Shame

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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Having glimpsed so many lives I now wanted to take stock of a single life, the one I knew best, my own. The strange contradiction was that I, who had grown up isolated in the Midwest of the 1950s and had felt I was a freak, unique in my perverted tastes, now in the liberated 1980s hoped to write about myself as a representative figure. I suppose the uniqueness, the freakiness of my adolescence, found an echo in my fierce desire as an adult to bear witness to my real feelings and actual convictions, even if they were politically suspect and uncomfortable for the reader. At the same time a new sense of gay community and solidarity made me want to render my experiences as somehow typical and representative. A Representative Freak—that’s the paradox that lies at the heart of this novel. I say a “novel” because I wanted the alibi of fiction to give me the permission to change things around in order to make them more typical. In real life I had had many, many sexual experiences by the time I was sixteen, but I knew that my sort of compulsive and precocious sexuality was so atypical that few readers would be able to identify with it. In real life I was an intermittently gifted student, who had already written two full-length novels by age eighteen, even if they were amateurish and unpublishable; I was also fairly popular with the other boys at school, despite my odd personality. In creating the narrator-protagonist of A Boy’s Own Story, however, I wanted to play down all this precociousness and even my intense friendships. I was also quite conscious of working my way through my own version of all those coming-out stories I’d heard over the years, and to show their predominant features. I wanted to describe the first time. I wanted to show the terrible guilt. I wanted to represent the urge to seek professional help, first from a minister and later from a shrink. I wanted to explore the quandary of a simultaneous longing to be straight and a longing to have sex with men. The most controversial part of the book was the ending (which I won’t give away), since it showed the main character in an unsympathetic light. Those closing pages, however, mirrored the most shameful moment in my own young life. Over the years the conclusion has been variously interpreted as the painful, disillusioning beginning of adulthood or as the self-hating action of a boy deformed by a repressive and destructive era. I can distinctly remember that throughout the long composition of A Boy’s Own Story I kept wondering whether I would have the courage to show this reprehensible moment.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  How could I explain to her how much things had changed, that we kids scarcely admitted we had parents, that to us parents were as uninteresting as the rich in novels about backstairs life; they were large naive personages who ask irrelevant questions from time to time and from whom the truth must always be kept. In particular the logical or at least consistent standards of adults, their admiration of money, of substance, of homely virtue, were valuable to us kids precisely as rules to flout, for our preferences in clothes, music, people were rigorously whimsical. As long as I remained unpopular I belonged wholely to my mother. I might fight with her, insult her, sneer at her, ignore her, but I was still hers. She knew that. She even had a way of swaggering around me. There was a coarseness in the speculations she made about me to my face, the way an owner might talk about a horse in its stall. At times she insisted that I had a great future ahead of me, by which she meant a job and a salary, but just as often she’d look at me and ask, “Do you think you’re really bright?” Quick smile. “Of course you are. You’re very very bright.” Pause. “But I wonder. We think you are. But shouldn’t we have a second opinion? One that’s more objective?” She subjected herself to the same doubts—I was so completely hers that I had to eat what she ate, even her self-hatred, as a fetus must live off its host’s blood. The great event of our household had been that my father had left us for someone else. Afterward, how could we like each other all that much, since we were all equally guilty of having driven him away? At least, we’d failed to keep him. Nor was our shared fate black as good ink or crisp as a crow’s wing on snow; we hadn’t been assigned clear, tragic roles we could play with any sort of despairing joy. Instead, we’d been shamed and we’d become vacant, neglected, shabby with neglect. I don’t mean to say that we exhibited interesting symptoms or made trouble for anyone. But we were shadows, like the dead after Orpheus passes them on his way through the Underworld, after this living man vanishes and the last sound of his music is lost to the incoming silence. All my life I’ve made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It wasn’t that Marta was dumb. She had been an excellent student. In Indiana, she had topped the state exams in mathematics and science. She had been selected to represent her state in a national mathematics contest, had won a blue ribbon and a full scholarship. Yet in the bar that first night she had felt out of her depth, out and behind everyone else as they talked and raced full steam toward whatever they were arguing about. She’d stood there, her finger tucked through Sigrid’s belt loop, and Sigrid would sometimes look back at her with a smile, as if she were checking on