Despair

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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The state made a plea offer of twenty years, but it was never adequately communicated to Mr. Dill, so he went to trial, was convicted, and was sentenced to death. The appellate courts affirmed his conviction and sentence. He couldn’t find volunteer counsel for his postconviction appeals, so most of his legal claims were procedurally barred because he had missed the filing deadlines. When we first looked at Mr. Dill’s case a few weeks before his scheduled execution, no court had reviewed critical issues about the reliability of his conviction and sentence. Capital murder requires an intent to kill, and there was a persuasive argument that there was no intent to kill in this case and that poor health care had caused the victim’s death. Most gunshot victims don’t die after nine months, and it was surprising that the state was seeking the death penalty in this case. And the U.S. Supreme Court had previously banned the execution of people with mental retardation, so Mr. Dill should have been shielded from the death penalty because of his intellectual disability, but no one had investigated or presented evidence in support of the claim. Along with his other challenges, Mr. Dill had enormous difficulty speaking. He had a speech impediment that caused him to stutter badly. When he became excited or agitated, it got worse. Because he had not previously had a lawyer who would see him or speak to him, Mr. Dill saw our intervention as something of a miracle. I sent my young lawyers to meet with him regularly after we got involved, and Mr. Dill called me frequently. We tried frantically to get the Courts to issue a stay based on the new issues we’d uncovered, to no avail. Courts are deeply resistant to reviewing claims once a condemned prisoner has completed the appeals process the first time. Even the claim of mental retardation was thwarted because no court would grant a hearing at such a late stage. Although I knew the odds were against us, Mr. Dill’s severe disabilities had made me privately hopeful that maybe a judge would be concerned and at least let us present additional evidence. But every court told us, “Too late.” On the day of the scheduled execution, I once again found myself talking to a man who was about to be strapped down and killed. I had asked Mr. Dill to call throughout the day because we were waiting to hear the outcome of our final stay request at the U.S. Supreme Court. Early in the day he had sounded anxious, but he kept insisting that things would work out, and he told me he wasn’t going to give up hope. He tried to express his gratitude for what we had done in the weeks leading up to his execution. He thanked me for sending staff down to visit him regularly.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  459 Leo Tolstoy Lecture 69 The man who started writing this novel in 1873 had been born some 45 years earlier at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy in the Russian province of Tula. Leo Tolstoy was the fourth son of the Count, a lawyer and farmer, but the boy’s mother died when he was just two, and his father died seven years later. R aised by various aunts and educated for a time at Kazan University, Tolstoy dropped out at the age of 19, when he inherited and then moved to the place that became his home base for the rest of his life: Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate. Tolstoy started writing in his early 20s, witnessed Russian troops battling Chechen tribesmen, and commanded a battery at Sevastopol when it was under siege by the British and French in the mid-1850s. In this way, he gained material for War and Peace, his epic about Russia’s struggle to survive the Napoleonic invasion. In Anna Karenina, a novel of domestic life, Tolstoy tries to show why a lovely, socially distinguished woman who has left her unfeeling husband for Count Vronsky—a dashing man who loves her devotedly—should fi nally take her own life. Ultimately, Anna kills herself to punish her lover for his supposed infi delity and to regenerate his love for her. She succeeds only too well, for her death leaves Vronsky a broken man who can hardly wait to die himself. But the regeneration that Anna sought to awaken in Vronsky may be found in Levin’s marriage to Anna’s sister-in-law, Kitty, who is spurned by Count Vronsky at the beginning of the novel, yet fi nally won at the end by the patient, modest, worthy Levin. The suicide of the heroine of Anna Karenina at the end of the novel raises questions that the novel as a whole tries to answer. As early as 1870, Tolstoy conceived the idea for a novel about a high-society lady who would ruin herself in some way. The actual suicide of a woman who lived near him gave him the key to her character. But he still needed to show just what led his heroine to kill herself at the end.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  460 Lecture 69: Leo Tolstoy Heir to a family estate, which he inherited at the age of 19, Tolstoy brought to the writing of Anna Karenina a variety of experiences in both literature and life. Raised by various aunts (his parents both died during his childhood) and educated for a time at Kazan University, he dropped out at 19 to settle on the family estate but set out in his 20s to become a writer. During a visit to Moscow in the winter of 1849–1850, he partied hard but also managed to write a fragment about an aimless young man—a fragment that nonetheless reveals the writer’s own quest for an aim. At age 23, he witnessed Russian soldiers fi ghting in the Caucasus and thereby gained material for a short story about a raid that raises fundamental questions about the justifi cation for war. After commanding a battery at Sevastopol during a siege, he wrote Sevastopol Sketches, with vivid word-pictures of the dead and wounded, and prepared himself to write War and