The New Life

by Tom Crewe

After a while, he became aware of Frank’s erection and looked up. “I can’t help it,” Frank said, with an embarrassed smile. “Don’t mind it.” John unbuttoned him and Frank pushed it slowly, swollenly into his mouth, tasting of tears.

high voice.

The book should be sent only to the medical journals, at least to begin with. Advertised only in them, too. The hope must be that they show themselves unprejudiced, and so doing set an example. Radical ideas, I’ve found, often gain their first acceptance in the medicals.”

Ellis pointed and said, “My wife lives on that street.” “You do not live together?” “No.” “You have separated?” “We have never lived together. We did not believe it necessary.” “How do you manage?” “We see each other often.”

Jack stared awhile longer. “I am in the book,” he said. “You are anonymous.” “Everywhere? In your notes? If someone were to search?” “Everywhere. Anything that could identify was burned.”

“It is possible for things to be morally right, and practically wrong. Recognition of which fact keeps most people sane.” “There is a name for it: hypocrisy. It is a justification for selfishness.”

‘What of this man? You have valued him for his work, his wit, his friendship, his patriotism—are not all these things still true, even as he has held his secret?’

After a year at Cambridge, her features had come into definition, like a mold that had set. And she was cleverer, more considering.

just that ruffling breeze of pleasure deriving from the sight of any good-looking man.

Their lives no longer twined—they overlapped, and what Henry was overlapping with was not Edith’s life alone, but her resumed life with Angelica.

Henry saw in each a fierce desire to take decisions and pass verdicts, and then an exasperated, helpless recourse to the other for their verdict and assent.

Edith possessed them both.

They did not hint at what lay beyond, but he could recognize some anxiety on their part, that it was perhaps too close in view. There were separate beds made up in Edith’s flat, and Angelica’s room was full of her own things. Was it for show? He supposed they kissed. He supposed, supposed, supposed.

Ever since the day he had gone into the copse after Angelica, he’d felt threatened by sexual need, keener than any he’d ever known. Perhaps it was how Wilde had felt, before he gave way utterly. (Was he, perhaps, feeling like this when Henry had seen him, absorbed in his book?) It was how Carpenter and Addington had felt; how many of the inverts who’d submitted their histories had felt: desire burning you up, too hot to touch.

He understood this: what it is to burn, and to dare not touch. Except, by following Angelica, by touching the ground, by doing what he had done, he had, like all these men, given way. Or nearly. And ever since, his imagination, for so long so closely kept, was loose, dancing out ahead of him. Some nights, he simply sat, held in the grip of his desire, unable to move for fear or ignorance of what he might do. He did not know where to take his desire. He often wondered about the man he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—exchange a glance with Jack on the platform at London Bridge, boarding the Dover train. Were they together in Paris? Had they jointly planned their escape? Or had Henry ...

“I have been reading through your book. It has been like breathing a bag of soot. I am”—her voice broke—“filthy from it. I found your history. Case Eighteen. You are recognizable to me. I have read all about your misery, your loneliness. Thank you, for waking me this morning and pressing this record of your adulteries into our bed. As if, when I wake, I am not sufficiently reminded.”

“They would not think of her at all,” she snapped. “She does not come into it. I know how you felt as a child. Your longings. Your photograph that you fidgeted over, until your father bid you stop. I am sorry for you. Do you know what I wanted as a girl? A husband who loved me. A man in a blue necktie, with polished shoes. You say you were lonely”—her voice broke again; the tears in her eyes brokenly reflected the window—“I was lonely,” she went on, “and I was not free to go into the streets, to go with soldiers to their dirty lodgings. I was not free to bring strange men to this house. I was not free to install in it a man of another class, twenty years younger. Not free to share a bed with him—not free to send him out with my silly daughter for the afternoon. But it is you who have been lonely. It says so in your book.”

“You did not know; I did not know. I forgave it. We had our two girls. Then you tell me how my parts—it is not my fault—disgust you. How you delight in a man’s.

wrote, I’ll grant that the quiet is surprising. But do not trust it.

Henry hadn’t seen Addington since the book was published; indeed, they had barely communicated, only exchanging letters when the reviews appeared. Their relationship—it could not be called a friendship—had no reason to persist, but its falling away had contributed to Henry’s sense of dislocation. He supposed it was natural to feel something. When he’d imagined the terra incognita of the future, Henry had relied on Addington being there as his fellow explorer, or at least as a landmark, a co-ordinate by which he could navigate. Instead he was alone.

Edith raised her glass. Their plates were still in front of them, streaked with gravy and scattered with bits of meat. Her face was flushed, and there was happiness on it. “I would like to say to Henry—congratulations. This year you published your book, fearlessly, on a subject no one has dared come near before. And it has succeeded, has been praised and has sold—in spite of the naysayers, of whom I’m sorry to admit I was one.” She searched out his eye, the glass still held up. “I should not have doubted you. Merry Christmas. To Henry.” “Henry,” Angelica echoed. Tears crept at the corners of his eyes, drawing the candlelight. He looked between the two of them. “Thank you,” he said, and then remembered to pick up his glass. “To my wife and her dear friend. Thank you for your hospitality.” They toasted. “To Oscar Wilde,” Angelica said a moment later. “To Oscar Wilde.”

“I have wanted you out of those old boots as long as I’ve known you,” Edith said.

“It is shocking to read about. But once you are used to it, it is a little like reading about Ireland, or socialism.”

In earlier life he preferred men from twenty to thirty-five; now he likes boys from sixteen upwards; grooms, for instance, who must be good-looking, well-developed, cleanly, and of a lovable, unchanging nature; but he would prefer gentlemen.

when he really loves a man he desires paedicatio in which he is himself the passive subject.

And I trust that someday it may be taken up and discussed as a medical question in connection with its benefit to health, both physically and morally, and become a recognized thing.”’ ”

He has had intercourse with three women in the course of his life, but simply as a matter of duty, to see if he could be like other men. He did not like it, and it did not seem natural to him. With men, the age preferred is from eighteen to forty-five, or even up to sixty. While preferring the educated, he makes the following interesting remarks concerning his instinctive impulses: “I like soldiers and policemen for the actual sensuality of the moment, but they have so little to talk about that it makes the performance unsatisfactory. I like tall, handsome men (the larger they are in stature the better), very strong, and as sensual as I can get them to be, and I like them to practice paedicatio on me, and I prefer it done roughly, and I rather prefer men who are carried away by their lust and bite my flesh at the supreme moment, and I rather like the pain inflicted by their teeth, or elsewhere.”’ ”

He has always loved men younger than himself, invariably persons of a lower social rank than his own.’ ”

It took every shape: mutual masturbation, intercrural coitus, fellatio, irrumatio, occasionally paedicatio, always according to the inclination or concession of the beloved male. Coitus with males, as above described, always seems to him healthy and natural.

Had he tossed his life away, for the sake of these words? For the sake of sex? The sheer madness of it rushed at him: to have hazarded his freedom for the sake of those short periods of abandon; for the slick repetitive motions of his cock.

“Perhaps you will soon want to replace me with someone still in his workman’s clothes, who hasn’t picked up good manners.” “It is nothing to do with your clothes or your manners,” John said exasperatedly. “It is your character.”

I considered this Sweeney a friend of mine. I still can’t give up thinking that at least some of his opinions were his honest own.” Higgs had turned his big hands out on his thighs, the palms red and crossed with lines. “I’m sure some of them were,” Addington said. “There is a great deal of hypocrisy in this case.”

At the same time he was dubious, as one is dubious of all good fortune. He was conscious that these men and women were defending a principle: free speech.

That policemen should spy on decent men and women, deceive them, earn their trust just to betray them.”

“All for having ideas in their heads that haven’t been put there nice and tight by the proper authorities.”

“An invert,” Addington said, “when he first becomes aware of sexual stirrings in his nature, realizes that he is unintelligible. Should he attempt to tell a teacher or his parents

about these feelings, the inclination, which for him is as natural as swimming to a fish, is treated by them as corrupt and sinful; he is exhorted

His voice now was the voice with which a man berates a lover, the voice of a man who sees that love is lost, who is filled with longing rage.

“Please go home, Henry,” Edith said. “Yes,” Angelica said. “We call each other wife. And she is more my wife than yours, Henry.”

True development does not respect comfort.”

People don’t always make the proper distinctions.”

“This is what frightens us,” Ellis said. “You are too absolute.” “I have heard that before. I have an old friend, to whom I told the truth about myself when we were students. For years he went on arguing against me in terms of utility: how would self-candor tend to better results for my happiness, my family’s, the world’s? I listened to him too long, balancing the one thing against all the others. Now I understand that life is absolute. It is the only interest. The friend I speak of

“You have been reckless, out of personal need.” Ellis’s voice was shaky. “You prefer destruction to temporary disappointment.” “Temporary on what scale?” “We cannot know—it cannot be seen.” “That is no answer, Henry. You should speak to your friend Miss Britell. She has an understanding of personal need. As does your wife, if I am not mistaken.”

“You do not require anything else?” “I have no great expectations of happiness for myself. Mostly, I should like just to be left alone. To be invisible.”

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), who in the early 1890s wrote a book together called Sexual Inversion. This

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