Man Without a Shadow

  But the story of Harry’s that impressed me most was about a girl he met when he was training in some town in the north of England. Harry is always a little apologetic about his lack of education, and he’s a non-stop reader. He is also a fine sportsman. One evening, he and a few friends were playing cricket on a park, when some men stopped to watch the game. Afterwards, an old colonel came over to him and asked him if he’d like to play cricket in his team. Harry was delighted—it got him off a great many duties. He met the colonel’s daughter, and was immediately dazzled by her; she’d just returned from a Swiss finishing school, and was apparently rather beautiful. Harry knew that he might be moved abroad at any moment; this gave the love affair the war-time urgency, and within a few days they were lovers. They had to keep it secret from the colonel, and used to meet late at night, after the cricket practice. Harry told me how one night, they went into a park, and had sex at the side of a lake. It was a warm, starlit night. After they’d finished their love-making, neither of them bothered to put their clothes on immediately. The girl apparently liked to take off most of her clothes. Harry told me that he lay there at the side of her, while she sat up, and he looked at the shape of her breasts outlined against the sky. He said that she suddenly began to recite poetry in French—at least, he thinks it was French—a poem he thought was about the stars.

  Harry told me that story on at least three occasions. Obviously, it represents something to him—a dream that will always make him dissatisfied. They never saw one another again after he left the town, and he heard later that she had married an officer (Harry was a sergeant). He told me that he would never forget the outline of her breasts against the sky, and the sound of her voice spouting Baudelaire or somebody of the sort. It symbolized a kind of fairy-tale fulfilment. When he told me these stories, I could understand why he was dissatisfied in his job, with his excellent wife and pleasant home. As to me, I’m sure he’d have been even more unhappy if he’d married the girl. And yet the thought remains his symbol of freedom.

  How much unfulfilment there is in all modern society. I am not now speaking about the unfulfilment of the poets and potential artists who dream of a world of Wagnerian ecstasy, but about men like Harry, about the working-class boys who go to sea hoping for an ‘adventurous life’, about the shopgirls who get starry-eyed about a nonsensical musical film in which the dashing hero is played by a film star who is known to be a homosexual and a drug addict.

  I have two photographs that fascinate me. One is in a book on German films. It shows Hans Albers, who was apparently Germany’s most popular film star in the thirties, dressed for dinner, and walking down a broad staircase with several beautiful girls on either side of him. I am told that Albers always played the part of the bell-hop who marries the princess, the poor boy who marries the boss’s daughter, etc. This photograph symbolizes all the longing of shopgirls and factory boys for the life of grace and money.

  The other photograph is of Douglas Fairbanks senior playing in The Iron Mask. I suppose he is D’Artagnan; he is dressed in leather boots and an open-necked shirt. He stands on picturesque-looking flagstones that immediately evoke the Paris of The Vagabond King. One hand rests on his hip, the other holds the hilt of a sword whose point touches the flagstones. He has a tiny pointed beard as well as a moustache, his head is thrown back, and he smiles with total confidence. Everything about his pose suggests immense vitality; I have never seen him in a film, but I can imagine him leaping out of windows, stopping runaway carriages, clambering over battlements and fencing with ten men at a time. He symbolizes the other daydream—the life of action. Albers is grace and the glamour of wealth; Fairbanks is unchallengeable, undefeatable vitality, a man who can never be hurt or discouraged, who looks at all life with the same confident, handsome smile. ‘Pooh, it’s easy when you plunge in with one leap. . . .’

  Two dreams, and a society sick with longing for both of them, like Harry and his naked girl reciting Baudelaire. . . .

  Later: While I’m on the subject of Harry, a few more points about him that interest me. Sexually, he is exceptionally successful, and always has been. He told me once about his first sexual experience. He used to go to the cinema a great deal. One day, an attractive woman sat next to him—he was about ten at the time—and allowed her hands to roam. Harry had no thought of stopping her; in fact, when he got over his first astonishment, he helped her by unbuttoning himself. In the interval, she took him to a café upstairs and bought him ice-cream and lemonade, then sat next to him again and continued to fondle him. I asked Harry how he felt about this. Alarmed? Or perhaps a little shocked? He said: ‘Oh no, I enjoyed it.’ He made no attempt to return the caresses, and after the film, never saw the woman again. His theory was that her husband was impotent or unsatisfying; I would suppose it was some kind of neurosis uncommon in women (there are hundreds of men who would like to do the same to little girls, but few women who feel any interest in young boys).

  Only one more of Harry’s stories stays in my head. He told me how, as a child, he climbed over a railway embankment, and saw two small girls engaged in sexual play, poking a twig into one another.

  All this helps to explain his nostalgia about the Baudelaire girl. His earliest experiences of sex were of a fairly degrading kind—a mere physical titillation. He is so obviously handsome—in the Douglas Fairbanks manner—that women often take the lead in seduction, and offer themselves frankly. The one thing, therefore, that his sex-life has always lacked has been the element of glamour, the ‘great love’. And no matter how unromantic a man might think himself, there is always a corner of him that envies the Tristans and Lancelots; he secretly longs for sex to cease to be a pleasant but animalistic activity; he wants it to become part of the driving force for his greatest ambitions, his need to live more fully and intensely.

  Why is it that these romantic ideas never cease to exercise their influence on us? I can never read the passage in Dante about how Paolo kissed Francesca’s mouth, ‘all trembling’, without feeling that shiver of longing. The music to which Zandonai sets this scene in his opera seems to me some of the greatest in the world. And why do we feel such a response when Tristan and Isolde drink the love potion, then stare at one another in silence, until the orchestra takes up opening phrase of the Prelude in a whisper? When finally she sings ‘Tristan,’ and he sings ‘Isolde,’ I feel a ripple through my hair and a shiver down to my finger-tips. It is because of the idea that love is a force that is greater than either of them, and that from now on, nothing else can ever matter to either of them but that total absorption in one another. We live boring and dissatisfied lives, never feeling much contact with another person. My ‘sex life’ is adequate, but my ‘love life’ is an ironic absurdity. I suspect Gertrude of being possessive in a kind of suppressed-neurotic way; Caroline, I know, might go to bed with a handsome drama student any day—and I wouldn’t even feel jealousy. I would like to believe that the Tristan-Isolde love can exist, and can transform my being.

  Oct. 29th.

  Sitting in this room, drinking endless cups of tea, there are times when I wonder whether I have not somehow chosen a completely false direction. Should I not rather be in another city, struggling for existence? I disgust myself. A few years ago I thought that I would like to spend every day in the reading-room at the British Museum, like Butler and Shaw and Wells. Now, I sit here, within half an hour of the place, and cannot overcome my laziness.

  I go back over my calculation to see where I’ve gone wrong. It goes like this: animals are feeble creatures; they are thrown down into the world, guided by a few instincts. They have no freedom; they do nothing that the body does not order them to do. Man is also an animal; he also finds himself in an environment, with various pressures to determine the direction of his life. But he has discovered a number of methods of increasing his minute powers. His memory is almost nonexistent, a mere candle flame. He learned to use language to pr
eserve his knowledge. A transformer is a device that can turn a low voltage into a high voltage. Language is man’s memory-transformer; his memory has the power of a mere flashlight battery, but language multiplied until it becomes a power-station, capable of holding the knowledge of hundreds of years. But language was not his only ‘transformer’. He also developed imagination. This meant that man was no longer confined by his environment. He can be born into poverty and dirt, but through imagination, these cease to be absolutes; he can nourish his mind on beauty and idealism. Surely imagination is the greatest power ever discovered by man, greater than oil, electricity, atomic energy? With imagination he leaves the realm of the animal and enters the realm of the god. Imagine three lonely women living in a Yorkshire parsonage with a bigoted father and a drunken brother, and almost no opportunity to learn about ‘the world’; and yet all three succeed in creating works of imagination, because at least they were given access to the world of literature, and drew as much nourishment from it as the richest young lady could draw from travelling all over the world and having a hundred lovers. This is astounding; to an animal, it would seem a kind of black magic. Yes, undoubtedly, imagination is freedom, a new dimension for human beings. Imagination is the power of the absurd; it is nothing less than an antigravity device that can cause man to rise into the air like an Indian fakir. Everything may be against him; he may, like Blake, be a total failure in every worldly sense, without money, without reputation, his paintings dismissed as untalented, his poems described as the work of a madman; and yet, with every ‘natural’ disadvantage to push him backwards, he defies the laws of physics and moves forwards.

  Man, then, is a flea who has invented devices that enable him to lift mountains. Yet then I open Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and find Caesar refusing to save the library of Alexandria because ‘It is better for the Egyptians to live their lives instead of dreaming them away over books.’ If it was as simple as that! Life versus dreams. But it isn’t. Man is awkwardly poised between god and animal. I sit here, surrounded by the devices that taught me freedom in my childhood—books, gramophone records, writing materials, and I place my trust in them to achieve still more freedom. But it’s an uphill struggle; my body would rather go and get drunk, take a run over the fields in a high wind, rape the first pretty girl I meet in Camden Town; it doesn’t like all this study and imagination.

  Oct. 30th.

  I took my own advice yesterday, and went over to meet Caroline out of school. She wanted to look at the site of the Christie[1] murders, so I took her along to Ruston Close. A nasty area. We went into a café and drank tea; it was a grimy little place with oilcloth on the tables. While we sat there, two women came in who might have been Christie’s victims. Perhaps it is the associations of the Christie case, but this district always seems to me to reek of sex. I watched this poor, sluttish-looking woman of forty come in and buy tea and ten Woodbines; fat behind; her underslip hanging crookedly below her lop-sided skirt. She sits opposite, looks out of the window at the kids playing rounders in the middle of the road, then looks curiously at Caroline. Caroline looking very blonde and pink and pretty and well-dressed in a red skirt with large gold buttons, and asking me with morbid curiosity if I can understand how a man could violate dead bodies. When I reply yes, I think I can, she shivers. I imagine Christie staring out of this window, and dreaming an Eastern despot’s lurid daydream: being given the freedom of all women. Beckoning to that thirteen-year-old girl playing rounders: take off your skirt. Then to that girl in the green coat who is swinging a handbag that is too big and too glossy: raise up your dress to your waist and let me see if you attract me. This is my ‘transformer’ magnifying sex until it fills the world. Because sex isn’t really all that important. . . .

  [1]John Reginald Halliday Christie. Multiple sex murderer. Sexually impotent with conscious women, he murdered and violated at least five women at his home at 10 Rillington Place, London, W.11, between 1940 and his arrest in 1953. He also killed his wife in December 1952.

  Caroline wanted to go and see Cyrano de Bergerac with José Ferrer. I enjoyed the first half, then got sick of the feeble defeatism. I think I prefer Christie, who wants to seize girls like an animal to this fool who thinks Roxana a goddess.

  Afterwards, we went and drank cider in a pub behind the BBC, and somebody put on some gramophone records—Trenet singing La Mer, and I suddenly felt superbly sentimental and happy and looked at Caroline and thought that it’s a pity this isn’t a real love affair, just an affair. These moments give a love affair a kind of immortality.

  In the night, I kept thinking about Madeleine in the next room; I knew she has the day off today. The other day, she came into the kitchen and caught me making tea in my underpants. She pretended to be very shocked—in fact, made such a fuss about it that I could see that her indignation was drawing strength from some other emotion. So this morning, when Caroline had gone to school, I made more tea, went into Madeleine’s bedroom with two cups, and climbed into bed with her. She ordered me to get out, but without much conviction, so I simply sat there and drank my tea. We talked in a funny, embarrassed, casual way. I was sorry to see she was wearing a nightgown with a high neck. I didn’t expect much from her, but was curious to see how far she’d let me go. The conversation was deliberately casual, even a little prim. Then we lay down, I put my arm around her, and we talked some more. Then she let me kiss her and caress her breasts through the nightgown. I cursed the bloody thing; it came all the way down to her feet, which made it difficult to raise it without bending down—which would be the ideal opportunity for her to stop me. Seduction should be able to proceed by tiny stages, like sliding down a slope; any sudden leaps are likely to stop it for good. However, after kissing her for twenty minutes and getting indecently excited, I knew I either had to go on or get out of bed; besides, I’d managed to raise the nightgown by pretending to caress her behind. So I grabbed the bottom, pulled it up above her waist, and went to work kissing her and pressing myself against her. She didn’t put up any defences, just opened her legs. She insisted on lying perfectly still; I deliberately cooled my excitement by thinking about something else. After about half an hour, we got up and made tea. She seemed rather resentful about the whole thing. She said contemptuously: ‘Is that all sex is?’ I assured her that no one ever enjoyed it the first time. She said: ‘If that’s all it is, I don’t think I’ll bother to try it again.’ After breakfast, she gave me a little lecture about how important it is that Caroline never finds out (I don’t think Caroline would give a damn). I think she’ll enjoy looking at Caroline and feeling that she’s one up.

  Now I again try to remember how the conjurer performed the trick. Because it was a trick. I didn’t really want Madeleine. It was just the usual male desire to enter one more moated castle. When I use the bathroom, and see Madeleine’s underwear drying there, I don’t like to think that it represents a world that is forbidden to me; now I can think instead: that belongs to another of my mistresses. But what does this mean? I feel like saying to the Life Force: why don’t you trust me, why don’t you take me into your confidence instead of cheating me into doing what you want? I’d be only too happy to know why I’m serving, how the purpose can be achieved.

  My mind manufactures considerable power. It struggles, it doesn’t allow itself to be imposed on, it analyses. But not enough power for certainty, for knowledge of purpose.

  Yet despite this sense of stagnation, things are not so bad. Today I read Borchart’s play The Man Outside. Powerful, beautifully written—but its defeatism bores me. In Louis Vertrand, I find this comment: ‘Even so is my soul a desert, where on the brink of the abyss, one hand stretched towards life, the other towards death, I utter a despairing sob.’ This strikes me as balls. At least we’re no longer as feeble as that. I don’t stand between life and death and sob despairingly. I have no doubt whatever which I prefer. I may not quite know what I want out of life;
I may fornicate and then feel cheated. But at least I have no doubt at all that death is an evil stupidity. Most people live on the surface of life; they can be brushed off like flies. My roots are a little deeper, and every day I try to push them deeper. That is why we die: we don’t want to live enough. I remember that Polish student in Birmingham who could make himself burst out into the most awful pimples and boils when he got upset. We don’t yet understand the strange power of the mind. But one day, someone will discover how to use that power to live twice as long as at present, and how to avoid the present dreariness and lack of direction.

  An interesting speculation occurs to me. Austin once told me that Sweden is a country of fornication, where one of the catch-phrases goes: ‘Let’s go to bed and see if we like one another.’ And yet Sweden also has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. This is my theory: when a man and woman get into bed together, they imagine they are going to titillate one another; there is no one else, just the two of them. But this isn’t true. There is a third. In the very act of sex, they are performing an incantation that arouses the sex-god, whose business is to drive the world in the direction of evolution. If the two are performing the sex act in a spirit of boredom, he loses his temper and punishes them.

  Yes, I remember it now, the sensation I experienced after that first night with Caroline. I remember lying beside her, staring at the light on the opposite wall, and feeling an immense exultation, as if I was a magician who had just succeeded in raising elemental spirits. It was a feeling that there are other forces in the world besides the ones of which we are aware, forces that hide below the surface, but are fully cognisant of everything that goes on. These forces inject meaning into the world. The world is meaningless without them, like the scenery stored in an empty theatre.