542
PARTISAN REVIEW
ate in restaurants. Even breakfast was brought in.) Then she tidied away the
whips.
The same sort of thing happened to me with other well-known
men-whose names I am withholding-but Ken not only made no secret
of his tastes but flaunted them. He took to extremes the didact's need to
believe that everyone mus t be the same as himself, describing his somewhat
perverse musical
Oh, Calcutta
as "after-dinner entertainment for civilized
people."
A scene: A party in Mount Street. Ken is confronting a young actress,
newly arrived in London. He is trying to persuade her that her refusal to accept
whips and associated delights was because she had been taught prejudice.
"You have been conditioned," says Ken, his stammer reinforcing his
pedagogical self. He towers over her while she smiles delightfully up at
him.
"But, Ken," she murmurs, " I don't enjoy it."
He is checked, but the force of his need to instruct carries
him
on.
"You have been taught to think that there is only one way of having sex."
"I wouldn't exactly say only one...." She smiles, earning applause from
the listening party-goers.
"Only one kind," says Ken, and is probably on the point of launching
into informational anecdotes from Greece and Rome and the Lord knows
where else, but she again says firmly, "Ken, I don't enjoy it."
And now one may observe the swi tch in him from the teacher to the
wit. "I must protest that you have unfairly silenced me," says Ken. "I have
no more to say. How, logically, could I have? How could you not have my
blessing? Enjoy, then, my darling."
It
is a disconcerting thing for a more or less normal woman, after hav–
ing enjoyed dinner and chat about literature, the theatre, politics, to find
one's host suggesting a little diversion with whips, as if saying, "A drop of
port, perhaps? Or I have some nice dessert wine." Or even producing the
whips-once it was a sjambok, always irresistible to sadomasochists-and
reacting to a refusal as if it were you, not he, who is a little strange.
The following tale is here because of the talk about black men's supe–
riority in bed. White women lusting after black penises is one of the
myths furnishing the colonial mind, and I was listening to variations on the
myth as I grew up. And then this particular incident happened at a time
when the prowess of black studs was much vaunted, because for some rea–
son the superiority of black people's sexuality (men and women both) had
become part of "progressive" thinking.
A certain exiled black writer was putting in his time in London. He
pursued me for months, full of ardor; he loved me, he could not sleep for
thinking of me. Sighs and suffering, the language of romantic despair-the
