Desire

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 Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She fluttered her eyelids, dazzled by the radiance of the face bearing down on her, and finally, in a toneless voice, she said: ‘No, I have no lover. I ... love you. ...’ He relaxed his hold and began pulling off his dinner jacket and waistcoat; his tie whistled through the air and ended up round the neck of Lea’s bust — up on the mantelpiece. Meanwhile, he never moved away from her, and kept her, wedged between his knees, where she sat on the chaise-longue. When she saw him half-naked, she asked, with a note of sadness: 4Do you really want to? ... Do you? ...’ He did not answer, carried away by the thought of his approaching pleasure and the consuming desire to take her again. She gave way and served her young lover like a good mistress, with devout solicitude. Nevertheless, she anticipated with a sort of terror the moment of her own undoing; she endured Cheri as she might a torture, warding him off with strengthless hands, and holding him fast between strong knees. Finally, she seized him by the arm, uttered a feeble cry, and foundered in the deep abyss, whence love emerges pale and in silence, regretful of death. They remained enfolded in their close embrace and no words troubled the prolonged silence of their return to life. The upper part of his body had slipped down and he lay across Lea’s thigh, his pendent head, with eyes closed, resting upon the sheets as if he had been stabbed to death over the body of his mistress. She, meanwhile, partly turned away from him, bore almost the full weight of this unsparing body. She breathed softly but unevenly. Her left arm ached, crushed beneath her, Cheri could feel the back of his neck growing numb. Both were waiting, concentrated and motionless, for the abating tempest of their pleasure to recede.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  To be so acutely rich and to know it\ Last night Hugo put his head on my knees. As I looked at him tenderly I said to myself, “How can I ever reveal to him that I no longer love him?” And what is more, I realize that I am not wholly wrapped up in Henry, that Allendy preoccupies me, that the other night I was sentimentally stirred by Eduardo’s presence. The truth is that I am capricious, with sensual stirrings in many directions. I see Allendy on Thursday. I am very keen on this meeting. In imagination I have been out with him to the Russian restaurant, and he has visited me here in Louveciennes. Henry can well be jealous of Allendy. Allendy himself has freed me of the sense of guilt. Henry was mystified by my new pages. Was it more than brocade, he asked, more than beautiful language? I was upset that he did not understand. I began to explain. Then he said, as everybody else has said, “Well, you should give a clue, you should lead up to it; we are thrown into the strangeness unexpectedly. This must be read a hundred times.” “Who is going to read it a hundred times?” I said sadly. But then I thought of Ulysses and the studies which accompany it. But Henry, with his characteristic thoroughness, would not stop there. He walked about and raved that I must become human and tell a human story. Here, I faced my lifelong problem. I wanted to go on in that abstract, intense way, but could anyone bear it? Hugo understood it, nonintellectually, as poetry; Eduardo, as symbolism. But for me there was meaning in those brocaded phrases. The more I talked about my ideas, the more excited Henry became, until he began to shout that I should continue exactly in that same tone, that I was doing something unique. People would have to struggle to decipher me. He always knew I would do something unique. Besides, he said, I owed it to the world. If I didn’t do something good I should be hung; after nurturing this work with a lifetime of journal writing, the orange squeezer, where all the seeds and rinds are left behind. He stood by the window saying, “How can I go back to Clichy now? It is like returning to a prison. This is the place where one grows, expands, deepens. How I love this solitude. How rich it is.” And I stood behind him, clinging to him, saying, “Stay, stay.” And when he is here, Louveciennes is rich for me, alive. My body and mind vibrate continuously.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Was he ill? He slept well, ate according to his fancy — that is, delicately, sniffing all the meat suspiciously, and preferring fruit and new-laid eggs. No nervous twitch disfigured the lovely balance of his features, and he drank more water than champagne. “No, he’s not ill. And yet he’s ... something. Something that I should guess, perhaps, if I were still in love with him. But ...” Once again she fingered the lace round the neck of her bodice, inhaled the warmth and fragrance that rose up from between her breasts, and as she bent down her head she saw the precious twin pink and mauve disks through the material of her dress. She blushed with carnal pleasure, and dedicated the scent and the mauve shadows to the skilful, condescending, red-haired man whom she would be meeting again in an hour’s time. “They’ve spoken of Lea in front of me every day, and I didn’t hear. Have I forgotten her, then? Yes, I have forgotten her. But then what does it mean, ‘to forget’? If I think of Lea, I see her clearly, I remember the sound of her voice, the scent which she sprayed herself with and rubbed so lavishly into her long hands.” He took such a deep breath that his nostrils were indented and his lips curled up to his nose in an expression of exquisite pleasure. ‘Fred, you’ve just made the most horrible face; you were the spit and image of that fox Angot brought back from the trenches.* It was the least trying hour of the day for the pair of them, awake and in bed with breakfast over. After a refreshing shower-bath, they were gratified to hear the drenching rain — three months ahead of the proper season — falling in sheets that stripped the false Parisian autumn of its leaves and flattened the petunias. They did not bother to find an excuse, that morning, for having wilfully remained behind in town. Had not Charlotte Peloux hit upon the proper excuse the previous evening? She had declared, ‘We’re all good Parigots, born and bred, aren’t we! True blue one and all! We and the concierges can claim that we’ve had a real taste of the first post-war summer in Paris! ’ ‘Fred, are you in love with that suit? You never stop wearing it. It doesn’t look fresh, you know.’ Cheri raised a finger in the direction of Edmee’s voice, a gesture which enjoined silence and begged that nothing should divert his attention while he was in the throes of exceptional mental labours. “I should like to know if I have forgotten her. But what is the real meaning of ‘forgotten’ l A whole year’s gone by without my seeing her.” He felt a sudden little shock of awakening, a tremor, when he found that his memory had failed to account for the war years. Then he totted up the years and, for an instant, everything inside him stopped functioning.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  Understood in this way, the will can be seen as part of a larger scheme. Because all things are created by a good God who wills what is good for his creatures, all things are created with an inclination of their own to the good, but of very different sorts. Some, like plants or even inanimate things, have a built-in inclination to the good apart from any cognition of the good. Aquinas sometimes calls this inclination a natural appetite. (The sort of thing he has in mind is exemplified by plants naturally turning toward sunlight.) Higher up the ladder of being are animals of certain sorts which are naturally inclined to the good but with some (sensory) cognition.7 They can cognize particular goods, although they lack the ability to reflect on them or to think of them as good. Inclination dependent on limited cognition of this sort Aquinas calls ‘sensory appetite’. Higher still are human beings whose inclination to the good is dependent on intellect, which allows them not only to cognize particular goods but to think about them reflectively as good. This inclination is rational appetite, and it is what Aquinas takes the will to be.8 So close is the association between intellect and will for Aquinas that he often speaks of the will as being in the intellect,9 and he thinks that anything which has intellect must also have will.10 Understood as rational appetite, the will is the primary mover of all the powers of the soul (including itself) except the nutritive powers,11 and it is also the efficient cause of motion of the body. Most important for our purposes, the will exercises some degree of efficient causality over the intellect. In some circumstances, it can command the intellect directly to adopt or to reject a particular belief.12 It can also move the intellect by directing it to attend to some things and to neglect others,13 or even to stop thinking about something altogether. So, for example, while you are reading a magazine, you come across an advertisement asking for money for children, with an emotionally powerful picture of a starving child. Your intellect recognizes that if you look at the ad for very long, you are likely to succumb to its emotional force. Intellect sees the goodness of contributing to the charity, but it also recognizes that if you give money to this charity, you won’t have it for the new computer you have been coveting. Your desire for the new computer is strong and influences intellect to rank saving money for the computer as best for you now. In consequence of the finding on intellect’s part, and with this influence from the passions, will directs intellect to stop thinking about the charity, and (after a further interaction of intellect and will) you turn the page of your magazine.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I lie. That day in the café, sitting with Henry, seeing his hand tremble, hearing his words, I was moved. It was madness to read him my notes, but he incited me; it was madness to drink and to answer his questions while staring into his face, as I have never dared to look at any man. We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss. He spoke of “Hugo’s great kindness, but he is a boy, a boy.” Henry’s older mind, of course. I, too, am always waiting for Hugo, but leaping ahead, sometimes perfidiously, with the older mind. I try to leave my body out of it. But I have been caught. And so when I come home I extricate myself and write him that note. And meanwhile I read his love letter over ten or fifteen times, and even if I do not believe in his love, or in mine, the nightmare of the other night holds me. I am possessed. “Beware,” said Hugo, “of being trapped in your own imaginings. You instill sparks in others, you charge them with your illusions, and when they burst forth into illuminations, you are taken in.” We walk in the forest. He plays with Banquo. He reads by my side. His intuition tells him: be kind, be sweet, be blind. With me, it is the craftiest and cleverest method. It is the way to torture me, to win me. And I think of Henry every moment, chaotically, fearing his second letter. I meet Henry in the dim, cavernous Viking. He has not received my note. He has brought me another love letter. He almost cries out, “You are veiled now. Be real! Your words, your writing, the other day. You were real.” I deny it. Then he says humbly, “Oh, I knew it, I knew I was too presumptuous to aspire to you. I’m a peasant, Anaïs. Only whores can appreciate me.” That brings out the words he wants to hear. Feebly, we argue. We recall the beginning: we began with the mind. “Did we, but did we?” says Henry, trembling. And suddenly he leans over and engulfs me in an endless kiss. I do not want the kiss to end. He says, “Come to my room.” How stifling the veil about me, which Henry struggles to tear, my fear of reality. We are walking to his room, and I do not feel the ground, but I feel his body against mine. He says, “Look at the carpet on the stairs, it is worn,” and I do not see, I only feel the ascension. My note is in his hands. “Read it,” I say, at the bottom of the stairs, “and I’ll leave you.” But I follow him. His room, I do not see. When he takes me in his arms, my body melts. The tenderness of his hands, the unexpected penetration, to the core of me but without violence. What strange, gentle power.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The question imposed itself: “Was I too to sink to fatness? wallow in sensuality, degrade myself for a nerve-thrill?” “No!” I cried to myself, “ten thousand times, no! No! I’ll go and seek the star-lit deserts of Truth or die on the way!” I closed the book and with it and the second volume of it in my hand went to Mrs. Trask. “I want to buy this book”, I said, “it has a message for me that I must never forget!” “I’m glad”, said the little lady smiling, “what is it?” I read her a part of the passage: “I see”, she exclaimed, “but why do you want the books?” “I want to take them with me”, I said, “I mean to leave Lawrence at once and go to Germany to study!” “Good gracious!” she cried, “how can you do that? I thought you were a partner of Sommerfeld’s; you can’t go at once!” “I must”, I said, “the ground burns under my feet: if I don’t go now, I shall never go: I’ll be out of Lawrence tomorrow!” Mrs. Trask threw up her hands and remonstrated with me: such quick decisions were dangerous; “why should I be in such a hurry?” I repeated time and again: “If I don’t go at once, I shall never go: ‘the ignoble pleasures’ will grow sweeter and sweeter to me and I shall sink gradually and drown in the mud-honey of life.” Finally seeing I was adamant and my mind fixed: she sold me the books at full price with some demur, then she added: “I almost wish I had never recommended Emerson to you!” and the dear lady looked distressed, almost on the verge of tears. “Never regret that!” I cried, “I shall remember you as long as I live because of that and always be grateful to you. Professor Smith told me I ought to go; but it needed the word of Emerson to give me the last push! The buds of poetry and science and art shall not perish in me as they have ‘perished already in a thousand, thousand men!’ Thanks to you!” I added warmly, “all my best heart-thanks: you have been to me the messenger of high fortune.” I clasped her hands, wished to kiss her, but foolishly feared to hurt her and so contented myself with a long kiss on her hand and went out at once to find Sommerfeld. He was in the office and forthwith I told him the whole story, how Smith had tried to persuade me and how I had resisted till this page of Emerson had convinced me: “I am sorry to leave you in the lurch,” I explained; but “I must go and go at once.” He told me it was madness: I could study German right there in Lawrence; he would help me with it gladly. “You mustn’t throw away a livelihood just for a word”, he cried, “it is madness, I never heard a more insane decision!”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He lives by gusts. It is the gusts I enjoy in Henry. I may sit for a whole day after a gust and sail my river boat slowly down the feelings that he has dispersed with prodigality. Eduardo says I have never really entirely given myself, but that seems impossible when I see how I submit to the nobility and perfection of Hugo, to the sensualism of Henry, to the beauty of Eduardo himself. The other night at the concert I stood transfixed before him. He has learned not to smile, which is what I must learn. The color of his skin alone attracts me. He has the golden pallor of the Spanish but with a Northern glow, too, a rosiness under the tan. And the color of his eyes, that changeful green, unbearably cool. It is the mouth and nostrils which promise. But again I have the sensation of Eduardo and me walking through the world and knocking our heads together. Our heads alone meet and knock. I would have nothing else. I like his mind, which is like a sanctuary, very rich with his continuous plumbing and analysis. He seems without will because he obeys his unconscious, and, like Lawrence, cannot always tell why. Henry has noticed what neither a Hugo or an Eduardo would notice. I was lying in bed and he said, “You always seem to be taking poses, in an almost Oriental way.” He demands strong words from me when he fucks, and I cannot give them. I cannot tell him what I feel. He teaches me new gestures, prolongations, variations. Eduardo asked me the other day if I would like to try June’s way: plunge into an absolute denial of scruples, to lie (to one’s self, principally), to deform one’s nature so as to allow no impediment, like my incapacity for cruelty. Yesterday, in the very paroxysm of sensual joy, I could not bite Henry as he wanted me to. Eduardo is afraid of my journal. He is afraid of an indictment, and that I should not have understood. He confessed this fear to his psychoanalyst. I have a sense of all that I leave out—the lacunae, especially the dreams, the hallucinations. Also, the lies are left out, a desperate necessity to embellish. So I do not write them down. The journal is therefore a lie. What is left out of the journal is also left out of my mind. At the moment of writing I rush for the beauty. I disperse the rest, out of the journal, out of my body. I would like to come back, like a detective, and collect what I have washed off. For example, the terrible, divine credulity of Hugo. I think of what he could have noticed. The time I came back from Henry’s room and washed myself, he could have seen the few drops of water that fell to the floor; stains on my underclothes; rouge rubbed off on my handkerchiefs.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I declared I was ill and was going to England at once; I must make a new start and accumulate some more money and a few mornings later I bade Bancroft “Good-bye” and crossed the Channel and went on to my sister and father in Tenby, arriving there in a severe shivering fit with a bad headache and every symptom of ague. I was indeed ill and played out: I had taken double doses of life and literature, had swallowed all the chief French writers from Rabelais and Montaigne to Flaubert, Zola and Balzac, passing by Pascal and Vauvenargues, Renan and Hugo, a glutton’s feast for six months. Then, too, I had nosed out this artist’s studio and that; had spent hours watching Rodin at work and more hours comparing this painter’s model with that: these breasts and hips with those. My love of plastic beauty nearly brought me to grief at least once and perhaps I had better record the incident, though it rather hurt my vanity at the time. One day I called at Manet’s old studio which was rented now by an American painter named Alexander. He had real power as a craftsman but only a moderate brain and was always trying by beauty or something remarkable in his model to make up for his own want of originality. On this visit I noticed an extraordinary sketch of a young girl standing where childhood and womanhood meet: she had cut her hair short and her chestnut-dark eyes lent her a startling distinction. “You like it?” asked Alexander. “She has the most perfect figure I have ever seen!” “I like it”, I replied; “I wonder whether the magic is in the model or in your brush?” “You’ll soon see”, he retorted, a little piqued, “she’s due here already” and almost as he spoke she came in with quick, alert step. She was below medium height; but evidently already a woman. Without a word she went behind the screens to undress, when Alexander said: “Well?” I had to think a moment or two before answering. “God and you have conspired together!” I exclaimed, and indeed his brush had surpassed itself. He had caught and rendered a childish innocence in expression that I had not remarked and he had blocked in the features with superb brio: “It is your best work to date”, I went on, “and almost anyone would have signed it.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Oh, you wise boy!” she laughed, “don’t you see you are skipping the time I most desire you, and that’s not kind to either of us; is it?” “There’s still another way of evasion”, I said, “get me to withdraw before I come the first time, or get up immediately and syringe yourself with water thoroughly: water kills my seed as soon as it touches it—” “But how will that help if you go on half a dozen times more?” she asked. “Doctors say,” I replied, “that what comes from me afterwards is not virile enough to impregnate a woman: I’ll explain the process to you if you like; but you can take it, the fact is as I state it.” “When did you learn all this?” she asked. “It has been my most engrossing study,” I laughed, “and by far the most pleasureful!” “You dear, dear,” she cried, “I must kiss you for that.” “Do you know you kiss wonderfully?” she went on reflectingly, “with a lingering touch of the inside of the lips and then the thrust of the tongue: that’s what excited me so the first time” and she sighed as if delighted with the memory. “You didn’t seem excited,” I said half reproachfully, “for when I wanted another kiss, you drew away and said ‘tomorrow’! Why are women so coquettish, so perverse?” I added, remembering Lucille and Jessie. “I think it is that we wish to be sure of being desired,” she replied, “and a little too that we want to prolong the joy of it, the delight of being wanted, really wanted! It is so easy for us to give and so exquisite to feel a man’s desire pursuing us! Ah how rare it is”, she sighed passionately, “and how quickly lost! You’ll soon tire of your mistress”, she added, “now that I am all yours and thrill only for you” and she took my head in her hands and kissed me passionately, regretfully. “You kiss better than I do, Lorna! Where did you acquire the art, Madame?” I asked, “I fear that you have been a naughty, naughty girl!” “If you only knew the truth,” she exclaimed, “if you only knew how girls long for a lover and burn and itch in vain and wonder why men are so stupid and cold and dull as not to see our desire.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I soon got my arm round her and kept kissing her till she told me she had never known a man so greedy of kisses as I was. It was delicious flattery to me to speak of me as a man and in return I raved about her eyes and mouth and form; caressing her left breast I told her I could divine the rest and knew she had a lovely body. But when I put my hand up her clothes, she stopped me when I got just above her knee and said: “We’d have to be engaged before I could let you do that. Do you really love me?” Of course I swore I did, but when she said she’d have to tell her father that we were engaged to be married, cold shivers went down my back. “I can’t marry for a long time yet”, I said, “I’ll have to make a living first and I’m not very sure where I’ll begin.” But she had heard that an old man wished to adopt me and everyone said that he was very rich, and even her father admitted that I’d be “well fixed.” Meanwhile my right hand was busy: I had got my fingers to her warm flesh between the stockings and the drawers and was wild with desire; soon mouth on mouth I touched her sex. What a gorgeous afternoon we had! I had learned enough now to go slow and obey what seemed to be her moods. Gently, gently I caressed her sex with my finger till it opened and she leaned against me and kissed me of her own will, while her eyes turned up and her whole being was lost in thrills of ecstasy. When she asked me to stop and take my hand away, I did her bidding at once and was rewarded by being told that I was a “dear boy” and “a sweet” and soon the embracing and caressing began again. She moved now in response to my lascivious touchings and when the ecstasy came on her, she clasped me close and kissed me passionately with hot lips and afterwards in my arms wept a little and then pouted that she was cross with me for being so naughty. But her eyes gave themselves to me even while she tried to scold. The dinner bell rang and she said she’d have to go, and we made a meeting for afterwards on the top deck; but as she was getting up, she yielded again to my hand with a little sigh and I found her sex all wet, wet! She got down out of the boat by the main rigging and I waited a few moments before following her. At first our caution seemed likely to be rewarded, chiefly, I have thought since, because everyone believed me to be too young and too small to be taken seriously. But everything is quickly known on seaboard at least by the sailors.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Not at once, eh?” she pouted, “talk to me first. I want to know how you are?” and I drew her to the big armchair and sat down with her in my arms. “What am I to tell you?” I asked, while my hand went up her dress to her warm thighs and sex. She frowned but I kissed her lips and with a movement or two stretched her out on me so that I could use my finger easily. At once her lips grew hot and I went on kissing and caressing till her eyes closed and she gave herself to the pleasure. Suddenly she wound herself upon me and gave me a big kiss. “You don’t talk”, she said. “I can’t”, I exclaimed, making up my mind. “Come”, and I lifted her to her feet and took her into the bedroom. “I’m crazy for you”, I said, “take off your clothes, please.” She resisted a little but when I began loosening her dress, she helped me and took it off. Her knickers, I noticed, were new. They soon fell off and she stood in her chemise and black stockings. “That’s enough, isn’t it?” she said, “Mr. Curious”, and she drew the chemise tight about her. “No”, I cried, “beauty must unveil, please!” The next moment the chemise slipping down caught for a moment on her hips and then slid circling round her feet. Her nakedness stopped my heart; desire blinded me: my arms went round her, straining her soft form to me: in a moment I had lifted her on to the bed, pulling the bed clothes back at the same time. The foolish phrase of being in bed together deluded me: I had no idea that she was more in my power just lying on the edge of the bed; in a moment I had torn off my clothes and boots and got in beside her. Our warm bodies lay together: a thousand hot pulses beating in us: soon I separated her legs and lying on her tried to put my sex into hers, but she drew away almost at once. “O—O, it hurts” she murmured and each time I tried to push my sex in, her “O’s” of pain stopped me.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  For the first time in my life I notice here that the writer’s art is not only inferior to reality in keenness of sensation and emotion; but also more same, monotonous even, because incapable of showing the tiny, yet ineffable differences of the same feeling which difference of personality brings with it. I seem to be repeating myself in describing Kate’s love after Mrs. Mayhew’s, making the girl’s feelings a fainter replica of the woman’s. In reality the two were completely different. Mrs. Mayhew’s feelings long repressed flamed with the heat of an afternoon in July or August; while in Kate’s one felt the freshness and cool of a summer morning, shot through with the suggestion of heat to come. And this comparison even is inept because it leaves out of the account, the effect of Kate’s beauty, the great hazel eyes, the rosied skin, the superb figure. Besides there was a glamour of the spirit about Kate: Lorna Mayhew would never give me a new note that didn’t spring from passion; in Kate I felt a spiritual personality and the thrill of undeveloped possibilities. And still using my utmost skill, I haven’t shown my reader the enormous superiority of the girl and her more unselfish love. But I haven’t finished yet. Smith had given me “The Mill on the Floss” to read; I had never tried George Eliot before and I found that this book almost deserved Smith’s praise. I had read till about one o’clock when my heart heard her; or was it some thrill of expectance? The next moment my door opened and she came in with the mane of hair about her shoulders and a long dressing gown reaching to her stockinged feet. I got up like a flash; but she had already closed the door and bolted it; I drew her to the bed and stopped her from throwing off the dressing-gown: “let me take off your stockings first”, I whispered, “I want you all imprinted on me!” The next moment, she stood there naked, the flickering flame of the candle throwing quaint arabesques of light and shade on her beautiful ivory body: I gazed and gazed: from the navel down she was perfect; I turned her round and the back too, the bottom even was faultless though large; but alas! the breasts were far too big for beauty, too soft to excite! I must think only of the bold curve of her hips, I reflected, the splendor of the firm thighs, the flesh of which had the hard outline of marble and her—sex? I put her on the bed and opened her thighs: her pussy was ideally perfect. At once I wanted to get into her; but she pleaded: “please, dear, come into bed: I’m cold and want you.” So in I got and began kissing her.