5. Florence Nightingale
Let us stand back for a moment.
Question: Who would present herself as his carer and redeemer, who would deliver him from this bottleneck of sexual opportunism and abuse?
Answer: The world’s most glamorous and celebrated feminist. That’s who.
He made the phone call and steered himself to the broad deep house off Ladbroke Grove, up near Portobello. Of course Germaine had no knowledge of his latest doings; to her he was only an occasional friend and visitor. But she took him in.
He slept on a mattress in a nook just beyond her bedroom door, so she could hear his groans, his piteous cries; she tended him and soothed him until one morning, after about a week, having brought his usual cup of tea and settled herself down to cradle him in her arms, as she did every morning, Germaine said,…Oh. You really are feeling better, aren’t you. I’ll just go and brush my teeth.*4
The planetary forces of retribution, the local genies of justice, we can assume, were inactive in that precinct of West London during a certain month in 1974. All they could come up with was Germaine Greer – to minister to me in my trial.
6. Freedom and Ariadne
Now you probably wouldn’t mind hearing more about the author of The Female Eunuch (1970), my host and my nurse, and there is plenty more to say; but if you’ll bear with me I’m thematically obliged to concentrate on whatever it was she nursed me out of.
I have not stopped thinking about that little packet of my life – those five or six nights in the complicit South Kensington hotel (I only remember the Regency caddishness of the striped wallpaper in its single public room); and I have gone on thinking about those two young women. The unanswerable malaise that overtook me clearly derived from an awareness of transgression. But which transgression?
No trawling of the conscience has ever presented me with a single reservation about what went on with Rita. With Ariadne, though, I sometimes feel about myself an inner rumour of parasitism. It was I hope a gentle encounter – in mid-afternoon, beginning with tea and biscuits (brought to us by room service). Still, I felt a deficit of volition in Ariadne; and I feared I was the beneficiary of something outside myself. Something like an indoctrination. Ariadne was nowhere near as experienced as Rita, and I now wonder what kind of tuition she was given as she acclimatised herself to the culture of escort work.
But in truth there was plenty of that in the 1970s: the exploitation of cultures, of currents of thought. To put it more crudely, men ponced off ideology. I ponced off anti-clericalism, I ponced off rejectionist ageism, and most generally of course I ponced off the tenets of the Sexual Revolution – meaning I applied peer pressure and propagandised about the earthy wisdom of the herd.
Ariadne was what is now known as an outlier. In her modest way she represented a reactionary force, that of female submission. And, given the chance, I (silently) ponced off that. She wasn’t acting in perfect freedom. Who ever was, back then? Who ever is?
Anyway, that wasn’t what laid me low.
7. Revolutions
Now. What do you do in a revolution? Very broadly, three things. You see what goes, you see what comes, you see what stays.
In the Sexual Revolution, what went was premarital chastity; what came was a gradually widening gap between carnal knowledge and emotion; what stayed was the possibility of love. The Sexual Revolution made no particular demands on writers; all it did was grant them a new latitude. They could now busy themselves with subjects that were previously forbidden, by law; and nearly all of them tried it (without success).
But imagine for a moment, that you are a poet or a novelist in a real revolution, and a very violent revolution – like the one in Russia (incomparably more violent than the one in France). For the novelist or poet, what went was freedom of expression; what came was intense line-by-line surveillance;*5 what stayed was the creative habit of putting pen to paper. So how was a writer to adapt and adjust?
Well, you could be like the novelist and dramatist Alexei Tolstoy (distantly related to the author of Anna Karenina and also, through marriage, to the author of Fathers and Sons). Alexei was a venal cynic who confessedly ‘enjoyed the acrobatics’ of trimming his work to ‘the general line’, or to current Bolshevik orthodoxy (a protean contraption). This is also the man who said that one of the things he hated most in life was windowshopping with inadequate funds…
Alternatively you could be like Isaac Babel, the writer of sharply expressive short stories, who at a certain point declared himself to be ‘the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence’. It was a noble intention. But even if you stopped writing, you could hardly stop talking; Babel said enough, and was shot in a Moscow prison in 1940.
‘Of the 700 writers who met at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934,’ writes Conquest, ‘only fifty survived to see the second in 1954.’
The choice, then, was active collaboration or mutism. There was also a third way, involving what we might call a delusion of autonomy. Writers of the third way persuaded themselves that they could proceed, could get on with their stuff (quietly and yet publishably), without grave internal compromise. Alexei Tolstoy could flourish because he had the thick skin of artistic indifference – in common with all RAPPists (members of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers); privileged and decorated, they lived well; more basically, they lived on. It was the idealists who were culled, one way or the other. The lethal element here was literary authenticity;
