What The Body Remembered
I worked across three decades, and the span of that time meant I encountered men who had been formed in worlds I had only read about. Some of the men who came to me in the early years of my practice had been born before the Second World War—born into the Depression, into colonial Australia, into the tail end of the Victorian and Edwardian traditions.
Some of them had lived through enough of the century to carry, in their bodies and their habits of conduct, a layered record of everything the culture had told them about what a man was and what a man did with his body.
These men were a distinct presence, and what they carried was distinct in ways I noticed before I had a specific historical framework to account for it. I want to be careful here, because I am drawing on memory and impression across a long span of time, and memory compresses and simplifies. What I can say with some confidence is that there was a quality in some of these older men—a quality in how they moved, how they undressed, how they occupied the room—that was not quite like anything I found in younger men, even older younger men. It was not simply age. It was something in the grain of the habit.
Some of these men came from outside the Anglophone tradition entirely. I worked with men from various parts of the world, including men who had grown up in Asia, in the Middle East, in parts of Europe with their own distinct bodily conventions. What they had in common with the older Anglophone men was not the specific content of their assumptions about propriety but the depth at which those assumptions were installed. They had been formed before the Second World War, in one tradition or another, and that formation had a quality of fixity that was different from the formation I encountered in younger men—not because it was more correct or more coherent, but because it had had longer to set.
I have read that the period between the wars was a moment of contested possibility for bodily conventions in the English-speaking world. The interwar naturist movement was gaining momentum. The bare male chest was becoming acceptable on some beaches by the mid-1930s. The Lambeth Conference of 1930 had, tentatively, begun to separate sex from reproduction in official Anglican theology. The Depression had produced a different relationship to the body—the bodies of the unemployed, visible in public queues, dressed in the clothes they could afford, were less easily kept within the regulatory framework that applied to the working and prosperous body. Modernity was applying pressure to the conventions. And then the war arrived and the conversation was interrupted.
The men I am thinking of had been formed at the edges of all this—some during the Depression, some during the war itself, some in the years just before. What the war had done to bodily convention is its own history. Men who had spent years in military service had lived in conditions of enforced physical proximity—the shared barracks, the communal bathing, the uniform that reduced the body to a functional unit, the medical examinations in which the body was assessed for its fitness to be used. Several of the older men I worked with had a quality of physical practicality about their own bodies that I came to associate with this history, without being certain of the association. The body was something that had done things, had endured, had been organised and examined and deployed. It was not primarily an object of personal assessment.
And yet what survived alongside this was something else: a habitual propriety that was not conscious and not articulated but was unmistakably present. I noticed it in how they managed the transition from clothed to unclothed. Men of a certain age and formation tended to undress methodically, each garment placed in order, the clothing arranged or folded in a way that preserved its dignity even in the act of removal. This was not vanity and it was not anxiety. It was more like a form of respect—for the clothing, for the room, for the occasion. The body’s undressing was conducted with the same attention to propriety that the body’s dressing had presumably always received. The habit survived the removal of the object it was normally applied to.
Some of these men had been formed in non-Anglophone traditions, and I want to be specific about a few observations that I hold as distinct from what I noticed in men formed in the British colonial inheritance. A man who had grown up in Japan before the war—I am thinking of one man specifically, who came to me over several years in the early part of my practice—arrived with a different relationship to the body’s appearance in a room with another person.
The communal bathing tradition, the onsen and the sento, may have given him a body that knew how to be present without performance or apology, in a way that was different from both the ease of the men who had grown up with communal locker rooms and the formality of the older Anglophone men. The body in a shared hot room, unremarkable, requiring nothing. He undressed without ceremony and without the methodical propriety of the men formed in the British tradition. He was simply present, and his presence was simply the body. The assumption was different. The body was not conducting itself in relation to a moral framework that it had partially internalised. It was just there, doing what it was doing, in a room with another person.
What I noticed between these different formations was not a hierarchy—I am not suggesting that one inheritance produced more admirable men or better bodily relationships. I am noticing the variety, and the fact that the variety had historical location. The men formed before the Second World War, in whatever tradition they had been formed in, carried the specific texture of that formation in their bodies. And the texture had not simply survived as belief or attitude. It had survived as conduct—as the specific way a man held himself getting dressed, or the specific quality of attention he brought to the room, or the specific words he chose or avoided when he spoke about what he was doing there.
Several of the older Anglophone men used language that had already become archaic by the time I heard it. Not the language of the body specifically—that was often carefully neutral, maintained at the level of the functional or the medical—but the language around it. Words like “proper” and “appropriate” appeared in their conversation in ways I did not find in younger men. “I hope this is proper” was a formulation I heard from a man who would have been in his early eighties at the time, and what he meant was something more specific than what the word might mean in ordinary contemporary usage. He was using it in its older sense: conforming to the standard of what is fitting, appropriate to one’s station and circumstances, consistent with the moral order of the situation. He was asking whether the situation conformed to a standard, not whether he was comfortable with it. The standard was exterior to his comfort. His comfort was not the relevant measure. Whether it was proper was.
That use of proper is, I think, evidence of something more than individual preference. It is evidence of a formation in which the body’s behaviour in any context was measured against an external standard rather than an internal one. The younger men who came to me were much more likely to ask, in one form or another, whether what was happening was right for them—whether they were comfortable, whether this was what they wanted, whether it felt good. These are questions addressed to the self. The older man’s question was addressed to the situation. The standard was not inside him. It was outside, in the moral structure of the world as he had been formed to understand it.
I am not idealising this. The external standard was often a standard that had been generated by exactly the traditions I have been critiquing across these essays—the Victorian regulatory framework, the Augustinian inheritance, the colonial imposition of propriety as a marker of civilisation. The older man asking whether things were proper was, in some cases, asking whether he was conforming to a standard that had caused considerable suffering to the people required to conform to it. I notice this without resolving it. The suffering the standard caused and the quality of the man who had internalised it are not the same thing, and the man was not the standard, even if the standard had shaped him.
What I found in those men, alongside the propriety, was often a quality of unsentimental physical presence that I found genuinely interesting. They had, most of them, been through enough that the body’s ordinary demands and vulnerabilities were simply facts of life rather than occasions for self-assessment. The body had aged in the way bodies age. The body had done things. The body had been cold, and hungry, and ill, and afraid, in circumstances that made its current condition—in a warm room, comfortable, attended to—something simply to receive. Several of those men were among the most straightforwardly at ease in their bodies of anyone I worked with. Not the ease of men who had resolved their relationship to the body’s significance, but the ease of men who had stopped expecting the body to be significant in the ways that the culture was asking younger men to consider it significant.
I think about the man who asked whether things were proper. He settled into the work and stopped asking. The question had been necessary, at the start, to establish that the situation fell within the range of what he was prepared to countenance. Once it had been established, it was not revisited. The standard had been satisfied, and the satisfaction was quiet and complete and did not require further examination. He lay there in the specific way that men of his formation lay on tables—not relaxed in the loose contemporary sense, but comfortable in the older sense, settled into the occasion, inhabiting it properly, which for him meant inhabiting it with the specific quality of attention he brought to anything he had decided was appropriate.
That quality of attention—given fully to what was in front of him, without monitoring the self, without apology, without the background commentary that I found in so many younger men—was, I think, a function of the formation itself. Not a virtue he had cultivated. A habit so old it had stopped being a habit and become simply who he was.
He left as he had arrived: methodically, everything in order, the occasion concluded with the same attention to propriety with which it had begun.
You are here: Uncovered