Read Flesh Online

Authors: Brigid Brophy

Flesh

BOOK: Flesh
11.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Flesh

BRIGID BROPHY

I
.
M
.

In sexual fables of instructor and protégé it is, traditionally, a man who takes the lead and a woman who follows, whether or not wholly willing. Thus Pygmalion and Galatea, George Bernard Shaw’s famous variation on same, and so forth. In her third novel
Flesh
(1962), Brigid Brophy turns the tables, without fuss or contrivance, but with great style and acute perception. If women are usually seen, for cosmetic reasons, as the more mutable sex, in
Flesh
it is a man who is transformed, both in body and mind, under a woman’s skilful hands. The process of change, though, runs on a little further than either party had quite bargained for.

Marcus, Brophy’s male lead, doesn’t seem like promising raw material when first we meet him. Awkward and ungainly, carrying the mantle of ‘the son in a Jewish family’, he cuts a tortured figure at parties – so inwardly hyperaesthetic as to make small talk impossible, his face ‘a great ruby and white badge of over-sensitivity, wearing a look of Noli Me Tangere.’ Everything about Marcus is wrong in this way – down to the pained, over-thought inadequacy of the flat he can’t afford to decorate as he’d like – and all of it Brophy paints in close detail, deftly, just as she does every inch of the novel.

Incredibly, at one more unpromising party Marcus is ‘rescued’ by a young woman named Nancy, with whom he manages to struggle through a conversation, to express some of his pent-up inner passions, to offer, even, that his favourite painter is Rubens. The effort is epochal for him: afterward something, clearly, has changed. In short order Marcus will feel ‘like a derelict property suddenly bought up by a speculator’. And his mother will be near to tears in ‘her joy that Marcus had a girlfriend at last’.

Who is this Nancy, and what is her game? Like Marcus she comes from a solid North West London Jewish family (though hers is a bit more solidly bourgeois). She’s keenly intelligent, notably competent, orderly, clear-eyed and candid. With her short, thick black hair and trim figure she is, in Brophy’s lovely phrase, like ‘the neat black head of a match’. In time she will tell Marcus that she doesn’t care to be taken for ‘a bullying female’. Nonetheless, without malice, she seems to have looked for a mate whom she can mould.

The first challenges for the would-be couple are how to get clear of the shadows cast by their respective families, and past Marcus’s obvious physical repression, too. At a dance thrown for Nancy by her parents she teaches Marcus how to move her around the floor. Once over his initial qualms, he is stunned by the ease and fluidity and togetherness. ‘This publicly permitted parody of an experience he had never had, sexual intercourse, at last liberated his physical response to Nancy.’ He asks her to marry him on the spot.

Readers will want to discover the rest of this short and succulent novel for themselves. It’s worth saying, though, in point of the woeful neglect of Brigid Brophy’s work during the latter years of her life and since her death – a neglect now being redressed by a new generation of admirers – that given our endless interest in matters of sex and gender it is a stunning thing that a writer so uncommonly sharp on these subjects as Brophy should ever have slipped out of currency. Just for instance, had there been a Literary Good Sex Award for grabs in 1962 she would surely have been a nominee, and on account of numerous passages, such as that when she writes of Marcus and Nancy making love on chill mornings partly to keep warm:

‘… instead of pulling up a blanket to cover them they applied to one another. Marcus could plunge himself into Nancy with all the delicious casualness of a man lying on a river bank and lazily inserting his leg in the warm stream, sensitive to, delighted by, the pulsing of the vigorous current against it.’

Brophy is one of a select band of writers who have suffered, most probably, for being too good. As D. J. Enright noted once in the
London Review of Books,
her novels ‘have often been described as ‘brilliantly written’: a judgement which can have done her sales little good. (‘Don’t bother with that book – it’s brilliantly written!’) But high prose style – which sometimes, however stupefyingly, gets mistaken for artifice or mere surface polish – is most of the matter in this game. ‘True stylishness’, says Enright, ‘always has a point, and makes it firmly yet discreetly.’ Brophy’s firmness was well known to those who shepherded her writing into print. As her former agent Giles Gordon wrote in a fond obituary in 1995, ‘woe betide the “editor” who tried to rewrite her fastidious, logical, exact prose, change a colon to a semi-colon (or vice versa), or try to spell “show” other than “shew”, slavish Shavian that Brophy was’. And ‘shew’ is very much on display – as is every shining facet of Brophy’s gift – in
Flesh.

