Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Now about hustlers becoming payers later on: Perhaps that's true of callboys with notoriously less hangups. I'm talking about the masculine, straight-playing streethustler; he knows, from his vast experience and those shared by others like him, of the hustler's contempt, pity—at times even hatred—for the client. It would require a psychic upheaval for him to be able to shift roles masochistically. And the malehustler is a proud creature, though less so now. A few years back, he was almost without exception masculine; it was almost always assumed he would “do nothing back.” Within the past few years—drugs, gay liberation—two other breeds have thrived—the masculine bisexual and the androgynous, usually willowy but not effeminate, young hustler. Of course, the queens have existed since the time of the dinosaurs. Street techniques vary, but there are general aspects. The hustler usually stands on one of several known corners, or walks idly along the streets, or mills with other hustlers outside known food stands, coffeeshops. Steady hustlers have their favorite corners. A client will stop his car and signal a hustler. Depending on his style or lack of it, the hustler will then stand by the car until the man speaks first or will just hop in. Fantasy is important on the streets. If a client asks whether you're married, you say yes if you're smart, because he wants that. If he asks if you've been in the marines, or the army, or the navy (curiously never the air force), yes. If he asks if you've ever worked in a carnival, or posed for pictures, or been in a rodeo, yes, yes, yes. Danger of course is always present, a constant factor. Plainclothes cops offer money, make the entrapping proposition, then bust. There are the marauding gangs of hoods who raid hustling streets. And the psychotic figures attracted and repelled by hustlers.… The psychic danger of constant loneliness. For many drifting youngmen, hustling is their only means of experiencing worlds otherwise totally locked to them. For moments their desired young bodies are the keys to those worlds. Their fleeting youth is their one bid for attention. Beyond that, their lives will fade. But during those moments, hustling, they matter, importantly. The drabness lifts. Postscript Recently Time magazine created a new style of male-hustling. A story on “pornography” referred to the thriving heterosexual massage parlors lining the south side of a certain Los Angeles boulevard, and to the male prostitutes hustling on the north side. The latter was not true. There had existed, yes, a “limbo” section on that thoroughfare, where one stood or hitchhiked along certain blocks or lingered outside an all-night coffeehouse. Although occasionally you might find a client there, it was not a hustling area, more mutual cruising than anything else. Days after the Time mistake, the area conducive to hitchhiking was suddenly converted into a hustling turf rivaling that on Selma—at a time when the arrests were decimating hustlers on that street.

• From Escape (2007)

  Warren’s arrest was not the end of his power. After his capture he was still seen as the prophet, albeit a persecuted one. The message he sent out was that God wanted him to be captured. For FLDS members living with almost no exposure to the outside world, this was believable. They were not going to abandon their loyalty to him overnight because he was in the hands of the wicked. The word around the FLDS was that the authorities didn’t have anything on him and it was just a matter of time until they would be forced to let him go. He always found a way to stoke the fires of his fanaticism for a community of his brainwashed believers whose faith in him continues. They believe he is being poisoned in prison. It’s hard to know what to believe about Warren Jeffs. He apparently confessed to his brother Nephi Jeffs that he was the most evil of men and had worked his way up through the FLDS only because he wanted power. Jeffs said he hadn’t upheld the priesthood since he was twenty. He asked his brother to convey his “confession” to the community. Then he changed his mind and told him not to. Somehow after his capture he sent word back to his followers to close all the private religious schools. Children were to stay at home and out of school. This is still in effect today. Jeffs’ mental competency was an issue initially, but a judge found him competent to stand trial. A trial is expected to begin in the fall of 2007 on the state charges in Utah against Warren Jeffs for being an accomplice to rape. There are other charges against Jeffs in Utah and Arizona. He faces federal charges for evading prosecution. I was told that he has been placed on a suicide watch and is wearing paper clothes. Warren Jeffs is both a problem and the symptom of a problem. The FLDS has created a lot of Warrens, men who are intoxicated with their own power, believing they need at least three wives to get into heaven and wanting to dominate women and children. Generation after generation of believers have been conditioned to equate obedience with salvation. People who have never been taught or allowed to think for themselves don’t suddenly change. Change is too frightening. Unlike other cult members who have lived a prior life outside and know other values, the FLDS is the only life Jeffs’ followers have ever known.