to read, even in the modern version: ‘Gauvin’.
But not without a certain apprehension do I join that band of writers who try to capture those pleasures called carnal which can get such a grip on the heart. Like many who have tried and many more, no doubt, who have given up in despair, I shall find that words don’t help one express the ecstasy of love, that transport so intense that ordinary frontiers dissolve and we discover bodies we never suspected we possessed. I know I shall make myself ridiculous. I know my unique emotions will be mired in the banal and that every word, every forlorn, drab, coarse, grotesque, even frankly repellent word is waiting to betray me.
And how to write from the heart about the surgings and subsidings, dissolutions, resolutions, and resurrections of desire? What sort of emotion is evoked by the word ‘coition’? Co-ire, the Latin for ‘go together’. But when two bodies go together, what becomes of the pleasure?
Then there’s ‘penetration’. We’re in the law courts here: ‘Did penetration actually take place, Miss Smith?’ ‘Fornication’ has a whiff of surplices and sin. ‘Copulation’ is ponderous, ‘coupling’ animal, ‘sleeping with’ boring and inaccurate, and ‘fucking’ altogether too brisk. Well then, there’s ‘swiving’, ‘tupping’, ‘hauchmagandy’, ‘quenching the fire’. These, alas, are the forgotten coinings of a youthful language, before it was bridled by sobriety. In these days of verbal inflation, when words fall out of fashion as fast as our clothes, we have only grubby obscenities rendered meaningless by constant repetition. The worthy ‘making love’ is always at hand, ready to serve but devoid of emotional thrill, neither scandalous nor erotic. Not fit for literature, then.
As for the organs which produce this pleasure, every writer, male or – perhaps more so – female encounters a whole new set of pitfalls: ‘Jack’s rod was rigid, swollen to bursting Mellors’ phallus raised itself, superb, awe-inspiring…’ The assistant-director’s balls, your adorable scrotum, his penis, your pubis, my vagina dentata, your clitoris, Beatrice. How to avoid becoming comic? The very science of anatomy loses its neutrality when sex comes into the picture. Words, recalcitrant bastards, insist on independent existence or impose received images on the transparency one seeks, coming as they do from slang or Latin, slime or the sublime. Where they exist at all, that is. For as far as the female orgasm is concerned, even the best writers display an appallingly meagre vocabulary.
One just has to forget everything and start afresh – forget press pornography, hard or soft, mucous membrane journalism with its relentless accounts of sexual acrobatics churned out by cynical hacks on subsistence wages. Forget more especially fashionable post-modern erotica which cloaks its nastiness in high-flown jargon.
All the same, there’s no way I can tell my story without describing the sin of firkytoodling, as sexual play was known in the sixteenth century. It was by abandoning themselves to firkytoodling that my hero and heroine became enslaved to each other. It was in quest of firkytoodling that they pursued each other to the ends of the world. It was because of firkytoodling that they were never able to part, though in every other aspect of their lives they were as apart as they could be. It would be nice to say that this love came from the marriage of true minds, or a childhood bond, an extraordinary gift or a heart-rending disability of our hero or heroine. But facts had better be faced and the bare fact is, these two weren’t meant to know each other, were even meant to despise each other, and it was only the speechless language of love which made them able to communicate. It was the magic of his thing in her whatsit – and perhaps a touch of the destiny one always likes to invoke in these matters, or mysterious forces or the play of hormones or whatever – which bound them so inextricably that they overcame all obstacles to their love.
What I’ve got to do is make the commonest act of all seem dazzling. Why write at all if you can’t dazzle? So how can I describe that hope of heaven which gleams between the legs of men and women, making a miracle of an act which takes place everywhere and has done since forever, between sexes – opposite or the same – pathetically or gloriously? I’m not endowed with any special knowledge or with words which haven’t been used or abused a thousand times before. This is no voyage to an undiscovered country: love has no terra incognita. In the end, there’s nothing more commonplace than a cunt unless it’s two cunts. When it comes to it, a phallus of the finest quality ejaculates just like any common or garden cock. Prudence would dictate giving up now. Between the pitfalls of pornography on the one hand and insipidity on the other, very few writers have scoffed at the dangers and achieved literary masterpieces that shine with an insolent brightness. But it’s only after the event, once one’s failed, that prudence seems such a desirable quality. Isn’t all literature imprudent anyway?
But, in spite of all this, what a beautiful risk it was to write the opening lines of this impossible story: ‘I was eighteen when Gauvin entered my heart for life, or what I took to be my heart, though at the time it was still only my skin…’
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1 Gauvin
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I was eighteen when, without either of us realising it, Gauvin entered my heart for life. Yes, it began with my heart, or what I took to be my heart though, at that time, it was still only my skin. He was six or seven years older and, as a deep-sea fisherman earning his own living, he was a match for me, a middle-class student, but still dependent on my parents. My Paris friends were greenhorns and wimps beside this young man, already marked by a calling which turns a sinewy adolescent into a force of nature and, all too soon, a man old before his time. Yet boyhood still lurked in his eyes, which he dropped whenever you looked at him, and youth in the arrogant curl of his mouth. But there was a man’s strength in his great hands, toughened by salt water, and his deliberate gait, each step set firmly, as if on a rolling deck.
Until we reached adolescence we eyed each other with the wariness of incompatible species – he the Breton, I the Parisienne – knowing that our paths were bound in different directions. To aggravate things, he was the son of a poor farmer and I the daughter of summer visitors. He seemed to think that being summer visitors constituted our chief occupation, a way of life for which he felt nothing but contempt. The little spare time he had was spent in violent games of football with his brothers, an activity which left me cold. Or he would shoot birds with his catapult or raid their nests, all of which revolted me. The rest of the time he would be scuffling with his mates or, if he met my sister and me, swearing like a trooper for our benefit. I decided that this was typical male behaviour, by definition hateful. It was he who punctured the tyres of my first little-rich-girl’s bicycle. To be fair, that bicycle was a real kick in the teeth. All he and his brothers possessed was a clapped-out old box on wheels in which they would clatter down the one street in Raguenès, rejoicing in the racket. As soon as his legs were long enough, he flung them across his father’s decrepit old nag of a pushbike and sneaked off every time the old man lay senseless in a ditch after a Saturday-night bender. My sister and I responded by using clothes-pegs to fix postcards to the wheels of our shiny chrome bicycles, with their bells and mudguards and their little baskets. This made a whirring engine-like noise which was meant to impress the Lozerech boys. They took no notice whatsoever.
There was a sort of tacit agreement that we play with the one girl of the Lozerech family, the youngest of what my father dismissively described as ‘that brood of rabbits’. She was a charmless little blonde, with a name, Yvonne, which we thought lamentable. As I said, we had nothing in common.
When he was fourteen or fifteen Gauvin disappeared from my horizon. He was already at sea during the summer as ship’s boy on his brother’s trawler, the Valliant Couturier. I was charmed by the name: for a long time I believed it was for a real valiant couturier, renowned for some unexpected act of bravery at sea. Gauvin’s mother used to say that he wasn’t one to shirk and it wouldn’t be long before his apprenticeship was over. But for the moment he was just ship’s boy, the scapegoat on board. That was the custom and a skipper had less right to be soft with a relative
