The end justifies the jeans
Dot Wordsworth
THE REAR VIEW by Jean-Luc Hennig Souvenir, L15.99, pp. 181 the bottom line for Professor Hennig is that to be human is to have a bum.
Among the 193 existing species of primates only the human species possesses hemispher- ical buttocks which project permanently from the body, although some people have claimed that the Andean llama also possesses buttocks.
Not that the llama is a primate.
The interest of bottoms is obvious: they are objects of sexual attraction and yet dis- pensers of excrement. Both elements have been recognised since the days of Aristo- phanes, and the tension between them makes the bottom fundamentally funny. When the learned English 17th-century comedian Ben Jonson began his play, The Alchemist, with the words: 'Thy worst, I fart at thee. . . ' he was consciously echoing a classical source, kataperdomai, from Aristo- phanes' The Wasps. Professor Hennig doesn't happen to mention this, but you get the idea.
Choose a word at random and someone can write a book on it. A classic of its kind was Reginald Reynold's masterly Beards, with its beguiling discussion of the connec- tions between hippophagy and pogonotro- phy (all right, eating horses and wearing beards). Why not, then, go through the alphabet: ants, bees, cats, dogs, elephants,
foxes, goats and so on? A book of this kind tends to be a bit like knitting blanket squares; it passes the time but it doesn't add up to much. Anyway, we have now got down as far as bottoms.
Bottoms are back in fashion. There is a poster on London double-deckers showing a pretty boy with the caption: 'The best seat on the bus.' I think it advertises jeans. A hundred years ago, with the remarkable accessory of the bustle, it was women's bottoms (as it still is with some, such as President Yeltsin, now famous for the extraordinary photograph of a secretary's face after he had pinched her).
Whatever the attractions, in Christen- dom actual buggery has been regarded as a shameful act. But there seems to be some confusion in this book about the Church's teaching on sexual intercourse with the man taking his place behind. It is claimed that Albertus Magnus (1200-80), the men- tor of Thomas Aquinas, authorised it if the man was fat, but then Professor Hennig adds that it was thought 'sinful'. You can't have it both ways. In general, though, the position was clear: coitus should seek to engage 'the legitimate vessel'. Enough of that.
Professor Hennig proceeds in his very French way (he used to work for Liberation) to discuss as many aspects of the bum as come to mind. For him that means quoting Charles de la Hueterie, Jose Luis de Vilallonga, Clement Marot and Jacob Vanloo, writers who lie on few of our bedside tables.
He refers in passing to the steatopygy of Sumo wrestlers and the callipygy of FeIli- ni's fat women. He briefly surveys bathing and tattooing. There is a rather scanty chapter on surgery. But, frankly, his main interest is sexual; my aunt will not be get- ting this book for Christmas.
Those such as Professor Richard Cobb who revel in French argot will be dis- appointed to find that Professor Hennig's chapter on slang has been jettisoned and supplanted by an unsatisfactory ramble around English dictionaries. It is proposed that the Latin for bottom, culus, is related to cunnus, the female pudenda. This is not convincing. Lewis and Short's dictionary suggests culus is cognate with a similar word in Greek that meant 'curving, while cunnus is connected with a Sanskritic word meaning 'trench'. Makes sense, of a kind.
We are told that Jean Genet, and he should have known, used the phrase bronze 'Ye, or its French equivalent to mean anus'. It is not clear where this gets us. We are not told that Partridge records the Word bronze with the same meaning in Aus- tralian usage from the 1920s. I rather think brass eye is used in Caribbean slang with a similar reference, though again it may be the frontal rather than the rear view; it would be interesting to hear if any Specta- tor readers have come across it.
An index would have been useful.
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