London Triptych

by Kemp, Jonathan

  But as London recedes behind me like a lover I’m leaving behind, I can’t stop thinking about what the bleedin’ hell I’m going to do when I get there. I don’t know a bloody soul there except Walter, and have no fuckin’ idea where to find him. I’ll start at the Post Office, I suppose; surely they have need of gram boys in Manchester. And failing that there’s always renting. There must still be men on this septic isle willing to press a shilling into a lad’s hand for the pleasure of tasting his flesh. And as I settle back into my seat, feeling less anxious about what’s in store for me, I call to mind a scene at Taylor’s when I hardly knew Oscar at all.

  We were all in the parlour, with its shadowed and dusty grandeur, its worn and torn flock wallpaper and its worm-eaten furniture, which creaked and groaned under Oscar’s weight. Oscar always liked to sit with us, not like the other swells who would pick a boy before they’d finished their drink and often as not decline the drink altogether and simply go upstairs. Oscar would sit and talk for hours before choosing one or two of us to take upstairs. He seemed to enjoy chatting with us more than anything we ever did with our bodies, and he said he loved watching us. He said we were like panthers. Daft bleeder. Most of all, though, he loved to hear stories about what we got up to with the other clients, especially royalty and aristocracy, or anyone well known. He loved hearing what they liked to do with us and as we got more and more smutty he would laugh even more and clap his hands with glee, like a child. As we joked and cursed he would laugh long and loud. Nothing was too vulgar for him. I remember once him saying to us, ‘My dear panthers, if only you were running this country, what a joyous place it would be. People would flock here from all over southern Europe to admire how we had managed by some Herculean effort to overcome the most adverse climate and produce a truly Latin temperament. If only we had a government of whores!’

  ‘But we do,’ said Charlie. ‘Didn’t you know, Mr Wilde, we do run this country.’

  ‘For sure,’ I added, ‘and isn’t this the Houses of Parliament you’re in right now?’

  ‘It’s a little-known fact that no law is passed in this land,’ continued Charlie, quite taken with the idea and running with it, ‘no department of state may function, no decision of national importance is ever made without our say-so. All the heads of state consult us; crowned princes defer to our greater wisdom; high court judges and law lords pick our brains on all important matters of state.’

  And then Walter chipped in with, ‘Taylor’s not just a queen, sir, he’s the Queen.’

  ‘Long live the Queen!’ cheered Oscar, raising his cracked champagne flute, pinkie aloft, sweaty face split in a fat grin.

  ‘I know no greater pleasure than being with those who are young, bright, happy, careless and free,’ he had said in court. ‘I do not like the sensible and I do not like the old.’

  I look out of the window to watch dusk unfolding, trying not to think that he has a very different view right now.

  1954

  I spent the next few days in my bed with a fever, sinking and surfacing, vanishing down long shadowed corridors of nightmares, corridors with walls that suddenly sprouted other doors, other corridors, and the floor dropped beneath my feet, or lifted me higher, or turned to liquid, or sand. I twisted inside sweat-stained sheets in temperatures that burned into a chill, a chill that ate at my bones and chewed through my nerves like wires, causing fires to erupt in my head, I heard voices calling me, taunting me, caressing me, chastising me. It felt, at times, as if someone had sneaked in and stolen all of my bones and my flesh lay there like a wet rag unable to move; at other times every bone in my body ached as if it had been put back in the wrong place. My eyeballs were pulled from their sockets and placed on the ceiling above me so I could view the wild thrashing of my fevered body below. For what seemed like an eternity I was gnawed by nausea, and crawled from my bed only to vomit into the white porcelain of the toilet bowl or empty my burning bowels. The rain had soaked down to my bones and floored me.

  By the third day I felt well enough to go downstairs and make myself a cup of tea.

  By the fourth day I felt as I had never felt before in my life. A horizon of possibility beckoned to me and a new fever gripped me: a fever to paint. After a quick wash and a hearty breakfast, I went straight to the studio. I’d been putting it off, I must admit, too preoccupied, I suppose, with other things – too busy thinking about Gore. Love (if that’s what it was) is a kind of sickness, clouding perception. I had become totally distracted.

