528
PARTISAN REVIEW
son after your fashion-you, I hear, are one of the very worst."
A feeling of doom descended upon me. So I was guilty too. I
too had done the dreadful thing, whatever it was, that wrecked you
for life, body and soul, and ended in suicide or the lunatic asylum.
Till then I had hoped that I w.as innocent, and the conviction of sin
which now took possession of me was perhaps all the stronger
be–
cause I did not know what I had done. I was not among those who
were interrogated and flogged, and it was not until the row was well
over that I even learned about the trivial accident that had connected
my name with it. Even then I understood nothing. It was not till
about two years later that I fully grasped what that lecture on the
Temple of the Body had referred to.
At
this
time I was in an almost sexless state, which
is
normal,
or at any rate common, in boys of that age; I was therefore in the
position of simultaneously knowing and not knowing what used to
be called the Facts of Life. At five or six, like many children, I
had passed through a phase of sexuality. My friends were the
plumber's children up the road, and we used sometimes to play
games of a vaguely erotic kind. One was called "playing at doctors,"
and I remember getting a faint but definitely pleasant thrill from
holding a toy trumpet, which was supposed to be a stethoscope, against
a little girl's belly. About the same time I fell deeply in love, a far
more worshiping kind of love than I have ever felt for anyone
since, with a girl named Elsie at the convent school which I attended.
She seemed to me grown up, so I suppose she must have been
fifteen. After that, as so often happens, all sexual feelings seemed
to go out of me for many years. At twelve I knew more than I had
known as a young child, but I understood less, because I no longer
knew the essential fact that there
is
something pleasant in sexual
activity. Between roughly seven and fourteen, the whole subject
seemed to be uninteresting and, when for some reason I was forced to
think of it, disgusting. My knowledge of the so-called Facts of Life
was derived from animals, and was therefore distorted, and in any
case was only intermittent. I knew that animals copulated and that
human beings had bodies resembling those of animals: but that
human beings also copulated I only knew as it were reluctantly, when
something, a phrase in the Bible perhaps, compelled me to remem–
ber it. Not having desire, I had no curiosity, and was willing to leave
