Ellis was then about sixty with scant white hair and a great white beard, quite the prophet. He had practised as a physician but had given up medicine to devote himself to literature. Many of us had been grateful for his Mermaid Series of the Elizabethan Dramatists, published in the late 1880s. It was in connection with an erroneous statement Ellis had made about the origins of Elizabethan act division that I first came into personal contact with him. I forget where he had given his public lecture about Sackville and Norton and the Inns of Court and Gorboduc and Locrine, but I remember vividly a kind of proletarian hogo (beer, black tobacco and inerasable grime) haloing it, so presume it was part of some London County Council extension series for selfimproving workers; Ellis said that the Elizabethan dramatists got their five acts from Seneca, along with much else, and I counter-affirmed that they got them from Terence and Plautus, Seneca's brief closet tragedies following Greek procedure in admitting no act division. Ellis had to admit that he had not thought much about the matter, and later that I was right, but the fallacy he propounded on that occasion was taken up by T. S. Eliot and eternized in one of the magazine reviews he collected and called essays. I corrected Eliot in the dining room of the Russell Hotel in, I think, the late 1930s (he fed himself with crumbs of Wensleydale the while), but the error has survived his death. There was a lot of the dilettante about Eliot. The first volume of Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928) was the occasion of scandal and state prosecution, and to many of my generation Ellis was a martyr-hero.
He had acquired, he said, a taste for beer in Australia when a teacher there, and he was drinking it in the bar of the Hotel de Paris when I encountered him that Sunday at noon. He had various curious mannerisms. He would screw up his face so as to exclude the passage of air through his nostrils, at the same time snoring faintly and rapidly; he showed his teeth, which were not good, in unexpected and irrelevant as it were demonstration snarls; he swilled his mouth with beer before gulping it audibly; and he plucked at his crotch as if to extract music from it.
"Homosexuality," he told me. "This friend of mine at Roquebrune is a homosexual of long standing. I think there is little that can be done about it, and I fail to see why it should be regarded as morbid. It is the law that is morbid, but the law will in time be changed. What is your problem?"
"The aetiology of it--"
"You cannot very well say that. Dear Sigmund in Vienna has rejected altogether the grossly physical Helmholtzism on which all his generation was raised. He will have it that neuroses and hysterias and what the world calls, if it knows the term, sexual aberrations and inversions and so on have no physical cause though they may have physical symptoms. The so-called aberration of homosexuality has nothing whatever to do with an irregular endowment of hormones or whatnot. No one is born homosexual. No one is born heterosexual either. But everyone is born sexual. This sexuality is first fixed, inevitably, on the mother, source of oral and other gratifications."
This was dry and cold and un-Elizabethan discourse, and it was far too loud. There was an English family of father, mother and two puppyish daughters seated nearby at a table, and they were taking it all in. Ellis suddenly roared with laughter, plucked a couple of harp chords from his tweeded crotch, and cried: "Freud the Jewish scientist will end up a Christian Scientist if he is not careful. Eh? Eh?" He then snarled brown and yellow at the room, which was filling up at this aperitif hour, and said, "Most of the people here are heterosexual. Though, of course, we must not leave out of account the fact that the Cote d'Azur is a refuge for those of the opposed persuasion. Like, I presume that is your reason for being here, yourself." He then looked, it seemed, appraisingly at the bartender and said, "Encore un bock.'
"Forgive me," I said. "All this is of the greatest interest, but--"
He was quick to understand. "Too loud, eh?" he said too loudly. "Yes, a foul fault. It comes of my going deaf." Then he began to whisper quite as audibly as he had declaimed. "Everyone, as I said, is born sexual. There are stages of infantile development which lead, in the majority of cases, to a declaration of heterosexual tropism. Now the homosexual is made out of an inordinate Oedipal situation. But his homosexuality is not a neurosis or psychosis. Only his attitude to it, which means his attitude to society's attitude to it, can produce a condition in which it is in order to talk of an aetiology. Do I make myself clear?"
All too clear, all too too clear.
He downed his bock and said, to my relief, "Let us walk a little. It seems to be a gorgeous day."
