by John Fowles
But there was one noble element in his rejection: a sense that the pursuit of money was an insufficient purpose in life. He would never be a Darwin or a Dickens, a great artist or scientist; he would at worst be a dilettante, a drone, a what-you-will that lets others work and contributes nothing. But he gained a queer sort of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be nothing--to have nothing but prickles--was the last saving grace of a gentleman; his last freedom, almost. It came to him very clearly: If I ever set foot in that place I am done for.
This dilemma may seem a very historical one to you; and I hold no particular brief for the Gentleman, in 1969 far more of a dying species than even Charles's pessimistic imagination might have foreseen on that long-ago April evening. Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal. There runs through this succession of superseded forms we call existence a certain kind of afterlife. We can trace the Victorian gentleman's best qualities back to the parfit knights and preux chevaliers of the Middle Ages; and trace them forward into the modern gentleman, that breed we call scientists, since that is where the river has undoubtedly run. In other words, every culture, however undemocratic, or however egalitarian, needs a kind of self-questioning, ethical elite, and one that is bound by certain rules of conduct, some of which may be very unethical, and so account for the eventual death of the form, though their hidden purpose is good: to brace or act as structure for the better effects of their function in history.
Perhaps you see very little link between the Charles of 1267 with all his newfangled French notions of chastity and chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles of today, a computer scientist deaf to the screams of the tender humanists who begin to discern their own redundancy. But there is a link: they all rejected or reject the notion of possession as the purpose of life, whether it be of a woman's body, or of high profit at all costs, or of the right to dictate the speed of progress. The scientist is but one more form; and will be superseded.
Now all this is the great and timeless relevance of the New Testament myth of the Temptation in the Wilderness. All who have insight and education have automatically their own wilderness; and at some point in their life they will have their temptation. Their rejection may be foolish; but it is never evil. You have just turned down a tempting offer in commercial applied science in order to continue your academic teaching? Your last exhibition did not sell as well as the previous one, but you are determined to keep to your new style? You have just made some decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of possession, has not been allowed to interfere? Then do not dismiss Charles's state of mind as a mere conditioning of futile snobbery. See him for what he is: a man struggling to overcome history. And even though he does not realize it.
There pressed on Charles more than the common human instinct to preserve personal identity; there lay behind him all those years of thought, speculation, self-knowledge. His whole past, the best of his past self, seemed the price he was asked to pay; he could not believe that all he had wanted to be was worthless, however much he might have failed to match reality to the dream. He had pursued the meaning of life, more than that, he believed--poor clown--that at times he had glimpsed it. Was it his fault that he lacked the talent to communicate those glimpses to other men? That to an outside observer he seemed a dilettante, a hopeless amateur? At least he had gamed the knowledge that the meaning of life was not to be found in Freeman's store.
But underlying all, at least in Charles, was the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and most especially an aspect of it he had discussed--and it had been a discussion bathed in optimism--with Grogan that night in Lyme: that a human being cannot but see his power of self-analysis as a very special privilege in the struggle to adapt. Both men had seen proof there that man's free will was not in danger. If one had to change to survive--as even the Freemans conceded--then at least one was granted a choice of methods. So much for the theory--the practice, it now flooded in on Charles, was something other.
He was trapped. He could not be, but he was.
He stood for a moment against the vast pressures of his age; then felt cold, chilled to his innermost marrow by an icy rage against Mr. Freeman and Freemanism.
He raised his stick to a passing hansom. Inside he sank back into the musty leather seat and closed his eyes; and in his mind there appeared a consoling image. Hope? Courage? Determination? I am afraid not.
He saw a bowl of milk punch and a pint of champagne.
39
Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have I received any favors at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard, Sir?
--From a letter in The Times (February 24th, 1858) *
[* The substance of this famous and massively sarcastic letter, allegedly written by a successful prostitute, but more probably by someone like Henry Mayhew, may be read in Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age.]
* * *
Milk punch and champagne may not seem a very profound philosophical conclusion to such soul-searching; but they had been perennially prescribed at Cambridge as a solution to all known problems, and though Charles had learned a good deal more about the problems since leaving the university he had not bettered the solution. Fortunately his club, like so many English gentlemen's clubs, was founded on the very simple and profitable presumption that a man's student days are his best. It had all the amenities of a rich college without any of its superfluous irritations (such as dons, deans and examinations). It pandered, in short, to the adolescent in man. It also provided excellent milk punch. It so happened that the first two fellow members Charles set eyes on when he entered the smoking room had also been his fellow students; one was the younger son of a bishop and a famous disgrace to his father. The other was what Charles had until recently expected to be: a baronet. Born with a large lump of Northumberland in his pocket, Sir Thomas Burgh had proved far too firm a rock for history to move. The immemorial pursuits of his ancestors had been hunting, shooting, drinking and whoring; and he still pursued them with a proper sense of tradition. He had in fact been a leader of the fast set into which Charles had drifted during his time at Cambridge. His escapades, of both the Mytton and the Casanova kind, were notorious. There had been several moves to get him ejected from the club; but since he provided its coal from one of his mines, and at a rate that virtually made a present of it, wiser counsels always prevailed. Besides, there was something honest about his manner of life. He sinned without shame, but also without hypocrisy. He was generous to a fault; half the younger members of the club had at one time or another been in his debt--and his loans were a gentleman's loans, indefinitely prolongable and without interest. He was always the first to start a book when there was something to bet on; and in a way he reminded all but the most irredeemably sober members of their less sober days. He was stocky, short, perpetually flushed by wine and weather; and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candor of the satanically fallen. These eyes crinkled when they saw Charles enter. "Charley! Now what the devil are you doing out of the matrimonial lock up?"
Charles smiled, not without a certain sense of wan foolishness. "Good evening, Tom. Nathaniel, how are you?" Eternal cigar in mouth, the thorn in the unlucky bishop's side raised a languid hand. Charles turned back to the baronet. "On parole, you know. The dear girl's down in Dorset taking the waters."
Tom winked. "While you take spirit--and spirits, eh? But I hear she's the rose of the season. Nat says. He's green, y'know. Demmed Charley, he says. Best girl and best match-- ain't fair, is it, Nat?" The bishop's son was notoriously short of money and Charles guessed it was not Ernestina's looks he was envied. Nine times out of ten he would at this point have moved on to the newspapers or joined some less iniquitous acqu
aintance. But today he stayed where he was. Would they "discuss" a punch and bubbly? They would. And so he sat with them.
"And how's the esteemed uncle, Charles?" Sir Tom winked again, but in a way so endemic to his nature that it was impossible to take offense. Charles murmured that he was in the best of health.
"How goes he for hounds? Ask him if he needs a brace of the best Northumberland. Real angels, though I says it wot bred 'em. Tornado--you recall Tornado? His grandpups." Tornado had spent a clandestine term in Sir Tom's rooms one summer at Cambridge.
"I recall him. So do my ankles."
Sir Tom grinned broadly. "Aye, he took a fancy to you. Always bit what he loved. Dear old Tornado--God rest his soul." And he downed his tumbler of punch with a sadness that made his two companions laugh. Which was cruel, since the sadness was perfectly genuine.
In such talk did two hours pass--and two more bottles of champagne, and another bowl of punch, and sundry chops and kidneys (the three gentlemen moved on to the dining room) which required a copious washing-down of claret, which in turn needed purging by a decanter or two of port.
Sir Tom and the bishop's son were professional drinkers and took more than Charles. Outwardly they seemed by the end of the second decanter more drunk than he. But in fact his facade was sobriety, while theirs was drunkenness, exactly the reverse of the true comparative state, as became clear when they wandered out of the dining room for what Sir Tom called vaguely "a little drive round town." Charles was the one who was unsteady on his feet. He was not too far gone not to feel embarrassed; somehow he saw Mr. Freeman's gray assessing eyes on him, though no one as closely connected with trade as Mr. Freeman would ever have been allowed in that club.
He was helped into his cape and handed his hat, gloves, and cane; and then he found himself in the keen outside air--the promised fog had not materialized, though the mist remained--staring with an intense concentration at the coat of arms on the door of Sir Tom's town brougham. Winsyatt meanly stabbed him again, but then the coat of arms swayed towards him. His arms were taken, and a moment later he found himself sitting beside Sir Tom and facing the bishop's son. He was not too drunk to note an exchanged wink between his two friends; but too drunk to ask what it meant. He told himself he did not care. He was glad he was drunk, that everything swam a little, that everything past and to come was profoundly unimportant. He had a great desire to tell them both about Mrs. Bella Tomkins and Winsyatt; but he was not drunk enough for that, either. A gentleman remains a gentleman, even in his cups. He turned to Tom.
"Tom ... Tom, dear old fellow, you're a damn' lucky fellow."
"So are you, my Charley boy. We're all damn lucky fellows."
"Where we going?"
"Where damn lucky fellows always go of a jolly night. Eh, Nat, ain't that so?"
There was a silence then, as Charles tried dimly to make out in which direction they were heading. This time he did not see the second wink exchanged. The key words in Sir Tom's last sentence slowly registered. He turned solemnly.
"Jolly night?"
"We're going to old Ma Terpsichore's, Charles. Worship at the muses' shrine, don't y'know?"
Charles stared at the smiling face of the bishop's son.
"Shrine?"
"So to speak, Charles."
"Metonymia. Venus for puella," put in the bishop's son.
Charles stared at them, then abruptly smiled. "Excellent idea." But then he resumed his rather solemn stare out of the window. He felt he ought to stop the carriage and say good night to them. He remembered, in a brief flash of proportion, what their reputation was. Then there came out of nowhere Sarah's face; that face with its closed eyes tended to his, the kiss ... so much fuss about nothing. He saw what all his troubles were caused by: he needed a woman, he needed intercourse. He needed a last debauch, as he sometimes needed a purge. He looked round at Sir Tom and the bishop's son. The first was sprawled back in his corner, the second had put his legs up across his seat. The top hats of both were cocked at flyly dissolute angles. This time the wink went among all three.
Soon they were in the press of carriages heading for that area of Victorian London we have rather mysteriously--since it was central in more ways than one--dropped from our picture of the age: an area of casinos (meeting places rather than gaming rooms), assembly cafes, cigar "divans" in its more public parts (the Haymarket and Regent Street) and very nearly unrelieved brothel in all the adjoining back streets. They passed the famous Oyster Shop in the Haymarket ("Lobsters, Oysters, Pickled and Kippered Salmon") and the no less celebrated Royal Albert Potato Can, run by the Khan, khan indeed of the baked-potato sellers of London, behind a great scarlet-and-brass stand that dominated and proclaimed the vista. They passed (and the bishop's son took his lorgnette out of its shagreen case) the crowded daughters of folly, the great whores in their carriages, the lesser ones in their sidewalk droves ... fromdemure little milky-faced millinery girls to brandy-cheeked viragoes. A torrent of color --of fashion, for here unimaginable things were allowed. Women dressed as Parisian bargees, in bowler and trousers, as sailors, as señoritas, as Sicilian peasant girls; as if the entire casts of the countless neighboring penny-gaffs had poured out into the street. Far duller the customers--the numerically equal male sex, who, stick in hand and "weed" in mouth, eyed the evening's talent. And Charles, though he wished he had not drunk so much, and so had to see everything twice over, found it delicious, gay, animated, and above all, unFreemanish.
* * *
Terpsichore, I suspect, would hardly have bestowed her patronage on the audience of whom our three in some ten minutes formed part; for they were not alone. Some six or seven other young men, and a couple of old ones, one of whom Charles recognized as a pillar of the House of Lords, sat in the large salon, appointed in the best Parisian taste, and reached through a narrow and noisome alley off a street some little way from the top of the Haymarket. At one end of the chandeliered room was a small stage hidden by deep red curtains, on which were embroidered in gold two pairs of satyrs and nymphs. One showed himself eminently in a state to take possession of his shepherdess; and the other had already been received. In black letters on a gilt cartouche above the curtains was written Carmina Priapea XLIV:
Velle quid hanc dicas, quamvis sim ligneus, hastam,
oscula dat medio si qua puella mihi?
