Sex and the Intelligent Teenager
Date: 1966-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Psychology; Philosophy; Sexuality
Publisher: Paupers' Press

Born: Leicester, 1931.

Internationally acclaimed philosopher, novelist, literary critic, playwright, criminologist. His first book: The Outsider, an instant bestseller in 1956, launched him on a remarkable career as a full time writer which has yielded well over 100 titles including eight Paupers’ essays.

Sex and the Intelligent Teenager, first published in 1966, has become one of the rarest of these titles, much sought by collectors and scholars around the world.

Colin Wilson

Sex and the Intelligent Teenager.

PAUPERS’ PRESS.

Copyright © 1966 Colin Wilson

Introduction Copyright © 1996 Colin Wilson.

Published by:

Paupers’ Press,

27 Melbourne Road,

West Bridgford,

Nottingham NG2 5DJ

England.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

First published in 1966 by Arrow Books Ltd

I.S.B.N. 0-946650-60-8 (Paperback)

Introduction to 1996 Paupers’ Press Edition:

I began writing this book thirty years ago, in 1965, because I wanted to express the ideas of an earlier book, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, in a simple form that would be accessible to the generation I hoped would be my future readers. This was the period of the Beatles and the pill and the miniskirt, and the young seemed to feel that they had just discovered sex. Pretty teenagers danced until the early hours of the morning, then went back to somebody’s pad with a boy they’d only just met and slept together.

Of course, there had been discos in the 1950’s where you could rock around the clock to the sounds of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, but then it was somehow all much more innocent. To begin with, the girls wore long skirts that, even in the wildest gyrations, seldom rose far above the knee. Now the miniskirt and the pill combined to make teenage sex the norm. In a 1980’s television documentary about the pill, one girl described how it had created a new sense of intimacy and freedom between the sexes. She and a total stranger had fallen into conversation in the tube, decided they liked one another, and returned to her room for sex, after which, they simply said goodbye. It was nice, she said. They both enjoyed it, and there were no strings attached.

She spoke of her sense of excitement at this new world in which you could enjoy sex as casually as the teenagers of my day (the forties) enjoyed kissing and cuddling in the back row of the cinema. It seemed that all the old inhibitions had gone for good. In the past, boys and girls had been attracted to one another, but if you had been well brought up, you went through all the formalities, and the sex, when it came, was supposed to be a possible step towards marriage. Now, if you liked a boy and he liked you, you tried it out, and if you decided he wasn’t really your type, you went and tried it with somebody else.

Even I saw a little of this new world. In 1957, when I moved to Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy, we were still in our mid-twenties. In the Mevagissey pubs, we met a crowd of young fishermen who made a habit of going to dances solely with the intention of getting into fights. The police probably thought of them as young hooligans, but to us they seemed oddly innocent. They often came back to our house to drink and listen to records until two in the morning, and on a few occasions we even joined them in a local dancehall. (They never fought there—they reserved their high spirits for places where they met rivals from other villages.) None seemed to have regular girlfriends, and their affairs with girls they picked up on Saturday night never seemed to last more than a week or so.

They knew I wrote ‘intellectual’ books, (it struck them as a marvellously lazy way of making a living), and often asked me to explain what I wrote about. Although it was necessary to avoid abstract language, I never had to ‘talk down’ to them, and in our discussions they showed the same level of intelligence that I would expect among a group of university students.

Then, within what seemed an astonishingly short time, they were all married, and settled in council houses with a growing family. And I realised that, in a sense, the most interesting part of their lives was over. In ten years or so they would look very like their fathers, and return home for tea at six o’clock in the evening, then settle down to watch television, or go for a pint and a game of darts in the Fountain, and grow old so imperceptibly that no one would notice ... Housman would have made it all sound rather tragic, but looking at them without sentimentality, I could see that they were at least better off than their great grandfathers.

One day when I happened to pass a bench in the park that had seen more couplings than most boudoir couches, I found myself thinking again about Nipper and Perrin and Kevin and Ralph, and remembering the days when their sole ambition was to hammer the lads from Bugle and deflower every virgin within a fifty mile radius. They obviously felt that sex offered what is now called ‘a window of opportunity’, a window that opened out on to a world where anything could happen. And I remembered an American friend in Strasbourg remarking how wonderful it was to realise, in his second year at college, that girls weren’t distant and untouchable, but that they were as curious about sex as men, and were perfectly willing to experiment. Then the window closes, and the sense of wonder is eclipsed by the ‘light of common day’ and the problems of bringing up a family ...

What struck me in 1965 was that this new generation, like my American friend, thought that they had discovered something new and incredible, something that had been overlooked by all previous generations, with their old-fashioned moral and religious ideas. Men found girls attractive; girls found men attractive. The opposite sex could make you dream, could make you feel that the world was full of magic. The older generation warned that this magic could be dangerous—could leave you with unwanted pregnancies or sexual diseases. But even before the pill came along, there were such things as condoms and female contraceptives. Now everyone had grown up, we could stop worrying about these bugbears. The musical Hair proclaimed ‘Masturbation can be fun.’ Don’t be afraid of the magic carpet—clamber on board and let it carry you off to the Emerald City of Oz ...

They were unaware that it had already been tried. In the 19th century, an extraordinary American religious prophet named John Humphrey Noyes came to the conclusion that the Second Coming had arrived around the year 70 AD, and that in this new era, there should be neither marriage nor giving in marriage. In his Oneida Community, every man was every woman’s husband, and every woman was every man’s wife. Unwanted pregnancies were avoided by a system he called Male Continence, which meant that the male introduced his penis into his partner’s vagina, then simply lay there and savoured the pleasure; when he felt orgasm was beginning to approach, he withdrew. Apparently the members of the community found this far more satisfying than straightforward sex, for it introduced an element of disciplined anticipation, which kept habit at bay.

The Oneida Community was finally driven out of existence by the outrage—and no doubt envy—of its neighbours. But in the 20th. century, the idea of total sexual freedom was revived by a German called Otto Gross, who preached that ‘Pleasure is the only source of value.’ Noyes had preached sexual freedom in the name of religion, but Gross preached it for its own sake. Two of his most ardent followers were the von Richthofen sisters, who also became his mistresses; one of these, Frieda, married D.H. Lawrence, and practised Gross’s teaching by being unfaithful to him on their honeymoon. On another occasion, after a quarrel with Lawrence, she swam naked across a river, and gave herself to a brawny woodcutter she encountered on the other side.

Now we would expect Lawrence to turn away from all this with disgust and indignation. But on the contrary, he was also taken—for a while—with Gross’s gospel of promiscuity, and also did his best to practise it. It was only later that he saw beyond it to his doctrine of ‘What many women cannot give, one woman can.’

To me, it always seemed very clear that the gospel of sexual freedom is naive and unrealistic—rather like the doctrine of these early French socialists who thought that man was born free but is everywhere in chains. The gospel of social freedom sounds marvellous: the world is full of injustice and inequality, But there is really plenty to go round, and if we simply made sure it was distributed equally to all members of society, we would all live happy ever after. In practice it simply doesn’t work because the producers and entrepreneurs lose all heart if you tell them that you are going to take away all their profit and distribute it among the poor; they simply stop being productive and enterprising, or (as in the old Soviet Union) manoeuvre themselves into positions of power in which they can continue to be as enterprising (and wicked) as ever.

By 1965 I had also witnessed the interesting spectacle of the downfall of the Beat Generation. It all began in 1957—a year after the publication of my first book The Outsider—with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which inspired a generation of hippies and hitchhikers. The kind of freedom Kerouac preached sounded marvellous—wandering between New York, San Francisco and Mexico at least once a year, sleeping on floors, smoking pot and listening to jazz and letting it all hang out. In practice, it didn’t work—at least, not for long, for the gospel of freedom soon turned into a gospel of drifting. Kerouac ended as an alcoholic, and Neal Cassidy, the real hero of On the Road, died by the railtracks in Mexico after mixing alcohol and drugs.

So where the young of the 1960’s were concerned, I wanted to introduce a note of realism, to say: sexual freedom is delightful, but if you think it’s the formula for happiness, you’re in for disillusionment. Like politics, sex is complex and full of boobytraps. Look into it closely, study its complexities, and you’ll find it more fascinating than you ever suspected. But if you take it at face value, you’ll end empty handed, as if a confidence trickster had taken your wallet.

I must admit that, when Colin Stanley, the publisher of Paupers’ Press, suggested I should write an introduction for this new edition, I was less than enthusiastic. I opened the book, read a few pages, and then put it on my bedside table until I felt stronger. A couple of days ago, I opened it casually halfway through, and began to read the section on Casanova, Frank Harris and Henry Miller, and found it not half bad. It is always pleasant to find that a work from your remote past still excites you. So, without giving myself a chance to change my mind, I began this introduction.

What strikes me most forcibly is how little my basic outlook has changed in thirty years. What has changed, of course—with the aging of my body—is my physical outlook on sex. As a teenager, I experienced the usual male desire to seduce every girl in the world. But I married when I was 19, and although I separated from my first wife after eighteen months, soon met Joy, and the two of us have been together ever since. But being ‘settled down’ did nothing to assuage the desire to explore the mysteries of femininity. And being the author of a successful book certainly increased the opportunities. Graham Greene had solved the problem by abandoning his wife, and devoting his life to affairs. Bertrand Russell abandoned several wives, but remained a tireless seducer. H.G. Wells stayed married, but still devoted his life to affairs, while his wife stayed at home and looked after the children. I found I loved my family too much to risk endangering my marriage—or making my wife miserable—by following their example, but must admit that I felt rather like a reformed alcoholic who would love to start drinking again. It was not until my late forties that I noticed the sexual compulsion losing its grip. I had always recognised that the attraction to womankind in general was a biological illusion, but it was not until my fifties that I could feel this as well as see it.

This matter of ‘the sexual illusion’ is one of the most fascinating of philosophical problems. We feel, quite rightly, that we need experience to enable us to grow and evolve, just as we need food. But where sex is concerned, the life force is inclined to deceive us. Our appetite—particularly the male appetite—exceeds any useful purpose that it serves.

At the time I am writing this, the trial of Rosemary West is just drawing to a close. She had been a nymphomaniac since her mid-teens, when she slept with her father and seduced her brother. Fred West had come from a household where his father sexually abused his sisters, and where his mother seduced him. When he was twelve. They were both ‘sex maniacs’, but that label prevents us from understanding the deep underlying motive: that they felt instinctively that if only they could satiate themselves with sex, in a way that is impossible to normal members of society, they would somehow be utterly fulfilled and mature human beings. In fact, Rose was to attempt suicide with an overdose, and Fred would finally hang himself with a strip of bedsheet. The instinct for ultimate fulfilment had simply lured them into a kind of quicksand, like some demonic tempter from a mediaeval chapbook.

I conclude that there is a certain element of delusion in sex. The sexual elevator doesn’t go all the way to the roof. It only goes halfway; if you want to go the rest of the way, you have to get out and walk.

This book is not intended as a moral tract; merely as a simple travel guide to a realm beset with pitfalls and delusions.

Colin Wilson

November 1995.

Contents

Introduction

The ‘adult conspiracy’ against the teenager. Our personalities are imitated from others. Wolf children. The sexual revolution; where is it leading? The teenager caught between two types of dishonesty.

1 The Physical Side of Sex

Roberta Cowell and ‘change of sex’. Origin of life. Chromosomes. Woman’s reproductory system. Male and female sexual organs. Hormones and their purpose. Monkey glands. The ‘castrati’. W.B. Yeats and the effect of ‘monkey glands’.

2 The History of Sex

Primitive man was promiscuous. Eskimoes. The role of leisure in changing man’s attitude to sex. Breeding the race. Greeks, Hebrews and Romans. The Christian revolution. Decline of the West? Sexual morals in modern Japan, Sweden, America. What is the next step?

3 The Problem of Sexual Perversion

Sexual attraction based on the ‘forbidden’. Hence perversion. Homosexuality and transvestitism. Auto-eroticism, fetichism. Sadism and the Marquis de Sade. The ‘moonlight murderer’ of Texarcana. Jack the Ripper. Lack of early affection the cause of anti-social behaviour and mental instability. Marilyn Monroe and Lucia Joyce.

4 The Male Urge to Conquest

Casual and aggressive nature of the male sexual impulse. Barbusse’s Inferno. The gap that exists between desire and its satisfaction. Human sexuality is visual. A Pagan’s Hosanna. Robert Irwin. The Peoria murderer. Mezzrow and drugs. The Great Lovers: Casanova, Frank Harris. The ‘desire for greatness’. Byron. Henry Miller. Wells and Shaw.

5 The Paradoxes of the Sexual Impulse

The ‘mental’ side of sex. Maupassant’s story The Unknown. Bill Hopkins’Divine and the Decay. The rape of Tamar. The two halves of man—the ‘bank clerk’ and the ‘racing driver’. The urge behind sex is the urge that created civilisation. An autobiographical digression. ‘Outsider’ and ‘Insider’. How the Outsider theory helps to explain the paradoxes of the sexual impulse. Nietzsche and his ‘vision on the hilltop’. The murder case of ‘Jan and Ada’.

6 The Great Pornography Battle

History of pornography in the twentieth century. D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Ulysses case. Faulkner’s Sanctuary. No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The James Bond novels. Nabokov’s Lolita. Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Fanny Hill. The Naked Lunch. Candy. The sensible attitude to pornography.

7 Sex and the Future

The mechanism of the sex drive. What is ‘normal’ sex? D.H. Lawrence’s views on sex. How Lawrence came to hold them. Yet even Lawrence tended to ‘perversion’. The parable of the blind men and the elephant. The ‘naive school’. Is sex a great illusion or the greatest of all human drives? The meaning of existence. The evolutionary theory of sex and its ability to explain the problems outlined. The reaction against Freud. The New Freedom. Juvenile delinquency. What is freedom?

Introduction

The ‘adult conspiracy’ against the teenager. Our personalities are imitated from others. Wolf children. The sexual revolution: where is it leading? The teenager caught between two types of dishonesty.

Chesterton once asked why it is that the world is so full of brilliant children and dud grown ups. In my own experience, the dudness starts to set in at about the age of twenty, and in most cases it has suffocated the real intelligence and sympathy by the age of thirty. The teens are a difficult time simply because the real battle between brilliance and dudness has started. Dudness usually wins hands down.

I had an uncle—who shall be nameless here—who used to assure me that no one has any sense under thirty. He was basically a decent and amiable man; yet everything he stood for made me shudder; hard-headedness and ‘common sense’ and knowledge of the world. (Actually, I have come to realise as I’ve got older that a lot of this knowledge of his was a fake.) We used to have long arguments about life and imagination, and he could always make me feel that I was stupid and inexperienced. The worst of it was that a certain part of me was on his side, and recognised that the world was a hard and difficult place, with no time for daydreaming. But still an instinct in me fought against his superior wisdom, feeling that I might as well commit suicide if the world really was as he said. But what he said was echoed by a great many adults that I talked to: that no one at fifteen can know anything about the world or about life; that, in fact, all teenagers are little better than idiots, who will one day reach the majestic age of thirty, and then look back on their younger selves with a contemptuous smile. I could argue myself black in the face; the answer was always the same: ‘You’ll see things differently when you get older.’

Well, I am now thirty-four, and it gives me the greatest pleasure to declare that they were all liars, every one of them, and I was a fool ever to be taken in by them. The ‘adult’ is usually as bewildered as the teenager; he is just better at concealing it. He has sold out, and knows it, and does his best to forget it. (Some of them are extremely expert at forgetting it.) It is true that getting older has certain advantages. Emotions become easier to handle, and embarrassments don’t matter so much. In my teens, I found that nothing upset me so much as speaking to someone who didn’t hear me, or who ignored me: I’d find myself blushing until I looked like a traffic light, and felt everyone in the room was staring at me. Now I find it doesn’t much bother me; it doesn’t really seem to matter much. In the same way, I used to find that arguing with a fool would overwhelm me with irritation; and if the fool accused me of things I knew to be nonsense, a part of me would still begin to wonder if he might not be right after all. Fools still worry me, but only if they actually get under my feet, or attack my books; but they no longer have the same awful power to get under my skin.

But of one thing I can assure you: people don’t get wiser as they get older. As often as not, they get stupider. They learn to hide their unsureness by acting like other people, or by coming to terms with their own mediocrity, or sometimes by drinking themselves silly so they can bounce themselves into self-confidence. The ‘adult world’ is a gigantic confidence trick, with this difference: they deceive themselves as much as they deceive anybody else.

All this might seem a little unfair; after all, there are lots of quite tolerable ‘adults’. But that is not my point. Children and teenagers possess something that most adults have hopelessly and irrevocably lost. Adults have come to accept a certain kind of defeat, and come to terms with it. As a child, this was one of the things that used to baffle me about adults; I knew that everybody has to grow up, but I couldn’t see anyone I wanted to grow up like. It was a sound instinct. Now I am adult, and I still can’t see any adults I would have wanted to grow up like. They all seem pitiful half-measures.

On the other hand, as a writer, I often have to go to lecture at schools or universities, so that I come into contact with a fair number of teenagers; and I always find it an exciting experience. There are, of course, as many stupid teenagers as there are stupid adults—or almost as many. (But they won’t be reading this book, anyway.) The intelligent teenagers are all alike in one thing: they find living pretty hard work. They carry around a tangled mess of emotions that sometimes makes them incoherent. But underneath the mess, a volcano of mental energy tries to break through, to get out into the daylight. It may be, to a large extent, sheer misery and discomfort that makes them so intelligent. Unfortunately, they have to fight the whole ‘adult’ conspiracy, as well as their own emotional problems. The more stupid adults are, the more they try to impress you with their authority, and the more they assure you that you only have emotional problems because you are so young and so immeasurably inferior. It is best not to argue with them, because they can usually make themselves pretty unpleasant; but it is as well to remember that the stupider a man is, the more he needs to ‘pull his authority’. (This will also be a good tip for any of you who are unfortunate enough to land in the armed forces.)

One of the weirdest things is that most adults have so far forgotten what it was like to be a teenager that they envy teenagers. They have forgotten the non-stop problems, the miserable embarrassments, the awkward feeling of being stuck between two worlds—childhood and adulthood—and not belonging to either. They read in their newspapers about all-night teenage parties that end in sex orgies until they imagine that teenage life is one long riot of jiving (or rock ’n rolling or twisting, or whatever the fashion happens to be), Merrydown cider and sexual experiment. I remember an odd party that I went to a few years ago, where the age of the guests ranged between sixteen and sixty, and were sharply divided into two age groups, the under-twenty-fives and the over-fifties (who were all men). Most of the over-fifties would have left early (well, say before midnight), except that one of the girls got drunk and took off her skirt, then later passed out on the settee without getting fully dressed again. A few other mildly indecorous incidents of the same kind occurred. The consequence was that the over-fifties stayed on until four in the morning, obviously dying for want of sleep, but pop-eyed with curiosity about the disgraceful way the young behave, and hoping the real orgy would start at any minute. They all looked jaded and disappointed when they finally dragged themselves home with the rest of us. I should add that the girl who got undressed was well over twenty; I have never met a teenager who could overcome her inhibitions to the extent of undressing at a party. (This may be just my bad luck; I’m sure they do exist—but not in the quantities their elders would like to believe.)

But I still haven’t made my main point. Most of us possess a certain amount of ‘personality’: what we do not realise is that it is almost entirely imitated from other people. Most of us, of course, can pick up mannerisms from someone we admire; (I remember a boy at school who started walking in an odd bowlegged way in imitation of his favourite cowboy film star.) But we still believe that our personalities are really our own. It isn’t so. Everything we say or do—or even think—is borrowed from other people, starting with our very earliest childhood.

It is hard for us to realise just how much this is true. For example, there are a few well authenticated cases of children who have been brought up by wolves or apes—like Tarzan or Mowgli; but these children don’t grow up to be super-men like Tarzan, even though they may be recaptured by human beings at an early age. They remain wolves or apes for the rest of their lives.

Sir William Sleeman investigated a few such cases in India in 1849. Two years earlier, a trooper near Chandur saw a large wolf go down to the river to drink, followed by three wolf cubs and a boy. They tried to get between the boy and the wolves, but he was able to run as fast as the wolves. Eventually he was caught and taken into captivity. According to Sleeman’s account, his appearance was ‘coarse and repulsive’ and his habits filthy. He would only eat raw meat or bones at first, although he later ate oat cakes. He would not wear clothes, and when given a quilt to sleep on, he tore it to pieces and ate some of it. He ate with the dogs, and made friends with one of them, but developed no ‘human habits’. He never spoke, except a few minutes before his death three years later, when he said that his head ached, and asked for water. The same account mentions a nine-year-old girl who was found among monkeys, and who had become in most respects a monkey.

Any observant mother or father will notice the same kind of thing about their children; that when they are very young, all their words, actions and mannerisms are imitated from their parents. To other people, a young child may appear to have a personality of its own; the parents know better. A child that was brought up in complete solitude, with absolutely no contact with other living creatures, would be an idiot by the age of five, because there would be no one to imitate. It would sit staring blankly in front of it.

This is a tremendously important realisation. For it means that your capacities and your personality are due entirely to the people around you. You not only learn to use your parents’ language and imitate their mannerisms: you also learn to see the world through their eyes. You may think yourself very lucky that you were not brought up by an ape, or by moronically stupid parents. But you may also think yourself unlucky that you weren’t kidnapped by a superman when you were six months old, for in that case, you would probably now be a superman too, or something very close to one.

I am slowly coming to my point. You see the world through your parents’ eyes in a fundamental sense—no matter how much you may disagree with them. It is as if they had fixed a pair of dark glasses on your nose that would be stuck there for the rest of your life.

But do you remember the sensation of Christmasses when you were a very young child? The excitement of a big store, with its smells of food and sweets, and the tinkling of the bells in the cash registers, and the blaring Christmas music coming through the loudspeakers? Or can you recall what it was like to look at a children’s book with some picture of a broad landscape and distant mountains? And the awful dreariness of the new year when you had to go back to school again, and face another whole year before another Christmas? As a child, you rejected the boring world in which adults spend their lives. You rejected it because a deep instinct told you that life doesn’t have to be as second-rate and dreary as your parents’ version of it. My uncle—the one who said that no one has any sense under thirty—would have assured you that this was mere escapism, and that you would have to face up to reality. So would most adults. But if you were any good at all, you wouldn’t believe them. They only believe life to be dreary because of the dark spectacles their parents placed on their noses. And they knew better as children; they also had this vision of excitement and intensity at Christmas, or in reading some adventure story. Then they grew up and forgot about it, and didn’t even suspect that they were looking at the world through dark glasses.

Do you take my point? Try to imagine what it would be like to be a dog, lying on the rug and staring up at the human beings in the room. Well, if you had been brought up by a dog, this would be how you would see the world. If you make your mind go blank for a moment, and look around at the room without thinking anything, you have got a vague idea of what it is like to be a dog. (A dog, of course, cannot think in our human sense; that is a trick your parents taught you.) This book you are now reading would seem merely another object, like the fire irons and the table. (If your cat could think, it would wonder why on earth you keep staring at this book—wondering if perhaps there was a mouse concealed inside it, to explain why you look at it so intently.)

In short, the world is rather meaningless to your dog because your dog has never been taught how to look at the world. Meaning is something you have to be trained to see. Well, we are mere human beings, and not a lot better than dogs. And, just as with a dog, the world appears to be much more meaningless to us than it really is. If you had been brought up by a superman, this same room would now strike you as dazzlingly beautiful and exciting, and all life would be like Christmas when you were a child.

What has all this to do with sex? A very great deal indeed. In fact, sex cannot be understood without approaching it in this way. You may buy a book like Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour of the Human Female and learn some interesting facts about the incidence of pre-marital intercourse in America; you may buy a book with some such title as The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge, and discover some interesting things about the sexual customs of the South Sea islanders. But it will certainly not tell you much about sex that you did not know already; it will give you sexual information, not sexual knowledge. On the other hand, you might buy Barbara Cartland’s Sex and the Teenager, and read:

‘ ... your mother is the nicest and most understanding “girl” you know ... Try to tell her how wonderful she is and how much she means to you ... Say “I love you” to your mother, and it will help you a lot in the growing up process ... Sir Winston Churchill, the greatest man of the century, often cries when he is moved in any way. He is not ashamed of it, so why should you be ashamed to show your feelings?’

I am not sure what kind of teenager Barbara Cartland thinks she is writing for, but I do not think I have ever met one who is moronic enough to take this kind of thing seriously.

No, all this has nothing to do with sex and its real problems. Sex is one of the most powerful urges that human beings experience. It drives us and dominates all our lives.

What is more, although most adults have lost the power to enjoy Christmas as they did when they were children, they have gained another power that can make the world seem more meaningful than it can ever appear to a child: I mean the capacity for sexual experience. For 99 per cent of human beings, sexual experience is the deepest and intensest experience of their whole lives. If they only had the intelligence to grasp its full meaning, Chesterton’s jibe about brilliant children and dud grown ups would cease to be true, and all human life would be transformed.

Well, I am a poet, and I don’t much like human beings as they are. If I were God, I think I might be tempted to wipe them all out and start all over again; they are really a pretty dreary and disappointing lot. And when critics accuse me of being too preoccupied with sex (which happens now and then) I cheerfully admit it. It is one of the few subjects that all intelligent people ought to be preoccupied with. Let us think about sex. Let us talk about it. There is no more important subject on the earth, and it may be a clue to something that poets and philosophers have been searching for since human beings learned to think. Ignore the idiots who tell you that ‘sex should be kept in its proper place’. A single look at them will convince you that they wouldn’t be so second-rate if they’d ever thought for themselves.

Anyway, there is another good reason why we should think about sex. It is becoming a subject on which more and more teenagers can speak with the authority of first-hand experience. This may be all very shocking, but it is so. In the Guardian for the 6 January 1965, I find this headline: SEX AND THE UPPER SIXTH FORM: 30 PER CENT NON-VIRGINS. The article goes on to tell how a 17-year-old girl has written an article in a magazine called ‘Family Planning’ saying that most of her friends have lost their virginity by the age of 18, and how after teenagers have been going out for about two months ‘it is generally accepted that they will have intercourse’. Thirty per cent of her form are non-virgins. And Doctor Albert Ellis, one of the editors of The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Behaviour, states it is his opinion that sexual freedom will continue to increase, and that by the end of this century, any intelligent unmarried person who does not engage spontaneously in all forms of sexual intercourse will be regarded as either neurotic or perverted (page 291). Again, in 1964, a doctor talking to the British Medical Association (when teenage sex was being debated) told about a boy and girl who met in his waiting room for the first time, and who had had sexual intercourse before it was the boy’s turn to go in five minutes later.

And, in spite of all this, Barbara Cartland can write as follows in her Sex and the Teenager:

‘I can assure you that decently brought up boys don’t think much of girls who allow real kissing the first evening they go out together.

‘“I was surprised,” a young man said to me the other day, talking about a girl we both knew, “that she let me kiss her when I took her home. She didn’t seem that sort.”

‘I knew the girl in question had been flattered and excited because he asked her to go out. She wasn’t “that sort”, but because she thought he expected kisses, she weakly gave him what he wanted. As far as I know, he hasn’t bothered about her since.’

Miss Cartland may not know it, but the days when a girl was thought immodest for kissing a boy on her first date are a long way behind us. If she doubts it, she should look at the queues of teenagers outside any cinema showing one of the James Bond films. Bond’s author, Ian Fleming, made the same point in an interview just before he died: ‘In these days, seduction is replacing courtship.’

In short, it is time that everybody learned to think intelligently about sex. No subject is more surrounded by stupidity and lies. It is almost impossible for teenagers today to get anywhere near the truth about sex. They are presented with two distinct and incompatible views. On the one hand, there is James Bond and his various predecessors—like Mickey Spillane—and imitators. From these books you get the impression that sex is a purely physical sport, like big-game hunting. And when a girl gets raped in a park by a gang of youths, this is only the younger generation showing how well it has learnt its lesson.

On the other hand, youth itself seems inclined to the most sickly kind of sentimentality. Ever since Johnny Ray started a fashion with ‘Cry’ in the early fifties, the pop idols of the younger generation have been singing songs about the sadness and misery of love: ‘I’ve been crying ever since you left me, baby,’ etc. The sentiments behind some of these popular songs are so disgustingly untrue that in a healthy society the writers would be heavily fined or put in jail. I switched on the television the other day, and heard a girl singing:

‘People who need people

Are the luckiest people in the world’.

I have never heard a more resounding and sickening lie. People who need people are weaklings and morons. I know several ‘people who need people’, and they are all pathetic neurotics. Most of the world’s greatest men and women did not even particularly like people; I cannot think of a single one who needed people, because to need people reveals that you have an empty head. A great poet needs beauty; a great musician needs music; a great mathematician needs mathematics; but no one who was ever worth a button needed people.

So the teenager swims in a sea of sloppiness, and no one is willing to make the attempt to tell the truth. Well, this book will attempt to tell the truth on the subject of sex, insofar as I know it myself. This may not be far, but that is beside the point. My chief aim is to persuade you to engage in the unfashionable exercise of thinking, which most of your elders and betters gave up a long time ago.

1: The Physical Side of Sex

Roberta Cowell and ‘change of sex’. Origin of life. Chromosomes. Woman’s reproductory system. Male and female sexual organs. Hormones and their purpose. Monkey glands. The ‘castrati’. W.B. Yeats and the effect of ‘monkey glands’.

In 1948, a young ex-fighter pilot called Robert Cowell began to feel that he was going mad. His marriage was unsuccessful, and he felt a constant sense of nervous strain. He decided to see a psychiatrist. The treatment commenced with a series of ‘association tests’; he was given lists of words, and asked what he associated with each, and also shown ink blots and asked what they reminded him of. When the tests were over, Cowell received a surprise. They showed conclusively that he had the mind of a woman. Yet he was a masculine kind of young man, with nothing of the ‘pansy’ about him—an engineer by profession whose hobby was driving racing cars.

He had always been fairly plump, and one day, in the changing room after a game of tennis, a friend remarked: ‘You ought to wear a brassiere!’ It then struck Robert Cowell that his breasts did seem to be rather large for a man.

He went to see a Harley Street doctor who specialised in sexual disorders; the doctor confirmed that he was basically a woman, and that he was becoming more woman-like every day. The moment he was able to face this astonishing fact squarely, the changes accelerated; his hips became broader, his hair thickened, his facial hair vanished and his skin became softer. Three years later, Robert Cowell became Roberta Cowell, a thirty-three-year-old woman. An operation removed the last traces of maleness, and injections of female hormones made the change complete. His drive and will-power slackened; he found that he was far more at the mercy of emotions than before, and could now cry easily; a powerful mothering instinct also developed. When he divorced his wife a year later, Roberta Cowell could, if she had wanted to, have married a man.

The case of Roberta Cowell’s ‘change of sex’ occurred when I was about twenty years old, and it received a great deal of publicity. Although I was fairly widely-read, and by no means ignorant in sexual matters, I can still remember my sense of shock on reading the story, and seeing the two photographs that illustrated it: one of a plump-faced but definitely masculine young man, the other of a slim-faced and glamorous blonde—the same man three years later. For one of our deepest prejudices is our feeling that men are men and women are women, that they are as different as cats and dogs. But the more we study the subject of sex, the more we realise that almost every idea we hold about it is false.

Let us have a look at the purely physical side of sex.

The Beginning of Life

We have to start the story of sex a long way back, when the earth was a great ball of white-hot gas, probably torn from the sun by a passing comet. As the ball of gas cooled, it shrank into a solid, and the steam in its atmosphere condensed into great seas—seas of boiling hot water. On this earth of millions of years ago, there was no life of any kind—only slowly cooling rock, and the hot sea. The sky was still full of steam that prevented the sunlight from reaching the earth, so everything was in pitch darkness. But finally the steam turned into water, and joined the warm seas, and the sun shone on the rock and water that formed the earth. And at this point, we believe, the miracle occurred: the sun somehow altered the carbon that was dissolved in the water, and created life—tiny cells that swam about in the seas. These cells multiplied by the simple process of dividing into two, each half becoming identical with the parent cell.

Even today, thousands of millions of years later, these same tiny cells can still be found in water, and they reproduce in the same way—by dividing into two. (This is called mitosis.) But sometimes, an interesting thing occurs. The cells seem to get exhausted, and incapable of splitting. When this happens, two of the cells get together, and interchange certain of their elements. When they separate, they are again able to reproduce themselves by mitosis.

This, as far as we know, is the most primitive form of sex. In some way, the two cells re-charge one another’s vitality.

How Babies are Formed

Every living creature, including man, is made up of billions of cells. Cells may be many different shapes; they may be shaped like a biscuit, or like a cube, or like a balloon filled with water. Inside the cell there is a roughly circular body called the nucleus, and this nucleus is the key to all life. For it contains a number of tiny threads called ‘chromosomes’, and strung on these threads, like beads, are the genes, which determine whether you will have brown hair or blonde hair, a long nose or a short nose, blue eyes or brown eyes.

In the human body, every cell has 48 chromosomes, in two identical sets of 24 (half contributed by the mother, half by the father). But this is not entirely true. Women have two identical sets of 24 chromosomes. Men have two almost identical sets, except that a single chromosome in one set is slightly smaller than the others.

When a man has a sexual orgasm inside a woman he usually releases about 200,000,000 ‘spermatozoa’. Each one of these spermatozoa is shaped like a tadpole with a tiny tail which enables it to move. Half these tadpoles contain 24 identical chromosomes; the other half contain 23 identical chromosomes and a much smaller one. There now begins a race to reach the female egg, which contains 24 identical chromosomes. Only one out of the two hundred million tadpoles can be the winner, and the distance they have to cover, although only about five or six inches, represents a great many miles to these tiny creatures, while folds in the flesh may seem like mountain ranges. Only a few of them reach the uterus, and surround the ovum, which appears to them to be a vast globe, many thousands of times bigger than they are. Only one of them finds the right way into this huge globe, through a single sensitive point where the membrane can be penetrated. If the single spermatozoon contains 24 identical chromosomes, then the baby will be a girl. If it contains 23 and a small one, then it will be a boy.

We might say, then, that man is man because he is ‘odd’. The woman is even. This can be seen even more clearly in the case of grasshoppers, where the male cell is actually short of one chromosome—it has 31 to the female’s 32. It looks as though the Bible might have been wrong to declare that God created Adam first. Biologically speaking, man is an afterthought. He is man because he is unbalanced.

This, incidentally, is not true of birds or butterflies, where the male has ‘even’ chromosomes and the female the odd ones.

In short, as V.H. Mottram wrote in his book The Physical Basis of Personality: ‘Woman is woman, but man is half a woman.’

Bernard Shaw went even further in his play Man and Superman, and suggested that woman created man. ‘She knows by instinct that far back in the evolutionary process, she invented him ... created him in order to produce something better than the single-sexed process can produce.’ But woman made a mistake in creating a creature whose sole purpose was to give her babies. Having nothing else to do, he has created civilisation without consulting her, and has become the ‘dominant sex’. And now, through having too much energy and too little to do with it, man might destroy the civilisation he has created by going to war.

When Shaw wrote all this in 1902, no one took this idea very seriously—it was another Shavian joke. Now our discoveries in biology and genetics make it look as if he may well have been right.

But before we get into these fascinating regions of speculation, let me finish describing the basic physical facts about sex.

The cavity in a woman’s body inside which the baby lives for the first nine months of its existence is called the uterus. The uterus is shaped rather like a sheep’s head, seen from in front. At its lower end—where the sheep’s nose would be—it enters the vagina, and this neck is called the cervix. The top end of the sheep’s head has a pair of tubes that look like horns; these are the oviducts, and the ovum travels along these to the uterus. The male sperm makes for these oviducts.

Underneath the ‘horns’, there are a pair of oval objects that might be ears; these are the ovaries, where the female seed is created. The two ovaries work alternately, each one producing a ripe ovum once every eight weeks. When the ovum is ripe, the outer shell of the ovary bursts, and throws out the seed (which, is about the size of a pinhead). The seed is instantly ‘caught’ by the funnel-like end of one of the horns—the oviducts—and proceeds to pass along the oviduct. Its journey takes about eight days, and it is during this period that the woman may be impregnated.

In the meantime, the walls of the uterus have become thick and spongy, ready to receive the ovum if it has been fertilised. If the ovum has not encountered any male spermatozoa on its journey, it dissolves in the uterus. The thickened mucous membrane of the uterus also dissolves, and is discharged from the vagina with a certain amount of blood; this discharge constitutes ‘menstruation’. Then the whole cycle starts over again, using the other ovary and oviduct. The ‘dangerous time’ during which a woman can conceive is therefore during the period that starts fifteen days before menstruation. About a week later, the ovum has reached the uterus, and the ‘danger period’ is over.

The Female Genital Organs

I shall here describe the male and female genital organs briefly, for many men and women are startlingly ignorant about the exact formation of the organs of the other sex. In my own schooldays, most of us assumed that a woman’s vagina was situated ‘at the front’, in the same position as a man’s penis; we also assumed that, like a man, she used the same organ for purposes of sex and relieving her bladder. I can remember a group of us speculating one day how a woman ever became pregnant, since her urine would wash out the sperm within an hour or so of it entering her body.

This, of course, would seem to be nature’s reason for supplying women with two different organs for these two purposes. The female genital organs consist of a lengthy fold that extends completely between the front and back of her thighs. This is called the vulva, and consists of two pairs of lips, known as the large and small lips.

Towards the front end of the vulva, there is a body called the clitoris, which is actually a kind of minute penis. Like a man’s penis, the clitoris is one of the major sources of sexual excitement. Like the male penis, it becomes suffused with blood during sexual excitement and becomes erect. The clitorises of European women are relatively small—perhaps half an inch long (and most of this is hidden). In Negro women it may be much larger. (A photograph in Paul de River’s The Sexual Criminal shows a Negro woman whose clitoris is as large as the penis of a five-year-old boy.) In female apes, the clitoris may be so large that they cannot be distinguished from males.

Immediately behind the clitoris there is the urinary opening, which is about as large as the urinary opening in the ‘head’ of a penis. Midway between this and the anus, there is the vaginal opening. In virgins, this is closed by a membrane called the hymen, which usually has a small hole in the centre to allow the passage of menstrual blood. The hymen is usually broken by the first act of coitus (sexual intercourse), and its tearing usually produces a certain amount of blood, and a soreness that lasts for a day or so.

The folds of the vulva, close to the vagina, contain two small glands that secrete an oily liquid, whose purpose is to make it easier for the penis to penetrate. There is a muscle around the mouth of the vagina which allows it to contract and grip—either for the purpose of gripping the male penis, or, if the woman objects to the sexual act, for closing the vagina tight. The vaginal tube itself—which extends up to the uterus—is full of folds and ridges, so that it can, if necessary, be stretched to a surprising degree. This, of course, is to facilitate the exit of the baby.

The Male Genital Organs

The inside of the penis is composed of a spongy material; sexual excitement causes blood to flow into the penis, causing an erection. The testicles—in common parlance the ‘balls’—are the organs that actually create the sperm that fertilises the female ovum. But these spermatozoa do not pass directly from the testicles to the penis; they have to make a long journey, collecting a yellowish secretion from the seminal vesicles (between the bladder and larger intestine) and from the prostate gland (situated above the anus) a milky liquid called spermine that stimulates the spermatozoa.

Hormones

But the testicles have another, equally important, function. They produce a certain hormone that, released into the blood, makes a man ‘male’. If the testes of a boy of twelve are removed, he will not develop the usual male characteristics—a deep voice, pubic hair, and so on.

Hormones are produced by certain glands called the ductless glands. A gland is any kind of organ that produces some liquid secretion. The breasts of a woman are glands; so is the penis. We also have glands that produce tears, and glands that produce sweat. But all these glands have ‘ducts’ or channels through which the liquid flows. Inside our bodies there are a great many glands which produce liquids—called hormones—that discharge their secretions direct into the bloodstream.

We might think of this gland system as a primitive system of communication; they use the blood to send messages just as the Indians of North America used the rivers. We also possess a nervous system to transmit messages—which might be compared to wireless telegraphy. So it seems very probable that our gland system is a primitive left-over, from the days when man was a nerveless fish-like creature. However, primitive or not, it plays a very important role in the lives of human beings. For example, if someone gives me a shock, my suprarenal glands discharge into my blood a hormone called adrenalin, which makes my heart beat faster, my stomach contract, and perhaps the muscles on my scalp to contract so that my hair ‘stands on end’. Another gland, the thyroid, produces a hormone called thyroxin, which seems to have close connection with the intelligence. A child with a sluggish thyroid gland may grow up a cretin. If tadpoles are fed with thyroxin, they develop into frogs much sooner.

The most important of our glands is called the pituitary, and it is situated near the base of the brain. This controls all the other glands, and prevents any of them getting out of step (for one unbalanced gland will unbalance the whole system). The interesting point here is that through the pituitary the brain has a direct influence on the sex glands. As we all know, sex is very largely ‘mental’, and one of the chief reasons—physically speaking—is that there is a direct link between the brain and the testicles.

Sex is controlled by a hormone, which, of course, is different in the man and the woman. The male sex hormone is called testosterone; there are two female sex hormones, aestrogen and progesterone. Chemically, they are very similar indeed. So that if, while a baby is still forming in the womb, the glands make some slight mistake, the baby may be born half man and half woman, and may grow up into a male who possesses a penis and feminine breasts. Something of the sort probably happened in the case of Roberta Cowell. Although she is not very explicit in her book, it seems likely that she actually possessed a vagina as well as a penis. I have already mentioned that the clitoris is really a very tiny penis, so there is nothing very surprising in this. In the case of men who are half women (who are known as hermaphrodites), they can now be changed into a man or a woman by injections of the male or female hormone.

Roberta Cowell mentions an interesting case of hormone change in her book. In 1937 a three-year-old boy had a tumour of the larynx which almost prevented him from breathing. Such tumours often clear up of their own accord when a child reaches puberty; so the boy was given injections of the male sex hormone. Within a few months, the boy developed powerful muscles, a deep voice, and a penis almost as large as that of a fully grown man. He also became a bully who was always picking quarrels with the other children in the ward. When the injections stopped, he returned to normal, physically and mentally.

In other words, any of us who received a sudden and violent shock that disturbed the functioning of the pituitary gland might find all kinds of strange things happening until normal functioning was restored. A woman might grow a beard; a man might find himself developing into a woman. If the disturbance took place in a child or teenager, it might lead to arrested growth, or excessive tallness or fatness. (Hormones were unknown in the days of Lewis Carroll, but the section of Alice in Wonderland where Alice drinks out of a bottle and becomes immensely tall, then very small, might be a science-fiction account of some super-hormone.)

‘Monkey Glands’

If the testes of a cock are removed before it reaches maturity, the cock’s comb fails to develop. In the case of a stag, its antlers fail to develop. But a surprising thing was then discovered. If testicles taken from another cock—or stag—are sewn under the skin of the undeveloped creature the cock’s comb and the stag’s antlers proceed to develop in the normal way. In other words, the testicles do not have to be in their proper place underneath the penis; they will do their work of releasing male sex hormone into the blood from almost any place in the body (provided, of course, it is in the bloodstream).

Men who are castrated are known as eunuchs, and the operation has the effect of ‘feminising’ them; the voice becomes higher, body hair disappears, and a great deal of fat develops. The Russians used to have a curious religious sect called the Skoptzi, who believed that all sex was evil; so the convert to the Skoptzi had to have his testicles removed—or, in the case of a woman, the breasts amputated. The sect was outlawed, but still flourished. In his book on poltergeists, Sacheverall Sitwell tells a story about a Russian merchant called Plotitsine who started a little community of Skoptzi on a remote farm. When the police knocked on the door, it was opened by a man with a high-pitched voice, with soft, flabby hands and hips like a woman’s. This ‘community’ was found to contain about fifty people, members of the forbidden sect. It was revealed that when a new convert joined, the members held a kind of festival in which they chanted hymns and worked themselves into a frenzy, throwing off their clothes; at the height of this frenzy, Plotitsine himself would mutilate the man—or woman—with a red-hot knife. The members of the sect—which included, according to Sitwell, about two dozen young girls, some of them beautiful—were all sentenced to prison.

Many references to eunuchs will be found in the Arabian Nights; rich men with harems naturally did not trust their ‘wives’with the servants, so had the servants castrated. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when opera became popular in Italy, women were not allowed on the stage, so men voluntarily submitted to castration to sing the female parts. The sacrifice may have been considerable, but the wages could be enormous for a eunuch who became a popular star. The surprising thing is that many of these eunuchs were idolised by women. A ‘castrato’ called Senesino sang in Handel’s operas in London in the 1720s, and his female admirers were as frantic with adoration as the fans of a modern ‘pop’ idol, even though he was known to be stupid, loud-mouthed, coarse and incapable of politeness.

It is usually supposed that ‘castrati’ are incapable of feeling sexual desire, but this seems to vary from individual to individual. The removal of the testicles will make a man more ‘womanly’; most women have a far less greedy and indiscriminate appetite for sex than men; they are more sentimental and less lustful. So the castration of a harem servant probably had more or less the desired effect. But a large part of sex is ‘mental’, so the removal of the testicles is no guarantee that a man will lose sexual desire. In Voltaire’s Candide, there is a scene where a young girl is shipwrecked, and faints from exhaustion. She wakes to find herself being raped by a man who mutters between his teeth: ‘Che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni—what a nuisance to have no balls.’

When it was realised that the transplantation of the testes from one animal to another could endow their new owner with a new vitality, two experimenters, Steinach and Voronoff, went into the whole question of ‘rejuvenation’. Steinach tried transplanting the testes of a young rat into a very old one. The young rat began to show signs of senility; the old rat, which was bald and very slow of movement, became vigorous again, grew a thick coat, and became the father of a family. Voronoff decided to try the experiment on human beings. But here he was up against a difficulty, since young men were no longer willing to be castrated for the sake of gaining a high soprano voice. He had to use the testicles of monkeys. He describes what happens in a book on the subject of grafting:

‘My first patient was an Alsatian (i.e. a man born in Alsace not the dog). Hard work and privations had made this 73-year-old man look like 80. Decrepit and bent, unsteady in gait, with all the external symptoms of exhaustion and stupor, his characteristic emaciation resulted from physical misery. The graft was performed on March 5th, 1924, at the public clinic of Algiers ...

‘The monkey used for the graft was a tall, tailless specimen of the “Macque” species, which was used for the first time ...

‘A year later, on April 7th, 1925, I went to Dookra with the General Secretary of the Algiers Government ... Our expectations were more than fulfilled; only a comparison of photographs taken before and after the graft can convey an idea of the change in the patient. George Behr was truly unrecognisable. From being a pale and feeble creature with a wandering look and hollow cheeks, he had become a happy-looking fellow with pink cheeks, who was obviously in buoyant health. Three months after being grafted, he obtained a position with M. Pommereau, the Dookra chemist.’

George Behr was then able to do a hard day’s work as a general handyman; he also remarked that his sexual vigour was returning, and he was feeling sensations he had not experienced for years. His voice had also changed; from being thin and stuttery, it had become firm and cheerful.

The ‘monkey gland’ experiment had a curious influence on modern literature. The poet W.B. Yeats—whom many regard as the greatest poet to have written in English in the twentieth century—underwent the monkey gland operation in his late sixties. The early Yeats had been a dreamy poet who wrote about escaping to fairy land from the stupidity and coarseness of the world. His love life was not happy—in the best tradition of other-worldly poets; he was in love with a woman called Maude Gonne for many years, but she married someone else. (Twenty years later, he even proposed to her daughter, but was rejected. He had a platonic affair with the actress Florence Farr—but it was Bernard Shaw who took the girl to bed.) He finally married in his fifties. Nearly twenty years later, Yeats had the Voronoff operation, and a radical change came over his personality. For the first time in his life the subject of sex entered his poetry. He invented a woman called Crazy Jane who had been a prostitute in her youth, and wrote a whole series of poems about her that would have shocked the young W.B. Yeats out of his wits; the same is true of some poems in his Last Poems called ‘The Three Bushes’, about a young noblewoman who was too frightened to give herself to her lover, so sent her chambermaid to him in the night:

‘From the pleasure of the bed

Dull as a worm,

His rod and its butting head

Limp as a worm ... ’

But the rejuvenation also gave some of his poetry a note of sheer vigorous gaiety that had been missing before:

‘A statesman is an easy man,

He tells his lies by rote;

A journalist makes up his lies

And takes you by the throat;

So stay at home and drink your beer

And let the neighbours vote ...

Or Yeats makes a ‘roaring tinker propose to go

... Out and lay our leadership

On country and on town,

Throw likely couples into bed

And knock the others down.’

It can be seen that the effects of the ‘monkey glands’ on Yeats were not entirely sexual. Many of his admirers—myself included—count these later poems of Yeats as his greatest achievement. Life blows through them; to read them is like going for a walk on a windy day. What his wife thought of the transformation is not recorded; she may not have been entirely happy about it, since the evidence of the poems suggests that he developed a roving eye, and began to think about:

‘Girls down on the seashore

Who understand the dark ... ’

In the poem from which these lines are quoted, he represents himself as a ‘wild old wicked man’ with ‘his stout stick under his hand’. It is a strange thought that we owe some of the greatest poetry written in the twentieth century to a monkey’s testicles.

2: The History of Sex

Primitive man was promiscuous. Eskimoes. The role of leisure in changing man’s attitude to sex. Breeding the race. Greeks, Hebrews and Romans. The Christian revolution. Decline of the West? Sexual morals in modern Japan, Sweden, America. What is the next step?

We have looked at the purely biological side of sex. Now let us look at the history of sex—or rather, at the part sex has played in human history.

We do not know for certain, but it seems probable that the earliest men did not bother about marriage, or even about fidelity. The ethnologist Bachofen suggests that ‘man satisfied his natural instinct like the beast, without lasting bond with the particular female’. We must remember that no one knew that the sexual act produced children. The strongest male—the most successful hunter—would have a monopoly of the most attractive females of the tribe, just as he would be allowed to choose the best pieces of meat. But no one would expect him to choose the same piece of meat every day; and since there would be many good hunters in the tribe, and their luck would vary, both the man and the woman would change partners from day to day. Children, it was assumed, came by some form of magic, some favour of the gods—hence the old phrase about being ‘blessed with children’. There are Aborigines at present in Australia who still see no connection between intercourse and childbirth.

In our society, sexual jealousy is so taken for granted that we find it difficult to understand how primitive men could be free of it. And yet Eskimoes still practise ‘wife lending’ to guests, and certain tribes of Australian Aborigines practise wife-lending among themselves. Jealousy is largely a social affair, although we may fail to see the connection at first sight. In recent years, zoologists have come to recognise that sexuality in animals is a sub-department of the social and territorial urge. The strongest member of a tribe of monkeys resents any attempt to steal his wife because it challenges his social authority, not because it arouses his sexual jealousy. The Eskimoes, fighting their constant battle against nature, are probably less interested in these questions of precedence. In winter, teenage Eskimoes play a game called ‘Putting out the lights’, in which the lamps are extinguished one by one, and then men and women casually choose a partner for the night. (Putting out the lights one by one is obviously intended to induce a rising state of sexual excitement.)

This kind of thing is probably completely natural to human beings in their ‘natural’ state, and is a reason for believing that our primitive ancestors knew nothing of marriage.

It was man’s imagination that changed all this. When people are primitive, they are also realistic; they grab what they can get—the nearest woman—and are glad enough to get it. But men whose conditions were not so hard had time to daydream; they had energy left over from building homes and hunting. They began to make war for the fun of it, and to give more thought to social matters. Fighting against nature, the Eskimoes are friendly and unaggressive. Men with nothing better to do occupied their time fighting one another. The idea of the king and leader became increasingly important. They invented gods, and then appointed priests to serve them. And so, instead of being one warm, friendly tribe, sharing its food and its women, these early societies became strictly ‘hierarchical’. The leaders were proud of their position, and constantly on the lookout for any challenge to it. Their wives, of course, were their property, and any attempt to steal or seduce a wife was a deadly insult. So when Paris stole Helen of Troy, the Greeks spent ten years of their lives avenging the insult.

It is difficult for us to imagine the state of mind of these primitive ancestors. They had no science and almost no art. So if nature was kind to them, and allowed them fairly peaceful lives, they had nothing to do except fill their heads with thoughts of battles and feats of heroism and the avenging of insults. Their only form of entertainment was to listen to minstrels and story-tellers who told them about battles. Nowadays we have libraries and picture galleries and concert halls, football matches and cinemas and television sets—we have a thousand things to think about, apart from breaking one another’s heads and brooding on deadly insults.

But the leisure that produced all this emphasis on war and property had some less depressing effects. It led certain men of intelligence to discover the pleasure of thinking for its own sake. And so the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Arabians each made their own discoveries in mathematics and science, and the foundations of art and poetry were laid. This was the second great step forward in the history of the human race. The first had come at the beginning—about a million years before—when some ape-like creature had learned to use a piece of bone as a club, and had so become the ancestor of the tool-making animal we call man.

We might at this point make an interesting observation: these nations that were responsible for the birth of science and mathematics were also the first to take homosexuality for granted. The Greeks, for example, regarded it as completely natural for a married man to have a ‘boy friend’ who might mean far more to him than his wife. The purpose of marriage was to produce children; and to make this institution more attractive, the father of the bride provided the largest dowry he could afford. But the woman’s place was in the home. She was not expected to be a real companion for her husband. He could take other mistresses—so long as they were not other men’s wives—or select some intelligent and beautiful boy to be the companion of his leisure hours. If the husband was a man of rank, then the boy’s father would be highly flattered that his son had been selected in this way. The older lover would become a kind of father to the boy, developing his mind and emotions, and receiving in exchange the boy’s physical favours. No kind of shame was attached to all this; it was taken very much for granted that a boy was as natural an object of love as a woman.

Girls, by comparison, were under-privileged. A girl was expected to keep her virginity until marriage, and then to be strictly faithful to her husband. If there were sex-crimes in ancient Greece—as no doubt there were, human nature being what it is—the victims were small boys, not small girls. An ancient Greek would have found Lolita a baffling document.

I shall speak further of homosexuality in the next chapter. The point to note here is that one of the first civilisations to produce philosophy and imaginative literature also took quite naturally to what we would call ‘sexual perversion’. The Greeks did not consider it ‘perversion’. Why? Because, for them, homosexuality was associated with things they knew to be good—with art and philosophy and culture in general. Cultured women existed, but they were rare; culture was a masculine monopoly. Women were regarded as rather inferior creatures, not really capable of sharing a man’s highest aims or his deepest thoughts. And if a man found ‘soul-companionship’ in a handsome boy, what could be more natural than to go to bed with him? So the Greeks thought; and the women, apparently, did not quarrel with their tastes.

Among Arabians and Egyptians, homosexuality had not reached quite this point of social acceptance, but it was nevertheless taken for granted.

It is interesting to compare Greek morality with that of the Hebrews. The ancient Hebrews were a narrow and bigoted people, interested in little but religion and squabbling among themselves. They produced no art or science, and very little poetry. Their laws against homosexuality were most rigorous. The same is true of most of the ancient, war-like nations. So it may be fairly argued that where the imagination was allowed to develop, sexual ‘perversion’ followed automatically. The ancient Indians were a highly cultured people; so were the Persians; homosexuality was taken for granted in both countries. (In illustrated editions of Omar Khayyam, the ‘beloved’ is usually portrayed as a girl, but was probably a handsome boy.)

When we come to ancient Rome, we enter an even more ‘modern’ atmosphere. In fact, anyone who has read one of the James Bond books has a fair idea of the way the ancient Roman thought about sex. The highly spiritual Greek ideal of love has vanished; the Latin word ‘amor’ means something far closer to ‘desire’—as used, for example, by Eugene O’Neil in his title Desire under the Elms. The Latin poets—Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Lucretius—see love as an ecstasy and a torment. It is not at all unlike the atmosphere of a Tennessee Williams play. Roman religion is all closely connected with sex, and the symbol of the erect penis is prominent in Roman painting. In fact, it might almost be said that the symbol of ancient Rome is an erect penis—the symbol of a coarse vitality, a powerful urge to dominate and conquer. Conquering Roman emperors and generals never failed to erect a ‘column’ to themselves. Homosexuality was as widely accepted as in Greece, but without the excuse of intellectual idealism. Bestiality—intercourse with animals—was also taken for granted, as with the Ammonites. (The latter, who worshipped the god Moloch, had male and female prostitutes in their temples, as well as ‘sacred dogs’—also for the use of worshippers; the money obtained in this way was placed on the altar of the god.)

Now the interesting point about most of these ancient civilisations is that in all of them marriage was regarded as sacred. The purpose of marriage, after all, is to continue the race. Three thousand years ago, the population was relatively small—there were only about a hundred million people in the whole world. (Nowadays, the population increases by that number every three years. At the time of writing, world population is about two and a half billion.) It was important to keep the population high. In ancient Rome, the Emperor Augustus became so alarmed at the way the population was falling—due to the increase in homosexuality and prostitution—that he made laws penalising unmarried men over twenty and unmarried women over twenty-five, and also childless couples. (Even this measure failed to save the situation.)

This is why marriage has always been held to be sacred, and female virtue so important. Even the Romans—who took an easygoing view of most sexual offences—had harsh laws to deal with men who seduced married women.

On the other hand, prostitutes and prostitution have been accepted by almost every ancient civilisation. The Greeks, Romans, and even the Hebrews, had temple prostitutes—that is, priestesses who prostituted themselves and gave the money to the god. So in most of these civilisations, women tended to be sharply divided into two kinds—virtuous wives and prostitutes. (Kept mistresses formed a third common category.) The words ‘Roman matron’, for example, conjure up a picture of a beautiful but frigid woman who looks as if she dislikes sex—and who, like Lucrece, commits suicide if she has it forced on her. If the Roman wanted sexual pleasure he went to a prostitute, or to his mistress or boy friend.

I make this point here because it will prove to be of importance later. Sex tends to get divided into two departments: pleasure and childbearing, the mistress and the wife, the perverted and the ‘normal’, and these are all closely related. In the case of the Greeks and Romans, we can see clearly how this happened. Their women were little more than housekeepers and childbearers.

Now came the greatest sexual revolution in world history—the Christian revolution. But before speaking of this, we must emphasise that most early religions tended to be involved with sex. Primitive man, whether he lived in Egypt or Greece or Mexico, regarded the penis as a kind of sacred rod, and ancient temples are full of phallic symbols. According to the Hindu myth, the god Shiva lost his penis through a curse; it fell off and sank into the ground, and then grew so enormous that its roots reached to the centre of the earth and its head reached the sky. It turned to fire and caused earthquakes and natural catastrophes. Two of the gods, Vishnu and Brahma, went to investigate its size, and discovered it to be infinite. So Devi, the great goddess, was asked if she would receive the organ in her vagina; she agreed, and the world was saved. The gods then advised men never to dare to curse the penis again, but to regard it as sacred. This is the myth the Hindus invented to explain why their religion was so full of sexual mysteries.

In many of the ancient religions, the penis was symbolised as a snake, and also sometimes as a fish. (The reasons for both are obvious, the fish is shiny and slippery; the snake can enter hidden places.) The snake was one of the chief symbols of the Greek god Dionysus (or Bacchus), the god of wine—although he is sometimes portrayed as a wild bull, sometimes as a he-goat. All this would make it clear—even if we had no other evidence—that the religion of Dionysus was largely sexual. In the Dionysian rites, the worshippers stripped and made themselves drunk with wine and dancing, and then—like the Eskimoes—coupled freely. All this was a part of the worship of the god; they believed that their ecstasy proved that he descended among them. In America today there are cults of snake worshippers, who handle snakes to work themselves into a frenzy. But although there are no open sexual rites here, one investigator mentions that at a meeting he attended one young man was there specifically for the purpose of seducing girls while they were in this state of hysteria.[1] This kind of total abandonment of the everyday personality is inevitably associated with sexual abandonment.

Most of the ancient religions possessed these sexual elements. Christianity set out to change all that. Nowadays it is the fashion to sneer about the Christian attempt to turn sex into sin; but it is far more important to understand it.

