How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species—
Presentable, eminently presentable— shall I make you a present of him?
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine
specimen? Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside? Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing?
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face
him with a new demand on his understanding and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue. Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully. Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence, a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species—
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable— and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.
And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long. Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty—
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England what a pity they can’t all be kicked over like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly into the soil of England.
Far-off
at the core of space
at the quick
of time
beats
and goes still
the great swan upon the waters of all endings
the swan within vast chaos, within the electron.
For us
no longer he swims calmly
nor clacks across the forces furrowing a great gay trail
of happy energy,
nor is he nesting passive upon the atoms,
nor flying north desolative icewards
to the sleep of ice,
nor feeding in the marshes,
nor honking horn-like into the twilight.
But he stoops, now in the dark upon us;
he is treading our women and we men are put out as the vast white bird furrows our featherless women with unknown shocks
and stamps his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh.
I know a noble Englishman who is sure he is a gentleman, that sort—
This moderately young gentleman is very normal, as becomes an Englishman, rather proud of being a bit of a Don Juan you know—
But one of his beloveds, looking a little peaked towards the end of her particular affair with him said: Ronald, you know, is like most Englishmen, by instinct he’s a sodomist but he’s frightened to know it so he takes it out on women.
Oh come! said I. That Don Juan of a Ronald!
Exactly, she said. Don Juan was another of them, in love
with himself and taking it out on women.
Even that isn’t sodomitical, said I.
But if a man is in love with himself, isn’t that the meanest form of homosexuality? she said.
You’ve no idea, when men are in love with themselves,
how they wreak all their spite on women, pretending to love them. Ronald, she resumed, doesn’t like women, just acutely
dislikes them. He might possibly like men, if he weren’t too frightened
and egoistic. So he very cleverly tortures women, with his sort of love. He’s instinctively frightfully clever. He can be so gentle, so gentle so delicate in his love-making.
Even now, the thought of it bewilders me: such gentleness! Yet I know he does it deliberately, as cautiously and
deliberately as when he shaves himself. Then more than that, he makes a woman feel he is serving her really living in her service, and serving her as no man ever served before.
And then, suddenly, when she’s feeling all lovely about it suddenly the ground goes from under her feet, and she
clutches in mid-air, but horrible, as if your heart would wrench out; while he stands aside watching with a superior little grin like some malicious indecent little boy. —No, don’t talk to me about the love of Englishmen!
Good husbands make unhappy wives
so do bad husbands, just as often;
but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband
is much more devastating
than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate; he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse
and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word.
So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.
They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near,
till they touch in flood.
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
We’ve made a great mess of love since we made an ideal of it.
The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman,
all my life that moment I begin to hate her.
The moment I even say to a woman: I love you!— my love dies down considerably.
The moment love is an understood thing between us, we
are sure of it, it’s a cold egg, it isn’t love any more.
Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade; if it doesn’t fade, it is not a flower,
it’s either an artificial rag blossom, or an immortelle, for the cemetery.
The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes
on it, or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego
takes possession of it, it is not love any more, it’s just a mess. And we’ve made a great mess of love, mind-perverted,
will-perverted, ego-perverted love.
My father was a working man
and a collier was he, at six in the morning they turned him down
and they turned him up for tea.
My mother was a superior soul
a superior soul was she, cut out to play a superior role
in the god-damn bourgeoisie.
We children were the in-betweens
little non-descripts were we, indoors we called each other you,
outside, it was tha and thee.
But time has fled, our parents are dead we’ve risen in the world all three;
but still we are in-betweens, we tread between the devil and the deep cold sea.
O I am a member of the bourgeoisie and a servant-maid brings me my tea—
But I’m always longing for someone to say: ’ark ’ere, lad! atween thee an’ me
they’re a’ a b—d—lot o’——s,
an’ I reckon it’s nowt but right we should start an’ kick their——ses for ’em
an’ tell ’em to——.
There is a little wowser
John Thomas by name, and for every bloomin’, mortal thing
that little blighter’s to blame.
It was ’im as made the first mistake
of putting us in the world, forcin’ us out of the unawake,
an’ makin’ us come uncurled.
And then when you’re gettin’ nicely on
an’ life seems to begin, that little bleeder comes bustin’ in
with: Hello boy! what about sin?
An’ then he leads you by the nose
after a lot o’ women as strips you stark as a monkey nut
an’ leaves you never a trimmin’.
An’ then somebody has ter marry you
to put him through ’is paces; then when John Thomas don’t worry you,
it’s your wife, wi’ her airs an’ graces.
I think of all the little brutes
as ever was invented that little cod’s the holy worst.
I’ve chucked him, I’ve repented.
The feelings I don’t have I don’t have.
The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don’t have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of
us have. The feelings people ought to have, they never have. If people say they’ve got feelings, you may be pretty sure
they haven’t got them.
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all you’d better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.
Any woman who says to me —Do you really love me?— earns my undying detestation.
When a man can love no more and feel no more and desire has failed and the heart is numb
then all he can do
is to say: It is so!
I’ve got to put up with it
and wait.
This is a pause, how long a pause I know not,
in my very being.
A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
and swirl of a tail!
If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they’d be worth looking at.
Tell me a word
that you’ve often heard,
yet it makes you squint
if you see it in print!
Tell me a thing
that you’ve often seen,
yet if put in a book
it makes you turn green!
Tell me a thing
that you often do,
which described in a story
shocks you through and through!
Tell me what’s wrong
with words or with you
that you don’t mind the thing
yet the name is taboo.
‘We climbed the steep ascent to heaven
Through peril, toil and pain.
O God to us may strength be given
To scramble back again.’
O I was born low and inferior
but shining up beyond
I saw the whole superior
world shine like the promised land.
So up I started climbing
to join the folks on high,
but when at last I got there
I had to sit down and cry.
For it wasn’t a bit superior,
it was only affected and mean;
though the house had a fine interior
the people were never in.
I mean, they were never entirely
there when you talked to them;
away in some private cupboard
some small voice went: Ahem!
Ahem! they went. This fellow
is a little too open for me;
with such people one has to be careful
though, of course, we won’t let him see!—
And they thought you couldn’t hear them
privately coughing: Ahem!
And they thought you couldn’t see them
cautiously swallowing their phlegm!
But of course I always heard them,
and every time the same.
They all of them always kept up their sleeve
their class-superior claim.
Some narrow-gutted superiority,
and trying to make you agree,
which, for myself, I couldn’t,
it was all cat-piss to me.
And so there came the saddest day
when I had to tell myself plain:
the upper classes are just a fraud,
you’d better get down again.