Flannelled Fool
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| Flannelled Fool | |
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| Author | T. C. Worsley |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Ross |
| Publication date | 1967 (1st edition) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 213 pp (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | NA |
Flannelled Fool is an autobiographical novel of 1967 by T. C. Worsley.
Flannelled Fool is sub-titled A Slice of a Life in the Thirties and covers the early years and education of Cuthbert Worsley .
[edit] Plot summary
There is a strong emphasis on Worsley's feelings for school boys and young men. Worsley was sexually naïve and unaware, for instance, what masturbation was until he was 19 years old. As a private school teacher, his eye ‘was already running over the boys I came in contact with, and was soon to settle, if it hadn’t already settled, on one in particular.’
Worsley defines the love he felt for the boys as pure; He had "no physical designs on any of the boys, even those whom I was later to ‘fall in love’." Worsley describes how he falls "into a series of enslavements to a series of younger boys." He "hated in myself the feebleness with which I habitually indulged them. I could see I was spoiling them without being able to stop it." One relationship was his short-lived entrancement with Fitzpatrick, who had "the luminous beauty which could only be doomed to a brief existence."
In the book’s epilogue, titled "A Missed Chance," the 27-year-old Worsley describes a three-month period he spent privately tutoring David Craig, "...a sweet, dear-natured, natural little boy of thirteen, delicately good-looking, but in fact physically quite robust." David becomes very attached to Worsley and eventually persuades him to share his bed when his mother is away. Worsley has a revelation that his whole life might have been different if someone, with love, had taught him the uses of his body, imagining that "It would not have been an act of seduction, but an act of education and resolves to carry it through." Nothing untoward happens in the bed, however, though Worsley describes this as "an act of moral cowardice. It was a defeat for knowledge, and knowledge, not innocence, is what the young want and need."
