I turned the book Professor Masters had given me through my hands as if it were a religious relic.
'Eroticism,' I said, and said it again. 'Eroticism.'
It was by Georges Bataille, the writer he had mentioned, the writer of whom I knew nothing and would end up knowing everything. His book was first published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1957. What I clutched in my damp palms was the first English translation by Mary Dalwood, published in 1962 by Calder and Boyars. I make a point of reading the copyrights and small print before reading a book and see it as a courtesy, like watching film credits before leaving the cinema and coming away knowing that the best boy was Bill Sparky Baker.
The book's single word title Eroticism immediately evoked everything louche and vulgar that I could think of, and I was relieved to discover as I skimmed the Introduction that it was not a raunchy novelette, but a history of erotica, taboo, mysticism and transgression through the ages, a study of human urges, passions and the impulses that, according to Bataille, exist in the night of our subconscious like creatures in darkness seeking the light.
He opens his study with this sentence: 'Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.'
I found this baffling and enthralling. I drank a glass of water. My headache had dulled to a faint throb. I read the book from cover to cover without taking notes and was about to start reading it again when I realized I was hungry. My room with its high fluted ceiling and dormer window had turned inky with shadows. More than three hours had gone by and the Nurofen had turned to acid in my stomach.
The sky was black and clear, though starless, and my breath drifted from my lips in feathery coils. The walls of Trinity loomed up like Mount Doom from The Lord of the Rings, and I realized as I reached for the simile how it belonged to who I had been in my scarlet blazer sitting exams in the spring, not who I was and might become. My leg hurt from the fall, but the cold was an anaesthetic and I was wearing the same blue stockings, the hole in the knee buttoned by a bloody scab.
I was still learning my way around Cambridge and wandered the winding streets clutching my book like a simulacrum of every scholar who had walked those same streets across the vagaries of the last five hundred years. I was conscious, too, that I was a beneficiary of the college's current updates, a young woman bearing a copy of Eroticism after centuries of bent men nursing the Bible, including those, like Oliver Masters, whose intention was to subvert its contents – Bertrand Russell, Francis Bacon, Wittgenstein, they had all pressed the leather of their soles on those ancient cobbles.
The sign Slice of Melon over the entrance to a wine bar drew me into a warm expanse of green leather banquettes in raised booths and Madonna whispering about sex over hidden speakers. There were few customers and I found a seat in the corner below a yellow light bright enough for me to return to my book.
The waiter was young, good-looking, off-hand and had an accent from the north of England I was unable to place. In a moment of madness, I ordered a hamburger with bacon and blue cheese, a side of chips and a large white wine.
'How do you want the burger?'
'Five seconds after bloody,' I said.
'Haven't seen you in here before. You a fresher?'
'Yes,' I replied and he turned away.
'One more thing, a bottle of sparkling water, please,' I added, and he waved over his shoulder.
'Right you are.'
I ran once more through all the things my tutor had said and the same phrase kept coming back at me like an echo from the mirror: a good spanking is exactly what you need. What he was actually saying is: a good spanking is what I intend to give you, which was shocking, and all the more so that I wasn't more shocked. I was aware from reading Bataille, and perhaps that was the point of loaning me the book – the precious first edition – that I had been invited into an erotic, as much as a cerebral game, a surreal piece of theatre. On the stage he had constructed, in the scene he was setting, Professor Masters would play the role of the seer with cryptic knowledge, a contemporary Lao Tzu. I was cast as the desirable young woman, or 'privileged object of desire,' to use Bataille's phrase, the acolyte who had more to gain from conceding than resisting the inevitable course of the drama.
According to Eroticism, the pursuit of the erotic is to break down all barriers – to live so fully, even death loses its grip.
How do you do that, make that leap of faith? How fully is fully? Is sex erotic or passionate, and I wasn't even sure of the difference, the highest goal; the greatest attainment? A lot of girls at my school must have thought so. From the moment their breasts began to grow and their bottoms became rounder, they talked about little else. Like the rats and cats and orang-utans, is our prime motivation reproduction? Bataille says humans are uniquely graced with choice. Once you take reproduction out of the equation, what remains, he says, is bourgeois coupling doomed to ennui, or the uncovering of sexuality as if it were a Spanish onion with endless gossamer thin layers of piquant potential.
The way Oliver Masters had arranged his study with the Kama Sutra prints, the burning joss sticks and distinct lack of chairs had hauled me like a little mouse in the talons of an eagle away from my old world of uniforms and Holy Sisters and dropped me like carrion on the far edge of my imagination. He had in his suite of rooms set out to seduce me intellectually as foreplay to a physical offensive, which I now anticipated and would be prepared for when it came.
The sulky waiter returned with the wine and water. He glanced at my book.
'What are you reading?'
I showed him.
'Never heard of it,' he said, shaking his head, and I felt a need to explain.
'It's a philosophical study.'
'Like the title,' he remarked, and I realized he was likewise a student, probably a bright grammar school boy juggling time working his way through college.
Mother had planned the same agenda for me. Like politicians who have never seen war and blithely send others into battle, she believed work would widen my horizons and, in one respect, at least, she was right: my four weeks as an intern with Drew Butler had not been entirely wasted.
My father was home the first two weeks of September. He was delighted that I was going to his old college and chatted wistfully about his time at Cambridge, years that had shaped his life, although not entirely in the shape he had imagined. Mother had entered his circle like a brightly burning flame in a red dress and they walked down the aisle at the Norman church at St Nicholas in Kent before knowing anything about each other beyond their backgrounds and class, those qualities that had once mattered so much and matter less now that it is solely money that matters. Father only came to realise when they were alone on their ten day honeymoon in Venice that they seldom saw things the same way, but avoided confrontation and set about fine-tuning Mother's decisions, the shapeshifter behind the scenes in marriage as in his career.
One morning, while I was bronzing in the garden, he slipped a book on the edge of my sunbed.
'Lovely day,' he whispered, and continued along the path to the rose arbour.
The book was The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, a sky-blue cheque like a bookmark tucked between the pages.
'I'm so dying to read it,' I called, and he turned with a bow, his long fingers revolving in a swirl like Raleigh with Elizabeth I.
He was inspecting the carnage left by the gardener and became Charlie Chaplin as he hacked his way through the overhanging roses with an invisible umbrella. I laughed until tears ran down my cheeks and it brings a tear to my eye even now as I recall those rare times when my quiet courteous father let go and became himself. Daddy had been briefly in the Footlights, classics paved the road to the Foreign Office, but he had secretly dreamed of the BBC.
The waiter had returned to his place behind the bar where two other young men sat on high stools nursing bottles of lager. It was obvious by the way in which the waiter leaned forward to whisper replies in answer to their questions that they were talking about
me. Their eyes kept flicking in my direction and I stared back over my shoulder until they looked away. That night I realized that a girl alone with a book is always an object of fascination.
According to Bataille, corporal punishment is intrinsic to erotica as a corruptor of established patterns. Being dressed is civilized. Stripping naked, especially where it is inappropriate to do so, is a direct challenge to civilisation. Ultimately, the purpose of eroticism is to break down traditional thinking and attitudes in preparation for living life free of rules.
I had been subjected to those patterns of traditional thinking at my strict school and it seemed odd to me that parents and educators are not aware that the firmer the discipline the greater the desire to transgress. Within weeks of leaving school, I was performing a striptease for a complete stranger. From Black Spires to Pink had been a tiny step. I had been funnelled into one pattern and was freewheeling relentlessly into another.
My food came. I asked for another glass of wine and some mayonnaise to which I mixed a splash of ketchup, the marriage a guilty secret for dunking hot salty chips. I ignored the two boys at the bar with their furtive glances. The hamburger dripped, and I can see myself sitting beneath the yellow light with a hole in my stockings in that wine bar ten years ago reading Georges Bataille.
'As often as not, it seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions. I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions.'
I read the sentence a second time. I wiped my fingers on the paper napkin, and my mind slipped back once more to those weeks in September when Daddy was home. Mother had her bridge and tennis. Matt had formed a band among the rowers they'd called Rowlocks, and was constantly locked in his room with an electric guitar he was hopelessly learning to play. It was immediately after I had danced for Roger Devlin, and it occurred to me that there had been an oedipal element to that sudden urge to shed my virginity with an older man, a metaphorical passion to break the incest taboo, as Georges Bataille would have it. Fast forward ten years and I see myself in the skin of Marie-France floating on the surface of a moonlit swimming pool with the eyes of Kamarovsky watching. As Hesse explores in The Glass Bead Game, there is an invisible thread that runs through all things we can't understand and call destiny.
My father never went anywhere without a book tucked in his pocket and it was moving the way he led me those weeks a decade ago through his library as if Hesse, Kundera, Kazantzakis and John le Carré were stepping stones leading to his secret world. He said reading releases you from the limits of yourself, and I came to see that my father had always limited himself in pursuit of some ideal he wasn't entirely sure of, that England, his England, had become, in his lifetime, a country he no longer knew.
When I had finished reading The Glass Bead Game, we discussed Magister Ludi's quest for the key to perfect knowledge, his awareness in his final hours that death comes before the key is in your hand, that if life has meaning it is found in simple things, in what's happening now, today, that it is the journey not the destination that's important, a maxim so well known it is easily forgotten.
Father then gave me the darker, more abstract Steppenwolf, which I devoured, and it was curious that he should introduce me to Hesse's self-doubting cast of characters as I was about to start university. He left me to fathom his intentions, and I began to see that it is not the amassing of knowledge that's difficult, it is dealing with doubt and uncertainty, the curse and goad of the writer, the artist, the fresher flushed from convent into the rosy delights of Cambridge.
