Victorian time…
I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I
knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to
keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for
all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my
upbringing…
The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle
and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first
intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.
As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those
gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously
and askance. Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a
shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them…
The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to
me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that
strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced
me about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say
blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by
shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an
ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like
a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was
indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead
there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a
new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the
twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of
the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather
than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a
picture.
All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked
avoided chamber…
It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down
the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret
broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged
suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I
can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative
talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted
Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but
we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named,
if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's
rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and
deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings-
he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it-and a huge French
May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on
a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the
floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face
downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and
our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like
an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of
mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from
his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs,
except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank
a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk,
and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,-there was a transient
fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was
responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to
conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away
from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the
instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman
of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice
and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one
evening-Heaven knows how we got to it-" Look here, you know, it's
all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them.
What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all
festering inside about it. Let's out with it. There's too much
Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"
We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was
clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember
Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and
Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought
them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and
the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.
And all that sort of thing."
Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of
those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for
decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the
less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of
India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and
Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-
town spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case was
too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and
his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together,
carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the
monasteries of Thibet.
"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."