…Poor Phoebe. This is the first thing that needs to be said. Poor, poor Phoebe…
After what we’ve just been through, though, I think a cleansing thought experiment – or thought exercise – is in order, don’t you? And there’s more confessional stuff to come, including the Worst Thing I Ever Did. So let’s take a break and briefly repair to the cool symmetries of art.
A great philosopher of literature – the Reverend Northrop Frye – suggested that the four seasons correspond to the four major genres. I think that’s a sweet and lyrical notion (though I admit that nothing really hangs on it). Now I suspect you know what the four seasons are. And here are the four major genres: tragedy, comedy, satire, romance. So the question is: Which genre corresponds to which season?
Tragedy, in its shape, follows the mouth on the tragic mask. Picture that ominous grimace: a starting point (on the lower left-hand corner), a steep rise, a flattening out, then a steep decline. The tragic hero is simultaneously transcendent and earthbound – human, all too human in the end: only human. That monumental individuality is one of the reasons why tragedy is now so seldom seen – a rare bird in the grey sky of post-industrial modernity.
Comedy, classical comedy, is similarly obedient to the line of the mouth on its mask. In this case it’s a smile: a deep descent that levels out and gathers into a fresh resurgence. The logistics of classical comedy are touchingly straightforward: a young man and a young woman fall in love and eventually get married (overcoming the obstacles cast in their way by the more hidebound society that surrounds and frustrates them). All Shakespeare’s comedies, and all six of Jane Austen’s novels, strictly adhere to this form (and my own father’s Lucky Jim, considered so rowdily iconoclastic in the mid-1950s, shows lamb-like submission to it). Comedies end happily, tragedies unhappily. The tragic hero is conspicuously distinguished; the comic hero is an everyman, the comic heroine an everywoman, and they are distinguished only in their charm.
Satire is best understood as militant irony. Vice, affectation, and stupidity are exposed to ridicule and implicit moral correction but also to anger and contempt. Whereas comedy tends to run only a light fever of subversion (off with the old), the mood of satire is revolutionary and hotly roused.
Romance, classical romance, only incidentally includes sentimental or idealised love stories; neither is it confined to medieval tales of chivalry. Romance, with its delirium and voodoo, identifies itself as being largely indifferent to the cause-and-effect of everyday life. For example, science fiction of the ‘star tsar’ variety (Nabokov’s anagrammatic phrase) is pure romance. Harry Potter et cetera is romance. Anything that reifies fantasy is romance.
I’ll give you a few minutes to think. Tragedy, comedy, satire, romance; spring, summer, autumn, winter. If, say, tragedy is winter (and it isn’t), what are the affinities?
While you consider that, consider this.
George Orwell famously said that ‘autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful’ (‘a man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying’). By that measure at least, what follows is gospel truth.
Unintellectual girls (including avowed philistines and bibliophobes) are one thing, and girls who pose in nude magazines are another, and girls on the borders of criminality are yet another – but not even escort girls, non-retired escort girls, escort girls going about their business, lie beyond my experience (or make that his experience. In this context the words come much more willingly when you wear the loincloth of the third person).
In the early–middle 1970s Martin himself contributed to Oui magazine, and under his own name (unlike the prudent Phoebe). There were two pieces: the first was about decadent London nightclubs; the second was about escort girls. And the second piece was a pack of lies. More than that, it aspired to the stout condescension of an old Fleet Street exposé, along the lines of I made my excuses and left. In reality, of course, the present writer did nothing of the sort; he made no excuses, and he stayed.
At that time Martin was fresh from a summary eviction. He had been told to leave the flat he shared with his longterm sweetheart (arraigned for infidelity). So by the time he began his research on the question of escort girls, he was already to be found in a hotel – a decadently welcoming little place in South Kensington. Although the published piece claimed to describe his engagements with three escort girls, in reality there were only two: Ariadne and Rita.
Ariadne was from Athens; Rita was from Whitechapel in the East End. These were atypical escort-girl experiences, he assumed: the subject of money never came up. In fact, when he casually offered Ariadne a fiver for cab fare (it was raining), she said, ‘A taxi does not cost five pounds.’*1
Why did Ariadne and Rita go to bed with Martin for nothing? A brief trance of self-satisfaction would seem to be in order. As against that, though – well, he was anomalously young (twenty-five), and he was anomalously respectful and unpresumptuous: he treated them not like escort girls – and how would you go about that? – but like blind dates whom he naturally wished to please with his inquisitive and undivided attention. Anyway, go to bed with him they did…
Meanwhile, as he wondered what he was about, his whole being, his history, his childhood, his Ribenas at Sunday school, his particular elders, his heroes and heroines in poetry and prose: his entire inner life was saying to his inner ear, You can’t possibly get away with all this – and nor should you.
He agreed (quite right), and bowed his head, thinking, Come on. What was the world waiting for?
…The quote that opened this segment is one of Orwell’s more limited epigrams. He was writing about a memoir by Salvador Dalí, the kind of man who was far more likely to belittle his virtues, if any, and aggrandise his sins. It is not for nothing that Orwell is regarded as quintessentially English; and the English literary tradition, unlike those of the mainland, is quintessentially moral, never having come up with many exponents (or many readers) of the perverse. There is only Lawrence, that perennial exception…With just a single novel under his belt, Martin knew very well that this was the tradition he belonged to. ‘You’ve done wrong,’ his mother used to say all her life, humorously (and nearly always referring to herself). ‘So now you’ve got to be punished.’
Satire is winter, wintry, bitter; the frost has its teeth fast in the ground.
Romance is summer, a time of freedom and adventure, and dream-strange possibilities.
Comedy is spring, the burgeoning of the flora, the Whitsun weddings, the maypole.
Tragedy is autumn, the sere, the yellow leaf…
While every death is a tragedy, Stalin famously observed, the death of a million is just a statistic. The second half of this statement is untrue. In giving voice to it, the big moustache laid bare his hope for some historiographical leniency – as did the little moustache when he said that the court of time listens exclusively to the victors, and so for example ‘history sees in Genghis Khan only the great founder of a state’.*2
A million deaths are at the very least a million tragedies (to be multiplied by the children, spouses, and immediate family of each victim). Every death is a tragedy; but then so is every life. Every life is a slave to the curve, the upended U, the woeful gape of the tragic mask.
In the decadent hotel Martin typed out the piece on his Olivetti (now was the moment, Leonora was clearly suggesting, when I should conjure up the ‘gratuity’ or the ‘little present’, i.e., the carnal bribe, to call it what it was; but with a smile of regret, etc., etc.), placed the folded sheets in the addressed envelope, and went downstairs to give it to the desk clerk; then he returned to his room and smoked and waited.
Retribution was surely impatient to come his way – and from so many angles. Let him think: a dramatic intervention from Ariadne’s mountain-dwelling, junta-loving father (and all his male clan); or a surprise visit from one of Rita’s many ex-convict ex-boyfriends; or an invasion of passionately mercantilist pimps armed with baseball bats and straight razors…At the very minimum (what was keeping it?) he hourly foresaw a targeted nemesis, one brewed by Mother Nature.*3 In the end even his dealings with the nude magazine would advance smoothly; Oui at once accepted and processed his perjured report (and duly printed it without challenge), and remitted him £200…
Thus the world did nothing. Society, equity, law, God, the Protestant ethos, common justice – all these spirits and entities stood down and sat on their hands. In the end only one precept applied. If you want something done (i.e., punishment), you have to do it yourself.
It started in the hotel room as he was packing his bag: a marshland, illumined by marshlights and fireflies and phosphorescent earthworms, was opening up beneath his feet. The sudden sickness felt mortal; in somatic synergy, organ after organ, one after the other, would be apologetically shutting down. At no point did he connect this horrible turn with his recent trespasses; it was perfectly simple: he had reached the end of his span. There was the phone on the bedside table. Should he dial 999?…When you’re young, and you find yourself in sole charge of the bodily instrument, you may be infinitely hypochondriacal, of course; but you’re also much too fatalistic to squander your last breaths among doctors. He sank back and dialled 0.
‘Good morning – this is room twenty-seven. I’ll soon be checking out.’ And he asked them to prepare the reckoning.
…I will arise. I will arise and go now, with a suitcase to the callbox. A phone call will I make there…All he wanted was somewhere to lie down and, if at all possible, the extreme unction of a pliant palm on his brow.
Let us stand back for a moment.
Question: Who would present herself as his carer and redeemer, who would deliver him from this bottleneck of sexual opportunism and abuse?
Answer: The world’s most glamorous and celebrated feminist. That’s who.
He made the phone call and steered himself to the broad deep house off Ladbroke Grove, up near Portobello. Of course Germaine had no knowledge of his latest doings; to her he was only an occasional friend and visitor. But she took him in.
He slept on a mattress in a nook just beyond her bedroom door, so she could hear his groans, his piteous cries; she tended him and soothed him until one morning, after about a week, having brought his usual cup of tea and settled herself down to cradle him in her arms, as she did every morning, Germaine said,…Oh. You really are feeling better, aren’t you. I’ll just go and brush my teeth.*4
The planetary forces of retribution, the local genies of justice, we can assume, were inactive in that precinct of West London during a certain month in 1974. All they could come up with was Germaine Greer – to minister to me in my trial.
Now you probably wouldn’t mind hearing more about the author of The Female Eunuch (1970), my host and my nurse, and there is plenty more to say; but if you’ll bear with me I’m thematically obliged to concentrate on whatever it was she nursed me out of.
I have not stopped thinking about that little packet of my life – those five or six nights in the complicit South Kensington hotel (I only remember the Regency caddishness of the striped wallpaper in its single public room); and I have gone on thinking about those two young women. The unanswerable malaise that overtook me clearly derived from an awareness of transgression. But which transgression?
No trawling of the conscience has ever presented me with a single reservation about what went on with Rita. With Ariadne, though, I sometimes feel about myself an inner rumour of parasitism. It was I hope a gentle encounter – in mid-afternoon, beginning with tea and biscuits (brought to us by room service). Still, I felt a deficit of volition in Ariadne; and I feared I was the beneficiary of something outside myself. Something like an indoctrination. Ariadne was nowhere near as experienced as Rita, and I now wonder what kind of tuition she was given as she acclimatised herself to the culture of escort work.
But in truth there was plenty of that in the 1970s: the exploitation of cultures, of currents of thought. To put it more crudely, men ponced off ideology. I ponced off anti-clericalism, I ponced off rejectionist ageism, and most generally of course I ponced off the tenets of the Sexual Revolution – meaning I applied peer pressure and propagandised about the earthy wisdom of the herd.
Ariadne was what is now known as an outlier. In her modest way she represented a reactionary force, that of female submission. And, given the chance, I (silently) ponced off that. She wasn’t acting in perfect freedom. Who ever was, back then? Who ever is?
Anyway, that wasn’t what laid me low.
Now. What do you do in a revolution? Very broadly, three things. You see what goes, you see what comes, you see what stays.
In the Sexual Revolution, what went was premarital chastity; what came was a gradually widening gap between carnal knowledge and emotion; what stayed was the possibility of love. The Sexual Revolution made no particular demands on writers; all it did was grant them a new latitude. They could now busy themselves with subjects that were previously forbidden, by law; and nearly all of them tried it (without success).
But imagine for a moment, that you are a poet or a novelist in a real revolution, and a very violent revolution – like the one in Russia (incomparably more violent than the one in France). For the novelist or poet, what went was freedom of expression; what came was intense line-by-line surveillance;*5 what stayed was the creative habit of putting pen to paper. So how was a writer to adapt and adjust?
Well, you could be like the novelist and dramatist Alexei Tolstoy (distantly related to the author of Anna Karenina and also, through marriage, to the author of Fathers and Sons). Alexei was a venal cynic who confessedly ‘enjoyed the acrobatics’ of trimming his work to ‘the general line’, or to current Bolshevik orthodoxy (a protean contraption). This is also the man who said that one of the things he hated most in life was windowshopping with inadequate funds…
Alternatively you could be like Isaac Babel, the writer of sharply expressive short stories, who at a certain point declared himself to be ‘the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence’. It was a noble intention. But even if you stopped writing, you could hardly stop talking; Babel said enough, and was shot in a Moscow prison in 1940.
‘Of the 700 writers who met at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934,’ writes Conquest, ‘only fifty survived to see the second in 1954.’
The choice, then, was active collaboration or mutism. There was also a third way, involving what we might call a delusion of autonomy. Writers of the third way persuaded themselves that they could proceed, could get on with their stuff (quietly and yet publishably), without grave internal compromise. Alexei Tolstoy could flourish because he had the thick skin of artistic indifference – in common with all RAPPists (members of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers); privileged and decorated, they lived well; more basically, they lived on. It was the idealists who were culled, one way or the other. The lethal element here was literary authenticity; if you had it within you, you were doomed.
A glance at the fate of two poets.*6 The talented Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote obligingly gruff-voiced hymns to bayonets and pig-iron statistics; and he put a bullet in his brain in 1930, aged thirty-six. The talented Sergei Yesenin wrote obligingly soft-voiced hymns to rural toilers and reapers; and hanged himself in 1925, aged thirty. What these two men had done was betray their gift and their avocation; and therefore they fell afoul of the sources of their being.
Me, I wrote a bit of hack reportage about escort girls in a nude magazine. But to compare little things with large is a salutary habit; the little thing tells you a little about the large thing. In miniature, little things, like exceptions, prove the rule – using prove in the older sense of ‘test’.
Yesenin and Mayakovsky told what they knew to be lies in their poems. Me, I wrote lies about escort girls in a nude magazine. Consequently I didn’t kill myself. I just had the third cousin of what Solzhenitsyn had when pressured (unsuccessfully) to denounce, to delate, to ‘write’, as they said (‘Does he/she write?’ was a common, and anxious, enquiry). He said to himself: ‘I feel sick.’ Yesenin and Mayakovsky were self-denouncers, in their verse.
All the writers whose last decision was suicide were killed by the State. Their situation affected them like a slow-acting poison, delivered (perhaps on the point of a phantom umbrella) by ‘the Organs’, as the secret police were popularly known; or like a course of mind-altering drugs, administered over months or years, in national psychiatric wards specialising in the ideologically insane.
But the poet-suicides had to have something within them to make the spell firm and good. Demyan Bedny, the obese ‘proletarian poet laureate’, lived complacently (until the later 1930s); he had a town named after him, his face appeared on postage stamps, and he was the only writer in the USSR to be honoured with an apartment in the Kremlin. None of this seemed to bother Bedny, and why would it? He was manqué, and could say of any of his poems, I didn’t really mean it. The writers who really did mean it ended differently; in their own souls they were playing with fire.
My thing with Phoebe Phelps went on until Christmas 1980. The night of shame was merely the halfway point; and for a while, for a year, for two years, there was love, there was unquestionably love. But after that she attenuated, gradually receding from me. Today, when I think long enough about her as she was then, as she faded, I end up with a version of Keats’s line about ‘Joy’ (capitalised, like Pleasure and Delight, in ‘Ode to Melancholy’): those hands of hers (moving languidly now) seemed to be ever at her lips, bidding adieu. And she lost her quiddity and solidity, no longer novelistic, merely lifelike…
Phoebe will not tend to dominate these pages, as she would in a work of unalloyed fiction; but she will periodically resurface. There was her bold move in the summer of 1981, and her even bolder move on September 12, 2001. And, much later, there was the meeting in London in 2017, when she was seventy-five.
Before we sign off on the nice idea about the genres and the seasons, I will suggest that the progress of a human life can also be evoked in genres and seasons. In this minor thought experiment, chronology is reversed (do you think that’s significant?): the three-score-and-ten begins around August 31, moves backwards through summer and spring and then winter and autumn, and comes to an abrupt halt around September 1. I’ll be brief.
Life begins, then, with summer and romance. Childhood and youth constitute the phase of the fairy tale – with domineering fathers, wicked stepmothers, vicious half-siblings, etc., to be included ad hoc. The time of quests, dragons, and hidden treasure. The Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland.
Then comes spring and comedy. The problem comedy of one’s twenties and thirties, the phase of the love story, the picaresque, and the bodice-ripper, the sentimental education and the Bildungsroman, leading one way or another to marriage and probably children, Love in the Haystacks leading to All’s Well That Ends Well.
Then comes winter and satire. Maturity and middle age, the phase of the brackish roman-fleuve and the increasingly sinister Aga saga, with sour whispers gathering in the kitchen dusk. For some, the great losses and injustices of life can be tamed and borne; for others, the debit ledger breaks free and burgeons. It is the time of Can You Forgive Her? (yes, you can) and He Knew He Was Right (no, he was wrong).
Then comes autumn and tragedy: decline and fall, the roman noir, the Gothic ghost story, the book of the dead.
Until September 2001, when I was fifty-two, I’d never given my ‘identity’ (my what?) a moment’s thought. Why would I? I was white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, non-believing, able in mind and body…Identity crises were for the rest of the world to worry about, the present world (the extant, the actual), fluid and churning and chameleonic, with its array of syndromes, conditions, disorders, and its burgeoning suite of erotic destinies (I’m bi, I’m trans, I’m chaste). In short, your identity sleeps inside you, unless or until it is roused.