Peace. War and Peace is an epic about Russia’s survival of the Napoleonic invasion. It is also a study of two distinguished families. Anna Karenina is a novel of domestic life that turns on a special kind of unhappiness in marriage. While Jane Austen’s novels turn on matters of courtship, many 19 th- century works turn on questions rising out of adultery. Given that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the unhappiness of Anna’s marriage emerges, fi rst of all, by contrast with the unhappiness of her brother Stephen’s marriage to Dolly Oblonsky. Dismayed to learn that Stephen has been having an affair with their former French governess, Dolly threatens to leave him and tell the world he’s a scoundrel. But she doesn’t because she wouldn’t know what to do with their fi ve children. We’re soon made to feel that Dolly and Stephen will somehow make up their differences. Ironically, in coming from St. Petersburg to Moscow to help mediate the quarrel between her brother Stephen and his wife, Anna meets the man who will destroy her own marriage and, ultimately, lead to her suicide. Young, Ironically, in coming from St. Petersburg to Moscow to help mediate the quarrel between her brother Stephen and his wife, Anna meets the man who will destroy her own marriage and, ultimately, lead to her suicide.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  Scope 498 Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition 2nd Edition Part VII: Modern Literature Scope: S tarting with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), this section of the course considers how the literature of the late 19 th and early 20th centuries re fl ects the gradual disintegration of the institutions, social structures, and assumptions that once sustained individual men and women. In James’s novel, where a bright but innocent young American woman seeks to complete her cultural education in Europe, it proves to be a garden teeming with venomous snakes. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a high-minded European trader who hopes to civilize the natives of Africa while collecting ivory there turns into a rapacious monster. In raising fundamental questions about the value and virtue of European culture, these two late-19 th-century novels point the way to 20th-century Modernism, which radically questions traditional beliefs—especially when confronted by the unprecedented specter of worldwide war. Bereft of traditional support structures, Modernism spotlights the isolated self, as in Joyce’s autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) or Marcel Proust’s exhaustively introspective À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–1927). In the wake of World War I (1914–1918) and the run-up to World War II (1939–1945), poets and novelists in America and Europe express a sense of radical displacement, disorientation, and deracination. In “The Second Coming” (1920), Yeats sees nothing but “mere anarchy” as he surveys the wreckage wrought by World War I, the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, and the imminence of yet another bloody Irish revolt against English rule. In Kafka’s The Trial (1925), a perfectly respectable young banker is arrested for no reason, subjected to endless delays by a totally incomprehensible legal system, and fi nally executed—all without ever being tried. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (also 1925), an elegant evening party organized by a well-to-do London matron is invaded by the news of a suicide: A young man who has been incurably traumatized

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He waited until the morning that the trial was set to begin before he told investigators that he could not testify because what they wanted him to say was not true. He tried to wrangle for more favorable treatment but decided that there was no punishment he was willing to accept for a murder he hadn’t committed. Myers’s refusal to cooperate got him sent back to death row. Back at Holman, it wasn’t long before he again showed serious emotional and psychological distress. After a couple of weeks, prison officials were so concerned that they sent him to the state hospital for the mentally ill. The Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility in Tuscaloosa did all of the diagnostic and assessment work for courts managing people accused of crimes who might be incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness. It had frequently been criticized by defense lawyers for almost never finding serious mental disabilities that would prevent defendants from going to trial. Myers’s time at Taylor Hardin did very little to change his predicament. He hoped that he might be returned to the county jail after his thirty-day stint at the hospital, but instead he was returned to death row. Realizing he could not escape the situation he’d created for himself, Myers told investigators he was ready to testify against McMillian. A new trial date was scheduled for August 1988. Walter had been on death row for over a year. As hard as he had tried to adjust, he couldn’t accept the nightmare his life had become. Although he was nervous, he had been convinced that he was going home back in February, when the first trial was scheduled. His lawyers seemed happy that Myers was struggling and told Walter it was a good sign when the trial was continued because Myers refused to testify. But it meant another six months on death row for Walter, and he couldn’t see anything encouraging about that. When they finally moved him to the Baldwin County Jail in Bay Minette for the August trial, Walter left death row confident he’d never return. He had become friends with several men on the row and was surprised by how conflicted he felt about leaving them, knowing what they would soon face. Yet when they called his name to the transfer office, he lost no time gathering his things and getting in the van to leave. — A week later, Walter sat in the van with shackles pinching his ankles and chains tightly wound around his waist. He could feel his feet beginning to swell because the circulation was cut off by the metal digging into his skin.