Lifestyle Choices

But the mother and father of all the propositions in this vein is the number that rattled the candlesticks on every piano in the land during the Victorian period. ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, bearded baritones would warble passionately to bosomy beauties, ‘For the black bat, Night, has flown’:

Come into the garden, Maud, I am here — at the gate — alone!

Who says the Victorians were repressed? It’s a myth. This luscious lyric is positively aquiver with sensuality. The author, Tennyson, claimed to suffer from depression, a claim disputed by his elder brother: ‘I am the most melancholy of the Tennysons’, he would say reprovingly. But that could only have been when he wasn’t cheering himself up by thinking about a bit of the other, in Les Dawsonese. For the poem swells to a climax rioting with the most colourful version of masculine sexual ecstasy that any chap could be privileged to enjoy:

There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate!

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’,

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’ . .

She is coming, my love, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble beneath her feet

And blossom in purple and red.

Do you think that this is what Hemingway means in For Whom The Bell Tolls when he asks, ‘Did the earth move? for you, too?’ Tennyson, Alfred Lord, was obviously a man who could make the earth move — and that, after all, is what every woman is looking for. It helps if he looks like Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Jeremy Irons or Sting. But he doesn’t have to. My best friend thinks even Richard Dreyfuss is `kinda cute’. And all toms are grey in the dark, as every pussy knows.

Sadly, a quick blast of the poetics as a preliminary to an earth-shaking consummation is a treat reserved for all too few women. Post-Tennyson, maybe only a brave man would try it. But one who has, with considerable success, is Richard Sylvester. His poem is a witty spoof on what people reverently call ‘The New Technology’. It’s also a masterpiece of graceful suggestiveness — unless you want to read it literally as a hymn to his hi-fi system:

Electronic baby,

Let me test your circuit,

Let me take your valves out one by one, Blow on them,

Polish them,

And replace them all

Individually.

Let me trace your wiring . . .

Let me plug you in . . .

Let me switch you on . . .

Electronic baby,

Let me finally come

Into your closed circuit.

Well blow mah mind, as Scarlett O’Hara never said. If this doesn’t make you crackle with desire, keep trying. With a computer future looming, women have got to be prepared for anything!

Even a robot, propositioning in poetry, is in with a chance. Most men, like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, have to settle for the discovery that they’ve been talking prose all their lives. But don’t knock it. Prose is a perfectly adequate medium for some perfectly wonderful propositions, and no one demonstrates this better than Dick Francis.

Thriller king Francis is one of the most enjoyable of contemporary prose writers, though the grip of his tense yarns is such that most people don’t have time to notice. His is the kind of style in which so much more is implied than ever is said.

This is exactly the way in which his heroes conduct their propositions of the ladies on whom their eves alight, in between horses and villains and other denizens of the Francis landscape. His men are never coarse and demanding, but cool and laid-back. The DF hero knows that oblique is elegant, and a gentleman jockey does not rush his fences or expect to walk up to a strange mare and jump on. They’ve mastered the essential technique, of suggesting the idea in a roundabout way. This allows the girl vital room for manoeuvre, and pays her the compliment of not taking her agreement for granted.

Louise answered the telephone. When I told her what I wanted, she was incredulous.

`You’ve actually found him?’

`Well,’ I said. ‘Probably. Will you come, then, and identify him?’

`Yes.’ No hesitation. ‘Where and when?’

`Some place in Bristol.’ I paused, and said diffidently,

could pick you up in Oxford this afternoon, and we could go straight on. We might spot him this evening . . . or tomorrow morning.’

There was a silence at the other end . . . and then her voice, quiet and committed.

`All right.’

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