"Do you believe in chastity? I think chastity's marvellous."
"Not too much chastity," Tom said.
"All you can get," I said sincerely. The King of Bohemia was zigzagging toward us, sword ready for accolade.
"Well," I said to Hortense, when we were taking a late-night pot of tea in our drawing room, both, having drunk so much, being thirsty, "do we go and support the petitioners?"
"That was a horrible little woman. I had to hit her, you know. Clawing and fumbling like that. But I can't help feeling a bit sorry for her."
"Lesbians," I said, stretching my legs on a limegreen pouffe, "are said to know far more about giving sexual satisfaction than men. They have patience, for one thing. They're not in a hurry to get it all done. Like," I guessed, "Domenico."
"You have this great gift for making everything sound horrid. And what do you know about Domenico?"
"Men are like that. With women, anyway. Poor Tom. I don't think there's much sex in poor Tom. What's known as a white marriage. Do we go tomorrow?"
"You put me in an awkward position, don't you? I mean, about freedom and so on. You must go, of course. You must be in the forefront and to hell with the consequences."
"Such as a truncheon or a police horse's hoof. I don't really believe, Hortense," I said, getting up with energy to pour myself more tea. "I really don't think it's right to be the way we are, those of us that are, I mean. I don't glory in it. It's not right and it's against Nature. It's a curse. That silly girl was going on about chastity tonight. I found chastity and I felt no frustration. I found a way out."
"I've heard all about that, what happened in the Federated Malay States." She pronounced Malay with two ays and a stress on the first syllable. "That seemed to me to be unnatural."
"Like Jesus Christ? Like priests?"
"Now it's you who's being blasphemous. Get on the telephone to the Vatican or wherever fat Carlo is. He'll tell you what to do. He'll talk about free will and standing by your brothers in adversity."
"He'll talk about free will used evilly, as you damned well know, What I talk about is predestination and not liking what's been predestined. But I agree with one thing--it's nothing to do with the state or the secular law. Damn it, we'll both go. But we'll both run away if there's trouble. This martyrdom is all nonsense."
"Run away, oh no."
"Run away or else get an eye kicked out or your crowning glory pulled off along with your scalp. We both have duties elsewhere."
"I do. Do you?"
"I may," I said, "one day write a good book. Perhaps all the tripe I'm doing is a preparation for that. Schicksal."
"Sister Gertrude, Rude Gert, Tom is silly really but you have to laugh, was always going on about Schicksal. I know all about Schicksal. It's nonsense. And now I'm going to bed." She went with no good-night kiss for her elder brother, locking her bedroom door with a loud click of the bolt. Stupid girl, what did she expect? My rushing in to peep at her naked? Somnambulistic incestuous rape?
Dreams have been too often my surrogate for experience. I sank to sleep before being able to finish my last cigarette. Almost at once I heard Big Ben's thirteen tons clang the hour of two and then clang it again, then again, a kind of chuckling grinding between the repeated messages, something wrong with the works. I was standing naked facing the public entrance in Old Palace Yard: the door was open but nobody was within. The Yorkshire magnesian limestone of the Houses of Parliament was visibly corroding in the acid rain of London: knobs and nuts of black petrous matter dropped and feebly plashed in the puddles. "Now," I cried, and I turned. I faced a horde of sexual aberrants at their worst, hissing, camping, simpering, Val nowhere to be seen. Oh do fetch the bobbies, the little darlings. We do so want to be done. Bits of corroded stone were picked up and thrown at me, weakish, girlish. Hortense appeared in underwear from within the building, coming through the Norman Porch and high-heeling down the stairs with a clatter. Domenico, dressed as a fascist, cried "Disgraziata" and hurled a hefty missile, grey lead tortured into a cricket ball. This caught Hortense in the right eye. Blood spurted and then the eye itself stared out dead on the end of its stalk. There were cheers. That will spoil her beauty, disgraceful little bitch. Her scream seemed to be a waking not a dream one. It woke me as if it were in my bed. I knifejacked to sitting, shaking and sweating. The rain was teeming, and Brook Street was full of drowned quivering lamps. I relighted that discarded cigarette.
And now, as so often happened, my brain in a fever took over the datum of the dream and enriched and expanded it. Norman Douglas spoke pedantically on behalf of the buggers. "We have this right, you see, to shove it up. On a road in Capri I found a postman who had fallen off his bicycle, you see, unconscious, somewhat concussed. He lay in exactly the right position. I buggered him with athletic swiftness: he would come to and feel none the worse." The Home Secretary nodded sympathetically while the rain wept onto him in Old Palace Yard. "I mean, minors. I mean, there'd be little in it for us if you restricted the act to consenting males over, say, eighteen. Boys are so pliable, so exquisitely sodomizable. You do see that, don't you, old man?" The Home Secretary nodded as to say, Of course, old public school man myself, old boy. I saw a lot of known faces, Pearson, Tyrwit, Lewis, Charlton, James, all most reasonable, claiming the legal right to maul and suck and bugger. I put myself in the gathering and said, also most reasonable, that it was nothing to do with law: you were still left with the ethics and theology of the thing. What we had a right to desire was love, and nothing hindered that right. Oh nonsense, he's such a bore. As for theology, isn't there that apocryphal book of the Bible in which heterosexuality is represented as the primal curse?
That was my own invention, which was to appear the following year as a superbly printed little pamphlet from the Black Sun Press. Am I now, knowing what happened to this publication, knowing how it is in use at this moment as a text read aloud at homosexual marriages, indulging in the false insights of pretended prophecy? I have already, by reproducing that text earlier in these memoirs, avowed authorship, and it is for the first time in print. I have provided a kind of theological justification for homosexuals to whom instinct is not enough. Why did I do this? Reaction, partly, against the sanctimonious rebukes of Raffaele Campanati; the surrogation of a fury of lust unappeased; the fulfilment of the right of even the bad artist to see how far imagination can take him; submission to a rational demon. Shakespeare could have done it, and better, had he been called upon. Write me, O writer, a justification of Jew-baiting and death camps, put it in the invented mouth of an invented zealot, make it convince. The artist's pride: he must see if he can do it. What is the point of the dialectic of fiction or drama unless the evil is as cogent as the good?
"There is," Norman Douglas said with a Scots twang, "the question of sterile seed. Its spending in the vas naturale mulieris is as much of a pollution as its spurting in male mouths and around male thighs and buttocks. I mean, old man, if you're holding to the strict Aristotelian view. Yes, I know, if you know you're sterile, which is perhaps a good reason for not wishing to know. You speak truth in that mock biblical thing of yours: the primal function of the flow was the expression of joy and it remains so. What, are we to be chained, like beasts, to biology?"
The rain was still heavy as Hortense and I sat facing each other over the breakfast brought to our suite: kippers, kidneys, eggs, toast, strong Claridge's tea. I said, "It won't happen. They're not the sort of people who'll face the" rain.
"It'll stop," she said. "It's too heavy not to." Both her eyes burnt cool and steady at me: that dream had not been a melodramatization of her catching ocular cold from a draught or bumping her brow on a darkling visit to the bathroom. But the rain continued as we went out into the West End on our different missions: she to buy toys for the twins, I to visit my diastematic agent. They wouldn't face the rain, which mewled consistently all day. The Evening Standard proved me wrong. A procession of men, young and not so, carrying slogans blurred by the wet--We are a
s God made us--Justice for the Gay--got mixed up on Bridge Street with a hundred or so unemployed from the North, the destination of both groups the House of Commons. The unemployed, outraged by the frivolity and, yes, indecency of the deviant demonstrators, initiated violence to which some of the others responded, though many ran away. The police, apparently, looked on for a time before intervening. There were no serious injuries except for a young man who was blinded by a stone in the left eye. Representatives of both groups were permitted, under police escort, to present signed petitions, the one to the Member for Warrington, Lanes, the other to the Home Secretary. Having delivered his document, the leader of the deviant demonstration, a poet well-known in Soho, Valentine Wrigley, shouted obscene slogans in the outer corridors of the House of Commons. The police had remonstrated kindly but he had knocked a portcullised cap off a constable's head. He had been taken in charge.
"They don't," I said to Hortense over tea, "really want the big gesture. They don't really want a change. They want to be naughty and they want to be noticed, no more. For their activities to be proscribed by law is meat and drink to them. And they call themselves early Christians. They want the titillation of acknowledged wickedness. There's no mention of any women being there. So much for your Miss Tarleton."
"Not mine."
The Well of Loneliness was not to be republished in Great Britain for another twenty-one years. It remained and remains a bad book. At the trial in the United States in 1929, the New York judge rendered the same judgment as the London magistrate, but his verdict was unanimously reversed by a higher court. You could no longer prosecute a book on its subject matter alone. There was never much point in moral activism in Great Britain, it was always a matter of waiting for the Americans to move. The colonies still worked for the old mother bitch.
CHAPTER 43
A decade ends in zero, not nine, and the twentieth century will still be going on (or, if this book survives its epoch, was still going on), though very wearily, in the year 2000. Still, the switchover to a new ten is dramatic and feels like a beginning. In 1929 we were ten years away from a new war and eleven years beyond the end of an old one. An age was beginning in one sense; in another it was ending in spectacular style. There was, for instance, the Lateran Treaty which Monsignor Carlo Campanati, collaborating behind the scenes with Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, did so much to implement.
It was February 11, a wet day in Rome, and the Angelus was clanging and throbbing. The noon gun fired from the Gianicolo as Cardinal Gasparri, accompanied by Monsignor Campanati, drove into the Piazza Laterana. Into the Palazzo Laterano strode Benito Mussolini and his aides. On a long table, gift to the papacy of the people of the Philippines, the papers lay waiting, along with polished silver inkwells, blotters clean as a baptised infant soul, a beautiful gold pen.
Cardinal Gasparri said in greeting to the Duce, "This is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. Auspicious, auspicious."
"Is this Our Lady of Lourdes the same as all the other Our Ladies?" the bullfrog atheist asked.
"That is unworthy," Monsignor Campanati said.
"I've had just about enough of you," the Duce said surlily. "I'll be glad when this is over."
"It is also," Cardinal Gasparri said, "the seventh anniversary of the crowning of His Holiness."
"Yes yes," the Duce said. "By a retrospective act that coronation is converted into a purely spiritual ceremony. That is what the Italian State is paying for."
"I was reading the other day," Monsignor Campanati said, "your pamphlet entitled God Does Not Exist, is that still your view?"
"Irrelevant," the Duce scowled. "I've had enough of you, I say. I want you packed off to America or somewhere. Your Eminence," he said to Cardinal Gasparri, "your assistant here is well aware of my church marriage and the baptism of my children. He knows that I've repaired your churches damaged in the war, I've had crucifixes put up by law in schools and public offices. I've been bullied enough by this underling, with all respect to his holy cloth. I would remind you to remind him that I am the secular head of the Italian State."
"You must," Cardinal Gasparri told Monsignor Campanati mildly, "not bully the secular head of the Italian State."
"I apologise," Monsignor Campanati said humbly. "It was and is no more than the affectionate bullying of a father. I am delighted that the Duce, as he calls himself, has at least represented himself as having seen the light, though I have the duty in God of continuing to question his sincerity. I have heard that he still talks of a priest-ridden people and alludes to a marriage of convenience between Church and State. Look now where he has put his left hand; it is Godless superstition. We will not through magic drain away his potency."
The Duce hurriedly withdrew his left hand from his crotch and thrust it into the bosom of his morning coat. He had instinctively been making the apotropaic gesture against the sacerdotal evil eye. "Let us get this business over," he grumbled. "Where do I sign?"
"Here," Cardinal Gasparri said, pointing with a heavily laden ring finger. "And here. And here." So the Duce attacked the documents as though they were an enemy and trampled his signature across them. He then stood upright and said: "Is there more?"
"No more. Praise be to God, the Lateran Treaty is concluded."
"Initiated, one might more properly say," Monsignor Campanati said. "Will not the Duce also say praise be to God?"
"I will say thank God it is done," the Duce said. "Listen to me, Monsignore. I wish now to be left alone. I will go my own way. I do not want the catechism wagged at me and spies reporting on whether or not I have been to mass. A man's soul is his own."
"God's," Monsignor Campanati said. "God's. Still, at least you talk of a soul, and that is something."
"Shall champagne be served?" Cardinal Gasparri asked. "Very well, no champagne. No no, that pen is yours. It is all chaste gold. A gift from His Holiness." The Duce, still scowling, handed the pen to an aide. The aide wiped the ink off on a corner of a blotter and then stowed the pen in his top pocket.
"Do not forget ever," the Duce said, "and bid His Holiness not to forget, that this idea was mine. Tell your flocks that it was mine. We want no falsification of history."
"I," Monsignor Campanati said, "first put the idea to Moscon, and Moscon put it to Dragone, and then it climbed the long ladder to you. As you say, let us have no falsification."
"Well, then," the Duce said.
"Well, then," Cardinal Gasparri said, and he proffered his hand. The Duce took it. He did not take the hand of Monsignor Campanati, since that was not proffered. The Duce about turned and marched out, his aides following. Monsignor Campanati and Cardinal Gasparri looked at each other.
Monsignor Campanati said, "He is too stupid to realize yet what this will mean to him. He is established solid. They will make a little god out of him. They will cherish his very snotty handkerchiefs as holy relics. Women will offer themselves like sacrificial virgins. His picture will be everywhere. The Church, God help us all, has sanctified his castor oil and rubber truncheons."
"It's you who are always saying that good can use evil. I believe that too. The point is that he won't last. We will. Let's go to lunch."
I have put together the above out of what Carlo later told me. The significance of this event in Rome on a wet February day perhaps requires elucidation. During the Risorgimento the Papal States, which were rich secular territories covering some seventeen thousand square miles, including all of the city of Rome, much land north of the Tiber, much south of the Po, champaign, river and township extending from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic, the papally ruled population more than three million strong, were rudely wrenched away by the forces of reform. Mussolini's new order, needing if not the vocal support of the Church at least a silence that could be interpreted as complicity, offered a settlement to compensate for the loss of its temporal power. The Lateran Treaty provided for the setting up of Vatican City as an independent sovereign state. Three basilicas--San Giovanni Laterano, Santa Maria Maggio
re and San Paolo--and all their subsidiary messuageswere declared extraterritorial and rendered immune from state property taxes. The same applied to the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo as well as a number of other odd edifices within the city of Rome. In return, the Vatican recognized the existence of the Italian State and the permanent secular occupation of what was still, ineptly, termed the Holy City. But it insisted that, if the state left the Church alone, the canon law of the Church should nevertheless suffuse the laws of the secular commonalty. Thus, the state could not grant divorces and, if you were married in a church, that was deemed to satisfy the requirements of the civil authorities.
There were really three separate agreements unified in the Lateran Treaty. There was the Lateran Pact, which created the new state of Vatican City. There was the Financial Convention, under the terms of which Italy gave the Vatican the equivalent of some ninety million dollars--part in cash, part in government bonds--and agreed to pay the stipends of parish priests. And there was the Concordat, which exempted the clergy from paying taxes and gave the Vatican 3 financial control of a number of so-called ecclesiastical corporations all over Italy. The Concordat also banned the Protestant Bible and the holding of evangelical meetings, even in private homes. Catholicism was the official religion of the Italian State. Religion had to be taught in schools, and educational establishments under a Catholic aegis gained preference over lay or state institutions. February 11, the day of the signing, became a national holiday. On June 7, 1929, the day of the ratification of the Treaty, the Pope created a Special Administration of the Holy See and put Bernardino Nogara, who was related to the Archbishop of Udine, in charge of it. Carlo was never too happy about this; he believed he could have managed all those millions far better himself. Nogara, he said, was not a holy man. He was a liar and a hypocrite. Lay as he was, he lacked ecclesiastic scruple. He fell into the trap of allowing Vatican money to serve dubious secular enterprises.
"Money is money," I told Carlo, "whoever manages it. It's neither dirty nor clean. Even Judas's money was blessedly above or beneath the taint of treachery. Like an animal. And, like an animal, it must be permitted to breed. That is the law of Nature."