They meet former collaborators and former resistants and people whose experience under Fascism has driven them to despair. The Howards are at sea. Increasingly corrupted by money and the privileges it can buy in a poor country, they guitily discover they enjoy the company of the collaborators, their style, their fine food, rather better than the European comrades, with their dour air, their poverty, their patronage of typical little workers’ bistros where the food wreaks havoc with Stephen’s ulcer and on Emily’s increasingly refined palate.
Emily gives herself over to gluttony; soon they are like Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt. Stephen querulous, dyspeptic, is increasingly given to shady practices with the money that has been settled on his daughter and the nephew whom they have adopted, for Emily’s earning power is on the wane.
But still they spend, spend, spend, as news comes of the witch hunts at home. The leaders of the red élite that so berated them, those ‘pious, stiff-necked people’, as Emily calls them, are now in prison; they pleaded the First Amendment, they refused to name names. Communism has fallen out of fashion with a vengeance in the US.
The European comrades, the governesses, and shabby businessmen who turn out to be great heroes of the Resistance, are not interested in living well, to which the Howards by now are fatally addicted although Emily’s writing, like Communism, has gone out of fashion and their debts are piling up. Has the time come at last to get off that ‘slow train from Finland’?
Emily, half-mad with worry and balked ambition, gives in first, hoping that if she recants she will be forgiven and once more be rich and famous. Once she has done so, Stephen, heart and spirit broken, follows suit. Stead does not make a big issue of the scenes where the Howards name names, as if she cannot bear to linger on it.
Emily might have been able, out of her chronic Bohemianism, to patch herself together and go on, Stephen has nothing left to live for. That ‘bad end’ their author has prepared for them is nigh.
(1987)
• 33 •
Phyllis Rose: Jazz Cleopatra
‘She just wiggled her fanny and all the French fell in love with her,’ said Maria Jolas to Josephine Baker’s biographer, Phyllis Rose. Maria Jolas, evidently still bewildered after all these years by the insouciant ease with which the washerwoman’s daughter from St Louis, Missouri, conquered Paris in 1925.
But by all accounts that wiggle was an unprecedented event even in the uninhibited world of Parisian spectacle. Her posterior agitated as if it had a life of its own. Phyllis Rose theorises about it: ‘With Baker’s triumph, the erotic gaze of a nation moved downward: she had uncovered a new region for desire.’ Surely Ms Rose is being a little unfair; the French reputation for sexual sophistication may be exaggerated but the habitués of Montmartre cabaret must have seen a bare bum before.
And, of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. Baker herself put her finger on the source of her attraction: ‘The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks,’ she said. When Baker sailed the Atlantic in 1925 with a group of African-American artists, including Sidney Bechet, to take a little taste of show-stopping Harlem nightlife to Europe, she left behind nascent Broadway stardom as a comic dancer, an elastic-limbed, rubber-faced clown, grimacing, grinning, crossing her eyes, to find herself freshly incarnated as a sex-goddess without, it would seem, changing her act very much at all.
She even, although glammed up to the nines, continued crossing her eyes at odd moments: she must have felt it necessary to make her own ironic comment on herself to her audiences, so rapt and breathless was the Parisian reaction to the Revue Négre. ‘Their lips must have the taste of pickled watermelon, coconut, poisonous flowers, jungles and turquoise waters,’ enthused one scribe.
Yes, of course there is an implicit racism behind that purple prose, but it is a better thing to be adored for one’s difference than shunned for it and Phyllis Rose describes eloquently the extraordinary sense of liberation these black artists felt when they arrived in Europe. Life acquired a grand simplicity; any bar would serve them, and waiters said: ‘sir’, and ‘madame’. They could check into any hotel they wanted. To use a public convenience did not provoke a race riot. Later on, in the US in the Fifties, Baker would battle valiantly in the Civil Rights Movement; in Paris in the Twenties, she allowed herself to enjoy being a girl. She was Cinderella, the papers said; all she need do now was try on the slipper and marry the prince.
As toothy, exuberant, not-precisely-pretty Josephine Baker grew into her new role of jungle queen, savage seductress and round Baudelairean Black Venus, she left off making faces. At night, she hit the town in Poiret frocks. She never married a prince but Georges Simenon always said he would have married her had he not been married already; then, staggering thought, she would have been, in a sense, Madame Maigret. She had plenty of other offers, too; Phyllis Rose does not drop many names, although she gives a teasing vignette of the architect Le Corbusier, whom Baker met on an ocean liner. ‘He and Josephine became great pals and he went to the ship’s costume ball dressed as Josephine Baker, with darkened skin and a waistband of feathers.’
She acquired a pet, a leopard named Chiquita, ‘a male despite his name’, who sported a diamond collar. (She had a Bardot-like passion for animals.) Chiquita went everywhere with her, her exquisite objective correlative; the French wanted her to be herself a jewelled panther and good humouredly she gave them what they wanted. Baring her breasts, she danced in the Folies Bergéres wearing a girdle of bananas and sealed her fame. From henceforth, this garment, which is, I think, unknown in any form of dress in any part of the world, which is purely the invention of a mildly prurient exoticism, would be associated with her.
In 1928, she danced in Berlin. Louise Brooks, there to film Pandora’s Box for Pabst, and something of an expert in the methodology of exploited sexuality, saw her. When Josephine Baker appeared, naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu’s stage entrance was described by Wedekind: “They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage”.’ Phyllis Rose doesn’t record Brooks’s observation, suggesting as it does that there was, perhaps, rather more raw eroticism about Baker’s early performances than Rose lets on.
La Baker came back to the Casino de Paris and sang: ‘J’ai deux amours. Mon pays et Paris.’ That became her song. In return for her youth, her sex, her exoticism, the French gave her love, cash, and respect. She briefly returned to Broadway in 1935 and arrived at a party for Gershwin in full drop-’em-dead French glamour-queen glad rags: ‘Who dat?’ said Bea Lillie. In France once again, now and then she’d change the words of her song: ‘Mon pays, c’est Paris.’ After a war in which she proved her loyalty to her adopted country, smuggling secret information in invisible ink on her sheet music, would you believe, the French gave her the Légion d’Honneur.
She died in her seventieth year, in 1975, in the white heat and ostrich plumes of her umpteenth come-back, an institution, a heroine, mourned by the dozen children – her multi-ethnic ‘Rainbow Tribe’ – she adopted in her forties, something glorious if faintly touched by the ludicrous, at last, a geriatric sex-queen cherished in old age by the French loyalty to the familiar as she had been feted when young by the French passion for the new.
(1990)
• 34 •
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of narrative fiction and was written a thousand years ago by a woman whose real name we do not know (she’s always been known by the name of her own main heroine, Murasaki). Its most immediately affecting quality is that of an exquisite and anguishing nostalgia. Not a whisper of the morning of the world, here; all regret at the fall of the leaf and remembrance of things past.
It is also endlessly long, constructed with great skill and composed in a Japanese so archaically elusive that many modern Japanese will use Seidensticker’s definitive English translation as a handy crib. Murasaki Shikibu had the capacity for dealing with emotional complexity of a Stendhal an
d a sensibility rather more subtle than that of Proust.
Kyoto, the Imperial capital of Japan of the Heian period, which is her setting, was a dazzling place, where fine handwriting, a nice judgement in silks and the ability to toss off an evocative 60-syllable tanka at the drop of a cherry blossom were activities that achieved the status of profound moral imperatives for the upper classes.
The major work of English literature extant at roughly the same period is butch, barbaric, blood-boltered Beowulf, a fact that makes the Japanese giggle like anything. Though Murasaki does not by any means capture all the world in her silken net; cultured as all hell her courtiers may be but they are the élite of an élite and when her hero, Genji, in exile, catches a glimpse of the life of the common fisherman, he finds it difficult to believe other people are altogether human. Murasaki’s imperial court is a claustrophobic place.
And it is a curious fact that a novel so variously beautiful, so shot through with rainbow-hued poetry, so sophisticated, so instinct with that heart-wrenching sense of the impermanence of the world the Japanese call ‘mono-no-aware’ (the sadness inherent in things) should procure in this reviewer at least the sense of having gorged herself on a huge box of violet-centred chocolates.
At least Arthur Waley’s Bloomsburyish and truncated version (which Seidensticker’s monumental achievement is bound to supersede) gave the inescapable lady-novelist quality of The Tale of Genji its due. Seidensticker’s chaste, occasionally transatlantic, idiom errs only on the side of a lack of self-indulgence.
The polygamous and promiscuous Heian court – ‘court life is only interesting when all sorts of ladies are in elegant competition,’ opines Genji – produced a bumper crop of lady writers; in the endless boredom of rarely visited harems, in the well-screened apartments of retired empresses, there were dozens of bright, clever, highly educated, twitching, neurotic women, scribbling away – poems, novels, diaries, commonplace books, anything to pass the time.
Life revolved around the suns, the shining ones, the emperor, and chief ministers. The character of Genji himself, the sentimental rake who never forgets a one-night stand and always commemorates it in a wee personalised poemlet on the loveliest note-paper, the first great romantic fictional hero in the world, is indeed supremely fictional. It is not a characterisation but an idealisation, a model for polygamous husbands.
But the life of the Imperial sprig, Genji, is not the whole meat of the novel. It is essentially a family saga, the family the enormous clan of the Imperial family, with the extraordinary network of relationships that multiple wives, child marriage, and institutionalised illegitimacy makes possible. It flows on and on, with no apparent reason for stopping, then halts abruptly in midstream – possibly because Murasaki died, or became a nun.
After Genji dies, about three quarters of the way through, Murasaki concentrates her attention on the tormented love-affairs of the frivolous Niou, and of Kiaru, with his repressed sexuality and general oddness. There is a definite change of emphasis, now, a sharpening of focus, an increase in psychological realism. It is as though the lives of Genji and his lovely consort, Murasaki, had been an account of a golden age, now past; the world is running downhill, no more descriptions of snow-viewing or incense-making competitions. The glamour of all those beautiful people is definitely tarnished.
Beautiful people Niou and Kiaru certainly are, but as deeply unpleasant as most beautiful people. As one ex-concubine remarks of the father of her child: ‘The Prince at Uji was a fine, sensitive gentleman but he treated me as if I were less than human,’ and the unfortunate product of this liaison is hounded to the point of suicide by the conflicting attentions of our predatory heroes.
One suspects that, by page 1,000, it is beginning to occur to our narrator herself that the Heian Court, from the point of view of one of those ladies in elegant competition, is really a meat-market with a particularly pretty decor. That ineffable Buddhist gloom, which makes Calvinism look positively sprightly, begins to suffuse the text.
Nevertheless, the decor is absolutely ravishing. Murasaki depicts an exquisite, pictorial life. The first chapters unfold themselves like a succession of painted screens, in which the beauties of nature and the seasons and the weather have the function of pure decoration. There are the rituals of bird and butterfly dances; the shuttered, sequestered women with their black-painted teeth and six-foot swatches of hair, in robes of white silk lined with red, yellow lined with russet, arrange and rearrange those irridescent sleeves that are all custom allows of them to be seen beneath their curtains, sleeves often wet with tears due to the demands of their highly cultivated hearts.
Flowers, everywhere; women named for flowers. Gardens. Ruined houses where neglected ladies sit like Mariana in the moated grange (‘he cometh not,’ she said). And, dominating everything, an absolute tyranny of good taste, a Stalinist regime of refinement. Choose a singlet of the wrong shade of red and your life is as good as over.
Yet the ominous thunder of the river in which poor Ukifune tries to drown herself reverberates through the last chapters like the very voice of stern Buddhist morality itself. It’s all the dream of a dream, you see. All of it. It is curious that this wonderful and ancient novel that Seidensticker’s translation makes so voluptuously deliciously readable should have so little hope in it.
(1977)
• 35 •
Eric Rhode: On Birth and Madness
This book begins like a novel: ‘A woman attends a funeral. The coffin is lowered into the grave. A man approaches her and says: “He was not your father.”’ But the reader’s expectation of continuous narrative is excited only to be disrupted; Eric Rhode prefers to work in discrete sections of speculation, each independently, often curiously titled – ‘Father into Foetus’, ‘Eyes Pregnant with a Mother’s Babies’. This method of organisation is reminiscent of the collections of brief, aphoristic essays by Theodor Adorno, although Eric Rhode’s intellectual method is rather less rigorous than Adorno’s. Rhode’s speculation centres on work as a psychiatrist in a puerperal breakdown unit – that is, a place where women are sent who have gone mad in connection with the process of childbirth. However, his scope extends far beyond the specificity of his book’s title.
It is a favourite saying among women of my type that if men could have babies, then abortion would be as readily available as light ale. Nevertheless, it is in just this physical difference that the whole opposition of the sexes lies. If men could have babies, they would cease to be men as such. They would become the ‘other’. They would become magical objects of strangeness, veneration, obloquy, awe, disregard, and oppression, recipients of all the effects of the syndrome of holy terror. I wonder if it has occurred to Eric Rhode that, but for a chance division of cells while he was an undirected foetus, he, too, might have had babies. Certainly he seems to imply that parturition is not a function of the psychiatric profession itself: ‘Psychiatrists talk about a mental unhinging round about the seventh month: is this true? We need more evidence, especially from the pregnant delegates themselves.’ So there aren’t any women psychiatrists around who can supply the necessary?
Don’t think I don’t realise that Rhode doesn’t mean this. It is only the sloppy way he has phrased it. Yet the question need not have remained rhetorical. Even if he does not know any psychiatrists who have been pregnant, if that is possible, then his list of acknowledgements includes known mothers who could have told him. Semantic sloppiness usually goes hand in hand with mental sloppiness. For example, is it just some psychiatrists or all psychiatrists who claim that women become ‘unhinged’ – whatever that means – in late pregnancy? If it is the opinion of the entire profession, as he implies, how was it arrived at – by a postal ballot or by a show of hands? Rhodes is not fond of footnotes, on the whole. Nor, I suspect, of empiricism. On the other hand, he has far more female intuition than I do.
It occurs to me, thinking about this wayward, infuriating book with its shining flashes of metaphysics, its linguistic i
mprecision, its mass of references (Blake, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Gior-gione, Walter Benjamin, and more, and more) how deeply psychoanalysis is concerned with culture. Not only broadly, with culture as opposed to nature, but also with culture in its narrowest sense – that is, high-bourgeois culture. Easel painting, symphonic music, literature. As if Freud had condemned the entire profession to the taste of a cultivated Viennese at the turn of the century.
Rhode is prepared to advance pure cultural product as the sacred book of the Freudian calling. By page three, he is already talking about ‘a Greek play often read as psychoanalytic holy writ, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King.’ But he does not think of Oedipus the King as a cultural product, with the specific conditions of the time and place of its composition mediating its universality. Nor does he treat the play as if Sophocles had dreamed it. Rather, he seems to think of the Oedipus family as though they were real people with real problems, an approach similar to that of the literary criticism of A. C. Bradley. He talks about the Hamlets the same way; they might even be patients, although he does not pause to entertain the Bradleian-style gloss I’ve always put on the play myself: that it only makes sense if Hamlet is really the son of Claudius and not of ‘Hamlet’s Father’ at all.
One could argue that Oedipus the King is really, deep down, about the overthrow of Mother Right, that the play contains, transforms, subverts, patricises the ideology of those antique, matrilinear communities around the Mediterranean celebrated somewhat circumspectly in The Golden Bough, and increasingly cherished by women of my type as we reach a certain age, in which kingship was attained by marriage with the queen and terminated in ritual combat with the inevitable defeat by a more nubile successor when the hapless consort’s hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his Greek Myths, and though Graves’s anthropology is just as shaky as J. G. Frazer’s, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?’ only becomes pressing when property is inherited through the male line.
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