His Bowels Did Yearn Upon His Brother (Notes on Ganymede, by Daphne du Maurier)

Zeus küsst Ganymed (1758)

Fresco by Anton Raphael Mengs and Giovanni Casanova.*

(Palazzo Corsini, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.)

I. 

One of the distinguishing traits of the true pervert is that they have a very active imagination, one that is often informed as much by classical scholarship as by their sexual proclivities. They never quite see the world as it is, or the people in it - including themselves - as they are. They have what Lawrence terms glimpses. That is to say, they see in the faces and forms of young adolescents something divine as well as erotically fascinating:

[...] when lads and girls are not thinking,

when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean from self-consciousness,

either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder or mere stillness,

you may see glimpses of the gods in them.    

- D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods'

Thus it is that when the fastidious academic who is the narrator of Daphne du Maurier's third tale in her astonishing collection The Breaking Point (1959) goes on holiday to Italy, he quickly finds himself besotted with a youth and in a whole heap of trouble ...

II.

Arriving in Venice, our anonymous protagonist immediately feels as if he has entered an extratemporal space "outside the rest of Europe and even the world". This was Venice as an electrifying inner experience rather than actual location on a map. One that existed, magically, for him and for others who shared his tastes and were susceptible to the same secret enchantment. 

His excitement as he strolls the streets was "intense, almost unbearable", but it's as nothing compared to the moment when he first sees a young waiter, aged "about fifteen, not more", working at a café on the piazza:

"I told you I was a classical scholar. Therefore you will understand - you should understand - that was happened in that second was transformation. The electricity that had charged me all evening focused on a single point in my brain to the exclusion of all else; the rest of me was jelly. I could sense the man at my table raise his hand and summon the lad in the white coat carrying a tray [...] and this self who was non-existent knew with every nerve fibre, every brain-cell, every blood corpuscle that he was indeed Zeus, the giver of life and death, the immortal one, the lover; and that the boy who came towards him was his own beloved, his cup-bearer, his slave, Ganymede. I was  poised, not in the body, not in the world, and I summoned him. He knew me, and he came. 

      Then it was all over. The tears were pouring down my face and I heard a voice saying, 'Is anything wrong, signore?'"

It's significant how quickly he persuades himself that the blue-eyed boy is fully aware of the strange scene unfolding between them; how when the latter gives a smile and a little bow after the bill has been paid, the former takes this as a sign of Ganymede's knowing complicity.

The next night, he returns to the café and this time the glimpse goes beyond the first instantaneous flash:

"I could feel the chair of gold, and the clouds above my head, and the boy was kneeling beside me, and the cup he offered me was gold as well. His humility was not the shamed humility of a slave, but the reverence of a loved one to his master, to his god." 

The pursuit - the grooming - of Ganymede continues, despite an early premonition of danger; indeed, doesn't danger merely add spice to the game for an illicit lover? Of course, the affair quickly turns sour as reality begins to intrude: Ganymede is actually a very ordinary boy, of whom one could not expect too much, more interested in the latest rock 'n' roll records than he is in Shakespearean sonnets.

Just as well then, since he was bound to disappoint, that Ganymede is killed in a water-skiing accident. He may have been "beautiful as an angel from heaven", but he would soon have grown fat, grown ugly, grown old.

Besides, whilst the accident had been terrible - "a mass of churning water, of tangled rope, of sudden, splintering wood", and the young body of Ganymede drawn into the suction of the speedboat's propeller blades, turning the sea crimson with his blood - the horror soon passes and one comes to accept even the unfortunate consequences of such an affair, such as being forced to resign from one's job.   

At least that's true for du Maurier's cultured paedophile in this tragic tale. Having lost his old life and old friends and colleagues, having moved to a different part of town (the area near Paddington known as Little Venice), he happily adapts to a new regime of existence. At seven o'clock each evening, for example, he goes to his favourite local restaurant:

"The fact is, the boy who is training there as a waiter celebrates his fifteenth birthday this evening, and I have a little present for him. Nothing very much, you understand - I don't believe in spoiling these lads - but it seems there is a singer called Perry Como much in favour amongst the young. I have the latest record here. He likes bright colours, too - I rather thought this blue and gold cravat might catch his eye ..."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 579. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Ganymede', The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 83-123. All lines quoted and paraphrased above are from this edition. 

*Amusingly, the work was an imitation of an ancient Roman fresco, created to fool the famous archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, well-known for his interest in pederasty.

For a sister post to this one on du Maurier's tale 'The Blue Lenses', also in The Breaking Point, click here.