2009 One of the phenomena bemoaned by the literary establishment in this generally gloomy year was the vast popularity, among the British Reading Public, of the ‘celebrity’ novel. Typically this was a ‘ghosted’ product – the nominal author blithely admitting the fact that the only pen they had put to paper was on the contract. ‘They’ wrote her novels, Katie Price (famous as the glamour model Jordan) said in one of her innumerable interviews (most of which concentrated on her F-cup, surgically enhanced, frontal features).
One novel of Price’s (or at least, a novel with her name on the title page and her full-on picture on the dust flap), Crystal, sold more – the literary commentator David Sexton wryly noted – than all the Booker shortlist for that year (2007) combined. These, as Richard Hoggart would have said, were the ‘uses of literacy’, 2009-style. Tabloid newspapers had always known: ‘tits sell’. ‘Lit’, notoriously, doesn’t sell.
Jordan, wrote the author Lynda La Plante, was ‘killing publishing’ – which seemed a little perverse, at least for Price’s publisher who was in the best of financial health. Jordan’s success had also irritated Martin Amis mightily. At a lecture on this evening, 24 October 2009, for the ‘Hay in London’ literary festival, he informed his audience that Price/Jordan ‘has no waist, no arse … an interesting face … but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone’. Her (so to call it) fiction he regarded as beneath notice. Nonetheless, he had introduced a character (‘Threnody’) obliquely based on her in his forthcoming work of fiction, State of England.
The giveaway word ‘worship’ aligns Amis with male authors similarly attracted. It’s an impressive crew. Fielding’s overdone jokes about Lady Booby betray a fascination with what he elsewhere more reverently calls ‘beauteous orbs’. Hardy makes similarly revealing references to Tess Durbeyfield’s frontal development. The ‘luxuriance of her figure’ is what first catches seducer Alec’s eye. The sage of Wessex, we deduce, also had an eye for them.
J.G. Ballard adored Elizabeth Taylor, and wrote a great novel about her – Crash. But Ballard had to concede that Marlon Brando was the better actor and, in his later years, had the bigger breasts.
Lawrence complains bitterly, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, about the flat-chested flapper. He despised what he called ‘little iron breasts’ and women who wanted the vote. Connie, like Frieda, was, we apprehend, generously endowed. Lawrence lyricised on the ample breast in his poem, ‘Look, we Have Come Through’:
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me space and fear, but the fourth side rests,
Warm in a city of strength, between her breasts.
He loved, Lawrence said in another poem (‘Song of the Man who is Loved’), to get his ‘hands full of breasts’. Groping some call it.
Leading the mammalian crew among the moderns is Philip Roth, who published a novel in 1972 in which the hero, David Kapesh, in a pathological recycling of Kafka, is metamorphosed into a 155-lb breast. No prizes for guessing the title.
Norman Mailer is hot on Roth’s heels as a breast-worshipper. In Marilyn: A Biography he ponders, at immense length, the power of Marilyn’s ‘popped buds and burgeons of flesh’. She was, Mailer enthused, ‘a cornucopia. She excited dreams of honey for the horn’. Mailer’s encomium, in Esquire, on the 40DD breast picture (nothing else, just the breasts) that took (male) America by storm in 1999 is rather slangier:
These breasts really hit home for a nation eager to stare at a huge honkin’ set of big ol’ whoppers. The reassuring presence of this enormous pair of mamajamas is something all Americans, from every walk of life, can relate to.
Why is it, Susan Seligson (the author of Stacked) recently enquired, that ‘big breasts never fail to render men instantly stupid?’