Man Without a Shadow

by Colin Wilson

  Before we left the room to go down to Kirsten, he said one more thing that stayed in my mind. We had been talking about some of the ‘unhappy geniuses’ of the nineteenth century—from Keats to Van Gogh. Cunningham said: ‘No man will ever be entirely great until he has succeeded in declaring himself entirely and completely for life, with no doubt anywhere in his being. In spite of death and misery and the apparent cruelty of nature, he has to declare his complete and total trust, without any misgiving.’ I was so impressed by this that I went into the lavatory and wrote it down on an envelope.

  Later: Writing in these long bursts is exhausting. Cunningham makes it necessary; it is impossible to write about him briefly. Anyway, let me jump ahead of my story. Last night I ended by sleeping with Diana, and I still tingle all over when I think of it. And this again as a direct result of Cunningham’s intervention. I must confess that my original suspicion of him has changed into fairly undiluted admiration.

  Before we left the room to go down, I stopped to shave; he asked me, grinning, if I wanted to get Diana into bed. I said I did. At this, he said that he’d make sure that I possessed her before the night was over. I knew immediately that he was not joking, but asked him how this was possible. He said: ‘I’ll make sure you get left alone with her. Whip her dress above her waist and shove it in.’ I said I doubted whether this technique would work. ‘Balls,’ he said. ‘Make it a bit more subtle if you’re frightened. Grab her in your arms and ask her if she loves you. If she says no, tell her she’s mistaken—she does. But she won’t say no if you ask her belligerently enough. Make it sound like an ultimatum, that’s the secret.’ He then told me gleefully about one of his earliest conquests. When he was at Oxford, he spent a holiday in Paris. He went to a ball where a dazzlingly beautiful princess was to be married to a Greek millionaire. As soon as he came into the room and saw her, he felt that he had to have her. He said: ‘I knew that if I didn’t have her, I’d spend the next ten years dreaming about her, and turn into a love-sick poet. I decided I’d rather be horsewhipped than meet with such a horrible fate. So immediately after the first dance, I walked up to her and asked her to dance. While I was crossing the floor towards her, I felt an awful sickness, and wanted to rush out of the place. But the moment I began to speak to her, I regained confidence; I stared at her, and willed her to agree, although I knew her future husband was standing behind her and glaring at me. She agreed and stepped out on to the floor with me. After pressing her against me for a few moments, I had a monstrous erection. I deliberately pulled her close to me so she was aware of it, clenched my teeth, and muttered in her ear: “Listen, I’ve got to screw you tonight or I’ll go mad.” She looked horrified and said: “That is impossible. There is my fiancé, and I am still a virgin.” “That can’t be helped,” I said. “I am the man who is destined to take your maidenhead. Come outside now.” She kept muttering: “No, no, it is impossible.” I tried to steer her out on to the lawn, but she wouldn’t; she said she had to be back at her table to meet someone. So I said: “I’ll wait along the corridor, in the room next to the library. If you are not there in ten minutes, I’m coming to get you.” Then, without finishing the dance, I turned and left her. Sure enough, after ten minutes, she came out to the cloakroom. By that time, I’d spied out the house and found a way upstairs to the bedrooms. I grabbed her wrist, pulled her upstairs, and as soon as I’d got her in the room, threw her on the bed, ripped off her panties, and bit half-way through her lower lip. Within less than two minutes I’d stripped off the rest of her clothes and had her.’ ‘Was it pleasant?’ I asked. ‘Not very pleasant. She was frigid.’ ‘She doesn’t sound it.’ ‘No? You don’t understand. People can be hypnotized by conviction and purpose. They possess none themselves, and the idea of coming into contact with it excites them.’ I asked him what had happened to the girl afterwards. ‘I don’t know. She looked in a mirror and started to cry, because her bitten lip was impossible to hide, and half her clothes were torn. I simply dressed and walked out of the room. I read later that she married her millionaire, so I suppose it must have been all right. But years later, a friend of mine met her in the south of France; he happened to show her a photograph with me in it, and she recognized me. She gave him a message for me: Tell him I love him, and that if he wants to come for me, I will go wherever he likes.’ I asked him: ‘Why didn’t you?’ ‘I had other things to do. Besides, as I said, she was frigid.’

  With anyone else, I would dismiss this story as wish-fulfilment; with Cunningham, I am certain that it happened—or that something fairly close to it happened.

  I should also mention that I finally got around to asking Cunningham about the library episode. I even went so far as to show him what I had written about it in my journal. Perhaps this was a mistake—I should have asked his version first. At all events, he confirmed what I had written. He said he had never seen the girl before, and had not seen her since. He declared that certain women, when frustrated, give off a kind of invisible distress signal. This signal is not visible to all men—only to those who are capable of a satisfactory response. He said that, like me, he had immediately felt a powerful desire for the girl, so strong that he was tempted to grab her in front of everyone in the library. Instead, he came into the corner where I was sitting—the only spot not visible from the central desk—and allowed his own desires to expand until they became a kind of ‘disturbance of the ether’. He claimed that all the time the girl stood at the bookshelf, with her back towards us, she was conscious of him and was already responding actively to his desire in the usual female way. He said that what he was afraid of was that he might give her an orgasm before he had a chance to touch her.

