Advent Calendar 19th December 2011: Divine friend, much desired

December 19th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

We’re leaving Berlin now, or rather: Michael Davidson fled Berlin in 1933 after being chased by the Nazis, who had just gained (more) power. It’s an exciting story to say the least, but we’ll skip it and head back to London. Davidson fled there via Prague and Vienna. It’s about 1935 now, Davidson is 38 years old. We read from page 167 (chapter 12) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

My behaviour, in these years, was disastrous, and leading me – obviously, had I paused to look – straight to my ‘first row’. I was drinking more than usual; and with more than usual frenzy was chasing ‘romance’: Millard would have disapproved.

I had no beloved, though many delusions of love – ‘in each of them I saw the sign of the one I was waiting for’, wrote Carlo Coccioli in his extraordinary novel of Florence and Paris, ‘The Eye and the Heart’.

That is the impulsion, the motive power, of the prowling paederast – the unending search for the ‘divine friend, much desired’. One tried to look, always, beyond the brevity of pleasure.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

Advent Calendar 18th December 2011: 14-year-old Werner

December 18th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

And then I met Werner. I had, of course, surveyed the city’s swimming-baths; and most afternoons was going to those in the Bärwaldstrasse, somewhere in the wilderness beyond Hallesches Tor. And there one day, naked beneath the showers, I found the most startingly beautiful person I’d ever seen: a living, and lively, Beardsley decoration of ‘Salome’ – he might have been the original Beardsley prototype, except that he was an improvement on the artist’s invention. He had all the Beardsley sin, but none of the corruption; all the grace and uniqueness, but without the epicene languour. His was the face Beardsley would have drawn, had he not been dying of consumption. Ivory-white skin, parchment-pale, with a fervent scarlet mouth and huge sable eyes, full of black fire; a mass of romping black hair, thick and lively as a bear’s, and the figure of a Gemito fisherboy. To Beardsley he added something of the della Robbia choristers in Florence and a great deal of the famous ‘Tripod’ satyrs in the Naples Museum. It didn’t surprise me to find that this face had been chosen from all over Germany to go on the cover of the magazine published by the Socialist Labour Youth – whose blue blouse and red scarf he wore.

But, I quickly found, it wasn’t only his face that was intoxicating; it was a glittering personality and the incomparable friendship that he gave – in his magic company differences of age, culture, language, vanished: he made me his equal and partner. Was ist mein ist Dein, he pronounced early on; and that remained his rule for the next few years – what was his was mine: he would share, when I was broke, his last cigarettes; and gave to the last drop his love and loyalty. I had found at last the ‘divine friend much desired’; if one of us was faithless it was I – never he.

Before I knew what was happening, that first day, I’d been swept on to the back of his bicycle and was whirling down the Friedrichstrasse – to a schwules Lokal, one of those ‘queer’ bars whose discreetly blacked-out façades and sombrely curtained doorways proclaimed out loud their nature, where we drank cognac.

He was not quite 15. Then, from the homosexual bar, he bicycled me back to his home in the Zimmerstrasse and introduced me to his mother.

We must have been an astonishing sight, Werner and I: roistering round Berlin with our arms round each other’s necks; both with long bare legs and open necks; singing Wanderlieder or socialist songs, drinking a great deal, embracing and spooning in public places and generally behaving outrageously – I skinnily ugly and 30 years old; he dazzling in looks, with that astonishing head and face in which the angelic and the demonic were tantalisingly blended.

You have read a passage from chapter 11 (page 152-153) of Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

Advent Calendar 17th December 2011: Berlin, Berlin!

December 17th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

Chapter 11 in Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself begins with a description of Berlin in the 1920s, with its Strichjungen and Stundenhotels, theaters that produced “serious plays of a sexual audacity that would have shocked London for the next 25 years”, and, of course, Magnus Hirschfeld’s legendary Institut der Sexualwissenschaft, in whose library Davidson would “spend hours”. Just think of it. Hirschfeld’s institute and its library were to be destroyed by Hitler just a few years later. Page 151 (chapter 11):

I discovered, too, the amazing tolerance of Berlin; the people generally accepted as a human fact, even though many deplored, conduct which in England would have raised cries of horror or menace.

Once a policeman appeared when I was having difficulty with an offensive youth whom I couldn’t shake off. ‘You know,’ said the policeman kindly, ‘you should be very careful about what boys you pick up – there are some bad ones about.’

I had a Swiss friend whom I’ll call B—: a senior functionary in one of the international organizations in Geneva. He kept going a pied-à-terre in Berlin; and there one morning, he told me later, he found on his doorstep when he answered the whirr of his bell a well-dressed man in a Homburg hat and carrying the inevitable briefcase.

‘Herr B—?’ said the stranger.

‘Jawohl’, answered B— inquiringly.

‘I believe you’re a friend of a boy named —?’ the man went on. B— was taken aback; but the visitor hastened to put him at his ease. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘I just came to call – I always like to know what sort of man my son is going with.’

That was Berlin in the years that I knew it, between 1928 and 1933.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Berlin, Michael Davidson, prostitution

Advent Calendar 16th December 2011: Public baths part 5 – playful masturbatory frolic

December 16th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

For as long as civic memory went back, men and boys at the ‘town’ bathing places, like members of the University at Parson’s Pleasure, had worn nothing at all; it was an Oxford tradition – a tradition which old Dundas (he must have been in his late 50s) was mightily concerned to preserve.

At Long Bridges he was down like a ton of bricks on the slightest little playful masturbatory frolic among the boys; and when, on the green sward of that lovely tree-encircled backwater, I appeared with my camera and told him I had discovered a ‘new vice’ – taking photographs with the camera apparently pointing in one direction, while in fact the lense was eyeing another – he went back to his rooms and wrote me a four-sheet letter of close small handwriting beginning, ‘I’m very worried about your “new vice”‘ [...]

… by the time I revisited Oxford in 1941, summoned there by the branch of the War Office that was planning an assault on the coast of Morocco, the verdant candour of Long Bridges had been defiled by rows of bathing-boxes and the place given over to the sexual swagger and simpering prurience of mixed bathing.

(Page 148-149, chapter 10, of Michael Davidson’s autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself)

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, public baths

Advent Calendar 15th December 2011: Public baths part 4 – scampering urchins

December 15th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

We’re already on the 15th of December, so we’ll skip a chapter where Michael Davidson associates with the Bloomsbury people in 1920s London. Instead, we’re going to Oxford. It’s now 1927 and Davidson has just turned 30. We read from page 148 (chapter 10) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

My principal memories of Oxford are summer ones: of Long Bridges, sylvan and sunlit, the ‘town’ bathing place along the tow-path from Folly Bridge, where bare wet bodies dived and darted and Robert Dundas of Christ Church, that massive and renowned don, lay on the grass like a contemplative walrus and appraised the scampering urchins around him.

Dundas was one of those Oxford ‘characters’ famous for foibles and idiosyncracies; and famous for his curt, downright remarks uttered in the jerky, high-pitched contralto that was made to be mimicked. One day, when Wystan Auden was up at the House, Dundas sent for him. ‘Oh, Auden –’ the great man snapped. ‘I wanted to tell you – I can’t be your tutor any longer. You see, I’m in love with you –. Good morning!’

Once, when I was with him at Long Bridges, lying beside parallel bars that had just been installed, he roused himself from his Olympian lethargy to say: ‘I presented this gymnastic apparatus to the municipality’; and added curtly, gazing up from ground level at the naked acrobatics going on above: ‘Very good investment, don’t you think?’

For as long as civic memory went back, men and boys at the ‘town’ bathing places …

To be continued tomorrow!

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, Oxford, public baths

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