Coming of Age in Great Britain

By COLIN MACINNES Mr. Mataranka Birdum, a young Australian aboriginal and disciple of Miss Margaret Mead, was among us recently, on a scholarship from the British Council, to study the sexual customs of our country. Mr. Birdum's sociological method, so he told me, comprised statistical analysis, personal experiment, and sample investigation—in which latter phase of his study he kindly asked me to be one of his informants. I give below his questions and my answers, extracted from the tape he made; and the reader will, I hope, pardon any incoherence arising from a conversation casual and disjointed.

What, Mr. Maclntyre, do you esteem sex to be?

Sex is both immensely serious and totally frivolous. It is serious because it can create life, and involves another human creature. It is frivolous because it is simple, natural and de- lightful. To feel the gravity of sex and its superb comicality is to know it.

Is this view general in your nation?

I think there are three views,■ one of them being a non-view. These are the Judeo-Christian, the liberal-permissive- and the unquestioning.

The Judeo-Christian holds that sex is a sin outside marriage, and should be principally directed to the creation of children. This is the official attitude of our State church and of most of those, like judges and politicians, who are in Positions of authority. I think its rules are Obeyed by a minority of the nation because of faith, fear or inclination. You must remember, Mr. Birdum, that we are traditionally a Christian People, and for 2,000 years of the Christian era a prodigious volume of propaganda on the sexual theme has inundated the West. I believe that on actual human lives, this has had four consequences. A minute fraction of mankind, by nature destined anyway to saintliness, has hearkened to these admonitions and been streng- thened by them. A larger group—but still one all too large—have seen their lives ruined by fears these fierce warnings have aroused. A third bigger segment has accepted these rules because they found them convenient, respectable and corresponding in any case to the natural limi- tations of their desires. But another vast majority, even in ages of maximum credulity and clerical tyranny, have simply paid lip-service to this code: they have said yes with their mouths, and no with the remainder of their bodies: Only in Christian countries, or those nominally so, has the sexual instinct been subjected to such severe psychic strain. Even in the Jewish faith, from which the Christian is derived, there is, despite all severities, no denial of sensuality itself: it is characteristic, for example, that the Sabbath eve, among Jews, is considered the happiest moment for connubial bliss. But though, to Christian doctrine, provided wedlock is secure, there is no theoretical enmity to sexual rapture, in fact this religion has proved itself hostile even to sanctified sensuality. In other faiths, often more venerable, this strained duality is absent. In Hindu religious art the body is holy and becomes the spirit. In Buddhist belief the least of sins is physical, the ultimate spiritual pride. Even Islam, though also born late of Israel and austere, rejoices in sensual bliss. But Christians invented the numbing notion of nakedness: of the body, when un- clothed, being defiled. All early Christian art rejected the harmony in flesh and spirit of its Egyptian and Grecian origins, and hid or made horrid our despised human flesh. And this at first happened in warm southern countries, so that we cannot equate Christian asceticism with its latter- day triumphs in the cold puritan north.

I think we stray a little from our topic. You spoke also, Mr. MacIntyre, of (let me inspect my note) the 'liberal-permissives' in your country.

These arc persons whose sexual attitudes are largely determined by a defiant rejection of the, Christian ethos : if the Church says sex is solemn, and its abuses sin, they say both are neither. This gives to their sexual judgments and be- haviour a marked degree of tolerance—or per- haps indifference—but deprives these of much weight and beauty. For after all, there is a reli- gious element in sexual union: it is the only miracle most of us will ever know: a re-creation of ourselves through someone else, and thus a sacrament.

But you have said it is also frivolous.

It should be so, but only can with style and happiness if this frivolity arises from shared love. Sex can be anything—an appetite, a passion, a devotion; and it will give you exactly what you give to it. The sexual act has in common with all other functions of our bodies that it satisfies a natural impulse; it is entirely different from any other in that its physical quality is inti- mately involved with all those in our being: mind, heart, spirit, soul. If we seal up these four, or any one of them, the sex act still satis- fies the body, but dissatisfies because our bodies hold so much more than our flesh. When poets, in their wild wisdom, equate sensuality with love, they are declaring, as poets often do, no pretty fantasy, but an acute reality. Without love, sex is a destroyer, for sex conjures up, in human beings, so much more than a mere animal act —and such animals as we are must be true to our whole complex natures. The reward life brings to those who do not divide sex from their affections is that when sex is born of love it is infinitely more profound; also enjoyable; also innocently frivolous. What I think liberal-per- missives miss is this sense of joy and wonder.

And now, please, Mr. MacIntyre, the 'unques- tioning' category?

I believe that, for the majority of my country- men—that is, especially among the working classes—sexual conduct is not a 'problem' at all: it is a matter of desire, convenience, risk, human relations. in this folk wisdom I think there is sound sense, and that a prime error is, precisely, to make of sex a 'problem.' When- ever this word is used by human creatures of any human situation you may be certain the 'problem' is man-made and soluble. The only problems worth worrying about in the world today are poverty and pain: real ones, about which something could be done, though little is. Instead we have phantom substitutes like the 'class problem,' the 'race problem' and the 'sexual problem.'

1 never read any pronouncement, in our coun- try, upon sexual themes without asking myself a question which I think legitimate—namely, is the pronouncer's own sex life satisfactory to himself, or herself (and to both their consorts)? Is this declaration made out of anguish, or benevolence? By what right of understanding does this person presume to teach? And even when I read artists on this theme (for whom I am bound to feel a conspiratorial sympathy), I must also ask this question. Was Lawrence, for instance, sexually fulfilled?

Lawrence, I believe, was an imprisoned liberator. Liberator in the sense that he loved and celebrated natural life (no one has written more evocatively of the English countryside since Chaucer), was possessed by a profound respect for personal identity, but was im- prisoned by his sexual obsession. He condemned those whose sex ran to their brains, but his own lived less in life than in a haunted imagination. God knows it was a triumph for a miner's son in Edwardian England to so tease our spirits with this theme that he is still a controversial figure in 1963. But if you seek sexual analysis by artists who accepted sex, and did not seek to make a 'cause' of it, read rather the Abbe Prevost, or Prosper Merimee, or Madame Colette: in whose works the theme is glorified and dissected from a position of absolute acceptance. Let us, please, return to England, since this is the topic of my thesis. I understand your three categories—religious, permissive, unde- manding—but ask now if you think these d'fferent from in other countries?

I have had the pleasure, Mr. Birdum, of visiting your tribe in Arnhem Land, so I know your people, whom my own regard (excuse me) as sen- sual savages, to be one which lives sex and does not talk about it. This is not due, need I say, to any lack of sophistication, let alone sensuality —nor, at profounder levels, moral instinct—but to a feeling it is superfluous to speak about the obvious. 'Why talk of cooking? Let us eat. What need to speak of sex? Let us live it.' Our nation, by contrast, is a land of cookery books and inferior dishes, of endless chatter about sex and inharmonious sexuality.

I hope You will not think I seek to flatter you in saying peoples who have not endured the self- analysts that is the great pain and glory of the European races possess a beauty we have largely lost. The sexual wisdom of Sigmund Freud (or of Shakespeare for that matter) is, I think, much to be envied if to map his own psyche is the ultimate desire ofr Man : yet at what human cost, among thousands of nameless men and women,

have the sexual revelations not been made!

C/1 this l am well aware : Miss Mead has warned me that, in pursuing my earnest studies, I might lose that which most attracted her to my island : our innocence, so she said (though we did not quite agree with her on this). But, Mr. MacIntyre: is there no sexual innocence in England?

Six years ago, I knew a young English boy and girl named Alex and Jean, who were then eighteen and sixteen. They were 'going steady,' Which, in English idiom, means going the whole way with an eventual view to marriage—but with not yet an engagement ring. On alternate week- ends each visited the other's family and stayed there—with the knowledge and approval of both Parents. Three years ago they were engaged, married a year later, and now have an infant 8". BY any standard I can understand their conduct is responsible, sensible--and innocent. I do not say such practical wisdom is typical of our young. The young can behave as irre- sponsibly as the old, though with perhaps a Justification their elders cannot claim, which is the necessity of discovery. Their life is a battle of which they cannot yet know the nature: only by fighting it can they discover this. And I think their elders should beware of dubbing their con- duct irresponsible; for you cannot be this until You know what to be responsible about. You will surely, Mr. Birdum, have read our newspapers, and learned from their articles that our older generations have an almost obscene obsession with the sexuality of the young. They P,,rY on their juniors like decaying gentlemen with field-glasses in public parks. Is their motive a their solicitude, a wish to help the young from h „ell' Own greater understanding, and protect them from unnecessary pain? It is hard to believe this. The tone of these admonitions must suggest the old are prompted by envious ran- cour and a bullying intention to interfere. For example: when the word 'morality' is used, in strictures by one generation on another, why must this always mean sexual morality? Are there not ten commandmentS and seven deadly sins—only one of each relating to the flesh? Why . must this one snatched joy of youth be plucked out by the old to epitomise a total sinfulness?

As in England so at home, 1 think; except that in Arnhem Land we have at least the sense to slaughter such old people (or perhaps suffo- cate). But why, Mr. MacIntyre, do you esteem these matters' so important?

Because, Mr. Birdum, I think the English, despite all legends to the contrary, are an ex- tremely sexy people. We have denying sects and dirty-minded fringes. but basically, in all classes, this people seems to me a sensual one; and sen- suality has beauty provided it is not betrayed.

Sex, whatever moralists may say, is the great human equaliser. You cannot pull rank or race or income or even talent (except perhaps of a particular kind) in bed. Thus sex, though it can destroy and hurt, can also anneal and harmonise.

I do not believe any man or woman exists who is fulfilled unless also sexually fulfilled; though I would never exclude anyone whose kind of fulfilment is a freely accepted, positive rejection of this joy. So whenever, Mr. Birdum, in the course of your anthropological explorations. yo ask any one of us what he may think about a.1 this, please also ask yourself if the voice you hear speaks out of love, or hatred, of its u.. a body and those of others.

No need to tell me so : tape now runs out : some final words to me?

Only to say I think our sexual bliss and recti- tude would be enormously enhanced if for a year —even perhaps a month—a self-denying ordi- nance were accepted on this topic in pulpits, Parliament, Royal Commissions, magistrates' courts, press, films, telly, radio, books and pri- vate conversations by all those (including one- self) who monotonously sound off about it. To lose sex as a word, and gain it as an experience, our best way would be silence and affection.