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The notion of a “subculture” may be anachronistic, and it may too easily smooth over the brutal realities of social stratification in a world where slavery and prostitution played a fundamental role in many same-sex pairings. But the most intriguing novelty, by far, is the evidence for male-male marriage in the early empire. If we had only the extravagant reports about Nero or Heliogabulus marrying their favorites, we might ascribe it to conventional senatorial animus, although the extreme and unnecessary level of detail about the ceremonies would be striking. But there is plenty of evidence besides. The “adoption” of a young male beloved by his elder lover at the conclusion of the novel The Ephesian Tale is not quite a marriage, but it is clearly a happy resolution to parallel the other unions. The epigrams of Martial and the satires of Juvenal are insistent. While the mockery and the hostility are unrelenting, the descriptions are without parallel. Martial describes a man, Galla, who had married six or seven cinaedi. In another case he describes a marriage complete with the torch-lit procession, a wedding veil, a dowry, and the usual cheers of good luck. Juvenal’s second satire, written sometime in the early second century, is even more compelling. Juvenal claims that recently a man of wealth and status was given away in marriage to a man; he imagines that the day is near when male-male marriages will take place publicly and be recorded in the state’s registers. Amid a pastiche of the usual slurs, an adulteress threatens the cinaedi with the dangers of public law and laments, “Great is the concord among the effeminates.” Concordia was the bedrock value of Roman conjugal morality, and beneath Juvenal’s malicious irony lurks a reference to the solidarities of a community endangered by public norms.28

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  As I was taking my pants off I suddenly remembered what the bastard had told me. I looked at my cock and it looked just as innocent as ever. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the syph,” I said, holding it in my hand and squeezing it a bit as though I might see a bit of pus squirting out. No, I didn’t think there was much chance of having the syph. I wasn’t born under that kind of star. The clap, yes, that was possible. Everybody had the clap sometime or other. But not syph! I knew he’d wish it on me if he could, just to make me realize what suffering was. But I couldn’t be bothered obliging him. I was born a dumb but lucky goy. I yawned. It was all so much goddamned limburger cheese that syph or no syph, I thought to myself, if she’s up to it I’ll tear off another piece and call it a day. But evidently she wasn’t up to it. She was for turning her ass on me. So I just lay there with a stiff prick up against her ass and I gave it to her by mental telepathy. And by Jesus, she must have gotten the message sound asleep though she was, because it wasn’t any trouble going in by the stable door and besides I didn’t have to look at her face which was one hell of a relief. I thought to myself, as I gave her the last hook and whistle—“me lad, it’s limburger cheese and now you can turn over and snore. . . .” It seemed as if it would go on forever, the sex and death chant.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They went back to the party. Charles stopped behind Sophie. She rubbed his arms. The host reached again for Lionel’s hand and pulled at him. “You okay?” the host asked. Lionel sat on the arm of the chaise. The host’s hands were greasy from dinner, and he’d stretched his feet across the laps of the couple. They were leaning forward now, each of them having a different conversation with the androgynous person, talking over each other in a hash of references to Dostoyevsky and Planned Parenthood: “People only think they like Tolstoy better, but he’s basically J. K. Rowling. Dostoyevsky is the real genius.” “Like, we’re this fucking close to being totally defunded. Skip a latte and make a damn donation, right?” “Okay, but, like, I’ve tried. Where should I start?” “Sure, but one person can’t do anything against the vast political machine of American empire.” “Honestly, I think telling someone where to start with an author is kind of a slippery slope to fascism.” “That’s what they want you to think. Like, imagine if MLK had just stayed home because it was hard .” “I personally think Crime and Punishment is better, but hey, what do I know anyway?” “I’m fine,” Lionel said. “Just getting over a bug.” “You’re not contagious, are you?” someone asked. Lionel looked up and saw that it was the chubby man from before, sitting on the floor next to Sophie’s chair. “It’s flu season.” “I don’t think it’s contagious,” Lionel said. “Good, because I don’t have a great immune system, and, like, it’s socially irresponsible to come out if you’re not feeling well.” “Oh, ‘social responsibility,’ here we go,” the host said, rubbing his greasy fingers across Lionel’s back. “It’s not funny. I mean, not everyone has a robust immune system and—” “Maybe if you ate more vegetables and hit the gym,” the host said with a sneer. Lionel felt conflicted. The man was annoying, but the host was being unnecessarily mean, and Lionel sensed it was because the man was fat and because the host did not find him attractive. “Plant-based diets aren’t actually shown to have a significant protective effect against infections from viral vectors.” “Oh, right, yeah, totally,” the host said, beaming, looking around the room for validation, and since it was his potluck and his apartment, people did go along with him, smiling thinly and humming in assent. The man on the floor turned red, but then shrugged. “Speaking of vegetables, I should probably clean up my mess,” Lionel said. “No, stay,” the host whined. Lionel crouched near the fireplace, but his plate and the food had already been cleared away. What remained was a shiny streak on the scuffed wood flooring.