Cross Channel (7 page)

If the neighbouring drinker came in several physical forms, he likewise introduced himself variously as Tanguy, Prévert, Duhamel and Unik; once even as Breton himself. We can, at least, be sure of the date of this untrustworthy encounter: March 1928. Further, my Uncle Freddy, as even the most cautious commentators have agreed, is - was - none other than the mildly disguised ‘T.F.’, who appears in Session 5(a) of the Surrealist Group’s famously unplatonic dialogues about sex. The transcript of this session was published as an appendix to
Recherches sur la sexualité, janvier 1928 - août 1932
. The notes state that my uncle was almost certainly introduced to the group by Pierre Unik, and that ‘T.F.’, contrary to the subsequent meanderings of his subconscious, was actually in Paris on holiday.

We shouldn’t be too sceptical about my uncle’s undeserved
entrée
to the Surrealist circle. They did, after all, admit occasional outsiders - an unfrocked priest, a Communist Party militant - to their discussions. And perhaps they thought a conventional twenty-nine-year-old Englishman supposedly acquired through a linguistic misunderstanding might usefully broaden their terms of reference. My uncle was fond of attributing his permitted presence to the French dictum that within every lawyer there lurk the remnants of a poet. I am not of either world, you understand (and neither was my uncle). Is this piece of wisdom any truer than its opposite: that within every poet there lurk the remnants of a lawyer?

Uncle Freddy maintained that the session which he
attended took place in the apartment of the man he met in the bar; which limits it to five possible locations. There were about a dozen participants according to my uncle; nine according to the
Recherches
. I should make it clear that since Session 5(a) was not published until 1990, and my uncle died in 1985, he was only ever faced with self-inflicted incompatibilities. Further, the tale of Uncle Freddy and the Surrealists was strictly for what he called the smoking-room, where narrative libertarianism was more acceptable. After swearing listeners to lifelong silence
vis-à-vis
Aunt Kate, he would enlarge on the frank licentiousness of what had taken place back in 1928. At times he would claim to have been shocked, and maintain that he had heard more filth in one evening among Parisian intellectuals than he had in three years of barrack-room life during the last war. At others, his self-presentation was as the English man-about-town, the card, the dandy, all too willing to pass on a few tips, a few handy refinements of technique, to this gathering of Frenchmen whose cerebral intensity, in his view, hampered their normal sensual responses.

The published Session, needless to say, confirms neither version. Those who have read the
Recherches
will be familiar with their strange mixture of pseudo-scientific inquiry and frank subjective response. The truth is that everyone talks about sex in a different way, just as everyone, we naturally assume, does it in a different way. Andre Breton, animator of the group, is a lofty Socratic figure, austere and at times repellent (‘I don’t like anyone to caress me. I hate that.’). The others are variously benign to cynical, self-mocking to boastful, candid to satirical. The dialogues are happily full of humour; occasionally of the unintended sort, inflicted by posterity’s frigid judgment; but more often intended, issuing from a rueful acknowledgment of our human frailty. For
instance, in Session 3, Breton is catechising his male companions about whether they would allow a woman to touch their sex when it was not erect. Marcel Noll replies that he hates it. Benjamin Péret says that if a woman does that to him, he feels diminished. Breton agrees: diminished is exactly the right word for how he would feel. To which Louis Aragon rejoins: ‘If a woman touched my sex only when it was erect, it wouldn’t get that way very often.’

I am straying from the point. I’m probably also trying to put off the admission that my uncle’s participation in Session 5(a) is for most of its extent frankly disappointing. Perhaps there was a false democracy in the assumption that an Englishman picked up in a bar because of a verbal mistake would have important testimony to offer this probing tribunal. ‘T.F.’ is asked many of the usual questions: under what conditions he prefers to have sex; how he lost his virginity; whether and how he can tell if a woman has reached orgasm; how many people he has had sexual relations with; how recently he has masturbated; how many times in succession he is capable of orgasm; and so on. I shall not bother to relate my uncle’s responses, because they are either banal or, I suspect, not wholly truthful. When asked by Breton the characteristically compendious question, ‘Apart from ejaculating in the vagina, mouth or anus, where do you like to ejaculate in order of preference: 1) Armpit; 2) Between the breasts; 3) On the stomach?’ Uncle Freddy answers - and here I have to retranslate from the French, so do not offer these as his exact words - ‘Is the cupped palm permitted?’ Quizzed about which sexual position he prefers, my uncle replies that he likes to be lying on his back, with the woman sitting on top of him. ‘Ah,’ says Benjamin Péret, ‘the so-called “lazy position”.’

