Flesh by Brigid Brophy

Flesh Reviews

• 
  MJ Nicholls

  Despite residing in the near-Nordic tropicality of Freezeballs, Scottchland, I too have been affected by the seasonal Goodreads disorder THTR (Too Hot To Review). Temperatures have soared from minus one degree to a parch-throated plus three degrees, and agrarian pandemonium has broken out in this here farmboy’s homeland. As the world decays around me, I lie secure in my nook reading the early works of Brigid Brophy, including this novel about an incompetent intellectual who is saved from a lifetime of stuttering chastity by a sexually philanthropic lady who spiffs him up until he’s out refurbishing cabinets. By the time this review hits the filters, I will have been reduced to wringing blades of grass for water, or auto-lactating the teats of any partly alive bovines to maintain hydration. If I live, a GR giveaway of my memoir How I Auto-Lactated a Dying Cow to Survive will be made available (to those in the UK only).
• 
  JacquiWine

  Having enjoyed The Snow Ball so much, I decided to go on a hunt for more novels by Brophy – a search that eventually uncovered Flesh, a suitable companion piece from 1962. Once again, Brophy demonstrates her natural ability to riff with the creative arts, this time alluding to Rubens’ women as symbols of sexuality.
  
  When we are first introduced to Marcus, he appears as a shy, socially awkward, gangly young man, struggling to find his place in the world. By the end of the narrative, he is transformed – infinitely more comfortable with himself and his relationships with others. The woman who brings about this fundamental change in character is Nancy, a self-assured, sexually experienced young woman whom Marcus meets at a party.
  
  To read my review, please visit:
  
  
  https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019...
  
• 
  Manny

  Watching an episode of The Office, that masterclass in tact and sensitivity, I was reminded the other day of a conversation from this obscure 60s novel. She's in the middle of a painful autobiographical revelation.
  
  "Losing my virginity I took in my stride," she says.
  
  "The best place to take it!" he can't help interjecting.
  
  She starts weeping and he wishes he'd managed to resist the line. But even more that she wouldn't be such a damn emotional woman. What's wrong with them? Don't they have any sense of humor?
  
  
  
• 
  Helen McClory

  A good languid summer book about dissipation, marriage, and lolling about.
• 
  Jim

  On 14th August 1962, John Lennon asked Ringo Starr to join the Beatles—the rest is history, the number nine whose route dawdled from Auchenshuggle to Dalmuir was the last tram to run in Glasgow, Sean Connery played James Bond for the first time and Golden Wonder introduce flavoured crisps (cheese & onion) to the UK market. It was a different world, a… quainter world. And this is, despite the raunchy title, is a quaint novella. There really is little to suggest that it was written at a pivotal time in history especially since its author insists on using ‘shew’ rather than ‘show’ and everyone is ever so polite even when they're being rude.
  
  Its hero is Marcus, a bourgeois twenty-eight-year-old Jewish virgin who’s never done a day’s work in his life. He’s an intellectual who for some reason chooses to swim in non-intellectual circles and as such often appears something of a hopeless case, always on the periphery of things. This affords him, as he puts it, a “distressing amount of opportunity to observe” which he does without learning anything useful. A sensitive soul he may be but not a fool; he’s well aware of where he stands in the pecking order. He realises, for example, when he’s invited to parties it’s simply “on the strategic maxim that good parties needed more men than women.” At such dos he finds his spot—near a bookshelf is good—and sticks to it “wearing a look of Noli Me Tangere.” He’s the last person he would’ve expected Nancy to take an interest in. She approaches 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” and somehow no matter how much it looks as if the conversation’s going to the dogs she manages to find something in him to be entranced by. “Marcus knew that people must wonder what Nancy saw in him.” That’s the first line in the book and people just go on wondering.
  
  But it’s not really anyone else’s business bar theirs. They date, get engaged, married and then have sex, neither being in much of a rush to do anything about it beforehand. Nancy, we’re told, does have one talent: “[i]t was for sexual intercourse.” She’s not a virgin when they marry. Prior to Marcus she’s had no less than four previous lovers which might make most readers smile nowadays but I suppose that would be seen as quite shocking back then. Marcus is not shocked. If anything he’s grateful and proves to be a willing student who quickly masters the basics and then moves on from there. There’s a fair amount of sex in the book—at least at the start of the marriage—but nothing graphic. This is about as dirty as it gets:

  Marcus could plunge himself into Nancy with all the delirious casualness of a man lying on a river bank and lazily inserting his bare leg in the warm stream, sensitive to, delighted by, the pulsing of the vigorous current against it.

  So, yes, his wife introduces him to the pleasures of the flesh but once they return home and set up house he finds a job to amuse himself; later she follows suit and they drift off into domesticity if not exactly bliss.
  
  This, however, is where flesh comes back into the picture. Despite being Jewish “[t]he cooking Nancy had been taught was English and, in principle, not very interesting” but it is fattening. Marcus starts to put on weight so much so that at one point he jokes, “I've become a Rubens woman.” But none of this disrupts the marriage which they shape to suit themselves and seem satisfied when the book ends, occasionally happy even and we fully expect them to continue in connubial contentment until one of them dies (probably him from a heart attack).
  
  It’s an odd little book this. The language is delightful and witty. I pretty much hate descriptive writing but if you do insist on describing things at least have a stab at making the descriptions interesting. In this Brophy succeeds admirably. As good an example as any, Marcus’s parents’ house:

  The whole place was overcast by some relic of the twenties' belief that orange was a jazzy colour. The rooms could be seen only through an orange filter: dilute orange juice on the walls, metallic orange worked into the square light switches, glowing orange in the curtains, russet on the three-piece suite, auburn in the mahogany of the console T.V. Or perhaps here the electric bulbs, behind their square, stitched parchment shades, were too bright. The orange light sought out the emptiness and illuminated the terrible pitch of cleanliness at which Marcus's mother kept all fifteen rooms.

  There’re loads of little paragraphs like this to distract and entertain you but I struggled to relate to (or even care much for) anyone in the book. I kept coming back to the same nagging question: Why call the book Flesh? I kept dredging up lines from the Bible like “all flesh is grass,” “the flesh is weak” or “the end of all flesh is before me.” When Adam meets Eve he calls her “flesh of my flesh.” Flesh is an antonym for spirit. Although we’re fleshly creatures it’s that aspect of our nature we’re encouraged to repudiate. Where exactly is Brophy headed here? Their Jewishness is not laboured—they don’t practice or even believe—and yet they struggle to free themselves from its history even if the religious observances were easy enough to give up; they are still Jews on the inside but not in the way Paul was talking about.
  
  One reviewer
  wrote:

  The book is dedicated to Iris Murdoch, with whom gossip suggests Brophy had an affair, and indeed Brophy’s prose sits somewhere between the intense cleverness of Murdoch and the gimlet-eyed irony of Muriel Spark. She deserves to be as revered, and as read, as either.

  I’m not sure she’s in the same league as either of these but I can see where he’s coming from.
  
• 
  Stephen Curran

  It’s the early 1960s and Marcus stands alone at a North London party, contemplating the sausage rolls in relation to his Jewishness. Rescuing him from his unwanted solitude comes Nancy, also a Jew. She pops a sausage roll into a napkin and eats.
  
  This slim domestic tale is a gender-reversed Pygmalion story, with Nancy playing the tutor, moulding Marcus in matters both social and sexual. At the start of the transformation, Marcus admires the women in Rubens paintings. By the end, helped along by his newfound indulgences, he has come to resemble one.
  
  Taken passage-by-passage, Brigid Brophy’s writing is a joy, and a couple of times she made me laugh out loud. But as a whole, the novel feels unfinished. The ending in particular is rushed, introducing significant new developments and dashing them away in a flurry of very short chapters. I’ll bet she had a deadline to meet.
• 
  Jonathan

  Decent enough story about a young man who gets along in life by making very little effort. Annoying habit by the author of using the archaic 'shew' and 'shewing' for 'show' etc., made even more so by overuse of the words. Interesting characters though in a vaguely comic way.