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Difficult as my father might be and obsessed with him as I might have been, Dr. O’Reilly had decided my dad was merely a son of a bitch but not the true villain, not like Mom. It was she who had broken past the immunological barriers of my frail psyche and infected every last inch of my soul. It was she who’d ensnared me in silk fetters, she who’d shorn my strength and blinded me to the gross imposition of her will. Indeed, she’d so thoroughly invaded me that scarcely anything of my own remained to me. Dr. O’Reilly’s mission was to purge the invader and to fatten up my ego. Although he’d never met her he spoke of her with real venom. His blue eyes blazed with scorn. When I said I feared what would happen to her if I rejected her, he said, “That old cow? She’ll outlive us all,” as though he and I were a pair of young boys and she all the tenacious wickedness of the adult world. During World War II O’Reilly had served as an army doctor in Polynesia, where he had studied the childrearing methods of the natives. There no infant was ever punished, he said, and none ever cried. An infant’s deepest insecurity, he went on, was derived from its physical smallness and helplessness. The Polynesians, especially those on the happy isle to which fortune had blown the good doctor, countered this insecurity by carrying their babies on their backs in a sling pitched so high that Baby’s eyes peered out over Mama’s head. This literally superior position insured the infant against all future anxiety and guaranteed him a life-long serenity. Eager to spread these advantages to America, O’Reilly insisted his patients emulate the Polynesian mode of transporting a baby. I saw those patients, men and women alike, all over town, sheepishly stepping over snowdrifts or gliding down supermaket aisles, their infants, petrified with fear, squawling and clutching locks of parental hair. But this practice figured as only one of the many ways in which O’Reilly reformed our lives. Unlike those tight-ass Freudians, he said, who never suggested anything, who judged silently and interpreted rarely, he quite cheerfully broadcast his wisdom by spilling handfuls into fertile minds he himself had furrowed.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Beattie wore black suede shoes and had his hair cut in a flattop, longer in back than in front. It sloped down toward you like a ski jump. If he bent his head, his scalp showed white. His handshake was limp, but a second after he’d removed this cold, boneless fillet from your hand he was slicing the air with a powerful snap of his fingers in response to some mental or recorded riff he was hearing. He’d squint and bite his lower lip and his head would bob up and down in an accelerating rhythm. Soon he’d be whispering, “And-a one, and-a two …” He had, it seemed, only one suit, a shiny gray sharkskin, the baggy pants radically pegged, the jacket’s lapels narrow and usually turned up as against a draft. On off hours he wore no tie but just a black shirt buttoned tightly at the neck to give him a throttled look. His neck and face and hands were pale and big; he seemed like a prisoner in a cheap suit he’s been given on dismissal. He projected a strong, almost rancid sexuality, but it was hard to place. It was too canny and too asymmetrical to seem robustly masculine in the old sense. He had a way of grabbing his crotch and holding it, sometimes even shaking it for a second while he was talking. I suppose he’d picked this up from the Negroes he’d met in the jazz world. This gesture seemed designed to lend an extra weight to his words. Or perhaps it was a proof to the listener that he was being honest, all there, a body behind his words. His ears were a shade pinker than his pale face. His eyebrows were very solid and dark and looked as though the draftsman had pochéd them in quickly. His upper lip was so thin as to form just a line, but his lower lip was full. On some days he laughed hysterically at simple statements; he’d double up and keep repeating an ordinary word someone had chanced to use as if he hoped to wring some new meaning out of it. When he held his crotch, his baggy pants would ride up to reveal how powerful his thighs were. He wore socks of bright pinks and purples and they were only ankle-high. His responses were sometimes weirdly delayed. Someone would ask him a question and he’d study his face a moment, two moments, before saying a soft, feathery yes or an even less audible no. I sat around with the Butt Club boys and Mr. Beattie on two or three different afternoons, but I didn’t like him. He reminded me of that hustler I’d met two summers ago. He had the same air of being a con man. Something shifty. One day Chuck told me Beattie was about to receive a shipment of marijuana. Did I want to buy in or at least try a joint or two?

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Dr. O’Reilly was not a good listener. He was always scooping up handfuls of orange diet pills and swallowing them with a jigger of scotch. As a great man and the author of several books, he had theories to propound and little need to attend to the particularities of any given life—especially since he knew in advance that life would soon enough yield merely another illustration of his theories. To save time, O’Reilly unfolded his ideas at the outset and then rehearsed them during each subsequent session since, as he explained, although these notions could easily enough penetrate the conscious mind, they soaked less readily into the hairy taproot of the unconscious. When he wasn’t presenting his theories, O’Reilly was confiding in me the complexities of his personal life. He’d left his wife for Nancy, a patient, but the moment his divorce had gone through, his wife had discovered she was dying of cancer. O’Reilly complied with her last wish and remarried her. The patient promptly went mad and was now confined in an institution in Kansas. O’Reilly, to console himself, was throwing himself into his work. He was taking on more and more patients. He saw the last patient at midnight and the first at six in the morning. Sometimes I would have both the last hour and the first and I would get permission from the school to spend the night on the analytic couch. I’d set the alarm for five-thirty. I’d arise and hurry over to O’Reilly’s apartment next door. It was decorated like a ship’s cabin, complete with bunk beds, coiled ropes on the walls, portholes for windows, a captain’s desk and red and green lights to indicate port and starboard. To awaken O’Reilly I’d put on his favorite record, “Nothing Like a Dame,” a song he considered “healthy.” I’d then make a cup of coffee for him and with it hand him his jar of Dexedrines. By six-thirty at the latest he was alert, dressed and ready to return to his office. I associate those morning hours with the smell of his lime cologne.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Fucker,” Farnland said, but then he smiled, showing Charles his teeth, gnarly and green-yellow. Charles smiled back. Pathos was what Farnland had called his “dumb number.” It was, he said often during rehearsal, art’s most noble pursuit. One evening, one of the other dancers had jokingly said, What about ethos? And Farnland, from a seated position, had flung a hard-shell water bottle at her head. Then he’d shouted them all down for ten minutes about making snide little remarks and the terrors of their generation. What did any of them know about art? About anything? Charles half wished that Farnland would make a scene now. That he’d do something. But he didn’t. Farnland waved him off and pushed out into the hall. The noise from the class next door, the music, filled the room briefly, and then was gone. Charles flexed his fist and worked over his knee. Little old man, full of spite. But Charles had done nothing to stop him. • • • Charles cut through the courtyard, scattering a group of smoking students. They trailed white smoke, legible in the piercing daylight. His sweat had turned to a chalky crust, and he could feel it breaking up when he moved, cold sneaking in against his skin. The class had done its work. His muscles were warm, and he felt pliant, alive. He’d pulled the brace on to give his knee some relief. On the other side of the courtyard, he slipped into the dance library. Sophie often haunted the upper levels of the library in the media room, looking over old choreography. She could have streamed it on her phone in high definition, but she liked browsing through the years of archival footage, poring over little-known, minor dancers, taking bits here and there from everyone like a magpie. He found her sitting on the floor with an enormous album covering her entire lap. She was running her finger up and down the list, deciding which to take out. She leaned down over it, exposing the tender white nape of her neck. He kissed her there before she knew he was present, and she jumped, screaming. “Shh,” he said as he crouched. His knee crackled like static. “You are a menace,” she hissed, her eyes flashing. “What are you looking at?” He sat down to take the weight off. “Old shit.” She handed him the book, the pages yellowed, little black disks tucked inside plastic wrap, neat type glued next to each one. “God, you stink.” “I had practice.” “That’s not practice smell,” she said. “That’s not practice smell at all.” He squeezed his legs together, thinking that might help, but she just snorted at him. “Where’s your phone?” “I don’t know, dead probably,” he said, looking but not looking at the album. “I called you,” she said. “After you left last night.” “Oh, well, it died, so.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn’t resist visiting though I didn’t want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he’d ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He’d written away for the “literature” of the American Renaissance Party and proudly showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Führer’s legacy, Communist lies about the “so-called death camps” and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall. His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he’d never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who’d emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie’s ties came from Charvet on the Place Vendôme because that had been Proust’s haberdasher. He and I shared the irregular, never-foreseen status of students too clever for afternoon study hall and too inept for afternoon sports. As a result we alone were free to spend those long vacant hours from two to six in the empty dorms or, when the weather was good, on walks through the baronial grounds of the estate. The weather, however, was usually polar and he and I then found our exercise in stubborn, smoldering debates about equality and democracy (I for, he against). I can still taste the bitter black coffee and hear the jolly accordion and sweeping strings of Juliette Greco’s accompaniment, music we’d have sneered at as polka-Polish or Hollywood-snythetic had it not been French, but that, since it was, we relished and hummed along to though neither of us was ever quite capable of translating the words (“Something … something … if you something I’ll always? Toujours? Is that toujours? Play it again”). Howie had a face only a medieval Japanese woman could have loved: perfectly round, pasty, just a wisp of fine hair above, below a dark, tiny dead rosebud of a mouth, the rudiment of a chin, like a child’s hand poking through a sheet, and those eyes, so arrogant and expressive with glasses, so myopic and defenseless without.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Instead of an elegant rally provoking true gay pride, a new “slave auction”—a parody of the earlier charade-would be held to raise money for the defense of the 40. Before 600 people, gay leaders—several of whom had long fought bravely and with dignity for the cause of gay freedom—posed on a stage as “slaves” and were “sold” to the highest bidder. A well-known minister, auctioned, proceeded coyly to do a mini-strip, removing his jacket, tie, opening his shirt. Another gay reverend offered “absolution when it's all over.” Part of the auction was conducted by a woman ridiculous in male leather pants. Further attesting to the interchangeability of roles—that the “master” in gay S & M is a closet “slave”—one man auctioned himself off as a “master”! The second auction unhappily converted other gays into seeming camp followers of the S & M faction. In a move reminiscent of a scene from Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which an insane general is assuaged in his intent to court-martial and execute 100 men by being offered 3 instead, the District Attorney attempted to placate both cops and homosexuals by dismissing felony charges against 36 of those arrested; but, exhibiting the idiotic “logic” that only the law can tolerate, he charged the two sponsors of the auction and the two who had acted as auctioneers, with the afterthought felony-charge of pandering—the original charge of involuntary servitude being even more clearly indefensible. Against the 36 others, all charges were eventually dropped. And so the City of Los Angeles had been robbed of more than one hundred thousand dollars to bust a gay bathhouse on hoax charges. As the war went, it was a victory for the gay side. Despite the gay excesses, the police action had been so absurd that it drowned every other consideration. There was no public support for the action; none—not even from the conservative provinces. The cops had aroused citizen indignation. Gays had stuck with gays. Soon after, during a televised news conference, a visibly unnerved chief of police proclaimed that he would, once and for all, define the difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. As psychiatrists, sociologists, psychologists, and laymen—homosexual and heterosexual—waited for the ultimate revelation, the chief—converting his arms into “wings” and fluttering his “tail”—did a baffling imitation of a “heterosexual bird” mating in a nest, and then of a “heterosexual (sic) bird” mating in the nest but this time saying, “Slam, bam, thank you, sir.” The difference still remains blurred. Of course there were major casualties on the gay front. Despite dismissed charges, some of the defendants lost their jobs; others were alienated disastrously from their families, who had seen their faces captured by the cop-alerted TV cameras.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome suburban dog (one of those who lie in wait for cars) as we swerved into Lawn Street. A little further, the Haze house, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy and old, more gray than white—the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower. I tipped the chauffeur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady was calling to him from her porch. What could I do? I pressed the bell button. A colored maid let me in—and left me standing on the mat while she rushed back to the kitchen where something was burning that ought not to burn. The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s “Arlésienne.” A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that Monsieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition. Presently, the lady herself—sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order—came down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.” “Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.” “I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.” “What?” countered Lo, her features working. “That fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little article.” And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy. 19 With Lo’s knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short but slow queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues’ gallery. Handsome Bryan Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion fair, was wanted for kidnaping. A sad-eyed old gentleman’s faux-pas was mail fraud, and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed, and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller. I forget my letters; as to Dolly’s, there was her report and a very special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and perused its contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to mind and drifted toward the newsstand near the exit. “Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness , the relaxed vitality , the charm of my —and the author’s—Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint. “We are going to New York after to-morrow, and I guess I can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo!