  He claims that when he spoke to her, he simply said: ‘I wish to see certain books in your special collection.’ I asked him why this caution was necessary; he said because she was a ‘respectable girl’ who might easily take fright at her own responses. However, believing that he wanted to see the theology section, she took him to some damp room in the basement. There, he says, he unzipped her skirt without further ado, and possessed her on a table. He says she made no attempt to resist, but kept moaning: ‘You’re hurting me.’ Afterwards, he said, she got all intense and said: ‘What are we going to do?’ and he realized that she was one of these girls with an awful ability to cling. He said: ‘These are the moments when I abandon the superman role. The only safe course is flight.’ He has taken care to avoid the library ever since then.

  Diana interrupted us; she came up to ask me what time Cunningham would be arriving, and was disconcerted to find him there already. She muttered something about a makeshift supper, and Cunningham immediately declared that we were all to be his guests, and that we’d go and have a Chinese meal. So we went down and joined Kirsten, who refused a glass of wine, and looked wretchedly embarrassed and stood twisting his hands and mumbling. Cunningham offered to play one of his own compositions on the piano; when he announced the title: Kratakoa, I suspected it was going to be noisy and discordant, and suggested that it would be better to hear it later when we’d eaten. (Afterwards I explained to Cunningham about Kirsten’s dislike of ‘modern music’, and that it might have driven him further back into his shell.) Diana agreed to have a drink (out of embarrassment, I think) and Cunningham and I behaved as if Kirsten wasn’t there, and continued our discussion. I expounded my theory of the indifference threshold, which fitted in fairly closely with what he’d been saying earlier, then told him my project of an opera libretto on Major Weir. Just as I expected, Cunningham declared that he knew all about Weir, ‘the inside story’. He dismissed my theory that Weir was simply oversexed and repressed, and assured us that Weir really had intercourse with the devil. I noticed immediately that Kirsten looked interested, and began to brighten up.

  We took a taxi down to a Chinese restaurant in Limehouse, ordered lager from the pub next door, and had an excellent meal. Meanwhile, Cunningham talked at length about sex and Major
Weir. The essence of the thing, he explained to us, was Weir’s bestiality with horses, sheep, etc. He declared that there are two types of sexual energy, heavenly and diabolic, and that the sex act is not a physical act, but actually a symbolic conjuration, exactly like raising demons. The orgasm does not spring from a reservoir of sexual energy called ‘the libido’, but comes from beyond the body, in exactly the same way that the electricity in our houses comes from a power station that may be twenty miles away. Otherwise, Cunningham said, how can you explain the fact that the sexual energies cannot be exhausted? A man can keep on having orgasms indefinitely—twenty times a day if he wants to. It is inexhaustible. Admittedly, a man might feel sexually drained after the first orgasm, particularly if it happens to be with a wife or someone who excites no desire for conquest. But this is not real exhaustion, but only the refusal of the erotic energies to reveal themselves in response to such feeble conjuration. The exhausted man can be roused to excitement five minutes later by the thought of a strange woman or something forbidden.

  Hence the importance of sex in all diabolic orgies. For what could be more blasphemous than summoning energy from the divine erotic powerhouse, and pouring it into the anus of a donkey? It is literally dipping Christ into hell. The devotee of the Black Mass who agrees to use his powers of sexual conjuration in this way receives a ‘bonus’ from the devil, an extra load of diabolic sexual energy. This energy, Cunningham said, is admittedly not of the same power or quality as the divine article—its quality is like methylated spirit compared to Napoleon brandy—but added to the divine article, it makes a mixture of unparalleled kick. The only trouble is that it is habit-forming, like a drug, and finally sets up a perpetual torment, a kind of unquenchable thirst. This is the explanation why all sex maniacs have to commit their crimes with increasing frequency, and are often driven by an inner compulsion to be caught. The torment is unbearable; the more they commit their crimes, the worse it becomes, like trying to satisfy a burning thirst with petrol or corn whisky. They are also driven further and further from a sense of contact with other human beings, until they feel alone in the outer darkness with the devil. This is why their sadism increases. Cunningham instanced a case of sexual murder that took place in Arkansas when he was out there just after the war. The murderer preyed on young lovers at the time of the full moon. His first crime only involved knocking out the man and raping the girl. Subsequently, he got into the habit of shooting the man, and then torturing the girl before he killed her. In the last of these cases, the killer tortured the girl horribly, mutilating her with a knife, for six hours after he had murdered her lover. But now he was nearly insane with remorse; he tried to confess to a priest, but the devil drove him out of the church before his turn came. Finally, knowing that he would be driven to ever greater lengths next time, he decided to hand himself over to the police. At this point, the devil intervened, and put the idea of suicide into his head, knowing that suicide is the ultimate sin for which there is no forgiveness; the man threw himself under a train.

  At this point, Kirsten asked how Cunningham knew all this, since the man had never been caught. Cunningham said that he had access to all details in these cases, but that he could not, at present, tell us more. Diana asked if he had known the identity of the murderer before he committed suicide. Cunningham said yes, he had.

  At this point, I asked Cunningham if he knew the identity of Jack the Ripper. He smiled and said he certainly did; the Ripper was a rich nobleman who inherited a certain insanity from his grandfather; he had died of syphilis in a mental home near Ascot. He then leaned over and whispered the name in my ear[1] —— . Cunningham told me that he could present me with definite evidence at any time I wished.

  [1]For various reasons, connected with the surviving relatives of the man named, it has been thought advisable to repress the next sentence. Ed.

  Diana now asked him if he knew anything about the Whitechapel murderer. I watched Cunningham closely to see if he’d look at me. It is probable that Oliver has told him about Austin, even though Oliver was never certain. But Cunningham said cautiously that he only knew certain details; since the man was still alive, he was not allowed to speak of it. Kirsten pressed him to tell what he knew. Cunningham shrugged, and answered that the killer was a rich homosexual, who, like Jack the Ripper, had inherited his degeneracy from a line of alcoholics on his father’s side. He said he could not tell us any more, and was not allowed to reveal the name. Naturally, both Diana and Kirsten were seething with curiosity, and asked Cunningham why the murders had stopped so abruptly, and whether the police knew the killer’s identity. He said yes, the police knew his identity, but that nevertheless the killer was not now in prison. Naturally, I suspected that Glasp had told him everything. (It is strange, incidentally, that Oliver hasn’t asked me any questions about Austin, almost as if he had some secret reason for keeping silent.)

  Now there was a curious event. Cunningham stared at Diana very hard, and she stared back at him, her eyes very wide. Kirsten and I simply watched; both of us felt that we shouldn’t interrupt. Finally, Cunningham smiled and asked her what she was thinking. She looked at him in a very puzzled way, and asked if the murderer was a woman! He said no, and asked her why. She said that a name had come into her head—the word ‘Anne’. Cunningham only smiled; then he told Kirsten that his wife had definite psychic powers. He said that as she was staring at him, he was suddenly aware of a definite psychic pressure, as she tried to read his mind. He had therefore looked at her, and given her a chance to read it; this was why they stared at one another.

  Diana admitted that she had been staring at him, trying to force him to tell them the name of the murderer, and that when he had looked at her, the word ‘Anne’ seemed to come into her head.

  As she said this, I suddenly realized that ‘A.N.’ are Austin’s initials, and my hair stirred; I felt as if I’d accidentally sat in an electric chair. For some odd reason, all three of them looked at me, as if they were aware of something. I muttered: ‘Strange,’ and took a long drink of lager, to cover up my confusion.

  After this supper, there is no doubt whatever in my mind that certain people possess the rudiments of curious powers. Well, why not? We know, for example, that the sense of colour is a fairly recent development in human beings. The ancient writers never mention colours. Tests on animals prove that they have almost no colour sense; they see the world in a kind of monochrome. Colour sense is an evolutionary luxury, and it has not developed until fairly recently (over the past two or three centuries, I suppose). Well, why should there not be still further senses in a stage of early development? Again, Cunningham admitted that sadism is a sign of degeneracy—i.e. the opposite of evolution. A more sensitive person is too closely in contact with other people to be able to inflict pain. Surely it is not fanciful to suppose that evolution will move towards a universal sense of community, constant telepathic contact between human beings? Perhaps Cunningham’s ability to see round corners is an example of this new sense. What puzzles me is that it should be a man like Cunningham, who definitely strikes me as a kind of fool (in many ways, he is strangely like Austin). He undeniably has powers—remarkable powers, and a kind of genius, but it is on an animal level; he lacks the real self-discipline of the mystic or man of genius. Hence, I suppose, his interest in magic and other off-beat subjects.

  I find this possibility of developing new powers immensely exciting; it gives the world a new meaning for me.

  After supper, we took a taxi back to Kirsten’s, now in a very friendly mood. Cunningham easily induced him to drink more—we stopped at a pub to load up on spirits—and he became talkative. It was the usual kind of thing—the world of the spirit, the empyrean, etc. Then he wanted to tell us about an opera he’d written, based on a novel called Varney the Vampire.[1] The plot sounded excruciatingly funny, but both Cunningham and I kept a straight face. Kirsten explained that the heroine symbolize
d Heavenly Virtue, renunciation, unselfishness, etc. He then sat at the piano, and insisted on playing us the overture and leading arias. Kirsten will insist on singing the words—his own, of course—and interrupting the playing to shout things like: ‘He seizes her in his arms; they reach a transport of ecstasy,’ and more thunderous bangs on the piano, with Kirsten yodelling like a dog.