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

  She snorted cocaine. When I saw her at age thirty-one, she had just moved into a small apartment in Oakland, by herself. For our visit, we both sat on boxes. And then I noticed that she had unpacked only one item—a framed photograph of herself as a little girl, standing with her mother and father, all smiling and happy. This is all that remained of the intact family, with Brenda struggling in her mind to hold on to some unity, some sense of affection, some hope. Even though her parents had in effect abandoned her, she, like Carol, talked about them with a longing that was utterly heartbreaking. Thus we are left with a troubling but very important finding that highlights what divorce can and cannot accomplish. Children who grow up in chaotic families—divorce or no divorce—have similar lives. The divorce by itself provides no rescue unless at least one parent changes and shows real concern for the child by establishing a stable household and responsible parenting. Sometimes, as Larry’s story shows, the child can rescue himself by finding mentors or summoning the inner strength to become his own parent. Both groups of children enter adulthood with low self-esteem, a hunger for love and human closeness, and badly skewed views of man-woman relationships. Women who are exposed to the sexual acting out of their parents are more likely to become promiscuous starting in their early teens and continuing into their twenties. But in what may be a silver lining to this dark cloud, their promiscuity tapers off as they reach their thirties. Some decide to just stop because they’re afraid of getting hurt or becoming ill. Others find that sex no longer relieves their depression. Still others are lucky enough to meet men who, as one woman put it, “refused to be just the next guy in line.” Two women in the divorced group joined churches with strict standards for moral behavior. “It took the church to keep my legs closed,” one told me seriously. The men raised in chaotic marriages and chaotic divorces also suffer low self-esteem but it’s not usually manifest in promiscuity. Rather, they turn to alcohol and drugs. Unlike their sisters who give up reckless sex, the men’s addictive behaviors overall do not wane as they reach their late twenties and early thirties. Nevertheless, a few of these men and women—six in all in our study—turned their lives around when they joined mainstream churches. None had gone to these churches as children, but here they found the moral guidelines they had been missing as children. They found spouses and a community that provided the support they had always longed for. I left Larry in his early twenties full of admiration for the progress he had achieved in rejecting the alcohol and violence that were the ideals of his adolescent years.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I don’t know quite why I was in there, but one evening in the cocktail bar I was served by this fabulously handsome boy, and I stayed on and got him talking, though he was madly shy, but then I’ve always liked that. It turned out he’d had a rather extraordinary experience, as he’d worked his passage over on a ship—this was long before West Indians came in any number, of course—and then, missed the boat home. He walked into town from the Docks and as it was rather cold and rainy and not I suppose at all what he’d hoped for he went into the National Gallery to keep warm, and there he was found by an artist called Otto Henderson, who was a madly musical type as we used to say—and also a third-rate painter by the way—and he sort of picked him up. He lived with Otto for a bit, but Otto was a terrible drunk and it got rather difficult, so Otto found him a job in the Trocadero, where, as it happened, he knew the head barman who was very Scottish and respectable apparently but underneath, according to Otto, wore ladies’ knickers. Scottie was terribly jealous, needless to say, when I hit it off so with his black Adonis. Later on, he even threatened to expose me, but he changed his tune when I promised to tell all about the knickers.’ Charles laughed, and waved a hand in the air, as if shaking a tambourine. ‘How did it all end up?’ ‘Oh, Scottie had him dismissed for drunkenness (he did put it away rather) so I took him on myself for a bit. That didn’t really work out, what with Taha in the house as well, so I farmed him out to a friend.’ His face clouded. ‘There was quite a lot of talk about it at the time. Of course in a way it helped being a Lord—the English have such a superstitious awe of the aristocracy. But it also had its disadvantages, in terms of gossip and what-have-you—the English having such prurient and priggish minds. As you will find out, my dear, when you succeed’—words which seemed to anticipate not only my succession but my success. ‘I suppose black people were comparatively rare then—in England.’ Charles half suppressed a burp of agreement. ‘There were a few seamen—they had a hostel out at Limehouse. I had some good friends there, brave, reckless fellows, many of them. There were jazz players in London, of course, who had quite a following. But I suppose most people in the country didn’t see a black person in all their lives.