John Fowles - The Magus

CO-STARRING

THE MONSTER OF THE MISSISSIPPI

A blank.

JOE HARRISON

The wheel again.

AS HIMSELF

Then there were words in an over-ornamented frame:

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Lady Jane, a depraved

young aristocrat, in her

hotel room

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I was going to see a blue film.

It began: a lushly furnished, frill-laden bedroom in Edwardian style. Lily appeared in a peignoir, her hair down. The peignoir gaped absurdly over a black corset. She stopped by a chair to adjust a stocking, in a hackneyed leg-showing routine, though the close-up also allowed her to show the scarred wrist. She looked suddenly towards the door, and called something. A page entered with a letter on a tray. She took it and the page left. Shot of her opening the letter, sneering, and tossing it aside. The camera closed on the letter on the floor.

The quality of the film was bubbly and blistery, badly synchronized, like early silent film. Another ffickering framed title appeared.

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… now I know the abominable truth about

your perverted lusts, all is over between us.

I remain, but not for long, your disgusted

husband… LORD de VERE!”

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A new shot. Lily was lying on the bed, with the camera shooting down on her. The peignoir had gone. The corset, fishnet stockings. She had managed to give her heavily rouged and mascara’d face a suitably pouting and femme fatale look, but the visual effect was not far removed from the verbal: like so much pornography—in this case I supposed intentionally—it was dangerously near the ridiculous.

It was all to end in a joke; a joke in bad taste, but a joke.

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Panting with desire she waits for the arrival

of her coal-black partner in unspeakable sin.

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Back to the same shot. Suddenly she sat up with a leer on the French brothel brass bed. Someone else had come in.

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The entry of Black Bull,

a vaudeville singer

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A shot of the open door. It was Joe, dressed in absurdly tight trousers and a sort of loose-sleeved white blouse. More like a black bullfighter than a black bull. He closed the door; a smouldering look.

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The only language they know

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The film veered into nastiness. There was a shot of her running to meet him. He stepped forward and gripped her by the arms and then they were kissing wildly. He forced her back to the bed and they fell across it. Then she rolled on top of him, covering his face, his neck in kisses.

An echo of the hotel on Phraxos.

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A buck nigger and a white woman

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She was standing in the black underwear, against the wall, her arms out, another vicious echo of the night in the hotel. Of course the incidents of that night had been echoes of the already made film. Joe was kneeling in front of her, bare above the waist, feeling with open hands up over her corset to her breasts. She caught his head and pressed it against her.

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For this she has sacrificed a loving

husband, lovely children, friends,

relations, religion, all.

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Next there came a five-second fetishist interlude. He was lying on the floor. There was a close shot of a naked leg ending in a foot in a high-heeled black shoe resting on his stomach. He caressed it with his hands. I began to suspect. It could easily have been any white woman’s leg; and any black man’s stomach and hands.

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Passion rises

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A shot across the room of her pressing him back against the wall, kissing him. His hand slipped round her back and began to unhook the corset. A long bare back, a very short echo, bound in black arms. The camera closed, then tracked down clumsily. A black hand moved suggestively into shot. Joe was now apparently naked, though hidden by her white body. I could see his face, but the quality of the film was so bad that I could not be sure it was Joe. And her face was invisible throughout.

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Shameless

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I forced myself to be more suspicious than shocked. A series of very short shots. Bare white breasts, bare black thighs; two naked figures on the bed. But the camera was too far back to make identification possible. The woman’s blonde hair began to seem too blonde, too shiny: wiglike.

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Decent people lead ordinary lives

while this bestial orgy takes place.

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A street shot in a city I did not recognize, though it looked American. Crowded pavements, a rush hour. It was of better quality than the other sequences and had obviously been cut in from some other film; and it made the “blue” sequences seem even more antiquated and claustrophobic.

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Obscene caresses

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An anonymous white hand stroked an anonymous phallus in one of the most unexceptionable caresses of love. Its obscenity lay in the fact that two people could lie and be photographed doing it. But it was the wrist of the right, the unscarred hand that was in the frame; and although it made a playful flute-fingering gesture, I was becoming more and more suspicious.

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The invitation

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There was the most brutally pornographic shot yet, down angled, of the girl lying on the bed. Once again it did not reveal her face, which was twisted back almost out of sight. It showed her waiting to receive the Negro, whose blurred dark back was close to the camera.

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Meanwhile

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Suddenly the quality of the film changed. It was shot, very jerkily, by a different camera in different circumstances. Two people in a crowded restaurant. With an acute shock, a flush of bitter anger, I saw who it was: Alison and myself, that first evening, in the Piraeus. There was a flash of blank film, then another shot of us, which for a moment I could not place. Alison walking down a steep village street, myself a yard or two behind her. We both looked exhausted; and though it was too far to see the facial expressions, one could tell from that gap between us, the way we walked, that we were miserable. I recognized it: our return to Arachova. The cameraman must have been hidden in a cottage, shooting from behind a shutter perhaps, because a transverse black bar obscured the end of the shot. I remembered the wartime sequence of Wimmel. I also recognized the implications; that we had been followed, watched and filmed throughout. It would not have been possible on the bare upper slopes of Parnassus, but in the trees… I remembered the pool, the sun on my naked back and Alison beneath me. It was too horrible, too blasphemous, that that, of all moments, could have been public.

Stripped, flayed by the knowledge; and their always knowing.

Blank film again. Then another title.

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The act of copulation

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But the film ran through a series of numbers and flashing white scratches: the end of the reel. There was a ffipping sound from the projector. The screen stared white. Someone ran in through the door and switched the projector off. I gave a grunt of contempt; I had been waiting for that failure of nerve, of the courage of their pornography. But the man—I saw by the faint light through the door that it was Adam—walked to the screen and lifted it aside. I was left alone again. For thirty seconds or so the room remailled in darkness. Then light came from behind the curtains.

Someone began to pull them, from behind, by cords, as they do for plays in parish halls. When they were about two-thirds open, they stopped; but long before that the parallel with parish halls had vanished. The light came from a shade hung from the ceiling. It let no light through, so that the illumination was thrown down in a brilliant, intimate cone onto what lay beneath.