Afterthought

By ALAN_BRIEN

CORRESPONDENCE Columns are notoriously unsatis- factory arenas for contro- versy. The last contributor always seem to have the best case and few readers can bother to look up a previous issue to check whether one man actually said 'what the other man said he said. Often, too, the correspondence quickly gets out of synch and all the letter-writers seem to be carrying on monologues, like characters in a Chekhov play, deaf to the comments of their neighbours on the page. Few people like to be proved wrong in public and the agonised writh- ings of a dying controversialist are often embar- rassing to eavesdrop upon. So I shall leave J. C. Maxwell's rebuttal of Mary Holtby's rebuttal of my rebuttal of C. S. Lewis where it stands on page 627. Three times, in his Allegory of Love, Professor Lewis asserted in varying terms that no activity of any kind occurred in Spenser's Bower of Bliss. Yet the stanza I quoted (no. 73 in Canto XII of Book II) describes in rather pleasantly pornographic detail a long series of nuzzles and caresses. If this is not a howler by the standards of the Oxford School of English Literature, so much the worse for those standards.

What I do find significant is the way that both Mr. Maxwell and Miss Holtby are so much under the spell of the famous Lewisite reputation for erudition that they each accept his phrase, `lust turning into what would now be called scoptophilia,' at its face value. Yet I have been unable to find this technical term in any of the standard works. The accepted word seems to be 'scoptophilia' which Dr. Benjamin Karpman in his Sexual Offender and his Offences defines as 'excessive interest in looking at genitalia, sex acts, etc., as a sexual stimulus.' English and English's dictionary of psychological usage gives the only possible alternative spellings as `scopophilia' or 'scotophilia.' So 'skeptophilia' may be another howler.

As a constant reader of Spenser I get the im- pression that it is the poet rather than any of

his characters who is the voyeur. 'Dainty' is his invariable adjective for most parts of the female anatomy and there is a lip-smacking relish about his 'peeping' which suggests that he is always on the point of digging in with a spoon. In sonnet LXXVII of his Amoretti sequence, he describes his mistress as an ivory table 'all spred with juncats,' the centre-piece of which is a silver dish containing two golden apples. And in the previous sonnet, he apostrophises her bosom as 'the bowre of blisse.' There is no shortage of Freudian symbols in The Faerie Queene for those who know how to recognise them and they are at their most impressive when they are .un- conscious. Consider the lustful monster (Book IV, Canto VII, stanza 6):

His neather lip was not like man nor beast,

But like a wide deepe poke, downe hanging low, In which he wont the relics of his feast, And cruel spoyle, which he had spard, to stow: And ouer it his huge great nose did grow, Full dreadfully empurpled all with bloud; And down both sides two wide long ears did glow, And raught downe to his waste, when up he stood, More great then th'eares of Elephants by Indus flood.

You do not need any psychoanalytical training to see here a rather grisly amalgam of the male and female sexual organs.

While the surface of his mind was occupied with the mechanics of allegory, Spenser's Id was having an enjoyable time drooling over perver- sions far more scabrous than scoptophilia. In Canto VII of Book III, stanzas 47 to 49, we have twins who commit incest in the womb of a giantess and the female partner descends even lower—when short of young men `to quench her flaming thrust,' observes Spenser,. she `suffred beasts her body to deflowre.' Even Tennessee Williams has not yet given us characters quite so clinically exposed. Nymphomaniacs, can- nibals, rapists, fetishists, perverts—they roam this picture-book landscape in terrifying num- bers. Puritan Spenser, protected by the thought that he is preaching chastity and religion, allows his imagination to luxuriate in obscenities that sensual Shakespeare or outspoken Donne would not dare to admit into the light of print. Some- times his mind, like ours, seems to grow a little tired of the more saintly figures (at the end of Book III, he even forgets which sex Britomart is meant to be, calling her 'he' and 'him') but the writing always stokes up heat and energy when- ever anyone is about to be bedded.

These gentle ladies, wandering so provoca• tively alone in the sex-haunted woods, are not always as innocent as they appear. Dame Hellenore, for example, having run away from her old husband, Malbecco, with the courtly lover, Sir Paridell, is not at all perturbed at be- ing captured by the Satyres. She settles down quite cheerfully to milk their goats and make their cheese even though 'euery one as con? mune good her handeled.' And when the old cuckold creeps up to see how she 'is suffering the mass rape, Spenser slips in a stanza which Is little more than a dirty joke.

At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd, Whereas his lovely wife emongst them lay, Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude, Who all night did minde his joyou‘ play: Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day, That all his hart with gealosie did swell; But yet that nights ensample did bewray, That not for nought his wife them loved so well. When one so oft a night did ring his matins bell.

Professor Lewis is right when he declares that the history of Spenserian criticism is 'a history of gross under-estimation.' Spenser is often superb pornographer but this is a view df a national poet which conventional academics find it hard to admit. When his moral taboos are at their weakest, he is often at his strongest as writer. It is no more necessary to condemn 11,1.5 verse when you condemn his obsessions than It is to admire him when you enjoy his technique. The undressing of Serena (Book VI, Canto VIII) over five stanzas, by the 'salvage nation' who in' tend to rape, sacrifice and eat her, is a brilliant exercise in titillation. We are taken on a slow conducted tour of the naked heroine, stopping at each point of advantage for a little hornilY, which leaves little to the imagination. To us to- day, the arrival finally at the piece de now resistance has comic overtones when 'those daintie parts, the dearlings of delight, Which mote not be prophaned of common eyes' are compared to princely trophies hung on 'the triumphal' Arch' of her 'goodly thighes.' But the effect is still highly arousing and compares Well with the more routine pleasurings in Fanny HA There is also a great deal of interest for the modern reader in Spenser's politics. He con. tiqually rails and complains against the condi' tions at court and in the country—the WO suitors are humiliated, the advance of WI' educated entertainers into favour, the riotous behaviour of the lusty vagabonds, the preen' sions of the new rich, the ignorance of the clergy, the extortions of the monopolists, the dangers of equality between men and women and masters and men. Like Evelyn Waugh,

he is a right-wing satirist yearning for a golden

age and an antique time that he himself never knew. But he also is• obliged as a propagandist

of the status quo to praise the Queen and soh'

mit to God. He agitates for reforms but at the, same time preaches 'all change is perilous, and

all chaunce unsound.' He sees that the wrong

people are in charge but must also pretend that the 'great Maker' has ordained all—'whatever thing is done, by him is done.' In fact, his poetn,s

now can be read like the early novels of Waugh —for their vivacity, for their humour, for the sex—without the grateful reader feeling obliged

to subscribe to the peevish reactionary opinions. It is not a judgment that is likely to commend itself to the orthodox priests of the Oxford Eng' lish School.