No religion quite like Christianity had existed before. The Greeks thought that the ‘underworld’ was literally under the ground, and that the gods lived on the top of Mount Olympus. Their gods behaved very much like ordinary men and women, with jealousies, feuds, seductions and quarrels. Exactly the same is true of the gods of the north—Thor, Odin and the rest. The religion of the Hindus was altogether more profound; but as far as the common people were concerned, it was another religion of gods and demons and endless rivalries.

The Jews alone possessed a religion with one God, but they were very literal-minded about it all; they were the Chosen People of their deity, and he frequently intervened in human affairs to hold back the Red Sea, knock down the walls of Jericho, and so on.

But the human race was slowly growing up. The religions that suited simple farmers and warriors no longer fulfilled the inner needs of people who were learning to use their imaginations. And the Christian religion was profounder, greater than any religion that had so far appeared—with the possible and doubtful exception of Buddhism.

To begin with—and this is fundamental—it was a religion of the end of the world. It was a religion of people who found human life deeply unsatisfying. It expressed a feeling of revolt with the old, stupid way that human beings live—battling against nature, or against one another. Jesus told his followers—untruthfully, it turned out—that the end of the world would come within the lifetime of people then alive. There would be a great battle—Armageddon—and the wicked would perish, while the rest of humankind would live happily on an earth turned into Paradise.

But quite apart from this rather cheap appeal to fear, Christianity had a more positive appeal. (Otherwise, it would have died out when the end of the world failed to arrive.) It was as different from the old religions as classical music is from jazz, or as great literature is from the daily newspaper. It was a kind of ‘highbrow’ religion. People were growing up; they were getting deeper, and they wanted a deeper religion, not the old antics of the Greek gods (who had all been given Roman names). The word is unfashionable, but we can only say that it was a nobler religion than anything that had gone before. This was the reason it became so powerful. Human beings are not animals—not entirely, anyway—and they are always trying to get away from the animal part of themselves, and this harsh Nature that treats them as if they were animals. Christianity was the first religion that said: ‘You are not animals! You are immortal souls.’ It was just what everybody wanted to believe, at that stage in human history. Out of sheer reaction against the religions of the past, and the materialistic stupidity of Roman civilisation, and the bigotry of the Jewish religion, people swallowed the idea lock, stock and barrel. Christians marched to the arena singing, happy to be used as living torches or fed to the lions. If their higher aspirations failed at the last moment, they still had the hope of waking up sitting at the right hand of Jesus, and having the pleasure of seeing their torturers in Hell. (Although the Christian idea of Hell was a considerably later development; during its early years, Christianity still believed in the end of the world and the battle of Armageddon.)

Once we understand all this, we shall cease to make the mistake of attacking Christianity as a dull, sin-ridden religion that replaced the cheerful immorality of the Greeks and Romans. It had to come; humanity was ready for it—in fact, almost dying of hunger for it. If Jesus had not come along at this convenient moment, it would have had to be some other prophet or teacher. (Among the Jews, at this time, Saviours appeared every six months or so.) As it is, the Jesus and the Christianity we know today are almost completely invented. Jesus was actually a hunchback, about four feet six inches high, with a long nose and a half-bald head, and a rather scanty black beard. In Christian mythology he became the tall, blue-eyed Saviour with a blond beard and abundant locks. He taught his followers that the kingdom of God was within them, and that they ought to love their neighbours. His highly neurotic and imaginative disciple St. Paul quickly changed all this; Jesus was the Son of God, and he had died on the cross as a kind of scapegoat for human sin—to guarantee that even a sinner could get into heaven if he declared himself a Christian. It is unnecessary to say that Jesus never taught anything of the sort, and that St. Paul’s version of Christianity is the exact opposite of what Jesus meant.

It was St. Paul who gave Christianity its anti-sex tendency, explaining that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’, and implying that the good Christian should be able to do without sex. (But, of course, Paul also believed that the end of the world would occur in his lifetime, so the question of continuing the race did not arise.) Early Christians continued this tendency by producing the myth of the ‘virgin birth’ and inaugurating a cult of the virgin (conveniently forgetting that Jesus had several brothers, so that even if Mary produced Jesus in this mystical manner, she certainly did not remain the exclusive ‘bride of God’.)

The reaction against sex was largely a reaction against the old pagan religions with their endless phallic symbols. But it is interesting to note that the early Christians chose one of these sexual symbols for their own sign—the fish. The element of sex, thrown out of the front door, was creeping in again by the back. When the Christians finally became the masters of Rome in A.D., 312 and Constantine became the first Christian Emperor, the old pagan ideas began to creep back with a vengeance. Many old pagan festivals were ‘Christianised’, but this meant that Christianity was partly paganised. Women who entered convents became the ‘mystic bride of Christ’, and there can be no doubt that their mystical ecstasies contained a strong element of sex. There were far more women in the world than men; but since the Christian law said only one woman to every man, this meant that a large proportion of them spent their lives in sexual frustration. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that sex and religion again intermingled, as they had done in the days of Dionysus and Osiris. But sex was now heavily disguised under the veils of religion; and when it occasionally pushed its way out, it was promptly identified with the devil. Hence all the strange affairs of ‘possessed’ nuns—such as the one described in Aldous Huxley’s Devils of Loudun—and witches who confessed to having sexual intercourse with demons.

And finally—about sixteen centuries later—this Christianity, which had started out as the greatest idea the human race had ever known, became a decrepit tyrant. The fires of Seville were lighted; witches were burned; Jews were tortured; scientists were forced to recant and declare that the sun really moved around the earth. But all this was not really important. Christianity had done its great work; the human race was one stage further, and that was all that mattered. The Christianity of today is a dead religion, as the religions of Greece and Rome were dead two thousand years ago. It only waits to be swept away by the coming of some new great idea that will carry the human race a stage further.

But although I believe that Christianity is now a fading religion, with no more chance of a ‘revival’ than the paganism of Greece, there can be no question of sneering about it. It has served a tremendously important purpose—to take humanity over one of the most difficult and dangerous parts of its journey from the ape to the superman. Man of today is a completely different kind of creature from man of two thousand years ago. He has a mind, and he knows that by using it he can change both himself and his world. He is still, in many ways, far too much like ape from which he sprang—after all, a million years is not very long in the history of the earth—but he is no longer the passive, superstitious creature of a few thousand years ago.

Yet in many ways his present position is strangely like that of two thousand years ago. Once again, man is sick of himself and his world. Just as the early Christian was sick of the materialism of Rome and its dying religion, so the men of today are sick of the materialism of our civilisation, with its stupid capitalism and equally absurd communism. There is certainly no sign yet of some new religion, yet it is in the air. We know very little about it—except that it will be completely different from Christianity.

Is there anything else we can say about it? Well, there is this. Christianity differed from Roman paganism by being deeper. Its message to men was: ‘You are more god-like than you think.’ It taught man to see himself in a new light: no longer as the warrior or farmer, but as a kind of crusading spirit, out to change the world, to transform history. If it had not been for Christianity, Newton and Einstein would have been impossible.

Nowadays, the materialism of our civilisation has made us fall back into taking a very poor view of ourselves; nearly all serious modern literature is about weaklings, and its message seems to be that man is a weakling. There are many people who revolt instinctively against this, without quite knowing why. I have called such people ‘Outsiders’, and I shall speak about them at greater length in a later chapter. When a civilisation is full of ‘Outsiders’, it is hungry for a new religion—as the pagan world was two thousand years ago. Somehow, I think, a new religion—or some new great idea which may not be a ‘religion’ in the old sense—will raise up once again that feeling that man is more of a god than he knows, and that great changes may be closer than we realise.

Now to return to sex—but I must repeat that these discussions of religion are absolutely necessary to understand the subject.

What is happening to our civilisation today is very much like what happened to Roman civilisation two thousand years ago. That is to say, it is falling apart. Anyone who wants to get a clear picture of what happened to Rome should read Tacitus and Suetonius—or, alternatively, Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius—and then go on to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Rome had become a civilisation that thought of little but sex and war—just like ourselves. Every form of sexual perversion was widespread and was taken for granted. The Emperor Nero actually ‘married’ a boy who was dressed up as a girl—with great pomp and ceremony; he also committed incest with his mother for the sake of a new sexual thrill. The histories of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero are so full of scatological details of this kind that most ‘popular’ translations leave great portions in Latin.

Future historians, studying the world of the twentieth century, will also observe the curious breakdown of morals. Books like Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fanny Hill and the James Bond novels will be regarded as interesting documents of this breakdown.[2] They will not be condemned—neither do I intend to condemn them here; they will merely be recognised as the signs of a process similar to that which took place in ancient Rome in the time of Jesus.

And this, I think, places in perspective what is happening to our sexual morals in the twentieth century. Sex no longer has a great deal to do with procreation—and perhaps this is just as well, considering the ‘population explosion’. (By the time this book is published, it is even possible that the Roman Catholic church will have changed its policy of two thousand years, and approved birth-control.) The women of today have far more freedom than the women of ancient Greece or Rome; they are better educated; they are entering most fields that used to be exclusively masculine—politics, science, art, social work, the army and the police force. So the ‘sexual revolution’ is not confined to men alone—as it was in Greece and Rome. This means, at any rate, that homosexuality has a powerful rival. The ancient Greek did not go around seducing unmarried virgins; he stuck to prostitutes and attractive young men. Nowadays, very few girls are virgins when they marry. This is a major difference between our time and the time of Socrates or of Jesus. The sexual revolution affects everybody. Whether this is a good or a bad thing will have to be seen.

To summarise. There can be no reasonable doubt that our civilisation has reached the same stage that Rome had reached two thousand years ago. But not quite the same; history does not go in a circle, but in a spiral. At the time of writing this, I receive in the post the figures for last year’s crime rate in Los Angeles. Every class of crime has increased from the previous year; juvenile delinquency convictions are up to 269,584 (as compared to 244,312 the previous year—1963). Rape has increased from 3,058 in 1963 to 3,358 cases in 1964.

These figures reflect what is happening all over the world. In England—a rather more law-abiding country than the United States—crimes of violence (including rape) have doubled since the war, and the numbers increase steadily year by year, just as in America.

Let me emphasise that I am not quoting these figures in any pessimistic spirit, to show that our civilisation is doomed. I don’t believe it is. But we may as well face squarely the kind of thing that the historian of the future will say about us. ‘Their civilisation had become so complicated that they didn’t know whether they were on their heads or their heels. They were too clever and well-educated to be kept in order by priests and kings, but all their cleverness did not give them a sense of purpose. And the main thing we notice about them is that they seemed at a loose end—strangely bored and exhausted. In 1914 they had one of the greatest wars in history—nearly nine million people died—and you would have thought that this would really have woken them up to the advantages of a sense of purpose. But no; it only made them plunge into an orgy of forgetfulness—the jazz age. The same thing happened again a mere twenty-five years later. A half insane power maniac, already suffering from venereal disease, set out to conquer Europe. This time, the total losses were fifteen million. When the power maniac was defeated, the whole world went wild with delight. You would have thought: Now their civilisation will become really great. This will turn them into serious men with a purpose. But no. The politicians went on squabbling. The new jazz age was also the television age, the age of Lolita and James Bond, of heroin and marihuana. Violence, suicide, insanity, sex crime, reached a new height ... ’

Now all this, I agree, makes it look as if there is no hope for us; as if the patient is suffering from so many diseases that he cannot possibly survive.

This view was, in fact, first put forward by the German writer Oswald Spengler, soon after the first war. His enormous work was called The Decline of the West, and he argued that civilisations, like men, get older and die—and he went on to point out that our civilisation shows all the signs of being on its death-bed. A more recent historian made the same point, more convincingly, in an even larger work called The Study of History; but Arnold Toynbee is slightly less pessimistic than Spengler.

I do not believe that things are as bad as all that. To begin with, it takes civilisations a long time to die—Rome took many centuries—so there is plenty of time to solve the problem. And there are already signs that we shall learn to solve it. There will not be some new ‘religion’, because men have got beyond the stage when they could swallow the basic essentials for religion—the myths and superstitions and dogmas. But now science itself is ceasing to be so dogmatic and materialistic, and is beginning to recognise that humankind may be on the brink of some enormous change. Christianity was a great revolution because it taught man that he possessed greater powers than he realised. Now, with new investigations into ‘depth psychology’, ‘extra-sensory perception’, telepathy and so on, science may do precisely that. It may take a long time—but there is plenty of time. The downfall of Rome was hastened by a horde of barbarians. In the modern world, with the hydrogen bomb creating an uneasy balance of power, and the conquest of space facing us as one of our greatest challenges, there is unlikely to be a new invasion of barbarism. All we can say at the moment is that we are moving in the right direction.

All this, I repeat, must be understood before we can really understand what is happening to sexual morals in the twentieth century. There is bound to be an increase in sexual promiscuity, as well as in homosexuality. This does not prove that our civilisation is dying. The earliest men were promiscuous; the greatest ages of civilisation have had a high percentage of promiscuity and homosexuality.

To underline this point, we might consider what is happening to sexual morals in other countries of the world.

In Russia and China, promiscuity is still frowned upon. In China, it is strictly one woman to one man, and adultery and pre-marital intercourse are treated with Victorian severity. All this is understandable, since both countries are in the grip of a great social experiment that supplies a powerful sense of purpose. How long communism can continue to supply this sense of purpose when these countries reach the Western level of affluence is an open question.

In Japan, on the other hand, sex is treated with a freedom that is hardly conceivable to the English. There seems to be absolutely no shame attached to it. Masturbation is regarded simply as a solitary entertainment, like reading. In Japan the male is supreme, and a young boy is regarded as being much the superior of his mothers and sisters, even in the cradle. His mother will point out his sexual member to him, and take pride in exhibiting it to her friends if it is large. So if he is found playing with it, or examining the anatomy of his sisters or other female playmates, this is regarded as all very normal and encouraging.

The fact that the man is so supreme means that extramarital sex is also taken for granted. No wife would dare to object to her husband keeping a mistress—particularly if he is a wealthy or influential man. (Again, the Japanese character is as far from democratic as can be imagined; everyone in society has his place, and it is observed with great strictness. You can judge a man’s rank exactly by the depth of the bows he receives.) And since the son of the house is so much an object of hope and admiration, he is often initiated into the ways of sex at an early age—his father may solemnly take him to a brothel as a birthday present.

This frankness about sex means that our English obsession with pornographic literature is almost entirely absent. Fanny Hill would be regarded as a quite amusing and instructive novel in Japan, but certainly not as sexually stimulating. It would only arouse surprise that anyone should want to be stimulated in this way, when women are so amenable. Up to a few years ago, shops quite openly sold ‘bride books’, with pictures and text that were intended to stimulate young couples. But it was all quite free of ‘gloating’; it was taken for granted that a young couple would sit looking at a ‘bride book’ together and then proceed to practise its instructions; it was regarded as harmless as the family album. Shops also sold devices intended to increase the pleasure of masturbation. As Japan has become violently Americanised since the war, much of this trade has gone ‘under the counter’. It will be interesting to see how far the Japanese allow themselves to be pushed in the direction of Western prudery about sex.

It should be mentioned that this worship of the male has an uncomfortable aspect; the male feels that he carries all the hopes of his family, and may become extremely neurotic about it. It is quite common for schoolboys who have failed their exams to commit suicide in Japan. And here again, the Japanese attitude seems incomprehensible to a Westerner. Suicide is not regarded as a stupid or even criminal act; a family whose son has thrown himself under a train because he has failed his exam will feel as proud of him as if he had passed it; he has demonstrated his rigid sense of honour and his freedom from cowardice, and it is as honourable as death in battle.

The Japanese are a strange race; where sex and alcohol are concerned, they are completely free of inhibitions; but in all other personal relations they are riddled with inhibitions that would lead most Westerners to suicide. People behave as if they are afraid of one another. An employer would never dare to reprimand an employee for bad work; it would be too deep and serious an insult. And an employer who deliberately spoke insultingly to an employee would be risking a violent reprisal, perhaps even an attempt at murder. The most familiar of Japanese neuroses is a kind of fear of other people. The sufferer cannot look other people in the face, and blushes if he is spoken to. It becomes a tremendous and terrible decision to say ‘Good morning’. He behaves as if all his skin had been stripped off, and every personal contact was intensely painful.

So while the Western influence on Japan may be thoroughly bad where sex is concerned, it can hardly fail to be good in most other things. The Japanese are like permanent teenagers riddled with shyness and awkwardness. The younger generation in Japan is developing a ‘free and easy’ manner that is often shocking to parents, but is undoubtedly a healthy sign. The Japanese badly need to learn that ‘losing face’ is one of the lesser catastrophes of life. If they can teach us to treat sex as casually as we treat ‘losing face’, it will be an excellent bargain.

The mention of suicide brings us naturally to Sweden, which has a suicide rate equal to that of Japan. One person in every 5,000 commits suicide every year. The reason that I dwell on the suicide rate should be clear enough. Suicide is a disease of boredom. The country with the lowest suicide rate in the world is also one of the poorest—southern Ireland. (Only one person in 50,000 commits suicide there.) This is true the world over. Where there is poverty, suicide is low. Where there is prosperity—in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland—suicide is high. (Switzerland is the highest in the world; 23 people in every hundred thousand.) The English suicide rate is identical with the American: one person in ten thousand—just half as high as Sweden.

The Swedish attitude to sex is charmingly casual. The last time I was there, one of the catch-phrases was ‘Let’s go to bed and see if we like one another’. Another was: ‘That was marvellous—what’s your name?’ Abortion is legal. There is little censorship of literature. (Nabokov’s Lolita, which was a best seller in England and America, was published there without any fuss some years before it came out in England, and its sales were very low.) Sweden is one of the most efficiently run countries in the world, with almost no unemployment, a highly civilised penal code—most prisons are ‘open’, and their standard of comfort is as high as the average British family hotel. The strange consequence[3] is that adultery and suicide are by way of being national hobbies. This, of course, is an exaggeration; but it conveys something of the shock felt by an English observer who investigates Swedish society.

All this is worth noting because England and America are becoming more like Sweden year by year. It is time we began anticipating the problems.

Most Englishmen would be surprised to learn that America is still one of the most puritanical countries in the world—although obviously this is changing steadily. I observed this for myself when I did a lecture tour of American colleges two years ago. For the Englishman, America is the home of Hollywood and its highly publicised adulteries, of glossy magazines full of half-naked girls; it is the country that published Lady Chatterley and Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill quite openly long before England dared to follow suit, and that does not raise an eyebrow at Tennessee Williams’s lurid concoctions of homosexuality, incest and necrophily. But the Englishman does not realise that this is partly because the American is far more impressed by ‘culture’ than the English ever were, and are therefore more willing to concede that Lady Chatterley and the rest are serious literature.

In most American colleges—where one might expect a high degree of sexual freedom—there is, in practice, an almost Victorian attitude to sex. My own first awareness of this came at a college in California, when an extremely attractive girl in shorts and a tight sweater asked if she could speak to me privately. When it came to the point, she wanted to ask my advice about her boy friend. They had been going together for two years, and were getting married in a few months; she wanted to know if he would ‘lose respect’ for her if she gave herself to him before the wedding night. I found out later that a large percentage of American girls have the same attitude to sex—a fearful cautiousness. Sex is talked about a great deal and thought about even more; but the actual practice lags some distance behind. This is no doubt due to the American attitude to women; the tendency (a) to regard them as equals, (b) to idealise them. Since a woman knows that she is in an inferior position where sex is concerned—the man’s interest is in ‘making’ her and adding to his score—she understandably tries to compensate by placing a high value on her virginity. But since it is also important for the American girl to be sexually desirable—hence the tight sweaters and shorts—many of them become ‘teasers’. (The full phrase is unprintable here.) This may add to the interest of the American girl’s sex life, but it can hardly add to the virility and confidence of the American male. (On the contrary, a course of ‘teasing’ is likely to end by giving a man a deep-rooted sexual inferiority complex.)

What is clear, then, is that the somewhat prudish attitude towards sex in England and America is due to the relatively high position of women in these countries. India and Japan used to treat women as chattels; so there was no one to object to such works as the Kama Sutra and the Perfumed Garden—classic works on the art of making love. It is only recently that we have dared to print them openly in England and America; even then, only under the guise of ‘classics’; no modern doctor would dare to write a book on love-making as detailed as the Kama Sutra. Times are changing. India and Japan become more prudish and ‘westernised’, while the countries of the West begin to take the franker, oriental attitude towards sex. This does not mean that Western women are going to sink into a position of inferiority. What it means is simply that the East and the West are giving one another some of the best elements in their attitude towards sex. Women in the East will become steadily more important as their opportunities for education improve. In the West, we shall come to realise that prudishness is not necessarily a sign of a highly developed civilisation, and that neither is a certain degree of sexual freedom a sign of decadence.

Take, for example, a typically Western novel like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, set in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. The plot turns on the adultery of Hester Prynne—which has produced an illegitimate daughter—and on the fact that the unknown father of the child is the village minister; the book is mainly about the tortured conscience of the minister, which finally leads him to confess his ‘sin’ in public. An Englishman or an American can still read this novel with a certain interest, although it seems rather old-fashioned. An Indian or a Japanese would find it almost incomprehensible, except as a historical curiosity. Well, would we be better off if our morals were still those of The Scarlet Letter? A few die-hards will answer yes, but the rest of us can see that this kind of thing would simply not do in the age of space travel and the hydrogen bomb. It is far better for civilisation that we understand the Indian or Japanese attitude. The morality of The Scarlet Letter is all a part of a narrow parochialism. To reject it does not mean that we have chosen wickedness and immorality—only that the whole world today is smaller than Massachusetts three hundred years ago. If we are sensible about it, this will all be to our advantage.

Let me end this chapter by repeating my central point. The sexual problems with which I am dealing in this book are a side issue of a more important problem that affects the whole human race at this point in history. Mankind advances in a series of great clumsy leaps. What is more, it usually fails to understand the advance it has made. The early Christians did not understand exactly why they were reacting so violently to the religion of ancient Rome. Men do things instinctively; only later do they understand why they did them. A typical example is Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern science, and the man who did more than anyone else to destroy the old dogmatic religion; he spent most of his spare time writing an enormous commentary on the Book of Daniel, and believed that this was his most important work.

To summarise briefly. First came the ape-man, with no time to think of anything but food and shelter. Then came civilised man with time to spare, and he used his surplus energy in making war on his neighbours. Then came Christian man, whose spirit hungered for something more than fighting and tilling the ground. He set man a new goal: to leave behind his animal nature. Then came scientific man, and destroyed the elements of superstition and dogma in Christianity. This change was so tremendous that man is still recovering from the shock. But the great question mark faces us: What now?

1 William Sargant: Battle for the Mind.

2 See Chapter 6

3 I am not suggesting that the high suicide rate is entirely a matter of too much comfort; there are many other factors. See Herbert Hendin’s book Suicide and Scandinavia.

3: The Problem of Sexual Perversion

Sexual attraction based on the ‘forbidden’. Hence perversion. Homosexuality and transvestitism. Auto-eroticism, fetichism. Sadism and the Marquis de Sade. The ‘moonlight murderer’ of Texarcana. Jack the Ripper. Lack of early affection the cause of anti-social behaviour and mental instability. Marilyn Monroe and Lucia Joyce.

We must now face a question that arises naturally out of the last chapter: the question of homosexuality, and of ‘sexual deviations’ in general. It is not a pleasant subject; but unless you live in a monastery or a nunnery, it is one that you are bound to encounter a great deal in the modern world, and it is important to understand it.

We tend to have a very definite idea of what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘abnormal’ in sex. It is ‘normal’ for a man and woman to fall in love, get married and produce a family. If the husband takes an interest in the typist at his work, and seduces her, that is still ‘normal’, although perhaps undesirable, but if he took an interest in the office boy, this would definitely be ‘abnormal’.

But I have tried to show that our primitive ancestors may not have been monogamous; in fact, they may have known nothing about the system of husbands and wives. The women of the tribe produced children—having no idea of how they came to have them; the men of the tribe treated sex as a pleasant recreation after hunting, and chose whoever happened to be available. This is not certain, but it is highly possible. And it indicates that what we call the ‘normal’ family relationship may not be ‘natural’ to human beings. And we have seen that the Greeks and Romans insisted upon marital fidelity for social reasons, not because the Greeks and Romans were naturally good family men.

So let us be cautious before we start talking about what is ‘natural’ to the sexual instinct. We may be mistaking habits for instincts.

When we consider the matter without prejudice, we see that the one thing we can take for granted is the existence of the ‘sexual urge’, which is basically a selfish urge. By this I mean that it is like the need to eat, or to get warm when you are cold, or to sleep when you are tired. It certainly has more in common with these impulses than with the mother’s need to protect her child. Admittedly, the sexual impulse in human beings is so mixed up with the imagination that it is difficult to separate them. But it can be seen in a more ‘pure’ state in animals. A male dog will sometimes lock its front paws around someone’s leg and then move itself against him in a state of obvious sexual excitement. Monkeys at the zoo can be seen masturbating and attempting to commit homosexual acts with other monkeys. Monkeys and dogs possess very little of what we call imagination; in fact, one authority states that a monkey ‘cannot retain a mental image long enough to reflect on it’.

So it is probably fair to assume that the basic sexual impulse is a very simple pleasure impulse, as straightforward as holding your hands out to a warm fire. The sexual organs accumulate a kind of static electricity, a sexual energy, that they wish to discharge. They are like a loaded gun, waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

At this point, the human imagination enters. How do we choose who (or what) is to pull the trigger? In animals, there is no problem. The female animal goes ‘on heat’, which means that she releases a pungent-smelling scent from her sexual organs, and the male animal finds it irresistible. But human beings long ago dispensed with this method. And when we face this matter honestly, we have to recognise that the human sexual urge seems to be based upon urges that have very little to do with ‘love’. There is a strong sense of the ‘forbidden’ that seems to play the most important part. In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare describes Lucrece as a walled city, and Tarquin’s desire ‘to enter that sweet city’. This phrase catches something basic about the male sexual impulse. And in his novel Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann has a discussion between two characters on the subject of marriage, and one of them jeers at the words of the marriage service: ‘These twain shall be one flesh’, pointing out that if they ever did become ‘one flesh’ they would lose all interest in one another. Sex depends on strangeness, upon the idea of the forbidden.

Once we have grasped this, we have grasped the meaning of all sexual perversions and deviations. Everything depends upon what you happen to find strange or forbidden. Thomas Mann’s work reveals that he was fascinated by the idea of incest between brother and sister; but this may be because he never had a sister. Most brothers and sisters find one another sexually uninteresting precisely because this ‘strangeness’ does not exist between them; they are too familiar.

The same obviously applies to homosexuality. The ‘normal’ man is not excited by other men because they are too much like himself, too familiar. But if, for example, he happens to be at a boarding school when his sexual instincts are beginning to awaken and demand an outlet, the element of ‘forbidden-ness’ in sex-play with other boys may excite him as much as the forbidden-ness of a girl excites the average male. And once the imagination has been ‘hypnotised’ by an idea of strangeness and forbidden-ness, it has usually acquired a permanent taste.

Apart from this type of ‘acquired’ homosexuality, there is almost certainly another type that is more purely physical in origin. Although Robert Cowell emphasised that he was never attracted by other men in the days when he was a man, he admits that his aggressive masculinity and dislike of ‘queers’ was probably an unconscious attempt to compensate for his real tendencies. If hormones determine sex, it is easy enough to understand how a man can be born with a strong element of the female in him—or vice versa. There can be no doubt that scientists will one day understand exactly what produces homosexuality in the ‘born homosexuals’. In the meantime, it doesn’t matter particularly. Homosexuals, on the whole, do no one any harm. They tend to be clever and ‘artistic’, and a vast proportion of our culture and our entertainments industry is due to homosexuals. If you go to the cinema or the theatre, or switch on your television set, there is a considerable chance that you are watching homosexuals, and that the film—or play, or show—has been written and produced by them. Many girls would be startled to discover that their favourite heart-throb is a homosexual, but it is highly likely. Homosexuals tend to be gregarious by nature. They like other people, and attach great importance to their personal relations. (Some of them attach far too much importance to their personal relations, and can be extremely exasperating in consequence.)

All this means that homosexuals add a great deal of colour to our social life.

There is, of course, a negative side to this balance sheet. It is difficult to imagine a homosexual Beethoven or Newton or Shaw. Homosexuals, as a rule, do not make philosophers or scientists, because few of them possess that completely impersonal devotion to knowledge. (I can think of plenty of great artists, poets and musicians who were homosexual, but not of a single scientist or philosopher.) All the same, they play an extremely important part in our cultural life, since they produce an atmosphere that is conducive to creative work. There can be few creative men—in art, literature or science—who have not, at some point in their careers, owed a great deal to the kindness or encouragement of homosexuals.

Fortunately, the old school that feels that all homosexuals ‘ought to be horsewhipped’ is fast dying away. We may well live to see the day when it is taken so much for granted that the biographies in Who’s Who will carry a note ‘Homosexual’ or ‘Heterosexual’. It is very doubtful whether the percentage of homosexuals would increase if they were taken for granted in this way.

We can say, then, that homosexuality has no right to be included in a chapter on sexual perversions. Today, it is no longer regarded as a particularly nasty vice, and there is no reason why it should be. The old objection to homosexuality was that it does not people the earth. This is true; but in these days of over-population, hardly important. The day is probably approaching when we shall take it for granted that the world is made up of three sexes: male, female and homosexual.

While we are on the subject of homosexuality, we should also mention another curious ‘deviation’—transvestitism, the tendency of certain men to dress up as women. It may, of course, be associated with homosexuality; but, strangely enough, is often not. The key to this deviation lies again in the idea of ‘forbidden-ness’, and a kind of obscure desire to be the forbidden object as well as to possess it.

I mention transvestitism here for another reason. If we try to use the imagination to grasp why a man—sometimes an extremely masculine man—should want to dress up as a woman, we shall begin to understand something basic about the sexual instinct. In Plato’s Symposium, the playwright Aristophanes suggests a comic legend about how the sexes came to exist. He declares that once upon a time there was only one sex, and human beings were spherical creatures with four arms, four legs and two heads. But they became so powerful that the gods were worried, and they hit upon a method for reducing their power—to cut them in two down the middle. After this, human beings spent all their time looking for their ‘other half’, and had no time to be a challenge to the power of the gods.

