The Hand-Reared Boy by Brian Aldiss

I still hoped that my mother might grow to love me.  The more she said she did, the more I doubted it.

There was reason.

After buying a battered copy of Brian Aldiss's A Soldier Erect, a sequel to 1970's The Hand-Reared Boy, for a dollar at Wonderbooks in Frederick, MD, I broke down and bought a hardcover Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition of The Hand-Reared Boy online.  The first page of the book presents a sort of mission statement--The Hand-Reared Boy and its sequels are meant to be an assault on the English middle class in the form of a fictional autobiography that focuses on the sex life of one Horatio Stubbs, a man born in 1922.   

The Hand-Reared Boy, which covers Horatio's first 18 years, is a quick read, being relatively short (182 pages of pretty large print) and written in a simple straightforward style.  There are periodic cursory attacks on the middle classes, and some little reminiscences of childhood play and family friction, but most of the text is taken up with sexual relationships, including explicit descriptions of various sex acts.  The centerpiece of the plot is seventeen-year-old Horatio's affair with the thirty-five-year-old nurse or matron (at least that is what I think we would call her in America; the text calls her "Sister") at his boarding school, Virginia Traven, but this more or less conventional material occupies about the same proportion of real estate as does the wealth of anecdotes relating Horatio's multitudinous incestuous and homoerotic encounters.

Horatio is the second child of a bank manager and his wife living in the East Midlands; he has an older brother, Nelson, and a younger sister, Ann.  Nelson teaches him how to masturbate, and soon the two boys are regularly jerking each other off ("wanking.")  Ann soon joins in the fun, jerking off her older brothers.  Horatio also spends lots of time participating in mutual masturbation with other boys his age in the neighborhood.  The boys engage in this activity years before reaching puberty, and when they finally achieve the ability to have orgasms and ejaculate, it is a major milestone in their lives.  Horatio and Nelson also have sexual experiences with one of the family's maids.

This record is predominantly sexual in its emphasis.  In my life, and more especially in my childhood, it was not so.  This truth, while it affects every page, cannot be repeated on every page.

Aldiss stresses that, while the focus of this book is Horatio's sex life, he has a much larger life not directly connected to the realm of sex.  For example, we are told Horatio is a poor student, and also that he has a "temper," is liable to fly off the handle into violent rages.  These two elements of Horatio's character are not really elaborated on, but help drive the plot by spurring his parents to send Horatio to boarding school in Derbyshire.  Horatio's poor academics and his temper may also be the fruit of another component of the book that is not strictly sexual--Horatio's relationship with his mother.  Horatio doubts that his mother loves him--she nearly died in the process of giving birth to him, and wanted a daughter anyway, not a second son, and Horatio suspects she resents him.  Mother is depicted as callously and selfishly deceitful and manipulative in her dealings with everyone, including Nelson and Horatio, for example faking tears when they misbehave, or threatening to take up Ann and abandon them forever.

Mutual masturbation was rife, but homosexuality was virtually non-existent; perhaps the elaborate codes guarded against it.  Certainly the codes, with their embargo on emotion, helped to damp down affectionate attachments that might lead to later disturbances; on the other hand, they tended to promote coldness of temperament and concentration on the organ....

Boarding school, as depicted by Aldiss, consists of all the boys jerking each other off in a bewildering variety of ways; none of the boys, it seems, refuses to participate, and these mutual masturbation sessions are very public.  In the same way that Aldiss, not quite convincingly, assures us that Horatio's life doesn't revolve around sex even though this book about Horatio's life revolves around sex, Aldiss assures us that these boys are not homosexuals, even though they are jerking each other off every day and inventing sex games like tying their penises together with rubber bands or electing one boy to jerk off every single boy in the dormitory in succession.  

Sex activity was limited almost entirely to masturbation or mutual masturbation...sodomy and buggery never seemed to enter anyone's head....

All this jerking off is totally divorced from affection or love, Aldiss tells us; in fact, there is a strict "code of behavior" concerning mutual masturbation: "one does not wank one's friends."  The daily and nightly sex games are played not with one's buddies, but with one's closest neighbors in the dormitory.

What all the boys really want, Aldiss avers, is to have sex with girls, but willing girls are hard to come by because (as Aldiss has it) of the repressiveness of bourgeois culture which makes girls scared of semen and pregnancy.  "...they had been taught to say 'Oh, please don't do that" and 'Oh no, Horry, you mustn't!'....They had a dose of middle-class morality even more severe than the boys...."  Women in the novel don't display much agency--those that don't want to have sex have been fooled by "nonsense tales" and "bunkum," and the women who do have sex are driven by an uncontrollable lust or are actually insane.  Of course, men in the novel also seem largely driven by forces beyond their control, perhaps a sign of the influence of Freud and Marx on Horatio and/or Aldiss.  (Horatio becomes interested in socialism when a boy particularly skilled at jerking him off introduces him to a third boy who is a self-described communist who is always talking about the coming "bloody revolution" in which "the skivvies" will "knife their masters in their beds" and "cut off their little rigid plonks.")

Horatio is lucky enough to catch the eye of Sister Traven, and lucky enough to get hit in the head with a cricket ball so he is stuck in the infirmary for two weeks, where she has sex with him and he falls in love.

In the final third of the novel the Second World War breaks out and Nelson volunteers and Virginia moves to London, ostensibly to join the Nursing Service.  Still 17 and too young to serve himself, Horatio moves to London to take an office job and look for Virginia.  Furthering the novel's theme that women are duplicitous and untrustworthy, when Horatio finds her he realizes she is even older than she claims, that she was never serious about joining the Nursing Service, and has been lying about the status of her family (Aldiss's giving offering us an example of unhealthy middle-class striving.)  Even worse, at the same time Virginia was conducting her affair with Horatio, she was also having sex with other students.  Horatio confronts Virginia and tries to win her for himself, even asks her to marry him, but comes to understand she is mentally ill, a paranoid who is constantly lying, including to herself, and is beyond his reach.

Though hurt, Horatio comes to see his experience with Virginia as a positive one and view her as "a woman in whose arms I had first tasted beauty and release, and through them discovered my better self."  Aldiss considers the idea that a woman in her thirties who seduces teenaged boys is some kind of dangerous predator who hurts her young lovers, but rejects it, at least in the case of Virginia Traven. 

The Hand-Reared Boy is a book about sex, but I didn't find it sexy.  I suppose the sex scenes with Virginia Traven and other girls are not bad and in another context might be arousing, but the pervasive incest and homosexuality of the book was a turn off that rendered me immune to any possible excitement.    

Regardless, this is a decent read.  Obviously it is important in the history of literature about sex (Aldiss seems to think it is a pioneering work in its depiction of masturbation) and is full of gender stuff and some stuff about whites' views of blacks and about class relations--what the middle classes think of the working classes and the upper classes, mainly.  There's also some of the "culture of the 1930s" insights I always find interesting; e.g., young Horatio's favorite comedian is Max Miller, of whom I had never heard.  So, unless you object to reading page after page of teenaged boys jerking each other off, The Hand-Reared Boy is worth your time.