Human Relations and Other Difficulties

by Mary-Kay Wilmers

  Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education by Sybille Bedford

  Attraction Duty

  I have complained a lot about men in my time. In fact, I do it more and more. But I have never been part of what used to be called the women’s movement and those who have or who are, or who have never wanted to be, would probably consider me some sort of moron. I didn’t do consciousness-raising with my sisters in the late 1960s. I was married at the time and it seemed to me that if my consciousness were raised another millimetre I would go out of my mind. I used to think then that had I had the chance to marry Charles Darwin (or Einstein or Metternich) I might have been able to accept the arrangements that marriage entails a little more gracefully. In the 1980s, long since divorced, I decided that marriage to Nelson Mandela (or Terry Waite) would have suited me fine.

  When The Female Eunuch came out in 1970 the man I was married to bought me a copy (clearly he can’t have been the cause of all my troubles). But it was the same with the book as it had been with the sisters – I couldn’t get on with it. In the first place, I knew it all. Secondly, I couldn’t bear to think about my condition any more than I already did – which was, roughly speaking, all the time that was left from thinking about what to wear, what to cook, and what colour to paint the downstairs lavatory. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not nearly as much of one as I would like it to be.

  I am the same age as Germaine Greer and therefore in much the same relation to the subject of her new book, The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause, as I was to The Female Eunuch. It’s my story. At least that’s how I see it. (‘Oh God,’ my ex-husband said when I told him what I was writing about.) There are those – i.e. men – who say that a ‘male menopause’ deserves consideration, and it’s true that even men get old and fat and die. But the admirable Greer has no time for their menopauses. ‘This book will not devote any of its limited space to the “male menopause”.’ Later, and more bluntly, it’s ‘a phenomenon that doesn’t exist’.

  Would a more fair-minded woman have given the men a hearing? I don’t see why, but then I wouldn’t. ‘Me, me, me,’ the men shout and I hear them very clearly. ‘Me, me, me,’ I growl under my breath. Here I am, four paragraphs into my musings, or ravings, and beginning to doubt whether I will find anything to say about the menopause that isn’t a way of saying something about men. I look out of the window and see a roly-poly middle-aged man about the same age as me walking along arm in arm with his eight-year-old daughter. His first wife, assuming he had one and she was the same sort of age, may now be a millionaire, she may own a chain of shops or be a top civil servant or the wife of a duke: but her womb, according to Greer, will be the size of an almond and one thing she won’t have is an eight-year-old daughter. The menopause isn’t some sort of metaphor and it doesn’t make you believe in the even-handedness of God, or of human biology.

  On the other hand, even I don’t think it’s the invention of a mean-minded Creator wanting to give women a bad time. Or do I? Other female animals, we learn from zoology, don’t have a menopause; for better or worse, they carry on reproducing all their adult lives. Human animals take such a long time to get going, however, that they can’t afford to have mothers who are reaching the end of the line. I remember wailing in the days of my marriage that if anyone could suggest one good reason why I should do it I wouldn’t mind being the person who always washed up. Unfortunately I can’t see myself zenning out on thoughts of the species when I next catch sight of that roly-poly man and his daughter. There we are, however. At some point between the ages of 45 and 55 women dip out of the race while men carry on booming and fathering until the very brink of the grave.

  An old man I used to know, a painter well into his eighties, was so confident and so predatory that at night you couldn’t walk down the street with him unchaperoned. If it is part of the great scheme of things that men should go on contributing to the world’s population (and the planet’s decline) till they drop, then it follows that they will go on strutting and preening and considering themselves eligible for what Clive James used to call ‘the grade A crumpet’ until at last senility takes hold. (In James’s phrase, Ford Madox Ford, himself neither young nor pretty, had the grade A crumpet ‘coming at him like kamikazes’.) Germaine Greer may say, uncontroversially, that ‘many a man who was attractive and amusing at twenty is a pompous old bore at fifty,’ and Melvyn Bragg got a lot of stick for the novel he wrote about an icky romance between a nice enough man in his fifties and an even nicer 18-year-old whose looks were out of this world, but women (for whatever reason) never seem to tire of telling stories about young ladies and older men and living happily ever after. It doesn’t happen very much or very plausibly the other way round, not in life or in books. Even Colette, who pioneered the notion of the young man and the older woman, makes Léa give Chéri up for a biologically-appropriate wife.

