Longing

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 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I watched in disbelief as she charmed the uncharmable Knights. My protective sisters, my shy mother, my autocratic father, they were no match for her. Especially my father. When she shook his hand, she melted something hard at his core. Maybe it was growing up among the Candy Bar People, and all their mogul friends—she had the kind of self-confidence you run across once or twice in a lifetime. She was certainly the only person I’d ever known who could casually drop Babe Paley and Hermann Hesse into the same conversation. She admired them both. But especially Hesse. She was going to write a book about him one day. “It’s like Hesse says,” she purred over dinner one night, “happiness is a how, not a what.” The Knights chewed their pot roast, sipped their milk. “Very interesting,” my father said. I brought Sarah down to the worldwide headquarters of Blue Ribbon, in the basement, and showed her the operation. I gave her a pair of Limber Ups. She wore them when we drove out to the coast. We went hiking up Humbug Mountain, and crabbing along the scalloped coastline, and huckleberry picking in the woods. Standing under an eighty-foot spruce we shared a huckleberry kiss. When it was time for her to fly back to Maryland, I was bereft. I wrote her every other day. My first-ever love letters. Dear Sarah, I think about sitting beside that

• From Educated (2018)

  Just the play over in town, where his youngest daughter was singing the lead. Dad didn’t stop me from auditioning for the next play, or the one after that, even though he worried about me spending so much time away from home. “There’s no telling what kind of cavorting takes place in that theater,” he said. “It’s probably a den of adulterers and fornicators.” When the director of the next play got divorced, it confirmed Dad’s suspicions. He said he hadn’t kept me out of the public school for all these years just to see me corrupted on a stage. Then he drove me to the rehearsal. Nearly every night he said he was going to put a stop to my going, that one evening he’d just show up at Worm Creek and haul me home. But each time a play opened he was there, in the front row. Sometimes he played the part of an agent or manager, correcting my technique or suggesting songs for my repertoire, even advising me about my health. That winter I caught a procession of sore throats and couldn’t sing, and one night Dad called me to him and pried my mouth open to look at my tonsils. “They’re swollen, all right,” he said. “Big as apricots.” When Mother couldn’t get the swelling down with echinacea and calendula, Dad suggested his own remedy. “People don’t know it, but the sun is the most powerful medicine we have. That’s why people don’t get sore throats in summer.” He nodded, as if approving of his own logic, then said, “If I had tonsils like yours, I’d go outside every morning and stand in the sun with my mouth open—let those rays seep in for a half hour or so. They’ll shrink in no time.” He called it a treatment. I did it for a month. It was uncomfortable, standing with my jaw dropped and my head tilted back so the sun could shine into my throat. I never lasted a whole half hour. My jaw would ache after ten minutes, and I’d half-freeze standing motionless in the Idaho winter. I kept catching more sore throats, and anytime Dad noticed I was a bit croaky, he’d say, “Well, what do you expect? I ain’t seen you getting treatment all week!” —IT WAS AT THE Worm Creek Opera House that I first saw him: a boy I didn’t know, laughing with a group of public school kids, wearing big white shoes, khaki shorts and a wide grin. He wasn’t in the play, but there wasn’t much to do in town, and I saw him several more times that week when he turned up to visit his friends. Then one night, when I was wandering alone in the dark wings backstage, I turned a corner and found him sitting on the wooden crate that was a favorite haunt of mine. The crate was isolated—that was why I liked it. He shifted to the right, making room for me.

• From City of Night (1963)

  A streetangel. I bought him pairs of shoes! And Paris, that magnificent city of statues, glowed for me as if lighted by heaven itself. Alas, he was a robbing angel,” he sighed, feeling absently for his wristwatch. “But what I had gotten from him! Ah!” He turned heavenward. “My friend, the playwright—” He mentioned a French writer. “—was fond of saying, ‘We take when we must take, and we give when we must give.’ Oh, he was chic!... Now about you. What is the appeal that the streets hold for you? What do you look for? And, mainly, what do you find? The streets: where one can find a glorious child without shoes—or someone to buy them for him. In the streets where I found, in Paris, another vivid angel: with his father and mother. He was perhaps sixteen; he wore a tiny cross around his neck, and it fell on his chest, the shirt open almost to his lovely navel. And the mother and father saw me and said good day. They invited me to their drab home—too drab to house such an angel as their child—and so, understanding that, they let me have him: He lived with me—for a space of time, a glorious space of time. And for that glorious time, in gratitude, I saw that the father and mother had glorious wine on their table—daily.... The mother looked like a witch, Oh, yes! I believe in witches! There is much in the occult, you know. How is it possible for our time to believe in the fairytale of God and not in the other dark powers? Which is more difficult to believe? I have seen witches, I have seen them work, but I have not seen God.... I knew a woman in California who practiced witchcraft: Her power was Awesome. (She had a medium, a youngman... another affair!)... And when she discovered—brutally—that people came to her as one goes to see a clever fraud—not really believing in her Powers—when she discovered that, she willed herself to death. Yes—she announced she would die, and she did: trying futilely to prove by dying what she realized suddenly she had not proved by living: that she believed what she said.... People—people—” he started almost painfully: “people—die—when they see life—at last—without—Illusions—For some, it takes many, many years; for others, much less. And so each of us commits suicide: when we will our own deaths: That is the only Death....” He paused, studying the tape-measure. “But enough about the dark powers of the heart—yes, deceitful above all things!... On to more pleasant things!... A friend of mine—a director—said: ‘You are a talent scout, Professor.’ And indeed, I always search out Talent, dear, dear, child—angel—uncategorized angel. (Am I being unfaithful to you, Robbie? Robbie! Guard me, watch over me!)...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Anyone with half an eye could see that my heart lay all with Kitty Butler now; anyone might guess that, having once been offered the chance of a future at her side, and kept from it, I could never return to my father’s kitchen and be happy there, as I had been before. So when, an hour or so after Kitty’s departure, I nervously put her plan before my parents, and argued and pleaded for their blessing, they listened to me wonderingly, but carefully; and when, the next day, Father stopped me on my way down to the kitchen to draw me into the parlour where it was quiet and still, his face was sad and serious, but kind. He asked me, first, whether I had not changed my mind? I shook my head, and he sighed. He said, if I was quite decided, then Mother and he could not keep me; that I was a grown-up woman, almost, and should be allowed to know my own mind; that they had thought to see me marry a Whitstable boy, and settle close at hand, and so have a share in my little happinesses and troubles - but that now, he supposed, I would go and hitch up with some London fellow, who wouldn’t understand their ways at all. But children, he concluded, weren’t made to please their parents; and no father should expect to have his daughter at his side for ever... ‘In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow - and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.’ I had never known him so grave before, nor so eloquent. I had never seen him weep either; but now as he spoke his eyes glistened, and he blinked, twice or thrice, to hold the tears back, and his voice grew thin. I placed my head against his shoulder and let my own tears rise and spill. He put an arm about me, and patted me. ‘It breaks our hearts to lose you, dear,’ he went on. ‘You know it does. Only promise us that you won’t forget us, quite. That you’ll write to us, and visit us.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Whenever I go back to Eugene, and walk the campus, I think of her. Whenever I stand outside Hayward Field, I think of the silent race she ran. I think of all the many races that each of us have run. I lean against the fence and look at the track and listen to the wind, thinking of Bowerman with his string tie blowing behind him. I think of Pre, God love him. Turning, looking over my shoulder, my heart leaps. Across the street stands the William Knight Law School. A very serious-looking edifice. No one ever jackasses around in there. I CAN’T SLEEP. I can’t stop thinking about that blasted movie, The Bucket List. Lying in the dark, I ask myself again and again, What’s on yours? Pyramids? Check. Himalayas? Check. Ganges? Check. So… nothing? I think about the few things I want to do. Help a couple of universities change the world. Help find a cure for cancer. Besides that, it’s not so much things I want to do as things I’d like to say. And maybe unsay. It might be nice to tell the story of Nike. Everyone else has told the story, or tried to, but they always get half the facts, if that, and none of the spirit. Or vice versa. I might start the story, or end it, with regrets. The hundreds—maybe thousands—of bad decisions. I’m the guy who said Magic Johnson was “a player without a position, who’ll never make it in the NBA.” I’m the guy who tabbed Ryan Leaf as a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning. It’s easy to laugh those off. Other regrets go deeper. Not phoning Hiraku Iwano after he quit. Not getting Bo Jackson renewed in 1996. Joe Paterno. Not being a good enough manager to avoid layoffs. Three times in ten years—a total of fifteen hundred people. It still haunts. Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—that I can’t do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I’d like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on. It’s all the same drive. The same dream.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday. They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame. Later, as I kissed them good-night, he cleared his throat. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘back up to London in the morning, and I’ve barely had time for a proper look at you.’ I smiled. ‘Have you had a nice time with us, Nance?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘And you will take care of yourself, in London?’ asked Mother. ‘It seems very far away.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not so far.’ ‘Far enough,’ she said, ‘to keep you from us for a year and a half.’ ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. ‘We have been terribly busy, both of us.’ She nodded, not much impressed: she had heard all this before, in letters. ‘Just make sure it’s not so long before you come home again. It is very nice to get your parcels; it was very nice to get those gifts; but we would rather have you, than a hairbrush or a pair of boots.’ I looked away, abashed; I still felt foolish when I thought about the presents. Even so, I didn’t think she needed to be quite so rusty about it, quite so hard. Having made the decision to leave sooner, I grew impatient. I packed my bags that night, and rose, next morning, even earlier than Alice. At seven, when the breakfast things were cleared away, I was ready to go. I embraced them all, but my parting was not so sad, nor so sweet, as it had been the first time I had left them; and I had no premonition of anything to come, to make it sadder. Davy was kind, and made me promise I would come home for his wedding, and said I might bring Kitty if I liked, which made me love him all the more.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  If she moved towards King’s Cross again, I should miss her. At last she stowed the paper in a satchel that was slung, crosswise, over her chest, and turned - to her left, towards me. I kept to my step and, as I had before, I watched her; slowly she drew level with me until, once again, there was no more than the width of the road between us. I saw her eyes flick once towards mine, then away, and then, as she felt the persistence of my gaze, to mine again. I smiled; she slowed her step and, with a show of uncertainty, smiled back: but I could see that she had not the least idea who I might be. I couldn’t let the moment pass. While my eyes still held her questioning, amiable gaze, I lifted my hand to my head and raised my hat, and said in the same low tone that I had used on her before: ‘G’mornin’.’ As before, she started. Then she glanced up at the balcony above my head. And then she pinked. ‘Oh! It was you then - was it?’ I smiled again, and gave a little bow. My stays creaked; it felt all wrong, being gallant in a skirt, and I had a sudden fear that she might take me not for an impertinent voyeur, but for a fool. But when I raised my eyes to hers again her flush was fading, and her face showed neither contempt, nor discomfiture, but a kind of amusement. She tilted her head. A van passed between us, followed by a cart. In lifting my hat to her this time I had thought only, and vaguely, to correct the earlier misunderstanding; perhaps, to make her smile. But when the street was once again clear and she still stood there it seemed a kind of invitation. I crossed, and stood before her. I said, ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you the other night.’ She seemed embarassed at the memory, but laughed. ‘You didn’t frighten me,’ she said, as if she were never frightened. ‘You just gave me a bit of a start. If I’d known you were a woman — well!’ She blushed again - or it may have been the same blush as before, I couldn’t tell. Then she glanced away; and we fell silent. ‘Where’s your friend the musician?’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The cloud-base is low today. It does not matter. He is not flying today. He is walking. He is walking with his hawk, and he and Gos have traversed five fields to get here. Now he stands by the ruins of the chapel of St Thomas the Martyr. Once it was a chapel, then it was a house, and now it is a ruin, a great, collapsing carcass of stained ironstone. The roof is a broken ribcage heaped with rotting thatch. Lintels sag over windows and doors blocked with laths and limestone rubble. Great banks of nettles grow here, rich and green. Ash trees rise in lacy fists and the fields fall away each side. It is very quiet. He hears the ticking of a robin somewhere, like falling water. This place is soundly cursed against man, he thinks. The stink of the dead sheep he found dumped in a drain is still caught in his nose, a sorry, sodden wreck of fleece pullulating with maggots. He does not mind the smell. It is a bracing stench. It is the smell of mortality. He looks down at the rabbit-cropped turf. Beneath him, the people that lived and died and were buried here are here still, he thinks; their old bones would be grateful to see a goshawk again. He walks around the chapel, imagining the earth beneath him turning and muttering as it senses the familiar hawk above, as the bones of farm labourers mutter when agricultural machinery passes over their forgotten tombs. I thought of the small race now underground, strangers of a vanished species safe from comprehension, almost from imagination: monks, nuns, and the eternal villein. I was as close to them as anybody now, close even to Chaucer, ‘with grey goshawk in hond’. They would understand my hawk with their eyes, as a farmer understood an elevator. We loved each other. White’s visit to Chapel Green was my favourite part of The Goshawk when I was young. It was a communion with something lost and forgotten, and somehow a hawk was at the heart of it. It always gave me a sense of kinship with White – although I couldn’t imagine why farmers should have special knowledge of elevators. That made no sense at all. Maybe he meant to write ‘tractor’, I thought, for I didn’t know then what a bale elevator was, nor that White had been lately watching the Wheelers, who farmed the land around him, using one. But I could imagine the chapel quite clearly when I was small, and now it was clearer than ever. If I shut my eyes I saw White lifting Gos on his fist and shutting his own eyes very tight, as if it were possible for the whole mess of the twentieth century to slip aside, and the world of centuries before be resurrected, a lost community with him at its heart. He would have been loved. He would have been understood.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend. Safety. I think of the American airmen stationed here seventy years ago flying aircraft just like this one, scrambling to the iceboxes that were cockpits, wearing heated suits that didn’t work, breathing oxygen through rubber hoses that furred with crystalline ice, so that at altitude they had to bend and crush them between their fingers to get sufficient oxygen to breathe. They slept on cots in an alien land of rain and fog, dressed in silence for dawn briefings before running to their ships, holding the throttles forward, tight-chested as the engines spooled up, climbing through cloud, eyes locked on the manifold pressure gauges and the rpm displays, navigators calling headings in degrees. And then the hours of flight to and from Germany where they dropped their appalling cargo through skies thick with exploding shells. One in four did not complete their tour of duty. The sky was not a place of safety, no matter how commanding their view. What happened to them was terrible. What they did was terrible beyond imagining. No war can ever be just air. The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives’ ends. She finishes the last scraps of rabbit, strops her beak, rubs strands of pale fur onto the glove. Then she shakes her feathers into place and gazes up at the empty sky where the bomber had been. And I feel it then, the tug. How did Auden’s poem go, after those lines? The clouds rift suddenly – look there I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk’s eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And so, with Eminent contiadictions (I must warn you), the wayward saga of Miss Destiny unfolds—that night at the 1-2-3, in the ocean of searching faces: “Naturally,” she continued, “I got into the Finest circles. Philadelphia society and all that—and Im sippin muh cocktail at this party when in walks the most positively gorgeous youngman I have evuh seen. And he stares at me! Walked away from the hostess—who was a real lady (a society model, baby, and later she became a Moviestar and married that king—you know)—” muttering bitch after Pauline who just then passed brushing my shoulder purposely to bug Miss Destiny “—and this gorgeous youngman, why, he comes to me and says—just like that—‘You Are My Destiny!’ and I thought he said, ‘You are Miss Destiny,’ mistaking me you know for some other girl, and when the hostess says Im the most beautiful fish shes evuh seen, what is my name, Im terrified the gorgeous youngman will drop me if Im not who I think he thinks I am, so I say, ‘I am Miss Destiny,’ and he thinks I said, ‘I am his destiny’ (he told me later), and he says, ‘Yes oh yes she is,’ and from then on ‘I am Miss Destiny—” (Oh they go home that night and Miss Destiny must confess she is not a real woman, but, oh, oh, he doesnt care, having of course flipped over her, and he takes her to his country estate, his family naturally being Fabulously rich, and they simply Idolize Miss Destiny....) “His name was Duke,” Miss Destiny sighed, “and when I met him, oh I remember, they were playing La Varsouviana (thats ‘Put Your Little Foot,’ dear)—you see, although it was a cocktail party, it was so Elegant that they had an orchestra—and how I loved him, and I know thats a strange name—Duke—but it was his real name, not a nickname—but he would be a wild rose by any other name and smell as sweet!... Being aristocrats, all his family had strange names: his mother’s name was ah Alexandria, just like the ah queen of ah ancient Sparta who killed the ah emperor in Greek mythology (those are very old stories, dear)—” Suddenly here is Darling Dolly Dane back gasping tugging at Miss Destiny, who of course resents the intrusion in the middle of her autobiography. “Destiny, Destiny, quick,” Darling Dolly pleads, “Ive got to have the key to your pad right away quick hurry!” I notice Darling Dolly is carrying a small bundle that looks suspiciously like a pair of pants. All right, all right—and what does Darling Dolly want the key for? Darling Dolly Dane says she just clipped the score she went with who promised her the deuce, remember?

• From City of Night (1963)

  Between them was a very young, handsome boy, his shirt open to the waist. One of the woman’s arms was draped proudly about the boy’s shoulders; the other hand held a bottle of wine toward the camera.)... “This is for the last,” the Professor said, skipping a page, bringing the book to his chest momentarily; goes on: “And this is the most poetic of my poetic angels—he wrote the Most Divine, sensitive poems—crystals!—I helped him to get a grant—not through any foundation, mind you, but part of mine: My life’s source at that time thus contributing to his.” (The youngman in the picture wore his hair poetically over his forehead.) “He was a beautiful poet—” the Professor sighed, “and when I told him I would help him, he told me, passionately, that he would dedicate his first volume to me. Ive wondered if it came out.... Danny, the ice-skater: He glided across my not-so-icy heart.... And this one!—a Mr America candidate!” (The body in the photograph gleamed coldly as if chiseled out of ice.)... There were other photographs—youngmen in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, America... several sailors, servicemen, various youngmen in trunks: all staring at the world with a look strangely in common: a look which at first I thought was a coldness behind the smile and then realized must be a kind of muted despair, a franticness to get what the world had offered others and not extended readily to them.... And now the Professor turns back to the page he had skipped. I knew whom the picture would be of: “This—Is—Robbie,” he announced. (I saw a handsome youngman sitting on a foreign car, squinting at the sun, smiling widely as if someday he would own the world; as if the world for him was a mirror. But even in the picture he seemed to resent the brightness of the sun, greater than his own.) “I have here,” the Professor sighed, hugging the album closely again, “the indefinable shape of love—to which, dear child, you must not deny my adding your photograph....” I wondered suddenly if. I would photograph with the same hard look.... I remember Mr King: “Pictures in a fuckedup album.”) “Yes, Love, indeed,” the Professor said, “which has many forms. Who loved the most? I? They? Who was the taker, who the giver? Who can tell? Someday—at the last of my Research—I shall know.... Now,” he said, “take the chair and come stand near me—please....” I placed the album under the heavy book with the Professor’s name on the cover. I could feel the bulging eyes on me as I lifted the book, slipped the album under it on the shelf. I went and stood by the bed. When I was ready to leave, the Professor waved as usual. Again he sighed after me: “God Is Love!” Outside, the malenurse stared frozenly at me.

• From City of Night (1963)

  2 “Now, sit near me,” he said. “Yes, do bring that chair over. Not that one: the other one, it’s more comfortable, and I want you to be Comfortable.... Careful, now—my manuscripts. Push them aside, child—neatly, neatly—I was looking through some things before you came.” Sighing deeply, he waves a chubby hand over the room, indicating the books and manuscripts littering the floor. “They are: Relics—from another life!... Now, first of all, let me explain some exterior situations: You see me here, now, in this hospital bed, where Ive been for months and months; Suffice it to say: an Eternity! An automobile struck me—and it would have been Poetic Justice, yes, if I could say I had been hit by a gigantic truck—driven by a young handsome truckdriver, who knelt to gather my shattered heap of flesh (you see: I say ‘shattered heap of flesh’—I am frank with myself: Life wrecks all illusions—but you will find that out later), and to whom—had it been just such a handsome young truckdriver, though the very instrument of my infirmity—I would owe my life: There would have been something extravagantly Sexual—” He affected a slight tremor. “—about being struck by a truck—ummm—Well!... But, oh, the perversity of life: no such magnificent luck. It was no such earthangel who ran into me: but—ah, perversity, dear boy, keep it in mind: Perversity!—I was hit by a nervous, high-strung, skinny, homely, ineffectual, simpering oldmaid from Oklahoma, vainly trying to compete with our own glorious system of cabs! Not that I have anything against Oklahoma. As you will learn, I have some fond memories of—But that comes later.... And so it has taken all those months. This frail mechanism (if I may be allowed the indiscretion of referring to myself as ‘frail’—ha, ha—but I speak only relatively)—this frail mechanism called the body has refused to heal. In other words, the hip bone is no longer connected to the—How does that song go?... Anyway, you see me now rigged up in a 20th-century torture—not entirely unlike those used by the Inquisitors of old.... But do bring your chair closer, youngman—I want to hear every word you say, every phrase.... You will notice I have a hearing aid—which at times I feel must indeed be connected to an electronic god, who whispers all kinds of naughty electronic gossip to me. And, sometimes, alas! falls deadly silent... But you see, I am a bit of a poet, and you will understand—later, because I hope you will become my angel. (Robbie, forgive me, forgive me! )” He entreated Heaven.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  No, I shall go on my own.’ I said it rather firmly, as if going to the Palace every night was some chore I had been set to do and I had generously decided to do it with the minimum of bother and complaint. There was a second’s almost awkward silence. Then Father said, ‘You are a funny little thing, Nancy. All the way to Canterbury in the sweltering heat - and not even to wait for a glimpse of Gully Sutherland when you get there!’ And at that, everybody laughed, and the second’s awkwardness passed, and the conversation turned to other things. There were more cries of disbelief, however, and more smiles, when I came home from my third trip to the Palace and announced, shyly, my intention of returning there a fourth time, and a fifth. Uncle Joe was visiting us: he was pouring beer from a bottle, carefully, into a tilted glass, but looked up when he heard the laughter. ‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘Nancy’s mashed out on that Kitty Butler, at the Palace,’ said Davy. ‘Imagine that, Uncle Joe - being mashed on a masher!’ I said, ‘You shut up.’ Mother looked sharp. ‘You shut up, please, madam.’ Uncle Joe took a sip of his beer, then licked the froth from his whiskers. ‘Kitty Butler?’ he said. ‘She’s the gal what dresses up as a feller, ain’t she?’ He pulled a face. ‘Pooh, Nancy, the real thing not good enough for you any more?’ Father leaned towards him. ‘Well, we are told it is Kitty Butler,’ he said. ‘If you ask me’ - and here he winked and rubbed his nose - ‘I think there’s a young chap in the orchestra pit what she’s got her eye on ...’ ‘Ah,’ said Joe, significantly. ‘Let’s hope poor Frederick don’t catch on to it, then ...’ At that, everybody looked my way, and I blushed - and so seemed, I suppose, to prove my father’s words. Davy snorted; Mother, who had frowned before, now smiled. I let her - I let them all think just what they liked - and said nothing; and soon, as before, the talk turned to other matters. I could deceive my parents and my brother with my silences; from my sister Alice, however, I could keep nothing. ‘Is there a feller you’ve got your eye on, at the Palace?’ she asked me later, when the rest of the house lay hushed and sleeping. ‘Of course not,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s just Miss Butler, then, that you go to see?’ ‘Yes.’ There was a silence, broken only by the distant rumble of wheels and faint thud of hooves, from the High Street, and the even fainter sucking whoosh of sea against shingle from the bay. We had put out our candle but left the window wide and unshuttered. I saw in the gleam of starlight that Alice’s eyes were open.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I saw and heard it all, now, because - it was the very reason that had kept me blind and deaf to it before! - because his passion was my own, which I had long grown used to thinking unremarkable, and right. I almost pitied him; I almost loved him. I did not hate him - or if I did, it was only as one loathes the looking-glass, that shows one one’s imperfect form in strict and fearful clarity. Nor did I now begin to resent his presence on those strolls and visits that I should otherwise have made with Kitty on my own. He was my rival, of sorts; but in some queer way it was almost easier to love her in his company, than out of it. His presence gave me a licence to be bold and gay and sentimental, as he was; to be able to pretend to worship her - which was almost as good as being able to worship her in earnest. And if I still longed yet feared to hold her - well, as I have said, the fact that Walter felt the same showed that both my reticence and my love were only natural and proper. She was a star - my private star - and I would be content, I thought, like Walter, to fly about her on my stiff and distant orbit, unswervingly, for ever. I could not know how soon we would collide, nor how dramatically. By now it was December - a cold December to match the sweltering August, so cold that the little skylight above our staircase at Ma Dendy’s was thick with ice for days at a time; so cold that when we woke in the mornings our breath showed grey as smoke, and we had to pull our petticoats into bed with us and dress beneath the sheets. At home in Whitstable we hated the cold, because it made the trawler-men’s job so much the harder. I remember my brother Davy sitting at our parlour fire on January evenings, and weeping, simply weeping with pain, as the life returned to his split and frozen hands, his chilblained feet. I remember the ache in my own fingers as I handled pail after frigid pail of winter oysters, and transferred fish, endlessly, from icy seawater to steaming soup. At Mrs Dendy’s, however, everybody loved the winter months; and the colder they were, they said, the better. Because frosts, and chill winds, fill theatres. For many Londoners a ticket to the music hall is cheaper than a scuttle of coal - or, if not cheaper, then more fun: why stay in your own miserable parlour stamping and clapping to keep the cold out when you can visit the Star or the Paragon, and stamp and clap along with your neighbours - and with Marie Lloyd as an accompaniment?

• From City of Night (1963)

  He couldnt understand what I had received from Robbie, my Robbie. But Martin is not a very perceptive person: His books are searchlights on the facts of our world—but cold, too, like searchlights. And where his heart should be, there is a novel.... I wish that were original but it is not: A psychiatrist said that to him once, who, incidently—how shall I say it and be modest?— “was intrigued” by me. He—the psychiatrist—persuaded me to let him give me the Rorschach test—to test my subconscious!—and I let him—on a lark. I looked at one of the inkblots, and he said, “‘What do you see?’ I answered, ‘I see you , trying to see me! ’... And that reminds me of a young assistant to the good Dr. Kinsey. The assistant didnt fool me a second; he was a professional voyeur. Do you know what that is, my dear young angel? A watcher! Science—oh, yes—truly—he was most dedicated to the science of Sexology.... Countess von Braun was fond of saying: ‘If Sex is a science, its only laboratory is the Bedroom!’ ...I introduced the young assistant to two charming youngmen I knew (one of them gained a certain notoriety by playing the naked sailor in the musical Island Paradise ), and the assistant Expressed An Interest in seeing one of their ‘wild parties’—for The Research.... Shall I amuse you?... Well! These boys were not that kind —they were very quiet lovers—and I do not mean any trace of contempt when I say ‘that kind’—it is a most extraordinary kind, that kind. Anyway, the assistant was so insistent (The Insistent Assistant!) that they decided to ‘stage’ a wild party for him. And they did. It was incredible! The good assistant kept moving from room to room, watching—and, child, it was more than the glimmer of scientific discovery that shone in the good assistant’s eyes!... He asked to interview me, for The Book, but I told him my affairs with the angels are too precious to reduce them to lines on a graph! For example, how could he have indicated on a graph what Joe Jones (it was part of his distinction that he had such a common name—at first)—what Joe Jones meant to me? He was definitely an earthangel—and is there a graph for such a breed?...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I pulled at a thread that had come loose at my cuff. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said quietly, ‘to have a tidy house. I thought -’ I had thought that it would make her like me. In Diana’s world, it would have. It, or something similar. ‘I liked my house the way it was,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!’ She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!’ ‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.’ I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John’s Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work. I wouldn’t give him laudanum when he cried!’ Now Florence’s eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I’m sure I couldn’t let you do all those things!’ ‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It’s natural, ain’t it? If I was your wife - or Ralph’s wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.’ Now she folded her arms. ‘In this house, Miss Astley, that’s possibly the very worst argument you could have hit upon.’ As she spoke, however, the front door opened and Ralph appeared. He had an evening paper under one arm, and Cyril under the other. ‘My word,’ he said, ‘look at the shine on this step! I am frightened to tread on it.’ He saw me and smiled - ‘Hallo, still here?’ - then he glanced about the room. ‘And look at all this! I haven’t come into the wrong parlour, have I?’ Florence stepped across to him to take the baby, then propelled him out towards the kitchen. Here I heard him exclaiming very warmly - first over Annie, and then over the beef and potatoes, and finally over the pineapple. Florence struggled with Cyril for a moment: he was squirming and fractious and about to cry. I went to her, and - with terrible boldness, for the last baby I had held had been my cousin’s child, four years before: and he had screamed in my face - I said, ‘Give him to me, babies love me.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  You see, too, the long sequin-lighted rows, on either side, of stores and counter-restaurants, B-girled bars, Red Devil hotdog stands, movie-houses.... But you wont be disappointed for long if youve come to burrow beneath the tourist-neon surface of these streets. Off Las Palmas, along—but on the opposite side of—the outdoor newsstand—where professional existentialists with or without sandals leaf through a paperback book and the fairies cruise each other by the physique books, while the lady from, say, Iowa (who will sigh Ahhhhhh as the Premiere searchlights screw the sky), here to attend a PTA convention at the Biltmore, buys a moviebook—off Las Palmas, on Saturday nights especially, the oldman graduate of Pershing Square writes Bible inscriptions on the street: in chalk; neat, incredibly beautiful letters. The young highschool delinquents with flattops proclaiming their Youth heckle him cruelly in merciless teenage fashion while he dashes out his prophecies of not-unlikely Doom: the booming words like the musicless theme of this street.... The fairies, half-listening momentarily to his shouting threats of imminent Judgment (while surveying the crowd for someone Cute), cross the street on their way, perhaps to the Green bar (where Miss Ana Mae—in Congenial Surroundings—will drown those echoing Threats as she plays her organ coyly), and they may say bitchily about the judging prophet: “My dear! Isnt she Too Much?—she should get a Man and settle down”—and swish on giggling—hoping for a Man to settle down with—wondering nervously does tonight’s sexnervousness show beneath the giggles (and this can easily ruin a girl), and will they make it tonight and if so will it be someone Nice and early please God so they wont have to add to the shadows on Selma. And Selma Street is a dark purgatory to which those who havent made it in the bars or on the lighted Boulevard sentence themselves in the desperate hours after midnight Along a distance of about four blocks on that street, throughout the late night and into the first morning hours, male ghostforms haunt Selma along the apartment houses and the outlined trees (all appropriately flimsy in the night like movieprops); stand waiting for a car to stop, for someone to ask them what theyre looking for: If what you want is what hes willing to give, you go; if not, you wait for someone else to emerge out of the shadows.... Faces stare out of dark parked cars you think at first are empty, until a match, lighted suddenly, erupts, revealing a pair of staring eyes in the match-shadowed face....

• From City of Night (1963)

  Skipper merely said: “That park’s for chippies, man!—hell, they go for pennies there!”... One night, high, he had talked everyone into driving to Hollywood, and then, moodily, had put it down: “Hollywood’s nowhere.”... Off and on he stayed at Trudi’s near Silverlake—a neat, feminine unit in a flowery court, paid for by Trudi’s “daddy.” And in that world youll hear that Trudi’s daddy really wants Skipper but wont admit he (the daddy) is a fruit, and so he makes it with Trudi, forgetting, maybe—which is easy—that Trudi, too, is, technically, a man. Once I had gone to score marijuana at Trudi’s house—she always had some—and Skipper was there, sitting at the table eating, while Trudi lovingly served him like a young infatuated wife.... When Skipper was gone for longer than a few days—and he would disappear periodically—Trudi would come into the bars, hardly madeup, looking like a mournful little girl, asking if anyone had seen him. When theyd tell her no, she’d shake her head: “Those goddam beads,” she’d mumble. Other times, at the 1-2-3, she would come in Grandly, completely madeup, to meet Skipper. There is a consuming franticness about Skipper which seizes you the moment he begins to talk—the words coming often in gasps—his eyes burning—at times as if about to explode with intensity, at times on the brink of closing, giving up. Constantly, he flexes his body, looking down at it, studying it, as if to make sure it is still intact.... He hangs around in one place only a few minutes; if he doesnt score immediately, he’ll leave, go to another bar; come back—and when he is sitting down, he constantly drums his fingers to the frenzied music—and even when the music is slow, the frantic drumming persists, as though the sounds he hears are coming from within; veiling his eyes—lowered lids—or looking down at the bar—as if he doesn’t want to see too Clearly; creating circles on the surface of the bar with the water from the glass, then erasing them abruptly with his hand.... By midnight, he is usually drunk.

• From City of Night (1963)

  All this gives San Francisco an aspect of purity—a magnificent impressionistic prettiness. Even its inevitably shabby streets—around Mission, say, or toward the Embarcadero, into Italiantown—exhale that fresh, fresh bay-air. For me, San Francisco was the inevitable step in that journey toward the loss of innocence. Although I didnt realize it then (telling myself that I was coming here to separate myself— again! —from what had become a guilt-obsessed life; that there was a resurrective atmosphere in San Francisco which would make this possible), I understand now that I came here instead to initiate myself in a further rite which that world would only too willingly expose me to: hinted at subtly the previous time I had been here: when I had explored, but shortly, the netherworld of that city. And I did get a job. Yet in fairness I must say that, even then, I knew that on the slightest pretext, if any—as before—I would quit. Looking out the window where I worked on Market Street, I saw an older man stop to talk to a boy who had been loitering at the corner obviously trying to score. Together, they moved away. Minutes later, I walked out on that job. Away from those streets, I was wasting my Youth. The end of youth is a kind of death. You die slowly by the process of gnawing discovery. You die too in the gigantic awareness that the miraculous passport given to the young can be ripped away savagely by the enemy Time.... Youth is a struggle against—and, paradoxically, therefore a struggle toward —death: a suicide of the soul. Like a repentant lover, I returned to that previous way of life. And so had I come, under the guise of separating myself from Los Angeles, to search, in this seasonless city, under that bright clear cold sky, not only the life I had left behind but a new aspect of it? And the side of that world I will explore now in San Francisco is one that will scorch my consciousness. There are, recurrently, things that you realize only in retrospect, things that could have been observed as signals at the time of their occurrence. So it had been with several of the people I had been with, in New York and Los Angeles, but mostly in that previous time in San Francisco: the urgent whispered sexmutterings (“I am a—...” “Make me do—...” “Call me a—...”). There had been too, as clearly in retrospect, the insistence on pressure at certain moments, the hands reaching for you eagerly pleading for that pressure.... The motorcycled bars of Los Angeles.... Yet I had not really wanted to know. Buzz is a youngish score in San Francisco, who generally made his pickups at the arcade on Market Street. He was obviously fond of his nickname, which, in its jivy sound, made him feel much closer to the youngmen he picked up than the ordinarily remote score.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Those books about people running to the wild to escape their grief and sorrow were part of a much older story, so old its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing. When I was a student slogging through the first years of my degree, I read a long and beautiful thirteenth-century poem called Sir Orfeo. No one knows who wrote it, and I had forgotten it existed. But one morning while pulling a handful of chicks out of the freezer the poem came to mind, turned out of the ground in one of those strange excavations of the disordered mind. Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and the underworld by way of traditional Celtic songs about the otherworld, the Land of Faery. In Celtic myth that otherworld is not deep underground; it is just one step aside from our own. Things can exist in both places at once – and things can be pulled from one to the other. In the poem, Heurodis sleeps in an orchard under a grafted fruit tree – an imptree – and dreams that the next day she will be stolen away by the King of Faery. Terrified, she tells her husband the King. Orfeo surrounds her with armed knights, but they cannot protect her from this otherworldly threat: she slips through the air and vanishes. Stricken with grief, Orfeo gives up his crown and runs to the forest. For ten years he lives a solitary, feral existence, digging for roots, eating leaves and berries, playing his harp to charm the beasts around him. His beard grows long and matted. He watches the grand hunting parties of the Faery King pass through the forest. He cannot follow them. But one day sixty ladies with falcons on their fists ride by, hunting for cormorants, mallards, herons. As he watches the falcons strike down their prey the world changes. He laughs with delight, remembering his love for the sport – ‘Parfay!’ quath he, ‘ther is fair game’ – and he walks towards the women, and sees among them his wife. He has entered that otherworld, and now he can follow them back to the castle of the Faery King, a palace full of people that were thought to be dead but are not. And it is there he plays his harp to the King and persuades him to release his wife. But it was the hawks’ flight and the deaths they brought that ushered him into that other world, let him find his wife that was lost. And this ability of hawks to cross borders that humans cannot is a thing far older than Celtic myth, older than Orpheus – for in ancient shamanic traditions right across Eurasia, hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.