Only a story, of course, and not even intended seriously ... Yet it states something important about ‘the human condition’. It is true that the most powerful impulse in our lives is this sexual impulse. Nearly all great art and all great poetry has sprung from it. The interesting thing about it is that it gives us a sense of purpose that goes beyond anything we experience in the course of everyday living. The stories of Guy de Maupassant reveal that this was what fascinated him about sex. A life might be utterly dreary and meaningless, so that when we read about it, we are inclined to say ‘Yes, life is really a bad joke .. ’ and yet behind the apparent meaninglessness there is this tremendous glow of instinctive purpose that tells us: No, life is not meaningless, but human beings are too stupid to see its meaning. Maupassant was no philosopher; he just recorded faithfully what he saw: the apparent futility of human existence, and this great power of sexuality that seems to have a purpose of its own, which Aristophanes tried to explain with his legend of spherical men ... But how do we explain it? How do we explain the transvestite’s desire to somehow become a woman? The mind tries to grasp the problem, and finds itself groping in the dark. And yet it is obviously groping at the basic mystery of human existence. When we think about this problem, we can see why the ancients associated sex and religion. They may not be identical, but they have very much in common.

Sex makes us aware that man is not a logical and rational being. He is driven by forces that he does not understand. He is a kind of puppet; but who is pulling the strings?

This is a matter that must be considered at length in a later chapter. For the moment, let us continue to examine the subject of sexual perversion, and what it can teach us about human nature.

But before we go more deeply into this question, I must repeat that it is a subject that cannot be avoided. To ignore it does far more harm than good. It is impossible to do any adult thinking on the subject of sex without encountering it almost immediately. So let us look it firmly in the face, and discover what can be learned from it. When we do this, we shall discover that we have turned on a light that illuminates the depths of the sexual impulse.

We may as well begin, then, by listing the types of perversion which you are likely to encounter if you take one of the more lurid Sunday newspapers.

First, there is auto-eroticism, or self-love, which should not be confused with onanism (or masturbation). The autoerotic is actually excited by the sight of his own body. This is usually due to a type of upbringing that is now becoming blessedly rarer: that is, when prudish parents lead the child to believe that there is something indecent in the naked human body, and so excite a morbid interest in nakedness.

Auto-eroticism is also associated with scopophilia, or the disease of peeping-toms. This is so obviously the outcome of frustration—and again, of bad upbringing—that no more need be said about it.

Next on the list, and among the commonest of sexual ‘ailments’, is fetichism: that is, when some inanimate object arouses sexual excitement because it is associated with sex, or early sexual experience. In the late nineteenth century, corset-fetichism was one of its commonest forms, since women often wore corsets next to their skin. In the present age, it seems to have disappeared almost entirely. This is not simply because corsets have become rarer, but also because women in general are less prudish about them. For the woman of the Victorian era, the corset was often a dark secret that she would have died rather than reveal. Consequently, the corset could become an object that aroused strong emotions in frustrated males. In the midtwentieth century, panty-fetichism has probably become the commonest form of this deviation. Books on sexual anomalies list many other kinds. Although all this may seem hard to understand at first sight, a little thought soon makes it plainer. If a man can be excited by a photograph of a naked girl, it is only one step further for him to be excited by the sight of her undergarments on a line. And from then on it is easy to understand how certain people can be excited by any object that is somehow associated in their minds with sexual excitement.

The only strange thing about all this is that the fetich often becomes more important than normal sex. For example, Stekel mentions a case of a man who could only have intercourse with his wife if she was wearing an apron smelling of milk. (Analysis revealed that he associated this with a nurse who used to play with his genitals.)

When you are dreaming, the most insane things can happen, and yet you do not notice that they are insane in your dream. They seem quite natural. This is because when you are awake you have a strong sense of cause and effect, which is weakened by sleep.

Well, we now know that we are never really ‘awake’; dreams surround us most of the time. So there is no cause for surprise in the fact that our sex lives are often slightly insane. If we were really awake, this would not happen. There would be no more sexual perversion. But we are not awake, and this often means that men and women find the reality of sex extremely disappointing compared to their daydreams. So who can be surprised if the reality and the daydreams get mixed up, and produce some odd perversions?

Closely connected with fetichism is the perversion that sounds most horrifying, but is actually fairly rare and harmless: necrophily, the love of the dead. There are a great many cases of this mentioned in textbooks on sex—usually among mortuary attendants, grave-diggers and others whose business brings them into contact with the dead.[1] The classic case of necrophily was that of Sergeant Bertrand, a French soldier of the nineteenth century, who was sent to prison for three years for violating graveyards.

Bertrand would undergo immense pain and hardship to satisfy his strange desires; for example, he would strip naked and swim icy rivers on winter nights. And yet Bertrand was a religious man who was known as an excellent soldier. Obviously, here was a case where a man’s self-discipline was so powerful that it half-strangled his emotions, and when these emotions found an unrestricted outlet, they burst out with the force of an exploding volcano. Bertrand was fundamentally a prude who could never ‘let himself go’ with living girls. We find it difficult to imagine Casanova or Frank Harris being attracted by a corpse—no matter how young and beautiful—because their boisterous and uninhibited personalities felt under no restraint with women. They were far less self-critical than Bertrand, and so less frustrated.

But there is another curious feature of the Bertrand case that takes us deeper into the mystery of the sexual impulse. Bertrand would always destroy the bodies after he had violated them. And this brings to mind a phrase used by Zola about his ‘human beast’ in the novel of that title. ‘He wanted to possess a woman to the point of destroying her.’ This strikes us as abnormal because we associate sex with love—with tenderness and caresses, with a feeling of protectiveness towards the woman.

But think of the feelings of a young man—of fourteen or so—who has just become keenly aware of his sexual desires but is too shy and awkward to satisfy them. Is there any element of love or protectiveness in this? No; he eyes the girls who pass him in the street as a wolf eyes a flock of sheep. If he reads in a newspaper an account of a rape, he is not shocked; on the contrary, he tends rather to envy the rapist. (Barbusse has a powerful but unpleasant scene near the beginning of Inferno,[2] in which a lawyer describes a particularly nasty sex murder at the dinner table, and the men in the room try to look shocked and indignant, but cannot conceal their excitement; even the women present obviously experience a morbid thrill.) He is like a man dying of thirst in the desert; his desire for water contains no love or tenderness; he only wants to gulp it down.

Men tend to be ashamed of the strength of their sexual desire—particularly in youth; they will not willingly admit it, or let it become apparent to other people. What goes on in their imagination remains a lifelong secret.

Now if a man is at all amiable and good-tempered, he will not want to behave like a wild animal towards the women of his acquaintance. The moment he talks to a girl, his desire takes second place; she is a human being with whom he is having a civilised relationship. Even if he does not feel much affection or protectiveness, he has to pretend that he does if he wants the girl. If he is at all a pleasant sort of man, he will usually marry young because the girl’s desire to get married strikes him as quite reasonable, and he is unwilling to hurt her. So the original fierceness of the desire gets covered up by all kinds of other impulses and social conventions.

But if we are honest, we have to admit that all this has nothing whatever to do with the desire of a young man. There is no more tenderness and love in the male sexual appetite than in the appetite for a good dinner. An ideal relationship will have equal proportions of tenderness and sexual desire. But there is no necessary connection. And when a man likes sex far too much to get married, and goes on into his thirties having ‘affairs’, the basic selfishness of the male sexual impulse becomes even more obvious. Repetition makes him feel that all women are basically alike, and he pursues them in the spirit of a big-game hunter. He may even take pleasure in keeping trophies of each one.

This is not to deny the reality of love between man and woman. I am only trying to point out that what we usually call love is actually a mixture of several other things: sexual desire, protectiveness, tenderness and desire for emotional security (i.e. a kind of cowardice). And the basic male appetite is a crude and quite impersonal desire. ‘It is not a woman I want; it is all women.’

In short, ‘love’ is possible between men and women because the man’s sexual appetite does not do the woman any damage. It is as if a tiger established a relationship with some kind of magic antelope that he could eat every day without actually harming it. No doubt the tiger and the antelope would end up by becoming quite fond of one another. But the relationship would still be based on the tiger’s hunger, not on love.

Once we have recognised this, we have begun to understand something fundamental about sexual perversion—and about the sexual impulse itself. A woman’s desire is to be ‘loved for herself’—to be worshipped if possible—and to be regarded with protectiveness; she wants to be treated as a human being, and her needs and desires to be constantly considered. The basic male desire is concerned with none of these things. They dilute it. This is why a man like Bertrand could never be completely satisfied with living mistresses. There was too much of the hungry wolf about him. But when he went on to destroy the bodies, he was making a gesture of defiance towards woman and society. The pure male sexual instinct had been unleashed, and it was roaring defiance at the frustrations imposed on it by convention.

It does not follow that all men are potential necrophiles. The case of Bertrand only covers one aspect of the male need for dominance. John Braine’s novel Room at the Top reveals another. This novel is so well known that I need do little more than summarise its theme here. Its hero, Joe Lampton, sets out to seduce an ‘upper class’ girl, Susan, at the same time that he is carrying on an affair with an older married woman. Joe Lampton’s desire for Susan is based on the fact that her father is rich. He is a working-class boy with a rather tough outlook on life, and Susan represents all he wants out of life: beauty, glamour, wealth, innocence. In fact, the girl is an empty-headed little fool who is utterly spoilt, and when Joe marries her she is promptly unfaithful to him. Joe’s other mistress, Alice, is worth ten of her. She is also a great deal more sexually satisfying. The interesting thing here is that Joe does not want Susan for ‘what she is’; neither is he ‘in love’ with her, although he is infatuated with her beauty. All this is simply another proof that the male sexual appetite is an almost criminal instinct. It is an instinct of aggression towards the female. He is a burglar, and she is a house to be broken into.

Yes, it must be faced that the attitude of men towards sex is totally different from that of women. Most women feel an instinctive and sharp dislike for the type of man’s magazine with nudes. (My wife, opening one of them, commented: ‘They look like cattle.’) Women do not buy those ‘photographic’ magazines full of pictures of muscular men in jockstraps; the largest market for these is among homosexuals.

She may be as interested in sex as a man (and women are interested in sex—this is one of the most delightful discoveries made by young men, who are inclined to be a little ashamed of their desires). But it is in a far more personal way.

Sadism

This brings us to the most unpleasant of all perversions, but one of the most interesting to the student of human nature—sadism.

Sadism derived its name from a strange little man called Donatien de Sade, who was born in France in 1740. The name of the Marquis de Sade conjures up pictures of a kind of combination of Frankenstein and Dracula, with red eyes and pointed teeth. This is a mistake, of the same kind that makes people think of Casanova as a kind of eighteenth-century film star, when he was actually an ugly confidence trickster. The real De Sade was a rather fat and oily little creature with a dirty mind. (His jailers in his last years complained that his conversation was consistently filthy—but in a gloating, schoolboy manner.) He never did anything very wicked, unless you count it a crime to write deliberately shocking books. The worst he was ever accused of was inflicting a few knife-cuts on a woman and pouring hot candle wax on them—a nasty occupation, but quite harmless compared with the goings-on of Hitler and Stalin in our own century.

The secret of De Sade was his desire to shock. He had an excellent brain: but he was rich (to begin with) and thoroughly weak. He found nothing better to do with his early life than to spend it in brothels. The episode of the hot candle wax landed him in trouble with the law when he was still fairly young (mainly because he had kidnapped the lady, a cook). From that time on, he was seldom out of trouble with the law, and soon generated the rebellious, aggressive attitude to society that is to be found in juvenile delinquents. So De Sade wrote a whole series of books that were intended to be a slap in the face for society—Justine, Juliette, The 120 Days of Sodom and so on. He takes a delight in showing important people—judges, bishops, headmasters—committing all kinds of sexual misdemeanours. It is clear that he loathed virtuous women too, and his novel Justine is a long act of revenge on them—the virtuous heroine gets violated on every other page. (An early version of this novel can now be bought in England; although it is ‘cleaner’ than later versions, it shows exactly what De Sade was up to.) But apart from being an act of revenge on virtuous women, Justine is also an attack on the hypocrisy of society. It says, in effect: ‘Virtue doesn’t always triumph. It usually comes off worst. The “triumph of virtue” is a lie invented by the crooks who run society, to keep the poor quiet ... ’ In his next novel, Juliette, De Sade reverses the coin, and shows the success of Justine’s wicked sister.

Quite a lot of people admire De Sade and think he is a ‘significant’ writer, a kind of romantic figure of defiance, like Milton’s Satan. But if you ever pick up a copy of The 120 Days of Sodom, you will see why this is wishful thinking. Sodom is such a deliberately filthy book that it could never be openly printed and sold in England or America.

It tells how a number of dirty old men get together in a country house, and decide to practise every kind of debauchery over a hundred and twenty days, with the help of a small army of beautiful boys and virtuous young girls (kidnapped, of course). The duke who leads these debauches is described as one of the wickedest men who has ever lived; he has killed his mother, his sister and three of his wives. The book itself cannot be described as pornographic. Its intention is not to cause sexual excitement, but to disgust and revolt. Perhaps its most significant episode describes a strange man whose only delight is to debauch innocence. He has no physical interest in the innocents he perverts. He is simply a magnificent and impressive talker who has the manners of a hot-gospeller. Whenever he has persuaded some innocent young girl to embark on a career of prostitution, he goes off well satisfied. He sounds very much like De Sade himself.

The main thing that comes over from the book is the tremendous aggressiveness of the male sexual impulse. Here it is stripped quite naked. He never lived to complete it (the manuscript was only discovered by accident), and the last part of the book only exists in the form of notes. But it appears that almost everyone in the house is finally massacred to satisfy the lusts of the three debauchees. Probably it is as well he never finished it. It is a singularly dreary book after the first 100 pages.

It is important because it provokes deep thought. You do not have to be at all prudish to be appalled by it—it is guaranteed to shock the most enthusiastic lover of dirty books. (I might add that I once lent it to a member of a ‘pornography club’—they circulate rather grubby typewritten manuscripts about rape and kindred subjects; he was baffled by it and confessed he could not read more than the first few pages.) De Sade intended to shock. With more courage, he might have become an anarchist and thrown bombs.

Yet there was an insane logic about De Sade. He reminds us of an ignorant savage who smashes a radio set to discover where the voices are coming from, and then, when he finds nothing, goes on to break all the valves. For all his intelligence, De Sade failed to see the obvious—that pleasure ceases to be pleasure if it is pushed beyond certain limits. A glass of whisky produces a pleasant sense of relaxation; a bottle may only make you sick, and two bottles, drunk quickly enough, produce death.

In our own time, De Sade is enjoying a certain popularity, and reputable critics write books about his ideas. But it should be understood that his popularity is virtue to his intelligence, not to his sadism. Most sadists known to criminal history have been brutal and stupid as well as cruel. And the greater the stupidity, the more the sadism becomes subject to ‘the law of diminishing returns’.

Consider, for example, the case of the unknown ‘moonlight murderer’ of Texarcana, Texas. In 1945, this man approached a car in which a courting couple were ‘petting’; he wrenched open the door and knocked the man unconscious with a blow from a revolver; then chased the girl, knocked her out, and raped her.

An unpleasant experience—but at least they got away with their lives and nothing worse than a bump on the head.

But a month later the same man found another courting couple in their car, within a mile of the scene of the earlier assault. This time he shot the man through the head, and dragged off the girl. When her body was found—also shot—it was discovered that she had been killed two hours later.

A month later, yet another couple were rash enough to park in the same area after a dance. The man was shot in the back three times; the girl—who was only fifteen—was dragged from the car. The doctor who examined her body discovered that she had been tortured for four hours—as well as raped—before she was murdered.

The ‘maniac’ attempted one more assault—he shot a farmer through the window of a house, and fired at the farmer’s wife. The wife rushed out to call neighbours and the gunman escaped; the farmer died of his wounds. The ‘maniac’ was never heard of again, but a few days later a stranger committed suicide in the locality by jumping under a train; a burnt-out car was found nearby, and its description tallied with the description of the murderer’s car. This may have been coincidence, but it seems unlikely.

Consider this horrible story more closely. It is about a man plunging deeper and deeper into hell. At first he is only sexually frustrated, and envies the men who kiss their girls in cars. He satisfies his desire by violence. But now he sees himself as a monster, a kind of werewolf. When he looks at the people in the street, or drinks in a bar, he thinks ‘If they could read my mind, they’d shoot me like a mad dog!’ He feels an outcast. But also, the desire has become stronger, and it is not restrained by good nature. If he thinks about it honestly, he must realise that there is no real difference between sleeping with a prostitute and raping a strange girl. The female body is the same; what he does is the same. He cannot do any more if he sleeps with the Queen of Sheba. But he is incapable of thinking clearly any more; guilt darkens his mind, and makes him a mass of uncontrollable emotion. It is like a thirst that becomes worse and worse. If plain water will not satisfy it, then nothing will: but he can no longer realise this. He feels that somehow it must be possible to satisfy it. Sex is an act of aggression against the woman, so in the next case, he takes aggression even further, and ends by killing her after two hours. This is not enough, and he tries to go further still; he tortures the girl for four hours. But it is like trying to cure a thirst by drinking petrol. All that he does is to increase his feeling of being a beast, a social outcast. He can now no longer have a normal social relationship with anyone, for he will always feel ‘Ah, if he only knew!’ Worse still, what is he to do now? It is impossible to go further. Besides, every chance he takes increases his chances of being caught. (By now, the whole country was in arms, and thousands of men had been interviewed by the police.) He might move to another part of the country, but if he commits a similar crime there, he will be even easier to find, as a stranger on the move ... Finally he sees that there is no solution but suicide.

The case of Jack the Ripper is almost certainly similar. The Ripper was a criminal maniac who terrorised the East End of London in 1888; his crimes were physically more gruesome than the Moonlight Murderer’s, since he always took away certain of his victim’s inner organs; but at least he killed them quickly, without torture. But, like the Moonlight Murderer, the Ripper became steadily worse; the mutilations became more elaborate in his second and third murders; then he killed two women in one night; then he killed a woman indoors, and was able to spend several hours dismembering the body. And after this, nothing ... To this day, no one has the least idea of the identity of Jack the Ripper. But it is impossible to doubt that he either (a) committed suicide, or (b) became so totally insane that he spent the rest of his life in an asylum, without anyone suspecting that here was the Whitechapel murderer.

If we think about these cases, we shall learn something about ourselves that we had not realised. No matter how much we may feel a ‘misfit’, a round peg in a square hole, we somehow feel we belong to human society, and this keeps us balanced and sane. But do you realise how near to insanity everybody is? We stay sane because we are not very adventurous. We seldom ask the kind of questions that will make us realise how big and empty the universe is. We stay within our narrow little boundaries, and eat when we’re hungry, and sleep when we’re tired, and always keep a long way from the ‘outer edges’ of being. But these sex murderers have gone too far, and over the edge.

In recent years, zoologists have discovered that if you bring up a chicken without any kind of affection in the first weeks of its life, it will become quite incapable of affection, and will cease to need it. If the chicken is taken away from its mother when it is a day old, and placed in a cage with a tortoise, it will come to regard the tortoise as its parent, and will become firmly attached to the tortoise, refusing to leave it. It needs affection so much in these early weeks that it will give affection to any creature who feeds it or provides it with companionship. But if it doesn’t get affection, then something dies inside it, and it will always be an ‘odd man out’. This is true of most animals. If a baby rat is deprived of affection and then put into a cage with several others, it will become a ‘criminal’, refusing to observe the social rules of the rat community, and becoming a thief and a rapist.

Human beings are much the same. We can take it almost completely for granted that the ‘Moonlight Murderer’ had almost no affection in early childhood—he may have been brought up in a foundlings’ home, for example. So those tiny threads that hold most of us to sanity—and decency—did not exist for him. The world was just a huge rat cage full of rats who were determined to give him as little as possible. He was probably a thief—perhaps a burglar. (Oddly enough, most of the worst sex-criminals begin as petty thieves.) Then one day it struck him that he could also steal ‘sex’ from the community. Then began the descent into darkness that ended under a train.

I will dwell on this for a little longer, because it is of great importance. Consider the case of Marilyn Monroe, who was the most famous film star in the world when she committed suicide in 1962. She was only thirty-six when she died, she was rich and beautiful, and adored by all the world. So why should she kill herself? The answer is to be found in those early years of childhood. She never knew her father—he walked out on her mother as soon as he heard she was pregnant. (They were not married, anyway.) Her mother was mentally unstable, and later became insane. So the young Marilyn Monroe—her real name was Norma Jean Baker—went from home to home, and had several sets of foster parents. In one of these ‘homes’ she was sexually assaulted by the lodger—she was nine at the time. She also spent two years in an orphanage.

And so those fine, spider-like threads that hold most of us to ‘normal life’ never had a chance to form properly; she never had a chance to take her life for granted. But this also meant that when she later had the opportunity to settle down and become a happily married woman, she could never trust the happiness; she expected it to break up at any moment. She could never relax. In a certain way, her mental condition was very similar to that of the Moonlight Murderer, for she also wanted a kind of ‘reality’ that would be deeper than ordinary life. The rest of us have ‘stable personalities’ because stability is a habit with us; we are in the habit of trusting life. Marilyn Monroe could never trust life in this way. No habit is so difficult to break as the habit of fear. So although her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller was undoubtedly happy, and the two of them were exceptionally well-suited, she could not treat it as a permanent thing; she seemed to experience a compulsion to break it up, out of a kind of fear that it could be broken.

What has all this to do with sadism? I am trying to show that life is not quite so ‘ordinary’ and stable as it looks. It is mostly our own laziness that makes it seem so.

You might reply: ‘In that case, thank God for laziness’. But you would not be entirely right. Our laziness may keep us sane and happy, but it also keeps us from becoming ‘superhuman’.

One more example. Lucia Joyce, the daughter of the novelist James Joyce, went insane. (At the time of writing she is in an asylum near Northampton.) When she was a child, Joyce was constantly on the move from country to country. His daughter, Lucia, had to learn French and German as well as English—and miss a year’s schooling each time she had to learn a new language. She loved her father (and disliked her mother), but Joyce was a cold, detached man who found it difficult to give much affection. In her early twenties, Lucia began to show signs of nervous breakdown. To one friend of the Joyce family she said frankly: ‘The trouble with me is that I’m sex-starved’. She was in love with an Irish writer called Samuel Beckett—who has since become famous as the author of Waiting for Godot and various novels in which nothing whatever happens. Beckett was the worst possible person to fall in love with, for he also suffered from some version of the ‘life-dislocation’ of Marilyn Monroe and the Moonlight Murderer. He would lie in bed all day because he could think of no reason to get up, and declared that he could not fall in love because he was ‘dead inside’. So with her frustrating life and her disappointments in love, Lucia got worse, and finally became violent. Once the downhill road had been embarked on, it was impossible to stop. It is exactly the same mechanism that made the Ripper’s crimes become more and more violent. Once the first threads are snapped, there seems to be no good reason for keeping the others intact. The victim wants to find ‘stability’ by hurling herself to the bottom of the ‘slope’. She does not realise that at the bottom of the slope lies death ...

I mention Lucia Joyce because of one curious aspect of her case. As she became more insane, she had periods of strange lucidity when she developed a power of second sight. According to her father, she became a kind of prophetess who could forsee the future, and on several occasions she foretold the death of a friend or relative with accuracy, or accurately foresaw some other event. Her insight into people was also devastating, so that in her rages she could say things that shattered her victims by being extremely cruel but true.

If Lucia Joyce had been lucky enough to fall in love and marry happily in her teens, she would almost certainly have remained perfectly sane all her life; but she would never have developed these rather frightening powers. Being ‘normal’ and ordinary has great advantages, but it may lead to mediocrity.

1 A more detailed account of the subject will be found in my Origins of the Sexual Impulse.

2 See next chapter.

4: The Male Urge to Conquest

Casual and aggressive nature of the male sexual impulse. Barbusse’s Inferno. The gap that exists between desire and its satisfaction. Human sexuality is visual. A Pagan’s Hosanna. Robert Irwin. The Peoria murderer. Mezzrow and drugs. The Great Lovers: Casanova, Frank Harris. The ‘desire for greatness’. Lord Byron. Henry Miller. Wells and Shaw.

It might be argued that ‘perversion’ proves nothing because, by its very nature, it is an ‘illness’, an abnormality, and therefore an exception.

In the present chapter, I want to show that this view is based on a false idea about the sexual impulse—at least in the male. Because his only biological task is the impregnation of the female, there is bound to be a certain casualness in his attitude towards sex. And under certain circumstances, casualness becomes another name for criminality—a burglar, for example, is casual about other people’s property.

In 1908, the French writer Henri Barbusse produced a novel called Inferno. It is the story of a man of thirty who comes to Paris to take a job. He is alone; no one cares about him, and he feels that life is stifling, dull and pointless.

He feels that life is a dream, and that when he dies it will be as if he has not lived.

Then he discovers a small hole in the wall of his hotel room, though which he can look into the next room. Quite suddenly, other people’s lives are opened to him. The first time he looks through the hole, he sees the chambermaid getting the room ready. He had never noticed her before, except to think that she was coarse and stank of sweat.

‘And now I look at her. Gently, night strips off the ugliness, wipes out the wretchedness, the pain ... It is because she is alone.’

The maid takes out a letter, and stands by the window reading it; then she kisses it, and goes out. Suddenly, she has become a person to him, and he feels less alone.

From this time onward, he spends most of his spare time looking through the hole in the wall, and he slowly begins to realise what life is really like. Without realising it, we are all in glass cages, unable to reach other people. Through an accident, he has escaped his cage.

It is a great pity that Inferno is a very bad book, for it could be a masterpiece with such a theme. Barbusse has a strong tendency to sentimentality (as can be seen from the passage about the maid kissing the letter). But in spite of its badness, it has some important passages, and makes certain points about the sexual impulse more clearly than any book I know. When a strange woman sits in front of the fire and pulls up her dress, he writes: ‘All my flesh cried out as if branded’, and in these words he has caught something of the terrible, sharp urgency of the male sexual impulse. (It must be remembered that Barbusse was writing at a time when women wore skirts to their ankles and men found it sexually exciting to catch a glimpse of their calves.) Then she undresses, and ‘My eyes, which my clenched hands had charged with their full force, my glance, heavy as flesh, clamoured for her. Forever, in spite of laws, in spite of clothes, the male’s eyes issue craving to a woman like a reptile ... ’ He has to restrain an impulse to break down the wall, to rush into the next room and seize her; but he overcomes it.

The sheer urgency of the male need for a woman has seldom been presented with such power. And later, he makes this need even clearer, walking among women in the street, watching a girl’s dress blow up on the top of a tram-car, for he admits ‘It is not a woman I want—it is all women’.

But the point is still to come. He finally picks up a prostitute and goes home with her. But this is not at all what he wants. ‘It passed like a sudden hurtling down’, and he is again outside on the pavement, confused and tormented.

The rest of Inferno is an anticlimax. He watches two very young lovers sharing their first love; he watches a married woman and her lover, and hears a detailed (and rather theatrical) account of their love affair; he even watches two Lesbians making love, and feels sympathy:

‘They love each other: the rest does not matter. Let them be depraved or normal, accursed or blessed, they love and possess each other as deeply as any here on earth.’

What he comes to realise, through peering into the next room, is that life is infinitely more varied and fascinating than he ever realised, and sex is an infinitely complex thing that could not be understood after a lifetime of study.

‘All lovers everywhere are the same. They fall in love by chance. They see each other, and are joined by the things in their faces; they light each other up by their fierce preferences, which are a sort of madness; they affirm the reality of illusion and for a little while turn falsehood into truth ... Behold love in its entirety. Behold it close, sending into my face, like incense, the odour, the heat of living, fulfilling its labour of dementia and sterility.’

Yes, Barbusse has understood something very important. He has dared to say, first of all, that for man, sex is not merely a ‘major interest’; it can be a consuming fire that makes everything else seem absurdly unimportant. And secondly, he has put his finger on one of the basic things about the sexual impulse: that it stems from a need to enter other people’s lives, to get outside the walls of glass that encase us all from birth to death.

Let me deal with the first point first, for it is the key to one of the major secrets of the sexual impulse.

In most animals, the sense of smell is the most important agent of sexual attraction. A female dog, for example, has certain glands in the area of the vagina that secrete a substance called oestrum. When these glands are working, the bitch has a smell that is irresistible to dogs and—as any dog owner knows—seems to carry for miles.

The human female has similar glands situated behind the entrance to the vagina; they are called Barthollins glands. But they do not secrete an ‘odorous’ substance to attract men; their secretion seems to serve solely as a lubricant. Man is not lured to woman through his sense of smell, but through his sense of sight. And in fact, the stimulus produced by the sense of sight can be so powerful that the sexual act finds it hard to live up to it. This produces a certain anomaly—a deviation—in the sexual act, for when a man is in bed with a woman with the light out, his sense of sight cannot stimulate him. In Frank Harris’s autobiography My Life and Loves, the reader is immediately struck by the great importance he attaches to sight. Every time he makes love to a girl, he has to see her in the nude as soon as possible; and even after the sexual act, he insists on lighting the candle, pulling back the bedclothes and carefully examining his mistress. In Harris, this need for visual stimulation was stronger than in most men.

I have attempted to pinpoint this anomaly in a novel called The Man Without a Shadow. On his way to see his girl friend (with whom he will spend the night), the hero Sorme stops at a ladies’ shop to buy her some stockings. There are a number of cubicles for women to try on clothes, and in one of these a woman is pulling off her dress without having drawn the curtain. Sorme describes his reaction as being like a match tossed into a barrel of gunpowder: sudden overwhelming and terrifying desire. On his way to his girl friend’s flat he reflects on the absurdity of this desire, which is still making him tremble. From his glimpse of her, the woman was probably middle-aged, and certainly a great deal less attractive than the girl he is on his way to visit. Yet this sudden glimpse of her has produced in him a far stronger reaction than his girl friend will be able to excite.

Why should this be so?

To begin with, for the reason I have mentioned: the most powerful sexual stimulant for man is the sight of a naked or half-naked woman. But then we face the absurdity stated by Barbusse. To actually go to bed with a prostitute fails to satisfy the desire. The desire goes deeper than any possible satisfaction.

The same point is made by Philip de Bruyn, in a novel called A Pagan’s Hosannah. His hero lies on the beach, and watches a very pretty girl in a bathing costume walking past. He reflects that it would be impossible to satisfy the desire that he feels, unless he leaps on her and tears off her clothes. To get to know her, to make love to her, to persuade her into bed—as he does later—all these would be a kind of anticlimax.

One of the major reasons for this anomaly is that the mind is asleep. And because it is asleep—or extremely yawny and drowsy—it cannot maintain the excitement; it forgets it a few seconds later, as we forget our thoughts when we are about to fall asleep. It does not have enough strength to unite the sexual act itself with the original stimulus. It is like a baby that cannot hold two things at the same time; it has to drop one to concentrate on the other.

So we must understand something before we go any further. There is no such thing as ‘sexual normality’ and abnormality. All sex is grounded in abnormality—in this absurdity that, because the mind is asleep, desire can always go deeper than satisfaction. Normal sex will not exist until men wake up.

This is a disturbing conclusion, but we had better face it. Consider the case of Gerald Thompson, an American who was executed in 1935 for a sex crime in Peoria. Unlike most sex criminals, Thompson was a handsome young man; he had a good job and was engaged to a pretty girl. But on nights when he was not seeing his girl friend, he used to drive round in his car until he saw a woman walking alone, and then drag her into the car and rape her. While the girl was unconscious, he also used to take photographs of her. He did this to more than fifty women, who never reported him to the police because they were ashamed of the photographs. He might have continued for many years, except that he accidentally killed one of the women, and the police appealed for anyone with possible clues to come forward, promising absolute secrecy. When his victims came forward, it was easy enough to catch him.

The interesting thing about this case is that there was a certain mad logic in Thompson’s actions. He was only trying to put into practice the idea of Barbusse’s hero: ‘It is not a woman I want; it is all women’. He had observed that desire goes deeper than response, and was trying to remedy this in a quite logical manner. It would be wrong to call him abnormal. He was only exceptionally logical and uninhibited. Sex itself is abnormal.

Consider another, related case, which makes my point even more strongly. In 1936 a young man named Robert Irwin was put on trial for a treble murder—of two women and a man. (In this case, there was no sexual assault.) His psychiatrist, Frederick Wertham, gives a history of his case. As a young man, he had been obsessed by the idea of the weakness of the human will, and the shortness of human memory. He said to Wertham:

‘We have all read Shakespeare, the Bible, the dictionary. How much do we remember? Very little. And yet it is all there in our heads. Every line, every word, every syllable. The time will come, given enough development in this direction, when a man could lay in his bed at night and be able to actually open up the book of Shakespeare there in the dark. In his mind. And read it—yes, read it with his eyes closed ... Did you ever go to a movie twice? We all have. Simply because we can’t get that mental radio to run. For there it is, right in our heads, all the time. And once a man learns to visualise, he’ll be able to stay home the second time and see that movie in his head ... ’

But, as Irwin knew: ‘It requires more hard work and more will power than an ordinary human is capable of. That is why I want to bottle up every available ounce of physical and mental energy I possess ... ’

At an early stage, Irwin decided that his sex life was robbing him of too much energy, so he attempted to amputate his penis. This was when Wertham first met him. Wertham heard about the visualising and decided that Irwin was a harmless crank—an opinion he repeats in his book The Show of Violence in which he describes the case. It does not seem to strike him that this is the type of crankery that has produced all the world’s great men and great discoveries.

Irwin was perhaps doomed to tragedy because he never met anyone who might sympathise with his aims; the odds against him were too great. He developed a persecution mania and committed the murder for which he spent the rest of his life in jail.

The point I am making is that Irwin was another man like Gerald Thompson—but more intelligent, less brutal. He saw a problem that most people are too blind to see, and looked for a solution. His solution was the wrong one, as he might have found if he had met anyone with whom he could discuss it intelligently. What would be the point of being able to read Shakespeare in the dark, or see a film twice in your head? What the human mind needs is a deeper sense of purpose, of vision. Still, his basic instinct was right. The significant thing is that an intelligent man like Wertham should mistake Irwin’s rightness for insanity.

In the next chapter, we must examine this whole question of abnormality—sexual perversion—more closely. For the moment, let us return to Barbusse’s Inferno, and the man trying to enter other people’s lives through a hole in the wall.

One of the most obvious things about human beings, when you come to think about it, is that we are all suffocated by our lives, except at very rare moments. There are various ways of escaping this feeling. Sometimes, it goes of its own accord, on a bright morning, or at the beginning of a holiday. The world suddenly seems a bigger, happier place.

One simple way of lifting this sense of suffocation is through alcohol. A glass of wine or whisky, taken early in the evening, will usually make you suddenly feel that life is worth while after all.

And this gives us our clue to the sense of suffocation. It is due to this highly developed human consciousness we talked about in the previous chapter. The headlights are so bright, and shine so far ahead, that the blackness around us seems far deeper. Animals live in a twilight world. Their consciousness does not possess our searchlight powers; but this also means that they are closer to their instincts, their love of life. Who ever heard of an animal committing suicide? Who ever heard of a cow being bored?

It might seem, then, that alcohol is the answer? Or perhaps drugs? This description of smoking opium from Really the Blues by the jazz clarinet player Mezzrow makes it sound like an answer:

‘Before I finished one pill a heatwave heaved up out of my stomach and spread all through me, right down to my toes, the most intense and pleasant sensation I have ever felt in my life. At first it tipped easy-like through my main line, then it surged and galloped down all my side streets: and every atom in my body began to shimmy in delight. That fiery little pill was toe-dancing up and down every single strand of my nervous system, plucking each one till it hummed a merry song, lighting up a million bulbs in my body that I never knew were there—I didn’t even know there were any sockets for them ... ’

In other words, Mezzrow was blissfully relieved from the narrowness of his present consciousness. This phrase about ‘a million bulbs I never knew were there’ is important. Yes, we all possess these bulbs in our bodies; but most of the current is taken up with keeping this huge searchlight working, and there is never enough juice left for the small bulbs. It is for the same reason that we feel a sensation of exquisite comfort and happiness on the edge of sleep; the searchlight is no longer stealing all the electricity.

There is only one objection to drugs and alcohol: they give pleasure at the expense of consciousness. Anyone can easily verify this by drinking a couple of bottles of strong beer. There is a great feeling of warmth and intensity, but you no longer notice things unless you are looking directly at them. Your instincts become muddled, so that your speech has less precision. And almost everyone knows jokes about drunken men trying to read books upside down, or taking twenty minutes to get a key into a keyhole.

No, even if drugs had no serious after-effects (which they certainly have), they would not be the solution. They weaken consciousness, weaken the sense of purpose, the ability to deal with the present. But consider again the feeling you sometimes get on a spring morning or on the first morning of a holiday. The senses seem to have opened up. You are quite clearly aware of other times, other places. The sky itself seems to be a symbol of freedom. And yet this is not at the cost of a loss of concentration. You can deal with present problems just as efficiently—or even more efficiently than usual. You are actually better at dealing with problems because, apart from your ability to concentrate on the present, your consciousness is full of a certain energy of optimism.

Yes, this is what is wanted, and this is just what no drug, no kind of alcohol, can give you.

Whatever happens, we cannot afford to give away a single grain of consciousness, no matter how much we feel suffocated in the present. We owe everything we have become to this fierce fight of consciousness that we find so exhausting. Why do you think poets are always so bad at mathematics and science? Because they find life far too beautiful and pleasant to want to concentrate on anything so boring. Think of the little discoveries that led to present-day science—Galileo dropping two weights off the leaning tower of Pisa, and discovering that the heavy one fell at exactly the same speed as the lighter one; Newton sitting under an apple tree and wondering why apples fall instead of floating like balloons in the air. Can you imagine a poet doing anything so dull as dropping two weights off the tower of Pisa? Of course not; he would be too busy looking at the view, or writing a sonnet to his mistress. We owe our civilisation to boredom. If we were not so easily bored, we would be as placid as cows. But while boredom has spurred us on to build cities and roads, it sometimes has very great disadvantages: it prevents us from knowing what we ought to do next. In the days when horses were used to draw coal waggons they had blinkers on their eyes so that they would not get confused in the traffic in towns. Well, human beings are ‘blinkered’ by boredom, and it has driven us to do astonishing things; but the blinkers also stop us from seeing ahead. We cannot throw away the blinkers—or rather, we can, simply by taking opium or cocaine, but we lose more than we gain. The only good use for alcohol or drugs is to enable us to relax for a while to re-gather our strength. But they destroy that very discipline of the mind that could give us what we want. They encourage the mind to fall asleep.

We have got to learn to make human consciousness far more intense, and sex can give us some important clues about how this can be done. Sex is a conjuring trick, and we have got to find its secret.

The ‘Great Lovers’

‘For ever, in spite of laws, in spite of clothes, the male’s eyes issue craving to a woman like a reptile.’ This is a fine image; presumably what Barbusse means is that all men—at all events, all young and healthy men—would like to ‘hypnotise’ women as a snake hypnotises a bird. And in fact there must be few men who do not envy the Sultan who can turn to his Grand Vizier when he sees a pretty girl, and say: ‘Bring her to my palace tonight!’

But would this actually make a man’s sex-life perfect? Obviously not, for a dozen reasons. First, a sultan would get as bored with his harem as a librarian gets with books. What the sultan would like to experience, over and over again, would be the feelings of a young man in love for the first time, who knows that his mistress is willing to give herself to him completely. After a few weeks, a harem full of women would be no more exciting than a shed full of cows.

What gradually dawns on anybody who has the brains to go deeply into this problem is that the need for ‘all women’ is a cheat, a trick. Let us see if we can get some idea of how the trick is done.

Let us take a look at some of the world’s so-called ‘great lovers’, and find out exactly what they got out of life.

First of all, take Casanova, whose name is a synonym for sexual promiscuity.

Jacques Casanova, who liked to give himself high-sounding titles, was actually the son of a dissolute actor married to the daughter of a shoemaker. He was born in 1725 in Venice, which, in those days, was one of the most profligate and fascinating cities in the world. His father died after presenting his wife with six children, of whom Jacques was the eldest. The mother went on the stage herself, so Jacques grew up virtually without parental control, in the care of a grandmother.

Somehow or other, he acquired an education—he was highly intelligent, and people enjoyed teaching him things. He grew up into an ugly, well-built man with the complexion of a gypsy, beady eyes like a bird, a long, thin nose and a sensual mouth. He was very tall—well over six feet (it must be remembered that people were much shorter in those days—five foot six was the average height for a man).

The only respectable profession that was open to a man without money was the Church; so Casanova decided to become an abbé. He had been constantly in love since the age of ten—always innocently—but this did not worry him. He was a cheerful and likeable young rogue.

When he was sixteen he fell in love with a girl called Angela, but she did not find him particularly attractive. Angela had two friends, Nanette and Marton, and they agreed to help Casanova to win her. Casanova used to come to supper at their house, and after supper he would say goodnight, and apparently leave. But instead of leaving, he used to slam the front door and then sneak upstairs to the girls’ bedroom. Later on they would join him, bringing Angela with them, and the three used to talk in whispers, enjoying the sense of the forbidden. But one night Angela failed to turn up. Casanova was miserable, and the two pretty sisters tried to console him. He cannot leave until morning, when their aunt will unlock the door and go to church, so he sleeps between them in the bed. By morning, all three of them have ceased to be virgins.

Is this story true? We shall never know; but it is completely typical of Casanova. He cannot start his love-life by sleeping with just one girl; it has to be two.

Casanova, now an abbé, is introduced to a rich man who takes a liking to him, and invites him to live in his house. It looks as if Casanova is made for life; for this old man is very influential. But the old man dotes on a pretty girl called Thérèse, who also lives in the house. One day, when they think the old man is asleep, Casanova and Thérèse ‘took a fancy to examine into the difference of conformation between a boy and a girl’ (as he delicately puts it). A sudden violent blow from a stick puts an end to their scientific enquiry, and Casanova is thrown out of the house ...

I do not propose to try to summarise Casanova’s Memoirs. To begin with, the book is over 4,000 pages long. Suffice it to say that from this time on he becomes a swindler and a complete rogue. He begins by swindling his own family—selling furniture that his father left to all of them. A lawyer intervenes and has him thrown in jail. One night, Casanova escapes from jail and finds the lawyer; he knocks out three of his teeth, breaks his nose and pushes him into the canal. Then he hurries back to jail, so that when they came to look for him he has the perfect alibi. But when he gets out of jail, he is sensible enough to leave Venice, which is now too hot to hold him.

Few men can have had so many ups and downs of fortune as Casanova. Many times he became rich; many times he became a beggar. A one-eyed monk cheats him of every penny he possesses; another monk, equally rascally, teaches him the arts of thievery and murder so that he can make his way without starving. (To do Casanova justice, he never committed murder.)

Luckily for Casanova, he was a man of imposing presence and considerable intellect—ideal equipment for a confidence swindler. So he took to fortune-telling and various other forms of magical jiggery-pokery (aided with a little card-sharping) and managed to become a famous man. Sometimes fortune smiled on him so much that he was able to buy beautiful clothes and run a carriage; at other times he was forced to flee with a price on his head. But whether he was the darling of society, or on the run from the police, the great love of his life was women. He preferred innocent virgins, and it is hardly unfair to say that he was as great a swindler in love as in everything else. Once he was caught and imprisoned in the ‘Leads’ in Venice, and with immense patience and ingenuity he managed to escape. (The pages in which he recounts this contain, incidentally, one of the greatest escape stories in literature.) Finally, after a long life of seduction, swindling and midnight flits, he ended as a librarian in the castle of a nobleman—worn-out, bad tempered, endlessly complaining that the servants did not treat him with respect—and writing, writing, always writing, those immense memoirs that are the greatest portrait we have of the manners of the eighteenth century. (Even the 4,000-odd pages we possess are only a fraction of the manuscript; the last part—covering 25 years—is lost.)

But the first thing that any reader of the Memoirs notices is that Casanova regards himself first and foremost as a great intellectual. Although he is honest enough to describe his swindles at length he never seems to think of himself as a crook. And this is certainly the key to Casanova. Anyone who reads the Memoirs hoping for another Fanny Hill will be disappointed; sex occupies a relatively small portion of their pages, and the descriptions of it never go into physical details. And one of the most revealing chapters in the whole work deals with his visit to Voltaire—at this time the most famous writer in Europe (although nowadays he is less read than Casanova—a touch that would have delighted the old swindler). For Casanova is at great trouble to show you that he is Voltaire’s equal. He recounts every single word that passed between them, particularly the disagreements (in which Casanova insists he was in the right).

Once you have noticed this, you have grasped the clue to Casanova. He was not primarily interested in sex. As we read the Memoirs, we come to realise that this ‘great lover’ would have given his soul to be regarded as a great writer. He was, in fact, the author of various poems, plays and other works—all of which he mentions in such a way as to assure the reader that they are masterpieces. The truth is that Casanova was a highly intelligent man who might have become an important writer—if he had possessed the self-discipline. Unfortunately, he was vain, egotistic and weak. When we think about Casanova, we think of a tall man dressed in beautiful clothes with an immaculate wig, playing the ‘grand signeur’. (He liked to be known as the ‘Signeur de Seingalt’—a title to which he had no right whatever.) He is received in high society, regarded as a brilliant talker, known to be a great amorist and suspected of being a magician. But it is all show. If only he had written just one book by which everyone knows his name! He has, of course: the Memoirs: but they were published long after his death. The one thing he wanted most of all was denied to him.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing that Casanova took up sex because he couldn’t make the grade as a writer. Sex is delightful, but no man spends a life chasing women and getting them into bed because he found the first time so pleasant, any more than you could eat a ton of chocolates because you enjoyed the first one.

Think of Casanova. Rich clothes made of expensive brocades and velvets. Beautiful houses. Elegant carriages and horses. A welcome guest in the houses of the rich. A man of keen wit and intellect. A man of strange powers—a magician, in fact. An elegant sonneteer, an accomplished translator, a man of wide learning ...

This is how Casanova would have liked you to think of him.

In short, Casanova wanted to be a great man. Simply that.

The human race seems to be divided into two kinds of people. About 95 per cent know that they are not great, and never will be; they accept their station in fife, and get on with their everyday work without asking many questions. The remaining five per cent have a definite feeling that they ought to be great. They may not be very clear about how to go about it; but they look around them and are simply not satisfied to be like other people.

Now five per cent may not sound much,[1] but it is actually a lot of people. It is one in every twenty. Even in a small country like England, it means some millions of people. So I do not mean that five per cent of people are really Shakespeares or Napoleons. I simply mean that there is, in these people, a strong urge to domination, to push upwards. Only a very small percentage of the five per cent achieve much eminence. Again, a large proportion of them become critics and professors, and spend their time praising the great men who are securely dead, while attacking any sign of greatness in the living. H.G. Wells once wrote a story called The Country of the Blind about how blind people resent a man who is able to see, and want to put out his eyes. But in the real world, it is not the blind who hate the man with two eyes. It is the people with only one eye.

What it amounts to, then, is that about 95 per cent of human beings are more or less content to stay where they are, and the remaining five per cent feel an obscure need to struggle upwards at all costs—an evolutionary urge. Many of them will never come to anything much. They might become embittered and bossy civil servants who enjoy bullying the working-class housewives who come to ask them questions; in fact, they might become petty little bullies in a great many walks of life. You should try to be patient with such people. They are very unlucky. They have an urge that torments them constantly like a piece of broken glass in a shoe, and yet lack the ability or the confidence to do anything about it. They are the unhappiest of human beings.

Millions of teenagers experience this urge to break out of the dead routine that the world offers them; they cannot understand how their parents can take life so much for granted. This is why the late James Dean became so popular with teenagers; it is why the driving vitality of various pop groups—like the Beatles and the Shadows—speaks so directly to the teenager. It holds out a promise that life doesn’t have to be as dull as most adults seem to find it. Unfortunately, it is a losing battle. Stupidity and dullness are the deadliest enemies of all, and they suffocate you until you end by joining them out of sheer exhaustion.

Still, I don’t want to be too discouraging. I don’t feel discouraged. This is a world in which youth is coming to count more and more. If it would only learn to use its brains and take itself more seriously, it could win easily.

Enough. The great thing about stupidity is that it ends by falling asleep under its own weight. Let us get back to sex and Casanova.

He not only belonged to the five per cent that wants to be great; he belonged to the one per cent that is determined to get to the top at all costs. There was only one thing he lacked—real self-belief. A man with real self-belief hunches his shoulders and goes forward with his head bent against the storm, cursing the opposition and determined to win. A man like Casanova, with his desire for quick returns and a fundamental weakness of character, did not possess this kind of strength.

Now sex is one of the best ways in the world of raising your self-conceit, if you are at all personally attractive. It is heavily subsidised by the life force. You may be in the grip of a deep self-disgust; you may feel that your life is a failure; you may feel that every pleasure is a cheat: but if a pretty girl with a good figure walks past you, it is like the sound of a trumpet to an old war horse. That is why men sometimes imitate the howls of wolves when they see a pretty girl—or beat their chests like gorillas; they want to show that it is a completely primitive, animal reaction that goes deeper than thoughts or social conventions. Sex makes you realise that life is a lot more interesting than you thought. It makes you feel ashamed of having been about to give in. It makes you throw out the chest and utter an aggressive whoop. Suddenly life is marvellous again, and it was all a misunderstanding when you thought it had turned against you. The pessimism vanishes; you feel that your fundamental fault is your cautiousness, your mistrust of life. You feel that with twenty times as much optimism and energy, all the problems will vanish; it will be a walkover ...

All this sex can do. So it is the ideal morale-booster for a man like Casanova who had plenty of talent and intelligence, but just couldn’t quite make the grade because of his awful weakness of will. A weaker and stupider man might have taken to drink and drugs.

And this is why Casanova became a ‘great lover’. Every time a woman surrendered to him, he was a Napoleon at Marengo; he had proved his power again. Ezra Pound once said that poets ‘drink of life as lesser men drink wine’.

This was the kind of image Casanova liked to have of himself: Casanova the great whirlwind roaring round the world, sweeping up women like leaves, carrying them in its thrilling flight for a while, then dropping them. In one volume he recounts triumphantly how he met a pretty young married woman in a tailor’s shop, and found to his astonishment that she was still a virgin because her husband—many years her senior—was in poor health. In no time at all, he had won the husband’s confidence and seduced the wife. But we feel that half the pleasure is his feeling of having snatched this fruit from under the husband’s nose; he has again proved himself the better man ...

This is all very well; but again and again we discover that Casanova is a swindler in love as well as in life. On one occasion, to his rage, a girl resists him, and actually takes another lover. The shock to his self-esteem is great, but he plays the waiting game, and meanwhile poses as her friend. Sure enough, his chance arrives. She discovers she is pregnant, and the serpent sees his chance. He assures her that he has an ointment that will cure her trouble painlessly; it must be applied to the entrance to the womb. But how can she get it in there? she asks. Nothing could be easier, he says; he luckily possesses an instrument that is meant for precisely that purpose, and if the ointment is smeared on its end ... The silly girl takes his word for it, and Casanova finally gains his object. In due course, the girl is forced to have the baby in a convent.

An amusing story, perhaps, but it is typical of this confidence-swindler in love. Even in his first love affair—with the two sisters Nanette and Marton—he solemnly swears to them before he climbs into bed that he can be absolutely trusted ... Five minutes later, he is cautiously trying to make love to one of them.

No, Casanova is fundamentally a weakling and a rogue; if life won’t give him what he wants, then he will steal it. He is not, by his own account, a very bad rogue; he never did anyone real harm. Still, all this talk about the ‘great lover’ is nonsense. He was good at stealing candy from children, and stupid enough to spend his life at it.

But before proceeding to too many conclusions, let us glance briefly at the lives of a few more of these ‘great lovers’. We shall find that the conclusions are usually the same.

Frank Harris, for example, is strangely like Casanova, although his autobiography My Life and Loves is little more than a thousand pages long. But as soon as you begin to read it, you are struck by his similarity to Casanova. The first thing that strikes you is that this is very far from being a ‘dirty book’—although it could not be bought openly in England until 1964. Harris, who was born more than a century after Casanova, has the same pathetic desire to be regarded as a great man, a brain, an important writer. Son of an Irish naval officer, he ran away to America at the age of sixteen, and became first the manager of an hotel, then a cowboy, then a lawyer. Returning to England, he managed to become editor of a newspaper. He was a good editor, with plenty of ‘push’, at a time when most newspapers were all-too-respectable. He was one of the founders of cheap, popular journalism, giving the public ‘what it wants’—that is, assuming that you are talking to an audience of morons, and giving them the stupidest rubbish you can cook up.

Like Casanova, Harris thought that no holds were barred in man’s battle against the world, so he lied, blackmailed and swindled as much as he dared. Unlike Casanova, he is far from completely honest in telling his life story, and doesn’t admit to swindling. To read My Life and Loves, or his biography of Oscar Wilde (one of Harris’s closest friends) or his book on Shakespeare, you wouldn’t think butter would melt in his mouth. There are times when he talks like a great poet about the need for the highest kind of idealism—and obviously believes every word of it. As you read My Life and Loves, you may feel ‘What a great tragedy that fate did not make this mafa a great writer! He would have so enjoyed it!’ But if you read any book about Harris, you quickly realise why he was not a great writer. Like Casanova, he was too vain, too weak, too egotistic.

Still, as I’ve said, the remarkable thing about My Life and Loves is that it is not pornography; it is pervaded by a strenuous atmosphere of idealism and great literature. He is genuinely sincere, and a little naive. At one point, after recounting a number of seductions—one of a married woman—he remarks: ‘My young lady readers may be shocked to learn ... ’ He obviously feels that he is such a high, poetic soul that the most pure young ladies must be reading him with grave attention.

But in spite of all his attempts to hide it, his fundamental weakness and dishonesty come through. Like Casanova, Harris was interested in sex from a very early age, and by the age of fourteen he was already in the habit of suddenly thrusting his hand up girls’ dresses if they were stupid enough to get too close. You realise then what is wrong with him; he is a taker, who thinks he’ll never get what he wants unless he snatches it unexpectedly. On the boat on his way to America he has a love affair with the daughter of an officer, and she allows his hands to stray as soon as he assures her that he intends to marry her. In New York, he gets the opportunity to spend hours with her in her bedroom; but she is still unwilling to grant him the final privilege. So he simply shrugs his shoulders and leaves for Chicago, without even saying goodbye to a girl who has removed the sting of loneliness from his first excursion into the great world. It does not strike him that this is rather a mean thing to do. She has refused to allow him sex, so she can be cast off without compunction.

Harris’s accounts of his seductions are slightly more detailed—physically—than Casanova’s. He obviously takes a certain pleasure in recalling the precise details. But all the time, we feel he is making love in a completely selfish spirit—just as in his relation with the girl on the boat. Even more than Casanova, he is simply a thief of love. He is a highwayman, and all women are travellers who are fair game. Their virginity is something to be snatched from them when they are not looking. In the second volume he claims to have fallen in love with a girl he has met in London, and wants to marry her. But then he becomes a successful editor, and forgets about her. When they finally meet again he quickly seduces her, but somehow the love and marriage idea never develops. And although he claims that she is one of the most important women in his life, he never fully explains why they finally drifted apart. The reader has to read between the lines—and this is not too difficult. For Harris, Harris was the most important person in the world, and any relationship with a woman was bound to be a somewhat one-sided affair. Most women are fairly unselfish; but a woman would have to be a saint not to have minded Harris’s total self-preoccupation.

All this sounds as if I dislike Harris a great deal more than I do. He was an amusing rascal, and his autobiography is almost as good as Casanova’s. It is certainly a classic in its way. But once again, you cannot doubt for a moment that this man was a ‘great lover’ only because he badly wanted to be a great man, and was too weak and vain.

I will not labour my point too much. All the evidence seems to show that the ‘great lovers’ were failures, men who lacked a certain self-respect. They would have liked to give themselves this self-respect by doing something that would make them genuinely great; but they lacked the staying power. So sex became a good way of boosting the morale, far better than a bottle of whisky.

There is, for example, the odd case of Henry Miller, whose books have also been banned until recently. Like Harris and Casanova, all his work is autobiography, and much of it concerns his sexual conquests. Now Miller is a far better writer than Harris or Casanova, and he has a genuinely good mind. He loves ideas for their own sake, and some of his non-pornographic works, like The Books in My Life, show him at his best. But if you read his Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Plexus and Nexus), which he considers his masterpiece and ‘great testament’, nothing becomes more obvious than that this man suffers from a deep lack of self-belief and self-respect. This may be because he was little more than a ‘bum’ until he was over forty, and only then wrote his first successful book The Tropic of Cancer. But eventually you get rather depressed with the life of this new Casanova, who always seems to be living in dirty lodgings and drinking coffee with seedy artists and continually borrowing money. There are many people who think that Miller is one of the great prophets of the twentieth century. I personally feel that he is far more of a genuine tragedy than Casanova or Harris because he comes so close to being a great writer, but cannot shake off his awful failure to believe in himself.

While we are on the subject of ‘great lovers’, I might say a word about Lord Byron, who at first sight seems to contradict everything I have said above. For at first sight, Byron seems to be a great lover who was also a great poet and a man of intellect. There can be no doubt about his enthusiasm for sex. ‘As soon as he reached his room (in an hotel) Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid’ records his friend Polidori. From our schooldays, we all cherish this picture of Byron the gloomy genius, stalking around Europe and occasionally dashing off a great poem, then falling like a thunderbolt on the nearest pretty girl. Byron the superman ... bent under the weight of some‘great sin’ which he never dares to confess; Byron who inscribes himself in an hotel register as ‘aged 100’; Byron, who, when the vain Polidori asked in what respect Byron was his superior, replied: ‘In three things. I can swim across that river. I can snuff out that candle with a pistol-shot at twenty paces. And I have written a poem of which fourteen thousand copies were sold in one day.’ (This was called The Corsair, a sort of romantic novel in verse.) Yes, surely this is the real thing?

Unfortunately, no. Twentieth-century scholarship seems to be uncovering some of the hidden secrets of Byron’s life. The ‘great sin’ that he dared not confess was the same as Oscar Wilde’s ‘love that dares not speak its name’—homosexuality. Byron had been a mother’s boy, and like many mother’s boys, he became a homosexual at public school. He married an attractive girl called Miss Milbanke, and they got along fairly well, except that he insisted on making love to her in a way that he had learned at school.[2] She didn’t mind; but when later she quarrelled with Byron, she confessed the strange goings-on to her parents, who were horrified and insisted on a divorce. So Byron left England, terrified that some rumours of his homosexuality should leak out and horrify all the romantic young ladies who now bought his poetry and adored him as their hero. He was bi-sexual; women suited him as well as men; but he did not trust them or like them much. All his really close—and emotional—relationships were with men or youths. His only real ‘affair’ with a woman of his own station was with Lady Caroline Lamb, a pretty but completely neurotic woman who pursued him frantically and hurled him into bed so that he felt as though he was being raped. From this time on the ‘great lover’ preferred chambermaids or other women who were below his social station; they didn’t make him nervous. Underneath the haughty exterior, he was a small boy longing to be liked, very easily hurt, and thoroughly spoilt. His friend Shelley was in every way a far greater man—and poet—and Byron knew it. At close quarters, the great lover turns out to be yet another man who lacked self-belief, and who didn’t really enjoy sex with women. He died before he had time to grow up.

In the twentieth century, we have a similar case of a ‘Great Lover’ complex in H.G. Wells. In many ways, Wells came very close to being a great writer; he had by far the best brain of any of the ‘great lovers’ we have so far considered. But if we compare him with his friend—and literary rival—Bernard Shaw, we immediately see that Shaw was the truly great man. Wells was a short man with a squeaky voice (and a slight Cockney accent which he never lost). His early life was miserable and frustrated, and he was still a virgin when he married his cousin—a girl with whom he had little in common. He came close to dying of consumption and sheer discouragement; but luckily he began to make his name as a writer in his mid-twenties. Shortly after his marriage he was unfaithful to his wife with another girl who lived in the house, and he records his sensation of exaltation at this incident. Soon he fell in love with one of his pupils—he was a science teacher at the time—a quiet, intelligent girl who was obviously better qualified than his wife to understand him. Then at twenty-eight, he published The Time Machine, and fame arrived with a bang. He never looked back. There was no violent reaction—of the kind that so many of the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the 1950s suffered from the critics. By the age of forty he was a kind of national sage, and earning a fortune. He had also become known as the most persistent Don Juan in London. Perhaps because he was short and (by this time) fat, and had a squeaky voice, he set out to prove to himself what Casanova had discovered—that good looks are not important to women. His second wife was a gentle creature who was at first shattered by his endless affairs; but Wells had to prove something to himself, so nothing else mattered. He had to keep reassuring himself with material evidence of his fame and prosperity. Any serious writer, for example, soon finds that he can get to know far more people than he wants to know. If he is well known, he can spend his life going to parties where he will be introduced to other famous people, to peers and politicians and film stars. If he has any sense, he soon gets tired of this, and realises that even very pleasant people can be a complete waste of time. Then he tries to escape, and gets down to serious work. Wells could never manage this. Famous people, and women—these were the material evidence of success. His lack of self-assurance becomes evident in his many public quarrels. He flies off the handle easily, and bursts into hysterical vituperation of his opponent. To the end of his life, he is testy and thin-skinned.

Bernard Shaw also began life as something of an amorist—although, oddly enough, he remained a virgin until his late twenties, when one of his mother’s singing pupils seduced him. When he entered the socialist revival of the 1890s, and published his first books and wrote dramatic criticism for Frank Harris’s newspaper, he found it fairly easy to have love affairs, and had a whole series. (Some of these are recounted in Hesketh Pearson’s excellent life of Shaw.) But, just as his fame was really beginning, in the early 1900s, he married an Irish heiress, and settled down happily. In the next ten years he became the most famous dramatist in Europe. He occasionally developed a romantic passion for one of his leading ladies—like Mrs. Pat Campbell—but they never ended in bed, because Shaw had no compulsion to carry things to this conclusion. His enemies called him a cold fish; Frank Harris accused him of being impotent. This is not so. He had proved something to himself—that he could have as many beautiful women as anybody. Having proved it, he went on to the next thing. It is said that his marriage was never consummated because his wife disliked sex. This is by no means certain; but if it is true, it makes it more surprising that Shaw never took advantage of his fame to take mistresses. It is true that he had a certain Irish prudishness about ‘kissing and telling’ (unlike Wells, who advertised his amours openly in novels and in his autobiography). So he may not have been strictly faithful to his wife all his life. (There is, for example, an odd case where he pursued Mrs. Pat Campbell to the seaside, and was rebuffed.) But this is beside the point. Shaw was not a Don Juan, because he found that life had too many other interesting possibilities.

Teenagers—particularly males—may find this difficult to understand, and may be inclined to prefer Wells and Harris to Shaw. I can only say that, at thirty-four, my own sympathies have taken a definite swing in Shaw’s direction, and I look forward to the happy day—which he prophesies—when human beings will have outgrown sex completely. It does not seem such a completely impossible prospect as it seemed twenty years ago.

The point I am trying to make, in all these analyses of ‘great lovers’, is this: in a certain sense, woman’s instinct is centred on sex far more than man’s. Woman is the child-bearer. Her problem is to select the man who will give her the healthiest and brightest children. She may even prefer a rogue and a vagabond to a man who will offer her security, because an instinct tells her that his seed will produce better children. But if a man is any good, his instinct is centred on greatness; the driving force of his life is an obscure ‘will to power’ which he may not fully understand.

Now woman can give him splendid ‘moments of vision’, particularly when he is young and shy, and does not really possess much self-belief. The fact that an attractive girl dotes on him, and is willing to take off her clothes to prove it, is a marvellous shot in the arm. It stimulates him to greater efforts; it is a flash of lightning that suddenly reveals a whole landscape. In any case, a pretty girl makes his blood sing. She is like a walled city; he can only look longingly, trying to penetrate the clothes, knowing that the odds are against him capturing this particular city. But the same pretty girl yielding—the beauty without the clothes—is a revelation like the blast of an atomic bomb. The American writer James Drought has an excellent story called The Enemy about a young architect who is determined to revolutionise the business, in which there occurs a passage that catches the genuinely romantic thrill of a girl’s admiration:

‘She was always very strange to me. When we made love, enjoying kisses and rubbing our bodies together under the bridge or flat on a grassy bank upstream or in my parents’ car on Friday nights, there was no shyness or fright about Mary, and whenever I thought about it, which was seldom, I had to admit that I was the one who usually halted proceedings short of ecstasy.

‘If I kissed Mary, she kissed me back; if I rubbed her round breasts, even underneath her bra, she would arch her back, pressing her breast full into my hand and kiss me over and over; and once even when I slid my hand under her dress, she just kissed me harder and opened her thighs so my hand would have more freedom. I found I had to be sensible ... ’

This, in fact, is what sex should be at its best; no furtive caresses in the dark, in which the man and woman are enemies both after their own ends; but a union of trust, where the effect of the girl’s total submission is to make the man determined not to ‘take advantage of her’, and to stimulate the ‘will to power’, the need to strive for greatness.

1 Five per cent is, of course, only a rough figure, but it has a certain amount of backing from biologists and zoologists, who have observed that there is a ‘dominant minority’ of roughly five per cent among most animals. It may be more or less among humans.

2 See Lord Byron’s Marriage by Professor Wilson Knight, in which he argues convincingly that the cause of the break-up of Byron’s marriage was sodomy.

5: The Paradoxes of the Sexual Impulse

The ‘mental’ side of sex. Maupassant’s story The Unknown. Bill Hopkins’ Divine and the Decay. The rape of Tamar. The two halves of man—the ‘bank clerk’ and the ‘racing driver’. The urge behind sex is the urge that created civilisation, not a passive instinct like hunger. An autobiographical digression. ‘Outsider’ and ‘Insider’. How the Outsider theory helps to explain the paradoxes of the sexual impulse. Nietzsche and his ‘vision on the hilltop’. The murder case of ‘Jan and Ada’.

So far, in this book, I have tried to stick to the ‘facts’ about sex, and to avoid expressing my own theories. The facts—about the human body, about the part sex has played in history—speak for themselves. But chapters three and four—on sexual perversion and man’s ‘Casanova impulse’—have raised a large question mark. It is easy enough to learn about the physical side of sex; but we quickly discover that this is only a beginning. And the other side of sex—its mental aspects—is so deep and complex that we soon realise that we know practically nothing about it.

I have touched on one of the most baffling problems in speaking of Barbusse’s Inferno. Sexual desire is one of the most powerful urges that human beings can experience—and this is particularly true for men. Yet by comparison, the sexual act itself is disappointing. Why? If this question could be answered, it would provide a key not only to the mysteries of sex, but to the mysteries of human existence itself.

There is a short story by Guy de Maupassant called The Unknown that provides a useful starting point. A young man about town describes how he one day saw a young girl in the street to whom he was violently attracted. She was not conventionally beautiful, but had dark hair and a good figure, and walked with a slightly ‘swaggering gait’. He follows her until she takes a cab. A few months later he meets her again in the street; the sight of her again arouses the same violent desire to possess her; again he loses her. Then one morning he collides with her in the street, and takes the opportunity to speak to her. He blurts out his admiration; to his surprise, she takes it calmly, and suggests that she should call on him the following Sunday morning.

She arrives; almost immediately he starts to undress her. She asks him to look away while she finishes undressing. He glances over his shoulder, and sees that she has a black mark between her shoulder-blades—a patch of hair. And immediately he loses all desire for her. ‘And when I came to sing my song of love, I had no voice left—not even a trickle of sound.’ The offended girl remarks: ‘There was not much point in putting me to this trouble, was there?’ and leaves him. When he meets her in the street subsequently she ignores his greeting. He desires her as violently as ever—but will probably never have another chance of possessing her. And so the anecdote ends.

What is the meaning of this story? Why did he fail when it came to making love to her?

We should observe first of all that his desire for her is a purely physical sensation: that is to say, it is simply a desire to possess her, even if she turns out to be an imbecile or a pickpocket. Her personality does not matter; it is quite straightforward lust.

When he speaks to her, he hopes that she will give him her address, so that he can visit her. This would be the first step in the conquest. Instead, she offers to visit him, and this gives him his first shock. Up to this point, she is hardly a real person—she is little more than a fantasy that he might conjure up in order to masturbate. Her offer to visit him deals a blow at this fantasy. He is already a little worried by the time she appears. The black hair on her back is the last straw; it is again something shocking and unexpected. It does not matter why the black hair shocked him. (He says that he suddenly remembered that a sorceress—or demon woman—in the Arabian Nights had black hair between her shoulders.) It could have been almost anything that pricked this bubble of desire.

One more example will make this completely clear. In his novel The Divine and the Decay, Bill Hopkins has an episode in which a man is alone in a house with a sleeping woman, and decides to rape her. His need to possess her is not physical desire so much as a desire to dominate her; he likes to dominate people, and so far she has refused to succumb. He goes to her room, and the sight of her clothes on the chair increases his desire. Then she wakes up, sees him, and throws back the bedclothes, revealing her naked body. Instantly, he feels his desire seep away, and knows that she has won again. There is something too frank, too open, about her nakedness, that destroys his desire.

We might explain the Maupassant story by saying that the man felt a kind of superstitious fear at the sight of the hair between her shoulder-blades; but the episode from The Divine and the Decay shows that this would be the wrong answer. There is nothing frightening about a woman’s naked body. So why should the sight of it cause a man’s desire to collapse so abruptly?

The explanation goes far beyond sex. It is something basic about our experience as human beings. Another illustration will make this clearer; this time, from the Bible. The second book of Samuel tells the story of Amnon’s rape of his sister Tamar. Amnon, the son of King David, ‘was so vexed that he fell sick for his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin’. Amnon’s friend Jonadab suggests a ruse by which she can be possessed. Amnon pretends to be sick, and asks for his sister to be sent to him and nurse him; when she comes, he grabs her and asks her to get into bed. She protests, but he is the stronger, and violates her.

But then follows the significant part. ‘Then Amnon hated her exceedingly, so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.’ The girl naturally protests, saying that this ungrateful treatment is worse than raping her; all to no purpose; Amnon tells his servant to throw her out and bolt the door after her. (Helater pays for the rape with his life; his brother Absolom has him murdered.)

The Old Testament does not feel called upon to offer any explanation of why Amnon suddenly hated his sister; no doubt the author of Samuel assumed that his readers would understand without explanation; and he was right. This is the pattern of sex: a powerful desire that we cannot understand, but that we cannot disobey. Then it is all over, and it is like waking up from a dream. It is unnecessary to say that Amnon’s desire for his sister was of exactly the same kind as that of Maupassant’s hero for the dark-haired woman in the street: an irrational fever, a kind of impersonal lust. While he feels this lust, nothing else seems important, and he is willing to risk severe punishment from his father for satisfying it. It is not a casual desire; he is obsessed by it: enough to confide in his friend Jonadab and to go to considerable trouble to get his sister to his bedroom. Up to this point he is carried along by a hurricane of desire. Then he seems to wake up, and finds himself in bed with his sister, and the consequences dawn on him. He has no personal feeling for her; perhaps he did not even much like her as a person. He feels let-down, betrayed; and in a rather muddled way he feels that it is she who has betrayed him; so he throws her out.

Now it can be observed that the three examples I have mentioned all have one thing in common: there was no personal feeling for the woman; only a desire to take her body. If Amnon had been personally fond of Tamar, as well as desiring her, things would have turned out better. The same is true for Maupassant’s story; there would have been another day.

The sexual relationship between a man and a woman is a mixture of two elements: pure physical desire, and personal affection. Either may exist without the other; there is no necessary connection between them. It might even be argued that the ‘personal’ element tends to spoil the desire. The reason is obvious. On the sexual level, any man and any woman are ‘suited’ to one another; but it is far more rare for people to have any real liking and understanding for one another. Most marriages—particularly between young people—begin with pure physical desire. A youth sees a pretty girl; nothing seems more important than that she should give herself to him physically. They may have absolutely nothing else in common. And after two weeks of honeymoon, he begins to feel that he has been tricked. In fact, he feels rather as Amnon did with Tamar. It is inevitable that a large percentage of teenage marriages should end in divorce.

It must be faced that for most human beings, sex is diluted by its personal element. This is not to say that human beings would do better to behave like dogs on heat. But there is some truth in a rhyme quoted in one of the James Bond books:

‘Some love is fire
Some love is dust
But the cleanest kind of love is lust.’

There is, of course, another side to the question. Both men and women want emotional security, and family life is built on this security. Still, it is as well to recognise that there are two sides to this problem. It enables us to understand the motivations of the Marquis de Sade, for example, or Sergeant Bertrand. Both these men wanted their sex ‘pure’ in the James Bond sense; they wanted their whisky without water. In De Sade’s case, this was because he was a thoroughly spoilt and immature personality; he was too absorbed in himself to want a personal relationship with anybody. But then, most human beings are immature and spoilt. So it remains true that a great deal of human sex is diluted; in many cases there is so much water that the whisky is almost tasteless. It is fortunate that men like De Sade—or like the Peoria murderer or the Moonlight Murderer—are so rare. We must discuss this later.

Let us look again at the story of the rape of Tamar. What becomes clear is that Amnon was really two people in the same body. Aldous Huxley has an amusing story called The Farcical History of Richard Greenow in which a young man turns into a female novelist at night, and writes gushing and sentimental novels, while during the day he is a tough-minded young intellectual. This is an absurd example, but it points out a fundamental truth about most human beings. And this truth can be seen most clearly in the case of sex. We contain a shy, cautious person who loves security, and a rash and excitable hot-head who longs for strong sensations. Sex is the domain of the hot-head, and there is no human activity that makes us more aware that we contain two persons. To some extent, we are all Richard Greenows: half the time we are possessed by a bank clerk; the other half, by a racing driver.

This is not only true of sex, but of everything we do. For the most part, our lives are dull, full of boredom and routine, and we take it for granted that they will go on like this. Then there are other moments when it seems that we could change everything if only we had the courage and determination. In these moments, we have the bank clerk shouting in one ear, and the racing driver in the other, and it is extremely difficult to choose between them. The racing driver says ‘Gamble’; the bank clerk says ‘No, you will probably lose if you do’.

The story of most lives is the story of the gradual defeat of the racing driver. Every child wants an exciting life; every boy wants to be an engine driver or a soldier; every girl thinks of being an air hostess or a nurse. In the teens this conflict comes to a head. The modern world does not provide much opportunity for adventure, and juvenile delinquency is one of the results. A hundred years ago a boy could run away to sea; today the next best thing is to steal a car or get involved in fights with a rival gang. The youth is actually re-living the history of the human race, when men felt the need to go out and do something heroic. By the age of twenty, most people have come to accept the idea that the bank clerk was right after all; they become good citizens and fathers of families. The racing driver vanishes—or, at least, his appearances become less and less frequent. The racing driver is the loser; society is the gainer ...

But is this entirely true? How did our civilisation reach its present level? It was because of the men who were not willing to let the racing driver become the loser: the explorers, the mountain-climbers, the pioneers. Others disliked the way society was run, and became rebels and revolutionaries. Without these rebels, children would still be working in factories: America would still have an English king; Russia would still have a tsar. The ‘racing driver’ is the most valuable part about us. To destroy him is to destroy civilisation.

But apart from these adventurers and explorers, there is another type of person who is not willing to surrender to the bank clerk. I mean the men of intellect: the scientists, poets, musicians, artists. For anyone who thinks about this matter for a moment will recognise that the scientist and the poet are driven by exactly the same urge as the explorer or mountain climber. They are men who cannot accept the sheer ordinariness of everyday life, with its dreariness and repetition. The explorer dreams of unknown lakes and forests in the heart of Africa or Brazil (or, in the space age, perhaps on Mars or Venus). The scientist or poet dreams of exploring new territories of the mind and imagination. This is the great urge behind all science and art: the need to escape our boring, everyday lives, with their messiness and stupidity, and to find an intenser, more orderly world of the mind.

At this point, I must insert a little autobiographical material, which I shall try to keep brief.

My own training was as a scientist. I can still clearly remember the feeling of satisfaction that came from reading books on science at the age of eleven or twelve—the feeling of escaping the messy, emotional world of childhood, with its boredom and guilt and spite. At the age of sixteen I left school and took a job that I disliked; the consequence was that I lost interest in science and turned to literature and music for the sense of escape from futility. It was at this point that I coined the word ‘outsider’ (or rather, borrowed it from Shaw) to describe people who find themselves in this position of rejecting the boredom of their everyday lives, and yet who have no definite idea of what they do want. We all want to ‘fit in’ to society, because we all need a certain sense of security; but sometimes the attempt to fit in produces such an acute sense of discomfort—of being a round peg in a square hole—that there is no answer except to reject security and look for something more satisfying.

Obviously, an ‘outsider’ can be any kind of person. He could be a person with the temperament of an explorer who finds himself working in a bank. He could be a person with the temperament of an actor—or for that matter, a pop singer—who is forced to work at labouring jobs. He can be any number of types of misfit. But all ‘outsiders’ have one thing in common: the ‘racing driver’ element is suppressed and frustrated, and struggles to get out.

When, at the age of twenty-three, I wrote a book called The Outsider, I was startled to discover how many people considered themselves outsiders. For months after the publication of the book, I received dozens of letters a week, all beginning ‘Dear Mr. Wilson, I am an outsider ... ’ The success of the book was obviously due to the fact that so many people in modern society feel themselves ‘outsiders’.

I had tended to divide outsiders into three types: the physical outsider, the emotional outsider and the intellectual outsider. All outsiders have in common this need to reject the boredom of ‘everyday reality’. The ‘intellectual outsider’ tends to seek escape in the world of science or philosophy; the emotional outsider in the world of art or poetry; the physical outsider in adventure, in anything that demands physical skill or courage. I believe that most juvenile delinquents could be classified as physical outsiders.

Now I must admit that I personally am far more interested in the intellectual or emotional outsider than in the physical outsider. If our society had a little more courage and imagination, it could find a solution to the problem of the physical outsiders we call juvenile delinquents. They want a sense of excitement and danger; it would not be all that difficult to provide it. The writer Norman Mailer once suggested that big cities ought to build enormous concrete tanks where teenagers could practise skin diving—perhaps with a few small sharks to add an element of danger—and that ski-jumps should be built in public parks. He obviously has the right idea. (In Norway, where everyone goes skiing in the mountains every winter, there is almost no juvenile delinquency.) If the governments of the world spent only a fraction of the money they use for armaments on providing such ‘outlets’ for teenagers, there would be no problem of juvenile delinquency.

But the problem of the intellectual and emotional outsiders is altogether more difficult. A man who goes out to explore Central Africa gets rid of his problem in action. The scientist who sets out to explore the atom only sets himself deeper problems. Action is its own reward. It ends naturally in physical tiredness and sleep. But thought does not ‘end’; it goes on.

Let me make myself clear. All ‘outsiders’ are asked to make a choice between the bank clerk and the racing driver. But the choice of the ‘physical outsider’ leads no further. The choice of the intellectual or emotional outsider leads to still bigger questions. He has to keep going on, further and deeper. It is not enough for him to choose. He wants to know why.

The story of the rape of Tamar makes it fairly clear that Amnon was rather a brainless young man. If he had not been brainless, he might have found himself asking these questions: ‘Am I going mad? Half an hour ago I wanted her more than anything in the world; now I suddenly find that I hate her. Which is the most real—my feeling then or my feeling now? Was I suffering from delusions then—or am I suffering from them now?’

For that is one obvious answer to the problem of sex: that it is based on delusions—the same kind of delusions that, according to Homer, were caused by the song of the Syrens—or, according to Robert Browning, by the pipes of the Pied Piper. (One old rat described how he had marvellous visions of toasted cheese—until suddenly he woke up in the river.) Is that the answer to what happened to Amnon? Is sex a kind of hypnosis?

Or consider that instructive story in Tom Sawyer, where Tom is ordered to whitewash a fence as a punishment. When another boy comes to watch him doing it, Tom begins to whistle and pretend he is enjoying it, and when the boy asks if he can have a turn, Tom refuses. The boy offers to pay him in marbles, and Tom pretends to give way unwillingly. Soon he has a whole queue of boys waiting to take a turn at whitewashing the fence. Twain explains: ‘Work is that which one has to do; play is that which one does not have to do.’ Tom has managed to delude his friends into believing that work is play. Does the sexual urge delude us in the same way—all for the purpose of persuading us to undertake the arduous work of begetting and rearing children?

This is the kind of question that occurs to the ‘intellectual outsider’. He is not contented to choose between the bank clerk and the racing driver. He wants to know why. He wants to know what life is all about, and whether he is really any better off by choosing one or the other.

Let me offer only one example, to make clear the nature of this act of choice.

The philosopher Nietzsche (whose name is pronounced as if it rhymed with teacher) had two unusual experiences that deeply affected the course of his life and philosophy. The first took place when he was a student, and in rather poor health. He describes it in a letter.

‘Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky, and I hurried to a neighbouring hill called Leutch ... At the top, I found a hut where a man was killing two kids, while his son watched him. The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable sense of wellbeing and zest ... Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality. Pure will, without the confusions of intellect—how happy, how free.’

The second experience took place five years later, during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when Nietzsche was a young soldier of twenty-two working with an ambulance unit. The bloodshed and misery sickened him, and again his health was poor. One evening, after a hard day’s work with the wounded, he was walking into a small town near Strasbourg, feeling tired and depressed. Suddenly he heard hoof-beats behind him and the tramp of marching men. As he stood under the shadow of a wall, he recognised his old regiment marching past. The sight of these men marching with such happiness and confidence towards battle—and probably towards death—gave him again an overpowering sensation of happiness and vitality. He wrote in a letter that it suddenly became clear to him that ‘the strongest and highest will to live does not lie in the puny struggle to stay alive at any cost, but in the Will to War, the will to Power’.

In short, what happened to Nietzsche was that he suddenly had a very clear vision of the choice between bank clerk and racing driver, the ‘puny struggle to stay alive at any cost’ and the will to Power.

In The Outsider I used these experiences of Nietzsche—and similar experiences of other men of genius—as a starting point. For they made the basic question absolutely clear. Everything great that human beings have ever done has been built on optimism: that is, on believing the racing driver rather than the bank clerk. But if the great men were right in their optimism, then it means that most human beings have completely wasted their lives. Because in these moments of power and excitement we find ourselves thinking: Man is not the worm he always thought he was! But then the excitement fades, and we return to ‘everyday reality’. But everything that man has achieved has been achieved because a few men refused to accept the dullness of everyday reality.

It is not an easy problem. Nietzsche spent his whole life trying to understand his ‘vision’ on the hilltop; but he was a failure during his life, and he died insane. The same is true of the painter Van Gogh—another visionary—and of many other ‘outsider’ figures whom I wrote about. When we look back on the nineteenth century, and on the long list of men of genius who died insane or committed suicide or died of tuberculosis, there is a strong temptation to believe that men had better not meddle with these problems.

I do not believe this myself—but this is no place to explain why. The reason I have spoken about ‘outsiders’ is that discussion of it is necessary if we are to understand man’s sexual impulse.

Most of us may not have experiences like Nietzsche’s vision on the hilltop, but we have similar experiences, moments of immense confidence and certainty. And when these moments vanish, we find ourselves asking whether it was all an illusion—or whether this boring reality of everyday life is the illusion. After all, many people think they can understand the secret of the universe when they are drunk; but when they wake up the next morning they only have a bad hangover. In the same way, doctors have been experimenting with the effects of alcohol on bus drivers, and they discovered that while alcohol makes drivers far more confident, it also makes them less efficient. (After a few glasses of whisky, drivers were willing to drive an eight-foot bus between seven-foot posts.)

Now, in the light of these remarks, let us reconsider Maupassant’s story of the girl with hair between her shoulder-blades, and Bill Hopkins’ episode of the girl in bed.

Strong sexual desire gives us a sensation of being driven by something more important than our everyday selves. It stirs us in the way that the sound of a trumpet excites a war horse. It produces a sensation similar to Nietzsche’s vision on the hilltop.

Unfortunately, the results of obeying this trumpet call are often disastrous—particularly for inexperienced young people. The pleasure of the sexual act—which may last for fifteen minutes or so—may lead to nine months of inconvenience for the girl and a lifetime of inconvenience for both of them. In many of the poorer countries of the world, sex seems to be the only free pleasure that life allows—until it turns out to be one of the most expensive of all pleasures.

It is not surprising that mankind’s attitude to sex tends to be divided—particularly in the twentieth century, when the ‘population explosion’ threatens to reduce the whole world to an overcrowded slum. The only people who need feel no misgivings about sex are those who are so rich that they can afford to support any number of children.

In other words, we can never be sure whether sex is one of the greatest experiences that human beings can have, or whether it is a shabby confidence trick, designed to lure the rats into the river. This is why Maupassant’s hero suddenly failed to ‘sing his song of love’ when he saw the hair on the girl’s back. For whenever a man takes a girl in his arms, he is suppressing the half of himself that whispers: ‘Look out, it’s all a confidence trick!’ (The same, of course, applies to the girl, who has more to lose.) His two halves are wrestling furiously inside him. The conflict becomes fiercer if his desire is purely physical. (After all, if the man and woman know one another and trust one another, there is less cause to feel doubt.)

But why should the sight of hair on her back make the lover impotent?

The answer is that it has nothing to do with the hair on her back. But the sudden shock of seeing something so unexpected leads one of the wrestlers to lose his grip for a moment—and the other instantly takes advantage of it. His distrust immediately seizes him by the throat, and desire vanishes like the air from a punctured tyre. The same thing happens in the case of Bill Hopkins’ hero, intent on raping the girl in her bed. He has worked himself up to this rape by allowing his imagination free play. An essential part of the rape is that the girl should be passive and helpless against his strength. When the girl throws back the bedclothes and allows him to see her naked she has pricked this bubble of imagination; she is no longer passive. She is challenging him, and upsetting the balance of power between the two wrestlers he contains inside him.

All this creates deep and important insights into sex, but its importance goes far beyond sex. Sex is only the key by which we come to understand something fundamental about man.

To begin with, this view of sex enables us to understand all the so-called ‘sexual perversions’. Let us consider, for example, a classic case of sexual maladjustment, the sex murderer Reginald Christie. Christie was a shy, neurotic man, fifty-five years old at the time of his arrest. In his slum house in Notting Hill Christie murdered at least six women, including his wife. The motive—except in the case of his wife—was always sex. But most of his victims were prostitutes, so the question arises: Why did he have to kill them? And the answer would seem to be: Because women so frightened him that they had to be unconscious before he became capable of possessing them. The evidence seems to show that Christie would invite women into his house, get them drunk, and persuade them to sit in a deck chair which was attached to the gas-tap. When the women had succumbed to the gas, Christie would commit rape, and then strangle them—probably out of fear of what would happen when they woke up.

It will be seen immediately that this is Maupassant’s situation taken one stage further. Maupassant’s hero lost his sexual appetite at the sight of hair on the girl’s back; Christie lost his sexual appetite if the girl showed any sign of individuality. What he wanted was a girl who was little more than a sexual daydream—totally passive. Only then could he experience his moment of intensity, his equivalent of Nietzsche’s vision on the hilltop. And immediately afterwards, he had to face the problem of what to do with a dead girl—a problem he solved by hiding them in a cupboard in the wall.

In other words, all sexual perversion has the same root: this clash between the real world and the world as we would like it to be. The difference between a ‘sexually normal’ person, a sexual pervert and a sexual criminal, is only one of degree.

This may be a disturbing statement, but it serves no purpose to ignore it. The truth about sex is disturbing. First of all, we have to recognise that almost all men—there are very few exceptions—feel ‘sexually underprivileged’. When they read about a man like Gerald Thompson, the Peoria murderer, they may shake their heads disapprovingly, but it is only Thompson’s method they object to—the forcible rape of unwilling women. If they are honest, they will also recognise a certain mad logic in Thompson’s career of rape: Thompson was trying to realise something that all men want—the freedom of any beautiful woman in the world. Barbusse’s hero stated a basic truth when he said: ‘It is not a woman I want; it is all women.’

Most sexual perversions (and I am not counting homosexuality among them) are a groping attempt to achieve this, as we can see at a glance. The ‘Peeping Tom’, for example, is committing a harmless form of ‘rape’; he is violating the woman’s privacy instead of her body. (But one may easily lead to the other: as, for example, in the case of Charles Floyd, a truck driver of Dallas, Texas, who began as a Peeping Tom, and ended as a multiple sex murderer.) Fetichism is obviously an attempt to possess strange women without the problem of personal involvement. (I have cited elsewhere the case of ‘Rodney Shires’, a shy youth who worked for a theatrical agency; when he was attracted by an actress who was a client of the agency, he burgled her flat, using a skeleton key, and stole her underwear—which he would later destroy. This was Rodney Shires’ way of possessing ‘all women’.) It is only one stage from fetichism to Sergeant Bertrand’s necrophily, or Christie’s type of sexual murder. And one step further still, we have the sadist: the man who wants the girl to be little more than a sexual daydream, and who tries to convince himself that she is a sexual daydream by maltreating her.

In short, we have to recognise that the male sexual desire is basically impersonal. Romantic novelists have been telling us for centuries that love is intensely personal—that Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde, suit one another so perfectly that they want to stay together even after death. It is a touching idea, but it is untrue to the facts about sex. We may as well talk of a man enjoying his dinner so much that he wants to be united with it after death. Man is like a tiger looking for a good meal.

All this is not to say that love cannot exist between men and women. People can need one another on a personal level as well as on a sexual level. But the great romantics insisted on lumping the personal and the sexual together and calling it simply ‘love’. This is only muddled thinking.

A murder case that took place in Holland in 1948 will help to illustrate this point. Two fifteen-year-olds, Jan and Ada, both children of respectable parents, fell in love. Jan loved playing Red Indians, and Ada would join in his games—which involved her playing the part of the prisoner who is about to be scalped and burned. Jan would draw pictures of her lying on her back, and marked with crosses the places where he wanted to stick pins in her. Ada, strangely enough, was fascinated by these strange fantasies. Jan saw himself as the cruel torturer, and Ada derived equal pleasure from imagining herself the prisoner who was about to be tortured. Their fantasies suited one another perfectly. Ada kept a diary in which she rhapsodised about her love for Jan, and wrote: ‘I love you. Even if you kill me, I shan’t say anything ... Love is a hard thing to understand.’ One day Jan’s desires got out of hand. He bought a Scout knife, and borrowed his younger brother’s skipping rope. That night he took Ada to a disused shooting-range, and tied her (with her permission) to some railings. She became frightened and struggled; her struggles only excited him. He began to prick her with the knife, and ended by stabbing her and cutting her throat. Later he gave himself up and confessed everything.

In this case we can see that the ‘love’ between them was simply the interaction of two fantasies, two dream worlds. Jan dreamed of the ideally gentle girl, completely passive and yielding. Ada dreamed of being dominated, of yielding to a brute, impassive force. (In her diary, she wrote: ‘I adore you, brute of brutes.’) It was not ‘love’ they felt for one another; they were like two people talking different languages. But each fitted comfortably into the other’s dream world—until Jan suddenly burst out of her dream world and made her realise that he was truly ‘another’—an alien being, a Martian, a spider who has tired of pretend-to be in love with the fly.

We can see also why women are less prone to sexual perversions than men. It is not because women are closer to reality than men: it is not because woman can accept her lover for ‘what he is’, while men try to force women to fit their imagination, like the giant Procrustes who stretched men or chopped off their feet to make them fit his bed. No; men and women both live in their own dream world, but the woman’s dream tends to be passive, while the man’s is active. So woman has only one possible perversion—masochism—to man’s half-dozen (sadism, scopophilia, necrophilia, fetichism, etc.). Stekel cites a curious case of a sexually frustrated girl who used to imagine that she was lying naked on a butcher’s slab, waiting to be killed; the butcher’s assistants would come and touch her roughly while she lay there; finally, the butcher would come and examine her; then, before taking up his knife, would place his finger in her vagina. At this point, the girl would experience a sexual orgasm, and the fantasy would end—before the actual ‘execution’. Ada’s character was obviously fundamentally similar to this one; her fantasy also ended before the execution. Unfortunately, her lover’s did not.

I am not trying to debunk the idea of love between two people. People may form a strong and deep attachment to one another, just as you may feel a real personal liking for your grocer. But your relation with him is still based on the fact that he supplies you with something you need—groceries—and you supply him with something he needs—money. And the grocer’s relationship with his wife is also based on the fact that she gives him something he needs in exchange for something she needs.

Once we really understand this, we have understood the most important thing about sex—but also about all human life. We then no longer divide the world of sex into the normal and abnormal. But this does not mean that all sex now seems ‘normal’—including homosexuality, fetichism and sadism. This would obviously be an absurdity. Rather, we realise that all sex is more or less abnormal, because there is something ‘abnormal’ about all human existence. We only believe in the ‘normality’ of sex because we think that it is like eating and drinking—a straightforward physical appetite. It is not. There is a lot of confidence-trickery about sex. It is the greatest of all conjuring tricks.

But as soon as we realise this—and it is obvious enough if you think about Maupassant’s story, or the rape of Tamar—you raise the question: Who is the conjuror? In fact, you are asking the question that has been asked by philosophers and saints since man learned to think. This is why it is vitally important that everyone should learn to think intelligently about sex.

6: The Great Pornography Battle

History of pornography in the twentieth century. D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Ulysses case. Faulkner’s Sanctuary. No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The James Bond novels and their attitude to sex. Nabokov’s Lolita. Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Fanny Hill. The Naked Lunch. Candy. The sensible attitude to pornography.

Let us take a closer and more detailed look at this great ‘sexual revolution’ of the twentieth century, and see if we can find where it is leading.

A good starting point is the literature of the twentieth century, because it is doubtful whether there would have been any sexual revolution without books like Lady Chatterley and the rest.

The nineteenth century was the century of romantic love. Its motto is ‘Love makes the world go round’. Its basic idea is that nothing is so important as two lovers settling down to live happily ever after. We can still find plenty of this romantic love in modern women’s magazines—True Romance, and so on. But in the nineteenth century, it found great artistic expression in works like Wuthering Heights and Tristan and Isolde. ‘Love is more important than death’ said these works; and because they are great works of art, they convince you that it is true.

Yet when you look at it closely, the romantic century was not all that romantic. If you think of its great writers, very few of them bothered all that much about love—Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen ... It was the cheaper level of literature and entertainment that made love all-important. There were flocks of women novelists who made a rich living out of pandering to the romantic hunger of Victorian women. The theatre was full of musicals about romantic love—all heavily sentimental. When Flaubert dared to write a realistic novel—Madame Bovary—about a woman who wrecks her marriage because of her hunger for romantic love, he was denounced as the vilest and filthiest kind of cynic. A few years later, the same thing happened to Ibsen when he showed a perfect ‘romantic’ marriage in A Doll’s House, and then made his heroine leave her husband and children to seek self-development. Ibsen’s message was: All this romantic love is a silly lie; life was made for far more interesting things.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the revolution was well under way. Bernard Shaw created a sensation by portraying women with minds of their own who want a man and go all out to get him. H.G. Wells was almost prosecuted for his novel Ann Veronica about a young girl who enjoys ‘free love’.

Even so, D.H. Lawrence, who published his first novel in 1910, soon found himself in trouble for being too frank about sex. An early novel, The Trespasser, ran into trouble, and Women in Love was banned.

But the whole point about Lawrence was that he was a poet who could dare to be frank about sex. Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth may have thought that sex was important, but they could not be too frank about it; they had to confine their ecstasies to the beauties of nature. Lawrence was also a poet; like all poets, he felt that most people are blind and deaf to the important things in life. He felt that sex is one of these important things. He also felt that modern life was becoming increasingly shallow, trivial and unsatisfying. So in his most important statement of his ideas, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he tried to show the way that a woman who feels lost and confused finds a deeper sense of reality in a love affair with the gamekeeper.

‘Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of a woman.’

Elsewhere in the same book Lawrence refers to the penis as ‘the rod that connects man to the stars’. This is the essence of Lawrence: he sees sex as the most important thing that can happen to a man or woman. But it should also be noted that Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper have an idyllic love affair in a hut in the woods. Lawrence hates modern towns with their ugliness and complexity—just as Wordsworth hated London. Nature is as important to him as sex; in fact, he is at his best describing nature.

But Lawrence is a solitary figure in the ‘sexual revolution’. Most of the other revolutionaries were only concerned with destruction—with throwing out the old taboos of the Victorians, with jeering at the old sentimentality. Joyce’s Ulysses, which came out six years before Lady Chatterley, struck many people as the most obscene book ever published. There is something in this, for Joyce wanted to be obscene; he wanted to shock people by writing down the things that so far people had only seen on lavatory walls. Joyce was forty years old when Ulysses was published; he felt he had been neglected too long. He wanted people to sit up and take notice. So he has a scene in a brothel where a great deal of previously unprintable language is used, and ends the book by making his hero kiss his wife’s behind.

It was Ulysses that really started the ‘pornography’ furore that is still going on today. There had been nothing remotely like it. The serious critics said: ‘But this is an extremely important novel, full of genius and originality.’ The shocked public replied: ‘You may well be right. But what will happen if we excuse this kind of filth on the ground of the book’s originality? We shall soon have every teenager reading it and practising perversions at the age of fourteen ... ’ And the defenders replied: ‘Nonsense. Teenagers know as much about sex as most adults anyway. It will do no harm to bring it out into the open.’

Both sides were partly right. The general public certainly exaggerated the danger of publishing the book like Ulysses openly. It is an extremely difficult book to read, and any teenager who is intelligent enough to read it will be too intelligent to be corrupted by it. Still, the public was not entirely wrong. Ulysses formed a precedent that has led to the open publication of a great deal of straight pornography.

The point at issue was this. The sex in Ulysses was intended to shock. The brothel scene was intended to be a slap in the face to startle the reader. But the larger part of Ulysses—and it is 700 pages long—is a minute and plodding description of every thought and every action of a number of very ordinary people throughout an ordinary day. The shock element raises the whole book to a new level of interest, like the climax of a symphony. Without the sex and obscenity, Ulysses would be an unreadable bore.

Novelists before Joyce had got into trouble for obscenity—Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola, for example—but they had always defended themselves by saying that their scenes were not obscene but realistic and true to life. Now Joyce’s brothel scene was not intended to be true to life; it is a kind of nightmare that takes place in the mind of one of the characters. It was meant to shock.

So when, in the 1930s, the law allowed the open publication of Ulysses in England and America it was a red-letter day for the ‘sexual revolution’. The American novelist William Faulkner used Joyce’s shock tactics in several of his novels. As you read him, you feel that he is trying to work out how he can use sex and violence to hit the reader in the solar plexus. He wants to present a rather grim and savage view of life, and violence is an extremely useful tool. In The Sound and the Fury he sets out to show why a young man commits suicide, and there is a strong incest theme in the book. In Sanctuary a rich girl is kidnapped by a gangster who is sexually impotent, and who takes her virginity with the help of a corn-cob. Later he allows another gangster to make love to her, while he lies across the bottom of the bed, still wearing his hat and whinnying like a horse. The book culminates in a scene in which the wrong man is burned alive by a mob for the ‘rape’.

It is no criticism of Faulkner to say that he is determined to shock. All his books—like Lawrence’s—are criticisms of the modern world, and shock is an important method of expressing his meanings. He is another poet in revolt.

There is an important point that must be made here. I am not trying to imply that Lawrence, Joyce and Faulkner are beyond criticism. There is an element of childish ‘spoiltness’ about Lawrence that makes him often unreadable; for all its good intentions, Lady Chatterley is a very poor book. There was the same element of immaturity about both Joyce and Faulkner. Neither of them grew up. Faulkner failed to mature because he never really faced his problems; he preferred to spend much of his time drunk.

The law was still fighting a hard battle against obscenity, so the publication of Ulysses was not the signal for an avalanche of deliberately ‘shocking’ books. But Faulkner’s Sanctuary started a fashion, and by the late thirties there were millions of paperbacks in circulation that set out to exploit gangsterism, sex and sadism. One of the most popular was James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish —which, like Sanctuary, deals with the kidnapping of a rich girl by gangsters, one of whom is a pervert. The gangsters intend to murder Miss Blandish as soon as they have the ransom money, but their leader—an evil old woman called ‘Ma’—decides against it. Her son Slim is a sadist who used to cut up cats as a small boy. He has never shown any interest in women—until Miss Blandish appears. So now Miss Blandish is handed over to Slim. The author is not too specific about what happens to her, but we are told that Slim practised ‘every pleasure that his twisted mind could devise’. At the end of the book, after Miss Blandish is rescued and the gangsters are all killed, Miss Blandish commits suicide—presumably because she can no longer live without Slim’s attentions.

Like most of the gangster novels of the time, Miss Blandish is completely cynical. It has no ‘heroes’. The police are as corrupt and brutal as the gangsters. It all takes place in a world without values. This type of novel became extremely popular in the early forties. The authors used names like ‘Ben Sarto’ and ‘Darcy Glinto’—all implying toughness—and they had titles like Lady Don’t Turn Over and I’ll Spit on your Grave. One typical gangster novel began with the kidnapping of the police chief’s daughter. A policeman leaps on to the running board of the gangster’s car. The gangster deliberately swerves close to another car, crushing the policeman between the two cars—with appropriate descriptions of the ‘sickening crunch of splintered bone’ and the spurting of blood. The girl is then taken back to the gangsters’ hideout, where she is interviewed by the ‘chief’. When she threatens him he hits her on the jaw so that she sinks down to the floor. Her skirt conveniently catches on a chair, so that she reveals her suspender belt and panties. A few chapters later the rape scene follows, with the gangster muttering, as he fumbles with her clothes: ‘You gotta be good, baby.’

This kind of thing—with no literary merit—was openly published in paperbacks during the forties (and still is today). It was the direct result of Sanctuary and Sanctuary was the direct result of Ulysses. So the people who objected to Ulysses were not entirely mistaken about its bad effect.

In the mid 1950s Ian Fleming gave a new twist to the gangster novel in his James Bond series. The Bond books are better written than most of the gangster paperbacks of the forties. In his best chapters—describing games, for example—Fleming writes better than most of his predecessors, the creators of Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, the Toff and so on. There is also a conscious element of selfmockery in the Bond books. But when all this has been said it must be recognised that they are thoroughly nasty pieces of work.

To begin with, it is necessary to the novel of violence to have completely ruthless villains. Fleming chooses the Russians as his scapegoats. One does not have to be a communist sympathiser to find something rather evil in Fleming’s anti-Russianism. It is reminiscent of Hitler’s anti-semitism. (In an interview given to Playboy just before his death Fleming tried to minimise it by calling it ‘ragging the Russians’—as if it is all clean, healthy fun—but any reader of From Russia with Love will recognise it as a straightforward incitement to racial hatred.)

It is Fleming’s attitude to sex that concerns us here. Fleming’s sex is as unreal as that of any Victorian sentimental novelist; it is all a kind of schoolboy daydream. Bond’s reward for fighting against these monsters of evil is to continually find himself in close contact with ravishing girls in black underwear. All of the schoolboy’s sexual daydream goes into the Bond books. In the first one Bond and a girl are kidnapped together. The girl is secured by having her skirt pulled up over her head and tied, ‘looking incredibly indecent’. Naturally, Bond possesses her later in the book. In From Russia With Love Bond goes into his hotel room and finds a beautiful girl waiting in his bed—wearing nothing but black stockings and a black velvet band round the throat. As they make love, two Russian cameramen film them from behind a fake mirror.

What Fleming has done is to take all the elements that made earlier crime novels successful—the Saint’s expensive car and taste for good food, the sadism of No Orchids for Miss Blandish (From Russia with Love has a sadist who used to slice up cats as a boy), the gangsters of Mickey Spillane and Darcy Glinto—and reproduce them all with a slickness that was beyond most of his models. The result makes entertaining reading—but there is an element of poison about it all. There is something amiably nonsensical about Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond; you swallow the old-school-tie sentiments with amusement. But even the element of self-parody in the James Bond books cannot keep away the feeling that all this is a cynical exploitation of the nastiest elements of the modern world for the sake of making money. It is only one stage better than the grubby typewritten manuscripts that can be bought in the Charing Cross Road—the stories written specifically for men who want to be beaten, or to rape children.

Above all, there is the same feeling of a ‘world without values’ that you get in No Orchids for Miss Blandish, the feeling of a world in which there is nothing but brutality, violence and lust. The gangsters now no longer kidnap rich heiresses; they steal an atomic bomb, and threaten to destroy a whole modern city until they receive a ransom in millions. And in certain respects, Fleming sets out to pervert values as deliberately as the Marquis de Sade. In the Playboy interview, he declared that Bond was not intended to be a hero—that he was merely ‘a blunt instrument in the hands of government’. Like the talk about ragging the Russians, this is obviously another attempt at evasion. Bond is intended to be regarded as a hero, but he is a hero with a number of traits that were formerly reserved for villains: a ‘thin, cruel mouth’, a licence to kill, a preference for luxury and fast living, and a tendency to cast off his girls as soon as he has possessed them.

I dwell on the Bond books because they are a logical development of the un-banning of Ulysses. The anti-banners declared that more evil than good would result if censorship of books continued. The banners were sometimes conservative die-hards whose ideal of literature was Rider Haggard, Henty and The Fifth Form at St. Dominics. But many of them simply wanted to know where you draw the line between ‘literature’ and the ‘under the counter’ books specially written for flagellants, transvestites and so on. They felt that if the line was blurred too much, you would eventually get the books on flagellation and transvestitism sold openly for any teenager to buy. The James Bond books unfortunately indicate that they were right. The objection is not to sadism and perversion treated seriously, but to these subjects deliberately exploited for the sake of making money. We have laws against the open sale of drugs because we recognise that some people are attracted by the idea of self-destruction. We have laws against the corruption of minors, because we recognise that vice racketeers could open highly successful brothels catering for men who would enjoy sexual intercourse with minors. No one supposes that, if these laws were lifted, heroin would become as popular as whisky, or that most men would develop a taste for seducing girls of ten. But we recognise that there would be a small percentage of people who would become heroin addicts or seducers of minors, and this is enough to make us retain the laws. The case against the open sale of pornography is similar. It is not entirely a matter of stupid conservatives versus intelligent liberals.

In the fifties and sixties the sexual revolution has continued, and it is worth following its progress in some detail. First of all came Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, published as an ‘under the counter’ book for American tourists in Paris in 1955; the subject—the seduction of a ten-year-old girl by an adult man. There is much to be said in favour of the book. It is extremely well written by a man who is a genuine humorist. There can be no question of its being written for money. And its real subject is not simply the sexual perversion of a middle-aged man. It is about all the unsatisfied sexual desire in our society, all the ‘sexual underprivilege’. In other words, it is a sermon on Barbusse’s words ‘It is not a woman I want; it is all women’. Lolita is a symbol of all the million desirable and unpossessable girls in every city: all the girls at whom a man looks like a child looking in a sweet-shop window.

This is undoubtedly why Lolita was finally able to appear both in England and America without any prosecution.

For all its risqué subject, it was literature. Besides, it does not contain any sexually exciting scenes. Most of the sex is left to the imagination. So Lolita became a best seller in England and America, and another barrier was down. (But it is significant that it sold far better in America than in England; the English sales were much lower than the publisher had expected. In Sweden it was published without any kind of fuss, and did not even reach best-seller status.)

The next stage was to publish Lady Chatterley openly in America. Again, it became a best-seller. No doubt it could have been published in England without any fuss if it had been brought out in an expensive hard-cover edition. But a paperback publisher decided to issue it direct as a paperback. A case was brought against the book; it was fought long and hard. But the result was that the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley was published in England in 1960.

American publishers now vied with one another to find obscene ‘classics’. Henry Miller was obviously the next on the list. The Tropic of Cancer was an ideal book for these purposes. It had been highly praised by serious critics ever since it appeared in the thirties. It was an exceedingly dull book, simply describing Miller’s own life in Paris as a down-and-out. Miller was a frustrated writer who poured a great deal of pretentiousness into the book—poetic prose, and so on—so it could easily be defended as literature. There was not even an attempt to ban it (except in certain states of America—Maryland, for one). It quickly became a best seller, and paved the way for other Miller books—Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring, for example. In England two volumes of his Rosy Crucifixion, Plexus and Nexus, have also been published. (It has not been published in America, for libel reasons.) Significantly, the first volume, Sexus, the most frankly pornographic of Miller’s books, has not yet been published, and it is difficult to see how it can be; but no doubt an expensive edition would escape the attention of the public prosecutor.

The next obscene ‘classic’ was more controversial because no one could argue that it had any serious literary intention. This was Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, generally known as Fanny Hill. This had first been issued in 1749, and had had a steady under-the-counter sale ever since then. It tells the story of an innocent country girl who comes to London and is inducted into a brothel, where she is first introduced to sex by a lesbian. She and the lesbian later act as Peeping Toms, witnessing various scenes of intercourse through a hole in the wall. Fanny escapes the brothel with a lover, to whom she loses her virginity; but he is later sent abroad, so she again becomes a prostitute. At the end of the book her lover returns and she settles down to respectability.

In America Fanny Hill escaped prosecution and became a best seller. In England it met determined resistance, due to the intention of a paperback publisher to bring out the unexpurgated edition at a low price. It was felt that this book should not be easily available to any minor who had half a crown to spare, because it is pornography for the sake of pornography. An expensive hard-cover edition has been quietly on sale for years and has met no resistance; but the judges felt that a cheap paperback would be too much. In my own opinion they were right. I doubt whether it would ‘corrupt’ teenagers, but in the hands of boys and girls under the age of twelve it would certainly tend to stimulate an abnormal interest in sex, and there is no more reason why they should be allowed to buy it openly than that they should be allowed to buy whisky or cigarettes. It is not a matter of prudery, but of common sense.

It now seems to be the general rule that anything that can be regarded as serious writing can be published. The publication of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves has been another milestone. Harris’s book is enormous—a thousand pages or so—and of these probably not more than fifty could be regarded as pornographic; the rest tells endless stories of Harris’s distinguished acquaintances. And again, if pornography is to be defined as the exploitation of crude sex for money, then Harris’s book is not pornographic. He dwells on his past conquests with the nostalgia of an old man; he is less interested in money than in showing what a great man Frank Harris was.

In recent years there has been a curious and interesting development in this matter of pornography. Once a book has been attacked as pornography, it automatically gets on to the best-seller lists. So the guardians of morality have come to recognise that unless they have a very solid case—as with Fanny Hill—they are little more than publicity agents for writers of pornography. The consequence is that many modern novels have pornographic scenes, but everyone takes care never to mention them, and the casual reader may be startled to discover some hair-raising scene of sexual perversion in the middle of some paperback that he has bought at a railway bookstall. A case in point is the novelist Harold Robbins, who had published several novels without setting the Thames on fire. Then came The Carpet Baggers. One gets a feeling that he said: ‘Well, if this doesn’t do it, nothing ever will.’ And, of course, it did—and all the earlier novels can now be bought at every railway bookstall in paperback editions.

The amusing consequence of all this is that sex is no longer enough to put a book on the best-seller list. To achieve that, it has to have an ‘angle’—like The Chapman Report of Irving Wallace, based on the idea of the Kinsey sex-research unit operating in a typical American suburb, or Peyton Place of Grace Metalious, which sets out to ‘take the lid off’ a small respectable town. But dozens of imitation Chapman Reports and Peyton Places have never crept on to the best-seller lists because critics are unwilling to mention their sexual frankness. So it seems that there is something to be said for not trying to suppress every book that balances along the tightrope of pornography. Things eventually even themselves out.

At the time I wrote this, the sexual revolution in England and America has taken another step forward with the open publication of two books that would have been inconceivable ten years ago: William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, and Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. The Naked Lunch is the fantasies of a self-confessed dope addict with strong sadistic and homosexual leanings. It seems to be strongly influenced by the nightmare scene of Ulysses with everything taking place in a dream atmosphere in which anything can happen. It is the technique of the James Bond books taken to a mad extreme—all the sadistic and sexual fantasies given completely free reign, but with no attempt at a story. It is a nightmare written by someone who admires Joyce’s language, and who has read science fiction and Dracula:

‘Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon ...

‘Pool covered with green slime in a ruined French garden. Huge pathic frogs rise slowly from the water on a mud platform playing the clavichord.’

But reading The Naked Lunch produces a strange feeling of futility. After all, sex is a fairly simple act, and although the Hindus claim that there are sixty-nine positions, it is difficult to imagine half that number. So, reading Burroughs, one feels that sex cannot go further than this, just as in De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. It is as if someone brought up in a strict religious atmosphere suddenly decides to plunge into sin and taste every possible forbidden pleasure—and then, after a few days of ‘sinning’, discovers that there is nothing more to do—he has touched rock bottom. Without the old religious sense, the sin becomes meaningless; once you abandon all discipline, pleasure ceases to be pleasure.

In short, the most interesting thing about Burroughs, as about De Sade, is that he wants to be wicked and shocking, and discovers that it is impossible. Once you have finished kicking against the things that frightened and bullied you as a child—and they very quickly collapse—you discover that you are free and grown-up, and you are faced with the problem of being constructive. Like De Sade, Burroughs makes the discovery that it is impossible to be positively evil. For this is the dream of all these rebels: they would like to be immense, defiant figures of darkness, like Milton’s Satan, and they discover that you can’t be Satan unless you’ve got a God to defy; in other words, you can’t be Satan without being religious. Attempts to be evil quickly turn into something rather trivial and nasty, and sometimes simply comic.

These same comments apply to the French writer Genet, whose ‘banned books’ have also been published openly in recent years. He also attempts to be the Great Rebel and the Great Criminal and Pervert, and only succeeds in showing that crime and perversion are another name for immaturity.

So there is certainly something to be said for openly publishing Burroughs and Genet. They make you aware of something you might otherwise not have realised. As to their obscenity, the same can be said of it as of Ulysses: it is by no means everybody’s cup of tea: in fact, very few people could take much of it. A book like The Carpet Baggers is far more likely to corrupt than The Naked Lunch.

The case of Candy is very different. Like so many other banned books that have been published openly in the last ten years—including Lolita, Plexus, The Ginger Man and The Naked Lunch, it was first published by the Olympia Press in Paris—a press that catered for English and American tourists who wanted to buy pornography. Published in America in 1964, it quickly topped the best-seller lists.

Candy is interesting because, apart from Fanny Hill, it is one of the frankest pieces of straight pornography ever published openly.

It starts off as a female version of Voltaire’s Candide, the story of an extremely naive and idealistic young man whose innocence lands him in various misfortunes. Candy is a pretty and naive young American girl who hero-worships her college professor, a man who is full of fine and grandiloquent phrases about beauty and truth. It quickly turns out that the professor is an old phoney whose main interest is in seducing his prettier pupils—male or female. But by this time Candy is determined to embark on sexual experiments, and these form the substance of the book.

But the interesting thing about Candy is that it all takes place on a level of farce. It sets out to be funny, and, to a large extent, it succeeds. The situations are deliberately absurd. Her father is in hospital (as a result of a blow on the head dealt by one of Candy’s lovers). Her father’s twin brother tries to make love to her on the floor, but hurts her, so that her yell brings the nurse running in. In the confusion that follows, Candy’s father is thrown on to the floor, and escapes from the hospital. His twin brother is stunned by the nurse—with the bed pan—and bundled into bed in his place. No one discovers the mistake for several days, when the twin brother’s wife sees him without his trousers, and instantly recognises her husband by a part of him that is more familiar than his face.

Now this kind of thing was being done by Thorne Smith thirty years ago—in books like The Bishop’s Jaegers and The Jovial Ghosts. But Thorne Smith could never be too specific; he left a great deal to the reader’s imagination. Candy leaves nothing to the imagination. For physical frankness, it outdoes Ulysses.

The book ends with a deliberately absurd situation in which Candy has gone to Tibet to be a Buddhist nun. There is a storm, and she drags a dirty old monk into the shelter of the temple. Lightning rips a hole in the roof and topples over a huge statue of the Buddha, which presses Candy and the monk together, so they somehow finish by having intercourse—Candy pinned against the monk by the huge nose of the Buddha, which is buried in her rear. At this point she recognises the monk as her lost father—and the book ends.

Now the curious thing about all this is that Candy has no pretensions to seriousness. It is pornography written light-heartedly for American tourists. It is not badly done—although it is not well done either. But a chorus of well-known critics greeted it as a comic masterpiece, one declaring ‘It should be in every American home’ and another calling is ‘Morally bracing’. Life declared ‘Nowhere has sex been sicker than in the U.S.’, and went on to say that Candy was a healthy reaction—a reminder that sex is supposed to be fun.

This view would have roused D.H. Lawrence to rage, and I believe Lawrence would have been right. To say that ‘sex is fun’ is like saying that war is one of the healthier sports. It is the reaction of thoroughly trivial minds, glad to see their triviality parading openly. With Candy, the ‘great pornography battle’ has come the full circle. In the nineteenth century the writers who were accused of exploiting sex defended themselves by saying that it was necessary to their serious purposes. The same applied to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses. It is because Lawrence and Joyce eventually won their battles that Burroughs and Genet are now published openly. Frank Harris’ autobiography could be defended on grounds of being an interesting historical document, and even Fanny Hill can get by on this historical argument. But Candy is not historically interesting and it makes no pretence of seriousness. Reviewers talked about ‘brilliant and scathing satire’, but this is untrue; there is no satire in the book after the opening chapter with its parallels with Candide. It is simply a comic novel with sex thrown in, and its literary value is no higher than that of The Bishop’s Jaegers or Lucky Jim.

This is the real case against Candy. The modern world is trivial enough without this kind of thing. The one thing that Joyce, Lawrence and Faulkner have in common is a hatred of this shallowness; they want to see life taken more seriously; they want to see a literature with a real sense of values. Ulysses and Lady Chatterley and Sanctuary are finally unsatisfying because they are too negative; they are acts of rebellion that do not go far enough. And there is certainly a strong element of ‘sickness’ about them all. But to claim that Candy is a healthy reaction to all this sickness is the sickest thing of all. It is not. It is amusing and trivial rubbish. Trying to read it in one sitting (as I did, in an aeroplane) is like trying to make a good meal out of meringues. The final effect is an awful sense of mental nausea. There is probably no great harm in publishing the book; but its publication is still a sign of hopeless moral confusion, not of liberalism or freedom.

This summarises the situation today—moral confusion, made even more confused by platitudes about creative freedom and moral courage. The defenders of ‘creative freedom’ speak as if puritanism and hypocrisy are preventing the creation of immense masterpieces. In fact, Ulysses is the only genuine borderline case of a real masterpiece that uses obscenity to increase its impact. Lady Chatterley is one of Lawrence’s poorest books. The world would not be any poorer if Faulkner’s Sanctuary had never been published; in fact, all the sex could be thrown wholesale out of his books—such as Pylon and Light in August—and Faulkner’s stature as a novelist would not be in any way affected. The whole ‘creative freedom’ case reached a point of absurdity in 1933 over the prosecution of Erskine Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre, a poorly written piece of work with sex obviously thrown-in to sell the book. The book was ‘acquitted’ and naturally became a best-seller. To talk of ‘creative freedom’ in connection with such a book is to reduce the whole matter to nonsense.

There is one thing I must make very clear. I am not suggesting a new clamp-down on sex in literature. I am only pointing out that the argument for and against pornography has become a Tower of Babel, with both sides talking nonsense. The anti-banners pretend it is all a great moral crusade on behalf of freedom, and that anyone who opposes them must be some kind of fascist or religious fanatic. They seem to believe there would be some positive merit in having no standards at all. It is all a sign of our complete inability to do a little straight and sensible thinking. No one has yet suggested that the country’s moral freedom is at stake because alcohol and cigarettes are not on sale in school tuck shops. We recognise that where juniors are concerned their capacity for freedom is limited by immaturity and lack of self-discipline, and we are therefore obliged to exercise certain restraints. In the Scandinavian countries where, for some reason, the national temperament runs to alcoholism and fast driving, spirits are prohibitively expensive and drunken driving is severely penalised. No one suggests that this is a serious threat to individual freedom. But where it is a question of publishing Fanny Hill or Candy in a cheap paperback edition, common sense seems to vanish. It becomes an issue of freedom versus oppression. It seems to have struck no one that the simple answer would be to treat pornography as the Scandinavians treat alcohol—as an extremely expensive commodity. It would do no harm at all to make a law that books like Candy or the 120 Days of Sodom can be openly published, but never at a price of, say, less than £3 (or $10) a copy. This would establish an effective censorship, and without the waste of breath and confusion of ideas that were so evident at the Lady Chatterley trial. Anyone who really wanted to read the books could buy them or get them from a library, but the slight difficulty involved would automatically act as a filter.

7: Sex and the Future

The mechanism of the sex drive. What is ‘normal’ sex? D.H. Lawrence’s views on sex. How Lawrence came to hold them. Yet even Lawrence tended to ‘perversion’. The parable of the blind men and the elephant. The ‘naive’ definition of sex. Is sex the great illusion or the greatest of all human drives? The meaning of existence. The evolutionary theory of sex and its ability to explain the problems outlined. The reaction against Freud. The New Freedom. Juvenile delinquency. What is freedom?

What I have written about pornography applies to the whole question of sexual freedom. Obviously, we are living in a century of increasing sexual freedom. Obviously, a day will come when very few girls who marry will be virgins. But it is meaningless to ask ‘Where will it all lead?’—even though the question sounds sensible enough. To understand why, consider the question: ‘What is the difference between a man who knows all about wines, and a drunkard?’

The answer is obvious. The man who is really interested in wine uses his intelligence and his taste to enjoy it to the full. The drunkard wants to destroy his intelligence, and after his tenth drink he doesn’t know whether he is drinking wine, beer or gin.

The same is true about sexual freedom. Everything depends on the teenagers of the future. They may become sexual drunkards, and so destroy an important part of themselves, or learn to use the mind and intelligence in sex—in which case, the increased freedom should be a benefit to everybody.

If a man wants to become a connoisseur of wines, he begins by learning something about wine—how it is made, where it is grown and pressed, what kind of difference to expect between a wine from Burgundy and a wine from Bordeaux. If he does not take the trouble to learn these things, he will not be able to tell the difference between a good claret and a cheap Algerian burgundy (except that the latter will leave him with a worse hangover). The same applies to sex. The sexual act itself is as simple—and monotonous—as opening a bottle of wine and drinking it. It cannot be taken much further—which is why most pornography is so monotonous. But the point D.H. Lawrence was making is that it can be taken deeper. Lawrence’s objection to a book like Candy would have been that it makes sex seem simple and straightforward—and so cheapens it. As soon as we look at it more closely, we become aware that it is a subject that could take a lifetime to understand.

Let me give an example of this complexity. In Candy, the heroine does not actually lose her virginity until fairly late in the book. In all the earlier episodes, she comes close to it, but it never actually happens. In fact, the first description of actual intercourse does not occur until very late in the book. The reason is obvious enough—the authors want to build up the readers’ expectations. The actual scene of intercourse is stolen straight from Boccaccio: a ‘monk’ pretends to be initiating her into control of the senses, and tells her that although he will appear to be making love to her, he is actually teaching her spiritual discipline.

Now since the whole book has been building up to this point, it ought logically to be the climax of the work. And it is not. Having read it, you understand why the authors have left it until so late. It leaves you asking: ‘What now?’

And this focusses one of the basic mysteries of human sexuality, which I have referred to periodically in this book, but which we must now examine at length. Sex for animals is a straightforward business. When a dog is excited by the smell of a bitch on heat, the whole of its life is concentrated—for the time being—on the act of sex. It is all over in a few minutes, and the dogs go their separate ways. That is all there is to it. Even if a dog could be made as intelligent as a human being, it would still be unable to understand a book like Candy. It would want to know: but why don’t they get on with it?

Consider, for a moment, what happens when you sing in your bath, and you reach a note that is too high for you. Do you strain your voice to reach it ? No, you drop your voice a whole octave, and sing the note lower. Then, if singing in this lower key brings difficulties, you go back to the old key a few notes later.

If you happen to be interested in hi-fi, I can offer an even more precise illustration. If you are playing a record that has extremely soft parts and some very noisy climaxes you may find it necessary to keep adjusting the volume control. This depends completely upon the power of your equipment—and, above all, on the size of your loudspeaker. If it is a very large loudspeaker, it will take the noisiest climaxes without difficulty. If it is small, you will have to turn it down, because the music will simply ‘blur’ in the noisy parts.

Now it would seem, unfortunately, that the human sexual system has rather small loudspeakers. Whenever sexual excitement reaches a certain pitch, it automatically dies down again. And this explains very clearly why the girl in Bill Hopkins’ novel avoided rape by throwing back the bedclothes and showing herself naked. She left the would-be rapist with no time to turn-down the controls; his sexual desire ‘blurred’ and vanished. This is also why the scene of intercourse in Candy is not the climax of the book. This is why many people find the sexual act disappointing compared to its preliminaries. Our loudspeakers are too small, and they may reproduce soft sounds a lot more accurately than loud ones.

Why should this be so? Well, there are many reasons, but one of the chief ones is that human beings are lazy and do not develop their powers of feeling. For most of us—particularly in the modern world—life is one mad rush. This is why the poets of the nineteenth century—Wordsworth and Keats and the rest—felt it so important to get ‘back to nature’. The quiet and solitude could allow them to develop their powers of feeling again; it could soothe them into states of rest and perception which they could never develop in the midst of a city.

This is what Lawrence felt about sex. There is plenty of sex in modern life; in fact, we are constantly reminded of it. But most of it is shallow, superficial—a sex of the nerves. This is what we mean when we refer to Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot as a ‘sex symbol’. We mean a symbol of quick easy sexual stimulation. What Marilyn Monroe stood for can be seen in the famous ‘still’ from The Seven Year Itch of Marilyn standing on a grating with her skirt blowing around her waist. This is sex in its rawest form, pure desire. It can only awaken a male desire to grab her and possess her on the spot. And when the act of rape was over there would be nothing left.

This is centrally what Lawrence objected to. He felt that this was pure waste of the sexual impulse—the equivalent of pouring it down the drain. It is like a drunk swigging some rare old wine from the bottle, with the sole aim of knocking himself unconscious as quickly as possible. And this is increasingly what sex is coming to mean in the modern world. This is what you have come to feel about it by the time you have read Frank Harris and Henry Miller and Candy. It is the view of sex implicit in the James Bond books.

I am not citing Lawrence as a kind of sexual ‘saviour’. I personally find his novels almost unreadable; but I think that a great deal can be learned from him. In one of his poems, for example, he wrote:

‘What many women cannot give, one woman can.’

This is not merely a sermon on fidelity: I very much doubt if Lawrence was interested in fidelity as such. But it is worth considering his own experience in this connection. Lawrence was the son of a Nottingham coal miner, and one of a large family. He was a sickly child, and when he later became a schoolteacher his health got worse. Then he met the wife of one of his colleagues—Freda Weelkes, the daughter of a German baron. The meeting proved to be a turning point in his life. When she left her husband and children to live with Lawrence, he also had his first novel accepted, and was able to throw up his job as a schoolteacher. So Freda came to represent for Lawrence far more than a sexual partner. This connection with the aristocracy gave him a definite sense of leaving his old life behind. (He used to write to friends on crested writing paper, with a note: ‘My wife is the daughter of a German baron’.) Most of the male accounts of Freda seem to agree that she was extremely attractive sexually (although female views of her are less charitable); one writer goes so far as to describe her as a ‘sex goddess’. So from the sexual point of view alone, Lawrence’s conquest of her must have been extremely important (more so since he had had very little sexual experience before he met her). But with all these other factors added—her ‘rank’, her desertion of her husband and children—she came to represent something far deeper than sex: She also represented success, the fulfilment of daydreams. One of Lawrence’s friends, Henry Savage, has recorded the complete change in Lawrence that occurred between 1911 and 1914. From being a shy and rather quiet person he had developed into a man with a ‘message’, a definitely Messianic figure who could not bear to be contradicted (and who quarrelled with Savage when the latter defended Anatole France).

It is true that woman always represents success for the male. This is why Casanova and Frank Harris had to go on compulsively possessing woman after woman. But a woman who simply gives herself casually to a man has given very little—particularly if she is in the habit of doing it. So it is not enough to say that possession of a woman represents ‘success’ for the male. The important question is: How much success? And this is the real meaning behind the line: ‘What many women cannot give, one woman can.’ Lawrence meant that a hundred women can give a man the superficial success of possessing their bodies; but it means nothing. It does not change the man. It does not raise him to a new level of self-belief. Lawrence’s possession of Freda did raise him to a new level of self-belief. And this is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why he came to feel that sex must be far more than the casual possession of a strange female body. This is what he was trying to express in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lady Chatterley represents for the gamekeeper what Freda had represented for Lawrence. (But there was one important element missing; Lawrence also identified Freda with his success as a writer. Perhaps it is because this is missing that there is something unsatisfying about Lady Chatterley’s relation with Mellors.)

But having said all this, we now come to an even stranger matter. Professor G. Wilson Knight was the first to point out that certain of Lawrence’s novels involve sexual relations that would normally be regarded as ‘perverted’. Specifically, both Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Birkin in Women in Love, practise sodomy on their respective womenfolk. What is even more interesting is that Lawrence obviously felt that this was natural: in fact, that it somehow went deeper than ordinary sexual intercourse. (I have gone into this at greater length in my Origins of the Sexual Impulse.) The question this raises is an interesting one. I have tried to show in Chapter 4 that the Casanova impulse is not far from sexual perversion: in fact, it is already halfway towards sadism. In that case, Lawrence’s attitude to sex should show the opposite tendency—an even deeper ‘normality’ than usual. So how can we explain this defence of sodomy in Lawrence’s work?

One explanation is that Lawrence had strong homosexual tendencies—which he certainly had. But Lawrence’s homosexuality—as he made clear in a letter to Henry Savage[1]—consisted of admiration for the male body, not the usual desire for emotional involvement with men. No, it becomes clear from Lawrence’s books that he felt sex to be the total possession of a woman, and that he did not feel this possession to be complete without the act of sodomy.

In other words, we are again faced with the strange conclusion that ‘perversion’ is in the very nature of sex. If the sex is superficial, as in Casanova—a mere desire for conquest—then the perversion can easily slip to the limits of sadism, because the woman is not really seen as a person, but only as an object that gives pleasure. With Lawrence, this was impossible, because it was essential to his idea of satisfaction that there should be a deep personal involvement. All the same, Lawrence saw sex as ‘the sex war’, and so sodomy became a new act of conquest that went deeper than ‘normal’ sex.

Now I must try to state clearly exactly what it is that I have to say about sex.

If you are too close to a complicated subject, you automatically over-simplify. Ramakrishna has a story about a number of blind men who stand around an elephant. One of them touches its trunk and says: ‘It is like a python’. Another touches its leg and says: ‘No, it is like the trunk of a tree’. Another touches its tail and says: ‘No, it is like a piece of rope’. Another stands under its belly and says: ‘You are all wrong—it is like a great leather bag’.

The example of astronomy makes my point even clearer. The ancient astronomers all assumed that the sun went round the earth; so they had to work out the most complicated systems to explain the way the stars moved. It was not until somebody had the sensible idea of assuming that the earth—and the other planets—circles round the sun, that astronomy became really simple.

There is no subject that is more misunderstood than sex. The parable of the blind men and the elephant hardly describes the confusion. The ancient Greek worshippers of Dionysus believed it was a way of reaching God. St. Paul believed it was the original sin for which all men are condemned. Freud believed it was the great, dark urge behind all human activity, and that all forms of mental illness are due to sexual frustration. D.H. Lawrence came close to the opinion of the ancient Greeks, and saw it as a way of reaching the primitive creative drives of the universe. The average modern intellectual thinks that far too much fuss is made about sex; sex is ‘fun’, and it is all perfectly natural, and we ought to get on with it and stop talking about it. But the most widely prevalent view of all is what we might call ‘the naive view’. According to this, sex is something that ought not to be discussed too much; it should be confined to the bedroom. Its purpose is to produce healthy children, but in our corrupt twentieth century this has been largely forgotten, and we hear a great deal about various sexual perversions, and about all kinds of unmarried people treating sex far too casually ...

There is truth in every one of these views, just as there is truth in every idea about the elephant. But perhaps the last one contains the most falsehood and superficial thinking. It sees sex as a nice, clear, well-defined subject. It reminds me of a passage in Shaw’s Major Barbara, where the armaments king is talking to his son Stephen about what career he intends to follow:

UNDERSHAFT: Well come! is there anything you know or care for?

STEPHEN (rising and looking at him steadily): I know the difference between right and wrong.

UNDERSHAFT (Hugely tickled): You don’t say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of the law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you’re a genius, a master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!

And this applies to the ‘naive’ school who think that there is no difficulty about sex provided you keep a clear head and refuse to let yourself be confused.

I have tried to show that as soon as we examine this ‘simple and straightforward’ view of sex, and ask a simple question like ‘What is sexual perversion?’ we find ourselves in a maze of self-contradiction.

But perhaps the problem is rather like the problem of the astronomers who thought the sun went round the earth? Perhaps we are simply too close to it, and are trying to make the simplest explanation fit?

This is certainly my own view. Sex cannot be explained in a simple and straightforward manner.

And when we discuss it at length, we realise that we are left with two alternative theories, (a) Sex is the ‘great illusion’, the Syren song, that draws men like moths to a candle flame. But, like the instinct that makes moths fly into a candle, it is quite blind. As to ‘purpose’, it has no more purpose than the falling rain or the wind in the trees, (b) Although human beings may not know what it is all about, the sexual impulse itself knows exactly what it wants. It treats human beings like pawns on a chess board, but the game has a purpose, if only we had the wit to understand it.

In the first view, we accept that life is meaningless, and that human beings are doing their best in a pretty stupid situation. In the second view (which, as should be clear by now, is the one I favour), human beings are to blame for being so trivial-minded and stupid.

Every human being who has ever lived has had to face the same problems. Life is never easy, either for the rich or the poor, the intelligent or the stupid, the talented or the untalented. Everyone is tempted to oversimplify and to believe that life would be marvellous if only some simple condition were fulfilled. So the poor man believes that being rich would solve everything, but the rich man knows better. It is better to be rich than poor, but it doesn’t solve everything. (This is why poor countries like Russia and China fostered Communism—it is such a pleasant and convenient simplification.)

No. There is something else wrong with human life—something that goes deeper than any material conditions. The early Christians realised this, and invented the name ‘original sin’ for what is wrong. But such an idea does more harm than good, because it then raises all kinds of false religious ideas—about the Garden of Eden, etc.—which confuse the issue.

I can only offer my own interpretation of the situation, admitting that I am as likely as anyone to be mistaken. But at least it is the outcome of my own observation of human life, and is accurate to the best of my ability.

It seems to me, then, that the human race is divided into two kinds of people. Elsewhere, I have called them ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Most people take their lives for granted. They are passive. It is true that they struggle to keep alive, but their aims are purely material. They never ask what life is all about—or, if they do, they accept the ready-made answers of some religion, or a pseudo-religion like communism. They tend to take the universe for granted, and they really feel that life is meaningless. If these were the only kind of people in the world, we would not have civilisation—or rather, our civilisation would be static, like that of the bees or the ants.

We owe civilisation to the other kind of human being, who cannot take life for granted. He has a basic desire to know what life is all about, and he can see clearly that the priests and politicians know as little as he does. So he knows it is no use asking other people for the answer; he has to find it alone. If the ‘insider’ is like a man who owns a car and knows how to drive it, the ‘outsider’ is the man who also wants to know what is under the bonnet and how it works. He cannot take it for granted. He has a hunger to know more. He does not like to feel that he is a mere passive slave of a universe he does not understand. He wants to be in charge of his own life. He wants to understand. He cannot let his life carry him along, like a man sitting on a bus. He cannot ‘accept’. He wants deeper intensity, a deeper sense of purpose.

Admittedly, he can see that the ‘slave’ types are necessary to the world—for example, the people who go to a factory every day and hope for nothing better than a retirement pension at sixty. But such a life seems to him a form of living death. Besides, he can see that the factories and offices would not exist if it were not for people like himself—for poets and saints and philosophers and scientists—the men who are not content to accept life passively.

He is obsessed by one thought: There is a meaning in life if only I could discover it. He cannot accept that life is supposed to be a defensive battle to ‘keep the wolf from the door’. Every poet and prophet who has ever lived has felt that it can be something more.

But here is the problem. Life admittedly looks so meaningless. If you stare out of the window, you feel that the world doesn’t care whether you exist or not. Life rolls on meaninglessly, like the wind. And look at your dog. He takes it for granted that life holds no greater meaning than chewing a bone or chasing a ball.

And that is the point. Animals have no sense of this purpose behind existence. It is a fairly recent discovery, even for men. Religion and poetry and science are only a few thousand years old, while dogs like yours existed twenty million years ago. Man has raised himself to his present position by following these flashes of meaning, by following his instinct which tells him that there is more to life than meets the eye. He has been chasing this intuition of his for a few thousand years, refusing to believe his ‘common sense’ when it tells him that life doesn’t care whether he exists or not and that the whole thing is purposeless.

Now although I have said that there are two types of men—outsider and insider—the truth is that everybody contains something of both. No one is wholly outsider, or wholly insider. Everyone is free to make a choice, and to follow one or the other. Everyone has ‘outsider’ moments, when it seems clear that life could be infinitely more interesting and exciting if only we knew how to change it. Unfortunately, everyone also has to plod through the weary business of everyday living and dealing with his problems. These problems demand so much attention that a man has to be very strong minded indeed to spare much of his energy for pursuing the question of what life is all about. And when we consider the lives of these men who wanted to understand the meaning of life, we became more discouraged than ever. So many of them were failures. So many were crucified, or died insane, or committed suicide. Can anyone blame a man for being an ‘insider’ all his life?

I have said in the previous chapter that our sex lives show this same battle taking place in miniature. Perhaps it is true that very few human beings are faced with the choice of whether to be a poet or a bank clerk, a philosopher or a politician. But every adult human being in the world—the exceptions are almost non-existent—has known what it is to feel sexually excited so that nothing else seems to matter. And every human being has also had the feeling of disillusion that comes afterwards, the sense of having been ‘taken for a ride’ by life.

It would solve the whole problem if we could say: sex is merely another appetite, like the need to eat and drink. But it is so obviously not. To begin with, few human beings can get so carried away by the prospect of a good meal as by the prospect of sexual fulfilment. A young man who suspects for the first time that the girl he is in love with is also in love with him, knows that this appetite is quite unlike the need for food and drink. It is on an altogether higher level. It is far more like the urge that makes the poet love nature or the scientist love knowledge. And this becomes far more obvious when we consider the problem of ‘sexual perversion’. For sexual perversion develops for exactly the same reason that men go on writing music or building larger telescopes: there is the same urge to go further and deeper, the same need for greater intensity of experience. Sexual perversion may often be horrifying or disgusting, but it could not exist if man were a mere animal, because animals do not possess this strange instinct to go further and deeper. Sexual perversion is man’s appetite for knowledge and intensity collapsing to a lower level because of misunderstanding and cowardice. It is a paradoxical proof that life is not meaningless; that man is basically noble.

The problem of ‘le fiasco’ that I have cited—Maupassant’s story The Unknown—points to the same conclusion. Man’s sexual appetite is not like the appetite for food. It is far closer to the urge that makes people write poetry. It depends on imagination and ‘inspiration’, and vanishes like a bubble if these are pricked. Barbusse’s remark, ‘It is not a woman I want; it is all women’, shows the same thing. When a man is hungry, he does not say: ‘It is not a steak I want; it is all steaks’; it is one good steak that he wants. But the sexual appetite tends to fly over real women towards an ideal. Reality tends to disappoint it.

Even supposing all this is true: what does it prove? Supposing we agree that man’s sexual impulse is not a simple instinct of self-preservation, like his need for food, but is more a matter of his imagination—how much further does this get us?

And there we have a very important point. So far, throughout his whole history, man has been torn between his two impulses: his fear and his will to conquer. His fear tells him:

Seek security, stick to ‘hard facts’ and never mind the dreams. His will to adventure says: Never mind the ‘facts’—there’s no such thing as facts! Facts look different depend-on which angle you view them from. Follow the dreams! Dreams become realities for those strong enough to believe in them.

But earlier in his history, man was a slave to facts. Whether he liked it or not, he had to spend most of his time solving the problem of how to keep alive. Now for the first time in history there is a possibility that every man may be free to make his choice between ‘facts’ and dreams. With automation, we may soon arrive at a stage where no one has to work for more than twenty-four hours a week. Our increased knowledge of psychology enables us to make human beings understand their situation. There is no point in being free unless you understand what freedom means; but a day is coming when most human beings will be able to understand what they are and what they might become.

What I am trying to outline becomes more obvious if we look at some of the poets and visionaries of the nineteenth century—such men as William Blake, Shelley, Van Gogh. All three were ‘outsiders’ and visionaries; all three believed that man could become a kind of god if only he understood himself. All three were plagued with money worries all their lives, and Van Gogh’s final mental collapse and suicide was due to anxiety at being a burden on his brother Theo, who supported him while he painted pictures that no one would buy. When we look back on the nineteenth century and the great works it produced, it seems absurd that most of its men of genius spent their lives tormented by money worries: that Beethoven and Wagner and Nietzsche often wondered where the next meal was coming from. Success would certainly have saved the sanity of Nietzsche and Van Gogh, and given Beethoven another twenty years of life.

In other words: most of the great artists and visionaries of the nineteenth century were defeated by material worries. And—we hope—this time is slowly passing away. Man’s scientific achievement should at least rid him of this millstone round his neck. And we can already imagine a date in the future when men can follow their ‘outsider’ or visionary tendencies without being afraid of dying of starvation.

What will happen when man suddenly begins to consciously understand his destiny—when he recognises consciously that his job is to understand life, and discover what he is supposed to do with it?

We might object: what evidence is there that such a time is approaching? It might be another million years.

But the evidence seems to show that it is sooner than this; that we are already prepared for it. If we can agree that sexual perversions and sexual neuroses are evidence of a frustrated and misguided appetite for evolution, then it seems clear that this appetite has never been stronger than at the present time. And we then come to understand that one of the reasons for pessimism is actually a cause for optimism. The world has never had so much ‘sexual sickness’ as today. Since before the war, there has been a steady and spectacular rise in the rate of sex crime. Even in England, one of the most law-abiding countries in the world, the number of sex crimes had doubled by 1950, and have trebled fifteen years later. Sexual deviations of all kind are on the increase. I have already pointed out that Sweden, which has an unusual degree of sexual freedom, also has the world’s highest suicide rate. This does not suggest that sexual promiscuity leads to suicide, but that there are strains there which are leading to an increase in promiscuity and to an increase in suicide.

It is worth, at this point, mentioning the work of one of America’s most brilliant psychologists, Abraham Maslow, which bears on what we have been discussing. Maslow was trained as a Freudian, and Freud, of course, was inclined to reduce all mental illness to sexual causes. For Freud, man had no more basic—and no higher—impulse than his sexual drive. But when Maslow was experimenting with monkeys in the 1930s, he soon noticed that even monkeys seem to have a need for knowledge for its own sake. They would solve certain puzzles for the sake of food. For example, a banana would be placed in a box with a complicated lid, and the monkey would have to work out how to get at the banana. But when the banana was not placed in the box, the monkeys would go on doing the puzzles for pleasure alone.

Then Maslow had a patient who made him question his Freudian training. It was a brilliant girl, the manager of an ice-cream factory. She had been a promising pupil at college, and had hoped to continue with a life of research. But the slump came, most of her family were out of work—and she was offered the exceptionally well-paid job in the icecream factory. She did it to support her family, but found herself becoming more and more depressed, until she ceased to menstruate, and began to have suicidal impulses. At this point she went to Maslow. As a good Freudian, Maslow should have tried to find out what was wrong with her sex life. Instead, he advised her to study at night school in her spare time. And her illness very quickly vanished.

This patient—coupled with the experience of the monkeys—led Maslow to feel that sex is not the basic drive of human beings—or of all animals, for that matter. Human beings have an equally important need for knowledge: that is to say, an evolutionary drive.

What I have suggested in this book is simply the logical next-step. I have tried to show that the sexual drive itself is not a mere instinct of self-preservation. It goes far beyond that. It is a part of man’s ‘poet drive’, his ‘god drive’. It cannot be understood except as a part of this urge of man’s to become something more than man. And the sexual sickness of our own time, the increasing tendency to promiscuity and sexual violence, cannot be understood except in the light of this strange need to become more than man.

And this, logically, brings my book to a conclusion. I began by asking what would be the outcome of this increasing tendency to sexual freedom. This in itself is a meaningless question. We can only say that teenagers will take sex more and more for granted. Sexual experience will tend to begin earlier—in fact as soon as the body becomes capable of sexual satisfaction, at the age of twelve or thirteen. Teenagers will take it for granted that sexual intercourse is as ‘natural’ as kissing, provided there are no unfortunate consequences.

There is no reason why all this should lead to some general moral collapse. In Norway, for example, sex is already taken very much for granted among the under-twenties, and parents do not raise an eyebrow if their daughter spends a weekend in a ski-hut with her boy friend. (Neither is it taken for granted that they will have sexual intercourse; they may or may not, depending upon the girl’s inclination—and no one worries unduly whatever happens.) This has not led to a sharp rise in illegitimate babies or venereal disease or juvenile delinquency, and there is no reason why it should. The impulse behind it is sensible, reasonable and natural. There is no reason why this same reasonable attitude should not be taken for granted in England and America—and no doubt it will before long.

But all this is only half the question. Sexual freedom in itself is neither good nor bad. It depends completely on the attitude of the people concerned. The real point goes beyond this. Do people want sexual freedom for positive or negative reasons? Are they merely trying to overthrow their parents’ authority—or are they accepting that they are responsible and adult human beings, and that it is up to them to choose? Because this is what is needed: the recognition that we are free to choose.

And in saying this, I have stated the real problem of the modern teenager. As I write this, there has been a recent case of teenagers derailing a train—and killing the driver—by placing something on the line. Teenagers broke into a public garden just before the Easter holiday, and smashed everything: destroyed seats, uprooted trees, cut down every flower. In both cases, it seems probable that the culprits were under the age of fifteen.

Why should fourteen-year-olds want to destroy in this way? And the answer is: because of the increasing freedom. Rebellion starts earlier. The teenagers who wrecked the public garden were making their act of protest, of revolt, against their parents and against the whole adult word. Twenty or thirty years ago, they would have been afraid to make such a protest, even though they wanted to. But the increasing freedom in our society has destroyed the fear without destroying the rebellion.

In other words, the increased freedom has its bad side. We cannot say: the teenager of the future will take sex for granted at the age of sixteen, and that is entirely a good thing. Freedom is destructive unless it is accompanied by knowledge and a sense of responsibility.

Now I believe that learning to think about sex—in the way I have tried to outline in this book—can teach people the meaning of their freedom.

Before I conclude this book, I must try to make quite clear what I mean by this.

Consider this case of ‘counter-conversion’ cited by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 175):

A young man managed to spend a large fortune in two or three years, and found himself destitute. He had become a drunkard and a spendthrift. One day, he decided to commit suicide, and went to a lonely place to do it. But it happened that the hill where he was sitting overlooked an estate he had sold to pay his debts. He sat there staring at it for several hours, and then suddenly ‘sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again.’ He started by doing odd jobs around the town for a few pennies, and always asked his employers to give him some food into the bargain, so that he was able to avoid spending his wages. Finally he made enough money to buy a few cattle, which he resold at a profit. He ended by regaining all his lost lands, and died a miser with £60,000 in the bank.

The interesting part of this story is the part we do not know: what went through his mind as he sat on the hill. But, at least, his whole character suddenly changed. He had become a drunkard and a drifter; committing suicide was the logical conclusion of this passive attitude towards life. Now he suddenly realised that he possessed will and freedom—and proceeded to use them.

It is natural for animals to be passive—particularly domestic animals, who look upon their master as a kind of god who controls their whole destiny. Up to a few centuries ago, most men were passive for the same reason. The church taught them that there was a God in the sky, and man’s only business was to obey the dictates of religion. Then religion began to decline. ‘God is dead’, said Nietzsche. But the habit of passivity has been formed over millions of years. Man cannot throw it off easily. He tends to drift through life.

One of the chief reasons for this passive, drifting attitude is that our emotions are so difficult to control. Particularly when we are young, life is a series of emotional storms. We get used to accepting these storms passively, just as we accept the weather. It is not until we reach middle age that we begin to understand that we can control this ‘inner weather’—but by then it is too late. We have got too used to drifting.

It may be objected that men seldom face crises that make them aware of their freedom. The case I have cited—of the young man who became a miser—is unusual. Since everyday life is so boring and regular, it is hardly surprising that we find it difficult to make use of our freedom—or even realise that we possess it.

But this is the point that I have been trying to make throughout this book. Of all human experiences, sex gives man the clearest sense of freedom.

At the beginning of the second world war I was nine years old, and I can clearly recollect the sense of universal excitement and cheerfulness that it caused. England was unprepared for war, and there was every likelihood of being beaten—and yet everyone was happier than they had been for years. Why? Because the sudden challenge made people aware of their freedom. Life suddenly became full of exciting potentialities. Soldiers knew that they might never return, but at least they were going somewhere and doing something important. Admittedly there was nothing to stop any of them from living an exciting life in peace time. Any of them could have taken a job on a tramp steamer or gone off to climb mountains. But they were too passive, too much lacking in imagination.

The juvenile delinquents who tear up flower beds are expressing revolt against their passive, boring lives. It is a kind of despairing attempt to possess their freedom—but not a very intelligent one.

For anyone with a capacity to think—and that obviously applies to everybody who has read this far—there is no need for a war to create a knowledge of their freedom. To understand sex is to realise that it is almost pure freedom. This applies particularly to the teenager, because teenage sexual experiences possess an intensity that is never regained. I am not speaking necessarily of actual experiences of sexual intercourse, but of all the emotions aroused in a man by a woman, and vice versa.

The modern teenager possesses more freedom than any teenager in history. Once he understands this, and understands how to use it, he will discover that he can change the world.

1 See Collected Letters, p. 251 ‘I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality ... so that he loves the body of a man better than the body of a woman.’

Table of Contents

- Introduction to 1996 Paupers’ Press Edition:

- Contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Physical Side of Sex
- 2: The History of Sex
- 3: The Problem of Sexual Perversion
- 4: The Male Urge to Conquest
- 5: The Paradoxes of the Sexual Impulse
- 6: The Great Pornography Battle
- 7: Sex and the Future