Brophy and Brigid \ ILi
By SIMON RAVEN
PEOPLE (even those who do not mean to be rude) often ask me whether my journalism interferes with my serious writing. As a matter of fact, my journalism is serious writing. I hus Brigid Brophy by way of foreword to her new collection* of (previously printed) essays and review s, and I for one will call 'Amen. For whateser else may be said of them, every one of these pieces, which range from moral homilies of some length down to brief thriller-notices, is scrupulously and seriously written round a point which is of serious import—to Miss Brophy if to nobody else. 1 am sorry that it is necessary to qualify in this fashion; but I have to say at once that, while most of these pages are as full of sweet reason as a honeycomb is full of honey, there are occasional passages (among them some of the most intense in the whole book) of a dottiness almost beyond belief.
There are, it seems, two hands at work here. One, let us say, is that of Brophy, an intelligent writer of clear and masculine prose, sensitive indeed to every shade of meaning and every twist of moral subtlety, but in the sum tough, incisive and direct; while the other hand is that of Brigid, a faddy and finicking prig, of whom more hereafter. For let us forget Brigid as long as we can, and first consider, on the showing of these articles, what the incomparable Brophy has to say.
Taking a four-square eighteenth-century stance, Brophy deposes that what distinguishes man from the animals is his ability to adapt nature, that terrifying and incommoding old bore, to his own taste and convenience. Man makes light to banish nature's darkness; he tunnels under, flies over or even lays flat the mountains which nature has set up as barriers; he drains nature's pestiferous marshes, irrigates nature's dreary deserts, and sets up magnificent cities to which nature is admitted only in the form of seemly and disciplined parks. It is therefore ridiculous, Brophy goes on, to praise the 'natural' man or to make a song and dance about the 'natural' way of life. The triumph of man lies in his civilisation (i.e., his qualities as a civis or dweller in cities) and in his artificiality (i.e., his success in making things through his own arts); man has been unnatural from the first time he decorated the natural walls of his cave with drawings; and the first man who took his rabbit home and cooked it, instead of devouring it on the spot and au nature, was the first pervert.
Having established this general proposition, Brophy proceeds with relish to some succulent deductions. First of all, as to sex. `. . . Chastity is no longer a virtue but has become a neutral. . . . So long as it involved the risk of bringing an unequipped child into the world, promiscuity really and rationally was immoral..... But now we can manufacture reliable contraceptives. . . (Italics mine.) Man, that is to say, has once more beaten nature at her game; by doing away with the 'natural' consequences of unchastity he has rendered chastity superfluous; and let us note by way of corollary (Brophy is very firm about this) that 'in a rational view' chastity has always * DON'T NEVER FORGET. Collected Views and Reviews. (Cape, 38s.) ben superfluous for those of homosexual or otherwise unproductive inclinations. If we are not eoing to put up with natural laws which ordain darkness and disease, then neither need we be inhibited from our pleasures by the natural law which ordains that the function of sex is to beget. In this respect, as in many more, reverence for nature is just so much silly puritanism.
One minor point which follows is that mastur- bation is not only harmless but positively desir- able; in a way, Brophy urges, it is even creative, for it encourages fantasy, and anyhow it is per- haps the only outlet for ugly or deformed people. Another minor point is the injustice of the exist- ing laws about marriage and divorce; and a third the folly of making a fetish of sexual fidelity. 'Civilised people want one another's happiness, not the right to hang a "No Tres- passers" notice on one another's sexual organs.' But sensible and amusing as all this may be, it is now time to turn to yet another of Brophy's favourite theses—the palpable absurdity of the Christian or any other 'revealed' religion.
Although in some ways this is simply a matter of rationality, once again the basic Brophy con- ception of man's beneficent hostility to nature plays an important part. So long as man was on the losing end, he required a god for comfort and support; but now we have the machine we no longer need the god, and we have found more efficient means than faith with which to move mountains. Similarly, whereas ancient Greek religion featured the aristocratic saviour-hero, and whereas the Christian religion featured the humbler saviour-anti-hero (as more in keeping with the popular feeling of the day), both have now been outmoded by the man of reason, who, as doctor or scientist, does the hero's job of saving the people from pestilence and monsters, and as psychoanalyst fulfils the anti-hero's function of taking on the burden of their guilt.
This kind of thing is very beguiling, and one's appreciation grows greater still when Brophy, turning from general problems to individual persons and artists, uses her eighteenth-century method to praise those whom she esteems and to put down those she does not. By way of praise, there is an excellent piece on Thackeray's salutary cynicism as deployed in Vanity Fair; and when it comes to rebuke, Brophy's writing is rounder than that of anyone else in the game. On Henry Miller, for example, Brophy is quick to point out that all the boasting about 'human warmth' and 'guts' (attributes which, with typical philistinism, Miller takes to excuse him from the discipline of art) is the braying of the bar- barian who wishes to return to 'nature,' the howling of the ape-man who is the enemy of civilised literature.
. . . Henry Miller has been at his old game of asserting 'I got it, I got it, I got it'—in this case, genius. 0, and a penis. We'll come back to the second, which he probably has got. Genius he has not. . . . Henry Miller has really only one thing to say about Paris—Willer was here.'
Virginia Woolf, too, gets a fair old wigging. If Henry Miller's crime is reversion to the ape, Miss Woolf's is too much glassy essence—far worse, because apes are at least concrete and particular, and
. . . great novels are devastatingly particular. Virginia Woolf's novels are too devastatingly vague. I lost patience when I discovered . . . that she thought you need a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne. . . Sceptics may think ... that the whole experimental fabric was spun to conceal a hole—the absence of characters and incidents which arc as indispensable to true novelists as tunes to true composers...
Last and perhaps best, 1 doubt whether preten- sion and conceit were ever so surely and sharply deflated as when Brophy gets round to Dr A. L. Rowse.
Now, all this of Brophy's is so pleasantly writ- ten and deftly argued (if at times a shade too com- pressed for comfort), it is all, as I have already said, so beguiling, that one is tempted to over- look the asinine interruptions of the deplorable Brigid. But duty must be done, and we may as well take as example some typical utterance of Brigid's from an essay on 'The Rights of Animals.'
Brigid, it appears, is anti-fishing (cruel to the fish), anti-hunting (cruel to the fox), anti-zoo and anti-circus (unfair to wild creatures) and a vegetarian for good measure, because animals have to be killed before they can be eaten. Let me first make it quite plain that I do not advo- cate pointless cruelty to animals; and then let me inquire of Brigid what has become of Brophy's proud belief that the excellence of man consists in his ability to tame and order nature for his own convenience and pleasure. In the face of the peace and pleasure which so many people derive from fishing, it is impossible to take very seriously the brief discomfort of a cold-blooded member of a natural genus not far above the insects. As for fox-hunting, the spectacle is so splendid, of such conspicuous aesthetic value, that it is worth the life of a fox or two—and the neck of a huntsman or two for the matter of that. (The same, mutatis nzutandis, can be said of bull-fighting.) Zoos are sources of know- ledge, circuses, once more, of pleasure: the animals are well cared for and free from worry, and if they find the life a bit boring and con- stricted, they are no worse off in that regard than some millions of mankind. Again, while I admit that animals must be killed before we eat them, I also understand that they die quickly, and that, as the world runs, is a very great boon indeed. Finally, one is bound to observe that if we are to give up all activities that may entail a degree of suffering or injustice for some animal or person else, then we shall have precious few occupations left. Off-hand, I can only think of books and (if carefully conducted) sex, and I really cannot spend my entire life reading and copulating in order to oblige Brigid.
This must be well known to the pre-eminently rational Brophy; and the mystery is how she can bear to let Brigid carry on the way she does. It's not as if the fussing ends with animals: Brigid is also much exercised about women's rights, about the selfishness of people who actually want to keep some of their own property, about the crudity of Kingsley Amis's jokes, and about the waste of domestic abilities in the male —why don't more men stay at home and help with the nappies. Brigid wants to know, instead of rushing off to make money? Well, Brophy knows the answer to that one, and to a lot of far harder questions besides; so for Brophy's sweet sake let us try to forgive and endure Brigid, just as we humour the fatuous and opinionated wife who so often insists on accom- panying the brilliant husband.
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