So that was another version of doomed youth and of once-epicene but now-departed beauty. Perhaps now is the moment at which I should make my own confession here. We were taught the poetry of Owen and Auden at school, and allowed to ruminate on the obsession of Owen with wounded and bleeding young soldiers, as well as on the cunning way in which Auden opened “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love / Human on My Faithless Arm.” The master who introduced this was dexterous enough to point out that the words could easily be rearranged to make it “faithless on my human arm,” and ambidextrous enough to instruct us also in the subtleties of Catullus and his “Vivamus mea Lesbia,” but I don’t think any instructor was sufficiently phlegmatic to break the news that the two great English poets of the preceding two generations had been quite so gay. Lytton Strachey once summarized the boarding-school hothouse dilemma very aptly:
How odd the fate of pretty boys!
Who, if they dare to taste the joys
That so enchanted Classic minds,
Get whipped upon their neat behinds.
Yet should they fail to construe well
The lines that of those raptures tell
It’s very odd you must confess—
Their neat behinds get whipped no less.
There were two ways in which this hottest of all subjects could “come up” in an all-male school featuring communal showers, communal sleeping arrangements, communal lavatories, and the ever-present threat of an official thrashing on the rear. The first was unambiguously physical. Most boys decided quite early on that, since their penises would evidently give them no rest at all, they would repay the favor by giving their penises no respite in return. The night was loud with the boasts and the groans that resulted from this endless, and fairly evenly matched, single combat between chaps and their cocks. To even the dullest lad, furthermore, it would sometimes occur to think that self-abuse was slightly wasted on the self, and might be better relished in mixed company. Some were choosy about the company, and some less so, but I can only remember a very few boys who abstained from (or to put it more cruelly, were so unappetizing as to be left out of) this compensation for the general hellishness of male adolescence. It was quite possible to arrange a vigorous session of mutual relief without a word being spoken, even without eye contact.
It’s very important to understand that ninety percent of these enthusiastic participants would have punched you in the throat if you suggested there was anything homosexual (or “queer”) about what they were doing. (When I later read Gore Vidal’s distinction between homosexual persons and homosexual acts, I saw the point at once.) The unstated excuse was that this was what one did until the so-far unattainable girls became available. And there were related etiquettes to be observed: a senior boy might well have some sort of “pash” on a much junior one, but any action taken by him would be very strongly deplored. (You couldn’t actually treat a boy like a girl, in other words.) Yet the very word “pash” somehow gives the game away. In a minority of “cases”—another word for it, often represented by the = sign between two names written up as graffiti—things were infinitely more serious, as well as more ridiculous, because what appeared to be involved was, of all ludicrous things, the emotions. The routines of the day, from stolen glimpses across the chapel in the morning to a longing glance across the quadrangle as the bells tolled for “lights-out,” could be utterly consumed by the presence of “him.” One such episode came close to ruining my life, or so I thought and believed at the time.
I had one advantage and one disadvantage in this ongoing monastic sex drama, and the problem was that the advantage and the disadvantage were the same. I was a late developer physically, was quite girlish in my pre-pubescent years and then later, if I do say so myself, not all that bad-looking once boyishness had, so to speak, “kicked in.” This meant that I didn’t lack for partners when it came to the everyday (well, not every day) business of sheer physical relief. But it also meant that I could become the recipient of attention from older males, attention that could sometimes be very sudden and quite frightening. This perhaps made me additionally vulnerable to the fantasy of the “romantic” idyll.
Mr. Chips’s feminist-socialist wife had phrased it in a no-nonsense way by saying that official disapproval of public-school homosexuality was the equivalent of condemning a boy for being there in the first place. She was chiefly right about the sheer physical aspect. I knowingly run the risk of absurdity if I offer the spiritual or the transcendent in opposition to this, but actually it was my first exposure to love as well as to sex, and it helped teach me as vividly as anything could have done that religion was cruel and stupid. One was indeed punishable for one’s very nature: “Created sick: commanded to be sound.” The details aren’t very important, but until this moment I have doubted if I would ever be able to set them down. “He” was a sort of strawberry blond, very slightly bow-legged, with a wicked smile that seemed to promise both innocence and experience. He was in another “house.” He was my age. He was quite right-wing (which I swiftly decided to forgive) but also a “rebel” in the sense of being a cavalier elitist. His family had some connection with the louche Simon Raven, whose “Fielding Gray” novels of schoolboy infatuation and later versions of decadence furnished, for me at any rate, a sort of cheap-rate anteroom to the grander sequences of Anthony Powell. The marvelous boy was more urbane than I was, and much more knowing, if slightly less academic. His name was Guy, and I still sometimes twitch a little when I run into someone else who’s called that—even in America, where in a way it is every boy’s name.