a pet. She hated that look. Its knowing, gentle easiness. She hated it when people treated her like some kind of unwashed beast that needed a long leash and a slow walk. They fought about that look after the bar that night as Marta drove Sigrid home to the Near East Side, over by Willy Street Co-op, where Sigrid worked shifts and bought ugly produce half-off. In Sigrid’s driveway, they parked and listened to the engine click. Marta clenched the wheel because she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. Sigrid was drunk and tired, over it already. “You think I’m dumb,” she said. But Sigrid said, “Don’t put it on me, Marta. If you feel that way, it’s because you feel that way.” And Marta said, “No. It’s not me. It’s not. I do feel that way, but it’s not because of me, or not just because of it. You know that.” Sigrid leaned over the center console and kissed her, and Marta pushed her away, “No, no, we are talking.” But Sigrid just smiled and kissed her—once, twice, three times—and then she felt Sigrid’s hand sliding past the elastic of her pants and pressing flat against the outside of her underwear. Marta felt hot and suffocated, but Sigrid started to massage her there, and she felt loose and buoyed up on a wave of static. She rode that wave, the friction of Sigrid’s hand and the scrunching heat of her panties. Sigrid’s mouth opening, slick and warm, the gentle pressure of Sigrid sucking on her tongue. And then she realized that her hands were still on the wheel, still at ten and two, just as she’d learned how to drive in high school. “Do you want to come in?” Sigrid asked. “Is it okay?” Marta asked back, looking nervously at the prim, white house. The light in the living room was on. “Come in,” she said. It was early April, and there was still snow on the ground, and the lakes were still frozen. In Sigrid’s room, there was a pink quality to the air. Sigrid had draped a diaphanous scarf over the top of her lamp. Marta lay back on Sigrid’s bed with her clothes still on, and Sigrid climbed over her.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Their mean, tight expressions. Never Davis, who tore a hole in his uniform shirt and sometimes got his new shoes caked in mud. They never watched him that way. But for Grace, if she sweated through the neck of her shirt or got a smudge, her grandmother would pull it off her rough and say she didn’t appreciate things enough. That she’d be just like her mammy, dropping babies she couldn’t look after. One time, at a family picnic, a boy cousin, tall and beige like her, had kissed Grace on the mouth. She didn’t ask him to. She didn’t want him to. But he did just the same, and Grace recoiled. Before she knew what was happening, though, before she could get her mind around what had just been done to her, she felt a hard, fierce tug at her arm and turned around just in time to get slapped by her grandmother. She called her whorish and fast. Grace wept and tried to say that she hadn’t wanted it, but her grandmother pulled her into the house and locked her in the room upstairs. It wasn’t until she was in college that she felt she had some control over her own body. But even then, her grandmother called in the middle of the night. She called the dorm phone, not her cell, to make sure that Grace was in her own bed . Grace had once had to run clear across campus when she realized that it was ten thirty and her grandmother would be calling any minute. Grace sprinted over slick grass and hurdled stone benches, running beneath the high, fragrant trees. She could hear the phone ringing down the hall by the time she got to her floor, sucking in air, her chest burning. And she’d picked up the phone, only to hear her grandmother’s cold voice, the crackle of her disappointment: You been out with them boys . But she hadn’t been out with boys. She had been out with her friends. The girls from her floor. Who taught her to wear skirts and how to flirt. Who showed her how to bum cigarettes and how to burn the ends of her braids to seal them. The girls who taught her how to dance, how to enjoy herself, the swing of her hips and the sun on her stomach and thighs. Those girls had taken her in and showed her real love and kindness. Not watched her. She misses them now, powerfully. Dreka, Tierra, Amina, Asha, Brytt. She misses them and she misses that period in her life when everything seemed to fly open and she could breathe again. When she felt the strength in her arms and legs. She felt powerful. Alive. She wasn’t trouble to them. She was just Grace. What she misses most of all is that feeling of autonomy.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual. For I was possessed with a yearning for the company of men, for their look, touch and smell, and nothing transfixed me more than the sight of a man shaving and dressing, sumptuous rites. It was men, not women, who struck me as foreign and desirable and I disguised myself as a child or a man or whatever was necessary in order to enter their hushed, hieratic company, my disguise so perfect I never stopped to question my identity. Nor did I want to study the face beneath my mask, lest it turn out to have the pursed lips, dead pallor and shaped eyebrows by which one can always recognize the Homosexual. What I required was a sleight of hand, an alibi or a convincing act of bad faith to persuade myself I was not that vampire. Perhaps—yes, this must be it—perhaps my homosexuality was a symptom of some other deeper but less irrevocable disorder. That’s what Dr. O’Reilly thought. After I’d confessed all, he pressed his hankie to his glistening forehead, gnawed his raw lips and said with a dramatic air of boredom, “But none of that matters at all. In here, you’ll find”—the traveling blue eyes stopped meandering across the ceiling and fixed me—“that we’ll ignore your acting out and concentrate on your real conflicts.” How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study sorry old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice. Since Dr. O’Reilly was a very famous analyst, his fees were high; since he considered me to be acutely ill, he decided I had to see him three times a week; the result was a staggering monthly bill. My mother agreed to pay half the cost, but my father refused my request. He couldn’t find any good reason for me to be in therapy, nor was he at all convinced that therapy worked. “It’s just a bunch of crap,” he said over the phone. “I thought sending you to Eton was supposed to straighten you out.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X I V As Dante converses with Sapia, revealing the wondrous conditions of his own pilgrimage and the mysterious presence of his guide, he is overheard by two spirits who are leaning for support one against another at his right. Nearest to him is Guido del Duca of Bertinoro, who is the chief speaker, the other being Rinieri da Calboli of Forlì. They speak chiefly to each other, but draw Dante into their conversation, questioning him as to his origin; and when he indicates by a circumlocution that his birthplace lies upon the Arno, Rinieri asks Guido why Dante conceals the name under dark hints as though it were a shameful thing; whereon Guido approves of Dante’s shrinking from expressly naming this accursed ditch which rises in the midst of brutishness, and as it swirls through deeper pools, finds ever fiercer or more degraded neighbours, till it reaches the crowning infamy of Pisa. There follows a prediction of the woes which Rinieri’s relative Fulcieri shall wreak on Florence in 1303. Deeply stirred by their discourse, Dante questions the spirits as to their own past, and Guido accompanies his answer by a lamentation over the degeneracy of the Romandiola from which they both spring; and implores Dante to pass upon his way and leave him to weep undisturbed. Assured that they are pursuing the right way, since the generosity of these once envious souls would else have notified them of their mistake, the two Poets pursue their way as the warning voices against envy, anticipated by Virgil, ring in their ears; to which Virgil adds his sad reflections on the things which human choice relinquishes and the things it grasps. “WHO IS THIS that circles our mount ere death have given him flight, and opens and shuts his eyes at his will?” 1 “I know not who he may be, but I know that he is not alone; do thou question him who are nearer to him, and gently greet him that he may speak.” Thus two spirits, one leaning against the other, were discoursing of me there on the right hand; then held up their faces to speak to me; and one said: “O soul, that fixed yet in thy body dost journey towards heaven, for charity console us, and tell us whence thou comest, and who thou art; for thou dost make us marvel so greatly at thy grace, as needs must a thing that never was.” And I: “Through the midst of Tuscany there spreads a stream which rises in Falterona and a course of a hundred miles satiates it not.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That afternoon Peter, Kevin and I went fishing in the little outboard. The weather was hot, muggy, clouded over, and we waited in vain for a bite. We’d dropped anchor in a marsh where hollow reeds surrounded us and scratched the metal sides of the boat. I was sweating freely. Sweat stung my right eye. A mosquito spoke in my ear. The smell of gasoline from the engine (tilted up out of the shallow water) refused to lift and float away. The boys were threatening each other with dead worms out of the bait jar and Peter’s calls and pounding feet had scared off every fish in the lake. When I asked them to sit still, they gave each other that same smirk and started mocking me, repeating my words, their voices sliding up and down the scale, “You could be more considerate.” After a while the joke wore thin and they moved on to something else. Somehow—but at what precise moment?—I had shown I was a sissy; I replayed a moment here, a moment there of the past days, in an attempt to locate the exact instant when I’d betrayed myself. We motored back over the glassy, steaming lake; everything was colorless and hot and drained of immediacy. In such a listless, enfeebled world the whine of the motor seemed particularly cruel, like a scar on the void. I went for a walk by myself. I plodded up and down the hills on the narrow road that passed the backs of cottages, which turned their faces to the lake. An old car full of black maids sputtered past. It was Wednesday evening; tomorrow was their day off. Tonight they’d stay at a Negro resort twenty miles away and dance and laugh far into the night, eat ribs, wear gowns, talk louder and laugh harder than they could the rest of the week in the staid houses where they served. Most of the time they were exiled, dispersed into the alien population; only once a week did the authorities allow the tribe to reconvene. They were exuberant people forced to douse their merry flames and maintain just the palest pilot light. At that moment I really believed I, too, was exuberant and merry by nature, had I the chance to show it. In the silence that ebbed in behind the departing car, the air