Elaine Showalter

‘Shopping for pleasure’: is the title tautological or oxymoronic? On one side, the joys of shopping seem almost axiomatic, especially now that every newspaper and magazine offers tips on how to do it, and Zagat is about to bring out a series of retail-tourist guidebooks. In a recent poll taken in London, more than a quarter of respondents said that shopping was what they liked best about the city. In her fashion guidebook, Mimi Spencer exhorts her readers to ‘shop for England … just for the sheer entertainment value of it all’. Suzy Gershman, the American author of Born to Shop: Great Britain, is ‘so enamoured’ of the January sales that she recommends flying in from Cleveland or Omaha for a long weekend. On the other hand, there are – there actually are – women living in Zone 1 who hate to shop, and many feminists who regard shopping as selfishness, frivolity or political deviance. When I wrote an essay for American Vogue a few years ago on my own fondness for department stores, catalogues and shopping malls, I was attacked by academic radicals as the Marie Antoinette of the MLA, whose answer to the sweated and unemployed must be ‘Let them wear Prada.’

Joe Orton came 16th this year in the National Theatre’s poll of the hundred top playwrights of the century. Not bad for someone who failed the 11-plus, spent six months in prison, and was bludgeoned to death at the age of 34. He wrote Between Us Girls in 1957, after he had ended a period of collaboration with his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell. A classics scholar and failed actor, Halliwell was devoted to the gay literary canon avant la lettre, and had tutored Orton in the homosexual literary tradition from the Greeks to Genet. ‘Together,’ Francesca Coppa writes in her excellent introduction to the book, ‘they attempted to write works with a distinctively homosexual sensibility, and their early novels are all profoundly influenced by the style of Halliwell’s literary idol, Ronald Firbank.’ They co-authored five ponderously Firbankian novels, camply titled Lord Cucumber, The Silver Bucket, The Mechanical Womb, The Last Days of Sodom and The Boy Hairdresser. None ever made it into print.‘

The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime. It has been compared to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also condemned as a melodramatic mishmash. First, Richard Bernstein (last December in the New York Times) called it ‘a startling, piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer’s masterpiece’. Bernstein kvelled about its ‘largeness, the depth and complexity of its exorbitantly vivid, intelligent characters’ and Singer’s ‘skill in weaving into a seamless tapestry various disorderly responses to the savagery of life’. But then another New York Times reviewer, Lee Siegel, called it a ‘chaotic, rambling, repetitive and parochial’ book in a ‘plodding translation’ – a ‘shapeless lump’ compared to Singer’s best stories, which are ‘hard diamonds of perfection’.’‘

‘Where are your bodyguards?’ asked my London landlord, peering hopefully over my shoulder as I picked up the keys. It was an early warning of how great a disappointment I would be to my British friends. UK newspaper reports of American reactions to my book Hystories, published in March last year, had mentioned threats of assassination, and had described me as requiring constant protection. In the book, I argue that several contemporary phenomena – chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction – are hysterical epidemics, real disorders but caused by psychological conflicts rather than viruses, nerve gas, devil worshippers or extra-terrestrials. The book made a lot of people furious, but was hardly New Jersey’s Salman Rushdie.’‘

In ‘Taking It Easy’, one of the stories in During Mother’s Absence (1993), Michèle Roberts provides a recipe for a deliciously female mode of creative imagination. Her heroine, a freelance short-story writer of many genres and pseudonyms (Alexis K. Triffel, Virginia Lindisfarne, Jay C. Dacey), leaves her London life with its perpetual diets, its writing ‘squeezed in’ between domestic errands and maternal obligations, its dual enemies of ‘sleep and food’, to stay for a few weeks in the house of her friend Angèle’s mother in South-West France. Here she hopes to overcome her writer’s block and fulfil her ambition to produce a collection of stories ‘rivalling those of Colette and Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys all put together’. Angèle passes on advice from her brother Jim, a painter: ‘You have to make the problem part of the subject. So, obviously what you should do is write a story about writer’s block.’