  ‘Men,’ man-in-the-news Iron John Bly reports, ‘are more lonesome in every generation.’ In the last few days, as I’ve been getting more and more inflamed in my thoughts about the human (i.e. female, i.e. menopausal) condition, I’ve been hearing a lot about how hard it is being a man and having to stake your claim and prove your wonderfulness at every turn. Robert Bly says men need a male mother, and that’s fine by me. But I won’t believe it isn’t harder to be a woman until the day, should it ever come, when the balance of power is so drastically reversed that women can get into serious trouble, lose their jobs or be despatched to the gulag, for making jokes about men. However strongly I feel about the things I’ve been saying, I doubt whether anyone – i.e. any man – will find them upsetting. In fact, I wonder whether all my ironies aren’t simply one more way of sucking up to the ruling class. Is it just me, or do men care what women say provided they don’t look like Andrea Dworkin?

  On the other hand, I can’t say I think it’s entirely men’s fault that women live as if under their spell. Looking back at what I’ve written so far, it seems clear that I made a mistake in skipping those consciousness-raising sessions. The menopause isn’t simply something that happens to women that doesn’t happen to men. Nor is the big question – the really big question – why men, all men, whatever they have or haven’t got going for them, can always find a woman to sew on their buttons or proof-read their books. What we need to know is whether women are going to go on for ever dreaming about men: dreaming of finding one if they haven’t got one, of winning him back if he is slipping away, of killing themselves should he finally bolt. Greer, who, unlike almost every other woman in the world, has never seemed to share this obsessive interest in the opposite sex, is pretty clear: time to get out. ‘I never have to think any more, oh a party,’ she said in an interview in the Independent on Sunday, ‘what clothes shall I wear, what men will be there, what am I going to do?’ And even if, as I’ve heard suggested, she doesn’t wholly mean it, it’s good enough for me if she half-does.

  ‘Unless you have a really decent guy, talking to him about the menopause is like taking hemlock,’ a (married) Californian woman remarks in Vanity Fair. I don’t know about hemlock, but I’ve always kept my cardy on through the most equatorial flushes for fear that some male bystander (or colleague) would understand what was happening and laugh. Greer, you could say, is vigorously alert to the ways in which women let themselves be enslaved by men – or rather the idea of a man:

  The very notion of remaining attractive is replete with the contradictions that break women’s hearts. A woman cannot make herself attractive; she can only be found attractive. She can only remain attractive if someone remains attracted to her. Do what she will she cannot influence that outcome. Her desperate attempts to do the impossible, to guide the whim of another, are the basis of a billion-dollar beauty industry. All their lives women have never felt attractive enough. They have struggled through their thirties and forties to remain attractively slim, firm-bodied, glossy-haired and bright-eyed. Now in their fifties ‘remaining attractive’ becomes a full-time job … Jane Fonda’s body ma
y look terrific, what there is of it, but has anyone looked at the strain taken up by her face and neck muscles? … Is a middle-aged woman supposed to have the buttocks of a twenty-year-old? Such buttocks are displayed on advertising hoardings all over town. The man who is still making love to the wife of his youth may be thinking of other breasts than his wife’s. There is no lack of spectacular publications to furnish such imagery. The middle-aged woman who tries to compete with her husband’s fantasy sex partners hasn’t a hope.

  She’s the Norman Tebbit of feminism, a founder member of the on-yer-bike branch of the women’s movement; and I don’t imagine she’ll be sorry to think that it’s all over for her contemporaries; that for us what she memorably calls ‘the white-slavery of attraction duty’ is a thing of the past. ‘To be unwanted,’ she says in her introduction, ‘is also to be free.’ Which sounds good. But women, as men always say, are so unreliable; and no sooner has Greer got us off the hook than she’s talking in a most un-Tebbit-like way about ‘the older woman’s love’ being a ‘feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grassblade and blesses every fly’.

