Not Just A River In Egypt

[poliphilo]

It's 1949. Enid is in Africa, visiting relations. She meets a young man called John who is a friend of her brother's. Enid is 61, John is 37.

There's an immediate connection. John makes sheep's eyes, Enid makes sheep's eyes back. She hints in her diary at a karmic connection,

Even through the medium of Enid's besotted prose John comes across as a creep. People warn her against him, they say he's a schizophrenic, that he has a "bit of a kink". To make matters worse he's in the middle of divorcing his wife. Then he snatches his kids from his wife's care and asks Enid and the people she's staying with to look after them for him

He tells Enid that his wife is a lesbian and has been sexually abusing the three little girls. Enid believes him.  He goes on to say that his wife denied him "normal" sexual relations and the children were only conceived after he'd "forced" himself on her. A few lines further on Enid refers to the wife as a "sexual maniac".

Hang on a minute.

But now John is asking Enid if she has ever been in love. She says "Three times" and tells him about the men in her life.  The men in her life?  Yes, the men. Only the men. No mention of Smithie. No mention of Nina. No mention of Doro. Apparently they don't count. Or- at this moment- matter at all. And slowly it dawns on me that Enid- for all that she spends her life obsessing about women, for all that she sleeps with women- thinks of herself as totally straight.

Comments

[dadi.livejournal.com]

SOMEBODY needs to write a novel about Enid, I think!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Not me....:)

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Also, I thought it was cow eyes.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

John sound nasty though. And way beyond what you could justify with the 'man of his time' clause.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Same thing...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He must have had charm. Enid says he looked a bit like Ivor Novello.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

This John sounds like a very dodgy character!

Re only mentioning the men, our ideas of sexual identity are not the same as those of the past. In fact the idea of having a fixed sexual identity such as straight, gay or bi would have been an alien concept. Also, would she not have been of the generation of women who lost boyfriends or fiancés or even the chance of finding an opposite sex partner due to the First World War?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Enid didn't lose anybody close to her in the Great War. Her early engagement (to an artist) was broken off. Her second heterosexual relationship suffered the same fate. Both men lived into old age. Her first beau's sister married Enid's younger brother. (These were my grandparents, Ted and Lou).

Otherwise, as you say, ideas of sexuality were different back then.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

The story only gets richer.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's true.

And more confusing.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Just like life!

Reminds me a little of how the letters of Virginia and Vita got more messy and confusing as time went by, and I just wanted to have more of the juicy earlier stuff.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Enid came from a family not unlike Virginia Woolf's- only without the geniuses.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

I think sexual definition hadn't reached the heights back then that it has reached today. Enid was very likely bisexual with a preference for women, perhaps. But back then you just didn't define yourself that way. John sounds like a complete and utter creep.

And why won't you consider writing about Enid's life yourself? You do write well...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

This is a good point, about your writing. At the least you could edit/annotate, and write a helluvan intro. (Is "helluvan" kinda too-fine-a-point?)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about publication: Enid isn't a particularly good writer, she's not perceptive or witty- and when she has the mood on her she goes round and round in circles.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Looks like you're gonna have to write it then, poliphilo. If you decide it ought be shared. :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Put it this way, I'm not going to waste my life on hers. It's an interesting story, but not that interesting.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

The more of her life I read the less I think I want to write about her. The older Enid was judgemental and unattractively pious.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

That's a great/classic story, though, no?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A good novelist might make something of it, but I'm not a novelist, let alone a good one.

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

Wow.

This was the times. What year was Oscar Wilde jailed?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

In 1895- when Enid was 7.

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

Probably made quite an impression.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Enid writes about the changes her generation had to cope with, saying- and I think rightly- that no generation had ever had to cope with so much. In the end the demands of all those changes- social and ethical- defeated her and she took to banging away about the moral flabbiness of youth. That's where she loses me.

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

Absolutely fascinating.

low

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

Perhaps she thought that it was her "moral steadfastness" allowed her to not succumb to the temptation to identify as a lesbian... or, perhaps, she saw sex as something that was only valid when there is a man involved. In 1986 I visited London and had a lovely 4 day fling with a woman who lived there. One of the things that she told me was that Queen Victoria did not think sex was important if there was not a man involved, which is why she made homosexuality illegal... between men, but said not one word about lesbians. My friend gave me a necklace with a coin with Victoria's image on it. She said that images of Victoria were often worn by lesbians to signal other lesbians, and this history was the reason why.

Re: low

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

"Moral steadfastness" is a term she'd have identified with.

Unfortunately there's nothing in her voluminous writings- at least nothing I've come across yet- that clarifies her attitude to sex. She contemplates becoming John's mistress than backs out pleading "high spiritual ideals". She takes women to bed but never tells us what happens when they get there. Certain throwaway phrases suggest something akin to homophobia. I find myself wondering whether she ever actually had sex- or anything more than kisses and cuddles- with anyone.

Re: low

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

It's possible. The thing about homosexuality... or, sexuality in general, is that people cannot choose how they feel, but they can choose how they act. If a gay person honestly believes that there is no recourse, they may choose to never, ever, actually have sex with someone who they are strongly attracted to or deeply in love with. This is basically the same as"situational homosexuality" where people are, say, in prison. They end up having sex with members of their own sex because there are no opportunities to do otherwise.

Perhaps she sincerely saw no good could come from the fact that she kept falling in love with women, and did her best to make it not a reality.

[veronikos.livejournal.com]

I love the cognitive dissonance.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It saddens me that she knew herself so little.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I was in a similar situation to her when I was much younger, living with my religious parents.

Looking back, it was much better for me to be able to pretend to myself I was straight, so I didn't have to stress about it until I was in a safer environment. Sort of like Stockholm Syndrome. Her life was probably happier with self-deception if she wouldn't have been safely able to acknowledge herself.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like that explanation. I have to keep reminding myself that it was almost unthinkable for a gay woman to identify as such through most of Enid's lifetime. Even Vita Sackville-West- Virginia Wolf's Orlando- sought refuge in marriage.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that the generations that spanned the 40s and 50s were strongly influenced by the huge massacre of 14-18. In previous generations, the importance of giving birth was inheritance. During those years, it wasn't so much about inheritance, but about restoring some kind of norm. So people didn't examine the nature of their sexuality, but they did have a sense of duty about giving birth.
I might be talking utter nonsense, but I don't think so, and perhaps this explains why a man might think it normal to "force himself" and then Enid might think in terms of the wife as a "sexual maniac"; not necessarily as a lesbian nymphomaniac (although her opinion might include that) but as a person with disordered sexuality, in the sense that she hasn't recognized her duty to reproduce. I wonder if she believed the accusation about the children?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a interesting idea- and quite new to me; I'll have to mull it over.

Yes, Enid believed the children had been abused. She wrote a deposition (of which I have a copy) in which she describes the oldest girl's sexualized behaviour. It didn't occur to her that the supposed abuser might have been the father.