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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  I’m the only person in your life who’s held you together this long—but go ahead and leave! You’ll screw yourself up so thoroughly that you’ll never do anything worthwhile again.” — “How can you expect to have anything interesting to write about if you’re so afraid of new experiences?” Adrian asked. I had just told him that I wouldn’t go with him but had decided to return home with Bennett instead. We were sitting in Adrian’s Triumph, parked on a back street near the university. (Bennett was at a meeting on “Aggression in Large Groups.”) “I plunge into new experiences all the time. That’s just the trouble.” “Bullshit. You’re a scared little princess. I offer you an experience that could really change you, one you really could write about, and you run away. Back to Bennett and New York. Back to your safe little marital cubbyhole. Christ —I’m glad I’m not married anymore if this is what it leads to. I thought you had more guts than this. After reading all your ‘sensual and erotic’ poems—in inverted commas—I thought better of you than this. ” He gave me a disgusted look. “If I spent all my time being sensual and erotic, I’d be too tired to write about it,” I pleaded. “You’re a fake,” he said, “a total fake. You’ll never have anything worthwhile to write about if you don’t grow up. Courage is the first principle. You’re just scared.” “Don’t bully me.” “Who’s bullying you? I’m just leveling with you. You’ll never know fuck-all about writing if you don’t learn courage.” “What the hell do you know about it?” “I know that I’ve read some of your work and that you give out little bits and pieces of yourself in it. If you don’t watch out, you’ll become a fetish for all sorts of frustrated types. All the nuts in the world will fall into your basket.” “That’s already happened to some extent. My poems are a happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance.” I was cribbing from Joyce, but Adrian wouldn’t know, being illiterate. In the months since my first book had appeared, I had received plenty of bizarre phone calls and letters from men who assumed that I did everything I wrote about and did it with everyone, everywhere. Suddenly, I was public property in a small way. It was an odd sensation. In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but then when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced for all the wrong reasons. Or are they the right reasons? Do all the nuts in the world really have your number? And not just your telephone number either. “I thought we really had a good thing going,” Adrian said, “but it’s over now, because you’re so bloody terrified.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  There was silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni's. Tell me,' I said at last. Is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down for- ever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?' Think,' said Jacques, 'of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of some- James Baldwin 76 thing else and pretended that nothing was hap- pening down there in the dark between your legs/ I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked up- ward hopelessly at me. Tou think,* he persisted, *that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are/ 'Why are they— shameful?' I asked him. 'Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light/ I asked him: Why?' That you must ask yourself/ he told me, 'and perhaps one day, this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.' I looked over at Giovanni, who now had one arm around the ruined-looking girl, who could have once been very beautiful but who never would be now. Jacques followed my look. 'He is very fond of you,' he said, 'already. But this doesn't make you happy or proud, as it should. It makes you frightened and ashamed. Why?' 'I don't understand him,' I said at last. 1 don't know what his friendship means; I don't know what he means by friendship.' Jacques laughed. Tou don't know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling — GIOVANNI'S ROOM 77 it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?' I said nothing. 'Or for that matter/ he continued, 'what kind of love affairs?' I was silent for so long that he teased me, saying, 'Come out, come out, wherever you areT

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  so that pity may quickly be awakened in others, not only by the sound of their words, but by their appearance which pleads not less. 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 shade7 that was expectant in look, and if one would ask, “how so?” its chin it lifted up after the manner of the blind. “Spirit,” said I, “that dost subdue thee to mount up; if thou art that one who answered me, make thyself known to me by place or by name.” “I was a Sienese,” it answered, “and with these others here do cleanse my sinful life, weeping unto Him that he lend himself to us.8 Sapient was I not albeit Sapia I was named, and of others hurt I was far more glad than of mine own good fortune. And that thou mayst not think I deceive thee, hear if I was mad as I tell thee. Already when the arc of my years was descending,9 my townsmen, hard by Colle, were joined in battle with their foes, and I prayed God for that which he had willed. There were they routed, and rolled back in the bitter steps of flight, and seeing the case I took joy exceeding all other; so much, that I lifted up my impudent face, crying to God: ‘Now I fear thee no more,’ as the blackbird doth for a little fair weather.10

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “I’m a frank person,” she said, “but conventions are conventions, and I find it difficult … Let me put it this way … The Walkers, who live in what we call around here the Duke’s Manor, you know the great gray house on the hill—they send their two girls to our school, and we have the niece of President Moore with us, a really gracious child, not to speak of a number of other prominent children. Well, under the circumstances, it is rather a jolt when Dolly, who looks like a little lady, uses words which you as a foreigner probably simply do not know or do not understand. Perhaps it might be better—Would you like me to have Dolly come up here right away to discuss things? No? You see—oh well, let’s have it out. Dolly has written a most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets which Miss Redcock, who is getting married in June, distributed among the girls, and we thought she should stay after hours—another half hour at least. But if you like—” “No,” I said, “I don’t want to interfere with rules. I shall talk to her later. I shall thrash it out.” “Do,” said the woman rising from her chair arm. “And perhaps we can get together again soon, and if things do not improve we might have Dr. Cutler analyze her.” Should I marry Pratt and strangle her? “… And perhaps your family doctor might like to examine her physically—just a routine check-up. She is in Mushroom—the last classroom along that passage.” Beardsley School, it may be explained, copied a famous girls’ school in England by having “traditional” nicknames for its various classrooms: Mushroom, Room-In 8, B-room, Room-BA and so on. Mushroom was smelly, with a sepia print of Reynolds’ “Age of Innocence” above the chalkboard, and several rows of clumsy-looking pupil desks. At one of these, my Lolita was reading the chapter on “Dialogue” in Baker’s Dramatic Technique, and all was very quiet, and there was another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft curl around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Actually I didn’t, but thanks anyway, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry. I’m thinking of going back home and stopping in Italy again for a few days on the way. My ticket gives me a free stop in Rome. I don’t think the climate here agrees with me. Lalah and Chloe are supposed to fly to New York next week anyway and it keeps getting hotter and hotter….” I was babbling on out of nervousness. Meanwhile, Pierre was stretching out on the bed next to me and putting his arms around me. What was I supposed to do? If I fought him off like an ordinary rapist, I’d offend him, but if I took the path of least resistance and went along with him, it was incest. Not to mention the fact that Randy would probably kill me. But what should I say? What was the etiquette in a situation like this? “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said weakly. Pierre’s hands were under my nightgown, stroking my thighs. I wasn’t as unaroused as I wanted to pretend. “What isn’t a good idea?” he asked nonchalantly. “After all, it’s natural for a brother to love his little sister….” And he went on doing what comes naturally. “What did you say?” I asked, sitting up. “Just that it’s perfectly natural for a brother to love his little sister….” He might have been Albert Ellis giving a lecture. “Pierre,” I said gently, “haven’t you ever read Lolita?” “I can’t stand that phony prose style of his,” Pierre said, annoyed with me for distracting him. “But this is incest,” I said emphatically. “Shhh—you’ll wake everyone…. Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant. We’ll do it the Greek way, if you like….” “It wasn’t pregnancy I was worried about for God’s sake—it was incest!” My reasoning didn’t seem to make a dent in Pierre’s resolve. “Shhhh,” he said, pushing me down on the pillow. He was like some of the guys I’d met in Italy. If you resisted because you really weren’t interested, they thought it was fear of pregnancy and kept suggesting other alternatives—anal intercourse, sucking, mutual masturbation—anything except “NO.” Pierre inched up to the head of the bed and offered his erect penis to my mouth…. The showdown. A battle was raging within me. It would have been so damned easy to oblige. To suck him and be done with it. It was so simple really. What difference could one more blow job make to my life? “I can’t,” I said. “Come on,” Pierre said, “I’ll teach you.” “I didn’t mean that. I meant I can’t; morally, I can’t….” “It’s easy,” he said. “I know it’s easy,” I said. “Here,” he said, “all you do is…” “Pierre!” I screamed. Pierre gathered his pajama bottoms around him and beat it out of the room.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but I just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your mother’s husband—and good grief—that’s Daddy! But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really want. So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you should blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear? I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called Orgy Girls. On the bed were about ten other books with titles like Teenage Incest; Swapping: Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Entered in All Places; A Trip Around the World; and Letters of Lust. Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival. His hips began to move faster [Lalah read in a histrionic voice] as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily…. …Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark. “Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded. “Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book. “Listen, kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears….” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know. “Well—what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially. “Come on you idiots—tell me!” “You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you…” Lalah said, still giggling. “How the fuck did you know?” “Because he tried it with me,” she said. “And me,” said Chloe. “You’re kidding.” “We are not kidding,” Lalah said. “ Would that we were….” “So what happened?” “Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe says she did, too…but I’m not entirely sure I believe her….” “You bitch!” Chloe yelled. “OK…OK…I believe you.” “And you mean you just stuck around here after that happened?” “Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless…. He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.” “A bit horny?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  You know how we do.’ Thus did the show begin. There was support for the first artist, a young man who rhymed stiffly but spoke eloquently of America’s latest war. After this came a gawky, lanky girl with ears that thrust through the poker-straight curtains of her long hair. Claire suppressed her own hatred of elaborate metaphor and managed to enjoy the girl’s cruel, witty verse about all the useless men she’d known. But then three boys, one after the after, recounted macho tales of street life, the final boy speaking in Portuguese. Here Claire’s attention petered out. It happened that Zora was sat right in front of her at an evocative angle, her face presenting itself to Claire in profile. Without wanting to, Claire found herself examining it. How much of the girl’s father was here! The slight over-bite, the long face, the noble nose! She was getting fat, though; inevitably  the anatomy lesson she would go the way of her mother. Claire rebuked herself for this thought. It was wrong to hate the girl, as it was wrong to hate Howard, or to hate herself. Hate would not help this. It was personal insight that was required. Twice a week at six thirty Claire drove into Boston, to Dr Byford’s house in Chapel Hill, and paid him eighty dollars an hour to help her seek out personal insight. Together they tried to comprehend the chaos of pain Claire had unleashed. If one good thing had come out of the past twelve months, it was these sessions: of all her psychiatrists over the years, it was Byford who had brought her closest to breakthrough. So far this much was clear: Claire Malcolm was addicted to self-sabotage. In a pattern so deeply embedded in her life that Byford suspected it of being rooted in her earliest babyhood, Claire compulsively sabotaged all possibilities of personal happiness. It seemed she was convinced that it was not happiness that she deserved. The Howard episode was only the last and most spectacular in a long line of acts of emotional cruelty she had felt impelled to inflict upon herself. You only had to look at the timing. Finally, finally , she had found this wonderful blessing, this angel, this gift , Warren Crane, a man who (she could not help but list his attributes as Byford encouraged her to do): (a) Did not consider her a threat. (b) Did not fear or dread her sexuality or gender. (c) Did not wish to cripple her mentally. (d) Did not, at a preconscious level, want her dead. (e) Did not resent her money, her reputation, her talent or her strength. (f ) Did not wish to interfere with the deep connection she had with the earth – indeed, loved the earth as she did and encouraged her love of it. She had come to a place of personal joy. Finally, at fifty-three.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Now she looked up as the man took a half step back to give her a fuller view of him. She found she wanted very much to be right , and struggled for a minute between a few places she recalled having French history, unsure if she was right about any of them. She wondered about her own boredom. She must be very bored indeed to want to be right before this man. ‘Ivory . . .’ began Kiki cautiously, but his face repelled this, so she switched to Martinique. ‘ Haiti ,’ he said. ‘ Right . My – ’ began Kiki, but realized she did not want to say the word ‘cleaner’ in this context. She began again, ‘There’re so many Haitians here . . .’ She dared a little further: ‘And of course it’s so difficult, in Haiti, right now.’ The man put the hub of each hand firmly on the table between them and engaged her eyes. ‘ Yes . Terrible. So terrible . Now, every day – terror .’ The solemnity of this reply forced Kiki to turn her attention back to the bracelet sliding off her wrist. She had only the most vague sense of the difficulty she had made reference to (it had slid off the radar under the stress of other, more pressing difficulties, national and personal) and felt ashamed now to be caught under the pretence of having more knowledge than she possessed. ‘This is not for here – for here .’ he said, suddenly coming around the table and pointing at Kiki’s ankle.  On Beauty ‘ Oh . . . it’s like a . . . what do you call that, an anklet ?’ ‘Put here – put up here – please.’ Kiki released Murdoch to the floor and allowed this man to lift her foot on to the small bamboo stool. She had to rest her hand on his shoulder for balance. Kiki’s sarong opened a little and some of her thigh was revealed. Moisture sprang from the chubby crease behind her knee. The man did not seem to notice but remained purposeful, catching one sweaty loose end of the chain and bringing it round to meet the other. It was in this unorthodox position that Kiki found herself ambushed from behind. Two masculine hands grabbed her round her middle, squeezed – and then a hot red face materialized next to her own like the Cheshire Cat’s, kissing her damp cheek. ‘Jay – don’t be crazy – ’ ‘Keeks, wow – you’re all leg. What’re you trying to do, kill me?’ ‘Oh, my God – Warren – Hi . . . You almost killed me – Jesus – creeping like a fox – I thought it was Jerome, he’s around here someplace . . . God, I didn’t even know you guys were back. How was Italy? Where’s – ’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  And so naturally it was the perfect time to sabotage her own life. To this end she had initiated an affair with Howard Belsey, one of her oldest friends. A man for whom she had no sexual desire  On Beauty whatsoever. Looking back on it, it was really too perfect. Howard Belsey – of all people! When Claire leaned into Howard’s body that day in the conference room of the Black Studies Department, when she clearly offered herself to him, she had not really known why. By contrast, she had felt all the classic masculine impulses and fantasies surge through her old friend back towards her – the late possibility of other people, of living other lives, of new flesh, of being young again. Howard was releasing a secret, volatile, shameful part of himself. And it was an aspect of himself with which he was unfamiliar, that he had always presumed beneath him; she could sense all of this in the urgent pressure of Howard’s hands on her tiny waist, the fumbling speed with which he undressed her. He was surprised by desire. In response Claire had felt nothing comparable. Only sorrow. Their three-week affair never even met with a bedroom. To go to a bedroom would have been a conscious decision. Instead, in the regular course of their college business, their thrice-weekly after-hours meeting in Howard’s office, they would lock the door and gravitate to his huge squishy sofa, upholstered in its ostentatiously English, William Morris ferns. Silently and fiercely they fucked among the foliage, almost always sitting up, with Claire sat perfunctorily atop her colleague, her little freckled legs wrapped about his waist. When they had finished he had a habit of pushing her backwards until she was lying beneath him. Curiously, he laid his big flat hands on her body, on her shoulders, on her flat chest, on her stomach, on the backs of her ankles, on the thin, waxed line of her pubic hair. It seemed a kind of wonder; he was checking that she was all there and this was all real. Then they would get up and dress. How did that happen again? They often said this or something like it. A stupid, cowardly, pointless thing to say. Meanwhile sex with Warren was newly ecstatic and always completed with guilty tears, which Warren misinterpreted, in his innocence, as joy. The whole situation was vile, the more so because she couldn’t defend it, even to herself; the more so because she was terrified and humbled by the long reach of her miserable, unloved childhood. Still clasping its fingers round her throat all these years later!  the anatomy lesson Three Tuesdays after the affair began Howard came into her office to tell her it was over. It was the first time either properly acknowledged it had begun. He explained he’d been caught with a condom.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  In Heidelberg, I had been working on a novel called The Man Who Murdered Poets. The protagonist was a young madman who goes off to kill his doppelgänger in order to assume his creative powers. Why a novel in the voice of a madman? Clearly I was trying to deal with the trauma of my first marriage in literary terms. Nabokov was my favorite novelist then and I was pursuing a Nabokovian theme. Underneath these motivations lurked a far more important one. I was convinced that no novel from a female point of view could claim the literary cachet I craved. Here is something that seems astonishing in retrospect. In those days women writers hid in plain sight. I remember searching for a critical book on Emily Dickinson in Butler Library at Columbia and finding it in a series of volumes entitled “American Men of Letters.” Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë were read as bloodless classics rather than as flesh-and-blood women. Edith Wharton was regarded as a lesser Henry James. At Barnard from 1959 to 1963, we almost never read women poets or novelists—though the college was and is noted for its encouragement of female excellence, and has produced an astonishing roster of creative writers: Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Hortense Calisher, Belva Plain, Rosellen Brown, Mary Gordon, Anna Quindlen, Edwige Danticat—to name only a few. Despite this record, modern poetry at Barnard in my day meant T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound. Contemporary fiction meant Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Women writers were confined to the ghetto of popular culture. Only allowed to shine in the genres of mystery, romance and the historical novel, they were even tolerated when they made big money as long as they did not aspire to literature. But if you wanted to be seen as serious, you had to be male. (Yes, there were a few exceptions—like Mary McCarthy—but most of the women who claimed the pen [such an intrusion on the rights of men] concealed themselves in the ladies’ department of popular fiction.) While I was writing poems from a female point of view, I was writing fiction from a male. Poetry, because it was clandestine and largely unread, allowed me to experiment with female honesty. Fiction, because it was public, led me to impersonate a male novelist. So I returned to New York City in 1969 with a book of poems and part of a novel. I went back to Columbia University again, but this time not to the Ph.D. program in eighteenth-century English literature but to the School of the Arts, where I could study the making of poems with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. I refined and refined my first book of poems, which eventually found a publisher in Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I felt sorry for her. I thought she might really need my ten dollars. After all this was Saturday night, and yet she didn’t have any customers. Somehow I equated her fatness, her blackness, her unpopularity with my own outcast status. She’d show me sympathy, which would magically awaken my virility. In her adoring eyes I’d become a slender-hipped young prince under a gold crown of hair, skin as smooth as petals under a light green tunic. I’d