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I cannot eat in her presence. But I am calm outwardly, with that Oriental placidity of bearing that is so deceptive. She drinks and smokes. She is quite mad, in a sense, subject to fears and manias. Her talk, mostly unconscious, would be revealing to an analyst, but I cannot analyze it. It is mostly lies. The contents of her imagination are realities to her. But what is she building so carefully? An aggrandizement of her personality, a fortifying and glorifying of it. In the obvious and enveloping warmth of my admiration she expands. She seems at once destructive and helpless. I want to protect her. What a joke! I, protect her whose power is infinite. Her power is so strong that I actually believe it when she tells me her destructiveness is unintentional. Has she tried to destroy me? No, she walked into my house and I was willing to endure any pain from her hands. If there is any calculation in her, it comes only afterwards, when she becomes aware of her power and wonders how she should use it. I do not think her evil potency is directed. Even she is baffled by it. I have her in myself now as one to be pitied and protected. She is involved in perversities and tragedies she cannot live up to. I have at last caught her weakness. Her life is full of fantasies. I want to force her into reality. I want to do violence to her. I, who am sunk in dreams, in half-lived acts, see myself possessed by a furious intention: I want to grasp June’s evasive hands, oh, with what strength, take her to a hotel room and realize her dream and mine, a dream she has evaded facing all her life. I went to see Eduardo, tense and shattered by my three hours with June. He saw the weakness in her and urged me to act out my strength. I could hardly think clearly because in the taxi she had pressed my hand. I was not ashamed of my adoration, my humility. Her gesture was not sincere. I do not believe she could love. She says she wants to keep the rose dress I wore the first night she saw me. When I tell her I want to give her a going-away present, she says she wants some of that

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “But how did you do it!” we wanted to know and he gave us his whole experience. “Girls love kissing,” he said, “and so I kissed and kissed her and put my leg on her, and her hand on my cock and I kept touching her breasts and her cunny (that’s what she calls it) and at last I got on her between her legs and she guided my prick into her cunt (God it was wonderful!) and now I go with her every night and often in the day as well. She likes her cunt touched, but very gently”, he added, “she showed me how to do it with one finger like this” and he suited the action to the word. Strangways in a moment became to us not only a hero but a miracle-man; we pretended not to believe him in order to make him tell us more, but in our hearts we knew he was telling us the truth, and we were almost crazy with breathless desire. I got him to invite me up to the Vicarage and I saw Mary the nurse-girl there, and she seemed to me almost a woman and spoke to him as “Master Will” and he kissed her, though she frowned and said “Leave off” and “Behave yourself”, very angrily; but I felt that her anger was put on to prevent my guessing the truth. I was aflame with desire and when I told Howard, he, too, burned with lust, and took me out for a walk and questioned me all over again and, under a haystack in the country we gave ourselves to a bout of frigging which for the first time thrilled me with pleasure. All the time we were playing with ourselves I kept thinking of Mary’s hot slit, as Strangways had described it, and at length a real orgasm came and shook me; the imagining had intensified my delight. Nothing in my life up to that moment was comparable in joy to that story of sexual pleasure as described, and acted for us, by Strangways. MY FATHER. Father was coming: I was sick with fear: he was so strict and loved to punish. On the ship he had beaten me with a strap because I had gone forward and listened to the sailors talking smut: I feared him and disliked him ever since I saw him once come aboard drunk.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I used to illustrate the absurdity of our present system of educating the young by a quaint simile. “When training me to shoot”, I said, “my earthly father gave me a little single-barreled gun, and when he saw that I had learned the mechanism and could be trusted, he gave me a double-barreled shot-gun. After some years I came into possession of a magazine gun which could shoot half a dozen times if necessary without reloading, my efficiency increasing with my knowledge.” My Creator, or Heavenly Father, on the other hand, when I was wholly without experience and had only just entered my teens, gave me, so to speak, a magazine gun of sex, and hardly had I learned its use and enjoyment when he took it away from me forever, and gave me in its place a double-barreled gun: after a few years, he took that away and gave me a single-barreled gun with which I was forced to content myself for the best part of my life. Towards the end the old single-barrel began to show signs of wear and age: sometimes it would go off too soon, sometimes it missed fire and shamed me, do what I would. I want to teach youths how to use their magazine gun of sex so that it may last for years, and when they come to the double-barrel, how to take such care that the good weapon will do them liege service right into their fifties, and the single-barrel will then give them pleasure up to three score years and ten. Moreover, not only do I desire in this way to increase the sum of happiness in the world while decreasing the pains and disabilities of men, but I wish also to set an example and encourage other writers to continue the work that I am sure is beneficent, as well as enjoyable.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  When she returned a few weeks later, I felt as if she were new and unknown and I had to win her again; but as soon as my hand touched her sex, the strangeness disappeared and she gave herself to me with renewed zest. I teased her to tell me just what she felt and at length she consented. “Begin with the first time” I begged, “and then tell what you felt in Kansas City.” “It will be very hard”, she said, “I’d rather write it for you.” “That’ll do just as well”, I replied, and here is the story she sent me the next day. “I think the first time you had me,” she began “I felt more curiosity than desire: I had so often tried to picture it all to myself. When I saw your sex, I was astonished, for it looked very big to me and I wondered whether you could really get it into my sex which I knew was just big enough for my finger to go in. Still I did want to feel your sex pushing into me, and your kisses and the touch of your hand on my sex made me even more eager. When you slipped the head of your sex into mine, it hurt dreadfully; it was almost like a knife cutting into me, but the pain for some reason seemed to excite me and I pushed forward so as to get you further in me; I think that’s what broke my maidenhead. At first I was disappointed because I felt no thrill, only the pain; but when my sex became all wet and open and yours could slip in and out easily, I began to feel real pleasure. I liked the slow movement best; it excited me to feel the head of your sex just touching the lips of mine and when you pushed in slowly all the way, it gave me a gasp of breathless delight; when you drew your sex out, I wanted to hold it in me. And the longer you kept on, the more pleasure you gave me. For hours afterwards my sex was sensitive; if I rubbed it ever so gently, it would begin to itch and burn.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  It will be six or seven years at least before I shall know whether the book is good and life-worthy or not and yet need drives me to publish it at once. Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work? I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul. First of all I wished to destroy or, at least, to qualify the universal opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all paint it crowned with roses of illusion: Juliet is only fourteen: Romeo, having lost his love, refuses life: Goethe follows Shakespeare in his Mignon and Marguerite: even the great humorist Heine and the so-called realist, Balzac, adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely untrue in regard to the male in boyhood and early youth, say from thirteen to twenty: the sex-urge, the lust of the flesh was so overwhelming in me that I was conscious only of desire. When the rattlesnake’s poison-bag is full, he strikes at everything that moves, even the blades of grass; the poor brute is blinded and in pain with the overplus. In my youth I was blind, too, through excess of semen. I often say that I was thirty-five years of age before I saw an ugly woman, a woman that is, whom I didn’t desire. In early puberty, all women tempted me; and all girls still more poignantly. From twenty to twenty-three, I began to distinguish qualities of the mind and heart and soul; to my amazement, I preferred Kate to Lily, though Lily gave me keener sensations: Rose excited me very little yet I knew she was of rarer, finer quality than even Sophy who seemed to me an unequalled bedfellow. From that time on the charms of spirit, heart and soul, drew me with ever-increasing magnetism, overpowering the pleasures of the senses though plastic beauty exercises as much fascination over me today as it did fifty years ago. I never knew the illusion of love, the rose-mist of passion till I was twenty-seven and I was intoxicated with it for years; but that story will be for my second volume. Now strange to say, my loves till I left America just taught me as much of the refinements of passion, as is commonly known in these States. France and Greece made me wise to all that Europe has to teach; that deeper knowledge too is for the second volume in which I shall relate how a French girl surpassed Sophy’s art as far as Sophy surpassed Rose’s ingenuous yielding.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I soon got my arm round her and kept kissing her till she told me she had never known a man so greedy of kisses as I was. It was delicious flattery to me to speak of me as a man and in return I raved about her eyes and mouth and form; caressing her left breast I told her I could divine the rest and knew she had a lovely body. But when I put my hand up her clothes, she stopped me when I got just above her knee and said: “We’d have to be engaged before I could let you do that. Do you really love me?” Of course I swore I did, but when she said she’d have to tell her father that we were engaged to be married, cold shivers went down my back. “I can’t marry for a long time yet”, I said, “I’ll have to make a living first and I’m not very sure where I’ll begin.” But she had heard that an old man wished to adopt me and everyone said that he was very rich, and even her father admitted that I’d be “well fixed.” Meanwhile my right hand was busy: I had got my fingers to her warm flesh between the stockings and the drawers and was wild with desire; soon mouth on mouth I touched her sex. What a gorgeous afternoon we had! I had learned enough now to go slow and obey what seemed to be her moods. Gently, gently I caressed her sex with my finger till it opened and she leaned against me and kissed me of her own will, while her eyes turned up and her whole being was lost in thrills of ecstasy. When she asked me to stop and take my hand away, I did her bidding at once and was rewarded by being told that I was a “dear boy” and “a sweet” and soon the embracing and caressing began again. She moved now in response to my lascivious touchings and when the ecstasy came on her, she clasped me close and kissed me passionately with hot lips and afterwards in my arms wept a little and then pouted that she was cross with me for being so naughty. But her eyes gave themselves to me even while she tried to scold. The dinner bell rang and she said she’d have to go, and we made a meeting for afterwards on the top deck; but as she was getting up, she yielded again to my hand with a little sigh and I found her sex all wet, wet! She got down out of the boat by the main rigging and I waited a few moments before following her. At first our caution seemed likely to be rewarded, chiefly, I have thought since, because everyone believed me to be too young and too small to be taken seriously. But everything is quickly known on seaboard at least by the sailors.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Now I must leave him for the moment and turn again to Mrs. Mayhew. Of course I went to her that next afternoon even before three. She met me without a word so gravely that I did not even kiss her: but began explaining what Smith was to me and how I could not do enough for him who was everything to my mind as she was (God help me!) to my heart and body, and I kissed her cold lips while she shook her head half sadly. “We have a sixth sense, we women, when we are in love”, she began: “I feel a new influence in you; I scent danger in the air you bring with you: don’t ask me to explain: I can’t; but my heart is heavy and cold as death.... If you leave me, there’ll be a catastrophe: the fall from such a height of happiness must be fatal.... If you can feel pleasure away from me, you no longer love me. I feel none except in having you, seeing you, thinking of you—none. Oh! why can’t you love like a woman loves, No! like I love: it would be heaven; for you and you alone satisfy the insatiable; you leave me bathed in bliss, sighing with satisfaction, happy as the Queen of Heaven!” “I have much to tell you, new things to say”, I began in haste. “Come upstairs,” I broke in interrupting myself “I want you as you are now, with the color in your cheeks, the light in your eyes, the vibration in your voice, come!” And she came like a sad sybil. “Who gave you the tact?” she began while we were undressing, “the tact to praise always?” I seized her and stood naked against her body to body: “What new thing have you to tell me?” I asked, lifting her into the bed and getting in beside her, cuddling up to her warmer body. “There’s always something new in my love,” she cried, cupping my face with her slim hands and taking my lips with hers. “Oh, how I desired you yesternoon, for I took the letter to your house myself and I heard you talking in your room perhaps with Smith”, she added, sounding my eyes with hers; “I’m longing to believe it; but when I heard your voice, or imagined I did, I felt the lips of my sex open and shut and then it began to burn and itch intolerably. I was on the point of going in to you; but instead, turned and hurried away, raging at you and at myself—.” “I will not let you even talk such treason,” I cried, separating her soft thighs, as I spoke, and sliding between them. In a moment my sex was in her and we were one body, while I drew it out slowly and then pushed it in again, her naked body straining to mine.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I looked mischievously at Henry and said, “Is that so? Really?” My Henry listened like a big bear to little, sinuous Fraenkel explaining complex abstract ideas. Fraenkel has a passion for ideas. Fraenkel, as Henry says, is an idea. A year ago those ideas would have filled me with joy. But Henry has done something to me, Henry the man. I can only compare what I feel to Lady Chatterley’s feelings about Mellors. I cannot even think about Henry’s work or Henry himself without a stirring in my womb. Today we had time only for kisses, and they alone melted me. Hugo tells me his instinct assures him there is nothing between Henry and me. Last night when I slipped Henry’s letter under my pillow, I wondered if the paper would crackle and Hugo would hear it, if he would read the letter while I lay asleep. I am taking great risks, with exhilaration. I want to make big sacrifices for my love. My husband, Louveciennes, my beautiful life—for Henry. Allendy says, “Give yourself wholly to one person. Depend. Lean. Have confidence. Have no fear of pain.” I think I have, with Henry. And yet I still feel alone and divided. He left me at the Gare St. Lazare last night. I began to write in the train, to balance the seven-leagued-boot leaping of my life with the ant activity of the pen. The ant words rushed back and forth carrying crumbs: such heavy crumbs. Bigger than the ants. “Have you enough heliotrope ink?” Henry asked. I should not be using ink but perfume. I should be writing with Narcisse Noir, with Mitsouko, with jasmine, with honeysuckle. I could write beautiful words that would exhale the potent smell of woman’s honey and man’s white blood. Louveciennes! Stop. Hugo is waiting for me. Retrogression. The past: The train to Long Beach. Hugo in a golf suit. His legs stretched out near mine arouse me. I have brought iodine because he gets sudden toothaches. I wear an organdy dress, stiff and fresh, and a picture hat with cherries dangling on the right, in a dip of the large soft wing. The Sunday crowd is flushed, sunburnt, tattered, ugly. I return loaded with my first true kiss. In the train again—this time to meet Henry. When I ride this way, with my pen and my journal, I feel extraordinarily secure. I see the hole in my glove and a mend in my stocking. All because Henry must eat. And I am happy that I can give Henry security, food. At certain moments, when I look into his unreadable blue eyes, I have a sensation of such torrential happiness that I feel emptied. Eduardo and I were going to spend the whole afternoon together. We began with an abundant lunch in the Rotisserie de la Reine Pedaque, a place which makes one hungry. Malicious, psychoanalytical conversation. Fresh strawberries.