So although I now see that my father was not critical of me for “loafing,” had faith in me and minded not at all what I did so long as I was happy, these nervous strains and anxieties, mere figments of my own frustrated thought, and the slynesses I sometimes practiced to preserve what I considered to be my personal freedom and dignity, confused and impaired my relationship with him. Concerned entirely with my own problems I gave no thought to him, except perhaps as underlining them with his tact; yet he too, I now know, had his problems and might have been glad to share them with a more attentive son. It may be that in temperament I belonged more to my mother than to him; as she herself once remarked, “I know it’s not a nice thing to say, but of course the culture comes from my side of the family,” and I shared with her several idiosyncrasies, physiological or psychological: I shall extend the list later. Although my father sometimes took Epsom Salts, they were precautionary, a flush for his over-taxed liver; his bowels behaved generally with exemplary regularity. My mother and I were martyrs to constipation. She took suppositories, I lived on cascaras. Like her again I was frightened of sea-sickness and always wanted to postpone Channel crossings if the trees outside our house were blowing about on the eve of my departure. Such behavior disgusted my father, “mere nerves” he called it, as though that solved the problem; but as a small boy, before my operation for peritonitis, I had been liable to sickness in almost any vehicle, even a carriage or a lift, and afterwards was always sick, hideously, abjectly, groaningly sick on the most moderately disturbed sea, until Mothersill and Kwell came to my rescue. Oh those troopships during the war—was not one called The Viper?—where in the darkness one slipped and fell in the vomit the wretched crowded soldiers had puked up all over the deck and each other, and to which oneself soon added!
However, if I was more my mother’s son than my father’s, that is not to say that I was ever able, or inclined, to talk about myself to her either. Indeed I evaded her more than I evaded him, she was too garrulous and as inattentive as myself. I don’t remember having had a close heart-to-heart conversation with her in my life, or with him. But then there was another obstacle that blocked the way to confidence, an obstacle more important than anything I have so far mentioned, and to which I must now come.
12
A USEFUL VANTAGE point for observing my father and myself together is the Bois de Boulogne in the spring of 1923. My parents were in Paris with my sister, who was working as a mannequin for one of the fashion houses, and I joined them there, coming up from Ragusa, where I had been with a young artist friend. At this time I had a flat in St. John’s Wood.
I remember sitting with my father one afternoon in the Bois, watching the procession of people go by. If I had known and thought about him then as much as I have learnt and thought about him since his death, what an interesting conversation we might have had. For here was the city of his romantic youth, hither he had brought Louise after his desertion of de Gallatin, here he had married her and lived with her and her parents in the Boulevard de Courcelles until she died, hither he had escorted my mother thirty-one years ago. The place must have been full of memories for him, happy and sad, and if I could have that day again, I hope I should make better use of it. But although it was jolly sitting with him in the Bois, we had no interesting talk; instead we were watching a dog’s large turd, just pointed out by him, which lay in the middle of the path in front of us. Which of the people passing along would be the first to tread on it? That was our curiosity, and thus, whether it was dogs’ turds, or “yarns,” or other trivialities, did all our life together senselessly slip away.
To watch the world go by—this “wonderful old world” as he often called it—whether in the Bois, on Richmond Terrace, or elsewhere, was one of my father’s pleasurable leisure occupations, and when our little excremental comedy had worked itself out to its messy conclusion, we reverted to observing the faces and dresses of the crowd parading before us. But whereas my father was appraising the women, commenting on those “plump little partridges” he found interesting, I was eyeing the young men. Venus herself could have passed without attracting my gaze or altering the beat of my pulse if my father had pointed her out.
To psychologists my love-life, into which I must now again go before continuing with my father’s, may appear somewhat unsatisfactory; in retrospect it does not look perfectly satisfactory to me, indeed I regard it with some astonishment. It may be said to have begun with a golliwog and ended with an Alsatian bitch;1 in between there passed several hundred young men, mostly of the lower orders and often clad in uniforms of one sort or another. Even behind the golliwog I have a suspicion that another shadowy figure lurks: a boot-boy. I do not firmly bring him forward because I can’t be sure that he existed, though why should I have invented him? In Apsley House, the first of our Richmond residences, I place him, and he is a game, a childish game, possibly and unwittingly suggested by my weekend and sometimes retributive father himself, for in this game my brother, the boot-boy and I take down each other’s trousers by turn and gently beat the bare bottoms that lie, warmly and willingly, across our laps. With this forgotten boot-boy I associate the word “brown,” but whether it was his face, or his bottom, or his name that was brown I don’t recall.
The golliwog has more substance. He occurred during my convalescence from peritonitis. After the operation [“It has been successful,” said Mr. Cuthbert Wallis, the eminent specialist, “but I can’t answer for his life.”] my father, on his early way to town, said he wanted to bring me back a present, what would I like? Expense was no matter, I could have anything in the world I desired. I said, “A golliwog.” I was twelve years old and my father could scarcely believe his ears. He got it for me of course; but in later life he referred to it as one of the most extraordinary requests he had ever received. Of the golliwog itself I now remember nothing; possibly the shocked amazement on my father’s face smeared it with guilt; afterwards I became more cautious in concealing my weaknesses, in covering up; but the unguarded moment of the golliwog, so to speak, sometimes recurred; repress him as we may, he manages to crop up.
It should not be inferred, however, from golliwogs at twelve and the nickname “Girlie” at my preparatory school that I was in the least effeminate. That I was a pretty boy I have already said and the illustrations to this book may confirm, too pretty I fear—beauty, among the gifts of fairy godmothers, is not the one most conducive of happiness (though I remember a man at Cambridge saying to me, “I wish to God I had your looks, I’d have any bloody girl in the world I wanted”); but I was far from girlish, physically or in my nature; there were no marks upon me as I matured from which my father could have suspected the sort of son he had sired; I did not lisp, I could throw overhand, and I could whistle. True, I disliked football and cricket and thought them dangerous recreations, but I was good at hockey (a hard, fast game Rossall played upon the sands of the seashore) and an accurate marksman (I captained the school shooting eight at Bisley for two or three years); I grew a mustache—albeit a wispier one than my father’s or the Count de Gallatin’s—during the war and took to a pipe: all manly accomplishments. Indeed I was far from needing, I am sorry to say, the fervent warning I received from Teddy Bacon at school. This boy was the son of that wealthy Manchester friend of my father’s whose £100 check I was later obliged to return, and he unfortunately left Rossall at the end of my first or second term. He was charming, clever and beautiful, with a pale milky skin and black hair, and he occupied in the regard of our English master, S. P. B. Mais, the pre-eminent place in which I was to succeed him. After he had gone I noticed a photograph of him in the center of Mais’s mantelpiece and, looking at it one day when I was alone in the room, I turned it round and found, to my surprise and jealousy, written upon the back of it in Mais’s hand: “The best boy I have ever known or am ever likely to know.” Teddy was the school whore; I can’t remember whether he was expelled or departed more normally; at any rate, just before he left he took me aside and begg
ed me, whatever I did, not to go the way that he had gone. The reason for this tardy revulsion I don’t recall, only the vehemence of it. My father’s friendship with his father had brought us together for a time, too short a time, I liked and admired him very much and if ever he had sat on my bed after lights out, asking to be let in, I wonder if my life, then and later, would have been happier. Probably not; happiness of that kind, I suspect, was not a thing I was psychologically equipped to find. In any case he was in a different house. He was killed in the first few weeks of the war.
Instead of supplying his place as the school whore, my sexual life was of the dullest. Apart from the furtive fumblings I have already mentioned, I had no physical contact with anyone, not even a kiss, and remained in this virginal state until my Cambridge days more than five years later. Other boys, less attractive than Teddy, became enslaved to me, but speechlessly; I gave them no help, they left, we corresponded, they entered the war and were killed, and when I myself, in my last terms, fell in love with a boy named Snook, I could not bring myself to touch him and it remained a pure and platonic ideal. A clue to the guilty state of my ideas of love as a pure thing, an innocent thing, spoiled and soiled by sex, may be got from a poem I wrote about my feeling for Snook in my last term and published in a magazine called The Wasp, of which I was inventor and editor, and most of which I conceitedly wrote myself. It was a counter-blast to the official school publication, and may have been the venture upon which Captain Bacon bestowed his £100. The personal pronouns in this poem are clearer to me than they may be to others.
He loved him for his face,
His pretty head and fair complexion,
His natural lissome grace,
But trusted not his own affection.
He watched him smile, his eyes
All lighted with youth’s careless laughter;
His brain rehearsed his lies
And wondered if he’d like him after.
Then love of beauty rose
Untarnished like a woodland flower,
Which never lies but grows
Caressed by sun and kissed by shower....
He would not understand,
This pretty child of many graces,
So with a burning hand
He led him out to quiet places.
This erotic little poem so upset my housemaster that he said his inclination was to beat me, but I replied that he could not do that because the title I had given the poem was “Millstones.” To another master, William Furness, with whom I was pally, I confided my passion for Snook. He said he thought it a very good thing that this was my last term—but for reasons which would have shocked my housemaster almost as much as the poem had done. Snook, said Furness, was, in his opinion, a perfectly heartless little boy and quite unworthy of me. A third pedagogic view of me may be added. I wish I could recall this master’s name. He was a reserved, sardonic, rather attractive, unsmiling man as I remember him, upon whom the charm of my appearance had failed to have the disarming effect it had upon everyone else. Bowing low to me instead of taking my proffered hand when I went to say goodbye, he remarked, with a faint, chilly smile, “Pride will have a fall, Ackerley, pride will have a fall.” Rebukes such as this are too seldom administered; I never forgot this shocking remark and think always with respect of the now anonymous man who troubled himself to make it.
The Snook situation continued sporadically into my Army and Cambridge life. Instinctively evading older men who seemed to desire me, I could not approach the younger ones whom I desired. Eluding “Titchy” I admired the younger Thorne at a distance. The working classes also, of course, now took my eye. Many a handsome farm- or tradesboy was to be found in the ranks of one’s command, and to a number of beautiful but untouchable NCOs and privates did I allot an early sentimental or heroic death in my nauseous verse. My personal runners and servants were usually chosen for their looks; indeed this tendency in war to have the prettiest soldiers about one was observable in many other officers; whether they took more advantage than I dared of this close, homogeneous, almost paternal relationship I do not know. Then came capture and imprisonment. In the hospital in Hanover, to which I was taken with my splintered pelvis, I became enamored of a Russian medical orderly, a prisoner like myself, named Lovkin; he was gentle and kind, with a broad Slav face, but apparently without personal feelings; we had no common language, but liking to be in his arms I wanted no one else to carry me to and from the operating theater and to dress my wound, which suppurated for weeks until all the little fragments of bone had been extracted. My memory of the rest of my imprisonment in Germany is emotionally featureless; there were two or three middle-aged officers, among the various lagers I was sent to, with whom I formed friendships and whose feelings I believe I aroused and frustrated, but I remember them only as shadows.
In Switzerland I was attracted to two young men. One was a captain of my own age named Carlyon. He had an artificial eye and a dog, his inseparable companions. To say that he was unapproachable does not mean that I was ever bold enough to approach him. My sentiments for him too were confided only to my notebook in many a sickly verse. Around the other, a consumptive boy who died of his complaint soon after the Armistice, I wrote my play The Prisoners of War, which the poor fellow, having identified himself in it, thought awfully unkind, as well he might since I accused him, in the character of Grayle, of a heartless unresponsiveness to love without, in reality, ever having made my own feelings towards him plain—if indeed I knew what my own feelings were. A passage in this play seems to me revealing as showing how little I had developed emotionally since my schooldays. The hero Captain Conrad (myself of course) is asked by one of the other characters why he is so fond of Lieutenant Grayle. He replies, “I don’t know. He’s clean. Fills gaps.... His life’s like an open book.” (“Fills gaps” I longed to eradicate when I was older and the play was already in print; I saw that Freud had got away with more than I intended.) “But hardly worth reading!” exclaims the other. This passage echoes my conversation, four years earlier, with Furness about Snook. I was still on the same tack, purity, innocence, and innocence is untouchable (“Millstones”). Sex remained a desirable but guilty thing.
However, my knowledge of life now began to increase. I met in Switzerland a mocking and amusing fellow with whom I became very thick. He was the second forceful intellectual under whose dominance I fell. His name was Arnold Lunn, and with his energetic, derisive, iconoclastic mind and rasping demonic laugh he was both the vitality and the terror of the community. Almost the first mischievous question he shot at me was “Are you homo or hetero?” I had never heard either term before; they were explained and there seemed only one answer. He himself, like Mais, was hetero; so far as I recall I never met a recognizable or self-confessed adult homosexual (except an ancient master at school, called “the Nag,” who was mysteriously sacked) until after the war; the Army with its male relationships was simply an extension of my public school. Lunn lent or recommended me books to read, Otto Weininger, Edward Carpenter, Plutarch, and thus and with his malicious, debunking thought opened my mind. When I was at last repatriated and my mother’s frequent innuendoes about girls and the eventual arrival of “Miss Right” exasperated me, I lectured her severely on Otto Weininger, while the poor lady lifted the wads of her hair from her shrinking ears, the better to catch, if she must, the appalling things I seemed to be saying. Of Weininger now I recollect little; that I ever got to the end of him I doubt; but I believe that his thesis is that, in respect of the male and female principles, we all have both in some degree, individually and therefore variously blended, as though we were bags of tea; if the human race, then, were sorted out and lined up in one vast single-rank parade, the hermaphrodite would stand in the center, the 100% male and female at either end, and infinite gradations of the mixture in between. Presumably having got so far, I must have concluded my lecture by placing myself on parade in such a position as to indicate that girls were not for me; at any rate, poor Arnol
d Lunn became, in my mother’s anxious thought, an incarnation of the devil. It did not matter; nothing much, especially of a disturbing nature, remained in her mind for long—worry was bad for the health—and anyway Lunn, like Mais, belonged for me to his time and place; transplanted into my home soil they both soon withered away.
I was now on the sexual map and proud of my place on it. I did not care for the word “homosexual” or any label, but I stood among the men, not among the women. Girls I despised; vain, silly creatures, how could their smooth, soft, bulbous bodies compare in attraction with the muscular beauty of men? Their place was the harem, from which they should never have been released; true love, equal and understanding love, occurred only between men. I saw myself therefore in the tradition of the Classic Greeks, surrounded and supported by all the famous homosexuals of history—one soon sorted them out—and in time I became something of a publicist for the rights of that love that dare not speak its name. Unfortunately in my own private life also it seemed to have some impediment in its speech; love and sex, come together as I believed they should, failed to meet, and I got along at Cambridge no better than anywhere else. In varying degrees and at various times I was attracted to a number of other undergraduates; I had sexual contact with none of them. So far as I know, all but one were normal boys, and the normal, manly boy always drew me most. Certainly effeminacy in men repelled me almost as much as women themselves did. But although I felt that, had I tried to kiss these normal, friendly boys who came so often to my rooms, my advances would not have been rebuffed, I could not take that step. It seemed that I needed a degree of certainty so great that only unambiguous advances from the other side would have suited me; these I never got, and even had I got them I might not, for another reason,2 have been able to cope. To one boy I was so attracted that I bought him an expensive pair of gold and platinum cuff-links at Asprey’s which linked our engraved Christian names together. My homosexual undergraduate friend thought him a horrid little boy and I did see that he was perfectly brainless, but he had the kind of dewy prettiness I liked, the innocent look of Snook and “Grayle”—and innocence was difficult to tamper with. Him I managed to kiss, but went no further; the distance between the mouth and the crotch seemed too great. Yet I believe that he himself wished it to be spanned, for our last meeting took place in my Richmond home to which he had been invited for a dance-party and to stay the night, and having spent a chaste one there he remarked ruefully the following morning, “Every time one meets you, one has to start all over again.” Another boy provided a similar but plainer and therefore sadder lesson. He was a Persian and, I thought, the most ravishingly pretty boy I’d ever seen. I knew him only by sight and would trail about Cambridge after him whenever I spied him in the street, wondering how to get into conversation. Once I followed him to the station and he got into a London train. I got in too, though I had not the least intention or wish to visit London. Not daring to sit beside him I eyed him covertly across the carriage. Whenever he looked at me I looked away. At Liverpool Street he entered a taxi and I returned to Cambridge by the next available train. Some ten years later, when I was well into my sexual stride, I ran into him at Marble Arch and managed to recognize him, though the bloom and the charm had vanished, the wonderful astrakhan hair receded. More surprisingly, he recognized me. I told him of my admiration for him in Cambridge; he said with a laugh that he had been well aware of it, what a pity I had not spoken, he had always hoped I would speak, and how about returning with him to his flat now? it was just round the corner. He was no longer attractive to me, but the glamorous memory remained and I went. Our deferred pleasures were, to me, closer to pain; to him a fiasco. He smelt rather nice of some musky perfume with which he and his flat were drenched, but my apparently artless ideas of love had no place in his highly sophisticated repertoire. He disliked being kissed, and the attentions and even acrobatics he required to stimulate his jaded sex were not merely disagreeable to me but actually uncomfortable. Within limits I attempted to oblige him, but he said scathingly at last, “The trouble with you is you’re innocent.” It was a wounding word, but kinder than the right one.
My Father and Myself Page 10
