High life
Incest chic
Taki
here are very few taboos left in the world — especially here in the Home of the Depraved — incest being one of them. No longer. Random House editor, Harry Evans — yes, our very own little Harry, hubby of Tina — has extolled The Kiss: A Memoir as a masterpiece, while one Phillip Lopate in Vanity Fair calls it lyrical and dry. Other slimebags have gone even further. Words such as uncanny, heartbreaking, fearless, amazing abound.
Mind you, it was bound to happen. After same-sex marriage taboos were removed by those nice guys, who think they know What's good for us small-timers, incest chic was next in line. 'Boy, did I have a wild one last night, I've never seen Jocasta so randy. Ma and I woke up all of Thebes.' The Kiss: A Memoir, in which the author Kathryn Harrison writes about the four-year affair she had with her father, has Big Bagel literati in a tizzy. Newsweek has called Harrison brave. I imagine in the sick mind of the Newsweek critic that the fact Harrison has a four-year-old son and a six- Year-old daughter makes her even braver. We are, after all, living in the age of Clinton.
The bad news is that culture today is Presided over by non-talented leftists who Constantly push the limits of perversity and Promiscuity. The good news is that, although the book has been publicised in one of the most successfully orchestrated campaigns, it is only the degenerate Phonies posing as literati that are swinging 20 greenbacks for it. Needless to say, our very own Tina Brown in her very own weekly, The Big Bagelite, is excerpting parts of the Oedipal yarn her hubby published. It is, after all, a family magazine.
The horror of publishing such rot is not in the act itself — there are worse things happening daily, although I cannot think of some right now — but in what I suspect is an effort to normalise incest. Harrison vol- untarily entered into an affair with her old man when she was 20, one she kept up for four years. Worse, she is revelling in it. She and her husband have become ubiquitous: Vogue, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post. She will obviously do all the talk-shows next, perhaps cry a little on Oprah, and then get invited to the White House.
I may be going out on a limb here — and I will defend my own case in a British court in case the slimebag sues — but I wonder whether she's really telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Now this is not as foolhardy as it seems, nor am I anxious to give la Harrison some of my drachmas. She already has her eyes firmly on the bank. Here is why I don't find her sleaze completely convincing.
The Kiss is presented as a memoir with- out a single date, location, or names other than the two slimy ones ever being men- tioned. All the other principals of the story — like her step-mother, in whose house the affair began — are now conveniently dead. Better yet, many scenes in The Kiss — writ- ten in somnambulant tones and absurd vic- tim-speak — have already appeared in Harrison's first and unsuccessful novel, Thicker than Water. This was 1991. She told Publisher's Weekly that she had made the whole thing up. Six years later she is telling us that it really happened. Which story should we believe?
'It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty,' says la Harrison. Especially as Harry Evans doesn't pay for keeping things secret. I say secrecy (once known as privacy) should have been a plus where her own children are concerned. (`Mommy, was grandad a good f—?') And there is something else she forgot. Decency. Have you absolutely no decency, Mrs Harrison?
'That one, please.'
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