protect her. I’d earn money and buy her freedom. We’d be outcasts together as a mixed couple, she a Negro whore and I her little protector. But no matter, for if this fantasy kept me a pariah by exchanging homosexuality for miscegenation, it also gave me a sacrifice to make and a companion to cherish. I would educate and protect her. I would nurse her back to decency after her years of debauchery. We went downstairs into a cellar room curtained off from the furnace by a flannel blanket suspended from a clothesline. Her night table was a wooden crate. Her mattress had no sheets on it and was resting on the floor. She pulled her slip over her head and said, “Get your clothes off. I don’ have all night.” She didn’t even watch me as I undressed. As I pulled my underpants off I worried she’d laugh when she saw my fear-shriveled penis, but her indifference to me was complete. I creaked awkwardly as I lowered myself onto the bed beside her. Her fingers started blindly grubbing for my penis, which she found and yanked. Then she sighed, heaved herself up onto an elbow, finally lowered herself and plopped my penis in her mouth. Nothing happened. I could scarcely feel anything. “I don’ have all night,” she said again as she unthreaded a hair from between her teeth and looked at it suspiciously. “Sorry,” I said. It dawned on me that neither of us was enjoying this and that she was as eager as I for it to be over. “For some reason I’m not in the mood tonight,” I said. “Let’s just talk a minute and then go upstairs. And if any of the fellows should ask—” “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “Ah’ll say you was great, a real stud. And in the future, my man, drink gin. Gin make you hard. It do. It make a man hard.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Howard had always disliked Monty, as any sensible liberal would dislike a man who had dedicated his life to the perverse politics of right-wing iconoclasm, but he had never really hated him until he had heard the news, three years ago, that Kipps too was writing a book about Rembrandt. A book that, even before it was published, Howard sensed would be a hugely popular (and populist) brick designed to sit heavily atop the New York Times bestseller list for half a year, crushing every book beneath it. It was the thought of that book, and of its likely fate (compared to Howard’s own unfinished work, which, in the best of all possible worlds, could only ever end up in the bookshelves of a thousand art history students), that had pushed to him to write that terrible letter. In front of the entire academic community Howard had picked up some rope and hanged himself. Outside Kilburn Station Howard found a phone-box and called directory inquiries. He gave the Kippses’ full address and received in return a phone number. For a few minutes he hung about,  On Beauty examining the prostitutes’ cards. Strange that there should be so very many of these ladies-of-the-afternoon, tucked away behind the Victorian bay windows, reclining in post-war semis. He noticed how many were black – many more than in a Soho phone-box, surely – and how many, if the photos were to be believed (are they to be believed?), were exceptionally pretty. He picked up the handset again. He paused. In the past year he had grown shyer of Jerome. He feared the new adolescent religiosity, the moral seriousness and silences, always somehow implicitly critical. Howard took courage and dialled. ‘Hello?’ ‘Yes, hello.’ The voice – young-sounding and very London – threw Howard for a moment. ‘ Hi .’ ‘Sorry, who’s this?’ ‘I’m . . . who’s that?’ ‘This is the Kipps residence. Who’s that ?’ ‘Ah – the son, right.’ ‘Pardon? Who is this?’ ‘Er . . . look, I need to – this is awkward – I’m Jerome’s father and – ’ ‘Oh, right, let me just call him – ’ ‘No – no – no, wait – one minute – ’ ‘ ’Sno trouble – he’s having dinner, but I can call him – ’ ‘No, don’t – I – look, I don’t want to . . . Thing is, I’ve just come from Boston . . . we only just heard, you see – ’ ‘OK,’ said the voice in an exploratory way that Howard couldn’t get a handle on. ‘Well,’ said Howard, swallowing hard, ‘I’d quite like to sound out someone in the family a little . . . before I speak properly to Jerome – he didn’t explain much – and obviously . . . I’m sure your father – ’ ‘My father’s eating too. Do you want to – ’

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Then the coiner: “Thus thy jaw gapes wide, as usual, to speak ill: for if I have thirst, and moisture stuffs me, thou hast the burning, and the head that pains thee; and to make thee lap the mirror of Narcissus7 thou wouldst not require many words of invitation.” I was standing all intent to hear them, when the Master said to me: “Now keep looking, a little longer and I quarrel with thee!” When I heard him speak to me in anger, I turned towards him with such shame, that it comes over me again as I but think of it. And as one who dreams of something hurtful to him, and dreaming wishes it a dream, so that he longs for that which is, as if it were not: such grew I, who, without power to speak, wished to excuse myself and all the while excused, and did not think that I was doing it. “Less shame washes off a greater fault than thine has been,” said the Master: “therefore unload thee of all sorrow; and count that I am always at thy side, should it again fall out that Fortune brings thee where people are in similar contests: for the wish to hear it is a vulgar wish.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘About simulated wars or whatever the fuck that was . . . And I was thinking: What is wrong with this man? I was ashamed of you. I didn’t say anything, but I was. Howard,’ she said, reaching out to him but not far enough to touch, ‘this is real . This life. We’re really here – this is really happening. Suffering is real . When you hurt people, it’s real . When you fuck one of our best friends, that’s a real thing and it hurts me.’ Kiki collapsed into the couch and started to weep. ‘Comparing mass murder to my infidelity seems a tad . . .’ said Howard, quietly, but the storm was over, and there was no point. Kiki cried into a pillow. ‘Why do you love me?’ he asked. Kiki kept on crying and did not answer. A few minutes later he asked her again. ‘Is that some kind of trick question?’ ‘It’s a genuine question. A real question.’ Kiki said nothing. ‘I’ll help you out,’ said Howard. ‘I’ll put it in the past tense. Why did you love me?’ Kiki sniffed loudly. ‘I don’t want to play this game – it’s stupid and aggressive. I’m tired.’ ‘Keeks, you’ve been holding me at arm’s length for so long, and I can’t remember if you even like me – forget love, like .’ ‘I have always loved you,’ said Kiki, but in such a furious way that words and sentiment disconnected. ‘ Always . I didn’t change. Let’s remember who changed.’ ‘I am honestly, honestly not picking a fight with you,’ said Howard wearily and pressed his eyes with his fingers. ‘I am asking you why you loved me.’ They sat and said nothing for a while. In the silence, something thawed. Their breathing slowed. ‘I don’t know how to answer that – I mean, we both know all of the good stuff and it doesn’t help,’ said Kiki.  on beauty and being wrong ‘You say you want to talk,’ said Howard. ‘But you don’t. You stonewall me.’ ‘ All I know is that loving you is what I did with my life. And I’m terrified by what’s happened to us. This wasn’t meant to happen to us. We’re not like other people. You’re my best friend – ’ ‘Best friend, yes,’ said Howard wretchedly. ‘That’s always been the case.’ ‘And we’re co-parents.’ ‘And we’re co-parents ,’ repeated Howard, chafing against an Americanism he despised. ‘You don’t have to say that sarcastically, Howard – that’s part of what we are now.’ ‘I wasn’t being . . .’ Howard sighed. ‘And we were in love,’ he said. Kiki let her head flop back on the couch. ‘Well, Howie, that was your past tense, not mine.’ They were silent again. ‘ And ,’ said Howard, ‘of course we were always very good at the Hawaiian.’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “I’m a frank person,” she said, “but conventions are conventions, and I find it difficult … Let me put it this way … The Walkers, who live in what we call around here the Duke’s Manor, you know the great gray house on the hill—they send their two girls to our school, and we have the niece of President Moore with us, a really gracious child, not to speak of a number of other prominent children. Well, under the circumstances, it is rather a jolt when Dolly, who looks like a little lady, uses words which you as a foreigner probably simply do not know or do not understand. Perhaps it might be better—Would you like me to have Dolly come up here right away to discuss things? No? You see—oh well, let’s have it out. Dolly has written a most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets which Miss Redcock, who is getting married in June, distributed among the girls, and we thought she should stay after hours—another half hour at least. But if you like—” “No,” I said, “I don’t want to interfere with rules. I shall talk to her later. I shall thrash it out.” “Do,” said the woman rising from her chair arm. “And perhaps we can get together again soon, and if things do not improve we might have Dr. Cutler analyze her.” Should I marry Pratt and strangle her? “… And perhaps your family doctor might like to examine her physically—just a routine check-up. She is in Mushroom—the last classroom along that passage.” Beardsley School, it may be explained, copied a famous girls’ school in England by having “traditional” nicknames for its various classrooms: Mushroom, Room-In 8, B-room, Room-BA and so on. Mushroom was smelly, with a sepia print of Reynolds’ “Age of Innocence” above the chalkboard, and several rows of clumsy-looking pupil desks. At one of these, my Lolita was reading the chapter on “Dialogue” in Baker’s Dramatic Technique, and all was very quiet, and there was another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft curl around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘But there ain’t nothing to talk about,’ said Bailey in a low, resolved tone. ‘That’s the instruction – do you get that?’ ‘Umm, can I?’ said Tom, taking a step forward. ‘Mister Bailey, we’re not trying to irritate you, but we were just considering whether . . .’ Bailey waved him off. There was nobody else in this back lot. Just Levi. ‘Do you get that? This comes from above my head and it’s done. Can’t be changed. You get that, Levi?’ Levi shrugged and turned from Bailey slightly, just enough to show how little this stand-off meant to him. ‘I get it . . . I just think it’s bullshit, that’s all.’ Candy whistled. Mike pushed the fire-exit door open and held it, waiting for the others.  the anatomy lesson ‘Tom – all of you, get yourselves back to work – now ,’ said Bailey, scratching one hand with the other. The welts were pink and raw. ‘Levi, stay where you are.’ ‘It’s not just Levi, we all feel – ’ tried Tom bravely, but again Bailey held a finger up in the air to stop him. ‘Right now , if it ain’t inconveniating you too much. Somebody’s got to work round here.’ Tom offered a look of pity to Levi and followed Mike and Candy back to work. The fire door swung shut, very slowly, pushing out a little of the warm store air into this barren cement place. At last the judder of the lock sounded and echoed across the back lot. Bailey took a few steps closer to Levi. Levi kept his arms folded high on his chest, but Bailey’s face this close was a shocking thing and Levi could not help blinking over and over. ‘ Don’t – act – like – a – nigger – with – me – Levi ,’ said Bailey in a whisper, each word with a momentum of its own, like darts he was throwing at a target. ‘I see you, acting up, trying to make me look stupid – thinking you’re all that, ’cos you’re the only brother any of these kids met in they whole lives. Let me tell you something. I know where you’re from, brother .’ ‘ What? ’ said Levi, his belly still turning over after the shocking plummet invoked by the strange word – like a speed bump in the sentence – never before said to him in anger. Bailey turned his back on Levi and reached out for the fire door, his upper body sadly hunched over. ‘You know what it means.’ ‘What are you talking about, man? Bailey, why you talking to me like that?’ ‘It’s Mister Bailey,’ said Bailey, turning back. ‘I’m senior to you here. ’Case you ain’t noticed. Why am I talking to you ? Like what? How did you just talk to me in front of them kids?’ ‘I was just saying that – ’

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  hath made my burial-ground a conduit for that blood and filth, whereby the apostate one who fell from here above, is soothed down there below.” With that colour which painteth a cloud at even or at morn by the opposing sun, did I then see all heaven o’erfused; and as a modest dame who remaineth sure of herself, yet at another’s fault, though only hearing it, feeleth all timid, so Beatrice changed her semblance; and such, I take it, was the eclipse in heaven when the supreme Might suffered. Then his discourse proceeded, with voice so far transmuted from itself, that his semblance had not altered more: “The spouse of Christ was not reared upon my blood, and that of Linus and of Cletus, that she might then be used for gain of gold; but ’twas for gain of this glad life that Sixtus and Pius, Calixtus and Urban shed their blood after many a tear.3 It was not our purpose that on the right hand of our successors one part of the Christian folk should sit, and one part on the other;4 nor that the keys given in grant to me should become the ensign on a standard waging war on the baptized;5 nor that I should become the head upon the seal to sold and lying privileges, whereat I often blush and shoot forth flames. In garb of pastors ravening wolves are seer, from here above in all the pastures. Succour of God! oh wherefore liest thou prone? Cahorsines and Gascons6 make ready to drink our blood. Oh fair beginning, to what vile ending must thou fall! But the lofty Providence,7 which with Scipio defended the glory of the world for Rome, will soon bring succour, as I deem. And thou, my son, who, for thy mortal weight, shalt return below once more, open thy mouth and hide thou not the thing which I not hide.” As our atmosphere raineth down in flakes the frozen vapours when the horn of the heavenly Goat is touched by the sun;8 so did I see the ether adorn itself and rain upward the flakes of the triumphal flashes, which had made sojourn there with us. My sight was following their semblance, and followed till the medium, by excess, deprived it of the power to pierce more far.9 Whereat the Lady, who saw me now absolved from straining upward, said to me: “Down plunge thy sight and see how thou hast rolled.” From the hour at which I had before looked down, I saw that I had moved through the whole arc which the first Climate makes from middle unto end;10 so that I saw beyond Cadiz the mad way which Ulysses took, and on this side, herd by, the shore whereon Europa made herself a sweet burden.11 And further had the site of this thrashing-floor been unfolded to me, save that the sun was in advance beneath my feet, served by a Sign and more from me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  He put an unpeeled banana in my mouth, warning me that if I took it out he’d know, and he’d punish me emotionally. “Okay, master,” I mumbled sarcastically. “Keep it in there,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen. I didn’t think it was very funny, but I played along. Back then, I interpreted Trevor’s sadism as a satire of actual sadism. His little games were so silly. So I just knelt there with the banana in my mouth, breathing through my nose. I could hear him on the phone making a reservation for two for dinner that night at Kurumazushi. After twenty minutes he came back in, took the banana out of my mouth. “My sister’s in town so you have to leave,” he said, and put his flaccid penis in my mouth. When he wasn’t hard after a few minutes, he got angry. “What are you even doing here? I don’t have time for this.” He ushered me out. “The doorman will hail you a cab,” he said to me, like I was some one-night stand, some cheap prostitute, like somebody he didn’t know at all. Anal sex came up with Trevor only once. It was my idea. I told him I wanted to prove that I wasn’t uptight—a complaint he gave because at some point I’d hesitated to give him a blow job while he sat on the toilet. We tried once on a night we’d both had a lot to drink, but he lost his erection as he tried to wedge it in. Then all of a sudden he got up and went into the shower, saying nothing to me. Maybe I should have felt vindicated by his failure, but instead I just felt rejected. I followed him to the bathroom. “Is it because I smell?” I asked him through the shower curtain. “What’s wrong? What did I do?” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “You just left without saying anything.” “There was shit all over my dick, okay?” he said angrily. But that was impossible. He hadn’t even penetrated me. I knew he was lying. But I still apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you mad?” “I can’t have this conversation with you right now. I’m tired and I’m not in the mood to deal with your drama.” He was nearly yelling. “I just want to get some sleep. Jesus!” I called him the next day and asked if he was free that weekend, but he said he’d already found a woman who wasn’t going to “pull pranks for attention.” A few nights later, I got drunk and called up Rite Aid and ordered a case of sexual lubricant to be delivered to him at his office the next morning. He sent me a note at the gallery by messenger in response. “Don’t ever do that again,” it said. We got back together a few weeks later.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Bennett made no protestation. Entwined and sweating, the three of us finally fell asleep. — I have told these events as plainly as possible, because nothing I might say to embellish them could possibly make them more shocking. The whole episode was wordless—as if the three of us were in a pantomime together and each had rehearsed his part for so many years that it was second nature. We were merely going through the motions of something we had done in fantasy many times. The whole episode—from my leaving the address with the switchboard operator to Adrian’s stroking Bennett’s beautiful brown back—was as inevitable as a Greek tragedy—or as a Punch and Judy show. I remember certain details: Adrian’s wheezing snore, the enraged look on Bennett’s face when he entered the room (and, in rapid succession, me), the way we three slept entangled in each other’s arms, the large mosquito which fed off our mingled blood and kept awakening me with bites. In the blue early- morning twilight, I awoke to find that I had rolled over and crushed it sometime during the night. It made a bloody Rorschach on the sheet, like the menstrual stain of a tiny woman. In the morning we disowned each other. Nothing had happened. It was a dream. We walked down the baroque steps of the pension as if we all happened to be separate lodgers meeting for the first time on the winding stairs. Five of the English and French candidates were breakfasting in the downstairs hall. They turned their heads as one and stared. I greeted them rather too heartily—especially Reuben Finkel, a redheaded, mustachioed English candidate with a terrible Cockney accent. Leering like Humbert Humbert, he had surprised me and Adrian numerous times at swimming pools and cafés; I often thought he was following us with binoculars. “Hello, Reuben,” I said. Adrian joined in the greetings, but Bennett said nothing. He walked on ahead as if in a trance. Adrian followed him. It momentarily occurred to me that perhaps something more had happened between the two men during the night, but I quickly put it out of my mind. Why? — Adrian offered to drive us back to our hotel. Bennett stiffly refused. But then when we were unable to get a taxi, Bennett finally gave in—without even the courtesy of a word or a nod in Adrian’s direction. Adrian shrugged and took the wheel. I doubled myself up in the midget-sized backseat. This time Bennett directed and we did not get lost. But throughout the whole ride, there was a terrible silence between us, except for the directions Bennett offered. I wanted to talk. We had been through something important together and there was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. This might be the beginning of some kind of understanding between us, but instead Bennett was hell-bent on denying it. Adrian wasn’t much help either. All their talk about analysis and self-analysis was pure bullshit.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘What drama you all live in,’ said Claire happily. ‘I don’t blame him – I mean, I don’t blame Jerome – I saw her, she’s so amazing, looks like Nefertiti. Didn’t you think so, Howard? Like one of those statuaries in the bottom of the Fitzwilliam, in Cambridge. You’ve seen those, right? Such an anciently wonderful face. Didn’t you think?’ Howard closed his eyes and drank deep from his glass. ‘Howard, the music – ’ said Kiki, turning to Howard at last. It was amazing to see her words and her eyes entirely unconnected to each other, like a bad actress. ‘I can’t take any more of this hip-hop. I don’t know how it even got on there. People can’t stand it – Albert Konig just left because of it, I think. Put on some Al Green or something – something everybody can enjoy.’ Claire had already taken a few steps towards Monty. Kiki joined her, but then paused and came back towards Howard and spoke in his ear. Her voice was shaky, but her grip on his wrist was not. She said one name and put a disbelieving question mark at the end of it. Howard felt his stomach fall away. ‘You can stay in the house,’ continued Kiki, her voice cracking, ‘but that’s it. Don’t you come near me. Don’t you come near me. I’ll kill you if you do.’ Then she calmly drew away and got in step with Claire Malcolm once more. Howard watched his wife walk away with his great mistake. Initially, he was quite certain he was about to be sick. He walked purposefully into the hallway towards the bathroom. Then he remembered Kiki’s errand and perversely determined to complete it. He paused in the doorway of the empty second living room. There was only one person in there, kneeling by the stereo, surrounded by CDs. That narrow, expressive back he had seen once before was exposed to the night: a clever top, tied up at the neck. One expected her to unfurl and dance the dying swan. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, turning her head. Howard had the queer sense that this was a reply to his silent thought. ‘Having a good one?’  On Beauty ‘Not really.’ ‘Bummer.’ ‘It’s Victoria, isn’t it.’ ‘ Vee .’ ‘Yes.’ She was right back on her heels, with only her top half turned to him. They smiled at each other. Howard’s heart spontaneously went out in sympathy to his eldest son. Mysteries of the past year resolved themselves. ‘So you’re the DJ,’ said Howard. Was there a new word for that now? ‘Looks like it – you don’t mind?’ ‘No, no . . . although a few of our senior guests were finding the selection . . . maybe a little bit hectic.’ ‘Right. You’ve been sent to sort me out.’ It was strange to hear this English phrase said in such an English way. ‘To confer, I think. Whose music is this, anyway?’