was filled with the one-note chant of crickets. Their song seemed like the heartbeat of loneliness, a beat that sang up and down the wires of my veins. I was desolate. I toyed again with the idea of becoming a general. I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “But I feel very drawn to other men,” I said. Although something defiant in me forced these words out, I felt myself becoming a freak the moment I spoke. My hair went bleach-blond, my wrist went limp, my rep tie became a lace jabot: I was the simpering queen at the grand piano playing concert versions of last year’s pop tunes for his mother and her bridge club. There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction. “Just because you feel something is no reason to act on it,” the priest said. “Americans hold up their feelings as though they were … dispensations.” He drained off the brandy. “For instance, I’ve taken a vow of chastity and I abide by it.” “What do you do for relief?” He smiled at my impertinence. “Do I masturbate, is that what you’re asking? I don’t. Occasionally there’s a nocturnal emission.” He touched his lips with his fingertips. I wondered if the women of his parish who volunteered their services as housekeepers to the priest treasured those stiffened linen relics of sanctity. The pastoral chat was not turning out. Father Burke was miffed. He was most irritated with the Scotts, who’d misrepresented to him my readiness to leap up into the lap of Mother Church. The priest consulted his pocket watch, then worked a toothpick behind a screening hand, a nicety that seemed to me nearly as repulsive as nocturnal emissions. My stubbornness caused the Scotts to cool considerably. When I dropped in on Rachel the Monday after Thanksgiving, she scarcely looked up from her Imitation of Christ. At last she sighed impatiently, set it aside and said, “I don’t think you should spend quite so much time here. It’s not healthy for you. You should run and play with the other boys. Besides, I’m doing a lot of reading in The Golden Bough for my next poem and I can’t just chew the fat with you for hours and hours and hours.” Tears sprang to my eyes and I hurried away. Recently a new part-time teacher had been added to the staff, a Mr. Beattie, who had been hired to instruct three afternoons a week those students interested in jazz. Beattie himself was a jazz drummer and had even toured with a band; he still held regular jam sessions somewhere downtown on weekends. Chuck told me Beattie was a “character,” his highest accolade. Chuck was so sure of himself he was always seeking out “characters” in order to introduce dissonance into his otherwise tonic experience.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They wore wooden crosses under their Lycra shirts and talked about vacation Bible school. Once, Charles had come into the changing room after rehearsal and found them taking pictures of each other with their tights rolled down to the tops of their hips, flexing their chests and stomachs. They were startled to see him and quickly assumed a posture of boredom, their eyes cast down. Now the two of them were doing mirrored stretches, pushing and pulling each other. They had turned it into a kind of strength contest and each struggled mightily to knock the other boy over. Their skin was taut but oily, the corners of their mouths boiling with angry acne. Their foreheads were spotted with a flora of sores and inflammation. But both of them had large eyes and emitted an intense freshness that made Charles feel ancient at twenty-four. Charles got out the elastic, looped it over his toes, and flexed until the burn subsided. He switched feet. The boys were talking about the afternoon rehearsal for Farnland’s piece. Charles bristled. He was never going to be a beautiful dancer—this had never been a mystery to him. He was too tall, for one thing, and too slow for another. No matter how hard he tried, there was always something rough and unfinished about his dance—which was one thing if you were doing contemporary, but Charles had too much self-respect to consider himself a contemporary dancer. He had been classically trained, or whatever passed for classical in Maine, and he had certain ideas about what that meant. They watched him as he changed shirts. They were hairless, those two, not even a faint blond fuzz, as smooth as marble. He felt their disgust. Their horror. They saw what their future might entail when they thickened and coarsened and their bodies turned them into men. • • • The instructor for the late class was Farnland, an ancient choreographer about whom there were rumors. But there were always rumors about what happened in private rehearsals and masterclasses. What people said and did in the steam room or in the evening sessions when they drilled and drilled because the instructor had been shot down at a bar the night before. Everyone talked about everyone else, passed around gossip about hands lingering, rising, falling, searching, coming to rest in inappropriate places for beats of time too long. All of it allusion and reference and innuendo. When asked to confirm, though, no one had anything to say, because, hey, letters of rec, hey, new works choreographed, credit given or credit withheld. A million ways to get even or pay off. Everyone wanted their pound of flesh one way or another. Charles and the others set up the barres, locking down the wheels so they’d stay put. He found himself near the wall of windows that looked out over University Ave. The world was all brightness and snowmelt. His eyes stung a little.

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

  When Serapion meets Thais, he sees a bed and out of shame inquires about finding another, less visible place for their assignation. She assures him that the bed is secluded and adds, “If it is God you fear, the one who knows our secrets will see us wherever we go.” The monk is struck and asks if she knows of God. She confesses that she was baptized as a child but she never learned Christian teaching. She fell at the monk’s feet. “I know there is repentance for sinners, but by my wickedness I have exceeded the measure of forgiveness which can be offered.” He assures her that there is salvation, even for her. She gathered her worldly wealth and burned it “in the middle of the city.” Thais symbolizes a society superficially baptized but not reordered to strive for God—a reasonable likeness of the post-Theodosian world.57 As in the primitive version of the tale, Serapion leads the penitent prostitute to a female monastery. Thais is immured in a small cell with a hole just wide enough for food to be passed in. But in the refined version, the bare details of her enclosure and penance have become a grotesque portrait of human debasement. The cell is dark. Serapion seals it with lead himself. When Thais asks him where she is to discharge her bodily necessities, he answers, “Do what you must in the cell. You have luxuriated in sweet oils and perfumes, now let a fetid stench work its good on you.” She spent three years in darkness, as if in a tomb. Serapion went to Anthony—the father of Egyptian monasticism, who has been invited into this dark spiritual antiromance—to ask about the poor woman. Anthony’s disciple, Paul, dreams of a heavenly bed, attended by three virgins carrying lamps, with a crown upon it. A voice tells him that the bed is for Thais, the whore. Serapion goes to tell her that she is forgiven, and he finds her body so wasted away from penance that her skeleton is visible through her skin. Just days after coming out of her cell, Thais dies.58

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

  Paula shook her head sadly. “It’s not permanent. My mom has a lot going on. She’s remarried. Dan is a nice guy but we don’t know each other and I can’t expect that he would have the same feeling for me as my own dad. I can tell it’s a strain on him and Mom having Racer and me living there. The truth is Racer and I have no home of our own. Anyway, the first thing I did was to get sober. Mom paid for me to see a counselor. From there I went into AA. I’ve been sober for over two years,” she said, adding with grim humor. “High for almost twenty years and sober for two. Not much of a record.” “It’s a great victory. You’ve been drinking since you were twelve. Tell me, how were you able to stop?” Paula lifted her chin and stared out my window for several moments. “I was always ashamed,” she started slowly. “But I guess what happened with Racer was a wake-up call. I can’t tell you how degraded I felt when that cop brought Racer back. Right then I knew I needed to take control or really awful things would happen to me and to my child.” One of the encouraging findings of this study is that nearly all of the women who abused drugs and alcohol in their teens and twenties gave up this self-destructive behavior by the time they reached their early thirties. 1 Moreover, they did it on their own. “I started to black out after the third drink,” one woman told me. “I wouldn’t remember driving home, where I parked the car, or how I got myself to bed. Sometimes I’d wake up in some stranger’s bed. At first it was kind of funny, then real quick it became frightening. I had to stop.” The decision to end the addiction was typically part of a major change in relationships that included the decision to end their promiscuous behavior or a decision to leave a bad relationship or a bad marriage. It heralded a change in lifestyle and a change in values. It was an important crossing and they knew it. There is no one stimulus for these major changes. For some women, the birth of a child in or out of wedlock jump-starts their emotional development. As they grow into the role of parent and gradually take responsibility for the infant, toddler, and young child, they realize they cannot continue their adolescent acting out. Others become badly frightened by somatic symptoms or simply wake up to the fact that they have been on the wrong road for too long.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  On a journey to Troas we visited the plain of the Scamander in time of catastrophe: I had come to see the flood and appraise its damage at first hand; the waters, under a strangely green sky, were making mere islets of the mounds of the ancient tombs. I took a moment to pay homage at the tomb of Hector; Antinous stood dreaming over Patroclus' grave but I failed to recognize in the devoted young fawn who accompanied me an emulator of Achilles' friend: when I derided those passionate loyalties which abound chiefly in books the handsome boy was insulted, and flushed crimson. Frankness was rapidly becoming the one virtue to which I constrained myself; I was beginning to realize that our observance of that heroic code which Greece had built around the attachment of a mature man for a younger companion is often no more for us than hypocrisy and pretence. More sensitive to Rome's prejudices than I was aware, I recalled that although they grant sensuality a role they see only shameful folly in love; I was again seized by my mania for avoiding exclusive dependence on any one being. Shortcomings which were merely those of youth, and as such were inseparable from my choice, began to exasperate me. In this passion of wholly different order I was finally reinstating all that had irritated me in my Roman mistresses: perfumes, elaborate attire, and the cool luxury of jewels took their place again in my life. Fears almost without justification had entered that brooding heart; I have seen the boy anxious at the thought of soon becoming nineteen. Dangerous whims and sudden anger shaking the Medusa-like curls above that stubborn brow alternated with a melancholy which was close to stupor, and with a gentleness more and more broken. Once I struck him; I shall remember forever those horrified eyes. But the offended idol remained an idol, and my expiatory sacrifices began. All the sacred Mysteries of Asia, with their strident music, served now to add to this voluptuous unrest. The period of Eleusis had indeed gone by.

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

  Th e word for “contrivance,” mēchanē, is a rich word, alluding broadly to man- made devices that illustrate human resourcefulness. But mēchanē can also have the more narrow sense of a stage device, a theatrical machine espe- cially used to produce sudden apparitions of the gods. Th e ploys of the girls whose chastity is threatened are not only desperate and incredible ploys; they are, self- consciously, stage devices. Th e girls who preserve their chas- tity do so simply by playing their role, by compelling the drama somehow to go on, so that the story can unfold according to its logic which, of course, will preserve their bodies inviolate.  Th e more sophisticated specimens of ancient romance, especially the works of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, are in such total command of the tradition that it is illuminating to consider how they exploit the tensions inherent in the standard repertoire of the genre. Leucippe and Clitophon is an arch melodrama, a wry, winking, sensational elaboration of the erotic romance. Its most notable idiosyncrasies form carefully wrought statements on the conventions of romantic literature. For example, the fi rst two books of the novel are conducted according to the rules of classical pederasty, as Clitophon is tutored in seduction by his expert cousin Clinias. Achilles Tatius exploits the rich possibilities off ered by this conceit. It allows him to burlesque Plato, and it serves as a kind of valediction to same- sex eros be- fore the heterosexual romance is able to proceed. But the fi rst two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are also a deliberate manipulation of the rules of the romantic genre, especially the delicate protocols of feminine respectability. Th e scenes of Clitophon’s tutelage in the arts of seduction call into ques- tion the distinction between volition and coercion, a distinction that is a foundational prop of the romantic genre. Th e classical model of pederasty, which institutionalized a certain amount of bluff and ambiguity around the question of the boy’s consent, provided a ready contrast to the strident un- willingness of the romantic heroine to consent to anything but marriage.  FROM SHAME TO SIN Clinias tells Clitophon that “when you have a tacit understanding that the next step is the big deed, even those who are ready to surrender prefer the appearance of compulsion, to let the façade of force defl ect the shame of consent.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  She said damn and hell and drank whiskey and had two moods—rage (she was always shouting at Kevin) and mock rage, an appealingly ardent sort of simmering, Virtue Stymied: “All right then, be gone with you,” she’d say, feisty and submissive, or “Of course you’ll be having another drink.” It was all playacting and intended to be viewed as such. She had “temperament” because she was Irish and had been trained as an opera singer. If she wandered into a room and found Kevin’s T-shirt balled and hurled in a chair, she’d start bellowing, “Kevin O’Malley Cork, get in here and get in here now. Look alive!” Nothing could restrain these outbursts, not even the knowledge that Kevin was out of earshot. Her arms would stiffen, her clenched fists would dig into her slim flanks and bunch up her dress, her nose would pale and her thin hair, the color of weathered bricks, would seem to go into shock and rise to reveal still more of her scalp. Because of her operatic training, her voice penetrated every corner of the house and had an alto after-hum that buzzed on in the round metal tabletop from Morocco. During the mornings she chain-smoked, drank coffee and sat around in a silk robe that revealed and highlighted her bony body. With her freckled face, devoid of makeup, rising above this slippery red sheen, she looked like an angry young man trapped in travesty as a practical joke. This couple, with their liquor and cigarettes and roguish, periodic spats, struck my stepmother as “cheap.” Or rather, the woman was cheap (men can’t be cheap). The husband, my father later decided, wasn’t “stable” (their money was by no means secure). Though they lived in a mansion with a swimming pool and antique furniture, they rented it, probably the furniture as well.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Now who’s trouble? she can almost hear. It’s true that, growing up, Grace had been the one they watched like a hawk. Her grandmother used to say that boys made babies and girls brought them home, dropped them like kittens at the doorstep, and then who had to raise them but the parents or the grandparents? Nothing her grandmother hated more than the sight of a loose girl, which was to say every girl. When Grace was little, she was the one whose hair they combed all Sunday morning and the one they dressed in the stiff white polyester dress with a ruffle collar before church. She didn’t get to run through the woods that cut along by the cemetery. She didn’t get to crouch by the pews and play cars before the service started. No. Grace had to behave. Even on days when it was just her and Davis waiting to be collected by their parents, Grace would look up and see her grandmother and aunts looking out at her through the window. Their hard faces. Their mean, tight expressions. Never Davis, who tore a hole in his uniform shirt and sometimes got his new shoes caked in mud. They never watched him that way. But for Grace, if she sweated through the neck of her shirt or got a smudge, her grandmother would pull it off her rough and say she didn’t appreciate things enough. That she’d be just like her mammy, dropping babies she couldn’t look after. One time, at a family picnic, a boy cousin, tall and beige like her, had kissed Grace on the mouth. She didn’t ask him to. She didn’t want him to. But he did just the same, and Grace recoiled. Before she knew what was happening, though, before she could get her mind around what had just been done to her, she felt a hard, fierce tug at her arm and turned around just in time to get slapped by her grandmother. She called her whorish and fast. Grace wept and tried to say that she hadn’t wanted it, but her grandmother pulled her into the house and locked her in the room upstairs. It wasn’t until she was in college that she felt she had some control over her own body. But even then, her grandmother called in the middle of the night. She called the dorm phone, not her cell, to make sure that Grace was in her own bed. Grace had once had to run clear across campus when she realized that it was ten thirty and her grandmother would be calling any minute. Grace sprinted over slick grass and hurdled stone benches, running beneath the high, fragrant trees.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  With her first paycheck she went for an eye exam, got prescription glasses and the difference in the way she could see felt like a miracle. Tall, with perfect skin and thick dark hair cut short, a good body, excellent posture, Daisy could have passed for twenty-five. Her older sister, Evelyn, had taught her a thing or two about using makeup, about flirting. She’d met Gerald Dupree at a lunch counter, where they’d both ordered split-pea soup. When their checks came he put down the fifteen cents to pay for hers. She married him on a whim, two months later. She knew what to expect on her wedding night, but nothing beyond that. In a motel outside Elkton, Gerry became frustrated with her. “What’s going on down there?” he’d asked. “How should I know?” she’d answered. “I can’t get in.” “I told you—I’m a virgin.” “I’ve had my share of virgins, baby, but this is something else.” He sent her to a doctor, who broke the news. She would never be able to have children, would never have normal sexual relations. She understood about not being able to have children. But what did she know about normal? What did she know about sexual relations? She didn’t ask questions, and the doctor didn’t offer explanations. When she told Gerry she would not be able to have children he seemed more angry than disappointed. He didn’t hold her or kiss her or say he loved her anyway. “Did he tell you why you couldn’t have children?” he asked. “Something about missing female body parts.” “Jesus, body parts! What body parts? You mean you’re a freak? I married a freak? Did you know? You must have known.” “I didn’t know.” “How could you not have known? You tricked me into marrying you.” “How did I trick you?” “You gave me the come-on from day one. You were such a sexpot. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? What did you think would happen when…oh, Christ, never mind. We’ll get it annulled.” “What’s ‘annulled’?” “It means, since the marriage was never consummated—” “What’s ‘consummated’?” “We never had sex. Do you know what that means?” She wasn’t an idiot. She just didn’t understand what was happening. “So now we go back to the way it was before we went to Elkton,” he told her. “We go back to our lives before we met.” “Can I keep your name?” This made him laugh. “Dupree ? You want to be Daisy Dupree ?” “Yes.” “Fuck, Daisy! How’re you going to explain that to your family?” “That’s my business.” “Be my guest.” —AFTER THAT, she’d reinvented herself. She’d learned to throw back a Scotch, to straddle a chair, smoke a pack of Camels a day and laugh at off-color jokes. She even told a few herself. When her brother-in-law, Mel, said, You’ve turned into a real broad, Daisy, she’d said, Good for me!

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And as to the blind the sun profits not, so to the shades there where I was now speaking, heaven’s light will not be bounteous of itself; for all their eyelids an iron wire pierces and stitches up, even as is done to a wild hawk because it abideth not still. I seemed to do them wrong as I went my way seeing others, not being seen; wherefore I turned me to my wise Counsel. Well knew he what the dumb would say, and therefore awaited not my questioning, but said: “Speak and be brief and to the point.” Virgil was coming with me on that side of the cornice whence one may fall because it is surrounded by no parapet; on the other side of me were the devout shades, who, through the horrible seam, were pressing forth tears so that they bathed their cheeks. I turned me to them and began: “O people assured of seeing the Light above, which alone your desire hath in its care; so may grace quickly clear away the scum of your conscience, that the stream of memory may descend clearly through it, tell me (for to me ’twill be gracious and dear) if any soul be among you that is Italian, and perchance it will be good for him if I know of it.” “O brother mine, each one is a citizen of a true city; but thou wouldest say, that lived a pilgrim in Italy.” This meseemed to hear for answer somewhat farther on than there where I was; wherefore I made me heard yet more that way. Among the others I saw a shade 7 that was expectant in look, and if one would ask, “how so?” its chin it lifted up after the manner of the blind.