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La Baker came back to the Casino de Paris and sang: ‘J'ai deux amours. Mon pays et Paris.' That became
her
song. In return for her youth, her sex, her exoticism, the French gave her love, cash, and respect. She briefly returned to Broadway in 1935 and arrived at a party for Gershwin in full drop-'em-dead French glamour-queen glad rags: ‘Who dat?' said Bea Lillie. In France once again, now and then she'd change the words of her song: ‘Mon pays, c'est Paris.' After a war in which she proved her loyalty to her adopted country, smuggling secret information in invisible ink on her sheet music, would you believe, the French gave her the Légion d'Honneur.

She died in her seventieth year, in 1975, in the white heat and ostrich plumes of her umpteenth come-back, an institution, a heroine, mourned by the dozen children – her multi-ethnic ‘Rainbow Tribe' – she adopted in her forties, something glorious if faintly touched by the ludicrous, at last, a geriatric sex-queen cherished in old age by the French loyalty to the familiar as she had been feted when young by the French passion for the new.

(1990)

The Tale of Genji
is a masterpiece of narrative fiction and was written a thousand years ago by a woman whose real name we do not know (she's always been known by the name of her own main heroine, Murasaki). Its most immediately affecting quality is that of an exquisite and anguishing nostalgia. Not a whisper of the morning of the world, here; all regret at the fall of the leaf and remembrance of things past.

It is also endlessly long, constructed with great skill and composed in a Japanese so archaically elusive that many modern Japanese will use Seidensticker's definitive English translation as a handy crib. Murasaki Shikibu had the capacity for dealing with emotional complexity of a Stendhal and a sensibility rather more subtle than that of Proust.

Kyoto, the Imperial capital of Japan of the Heian period, which is her setting, was a dazzling place, where fine handwriting, a nice judgement in silks and the ability to toss off an evocative 60-syllable tanka at the drop of a cherry blossom were activities that achieved the status of profound moral imperatives for the upper classes.

The major work of English literature extant at roughly the same period is butch, barbaric, blood-boltered
Beowulf
, a fact that makes the Japanese giggle like anything. Though Murasaki does not by any means capture all the world in her silken net; cultured as all hell her courtiers may be but they are the élite of an élite and when her hero, Genji, in exile, catches a glimpse of the life of the common fisherman, he finds it difficult to believe other
people are altogether human. Murasaki's imperial court is a claustrophobic place.

And it is a curious fact that a novel so variously beautiful, so shot through with rainbow-hued poetry, so sophisticated, so instinct with that heart-wrenching sense of the impermanence of the world the Japanese call ‘mono-no-aware' (the sadness inherent in things) should procure in this reviewer at least the sense of having gorged herself on a huge box of violet-centred chocolates.

At least Arthur Waley's Bloomsburyish and truncated version (which Seidensticker's monumental achievement is bound to supersede) gave the inescapable lady-novelist quality of
The Tale of Genji
its due. Seidensticker's chaste, occasionally transatlantic, idiom errs only on the side of a lack of self-indulgence.

The polygamous and promiscuous Heian court – ‘court life is only interesting when all sorts of ladies are in elegant competition,' opines Genji – produced a bumper crop of lady writers; in the endless boredom of rarely visited harems, in the well-screened apartments of retired empresses, there were dozens of bright, clever, highly educated, twitching, neurotic women, scribbling away – poems, novels, diaries, commonplace books, anything to pass the time.

Life revolved around the suns, the shining ones, the emperor, and chief ministers. The character of Genji himself, the sentimental rake who never forgets a one-night stand and always commemorates it in a wee personalised poemlet on the loveliest note-paper, the first great romantic fictional hero in the world, is indeed supremely fictional. It is not a characterisation but an idealisation, a model for polygamous husbands.

But the life of the Imperial sprig, Genji, is not the whole meat of the novel. It is essentially a family saga, the family the enormous clan of the Imperial family, with the extraordinary network of relationships that multiple wives, child marriage, and institutionalised illegitimacy makes possible. It flows on and on, with no apparent reason for stopping, then halts abruptly in midstream – possibly because Murasaki died, or became a nun.

After Genji dies, about three quarters of the way through, Murasaki concentrates her attention on the tormented love-affairs of the frivolous Niou, and of Kiaru, with his repressed sexuality and general oddness. There is a definite change of emphasis, now, a sharpening of focus, an increase in psychological realism. It is
as though the lives of Genji and his lovely consort, Murasaki, had been an account of a golden age, now past; the world is running downhill, no more descriptions of snow-viewing or incense-making competitions. The glamour of all those beautiful people is definitely tarnished.

Beautiful people Niou and Kiaru certainly are, but as deeply unpleasant as most beautiful people. As one ex-concubine remarks of the father of her child: ‘The Prince at Uji was a fine, sensitive gentleman but he treated me as if I were less than human,' and the unfortunate product of this liaison is hounded to the point of suicide by the conflicting attentions of our predatory heroes.

One suspects that, by page 1,000, it is beginning to occur to our narrator herself that the Heian Court, from the point of view of one of those ladies in elegant competition, is really a meat-market with a particularly pretty decor. That ineffable Buddhist gloom, which makes Calvinism look positively sprightly, begins to suffuse the text.

Nevertheless, the decor is absolutely ravishing. Murasaki depicts an exquisite, pictorial life. The first chapters unfold themselves like a succession of painted screens, in which the beauties of nature and the seasons and the weather have the function of pure decoration. There are the rituals of bird and butterfly dances; the shuttered, sequestered women with their black-painted teeth and six-foot swatches of hair, in robes of white silk lined with red, yellow lined with russet, arrange and rearrange those irridescent sleeves that are all custom allows of them to be seen beneath their curtains, sleeves often wet with tears due to the demands of their highly cultivated hearts.

Flowers, everywhere; women named for flowers. Gardens. Ruined houses where neglected ladies sit like Mariana in the moated grange (‘he cometh not,' she said). And, dominating everything, an absolute tyranny of good taste, a Stalinist regime of refinement. Choose a singlet of the wrong shade of red and your life is as good as over.

Yet the ominous thunder of the river in which poor Ukifune tries to drown herself reverberates through the last chapters like the very voice of stern Buddhist morality itself. It's all the dream of a dream, you see. All of it. It is curious that this wonderful and ancient novel that Seidensticker's translation makes so
voluptuously deliciously readable should have so little hope in it.

(1977)

This book begins like a novel: ‘A woman attends a funeral. The coffin is lowered into the grave. A man approaches her and says: “He was not your father.”' But the reader's expectation of continuous narrative is excited only to be disrupted; Eric Rhode prefers to work in discrete sections of speculation, each independently, often curiously titled – ‘Father into Foetus', ‘Eyes Pregnant with a Mother's Babies'. This method of organisation is reminiscent of the collections of brief, aphoristic essays by Theodor Adorno, although Eric Rhode's intellectual method is rather less rigorous than Adorno's. Rhode's speculation centres on work as a psychiatrist in a puerperal breakdown unit – that is, a place where women are sent who have gone mad in connection with the process of childbirth. However, his scope extends far beyond the specificity of his book's title.

It is a favourite saying among women of my type that if men could have babies, then abortion would be as readily available as light ale. Nevertheless, it is in just this physical difference that the whole opposition of the sexes lies. If men could have babies, they would cease to be men as such. They would become the ‘other'. They would become magical objects of strangeness, veneration, obloquy, awe, disregard, and oppression, recipients of all the effects of the syndrome of holy terror. I wonder if it has occurred to Eric Rhode that, but for a chance division of cells while he was an undirected foetus, he, too, might have had babies. Certainly he seems to imply that parturition is not a function of the psychiatric profession itself: ‘Psychiatrists talk about a mental unhinging round about the seventh month: is this true? We need
more evidence, especially from the pregnant delegates themselves.' So there aren't any women psychiatrists around who can supply the necessary?

Don't think I don't realise that Rhode doesn't mean this. It is only the sloppy way he has phrased it. Yet the question need not have remained rhetorical. Even if he does not know any psychiatrists who have been pregnant, if that is possible, then his list of acknowledgements includes known mothers who could have told him. Semantic sloppiness usually goes hand in hand with mental sloppiness. For example, is it just some psychiatrists or all psychiatrists who claim that women become ‘unhinged' – whatever that means – in late pregnancy? If it is the opinion of the entire profession, as he implies, how was it arrived at – by a postal ballot or by a show of hands? Rhodes is not fond of footnotes, on the whole. Nor, I suspect, of empiricism. On the other hand, he has far more female intuition than I do.

It occurs to me, thinking about this wayward, infuriating book with its shining flashes of metaphysics, its linguistic imprecision, its mass of references (Blake, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Gior-gione, Walter Benjamin, and more, and more) how deeply psychoanalysis is concerned with culture. Not only broadly, with culture as opposed to nature, but also with culture in its narrowest sense – that is, high-bourgeois culture. Easel painting, symphonic music, literature. As if Freud had condemned the entire profession to the taste of a cultivated Viennese at the turn of the century.

Rhode is prepared to advance pure cultural product as the sacred book of the Freudian calling. By page three, he is already talking about ‘a Greek play often read as psychoanalytic holy writ, Sophocles's
Oedipus the King
.' But he does not think of
Oedipus the King
as a cultural product, with the specific conditions of the time and place of its composition mediating its universality. Nor does he treat the play as if Sophocles had dreamed it. Rather, he seems to think of the Oedipus family as though they were real people with real problems, an approach similar to that of the literary criticism of A. C. Bradley. He talks about the Hamlets the same way; they might even be patients, although he does not pause to entertain the Bradleian-style gloss I've always put on the play myself: that it only makes sense if Hamlet is really the son of Claudius and not of ‘Hamlet's Father' at all.

One could argue that
Oedipus the King
is really, deep down,
about the overthrow of Mother Right, that the play contains, transforms, subverts, patricises the ideology of those antique, matrilinear communities around the Mediterranean celebrated somewhat circumspectly in
The Golden Bough
, and increasingly cherished by women of my type as we reach a certain age, in which kingship was attained by marriage with the queen and terminated in ritual combat with the inevitable defeat by a more nubile successor when the hapless consort's hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his
Greek Myths
, and though Graves's anthropology is just as shaky as J. G. Frazer's, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?' only becomes pressing when property is inherited through the male line.

Children, since they are polymorphously perverse by nature and, furthermore, do not usually possess property, can be much nicer, wiser, and kinder than culture. In an early essay, Melanie Klein tells about a small boy who, informed how babies are made, is told that he can do it himself when he grows up. ‘“But then I would like to do it to Mama.” “That can't be, Mama can't be your wife
[sic]
for she is the wife of your papa, and then papa would have no wife.” “But we could both do it to her!”' The heart, or hearts, of many-breasted Cybele would warm to that. (I wonder if Melanie Klein believed women became unhinged in the seventh month of pregnancy.)

I understand perfectly well that Sophocles' play is about aspects of human relations that transcend the immediate circumstances of its composition. Oedipal conflict pre-dates Sophocles. On the other hand, the play isn't the pure product of Sophocles' unconscious either – art is not the dream of culture. But Sophocles and Rhode are both very much concerned with crude biologism
vis-à-vis
the Oedipal situation. Indeed, Rhode is so interested in paternity that he introduces a woman concerned about her own paternity in the first paragraph of a book that is supposed to be about maternity.

‘He was not your father.' In the terms of the real world in which we live and where we try to cherish our dear ones, Oedipus
does
escape his fate. He does not murder the man who saved him from death, nurtured him, gave him a bicycle, had his teeth straightened, paid for driving lessons, etc. Nor does he impregnate the woman who wiped his bum, taught him to sneeze, and
catered to all the indignities of childhood that effectively de-eroticise the relationship between mothers and sprogs. Oedipus's genuine filial feelings are not outraged. His biological parents are perfect strangers. To emphasise the biological aspect of parenthood is to deny culture in a way that makes us less human. That dreadful question – how do we know whose child we are? – has dogged patriarcy since its inception, yet it is a profoundly absurd question. Put it another way: an American friend discovered her son had financed his grand tour of Europe by selling shots of his sperm to an AID agency. ‘My grandchildren!' she cried and then fell silent, suddenly aware of the absurdity, to even think of them like that.