  But now, for the first time ever, I feel totally energised and focused to a point as hard and sharp as a cut diamond. I am filling the hollowness I feel with an enthusiasm quite unfamiliar to me. I know not at all where it might be leading me; I am simply placing one foot in front of the other, much like an infant beginning to walk, unsteady but resilient, half-blind but curious. Yesterday I felt like a man about to take an ice-cold plunge; today I feel that being in the water isn’t as bad as I’d imagined. I still have all the chaos within, but now I have the time to sift through to its hidden riches without worrying whether I should. I don’t know if love and creativity are compatible, nor whether this devastation is part of my fate. But I am strangely exhilarated by my grief. It’s liberated me, allowed me to experience things in a way I haven’t since I was a child. Everything seems peculiarly vivid, the daylight a sign – though as yet I don’t know of what exactly. Through the fog of my headache, I recall last week’s events, and already they seem a hundred years ago.

  I am driven to give vent to those emotions in a way I never have been before. I feel such intensity I’m scared I might die of it, or I’m scared it might go, or I might not have it in me to express it adequately. My fear and my desire collide and I paint and paint hour after hour in a blur of rapid strokes as if my life depended upon it. Perhaps it does. I have these visions inside, visions of Gore’s flesh, glowing like a monstrance, drawing me like a spell. I need to get them out. Perhaps then I will be at peace. These strange, dark, distorted canvases have become some kind of abstract autobiography. Heaven knows what they say about me, but at least they say something. That, at least, is enough.

  Each brush stroke charges me, and I don’t know if I am still inebriated with fever, but my blood sings to the paint, and the paint sings to my blood, and I have become the air that carries their voices back and forth. I cannot, must not stop now. Not for anything. Not with the fire in me now. I must paint, paint, paint.

  About the Author

  Jonathan Kemp was born in Manchester. He now lives in London, where he teaches creative writing, literature and queer theory at Birkbeck. He also DJs. London Triptych is his first novel.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to my family for their constant love and support.

  To all my gorgeous friends for their years of encouragement and humour, and for never doubting I’d get there in the end, especially: Michael Atavar, Darius Amini, John Lee Bird, Helen Boulter, Pippa Brooks, George Cayford, Matthew Fennemore, Johnny Golding, Lucien Gouiran, Sally Gross, Hally, Gerry Hislop, James Killough, Louise Lambe, Sadie Lee, Clayton Littlewood, David Male, Steve Muscroft, Joe Pop, Clive Reeve, Chris Rose, Matthew Stradling, Sue Smallwood, Roy Woolley.

  Many thanks to Jim MacSweeney and Uli Lenart at Gay’s the Word bookshop. Extracts from London Triptych appeared in Chroma Journal and Polari Journal (www.polarijournal.com). Many thanks to Shaun Levin and Pema Baker, the respective editors of those two publications. Thanks to Jake Arnott and Neil Bartlett.

  Endless gratitude to my literary agent, Adrian Weston; Candida Lacey, Vicky Blunden and Corinne Pearlman at Myriad Editions. And to Linda McQueen for her amazing copy-editing skills.

  AFTERWORD:

  A Government of Whores

  LONDON TRIPTYCH started out as a short story entitled ‘Pornocracy’ that I wrote for a competition. I had always been intrigued by the secret histories of male prostitution, and this first attempt gave me the character and voice of Jack Rose. History is all
too often seen as something that only people who wield power experience or create; the powerless are seen to lead lives of no consequence. I wanted to see things from the other side: to give voice to the voiceless. I was interested in viewing the Wilde scandal from the perspective of one of the young boys involved, in imagining the lives of these bit-players, this shadowy cohort whose fleeting appearance in the history books fascinated me. Who were these ‘panthers’ with which Wilde ‘feasted’?

  This is the story that has the most historical grounding, in the form of Wilde’s life and the detailed accounts of the trials. Alfred Taylor’s boyhouse existed at the addresses used here, and much of his personal history is the same; he was convicted along with Wilde, receiving the same sentence. It was, however, also the most difficult to research in terms of the lives of male prostitutes. Their invisibility was the very thing that drew me to them. The transcripts of the Wilde trials were very useful, as was Kellow Chesney’s marvellous The Victorian Underground. I also relied on the pornography of the time, such as Teleny, a book Wilde was supposed to have had a hand in the writing of. There is no specific historical counterpart to Jack; I took his name from Jack Saul, the narrator of one of the very few homosexual porn novels of the time, Sins of the Cities of the Plain, published in 1881. Wilde actually owned a copy of this book, according to Thomas Wright in Oscar’s Books: A Journey through the Library of Oscar Wilde. So Jack Rose is a fiction; but I wanted him to do what he did out of jealousy: to kill the thing he loved, and perhaps be the inspiration for Wilde’s famous refrain.

  The short story didn’t win the competition but pretty soon I had embarked on a novel on the same theme. I was keen to explore further than Jack’s story alone would allow. I needed other voices from other times, and formed the idea of three lives spaced roughly fifty years apart but overlapping chronologically. It made sense to counterpoint Jack’s exploits with a different, more mature voice, so I developed Colin. I knew several older artists who had fascinating stories about gay London in the 1950s and their experiences were invaluable to me, in particular those of the artist George Cayford.

  The early ’50s saw a great witch-hunt of homosexuals by the British press and the police, which included the arrest of Sir John Gielgud and the imprisonment of the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke (whose 1955 account of his prison experience, The Verdict of You All, is a wonderful read), and peaked with the 1954 scandal involving Lord Montagu and Peter Wildeblood as recounted in the latter’s book, Against the Law. Colin’s world view is shaped by that climate of fear. I wanted him to feel imprisoned by society, but to find, ultimately, his own way out. I wanted him to find some kind of salvation, acceptance and recognition. And I wanted art and love to be the source of those things. Novels from the time, such as Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile and Michael Nelson’s A Room in Chelsea Square, provided additional inspiration and atmosphere.

  These two characters then suggested a third. The work felt incomplete. It called for a more contemporary voice to offset the other two: a modern-day Jack, the voice of a man whose sexual freedoms, whilst having their precedent and forerunner in Jack, were nevertheless the fruits of late-twentieth-century gay liberation. It needed a voice from a more contemporary London, my London. This allowed me to draw from my own experiences of the city, though David’s story is by no means my own. I’ve never been interested in writing autobiography, though I’m aware that most writing is, in some indirect and alchemical sense, autobiographical. I agree with Jeanette Winterson that ‘there is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies’. I like to think I included a bit of both in London Triptych. James Joyce’s claim that memory is an act of creation resonates with me. Wilde himself said, ‘Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.’ These are my guiding lights. I think we need to believe more in the powers of fiction, to trust that some kind of truth lies in imagined stories, to believe that – to paraphrase Jean Cocteau – a lie can tell the truth. The modern-day obsession with reality is doing us no good. Wilde, certainly, would have abhorred it. It leads us to believe that there is such a thing as reality and that language can represent it accurately. I’m more inclined to think that language makes realities (in the plural), for better or for worse. Surely this is what storytellers do, fabricate other universes, places governed by different laws.

  I’m not a historian, and I didn’t want to write history (though some history books, such as Matt Cook’s London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914, were invaluable). I wanted to use history to provide some kind of backdrop for the lives of these three men, and I wanted to use the city almost as a fourth character. As such, the city too needed to change. Jack’s London is not Colin’s, and David’s London is different again. Not simply because our experiences of cities are mostly subjective, but because cities themselves are fluid, impermanent entities, grounded in a historical specificity that is in a permanent state of flux. For me, cities are also profoundly sexual, and that sexuality is caught up in the anonymity they provide. I think there is a great deal of knowledge in the sexual, and it was crucial that this most sidelined and contentious aspect of urban life be central to the stories I was weaving. For Jack the city provides a way of having sex with men without needing to integrate such behaviour into his overall sense of self – and of making a decent enough living at it, too. He is uncomplicatedly libidinal – though there is little about the libido that is truly uncomplicated. Jack represents, I hope, a way of connecting with the body that is freer than, say, Colin’s: a form of sexual consciousness that is bold and blunt, not shackled by psychology, nor by religious or bourgeois morality, all of which he has mercifully escaped, though he ends up as their victim, nevertheless. I reintroduced him within Colin’s narrative because I was interested in imagining how he would change as he grew older.

  By comparison, Colin represents all that is destructive about the morality surrounding homosexuality – a morality that exists not only in the shape of his parents (as superego) but also in the form of the police and doctors and other people in his social group. For him, the city is a place to scavenge for visual scraps to be soaked up and used to populate his masturbation fantasies. For him Gore represents the antithesis of what he has come to expect from life, a kind of sexual freedom unimaginable to him. Like Jack, Gore is a mirror in which we see our own desires. Through Gore, Colin discovers another London, one that unsettles him as much as it fascinates him.

  For David, the city represents escape. Like many gay men of my generation who grew up in the provinces, London reeked of freedom and decadence, standing as a beacon towards which we all made our merry way, like children dancing in a line behind the Pied Piper. The appeal was primarily, for me at least, that of anonymity – not just in terms of the sex available, but in terms of confronting and constructing one’s self. One could be anonymous in London – in any big city – in a way that is unthinkable in a small town; one could wipe the slate clean and start anew if one wanted to. David’s journey, like the journey of the ego, is one of negotiating the physical world and assessing one’s place within it. I wanted it to be clear that he has learnt something from that journey, even if he fails, as yet, to see exactly what that lesson might be.

  Wilde’s life and work became a governing principle as I worked on the novel. I incorporated and adapted events from his life into the narrative. For example, Wilde’s mother died during his incarceration, so I killed off David’s mother not long after he is imprisoned. All the words attributed to Wilde are mine, apart from one line. David’s story uses the second person – is addressed to the boy who was his downfall – in order to evoke De Profundis, Wilde’s prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. I like the way it appeals to a singular recipient, a single reader – though in this case one who will never lay eyes upon it. And, of course, just like The Picture of Dorian Gray, a painting is at the heart of the story: representation as the embodiment of erotic thought. One of the games I’ve enjoyed playing whilst writing the novel is to scatter echoes and n
ods throughout the three narratives. Nods not just to one another, but also to Wilde’s life and work.

  I tried to incorporate certain constants in the three narratives. As well as the city, there is the law. The police play a part in all three stories, as they have in the lives of many gay men. Love is another constant, as is sex. Indeed, the two are the most tightly bound themes of the book. Whilst I concur with Foucault that the truth is never to be found in sex, the truth of sex is one that is often overlooked in our panicky rush to categorise and moralise. I was attempting to write about gay sex in new ways, ways more in line with writers such as Georges Bataille or Kathy Acker, or Neil Bartlett and Samuel R. Delany, where sex can become an opportunity to explore subjectivity and sometimes language.

  I wrote the three narratives as separate stories – even separate files – but I knew pretty much as I worked through them where the breaks would be. Each one was episodic. It was just easier to manage that way. But they each had an almost identical dramatic arc, so that when they were intertwined they would peak and fall at roughly the same time in the overall narrative curve of the novel. What came across on reading it through for the first time after I had plaited the three narratives together were the many other ways the three voices echoed one another. Jack’s story ends with him travelling from London to Manchester, whilst David’s begins with the reverse journey. Having Jack reappear in Colin’s strand, and then Gore reappear in David’s, was not something I had planned from the start. It came late, as did the title. But once I had decided on it I enjoyed working out how it would manifest, how these characters would be as older men. In setting up Jack and Gore’s reappearances as old men, I wanted to open a space for also imagining David as an old man, as someone different again from the person we meet in the pages of his narrative. Our lives as gay men are not necessarily scripted to the level of straight people – we don’t tend to have children (though this is changing), and we tend to organise our sexual and personal lives very differently – and one thing I was trying to do was to imagine the lives of older gay men in ways that enable us to write our own scripts.