Walking in the Shade (53 page)

I look back on tangles of misunderstanding. Men whom I liked, with whom I intended friendship, imagined I was in love and were confused when refused, became huffy, were hurt:
Why did she lead me on?
Men who I hoped would see I fancied them did not know it, since the signs were so well camouflaged by general mateyness. The free-and-easy, anything goes of the fifties, and then the sixties, obscured genuine emotions, attractions, repulsions. If there is a convention that easy sex is a sign of general liberation, civilisation, and equality, then what happens to all the subtle to-and-fro, the natural affinities and antipathies—real sex, in short?

To add to the confusion, I enjoyed flirting, but then I don't see that as any more than a pleasant game, an agreeable convention. Well, it is in some parts of the world. Recently I met a couple of young Mexican women who had gone to Canada and the United States for a holiday. Used to the flattering attention of men and to the pleasures of flirting, they soon wondered what was wrong with them: had they lost all their looks and their charm? Enquiring of a sympathetic male friend, they were told, ‘You don't understand: men can't show they find women attractive any longer; they may find themselves in prison.'

My most bizarre sexual encounter was with Ken Tynan. I had gone with him to the theatre and then to some party of actors winding down after a performance. Ken was the star, shedding witticisms and benevolent advice and criticism. Then it was very late, and he suggested I stay the night in Mount Street. The young of every generation have to imagine they have invented casual ways, but the innocent sharing of beds did not begin in the sixties. Not once, nor twice, have I spent a friendly night with some man because we haven't finished our conversation or because he missed the last train. Never, not for the slice of a second, had there been sexual attraction between Ken and me. I cannot imagine two human beings less likely to make each other's pulses flutter. I had often been in the Tynan bedroom, because it was where we left coats during parties. I came back from the bathroom to get into bed beside companionable Ken, and suddenly the bedroom walls had been grotesquely transformed, for on them were arranged every sort of whip, as if in a whip museum. Now, you'd think, wouldn't you, that Ken would say, ‘Are you wondering what all those whips are doing there?' Or I would say, ‘Now, about those whips, Ken?' Not at all; there we lay, side by side, conversing agreeably about a hundred things, but certainly politics, because that was our favourite subject. I used to tell him he was romantic, not to say sentimental, and ignorant, and he complained I was cynical and lacking faith in humanity. I remember an occasion when he summoned me to a meeting to discuss how to protest about something, I forget what, with several prominent people. I said I found this business of celebrities ‘sitting down' in public to fast as a protest absurd and laughable, because everyone knew that the moment the ‘fast' was over we would all be off to a five-star restaurant. Ken thought I was lacking in any instinct for publicity, and he was afraid I often showed reactionary tendencies.

And so we fell asleep and were woken by a female menial bringing breakfast on two trays. (Ken refused to cook, and so did Elaine Dundy. Neither knew how to boil an egg, they proudly claimed, and they always ate in restaurants. Even breakfast was brought in.) Then she tidied away the whips.

The same sort of thing happened to me with other well-known men—whose names I am withholding—but Ken not only made no secret of his tastes but flaunted them. He took to extremes the didact's need to believe that everyone must be the same as himself, describing his somewhat perverse musical
Oh, Calcutta
as ‘after-dinner entertainment for civilised people'.

A scene: A party in Mount Street. Ken is confronting a young actress, newly arrived in London. He is trying to persuade her that her refusal to accept whips and associated delights was because she had been taught prejudice.

‘You have been conditioned,' says Ken, his stammer reinforcing his pedagogical self. He towers over her while she smiles delightfully up at him.

‘But, Ken,' she murmurs, ‘I don't enjoy it.'

He is checked, but the force of his need to instruct carries him on. ‘You have been taught to think that there is only one way of having sex.'

‘I wouldn't exactly say only one….' She smiles, earning applause from the listening party-goers.

‘Only one kind,' says Ken, and is probably on the point of launching into informational anecdotes from Greece and Rome and the Lord knows where else, but she again says firmly, ‘Ken, I don't enjoy it.'

And now one may observe the switch in him from the teacher to the wit. ‘I must protest that you have unfairly silenced me,' says Ken. ‘I have no more to say. How, logically, could I have? How could you not have my blessing? Enjoy, then, my darling.'

It is a disconcerting thing for a more or less normal woman, after having enjoyed dinner and chat about literature, the theatre, politics, to find one's host suggesting a little diversion with whips, as if saying, ‘A drop of port, perhaps? Or I have some nice dessert wine.' Or even producing the whips—once it was a sjambok, always irresistible to sadomasochists—and reacting to a refusal as if it were you, not he, who was a little strange.

The following little tale is here because of the talk about black men's superiority in bed. White women lusting after black penises is one of the myths furnishing the colonial mind, and I was listening to variations on the myth as I grew up. And then this particular incident happened at a time when the prowess of black studs was much vaunted, because for some reason the superiority of black people's sexuality (men and women both) had become part of ‘progressive' thinking.

A certain exiled black writer was putting in his time in London. He pursued me for months, full of ardour; he loved me, he could not sleep for thinking of me. Sighs and suffering, the language of romantic despair—the lot. Now, I had never been to bed with a black man. This was because I did not really fancy them. You could say it was my early conditioning, if it were not that the same conditioning has produced people, but I think mostly men, who yearn for black flesh. It was because of pity for his state that I eventually gave in, expecting to assuage a painful passion. The actual sexual contact lasted perhaps three minutes, and then he fell asleep. His snores were such as I had never heard before nor have since. I removed myself to another bed and slept peacefully till morning. When I took him in a cup of tea he was uxorious and complacent. Then he saw I had not slept beside him and demanded to know why. The inhibitions of a proper upbringing—‘You must
never
hurt people's feelings'—intervened, and I murmured, ‘You were snoring.' He seemed surprised. Having drunk his tea, he dressed and said that he was so happy. He then resumed his romantic pursuit—telephone calls, passionate letters, encounters in the street, where he had been lying in wait. I cannot help feeling that all this romantic passion of his had derived from literature. I have sometimes caught a certain ironical look on the faces of black women friends when told of the amorous fame of their partners. But perhaps I was unlucky.

Another occasion I remember with shame. This was a black man too, and he was from Jamaica. Madly in love, he was, and his pursuit was lengthy and exhaustive. Remembering my previous experience, I kept saying no, and then at last I thought, as women may do, Oh, for God's sake, what am I making such a fuss about, if it means so much to him? I took off all my clothes—and then I put them on again, for by now I was thinking, Why the hell should I, when I don't want to? This was a terrible thing to do. Cruel. As my mother might have said, though in a somewhat different context, There are things a decent woman doesn't do.

There was a theatre director who was as queer as they come, and famously so, with whom I shared the easy friendship women do with some homosexuals. A rumbunctious sexual romp of a play was running,
Lock Up Your Daughters
, and in it was the line, ‘When is the ravishing going to start?' I am descending a staircase, glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and this suitor stops me by gripping both my arms while he stands in front of me, demanding, ‘And
when
is the ravishing going to start?' A joke, you'd think, but no, for a time whenever we met he'd accost me, by now full of accusation, saying, ‘It is your duty to initiate me into the joys of this heterosexual sex we hear so much about.'

And now an embattled subject, American men. Things may very well have changed, for they always do, but in those days a lot of comparisons were being made, invidious or not. A woman cannot have as bed partners first a man from the centre of Europe and then one from America, both womanisers on principle, without brooding about differences. I say ‘womanisers' and not ‘lovers of women' here, because no one could accuse—then—Americans of that willing if sometimes whimsical subjection to the magics and manias of love that we call romance. All the Americans I knew had a certain attitude to sex—let's not call it love—and they all played a role. Mensch. Tough guys. Where did it come from? I think, like jazz and a lot else in American culture, from black culture. A real man loves them and leaves them—no, fucks them and leaves them. There was something willed about it and something joyless. A practical lot, they are, down to earth. Or were. Now, the essence—surely—of this masculine woman-haver-and-subduer is something active, dominant, is one who sets the pace and draws the boundaries. But as we all know, extremes meet, and extremes turn into their opposites.

Imagine a room and in it several women, all European, and it is the mid-sixties. We are talking about American men. We have all had American lovers—no, bedfellows—and two of us have actually had, or been had by, the same man. It is not common, this kind of conversation between women—or it wasn't then—and it all happened by chance. There we were, ten or so of us…the talk led from one thing to another. The conclusions I am offering are too comprehensive to be the result of only one woman's researches.

Would we all agree that American men loved with their heads and not their hearts? Absolutely; their hearts were not involved. Would we agree that in those heads was a blueprint for behaviour with women, in bed and out of it, and they performed—or fucked—not from some deep instinct or (perish the thought) the need to express love, but from a need to affirm to themselves that they were indeed mensches? Here D. H. Lawrence was quoted: ‘warm-hearted fucking', for instance. It is interesting how often this writer is quoted in conversations of this sort. For if he knew very little about sex, he did know a lot about love. But in parenthesis, perhaps we should remember that the expertise in sex we all pride ourselves on is after all recent: nothing unusual then about Lawrence's ignorance; it was general.

It was as if—we agreed—in the solar plexus of this performer was a cold place, an icy promontory, an extension from some continent all tundra. There was the intelligent head, there were the hot prick and balls, but in between, a cold defensive place.

The talk strayed off to the legacy of the troubadours and trouvères in France, in lovely France, for could we perhaps make a case that loving of a certain poetic and even fanciful kind had never reached Germany, whose culture had so extensively influenced America, and particularly its universities…? Well, that was the kind of talk, and its culminating moment was when one television woman offered a little tale of a certain American film-maker, an exemplar of cock-and-balls, poised over her like an arched bow, but motionless, scolding her, ‘Use it, use it, damn you.' Was not that the extreme of passivity, male as fucking machine, for the pleasure of the female, to be used by her (but was the word ‘pleasure', with its frivolous associations, permissible here?)? Here was the absolute embodiment of a mensch but, at the moment of truth, passivity and instructions how to make use of him. Was this not a case of an extreme turning into an opposite? Well, yes, that was about it—at least for that time, for if you read novels and other witnesses of American culture, it was not always thus. No, a certain time produced the fucking machine, which, as everything has to do, disappeared. Or has it? Has feminism restored the warm heart, the male solar plexus radiating hot need like a little sun?

Probably the most interesting thing about this long-ago scene is its tone, so far from vindictiveness of the Cruel Sisters. For years—decades—perhaps centuries—women have been complaining about men's lack of sensitivity, their unkindness, but no sooner have women acquired power than they permit, even sanctify, some of the nastiest manifestations of human nature.

A television programme: In front of several million viewers, a liberated woman says, ‘My husband is a bit of a wimp really.'

Turn it around: ‘My wife is a very frightened soul, I am afraid, no courage.' Oh, the
callous
swine.

A dinner party: The wife, casually: ‘My two husbands—' The husband: ‘But surely you've had three, darling?' ‘Oh, I wasn't counting you; I haven't had a child by you.'

‘My wife's a disappointment to me. She's barren.' The
pig
.

Another party: ‘My husband often can't get it up. He's semi-impotent.' This, loudly laughing.

Monsieur Sorel in
The Red and the Black
, the archetype of the thick insensitive boorish husband, with a sneer: ‘Woman's delicate machinery…'

Only last week I got a letter from an American woman: ‘Do you ever think about the female monsters you unleashed with
The Golden Notebook?
They hate men and hate women who love men.'

A scene: A famous American feminist is visiting London, and I go to see her with a man who has consistently taken a feminist position, and long before it was fashionable. As we walk through the hotel she deliberately slams one door after another in his face.