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America’s preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness. Communities were on the lookout for bad moms who should be put in prison. About the same time as Marsha’s prosecution, Bridget Lee gave birth to a stillborn baby in Pickens County, Alabama. She was charged with capital murder and wrongfully imprisoned. Lee, a church pianist, mother of two, and bank bookkeeper, had gotten pregnant after an extramarital affair. Scared and depressed, the thirty-four-year-old hid her pregnancy and hoped to secretly put the child up for adoption. But she went into labor five weeks before her due date, and the baby was stillborn. She didn’t tell her husband about the stillbirth, which aroused suspicion. The disreputable circumstances surrounding Lee’s pregnancy were enough to influence the pathologist who conducted the autopsy to conclude that the stillborn baby was born alive and was then suffocated by Lee. Months after Lee was arrested and charged with capital murder, six additional pathologists examined the body and unanimously concluded that neonatal pneumonia had killed the child—it was a classic stillbirth with very common features. This new information led the prosecutor to drop the charges, sparing Ms. Lee a capital trial and, potentially, the death penalty. The discredited pathologist left Alabama but continues to serve as a practicing medical examiner in Texas.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  A new formula emerged for criminal prosecution, especially in high-profile cases, in which the emotions, perspectives, and opinions of the victim figured prominently in how criminal cases would be managed. However, as Mozelle and Onzelle discovered, focusing on the status of the victim became one more way for the criminal justice system to disfavor some people. Poor and minority victims of crime experienced additional victimization by the system itself. The Supreme Court’s decision in Payne appeared shortly after the Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case that presented convincing empirical evidence that the race of the victim is the greatest predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States. The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more. Many poor and minority victims complained that they were not getting calls or support from local police and prosecutors. Many weren’t included in the conversations about whether a plea bargain was acceptable or what sentence was appropriate. If your family had lost a loved one to murder or had to suffer the anguish of rape or serious assault, your victimization might be ignored if you had loved ones who were incarcerated. The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others. More than anything else, it was the lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers that devastated Mozelle and Onzelle. “You’re the first two people to come to our house and spend time with us talking about Vickie,” Onzelle told us. After nearly three hours of hearing their heartbreaking reflections, we promised to do what we could to find out who else was involved in their niece Vickie’s death. — We were getting to the point where, without access to police records and files, we wouldn’t be able to make more progress. Because the case was now pending on direct appeal, the State had no obligation to let us see those records and files.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And neither will the white man. We will need every ounce of moral stamina we can find. For everything is changing, fr om our notion of OTHER ESSAYS politics to our notion of ourselves, and we are certain, as we begin history's strangest metamorphosis, to undergo the tor ment of being forced to surrender far more than we ever re alized we had accepted. Harper's, February 1961 Th e New Lost Generation T HIS is an extremely ditlicult record to assess. P.erhaps it !;>egins for me in 1946, when my best friend tQoLhis li _ fe . He was an incandescent � grd bo� Jof\n_y�� � ty-fo�whose future, it had seemed to all of us, would unfailingly be glo rious. He and I were Socialists, as were most of OJII: friends., and weareamcd _ofQ6}Tk topia 4 and-WQfked - toward it. We may have evinced more conviction than intelligence or skill, and more youthful arrogance than either, but we, neverthe less, had carried petitions about together, JoughLlandlords together, worked as laborers together, been fired together, anastarved together. -- - -- But for some time before his death, troubles graver than these had laid hold of my friend. Not only did the world stub bomly refuse his vision; it despised him for his vision, and scourged him for his color. Of course, it despised and scourged me, too, bur I was different from my friend in that it took rrt�arly no time to despise the world right back _ and dec! de. th;tLLwould a<;:COJ!IP!i�h,_ i!l time, _ _ \vith patience and cunning and by becoming indestruqible, what I _ _might nci"t, ii1 the mome - nt, - achieve by force �r persuasion. My friend did not despise anyone. He really thought that people were good, and that one had only to point out to them the right path in order to have them, at once, come flocking to it in loudly rejoicing droves. Before his death, we had quarreled very bitterly over this. I had lost my faith in politics, in right paths; if there were a right path, one might be sure (I informed him with great venom) that whoever was on it was simply asking to be stoned to death-by all the world's good people. I didn't give a damn, besides, what happened to the miserable, the unspeak ably petty world. There was probably not a handful of decent people in it. My friend looked very saddened by these original reflections. He said that it seemed to him that I had taken the road which ended in fascism, tyranny, and blood. So, I told him, have you. One fine day, you'll realize that people don't want to be better. So you'll have to make them better. And how do you think you'll go about it? 6 59 660 OTHER ESSAYS He said nothing to this. He was sitting opposite me, in a booth, in a Greenwich Village diner.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Sexual desire does not obey the laws that maintain peace and contentment between partners. Reason, understanding, compassion, and camaraderie are the handmaidens of a close, harmonious relationship. But sex often evokes unreasoning obsession rather than thoughtful judgment, and selfish desire rather than altruistic consideration. Aggression, objectification, and power all exist in the shadow of desire, components of passion that do not necessarily nurture intimacy. Desire operates along its own trajectory. The Flannel Nightgown My first meeting with Jimmy and Candace was a powerful illustration of this all too common story. Jimmy and Candace are young musicians in their early thirties who’ve been married for seven years. They are a biracial couple: she is African-American; he is of Irish descent. She exudes confidence in her boy jeans and aquamarine nails; he has the Quiksilver signature all over him. They’re attractive, spunky, and on the go—and they are in despair over what’s happening to them. “We’re not having sex, and this has been going on for years,” Candace explains. “We are terrified about it and so upset. And I think we each have a deep-rooted fear that we’re going to find out it’s unfixable.” Like John, Candace has experienced what feels like an inescapable loss of desire in every relationship she has been in; and what emerges from our conversation is that she understands her pattern. “My problem, my side of it, doesn’t have to do with Jimmy,” she explains. “When I’m intimate with someone, when I’m in love and he loves me, I suddenly lose interest sexually. I feel like there’s something missing and I can’t get close to my partner on a sexual level. I had a number of long-term relationships before I met Jimmy, and it happened each time.” Candace knows who Jimmy is for her. He’s reliable, thoughtful, and intelligent. They share a rich partnership. And while she wants these characteristics in a man, their collateral consequences are counter-erotic for her. Faced with Jimmy’s kindness, she isn’t able to experience her own sexual energy. “What I can tell you,” she says, “is that his kindness makes me feel safe, but when I think about who I want to sleep with, safe is not what I look for.” “Because it’s not what?” I ask her. “It’s not transgressive enough? It’s not aggressive enough?” “It’s not aggressive enough.” “And he is in some way too much of a conscientious lover?” “Yeah.” “And he’s constantly paying attention to you?” “Which is very thoughtful.” “Very thoughtful indeed, but not exciting.” I add. “It’s all very affectionate, very cozy; it’s just not sexual. You’ve replaced sensual love with something else. It’s what the sex therapist Dagmar O’Connor calls comfort love.” Candace nods, “Like a flannel nightgown.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  How hypocritical, therefore, for me to have demanded that Paula ask help from me openly. So she’d covertly asked for help, using a cover story about the workshop? So what! I should have tried to comfort her without insisting she genuflect. As I contemplated Paula’s anger rock, I realized how little chance there was of salvaging our relationship. Certainly this was no time for subtlety, and I opened up to her as never before. “I need you,” I said, reminding her, as I often had before, that therapists too have needs. “And perhaps,” I went on, “I haven’t been sensitive enough to your distress. Yet I’m not a mind reader, and haven’t you for years refused all my offers to help you?” What I wanted to say was, “Give me another chance. Even if this one time I didn’t pick up on your distress, Paula, don’t leave forever.” But I had come close enough to begging that day. Paula was adamant, and we parted without touching. I put Paula out of my mind for many months until Dr. Kingsley, the young psychologist to whom she had taken such an irrational dislike, told me of a disagreeable encounter she had had with Paula. Paula had returned to the group Dr. Kingsley was leading (we now had several groups in the project) and— sounding like “Mrs. Cancer,” as the psychologist put it—had monopolized the session with a speech. I immediately phoned Paula and invited her to lunch again. I was surprised at how pleased Paula seemed by my invitation, but as soon as we met—this time at the Stanford Faculty Club, which serves no Hula sandwiches—her agenda became clear. She could talk of nothing but Dr. Kingsley. According to Paula, Dr. Kingsley’s cotherapist had invited her to address their group, but as soon as she had begun speaking, Dr. Kingsley had accused her of taking too much time. “You’ve got to reprimand her,” Paula said urgently. “You know teachers can and should be held responsible for the unprofessional behavior of their students.” But Dr. Kingsley was my colleague, not my student, and I had known her for years. Not only was her husband a close friend but she and I had led many groups together: knowing her to be a superb therapist, I was certain that Paula’s account of her behavior was greatly distorted. Slowly, far too slowly, it dawned on me that Paula was jealous: jealous of the attention and affection I bestowed on Dr. Kingsley; jealous of my alliance with her and with all the members of the research staff. Naturally Paula had resisted the consultation workshop; naturally she had discouraged any collaboration with other researchers. She would resist any change. All she wanted was to revert to the time when she and I had been alone with our little flock. What could I do?

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I was taken aback. Here was a key figure in the lives of thousands of children asking me whether what he and his colleagues do or say on the bench makes any difference. He seemed relieved by the notion that maybe his actions are insignificant. I told him that I personally doubt the existence of a “divorce gene.” If such a biological trait had arisen in evolution, it would be of very recent vintage. But, I added, “What the court does matters enormously. You have the power to protect children from being hurt or to increase their suffering.” Now it was his turn to be taken aback. “You think we’ve increased children’s suffering?” “Yes, Your Honor, I do. With all respect, I have to say that the court along with the rest of society has increased the suffering of children.” “How so?” he asked. We spent another half hour talking about how the courts, parents, attorneys, mental health workers—indeed most adults—have been reluctant to pay genuine attention to children during and after divorce. He listened respectfully to me but I must say I left the judge’s chambers that day in a state of shock that soon turned to gloom. How can we be so utterly lost and confused that a leading judge would accept the notion of a “divorce gene” to explain our predicament? If he’s confused about his role, what about the rest of us? What is it about the impact of divorce on our society and our children that’s so hard to understand and accept? Having spent the last thirty years of my life traveling here and abroad talking to professional, legal, and mental health groups plus working with thousands of parents and children in divorced families, it’s clear that we’ve created a new kind of society never before seen in human culture. Silently and unconsciously, we have created a culture of divorce. It’s hard to grasp what it means when we say that first marriages stand a 45 percent chance of breaking up and that second marriages have a 60 percent chance of ending in divorce. What are the consequences for all of us when 25 percent of people today between the ages of eighteen and forty-four have parents who divorced? What does it mean to a society when people wonder aloud if the family is about to disappear? What can we do when we learn that married couples with children represent a mere 26 percent of households in the 1990s and that the most common living arrangement nowadays is a household of unmarried people with no children?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "; JO� �r · · "" . · .� At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caug�t in some utterly un believable cosmic jo ! e1 a joke sq hideo.us and in such bad taste�thai-i:t. defeats all categories and_ defini tions. One's only hope of supporting, to say nothing of sur viving, this joke is to flaunt in the teeth of it one's own particular and invincible style. It is at this turning, this level, that the word color, ravaged by experience and heavy with the weight of peculiar spoils, returns to its first meaning, which is not negro, the Spanish word fo r black, but vivid, many-hued, e.g., the rainbow, and warm and quick and vital, e.g., life. How hard it is though, to speak of Negro life in these terms, Negroes being so bitterly maligned and so brutally pe nalized for those very qualities of color which have helped them to endure. The Puritan dicta still inhabit and inhibit the �eljcan body_and..sou.l. Joy and sin have been synonyms here fo r so many generations that the fo rmer can now be defended only on therapeutic, i.e., pragmatic grounds, necessitating a similar metamorphosis fo r the latter. Now it is suggested that we Live-a little!-in order not to become too dangerously 6 73 OTHER ESSAYS Disturbed. ( Plm ra change-) Bl!!_no _ o_11_e _ _ )1as suggested-I would like to think that no one has dared-such a formula to Negroes, who do not yet dance or make love as a way: of .supporting Mental Health, and who are, indeed, in the main, t_hank heaven, incapable of making so deluded a-c�tion. They have seen too many dancers, to say nothirigof10Vers, swept straight into the madhouse; dancing and love are meant to seem effortless, but are very ditlicult and dangerous ac tivities. To suggest that joy can be present, in_.an}'_�), 9fNeg�9 l!fe_offeng�f course, immediately all of our social and �ntimental assumptions. Joy - i - s thefnlltof'Yankee thrift -:ind virtue-an-d makes-its sweet appearance only after a lifetime of cruel self-denial and inveterate moneymaking. On the other hand, such a suggestion immediately justifies the immorality, the inequity of our social regulations: if the Negro is "happy" in his "place," as we still would be only too delighted to believe;then It becomes, in us, a virtue not only to!_ee.e him there but to frustrate, for the sake ofhis cori_tinuea happiness and the protection of our property and our profits, any at tempt of his to rise out of it. ---· -- -- Well, the Negro is not happy in his place, and white people aren't happy in their place, either-two very intimately related facts-but the unhappiness of white people seems never to rattle and resound more fiercely than in their pleasure mills.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  With the exception of a woman in a dressing-gown who looked in from the back to complain, there were only men here. Yet it certainly didn't seem like a gay bar—unless it was some specialist working men's kind of ugly set. At last I nerved myself to gesture the barman down. Did he know someone called Cherif, French Moroccan, a docker . . . ? At which he made a very clear announcement that what do you call him Cherif was not welcome there, or any of his type. I walked out at once and started back the way I had come, the same children turning and watching as I passed. The early evening was high and receptive and unsurprised. The silence of neglect that enveloped the old church of St Narcissus was broken only by its hourly chime and—as I discovered that night—a six-hourly broken-toothed carillon, which donged its way heartlessly through a hymn that I hoped had ended each time it reached the irregular pauses of its missing notes. It had me awake at midnight and at six, with a stab of despair about last evening; I worked through wearying punitive fantasies about Cherif that fizzled out each time in shallow sleep. At ten I went round, through a gleaming holiday haze, to the Altidores' house. They lived in Long Street, which ran out from the centre of town in an elegant, endless curve; I counted ahead of me and picked out No 39 before I got to it: tall and reserved, with a high basement and four or five steps climbing steeply to the black front door. I noticed I was repressing my curiosity about my future, coming to our first encounter with the empty mind and last-minute turn of speed that are a way of meeting a challenge; though all the time the boy's touchingly sullen image was in the air before me, flickered, like a subliminal projection, over spires and gables, while his surname exercised its glimmering romance: Altidore, it was a gothic belfry in itself, or else a knight-errant out of The Faerie Queene . . .

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was still perplexingly calm, though I pulled on the cigarette fiercely, and stared at the threadbare pommel of the bar-stool next to me, where he had sat so untouchably that evening. It was the arch ingenuousness of his remark "That guy Matt must be gay" that came to me first; and then Matt's obscene and encouraging gesture behind the boy's back. I finished my drink quickly but thoughtfully and I was almost at the door when it flung open with consummate timing to admit the busy world of Ronald Strong. I thought for once I would speak to him, my mind was clear and fuelled, I stopped with an ironic glance—but he looked me up and down in an expressionless second and swept past. I went on out with a dull, half-audible "Fuck you". As I walked across town I was shocked but composed, as one is at first after a death one knew was coming. The horrible fact had been with me, known to me all along—it was none the less plausible for having been imparted in a dream. Out towards Matt's, those wide neglected streets, the houses shaken by lorries, the pavements and windows silted and blinded with dust. I was watching my own purposefulness curiously, wondering when it would falter. Matt cared about nothing, and so was oddly invulnerable—he was the great facilitator, he would say he was "only getting the kid ready" for me, and perhaps that was true, perhaps he'd set him up to the whole thing. I pondered whether Matt could be involved in his disappearance—I couldn't see the point. I'd thought I was about to break with him for good, to limp away in the laughable shreds of my dignity, but maybe that was pointless too; he liked me but he wouldn't miss me, whereas I was snagged with a sentimental respect for the part he had played in my fiasco. I went on past the end of his road. I was dawdling alongside parked cars that the street-lamps filled with shadow, though sometimes there was a box or a child's shoe cross-lit all night in the back of a shooting-brake. How sombre and secure those welled interiors looked, with only a pane of glass to keep everything else out. Of course I'd always wanted a car, but never a car that I could afford—I scorned the prospect of days in the drive, daubing at the rust on a Maxi or an 1100. I wanted a Jensen CV8, or a love-hunting Giulietta like Paul's. And here was the Fratry of St Caspianus, half-derelict, still sheltering some unimaginable obscurity of devotion. And then a sound you often heard at Matt's, the two-note blast of a juggernaut's horn, echoing from a narrow street like the Last Trump in an unknown Requiem.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The blacks, for the most part, were not to be found with the flower children. In the eerie American way, they walked the same streets, were to be found in the same neighbor hoods, were the targets of the very same forces, seemed to bear each other no ill will-on the contrary indeed, especially from the point of view of the forces watching them-and yet 468 NO NAME IN THE STREET they seemed to have no effect on each other, and they cer tainly were not together. The blacks were not putting their trust in flowers. They were putting their trust in guns. An historical wheel had come full circle. The descendants of the cowboys, who had slaughtered the Indians, the issue of those adventurers who had enslaved the blacks, wished to lay down their swords and shields. But these could be laid down only at Sambo's feet, and this was why they could not be together: I felt like a lip-reader watching the communica tion of despair. It was appalling, anyway, with or without flowers, to find so many children in the streets. In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, un precedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one's flesh and blood, especially one's children. The blacks arc the despised and slaughtered children of the great Western house-nameless and unnameable bastards. This is a fact so obvious, so speedily verifiable, that it would seem pure insan ity to deny it, and yet the life of the entire country is predi cated on this denial, this monstrous and pathetic lie. For many generations, many a white American has gone-sometimes shrieking-to his grave, knowing that his own son, the issue of his loins, was denied, and sometimes murdered by him. Many a white American woman has gone through life carrying the knowledge that she is responsible for the slaughter of her lover, and also for the destruction of that love's issue. Ye are liat'S and the truth's not in you: it cannot be pretty to be f( >rccd, with every day the good Lord sends, to tell so many lies about everything.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They had not expected to be t< >rced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realized how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defense of the rejected and destitute, they were confronted with the extent TO BE BAPTIZED of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free. I next came to San Francisco at the time of the flower chil dren, when everyone, young and not so young, was fr eaking out on whatever came to hand. The flower children were all up and down the Haight-Ashbury section of San Fran cisco-and they might have been everywhere else, too, but for the vigilance of the cops-with their long hair, their beads, their robes, their fancied resistance, and, in spite of a shrewd, hard skepticism as unnerving as it was unanswerable, really tormented by the hope of love. The fact that their uniforms and their jargon precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible-or no longer possible-could not be considered their fault. They had been born into a society in which noth ing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity. Their flowers had the validity, at least, of existing in direct challenge to the romance of the gun; their gentleness, however spe cious, was nevertheless a direct repudiation of the American adoration of violence. Yet they looked-alas-doomed. They seemed to sense their doom. They really were flower children, having opted out on the promises and possibilities offered them by the shining and now visibly perishing republic. I could not help feeling, watching them, knO\ving them to be idealistic, fr agmented, and impotent, that, exactly as the Third Reich had had first to conquer the German opposition before getting around to the Jews, and then the rest of Europe, my republic, which, unhappily, I was beginning to think of as the Fourth Reich, would be forced to plow under the flower chil dren-in all their variations-before getting around to the blacks and then the rest of the world.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation. I was a kind of ruminant there. Even so, it did not turn out in quite the way that—in the first numbed and degraded hours—I had imagined it would. Indeed, for several weeks the time rushed by, and it was really only in the final month, when freedom grew palpably close, that every minute took on a crabwise, cunctatory manner, came near to stalling altogether. I was haunted then by an image, a visionary impression of young spring greenery—birches and aspens—quickened by breeze but seen as if through frosted glass, blurred and silent. But by then a real atrocity had happened, something more than my freedom had been taken away from me. My early days there called on my resilience. It was like being pitched again into the Gothic and arcane world of school, learning again to absorb or deflect the vengeful energies which governed it. But a difference soon emerged, for while the schoolboys were bound to struggle for supremacy, and in doing so to align themselves with authority, thus becoming educated and socially orthodox at once, we in the prison were joined by our unorthodoxy: we were all social outcasts. The effects of this were often ambiguous. Many of the distinctions of the outside world survived: respect for class, disgust at certain violent or inhumane crimes, and the ostracising of those who had been convicted of them. But at the same time, since we were all criminals, a layer of social pretence had been removed. There could be no question of pretending one was not a lover of men; and since many of the inmates of my wing were sex criminals—or ‘nonces’ in the nonce-word of the place—there was between us a curiously sustaining mood of sympathy and understanding. Of course guilt and shame were not magically annulled by this, but a goodish number of us—by no means all first offenders—had been caught for soliciting or conspiring to perform indecent acts, or for some intimacy (often fervently reciprocated) with underage boys. And many of the prisoners themselves, of course, were little more than children, old enough only to know the dictates of their hearts and to be sent to prison. The place was fuller than it ever had been with our people, as a direct result of the current brutal purges, and many were the tales of treachery and deceit, of bribed and lying witnesses, and false friends turning Queen’s Evidence, and going free. Such tales circulated constantly among us—and I added my own mite to this worn and speaking currency.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, you could hardly start groping him in a lesson." Then, "How's it going to end?" "That—that's too logical and impossible a question. How it is is all that counts." Edie said nothing. "I'm so empty and aching for him, he affects everything I do and think, and it's very hard to believe that maybe he doesn't even know. It really makes me feel quite mad at times. When I go round for the lessons, you know how it is, at first I feel absolutely mad simply being with him, then after a few minutes I kind of subdue my passion with words, things get normalised, their banality somehow shows through for a while—of course there are spurts of hot heart-burn—and then as the end approaches it becomes unbearable again. I feel my face is stiff with all the pain he doesn't even know he's inflicted: it's just that basic biological thing, you can't stand being separated, and for minutes after he's said goodbye your heart is thumping and thumping and you feel full of despair and shock as if you'd just witnessed some great accident. And you have to have a drink." I took a deep pull on the cigarette and stubbed the whole thing out. "Ah, coffee." The waiter set down the copper pot, and busied and obstructed us removing the ashtray and at last empty glasses. "Which way do you think his thoughts turn?" Edie asked. "Anights? Well, it's hard . . . Did I mention the Three? They enhance each other's mystique no end. They're all beautiful and well off and give the impression of being crazy about each other." "You know what they say . . . 'Un trio n'excite pas de soupçons'." "Well, my soupçons have never been more excites in their lives." I hesitated, and then drew out the wallet of pictures from my inside pocket. "I can show you." "Oh." I shuffled through the prints and laid out half a dozen in front of her. She seemed deliberately to take a detached line. "So this dark one is Patrick? He looks a real little thug, I must say. Quite nice though." "He doesn't look a thug. He's got a gigantic cock." "Sibylle is lovely, I agree. beautiful eyes, and mouth; and colouring." "Yes." "She looks very sophisticated and irresistible." "Quite. Thank you." "And this must be him." I looked away and then back to the upside-down image and waited for her reaction. It was the faun-like picture of Luc on the beach. "Don't you think it's very ancient Greece that one?" "Mm. Where was it taken?" "It's at a place just over the French border where the Three are always going. I followed them down there with my friend Matt and we kind of spied on them." "I see, you took this." "No, no—no. I stole the negatives and had them printed."

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  “No, not so much then. I didn’t get into sex in a big way until after I left home and my parents had less control over me. I didn’t have a steady boyfriend until I was a freshman in college. I met Ian the summer before my junior year. We smoked a lot of dope together and had a good time. But one night we got caught just like my brother, and my folks threw me out of the house. I had nowhere to go, except to Ian’s, and so I moved in with him. This threw us together before we were ready and then everything went downhill. We spent the next three years in a repeat of my parents’ relationship except with marijuana and speed, not alcohol.” Because her parents cut off all financial support, Carol dropped out of college and went to work as a waitress. “I was completely dependent on Ian for almost everything, including a place to live, a car, and money. This put me where I least wanted to be, feeling vulnerable and powerless. It wasn’t long before things got really ugly. We broke up several times, got back together several times, and fought like tigers. It usually ended with Ian hitting me and locking me out of the apartment. I felt like he had a hard hold or a spell on me because I just couldn’t leave him. I’d collapse outside the door and cry and whimper and beg him to open the door, just like a dog, and let me back in.” Just then a shadow fell over Carol’s face and her voice strangled. “I wanted so much to talk to my mom or my dad about what was happening with Ian and hoped they would tell me what to do. I desperately needed to talk to someone, anyone. I remember crying, and the image of my mother’s face would come up. Even though she threw me out and did all sorts of terrible things to me, I still needed her. It’s crazy, but the more she hurt me the more I desperately longed for the kind of mom I never had.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I was," I said rudely. "I'm waiting for someone. Well, Cherif, you remember him." "Oh him," said Ty condescendingly. "He's a stupid young man." "He's living with me at the moment," I said, not exactly to contradict him. And then in a few sentences I told him how I was despairing in love, trapped in my own home by a boy who was in love with me, and now my place of work had been infiltrated by someone I hated. I doubt I would have poured it all out so succinctly and bitterly to anyone capable of responding, but to formulate it to Ty was a distinct lonely relief. All I kept back was the repeating shock of Dawn's being dead, my own regret at his not having said goodbye, the guilty certainty that anything I did was something he couldn't do. His reply was blithe but still surprising. "Well, I know what you are like. You must tell your love to the boy, otherwise you will never have peace with yourself, and try to find out the good side of the Rex Stout person, which there must be, and say to someone who has just come into the bar that he must go and live somewhere else and go to hell too." "Thank you," I said, as he got up and finger-waved goodbye. I wondered what had happened at the man's house in the country. Perhaps he ran a moral self-help centre. I heard Cherif give his mocking hoot at Ty as they passed behind me. "Baby, why do you call Ty Mouchoir?" I asked him, when he'd settled and fussed over me enough. He grinned and pointed between his legs. "Because it is not real. Just a rolled-up hanky." "Don't be ridiculous." He shook his head with a little moue of incontrovertibility. "I know," he said, clearly not wanting to offend me with the details of proof. Actually, I thought the story might help to pass the coming hours. I longed for Edie and wished she would come back again, with her gift for sharing and judging my feelings at the same time. She didn't know how many imagined dialogues she took part in, how often her friend addressed his silent pleas and exclamations to her. Still, soon I would be beyond caring, the wave of drink would rise and after a pretence of doggy-paddle I would embrace Cherif and go under.