Michael Mason

One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary. Everything about the jacket of ‘Men’ or Men suggests that what Weidenfeld and Nicolson favour about this book – that is, what they find commercially promising – is its author rather than her text. It is not just that Ms Ford is given great emphasis in the bled-off photograph of her that fills the back cover: the jacket strives to personalise the text inside, implying it to be interesting only, or chiefly, because of who wrote it. The background is pure white, the lettering scarlet and black. Not the expected livery for a book subtitled ‘A Documentary’ (but, as it happens, exactly the jacket colours of a recent mass-paperback humorous compilation by a woman about men). That subtitle does make its way onto the jacket (insofar as authors compose titles, there is a limit to the publisher’s power to drive the appearance of a book and its content apart). But the MEN above it dominates in letters more than six times taller – and then those inverted commas are sneaked in to discredit further the suggestion of objectivity or factuality which the subtitle might regrettably have carried. The reduction of Anna Ford to the thinking man’s Jackie Collins is complete.’

Human cultures in the historical period are intimidatingly complex affairs, and it is usually very difficult for the cultural historian to achieve generalisations that are reliable and also interesting. But middle-class sex in the Victorian period, one might think, is an exception. Surely cultural history can say something definite, but not trivial, about this subject. Not only academic self-respect but, in a sense, the self-respect of 20th-century Western attitudes at large are tied up in the question. If ‘Victorian’ does not correctly connote a special point of view about sex, at least one prevailing among the Victorian middle class, an alarming instability starts to make itself felt. One of the most secure ideas, apparently, that we have about the recent past, which enters even very informal discourse on countless occasions, looks dubious.

Germaine Greer has three main propositions to advance in her new book. These are, first, that genital, recreational sex is overvalued in our culture. Second, that birth-control programmes in the Third World are unnecessary, ineffectual and cruel. Third, that families which stress the procreative relationship are preferable to those which stress the conjugal relationship. These ideas are all plausible, and of great moment. They deserve an airing: they deserve the attention which a writer as well-known, energetic and fluent as Germaine Greer is likely to secure for them. The issue about Sex and Destiny is how much Ms Greer’s important case is likely to be damaged by the way in which she connects up her proposals, and the poor, even unprincipled quality of her arguments for them individually and as a cluster of ideas.

This is at once an impressive, even thrilling book, and quite a bad one. Its virtues and vices are connected. The author has a precisely-grounded exhilaration about The Origin of Species; perhaps more than any other literary writer on the work she communicates its exciting essence. Her exhilaration also leads her to claim far too much for the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on Victorian literature. Like others, she sees that The Origin – by virtue of its cultural situation and Darwin’s response to this – is one of the most interesting pieces of prose rhetoric ever penned. She has some brilliant things to say about Darwin’s style, but others that are unsatisfactory and ill-formulated: figments of her absorption with the text, or half-baked thoughts that too often scuttle to a modish vocabulary for refuge (it is undignified in a scholar of Mrs Beer’s seniority to use ‘deconstruct’ when she means ‘dismantle’, ‘recuperate’ when she means ‘recover’, and ‘fracture’ and ‘problematise’ when she means scarcely anything at all). She feels the nuclearity of The Origin, how you can go from it backwards, sideways, forwards into almost any phase of our culture, and her range and variety of reference are exceptional. She also writes, some of the time, with a fervid, self-indulgent miscellaneousness, in a kind of spray of allusions. There are too many one- and two-sentence paragraphs in this book: too many asides appropriate to a lecture, but making for jerky reading on the page.–

By a considerable coincidence there are now published within a short interval the first biographies of two substantial Victorian literary figures, over a hundred years after the death of either man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster. They were two of the stars of Victorian literary journalism: much in demand as editors, and absolutely reliable in their capacity to produce essays and reviews of first-rate quality on a huge range of topics at an intimidating speed. They both fulfilled unusual roles as advisers on the design and publication of work by more famous writers. Both strove for recognition as contributors in their own right to serious branches of study. Both made an adequate living at first by their prodigious writing efforts, but came to wealth at the end through their marriages, after they had more or less abandoned journalism. They were sociable men, fraternising widely and vigorously with the élite of the day. But no one was on a footing of unreserved friendship with either of them; both had enemies and detractors even among their close acquaintance.