Advent Calendar 24th December 2011: Rendezvous in Rabat

December 24th, 2011, 6:00 | 6 comments

It’s Christmas Eve – Merry Christmas everyone! If you’ve been with me for this advent calendar, please give a shout in the comments.

Back to Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself – and our last quote from it. It’s 1947 now. Davidson is 50 years old and has just got a job as a foreign correspondent for UK newspaper The Observer. His first assignment is to go to Morocco.

We read from page 223 (chapter 14):

My first concern was to find Mustapha. I scoured the places where he was likely to be but could find no trace; until one Sunday we came face to face by the main door of the cathedral, and caused surprise among the ladies of Résidence society who were going in for Mass by weeping for happiness upon each other’s necks.

He was now 23, married with a child, and working as chauffeur to a French government official. [...] We picked up our friendship; and Mustapha was kind, in an avuncular way, to my new boy Sidi Salah.

Dear readers, this will be it for this year! Maybe we’ll continue next December, because we’re actually only halfway through this amazing book. Bad planning on my side, but there was simply too much to quote. I’ve enjoyed rereading Davidson’s memoirs, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the abridged version published on this blog.

Now get the book; it belongs in the canon – our canon!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

Advent Calendar 23rd December 2011: Morocco!

December 23rd, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

We’ll skip Michael Davidson’s descriptions of prison life – hey, it’s already the 23rd! – and jump straight to Morocco. Davidson went there in 1937 – 40 years old – when he “came out” (of prison). Page 182 (chapter 13) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

In Rabat I met Mustapha. In was one of those magnetic encounters of the eyes, beneath the evening lamps of the Boulevard Galliéni, that lead sometimes to a brief bit of amusing commerce and sometimes – but O, so rarely! – to an ineffable happiness. From that evening on, Mustapha and I were together for nearly three years; until the fall of France cut brutally our lives apart. Once again I’d found that ‘divine friend’; Werner was reincarnate in Mustapha – without Werner’s peerless verve and glitter, but with the same sweet genuine loyalty, and, in place of Werner’s peremptory passion, a soft and wistful gentleness.

I supposed Mustapha to be about 14. He thought so too; but since Moroccans counted their birthdays from some unrecorded point in history like the summer the drought killed 50 sheep or the year the afreet appeared in the guise of a jackal, speaking with the voice of a man; and since they build their years out of lunar months, it’s best to assess an age by looking, as it were, at the teeth. He had the true Berber’s sweet oval face, snub and artless, with none of the Arab’s semite severity; his tribe were the Sghana, who grazed sheep over the plain above Marrakesh.

We went to Beni Mellal in the northern green skirts of the Atlas, where seven streams kept the encircling village lands lush with fruit and flower; and lived in a sparkling white palace where, in the evenings, on the chequered tiles of our patio with its colonnade of delicate arches, Mustapha played on his one-stringed lute small plaintive melodies which hovered up and down among the three or four notes which compose the Arab key, while I sipped red wine and watched his brown plucking fingers.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, Morocco

Advent Calendar 22nd December 2011: Modern heretics

December 22nd, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

Following the story of his imprisonment, Michael Davidson gives some examples on how media and public figures describe sex with youth as worse than murder. These examples are from “today”, meaning 1962 when the book was written. Davidson cites one judge saying:

The man who kills does no more than shorten a human life. But a man who corrupts a young lad or girl destroys one – and that is worse.

He compares this with the Spanish Inquisitors, who argued that “a murderer only murdered people’s bodies whereas a heretic murdered their souls.” Thus proving that there’s a religious aspect in the so called protection of youth. Davidson comments (page 171 in The World, the Flesh and Myself):

It seems likely that remarks like this are prompted more by hatred and fear of heresy than by a heart sorrowing for the countless innocent souls waiting to be corrupted.

One understands that the first paragraph of the book is well-founded. It goes:

This is the life-history of a lover of boys. It’s a first-hand report, therefore, on that heresy which, in England especially, is reprobated above all others.

Today, 50 years after Davidson wrote his autobiography, that is truer than ever.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, Southern Italy

Advent Calendar 21st December 2011: Pleading guilty

December 21st, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

London in 1936. Michael Davidson and his young friend have been followed by the police, and then: “the unspeakable, the unthinkable, had happened – I had been arrested.” The charges were unknown to him, but the boy, “poor Bill”, who had been taken to the police station with Davidson, had given a ‘statement’ and Davidson’s solicitor advised him to plead guilty; “if I made things easy by refraining from denying what plainly was true, I would almost certainly get probation.” We read from page 170 (chapter 12) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

I’ve always considered that most of the sexual actions one’s nature drives one unreasonably to perform are too silly for words. Why, I ask, does one want to do such pointless things? Yet at the moment, nothing in life seems so important.

When these things are publicly described in the nerveless tones of a dusty solicitor from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and publicly ascribed to oneself, sittin in the dock under the public’s goggling eye, they make one feel not only imbecile but also a monster; in his mouth things which seemed to one perfectly natural became horribly deformed. And that, evidently, is what’s intended.

Davidson didn’t get probation. He got jail.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

Advent Calendar 20th December 2011: Mothering a boy

December 20th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

Page 168 in Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself:

In the middle of 1936 I was living in a mean room off the Camden Road. Here I was ‘mothering’ a boy called Ray, a truant from home or perhaps reformatory: a touching psychopathic creature who lied and stole and wetted the bed in which he lay until it was time to go to the ‘pictures’; but whose nature was so loaded with pathos and need for affection that one was filled with fondness and compassion.

Plenty of food cured the bed-wetting; but no amount of coddling could cure anything else; and one day he walked out, taking what little I had – luckily it was a day I’d taken my typewriter out.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

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