Convocation went well enough—I talked about the nature of poetry and mysticism. Afterwards, half a dozen girls dragged me along to the Coffee Shop and asked me questions. They’d all read my Diary (which the American publisher issued under the sickening title The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme—a court case about it in Boston cost me every bloody penny of the royalties), and they were full of questions about Cunningham. Strange—that even through the unflattering medium of my pages, Cunningham’s personality can still exercise its fascination over girls. I’d love to see him turned loose in an American girls’ college—I think he would have met his match. The most aggressive sexual impulse in the world would drown in this sea of unripe American girlhood. At the University of Portland, I gave a seminar with the girls sitting around in a circle—a marvellous panorama of long legs and mini-skirts. But when a group of them took me out to lunch, I realised that the American girl hasn’t changed since James’s Daisy Miller. The apples look appetising enough, but they turn out to be made of wood.
A curious coincidence. I had lunch with Mervyn Dillard, head of the English department here, and he asked me if I knew anything about Esmond Donelly. Apparently Donelly was a famous Irish rake, contemporary of Sheridan, who spent his life begetting bastards in the area of Galway. Some of his correspondence with Rousseau was published in Berne around 1800 under the title Of the Deflowering of Maids, although apparently his family declared the work to be a forgery. Now Grove Press are issuing the book in America, with an Introduction by Mervyn Dillard. I told Dillard that I’ve lived in Galway for seven years and never heard of Donelly. Either he’s been totally forgotten, or his memory has been suppressed.
When I got back to the guest room, there was an envelope from my agent full of mail, including a letter from some people called Linden Press, which I insert here:
Linden Press, 565 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016
April 6, 1969
Dear Mr Sorme,
I gather from the interview in the New York Times Book Review that you are lecturing over here. The interview mentioned that you were returning shortly, so I hope this letter reaches you quickly.
I’ve been an admirer of your Sex Diary ever since its publication. The other day, I remembered that you’d dated the Introduction from Moycullen. In Memoirs of An Irish Rake, which we are publishing in the fall, Esmond Donelly describes seducing both illegitimate daughters of the priest at Moycullen, Father Riordan.
In view of your local knowledge, I wonder if you would be interested in writing an Introduction to our edition? I might also add that we would be happy to commission a book about Donelly, if you should feel any inclination to undertake such a work.
In the event of your receiving this letter before leaving the country, I wonder if you would call me collect at this number, so we might discuss a meeting?
Looking forward to hearing from you, I am
Yours sincerely
Howard Fleisher
Having an hour to spare before the car would take me to the airport, I phoned the number he gave me. He sounded amiable enough—wasn’t disappointed that I’d never heard of Donelly before today. I explained that I don’t get into New York until late next Friday, and he’ll meet me at Kennedy and take me out to his home on Long Island. This coincidence about Donelly impresses me. Such things happen with absurd frequency. The other day, I heard the name of the Russian poet Lomonosov on the car radio; a few hours later, I saw it in an encyclopedia when I was looking up something else. The coincidence made me wonder, so the next time I went into a campus book store, I asked the manageress if she’d got anything by Lomonosov. ‘It’s funny you should ask—a book of his poems came in yesterday.’ I bought it, read the Introduction, and immediately decided I have a magnificent character for a novel. Ten years ago, I would have regarded such a procedure as superstition. Now I eagerly follow the lead of coincidence.
April 11, Wilkes-Barre airport
Ten minutes before my lecture this morning, the head of the English department handed me my correspondence. There was a letter from Jim Smyth in San Francisco telling me that Helga Neisse has committed suicide—she jumped from the Berkeley tower, somehow climbing over the protective wire they’ve put there to prevent such things. I was feeling tired, rather bored, when the letter reached me; as soon as I read it, I seemed to wake up, and the fatigue became an illusion.
I also feel guilt, although it is a pointless guilt. I met Helga Neisse through Jim, who attends nude parties where everyone takes psychedelics and the girls paint their bodies. She was tall, dark-haired, rather listless; she had spent the previous night with Jim. We spent a couple of hours eating fish and chips and drinking pints of Youngers in the Edinburgh Castle while Jim talked astrology. He said the war in Vietnam would go on for at least another year because the stars were in conflict. And she suddenly said: Why did the stars bother to influence human existence when it was basically meaningless anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to leave everything to chance? When I mentioned I was lecturing at Berkeley at midday the next day, she offered to drive me out there.
She came to the hotel the next morning, and said she’d spent the night reading my Methods and Techniques of Self-Deception. She certainly looked as if she’d been up all night. I hate discussing my books, but I got the feeling she was on the edge of a breakdown and I ought to try to help. What amazed—and baffled—me was that she took it absolutely for granted that life is meaningless. She said this to me as if she was saying that water was wet. When I tried to explain that I didn’t think so, she said that this was the message she’d got from my book: human beings are incapable of being honest with themselves, so they turn their lives into little plays in which they are the central character; they invent the fantasies called religions, philosophies, and so on. I tried to explain that, up to this point, her interpretation was accurate enough; but that I was being destructive only to clear the ground for real thinking. What the mystics experience is not religion or philosophy, but reality. She asked in a hopeless—almost annoyed—tone: ‘What is reality?’ I said she didn’t have to ask that, because she already knew. If you are thirsty, and you take a long cool drink, the feeling of the drink going down your throat is reality. It is quite different from talking about a drink, or thinking about one. Human beings also have an odd capacity for experiencing a kind of emotional reality (as distinguished from physical). It was what I experienced the other day with the bar of soap, or what I experience at least once a year when I first smell the spring. The senses seem to go very calm, and you get the sense of really seeing things, as Wordsworth saw the Thames from Westminster Bridge. And there is a feeling exactly like the real taste of cool water against your throat. I told her that her feeling of futility was a kind of reality-starvation, which produces the same kind of exhaustion and misery as real starvation or thirst.
I lectured at Berkeley, and a students’ committee took me out to lunch; Helga came too. Afterwards, they took us to the top of the clock tower, and our host told us that there had been several suicides in the past year or so—one more than from the similar tower at Stanford. I suppose this gave her the idea.
We drove back to town and she talked all the way. Then she said she wanted to do some shopping, and asked me to go with her. I said firmly that I wanted to rest—too many hours of talking and lecturing leave me exhausted. But I invited her out to a meal in Chinatown. I read Hölderlin and then slept until seven. She came to the hotel at eight; we had some wine in my room, then walked to Chinatown. She told me she’d spent the afternoon walking around the docks. I began to understand why she seemed so exhausted. We drank Californian wine with the meal, and she seemed to relax. She talked about her problems—her marriage to a homosexual whom she’d failed to ‘reform’, affairs with various phonies—she couldn’t resist anything that sounded like a poet, painter or philosopher. And I began to see the real trouble: laziness, weakness, desire for something to happen
to her, for some Avatar to appear and give her the Answer. When we were into the second bottle of Almedan, she suddenly became very complimentary—explained that she had been trying to meet me since I was here in January. She explained she wasn’t asking anything of me except that I should be a friend, write to her now and then, and so on. I said I’d do my best. ‘It’s not that I want to sleep with you. I sleep around too much.’ My feeling was that there was nothing I wanted less than to sleep with her. On the previous evening, I’d thought her attractive, and rather envied Jim his night with her. And ten years ago I’d have slept with her anyway, without thinking about the consequences. Now I was clearly aware that she was trying to bargain with me, offering me something in exchange for something I could give her. I didn’t want to be her debtor.
We spent an hour in the City Lights Bookshop, met some friends of hers, and moved to a café across the road for more wine. At midnight, I said I had to get back—I had to be up the next morning to lecture at Palo Alto. She said she’d walk down to Sutter with me because she needed the fresh air. At the corner of Sutter, I tried to persuade her to get into a taxi, and she said she needed coffee to sober up. So, very reluctantly, I let her come to my room. (The night clerk is a friend of mine, and only winked.) I didn’t think she had seduction in mind—she seemed to be just lonely—but I was determined it wouldn’t happen anyway. She spent ten minutes in the bathroom while I made coffee. I went in the bathroom, leaving her to pour the coffee, and it reeked of perfume—I still can’t imagine what she had been doing with it, for she wasn’t wearing any. When I came out, she was lying on one of the twin beds with her eyes closed, looking very pale. I asked her if she felt all right and she said no, but she’d be ok in a moment. I put the coffee on the table at the side of the bed, and she reached out and groped for my hand. Then she said: ‘Would you kiss me please, just once?’ I was still being paternal; I patted her on the head, said, ‘Yes, yes, all right’, and bent over her. She had a soft and attractive mouth, even though the lower lip was slightly chapped. Kissing her was a shock—like what I’d been saying to her earlier about swallowing a cool drink and merely thinking about it. She gave a kind of moan, and lay there passively; when I tried to pull back, she made the same noise in her throat. It was an uncomfortable position—my neck was aching—so I put one knee on the bed. She suddenly began breathing deeply and regularly, as if immensely relieved, and her hand brushed against my trousers, as if by accident, and rested there. The inevitable response occurred. I had been curious all day whether she was wearing stockings or tights. I knew this was my last chance. If they were tights, or if she was wearing a panty girdle, I could linger a moment politely, then tell her to drink her coffee, while my expectations subsided. If not . . . Her thighs opened as my hand touched her knee; then I reached the bare flesh above the stocking. A moment later, my hand reached the crossroads, and I found she was wearing no pants. She must have removed them in the bathroom. By this time she’d unzipped my fly and was holding me. Even at this point, I knew we could stop, even though I was like a battering ram and she was already moving herself against my hand. But it would have seemed pointless. Within seconds, I was inside her. I must admit there was a terrific surge of sheer delight; it was pure male and female coupling, without personalities. Her warmth, as she closed around me, seemed predestined. It lasted only a short time. We were both so excited that we reached a climax within seconds. I lay inside her for a moment, looking at her face; she looked very peaceful. Then she said: ‘Let’s take our clothes off and get into bed.’ It was a reasonable suggestion, and we followed it. But the rest of the night wasn’t the same. She had got what she wanted; I had got what I had been determined to avoid. What bothered me most was that she didn’t seem capable of affection. She enjoyed the sex with a physical abandon I haven’t seen very often—proving again that promiscuous women are not necessarily frigid. But in between, she wanted to talk about her problems, about men, about psychology, about my lecture. . . . We had to talk in whispers, so as not to disturb the people in the next rooms.
On the train to Palo Alto the next morning, I cursed myself for not bringing my journal notebook, for I suddenly saw that I had important material. I hadn’t wanted to go to bed with Helga because I knew in advance that it would leave nothing behind. Then why do I get such physical pleasure from Diana, although I’ve been married to her for seven years? For years now, I’ve been trying to define the basis of the sexual impulse. Why should a man want to thrust his erect penis into a woman? There must be a reason; to say it’s an instinct is no answer. When Mopsy was a baby, I used to wonder why she sucked her thumb and held her ear with the other hand; then I noticed other babies doing it. I wonder if this is connected with breast feeding—whether a baby automatically reaches out for the other nipple as it sucks, and treats its ear as a nipple? There ought to be an analogous answer to the sexual impulse.
Helga told me a strange story. When she first went to college, she was a very repressed young lady from the middle west who held strong views on sex before marriage, especially as her mother had told her that a husband can always tell if his wife is not a virgin, and would probably desert her on the spot. For six months or so, she went out with various boys, permitted a little petting, but stopped them short if they tried to remove her pants. At the beginning of her junior year, she moved in with another girl, who told her that she had solved the problem by means of an artificial vagina. This object fitted around the loins by means of a belt; it was little more than a kind of rubber tube that lay on the pubis, and the opening slit had to be moistened with olive oil. Helga said she didn’t think it would work; her boyfriend had already told her he would break with her if she didn’t come across. But she tried it, borrowing her friend’s artifice. To her surprise, the boyfriend didn’t mind in the least. They slept together in motels at weekends; she insisted on wearing panties, in case the boy got carried away. But she said he didn’t even try to perform normal intercourse; he brought on her climax by caressing her after he’d had his own. She subsequently used the same thing with two more boyfriends, believing that she was being marvellously virtuous, until one night she got carried away and asked the boyfriend to make love normally.
I remembered that Diana had told me the same sort of thing about her earliest sexual experiences. She once quarrelled with her boyfriend, and went to bed with a man she’d met only that afternoon, to spite him. Before they even went to his room, she explained that she was a virgin and wanted to remain one. He agreed immediately, and they spent the night petting without actual intercourse.
Now I suddenly saw that this is an important clue. Of course he hadn’t demurred. There was Diana, a pretty, middle-class girl with a slim figure and demure manners. He wants to know her. She is like something in a museum case with the label ‘Do not touch’. There is a story in Maupassant of a criminal on the run who poses as a lady’s maid, and helps a beautiful woman to dress and undress for months. This is how a man wants to know a woman who sits opposite him on the Underground, or stands at the perfume counter in an expensive store. The actual penetration of her vagina is the least important part of it; merely the final symbol of surrender. He can look at her and think: ‘I’ve had her.’ But he has had her almost as completely once he has spent a night in her room, watched her take off her clothes, let his hands wander all over her body and felt hers on his, watched her dressing and combing her hair, seen the way she applies cosmetics, the kind of toothpaste she uses. The hunger of the male for the female is the hunger for her female-ness, her alien femininity, for everything about her.
Again, I was always fascinated by Kleist’s story of the Marquise Von O——, in which Russian soldiers invade a town and drag off the young countess to rape her. She is rescued by a Russian officer, and faints from her ordeal. A few months later, to her amazement, she discovers that she is pregnant, and is so certain of her innocence that she puts an advertisement into the newspapers asking the father to come forwar
d. Eventually, the father does so—it is the young officer who rescued her. Kleist had the sense to make the story end happily; most of the romantics would have had her committing suicide out of shame and the officer becoming a monk out of remorse. Goethe apparently said harsh things about Kleist’s story, declaring that it was too absurd to be true to life. Which demonstrates that Kleist knew more about human nature than Goethe—or at least, about sex. There is no need to postulate that the officer is a rake. He rescues her in the spirit of a knight of the round table. When she faints, he places her tenderly on a divan. She lies as still as if asleep; he feels curiosity about what her lower half would look like unclothed, for he knows he has only to raise her skirt to her waist to see her naked—these were the days before pants. He does it cautiously, afraid she will wake up, slips his hand between the thighs to open the legs. And then it doesn’t matter if she wakes; suddenly all that matters is to get his tight trousers off and bring their nakedness into contact. He does it and finds her easy to enter; he has an orgasm immediately. Ashamed, he withdraws, expecting to see her stirring; but she lies still. He adjusts her clothes, then his own (he would do it in that order); then he goes away for water. When he returns, she is sitting up, and regards him with gratitude. This is the moment; will she know that a stranger has visited her darkest recess? But she is so bruised and shaken that she notices nothing . . . Yes, Kleist understood that raging male curiosity that thirsts for knowledge of the female as dry ground thirsts for water. Goethe must have understood something of it too. What else was it that made Faust seduce Margaret? She is an ordinary peasant girl, not particularly bright, and if he was her doctor, he would simply feel paternal about her. But she is alien, strange; he is not even sure what a peasant girl wears under her Sunday frock; he badly wants to know.