Richard T Kelly

Editor, Faber Finds

April 2013

M
ARCUS
knew that people must wonder what Nancy saw in him.

Probably they were wondering even while she held her first conversation with him; and when Nancy took him up finally and avowedly, Marcus’s sister actually
expressed
it. “Honestly, Nancy, I don’t see what you see in him, an attractive girl like you …” It was merely a heavy joke, licensed by the occasion: disparaging sisterly affection towards Marcus, a just compliment to Nancy. Yet it was what everyone wondered.

Marcus wondered himself—but not really in humility. Rather, it gave him a moment’s pause of apprehension in the middle of the rapt pleasure he felt because Nancy did see whatever it might be. He was like a derelict property suddenly bought up by a speculator. He was bound to wonder what was to be made of him.

Surprisingly, he did not doubt that there was something to be made. Few people could have imagined he had this confidence. Outwardly, socially, not only was he a
hopeless
case, but he had obviously written himself off as one. It was quite an ordinary case—of over-sensitivity. The only remarkable thing was the acute degree to which he suffered from it.

His relations with what his parents called other young people consisted in his following, in his empty car, their piled, shouting and erratically-driven cars. In the silence of his car, he lost communication with them, even though he kept their tail lights in view. He could never tell
whether they really wanted him to tire, turn off and drive home; or whether they would set him down as more hopeless than ever if he did not presently draw up behind them at whatever house, pub or theatre it was they were being led to by the only one who knew the way.

Yet even in the solitude of his car, he kept the
confidence
of the over-sensitive: the confidence that he
was
sensitive. So far, it had meant only that he suffered more acutely. When he was invited to parties—at one of which he met Nancy—he diagnosed with hurtful accuracy that he had been asked only on the strategic maxim that good parties needed more men than women. He had had a distressing amount of opportunity to observe, and in perfect detachment, that the strategy worked. It made the women feel that innumerable men were dancing attendance on them, even though some of the men, like Marcus, never spoke (or danced); and the men who did talk to the women, and would have done so in any case, it made to feel that they had fought their way to the women by overcoming rivals. Marcus knew that he was there as a mere extra courtier, brought on to make the production look lavish.

Yet he remained confident that if he was sensitive to suffering he must equally be sensitive to delight—if only the circumstances, by a flick of the wrist, could be turned upside down. Indeed, where it was a question of things which could not be expected to reciprocate his
appreciation
—books, paintings, flowers, materials—he knew that he did experience a deeper delight than other people. He got more out of them—or put more in; it was the same thing. His delight was intense to the point of agony. He almost suffered it. And by this very token the human relationships which he now suffered could have been turned to delight. His acute sensibility to what other people disparagingly thought of him must be capable of functioning as an acute sensibility to someone’s
appreciation.
If he was so particularly aware of not communicating with most people, he must be capable of precise and minute communication. Only on the question whether there ever would be an appreciative person for him to communicate with did his confidence halt, and he felt himself depressed for ever on to the side of self-
depreciation.

Perhaps what Nancy picked out in him was the potentiality hidden on the reverse side of his sensibility. If so, she must have been extraordinarily alive herself to such potentialities. It would have been hard, the first time she saw his face, to distinguish anything in it except suffering.

He had got himself hemmed in by other people’s backs and jammed in a corner between a bookcase and a table of food, on neither of which was there room for him to set down his glass, which had been empty for half an hour. He picked out one of the books, opening up a black gap on the shelf, and mimed reading. But this solitary pleasure at a party seemed to him as much a solecism and a confession as if he had stood there wiggling a loose tooth in his mouth; and the feeling of being exposed overwhelmed any pleasure the book might have given him. He put it back in the shelf, meticulously aligning it with its neighbours as though it really was a tooth. He used up as much time as he could. But in the end there was no more to be done with the books. He had to turn back to the food table and hover there. His face might have been a Negro mask attached to the wall, a great ruby and white badge of over-sensitivity, wearing a look of Noli Me Tangere.

It was a long, large, terrible face: its size delivered up every quiver of its suffering magnified, like a drop of sweat on a face on the cinema screen. On such a scale the face had room to be both thin and fleshy. Temples, the ridge of the cheeks, the articulation of the jaw, were
all bony. But where there was flesh it was blatantly fleshy, hanging, without shape, on the point of becoming tremulous—or, rather, it always looked as though this was the moment just after it had been flayed, and while it was still quivering.

The lips, especially, were full and almost fruitily
suggestive
of suffering. They seemed to have been turned too far out, exposing some of the sensitive, private skin that should have been kept inside the mouth.

The nose, when it began, was as narrow and brown as the backbone ridge of a roast turkey; but, by the time it reached the bottom of a curve that really was shaped like a turkey’s backbone, it had lost both definition and colour and had become a great blunt truncheon of boneless flesh, which again suggested knives and suffering—
suggested
, indeed, the ritual surgery of Marcus’s race, as though the only way the nose flesh could have been left so tender and exposed was by the removal of a protective foreskin.

He had come to the party wearing a polo-necked sweater with his lounge suit. Even so, no one was deceived into thinking him poor, unconventional or otherwise interesting enough to approach. He emanated the true explanation: that he had sent all his shirts to the laundry at one go and, discovering it too late to buy a new one (he was not in the least short of money), had not known how to ring up his hostess and cry off.

Not that he could think she would have been distressed if he had stayed away. But again he could not tell if it would be acceptable for him simply to fail to come or whether he was bound to offer an explanation, in which case she would have said, “Come in anything” and he would not have known whether she meant it or not.

His face, hung above the food, quivering as if in a faint night breeze, might have been a voodoo talisman warning everyone that the food was forbidden, unclean. But as
a matter of fact strategy
had
worked, and the party was going too well for anyone to bother about food yet. Even Marcus ate nothing, though it was not for him the party was going well. It was he, in point of fact, who was troubled by taboo. One of the shallow silver dishes just beside his right hip contained sausage rolls, and he did not know whether the sausages were pork. His host and hostess were Jewish, but not orthodox. The party was mixed Jewish and Gentile: just a party, in fact.

Marcus was not orthodox himself. His parents went to a reformed synagogue, but extremely rarely. They had made no fuss when Marcus stopped going altogether.

Marcus did not, as a matter of fact, like meat in general, because he was squeamish about the killing of animals. Only the pig, through its ancient uncleanness, was too low for his sympathy; and the result was that, by a reversal of the taboo, he actually preferred pork to other meats. As a boy he had had a lust for fried bacon. He had once asked a Gentile friend to ask his mother to serve bacon accidentally on purpose when Marcus was invited to supper. It was wartime, which had admitted
dispensations;
and those, added to an already liberal background, would have made it perfectly permissible for Marcus to eat the bacon if it could be truly said that there was nothing else and that his refusal would cause
embarrassment.
But either the friend had forgotten to ask his mother or the family had already eaten up their bacon ration. Marcus remembered they had all eaten a ritually neutral but very unpleasing cheese pie instead.

Now he did not know whether he was more distressed because the sausage rolls might or because they might not contain the only meat he really enjoyed eating.

He did not even feel he could take up one of the paper table napkins which, so many white triangular sails from a watercolour seascape, had been crowded into a smoky Swedish tumbler. It would have relieved him to get rid
of his glass, pick out a napkin and fold it into shapes. But the Swedish tumbler had been placed hintingly close to the silver dish: people were obviously meant to wrap a napkin round one end of a sausage roll while they bit the other. Marcus was afraid that a white napkin in his hand might signal to someone to offer him a sausage roll. He would not want his first word to be No. On the other hand he did not want to be seen eating what might be pork, for fear of destroying the last thing he might have in common with about half the people in the room. At the back of many of his motivations was the fear of making himself, if he were not already, unmarriageable.

Yet he could not seriously think he had anything in common with anyone in the room, Jew or Gentile.

As though to mark the very point on which he differed from them all, casting Jew and Gentile alike into the wider class of philistines, he considered plunging back across his tiny corner of space which no one else wanted and looking at another book. His hesitation was acted out bodily. For a moment it was as though the night breeze had produced a gust and the voodoo scarecrow was flapping and spinning.

During that moment Nancy approached him: as though to take him down from the wall or lift him off the stake he was so agonisingly and insecurely impaled on, for ever.

“I knew there must
be
food,” she said. “I’m so hungry.”

He had no idea it was more than a moment’s rescue.

Profusely he offered her, so well as he could with his glass in his hand (but at least it did not have to be kept upright), the cheese biscuits, the canapés, the olives. He did not offer the sausage rolls because he could see she was Jewish. But she seemed, although she had said she was hungry, untempted by any of them. He felt bound to offer her the sausage rolls after all.

“Ah, yes,” she said, taking one of the paper napkins,
which he had forgotten to offer, and then one of the rolls. Biting into the roll and looking at Marcus, she said: “It seems so silly to let oneself be restricted by an old hygienic precaution that may have had some point in the ancient world, in the middle east….”

Marcus wanted to say that he believed the theory that it was a hygienic precaution to be a piece of modern middle-class folklore. But he was afraid of sounding supercilious and intellectually aggressive.

“Not that it
is
a hygienic precaution,” Nancy went on, on her own account, talking through chews as a gesture of informality, of flirtation even. “It’s perfectly obvious to anyone who’s read Frazer that it’s a straightforward primitive taboo.”

Marcus made the motions of gasping—his lips dropped apart—at this revelation that she was an intellectual, too. But no answer would come through his lips, and he closed them again. But, since she had done so, he at least dared to draw out one of the paper table napkins. He rid himself of his glass—there was still no room on the table itself, but he balanced it, carefully, in the silver dish, where Nancy had made a space by taking a sausage roll. He began folding the napkin, again carefully, into shapes, expressing anguish by the violence with which he scored the folds with his thumb-nail, while he waited for the one person in the room with whom he had something in common to walk away from him.

But she did not walk away.

Marcus wanted to dare to ask her whether she liked Proust. Instead, he said, in a depressed voice.

“Do you know many people here?”

“Almost everyone except you.”

He gave a giggle, which was really the expression of the gasp which had not come out before. Recovering himself—so far as he was ever in possession of himself—he told her his name, and she replied with hers.

“Do
you
know many people?” she asked.

“Almost no one.” His voice did not even pretend that this was unusual with him at parties.

“Presumably you know our host and hostess?” She helped herself to another sausage roll, Marcus’s bony hands scurrying to offer her one too late, so that he found himself thrusting the silver dish into her breasts, at a time when both her mouth and hands were already occupied and she could not defend herself against him.

“O yes,” he said hastily, putting the dish down, making a sign of apology and blushing, “O yes, I know
them,
of course.” And then, fearing he had given an untrue impression and claimed too much intimacy: “But not very well. Actually, she’s more a friend of my sister’s.”

“Is she here tonight?” asked Nancy.

“O yes.”

Both Marcus’s and Nancy’s glance searched the room, hers with purpose, his with none.

“What does she look like?”

“But surely—” Marcus began, before he realised that Nancy had been speaking of his sister, he of their hostess.

In despondency he corrected the misunderstanding. He believed Nancy must think him either witless or insulting to suppose she could have been asking whether their hostess was present at her own party; and he was more pierced by the irony because the whole reason why he had blundered so stupidly was that his thoughts had gone off in pursuit of some sign he might make, some subtle freemasonic code mark he might let fall, that should inform her that he too was intellectual.

BOOK: Flesh
11.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

We Sled With Dragons by C. Alexander London
Rescuing the Heiress by Valerie Hansen
Wishes by Allyson Young
On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett
A Touch of Heaven by Portia Da Costa
Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak