A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  – You say you were impatient to get things done. What did you think the Fabian Society should do?

  – Well initially I thought they should work more actively with the Labour movement, put up candidates for Parliament, but I changed my mind about that later. I judged that the Labour Party as long as it was controlled by the trade unions would always be a fundamentally conservative force, obsessed with improving wages and conditions in the workplace, never fundamentally questioning the nature and organisation of the work itself. More and more I came to the conclusion that progressive change would only come about by empowering a new political elite, a body of dedicated managers with a scientific education who would run the state.

  – Those you called ‘Samurai’ in A Modern Utopia? The guardians of the World State.

  – Yes, but the idea was already adumbrated in Anticipations as the ‘New Republic’. Later I called it ‘The Open Conspiracy’. It was always the same idea, the vision of a just and rationally governed global society from which war, poverty, disease and all the other ills of human civilisation would be eliminated.

  – But not for everybody. Not for the chronically poor, unemployed, sick, retarded, criminals, addicts of drink and gambling – what you called ‘the People of the Abyss’.

  Suddenly the interviewer sounds more like an interrogator.

  – No, not for them. People physically or mentally incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities for a happy, useful life, would have to be …

  – Eliminated?

  – Well, they couldn’t be allowed to be parasites on the rest of the community, obviously. They would have to be discouraged or prevented from breeding.

  – As you wrote in Anticipations: ‘To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped by their fecundity.’

  – Exactly.

  – And you also wrote: ‘the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss … will certainly be the most powerful or dominant nation before the year 2000.’ Isn’t ‘poisons’ a rather shocking suggestion?

  – You’ve taken that out of context. Listen to the whole passage: ‘The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions, death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the most powerful or dominant nation before the year 2000.’

  – Which one will that be, do you think?

  – I’ve no idea. Not Britain, by the look of it. Maybe China, if they can cure their passion for gambling.

  – But ‘poisons’ … Aren’t you advocating murder there?

  – I was thinking of something like euthanasia, painless voluntary termination. Such people, for whom there is no hope of a happy fulfilled life, would be persuaded that death was a preferable alternative. ‘Poisons’ was an unfortunate choice of word, one I’ve often regretted. It’s been thrown in my face many times, especially recently, with these reports that the Nazis have been gassing gypsies and mental defectives.

  – And Jews. Mostly Jews, in fact.

  – I’ve never regarded the Jews as collectively undesirable. I state that quite categorically in Anticipations. Here, on see here: ‘I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people take up against the Jews.’ And I go on to list all the things that people object to about Jews and argue that you can find them equally in other races. I’m anti-Zionist, but not anti-Semitic.

  – What about on the next page: ‘As for the rest, those swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? As I see it … they have to go.’ Go where? Did you mean die, or be killed?

  – Die, or die out. It’s obvious that the earth cannot support a desirable quality of life for all its inhabitants if the global population goes on expanding as it is at the moment, especially in parts of Africa and the East. There will have to be a world authority capable of controlling population growth by one means or another: contraception, sterilisation, euthanasia. If that doesn’t work, famine, or war provoked by shortages of food and water, will bring about the same result more brutally.

  – Did the Fabians object to these parts of Anticipations?

  – Not that I recall. In those days eugenics was rather fashionable on the political Left.

  – So that wasn’t why you fell out with them?

  – No. It was more a matter of policy and personalities. And sex. Basically they couldn’t take my views on sex, or not so much the views themselves as the fact that I acted on them.

  – How was that?

  – It’s a long story.

  PART TWO

  IT IS A very long story, one that began years before he ever heard the word ‘Fabian’, and it is another voice that tells it in his head, not an interlocutor or an interrogator or an interviewer, but a novelist, a novelist both like and unlike himself in earlier years when he wrote quasi-autobiographical novels, novel after novel, about men who were seeking some kind of explanation of what was wrong with the human world and what might be done to redeem it and how they might take a leading part in that redemptive process – religious language which superficially might seem to contradict his lifelong hostility to institutional religion, the repressive, fearful Low Church Protestantism of his mother, for instance, or the reactionary dogmatism of the Roman Catholic Church, but he has always regarded his sense of mission as essentially religious, often puzzling or scandalising his secular friends and acquaintances when he so described it. Any devotion to an idea that subordinates the individual’s aspirations to the collective good, the idea of socialism for instance, or the idea of a World State, is in his opinion essentially religious. It does not entail allegiance to a Church, or even a God, though there was a period in his life, embarrassing to recall, when he attempted to co-opt God into his programme for saving the world from self-destruction, in books like God the Invisible King, published in 1917, one he has never taken down from his bookcase to sample, well aware that he would not be pleasantly surprised.

