Ian Britain

Philistinism and anti-intellectualism enjoy each other’s company so much that it can be bracing to be reminded that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a philistine. That, at least, was a charge levelled at the British Fabians by some former members of the Fabian Society – and by some historians too quick to take those apostates at their word. The Fabians had unimpeachable intellectual credentials, but their preoccupation with policy, the mechanics of municipal and national government, and strategies for getting their policies implemented (initially by ‘permeating’ existing political parties, and later, in the case of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, through the Labour party) was such that they could appear ascetic and unmoved by the pleasures – and the potential – of literature and the arts.

Like Monaco, journals are sunny places for shady people. Black sheep and dark horses have often found a first sanctuary there. Precarious principalities, they are built on the shifting sands of subsidies, sponsorships and subscriptions. But their lifeblood is won or lost at the roulette wheel of submissions and commissions.

A full-blown history of sperm can’t be too long in the coming given the current academic vogue for studies of the body, and the huge spurt of curiosity prompted a few years ago by the appearance of a couple of tell-tale stains on the dress of a White House intern. It is possible the subject (or the object) first came into its own as a more than private matter when, nearly a hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey spotted a similar stain on the dress of his just-married friend Vanessa Bell and dared to name it in the mixed company of his assembled friends, the legendary Bloomsbury group in its embryonic days. ‘Semen?’ he enquired, with forensic candour, and forever after, so the legend goes, the group would never recoil from calling a sperm a sperm. ‘With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.’ So recalled Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, about a decade and a half later, when she had long since become the wife of Leonard Woolf and was already on the way to becoming one of the twentieth century’s most famous novelists and pin-up feminists.

Taboo – or not taboo? That is the question you soon start asking yourself if you bother with the text of this book and its purported revelations on the subject of ‘male beauty’. It is a stimulating question, but you end up wondering if the publishers, at least, mean you to go to such bother when they’ve hardly gone to any themselves, in the way of editing, to ensure some cogency in their celebrity author’s arguments. There’s little here, in fact, that you could call argument, in the sense of a coherent succession of reasoned propositions: nothing so solid or stable to argue against; nothing so stolid or boring. When not beguiled by the next image of upwardly nubile flesh, sumptuously reproduced from the work of the world’s great visual artists, you’re more at risk of being left stupefied by the next authorial assertion. Oh, yes, it will be provocative, but the provocation often lies in its brazen countering of the assertions that have preceded it. Silly you for craving consistency.

What do the fab four of this book have in common? Not simply that they are Australian and expatriate, that they are writers who have achieved a degree of celebrity and performers who have made skilful use of television.