I sipped my wine. I was young, naïve, oddly content and suddenly excited to be the maiden from the medieval dance with death, the symbolic sacrifice to my tutor's unheavenly desires. In primitive times, when crops failed, or a volcano erupted, our ancestors placated the gods with human sacrifice, a girl stepping from childhood and, logically, the prettiest in the tribe. As Mother had said, speaking of herself, I'm sure, beauty is a burden, as well as a gift. Beauty puts less desirable women on edge and torments men. The smiling pink lips of a cute girl suggest that unsullied part of her that men want most. The fact that only one man is going to seize the prize provides logic to her slaughter and, paradoxically, while man is born appreciating beauty, just below the surface he carries a predisposition, a gut feeling that beauty should be profaned, scarred, destroyed. There is no more conclusive way to obliterate beauty than in human sacrifice, as Joan of Arc discovered at the hands of the heathen English.
Georges Bataille infers that there is an innate gratification in falling from grace, that the supreme pleasure of love is illicit love, a feeling that you are doing wrong. Add existentialism to eroticism and what do you get? I wasn't sure. But it was something I imagine Oliver Masters understood.
16
The Messenger
I cupped my breasts beneath the quilt and listened to the bells in the tower chime the hours. I was tingling, electric, and my head throbbed from cheap white wine. I would learn one day that life is too short.
Pearls of pale light slid over the walls, oblong fragments shaped by the window. It was the start of my drift to insomnia, stealthy as a cat, it creeps up on you like an addiction. At midnight, I got up, opened my notebook and began to write without thinking about what it was I was writing. At school, words for me had been iron bars that imprisoned thought. Suddenly, it felt as if the pen in my hand was a key to a secret box.
Day was breaking when I turned on my computer. I transferred the notes into my essay. Over the coming days and weeks, I phrased and rephrased; cut and slashed. I thought of Georges Bataille as my lover. I was subservient to his tender dominance, his thoughts in my head like a plangent hymn I couldn't stop singing. In the bullring, the terrified bull always returns to the same spot as if it is a place of safety. It is called the querencia. In writing, I had found my querencia. My place, my passion.
My next tutorial wasn't until the middle of November and I felt crushed when it was cancelled. Professor Masters was in London recording a radio programme on how Flaubert had created the first misery-memoir with his novel Madame Bovary. The next time I made my way down the corridor to his rooms was two weeks later. He opened the door the moment I knocked. He was wearing a green corduroy suit and an open-necked white shirt, a raincoat thrown over his shoulder. He had an unscheduled meeting he had to attend and was obliged to cancel again. He took my essay, tossed the blue folder I had brought it in on the sofa, and I followed him back down the stairs.
'Bataille?' he said
'Amazing.'
'Amazing,' he repeated. 'Yes, I suppose he is. Of course, the book's a lot more profound in the original. I didn't know if your French was up to it.'
'It isn't,' I admitted.
'Just as well, then.' He paused. 'Home for the holidays?'
'Yes.'
'Jolly good. Try not to do anything too pagan.'
'I won't…'
'And read for fun, not…information.'
I wanted to say more, but I wasn't sure what and the moment passed. He gave a sort of shrugging smile, slid his arms into his raincoat and I watched him march off down Trinity Street. The clock chimed three times, the low and high notes in urgent progression. I had been listening to the bells all night without being able to place the melody and a chill ran up my spine as I recalled the variation from Schubert's Death and the Maiden, the title I had given to my essay. The striker chimed, the bells rang out and I was struck by a revelation: it wasn't me who had sat up that night writing my own Death and the Maiden, but something outside of me. I wasn't a fount of creative thought, merely a messenger.
Professor Masters had just turned towards Green Street and I set out to follow him. He had a long stride and his pace was so fast I had to run down Trinity to catch up. I slowed as I rounded the corner. I watched him cross into Sidney Street and vanish into the wan light of Hobson's Passage. I lost sight of him as he cut through the crowds. I looked left and right as I left the passage, and
caught a glimpse of his broad back in his raincoat as he made his way towards Christ College. From there, he entered the backstreets of the old town and I shadowed him through the maze.
I wasn't totally surprised when he entered the same wine bar where I had sat that night reading Bataille. I waited for a few minutes to catch my breath. I took a woolly hat from my bag to hide my hair, wrapped my scarf to cover the lower half of my face and felt like my father's daughter as I ambled past the bar. My tutor was sitting in a window seat with his back to me facing a woman I instantly recognised.
Ruth Raphael had been at Trinity ten years before me. An expert on everything, she had been on the same radio show as Oliver Masters and her face was familiar from staring out of The Sunday Times every week above her regular column about her brilliant life and other matters. In the photograph she has her hair pulled back and stares over half-moon glasses with that faintly raised-eye expression of people who know secrets. In the wine bar window, her wavy hair fell in dark curls to her shoulders and her brown eyes sparkled as she stared back across the table.
My breath misted through my scarf. I stood there for a long time and felt a stab of envy like a sharp knife which lasted through Christmas and was still smarting when I arrived back at college in January.
Two days after I had settled back, I received an email – Please call me. OM. I did so, on my new BlackBerry.
'I am so pleased you're back. We have to discuss Bataille. When are you free?'
It was rather a silly question, as I was free all the time. 'Whenever it's suitable,' I replied.
'Tonight,' he said. 'Meet me at the Great Gate, seven-thirty sharp. There's a little French place along the river. We can talk over dinner.'
'Dinner?'
'You do eat?'
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 19