Zoë Heller

Not long ago, James Wolcott wrote an article for the New Yorker lamenting the ‘softened, juvenilised’, timbre of modern female journalism. In the old days, he said, women like Germaine Greer and Valerie Solanas made men nervous. They produced feisty, aggressive prose. They were rude and polemical. They wrote, in Norman Mailer’s words, like ‘very tough faggots’. But somewhere in the aftermath of Seventies feminism, women’s writing lost its swagger: the cut and thrust of the Valkyrie was replaced by the flounce and preen of the ‘chick’. The pre-eminent female style, Wolcott claimed, has degenerated into a sort of grimly coquettish prattle – ‘flirty and confrontational at the same time’.’‘

Claire Bloom has now written two books about her life. Lest this give rise to any suspicion of autobiographical surfeit, she notes in the Preface to the latest volume, that her earlier book, Lime-light and After, constituted merely ‘a modest account’ of her acting career, whereas the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.

If anyone knows about the allure of hair it’s little girls. Between the ages of seven and twelve, girls groom their Barbies and each other with an intensity bordering on the freakish. At least they did in my day. Among the females in my class at primary school, hair-styling, or, more accurately, hair-fondling, was far and away the playground pursuit of choice. (The only thing that came near it, in fact, was that other proto-erotic pastime – tickling the insides of each other’s forearms.) As with the more fully realised sexual acts of later years, hair-fondling sessions were fraught with tensions about technique and performance. Some girls were known to be ham-fisted with hair, while others were known to have the touch. Some girls earned reputations for being ‘selfish’ – always wanting to be the fondlee and never the fondler – while a few much sought-after eccentrics were famous for preferring to do rather than be done.’

‘As a siren Wallis Windsor had been a figure who had changed historical events more drastically than any other woman in human history.’ If one could only believe that the Duchess of Windsor had changed historical events more drastically than Mary Queen of Scots, or Joan of Arc, or even Margaret Thatcher, then perhaps Caroline Blackwood’s recycled revelations about the Duchess – her expertise at fellatio, her 22 carat gold bath-tub at Cap d’Antibes, the amusing tricks that her homosexual lover, the Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, liked to perform with his penis at dinner parties – might seem quite, you know, important. The disappointing alternative is that The Last of the Duchess is just what it appears: a book of snobby royal tittle-tattle on which Blackwood is attempting, rather late in the day, to confer some gravitas. British newspapers do much the same thing, when they affect concern about the ‘constitutional implications’ of the Prince of Wales’s desire to be a tampon.’

This must be a brave letter. No exotic quotations; no miserable, ignominious echoes of Swinburne, no trace of silvery, erotic decadence; no Musset; no motif of Delius – nothing but lucidity … There’s a programme of insouciant, lilting French cabaret songs on the radio as I write and I have just lit a cigarette. Try and see me.’