Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (34 page)

It is quite likely that
Sex
will scare up a political response on the national as well as the socio-sexual level. The Woody Allen story broke in August during the Republican Convention in Houston, where Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson were somehow permitted to frame the party's recklessly militant 'family values' platform. The GOP is already backpedalling from its assaults on every domestic configuration that fell outside the traditional family — after it learned that the traditional family accounts for only 14 per cent of the American population. On the following day Woody Allen jokes were being freely tossed around the convention hall (Woody's upcoming projects, it was said, were
Close Encounters with the Third Grade
and
Honey, I Fucked the Kids).
There was even talk of 'the Woody Horton possibility': Allen might embarrass the Democrats just as Willie Horton — the black convict who violently recidivated on a Dukakis-sponsored weekend furlough — had destroyed them in 1988.

Madonna would certainly be fair quarry in a campaign which finds single-parent TV-sitcom characters worthy of attack. Republican moralism is after all a blunt weapon (its intention here is simply to show that 'left-wing' sexuality can often look like a mess); and never mind, for now, the far-right video vicars who are regularly discovered on the floors of hot-sheets motel bedrooms, under a heap of hookers and forged tax-returns. For the sex that
Sex
celebrates is not only vigorously perverse but also highly conceptualised. The fact that Madonna regards the book as essentially
comic —
even the S/M poses are 'meant to be funny' - shows how overevolved and tangential her own sexuality has become. And although love gets a single approving mention, there is no suggestion that younger readers should get some corny erotic normality behind them, before delving into all this glazed and minatory aestheticism. More generally, and more personally, there is the feeling that
Sex
is no more than the desperate confection of an ageing scandal-addict who, with this book, merely confirms that she is exhausting her capacity to shock.

The defence will run as follows. Madonna's little clones have all grown up now, and have not been replaced by the current wave of teens - who, Time Warner suggests, will be adequately deterred anyway by the book's civic-minded price tag. Madonna's audience, like Madonna, has always been a shifting thing: teen girls, teen boys, gay men, and now young and not-so-young women in the twenty-forty range. And it is to this last group that
Sex
is apparently directed. As Warner's Nanscy Lieman appealingly puts it: 'The few men who have seen the book are definitely intrigued. But the women take one look and go [inhalation then exhalation]: "Sshh. Oooh." ' In this version,
Sex
streaks like a tracer bullet through the dark sky of female sexual fantasy.

Erotica and pornography are male preserves, made by men for other men; there is nothing out there for women, except the joke beefcake of
Playgirl,
itself a crude transposition of a male idea. And here Madonna is, as always, on the crest of the contemporary: post-modern, post-feminist, she is the Woman of the Year of the Woman, incorporating Babe Power with the older, simpler Have It All credo of
Cosmopolitan.
This is womanhood without sisterhood. This is imaginative self-reliance.

Female sexual fantasy, or so men tend to believe, has always been a constrained and limited arena. Whereas the fierce specialisation of male erotica attests to a ridiculously detailed repertoire (a magazine shelf for every breast-size and leg-length), the female equivalent seems, or seemed, to be confined to variations on the theme of helplessness. In the staple, text-book example, the woman dreamed of abduction and rape (so that if she enjoyed it, it wasn't her fault), usually at the hands of some glistening exotic (who was therefore outside her own society). Such a story-line is clearly a relic — but where do we go from here? For the politically-correct, feminist-approved sexual reverie is just as obviously a contradiction in terms: person meets person on an equal-pay protest march; he is caring and respects her space; over a nut cutlet she frames the parameters of her erotic needs; he doesn't see a problem . . . Sshh. Oooh.

Half-unconsciously, gathering up all her pop-cultural inklings, Madonna may be on to something with
Sex —
on to something apart from more money and notoriety and everything else she already has to the point of boredom and embarrassment. The polymorphous perverse, the infantile mishmash of what can arouse us, may now be unprece-dentedly perverse but it is no longer polymorphous. It has exact and fixable shape (in two dimensions, anyway). It is made up of images. Take male homo-eroticism. The conventional notion used to be that the male liked thinking about two women together (the two women would, of course, drop everything if the male thinker actually appeared on stage), but the female didn't like thinking about two men together, because she more modestly assumed that she wasn't wanted or needed, and could not respond to something that seemed to exclude her. And the male-gay subculture felt darker, more hidden, more forbidding (and less legal) than its female counterpart. But this world, along with every other, is now part of our common currency of images and triggers, part of the visual babble we carry round in our heads. Sex is in the head. And the head has never been so crowded, or so hot, or so noisy.

From the start Madonna has included pornography in her unique array of cultural weaponry — because she understands its modern, industrial nature. In terms of dollar turnover, pornography in America is bigger than music and movies combined; it is bigger (and I don't know if I find this less or more amazing) than the motor industry. That she has utilised this huge and shadowy power is a tribute, not just to her flair for manipulation, but to her innate amorality - her talent for ruthlessness. The elements of the popular culture that she has melded together may look random and indiscriminate. In fact, they could have been assembled by a corporate computer: pornography, religion, multi-ethnicity, transsexuality, kitsch, camp, worldly power, self-parody and self-invention.

This last is perhaps the most important. Madonna's protean quality, her ability to redesign herself (evident in each new photo shoot: baby-doll, dominatrix, flower-child, vamp), represents an emphasis of will over talent. Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from
wanting
it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.

Alone among celebrities, she seldom talks about the real or private self that she supposedly reverts to when out of the public eye. A good deal of superstar neurosis is probably caused by such futile quests for the innocent original (though a psychotherapist has recently joined Madonna's entourage, maybe with a brief to root out this tiny phantom). Otherwise she is the self-sufficient post-modern phenomenon ('even her
publicity
gets publicity'), a masterpiece of controlled illusion. She has held nothing back. Her love life has long devolved into a mixture of adult soap and public relations. After this, it is no great wrench to detach your sexuality — your most intimate thoughts, your most delicate susceptibilities - and throw it into the mix.

Observer, 1992

V. S. PRITCHETT'S CENTURY

He meets you at the turn in the stairs, with an expression of mild apology and embarrassment. It's as if he expects the visitor to be astonished — even scandalised — by how well he is looking these days. He seems to say as much. And then he goes ahead and says it: 'I know. Yes, well, I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just
stuck,
I'm afraid.' He stands there intact and entire. Time and gravity have merely made him look sculpted-downwards, out of wood. You might find this face on the totem pole of an Amerindian tribe, long-vanished, perhaps, but widely famed for its pacifism and its compelling cosmogony.

Urged on by Lady Pritchett, who manages everything (she is prodigiously handsome and vigorous), we moved into the sitting-room. The house was autumnal in light and tang - unlike many a furnace of the elderly - and the Pritchetts were recovering, or regrouping, after a three-week visit from Eudora Welty, who journeyed there from Jackson, Mississippi. This sounded like a scoop, or a literary fantasy. And did these two veteran heavyweights talk obsessively about the art they had both mastered, that of the short story? 'No,' said Dorothy Pritchett. 'They talked about everything but. They talked about the
Algonquin.'
V.S.P. resignedly concurs. Everyone calls him V.S.P. And Dorothy sometimes calls him 'Vsp'.

For a while we gossipped in our turn, children, grandchildren, then the illnesses and deaths of people much younger than V.S.P., including the ex-occupant of the next-but-one house along Regents Park Terrace, A.J. Ayer. Frances Partridge has said that this is one of the great consternations of longevity: how the deaths of your own generation are followed by the deaths of the generation that came after, while you remain. 'It's all the wrong way round,' said V.S.P., who admits to finding the prospect of a tenth decade 'very shocking'. Dorothy brought coffee and joined us for the interview. She is not his eyes or his ears or his arms and his legs, all of which he still has. She is his memory. 'It's in patches,' he says, and gives his fizzy laugh.

