Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

The first of several half-thoughts.

It is a maturing process I am going through. Finally at the age of 33 it no longer appeals to me to be 'girly'(not in the sexist, derogative sense obviously - why is there not 'boyye'?). Someone once told me wisely to 'pick your battles' and now I have decided to pick my compromises. Some things are non-negotiable, as I told the PA at work after her tardiness made me late for my therapist's appointment: I leave the office every Friday at 1.50pm and no questions asked; I do what I have to do. I told her politely and genuinely to have a good time in Istanbul this weekend, but I did not say 'don't worry about being late'. Worry about it I say!

I did not battle with her - she is harmless and it would be pointless, but I did battle with another friend this week. There is a good phrase, if used fairly: "The intolerance of tolerance". I came up against it and recognised it this time. I was judged and found guilty for not being sexually liberal/available enough. One friend's sexually progressive or 'tolerant' ideas became a stick to beat me with.

I have a theory about people being right about something; that is, people having right-thinking, liberal or sensible ideas. It is all about how they deliver them to others that shows whether these 'correct' ideas are born out of a belief in justice or principally out of contempt for others. One 'correct and liberal' idea might give someone licence to feel contempt for a group of people who do not explicitly share those particular expressions of those ideas, so the very term 'liberal' or 'tolerant' comes into question.

As for general intolerance of what may objectively actually be stupid and therefore apparently deserving of punishment, I encountered a form of it in my life from my loving older sister: she is an exceedingly bright person who hates it when people around her do what she believes are indefensibly stupid things - in my case that would be getting too drunk and sleeping with a 45 year old married man, at age 23, in a distant city whilst her guest. She thought me extremely foolish and selfish and threw my things out of her apartment including my passport. I begged and pleaded and said sorry and she let me back in. She was right that I was stupid, but her reaction showed contempt for me. On Thursday night my friend of over 10 years came to stay with me in London from Nottingham. I say 'stay with me', although she arrived at 6.30am, and that is only because I persuaded her to get out of the hotel NOW and make her way to my house somehow or another, regardless of her stinking headache and the fact that I had to get up to go to work in an hour. By midnight the previous night I had begun to feel annoyed with her: she was supposed to have met me at 9.30pm and she had her phone switched off the entire night and I was considering calling the police. When I got an SMS just after midnight telling me she had got drunk and lost and she would call me in the morning, I concluded she had found another friend to stay with. Her message at 4.45am woke me up: She had awoken in a hotel alone, hungover and full of regret, wondering at what age she would grow out of this kind of mistake. My feeling was total love for her and that she must get here as soon as she could to be safe and with a friend. I understood only at that moment her loneliness. And knew it because I had been and was still her, but in my own way. And when my sister threw out my stuff ten years ago, her contempt for and frustration with a younger sibling at that moment obscured her knowledge of the loneliness that makes us all stupid. We have to pick our judgements carefully as well as our battles and our compromises.

For my mother's 65th birthday I bought her make-up and a book: my two favourite things! The book is a translation from the German - a collection of two novellas by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, called Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman. Zweig was considered an important writer in the 20s and 30s in Vienna. And he was yet middle-aged when he and his lover killed themselves. The book is a compelling meditation by a male author on the one impetuous, rash, passionate act that can change a woman's life irrevocably. The narrator - a bachelor - is staying in a hotel on the Riviera, and dines each day with the same collection of people - two couples and an elderly English woman. There are few guests at the hotel, so each watches the movements of the other and when an attractive young French man arrives and charms individually each member of the group, they can talk about nothing else over dinner. And then one morning he has gone, and later that evening there is a commotion in the complex. The paunchy middle-aged Monsieur, a married industrialist with two teenage daughters cannot find his wife. She is feared drowned or the victim of an accident. A little while later he emerges from their hotel apartment with a letter in his hand, and with great dignity calls off the search: his wife has left him he announces. Then he sits in a chair and begins to sob for perhaps the first time in his life, the narrator remarks. It is the maid who lets slip that Madame Henrietta's letter revealed that, at the age of 33, she had run off with the charming French man.

At dinner that evening the narrator's table is in uproar. The two German couples - in particular the husbands - declare themselves to be horrified and outraged that a married woman with two children could forsake her family to foolishly run off with a much younger man. They surmise that the elopement must have, cynically, been planned well in advance. The narrator disagrees: he finds himself defending Madame Henrietta - even in excess of what he feels - not only for her impetuous act but also against the idea that it was planned; it was the fruit of a coup de foudre (love at first sight) he insists. It was surely the first time she had felt love and for that he admired her act. The argument at table threatens to degenerate into full-scale and personal recriminations were it not at this point for the intercession of the elderly English woman who has remained quiet up until this moment. Calmly and politely she directs her words to the narrator solely; she challenges his bold defence of the act committed in the heat of passion on the grounds that if one takes this defence to its logical extreme one would be defending le crime passionnel - the violent murder of a spouse. The narrator, whilst continuing to stick by his original defence admires the English woman's mind and dignity. Over the next few days he finds that this hitherto very reserved lady seeks out his company and they exchange several intellectual ideas. He wonders that, were the age difference not so great, people would begin to suspect a sexual relationship between them! One day he receives a short letter from her, asking him to come to her room, as after much agonising she has decided that she would like to narrate to him an episode of her life that she has never shared with anyone before. He arrives at the appointed time and finds her agitated and vaguely distressed; after some hesitation she begins her story of the 24 hours that changed her life twenty years ago when at the age of 42 she 'saves' a young man from self-destruction...

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Desire and intimacy in Art

There was a moment during the hour I spent at the Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now exhibition at the Barbican that I realised I was enjoying pornography with a group of other fully-clothed and silent strangers. Crouched down in a small darkened space screened off for privacy within the gallery, I entered in the middle of the show, as you do, and was amazed ("pretend nonchalance") to see a film of a series of photographs of couples in the act of heterosexual and homosexual sex in a variety of carefully catalogued positions. These were the original photos that accompanied the Kinsey report and are old-fashioned looking enough and black and white so that the viewer/voyeur can maintain a dignified and scholarly distance from them. I particularly warmed to the images of women in nothing but smart hats and shoes, that you might have worn to Sunday mass in the 1940s, having it off with dastardly looking moustachioed gentlemen. And then there were the homo images which I have a thing for. I know that it is commonplace for men to snigger about how they would like to see to girls pleasuring each other - for their own greater pleasure -, but the spectacle of male gay sex has a strange effect on me: I feel at once excited and sad: I am excited to see this other pleasure, this pleasure that still seems daring to me, and sad because they don't need me. It is like watching two friends entirely engrossed in each other who cease to notice your presence and the feeling of loneliness, humiliation and distress at that moment of realisation is acute . When I grow up I want to be a gay man; I don't want to be left out any longer.

There were two very long, self-important Andy Warhol films of two men kissing or a James Dean look-alike climaxing whilst being given an invisible blow-job. I'm just glad it wasn't me giving him the BJ as it took him 50 minutes. There was also a disproportionate amount of beautiful Japanese erotic prints that made me marvel at the sophistication of Japanese culture in pre-modern times. We in Europe were a long way from elegant depictions of sex until the late 19th century, before which we went unwashed for months and sloshed about in our own filth, teeth rotting and narrowly missing all dying of the plague.

Growing bored and a little aroused with no eligible male in sight, I wandered into another darkened, screened off room and sat on a bench, while others loitered near the exit, to witness a slide show of the intimate life of couples - the most moving collection of images on the subject that I have ever come across in my adult life. Nan Goldin's exhibit Heartbeat is a work of art that most artists would only dream of creating, and for the non-artist it is almost impossible to imagine how the artist can gain entry into these truly intimate moments in a couple or a family's life. One very young couple is Goldin's nephew Simon and his girlfriend Jessica; I was devastated by her portrayal of first love - the kind of tenderness and compassion and closeness that I know I will never experience now: the moment as teenagers when you feel you are really alone in your world of love and pain. Goldin's subjects inevitably have a different attitude to nudity and every body in these photos became familiar and loved - each body was your mother's, your father's, your friend's - not merely an object of beauty, but a physical necessity, a wonderful fragile giving being that could never be subject to the crude judgements we are daily coerced into making upon ourselves and others.

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Westernisation

Westernisation or the adjective, 'westernised' is a word that is I've come across a lot lately in my reading and at political haranguing matches - otherwise known as the dinner party. And it makes me nervous; the way this emotionally charged term is exalted or abused seems to leave me little choice but to sit on the sidelines dumb and increasingly numb. I begin to wonder really whether it is just an outdated word - and obsolete unless referring to phenomena at least a century old.

Part 1
Let's start with the informal dinner party. On the face of it I share political and social convictions with all those who were present; they are a group of right-thinking, left-leaning women concerned about all the big injustices and occupations. And I'm not making light of this as I don't know anyone who can afford to.

The divisions arise when we come to talk of the recent controversy over the filming of Monica Ali's novel, Brick Lane. I haven't read either the book or seen the film and it seems I'm not alone there. The reference point is a leader article in the Guardian and a 'Comment is Free' piece by Monica Ali. The leader suggested that Ali should take some responsibility for the anger and sensitivities of a group of protesters from Brick Lane's Bangladeshi 'community' that was provoked by her portrayal of gender conflict in her novel. Since the marketing of the novel explicitly promoted Ali as a member of the Bangladeshi community giving an insight into a 'hidden world', and Ali is in fact only half Bangladeshi and didn't grow up in the East London's alongside these particular Bangladeshi residents, then she had misled the public into believing hers was the authentic voice of this 'community'. Ali responded by saying that there were always going to be people offended by something and her novel is a work of art and not the representative piece on one community.

One of the women present said that what riled her most is the patronising tone of Ali that suggested the largely working-class residents of Brick Lane could not appreciate Art for Art's sake, while several people said that Ali should not have allowed her publishers to use Orientalist terms such as 'hidden world' about a Muslim, Eastern residential area. Of course it wasn't long before Ali was discredited with the insult, westernised'. Ali is too westernised for these people's liking.

I had little problem dealing with their initial charges: it is unlikely that Ali as a new writer had much say in the marketing of her book and it would be extraordinarily difficult for her to get onto the bestseller's list without her Indian sub-continent origins - and thus her work - being exoticised for a British public bored of their apparently colourless society. Where there is a demand, the booksellers will comply. As for Ali's assertion that she never intended to be a representative of a community and this is Art and people will always be offended, I think that broadly I agree, not least because it is rare for good writing (I still don't know how good her writing is though) not to be provocative on some level, and because novel writing should never be required to dumb down, as have the political debates we are subjected to, just for fear of not being absolutely clear with whom they stand on absolutely every issue, never mind how problematic. I would feel sick to my stomach if Ali were bullied into coming out onto some sort of public platform and declaring her love, loyalty and sympathy with the 'Bangladeshi community' and apologising for offending some of them. It is still unclear how many people who live in the vicinity of Brick Lane were actually offended - some were surely indifferent and others may even have been fans of Ali's.

But as the informal post-dinner debate progressed what became clear was that many present hated Ali. They just hated her; for them she had become emblematic of all they despised in this imperialistic world. She simply wasn't a good enough Bangladeshi person - she was irresponsible, she was insensitive, she was conceited. And she was Westernised.

I remember showing some copies of the English language magazine I had worked on in Egypt to a curious friend and she had glanced over them - been surprised at how contemporary and pretentious it looked and with one word had declared the magazine null and void as far as its Egyptian credentials: the magazine was Westernised - she could therefore learn nothing about Egypt and Egypt's youth from it.

There is always one woman that turns the debate into the political haranguing match and this occasion was no different. Her coup de grace that struck me finally dumb with incomprehension was during a discussion on whether British publishers were deliberately blocking positive portrayals of Eastern or Muslim communities. A few of us thought that on the whole writers were critiques of their own societies and the sinister and disheartening aspects of their cultures and governmental systems were what prompted them to write as well as a very human feeling of disquiet, and of compassion for those that fell through the gaps. I said that I had studied Arab literature and saw many so-called 'negative portrayals' of Egyptian society, for example. After all a 'community' is not an entirely healthy or natural organism. She accused me of pathologising non-white, non-Western communities and then said that anyway the publishing sector in Egypt was controlled and funded by the Americans and that is why the books are not all positive portrayals of peaceable and integrated indigenous communities.

I felt sad

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