Flesh

by Brigid Brophy

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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, British Literature, Novels, 20th Century

158 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in Ealing, Middlesex, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."

She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.

Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."

Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

An awkward English party where even the suspect non-kosher sausage rolls look nervous. In the corner stands Marcus, a young Jewish lad so shy he treats conversation like an infectious disease. He holds an empty glass as if it were a moral duty. His sweater is a mistake, his face a public liability, his whole being an apology in human form. He is the living ellipsis at the end of other people's sentences.

Into this tremor of self-consciousness walks Nancy, brisk, hungry, and far too intelligent to care what anyone thinks. She plucks a sausage roll, lectures on primitive taboos, and unwittingly alters the trajectory of Marcus's life. He is transfixed, she is amused, and the room, buzzing with small talk, fails to notice that salvation has just begun to nibble a canape.

Nancy sees in Marcus a raw material begging for aesthetic redevelopment. He loves beauty but only the kind that hangs quietly in museums. She decides to turn him into a living exhibit. Their courtship becomes a comedy of mismatched registers: she speaks in clear declarations, he mumbles in minor keys. They discuss Rubens, whose women Marcus reveres as if they were sacred pastries, soft and unreachable. Nancy laughs at his reverence, marries him, and makes him live it.

His transformation begins in the most English way possible, through real estate. His dusty flat of art books and self-pity gives way to Nancy's sharper, cleaner house, where tweed curtains meet intellectual clutter. He learns that freedom smells faintly of furniture polish and that all of North West London shares one domestic perfume. By their engagement he has graduated from social relic to supervised optimist, cautiously hopeful that happiness might be possible under proper management.

Marriage, in Brophy's hands, is an experiment. On their honeymoon in Italy, Marcus discovers what it means to be terrified, married, and awake all at once. Nancy, precise and practical, takes command of his body as confidently as she takes command of conversation. He, the world's most inhibited aesthete, undergoes a revelation that feels part theology, part anatomy, and entirely sensual. Timidity ripens into rapture. He learns that the body can think and that desire can reason. In Nancy's world nothing, not even perversion, is perverse if it is wanted enough.

His nervous energy dissolves into pleasure, his diffidence into devotion, until he can say, without irony, "I have become a Rubens woman." Marcus has filled out, spiritually and physically, until his soul glows with the same excessive color as the canvases he once adored.

Brophy turns this metamorphosis into a sly anatomy of English repression. Flesh is both philosophical striptease and love story between intellect and instinct. Marcus achieves self-knowledge through embarrassment and enlightenment through lust, reaching a final, wickedly comic apotheosis as the very beauty he once worshipped from afar.

Judaism in Flesh functions as an atmosphere. It lingers in Marcus's reflexes, in his hesitation over pork, in his parents' house where piety has been polished into décor. Brophy paints this world with acid delicacy. Judaism gives Marcus a talent for taboo but no comfort when he violates it. It becomes a metaphor for overcivilization, for the way refinement curdles into paralysis. He wants to be ethical, beautiful, and loved, yet each ambition sabotages the others. Brophy turns his heritage into a language of embarrassment, a system of guilt repurposed as taste.

Her feminism, meanwhile, is cunning rather than pious. Nancy is no muse but an architect. She remodels Marcus. She is confident, efficient, sexually fluent. Brophy lets her orchestrate the relationship as a study in power: the woman teaches, the man learns, the body becomes both classroom and artwork. Nancy is creator; Marcus, her material.

The novel’s feminism is skeptical, sly, and free of slogans. It does not idealize women but insists on their right to complexity. Equality, Brophy implies, requires imagination, not imitation. A woman need not behave like a man to wield power, and a man need not mimic a cliché to deserve pleasure.

Despite its brevity, Flesh is a glittering piece of intellectual mischief. It is elegant yet indecent, philosophical yet bodily, a perfect prank on the English novel of manners. Brophy exposes the vanity of intellect and the absurdity of desire. She takes the old story of a man rescued by a woman and rewires it into a meditation on power, pleasure, and perception. In her world the mind and the body are twin instruments of discovery, each refining the other.

Written just before the cultural thaw of the 1960s, Flesh anticipates it with more wit and less noise. It mocks prudery and exhibitionism alike, and seems to tell us that sex without wit is simply manual labor. Intellect must learn to touch, and flesh must learn to think.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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?

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and sweet, this is a quietly realistic story of a young couple. There's lots of observational detail about North London Jewish life, and its subtle divisions. Although not explicitly stated, we can infer that Marcus' family are German exiles of the 30s, the mother never learned the language properly and they never lost their anxiety about belonging. In contrast Nancy gets her confidence from parents for whom assimilation is not an issue; her father is respected for his military record, which is the highest indication of acceptance possible in British society. I suppose several aspects of this book might have been daring in 1962: casual reference to (and acceptance of) male and female homosexuality; the idea that females enjoy sex and can take the initiative; that they don't lose the desire after childbirth. But the real challenging theme is just the unvoiced one that people can change, and aren't trapped in whatever stereotype they might belong to. Marcus starts as a lonely Jewish intellectual, but he gets a job and a family and puts on weight. Nancy isn't the one-track-mind a male author might use her as; the old shopkeeper never quite behaves as the caricature he could have been. The social satire is against the lazier satire these materials could have been.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Helen McClory · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Stephen Curran · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given the title and the synopsis on the back i was led to believe I has picked up a piece of delightfully absurd and trashy old erotica. What i got instead was a vague portrait of a marriage, where the man vividly reminded me of Tony Soprano despite my never having seen the show, and despite the book being about jews in 1960's london. To be fair, the couple did have a fair amount of sex, though none of it described in any detail nor containing more than a faint hint of deviancy. The plot was mostly about arguments, body shaming, and the weather, all with weird undertones of anti-semitism.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars