Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.

I recalled her arms flapping above the pianola like ravens’ wings, her smile of continual delight, her jerky walk and swaying stance and arms outstretched as if to embrace me as nobody else had done.

I tried to remember the colour of Bella’s eyes but was remembering how her syllables sounded like pearls dropping one by one into a dish when she said, “Candle, where are your cord dew roys?”

From feeling as helpless as a doll I suddenly wished to be nothing else, her pressure on my mouth and neck became terribly sweet, I began struggling not against suffocation but against a delight too great to be borne.

“My dear wee Candle, when I try to give you pleasure you cannot take it and break away. So how can you give much pleasure to me?”

real

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.

Now Bella (and this is why you may he right about pitying Wedderburn) Bella has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood. Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires.

Did you see the great Henry Irving’s production of Goethe’s Faust at the Glasgow Theatre Royal? I did. I was deeply moved. I recognized myself in that tormented hero, that respectable member of the professional middle class who enlists the King of Hell to help him seduce a woman of the servant class. Yes, Goethe and Irving knew that Modern Man—that Duncan Wedderburn—is essentially double: a noble soul fully instructed in what is wise and lawful, yet also a fiend who loves beauty only to drag it down and degrade it.

“Notice, McCandless,” said Baxter at this point, “that the fellow writes as you talk when you are drunk.”

lol

Basically innocent despite my wicked ways—fundamentally honest underneath my superficial hypocrisies—such

looool

I arose in that dazed state felt by all who oversleep from exhaustion and waken when they usually retire. The supper was a collation of cold meats, pickles and salad with an apple tart and two bottles of India Export Ale. There was coffee from a pot kept hot on a trivet by the fire. Growing livelier and more alert I glanced at my Fate who had curled herself snakelike in the easy chair across the table from me. She gazed upon me with a smile of such peculiar meaning that I shuddered with awe, dread and intense desire. Her naked shoulders were white against the dishevelled black cloak of her hair, her softly heaving . . .

dreamy

“Poor Wedder, you have been forcing the pace!” she said. “No more casinos and café dansants for you! I am your doctor now and I order complete rest, except when we are cosy together, like now.” From then on until the day I escaped I was a man of straw and her helpless plaything.

romantic sub boy

Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us—it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”

“Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others.

You never wedded, God, so may not know eight hours of it takes much more out of men than they can give without a lot of rest.

lool

“I told you everything—my inmost thoughts, childhood and darkest deeds. Why did you not speak of your past? Or rather, lack of past.” “You never gave me time before tonight to tell you anything, you talked so much. I thought you did not want to know my past, my thoughts and hopes and anything of me not obviously useful when we wed.” “You’re right—I am a fiend! I ought to die!” he yelled, then punched his head, burst into tears, pulled off his trousers, wed me very quick. I soothed him, babied him (he is a baby) and got him wedding at a proper speed.

loool

We all need rest, and time to sit and look and dream and think.

truth

I know you inwardly despise my brain— think it a mere appendage to my prick and less efficient than my testicles.

looool

The spinning wheel and little rattling ball ground something down in those who bet and watched, and they were pleased to feel it ground away because it was so precious that they loathed it, and loved to see others destroy it too. I’ve since discussed this with a clever man who says the precious thing has many names. Poor people call it money; priests, the soul; the Germans call it will and poets, love. He called it freedom, for that makes men feel to blame for what they do. Men hate that feeling, so want it crushed and killed. I am no man. To me the place stank like a Roman game where tortured minds, not bodies were the show. This crowd had come to see the human mind whose thoughts can wander through eternity pinned to a little accidental ball.

He said Russia is as young a country as the U.S.A. because a nation is only as old as its literature.

this reminds to read the other translation of Master and Margarita

“People who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs,” he said, “are like people without a past—without a memory—they are half people.”

“What are Socialists, Duncan?” I asked. “Fools who think the world should be improved.”

lol

“I dislike intoxicating fluids. I prefer the bitter truth.”

this is a good one

“Natives,” said Mr. Astley carefully, “are people who live on the soil where they were born, and do not want to leave it. Not many English can be regarded as natives because we have a romantic preference for other people’s soils, though we are very loyal to our old schools and school friends, our regiments and businesses. Some even feel loyal to the Queen, who is a very selfish old lady.”

apt

“But why are British soldiers fighting Egyptian natives? It makes no sense to me.” “I am glad it makes no sense to you, Mrs. Wedderburn. Politics, like filling and emptying cesspools, is filthy work and women should be protected from it. Let us talk of cleaner things, Dr. Hooker.”

oh god lol

Jesus was as maddened by all-over cruelty and coldness as I am. He too must have hated discovering he had to make people better all by himself.

Astley, Hooker, Wedder, all made miserable by one cracked Bell.

Harry is bad because he enjoys how cruelly folk act and suffer, wants to persuade me bad is needed. If he succeeds he will have made me bad too. I listen to him because I need to know all he knows. He is as honest as God and teaches facts God never taught—all the things I must change, so had better note down.

They are supposed to be superior to the animal pleasure of breast-feeding—supposed to be superior to the sexual act itself—yet all the time they are as much parasites, prisoners and playthings as odalisques in a Turkish harem.

There are three kinds of people. The happiest are the innocent who think everyone and everything basically good. Many children are like that and so were you until Hooker (very much against my will) showed you otherwise. The second and biggest kind are half-baked optimists: people with a mental conjuring trick which lets them look at hunger or mutilation without discomfort. They think the wretched deserve to suffer, or that their nation is curing—not causing—these miseries, or that God, Nature, History will make everything right one day. Doctor Hooker is one of that sort and I am glad his rhetoric did not blind you to the facts. The third and rarest sort know human life is an essentially painful disease which only death can cure. We have the strength to live consciously among those who live blindly. We are the cynics.”

Big nations are created by successful plundering raids, and since most history is written by friends of the conquerors history usually suggests that the plundered were improved by their loss and should be grateful for it.

“The tearful motherlinesss you feel toward the wretched of this earth is an animal instinct which lacks its proper object. Marry and have children. Marry me.

looool what assholes

“Then please hold my hand for a moment.” So I did and I felt for the first time who he really is—a tortured little boy who hates cruelty as much as I do but thinks himself a strong man because he can pretend to like it. He is as poor and desperate as my lost daughter, but only inside. Outside he is perfectly comfortable. Everyone should have a cosy shell round them, a good coat with money in the pockets. I must be a Socialist.

exactly.

French men were a lot easier to manage than British. The British pretended to be honest and practical but were at bottom a race of eccentrics. Only the French were sensible about the important things—did I not agree? I said, “I cannot say, Millie. What are the important things?” “Money and love. What else is there?” “Cruelty.” She laughed and said that was a very English idea, but people who loved cruelty had to pay for it, which proved love and money came first.

Mr. Astley said my pity was natural and good if confined to the unfortunate of my own class, but if acted on promiscuously it would prolong the misery of many who would be better dead. I had just seen a working model of nearly every civilized nation. The people on the veranda were the owners and rulers—their inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who keep society as it is. And while they spoke I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.

She said, “I greatly admire your sense, my dear, in taking a nice long honeymoon with your lover before marrying a respectable husband. Too many women enter marriage completely ignorant of what they ought to give and take. But this Wedderburn is obviously an over-sucked orange. You will be a far better wife to your husband if you now enjoy some variety.”

I am surprised at my popularity. Bell Baxter is certainly a splendid looking woman, but if I was a man there are at least a dozen here I would want more than me: soft little cuddlies, tall supple elegants, wild brown exotics.

“It is all so unequal—I have the fifth place in your affections. First comes your mysterious guardian, then your peasant fiancé, then the debauched Wedderburn, then the frigid Astley. Since I was a little tiny girl I have prayed for a pal but God hates me. Every time someone beautiful and friendly enters my life crash bang wallop, out they fly again leaving nuffink behind but a bloody big owl.”

This reminded her of something else. Suddenly she stared hard at Baxter, her face growing thinner, the pupils of her eyes expanding to completely blacken the irises. “Where is my child, God?” she asked.

The following conversation began in the study. It ended round the kitchen table where Bella demolished most of a cold boiled ham with bread, cheese, pickles and two or three pints of sweet milky tea. Though used to her quick recovery from emotional shocks I had never before seen it happen so physically. Her face lost the thin haggard look, her cheeks grew rounder, her brow smoother and softer, the tiny lines and wrinkles faded from her freshening skin. From looking any age between twenty-five and forty she became any age between twenty-five and fifteen.

I wish.

Bella clutched the hair of her head in both hands and cried, “You sound like Harry Astley! Do you want to make me a cynical parasite too, God? Do you too think my hatred of suffering is nothing but displaced motherhood?” “I will certainly think that if you start mothering children you cannot teach to be independent.”

“Would you exhaust your brain and body by toiling in grim places where courage as well as strong judgement is needed?” “I am ignorant and confused but not a fool or a coward. Give me work which uses me utterly!”

This is the only area in which I found my dear Bella unfeeling toward the pain of another. But when we got children of our own I discovered most younger people are happily unfeeling toward parents and guardians they feel confident with.

“If you have lied to me how can there be any truth? Who can be any good?” said Bella, looking frightened. “Truth and goodness do not depend on me, Bell. I am too weak.

So be a sensible donkey.

my new lexicon

Her flesh had shrunk so close to the bones that her figure was now angular, but the horriblest change was in her face. The white sharp nose, hollow cheeks and sunken eye-sockets showed the skull all too clearly, yet within the sockets each black pupil had expanded to fill the whole eye, leaving just a tiny wee triangle of white in the corners. Her dark curling mass of hairs had also expanded, for the first inch of each one stood straight out from the head “like quills upon the fretful porcupine”. I did not doubt that before me stood the emaciated form of Lady Victoria Blessington, exactly as she had emerged from the coal-cellar. But her voice, though sad, was distinctly Bella’s.

I love how her form changes

I was afraid you would go into labour and I HATE women near me when they are whelping, hate the blood, screams and stinking mess they make, ugh, the thought of it makes me want to retch.

yikes

“They cannot win a divorce action against you, Sir Aubrey. Your alleged adultery with Dolly Perkins is irrelevant. A husband’s adultery is no ground for divorce unless it is unnatural—committed anally, incestuously, homosexually or with a beast. If they appeal on grounds of extreme cruelty their own witnesses must testify that you locked Lady Blessington in the cellar because she was raving mad, and to keep her safe while you fetched medical help. A divorce action will end with Lady Blessington taken into protective custody as a ward of court. Were it not for the scandal we should welcome it.”

such nightmare times

Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at the General and said to him thoughtfully, “I remember you now, from the Dungeon Suite of the Hôtel de Notre-Dame, in Paris. You were the man in the mask—Monsieur Spankybot.” Then between bursts of laughter she cried aloud, “General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Spankybot V.C., how funny! Most brothel customers are quick squirts but you were the quickest of the lot! The things you paid the girls to do to stop you coming in the first half minute would make a hahahahaha make a cat laugh! Still, they liked you. General Spankybot paid well and did no harm—you never gave one of us the pox. I think the rottenest thing about you (apart from the killing you’ve done and the way you treat servants) is what Prickett calls the pupurity of your mumarriage bed. Fuck off, you poor daft silly queer rotten old fucker hahahahaha! Fuck off!”

I love her.