The manlet Dorian

A guy dropped in. With his round face and long overcoat, he gave the impression of two children, one standing on the other’s shoulders, who have teamed up so as to gain admission to an age-restricted movie. In his conversation, he always seemed to be skating over an abyss; he once told me “As our bodies get older, did you know they are actually cooking?”

He started to talk about his romantic plans. Divorced with two kids, he hadn’t been in a relationship for a year or more and was missing it. He encouraged me, too. “You’ve had a long relationship. Now you could explore some short-run ones.” Cross them off the bucket list, so to speak.

As this man chattered and shivered in my kitchen, I was visited by a strong sensation of evil. I had two thoughts:

• These people are bad. It is bad to know them and meet them. I wouldn’t want my children to be friends with their children.

• These people are doomed. Nothing this selfish and feckless can survive.

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There are a lot of Peter Pans about, of either sex. Some are sad: older single women still playing an exhausting game which they have to pretend to enjoy; the junkies running round the streets of my town, trapped in a permanent truancy, every institution becoming another version of reform school. Some are ridiculous, like the bestubbled local dads in baggy shorts who aspire to be their child’s best mate. Some, like my acquaintance, are both.

And in some sense, of course it’s good to be young and good that society is more youthful. Young means curious and openminded, and funnier, and always learning. I should know! An academic is someone who decided to stay in school for ever. Who wouldn’t want to remain young?

Peter Pan was born in 1902 when J. M. Barrie published The Little White Bird. Then he got his own stage play, subtitled The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and finally his own book. The book’s Peter can be a disconcerting creature. Although he seems to be about eleven, it’s repeatedly mentioned that he still has all his milk teeth. Like an extreme version of a real child, he’s completely selfish (after all, he steals other children from their parents). “Gay and innocent and heartless” is how J. M. Barrie described children, though he adopted two of his friends’.

But we might see our reflection best in another fin-de-siècle story, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

(The original is here. Spoilers: Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man, has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward. He wishes that the portrait should age while he stays young. This wish is granted. He falls under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, who passes on his cynical theories and French novels. He hides the aging portrait in his old schoolroom; when he shows it to Basil Hallward again, the latter is disgusted and confronts him. He kills Basil and conceals the crime. He tries to reform, but the picture displays his hypocrisy to him; he stabs it and is found dead in front of it, a wicked old man, while the picture again shows him in his youth.)

Dorian Gray is about many things — homosexuality, inequality, decadence — but most of all it is about not wanting to grow up. Up, not old: when we meet Dorian, he is really just a schoolboy, and a schoolboy he remains. He breaks off his engagement with Sybil Vane, his first love, because she acts badly in a play:

“Yes,” he cried, “you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once ... Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life.”

This passage contains a theory of art and life, but it’s also a teenage tantrum.

He never has another serious relationship with a woman. He’s terrified of the deadening effects of routine:

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits…

Hope I die before I get old. So he plays at relationships, treating them as opportunities to experience different emotions. He becomes, to quote Ron Swanson in Parks & Recreation, a tourist in people’s lives.

Like a thousand public schoolboys before and since, he sneaks off to the rough side of town to take drugs and party:

The floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor. Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered… the heavy odour of opium met him. He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure.

Oh, and he’s a dilettante in everything, he tries his hand at everything, he explores history, he reads up on this and that… he never gets over what M. Scott Peck called the “omnipotentiality of adolescence”. He tries mysticism and materialism, studies music and perfumes and jewels, imagines he is famous people of the past. He collects costumes, including Catholic priests’ robes: a decadent aesthete, but also a child with a dressing-up box. It’s not surprising that at the end of the book, after all this busyness, Lord Henry can tell him “I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself!”

Theories

Why perpetual youth? The cursed painting is a brilliant MacGuffin. What make Dorian Gray are the ideas that Lord Henry Wotton drops into his ear.

Life as self-creation

The swap between Dorian and his painting symbolizes, or literalizes, the attempt to turn one’s life into art. “You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets,” says Lord Henry, to excuse Dorian’s lack of achievements. Life, like art, should be a set of experiences:

To realize one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for…. if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream…

Yes, it’s the bucket list!

Now Dorian Gray has this in intense, exuberant form, as befits the first explorers of a way of life (also because it’s fiction and he can be magically endowed with infinite money), and we have it in commonplace banal form, 1000 Things To See Before You Die, because we are the package tourists following after. But it’s still recognizably the same thing: artistic self-creation is not just a cliché, but a principal way many ordinary people today think about their lives.

In this kind of self-creation, other people are an impediment. “To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,” says Lord Henry. “Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.” “The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art,” thinks Dorian. He is followed everywhere by Victorian gossip, that powerful tool of social control:

But he is protected from it by the magic amulet of his looks:

Even those who had heard the most evil things against him — and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs — could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room.

What Dorian achieves by plot device, modern people increasingly get automatically. Prosperity insulates us from consequences, from having to adjust our behaviour to harmonize with others. We can feed, clothe and house ourselves in return for increasingly little work, and so we can spend more of our lives in education before work, or retirement after it. The Victorians had to crowd into trains to get to work and return to neighbourhoods where everything was in walking distance. From the 1920s, we had the car, celebrated in teen films and in country music as a means of escape. We can choose not only our friends, but the contexts and ways in which we interact with them. We do not need each other: today, we may even be able to raise a family alone. The goal of progress is like a vignette in the scifi novel The Player of Games, where the hero’s friends throw him off a cliff at his birthday party. Robots fly down, catch him and buzz him back to the top unharmed.

Youth

The view of life as a succession of experiences is what makes youth “the one thing worth having”, as Lord Henry says, because youth is when experiences are newest and freshest. “You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully…. Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations…. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” This speech leads Dorian to his unholy wish. Young people’s opinions count for correspondingly more: “In art, as in politics, les grandpères ont toujours tort [grandfathers are always wrong].”

This is us, right? I mean, it’s ironic, we spent a century worshipping youth, now we live in an old people’s home, but anyway, here’s Coco Chanel sunbathing (and cooking herself as she gets older). Everyone knows that the twentieth century changed fashions and made it good to be tanned, and good to be young.

We aren’t historically unique in our desire to stay young, which is perennial, but we did unprecedentedly valorize youth. As for many things, the 1960s took the previous generation’s ideas to the mass market: “les grandpères ont toujours tort” is the same idea as Bob Dylan’s “don’t criticize what you can't understand”.

Consequences

Lord Henry’s theories of self-creation, life as art, and youth absolutely had the run of the twentieth century, and what makes Dorian Gray a great book is that Wilde identified them so early and so sharply. In that context, it’s interesting that Lord Henry himself is kind of a doofus. Already in the 1890s, everyone in high society agrees with his spicy bon mots and treats him like a genius. He’s not written as a rebel, but as a phrasemonger who is fêted for it. He ends up losing his wife and regretting it (“married life is merely a habit…. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits….”); sitting alone in his club, waiting for Dorian, who cuts him by being late.

Is Dorian the cynical monster shown in his painting, hiding behind an eternally youthful mask? I think that is the conventional interpretation, but not quite right. For a lot of the time, he really thinks he is the beautiful young man. He’s in an experience machine, and so long as he never suffers any consequences, he can avoid reality.

Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it…. Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a most just God.

But this forgetting is not effort-free:

… these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne…. For weeks he would… forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence.

Because he avoids consequences, he is incapable of taking responsibility. After he murders Basil Hallward (“Poor Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!”) he blackmails his friend, a medical researcher, to dissolve the body. To the friend he remarks: “I wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you.” That would make sense in a tragedy, from someone driven by fate, but Dorian Gray’s crimes are acts of whim. Even the central murder is more Trenchcoat Mafia than Hamlet.

But of course, for Dorian and for us, there are still real victims. Dorian tries to turn them off by closing his eyes so that they aren’t there. That’s what you do in an experience machine. “You must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy….” says Lord Henry of Sybil Vane’s suicide. Later, after murdering Basil, Dorian thinks “the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation.”

