The Joan Collins Fan Club: My life with Fanny the Wonder Dog – Julian Clary and Paul Merton

(Not discussed by the group but written in a personal capacity.)

I used to loathe camp comedians like Larry Grayson so I was nonplussed when Julian Clary hit the television screens. I thought mincing comedians were a thing of the past. Then it dawned on me that this was something different. Clary didn’t put himself down. He used his biting sarcasm to put other people down. Men in the audience were often the victims. So now we have a sort of retro-camp coming from someone highly intelligent.

The print looks like something out of a students’ rag magazine of the 1970s.

It isn’t laugh out loud funny wit the double entendres make me smile.

‘I hit rock bottom. I became a student’.

A groping landlord.

Hans Drops his Trousers is set in pre-war Berlin. The trousers obviously represent the Weimar republic and the very fact that Hans drops them is indicative of the middle class’ rejection of Hindenburg’s economic policy. Undoubtedly the underpants symbolise the emergence of National Socialism. The outline of his sexual organs clearly predicts the construction of the autobahns. Previously released under the title Show us your Arse, Square Head, this epic work captures perfectly the mood of decadence only hinted at in the earlier movie Watch out Gustav, there’s a Homosexual Behind you. ‘Highly recommended’

‘Who cuts your hair for you — is it the council?’

`Shut up and act like a man,’ I retorted, ‘or don’t you do impressions?’

`What a lovely shirt you’re wearing,Brian,’ I said. ‘Such a pity the shop didn’t have your size.”

I felt several beads of sweat on my forehead, which I quickly fashioned into a necklace

Men like you don’t grow in trees.You usually we swing from them.

The conclusion: As I look back over my life with Fanny the Wonder Dog, I realise that she has manipulated events to suit her own purposes. And I suppose I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. She is a remarkable creature, a spiritual being in contact with the Universe and all the lamp-posts in it.

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The Immoralist – Andre Gide

Some of us were a little apprehensive before reading this book. However, everyone in our group agreed that it was worthwhile. One said that it all ‘came together in the last thirty pages.’ We all agreed that is was well-written.

His description of places is good – you know that he’s been there. I particularly liked the descriptions of Carthage and El Djem (with their magnificent amphitheatres) and note that, one hundred years later, the only train from Sousse still arrives 1.00 a.m. so you risk not finding an hotel for the night. The return train is more convenient though ours had stones thrown at it and none of the doors closed. You are better off using a louage (shared taxi)

Both he and his father had tuberculosis which is why description of coughing up blood is so vivid. His war on tuberculosis begins with the awakening of his senses to a total receptivity to life-giving elements. The taste of good food, the tingling sensation of cold water on hot skin, the feel and touch of a palm tree, the sun on his naked body by day, and the invigorating desert air by night become the new objects of his worship. His rejection of all other claims on his life–except those which make for the indulgence of his newly-discovered self–excludes Marceline whose presence he begins to find oppressive.

The Immoralist is based on Gide’s personal experience of discovering his homosexuality while travelling as a young man in North Africa.

It was conventional to get married back then but noteworthy that he first sex with his wife two months after their wedding. That something wasn’t quite right didn’t stop him having an extra-marital affair with another woman.

The character of Menalque in The Immoralist is based on Oscar Wilde. Ménalque’s philosophy on personal property relates possessiveness to stagnation and false security and calls it the primary concern of an establishment which fears change.

Undoubtedly Gide was deeply disturbed by Wilde, and not surpris­ingly since the remarks of Gide in his letters of that time suggest that Wilde was intent on undermining the younger man’s self-identity, rooted as it was in a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigour and repression which generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned. Wilde wanted to encourage Gide to transgress.

Richard Ellmann suggests that ‘in effect, Wilde spiritually seduced Gide’. For Ellmann, the most important document about the ‘psychic possession of Gide by Wilde’ is those missing pages from Gide’s journal….. He is taken by Wilde to a cafe: ‘in the half-open doorway, there suddenly appeared a marvellous youth. He stood there for a time, leaning with his raised elbow against the door-jamb, and outlined on the dark background of the night’. The youth joins them; his name is Mohammed; he is a musician, a flute player. Listening to that music ‘you forgot the time, and place, and who you were’. This is not the first time Gide has experienced this sensation of forgetting. Africa increasingly attracts him in this respect; there he feels (liberated and the burden of an oppressive sense of self is dissolved: ‘I aid aside anxieties, constraints, solicitudes, and as my will evaporated, felt myself becoming porous as a beehive’ Now, as they leave the cafe, Wilde turns to Gide and asks him if he desires the musician.) Gide writes: ‘how dark the alley was! I thought my heart would fail me; and what a dreadful effort of courage it needed to answer: “yes”, and with what a choking voice!’ ……earlier courage was needed for self-discipline—now it is the strength to transgress). Wilde arranges something with their guide, rejoins Gide and then begins laughing: ‘a resounding laugh, more of triumph than of pleasure, an interminable, uncontrollable, insolent laugh . . . it was the amusement of a child and a devil’ .Gide spends the night with Mohammed: ‘my joy was unbounded, and I cannot imagine it greater, even if love had been added’. Though not his first homosexual experi­ence (probably his second), it confirmed Gide’s sexual `nature’—what, he says, was ‘normal’ for him: ‘There was nothing constrained here, nothing precipitate, nothing doubtful; there is no taste of ashes in the memory I keep.’ Even more defiantly Gide declares that, although he had achieved ‘the summit of pleasure five times’ with Mohammed, ‘I revived my ecstasy many more times, and back in my hotel room I relived its echoes until morning’ (this passage was one of those omitted from early English editions).

Michel’s puritan disdain for any signs of weakness which caused him to hide the seriousness of his condition from Marceline

He becomes indignant that he should be at the brink of death while others take life and health for granted. For the first time life becomes a precious possession whose value is only recognized when its essence is about to be snatched away. In a flash of emotional intensity Michel experiences the mystery of life and his passivity changes into an active and zealous will to live. So he breaks away from his former routine. Eager to cultivate his own immediate desires he becomes alert to those in others which are as yet unrestrained by the shackles of society’s rules. Hence Motkir’s theft of Marceline’s scissors stimulates more than idle curiosity in Michel, and is the first of many incidents where aberrant behaviour is the object of his intense fascination.

The biblical warning of Christ’s words to Peter (that young people have freedom whereas elderly people depend on others for their mobility) sound the first alarm as Michel becomes vaguely aware that absolute freedom of action is an illusion, that he is subject to the ravages of time.

Possessions become the bars of his cell in his deliberate attempt to imprison his latent restlessness and rebellion against conformity. In this context Gide inserts an observation on farm life which, on the surface, has nothing to do with Michel, but which becomes an image of Michel’s imprisonment and his attempt to foil his natural longings. At “La Morinière” Bocage, the bailiff, has enclosed the ducks at the onset of autumn winds. Human intervention and constraint frustrate natural instinct, and the ducks must comply with their northern cage. Gradually, Michel himself will grow restive in the self-made prison of his Paris apartment, and the lure of the south will become stronger.

Among the symbols of Michel’s feeling of stagnation verses spontaneity are the description of the irrigation system in Biskra and in the taming of the wild colt at “La Morinière.” The beautiful animal had been declared useless and unmanageable by his servants. Michel calls on Charles for help, and Charles tames him through quiet and gentle authority, wise restraint, and a deep respect for the animal. The once wild and useless colt becomes tame and docile:

The process of emptying the pond is another symbol: for the pond to remain useful its old contents had to be brought to the surface, its murky waters drained, and the leak repaired. Michel’s mind, like the pond, is blocked by old repressions and obstacles to his future productivity. To arrive at the bottom of his consciousness he has to bring everything to the surface and thereby heal the slow seepage which deprives him of the inner resources he needs to cope with life. Michel is so preoccupied with his liberation from restrictions outside himself that he fails to recognize the inhibiting forces within him.

Michel’s provisional moral code is comparable to the land he lets lie in disuse at “La Morinière.” He fails to recognize that his entire property is slowly deteriorating. The land and the mind which lie fallow are soon invaded by thistles and weeds and gradually lose their value. That Michel takes these neglected fields away from the farmers in order to cultivate them would indicate the possibility of regeneration, but Michel’s plans do not materialize, and his failure in meeting his responsibilities toward his land foreshadows his failure in meeting his responsibilities toward Marceline and ultimately toward himself. The gift of life cannot be wasted. Michel’s dream of absolute leisure is based on his reaction against the bondage of poverty:

Gide compared his book to the fruit of the colocynths which grow in the desert and are not without beauty, though they present only greater thirst to the one who seeks to drink their juice. The experience of life creates the desire for more life, and an unquenchable thirst is the essence of yearning. Michel’s dwelling stands in a garden which is girded by a wall. Within the enclosure stand three stunted pomegranate trees. The pomegranate, like the colocynth, does not appease thirst but creates a fiercer, deeper craving for its fruit. The fact that these trees are retarded in their growth and most likely barren illustrates symbolically that Michel’s adventure ends in sterility. Begun when he first tasted the forbidden fruit of consciousness in the gardens of Biskra, his quest has exhausted itself in the pitiful garden at Sidi–which is not the paradise he had thought to regain.

One of our members asked whether his wife might also be a symbol of Gide, of a split psyche between respectability and immorality, between the imprisoned and the free.

He no longer fancies Charles when he grows whiskers and wears a bowler hat. This confirms the difference between a pederast and a homosexual: I do not recognize the children, but the children recognize me. They have heard of my arrival and come running to meet me. Can it really be they? What a shock! What has happened? They have grown out of all knowledge — hideously. In barely two years ! It seems impossible … What fatigues, what vices, what sloth have put their ugly mark on faces that were once so bright with youth? What vile labours can so soon have stunted those beautiful young limbs? What a bankruptcy of hope! … I ask a few questions. Bachir is scullion in a café; Ashour is laboriously earning a few pennies by breaking stones on the roads; Ham­matar has lost an eye. And who would believe it? Sadek has settled down! He helps an elder brother sell loaves in the market; he looks idiotic. Agib has set up as a butcher with his father; he is getting fat; he is ugly; he is rich; he refuses to speak to his low-class compan­ions … How stupid honourable careers make people! What! Am I going to find here the same things I hated so at home? Boubakir? Married. He is not fifteen yet. It is grotesque. Not altogether though. When I see him that evening he explains that his marriage is a mere farce. He is, I expect, an utter waster; he has taken to drink and lost his looks . .. So that is all that remains, is it? That is what life has made of them? My intolerable depression makes me feel it was largely to see them that I came here. Menalque was right. Memory is an accursed invention. And Moktir? Ah Moktir has just come out of prison. He is lying low. The others will have nothing to do with him. I want to see him. He used to be the handsomest of them all. Is he to be a disappointment too? … Someone finds him out and brings him to me. No; Moktir has not failed. Even my memory had not painted him as superb as he now is. His strength, his beauty are flawless …

One can’t help but agree to: ‘I have a horror of honest folk. I may have nothing to fear from them, but I have nothing to learn either. And besides, they have nothing to say . . . Honest Swiss nation! What does their health do for them? They have neither crimes, nor history, not literature, nor arts … a hardy rose-tree, without thorns or flowers.’

I had to look up ‘Caryatid’ p. 36 = a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.

There’s an irritating, unnecessary apostrophe ion ‘Thursday’s’ p. 97

During World War I, Gide worked for the Red Cross, then in a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, and later offered shelter to war refugees. During the 1920s, he became an advocate for the oppressed peoples of colonized regions, as well as for women’s rights and the humane treatment of criminals. In 1947 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gide died in Paris on 19 February 1951, at the age of eighty-one. Six years later, his entire works were entered in the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.

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If it Die – Andre Gide

(We have not discussed this in the group but it was a ‘spin off’ from one of our meetings and this review is in a personal capacity.)

Gide has no time for notion that children are innocent. He talks about the bad things he did under the table with another boy. He is almost an apologist for the doctrine of original sin.

He loved his kaleidoscope and laments that children no longer have them. I did, much later on.

His childhood was lonely except for his mother’s governess, Anna, who always welcomed him and treated him as a humans being rather than a nuisance.

Like me, he wasn’t allowed to go to his own father’s funeral.

He asks his mother what an ‘atheist’ is and gets the reply ‘horrid and foolish’.

He observes that the French need to take sides, to belong to a particular party.

He is derided for getting full marks in school – this is often assumed to be a modern thing but, clearly, it isn’t.

Someone speaks of ‘domicilliary visits’. I have only ever heard that term once before, in 1978, from someone very pompous.

We get several boring pages about philosophy, art and poetry.

The person who had this copy before me pencilled in all sorts of ridiculous comments that made this book seem even more pompous. Some of his remarks are in French and some show that he knows little about Gide. For example, when Gide writes that he loathes virtue, the frantic scribbler adds a question mark.

Compared with other stuff that I’ve read by Gide, I found this somewhat boring.

Perhaps this comment says it all: Memoirs are never more than half sincere, however great one’s desire for truth; everything is-always more complicated than one makes out. Possibly even one gets nearer to truth in the novel

“In the name of what God or what ideal, do you forbid me to live according to my nature?…But I gradually came to wonder whether God really exacted such constraints, whether it was not impious to be in continual rebellion, whether such rebellion was not against Him.”

“but when Ali – that was my little guide’s name – led me up among the sandhills, in spite of the fatigue of walking in the sand, I followed him; we soon reached a kind of funnel or crater, the rim of which was just high enough to command the surrounding country”…”As soon as we got there, Ali flung the coat and rug down on the sloping sand; he flung himself down too, and stretched on his back”…”I was not such a simpleton as to misunderstand his invitation”…”I seized the hand he held out to me and tumbled him on to the ground.”

“I should say that if Wilde had begun to discover the secrets of his life to me, he knew nothing as yet of mine; I had taken care to give him no hint of them, either by deed or word.”…”No doubt, since my adventure at Sousse, there was not much left for the Adversary to do to complete his victory over me; but Wilde did not know this, nor that I was vanquished beforehand or, if you will”…”that I had already triumphed in my imagination and my thoughts over all my scruples.”

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The Line of Beauty – film version

We read the book in December 2013 and our review is here.

What it is to be good-looking (many of the cast are; others are hideous) and charming, able to bed anyone you want, and to get away with not contracting HIV (though I can’t believe hs was still virgin after graduation – this was the 1980s not the 1950s). The character of Nick Guest is well played, his naivety but also his wordly-wise behaviour.

Some of the tories are even half-likeable, like the women who thinks that ‘oral sex’ means kissing. Others are utterly despicable.

The religious kitsch in Leo’s mother’s house has tpo be seen to be believed.

The film version seems to be faithful to the book, though one of our members thought that it ‘flattened it out.’ Nick is more likeable in the film than in the book. The film accentuates his care for Fedden’s bipolar daughter whereas the book portrays him as a calculating ‘user’.

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The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst

This novel works as a satire on the 1980s but we wonder why Hollinghurst is obsessed with wealth whether it be old money like the old man in his ‘The Swimming Pool Library’ or by the new money of those who made good under Thatcher. Money talks more than establishment: Bishops don’t earn much.

This book is full of unpleasant people and tories (are they synonymous?) so it comes no surprise that: Catherine said Gerald despised his constituents. `If only you didn’t have to be MP for somewhere,’ she said, `Gerald would be completely happy. You know he loathes Barwick, don’t you.’ Nick had laughed at this, but wondered if his ‘dear ma and pa were in fact exempt from the loathing.

Not that tory MPs are out of touch: The sport of welly-whanging was unknown in the Surrey of Gerald’s youth, as it was of course in contemporary Notting Hill; the only wellies he ever touched in middle life were the green ones unhoused from the basement passage for winter weekends with country friends.

Nick embodies a cold age, an age of the calculating outsider, where everybody uses everybody else. He comes from a prosperous but not cultured background, like many of the parvenus of the period. Does this background make him paranoid or is that because he’s done so much drugs? His relationship with the mad daughter Catherine redeems him. His surname is ‘Guest’. He is not treated very well as a guest, particularly when he is no longer ‘useful’ to the tory family. Then again, he does outstay his welcome, somewhat.

The nastiness becomes ever more obvious towards the end: He was warm with indignation, and a new combative in excitement. Barry Groom had no idea of the life they n this house. ‘I suppose I’d have to say,’ said Gerald, ‘that it was an error of judgement. Untypical — I’m a pretty sharp judge of character as a rule. But yes . . . an error.’

`It’s an error you’ve paid a very high price for,’ said Barry Groom unrelentingly.

`He was a friend of the children, you know. We’ve always had an open-door policy towards the children’s friends.’

Hmm,’ said Barry, who had publicly disinherited his son Quentin ‘on principle’, to make him learn about money from scratch. ‘Well, I never trusted him. I can tell you that, unequivocally. I know the type. Never says anything — always nursing his little criticisms. I remember sitting next to him after dinner here, years ago, and thinking, you don’t fit in here, do you, you little cocksucker, you’re out of your depth. And I’ll tell you something else: he knew that. I could see he wished he was upstairs with the women.’

`Oh . . .’ said Gerald, in wan protest. ‘We always got along all right, you know.’

`So fucking superior.’ Barry Groom swore harshly and humourlessly, as if swearing were the guarantee of any unpalat­able truth. It was just what he’d done that night, after dinner, with an effect Nick could still remember, of having absolutely no style. ‘They hate us, you know, they can’t breed themselves, they’re parasites on generous fools who can. Crawling to you, crawling to the fucking Ouradis. I’m not remotely surprised he led your poor lovely daughter astray like this, exploited her, there’s no other word for it. A typical homo trick, of course.’ Gerald murmured something, with an effect of grumpy submission. Nick stood clenched by the door, leaning forward slightly, as if about to knock, in a novel confusion of feelings, anger at Gerald’s failure to support him, and a strange delighted hatred of Barry Groom. Barry was a multiple adul­terer and ex-bankrupt — to be hated by him was surely a mark of probity. But Gerald . . . well, Gerald, for all his failings, was a friend.

The vocabulary is somewhat pretentious. What is ‘matutinal steel’? (Clue: Matins) It’s a morning shave. And a stockbroker deal is ‘solemnised’.

There is some good observation: The pub itself was shut, bleared light came out through plastic sheeting as work went on after hours, a new brewery had bought it, they were knocking the little old bars into one big room to make it more spacious and unwelcoming.

Four months after discussing the book, we saw the film version – our review is here.

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Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar by Culm Tóibín

We like this author very much. Here, he looks at various authors and the various influences on their lives.

For Jorge Luis Borges being homosexual is like being Jewish, being in a ‘state of permanent niggerdom’. Those who came out of liberated concentration camps still wearing a pink triangle were rearrested and reincarcerated. Jews and Northern Irish Catholics have had a chance to work out the implications of their oppression but gays have no history. ‘Pathological and homosexual’ are almost synonyms. Kafka, a Jew in Prague, exhibited and hid.

Oscar Wilde was alone in prison 24 hours a day, not allowed to speak during exercise, had no writing paper, had problems with his ears and eyes. His plank bed induced insomnia and he could hardly escape becoming insane. In all this he played out the role of the tragic queer.

Roget Casement had read Heart of Darkness and wanted Conrad’s support. His diary mentioned the beauty of boys and he moved from pervert to invert, from using boys to getting them to use him. Conrad thought this was not in keeping with the aims of empire. After reading the Imitation of Christ he became a Roman Catholic and received his first communion on the day of his execution. It has been suggested that his enemies forged his diary to blacken his character.

Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull was homoerotic.  Homosexuality was part of his German heritage and his sons were more secure in their homosexuality than he was.

Bacon made no attempt to hide so people wrote about his unsatisfactory relationships (‘The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon’), his unhappy childhood, his low-life friends, his masochism, how he was jealous of his nanny’s soldier boyfriend, that he was locked in cupboard and did not ask the mirror why he wasn’t normal.

Elizabeth Bishop thought she had to write ‘precious’ poetry, that it was risky to use a word like ‘heavens’ and that ‘Oxford graduates smell’

James Baldwin’s work is about more important things than age or race or sexuality. His ‘high-faggot style is a mixture of the King James Version of the Bible and African-American. His father died when he was 19, after chilling in the pulpit, being cruel at home. He threw jug of water at a waitress who said that ‘niggers are not served here’. He believed that only mass conversion can change things, that it is too subtle merely to be an angry black man, merely a negro writer. He castigated the dishonesty of Greenwich Village and Paris. His was dangerously explicit writing for 1951, where a black man hanged from tree and his genitals cut off. He was not at home in the Civil Rights movement as it was hostile to homosexuals.

 Pedro Almodovar is covered though I was disappointed that his films are not mentioned. Born in 1951, he enjoyed reading lives of saints and Gregorian chants but he disliked the priests’ Religious Education. In 1960s, people behaved as if Franco was already dead yet the film school was shut down, Military service was a nightmare and he spoke to nobody for 12 months. His long hair was considered scandalous.  He loves managing chaos as long as he can control it.

Mary Kenny has lived in London for 20 years so she is out of touch with Ireland. She mentions a Roman Catholic priest who dies in gay sauna – another two priests were there to give him the last rites.

This book is well worth reading though those who know more literature than I will get more out of it than I did.

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The Liar – Stephen Fry

Sometimes I find Stephen Fry amusing but at other times I get annoyed by his smart-Alec-know-it-all, smug remarks. It’s as if other people didn’t exist except as extras

In this book, I like his description of the usefulness of boarding schools to keep spotty adolescents away from rest of society. He describes Trefusis’s labyrinth with books everywhere and suggests that Books are not holy relics; one may as well collect bubble gum cards (to write in), the banter of intelligent boys and masters who remain infantile. Dr. Meddlar the moralising chaplain later caught on the Dilly meat rack up to no good. (Piccadilly Circus is like a bath plughole – empire shrank so more dirty water) Other examples of hypocrisy include ex-public school boys in parliament going on about immorality.

He is getting sex but wanting love so he learns Cartwright’s timetable off by heart

Of  his later experience at a 6^th form college: the stupid college called pupils ‘students’ and lessons ‘lectures’

Witty remarks include never meeting people like you except when you are in court and then they’re wearing a wig, coming in a jiffy, ‘Too many cocks spoil the brothel’, ‘yes, I’m very good at reading.’ ‘Then keep off the grass.’

Pertinent observations include: Market forces should mean more lecturers not fewer. Are you listening, Michael Gove?

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Johnny Come Home – Jake Arnott

The 1970s Yorkshire TV documentary Johnny Go Home showed teenage runaways forced into prostitution in places such as the Playland amusement arcade in Piccadilly Circus. This novel looks at the underworld of rent boys and pop music.

 The author says he was “living on nothing in Leeds, before he got any kind of break. He’d completed an earlier manuscript (‘My great squat novel,’ he says, smiling. ‘It had the word “crepuscular” in the second paragraph’) which collected a neat stack of rejection slips, and he was pushing forty when his book came out.”

 The book was withdrawn from sale owing to the presence of bandleader Tony Rocco; there is a real former bandleader of that name, who objected to the character’s name. The book was reissued with the character’s name changed to Timothy Royal

Stephen Pearson is a hippy involved on the fringes of the anarchist Angry Brigade and he lives in a squat with his lover O’Connell, and when O’Connell commits suicide, their lesbian housemate Nina worries about how he will cope but his grief changed to lust. He knows Sweet Thing is trouble but he has compassion and he tells Nina that for all the political slogans, here’s a boy who actually needs help.

 Sweet Thing is an androgynous beauty, though he describes himself as “not bent, rent” and sees the world as a commodity. “I don’t want to be free,” he says when Pearson tries to explain gay liberation, “I want to be expensive.” He could just as easily been a working class house painter, he looked beautiful, desirable. The ‘ones who want to save you are easiest as you don’t have to do anything.’ He is paid a weekly retainer to service unstable pop star Johnny Chrome, enabling him to perform in the recording studio as well as on ‘Top of the Pops’. (Chrome is obviously Gary Glitter (and Rocco is Jonny King who was jailed for under-age sex. In the Surrey Disco/teen scene Kenny Morton was Bay City Rollers Manager Tam Paton) He is superstitious about sleeping in a dead man’s room, he thinks he can bring tricks back to the squat. Nina sees him as moody, full of hurt yet a cherub. He understood capitalism at a visceral level – his body was trade. Cash was a sensual pleasure: he desired nothing more than to spend it as quickly as possible. He is suspicious if signing a contract. He sees helping Angel with money as an investment – someone might help him out one day. He’d been on the streets since he was 14 and in children’s homes. He disagrees that he is being exploited – THEY are paying. He didn’t believe in ‘free love’ – it might cost him dearly. Hugging is a hippy thing. He loved nicking things from shops. He feels vulnerable as never before when having sex with Nina: it made him soft and weak, not hard and strong and she tells him, ‘You’re a lost boy.’ Someone interfering with his mind is worse than interfering with his body.

O’Connell, Pearson’s lover, never liked goodbyes, reckoned he’d fucked up his life so he didn’t want to fuck up his suicide. He was an autodidact. He identifies with Judas: the anointing at Bethany story makes connection with punters; Judas is as egotistic as glam rock star Rocky. ‘Before the cock is up’ Jesus’s arrest in a park with cruisers has been sparked by Judas’s kiss – importuning. Judas walked through the city of night

Nina is torn between her commitment to radical lesbianism and the attractions of the rent boy. She could fake an orgasm but come properly alone. He was interested in Reich’s free love. Doing it with a woman it made her feel more herself but it was not love but a political act. Liberation became another orthodoxy. She reckoned that war is menstruation envy. During orgasm she was calling out to a god she doesn’t believe in

Nina’s dad was a Communist chemist who regarded recreational drugs as misusing chemistry. He sees his daughter dropping out of university as throwing her life away

 The Political acts seem more like public schoolboy pranks: Prank phone calls, stink bombs in churches, porn in libraries. ‘The only choice in consumerism is refusal to pay.’ ‘If you’re not busy being born you’re busy buying.’ ‘In fashion as in everything else, capitalism can only go backwards’ – prescient of post-modernism. We get the typical in-fighting and falling apart among the left. Suicide bombings are a warning of the future and there’s talk of wanting to bomb Vietnam ‘back into the Stone Age.’ (cf. Afghanistan.)

An uncorrected proofreading copy gave me Society of the Spectacle – not ‘and’

Larry Parnes actually existed and died in 1989. Larry gave white T shirt if he wanted a man, black if he was up for grabs. ‘Don’t put out until you’ve got what you want.’

‘He felt so alone, like Ruth among the alien corn’ so he self-harmed with cigarette ends. He needed glam ‘Sweet Thing to tell him how to do it’ because he was ‘not just any boy’ he liked to be throttled

Berkovitch dresses a rock star in silver-stacked boots, spangled jumpsuits, outrageous wigs and relaunches him as ‘Johnny Chrome’, the ‘Liberace of Glamrock’. He wears the ubiquitous flares of the period and talks Polari: riah = hair

Detective Sergeant Walker was a member of the Metropolitan Police Force’s “hippy squad”, charged with infiltrating groups like the Angry Brigade.  He knows slogans but doesn’t understand ‘I have purchased a field of blood’. Rumour had it that informers were paid off with drugs hitherto seized. He is shocked by the word ‘over’

The style, one of our members complained, is simply: this happened, then that happened. However, this describes life for most of us. Compare this with Douglas Cooper’s Generation X. Then again, reflect that situationist works were densely written yet basically espoused simple ideas. Is the novel laying claim to being “A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.” The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself. Then consider the following Situationist quotations and see how they might be reflected in this book:

“Live without dead time”
“I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires” -What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see — whether it likes it or not! — when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift; a growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving them away”
“Be realistic – demand the impossible!”
“Beneath the paving stones – the beach!”
“Never work”
“Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth”

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Just Above My Head – James Baldwin

(We have not discussed this in the group but it was a ‘spin off’ from one of our meetings about the author and this review is in a personal capacity.)

This is a very atmospheric novel. One can hear the singing and sighing of the Black Pentecostal church, can sell the toilet, taste the kind of food someone has eaten and which infuses their sperm, can feel the wet hair from the rain, which is harder for black people to dry because of their ‘natty’ hair.

The King James Bible is never far from people’s memories: “pressed down, and running over.”  Nor are the spirituals – source of consolation and empowerment.

Eldridge Cleaver said that Baldwin’s fiction is finally “void of a political, economic, or even a social reference.”  Maybe this novel is Baldwin’s attempt to answer such criticism. People’s stories are told against the background of the civil rights movement. We see the human cost of a murder, the devastation caused by death and bereavement of whole families. Frustrating events like taxi drivers not giving rides to black people and big events like the Ku Klux Klan and racist police mar everyday life and explain the ‘chip on your shoulder’ which many black people are accused of having.

Sexual acts are very graphic, though some are dark and some innocent. The father who ‘uses’ his thirteen-year-old daughter for sex after his wife has died explains that it is normal and that all girls want their daddies.

The teenage boy’s first sexual experience is told in such a way that we feel his emotions and his fear that, in oral sex, his partner might bite off his member.

There is a good description of a man’s feelings about casual sex versus sex within a loving relationship: “And I had fucked everything I could get my hands on overseas, including two of my drinking buddies. I had been revolted—but this was after, not before, the act. Before the act, when I realized from their eyes what was happening, I had adored being the adored male, and stretched out on it, all boyish muscle and throbbing cock, telling myself, What the hell, it beats jerking off. And I had loved it—the adora­tion, the warm mouth, the tight ass, the fact that nothing at all was demanded of me except that I shoot my load, which I was very, very happy to do. And I was revolted when it was over, not merely because it really was not for me, but because I had used somebody merely as a receptacle and had allowed myself to be used merely as a thing. I was revolted that my need had driven me, as I considered it, so low: nevertheless, my need had driven me and could drive me there again. And what did a woman feel? I had never asked myself this question before. Women like it as much as men, okay, and a stiff prick has no conscience, okay again, but that merely justifies a grim indolence. I could spend my whole life in that posture and be found standing at this jukebox when Gabriel’s trumpet sounded, at an angle to the music and at an angle to my life.

“So then, for the first time, I wondered about love and wondered if I would find in myself the strength to give love, and to take it: to accept my nakedness as sacred, and to hold sacred the nakedness of another. For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure’s inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours.

“Then I suspected why death was so terrible, and love so feared—glimpsed an abyss and closed my eyes and shud­dered: but I had seen it.”

I was particularly interested in his musings upon the role of memory:

“I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden—the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly pos­sible—indeed, it is common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.

“This cannot be done by memory, but by looking toward tomorrow, and so, to undo the horror, we repeat it.”

“If one wishes to be instructed–not that anyone does–concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one’s head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems…
How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?…Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true–anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other–beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn’t, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you’re out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.”

Also interesting was the musing upon the self-knowledge required of a writer: YOU have sensed my fatigue and my panic, certainly, if you have followed me until now, and you can guess how terrified I am to be approaching the end of my story. It was not meant to be my story, though it is far more my story than I would have thought, or might have wished. I have wondered, more than once, why I started it, but—I know why. It is a love song to my brother. It is an attempt to face both love and death.

I have been very frightened, for: I have had to try to strip myself naked. One does not like what one sees then, and one is afraid of what others will see: and do. To challenge one’s deepest, most nameless fears, is, also, to challenge the heavens. It is to drag yourself, and everyone and everything and everyone you love, to the attention of the fiercest of the gods: who may not forgive your impertinence, who may not spare you. All that I can offer in extenuation of my boldness is my love.

I cannot say that every page completely absorbed me but many pages did.

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The Less-Dead by April Lurie

(We have not discussed this in the group but it was a ‘spin off’ from one of our meetings and this review is in a personal capacity.)

The less-dead are people whose deaths don’t seem to matter since they have no loved-ones to miss them. This is a detective story in which your friend might be your evenly and your enemy might be your friend. Who can you trust? What’s not to like?

The narrator is a straight teenager who, like most teenagers, is embarrassed by his father: with good reason since he is an evangelical preacher.

Someone who was formerly a member of the infamous ‘God hates fags’ Westboro’ Baptist church is suspected of being a serial murderer of gays. This unsettles the narrator’s father since he had tried to counsel this man. The narrator has invited a homeless gay teenager to his home and his father tries to help.

The hypocrisy of the ‘no sex before marriage’ rule is exposed – a convert says it is OK if he fornicates and then repents, and maybe repeats the process.

The failure of Exodus groups to change men’s sexual orientation and the misery such attempts cause is well portrayed.

In the back of her book, the author explains how the Bible’s ‘6 clobber texts’ against homosexuality are taken out of context and don’t mean what they appear, in the surface, to mean. However, scholarship as moved on and the evangelical understanding of these texts is much more nuanced but I did enjoy that prohibition against touching dead pig’s meat as meaning that football because it is an abomination! I also learned that Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority strove against Martin Luther King, claiming that racial integration was ‘the work of the devil that would destroy our race eventually.’

This female author has a lot of insight into the minds of teenage boys, both gay and straight. Her story should appeal to teenagers, though some American culture and background doesn’t appeal so much across the pond. evangelicals often speak of people ‘struggling with homosexuality’. At the back of this book there is a list of useful (American) websites for people ‘struggling with fundamentalism (and homophobia).’

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