The pangs of disprized love

Francis King

PLAYING THE HARLOT by Patricia Avis Virago, £6.99, pp. 252

This novel, completed in 1963 but only now posthumously published, elicited from Philip Larkin a postcard on which he com- mented: 'The thought of your great work makes me shudder.' Why it made him shudder must, one guesses, have been not because he expected a work of surpassing tragedy or horror but because he dreaded what it might reveal of his 1952 love affair with its author in Belfast, while she was still married to the philosopher Colin Stang.

Patricia — or Patsy, as she was known to her friends — Avis first submitted her novel to a friend, Charles Monteith. One of the three or four most intellectually power- ful and discerning publishers of the post- war years, Monteith rejected it, telling me that, though the book undoubtedly had its merits, it was so much a roman a clef that it would certainly cause trouble for him with those of his friends depicted in it and might even involve his firm, Faber & Faber, in at least one libel action.

But although it is a roman a clef, the por- traits of real-life people too often resemble a dozen or so blurred, foxed and creased snapshots discovered, years after they were taken, in an envelope at the back of a desk drawer. Larkin's published letters to Avis reveal at least as much about the essential man as the scenes between the novel's Mary and its Rollo Jute. Nonetheless, Avis does from time to time succeed in bringing him into perfect focus — as when, on a visit to Paris, regretting that he will miss Sunday afternoon by his own gas fire, he goes to bed with a Trollope instead of a trollop, or when his friend Bruce Mont- gomery (Anderson Cully in the novel, Edmund Crispin to readers of vintage detective stories) chides him for his grouchiness and glumness with the words: 'I wonder why you bother to live at all.'

It was through Avis that I myself first met Philip Larkin, when she asked if she might bring him along with her when she was coming round for a drink at my sister's and brother-in-law's London flat. At the time, I assumed that Larkin was so unnerv- ingly still and silent throughout the evening because he was shy. Now I realise that he must merely have been bored.

For Avis in her energetic but largely unsatisfying sex-life there were, as this novel makes amply clear, two powerful pheromones: intellectual or literary eminence and homosexuality. The pheromone which all too often excited her menfolk was her wealth. This wealth enabled her, the daughter of a Dutch father and an Irish mother, to leave her native South Africa for Somerville College, Oxford, where she took a degree in medicine, to abandon all thoughts of pur- suing a medical or any other profession except that of unsuccessful writer, to travel widely, to dish out cash to her often impecunious and greedy men, and to establish herself with her second husband, the poet Richard Murphy, in Ireland in an attractive Regency period lodge, Lake Park, previously owned by Edna O'Brien and Ernest Gel)ler.

The portrait of Richard Murphy, trans- mogrified in the book from poet to sculp-

tor, is hardly a flattering one. Nor is that of Conor Cruise O'Brien. Whereas both these portraits are misty, Avis's portrait of her- self as 'Mary' is, in contrast, brilliantly clear. At one point she writes: 'Nice, nor- mal anything doesn't much appeal to me any more', and at another, 'I've rather lost the art of keeping up appearances.' Here is the feverish intellectuality, with its constant quotations and allusions (Rilke, Racine, Nietzsche, Yeats, Thomas Love Peacock) — how such ostentatious displays of cul- ture must have grated on Larkin's nerves! — and here the no less feverish pursuit of man after man, only to find, in despair, that each was incapable of giving her all that she craved with so much ardour. Here, too, are the multiple miscarriages which so often landed her in hospital. One such mis- carriage was of a foetus by Larkin, who wrote to her on 11 August, 1992 (oddly the letter does not appear in the published collection):

I'm sorry about the little creature, but it's not for me to say, really. I dare say my pride in it would have been overbalanced by a distress- ful knowledge of double dealing.

Avis brought out an unexpected brutality in her men.

More than once Avis's heroine remarks that it is the fate of women to have to please men. Later, she defines woman's place in society with the bitter words:

Fine feathers make fine birds at a distance, don't they? But plucked ... plucked, gutted and trussed.

All her men eventually plucked, gutted and trussed her. But to suggest, as George H. Gilpin and Hermione de Almeida do in their introduction, that for this reason there was an affinity between her and Sylvia Plath is nonsense. Plath was herself a plucker, gutter and trusser. Moreover, she had a talent, some might even say genius, denied to Avis.

No doubt it was despair at never being able to achieve either a wholly satisfactory relationship or literary fame which drove Avis first to the bottle and then to death in 1977 from a cocktail of Nembutal tablets, Benedictine and Cointreau. At least in this self-destruction Avis did resemble Plath. Was this novel worth publishing almost a quarter of a century after its completion? Its defect is that, like its author's own life, it is chaotically organised, consists of a number of false starts, and eventually gets nowhere. But repeatedly the surface of the shallow, meandering river glitters with some arresting phrase or thought, or some revelatory incident involving one of the men whose powerful lives jolted and jarred against her fragile one. When that hap- pens, one is glad that this long-silent voice can now be heard.

I finished the book both remembering the enthusiastically responsive, doggedly intelligent, mordantly witty and totally unglamorous woman whom I met for the first time in Athens in 1955 when both of us were young, and regretting that a life that had then seemed to hold so much of promise should have petered out so aridly and miserably.