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The twins sit at the table with their coloring, the boy struggling to decide between red and blue to fill in the crude tree he’s drawn and the girl staring at him hatefully. Sylvia would like to go over there and color the whole thing green. It’s a disservice to let children go on thinking the world can be something it cannot. Her parents hadn’t let her think that sort of thing for long—that life could be what she wanted it to be, that all she needed was to try. “Sylvie,” the boy says with his cheeks between his hands. “Hungry.” “Is that a whole thought?” she asks, and he frowns, folds his arms across his chest. “Hungry.” “Five more minutes.” The boy licks his lips until his whole mouth is wet and bubbly with spit. Booger eater, she thinks. The girl cuts her eyes at him. “Sylvie. Hungry,” the boy says again. The fries crackle and hiss on the sheet pan. Sylvia wedges them free instead of letting them cool and transfers them to a plate that she leaves at the center of the table. They sit in a steaming mound flecked with coarse sea salt and red-pepper flakes. She hoists herself up onto the counter and watches the twins watch the fries. The boy licks his lips again. He is first, of course he is. Boys are greedy, always taking. But the world will make a mess of this boy. He’s all nerve and skin. Nothing between him and the outside. The food burns his fingers, and he drops the fries onto the table. He tries again, blows on one of the fries. Sylvia can see his mouth watering. He makes little chewing motions. Oh, he wants it bad. Like his father. Scratching at her bedroom door these last few nights. She has fewer reasons to say no, and the last time that she let him go down on her, he had seemed so grateful that Sylvia had only felt a little guilty and a little selfish. Impossible not to see the resemblance between their two wants. Sylvia tucks her knees against her chest and watches as he tries and fails, tries and fails, burns his mouth and his tongue. But he keeps trying. Eventually, he gets it in his mouth and keeps it there, chewing it into white mush. He smiles at her broadly, shows his food. “Good!” he says, as if approving of her. “Good! Like!” The girl, because she is smart, stabs a fry through with a crayon and blows on it. Then she shoves the whole thing into her mouth, crayon and all. She gulps it down. Good for you. • • • THEIR LUNCH doesn’t take long, and then Sylvia puts them down for a nap.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte’s lodger, I had thought fit to celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a moonfaced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes to three. As I walked through the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who with mille grâces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?) Very soon I had that avid glee well under control. She thought I was in California. How was—? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early marriages, she would never let her Phyllis, who was now eighteen— “Oh yes, of course,” I said quietly. “I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?” Mrs. Chatfield’s already broken smile now disintegrated completely. “For shame,” she cried, “for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.” I said didn’t she think “vient de,” with the infinitive, expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English “just,” with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said. There were only two blocks to Windmuller’s office. He greeted me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. He thought I was in California. Had I not lived at one time at Beardsley? His daughter had just entered Beardsley College. And how was—? I gave all necessary information about Mrs. Schiller. We had a pleasant business conference. I walked out into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  These substances, since first they gathered joy from the face of God, have never turned their vision from it wherefrom nought is concealed; wherefore their sight is never intercepted by a fresh object, and so behoveth not to call aught back to memory because thought hath been cleft. Wherefore they dream, down there, though sleeping not; thinking or thinking not, they speak the truth; but more in one than other is the fault and shame. Ye below tread not on one path when ye philosophize, so far doth love of show, and the thought it begets transport you. Yet even this with lesser indignation is endured here above than when divine Scripture is thrust behind or wrenched aside. They think not how great the cost of blood to sow it in the world, and how he pleaseth who humbly keepeth by its side. Each one straineth his wit to make a show and plieth his inventions; and these are handled by the preachers, and the Gospel left in silence. One saith the moon drew herself back when Christ suffered, and interposed herself that the sun’s light spread not itself below; and others, that the light concealed itself of its own self; wherefore that same eclipse responded to the Spaniards and the Indians as to

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard. The patient who always preceded me was the lady in the Persian-lamb coat; she left behind the peculiar perfumed smell of the paper tissues she wept into, a weak solution of those chemical towels handed out after lobster in family restaurants, and the heavier, more aggressive and I suppose offensive smell of her stubbed-out cigarettes (eight or nine in the sterling-silver cupped hand that served as the ashtray). These smells and the ghosts of smoke circulating through the sunlight, colloidal souvenirs, seemed to be the echoes of a just-completed drama by Racine in which lambent passions had glowed within the glass chimney of formal measures, in which all the action must occur offstage and is merely reported here and the only permissible emotions are the great ones—incestuous longings, guilt, and the impulse to murder—whereas the dimmer, more usual feelings of sloth, boredom, spleen, irritability are airily dismissed. For psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  8I did my best, your Honor, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave! A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executive’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together? Wholesome fun? Good Lord! Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease? Welcome, fellow, to this bordello. If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre. First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple—the next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Why doe ye marvell, ye Orators, ye Lawyers, and Advocates, if many of our judges now a daies sell their judgements for money, when as in the beginning of the world one onely Grace corrupted the sentence betweene God and men, and that one rusticall Judge and shepheard appointed by the counsell of great Jupiter, sold his judgement for a little pleasure, which was the cause afterward of the ruine of all his progeny? By like manner of meane, was sentence given between the noble Greekes: For the noble and valiant personage Palamedes was convicted and attainted of treason, by false perswasion and accusation, and Ulisses being but of base condition, was preferred in Martiall prowesse above great Ajax. What judgement was there likewise amongst the Athenian lawyers, sage and expert in all sciences? Was not Socrates who was preferred by Apollo, above all the wise men in the world, by envy and malice of wicked persons impoysoned with the herbe Cicuta, as one that corrupted the youth of the countrey, whom alwaies be kept under by correction? For we see now a dayes many excellent Philosophers greatly desire to follow his sect, and by perpetual study to value and revolve his workes, but to the end I may not be reproved of indignation by any one that might say: What, shall we suffer an Asse to play the Philosopher? I will returne to my further purpose.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The campers, though younger than the usual cadets, were nevertheless submitted to the same military discipline. In fact our camping activity, beyond nature hikes and swimming lessons in a chlorinated indoor pool, consisted of nothing but drill and inspection. We learned to make a bed with hospital corners and to stretch the rough flannel blanket so taut a coin would bounce on it. Everyone owned precisely the same gear, stowed away in precisely the same manner. Shoes were placed just under the cot, each pair four inches from the next, each shoe of a pair two inches from its mate. Trumpets awakened us and sent us to bed. We marched to the mess hall where we were served cold mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage; more horribly at breakfast we ate bacon in congealed grease and scrambled eggs floating on hot water. After breakfast we marched double-time back to our tents, where we had an hour to prepare our quarters for white-glove inspection. Our captain saw everything and forgave nothing. He could find that single pair of kneesocks at the bottom of a steamer trunk that wasn’t properly rolled and he would hand out to the offender enough demerits to fill all his free time for the rest of the summer. He was a small, wiry man with black eyebrows so full that if they weren’t pressed or combed into place they would stick out in disconcerting clumps like brittle, badly cared for paintbrushes or could droop down over an eye in a droll effect at odds with the commands he was barking. His skin was a tan mask clapped over a face that always appeared seriously exhausted; the dark circles and drained, bloodless cheeks could be seen through the false health of his tan. I ascribed his weariness to irritation. In fact he was much older than the other instructors. He may even have been close to retirement age. He might have been ill and in pain and perhaps his irritation was due to his ailment. After lights-out he became someone new. Although he was still in uniform his tie was loosened, his voice seemed to have dropped an octave and a decibel, he had Scotch mysteriously and pleasantly on his breath, and his regard had grown gentle beneath its thatch of drooping eyebrows. He stopped by each tent, sat on the edge of each cot and spoke to each boy in a tone so intimate that the roommate couldn’t eavesdrop. My roommate was a tall, extremely shy and well-bred redhead from a small town in Iowa: someone who seemed not at all eager to confide in me or to seek my friendship or even comments, as though he recognized that this life, at least, was worth enduring only if it remained unexamined.