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Novels and Novelists

The ‘Sex-Complex’

The ‘Sex-Complex’

The Sleeping Partner — By M. P. Willcocks

If there is one character in modern English fiction whom we wish with all our heart the Boojum would call for, it is the man or woman who from childhood up has suffered from what our psycho-analytical skimmings have taught page 68 us to call the sex-complex. It were foolish to deny that a large number of young persons have been severely handicapped, not so much by their parents telling them of the cabbage and the angel with a black bag in reply to their infant speculations as by their healthy adolescent curiosity being treated as a disease so disgusting that they must be kept in the dark at all costs and never told the unpleasant—if sacred—truth. But it were equally foolish to deny that the progress towards light of these unfortunate ones makes heavy reading. What we do not know about it is not for want of telling; it has been during the past few years the pet subject of our young writers to break a pen upon. But there is a rarer version; that of the sensitive child cursed with dissolute sex-ridden parents whom only to watch is poison enough, and this it is that Miss Willcocks has chosen. At the age of thirteen, her hero, Silas Brutton, was taken by his foxy old father, Nicky Brutton, the publisher, to see the prisoners at Portland Gaol. And a peculiarly odious servile convict was pointed out to them as having on one and the same evening received chapel membership and criminally assaulted a child. This story Brutton père found admirable … ‘as a man of the world the character of the crime tickled his sense of humour …’ but the episode infected the boy with the disease which was to ruin more than half his life. From that day he was fit for nothing but to be sickened by what he saw and heard. Life to him was so odious with its ‘human spawning’ and ‘tide of birth’ that when his father died, leaving him the publishing business, he let all slide because of his horror of the kind of stuff—‘the goat's foot among the vine leaves’—that the old man had built his house upon.

‘Warped’ (he cries), ‘of course it's left me warped. But the worst of it is that in publishing there seems to be no mean between Sunday School piffle and this painted harlotry….’

It is curious that the author seems to find something page 69 extraordinarily fine, pitiful and ‘lovable’ in Silas. As for his brother Ned, who wrests the business from him, we are dismally conscious of failing to share the approval of his proper masculinity, his passion for ‘comfort’ (which being interpreted is a natty little woman, rather red in the face, taking a pie out of the oven), his recklessness and jolly way of seeing things through. We are to believe that Ned is the kind of man that women adore; he is the big child beating on the table with his spoon who is and ever shall be irresistible. We confess that after we have been forced to watch him at table the whole book through, and then come upon: ‘he had been looking anxiously for that slight ooziness in the middle of the omelet that makes its perfection,’ we wish him dead.

But to return to Silas. He finds salvation in a brave, splendid little girl, Nan Carey, whose passion is biology.

‘Look,’ cried she, ‘at the way science gets her own back—after silly vapouring: there she shows the processes of birth and burgeoning, of begetting and conception, from the dance of the atoms to the birth … of a child-animal.’ … Silas found himself taken right into the inner chamber of his own fears, of his own disgusts. To Nan, the blind principle of fecundity from which he shrank … was … the ocean of life in which she sported….’

This, and a very great deal more of it, convinces him; the stream of life runs fair, ‘while before, as far as he was concerned, it had been stifled in slime.’ ‘And,’ to quote Miss Willcock's final words, ‘the moon and the stars carried on till the dawn once more snuffed them out.’

(August 29, 1919.)