Were poems exchanged? Were there white-hot and snatched kisses? Did we sometimes pine for the holidays to end, so that (unlike everybody else) we actually yearned to be back at school? Yes, yes, and yes. Did we sleep together? Well, dear reader, the “straight” answer is no, we didn’t. The heated yet chaste embrace was exactly what marked us off from the grim and turgid and randy manipulations in which the common herd—not excluding ourselves in our lower moments with lesser beings—partook. I won’t deny that there was some fondling. However, when we were actually caught it must have looked bad, since we had finally managed—no small achievement in a place where any sort of privacy was rendered near-unlawful—to find somewhere to be alone. The senior boy who made the discovery was a thick-necked sportocrat with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper: he had had his own bulging eye on my Guy for some time and this was his revenge.
The usual “thing” would have been public disgrace followed by expulsion. But “things” were made both more cruel and more arbitrary, and also less so. Various of my teachers persuaded the headmaster that I was a good prospect for passing the entrance exam for Oxford: a statistic on which the school annually prided (and sold) itself. The same could be said of Guy, though he didn’t eventually make it. Accordingly, having been coldly exposed to public shame, we were allowed to “stay on” but forbidden to speak to each other. At the time, I vaguely but quite worriedly thought that this might have the effect of killing me. Yet there was something so stupid, as well as so intricate, in the official sadism that I managed to surmount most of its effects. (After all, this was a time when not only was all homosexual conduct illegal in the rest of society, but all contact with members of the female sex was punishable by beating within the rules of my school! You could not win. “Perversion,” so often invoked from the pulpit and the podium, was the very word that I personally employed for this sick mentality on the part of the authorities.) Of the reaction of my parents I remember almost nothing. The luckless Commander was summoned and we had a whey-faced interview in some “study” or another until I realized that he was far more embarrassed than I was. (And this was a man whose regular standby of stoicism was to intone, unvaryingly, “Worse things happen in big ships.”) My mother wisely said nothing and wrote nothing. At the end of the term I didn’t go home but went rock-climbing in North Wales with a school group where there was considerable free and emotionless sex among the tents and cooking fires
. When I finally did get back, not having advertised my arrival time in advance, I was lucky to find my mother alone in the kitchen. She brilliantly rose and greeted me as if I’d been expected for some brittle and glamorous cocktail party of the sort that she always planned and never quite gave.
Looking back on this, I once again have the feeling that it all happened to somebody else. And yet I can be sure it was to me. Hoping to profit by a “lesson” or two, even from the most dismal and sordid moments, I could nominate perhaps more than a couple. The first is that, though I am generally glad not to be gay, I learned early on that most debates on this question are vapid or worse, since what we are discussing is not a form of sex, or not only a form of sex, but a form of love. As such, it must command respect. Then, and from having been the object of homosexual attention and predatory jealousy—this went on happening to me until I was almost out of university—I believe that the whole experience gave me some sympathy for women. I mean by that to say that I know what it’s like to be the recipient of unwanted or even coercive approaches, or to be approached surreptitiously under the guise of friendship. (Assaulted once by a truck driver when I was hitchhiking, and quite lucky to have broken away from him unharmed, I can never listen to any excuses about how the victims of such attacks in some way “invite” it.) I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.[10]
I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place. So, even at the cost of some intense momentary pain, I suppose that I might as well have learned this sooner rather than later.[11]
In the autumn of 1964, Michael Prest and I managed the Labour campaign in the school’s mock version of the general election. No boy at The Leys had any memory of any government except that of the Tories, who had been in power, with four successive prime ministerships, since Sir Winston Churchill’s victory in 1951. But the apparent grandeur of this had sunk into the farcical as the Profumo affair, allied to an infinite number of other scandals from missile procurement to rack-renting in London slums, made the term “the Establishment” (then newly coined by my future friend Henry Fairlie) a byword for “stink.” Boldly, Michael and I marched into the town and went to Labour HQ. We got hold of some leaflets to distribute and some posters to nail to the school’s trees. We invited a local Labour member of the council—his name, I remember, was Alderman Ramsbottom—to come and speak at lunchtime outside the school’s cafeteria or “tuck-shop.” I was afraid that the snobs and yobs (then synonymous in my mind) would sneer at him for his name, and so they did. But not for long. With great patience he outlined the achievements of previous socialist administrations and then asked the assembled boys if they could think of anything the Tories had done lately that could match the establishment of the National Health Service and the “granting” of independence to India. Satirically I shouted “Suez!”
Of course, on the day itself, the Tories got an easy majority of the school vote, in fact an overall majority, and I saw my own slender total being cut into by an effective and popular and charismatic Communist boy named Bevis Sale. Still, the Tories lost nationally. And I have to set down the fact that the school’s own “establishment” was committed to fair play. The local Tory MP, Sir Hamilton Kerr, came to respond to my plebeian Ramsbottom and made himself look a complete weed and drip by comparison. (“Pompous little ponce,” I heard my Scots housemaster distinctly say.) An even more grotesque figure named Sir Percy Rugg, who had been at the school and was the Conservative leader on the London city council, came to lunch after chapel one Sunday, and the headmaster’s wife made sure that, as opposition spokesboy, I was invited. The headmaster himself, a man somehow aptly named Alan Barker, sat on the Cambridge city council as an independent—being too right-wing for the official Conservatives—and his wife Jean has since become a national treasure in the massive and flesh-pink form of Lady Trumpington.
So I say again that I believe I benefited more from my public school than many boys who took it for granted. There came a day when the plummy-voiced reactionary Barker called me to his headmaster’s library and handed me (1) a copy of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and (2) a copy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto. He went on to instruct me in the elementary mechanics of dialectical materialism. I am sure that his intention was to inoculate me (the term “tremendously wrongheaded” was certainly used) but, just as Arthur Koestler had given so many good lines to his brutish but shrewd interrogator Gletkin in Darkness at Noon, so the dialectic in my churning mind took on a life of its own. It was certainly rather broadminded of old Barker to give me a demolition job on high-Victorian reputations that had been written by a notorious old Fabian socialist queen. And with Marx and Engels, I realized that I was reading a superb paean to revolutionary properties and qualities—but to those of capitalism, not just of the working class.
Before long, I was peeling off the compulsory-wear school tie that made us easily identifiable in the streets of the town, and joining undergraduates at lectures in the history faculty. I heard Herbert Butterfield of Peterhouse, a famous Methodist and critic of the Whig interpretation of history, talk on Machiavelli. I went to Walter Ullman’s inaugural lecture on theocratic states. It became possible, in a town with many jovially blind-eyed landlords, to join people for drinks and disputation in pubs afterward. While I was little more than a schoolboy, I was more than ready to be that relatively new thing—a “student.”
Other noises, coming from just off the tiny stage of school, had begun to reach me, sometimes by transistor radio. At the Poetry Society one evening, a boy named Mainwaring interrupted our sedate discussion to urge forward a new name that I first registered mentally as Bob Dillon. I was fairly soon hooked on what Philip Larkin called Dylan’s “cawing, derisive voice,” and felt almost personally addressed by the words of “Masters of War” and “Hard Rain,” which seemed to encapsulate the way in which I had felt about Cuba. Then there were the loving and less cawing strains of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “She Belongs to Me,” and “Baby Blue”… I’ve since had all kinds of differences with Professor Christopher Ricks, but he is and always has been correct in maintaining that Dylan is one of the essential poets of our time, and it felt right to meet him in the company of Shelley and Milton and Lowell and not in one of the record shops that were then beginning to sprout alongside the town coffee bars.
A more exotic name was also being wafted through the ether and into my head: the name Vietnam. This did not come freighted with fear like the word “Cuba”; it arrived, rather, as a summary and combination of everything one had ever learned, from Goya to Wilfred Owen, about the horrors of war. There was something profoundly, horribly shocking in the odds and the proportions of the thing. To all appearances, it seemed as if a military-industrial superpower was employing a terrifying aerial bombardment of steel and explosives and chemicals to subdue a defiant agrarian society. I had expected the newly elected Labour government to withhold British support for this foul war (and the amazingly coarse and thuggish-looking American president who was prosecuting it), and when this expectation was disappointed I began, along with many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillusionment with “conventional” politics. A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. Had the study of life and literature and history merely domesticated me to wast
e and betray my youth, and to gape at a spectacle of undisguised atrocity and aggression as if it should be calmly received? I hope never to lose the access to outrage that I felt then. At Easter 1966 my brother and I joined the annual march of Britain’s “stage army of the good”: the yearly pilgrimage of pacifists and anarchists and rag-tag Reds that tramped from the nuclear weapons factory at Aldermaston to the traditional center of radical protest in Trafalgar Square. I donned the universal symbol of peace and wore in my lapel its broken-cross or imploring-outstretched-arm logo. I also read Bertrand Russell’s appeal to forget about the insipid slogan of “peace” and take the side of the fighting Vietcong. I began to take part in the hot arguments that were latent in these two positions. Singing to the Trafalgar Square crowd, along with various folk-moaners like Julie Felix, was the dynamic, sexy Paul Jones of Manfred Mann. Patrolling the fringes of the demonstration were blue-uniformed figures whom I had been brought up to view as friends and protectors. The first real kick he gets from a cop is often a huge moment of truth to a young member of the middle class…
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