  The best of his novels about men seeking to understand what was wrong with contemporary society, and to find some useful role for themselves in it, was Tono-Bungay, published in 1909; in fact he regards it as his best novel of any kind, judged by normal literary criteria. The novels that followed were more polemical and discursive, and, with the exception of Ann Veronica, which was centred on its heroine, their heroes were so humourlessly high-minded that he privately referred to these books as his ‘prig’ novels. The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends, The Research Magnificent were some of their titles, all about men progressing from youth to maturity who were to some extent idealised versions of himself: taller, more handsome, from a higher social class, and considerably more punctilious in their relations with the opposite sex. These men invariably experienced a conflict between their personal sense of mission, whether intellectual or political, and their desire for union with a particular woman. Usually the woman proved to be an obstacle to the fulfilment of the mission, which could only be overcome by her being converted to it or by dying or by some act of renunciation by the hero.

  Women, and his relationships with them, had been at the heart of his difficulties with the Fabians. There were differences of opinion about political ends and means between himself and the leading lights of the Society which were always likely to be causes of conflict, but it was his sexual conduct that provoked the final breach and continued afterwards to dog his lone efforts to make the world see sense. The women, and the relationships, were recognisably reflected in the novels – recognisably, but not truthfully. The element of lust, so impo
rtant in his own sexual life, was almost entirely missing from these books, only occasionally discreetly hinted at and mostly veiled by high-romantic love talk in which the phrase ‘Oh, my dear …’ figured largely, the ellipsis gesturing towards intensities of emotion which the reader was obliged to imagine unassisted. The satisfaction of lust could not, of course, be truthfully described in fiction without inviting prosecution as a pornographer, and he was not one of those modern novelists, like James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, who had striven to extend the boundaries of the permissibly explicit. Although Ann Veronica had been denounced in the press and from pulpits as a depraved and depraving book when it was published in 1909, that was because the virginal young heroine frankly declared she wanted sexual union with the married hero, not because of any description of their eventual enjoyment of it. In that respect the novel was as pure as the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare. In fact he had never felt any urge to describe the sexual act and its variations in his fiction – it was the sort of discourse he preferred to keep private, confined to love letters and pillow talk. Even the secret Postscript he had written to his autobiography, a memoir of his sexual life to be published after his death by his executors when all the women mentioned were also deceased, was not revealing about what he did with them in bed. That was partly because the manuscript was typed up by Marjorie, and there were limits to how much information of that kind even an honest man, unashamed of his sexuality, wished to share with his daughter-in-law. The novelist in his head has no such inhibitions, but what interests him is not the mechanics of copulation but the operation of sexual desire in a man’s life, his life, how it could sometimes be a mere blunt brutal impersonal need for a woman, almost any tolerably attractive woman, assuaged in minutes, and at other times focused obsessively on a particular woman with tormenting pangs of longing and jealousy that lasted for months and years, disturbing and disrupting the serious business of improving collective life.

  He must have had well over a hundred women in his lifetime, some on only one occasion, and he has forgotten the names of the majority of them. He was never able to decide whether he had a more powerful sex drive than other men, or was just more successful than most in satisfying it. Perhaps both hypotheses were true. So where did it come from, this sexual appetite? There was no obvious genetic or environmental source. Reading his mother’s diary after her death he found no hint of erotic awakening in the account of her early married life, only pleasure in young motherhood, heavily overlaid with pious Christian sentiment. His father was a virile-looking man, and more pleasure-seeking than his wife, but his passion was sport, especially cricket, and for social recreation Joe Wells sought the male companionship of the public house. When he was old enough to observe and reflect on such things, in adolescence, his parents’ marriage seemed to him completely sexless; they slept in separate bedrooms, and if this was, as he later suspected, a method of birth control, his father seemed to acquiesce in it. His brothers had been, as far as he knew, sexually unadventurous. Sexual matters were never discussed in the home, which was a matriarchal society in microcosm, four men ruled over by a determined little woman who imposed a rigid code of puritanical decorum in word and deed. The smutty jokes and anecdotes that circulated at school had disgusted rather than excited him. So what could explain his inveterate and inexhaustible desire for women, which began before he even knew the facts of life, and persisted into old age?

  The first to affect him in this way were virtual, ideal and classical. These were allegorical figures representing the nations of the world in Tenniel’s political cartoons in the bound volumes of Punch which his father borrowed for him, along with many other books, from the library of the Bromley Literary Institute, when he was laid up for weeks in the front parlour of Atlas House at the age of seven or eight, recovering from a broken leg. A friendly young man, showing off his strength at the local cricket ground, had tossed little Bertie in the air for fun, but failed to catch him, and he fell on to a tent peg which broke his tibia. It was a curious coincidence that both father and son suffered a broken leg within a few years of each other, and with momentous consequences – catastrophic for the former, liberating for the latter. For that licensed orgy of promiscuous reading, in a home where this activity was normally regarded as a form of idleness – devouring works of history, natural history, popular science, adventure fiction, and bound volumes of Punch, as fast as his father could feed them to him – had laid the foundations of his future career as a writer. From the cartoons of Punch he acquired a precocious interest in domestic and international politics, but the personification of the nations – Britannia, Erin, Columbia, La France – as beautiful half-naked Grecian deities, with exposed breasts and thighs, also stirred feelings in him that he could not put a name to. All the women he knew were impenetrably covered in fabric from their chins to their feet. It was Tenniel’s drawings that first gave him an inkling of what might be found under those layers of cloth, and he furthered his knowledge in early adolescence by inspection of the plaster reproductions of classical statuary in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, goddesses even more scantily covered than Tenniel’s figures, with folds of drapery carved in the act of sliding from their magnificent hips, and all the more affecting for being three-dimensional. He took these images of women home with him stored in his memory and comforted himself in bed at night by conjuring them up in the form of flesh, willing the drapery to fall from their hips, a scenario which, if he turned on to his stomach and pressed his penis against the mattress, would provoke a delicious gush of spunk (as the rougher boys at school called it) without his incurring the guilt attached to actual masturbation. Not that he knew then the words ‘penis’ or ‘masturbation’, but when his mother, stripping his bed on washday, asked him sternly if he had been ‘touching himself’, he could honestly answer in the negative.

  *

  These encounters with virtual women implanted in him a devotion to the idealised female form and a longing to embrace the naked body of a beautiful woman, naked himself. The longing was intensified when he came across an old leather-bound edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the library at Up Park illustrated with engravings, one of which showed Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall, with Eve’s long tresses only half concealing her breasts, and a flower dangling from her hand barely covering her private parts, while Adam’s crotch was screened by the bough of a judiciously planted sapling. His arm was extended to lead Eve to their ‘Nuptial Bowre’ and although Milton was exasperatingly unspecific about what happened there and wrapped it up in stately poetic diction, it sounded thrilling:

  … transported I behold,

  Transported touch; here passion first I felt,

  Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else

  Superior and unmov’d, here only weake

  Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance.

  But it was many years before he was able to fulfil his dream of the naked embrace, years during which his sexual experience advanced very slowly and in a furtively titillating, frustratingly unconsummated fashion, always conducted through or under layers of clothing. There was for instance Edith, the youngest daughter of Alfred Williams, a distantly related ‘uncle’ who ran a school in Wookey, Somerset, with whom he stayed for a while at the age of fourteen in the period between his two apprenticeships, helping out as an unpaid classroom assistant. Several years older than himself and obsessively interested in sex, of which she had no practical experience but about which she possessed a good deal of information, Edith took it on herself to quiz him on his knowledge of the facts of life, and to correct his misapprehensions with a degree of detail that seemed to excite her as much as it embarrassed him. One hot day when they were sitting on a riverbank in the shade of a willow tree, she lay back on the grass, closed her eyes, and gave him permission to feel between her legs under her skirt to learn how women were made, and that was when he first discovered that they had pubic hair. The sensation was something of a shock and caused him to withdraw hi
s hand with an abruptness he later regretted, but when he attempted to repeat the experiment at the next opportunity she slapped his face.

  He had similar confusing experiences at the lodging house in Westbourne Park where he lived in his first year as a student at the Normal School of Science, sent there, ironically, by his mother because the landlady was known to her as the daughter of a piously Evangelical friend in Midhurst. This woman had in fact lapsed from the high moral standards of her parents and presided over a louche household in which the Sabbath was dedicated to the rites of Hymen rather than Jesus Christ. After Sunday lunch, a roast joint accompanied by beer and stout ale, the children were packed off to Sunday School with the servant girl, and the landlady and her husband and a married couple who were lodgers would retire to their bedrooms for a ‘lie-down’, though not before exchanging a good deal of badinage and innuendo about what this phrase denoted, leaving him in the company of a young woman called Aggie who was related in some way to the landlady. ‘Be good!’ the married couples would cry to the two young people as they departed, with leering smiles which were clearly an incitement to be the reverse. Even Aggie seemed to expect this, though she imposed strict limits on his exploration of her person when he fondled her on the sofa and attempted to undo various buttons and hooks on her apparel. ‘Oi! Stoppit! Not that! Not there!’ she would say, slapping and tugging at his hands. ‘What sorter gal jer fink I am?’ But she never showed any real indignation, or made any attempt to leave the room; she seemed content to spend the afternoon fending off his advances as if it were a recognised parlour sport, a kind of sedentary wrestling. Why he persevered he didn’t know, for she was not pretty and hadn’t an idea in her head, but there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go on a Sunday afternoon in winter if you were as penniless as he was.