The New Life

by Tom Crewe

give herself carelessly, without thought,

“He is my secretary. He’s helping organize my papers.” The smoke floated out and sagged on the air. Mark stared at him over it. “You can’t expect anyone to believe that, Johnny. He speaks like a cabman.”

Mark took this in. “The man from the park”—he made a grimacing smile—“and here he is, installed in your home. Your secretary—the man from the park. You have brought him into your family. Who is he? What does he want?”

“But you have dressed him; given him the run of your house. You are paying him some sort of wage?”

He is well-made, I’ll—”

“In your own home. How can you, Johnny?” “I love him. I desire him. Can you bear to hear that?”

He is a prisoner. You have no work for which he is capable. He is embarrassed every time he opens his mouth. Louisa and I can be polite, for your sake, all your sakes—other people will not understand, or will understand too well.

You cannot flaunt him. You cannot have him where you wish.

His desire, almost physical, to speak of what he and Frank had done, were doing.

He worried that his experiences would not be fully legible until then, even to himself. He wished to make them permanent, whole, to give them a place in the world.

and hers?” “An empty sacrifice. We gained a little respectability, and lost humanity.” “You are not showing much humanity now.”

John smiled. “I saw the swimmers in Hyde Park.” “Are they very beautiful?” “Yes.”

from downstairs. Eventually Mark said, “Louisa has made me a far better man than I would otherwise have been. We have achieved great things together. The university, Newnham, women’s education, have been well-served by us in partnership. I have not given her all of myself. But I have given all that I could. I can say that before the universe.”

“Yes, but it is more than that. He is so simple, so unencumbered. He is not self-conscious like we are. It is like drinking water from a stream.”

“You are taking great risks, Johnny.” “No substantial change has ever been managed without risk.”

“I am interested in the work of Cesare Lombroso. An Italian, obviously. He sees the criminal type as identifiable, but there is a corollary—that what is not willed, cannot be punished, at least not in the same way.”

We believe in the maximum of responsibility, where it can be freely exercised without injury: responsibility for oneself, one’s own development and pursuits, and responsibility for the health and progress of the community. One leads into the other, or should.”

He found himself foolishly tearful. “We do not understand our marriage. It is unconsummated. You talk of children only to score a point over your stepmother.”

“I told you that my women friendships were of the greatest importance to me. I said you were the only man I had ever truly bonded with. I told you. There has been no change in me. I thought, and Angelica thought, that with you and me as we are, and now with your book—we thought you might know something of what it is to prefer the company of your own sex. Something more than you could tell me before we married. Is that right, Henry?”

No two people need be everything to each other.”

Frank shifted in the seat opposite. It was the smallest movement; he merely moved one leg slightly to the right. But John understood immediately that he had done it to free his scrotum, to let it drop away from where it had stuck. He pictured the two globes in their loose snug skin, brushed with dark hairs; he felt in his mind their soft weight, their liquid fullness in his hand.

the arrangement he’d devised would expose him quite so ruthlessly to the play of his desire.

In company, John was constantly beset by impressions, seeing Frank doubly, as now, his outward appearance limned by secret knowledge. And when they were alone, some unspecified charge carried over from their official interactions, some stored-up social friction that made their lovemaking fierce and oddly abject on John’s part. Four nights ago he had let Frank penetrate him, his whole body expanding around it, centering upon it, so that while it lasted it was the great returning undiminishing fact in his life, that he was being penetrated by this man.

“I was friendly with a man who moved to Cambridge,” Frank said. “I never knew his name though, else I’d look him up and ask him to fill in your questionnaire. He was an interesting case.”

John was careful. Careful not to perform his erudition, careful not to propound—careful not to draw attention to distinctions, careful not to assume.

He watched Frank, carefully, to measure his effect; to measure the effect of the building, of its contents. He liked seeing him looking, liked the way his eyes flared and narrowed as he concentrated, liked how he could not help coming closer and closer to what interested him.

He was pleased that the questions he asked were intelligent, and that he himself was able to answer them, while Frank glanced between his...

There were several small moments of breathing proximity, when, standing side by side, John was aware of the heat gently beating from Frank’s cheek and could almost feel, as though by his senses he had taken...

In the classical gallery they separated, so that at one point John found himself in the aisle ranged through the statuary, at the far end of which Frank unexpectedly appeared between two male nudes, as if—the thought irresistibly occurred—to complete the line. Frank must have seen this thought in John’s face, because the next thing he did was imitate the pose of one of the figures, setting back his shoulders, extending a leg and gesturing with his right arm, his palm elegantly open. In response John burst out with a laugh, a high full laugh that fell into the room like glass, shattering on its quiet still surface, pieces flying to every corner. “Which o...

“We are three, then,” she said. She spoke just above a whisper. Her face was composed. “We are the three of us alone. So I release you. You may do as you like. I only ask that you do not give the servants reason to suspect, any more than they might already. We must pretend, but let us not pretend any longer between ourselves. I am giving you this freedom; in return I expect that you will bring no public scandal on this house. This house shall remain without blemish. The reputation of your daughters, John, shall remain without blemish. So will the reputation of your wife. I have been your wife too long to suffer any worse than I have suffered already. You will grant me this, if you are any man at all.”

he is occupied almost wholly with collecting what he thinks are physical manifestations of inversion (dimensions of the pelvis, shape of genitalia, inability to whistle etc.).

This is foolishness, though there is a link with Paolo Mantegazza’s notion that in inverts the nerves of pleasurable sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some cases carried to the rectum. This falls down on the point that not all inverts practice Venus aversa.

We might ask: how does the theory explain the known fact that most boys practise masturbation in their youth without ever becoming inverted, even when, in our public schools for example, this self-abuse is often in fact connected with some form of sexual inversion, either passionately Platonic or grossly sensual?

The arguments of Ulrichs seem to me, on the other hand, to be excellent. Ulrichs, who is himself an invert, seeks to establish a theory of sexual inversion upon the basis of natural science, proving that abnormal instincts are inborn and healthy in a considerable percentage of human beings; that they do not owe their origin to bad habits of any kind, to hereditary disease, or to wilful depravity; that they are incapable in the majority of cases of being extirpated or converted into normal channels; and that the men subject to them are neither physically, intellectually, nor morally inferior to normally constituted individuals. To deal with them as British law does, therefore, is no less monstrous than if you were to imprison the colour-blind.

In those countries—e.g. France and Italy—where inversion is permitted, and the law intervenes only to protect the young (with a protected age for boys, as for girls), to preserve public decency (barring resort to the street or open spaces), and to punish rape, there has been no surge in inverted practices, no spreading moral infection. Give abnormal love the same chance as normal love, subject it to the wholesome control of public opinion, allow it to be self-respecting, draw it from dark slums into the light of day, strike off its chains and set it free—and I am confident that it will exhibit analogous virtues, chequered of course by analogous vices, to those with which you are familiar in the mutual love of male and female.

Perhaps Edith had told her not to reply. In which case Edith knew about the letter, but had said nothing, as Angelica had said nothing. Or perhaps it was only Edith to whom Angelica wished to write, and as usual he was trying to penetrate their intimacy, presuming on it. Perhaps he needed to let them alone. Perhaps this was what Angelica wanted him to understand.

His intelligence, when he focused it, felt hard, sharp—like a cutting tool.

The subject—inversion—was beginning to shape itself under the scalpel of his attention. He could almost see it whole, finished, shaped:

a compact argument, faultless in...

There was so much loneliness and anger and lust, seething and boiling under this inadequate covering of words. He felt its furious pressure, under the surface of life.

Women were never mentioned. Not by Henry because he was too shy—it was one of the things he liked about Jack, that he did not talk about women.

I appreciate beautiful women. But in the same way that I appreciate beautiful scenery.”

“You have not considered marriage?” “It wouldn’t be fair to the woman. It would be a kind of trap. A horrible one. And”—he smiled slightly—“as there seems no immediate danger of the race dying out, I leave marriage to the people who like it.”

Jack made a small noise in his throat. One finger arched itself on his knee. “It was older men, at first. Ten years, twenty years older. Boys my own age were too similar—to me, I mean. Anxious, havering, overeager to talk. I could do all that just as well on my own: asking why, how, what to do about it. Older men were no longer interested in those questions. I have since changed my mind. I like men my own age, sometimes a little younger.”

Now, I cannot see where affection between people of the same sex differs from love as it is ordinarily understood. Everything I have ever read in books or seen in plays; everything I have seen in my life of ordinary love, I have known in inverted form. It cannot ever seem unnatural or abnormal, because it has been natural and spontaneous in me.” Jack’s eyes were soft with tears.

“You realize you didn’t ask, whether he has someone.” “That is not one of the questions.” “I know.” “Should I have done?” “Oh, Henry,” she said. “Yes, you should.”

A couple married as long as they had been could know many things without ever talking about them. Sometimes it was the need to speak which signaled trouble.

John held out his hand, and Frank, closing the door, came over and took it. Frank’s thumb rubbed gently in his palm, scratching with the nail. “Can I have some money, John?” he said. “For Mother.”

He had given him the money. It thrilled him, to have his love extending quietly and secretly, like an underground stream, into the far corners of Frank’s life, fructifying it.

He thought happily of poor Mrs. Feaver, of his being able in this way, without trouble or awkwardness, to ease her suffering, to show gratitude for the great gift she had given him. And he thought of Frank, the money sitting cl...