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look. ‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’ I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness. I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’ ‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’ ‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’ ‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case. ‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’ ‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’ James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There is a whiff of black magic sometimes at Skinner’s Lane.’ ‘I’m not surprised. It’s not my kind of thing. Henderson was said to be mixed up with some sort of spiritualist society himself, and Cecil said something about Nantwich getting in touch with I think a friend who had died tragically. I must say it rather gave me the creeps, as did Nantwich himself. Worth it, for the pavement, though.’ ‘This was before you were married.’ ‘Actually it was just about the time that P. and I started seeing each other. The irony was not lost on Cecil; he very much came from that world, and it was he who told me about Denis. Very tight lips, as you may imagine. Of course, the irony’s rather worse for you, being, you know, gay, and—I’m frightfully sorry, Will.’ ‘My dear Gavin. Anyway, I must think a whole lot more.’ I looked around my untidy bedroom, and was surprised to find I missed the invitation that the Nantwich book had offered for the past few weeks. I had played hard to get without ever envisaging an outcome such as this. ‘I’d love to see you, too. We must all get together. Now that I’m not writing a book I’ll have so much more time.’ Gavin made a miraculous little humming sound, in which sympathy and scepticism were perfectly combined. ‘He must have known gay people—he was a cultured man. What did he think he was playing at?’ ‘Well I’m too young to know. But I suspect it really was a different world—not only the law, of course, but political pressures, and we just don’t know. It’s Uncle Will. Yes, you can. Hold on, Will, I’ve got your nephew here to speak to you. Very important, right … See you soon, my dear!’ There was a plonk and a series of rustlings and a protest of ‘Daddy’ before Rupert came on the line: ‘Hello, this is Rupert,’ in his serious treble. ‘Roops, how nice to hear you. How are things.’ ‘All right, thank you. I’ve got to wait before Daddy goes out of the room.’ This took a while, as apparently he came back for something, and was, as I pictured it, being expelled from his own study and his important work on Romano-British drains. ‘It must be jolly secret,’ I said encouragingly. ‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed. ‘Arthur, you mean? Have you seen him then?’ And looking across the empty bed and out into the hazy sky, chimneypots among still trees, I felt a sudden plunging need for him, a Straussian phrase sweeping from the top to the bottom of the orchestra. ‘Yes, I have. It was in the road, yesterday.’ ‘It was jolly clever of you to spot him.’ ‘Well, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for him, you know.’ ‘What a good spy you are. What was he doing, did he recognise you?’

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

  I wish that he and Mom would move into the same house.” “Do you remember when they were married and all of you were living together?” “Sure. If they were together I wouldn’t have to take the bus so much and I would see them every day. It’s a long, long, long bus ride. I like seeing them both but this way’s hard because when I’m at my dad’s I miss my mom and when I’m at Mom’s I want to see Dad. Half the time I feel okay and half the time I feel bad. Every night I miss someone.” “What advice would you give someone your age who’s going to start living part-time with each parent, like you do?” “He’ll be tired,” Racer admitted, “because you have to keep on telling people where you are and you have so much to remember, where you are going and where your favorite stuff is. And it’s hard because, like, I have friends at my school but they can’t come to my dad’s house. And there are some kids I play with when I’m at my dad’s but I only see them when I’m there. And a lot of the time they don’t remember that I’m going to be there and they’ve made plans to play with someone else. So I don’t have anyone to play with when I go there. And when I’m at my mom’s the kids have made plans I don’t know about. Sometimes you feel like a rubber band. And,” here Racer looked very solemn, “if this boy likes to play baseball tell him he’ll probably miss some games and maybe some practices—that’s what happens. I hope his coach understands.” “Your mom told me you play baseball. She said you liked to pitch.” (This was an understatement. Racer is passionate about baseball but his parents have trouble getting him to practices and games with one home in Berkeley and one in San Jose.) “Yeah, I like to play a lot,” Racer told me. “Our team has the best record. We’re going to be in the championships. And the coach told me that I could pitch in the play-offs. But only if I’m there for the rest of the season.” Racer looked worried. “Have you talked to your parents about this? It’s so important to you.” “They said they’d try to work it out to get me to all the rest of the games, but I don’t know.” Racer scowled. “They say that a lot, but things don’t work out.” “If you could change something, what would it be?” “Going back and forth bugs me. Like me and my friends are playing and then it’s time to leave right when we’re into a game.