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Chuck decided we should visit a whorehouse. He picked up four day students from their houses and we lurched and wheezed in Chuck’s Chevy down through the black section of the city. It was midnight and though this was the weekend the streets were deserted; only here and there a few neon lights outlined the windows of a tavern. The bordello was a dingy wooden house behind a larger one. To get to it we had to squeeze down a narrow strip of sidewalk past a sturdy metal fence behind which a neighbor’s German shepherd kept barking and running back and forth. After we rang the bell for several minutes and Chuck pounded the door and sang a love song in warbling falsetto, which elevated the dog into new ecstasies of rage, the door at last was cracked open and a tall Negro man looked out. He had a tight black silk kerchief on his head and a few short white curly whiskers growing out of a shiny mole beside his mouth. Inside, two young black women and one woman who was white and middle-aged were sitting in slips in front of a television set. One of the black women had on pink-rimmed glasses and was knitting. The room beyond them, a waiting room lined with crude wooden folding chairs, was deserted and harshly lit. Three pictures leaned forward off the dirty walls, one a reproduction of a painting of Jesus praying in Gethsemane while his disciples dozed unmindful of the approaching Roman guards. The other pictures were of cloth behind glass, each embroidered with a motto: “Peace on Earth” and “Bless This House”—puns, I guess, but who could be certain. The house smelled of cooking fat and pork. “Now, you boys sit in here,” the white woman said, indicating the waiting room with a precise push of her hand, as though her hand were a croupier’s rake, “and choose your women.” We filed in under the harsh light. Chuck’s nose looked huge and cratered, his teeth as big as a dog’s. I felt my penis and scrotum contract, inchworm above a buckeye, but I was counting on the whore’s discretion—the guys need never know of my failure. “Girls, get your lazy black asses in here so these men can look you over.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  H.H.’s “point of fact” mocks the “scientific” certitude of psychiatrists who have turned intensely private myths and symbols—in short, fictions—into hard fact. The H.H. who is the subject of a case study immediately undercuts the persuasiveness of his own specific “trauma” by projecting it in fragments of another man’s verse; literary allusions, after all, point away from the unique, inviolable, formative “inner reality” of a neurotic or psychotic consciousness. Annabel Leigh, the object of H.H.’s unconsummated love, has no reality other than literary. See also Keys, p. 45. princedom by the sea: a variant of the most famous line in “Annabel Lee.” Poe’s “kingdom” has been changed to accommodate the fact that H.H. is always an aspirant, never an absolute monarch. He calls Lolita “My Frigid Princess.” noble-winged seraphs, envied: a pastiche composed of a phrase from line 11 of “Annabel Lee” and a verb from line 22. “Seraphs” are the highest of the nine orders of angels; in the Bible they have six wings, as well as hands and feet, and a human voice (Isaiah 6:2). “The seraph with his six flamingo wings” is invoked by John Shade in Pale Fire (line 225 of the poem). tangle of thorns: another H.H., the penitent, confessor, and martyr to love, calls attention to his thorns, the immodest reference to so sacred an image suggesting that the reader would do well to judge H.H.’s tone rather than his deeds. When H.H. addresses the “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” as he will do so often, he summarizes the judicial proclivities of those literal-minded and moralistic readers who, having soberly considered what John Ray, Jr., has said, already hate “Humbert the Horrible.” H.H. calls Lolita “crucified”—a verb that sincerely projects his “moral apotheosis.” CHAPTER 2 Jerome Dunn, the alpinist: in a novel so allusive as Lolita it is only natural to be suspicious of the most innocuous references, and to search for allusions under every bush. Anticipating the efforts of future exegetes, I will occasionally offer non-notes—“anti-annotations” which simply state that Nabokov intended no allusion whatsoever. Thus, “Jerome Dunn” is non-allusive, as are “Clarence Choate Clark,” H.H.’s lawyer, and John Ray’s residence of “Widworth, Mass..” For important caveats in Nabokov’s own words, see Aubrey McFate ... devil of mine and Orange ... and Emerald. paleopedology and Aeolian harps: respectively, the branch of pedology concerned with the soils of past geological ages, and a box-shaped musical instrument on which the wind produces varying harmonies (after Aeolus, Greek god of the winds). A favorite romantic metaphor for the poet’s sensibility. midge: a gnat-like insect. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. Sybil: or sibyl, from the Greek; any of several prophetesses credited to widely separate parts of the ancient world.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that may seem pretty obvious to the reader who knows the ropes. An advertisement in a lewd magazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who began by offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formal photographs in a rather soiled album (“Regardez-moi cette belle brune!”). When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out my criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however, after asking me what price I was prepared to disburse, she condescended to put me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provençal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess’ torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded son argent. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, lui, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie—for that was her stellar name—who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.