt in connection with sex—if we could be completely open about our sexual desires—if the result might not be to release some of our mental blocks, hidden powers? When I think of those sexual infernos that seem the common experience of all teenage boys, I’m surprised that far more girls don’t get raped. This I take to be the real problem with Oliver and this child Christine. I doubt whether Oliver has had any sexual experience. He naturally has a masochistic tendency. Then he meets Christine, a girl who doesn’t frighten or worry him (I remember how awkward he was when he met Caroline—didn’t seem to know where to put his feet and hands). In fact, she obviously thinks he’s something extraordinary. Unfortunately, she isn’t suitable for romance, being only eleven. Nevertheless, he is lonely, and allows her to touch dormant sexual feelings. Then she poses for him with nothing on, and the situation comes dangerously close to the explosion point. He won’t admit to himself that what he really wants is to take a sweet girl of about sixteen to bed; Christine is just a substitute for this. Heaven knows how long it would have taken before he would have admitted that he wanted her in every sense, but before he can reach that stage, just while he is trying to hide from himself that he is sexually stimulated by her, he suddenly learns that she is not, in fact, a virgin. Most people wouldn’t have felt particularly surprised by this. After all, in her kind of family, where several children often sleep in the same bed, and the facts of life are no secret from the age of five, precocious sexual experience isn’t so unusual, neither does it necessarily do much harm. No doubt Christine was perfectly sincere when she said that her cousin had practically raped her, and that she hated him for it. So why, under the circumstances, does Oliver go half-insane and rush off to the other end of England, refusing to see the poor child again? Why on earth couldn’t he be frank with himself, admit that he’d like to have sexual intercourse with her, but that at her age it is impracticable?

  How can we talk of sin and guilt, the world being what it is? The world is a confidence-trickster—that is, it is careful not to allow its reality to appear to us. And what is its reality? This is the question I devote my whole life to studying. And yet I think I have more idea of the answer now than a year ago. Usually I feel almost non-existent, as if I wouldn’t even cast a shadow in the sunlight, like Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl or the man in Hoffmann’s story. Yet I am learning to cast a shadow.

  Nov. 12th.

  It is the safe of meaning that I’ve got to crack, and I need a great deal more training in burglary. I’ve spent today like an absolute fool, staring out of my window, drinking tea, trying to read Huysmans’s Là Bas and not being able to work up much interest in it. God, this awful freedom, this appalling and terrible freedom. What are we to do? I spend my life trying to free myself from my conditioning, only to face this terrible lack of motive. Huysmans keeps asking why Gilles de Rais became a sadist and ‘ripper’ of children. He didn’t understand that the desert of freedom is his answer. When a man has too much freedom, too many privileges, he becomes an utter fool. What could you expect from the richest baron in France? We all have an absurd compulsion to keep looking forward to things. We’re incapable of sitting still. We have no will. We have to be driven on up the evolutionary scale, destiny sitting behind us and sticking a pointed stick up our arses. You ask why Gilles de Rais became a torturer of children—the answer is only too obvious. He had always had too much. But one of our chief sources of pleasure is striving for things. This keeps the appetite for life stimulated. With nothing much to strive for, Gilles found life becoming flat and tasteless. He wasn’t stupid enough to be a hunting squire; he liked books and paintings, ‘a fifteenth-century Des Esseintes’, Huysmans calls him. The human soul cries out: give me sensation, let me feel I am alive. It is a pity that there was no fifteenth-century Thomas Aquinas to deal with this problem. What does God intend us to do with that energy of freedom? Search for meaning, I believe, stare at this poker-face of life, and try to work out how to get behind it to the reality. But Gilles hadn’t the sense or penetration for that; like De Sade, he followed the downward curving road of the body. The difference between the two attitudes is the whole difference between male and female. The male confronts his boredom with a need to conquer, to penetrate, to achieve ecstasy by a kind of aggression. The female reacts to freedom with the cry: come and penetrate me. Bring me ecstasy and sensation. But what training had a man like Gilles for freedom? A darling of destiny, flattered by the king and courtiers, a marshal of France in his twenties, the comrade in arms of Joan of Arc. The sadism follows naturally. Since the life force has turned sex into an act of aggression, has made us respond with desire to the notion of violating another’s privacy with an erect penis, is it not inevitable that the sexual explorer looks around for new taboos to violate? Therefore, in some ways, the sex maniac must be regarded as admirable. The life force is like a stupid king, who drives his subjects to doing his will by forcing them to obey brutal morons. If a few of the subjects have the courage to revolt, so much the better for them. The life force appears to be incredibly stupid. It persuades us to perpetuate the species by implanting in us a kind of criminal impulse—for is not the desire to enter another’s body similar to the desire to break into someone’s house? When we were at school, we used to repeat a rhyme that went:

  It’s only human nature after all

  To take a pretty girl behind a wall

  To pull down her protection

  And to shove in your connection

  It’s only human nature after all.

  But note here the words ‘her protection’, and its suggestion of leaving the girl helpless. (Presumably if she goes with you behind a wall, she is quite willing to have sex, so why the imagery of violating her?) Why? Because this is the rather clumsy device the life force has hit upon to stimulate man to take upon himself the boredom of fatherhood. Then, having planted in us this preposterous conditioned reflex, it relies on our timidity and cowardice to ensure that the children who get brou
ght into the world have homes and families. A man who is free of this timidity will therefore go ahead and rape. The only reason he cannot be excused is that the stupidity of the life force doesn’t justify us in doing the opposite. The means employed may be clumsy and silly, but the aim is valid. It is rather like a bad teacher who treats intelligent pupils as if they were small children, and irritates them by talking down at them; all the same, she has something to teach, no matter how unfortunate her manner. In the same way, life seems to rely on our timidity and need for security to keep us from wrecking society. Therefore a man who chooses to be a criminal might be admirable in the same way as the sex maniac. But the same objection applies to him.

  I know that I could be a god with a few minor adjustments, that my consciousness could expand and increase my vitality tenfold. Then why does it seem impossible? There I’m baffled. I can only presume we are not yet ready for the new consciousness.

  Nov. 15th.

  A hectic twenty-four hours. First of all, Carlotta came yesterday afternoon to bring me a letter. It turned out to be a note from Oliver, asking me to go and see his exhibition, and giving an address in the Hackney Road. Carlotta was in one of her teasing moods—turned away her mouth when I tried to kiss her (just a fraternal greeting!), then sat around on the bed showing her behind but behaving with the gravity of an alderman, and forbidding any passes. This was just as well. If she’d realized how easy it is to get hooks into me, she’d have stripped and got into bed immediately. Because I’m pretty certain that that is what she has in mind. However, she succeeds in driving me into a state of suppressed irritation that has the effect of turning me into a monk. After ten minutes, it was obvious that this particular patch of human relations had got all snarled up, so I offered to take her out for a meal. She said she’d eaten. So I made the only other suggestion I could think of—that we go and call on Oliver. I didn’t particularly want to do this: I know he hates strangers. But we went all the same.