augure non opus est: "in me," mihi credite, dixit,
"utetur veris viribus hasta rudis."*
[*It is the god Priapus who speaks: small wooden images of him with erect phallus, both to frighten away thieves and bring fertility, were common features of the Roman orchard. "You'd like to know why the girl kisses this spear of mine, even though I'm made of wood? You don't need to be clairvoyant to work that one out. 'Let's hope,' she's thinking, 'that men will use this spear on me--and brutally.'"] The copulatory theme was repeated in various folio prints in gilt frames that hung between the curtained windows. Already a loose-haired girl in Camargo petticoats was serving the waiting gentlemen with Roederer's champagne. In the background a much rouged but more seemingly dressed lady of some fifty years of age cast a quiet eye over her clientèle. In spite of her very different profession she had very much the mind of Mrs. Endicott down in Exeter, albeit her assessments were made in guineas rather than
shillings.
Such scenes as that which followed have probably changed less in the course of history than those of any other human activity; what was done before Charles that night was done in the same way before Heliogabalus--and no doubt before Agamemnon as well; and is done today in countless Soho dives. What particularly pleases me about the unchangingness of this ancient and time-honored form of entertainment is that it allows one to borrow from someone else's imagination. I was nosing recently round the best kind of secondhand bookseller's--a careless one. Set quietly under "Medicine," between an Introduction to Hepatology and a Diseases of the Bronchial System, was the even duller title The History of the Human Heart. It is in fact the very far from dull
history of a lively human penis. It was originally published in 1749, the same year as Cleland's masterpiece in the genre, Fanny Hill. The author lacks his skill, but he will do.
* * *
The first House they entered was a noted Bagnio, where they met with a Covey of Town Partridges, which Camillo liked better than all he had ever drawn a Net over in the Country, and amongst them Miss M., the famous Posture Girl, whose Presence put our Company of Ramblers upon the Crochet of shewing their new Associate a Scene, of which he had never so much as dreamed before.
They were showed a large Room, Wine was brought in, the Drawer dismissed, and after a Bumper the Ladies were ordered to prepare. They immediately stripped stark naked, and mounted themselves on the middle of the Table. Camillo was greatly surprised at this Apparatus, and not less puzzled in guessing for what Purpose the Girls had posted themselves on that Eminence. They were clean limbed, fresh complec- tioned, and had Skins as white as the driven Snow, which was heightened by the jet-black Color of their Hair. They had very good Faces, and the natural Blush which glowed on their Cheeks rendered them in Camillo's Mind, finished Beauties, and fit to rival Venus herself. From viewing their Faces, he bashfully cast his Eyes on the Altar of Love, which he had never had so fair a View of as this present Time... The Parts of the celebrated Posture Girl had something about them which attracted his Attention more than any things he had either felt or seen. The Throne of Love was thickly covered with jet-black Hair, at least a quarter of a Yard long, which she artfully spread asunder, to display the Entrance into the Magic Grotto. The uncommon Figure of this bushy spot afforded a very odd sort of Amusement to Camillo, which was more heightened by the Rest of the Ceremony which these Wantons went through. They each filled a Glass of Wine, and laying themselves in an extended Posture placed their Glasses on the Mount of Venus, every Man in the Company drinking off the Bumper, as it stood on that tempting Protuberance, while the Wenches were not wanting in their lascivious Motions to heighten the Diversion. Then they went thro' the several Postures and Tricks made use of to raise debilitated Lust when cloyed with natural Enjoyment, and afterwards obliged poor Camillo to shoot the Bridge, and pass under the warm Cataracts, which discomposed him more than if he had been overset in a Gravesend Wherry. However, tho' it raised the Laugh of the whole Company, he bore this Frolick with a good deal of patience, as he was told it was necessary for all new Members to be thus initiated into the Mysteries of their Society. Camillo began now to be disgusted at the prodigious Impudence of the Women; he found in himself no more of that uneasy Emotion he felt at their first setting out, and was desirous of the Company's dismissing them; but his Companions would not part with them, till they had gone through with the whole of their Exercise; the Nymphs, who raised a fresh Contribution on every new Discovery of their impudent Inventions, required no Entreaties to gratify the young Rakes, but proceeded, without the least Sense of Shame, to shew them how far Human Nature could debase itself.