No Fretful Sleeper by Paul Millar, the biography of Bill Pearson who is perhaps not so famous now but his 1963 novel Coal Flat was a very big deal at the time (the full text is here at the NZ electronic Text Centre), as was his 1952 essay “Fretful Sleepers”. He was an exceptionally nice man – Elizabeth Smither notes on the back cover that “he was very solicitous about umbrellas” – and was unusually pro-Maori for a Pakeha of his generation; his life and career seem to have been blighted by his homosexuality, or rather by his generation’s attitudes to gayness.
Millar recounts in some detail how Pearson could not get an erection with a woman. He tried in Italy during the war but with female prostitutes it just wouldn’t work. Then he was transferred back to Egypt with the NZ Army. In Cairo one night he wandered into the back streets and was propositioned by an Arab boy. Taken into the boy’s Cairo den, an erection happened. More followed. The boy had straightened him out, as it were.
Bernard Brown’s comment on this story: “Obviously that was just what Bill needed. A Cairo-practor.”
He tried in Italy during the war but with female prostitutes it just wouldn’t work.
ReplyDeleteHe should have paid a prostitute to hit him in the head with a shoe and then fled to Sweden.
That vaguely rings a bell but a long way off. To what and whom are you referring? And I suppose the crucial detail is, what sort of shoe?
ReplyDelete