BOOKS
With a knowing ignorance
Philip Hensher
THE QUEEN OF CAMP: MAE WEST, SEX AND POPULAR CULTURE by Marybeth Hamilton Pandora, £9.99, pp. 278 Frst,' as Stephen Sondheim has it in his concise, archetypal star's life, 'You're another sloe-eyed vamp/Then someone's mother/Then you're camp.' Mae West skipped second base, and, indeed, might be thought to have started where most Holly- wood stars end up. But was she really, as Marybeth Hamilton calls her, 'the queen of camp'? I wonder, in fact, what camp actual- ly means. It's not something easy to define, and it's striking how most writers on the subject give up on definitions, and luxuri- ously reach for favourite examples. For every Susan Sontag, speaking of the 'failed glamour' of camp, or an Edmund White, offering the 'dictatorial power of camp,' or, alternatively, its 'recuperation of oppres- sion', there are 20 commentators prepared only to offer examples. The novels of Ronald Firbank, for example, the films of Douglas Sirk, the songs of Edith Piaf. But, paradoxically, the inadequacy of 'camp', or, more often, 'high camp' as any kind of label is immediately apparent as soon as one reaches for examples. Firbank's dense playfulness has an experimental, Modernist aesthetic which is far more dandified than camp; Douglas Sirk's purple melodramas have a grandeur mere 'high camp' could never aspire to.
There's an odd sort of bullying about the label of 'camp', one which refuses to deal with dissent. Camp art — there's something paradoxical about the idea we suppose, is innocent of its own effect; it believes itself to be grand, or sincerely moving, or sexy, and fails. But this naivete implies a reader who is the opposite of naive; a reader who can deflate the failed glamour of Busby Berkeley, and can do so, moreover, with a sophisticated sympathy and amusement rather than with denigra- tion. The combination of an innocent artist and a knowing reader is so compelling that it tends to exclude any other kind of response. Few readers have the nerve, in the face of an ironic, amused response to Ivy Compton-Burnett, say, to argue with it; to risk being regarded as unsophisticated by saying, 'I like this; I think it's serious; I think it's good.'
Camp is, I think, nothing to do with art, and everything to do with its audience. A good artist may be denigrated by the superior taste of a reader, focusing on some marginal quality in his work and neglecting real virtues. A bad artist may be elevated by a knowing audience, finding pleasure in the embarrassments of Victori- an melodrama, or Hollywood musicals, or whatever. Either way, what camp taste asserts is that the audience knows better than the artist; that the artist's intentions Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, 1932 are beside the point, that he was innocent of the effect his artwork creates. Who has not relished the charming absurdity of a cheap movie, and believing that the direc- tor didn't mean to be camp, allowed that belief to increase the pleasure?
It's a harmless response, mostly; anything of value will survive the attentions of camp followers, as it were. But we get into diffi- cult waters when it's not so clear that the director, or author, doesn't know what's going on. When an author seems to be writing something deliberately camp; to be pursuing the camp response in something which can only be understood as a camp piece of work, then the response is inevitably made more complicated. A film- goer who saw one film of Pedro Almod- ovar's, for instance, might like to imagine that the lush silliness wasn't intended. On seeing more than one, it's clear that the film-maker is working hard to get the response which less selfconscious directors achieve without trying, or knowing how they've achieved it. And the laughter, I think, freezes on the tongue; they have the same fake air as those American films pro- duced for millions of dollars by multi- national studios, and deliberately marketed as 'cult' films. More cunning purveyors of camp work hard at maintaining the pose of innocence, of not understanding what the audience is laughing at. I once saw Quentin Crisp, on stage, being asked what his defi- nition of 'camp' was; he first affected not to hear, then not to understand, and finally said, 'I think it means having relations with a lot of soldiers, doesn't it?'
Whether Mae West falls into the catego- ry of someone who was very well aware of her camp appeal, and knowingly marketed it, or whether she believed herself to be something else entirely, is a moot point. Certainly, she talked quite readily about camp, and the basis of her appeal in camp; `camp is bein' funny and dishy and out- rageous and sayin' sexy and clever things. I'm always sayin' somethin' sexy and campy. . . .' She was unembarrassed, too, about her homosexual following, which might suggest that she was very well aware of what was going on, and the precise nature of her appeal.
But looking again at that definition; is the essence of camp really `sayin' sexy and clever things'? West undoubtedly does have considerable appeal to a camp sensi- bility, but I doubt she did it by being sexy. Rather, her physical presence and amazing excess marked her out as a caricature of femininity; her image was one of huge sex- ual availability, but oddly unappealing, unthreatening, reassuring. Her bodily parts invited her audiences to objectify them, not in a spirit of lust, but in a spirit of amuse- ment; it is said that World War II airmen immortalised her monumental embonpoint by referring to their lifejackets as 'Mae Wests'; Salvador Dali modelled a sofa on her lips. These are not the tributes of sexu- al desire, but of camp. But West, it seems, remained quite unaware of this, if we are to judge by the way she presented herself. In two novels based on her films, The Constant Sinner and She Done Him Wrong, there are con- stant self-portraits. There is never any sense here that the heroines are anything but figures of world-historical beauty and refinement, with the sexual appeal and appetites of Messalina. It is a picture diffi- cult to reconcile with the hard-surfaced wisecracker — the female W.C. Fields, as it were — we know from the films of these books. The two novels have been reissued by Virago; I doubt that West had a great deal to do with them, but, with their quaintly dated racial attitudes and baffling Byzantine sexual manners, they are well worth an afternoon of anyone's time.
Marybeth Hamilton has written a very tolerable sort of book about West, full of the insights of a cultural historian. Some of it is not very readable, and most of it is pretty banal, but, unfortunately, it's diffi- cult to expect much more from academics nowadays. She has brought up quite a lot of interesting stuff about the theatrical background West surfaced from. Beginning in the relatively respectable form of vaudeville, suitable for families and the middle classes, West had to descend to the rougher, more blatant theatres of bur- lesque to make her mark. 'She is doing.less "singing" ', one critic noted, making his inadvertent point concisely with those inverted commas. Her speciality was an extraordinary display called the `cootch', which consisted, as far as one can- make out, of wiggling on a chair until the audi- ence collectively expired of excitement. `Unmodified,' unfortunately, 'her low- grade undulations would scare off big-time audiences.'
Hamilton has had some fun producing some early rivals to West in the vulgarity stakes. My favourite, I think, was Eva Tanguay, a woman entirely devoid of tal- ent. One critic didn't care for the display:
She gyrated wildly while yelling a song about the kind of fascinating girl she was. Throwing off some of her attire, she gave vociferously a doggerel of which the refrain was 'I don't care', her defiance being directed to those who disputed her talent. Finally stripped of skirts, she finished her exploit in skin tights from neck to toes, jiggling about the stage and screaming that, no matter what anyone might say of her immodesty, she was a success, success, success.
Faced with this kind of elementary compe- tition, even Mae West might become a star.
West's big break came with two success- ful, vulgar Broadway plays — one time- savingly entitled Sex — and various useful imprisonments for the corruption of morals. Once into the movies, her particu- lar brand of metaphorical sexiness found a large audience. And, even now, though it's hard to find anyone who's seen any of her films — and harder still to find anyone who, having seen My Little Chickadee would willingly sit through it again everyone, with a little prompting could probably successfully mangle one of her famous contrived wisecracks: 'Is that a pistol in your pocket or do you just want to Come up and see me sometime. . .?' An immortality of sorts. What doesn't come over is what Mae West was actually like. At the end of her career, endless grotesque rumours circulated about her. 'Was she a lesbian? A nymphomaniac? A transvestite? Or were those swivelling hips, those unforgettably awful come-on lines just a double bluff: was she in fact a virgin? The circulation of these rumours witnesses, if nothing else, how successful West was at hiding any kind of human reality behind a persona, or rather, a series of personas. After the war, West started her long descent towards her last films, Myra Breckinridge and Sextette; the appearance of the 84-year-old actress, incapable of remembering her .lines, still playing the vamp in this last, is one of the grisliest sights in all cinema.
The understandable drying-up of work led her to spend much of her time reinventing her own biography. Hamilton has an amusing paragraph or two about her successive accounts of her 1920s play on the subject of homosexuality, tastefully, as ever, titled The Drag. In the 1950s she was telling interviewers that the play was a dreadful warning of moral failing, based on her in-depth readings of Krafft-Ebing and Freud. In the 1960s, she claimed to have been influenced by maharishis, learning `from this yogi who'd cured me of this sneaky stomach pain I'd had'. By the 1970s, with a natural eye on her growing and enthusiastic homosexual following, The Drag had become an early, if not the very first, play of gay liberation. All nonsense, of course; but, as in all Hollywood lives, there's a faint poignancy in the idea of these sad, foolish people, pursuing a sort of fame, and an audience, which would first eat them alive, and then spit them out in disgust, and forget them. Mae West could never be anything else than her own inven- tion; the fact that her identity, from the start, was completely fabricated hardly lessens the pathos of her life.
Just a trim — I haven't got the time to listen to a perm!'
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