What was the dream of love in which you shone
With such enchanted grace? ...
Let me go back! Let me go back to you!
And we will learn some pleasant games to play,
And choose some other fancy to pursue....
Oh why did you not put your dream away,
Unhappy boy, when it was faint and new
And held you not in sway?
The other poem is similar and even worse. It also is about a picture—“The Portrait of a Mother.” Five stanzas may be too many to stomach, but I will quote five:
Your calm eyes watch me as I pace the floor;
Across the room and back they follow me:
Calm eyes, calm eyes, what do you watch me for,
Calm eyes that cannot see? ...
Oh watch me not! In quest of solitude
I turn among the shadows as I pace;
But I have not the power to elude
The vigil of your face....
What do you see? That fixed relentless look
Searching my visage seems to learn from it.
The face of man is not an open book
In which his sins are writ....
You look and shrink ... as though I had betrayed
Some sacred trust laid on me by a child;
Or smothered Love in secret as he played,
Smothered him as he smiled.
Why do you move beside me as I move?
Oh close your eyes and shunt my thoughts from me!
It was too beautiful ... the face of Love ...
For my mortality.
What my poor mother, the last person in the world to wear a “fixed relentless look,” thought of this poem I don’t remember; I suppose she must have read it. It is interesting to observe that it is, in different form, the same poem as “Millstones,” the one I published in my school magazine The Wasp some seven or eight years earlier. Although I wrote the two poems just quoted at Cambridge, I cannot now recall whether I was still chaste, in the sense of not having been to bed with anyone.
How much of all this did I enjoy, this long pursuit of love through sex, out of which, in the end, I emerged as lonely as I began? The moods of the past are difficult to recapture. The orgasm itself is a pleasure of course—had I not always placed it first among the pleasures?—but its pleasure has degrees. When things suited me and I felt relaxed I enjoyed it. But I was seldom quite suited or relaxed. If my prejudices were gradually ditched, my anxieties remained; experience, from which we are said to learn, has no effect upon the inner nature. A new form of anxiety, a maddening impotence, began to afflict me. I can put no date to it, it emerged in the company of my old stand-bys, my few steadies. I believe it had nothing to do with increasing age, nothing to do with sexual exhaustion; although so many boys had passed through my hands I lived with none of them, they came and went, sometimes to return, at no point in this journey did I have a feeling of stability, of more than momentary satisfaction. Indeed when, some time in the ’thirties, a friend asked me if I had any notion how many boys I’d taken to bed, I was astonished to find that those I managed to recollect got into three figures, for I never had any sense of riches, only of poverty, and at last of dire poverty. The impotence that started to defeat me was neurotic. I was still close to incontinence with new experiences—becoming rarer and rarer—with that deserter, for instance, that last, long emotional affair, who had not yet flashed upon my sexual scene; with old friends things began to go “wrong,” and with him also when he became an old friend. I looked forward eagerly in my poverty to seeing them when they could get away from their various units, to having their hands upon me and the use of their bodies; they knew what I wanted though they seldom wanted it themselves, and this hitherto I had not minded so long as I got my own comfortable satisfaction. Now I began to mind. Like the irksome, unsmotherable pea beneath the princess’s mattresses, some fret would enter my head. In spite of my theories about sex, I had always found it hard to impose my wishes (further evidence of guilt no doubt), to go straight for the thing I most desired, and since these boys were normal they either had no such wishes to impose or left it all to me. The Welsh boy alone sometimes took the initiative, though, being newly married, he wanted nothing for himself. Excepting for him, and throughout my life now that I come to think of it, no one whom I wanted, from my sailor onwards, even when mutual desires were involved, ever took the physical initiative; it was always left to me who found it difficult to take, and this, no doubt, was a situation I myself had created—and because of its frustration, perhaps desired. I seemed always to be pretending not to have an erection, not to be impatient and that the quid that usually passed between us at once (the boys were always short of cash) was not a quid pro quo but a gift. Now it began to defeat me, this situation with old friends who did not desire me and whom I myself no longer desired so much as the thing they had to give, if only I could get it. The fret would enter.... Why had I taken him to the pub first? it was getting late, I must hurry.... Why had I not taken him to the pub first? he was bored, I must hurry.... Why had I let him have his own satisfaction first? he was tired, I must hurry.... I was taking too long, he was only being obliging and my sweat and the weight of my body must be disagreeable to him, I must hurry, hurry.... Then the slow collapse, and nothing that he could do, or I could do in the way of furious masturbation, could retrieve the wretched failure.
In the mid-’thirties I began to keep a day-to-day diary. I had developed another of my theories—self-defensive it now looks—that there was not the slightest need to seek material for travel books, as writers usually did, by going off to foreign parts, climbing mountains, living with primitive tribes, pioneering down untrodden paths if any were left; everyone’s life, said I, even the veriest bank clerk’s in Manchester or Little Pidlington, was crammed with the most exciting interest and adventure if only he would observe and describe it. Let anyone keep a candid, detailed diary for a year, noting down everything that happened to him day by day, in his life, in his mind, and a book would emerge far more fascinating, however clumsily written, than if he had been anthropologizing among the Pygmies or sliding about on Arctic ice. My own diary lasted some six months, hastily scrawled because my nocturnal ramblings, all described, took up so much of my time. Then I got bored and discontinued it. Fifteen years later I came upon it again, read it through and instantly destroyed it, as though it were an evil thing. The evil was in the misery. It contained no single gleam of pleasure or happiness, no philosophy, not even a joke; it was a story of unrelieved gloom and despondency, of deadly monotony, of frustration, loneliness, self-pity, of boring “finds,” of wonderful chances muffed through fear, of the latchkey turned night after night into the cold, dark, empty flat, of railings against fate for the emptiness and wretchedness of my life. It also contained, the saddest thing of all, my critical comments upon my first meeting with that Welsh boy, now dead, his dullness and smelly feet.
At the time when I read this diary I was happy at last. It is, for me, the interesting part of this personal history that peace and contentment reached me in the shape of an animal, an Alsatian bitch. Is it, I wonder, of any value as a clue to my psychology to recall that in my play The Prisoners of War the hero, Captain Conrad (myself of course), unable to build on human relations, takes to a plant? He tells some story of another imprisoned officer who fell in love with a pet rabbit and read short stories to it out of a magazine. “Plants or rabbits,” he says, “it’s the same thing.” This bitch of mine entered my life in the middle ’forties and entirely transformed it. I have already described her in two books; it is necessary to say here that I don’t believe there was anything special about her, except that she was rather a beauty. In this context it is not she herself but her effect upon me that I find interesting. She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which it is in the nature of dogs to offer. She placed herself entirely under my control. From the mo
ment she established herself in my heart and home, my obsession with sex fell wholly away from me. The pubs I had spent so much of my time in were never revisited, my single desire was to get back to her, to her waiting love and unstaling welcome. So urgent was my longing every day to rejoin her that I would often take taxis part-way, even the whole way, home to Putney from my London office, rather than endure the dawdling of buses and the rush-hour traffic jams in Park Lane. I sang with joy at the thought of seeing her. I never prowled the London streets again, nor had the slightest inclination to do so. On the contrary, whenever I thought of it, I was positively thankful to be rid of it all, the anxieties, the frustrations, the wastage of time and spirit. It was as though I had never wanted sex at all, and that this extraordinary long journey of mine which had seemed a pursuit of it had really been an attempt to escape from it. I was just under fifty when this animal came into my hands, and the fifteen years she lived with me were the happiest of my life.
One of my friends, puzzled by the sudden change in my ways, asked me whether I had sexual intercourse with her. It may be counted as something on the profit side of my life that I could now receive such a question intelligently. I said no. In truth, her love and beauty when I kissed her, as I often did, sometimes stirred me physically; but although I had to cope with her own sexual life and the frustrations I imposed upon it for some years, the thought of attempting to console her myself, even with my finger, never seriously entered my head. What little I did for her in her burning heats—slightly more than I admitted in My Dog Tulip—worried me in my ignorance of animal psychology, in case, by gratifying her clear desires, which were all addressed to me, I might excite and upset her more than she was already excited and upset. The most I ever did for her was to press my hand against the hot swollen vulva she was always pushing at me at these times, taking her liquids upon my palm. This small easement was, of course, nearer the thing she wanted than to have her back, tail and nipples stroked. Yet looking at her sometimes I used to think that the Ideal Friend, whom I no longer wanted, perhaps never had wanted, should have been an animal-man, the mind of my bitch, for instance, in the body of my sailor, the perfect human male body always at one’s service through the devotion of a faithful and uncritical beast.
I must not, however, give the impression that I went entirely without sex during my years with this animal. I no longer ran after it or even thought of it in England, but at least twice here it offered itself to me, unsought and unexpected, and whenever I went abroad I found myself pursuing it again. I did not go abroad much, I preferred to spend my holidays with my bitch, but on the few occasions that I left her, when she was getting old and inactive, and went to France, Italy, Greece and Japan, I looked for sexual adventure and found it. Into it were once more imported all the old anxieties and worries, heartbreaks even, that had attended it throughout my life—with the latest anxiety, to which I have alluded, added: impotence. This anxiety, to which perhaps all my other anxieties had been tending and was their last phase, now took charge. I never approached any bed without the worry: “Shall I be able to function?” I would try, sometimes in advance of a meeting, sometimes with closed eyes during the desirable but fearful act, to put myself into a prosperous frame of mind, telling myself that I was perfectly unworried, comfortable, welcome, free, safe and happy, that everything was exactly “right.” Sometimes I managed; often the very fear perhaps of the frustration and humiliation of failure caused me to fail.
My Father and Myself Page 19
