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

Advent Calendar 14th December 2011: Mentoring W. H. Auden

December 14th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

In 1923 Michael Davidson, then 26, was introduced to Wystan Auden, then 16, or W. H. Auden as he would be called when he became famous. They developed “a poetical relationship” that was mainly maintained by letters; Davidson can pride himself on having discovered Auden, in a literary sense. Not only did he mentor and encourage him during two years, but he was also the first one to publish the young poet. Here’s from page 127 (chapter eight) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

Auden, as I remember him then, was tall and gangling, with fair hair limp across a pale forehead and clumsy limbs apt to go adrift; and an odd, cogitative face that was frighteningly unboyish. He seemed too engrossed in thought to be boyish; it was the face of a mind far older than its age and already had that look of puritan sternness which signifies contempt for all intellectual time-wasting.

He was very like he is today – already Stravinsky’s ‘big blond intellectual bloodhound’ – but fairer and less rugged. His face wasn’t, of course, yet rutted with those singular corrugations which seem like the seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion; but the tenderness of its boyhood was oddly combined with an extra-ordinary grown-up austerity.

I was bewitched at the first meeting; not by a physical attrativeness, which I didn’t find (beyond the general one of adolescence), but by the blinding discovery, as in a revelation, that here was wonderfully joined that divine freak called genius with the magical age of sixteen.

The maturity of even his smallest remarks, a kind of inspired wisdom which, in his company, one couldn’t help being aware of, was alarming; and I knew instantly that, though ten years older, I was shamefully his inferior in intellect and learning. But he went to my romantic head like one’s second Pernod; I saw that I had found my boy Keats or Chatterton, on whom I would lavish all I could muster of literary maternalism. I was in love; but I think I deliberately chose to be in love.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, W. H. Auden

Advent Calendar 13th December 2011: Public baths part 3 – first encounter with the Thought Police

December 13th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

London in 1922. Michael Davidson is 25 years old and frequents the city’s bath houses. In addition to them, “a strip of the Serpentine in Hyde Park had been insulated by tradition and a surprisingly unprudish Board of Works for the bathing of ‘males only’.” Davidson notes that “there was a wonderful lot of juvenile nudity there”. That’s where the following passage takes place – page 121 (the beginning of chapter eight) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

On this day, which was to leave a permanent bruise of private shame, I had taken my bathing-drawers and, aware of the notice ‘bathers only’, was sitting on the grass wondering how chilly the breeze blowing from the Marble Arch might be – besides, I had lent my slip to a boy who was shyer than most about going in with nothing on.

All at once the delicious scene was harshly shivered: I was being astonishingly spoken to by a policeman, being ordered to ‘go along’ with him out of the bathing enclave; I was in the hands of the Law.

By not instantly undressing and plunging into the water, by dallying on the bank fully clad, I’d broken a Parks Regulation – that was all; yet walking under police escort, I felt that each of those staring eyes was boring into my secret mind, that every man and boy discerned that I was ‘like that’, that I was being arrested for thinking illegal thoughts. I became parched with shame and humiliation – all my privacies, I thought, were lying bare.

This was rubbish, existing only in my own mind; yet it left me through life with a pursuing anxiety: a furtive, backward-glancing, collar-turned-up sensation of being watched by a special branch of Orwell’s Thought Police.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, public baths

Advent Calendar 12th December 2011: Pride

December 12th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

Still in South Africa, we jump right into the action. Page 119 (at the end of chapter 7) in Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself:

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ I remember saying. ‘You see, Mrs Ecks, I can never like you in that way – I like boys!’

She was furious: not disgusted or scandalized, but downright indignant. ‘I shall have that altered at once,’ she said with managerial decision, ‘I shall have you cured’; and at once telephoned to Johannesburg’s most expensive psycho-analyst.

I went to the man only once; and consciously, lying on his sofa, refrained from exposing my unconscious. Deliberately, I edited my answers; for I knew that I didn’t want to be cured.

I don’t think, through all the ups and downs in my life, despite all its humiliations and futilities, I have ever wanted my fundamental emotional nature to be different – not even when I went to prison on account of it; because if that nature, the essence of myself, were changed, then the ‘I’ that I know, the ‘I’ that is myself, would cease to exist – I’d be somebody else, a notion which is inconceivable.

One may despise oneself; one may regret one’s incapacities, ugliness, weakness of mind, deformity or character; and know oneself to be a rotter; but one cannot contemplate surely being a self that isn’t one’s own self.

I have often, during 40 or 50 years, tried to see myself as ‘normal’; but the attempt has been as ineffective as searching for the end of infinity. ‘He is a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than the whole world else,’ Samuel Butler observed. ‘No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person.’

So I gave that psycho-analyst no help.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson

Advent Calendar 11th December 2011: In search of Arcadia

December 11th, 2011, 6:00 | No comments

A new chapter, and a new continent. Michael Davidson is now in Zululand in today’s South Africa. He’s running a pig farm together with his 16-year-old “partner” and lover Mervin. He has also learned some basic Zulu. We read from page 111 (chapter 7) in The World, the Flesh and Myself:

The sorcery of Zululand’s splendid innocence hadn’t worn off: I wanted Arcadia, an idyll of unending tenderness; and thought that ‘we’ – I and a boy, any boy – had merely to live together in sunlit candour for life to flourish and happiness to be infinite.

I hadn’t learned, of course, what every paidophile has to learn – that the lifetime of his loves, if he gets any, endures no longer than his boy’s beardlessness; they pay the penalty of a butterfly’s freedom and, as a child out of last year’s clothes, grow out of themselves.

Not rarely, they ease into friendship; but that fierce and mystic delusion which is the sexual lunacy cannot span more than three or four years at most: suddenly, overnight like an overblown flower, it is dead; the unique and magic boy has become an ordinary young man, and one can look at the curve of his cheek without feeling a pang and an ineffable joy.

Ideally, if one can use the word in so reprobated a context, the paederast is, as the Greeks knew, a pedagogue: his loves should pass in succession through his life as pupils progress through a master’s class; and like the master he should see that each owes him at the end some mental or spiritual growth. But this is an ideal scarcely possible to attain, in this prying world, outside parts of Asia and the Mediterranean.

Category: Advent Calendar
Tags: Michael Davidson, pederasty, Zululand

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