Brophy Flesh

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30469-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Nancy meets Marcus at a party. He is untidy, nervous, shy: women have never paid him any attention. But here is virgin clay from which Nancy can mould her Adam. She marries him, and on their wedding night Marcus realises he is as much her protege in sex as in other fields. But soon he is confident that, under her guiding hands, he had been transformed into a consummate lover; and he begins to feel the urge to slip his leash. 'Elegant, funny and erotic... a good showcase for [Brophy's] perceptions on life and art, her wit and her dazzling prose.' Telegraph 'Sly and sophisticated and written in a deceptively simple manner.' Kirkus Reviews 'Brophy has the enviable knack of combining precision with suggestiveness.' Saturday Review

Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was a prize-winning British novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism, prison reform and Public Lending Right. Her celebrated debut novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, was published in 1953. It was followed by many other acclaimed novels including The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball (which Faber are reissuing with a new foreword by Eley Williams), as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. Brophy's marriage to art historian Michael Levey encompassed a thirteen-year relationship with Iris Murdoch. She died in 1995.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brophy, Brigid

Leseproben

1

MARCUS 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...