Yet it occurred, my crisis, it took place – it elapsed. Not that I would dare to claim any kind of parity with the outliers, the anomalies, those singled out for questioning in the planet-wide identity parade. My case was peculiar. There were no models or patterns, no support groups or integration programmes, no experts or counsellors, no newsletters, no ‘literature’. I was all on my own.
…As Larkin wrote (in a letter of 1958, complaining to a woman friend about the banal irritations of the Christmas season, and briefly comparing her trials to his): ‘Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.’ There. It even rhymes; it may not scan – but it rhymes.
And the poet’s comment is a useful check, perhaps, on the ambitions of the sympathetic imagination. Mine is happening to me – a factor of incalculable weight. The identity crisis in question was a humble thing; but it was exclusively and indivisibly mine.
*1 Yes, this all took place a very long time ago. Forty-odd years later, London taxis persist in not costing £5: they now cost £88.80. But back then the sum of £5 was only seen on the meter of a taxi bound for the airport. (And £5, as Phoebe reminded us, was what the agency would have paid Ariadne.)
*2 Genghis Khan is revered today only in Mongolia (whose premier airport bears his name). Elsewhere and always – even in Nazi Germany – he is remembered as a blood-smeared genocidaire. He killed about 40 million: close to 10 per cent of the global population in 1300. We remember him too, now, as a hyperactive satyr and rapist: 16 million people alive today are not being at all deluded when they claim to feel the blood of Genghis coursing through their veins…Hitler’s declaration – part of a morale-stiffening lecture to his military brass – was made on August 22, 1939, when the immediate prospect was the ‘depopulation’ of Poland; and Genghis, said Hitler (getting slightly carried away), ‘hunted millions of women and children to their deaths, consciously and with a joyous heart’. We may incidentally note that the
liberal thinker Alexander Herzen, in one of his extraordinary premonitions, said in the 1860s that a Russian post-revolutionary power might resemble ‘Genghis Khan with the telegraph’. Khan is Turkic for ‘ruler, lord, prince’ (and when Churchill heard the news on March 11, 1953, he said, ‘The great khan is dead’). At that point Stalin was revered as ‘the father of the peoples’ by about a third of humankind (China, et al.). So you could say that Stalin got away with it (i.e., his personal toll of 20-odd million), in the West at least, until the publication of Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) and more comprehensively Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s. Today, in 2018, Stalin’s approval rating in Russia is over 50 per cent.
*3 Specifically ‘a real dilly of a VD’, in the words of William Burroughs. One of the books I was reading at the time was The Naked Lunch. ‘The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places…And after an initial lesion at the point of infection [it] passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years…’ Elephantiasis of the genitals is ‘a frequent complication’, as is gangrene, to the point where ‘amputation in medio from the waist down [is] indicated’.
*4 Germaine was unwaveringly kind and gentle, and in every way – but the amatory demeanour of the world’s most glamorous feminist is surely of scant general interest in this day and age…I don’t think she and I ever talked except glancingly about the situation of women. Germaine’s strength was wild brilliance, not sober instruction; she certainly infused her influence, but the job of turning me into a true believer devolved upon the world’s second most glamorous feminist, Gloria Steinem, with whom I spent a not especially relaxing but highly educational day, as an interviewer, in New York State in 1984…It was said of Florence Nightingale that she was ‘very violent’ – tacitly. All the great feminists of my era had moral menace in them. And they were almost invariably childless. They had to harden their hearts: such was the historical demand.
*5 ‘He could feel quite tangibly the difference in weight between the fragile human body and the colossus of the State. He could feel the State’s bright eyes gazing into his face; any moment now the State would crash down on him…’ The extreme asymmetry in mass defines the ‘fear that millions of people find insurmountable…this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the State’. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate.
*6 And one senses that the third way attracted more poets than novelists. Obviously it did. Poetry by definition a) tends to be oblique, b) resists paraphrase, and c) can find refuge in extreme brevity. It is the work of a moment to imagine an opaque haiku about (say) the collectivisation of agriculture (1929–33); it is very hard to imagine an extended socialist-realist narrative on the same subject with not a thought in its head about the annihilation of several million peasant families.