White Meat
The Moons of Paradise. By Mervyn LeVY• (Arthur Barker, 42s.) The Moons of Paradise. By Mervyn LeVY• (Arthur Barker, 42s.) ELAINE MAY, in one of their talented sketches, plays a film starlet being interviewed by Mike Nicholls as a Jack Eigan-type radio personality, (and I hope none of you happy innocent English people has ever heard of Jack Eigan). She says, `Well, I mean, Jack, what can you say about Al? Schweitzer? I personally have never dated him? What can I say about Mr. Mervyn Levy? I personally have never dated him and have prob- ably, therefore, missed one of life's larger ex- periences. He has a luxuriant beard and has written several books about painting, as well as a monograph on L. S. Lowry. He has now given us a study of the breast in art from 1600 tic, a statue of a priestess in Knossos, right up to Picasso and Lucien Freud.
The line between art and pornography is a very thin one, as they hastened to mention last year in that strip-club trial, and I don't think for one minute that Mr. Levy intended to write a dirty book. What he has ended up with, how- ever, is, to my eye, no whiter than white for six chapters and plain and fancy silliness for the seventh and last. His views on life, women, art, love, sex and religion are unoriginal, and his paragraphs of lyrical musings about bosoms are embarrassing. On page 132 he says, 'Beyond sex and sensuality the body and breasts of a woman immersed in the waters of reverie, exist out of sexual time.' He is talking about Bon- nard's Woman in the Bath, but seriously, Jack, what can you do with a sentence like that? Even in the context?
He is hipped on the myth that prostitutes are golden-hearted and even goes so far as to say they are saints. I don't know any prostitutes, but I've read Streetwalker and Geoffrey Gorer. Maybe there are one or two golden-hearted ones, 'The child, the saint, the prostitute and the poet . . . are the true visionaries,' says Mr. LevY. Categories which do not include Thomas Edison cr Lord Adrian or Einstein (unless, of course, they're saints). Then Mr. Levy goes on to say a iut of horrid things about St. Paul. I do wish people would shut up about St. Paul. All right, so he said it is better to marry than to burn (which indeed it is). He also wrote the first Epistle to the Corinthians.
There is nothing in The Moons of Paradise which has not been said before and better. The best things about this book, apart from the illus- trations, some of which are lovely, are the quo- tations from two absolutely fascinating other books, The Nude, by Sir Kenneth Clark, and Sex in History, by G. Rattray Taylor. Mr. LevY also quotes the Kamasutra. In my adolescence I wanted to read the Kamasutra, but I never Lad the nerve to ask the librarian for it. Now I do not want to any more.
During a profound religious discussion with a friend, Mr. Levy came to the conclusion that all evil comes from wrong thinking. So aiha; been acting brutally and insanely against nature vise is new? On page 98 he writes. 'We hav since the opening of the Christian era.' It is TY_ stietc view that nature got the short end of the
well before the birth of Our Lord. I've been prurient ea' teenager, that this book is only for the prt teenager, the warped and the frustrated, but there may be more in it than that if it can make coe,le, Northern Anglo-Saxon me so cross.
chlorophyll. The Moons of Paradise hascontains The Concise Oxford Dictionary c
ROSALIE PACK ARD
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