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Whenever the door swung open I knew it would be him and swallowed my distress at the sight of his friendly face and everything it offered, and it was always someone else, a regular who won a curt, delayed greeting as he was absorbed into the group around the bar. 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 . . . Luc's mother answered my short but frantic-sounding ring; I stepped into an interior I had never guessed at, and which I saw at once was the shrine and workshop of an obsession. She must have been the most prolific needlewoman in Belgium. The hall, and then the sitting-room she pushed me into, were festooned with her work.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  My mother's weary, unwitting half-joke, "Are you getting up?", would be shouted from the hall, and I would reply with my comprehensive euphemism, "I'm just having a think." Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. It had been awkward, a bit scary, my legs were stung by nettles, we'd only kissed a lot, really, then quickly stroked each other off, but it was wholly different from the heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who called you a queer afterwards. Next day my head was full of the heat of it, the lovely certainty we did it for each other. When we met tonight, it would be a step further into the dreamy underwoods of love. By the time I went out for my walk after supper I was prospecting far into the future. I had coached Dawn to some surprising exam results, he had moulded me into a runner and swimmer who commanded respect. I wrote long letters to an imaginary friend abroad, dotingly detailing Dawn's sweetness and beauty. For all our open-air beginnings I had him closeted with me in des Esseintes-like privacy, in a sealed world of silk and fur and absolute indulgence. But Dawn didn't come. I sat on the bench reading Tennyson, but not taking it in, looking up every few seconds for a bike or just for him in dark running gear. It was breezier than last night, the wood was stirring in tumultuous slow-motion, the pond broken and bickering. I waited through a muffled sunset till the wind had blown off the cannon-smoke of low cloud and opened up a sky of densening stars. Of course we hadn't said we'd meet. I walked nervously under the wood's edge for a minute, and looked out the way I thought he would come, for a light swivelling over grass and bushes. But there were only the lights of planes, high up, climbing out of Gatwick, the intermittent yawn of their engines, and when they'd gone just the gusting of the trees. I was shivery in a T-shirt, and jogged home for warmth, working out a story about how I'd come back safely along the road. Next day I was desolate, and even coaxed out a few tears in my room, which I found impressive and almost cheering. I knew I had to ring Dawn, and got up suspiciously early to do so, hanging about in the hall with a book, until I thought the coast was clear, and then swiftly dissimulating my intention when my mother or Charlie came heedlessly through. I was more and more nervous the more I deferred.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  173 “Justification by Grace Through Faith” THE GROANING OF CREATION Paul’s vision in Roman 1–8 concerns the unity of Greeks and Jews, that is, of all people, in a transformed world of global peace. But the vision of imperial Rome was also about the unity of all people in a transformed world of global peace. The con- frontation is not, therefore, about ends, but about means. Is that final consummation to come as peace through violent vic- tory and pacification or as peace through nonviolent justice and justifi cation? We ourselves might not consider the distinction between Gentiles and Jews the or even a major division of the global fam- ily. We might think of the haves and the have-nots, of the First World and the Third World, of those who have more than they need and those who can barely survive. But, in any case, it is and always will be about the world. So Paul concludes this section with a magnificent hymn not just to our freedom but to that of creation itself: For the creation waits with eager longing for the reveal- ing of the children of God; for the creation was sub- jected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will ob- tain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom. 8:19–23) Paul mentions “creation” five times in those five verses. Hear, then, the voices of God and Bible, Jesus and Paul as they whisper

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Almost all of the letters I sent home asked her to “kiss the babies and tell them that I love them.” Cut off for the first time from home and family, I learned a lot about myself and my culture. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the military is not a landing spot for low-income kids with no other options. The sixty-nine members of my boot camp platoon included black, white, and Hispanic kids; rich kids from upstate New York and poor kids from West Virginia; Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and even a few atheists. I was naturally drawn to those like me. “The person I talk to most,” I wrote to my family in my first letter home, “is from Leslie County, Kentucky. He talks like he’s from Jackson. I was telling him how much bullshit it was that Catholics got all the free time they did. They get it because of the way the church schedule works. He is definitely a country kid, ’cause he said, ‘What’s a Catholic?’ And I told him that it was just another form of Christianity, and he said, ‘I might have to try that out.’” Mamaw understood precisely where he came from. “Down in that part of Kentucky, everybody’s a snake handler,” she wrote back, only partially joking. During my time away, Mamaw showed vulnerability that I’d never seen before. Whenever she received a letter from me, she would call my aunt or sister, demanding that someone come to her house immediately and interpret my chicken scratch. “I love you a big bunch and I miss you a bunch I forget you aren’t here I think you will come down the stairs and I can holler at you it is just a feeling you aren’t really gone. My hands hurt today that arthritis I guess. . . . I’ll go for now write more later love you please take care.” Mamaw’s letters never contained the necessary punctuation and always included some articles, usually from Reader’s Digest , to occupy my time. She could still be classic Mamaw: mean and ferociously loyal. About a month into my training, I had a nasty exchange with a drill instructor, who took me aside for a half hour, forcing me to alternate jumping jacks, sit-ups, and short sprints until I was completely exhausted. It was par for the course in boot camp, something nearly everyone faced at one point or another. If anything, I was lucky to have avoided it for so long. “Dearest J.D.,” Mamaw wrote when she learned of the incident, “I must say I have been waiting for them dick face bastards to start on you—and now they have. Words aren’t invented to describe how they piss me off. . . . You just keep on doing the best you can do and keep thinking about this stupid asshole with an IQ of 2 thinking he is Bobby bad ass but he wears girls underwear.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  A hare which my young hunter had tamed with great effort was caught and torn by the hounds, sole woe of shadow-less days. The people of Mantinea uncovered some traces of kinship with that family of Bithynian colonists, hitherto unknown; the city, where the boy was later to have his temples, was enriched by me and adorned. Its immemorial sanctuary of Neptune had fallen in ruins, yet was so venerable that all entrance to it had been forbidden: mysteries more ancient than mankind itself were perpetuated behind those never-opening doors. I built a new temple, far more vast than the old and wholly enclosing the ancient edifice, which will lie hereafter within like the stone at the heart of a fruit. On the road not far from Mantinea I restored the tomb where Epaminondas, slain in the heat of battle, is laid to rest with the young companion struck down at his side; a column whereon a poem is inscribed was erected by my order to commemorate this example of a time when everything, viewed at a distance, seems to have been noble, and simple, too, whether tenderness, glory, or death. On the Isthmus the Games were celebrated with a splendor unparalleled since ancient times; my hope, in reviving these Hellenic festivals, was to make Greece a living unity once more. We were drawn by the hunt to the valley of the Helicon, then in its last bronzed red of autumn; at the spring of Narcissus we paused, near the Sanctuary of Love; there we offered a trophy, the pelt of a young she-bear fixed by nails of gold to the temple wall, to Eros, that god who is wisest of all. The ship lent me by Erastos, the merchant of Ephesus, to sail the Archipelago, idled at anchor in Phaleron Bay; [Hadrian 158a.jpg] Hadrianic Cuirass with High Relief of Roman Wolf Supporting Athena Torso Standing in Agora, Athens [Hadrian 158bc.jpg] Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens [Hadrian 158d.jpg] Antinous of Eleusis Museum of Eleusis (Found in Ruins of Eleusis) I had come back to Athens like a man coming home. I ventured to add to the beauty of this city, trying to perfect what was already admirable. For the first time Athens was to grow again, taking on new life after long decline. I doubled the city in extent: along the Ilissus I planned a new Athens, the city of Hadrian joined to the city of Theseus. Everything had to be rearranged, or constructed anew.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But I no longer inflict upon Borysthenes' successor the burden of an invalid whose muscles are flabby, and who is too weak to heave himself, unassisted, upon a horse's back. My aide Celer is exercising him at this moment on the road to Praeneste; all my past experiments with swift motion help me now to share the pleasure both of horse and of rider, and to judge the sensations of the man at full gallop on a day of sun and high wind. When Celer leaps down from his horse I too regain contact with the ground. It is the same for swimming: I have given it up, but I still share the swimmer's delight in water's caress. Running, even for the shortest distance, would today be as impossible for me as for a heavy statue, a Caesar of stone; but I recall my childhood races on the dry hills of Spain, and the game played with myself of pressing on to the last gasp, never doubting that the perfect heart and healthy lungs would re-establish their equilibrium; and with any athlete training for the stadium I have a common understanding which the intelligence alone would not have given me. Thus from each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality. There have been moments when that comprehension tried to go beyond human experience, passing from the swimmer to the wave. But in such a realm, since there is nothing exact left to guide me, I verge upon the world of dream and metamorphosis. Overeating is a Roman vice, but moderation has always been my delight. Hermogenes has had to change nothing in my diet, except perhaps the impatience which made me devour the first thing served, no matter where or when, in order to satisfy the needs of hunger simply and at once. It is clear that a man of wealth, who has never known anything but voluntary privation, or has experienced hunger only provisionally as one of the more or less exciting incidents of war or of travel, would have but ill grace to boast of undereating.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Now the future had come he still hoarded and packed it. It sat opposite me, massive, gathering bullishly at the shoulders, the open shirt showing a broad V of black hair, the thighs splayed ponderously on the slashed and stitched upholstery of the banquette. I knew I could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity. As we travelled west, through lit City stations like Bank and St Paul’s which I thought purposeless at night till I recalled that Charles, for one, would need them, that here and there in the City that was emptied for the weekend, people, eccentric or indigenous, still lived, my thoughts deserted Bill (though I still looked at him), and fled on down the rails to Phil. We were nearly at Tottenham Court Road, where Bill would have to change for the Northern Line, when he said, with tense cheeriness: ‘How’s young Phil getting on these days?’ I didn’t know how much he knew. Phil and I had been discreet, though together, at the Corry; but it was hard to tell what, in the crowded complex of the Club, had been seen, guessed or overheard. I gave a smile which could be read as a happy admission or an amiable ignorance. ‘All right, I should say,’ I offered neutrally. The old bashful earnestness crossed Bill’s face, and as the train fiercely slowed and the inertia carried him towards me he said bravely: ‘I loves that boy.’ His innocence and embarrassment were revealed in the relish he summoned up in his tone, and even more in the tortured affectation of saying loves. The train abruptly stopped, tilting him backwards as he rose, and he bustled off with a sad and hasty goodbye. June 9, 1925 : Back in London after nearly 2 years, & everyone complaining about the heat. Unable to wear shorts, open shirt & topi, I begin to see what they mean. The town, after Cairo & then Alexandria, is strikingly brisk & convenient—also much smaller, in detail if not in plan, than I’d expected; I’ve been going about with the sort of pleasure I used to have on getting back to Oxford after the vac, checking that it’s all there (which in fact it isn’t). At Brook St, Sandy had called already before I got in, & left a message, in his inimitable style, on a page torn out of a book; it was in French, & highly, if florally & indirectly, improper, about how ‘il y a une chose aussi bruyante que la souffrance, c’est le plaisir’, & so on. I was tantalised at the end of the page & only then turned to the message, which was florally and indirectly improper, but in English.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The previous Christmas I had secured a distracted agreement that Dawn could come to Kinchin Cove with us and looked forward to it blindly in the teeth of all the warning signs. My mother rather liked Dawn, who helped with the washing-up, shared in her gentle mockery of my sixth-form posiness, and had a reliable second-row-forward straightness about him; she couldn't make out why we were such inseparable friends, and there was something sweet about her frequently exaggerating his good points, as if these must explain it: "Ralph's got bottom," she said to me one Sunday morning over pastry-dough and apple-peel. But by the early summer, brittle and hollow-eyed with her own anxieties, she had forgotten her promise. I made a scene about it, half-aware how I was disgracing myself, arguing really I suppose against something else. I told Dawn it was off and took him some photographs of the cottage from an earlier summer, the beach and rocks just below, the shallow river that ran out over the sand, the loafing figures of Charlie and his genuinely unsuitable friend Gary Quine, who got wrecked in the Wreckers, called my parents by their Christian names and gave me, when I was twelve, my first awed lesson in the use of a rubber johnny. Dawn wasn't much bothered about the place I loved and wanted to bring him to as a new brother, who could teach me to dive. He slipped an arm round my neck, gave me a long hard-working kiss and said why didn't we go off together, camping—we could go to France. He'd already opted out of his own family's trip to Spain. I knew with a sudden grave certainty far bleaker than that of my father's death that I would never go to Kinchin Cove again. We went to look at tents, quite unaware of their cost and complexity and scaling our plans down from "The Sultan" through "The Marquess" and "The Cavalier" until we ended up with a titchy dun-coloured thing called "The Pilgrim". "I think you'll be rather on top of each other in this one," said the sales assistant. The plan that we have a trial night on the common came from my Uncle Wilfred, who had supervised innumerable camps for the de Souzay Trust and stressed the importance for both of us of knowing how to pitch and strike. It was a wildly exciting idea, clouded at first by the fear that he was going to come up and instruct us himself. But no. He would be sitting with my mother, as he did increasingly in my father's last months; she was the only woman-friend Wilfred had and the evenings, kindly meant, were a strain for both of them. "Your uncle's more of a man's man" was all my mother ever said about him.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I didn't know their routines or anything about them; the phonebook gave me their address and I worked up an image of 12 Sands Road—by the sound of it pleasant enough—as a household severely unwelcoming to phone-calls of any kind, much less those from boys who wanted to fuck their son. I imagined Dawn denying all knowledge of me, hanging up on me, or just giving me some casual putdown. I had actually started dialling when my mother looked out from the kitchen and said, "Can't it keep till cheap time, love?" And I accepted her objection with only a show of reluctance. From 5 o'clock on I was locked in a parched rehearsal of my opening remarks, which involved an optional parent-charming paragraph (always say who you are and apologise for troubling them) that snagged on the question of how I should refer to him. Then I had to say "Hi! Dawn? It's Edward . . . Yeah, g r e a t . . . " and hope to catch the warmth in his reply and if at all possible lead him on to propose a meeting himself. By six these simple phrases had become a kind of hysterical gibberish in my mind, as though they'd been passed round the room in a game of Chinese whispers. I went to the phone, but thank god someone rang up for my father just at that moment, and I put it off till 6.30. After supper I said, "I'll just make that call now, Mum", and went and did it so quickly that the adrenalin only caught up with me at the moment someone answered: a girl, rather sultry and bored. He must have sisters. They were all out, she said. Or put it another way, she was there all by herself. She almost sounded as if she'd like me to come round and fuck her instead. She said she'd tell Ralphie that I'd rung, and repeated my number sluttishly wrongly before she got it right. Then I set out into the high-summer wastes of longing. Dawn never rang back. I missed him on the customed hill, all right. I missed him everywhere. Some days it was as if nothing had ever happened; on others I felt ruined, I'd been given a sip of some marvellous elixir and then had it snatched away. I knew it was absurd to fall in love after ten minutes' breathless smooching, but that only added an element of hysterical determination to my passion.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I started reading it on the Underground, rattling out eastward in an almost empty mid-afternoon carriage, the sun, once we had emerged from the tunnels, burning the back of my neck. The book was beautifully designed, refined but without pretension, with restfully little of the brilliant text on each thick, wide-margined page. It was a treasure, and I could not decide whether to keep it for myself or to give it to James. Imagining his pleasure at receiving it, and then feeling apprehensive about Arthur, I looked out of the window at the widening suburbs, the housing estates, the distant gasometers, the mysterious empty tracts of fenced-in waste land, grass and gravelly pools and bursts of purple foxgloves. Modern warehouses abutted on the line, and often the train ran on a high embankment at the level of bedroom windows or above shallow terrace gardens with wooden huts, a swing or a blown-up paddling pool. Everywhere the impression was of desertion, as if on this spacious summer day just touched, high up, with tiny flecks of motionless cloud, the people had made off. It was a false impression, as I found when my stop came and, slipping the book into my jacket pocket and taking up my bag, I went out onto a busy platform and then into a crowded modern high street with mothers shopping, babies in push-chairs blocking the way, traffic lights, delivery vans, the alarming bleep of pedestrian crossings. It was like an anonymous, exemplary street, with a range of nameable activities, drawn to teach vocabulary in a foreign language. I was amazed to think it was in the city where I lived, and consulted my A-Z surreptitiously so as not to set off with faked familiarity in the wrong direction. The culture shock was compounded as a single-decker bus approached showing the destination ‘Victoria and Albert Docks’. Victoria and Albert Docks! To the people here the V and A was not, as it was in the slippered west, a vast terracotta-encrusted edifice, whose echoing interiors held ancient tapestries, miniatures of people copulating, dusty baroque sculpture and sequences of dead and spotlit rooms taken wholesale from the houses of the past. How different my childhood Sunday afternoons would have been if, instead of showing me the Raphael Cartoons (which had killed Raphael for me ever since), my father had sent me to the docks, to talk with stevedores and have them tell me, with much pumping and flexing, the stories of their tattoos.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Will?’ ‘Yes?’ I sensed some more probing question was coming. ‘Does Arthur and Harold still live in England?’ ‘Oh, I think so, yes.’ ‘He didn’t escape then?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it, my old duck.’ I spent a lackadaisical afternoon, sprawling in the window-seat half-reading the paper, then closing my eyes, as the sun came round. I drifted in and out of sleep, took off my shirt, woke to find the coarse stitching of the tapestry bolster had patterned my slightly sweating back. I thought about Arthur, and how minutely brief our affair had been, and difficult to understand. I saw him again licking my balls; or swallowing as he slowly sat down on my cock; or helpless beneath me, locking his dry heels behind my neck. I hated to think it was over—yet dawdled half-awake in a maudlin, jealous reverie. I imagined him servicing the scarred and despotic Tony as they rolled towards the West End in their black-windowed Cortina. So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad—and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again. At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised. My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A general restlessness kept me on the streets a lot by day, and I began to recognise stall-holders and groups of kids and certain afternoon walkers who kept regular hours. I aimed always to go past the Altidores' in the early evening, when the lights might first come on in the house and Luc be seen at an upstairs window towelling his hair. But so far it had never happened, and I would go on with slackening pulse, through further streets already impregnated with a mood of bafflement and anti-climax. That Thursday, after my lesson with Marcel, who was making progress and described the plot of Bloodbath 4 with a new determination, I went out, drifted round the shopping-streets, spent a while in the photography section of a bookshop browsing the fashionably retro albums of athletes and swimmers, and then guiltily slipped into the Golden Calf for a bottle of Silence. I felt fizzy and reckless when later on I turned into Long Street just as the lamps twinked on above, pink and mauve and flickering like a favourite vice. I was still some way from the house, but I had it casually in my sights and knew just how it fitted in the rhythm of frontages opposite, glassier and posher than its immediate neighbours, the house before it having an illuminated cross in an upper window. Luc's front door opened and two figures came out sideways on to the top of the steps and then Luc himself, taller and protective, emerged between them: the Three! I knew Sibylle's smart look at once, and the boy too, of course, snug and strong. She reached up and kissed Luc on the cheek. I saw as if an inch away his flared lips kiss the air beside her as she did so, and he and the boy slid an arm round each other and left them burningly there through a last brief reprise of their talk. I faltered. could I be seen in the uncertain light? I should go on with a quick wave and greeting, even, ideally, stop and be drawn into a loose embrace of conversation—introductions could be made, fast friendships charmingly inaugurated. But I stopped where I was, twenty yards off, pressed against the wall, watching their joking and agreements in the doorway with the hunger of a ghost: I felt like a nothing, a mere emanation of weathered bricks and mortar. Fatuously, I crouched to re-tie a lace, but looked up helplessly in the youngsters' direction, and saw the guests disengage themselves, come down the steps and turn away with a further sung-out goodbye. They strolled off for a few seconds and Luc called, "Hey, Patrick", and when the boy looked round made a nodding jump, like heading a ball, and they both grinned. Then the boy, Patrick, went out into the road and bent to unlock a car: the Mini, the mauve Mini.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw dreamed of turning that passion into a career as a children’s attorney—serving as a voice for those who lacked one. She never pursued that dream, possibly because she didn’t know what becoming an attorney took. Mamaw never spent a day in high school. She’d given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car. Even if she’d known what was required, her new lifestyle offered little encouragement or opportunity for an aspiring law student with three children and a husband. Despite the setbacks, both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream. Neither was under any illusions that wealth or privilege didn’t matter in America. On politics, for example, Mamaw had one opinion—“They’re all a bunch of crooks”—but Papaw became a committed Democrat. He had no problem with Armco, but he and everyone like him hated the coal companies in Kentucky thanks to a long history of labor strife. So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich. Papaw was a Democrat because that party protected the working people. This attitude carried over to Mamaw: All politicians might be crooks, but if there were any exceptions, they were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Still, Mamaw and Papaw believed that hard work mattered more. They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.” Their community shared this faith, and in the 1950s that faith appeared well founded. Within two generations, the transplanted hillbillies had largely caught up to the native population in terms of income and poverty level. Yet their financial success masked their cultural unease, and if my grandparents caught up economically, I wonder if they ever truly assimilated. They always had one foot in the new life and one foot in the old one. They slowly acquired a small number of friends but remained strongly rooted in their Kentucky homeland. They hated domesticated animals and had little use for “critters” that weren’t for eating, yet they eventually relented to the children’s demands for dogs and cats. Their children, though, were different. My mom’s generation was the first to grow up in the industrial Midwest, far from the deep twangs and one-room schools of the hills. They attended modern high schools with thousands of other students. To my grandparents, the goal was to get out of Kentucky and give their kids a head start. The kids, in turn, were expected to do something with that head start. It didn’t quite work out that way. Before Lyndon Johnson and the Appalachian Regional Commission brought new roads to southeastern Kentucky, the primary road from Jackson to Ohio was U.S. Route 23.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  At the Corry life was going on full blast. I swam more joylessly than usual, hoping I might catch Phil, starved of him, longing to have and to hold him: I wanted the solidness of him in my arms, and for a moment excitedly mistook another swimmer for him as he lounged at the shallow end. He had trunks on just like Phil’s and when I surfaced grinning in front of him he gave me a bothered look before pushing off in a panicky, old-fashioned side-stroke. I felt keenly about the discipline of swimming, and then was suddenly bored by it, and by the taste of chlorinated water. When I hopped out I had a few words with Nigel. He was sprawling in those viewing seats erected long ago for matches and galas which never now took place. ‘Hullo, Will—good swim?’ ‘I’m not in the mood, I’m afraid, today. I can do it, you know, what’s the point?’ ‘Mm, still, good for you. How are you getting on with that book then? Good one, isn’t it?’ ‘I’m a bit disappointed by it, actually. You’ve lent me better.’ ‘Mm, but that Goldie, is it, I’d like to meet him. He can give me a taste of his truncheon any time.’ I shook my head sorrowingly. ‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’ ‘Get out,’ said Nigel, tutting and turning his head away. ‘I could show you something really sexy—and true,’ I said, in a sudden treacherous bid for his interest—he who didn’t interest me at all, handsome and idle though he was. ‘I’ve got some private diaries of a guy’ (Charles a guy? some affronted guardian spirit queried) ‘with amazing stuff in them. It’s even got things happening here—years ago …’ I had doubts and petered out. My true come-uppance not from a fascinated insistence I should tell more but from a deliberate lack of attention, as if to endorse my self-reproach. ‘You still going with that Phil?’ he wanted to know. ‘Yup.’ I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy. ‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’ ‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There were corners of the club, removed from the dance floor, dead-ends of cellars, cryptlike areas, dimly lit, faintly damp, with a limey dampness quite distinguishable from the tropical humidity the weather and the dancers made. We ran into John and Jimmy, a sweet black and white couple who had been together for years, John a cuddly blond, Jimmy handsome to tears, with lingering, ironical eyes. We stood and shouted some banter, Jimmy as usual hugging his friend from behind: they would shuffle around for hours like that, coupled and domestic and yet giggling, party-going. They might have been the beginning of a conga, ready to sweep everyone away in silliness and fun, but their devotion to each other made them at the same time inaccessible. I knew they had something which I had never had. They felt Phil a bit, oohing as he looked bashful but knew he couldn’t object, and Jimmy lifted up his hand as if he’d won a fight and made him flex his biceps and triceps, and then in a little showery cadenza of laughs and nonsense they were on their way. We went into the section beyond the fishtank, with a comfy bench running along the walls, very low, with knee-high tables crowded with beer glasses. From where we sprawled the fishtank formed an unreliable window onto the dance floor, its water threaded by bubbles up one side, and the tiny fish, neurotically it seemed, twitching from one direction to another as the music shook the thick glass. The floor of the aquarium was at eye level, and laid out like a miniature landscape, with picturesque rocks tilting up out of the pinky-brown sand, and a little pink house like a French country railway station with gaping doors and windows which the fish never deigned to swim into. The subdued lighting made the surface gleam when one looked up to it, and gave the water an unnaturally thick appearance, like a liqueur. Through this entranced, slowing medium the dancers could be seen spinning, rocking and bouncing, freakishly fast and disconnected. ‘All right, darling?’ Phil nodded. ‘Bloody hot,’ he said, running his hand over his chest and stomach and then looking at it admiringly. It was one of those occasions when I couldn’t think of much to say to him: we lolled stickily together and slurped our lager. They kept the lager so chilled that the glasses were slippery with their own cold sweat. When Phil slid his hand through the slit side of my vest I gasped at the shock—like cold water thrown in horseplay in the showers, or the touch of hands under clothing in winter out of doors. A short way off I made out a couple talking about us in a way meant to be noticed, heads together, with long glances and point-weighing smiles and nods.