  So what do we do now, my ageing sisters and I? If we can’t line up behind the new-order Greer, who do we take as our role model – Joan Collins or Alan Bennett’s lady in the van? Or, to put it differently, do we or don’t we put in a bid for hormone replacement therapy? (I don’t want to get into difficulties here: Joan Collins swears she’s never had it – she only looks as if she has.) There are reasons for taking it, and reasons for not taking it, and reasons for getting angry with your doctor either way, but if you do and it works, you feel better, you look better and you are better. (I speak from envy, not experience.) Then the question arises: what does ‘better’ mean? And is that sort of ‘better’ appropriate? Or, to quote Germaine Greer: ‘We hear that Mrs Thatcher uses hormone replacement but do not know whether to be encouraged or disheartened by the result.’

  Years and years ago I remember some poor woman being lambasted in the Guardian for liking a certain sort of maternity dress because in it she didn’t look pregnant (‘misses the point of being pregnant’, she was told). There are people on whom talk of hormone replacement therapy has a similar effect, as if it were to be blamed for overlooking or deferring the pleasure of being known and knowing yourself to be past it. No doubt in five or ten minutes’ time it will be really chic to be menopausal. Perhaps thanks to Greer and others it’s happened already. The only trouble is I’d rather go back on attraction duty than sit in my garden saying hello to the grass.

  My Distant Relative

  A distant relative of mine was a general in the KGB. ‘As long as I live,’ Stalin said of him, ‘not a hair of his head shall be touched.’ Stalin didn’t keep his word – which can’t have been wholly surprising even then. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, my relative wasn’t shot: he was beaten and tortured and kept in prison for 12 years. He died in 1981 with – I’ve been told – a portrait of Stalin by his bed.

  I am intrigued by his story and by his connection with the rest of my family, the last of whom left Russia in the first years of the Revolution. (My mother and her sisters were in Moscow in 1917: when I asked them what they did during that time they said they played cards – children in one room, grown-ups in the other.) None of those who are alive now – about the previous generation, who can say? – had ever heard of this KGB relative until an article in Life Magazine revealed the identity of Trotsky’s assassin, a Spanish communist called Ramon Mercader, and that of his mentor, my relative, Leonid Eitingon.

  For the fact of his being a relative the evidence, despite my efforts, is only circumstantial. I have sent my agents to the archives in Minsk, but there is nothing in writing to prove that the various sets of Eitingons living in a cluster of small towns on the banks of the Dnepr in the late 1890s belonged to the same family – though I would be amazed if they didn’t. A Soviet intelligence officer could be shot merely for having family in the West and when, in 1991, I went to Moscow for the first time to visit my putative relatives, Leonid’s children and grandchildren, they were willing enough to see me but reluctant to accept that I was anything other than an Englishwoman with a bee in her bonnet.

  The first indication that we might belong to the same family and that some of his relatives might have known some of mine came in 1993 from a cousin of Leonid’s, an old lady called Revekka who remembers meeting one of my great-uncles in Moscow in the late 1920s. My great-uncle was by then an American and very rich. Revekka’s mother, who was very poor, hoped that if the rich American saw her young daughter, he would give her some money – which he did. He called Revekka a little flower and gave her 100 dollars. But Revekka wasn’t pleased. Not only did she feel that her mother had tricked her, she didn’t like the compliment either. By the time she got home, the money had gone, been lost or mislaid. A month or so later, when she and her mother moved flats, it turned up. She doesn’t remember how it was spent, except that she got something she’d always wanted: a raspberry-coloured beret like the one Tatiana has in Eugene Onegin.

  I was in Moscow again ten days ago, for reasons I’ll come to. It was looking very beautiful, though it’s not a place that I generally like. In fact, I quite often hate it. The city is too big (you are forever travelling, as it were, from Norwood to Highgate), the roads are too wide (wherever you go an eight-lane highway to cross), the drivers unbelievably heedless. Most people, you feel, would just as soon you weren’t there. Not because they see you as the enemy or even the former enemy: they simply have no interest in you at all. No one in the street ever smiles. If you buy something they bark, if you ask the way they don’t answer or answer over their shoulder, walking away. At first ‘our victory’ was an embarrassment. Now it’s more straightforwardly a nightmare, or cauchmar, as the Russians say – odd that they don’t have their own word, only their own pronunciation. It may seem in order to Milton Friedman that Russian citizens trade in dollars as much as in roubles, that the road from the airport into town is marked by a procession of billboards advertising ventures with fly-by-night names like Inkombank and Discountbank, that most of the ads on the Metro – ads on the Metro! – invite you to get rich as fast as you can, but not even Friedman would say this is capitalism with a human face.

  In the cause of getting rich quick 63 foreigners were murdered in Moscow in the first six months of 1994. (Moscow is the only place I’ve ever heard shots being fired – quite a few.) Under the ancien régime it was the rough-handedness of the state that you had to watch out for: now it’s scary wherever you look. (My distant relative, I should explain, worked abroad: it wasn’t he who sent men at night to knock on your door.) In summer the sky is still a luminous blue at one or two o’clock in the morning, but the streets are scarcely lit; the Metro is thought not to be safe, taxis even less so. A few days ago the LRB contributor R.W. Johnson, a big man but in Moscow an obvious foreigner, was set upon by a gang of ten-year-olds on Gorky Street at midday. His clothes were ripped; he was lucky, he said, to have escaped with his life.

  In the block of flats where I was staying there were two families sharing a two-room flat. Nothing unusual about that. (When my distant relative first lived in Moscow he had a large room in the centre of town. His mother came to live with him there and when he was sent abroad in the 1920s, the old lady, her two daughters, their husbands and eventually their children all lived in that room and went on doing so for the next thirty years.) In the present case, however, one room was bigger than the other and in the larger of the two an old man lived on his own while a young couple with a child had to make do with the smaller one. The young man asked the old man if he would swap: in fact, he asked so often that in April the old man shot him. Now the old man is still living in the big room and the woman and her child are on their own in the smaller one.

  Komunalkas, as such flats are called, won’t disappear immediately thanks to capitalism, but more is in hand than one might have expected. Cranes no longer stand stil
l on building sites; in one neighbourhood all the pipes were being replaced, in another the telephone cables. There is more food than there was, and however extreme the rate of inflation, pensions too have increased. So when you look out of your window in the early morning you don’t see what used to be the first familiar sight of the day: large women in padded clothes shuffling towards the neighbourhood bread queue. And if you’re a visitor about your business in the middle of Moscow, and you’d like to sit down, you no longer have to take a trip on the Metro: there are places to sit, even cafés, in the centre of town. There is, for example, in addition to the flagship of capitalism in Pushkin Square, a new kind of McDonald’s, a pseudo-modish café on the modish Arbat (the street where in pre-revolutionary times my great-aunt Bertha had her dental practice). Prospective travellers to Moscow might like to think of arranging their visit before there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts next to the new McDonald’s and every neighbourhood has its own Body Shop.

  It’s all part of the Eurofication of the Soviet Union. (What happened to the cafés that must have existed in tsarist times: was it policy to close them down?) Trams rattle late into the night along the street I stay on: a reminder of the end of Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, the literary editor in The Master and Margarita who thought he knew it all. The trams used to be white and red and a little dishevelled: now some are a spanking bright blue and have Panasonic written on the front in large letters. Like much else in Moscow, they’re being taken over, Eurofied. It struck me this time that the rebarbative Stalinist skyscrapers had retreated into the background, as if in the new capitalist Russia they had given way to the pre-revolutionary buildings they themselves replaced. From my room, I see a group of dusty buildings, dressed in a rough compound with trees and a square of parched grass at the centre, framing a couple of rusty swings. In the next street along, a main road, there are large ramshackle apartment houses, reminiscent of Rome in their weight and their colour, irregular, dilapidated, stagey. In the event of a thunderstorm the heavy stone balconies are liable to break away from their moorings and tumble into the street. At one point my distant relative lived not far from here, in a handsome, pre-revolutionary block. In other parts of the city, the neoclassical centre especially, restored thanks to JVs (joint ventures) with the Germans, the Finns or the Italians, there’s a distinct whiff of Covent Garden – the Euro-heritage that one day will stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals.