PART
ONE: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
*
SEX
I have never had sex
with a woman, or, for that matter, with anyone else. At twenty-nine (29) I remain a virgin [the
same is still true at fifty-one (51), my age at the current revision of this
text], though I'm not by nature asexual.
I have always desired sex with a woman, but haven't had the good fortune
to encounter anyone suitable. Poverty
and isolation in a depressing area of north
The only kind of sex I have been accustomed to over the years is
the sublimated sexuality to be obtained from 1) fantasies; 2) wet dreams; and
3) pornography and/or erotica. I am a
regular fantasist, rarely omitting to fantasize from 10-15 minutes either
before I go to sleep at night or after I wake up in the morning. However, during the day I refrain from
fantasy altogether. I have other and
more important things on my mind!
Occasionally I get a wet dream, but I don't derive much pleasure
from it, as a rule. The context in which
it takes place may be one that privately disgusts, frightens, or alienates
me. Besides, the emission is rather
uncomfortable to live with. I usually
apply a paper tissue to the sheet and/or my lower abdomen, and then attempt to
get back to sleep again. Wet dreams
almost invariably wake me up!
Masturbation is another matter, but not one that I'm greatly
thrilled by, and these days I hardly ever indulge in it. I used to derive more pleasure from it when I
was eighteen or nineteen. The
ejaculation was then much more forceful, the pleasure so much keener, as Gide would say, in consequence. Now I find it something of an anticlimax and
am privately disgusted! I would usually
masturbate over a sex magazine once I had found a suitably alluring photograph,
and hold a paper tissue at the ready to collect my sperm. I often found the rear view of a woman more
alluring than the front, because I derive much pleasure from the sight of a
seductive rump. A photograph in which
rump, anus, vagina, and thighs were collectively on display was likely to
appeal more strongly to me than any alternative perspective.
But I didn't masturbate very frequently, in fact no more than once or twice a month on average, since it both
disgusted and humiliated me. After the
act I normally felt regret, thinking to myself that I must be mad and am only
conditioning myself away from natural sex, which is not going to make it any
easier for me to get a woman, should I ever be in a position to afford
one. Living on the bread-line is, I
suppose, the main reason why I did not get a woman, because poverty and shame
combined to preclude one from approaching anyone. Besides, I'm in the paradoxical position of
essentially being middle class by birth and therefore not finding working-class
women particularly attractive. There is,
I know, a deep-seated psychological reason for this, which derives from the
fact that my father effectively married beneath himself and suffered the
consequences, including separation or, rather, the fact that he ran-out on my
English-born mother even before I was born and she ended-up, when the business
she and her mother were running finally collapsed, dragging me away from Galway
City, the town of my birth, to an upbringing in Aldershot, of all places, which
I found both solitary and painful. When
I add to this the fact that my mother was the daughter, on her father's side,
of a Protestant-turned-nominal-Catholic from Donegal who left home to join the
British army (contrary to his parents' wishes), then there is also a tribal
conflict involved somewhere beneath the surface, which in part explains my
aversion to Englishwomen, as well as throws some light on my parents'
inharmonious relationship. Unlike my
mother, who is pro-British, I am essentially Irish, and not disposed to repeat
my father's mistake, which, as I see it, was to marry the wrong woman on both
class and ethnic grounds without, initially, being in the least aware of the
fact.
No man is ever wholly a writer.
He is also a private individual, a private human being. The writer is one part of me, the person
another. Thus while the writer will
advocate sublimated sexuality and speak out in defence of masturbation
vis-à-vis pornographic stimuli as a more civilized, because artificial, mode of
heterosexuality than conventional sex, the private person will often feel
disgust with masturbation and harbour certain misgivings about his sex
life. The private person desires to find
a woman, to lead a fairly normal sex life, while the writer, or philosopher,
continues to develop his thoughts along ever more progressive, and hence
artificial, channels, scorning conventional criteria. Thus there arises in me a disparity between
writer and person which is the source of much internal conflict, as
professional thoughts and personal feelings tend ever further apart. To what extent the former influences the
latter, to what extent the private person is conditioned by the writer, it
isn't of course possible for me to say.
But there must be some influence, some conditioning, from the one to the
other which contributes to keeping me solitary and, by natural standards,
perverse.
The private person suffers from a chronic depression due in part
to celibacy, in part to solitude, in part to environment (north London being
uncongenial to him), and so on, and knows that he will only get rid of this
depression if he radically changes his lifestyle and perhaps gives-up writing
altogether. But the writer goes from
strength to strength by extending the domain of the artificial, or
transcendent, in every fresh work, and so continues to derive profit from the
private individual's hardships. One
cannot fully serve two masters at once, even when they are housed in the same
person. Either the writer profits at the
private person's expense, or vice versa.
For me, the former situation has long been the case and although, with
my depression, solitude, etc., I am one of the most unhealthy, unfortunate
private people on earth, I'm undoubtedly one of the greatest writers, probably
the leading philosophical writer of my generation, though, of course, I have
not been recognized as such by the Irish-wary British!
I was discussing my sex life, such as it is, and should remark
that while the private person is often disgusted by fantasies, wet dreams, and
masturbation, the writer, by contrast, draws a certain satisfaction from them,
as attesting to the fact of his spiritual superiority. To masturbate over a men's magazine or
vis-à-vis a sex video is not so much to pervert oneself, the writer reasons, as
to indulge in a higher mode of sexuality, in which sex has been transferred, in
large part, from the body to the head, from the senses to the spirit. Instead of feeling quite as disgusted as he
might otherwise do, the private person is invaded, as it were, by the writer at
such times and consequently induced to modify his feelings in the direction of
spiritual pride or even moral righteousness.
The others, the mere average mortals, are coarse and sensual sinners who
would have a long way to evolve before they could expect to become like oneself - wholly given to sublimated sexuality. The writer believes that, since life is a
process of evolution from undiluted sensuality at one extreme to undiluted
spirituality at the other, pornographic sex, involving masturbation and/or
voyeurism, is a step in the right direction, not simply an inducement to
perversion. The private person may have
his depression and loneliness but, nonetheless, the writer still intrudes into
his thoughts and feelings from time to time, thereby making his acquiescence in
pornographic sex less psychologically disturbing than might otherwise be the
case. The writer obliges the private
person to admit that if he doesn't always feel happy about his use of
photographic erotica, it is largely because he is still too naturalistic and
sensual, at heart, to be content with nothing else. It becomes a kind of spiritual failing on his
part ... that he should prefer the prospect of natural sex to the actuality of
artificial, sublimated sex.
I don't wish to dwell on the interaction between writer and
private person any longer, nor, if I may be permitted an allusion to Hermann Hesse, on the 'Steppenwolfian'
difficulties it can entail, not least in respect of a sort of
split-personality. Suffice it to say
that if the writer becomes too domineering, the actual life of the private
person may well be endangered, if not destroyed. The writer cannot survive without the private
person's consent, yet neither, paradoxically, can the private person survive if
he isn't also, or at other times, supplemented by a professional, whether
writer or otherwise. That I have
survived as both writer and private person ... is a fact in large part due to my
personal cunning.
