The God of the Labyrinth

  ‘She was moving now, with small movements of her hips, and very cautiously, in case Mary looked round. I moved my lap, as if to ease cramp, and she raised her cheek for a moment. When she replaced it, I felt her hair against the importunate nose of my charger. During this time, I had not forgotten to continue to pinch the tiny nipple under my other hand. Fiona moved again, and I felt her ear, then her bare cheek. She had moved her uppermost thigh to make my access more easy. I longed now for the feeling of her lips, for her head was raised slightly.

  ‘At this moment, the bell rang, and we all started as if it had been a cannonshot. But I kept up my caressing, and the three of us were still, listening to the racket, and wishing the fellow dead. It stopped, and none of us moved; neither did I now bother to speak. Then the tip of my finger found the entrance of the robber’s cave, and slipped within; at that moment, my suppressed fluids leapt upwards and bubbled forth. I doubt whether the two of them knew why I tensed; but both of them lay still until it was over, while my spirit leapt up with the sparks of the fire, and the moment of supreme guiltlessness convulsed me like the lightning.

  ‘Mary was the first to sit up. She yawned, and stretched, and made as if she had fallen into a doze. Then Fiona did the same, but cast a quick glance down to see the source of the moisture that had bedewed her hair.

  ‘I hurried down to table, buttoning as I went; and when my father enquired about the two girls, I said I had not seen them, and sent Jamie up to call them. They came down wearing their other dresses, and apologising for falling asleep in front of the fire. Fiona sat next to me, and I looked with satisfaction at the moist place on her hair.

  ‘And now, my dear friend, in closing this Grandisonian epistle, I must once again pay tribute to the inspired teaching that has led to these satisfactory conclusions. The man who can spend two hours upon such a sweet pinnacle of ecstasy has experienced something of the state of the gods, and must become larger of soul thereby . . .’

  Glenney’s letter concludes with a page and a half of reflections of this sort—I shall not quote them because their style is bom­bastic, and by no means up to the standard of what went before—and the assurance that he will press his advantage, and attempt to complete the work he has begun. That he was unsuccessful appears from a letter he wrote the following June, in which he congratulates himself on not having accomplished his design, ‘for the thought of the complications that might have ensued makes me sweat and shake with ague’. He was not, I think, referring to the possibility of the girls becoming pregnant, but simply to the personal complications involved in being the lover of totally unsophisticated girls. He eventually became Fiona’s lover in 1768, two years later, and Mary’s in 1775, as we shall see.

  I have quoted the above passage at such length because it makes certain things clear. First, the reference to ‘inspired teaching’ indicates that in matters such as these, Glenney regarded himself as Esmond’s pupil. Can one, in fact, accept everything he has written about that afternoon of January 2, 1767? My own in­clination was at first to dismiss much of it as wishful thinking, particularly as the whole development of the passage indicates the influence of Cleland and Crébillon fils. But then, Glenney was not a particularly clever man; even some of the felicities of the above letter are borrowed from Esmond. One might say, in fact, that the chief interest of this letter is that it reveals how far Horace Glenney had taken on the stamp of Esmond’s personality. In many ways, it might have been written by Esmond. No, I think that what had happened here is altogether more interesting. Like most young noblemen of his time, Glenney was thoroughly licentious from an early age—he mentions elsewhere that he was first seduced by a farmer’s wife at the age of eleven, and that at thirteen he had a bad week when another girl’s menstrual period was late. But he was licentious in a stolid, unimaginative sort of way, pinching the bottoms of chambermaids, boorish and clumsy with girls of his own class, completely tongue-tied with women he really admired. He was bullied and then patronised by his father, and was in awe of his elder brother (who died in 1770 of bilious fever, after a three-day drinking bout on brandy and madeira). He hardly knew his mother, who had separated from his father ten years earlier because he beat her with a riding crop. Horace Glenney was an emotionally retarded country bumpkin. Then he met the brilliant Esmond, who might have been twenty years his senior as far as maturity went. I do not think that Horace Glenney was homosexual, but I think the only adequate way of expressing what happened at Göttingen is to say that he fell in love with Esmond. He picked up his ideas, his mannerisms, his literary style, his preoccupations. It was as if Esmond was a wizard, and Glenney the sorcerer’s apprentice. Women sighed and yielded as if by magic. There was an amazing quality of a daydream-come-true about it all. He returned to Golspie House, and girls treated him like a hero back from the wars. But although he was four hundred miles or so from the beloved, he lived and thought as though they were still in Göttingen together. Instead of sleeping with every girl in sight, he imposes a discipline upon himself, studies his Horace and Aristotle, and then decides upon a ‘sentimental’—that is, an elevated and rather detached—relation with his sister’s pretty girlfriend—in doing which he is anticipat­ing Novalis, Poe, Dowson, and various other romantics who fell in love with children. Inspired by his ideals, he rises above his normal limitations. And then—proof that the gods are still with him, that the magic is working as infallibly as ever—he realises that these two admire him as much as Maggie McBean and the other farmgirls, and that he can play with fire to his heart’s content. The daydream remains unbroken. He has absolutely no sexual interest in his sister; he knows her too well. But like leaves, they fall into the whirlpool of the daydream, and from his god­like eminence, he can choose what to do. How shall the dream finish? Shall he pluck the maidenheads like two blackberries, exercise his droit de seigneur? He hesitated; there can be no doubt he would have succeeded if he had really wanted to. It was sensible of his father to put the girls in the same bed; time sped by, and in mid-January he set out on the return journey to Göttingen, taking the long and arduous route via London, in order to travel with Esmond, rather than the much shorter route from Dundee to Cuxhaven. It is also interesting that the only occasion when Glenney again invited Esmond back to Golspie for Christmas was in 1770, when Mary was staying with friends in Brighton. For Mary and Fiona, Horace was still ‘the distant beloved’, and he was not going to make the mistake of allowing them to meet the original mould from which he was cast.

  As it is, one can gather from the length and detail of this letter the bursting pride that Glenney felt as he made his report to his teacher. He had been alone, with no one to advise him, and he had passed the test with top marks . . .

  Let me admit that my first response to Glenney’s letters was unsympathetic, and that my feelings about Donelly experienced another fluctuation downward. But it is necessary to explain that I was not disapproving on moral grounds—as any reader of the Sex Diary will know. Like Donelly, I have always been fascinated by the problem of sex because it seems to hold the key to the secrets of a more intense consciousness. I have always been obsessed by the way that sexual experience seems to slip through the fingers like fairy gold. And I must repeat here a number of key experiences that seem to me to hold an important clue to the mystery.

  In 1955, I had spent an afternoon in bed with a girl named Caroline, a drama student I had met through Gertrude Quincey. I have never understood why, but Caroline was one of those girls who produce in me a curiously intense level of lust, of purely physical desire. She once told me that when I made love to her, she sometimes pretended she was being raped, and that it increased the pleasure. This made me realise that, almost uncon­sciously, I was pretending that I was raping her, treating her purely as a hungry man would treat a tender steak, absorbing and devouring with a ravenous appetite. On this particular afternoon, I had made love to her a great many times—seven or eight. It was like a game. On one occasion I
came back from the bathroom and she was sitting in her panties, trying to hook her bra; I threw her back on her bed, pulled aside the leg of the panties, and entered her with almost a single movement; and again later, when she was fully dressed and ready to go, made love to her against the door. There was always an element of shock, of suddenness, in our coming together.

  Afterwards, I felt completely exhausted, blissfully relaxed, as if I had drained off every ounce of sexual desire, and could turn my mind to more important things. Then I went outside to get the milk off the doorstep. I lived in a basement flat, and a girl walked past the area railings, so close that I got a glimpse above the tops of her stockings. It was like a kick in the stomach. I realised with a shock that my sexual desire had not been drained; only my immediate curiosity about Caroline. The well was appar­ently bottomless.

  The same realisation came some months later, when I was on my way to spend the night with Caroline—who was by this time sharing a flat with a girlfriend. I called in at a ladies’ shop to buy her a pair of stockings. Behind me, as I stood at the counter, there were a number of those cubicles in which women try on dresses. I turned casually, and saw that a woman was in one of the cubicles, her back to me, without a skirt or underskirt. Again, there was the shock of tremendous desire. Yet the woman was middle-aged, as I saw when she turned; under ordinary circum­stances, I would not have given her a second glance. Leaving the shop, I was uncomfortably aware that my night with Caroline would not touch this depth of sexual response.

  This led me to formulate the notion that sexual perversions are an attempt to escape this oddly unsatisfying element in the normal sexual act. It is the situation of the normal sexual act that produces the disappointment. (There is the story of the psychiatrist who advised an impotent man to try self-hypnosis; before he got into bed, he was to close his eyes and repeat over and over again: ‘She is not my wife, she is not my wife . . .’) All forms of perversion consist in adding an element of the forbidden to the normal situation: the girl has to walk up and down in black stockings, and so on. Colonel Donelly’s story about being whipped by the governess makes the same point. This is a rather gloomy view of the nature of the sexual impulse, since anything ceases to be forbidden once you can persuade someone else to participate in the daydream. Sex becomes the pursuit of an ever-receding goal. . . .

  In Dublin five years ago, a minor occurrence modified this view. I was walking into the library of Trinity College when I met a girl coming out; she was wearing white stockings, and something about her face produced an intense shock. I had never seen her before, and I tried for ten minutes to place her. Then I remembered: she reminded me of a girl called Hazel who used to nurse me occasionally as a child. She was a pretty girl, who was ten or eleven when I was four or five. I looked upon her as a kind of extra mother; I was never so happy as when she was caressing me or changing my clothes or helping me to put on my shoes. By the time I was ten, she was married. I knew about the physical details of the sexual act, and it seemed horribly exciting and wicked. One day, I saw Hazel in the grocer’s, looking as pretty as ever, wearing a black skirt and white stockings. The thought that her husband had the right to raise this skirt and remove her stockings suddenly filled me with an anguished jealousy. I thought of the things they must do in the dark, and I looked hard at her face, thinking that it must have left some sign—of dreamy ecstasy, or perhaps of wickedness. I imagined that their life, when he came home from work, must be one long, gloating orgy. Yet she looked perfectly ordinary, just I had always known her, perhaps a little thinner, without the pink bloom. . . .

  And the thought of Hazel—whom I had forgotten for fifteen years or more—brought back memories of other girls I had admired when I was very young: a girl who lived two doors away who seemed to me a saint; a girl in the next street, whose oval face struck me as the most beautiful thing I had seen; a maternal aunt, not much older than Hazel, who sometimes took me to the pictures and then out to tea. . . . It came as a shock to remember how many of these girls—all older than myself—I had regarded as goddesses. It had never struck me before that I spent my childhood in a kind of matriarchal society, surrounded by women whom I worshipped, from whom all I asked was a smile, a caress. For in my teens, I thought of women as desirable creatures who had the whip-hand over man because of the treasure between their thighs, which they could withhold or bestow at will. It was man’s job to get the treasure, by persua­sion, trickery or violence. . . . And from then on, I devoted myself to the usual male task of ransacking as many treasure chests as possible; they were the prey, I the hunter. Yet the tendency to idealise them remained strong, and seemed to contradict the philosophy of the sex war. Now I understood. The sex war was nonsense. What I wanted from women was still what I had wanted from Hazel—the elder-sisterly compassion and tender­ness, the caresses, the attention, producing an immediate sense of security and self-confidence. I had often observed the feeling of peace that comes as the penis passes that ring of muscle at the mouth of the vagina, and slips into the warm, caressing inner folds. Now I saw that this was simply the ultimate caress. In a moment of affection, Hazel might reach out and touch my cheek gently, or rest her hand on my head, and I would experience an immediate flow of satisfaction. The peace of entering a woman’s body was an intensified version of this; it is a caress, a gesture of tenderness, but she is caressing the most intimate part of your body with the most intimate part of hers. The aggressiveness that Lawrence called ‘the sex war’ develops from the starvation of this need, just as criminality may develop from poverty. Even the Casanova obsession can be explained in this way—particularly the type of Casanova who wants to keep his women totally faith­ful to him, while he is allowed to do as he likes. It is the desire for the total assurance of female love and approval. All the women in the world love him; they are all willing to give him their love; even the knowledge that he is in bed with someone else makes no difference. . . .

  All this led me to recognise why I have lost interest in the sex war in the last few years. In Diana and Mopsy, I have a two-woman admiration society; the hunger for security has been fed until it is drowsy. The kind of self-confidence that is the gift of women has been achieved, and I can devote my full attention to more serious matters, to questions of philosophy and human evolution.

  All this explains my impatience with Horace Glenney, and with what I supposed to be Esmond Donelly’s philosophy of libertinism. I felt that it indicated either unfulfilment or im­maturity: the small boy’s desire for security. It was not this particular episode—of Fiona and Mary—that irritated me, because I appreciated that it was uncalculated; he wanted a ‘sentimental’ relation, and it turned into a sexual one. But other letters indicated that he was capable of a coarser approach. For example, in the Christmas of the following year, he returned home via a northern route, sailing from Amsterdam to Grimsby, and decided to spend a few days at Osnabrück, looking at the cathedral and the castle. The inn was crowded, and Glenney was placed in an upstairs room over a washhouse, which he shared with his manservant, a cockney named Doggett. Some time after midnight, he went downstairs to relieve himself, then stood for a while with his back against the wall of the washhouse, which was warm. As he stood there, a girl came out of the inn and went into the washhouse; once in there, she undressed, ladled warm water into a basin, and washed herself, while Glenney peeped in at the window. Then she dressed, and went to bed in another room of the same building. Glenney was about to follow her, when he heard a man’s voice, which seemed to come from her room. The next morning, he told Doggett to find out all he could about the girl, and whether she would be available that night. Doggett came back some hours later and told him that she was a respectable girl, a niece of the innkeeper, and that she was engaged to a carpenter’s assistant. She could not marry him because his master refused permission. The innkeeper had flatly refused to lend the man enough money to set up in business on his own. Glenney reasoned that it was probably this apprentice
’s voice he had heard coming from her room the night before; he decided to abandon the idea of sleeping with her.