It would gratify me to claim that V.S.P. and I go back a way. But it can't seem very far back to him. I was twenty-five. He was seventy-five, and considered to be 'marvellous' for his age even then. This is what impressed and assailed me throughout our meeting: a sense of depth. Depth of genius, certainly, but first of all depth of time. The interview was taking place in the year 1990; yet Pritchett grew up in a London still recovering from Jack the Ripper. The title of his first volume of autobiography,
A Cab at the Door,
fully evokes his origins: improvisation, hurried departure, resolute gentility. Those peripatetic Pritchetts may be leaving a lot of unpaid bills, but they are making their exit via the front door, not the back, and by cab, not on foot. And the cab, of course, is horse-drawn.

The young Victor emerged from 'a set of story tellers and moralists' (and savage eccentrics); his mother was a superexpressive illiterate, his father a clothes-horse and debt-dodger: and his milieu was that of 'trade', whose antiquity is best expressed by its humble grammar: 'short jobs in the drapery', 'put into the millinery', 'had lately become shopwalker in Daniels'. Pritchett was obliged to leave school early, for the usual reasons. During the Great War he worked in a leather factory in Bermondsey. Nicknamed 'the Professor' at home, where he had the status of 'a tolerated joke', he left for Paris at the age of nineteen. And so Pritchett lit out for a life of mental travel, in which he was free to reinvent himself.

He now sports the settled persona of the refined, understated, omnicultured mid-century litterateur, with his heavily qualified speech ('rather', 'quite', 'slightly') and his reserved yet caressing good manners. The bitternesses associated with poverty, class, early turbulence and the autodidact's solitude have long been assimilated. And this aura of twinkly equanimity, of aged saintliness, has in my view tended to neutralise his reputation — which, although considerable, is inadequate and misemphasised. V.S.P. is a grand old man; he is marvellous; may he live to be a hundred! His reputation is a haven of elegance, civility and quiet. But the essential Pritchett isn't like that at all. It is noisy, dangerous and beautifully awkward. It is visionary.

One of the many hats or masks that Pritchett wears is that of our senior literary critic. Here as elsewhere, though, he is a rampant instinctivist. Innocent of theory, espousing no tradition, his criticism is always doing all the
don'ts:
it is a mixture of generous connoisseurship and inspired psychology. Travel-writer, biographer, novelist, essayist, as happy with P.G. Wodehouse as with Antoine de Saint-Exupery -Pritchett looks protean, but really his genius is indivisible. He is a teller of stories.

'I think I can hit upon a writer's voice quite well,' he said. 'Then I find myself inventing a story about the book. Which is itself a story.'

'And
your
stories - they're the main thing, aren't they?'

'Oh, the stories to me are absolutely everything. I can't write novels. I have written novels, but they're not good. But the stories I think are sometimes good.'

'Yes, I think they're sometimes good, too.'

Naturally, one was falling in with the Pritchett style:

one was putting it mildly. But at that point I was only beginning to establish a final sense of
bow
good his stories are. Like many 'younger' readers (the word is used comparatively, and advisedly), I had picked up on Pritchett with the famous collections
Blind Love
(1969) and
The Camberwell Beauty
(1974). It quickly became clear to me that Pritchett was a writer of alarming clairvoyance: he had instant and unlimited access to the hearts and minds of so-called ordinary people. On the other hand there was a feeling that this genius was manageably minor, too febrile and amorphous, and somehow adrift in time and space: his was a shadowland of frumps and vamps, winking barmen, venomous valets, drunken matriarchs, venal quacks, lodgers, chamberpots, consumption and the smell of mouse.

This impression had survived the odd encounter with earlier stories in various Pritchett
Selecteds
and
Collecteds
and
Readers
and
Best of
s
.
But now 1 was spending eight hours a day with
The Complete Short Stories,
and feeling the delightful pressure of its strength-in-depth. The book is hefty, practically cuboid (1,200 pages), and some reviewers have claimed difficulty in placing it on their laps. A better challenge would be to place it in world literature. In any case one is crushed by the weight of achievement. The volume, like the stories, comes up on you the other way: from a million little epiphanies Pritchett builds something vast. There may be half-a-dozen prose writers born in this century who could cobble together some kind of rival omnibus. But none of them is English.