Powell and Waugh on first loves

Reading the beginning of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time last night I found an interesting example of Powell using a similar metaphor to one that Waugh uses to speak of early experiences of sexual love BUT, and this is fascinating, even in using the similar metaphor to describe the same thing the two novelists are clearly headed in different directions.

Here is Powell first. Peter Templer has just returned from London where he has had sex with a woman he picked up on the street and he has told Nick and Charles about this adventure that he has had and they have not. And Powell has Nick use the metaphor of a door opening to describe his feelings about it.

This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of a far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before.

These are young men, in the last years of high school in our terms, and the image of the door is meant to signify a leaving behind of the cloistered days of youth and entering the public world of adulthood—a particularly powerful image given that they are sharing tea in their private room at what Powell has described as the "medieval closes" of Eton as Nick experiences this moment. For Powell, sex is the ticket to admission to a ballroom full of shouting and music.

If we compare this with Waugh's use of the mysterious-door-now-open in describing how Charles reacts to meeting Sebastian for the first time, we can see the same metaphor used towards describing sexual experience toward a different end.

... I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find the low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Here the door opens on a  secret world of intimate love. A love that opens, not on and adult world of shouting and music, but on a secret garden that is like a new kind of childhood. A secret intimacy that contains intimations of a connection with God—"Suffer the little children to come unto me".

And the obvious question for our private reflections here is which of these two most closely corresponds to my experience of sexual love? Was sex for me a way to leave behind a protected world of childhood and enter into the risky rewards of adulthood? Or was it the way into a secret, intimate world of naughtiness that in some ways recreated childhood? Or was it one and then the other? Or was it one and, looking back, I wish it had been the other?

I would never discuss the answers to those questions publicly but they strike me as very important questions.


PS: I know some of you will wondering about a certain famous book about an enclosed garden. Well, Evelyn Waugh was just eight years old the year Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden was published. I have no idea whether or not he read it as a child but you do have to suspect he did.