Amusing when not accusing
Frederic Raphael
FELLATIO, MASOCHISM, POLITICS AND LOVE by Leo Abse Robson, £16.95, pp. 220 Leo Abse is a smiling Jeremiah who combines the capering shamelessness of a Jewish comedian with the gauche candour of the provincial Welshman. If he bases his critique of post-political Western society on the prevalence of fellatio, he is too blunt to be accused of innuendo. He pro- poses to discuss blow-jobs and he does. He sees the Clinton instance as the emblematic sexual act of a (Western) world in a hurry more for advancement and affectless satis- factions than for love, children or Freud's `mature genitality' (which doesn't sound all that much fun). Abse's earnestness is backed by an impatient wish for human emancipation from the cash nexus and, if possible, the Blair government.
His epigraph is Diogenes' remark, 'Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race that you break into a burst of speed.' Abse is 83, but he goes roaring on. He begins his sorry-state- of-the-nation analysis with a frank account of a 1935 visit to Le Sphinx, the famous Paris brothel on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, which Brassai photographed so memorably. It was there (on the eve of the premiership of quasi-namesake Leon Blum) that the virginal young socialist Leo was first treated to oral sex, which was unmentionable, if not necessarily unprac- tised, in prewar Wales.
Abse's brothers include a psychoanalyst as well as a poet; reticence is not a family trait. However, his frankness is neither boastful nor apologetic: he is a man who gets things off his chest, or wherever they happen to be. The main thrust, so to speak, of his argument is that oral sex is 'the symptom of a grave and pathological soci- etal condition'. There is something of the lay preacher in this Jew from the Welsh valleys. As a romantic, he would find noth- ing to smile at in Woody Allen's 'Sex with- out love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's the tops.' Abse's long record as an MP who promoted a number of sexually emancipatory bills, often in the face of humbug and doctri- naire conservatism on both sides of the house, acquits him of being a killjoy, but — as a more or less unreformed Freudian he does not go along with John Updike's assertion that oral sex is the domain of the true sexual gourmet (there is nothing here about what Ali G. calls 'drinking from the furry cup').
This is an endearing and often penetrat- ing essay, a mixture of outspoken courage and improbable nostalgia (who else wants the 1940s back?). Abse takes a sympathetic view of Ron Davies — the victim, if we accept his confessions, of a brutal father and of Bill Clinton (likewise), but there is recklessness in this attempt to search all our present discontents with a Marxist/ Freudian warrant. When he denounces 'the vicious influence of contemporary capital- ism upon personal sexual conduct', one wonders how he explains the satyriasis of Laventri Beria or the harem-keeping of Chairman Mao under 'socialism'.
He is properly scornful of the Dome for its sexually undifferentiated images of man and woman. In the past, he was no less righteously apprehensive of the Lottery for pandering to the national addiction to gam- bling. However, he doesn't seem to see that it now amounts to a semi-privatised income tax, seductively levied on those, such as pensioners, who could not otherwise be taxed without an outcry. He reads it only as validating the masochism of, for egregious instance, Robin Cook, tipster, diplomat and traitor to Old Labour.
Leo the Compassionate is more persua- sive and amusing than Abse the Accuser. For the most part, he keeps his enthusiastic cool very well, but Blair'n'Brown is, for him, a 'marriage' (Blair's description) made in hell and dedicated to the creation of a Britain fuller of insatiable, self-seeking, self-satisfied predators than of happy fami- lies. The problem with assessing politicians (or anyone else) in terms of their psychic maladies is that Freudian intuitions, although shrewd, can never be based on any objective measure. Even if President Milosevic is indeed a masochist, with suici- dal parents, craving his own destruction, does it follow that it was wrong to inter- vene in Kosovo? Maybe is was, but not for that reason.
Abse is aggressive but rarely vindictive. He should not, however, mock 'Junket Jack' Cunningham because his father was `gaoled for avarice' (surely that is not a criminal offence in entrepreneurial Blair Britain). It may be true, as Will Hutton is quoted as saying, that fat people are dis- criminated against, but solicitor Abse must know that Hutton is wrong to say juries `give them longer sentences'. Juries don't give sentences at all, do they?
This self-proclaimed old man obeys Dylan Thomas's injunction not to `go gentle'. He does it prosaically (with a plethora of 'proffers'), but he also does it with the scourging warm-heartedness of an incorrigible well-wisher and yea-sayer. Stick around, Leo.
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