My uncle is then interrogated about the British propensity
for sodomy, over which he is defensive, until it transpires that homosexuality is not the topic, but rather sodomy between men and women. Then my uncle is baffled. ‘I have never done it,’ he replies, ‘and I have never heard of anyone doing it.’ ‘But do you dream of doing it?’ asks Breton. ‘I have never dreamed of doing it,’ ‘T.F.’ doggedly responds. ‘Have you ever dreamed of fucking a nun in a church?’ is Breton’s next question. ‘No, never.’ ‘What about a priest or a monk?’ asks Queneau. ‘No, not that either,’ is the reply.

I am not surprised that Session 5(a) is relegated to an appendix. The interrogators and fellow-confessors are in a lethargic or routine mood; while the surprise witness keeps pleading the Fifth. Then, towards the end of the evening, there comes a moment when the Englishman’s presence seems briefly justified. I feel I should at this point give the transcript in full.

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: What is your opinion of love?

‘T.F.’: When two people get married …

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: No, no, no! The word
marriage
is anti-surrealist.

J
EAN
B
ALDENSPERGER
: What about sexual relations with animals?

‘T.F.’: What do you mean?

J
EAN
B
ALDENSPERGER
: Sheep. Donkeys.

‘T.F.’: There are very few donkeys in Ealing. We had a pet rabbit.

J
EAN
B
ALDENSPERGER
: Did you have relations with the rabbit?

‘T.F’: No.

J
EAN
B
ALDENSPERGER
: Did you dream of having relations with the rabbit?

‘T.F’: No.

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: I cannot believe that your sexual life can possibly be as empty of imagination and surrealism as you make it appear.

J
ACQUES
P
REVERT
: Can you describe to us the principal differences between sexual relations with an Englishwoman and those with a Frenchwoman?

‘T.F.’: I only arrived in France yesterday.

J
ACQUES
P
REVERT
: Are you frigid? No, do not take offence. I am not serious.

‘T.F.’: Perhaps I can make a contribution by describing something I used to dream about.

J
EAN
B
ALDENSPERGER
: To do with donkeys?

‘T.F.’: No. There used to be a pair of twin sisters in my street.

J
EAN
B
ALDENSPERGER
: You wanted to have sexual relations with both of them at the same time?

R
AYMOND
Q
UENEAU
: How old were they? Were they young girls?

P
IERRE
U
NIK
: You are excited by lesbianism? You like to watch women caress one another?

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: Please, gentlemen, let our guest speak. I know we are surrealists, but this is chaos.

‘T.F.’: I used to look at these twin sisters, who were in all visible respects identical, and ask how far that identity continued.

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: You mean, if you were having sexual relations with one, how could you tell it was she and not the other?

‘T.F.’: Exactly. At the beginning. And this in turn provoked a farther question. What if there were two people - women - who in their …

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: In their sexual movements …

‘T.F.’: In their sexual movements were exactly the same, and yet in all other respects were completely different.

P
IERRE
U
NIK
: Erotic doppelgangers yet social disparates.

A
NDRE
B
RETON
: Precisely. That is a valuable contribution. Even, if I may say so to our English guest, a quasi-surrealist contribution.

J
ACQUES
P
REVERT
: So you have not yet been in bed with a Frenchwoman?

‘T.F.’: I told you, I only arrived yesterday.

This is the end of Uncle Freddy’s documented participation in Session 5(a), which then returned to matters previously discussed in Session 3, namely the distinction between orgasm and ejaculation, and the relation between dreams and masturbatory desire. My uncle evidently had little to contribute on these subjects.

I had, of course, no suspicion of this future corroboration when I saw my uncle for the last time. This was in November of 1984. Aunt Kate was dead by now, and my visits to ‘T.F.’ (as I am inclined to think of him nowadays) had become increasingly dutiful. Nephews tend to prefer aunts to uncles. Aunt Kate was dreamy and indulgent; there was something gauzy-scarved and secretive about her. Uncle Freddy was indecently foursquare; he seemed to have his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets even when wearing a two-piece suit. His stance, both moral and physical, had the bullying implication that he truly understood what manhood consisted of, that his generation had miraculously caught the elusive balance between earlier repression and subsequent laxness, and that any deviation from this
beau idéal
was regrettable, if not actively perverse. As a result, I was never quite at ease with the future ‘T.F.’. He once announced that it was his avuncular responsibility to teach me about wine, but his pedantry and assertiveness put me off the subject until quite recently.

It had become a routine after Aunt Kate’s death that I would take Uncle Freddy out to dinner on his birthday, and that afterwards we would return to his flat off the Cromwell Road and drink ourselves stupid. The consequences mattered little to him; but I had my patients to think of, and would annually try to avoid getting as drunk as I had the previous year. I can’t say I ever succeeded, because though each year my resolution was stronger, so was the countervailing force of my uncle’s tediousness. In my experience, there are various good but lesser motives - guilt, fear, misery, happiness - for indulging in a certain excess of drink, and one larger motive for indulging in a great excess: boredom. At one time I knew a clever alcoholic who insisted that he drank because things then happened to him such as never did when he was sober. I half-believed him, though to my mind drink does not really make things happen, it simply helps you bear the pain of things not happening. For instance, the pain of my uncle being exceptionally boring on his birthdays.

The ice would fissure as it hit the whisky, the casing of the gas-fire would clunk, Uncle Freddy would light what he claimed was his annual cigar, and the conversation would turn yet again to what I now think of as Session 5(a).

‘So remind me, Uncle, what you were really doing in Paris.’

‘Trying to make ends meet. What all young men do.’ We were on our second half-bottle of whisky; a third would be required before a welcome enough form of anaesthesia developed. ‘Task of the male throughout history, wouldn’t you say?’

‘And did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Make ends meet?’

‘You’ve a filthy mind for one of your age,’ he said, with the sudden sideways aggression that liquor imparts.

‘Chip off the old block, Uncle Freddy.’ I didn’t, of course, mean it.

‘Did I ever tell you …’ and he was launched, if that verb doesn’t give too vivid an impression of directness and purpose. This time he had again chosen to be in Paris as map-reader and mechanic to some English milord.

‘What sort of car was it? Just out of interest.’

‘Panhard,’ he answered sniffily. It always was a Panhard when he told this version. I used to divert myself by wondering whether such consistency on my uncle’s part made this element of his story more likely to be true, or more likely to be false.

‘And where did the rally go?’

‘Up hill and down dale, my boy. Round and about. From one end of the land to the other.’

‘Trying to make ends meet.’

‘Wash your mouth out.’

‘Chip off the old …’

‘So I was in this bar …’

I caressed him with the questions he needed, until he reached the normal climax to his story, which was one of the few points at which he agreed with the subsequently published Session 5(a).

‘… so Fellow-me-lad says to me, “Have you done it with a French lass yet?” and I say, “Give us time, only got off the boat yesterday!” ’

I would normally have feigned a run of dying chuckles, poured some more Scotch, and waited for Uncle Freddy’s next topic. This time, for some reason, I declined his ending.

‘So did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Do it with a French lass?’

I was breaking the rules, and his reply was a kind of rebuke; or at least, I took it as such. ‘Your Aunt Kate was as pure as driven snow,’ he announced with a hiccup. ‘The missing doesn’t get any the less, you know, for all the years. I can’t wait to join her.’