Father Frobisher spoke loud words now. "God does care. Man bears in himself the miracle of the seed planted there by the Creator. The power of generating new human souls for God's kingdom. The wanton spilling of the seed in the sin of Onan, or in the pseudo-Hellenic embraces of your your your." Then: "I never heard of this bishop. But he referred to a man and a girl. You must give up this deadly sin. You must vow never to commit it again. Do you hear me?"
"I have," with equal loudness, "regularly vowed to give it up. I have gone dutifully to confession once a month, sometimes more, and repented of impure thoughts or impure acts. And then I have regularly fallen again. This cannot go on forever."
"It certainly cannot. It certainly."
"So I have to make a choice. It is not easy. Are you, Father, a Catholic from your cradle?"
"That is not to the purpose. But no, I am a convert. As Newman was a convert. But it is not to the."
"My father too is a convert. He became a Catholic when he married my mother, who is French. But on my mother's side I look back to a thousand years or more of unswerving devotion to the faith. Oh, there was the odd deviation--Catharism, Jansenism, if that's truly a deviation. But now I face the breaking of my mother's heart, since I cannot both be true to my nature as God made it and a faithful son of the Church. For even if I committed myself, as you have done, to a life of celibacy, where would be my spiritual reward? I lack your vocation. I have another vocation, at least I consider it to be that, but it can't be fulfilled in priestly seclusion from the life of the flesh. To which God do I listen--the God who made me what I am or the God whose voice is filtered through the edicts of the Church?"
"There is no difference, you must not say that, this is wholly wholly wholly."
I looked at him disbelieving for a second, hearing the wrong word.
"Heretical, blasphemous," picking up the Amontillado bottle. "It is finished," he said, in the very tones he would have used on Good Friday. Then: "We are living in terrible times. Thousands, millions, dead on the battlefields of Europe, the German blockades attempting to starve us into submission. There are men coming back from the front maimed, limbless, their lungs rotted with gas, blind, paralyzed, physically condemned to celibacy. Who are you to talk of a spiritual reward?"
I sighed and, without seeking permission, lighted a Gold Flake with a Swan vesta. He had himself taken in tobacco, and in a dirtier form. I blew out smoke with the pleasure he had shown in carking on the irritant. One substance, two forms. "I have to put it all off," I said. "Faith, grace, salvation. Perhaps when I'm sixty, if I reach that age, and the fires are burnt out, perhaps then I can come back. What did Saint Augustine pray--to be made pure, but not yet?"
"This is no occasion for frivolity or cynicism. You're in deadly peril."
"I no longer believe that, Father," I said, but the hand holding the Gold Flake shook. "Thank you for your time and help. For you have helped."
"I think you had better come back and see me again. Next week. Having prayed and meditated. Pray to our Holy Mother for the grace of purity. She will listen."
"Embarrassing, Father. I'd prefer to address a saint who knew about these things. Are there any? Or perhaps Our Lord himself. He, if what Renan hints at is true--"
"I know what you're going to say. Don't say it. I see already the way you're going. God help you. You've withdrawn, by a perverse act of the will, from the opportunity of grace. So quickly can these things happen. Come, we'll kneel, we'll pray together now." And he got up from his creaking chair and indicated the fireside rug.
"No, Father. Too late. Or too soon. It won't be easy, I can assure you. I'll always have a kind of--" It was my mother's language that came out, though the English word was available--"nostalgie. But I can't come home. Not yet. Not for a long time yet." And I got out of the place as quickly as I could.
CHAPTER 12
The above must not, of course, be taken as a verbatim account of what happened. I cannot remember the name of the priest or whether the cigarettes I smoked in those days were Gold Flake or whether he or I took tobacco in that Farm Street room, one substance, two forms. But the gist is true. I walked through Mayfair shakily, with the sense that my feet belonged to somebody else, and my head spun as though it were with a doctor's negative prognosis. On Berkeley Street the Star poster of a newspaper vendor said NIVELLE REPLACES JOFFRE. Yes, of course, there was a Great War going on, and here I had been trying to reconcile my sexual urges with my religious faith. LLOYD GEORGE WAR CABINET SITS. I turned onto Piccadilly. Outside Green Park station holly and chrysanthemums were being sold. A barrel organ in a side street played "Keep the Home Fires Burning." A middle-aged woman of the governing classes, whaleboned rigid, her hat a froth of feathers, gave me a hard look. She saw a fit, even jauntily fit, young man in a good grey suit with an open grey dustcoat, the wide-brimmed hat of the "arty" set back on his head like a halo. I bought an evening paper in the station and went down the stairs to get my train to Baron's Court. A trio of Tommies on leave, tipsy, their uniform collars undone, came up abreast and forced me to press myself against the stairrail. One of them began to sing, and the others raggedly joined in:
"You was with the wenches
When we was in the trenches
Afacing our German Joe--"
It might or might not have been meant for me.
In the train I opened my paper and read:
On getting into the flat the prisoner lit a gas fire, sat on a chair, and then committed the offence complained of. Witness did not say anything but tried several times to get away, but prisoner pulled him back. Prisoner kissed him and gave him a shilling, also a screwdriver, telling him the latter was a keepsake from him.
That was Norman Douglas of the English Review, to which I sometimes contributed. Douglas, who was getting on for fifty, spent much of his spare time picking up little boys. He had been unlucky on this occasion. I was no casual pederast and would never, I believed, put myself in danger; still, I shivered. I had said goodbye to my warm loving mother and elected for cold, uncertainty, sin, the horror of the normal and respectable, their claws, latent but acute.
How ironic it was that the small reputation I had so far made for myself had begun with the publication of a novel considered heterosexually assertive, also daring, even scandalous. This was, as some of you may know, Once Departed, published by Martin Secker (three printings of 1,500 each, with 4,000 sets of sheets sold to the United States). The epigraph was from Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam ("You know how little time we have to stay...") and the story dealt (deals, I should say, but I cannot help thinking of the book as a dead letter) with a young man due to die from an incurable though not superficially obnoxious disease who is determined to drain the cup before he goes. His sexual exploits, with girls great-limbed and firmbreasted under their 1911 carapaces, their hair tumbling in an odorous cataract on the removal of the innumerable pins, I described with a suggestiveness regarded as shocking by many, and the invocation of the powers of the Public Prosecutor was seriously urged in, I think, John Bull. It was a tyro work, published just after my twenty-second birthday, and it was composed as a cold and deliberate exercise in the presentation of heterosexual passion. It was assumed by many, especially by the young women I met at parties, that it mirrored my own tastes and appetites. I told no one that I could bring myself to compose the more intimate scenes only by imagining them as homosexual, though this was sometimes difficult with torrents of scented hair and swinging breasts getting in the way. What, of course, I was trying to prove was the limitlessness of the creative artist's province, his capacity for imagining feelings and situations totally beyond his personal encompassment.
This young man who was, cynically some might think, prepared to force his name on the reading public with a work of scandalous eroticism (or what passed for it in the year of Pygmalion, the loss of the Titanic, and Scott's last expedition) was still a deeply religious being, confessing and communicating weekly, hearing mass on occasions when the Church
did not oblige him to, scrupulous in examining his conscience nightly, always on guard against sin. He had, naturally, no control over his dreams, which tended to the homosexually extravagant, nor over the spontaneous floodings of semen which they occasioned. The books he wrote and intended to write could, he considered, be justified as cathartics, or warnings (the hero of Once Departed died, or dies, not of his fatal disease but of knife wounds in a Madagascar brothel). My second novel, Before the Hemlock, dealt with Socrates and Alcibiades and had naked males embracing offstage, but Socrates was found guilty of the corruption of youth and condemned to death. My novels could, in a word, at a pinch, be defended as instruments of morality. And yet I suppose they had something to do with my spiritual corruption, my eventual ability to throw off faith by an act of the will. But my sexual orientation was the true instigator of apostasy. God forced me to reject God.
Yet in the time of my faith I was, and I must make this clear, faithful to a degree hardly known in the countries of the Mediterranean (which Norman Douglas maintained to be, to their credit, wholly pagan), though Catholics of the North have not infrequently exercised belief to the excruciating limit. Having accepted the major premise about the divine foundation of the Church, they must of need accept everything it teaches, from Limbo to Ember Days. I had no doubt at all that, if I persevered in the sexual courses which had been planted on my inescapable path, I would end in hell. I knew what hell was: it was having an infinitude of teeth drawn without cocaine. It was a live coal falling on my six-year-old fingers when I was picking a celluloid blow-football ball out of the grate. But, since God had made me homosexual, I had to believe that there was another God forbidding me to be so. I may say also that I had to believe there were two Christs--one the implacable judge of the Sistine fresco, the other the mild-eyed friend of the disciple John. You will not be surprised to know that this second Christ played occasional parts in my erotic dreams.
However and anyway, as I climbed the steps of the station at Baron's Court, it was with the guilty lightness of one who knows he has gone the way he had to go. I had done my best, the God of the Church could hardly deny it. He and the God of my glands were, perhaps at that moment, conferring about my case. They would have to conclude that I must be left alone to practice a vocation (in the service of a divine attribute) which was inconsistent with celibacy and that a deathbed repentance was more than in the cards. So there it was, Deo gratias.
Now, entering the apartment house on Baron's Court Road, climbing the stairs to my top-floor flat, I was free to think about another kind of faith or faithfulness. Val Wrigley was to spend the night with me, as he did at least once a month. We were friends, we were lovers, but he was not free to enter the homosexual equivalent of the married state. He was nineteen years old and lived at home with possessive parents. He was a poet by vocation and worked in Willett's bookshop on Regent Street. He was fair, delicate, and very beautiful. He was fine-skinned and weak-lunged. He had read an article I had contributed to the English Review on the poetry of Edward Thomas and had written me a letter saying that he had thought himself to be the only admirer of Thomas's work and he took the liberty of enclosing three little poems much, he believed, in Thomas's style. One of the poems, as I seem to remember, contained the lines:
I had not thought to hear
A thrush in the heart of Ealing
Like a heart throbbing, unsealing
My waxed London ear.
We met for tea and buns in a shop of the Aerated Bread Company and then went to the Queen's Hall where, I think, the first British performance of Le Sacre du Printemps was given. I may be wrong, but I seem to associate the final movement with his cool hand touching mine in excitement. We became lovers almost at once.
He was able to spend the occasional night with me because his parents (his home, of course, was in Ealing) believed he did voluntary duty at the tea urn in the Salvation Army all-night troops' canteen at Euston station. He shared the shift, so he told his parents on my recommendation, with a nice harmless bookish man called Toomey. This was not too risky a tale: his parents, who had no right of access to a troops' canteen, could never check on it, and he could discuss rue and recount my dicta without fear. In other words, he would not have to lie too much. "And this Mr. Toomey, dear--is he married?"
"I don't know, Mother, I never asked."
"You must ask him to tea sometime." But I never went to tea in Ealing. Val left my flat early to go home to breakfast looking dog-tired. The deception worked well.
I unlocked my flat door, went in, and lighted the gaslight and the gasfire. Mrs. Pereira, my Portuguese landlady, had been in already to leave post--a couple of books for review and a letter from my mother in Battle, Sussex. It was Mrs. Pereira's snooping privilege to enter whenever she liked, but she preferred the pretext of performing a little service. She regarded me as a good tenant--I paid regularly and never brought women into my room.
At seven Val knocked--three shorts and a long, out of the scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth--and I rushed to open. "I'm starved. What are you giving us, old thing?"
It was gas-ring cookery. "A kind of ragout. A tin of bully beef with onions and carrots. And the remains of the Medoc."
"I'm starved." Like myself, Val spoke with a slight lisp. Telling Geoffrey of my past, I had mentioned this. Geoffrey had been delighted and did a fine cruel parody. "Thuch ecthtathy."
"Yeth, it wath, wathn't it, my thweet thweet boy." Val threw his long limbs into the shabby armchair and read the paper. He was not much interested in the war news, except when it got into the literary columns with the deaths of poets. He was a little distrait this evening, peevish. He went through the pages irritably, going ts-ts occasionally. It was as if he expected to be mentioned in the paper and, through editorial enmity, was not.
"What's the matter, dear? A bad day in the shop?"
"Oh, the usual, old thing. The only books people want to buy are Beat the Hun in the Vegetable Plot and the Pip Squeak and Wilfred Annual. Which reminds me. What are you giving me for Christmas?"
"I hadn't thought. There's not much to buy, is there?"
"You hadn't thought, no. There are one or two things about. If you don't want the trouble of going round the shops, you could always give me the money, you know."
"What's the matter with you tonight, Val?" I set the ragout on the small round table by the window. A District Line train hammered by.
"Ah, I see this friend of yours is in trouble." He found the item about Norman Douglas. He came to the table reading it.
"He's no friend. A colleague, you could call him." I served; the ragout had a faint odor of metal.
"Wasn't careful, was he? I say, this stew thing smells of army mess tins or something."
"The bully's army issue. But the civilian stuff's just the same."
"Why can't we eat out occasionally? Soho or somewhere. It's not nice having to sleep in the odor of bully. And onions." He forked in the stew listlessly. He was supposed to be starved.
"What's into you, Val?"
"Not quite your usual loving boy, am I? Oh, I'm a little depressed. Hole in the corner stuff. Not much in life, is there?"
"Love, Val, love. Try this cider."
"Windy stuff. All right, a little. Ah, I wrote something today." And he took a scrap of paper from his inner pocket. "Listen.
Do ye the savage old law deny.
Let me repay, in age or youth
An infinitude of eyes for an eye,
An infinitude of teeth for a tooth.
It needs tidying up a little, of course." He smiled, not at me, but in pleasure at his performance.
"Strafing Jesus again," I said. "I'm not impressed. Besides, that means nothing any more. I gave it all up today. I went to Farm Street and had it all out, or up. I made my choice. You can't shock me any more with your adolescent atheism."
"Fergus in the shop told me that in the army they split up the different religions by saying Catholics this side, C. of E. that, and fancy bugger
s in the middle. So you and I are now both fancy buggers." He giggled. "And you gave up Jesus for me."
"I gave up the Church because of the inescapability of living in sin. If you like, you can say I did it for you."
"Charmed, old thing. Awfully flattered." He forked his stew with a boy's spoiled pout making him look silly and ugly, also desirable. "I say, this is awful muck. Why don't we go and eat out? Celebrate being fancy buggers together."
"A matter of money, Val. I have exactly two shillings and ninepence farthing."
"Wouldn't take us very far, would it?"
"You said you were starved. This seems edible enough." I ate some. "Many a starving German would give his back teeth for it."
"Wouldn't need any teeth at all, would he? It's just mush." He spooned some of the thin grey sauce out of the ragout dish and deliberately let it slowly ooze onto the tablecloth.
"Don't do that, laundry costs money. That's a silly thing to do."
"Anyway, I don't believe the Germans are starving. I think it's just government lies. Oh, this horrible war. When's it going to be all over?"
"Nineteen nineteen. Nineteen twenty-one. Does it matter? You're not going to be in it."
"Nor are you. Well, I'm hungry, but not hungry enough for that muck. I think I'll go home. I can always say I'd a pain in my chest and they let me off tonight. Mother got a nice leg of lamb. Father managed to find some Christmas whisky for the butcher, ten years in the vat or something. Novelists don't have anything to barter, do they?"
"Nor poets."
"Except their lives, except their lives, except their lives. Die on the Somme or at Gallipoli and your poetic name is made forever. Still, I'm in the Keats tradition. A poet with phthisis."
"You're talking silly nonsense. You could have bread and margarine and jam if you like. And a nice cup of tea." I put my hand persuasively on his. He snatched his hand away. "What is the matter with you, Val?"
"I don't know. Don't maul me. I don't like being mauled."
"Val, Val." I got out of my chair and on my knees beside him. I took his hands, which were limp enough, and kissed each in turn, over and over.