Rediscovering Brigid Brophy

 

By MICHAEL CAINES

A few years ago, the Observer published a sublimely wayward list of Britain's "top" 300 intellectuals. Here one learned that the little-known Indian economist Amartya Sen and even lesser-known Irish poet Seamus Heaney were British, while one writer was included whose death in 1995 apparently presented no obstacle to her cutting a "public figure" in 2011: the restlessly inventive novelist and campaigner for author and animal rights alike, Brigid Brophy.    

Now it's twenty years since Brophy died, and it still remains fair to say that she deserves wider recognition. But that's not exactly saying anything new . . .

That is: people have been saying something like that since at least the 1980s. Apparently, they would ask Giles Gordon, her literary agent, "Whatever became of Brigid Brophy?" ��� and the "terrible answer" he would give was that multiple sclerosis had been, for many years, making her life "pretty much hell". 

And what made them ask in the first place? Apart from anything else: her campaigns for Public Lending Right, and against laboratory vivisections; the Shavian sharpness of her journalism; and her books, each one of which was a virtuosic left turn from the last.

Born in 1929, sent down from Oxford, and recognized as a promising literary talent in her twenties, the Anglo-Irish Brophy became an unmistakable critical voice in the early 1960s, partly by remaining true to some distinctively unfashionable sources of inspiration. She expressed heretical views about religious education, open marriage (she had one, to Michael Levey, director of the National Gallery) and lawn tennis, while maintaining that the two most fascinating subjects in the world were "sex and the eighteenth century". She could be forthright, outspoken, acerbic, or whatever word her opponents could find for her ��� in the TLS, Ian Hamilton (sheltered by anonymity, of course) called her "one of our leading literary shrews".

Yet that period of modest notoriety disguises the fact that her tastes were not entirely "of" the 1960s. Baroque-minded and classically educated, Brophy said that one early story, "Late Afternoon of a Faun", originated in a Latin class. She was in favour of Ronald Firbank and against the crudeness of Lucky Jim; highly pleasurable comments on the first and excoriating remarks on the second may be found in the memorable volume of "views and reviews" pictured above.

After GBS, she called a story collection The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl, which captures her versatility in a single volume. Here are paradoxes that remain all too piquant ("'Poverty is a crime,' the sage said, 'but it isn't the poor who are guilty of it.'"), one-liners ("'I'm afraid we shall have to make a small charge.' said the cavalry commander."), a straight-faced account of Ambrose Bierce outlasting his natural span of years and adopting the pseudonym Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the Platonic dialogue of the title, between God, Voltaire, Edward Gibbon and a few others. "I didn't ask for a whitewash job", Brophy has this supreme deity say of his depictions in art and literature, "Indeed, without self-flattery, I think I'm the ideal romantic-opera hero. It leaps to the eye. You have only to consider my moodiness, my sudden but inexorable anger and my frequent obstinate silences when addressed."

Much of Brophy's fiction has been reissued over the past two decades, including Hackenfeller's Ape, her spry debut of 1953, the "heroi-cyclic" In Transit and The Finishing Touch, a Firbankian acid drop of a novel, in which she transmogrifies Anthony Blunt into the headmistress of an institution on the French Riviera. There have been further welcome reissues in the past few years from Faber Finds and the Coelacanth Press.

I'm not expecting a reissue of a work of non-fiction such as Black Ship to Hell any time soon ��� that one's a lengthy, Freudian meditation on art, violence and civilization ��� but it would be wilful philistinism to ignore her collections of journalism. You know you are in the presence of a properly decided, opinion-pinioning mind when you read an essay that begins: "The three greatest novels of the twentieth century are The Golden Bowl by Henry James, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli by Ronald Firbank". Showing she meant what she said, Brophy went on to write a full-length "defence of fiction" in the guise of Prancing Novelist: In praise of Ronald Firbank.

There are signs that people are rediscovering the argument that Brophy needs rediscovering. Hunt around in the usual online ways, and you will find fresh acknowledgements of In Transit and the seminal contribution of The Rights of Animals. You may come across the website Discovering Brigid Brophy, where Brophy's daughter Kate Levey offers, among other things, reminiscences about her childhood home (most of which was given over to a kind of "private literary den"). The novelist Jonathan Gibbs has written warmly about Flesh, which features a different kind of gender swap from The Finishing Touch: it's Brophy's contemporary retelling of the Pygmalion myth, in which it is a woman who fattens up her husband and turns him into, as he himself jokes, a "Rubens woman".

And there's to be a Brigid Brophy conference in October, when the speakers will include Peter Parker and Philip Hensher. It sounds like I have to go, doesn't it? I'm looking forward to finding out more about this most mischievous of literary shrews, and the well-wrought range of her achievements.