*8 So when I characterised Phoebe’s shoot as ‘classy’, well, I knew whereof I spoke…In a sombrero and frilly bikini bottoms, and larking around in a studio sandpit, Doris had graced a cheerful little sauce-sheet called Parade (late 1960s, and costing one shilling and three grim and grimy old pence); Aramintha, by contrast, wholly and pallidly and uneasily naked, wandered the racks of a shadowy wine cellar, in the pages of a short-lived glossy called something like Atelier (mid-1970s, and costing an outrageous £3.50)…Among the young at least it was silently accepted that posing in nude magazines was just another thing girls could do. Doris and Aramintha did make me wonder about their personal reasons for taking this step – but not for long: Aramintha did it to spite and sully her father (a prominent Tory MP), and Doris, Doris McGowan, did it because that was more or less her job (she also featured regularly in Fiesta and Razzle)…Oui was a British cousin of Playboy and cost just over a quid.
*9 I never expected to forget the sexual terror-famines imposed by Phoebe Phelps, and I never have. Well, the famines proved indelible. The terror element (the antic hummingbird) turned out to be more evanescent. The only time I can’t help reliving it, funnily enough, is when I’m acutely jet-lagged. Acutely jet-lagged, I look at my watch – and its hands seem cruel and crazy: saying not two forty-five but a quarter to nine, saying not half past six but twelve-thirty. Phoebe was like that. Her hands, her arms, her legs: in the wrong position. And there was this element, too. All her eroticism capsized: from lover to hater. Because I knew, in detail, the quality of what seemed to be on offer, on offer to every man but me.
Transitional The Sources of the Being
…Poor Phoebe. This is the first thing that needs to be said. Poor, poor Phoebe…
After what we’ve just been through, though, I think a cleansing thought experiment – or thought exercise – is in order, don’t you? And there’s more confessional stuff to come, including the Worst Thing I Ever Did. So let’s take a break and briefly repair to the cool symmetries of art.
1. The four seasons
A great philosopher of literature – the Reverend Northrop Frye – suggested that the four seasons correspond to the four major genres. I think that’s a sweet and lyrical notion (though I admit that nothing really hangs on it). Now I suspect you know what the four seasons are. And here are the four major genres: tragedy, comedy, satire, romance. So the question is: Which genre corresponds to which season?
Tragedy, in its shape, follows the mouth on the tragic mask. Picture that ominous grimace: a starting point (on the lower left-hand corner), a steep rise, a flattening out, then a steep decline. The tragic hero is simultaneously transcendent and earthbound – human, all too human in the end: only human. That monumental individuality is one of the reasons why tragedy is now so seldom seen – a rare bird in the grey sky of post-industrial modernity.
Comedy, classical comedy, is similarly obedient to the line of the mouth on its mask. In this case it’s a smile: a deep descent that levels out and gathers into a fresh resurgence. The logistics of classical comedy are touchingly straightforward: a young man and a young woman fall in love and eventually get married (overcoming the obstacles cast in their way by the more hidebound society that surrounds and frustrates them). All Shakespeare’s comedies, and all six of Jane Austen’s novels, strictly adhere to this form (and my own father’s Lucky Jim, considered so rowdily iconoclastic in the mid-1950s, shows lamb-like submission to it). Comedies end happily, tragedies unhappily. The tragic hero is conspicuously distinguished; the comic hero is an everyman, the comic heroine an everywoman, and they are distinguished only in their charm.
Satire is best understood as militant irony. Vice, affectation, and stupidity are exposed to ridicule and implicit moral correction but also to anger and contempt. Whereas comedy tends to run only a light fever of subversion (off with the old), the mood of satire is revolutionary and hotly roused.
Romance, classical romance, only incidentally includes sentimental or idealised love stories; neither is it confined to medieval tales of chivalry. Romance, with its delirium and voodoo, identifies itself as being largely indifferent to the cause-and-effect of everyday life. For example, science fiction of the ‘star tsar’ variety (Nabokov’s anagrammatic phrase) is pure romance. Harry Potter et cetera is romance. Anything that reifies fantasy is romance.
I’ll give you a few minutes to think. Tragedy, comedy, satire, romance; spring, summer, autumn, winter. If, say, tragedy is winter (and it isn’t), what are the affinities?
2. Disgrace
While you consider that, consider this.
George Orwell famously said that ‘autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful’ (‘a man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying’). By that measure at least, what follows is gospel truth.
Unintellectual girls (including avowed philistines and bibliophobes) are one thing, and girls who pose in nude magazines are another, and girls on the borders of criminality are yet another – but not even escort girls, non-retired escort girls, escort girls going about their business, lie beyond my experience (or make that his experience. In this context the words come much more willingly when you wear the loincloth of the third person).
In the early–middle 1970s Martin himself contributed to Oui magazine, and under his own name (unlike the prudent Phoebe). There were two pieces: the first was about decadent London nightclubs; the second was about escort girls. And the second piece was a pack of lies.
