The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [534]
2. It was this episode which later prompted John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, in a famous article in Encounter, to claim that Lawrence had intended to show Mellors entering Constance by an act of buggery. As a homosexual Sparrow would not have realised that a man and a woman can quite naturally enjoy intercourse in the fashion Lawrence described.
3. This echoed the defence once offered by Ian Fleming to the charge that his James Bond novels were `pornographic': `Sex was a perfectly reasonable subject as far as Shakespeare was concerned, and I don't really see why it shouldn't be as far as I'm concerned.'
4. Author's note to the published edition of Saved (Methuen, London, 1966). A surprising feature of the play in retrospect might be how comparatively mild was its language. It was a tribute to the force of the taboo on `four-letter words' that, despite the Lady Chatterley case five years earlier, the use of such words in public was still at this stage remarkably rare. Indeed another symptom of the hysterical mood of those weeks in the autumn of 1965 was that, only 10 days after the premiere of Saved, this taboo was ostentatiously challenged in a carefully set-up BBC television interview with Kenneth Tynan, the leading `progressive' critic, now literary manager of the National Theatre. Tynan was asked whether he would allow a play to be staged at the National in which `sexual intercourse took place on the stage?'. This allowed him to give the strangely inconsequential reply `I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word "fuck" would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything that can be printed or said can also be seen.' In a sense it was the highpoint of Tynan's career. The coup succeeded in its aim of creating a public sensation. The BBC switchboard was jammed with protests. Tynan's fellow-progressives, led by Dr Jonathan Miller and George Melly, rushed publicly to congratulate him. He later compounded his inconsequentiality by claiming that he had only been `quoting from the evidence in the Lady Chatterley trial' Only over the next 15-20 years did the use of four-letter words on stage and screen become general. Had Bond written his play later, its dialogue would doubtless have contained little else.
5. In 1968 the critic Ken Tynan was to launch a campaign to promote the joys of masturbation and to make it `respectable. In storytelling this obsession was to reach its most publicised expression in Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint (1969), about a mother-dominated New York Jewish boy who manages to have sexual relations with a number of girls, all non-Jewish, but finds his greatest pleasure in endless, compulsive masturbation. Eventually he goes to Israel where he has an affair with a Jewish girl, whom it would be socially acceptable for him to marry. But his obsession with solitary sex wins out and he returns to mother.
6. One of the more conspicuous features of avant-garde storytelling in the early 1960s was the collapse of plot and structure. Films like L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad (1961), directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, or LAvventura (1960) and LEclisse (1962) by Michelangelo Antonioni were dreamlike in their deliberate inconsequentiality. Last Year In Marienbad, shot in an imposing chateau with formal gardens, centred on a beautiful woman (A) meeting a handsome stranger (X'), who tries to convince her that they had met before, possibly at some resort hotel, possibly in Marienbad, where she may have promised to run away with him. 'A claims not to remember their meeting, but it is never made clear whether they actually met or not. The key to the film's tantalising power was that it was a nyktomorph. Precisely