2
Used to
write novels or, rather, antinovels at one time, slightly influenced by James
Joyce and Henry Miller; left-wing kind of novels, I suppose you could call
them. No fictions, all characters either
based on myself or on people I had once known, maybe still knew to some
extent. No plot or story-line, more
American than British,
No, my characters were more usually
extensions of myself, variations on an autobiographical theme, you could
say. I have never been enough of a
novelist, thank goodness, to create pure fictions, like a bourgeois would do in
his relatively objective stance before the world. Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that
the better and more evolved the artist, the more he'll identify with his work,
finding in it but a reflection of himself.
It is only in bourgeois literature that there exists a lacuna between
creator and creations, author and fictions, as between the private and public
selves - the former true, the latter false.
Even the petty-bourgeois antinovelist disdains
such a lacuna, preferring, if anything like Henry Miller, to write about
himself and/or his thoughts. How much
more so must that apply to a writer like myself, intent on producing a
radically theocratic mode of writing in the formal framework of philosophical
literature, something a bourgeois novelist
would never do, given his atomic materialism. I reject relativity, the lacuna between fact
and fiction. I promote a truthful
absolutism, suitable to this level of writing, the writer at one with his
creations, the private made public and therefore negated. I have nothing to hide from anyone,
everything to reveal. Truth transcends
the individual. I have no need of relativities,
different characters, and frictions.
Radical theocratic writing focuses on the absolute, if not on the Ultimate
Absolute then, at any rate, on the absolutism of the individual writer, who can
invent a world of his own peopled by his own selves, former or current, as well
as by the selves he can anticipate (future projections) through a process of illusional abstraction from the truth that guides him and
is his creative essence. He can also
concentrate on other selves, as I have just done with regard to Anthony
Burgess. Selves are everywhere and many,
but he can absorb them into his oneness as an absolute writer. He doesn't even have to get out of bed to do
this. Selves come to him in his sleep,
abstractions of real persons or imaginings of the mind. Sometimes, when awake, he fantasizes with
these abstractions, creates scenes or romances, becomes their voyeur or
participates in their diverse proceedings.
Was he the gynaecologist who had a young woman lying naked on a high
couch with her legs unconventionally forced apart and back by a clamped
horizontal bar while he probed her sexual crevice with long, shiny
instruments? Or was he the young
mother's infant son looking on, while the doctor forced gynaecological sex upon
her as he slid a sopping wet gloved hand backwards and forwards inside her
dripping trench? He was everything and
anything - father, mother, and son by turns or simultaneously. He had projected a younger father onto a
younger mother, a pre-marital coupling, and had himself slept with his mother
in the father's role. There was no
incestuous barrier in the mind, no barrier on anything imaginative. He was totally free, within the biological
limits of his brain, to do what he pleased, whether as actor or spectator. Free, too, to admit the moral validity of
pornography in the supersession of fantasy - that
old-brain/subconscious-mind indulgence.
After all, I'm no fool; I can see perfectly well the moral superiority
of the contemplation of, say, a model in a men's magazine to the actual
indulgence of sexual fantasy. I spend
more time contemplating such models than fantasizing about either them or
anyone else.
Indeed, outside of soft-core pornography, I
don't really have a sex-life at all. As
I said at the beginning, I haven't kissed a girl in over thirteen years, not
having access to anyone in particular, the move to north London kind of further
isolating me from congenial company, making me more self-reliant, sharpening my
taste for men's magazines, upgrading my sublimations. Living where I do, a kind of intellectual
outsider blown in from the provinces, I was obliged, at an early date, to regard
soft-core pornography not merely as a substitute for sex, but as an alternative
to it, my aversion to working-class girls partly conditioned by a suburban
background, partly by my sophisticated culture, partly even by knowledge of my
father's experience in marrying a woman - my mother - who turned out to be
anything but his idea of compatible and whom he quickly left, ultimately
obliging her to drag a tiny me away with her from Galway, Ireland, into
problematic exile in Aldershot, England.
I didn't want to make a similar mistake, so preferred to keep away from
women whom my instinct and culture told me were essentially frivolous or likely
to be ethnically incompatible. Besides,
there were also financial constraints to bear in mind, a consequence of officially
being unemployed. In all honesty, I
couldn't have afforded to date a woman on a regular basis, scarcely even on an
irregular one. Neither did I want to
reveal my actual position to anyone, more humiliating, I dare say, than would
otherwise have been the case, given my literary pretensions. My secret was my own affair and I intended to
keep it so. If I had resigned myself to
voyeuristic admiration of women in the flesh, the actual flesh itself was
taboo. A few years ago I would have said
beyond my grasp. Now I will say beneath
it. Yes, for I have come, as I intimated
earlier, to regard my soft-core pornographic indulgences of certain men's
magazines as my sexuality, as complete and logical a
sexuality as any straight heterosexual behaviour. I will call it a theocratic as opposed to a
democratic sexuality, supernatural rather than natural.
Supernatural? Yes, a relativity,
as in heterosexual naturalism, between model and admirer. In natural sex a man inserts his penis into
his partner's vagina and makes love to her.
In supernatural sex, however, a man concentrates his attention on the
vagina of his selected female model and masturbates himself to a climax in
voyeuristic partnership. He indulges a
sublimated heterosexuality, his eyes focusing on his 'partner's' sexual orifice
while his penis responds both to it, through his mind, and to his own
masturbation. This is why I prefer
soft-core pornography to hard-core pornography, where, by contrast, there is
invariably a sexual relationship between models (participants), and one is
forced into the necessarily passive role of voyeur or, more usually, perverse onanist, one's masturbation accessory to the actual
coupling.
For me, a one-to-one relationship is
essential between myself and the female model, to which I make love on a
sublimated and inevitably one-sided basis.
A supernatural sex then, as much a norm for certain people on a given
evolutionary psychic level as natural sex is for those who live on a lower,
more bourgeois psychic level. In fact, I
have developed a scale of equivalents between sex and politics, and I firmly
believe that one's sexuality and one's politics should be on approximately the
same level, that the former will to some extent condition the latter. My own sexuality I would describe as
fascistic, which accords with my Social Transcendentalist ('Social
Transcendental' would be too adjectivally parallel and therefore loose)
ideological bent, though, in point of fact, I visualize Social
Transcendentalism as post-fascist and more a religion than a mode of politics
in reaction to Communism, the strict sexual equivalent to which would be
late-teenage juvenile pornography, an equivalent more suited, I would think, to
the masses than to their leaders!
Be that as it may, the theocratic,
supernatural essence of my sexuality cannot be denied. Sex is not simply a thing of the body; it's
conditioned by the evolutionary status of one's psyche, which in turn
conditions one's level of politics or, at any rate, ought to do. That the psyche is partly conditioned by the
nature of one's environment, I will not deny.
But other factors - temperamental, hereditary, educational, cultural,
social, ethnic - are also responsible, in varying
degrees, for the psyche's current status, a status which is continuously
changing.