DIARY
Iwas fascinated by reports that women's struggle, too long delayed, for equality has resulted in them taking over the pastime, and some of the potential humiliations, of men. Apparently there has been a startling rise in the employment of male prostitutes, which must offer one of the few growing job opportunities to school-leavers. The pay is £60 a time and around £150 for the night, and a young black chef from Guild- ford apparently does a roaring trade. One client, a 46-year-old doctor's receptionist, told the Guardian: 'I am deeply ashamed of doing it, but it makes me feel more alive. After all you only get one life, don't you?' These are words which might have been spoken by generations of men from Profti- mo to Mellor. I won't say my illusions about women have suffered, but I used to like having them on juries because I thought they were realistic and, unlike men, didn't live in a world of fantasy. Now, however, they have their own porn maga- zines and are reaching for the top shelf in the newsagents like so many dreaming males. I suppose true sexual equality will come when a general called Anthea is found having an unwise lunch with a young, unreliable male model from Spain.
Aiother strange moment in the sex war was described to us by an extremely popular novelist. His mother and father, well into their seventies, still lived in his old home in the East End of London. The mother decided to take an English course at the Open University and passed out tri- umphantly. She then looked about her and wondered what on earth an educated woman like her was doing with an ignora- mus like her husband. She promptly divorced him but, being a lady with a gener- ous heart, she still cooks his dinner every day and sends it down to him between two plates and wrapped in a tea-towel on the bus. One woman, hearing this story, told us that it was a well-known fact that many Open University courses lead to divorce.
State education took another dive into the rubbish bin this week with the announcement that government advisers are challenging 'the dominance of academ- ic subjects in secondary schools'. Sixteen- year-olds will be studying for vocational qualifications in courses planned by the Department of Employment. The young will end up with degrees in hairdressing and supermarket shelf-filling; of course they would all be better off studying Shake-
JOHN MORTIMER
speare. This particularly applies to bank managers, who need to discover that Shy- lock's unpopularity was not only due to rampant anti-Semitism in Venice, but because he lent out money at exorbitant rates of interest. Usury was condemned by the Canon Law and Shylock's enemies 'lent out money gratis', a form of loan which would be anathema to the National West- minster Bank. When a student was tem- porarily overdrawn recently she was charged £3.50 a day on two accounts and interest at an astounding 29 per cent, about 25 per cent above the rate which the Gov- ernment is so proud to have introduced. When I mentioned usury to the assistant manager he looked puzzled and it seemed that word hadn't formed part of his educa- tion. Banks have become the extortionate money-lenders of fiction, and their pounds of flesh are taken in a number of suicides. And yet the British public, with stoic but infuriating patience, put up with them.
Tea in Sloane Square with Stephen Daldry, the Royal Court's outstanding new director. I was lamenting the fact that 'new writers' seem to have forsaken plots. How- ever beautifully you write, the audience requires a story to keep them listening, and to stop them rustling sweet papers or dying of bronchitis. Chekhov deceived everyone by writing plays that appear plotless; in fact they are stories as meticulously constructed as any by Pinero. Plots are, however, horri- bly hard to come by. No one knows where they come from, and when in rare moments of good fortune they flash past, they have, as Henry James said, to be 'caught by the tail'. At the moment I am miserably plot- less. I think of the poor playwright who had written on his tombstone the simple words: 'A plot at last'.
The stock of the much over-praised Bloomsbury Group seems to be declining. I have always thought that, apart from E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey was the only true genius amongst them. Virginia Woolf has been criticised for finding the novels of Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells hopelessly vulgar, and now it seems the Harold Nicol- sons were snobbish about flowers. Accord- ing to a book on the 'decline and fall of the British aristocracy', Vita thought azaleas unsuitable because they are 'Ascot, Sun- ningdale sort of plants' and rhododendrons were like 'fat stockbrokers, who we do not want to have to dinner'. This taste has had a depressing effect on upper-class gardens, where only white, cream and pale green flowers are admitted; yet great artists like Matisse composed wonderful patterns of orange, pink, purple, yellow and blue. I am very grateful to begonias, tulips, asters and dahlias for producing such colours, but then I quite like H. G. Wells. I think the book underestimates the Nicolsons. They produced an excellent writer son, and Harold Nicolson himself wrote a very good book about Byron's Greek adventure. I also like to think of Vita wearing old jodh- purs with a twin-set and pearls. People were able to say that she was Lady Chatterley down to the waist and Mellors thereafter.
It's been a week of enormous excitement for me. At a reasonable price I was able to bid for a beautiful head of Isabelle by Epstein. The expert lady who helped me in this enterprise told me that the great sculp- tor did a number of studies of this particu- lar model, some of them showing far more• of her than I aim to possess. It seems that an elderly gentleman once brought a waist- length version of the same girl into an auc- tion house and it was noticed that the pati- na on her breasts was far brighter than on the rest of her body. It was judged that this work of art had been 'much cherished'.
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