Honey in the Evening
PERENNIALLY interesting though Dr. Lewinsohn's subject is, the themes themselves do not promise much novelty at first sight: hetairai and ephebi; Messalina and Poppma; St. Paul and St. Augustine; harems and houris; priestly celibacy and witches' sabbaths; troubadours and chastity belts; Gabrielle d'Estrdes and Don Juan . . . and that brief skim takes us about half way. These are all enormously traditional, but Dr. Lewinsohn deals freshly enough even with them, and in the last part of the book he is quite often able to find little- known opinions and experiences to point up the good old story.
Dr. Lewinsohn gives us a humane, yet not exag- geratedly impersonal, spirit of inquiry, with a mild humour and a sort of unabashed innocence. The book has none of that air of being plucked down from some musty professorial shelf to the accompaniment of a daring snigger of sus- pect erudition, nor yet of getting stacked between Germinal and a hideous pink truss in some fly-blown little shop window in the back streets of Runcorn. And yet it shows no trace of the barricade postures of defiant honesty either. We have reached a point where the obscurantists have been not merely defeated, but forgotten, where all these matters can be spoken of quite unselfconsciously. As with every sexual history, much of Dr. Lewinsohn's account deals with the almost uniformly ridiculous (and unsuccessful) attempts of ecclesiastical authorities to interfere and regulate. The only result was a good deal of needless suffering, well illustrated here by one of Hdloise's noble letters from detention camp. One is driven to reflect on the rough-and- ready division of humanity into seekers of the numinous in a white goddess and a holy spirit respectively. Perhaps the time is at last ripe (even though some psychologists and more theologians would then be at loss for a hobby) for devotees of the natural and the supernatural modes to take a vow not to interfere in each other's affairs.
Mr. Partridge is unconcernedly frank and learned too, if a little more inclined to moralise. The therapeutic value of the orgy in a repressed society has never been questioned. And some of the orgies the author describes sound quite good fun too. But not many. While straying over the ill-defined borderline into various curious but not, I should have thought, orgiastic episodes, he interestingly divides the orgy proper into two kinds—one accepted by society as a safety valve and the other based on individual rebellion. The socially approved, or tolerated, type is preferred, as less likely to lead to a sense of guilt. Even then the enjoyments of repentance are always avail- able—the other establishment is just over the road.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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