We walked only about the square bounded by the hotel, the Casino, the Cafe de Paris and the little park. It was indeed a gorgeous spring day, a day for the heterosexual flirtations of literary tradition. I said: "My father. The mildest of men, the kindest, as I well remember. I was never afraid of him. Despised him a little, perhaps, for not being firm enough with me, leaving all that to my mother. Despise him now for another thing, but let that pass." Then I suddenly caught a memory, shrill as the flapping seagull over the Casino, of myself screaming, held down, unable to get away, while my father approached me grimly with forceps. No, not his dental chair. Myself in bed with my mother, her arm about me, and my father coming into the bedroom grinning in (it must have been) mock ferocity with the kitchen tongs in his fist (impossible) and gripped in the tongs a monstrous brown and bloody molar. "Biggest I've ever seen," he seemed to leer, thrusting the tooth toward my hidden genitals. "Remember this, boy, remember to look after your pegs." There was a fire (why?) blazing in the bedroom grate, and he untonged the molar and let it drop among the coals. Then he waved the tongs at me, making a dull metallic castanetting, and went out singing. Was that what they called the primal scene, or something?
"Despise?" said Havelock Ellis. "Nothing to do with it. I say," hands suddenly clasped behind him, swivelling his whole body to get a better look, "that's an awfully pretty girl." She was too, about eighteen, smooth olive, coming from mass with her mother, a blancmange-colored missal in her hand. As though he had merely done a conventional homage to old man's lechery, he dismissed his admiration and turned back to me, saying, "Put it this way. Your father owned your mother and was very ready to deballock you for being his rival in love, and you conceived the fearful assumption that your father owned all women. That's what dear Sigmund teaches. It will do as well as any other theory. Like false etymology, you know. Tell some ignoramus that Mary Queen of Scots liked to eat marmalade when she was ill, and so they called the stuff Marie est malade. Or that Alexander loved roasted eggs, and when he came in from battle they yelled All eggs under the grate, hence his historic title. Nonsense, but it fills in a sort of gap in the brain. Like the Freudian mythology. It doesn't have to be rational, you know, indeed it can't be. But your father scared you off all women, and that's why you are what you say you are. So forget it. Enjoy yourself, life's short." Though in full view of a group of, from their twang, New Englanders, he arpeggiated a chord on his crotch.
"And how," I asked, "am I suppose to feel about my sister?"
"Sister, eh? Younger than you? Interesting business, having a sister. Sigmund had a hell of a row with one of those errant disciples of his, the one that started up on his own with a theory about everything stemming from the birth trauma, Otto Somebody, something in it probably, a row about homosexuality and incest. The sister, one of them said, I don't know whether it was this Otto or the great old bugger himself, she's outside the net. The father doesn't own her as he owns the mother. She's not a sex object, not during that phase, if you see what he's getting at, whichever one it was. Did you read my introduction to 'Tis Pity She's a Whore?"
"I read the play in the Mermaid Series. I don't remember an introduction."
"Never mind. Now I come to think of it, I didn't write one. Meant to, perhaps. It doesn't matter. Anyway, the only way out of homosexuality is incest."
"Or castration."
"I never prescribe castration. But, of course, I never prescribe anything these days. Like you, I call myself a ma
n of letters." He made a terrible face and leered terribly: "Sororal incest." We were standing on the periphery of the terrace of the Cafe de Paris. Ellis looked at the aperitif-takers as if they were a zoo, then said clearly to a laden waiter, "L'inceste avec la soeur." The waiter shrugged, as to say it was not on the tariff. "That flashes on the conscious level, like sheet lightning on the marine horizon. To be watched, the occasion of the fall avoided. Out of the frying pan into the other thing. Though that can lead to the seeking of sister substitutes, sororal surrogates and so forth. Interesting. You ought to write a play about it. No, surely it was done by Philip Massinger. Perhaps not. A novel, a bigger form, no room in a play really." I did write a novel, in 1934. Half of one, anyway. But I knew I'd never get away with it, not in an age when the editor James Douglas, who called Aldous Huxley THE MAN WHO HATES GOD, poor Aldous the God--drunk, declared he would rather give his children prussic acid than let them read The Well of Loneliness. My working title had been She Hath No Breasts.
"Which is the greater sin?" I asked. I was asking the wrong man. The right man to ask was arriving from Paris the following day. He would probably deny the existence of either of them, except as items in some hypothetical list worked out a priori by the Angelic Doctor, who had been so fat that they had to cut a half-disk out of his dining table. Copulatio cum aure porcelli, copulation with a pig's ear, is to be regarded in no different wise from the same act performed in natibus equi, in a horse's arse (A, 3, xiv), this being pollution and the unlawful spending of the seed which is intended for generation and the peopling of the heavenly kingdom with saved souls. Incest wasteth no seed so may be accounted the lesser sin, but see Ambrosius Fracastor, Bibellius, Virgilius Polydor Upyourarse, et cetera, et cetera.
"Sin? Sin?" cried Ellis at a small dog. "Oh my God, sin quotha."
It comes clear in memory now, but I cannot understand why I had walked painfully up from the Condamine to Monte Carlo, prepared to show my bruises to strangers who would think: "He was in a roughhouse with jolly jack-tars, the dirty bugger, serves him right." Had I come to look for that little traitor Curry at the Balmoral? Certainly not. Anyway, he had left. Hortense and Domenico, the hypocrites, had gone to late mass at Sainte Devote. Why had I not stayed in the bed I must the next day give up to Don Carlo, catching up on the sleep I had missed during a long night given over to listening for sounds of padding fornicatory feet (watch this, Toomey; oh, to hell with watching things all the time)? Had I wanted my sister to be defiled and did I now wish her to be married? Masochism, sexual identification with my artbrother Domenico? Did I wish them both to be uneasy about my apparent change of heart? What was going on? I have practised the craft of fiction for many years, but I know less than I ever knew about the tortuosities of the human soul.
Havelock Ellis now looked toward the little hill street between the Casino and the Hotel de Paris and, at the sight of a man coming up it, opened eyes and mouth wide with joy. This man, about fifty, clad in what seemed to be a suit of alpaca that shimmered purply in the intense light, now began to trot toward Ellis, grinning like a gridiron. Ellis met him halfway with speed, though not trotting. "My dear, my dear." This would be the homosexual from Roquebrune. I found out later that Ellis's wife was unabashedly lesbian and he himself quite impotent. There they were, Ellis and this man, embracing each other, the man going "What? What? Eh?" in the patrician manner. Then they went into the Hotel de Paris, embraced. Ellis had forgotten me already, the rude thing. I did not exist. And it was he who had brought me out into the square, leaving me now standing aimless and feeling a fool under the sun and gulls.
But lo, here they are coming up that same hill street to have luncheon with me at the Hotel de Paris--Hortense in appropriate off-white cotton with flowered sidebow at the waist, wide wrapover collar, glass bead necklace, deepcrowned narrow-brimmed hat with wide silk band, and Domenico in decent grey, wearing a curl-brimmed trilby of the kind that Puccini, one of his masters, favored. They have come out of mass and look sober and demure, the sinners. What is the nature of the luncheon--celebratory, penitential?
"The ceremony," I said over the coffee, "will, I presume, take place in Gorgonzola." Domenico, who was drinking his coffee, spluttered. He had not expected this. I had deliberately kept, during the meal, to the topic of my and Domenico's little opera. Milan's rejection of it, I said, was not the end of the world. My theatrical contacts in London did not include operatic ones, but I was sure that I could get my agent to get Sir Hilary Beauclerk at Covent Garden to consider its production. Domenico had at first been suspicious, but I was affable and charming, despite my half-closed eye and bruises; I was being a gentleman, a breed that Domenico had read about if not previously met. "The marriage ceremony," I amplified.
Hortense said, "Look, Domenico, this is not my idea, you know that. This is him being pompous and heavy and in loco parentis and bloody hypocritical."
"With your brother," I said, "performing that ceremony. I suppose that Hortense must go with you soon to meet the family. This is something that we can work out with Don Carlo when he comes tomorrow. I take it that your family is living in the modern age, with all its social liberties, just as you are. I take it that there will be no antiquated nonsense about a dowry or a marriage settlement. You love each other, enough, no more, no less. Don't you," I said with sudden ferocity, "love each other?"
"You're a nasty filthy pig," said Hortense.
"Don't," I snarled. "How dare you address me in that manner. You're not too old to be smacked. On your bare bottom too." At a table some five meters away Ellis's friend from Roquebrune was fluting at Ellis some Jacobean lines which I recognized:
"Kiss me. Never aftertimes should hear
Of our fast-knit aflections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour,
Which would in other insects be abhorr'd."
Then he giggled.
"Yes yes," growled Ellis, too loud, a bit tipsy, "vocal metathesis. Scared of the word. I shall never forget the occasion, the bloody fool. Like 'Good Hamlet, cast thy colored nightie off.' But that was only in rehearsal, got it out of her system."
"That play," I said to Hortense. She did not seem to know the keyword of the title for all her sophistication, sophistication meaning defilement. "Cognate with German Hure. Sister Gertrude may perhaps have used the word in some admonitory context or other."
"Yes," Domenico now said, having drunk his coffee and wiped thoroughly his lips with his napkin. "We love each other." And he put his hairy paw out toward Hortense's thin wrist across the table.
CHAPTER 27
Don Carlo's telegram had said he was coming for five days, but in fact he stayed well over a week. He had been gaining a reputation, I gathered, in the field of exorcism, and there was a tough job of exorcism to perform just outside Nice. The Bishop of Nice had requested his services, and so he had been granted a week's leave of absence from the Catho in Paris. A bit irregular, apparently, but Don Carlo was said by His Grace to be the best man in Europe at fighting the devil, and this was meant very literally. The devil was no metaphor to some of these churchmen but a palpable entity, or rather a well-structured army of entities (hence the name Legion, as in British Legion), with the Son of the Morning as generalissimo in charge of Belial and Beelzebub and Mephistopheles, as well as a large number of NCOs and privates eager to fight the bad fight and gain promotion. A lot of nonsense I thought at the time, but Don Carlo was ready to march in armed with the Rituale Romanum and, so to speak, knock hell out of these minor devils that had camped in the bodies of the innocent. He never had any doubt about the externality of evil, and this is what made him so formidable. Man was God's creation, and therefore perfect. The devil got in in the Garden of Eden and taught man how to be evil, and he was still doing it. Why didn't God annihilate the devil, then, and all his works? Because of free will. He had permitted th
e Revolt of the Angels because of free will. A divine bestowal by no manner of means nor in any wise to be rescinded. But let us hear the words of Don Carlo himself. The tough process of exorcism at which he daily labored (I imagined him with coat off and sleeves rolled up) had got into the columns of Nice-Matin. The victim of the attentions of some minor but limpet-like devils who had, apparently, names like Chouchou, Ranran, and Piquemonsieur, was a boy of eight, son of a railway worker who talked to a reporter in a bistro. Don Carlo believed, not without cause, that the press could do with its own exorcism and he refused to speak to its representatives. Instead he spoke to the world at large, or such of it as it was represented at eleven o'clock mass the following Sunday at Sainte Devote. He gave a sermon in very reasonable, though Milan-accented, French, taking as his text the ninth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark, the one about our name being Legion and us being many. He said: "A mere five months ago we came to the end of an excruciating, debilitating, murderous, thoroughly evil war. When I use that word evil I do not do so in the way of the politician or the journalist. For they use it loosely and vaguely, as a mere synonym for painful or undesirable. We have all heard phrases like 'the evils of capitalism' or 'the evil of slum landlordism' and we have permitted the term to take on a purely secular meaning. But mal, male, evil properly means an absolute force that has run riot in the world almost since the day of its creation and will only be quelled at the Day of Judgment. This force, being absolute, is not man-made. It is the monopoly of spiritual beings, creatures of God, high and majestic and beautiful servants of the Almighty who, under a leader, the most beautiful of them all, one whose name was Bringer of Light, rejected God's dominion, conceived rebellion, declined to serve, and were thrown from the empyrean into dark and empty space. They arrested what would have been an endless fall, for space knows no limits, by willing into existence a new abode of their own, which we call Hell, and substituting for the principle of eternal good the opposed principle of eternal evil.
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