My Secret Life (97 page)

Now it was very clear and frankly avowed by H., that our meetings were the delight of her life, that tho happy at home they were friendless nearly, and she looked forward to meeting me with the greatest pleasure, not only to tell me all, but to indulge with me in reminiscences, and have baudy afternoons with other women. “And it’s your fault, you’ve told me more than all the men and women together whom I’ve known.” — But there were hindrances. Sometimes two or three weeks intervened between our meetings at the abbess’ ; tho each meeting brought some baudy novelty.

When next we met we had little Black and not Miss R. for our companion, and Black and I together gave H. her complete dose of pleasure. Two fucks, a frig, and three or four gamahuches, some by me, some by Black, seemed the quantum which she called a jolly baudy afternoon. All were pleased, for B. loved gamahuching H., and being gamahuched by
me,
and tho so young, willingly sucked my pego to its liquid culmination. — H. still refusing to do that, or to touch B.’s quim with her tongue. — What with conversation about fucking in general — of the erotic caprices of men, of money gained and spent, sexual incitements, etc. etc.
—
in which conversations the abbess joined now at times — we passed most voluptuous afternoons or evenings. — But the cost was heavy — for the abbess’ house was quiet and expensive, and champagne and a second gay lady added much to the sum total of the expenses of meeting H.

The abbess was the most kindly woman of her class I ever knew and superior to her business, her house the nicest and quietest.

 

Now for brevity sake I epitomize the narrative of my doings with H*** during this year and years after. At intervals we met and indulged in every lascivious caprice. I had taken home from *** a fine dildo which squirted liquids, and which it amused her to be fucked with. Then I fucked her with it, licking her clitoris whilst I did it to her. Then Miss Black licked her clitoris whilst the dildo was working up H.
—
Then with the dildo strapped on to her, H. dildoed Black. Then she dildoed Black whilst I fucked her from behind. Then I fucked the pretty little black cunted lass whilst she gamahuched H. — Another time I dildoed H. whilst laying on her back, and B. licked her clitoris, and at the same time and unknown to B.,
—
for H. objected to any woman knowing that I played with her bum hole — put my middle finger up that tight anal orifice, and H. spent in ecstacies during the dildo fucking, finger buggering, and cunt licking. I could feel whilst up her bum the dildo moving up and down in her cunt, and H. grew a little fond of that double insertion. — We kept it to ourselves, tho often talking about it when alone, with her never failing remark, “Ain’t we beasts?” and my reply, “No, beasts don’t do that.”

After that she dildoed R. who was fattish and big arsed. — H.’s taste was for fat women to gamahuche her. — Then she frigged R., whilst standing in the rear I fucked the fat arsed one. Then we had R. and B. together, and I gamahuched H. whilst she frigged both women who lay one on each side of her. Then the two quiet strumpets — they were not street walkers — gamahuched each other whilst I fucked H. All these pranks were reflected in large cheval glasses, so that we could see every posture. At intervals of rest we drank champagne, eat cakes and sandwiches. Every woman as she pissed I made to mount the bed, and squat over a basin, whilst I kneeling on the floor in front of her, contemplated the amber jet from the crimson gash. How we laughed one day when B. let a little fart when piddling, and how annoyed she was, how modest, how she blushed — harlot tho she was — but it’s a fact.

I now gamahuched H. as much as she liked it done to her: the broad lick of her sweet vulva, the plunge of my tongue up the soft avenue was delicious to me, but
her
great pleasure was in frigging another woman whilst I was titillating her clitoris with my tongue. Then I had a whim which she didn’t like but to which I made her yield. I laid on my back on the bed naked, H. naked knelt over me, a knee on each side of my head, her cunt on my mouth so that I could lick her clitoris easily, whilst I grasped her satiny buttocks. Then one of the women — either R. or B. — gamahuched me and took my libation into her mouth. In the glasses H. could see all this. I with mouth on her cunt, and head enclosed by her lovely thighs could not. I could tell always when H. was about to spend, by the trembling movements of her thighs, and shiver of her belly and bum, and her cry. “Oh — I’m coming — suck his prick — spend dear — aha — spunk.” — She used these licencious ejaculations always now. She’d spend twice before I did once for I’d usually fucked her once before, and was longer in coming than she with her lustful capabilities. Indeed this double minetting was usually the termination of the day’s amusements, when all three had been fucked, frigged, or gamahuched.

Of course as said all these amusements were not had on the same day, this is an epitome of what took place from time to time during this and a few years after. — Each day’s amusement was noted down by me soon after, but are condensed here. Our meretricious tricks were nearly always played in the afternoon in broad daylight, beginning soon after luncheon, and in a room on which the sun shone brilliantly most of the day; often times on prick and cunt fell the warm sunbeams. The room was one where none could see or hear us, and where the amiable assistants got for us were mostly young and handsome, and who could bear any amount of light, any inspection of their secret charms, and who full of hot blood and the voluptuousness of youth, and stimulated by champagne, loved the baudy tricks and spent freely.

And to complete this catalogue of letches, and delights, — it occurred two years later when I first dildoed H. — I had an umbrella with a smooth handle of peculiar shape, and H. was delighted to let me fuck her with it till she spent

Indeed most things that a man, and three women could do together we did. What was wanting to complete the variety was H. to gamahuche me, but she’d neither do that, nor gamahuche the other women tho she’d frig them till they could spend no longer. — In after years once under pressure of circumstances H. took my libation in her mouth, and once sucked me up to rigidity only.

The narrative in its chronological order of events I finish. Many more incidents might have been told of varied delights, of whims and fancies normal and abnormal, yet tho the places, participants and actresses were different, the amatory amusements were similar to others played elsewhere, and their repetition in the narrative would be tedious.

I break with the past, my amatory career is over, my secret life finished. My philosophy remains the same. My deeds leave me no regret — with the exception perhaps of a very few. — Would that I were young enough to continue in the same course — that all might happen to me over again. — But age forbids, duty forbids, affection forbids — Eros adieu.

 

Here abruptly terminates the narrative. Some years after the writer died and the manuscript came as already told into the possession of him who arranged and abbreviated it. A wonderful narrative of something like fifty years of secret life.

A short list of our culture’s dominant assumptions about sexuality might go something like this: Powerful social forces in organized social life — religion, the elderly, middle-class life, or something called “Puritanism” or simply “society” in general — conspire to frustrate, condemn, or regulate the free expression of sexuality; sexual expression is therefore a struggle between individual desire and these repressive forces; the truth about humans, for better or worse, lies in what is hidden from social scrutiny, in what is most “intimate” and unspoken, and which can only be understood as the result of a revelation, a confession, a scandal; a person’s sexuality once disclosed reveals the truth of that person. These assumptions might lead a reader of
My Secret Life
to expect certain things: a titillating entertainment, a juicy scandal, a case history, a rare glimpse into the secrets of a soul, perhaps even a heroic act — a blow in the struggle for self-expression, personal emancipation against the Victorian version of political correctness.

With those expectations, what does one make of a passage like the following?

Molly, it will be recalled, is a fifteen-year-old girl from the country, secured for the narrator’s pleasure by a prostitute named Betsy. A short while earlier, when the girl resisted “Walter‘s” advances, Betsy had threatened to cast her penniless onto the streets. After the rape, Betsy tells the child to wash her vagina. “I would not hear of that,” Walter writes. “I wanted her as she was. I liked to see the bloody smears on her belly and thighs, and know her cunt was full of my semen.... The girl piddled, singing out — ‘ooooho’ in a whisper, as the piddle I suppose touched the torn edges of her virginity” [p. 297].

Here’s Walter seducing another woman, also a virgin:

 

“I have a confused recollection of thinking myself the next day an ass, for having missed a good opportunity of spermatizing a fresh cunt” [p. 178], he reports after temporary failure; but on the second try, he resorts to the ultimate threat: “ ‘Now don’t be a fool, — damned if I don’t murder you if you are not quiet!’ ‘Oh! oh!’ I had got her somehow on to the bed, she was helpless; with fear, liquor, and cunt-heat, I threw myself on to her.... A mighty straight thrust; and the virginity was gone at that one effort” [pp. 192-93]. “Breathless, fatigued, I got into a violent rage,” he tells us, in the course of struggling with another victim, “and it told as brutality often tells with a woman.”

I cite these passages because it’s crucial to see
My Secret Life
clearly from the outset for what it is. Page after page contains closely detailed accounts (possibly elaborated in the writing) of victims’ pleas, tears, and struggles, and the author’s pleasure in their terror, helplessness, pain, even their blood. The writing is obviously skillful: characters come vividly to life in the rapid sequence of dialogue and description, and phrases like “lay in a red rim” and “the torn edges of her virginity” work well as metaphors. But this is neither “naughty” nor “titillating” nor “scandalous” nor brave; it’s the record of a serial rapist, a man who today would face decades behind bars for criminal acts. Yet the same writer is also capable of a statement like this:

What would it mean for a child rapist to insist that a woman “is a paradise to a man”? Does he mean a woman in herself or “that which she has” for sale? In literature we are used to such dramatic contradictions, but usually we know where we stand as readers — Nabokov’s
Lolita
comes to mind, in this as in so many other ways when reading
My Secret Life.
Walter is a far more disturbing figure than Humbert Humbert because he seems unaware either of his brutality or his contradictions — a fact that comes out most clearly in his casual remarks. Here’s his reaction when a woman he’s raped complains he’s hurt her: “What a sham ... a woman always is, — a Grenadier has fucked her twice, yet she says my prick hurts her” [p. 206]. “I soon tired of her,” he writes of another servant woman: “She was a good-natured, foolish, stupid, trusting creature, and my wonder is that she had lived twenty-one years in the country, without having had a prick up her. As a lovely-cunted fuckstress she left nothing to be desired. She had her fears about consequences, for her courses stopped, but she somehow managed to set that to rights, and at last went to her situation” [p. 211]. Pregnancy and childbearing are a woman’s concerns, easily dismissible: “Mrs O
^*
b
^***
e was not up to the mark, and began to talk the sort of bosh that women do, who are funky of consequences” [p. 219]. Regretting having missed the chance of deflowering a working-class girl, he writes that he “first met the little stupid, who might have had the pleasure of a fuck, and profit as well. — As it is, I dare say some dirty young boy will open her cunt, and give her a black eye if she upbraids him if her belly swells” [p. 370]. The “little stupid” does not understand that being deflowered by a gentleman is a gift.