Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [154]
Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and how they were all—the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the spectacle of a flower or a landscape—in some way bound up with his sentiment for his mother, somehow rooted and implied in it. He remembered that Girls’ School in Paris, those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets. The book had been written in the age when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic fashion, when ‘kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt.’ The seductive and priapic major’s moustaches had been long, curly and waxed. What shame he had felt and what remorse! Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for strength! And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother. To resist temptation was to be worthy of her. Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God. He had begun to triumph. And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. Major Knoyle’s moustaches were also curly.
‘Augustine and the Calvinists were right,’ he said aloud, breaking in on the discussion of Seraphim’s breastbones.
‘Still harping?’ said Illidge.
‘God means to save some people and damn others.’
‘Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation, and (c)…’
‘When I think of the War,’ Spandrell went on, interrupting him, ‘what it might have been for me and what in fact it was…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, Augustine was right.’
‘Well, I must say,’ said Philip, ‘I’ve always been very grateful to Augustine, or whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg. It prevented me from being a hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.’
Spandrell looked at him; the corers of his wide mouth ironically twitched. ‘Your accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life. In other words, the event was like you. Just as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me. I’d been up at Oxford a year, when it began,’ he went on.
‘The dear old College, what?’ said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some derisive comment.
‘Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs—discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination. Such an apocalypse, the first real woman!’ he added parenthetically. ‘And at the same time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the superheated fancy and the pornographic book.’
‘Which is a tribute to art,’ said Philip. ‘As I’ve so often pointed out.’ He smiled at Walter, who blushed, remembering what his brother-in-law had said about the dangers of trying to make love after high poetic models. ‘We’re brought up topsy-turvy,’ Philip went on. ‘Art before life; Romeo and Juliet and filthy stories before marriage or its equivalents. Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned. Inevitably. In the good old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical. If boys and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare