A User's Guide to the Millennium, page 26
‘Take care of your mother,’ is his stern injunction to the seven-year-old Hillen, a remark that baffles the boy. She, after all, is supposed to take care of him. But the words are closer to the truth than he and his brother realize, and the book is a remarkable account of the way in which desperate alliances can form in the most unexpected places, even within a single family.
The Way of a Boy opens in the tea plantation after the men’s departure, with Hillen’s mother and the other wives trying to sustain the illusion of normality – that strange limbo which I remember well from my own childhood during a similar Japanese occupation, when the adults seemed to lose their belief in themselves, like actors in a play whose run is about to be cancelled. Hillen describes superbly how a child’s watching eye soon expands to take in every detail of adult weakness and uncertainty, a disturbing lesson that lasts a lifetime.
All too soon, the scenery shifts abruptly when the Japanese decide to intern the women and children. Taking with them whatever they can carry, Hillen and his brother follow their mother to the waiting truck, bullied and berated by the ever-angry Japanese soldiers. After an overnight stop at an excrement-strewn girls’ school, they are taken to their camp in Bandung, a section of the city closed off by a bamboo fence. Bloemenkamp – the Camp of Flowers – eventually held 5000 women and children, and the Hillens are crammed into a bungalow with five other families. Mrs Hillen divides their windowless room with a sheet, sleeping on one side while the sons sleep on the other, part of that subdivision of personal space that can turn an open dormitory into a Kafka-like labyrinth – the sight of sheets on a line still unsettles me.
In the heat and stench they endure boredom, starvation and incessant beatings. Hillen and his mother draw ever closer to each other, a process by no means inevitable. She risks her life by smuggling him out of the camp to a nearby hospital when he suffers an attack of blood-poisoning. But she never shares her dwindling rations with her ravenous sons, aware that a far greater danger threatens them if she dies.
The years pass as they move from camp to camp. The older brother is taken away to join the men, but they all survive and at the war’s end are reunited. Hillen, interestingly, had spent three years in a women’s world where the only adult males were the hostile Japanese guards, and one is curious to know what the long-term effects were upon him. Perhaps there were none. This memoir suggests that his childhood happily co-existed with a regime of hunger and brutality. He remained mischievous, dreamy and always ready to be generous, confirming that children sustained by the love of a single adult can survive anything.
Daily Telegraph
1994
Waste of Beauty
Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic, 1901–4
Edward Wilson
Edward Wilson, doctor and zoologist, was a member of Scott’s two Antarctic expeditions, on Discovery in 1901–4, which carried out the first inland exploration of the continent, and on Terra Nova in 1910–13. The tragic end of the latter partly overshadowed the Discovery expedition, and Wilson’s diary has only now been published.
Wilson gives a brilliant picture of the southward voyage – the phosphorescent spray breaking over the huge Finner whales that sidled past the ship; the air filled with yellow-billed albatross while the expedition members flew kites and read Swinburne to each other, all in excellent humour, their dress and manner becoming more and more piratical. As they neared the Antarctic the atmosphere changed, and Wilson reported that ‘jokes don’t go down easily.’ After the hazards of the first winter ashore he writes: ‘Men don’t improve when they live together … some of our mess have quite dropped the mask and are not so attractive in their true colouring. The Navy seems to me a most unfortunate necessity, because it spoils many otherwise excellent characters.’
Above all, the diary is remarkable for its immense detail. Wilson recorded everything: the best binoculars for observing birds (6 x Goerz rather than 6 x Zeiss, apparently), the precise process of fermentation by which the timbers of the ice-locked ship were being converted into alcohol in the bilges, weights and measurements of the expedition members, before and after (Scott put on weight). He has a sharp eye for the scene around him: the seas filled with lilac ice, the harsh jeering voices of the penguins, the snapping seals with teeth like old women, the crew jubilantly eating the first Antarctic ice taken from the sea.
Scott himself remains an aloof and isolated figure, reticent about his plans and given to the occasional calculated duplicity, but unsentimental and of iron tenacity. Wilson’s character emerges more clearly: good-humoured but given to outbursts of temper, a devout Christian and obsessive taxonomist more interested in recording the unknown fauna of the Antarctic, such as the primitive insects that confirmed the continent’s isolation since Cambrian times, than in the arduous sledging trips. These took him away into a blank wilderness of ice, ‘a wonderful waste of beauty’.
The description of the three-month journey he made with Scott has an hallucinatory intensity: the starving dogs eating each other in their harnesses as the exhausted men dragged them along, pursued by a single skua gull that fed on the dismembered pieces, the sky full of mock suns. One’s mind moves ahead a few years to when his body was found beside Scott’s in the tent on the Great Ice Barrier. The letter left by the dying Scott for Oriana Wilson summed him up: ‘True man, best of comrades and staunchest of friends.’
Guardian
1966
Use Your Vagina
How to Achieve Sexual Ecstasy
Stephan Gregory
Books like this one are never reviewed, although their sales – through mail order and under-the-counter outlets – are among the largest of all time, part of a huge invisible literature ignored by the critics. A factual reappraisal of these sexual handbooks, not merely as a subject for arch or clever comment, is long overdue. Most of them are profoundly earnest in tone, and deserve to be taken on their own terms in exactly the same way as the latest Ford Zephyr maintenance manual. How far any of them reflect the real world of sex is for each of us to judge. As basic primers they have the same unreality as the sort of colloquial French found in tourist guides, but this is less the fault of the publishers and authors than the impossibility of compressing the subject matter within the pages of a book.
How to Achieve Sexual Ecstasy was launched recently in a series of mail-order advertisements in magazines and underground newspapers. Elegant typography and a naked photographic model kicking up her heels suggested that this would be a fresh attempt to deal with an old subject matter. Some of the chapter titles, such as ‘Beyond Sexual Infinity’ and ‘Threshold of the Sexual Psyche’, seemed to describe a sexual version of 2001, conjuring up a vision of a Panavision penis driving towards all the bedposts of eternity, while the Blue Danube plays from the mattress vents. The book itself is far more conservative. Although its first publication is given as 1969, it is difficult to tell when it was written. So successful have these handbooks been over the last fifty years that many of them have been revised and reprinted dozens of times. This one is American in origin, the bulk of it probably written in the late fifties, although in one section comments are made on the Masters–Johnson studies. The author’s attitude is one of permissiveness governed by a strict moral code. Throughout, his text enshrines the notion that complete sexual happiness is the right of everyone in terms of that self-defeating paradox, normal sexual behaviour.
The hypothetical reader is difficult to visualize, although the sales of this book have already been enormous. Who in fact would want to read it? The preface describes it as a handbook of sex technique, though most of the amatory techniques and sexual positions described are known to any adolescent. At times one wonders whether these books are intended as fact or fiction. The lengthy description of acts of intercourse couched in detailed narrative terms are much more reminiscent of erotic fiction than they are of any handbook. However, in one sense it seems to me that these books of so-called sexual expertise provide what J. B. S. Haldane called a kinesthetic language, in this case a kinesthetic language of sex, a set of terms and descriptions by which ordinary people can describe a series of important experiences and activities for which no vocabulary previously existed.
A key to the book may come in the first chapter, in a section entitled ‘Arousing the Unresponsive Wife’, a suggestion that perhaps the book is designed for married couples who have begun to find a monogamous sexual relationship something of a bore. The description of an idealized sexual encounter, the set piece of the book, is presented with enormous detail, with a great deal of attention paid to the mise-en-scene: ‘The place should be agreeable to both participants. If it is to be a public place such as an hotel or motel, care should be taken to ensure availability of accommodation, by reservation if possible.’ Warnings are given about the hazards offered by paper-thin walls, corridor noises and highway traffic, as well as public places which cater for ‘illicit sex traffic, which should be avoided for aesthetic as well as practical reasons’.
Given the appropriate situation, all is well, and the extended description of the sex act becomes a kind of seduction of the reader, presented with a notable simplicity and warmth. Careful attention is paid to the needs of elaborate foreplay and a concern for the partner’s responses. Repeatedly the book stresses the traditional view of the supposed slowness of women’s responses (how times have changed). However, those of us who tend to rush our fences could surely learn something from the descriptions of how to kiss our partner’s elbows and savour the delights of the navel. ‘Under the impetus of these attentions,’ the author assures us, ‘the woman will quickly reach a high level of passionate abandon. Her breath will begin to come in gasps (or sobs) and her hips will be in continuous motion. She may ask you to “put it in me” or she may say something like “Hurry, hurry”. At this point you should roll her onto her back.’
An interesting comment on the psychology of the book is seen in what the author terms ‘the clean-up operation immediately following the afterplay period.’ He warns his readers that certain substances secreted under the duress of passion are often found offensive by both partners as passion wanes. It is wise, the author states, that clean-up begin before any feelings of revulsion may set in.
After this first extended narrative seen from the man’s point of view a similar chapter follows from the standpoint of the woman. What characterizes the text is the immense concern that the author attributes to his two idealized partners. Both are so busy caring for the feelings of the other that they can have little time for any real passion, let alone the aggression and cruelty that drive in the same harness as love and tenderness.
In the second chapter, ‘Specialized Coital Positions’, hints are given on how to derive the maximum of pleasure from the classic sexual positions. The language throughout is simple and matter-of-fact, under headings such as ‘Penetration is too shallow’, ‘Fit is too loose’ or ‘Fit is too tight’. Again, enormous attention is given to the need to satisfy the woman partner, a problem primarily solved in terms of a series of elaborate devices for bringing the clitoris into direct and continuous contact with the shaft of the penis. This continuous deference towards women reveals the archaeology of the book, that first realization of the immense sexuality of women that stunned the generation of Freud and D. H. Lawrence.
Other problems discussed are those of intercourse where the man is much taller than the woman, where the woman’s buttocks are particularly large, or where, given an unusually big penis, a fuller range of sexual pastimes is possible. The author recommends what he terms ‘riding high’, and places great stress on the so-called ‘wheelbarrow position’, strongly recommending it for those women who have difficulty in achieving complete orgasm. However, he points out the hazards of using the inverted-vulva positions during pregnancy. Again and again he emphasizes the need for women to make the most of their sexual pleasure, at times even at the expense of their male partners. ‘Use your vagina,’ he writes, ‘use it for sexual pleasure. Do not hasten towards his climax, but towards yours.’
Good advice, but at one point the author contrasts his idealized sexual experience with what he terms the usual and tragic pattern of sex in our society – masturbation, illicit adventures, frigidity, perversions, disenchantment, divorce, neuroses, psychoses, alcoholism and drug addiction, prostitution and sex crimes. What the book completely ignores is the fact that these activities are those which most people now seem to prefer, that sexuality is expressed more and more in terms only of its perversions and disenchantments rather than of those platonic embraces the book so humanely and affectionately describes. Too many of us would rather be involved in a sex crime than in sex. Sadly, the conceptualization of sex which has taken place along with everything else leads us away from precisely those idealized sexual encounters which these handbooks describe. To a large extent this book, like many others, is a nostalgic hymn to a kind of sexual Garden of Eden, whose doors Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes and numerous other pioneers tried for so many years to re-open. Alas, the original tenants are no longer interested. In all probability what will put an end to the population explosion will be not birth control but buggery. Sex does not exist, only eroticism.
For all its good intentions, and its broadminded concern for our sexual happiness, How to Achieve Sexual Ecstasy has a strangely period quality. Above all it is a monument to marriage and the monogamous sexual relationship, and to the somewhat old-fashioned notion that someone else’s pleasure is more important than our own. Far from being sent out under plain wrappers, books of this kind should be read in schools, though how far this would prepare our children for the real world seems doubtful, particularly to a generation of sub-teens brought up on Zap comics. When one thinks of successful marriages today one thinks in terms of couples who have worked out successful extra-marital relationships. A modern and much more relevant version of this manual would be concerned with the sexual perversions (some so bizarre that they have ceased to have any connection with sex), with the effects of drugs and pot on sexual behaviour, and the whole gamut of real and vicarious couplings possible when more than two people are present. It would also provide accounts of sexual intercourse with prostitutes, a specialized sub-category of sexual experience that requires its own expertise and mental attitudes. Needless to say, these ecstasies are of a very different kind.
New Worlds
1969
The Consumer Consumed
Could Ralph Nader, the consumer crusader and scourge of General Motors, become the first dictator of the United States? The question isn’t entirely frivolous. Now in his sixth year as the most articulate and determined champion of the ordinary consumer, Nader already reveals an ominous degree of self-denying fanaticism that links him to the last of the old-style populist demagogues and may be making him the first of the new. Given that party and presidential politics in the USA are no longer flexible enough to admit any true outsider (the next five US presidents will probably come from a tiny pool of a hundred or so professional politicians), one would expect any real maverick with a headful of obsessions to home in on us from an unexpected quarter of the horizon.
The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates – the inhabitants of marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with the ballot paper in the polling booth. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software. For most of us the styling and efficiency of a soup-mix or an automobile are far more real, and far more reassuring, than the issues of traditional politics: East of Suez, balance of payments, trade union reform. Anyone who can take a housewife’s trusting relationship with her Mixmaster or my own innocent rapport with my automobile and feed into them all his obsessions and unease is clearly going to be in business.
The son of immigrant Lebanese parents, Ralph Nader decided to become a defender of the common people, according to his own biography, at the age of eight. In the established tradition of populist leaders he took up his law books in their defence, but at Harvard Law School discovered that the young lawyers were being trained to defend the big corporations, not the small consumer. Nader’s confrontation with the biggest of the big corporations, General Motors, contains the entire psychology of his method, and represents no mean achievement – for the first time, he made Americans feel guilty about their greatest dream image and totem object: the motor car.
At the time, Americans were so busy worrying about their cars that few of them had a chance to look at Nader’s book Unsafe at Any Speed and the charged and emotive language he uses. This is the opening sentence: ‘For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.’
From this point, Nader never looked back, tapping a huge fund of insecurity about modern technology which has mushroomed into the present concern for pollution and road safety (similar efforts are now being made in Britain to make people feel uneasy over the enormous advances in sexual freedom).
What is interesting about Nader is that this champion of the consumer is himself a non-consumer. His annual income is estimated to be more than $100,000, but he lives on a minute fraction of this in a boarding-house room, without a car or a TV set. If one can divide dictators into smokers and non-smokers, Nader’s potential for dictatorship is clearly of the puritanical, non-smoking kind. Described as harsh and almost unfeeling in his dedication, Nader insists over and over again that his only concern is with ‘justice’ – love, needless to say, has no place in his scheme of things. ‘If you want to be loved, you’ll be co-opted.’ None of us can say we haven’t been warned.
