In search of Brigid Brophy

Let’s watch –

Stevas smirking from strength to strength,

Brophy still leading by half a length,

Auberon floating from sneer to sneer

And Brophy la Belle going over the weir . . .

Willing myself to read on through a collection of Geoffrey Grigson’s poems, I had to smile (smirk? sneer?) at this disdainful salvo. Grigson’s poem “Mass Media’s Media” – published in Ingestion of Ice-Cream (London: Macmillan, 1969) – is concerned with “all of these bleeders” who dared to appear on the television and radio. In the Grigsonian vision of the age, these people were phoneys; their game was racing paper boats “under the bridge / With Barbara Cartland and Muggeridge”. Alas, Grigson says, when the game’s over and the players are gone, “The drains like the river will still run on”.

Grigson himself, of course, is above all this. No oblivion for this sometime BBC broadcaster and producer! (Or any of us, hypocrite lectrice ou lecteur . . .)

“Brophy la Belle” here refers to Brigid Brophy (1929–95), an inimitable Anglo-Irish writer whose works I collect as best I can. Brophy wrote short, sharp novels and some equally sharp but sometimes heftier works of non-fiction; the range and quality of these works remain, to my mind, less widely acknowledged than they could be. But collecting editions her work has confirmed for me, among other things, that interest in Brophy has never wholly gone away (sorry, Geoff).

In the 1990s, for example, Virago got around to reissuing couple of her early novels, Hackenfeller’s Ape (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953) and The King of a Rainy Country (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956); the latter was again reissued in 2012 by the Coelacanth Press; and in the past few years Faber has reissued both Hackenfeller’s Ape and another later novel with a Mozartian element, The Snow Ball (London: Villiers, 1964). A collection of critical essays published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020 considered the full breadth of her achievements – as a pioneering modern campaigner for animal rights, among other things.

The intermittent reissues seem to have helped readers (re)discover Brophy. She also wrote plenty of entertaining and provocative reviews and essays that generally haven’t been reissued except in the selections she made herself. It’s these occasional pieces that, in the 1960s, led to her appearances on TV, to outrage Grigson et al. Writing anonymously in the TLS in that period, Ian Hamilton described her with grumpy chauvinism as “one of our leading literary shrews”. Not unlike Hamilton himself, Brophy got under people’s skin, largely thanks to her Shavian polemics concerning the necessity of social reform. Via the campaign to establish Public Lending Right in the UK, she even insisted that writers have rights, too.¹

Another gleeful exercise in provocation, meanwhile, co-written with her husband Michael Levey and their friend Charles Osborne, was a book of short pieces called Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1967). Well worth a look this one, if you’re a reader who enjoys testing your own judgements of Lucky Jim, the Brontës, Hamlet etc against those of three mischievous critics who find the solemnly worshipped canon wanting in various respects.

I’m looking forward to interviewing some of the leading experts on Brigid Brophy at the Oxford Literary Festival later this month, on March 20: Richard Canning, Gary Francione, Gerri Kimber and Brophy’s daughter, the brilliant Kate Levey. (Come and say hello if you happen to be in the neighbourhood?) With this event in mind, here is a little more of the Brophy story, as told through some books from Kate’s shelves (profound thanks to her for sharing these images) and some from my own. If anyone has any interesting Brophyana knocking around, of course, I’m all ears . . .

Brophy’s father John (1899–1965) was a journalist and a prolific author in a different vein. Pictured here is her copy of The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), the film of which, starring Peter O’Toole, was released the following year.

A recent discovery according to Kate: Brophy didn’t like the heart on the spine of The Crown Princess and other stories (London: Collins, 1953). Another reason, perhaps, why she apparently would have liked to destroy all copies of her first publication.

Brophy didn’t like the illustration in the first edition of Hackenfeller’s Ape, either, apparently; but the author was a friend of sorts. She could at least boast that a copy of this novel had been “torn to shreds by a Jesuit in a Catholic paper and has been banned in Eire”.

Brophy’s mother Charis also ventured into fiction a couple of times; see below for the label on the typescript of an unpublished novel and, above (above Geoffrey Grigson, that is), Charis’s copy of The King of a Rainy Country.

Brophy married the art historian Michael Levey in 1954; he would go on to become director of the National Gallery and receive a knighthood in 1981. (A complete collection of works by Brophy-associates would include novels by friends such as Maureen Duffy, Shena Mackay and Iris Murdoch; these are, in many cases, relatively easy to come by. )

Below is Brophy’s ownership signature in a copy of the first British edition, first reprint of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr (London: Calder and Boyars, 1966); the novel was already a best-seller by then, having attracted much controversy since its first publication in the US two years earlier. Brophy reviewed it (for the London Magazine, I think, although my memory may be at fault here), and her neat pencil notes adorn this copy’s front free endpaper (“importance of objects: motor bikes”; “bloodymindedness”).

In Transit (London: Macdonald, 1969) is a “trans-sexual adventure” and the most conspicuously avant-garde of Brophy’s novels. Brophy loved this paperback design, I gather; the hardback had featured a Magritte, courtesy of George Melly.

Kate’s copy of The Snowball in German, Der Schneeball, reminds me that books in translation is an aspect of collecting that I all too rarely explore. See also, if you can, the Japanese edition of the same novel: “each page is beautiful”.

Here’s one more design that won Brophy’s approval, for the revised edition of her study Mozart the Dramatist: The value of his operas to him, to his age, and to us (London: Libris, 1988). A mere authorial thumbs-up for a book jacket might not sound like much. But authors don’t always get their own way in these matters, you know . . .

1. Brophy should not just be remembered but praised by any writer who wants to be paid for their work – of which there are more than a few on this platform – as a leading campaigner for Public Lending Right, the legislation that finally ensured authors would receive payments when their books were borrowed from public libraries. (She certainly didn’t act alone; but much of the leg-work and the rhetoric was hers.) The mechanisms of publication and circulation have changed drastically in the ensuing years, of course. The principle remains vital.