by Colin Wilson
[1]Varney the Vampire, by Thomas Prest, is one of the earliest and most famous of vampire novels. Printed in 1847, it was reprinted dozens of times until Bram Stoker’s Dracula eclipsed it. Prest also wrote Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber.
After half an hour of this, Kirsten was in such a state of alcoholic emotion that he was hardly intelligible. Cunningham now asked him about his invention, and said he’d like to see it. Kirsten forthwith leapt to his feet, and told us to follow him. Diana, looking oddly subdued and tired (or perhaps it was only the gin she was drinking), followed after us. She was so bewildered she even left the door wide open and I (who was last out, since I went up to get an overcoat) had to close it. I walked with her behind Kirsten and Cunningham, and as she showed a disposition to stumble, had an excuse to put my arm round her waist. She didn’t seem to mind in the least. To my surprise, I realized that she was wearing only a thin dress under a short jacket, and apparently no underskirt. The zip at the side of the skirt was partly open, and her bare flesh underneath it was icy cold. I immediately insisted that she wear my overcoat; she agreed, although she protested that she wasn’t cold. Kirsten’s workshop is half a mile away, behind Hanbury Street, a room in a freezing warehouse that smells of leather. I was surprised that his ‘invention’ looked less weird than I’d supposed it would. I’d expected a kind of Heath-Robinson contraption; instead, it looked like a theatre organ. He said that it was an idea he’d got when he saw an invention of Maelzel’s as a child, on exhibition at a fair; it was called an ‘Orchestrion’, and produced noises like violins, flutes and horns all from one machine. Kirsten himself had also noticed that a combination of piano and organ sounds impressive, and had started designing the machine simply with the intention of uniting piano and organ in one instrument. Soon it came to him that all kinds of noises can be produced by pipes and strings, properly combined, and he began to design his own ‘orchestrion’.
It was icy cold in the damned shop, and poor Diana was now shivering, in spite of my overcoat. I was pretty chilly myself. However, Kirsten insisted that we hear his instrument, and announced that he would play us some more extracts from Varney the Vampire. At this, my heart sank, and I began to make excuses; but Kirsten ignored them and sat down, remarking that we must remember that the machine is still unfinished. He then proceeded to play his overture. To my utter amazement, it now sounded quite different. What had sounded absurd and tinny on the piano now became tremendously impressive. Some of his effects were astounding; for example, there is a quiet passage, played by a thing that sounds like a flute or a high violin, where the piano suddenly chimes in with a weird effect like an old barrel-organ; then the organ notes take over again, rising to a tremendous, jarring climax. (I don’t know why Kirsten professes to loathe modern music; he’s an expert in the use of discord.) There is now no doubt whatever in my mind that Kirsten is a musical genius of the first order. While his conversation is precise and pedantic and somehow lacking in vitality, the music shows evidence of a mind of great agility. There seems to be no effect in which he is not an expert; passages of Miltonic dignity are followed by distorted strains of Hungarian violins or cockney street music, giving his music a completely unique flavour, as tart as unripe apples. When he went on to play us the heroine’s final aria, it was now sublime and tremendous—it was everything he had said, a climax of sweetness and poignancy that actually brought tears to my eyes. In spite of the cold, I could have gone on listening for hours. However, it was now after midnight, and Diana was shivering convulsively and protesting that she wanted to go home. But Cunningham grasped Kirsten’s hand, called him a universal genius, and asked him to come back to his place and talk. I also tried to express what I felt to Kirsten, and he looked as if he was going to burst into tears. Suddenly he cheered up and shouted: ‘Let’s go and have another drink.’ Diana said firmly that she had to be up early and wanted to go home. He tried to dissuade her, but I could see she was tired, and strangely sharp with him, in the way that women are when they think their menfolk fools. Finally, she said she would go home alone; I said I’d go with her. At this, Kirsten said: ‘Good, in that case I’ll go back with our friend Caradoc’ (he was already using Cunningham’s Christian name, which I can’t bear to pronounce). Diana had walked out of the place; I hurried after her and caught her up in the street. She said I needn’t spoil my night on her behalf; I didn’t tell her that I was hoping she’d make my night for me. She let me put my arm round her, but walked back very fast (we were both frozen). As we went up the stairs, I was wondering what excuse I could use to get her to come upstairs; but it transpired that I didn’t need one; she opened her door and asked me if I’d like a cup of tea before I went to bed. So I went in with her. Her gas-fire had gone out (she had left it turned on) and neither of us had any small change. Her gas-stove was also out of action. So I suggested we go up and use mine. At first I thought she’d refuse and go straight to bed; but she came up docilely enough. In my room, I lit the fire and turned it up full; she huddled over it. I also put the kettle on the ring in the hearth, to warm the room quicker. For five minutes she sat with my overcoat on, until the heat became too great. Then she threw it off. The zip on her dress was now completely undone, but she didn’t seem to care; there was a strange abandonment about her as she sat there, as if she was drunk and tired (but we’d been listening to the orchestrion for an hour, so she’d had time to recover from the gin). I was full of enthusiasm about her husband, and said that I thought he’d be a great musician. At this she looked a little more interested, and asked me if I thought he would ever be a success. I said that I would be very surprised indeed if he wasn’t, and that I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t made a success already. She shrugged, and said that he’d ruined all the opportunities that had presented themselves so far. People who showed an interest in his music were put off by his conversation—that is, by his abuse of all contemporary composers, his contemptuous sneers about ‘compromise’, and his proposals to write symphonies that would go on for three hours, or operas longer than the Ring cycle. They all ended by thinking he was a crank, and sneaking away.
The tea seemed to make her more lively, and as the room was now stiflingly hot, she moved over to the bed and took off her shoes. For half an hour now, I’d had a curious feeling with her. It was not that she was willing to give herself to me, or was offering herself; it was just a certainty. I found myself looking at her as if she was already mine. For example, when she removed the overcoat, and I saw the zip was undone, I was surprised that the sight of her bare flesh, and a bit of suspender belt, aroused no desire, any more than they would in a husband. Yet it wasn’t that I’d lost interest; I was tingling with need for her, and longing to pounce on her like a wolf. And yet it was as if I had already possessed her once. She went on talking about him with a curious bitterness, and I began to wonder if she secretly resented the fact that Kirsten could never need her as much as a ‘normal’ man could.
When she’d finished her tea, she lay back against the pillow, her shoulders on the wall, and closed her eyes. At this moment, we both thought we heard footsteps on the stairs, as if Kirsten was returning. I was certain it was Kirsten, and immediately gave up all idea of making love to her. We didn’t speak about it, but just sat there, waiting for him to come up or call to her. Five minutes went by, and there was no sound, so we went on talking. Then, with a feeling that the evening was almost over, (and in any case, I wanted to go down to the lavatory, which I suspected would break things up), I went over to her as she lay with closed eyes, moved her shoulders so she was lying on the bed, and kissed her. She lay there as if she was unconscious; I knelt beside the bed for a few minutes, kissing her face and throat; then the bursting bladder got the better of me, and I went out of the room. After I came out of the lavatory, I saw that her door was slightly ajar, so I pushed it open and called ‘Robert’. Then I looked inside; we had obviously been mistaken in thinking he’d come home. It was
probably the tenant on the floor below coming up to the lavatory. There was a bunch of keys on the table, which I recognized as Kirsten’s, so I reasoned that he had probably gone out without them, and would have to ring the bell to get in. I then went down and confirmed that the front door was closed. Finally, I went up to my room, and found that Diana now appeared to be asleep. I turned off the fire and the light and undressed in the dark (my heart thumping, afraid she’d wake up and protest, or that the doorbell would ring). But nothing happened, and I climbed into bed; she stirred and moved over. But as soon as I started to kiss her and raised her dress, she woke up and struggled. I tried to hold her, but she refused. She said: ‘No, don’t. What if Robert comes back?’ I told her about the key on the table, and that he’d have to ring the doorbell to get in. By this time she was sitting up, and had got out of bed. I accepted the idea of defeat, and lay down again. She opened the door, picked up her shoes, and went out of the room. I said, ‘Damn,’ and turned over. However, before I could fall asleep, she came back into the room and closed the door, then I heard her clothes falling on the floor. A moment later, she slipped into bed. She left me finally at half past seven this morning.
Now it is over, I feel my usual persistent desire to anatomize the event and examine my own feeling. The most surprising thing is this: I am certain that I’m in love with her. As I write this, I can hear Kirsten’s piano below; the thought that she will sleep with him tonight is unbearable to me. And for the first time in my life, I want a woman so completely that I’d be happy to marry her, or agree to take her off to the other side of the world.
I try to understand how this feeling came about. It may be connected with my feeling of protectiveness about her. I’ve pitied her since I met her looking so tired on the stairs. I had spent the evening with her, and watched her shiver in clothes that should have been thrown away last summer. But the certainty that I was in love with her came on me quite suddenly when I was kissing her, immediately after she got into bed. A man in bed says, ‘I love you,’ automatically; the strange thing was that I didn’t want to say it, because it would seem a simplification of what I actually felt about her. This was partly physical excitement, no doubt. She seemed unsure of herself, and lay on her side, facing me. So I didn’t try to force her; just kissed her, and let my hands move over her body. She has an exceptionally pliable body—more soft than anyone I’ve ever known. She lay against me, her thighs caressing me, and it was then that I wanted her—I mean that I wanted to marry her. Finally, I had to ask her: ‘Would you leave your husband to live with me?’ She said, ‘I don’t know,’ and sounded frightened. I said: ‘Supposing I gave you a baby?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I said: ‘Then let me give you a baby.’ When she didn’t reply, I asked her: ‘Is it possible for you to have a baby at present?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’ At this, I started to make love to her like a demon. She tried to twist away, but I held her tight. I felt that she had to be bound to me somehow. There was the feeling of urgency, in case Kirsten came home, so I made love to her again and again, and after the second time she no longer tried to prevent me. Before she left, I had made love to her eight times. At one point, we heard someone on the stairs, and assumed it was Kirsten, and yet she made no move to get out of bed; on the contrary, she put her arms around my neck, as if she wanted him to find us together. For my own part, I didn’t care; I’d prefer him to find out quickly, so that I’d know where I stood. However, no one called, so I suppose it was one of the tenants going to the lavatory.
And yet we spoke very little; I didn’t even say I loved her. At dawn, she slipped out of bed, pulled on her dress, and went out, carrying her clothes. I didn’t want to sleep. I had to overcome a temptation to go down and join her, but reasoned that Kirsten might come in suddenly. Finally, I got up and began to write in this journal. At half past ten I met Kirsten on the stairs; he told me he’d spent the night talking at Cunningham’s, and that he thinks Cunningham a great man!
Now I should try to use all my insight to try to focus this problem of sex—and yet now is the very moment it seems most elusive. And yet one thing came to me clearly last night: sex depends entirely upon the idea of the violation of identity. It is like banging two eggs together in your hands so that they both break (the simile fails because only one of the eggs breaks—still, it holds my meaning).
Yes, we are all lonely, ‘each in his prison’, all automatically grasping for freedom as a moth flies to the light. And there, yesterday afternoon, was a desirable but inviolable Diana, a separate identity, who might be ‘an immense world of delight, closed to my senses five’. Then, like peeling the skin off an onion, I strip away the outer layers of her identity, and plunge into her centre as a bee plunges into a flower. I, of course, am the same for her. A shell is cracked.
What I am suggesting, of course, is an ‘illusion’ theory of sex, a neurosis theory. Sex, then, depends upon our being sick enough to want to smash the shell. A madman might believe that the whole world is against him, that there is a conspiracy to defraud him of his reality. The sexual illusion is on precisely the same level—a false notion that the being of the other person conceals a reality that you lack. It is like a child who, asked to choose between two apples, can never believe that he has not chosen wrongly. No wonder the ancients were inclined to summarize human existence in such legends as the myth of Tantalus.
The odd thing is that I’m not at all pessimistic about this. The illusion is only harmful if you allow it to be. For example, it might reach a stage of Don Juanism where you want simply to ravish every pretty girl you see in the street. But the real danger would only start if you began to calculate how this could best be done (like that West End rapist with his ether pad). Frustration is bad; failure of self-control is worse, the swiftest descent into hell. Meaning vanishes. This is surely the reason that all the most spectacular series of lust murders have ended either in the suicide of the killer (as in the Ripper case, or the Texarkana murderer), or in the murderer walking into the police traps like a somnambulist, as with Kurten and Heath.
I wish I had a language in which I could describe this failure of ‘meaning’ that must come to the sexual killer. I can focus the idea, yet cannot express it. I think of the Texarkana murderer, who began by merely attacking a couple in a car, knocking the man unconscious and raping the girl, and ended by torturing his victims to death. But even if he was an exceptionally stupid man, completely unreflective, he must have felt an awful sense of panic after each of these murders, an anticlimax worse than a bad hangover, a sense of having been cheated by the gods he was obeying. Such ‘hangovers’ must have produced the idea of devils in the Middle Ages. The devil whispers: ‘Rather murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. If you want sex, go and grab it. If you envy the man in the car, with one hand up her dress, go and knock him out and take the girl yourself. Do that and you will eventually be free and godlike and wise.’ But all that happens is that each time he has to go further, until, in an effort to grasp the girl’s innermost reality and violate her separateness, merely penetrating her body is not enough; he has to torture her, destroy her completely. And after each crime, he knows that he has sunk lower, and the fairy gold still glitters and lures him—further down the pit. And the slope above him is so steep that only a spiritual giant could find the courage to climb back. There is no answer but self-destruction.
Now I want to rest in Diana, to sink into her, make her my terminus and goal. Arbitrarily I say, ‘I love her,’ and it is true.
It is half past eleven; I shall go out and meet her for lunch.
Later: There are times when I feel driven to destroy illusions—my own and the world’s. The reason, I suppose, is that I want to know just how tolerable life would be without illusions—or if Andreyev and Artsybashev are right when they say that life would be revealed as it really is—loathesome, naked, ugly, intolerable.
One thing I know for certain—it is
damned hard work being a human being. When they are handing out the parts in heaven: ‘You go to Mars; you are to be re-born on Saturn; you are to be a salamander and live in the centre of the sun’—Earth is regarded as the ‘tough assignment’. ‘You are to be born as a human being on Earth.’ ‘Oh no, not that filthy dump. Why, everybody knows that to be a human being is the lousiest deal in the universe.’
These thoughts occur to me on returning from lunch with Diana. She seemed tired, and talked to me casually, without intimacy, as if last night had never happened. I left her, feeling irritable, resentful. When I got in, I thought: ‘The hell with it; so you spent a pleasant night in bed with somebody else’s wife, and now it’s over, so why worry?’ It is true that I sometimes wonder if I can ever be in love; I have made a habit of examining every emotion too closely, analysing it into its constituent parts. Love I see as part egoism, part possessiveness, partly need for security. And I wish I could explode this sexual illusion. Is there any hope that man might be a little more god-like without it? The world seems to me so full of illusion. Cunningham is a good man, vital and intelligent; yet all his talk of magic and evil is an illusion with which he keeps himself going. There is no evil, only stupidity. There is no magic; magic never works, never, at any time. So we are left in a rather unglamorous universe. The mainstay of the entertainment industry—romantic love—is another lie. Centuries have built codes of ethics on this idea of romantic love—knights on horseback, killing dragons and giants for the sake of a lady’s glove, and it is all a lie to conceal the truth—two dogs copulating in an alleyway.