It’s not surprising that economic development should have eventually enabled us to buy ourselves free of social constraint, and that when this happened, a value framework of mutual constraint should be replaced by a value framework of self-creation and self-development. There are obvious costs to that change in terms of social order: Steven Pinker has a nice write-up. That happens in Dorian Gray too (as well as the central murder, Dorian is indirectly responsible for at least two suicides). I think the book also contains a subtler point, that self-creation is not just costly to others, but an incoherent ideal. It is not in human nature to be in perfect harmony with oneself, or unrestrained by other people’s opinions.

Dorian Gray does not actually create himself at all. He is the creation of Sir Henry, who lives to influence people. As a young man, he repeats his theories back to him, and Sir Henry’s final praise (“Your days are your sonnets”) just recapitulates his own theories at the start (“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you”). Among its subjects, the book is is a study of what cultural evolutionary theory calls horizontal transmission: Sir Henry’s ideas, the French novel which poisons Dorian’s life, Dorian’s own influence in turn (“he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so”). As a picture of the twentieth century, I think this is basically right. It all starts with bad ideas.

The very first test of life-as-experience perhaps came in the Great War. Ivor Gurney’s poem To His Love captures the will and need to protect experience from reality. Its images, of a mask of beauty hiding something horrible, are close to Dorian Gray’s. Perhaps a part of that generation’s suffering was that it had had such beautiful dreams.

His body that was so quick
   Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn river
   Under the blue
   Driving our small boat through.
 
You would not know him now ...
   But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
   With violets of pride
   Purple from Severn side.
 
Cover him, cover him soon!
   And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers—
   Hide that red wet
   Thing I must somehow forget.

No artist desires to prove anything

Good art doesn’t fit in a box. I have been reading Dorian Gray as a diagnosis of modern life, but it can’t be that pat. Wilde is alive to the real power and attraction of Dorian’s lifestyle — not surprisingly, since it was certainly part of his own, at least sometimes.

Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

The novel also contains a message for would-be critics of this way of life. At its end, Dorian tries to reform, he deliberately does a conventionally good thing by renouncing his relationship with an innocent young woman, and he expects to be rewarded by the portrait. Nope:

A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. … Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? … No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.

That is a warning for anyone who wants to return to “the unstained purity of his boyhood”, or to turn society’s clock back: there is no going back, and if you try, you will create something fake.

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There are a lot of theories of for why fertility has declined in modern societies. The recent public interest will probably lead to a wave of new research.

Is the gender equity theory of fertility a cope?

An explanation I find plausible, though maybe it’s too subtle or vague to test, is just that our culture has created large numbers of people who are simply incapable of doing what it takes to raise a child. That requires — still, for most — cooperating with another adult; putting another person’s interests systematically before your own, who will never pay you back; starting a project which bears fruit over years or decades, perhaps ultimately only after your own death, and whose outcome you cannot possibly control. Of course, before contraception, many people didn’t volunteer for this job but were thrown into it. Still, there were institutions and cultural expectations which smoothed the channels for them. To put it another way, they were made to harmonize with others, and not with themselves, because living in a family indeed involves irreparable losses to one’s previous self and identity. It also precludes self-creation, because the influence that parents exert, which is of a different order to Sir Henry’s, requires one to play the part of parent so thoroughly that the mask fuses to the face.

Today, while parenthood is a job which only volunteers need undertake, it’s noticeable by its absence from our culture. (Flick through the sitcoms on your favourite platform, and count how many are set in a family. Until the 1980s, the family-plus-kids was probably the most common format.) At the same time, perhaps many people just do not have the inner resources for that job, any more than I could run a marathon. Parenthood is certainly an experience, but it is not one that can be taken up and dropped. German has the words Erfahrung and Erlebnis: Erlebnis is the bucket-list, theme-park ride kind of experience; Erfahrung is experience that permanently changes you, that makes you who you are. That’s parenthood. It also involves a very large amount of deadening routine. It’s not surprising that even experienced modern parents sometimes have the surprised look of teenagers who have wandered on to the wrong film set and find themselves wearing parents’ clothes. You can’t blame us! Nobody told us we would have to grow up.

“Peter, what is it?”

“I was just thinking,” he said, a little scared. “It is only make-believe, isn’t it, that I am their father?”

“Oh yes,” Wendy said primly.

“You see,” he continued apologetically, “it would make me seem so old to be their real father.”

Peter Pan. Illustration by Arthur Rackham.

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If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.

I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.