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Note on Après-Ski, Kinky

Unusual, so-called ‘kinky’ sexual behaviour has become something of a norm but in the 1960s it seemed excitingly new and suddenly obligatory.  This piece is subversively affectionate, secretly admiring what it savagely satirises.  Who does not know that some spice is needed when food loses its savour?—

                         Their icinesses weep: her nails weep for

                         the breaking skin, his eye for a spiked heel,

                         their hearts for fiercer laws, frankpledge of two,

                         (the jackboot was defeated from the scene

                         when incest of one race was the one mode)

                         to cure their love of life, their tasteless tongue.

Here celebrity lovers rich enough to take ski-ing holidays, not in those years on the school-trip calendar, are seeking a cure for their jaded ‘love of life’, in their erotic complicity fantasising over the bygone sado-masochistic era of Nazi licence.  See The Night Porter.

A record dips: the image is of a music record going up and down on its turntable.  Pilule d’Or, ‘golden pill’, here also the name of the music; the ’60s were the First (and Golden, pre-AIDS) Age of the contraceptive pill.  Herr Klamm: German businessman embedded in the white supremacist, apartheid economy of South Africa; Jungfrau (‘young maiden’—an alpine peak) rim: resort area in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland; Apollo: handsome young man, like a Greek god: ‘agape’ because stupid, though there’s a pun here too, since ‘agape’, when pronounced á-ga-pee, means spiritual love; Mistinguett: stage name of Jeanne-Marie Bourgeois (1875–1956), French music hall entertainer with great legs who often appeared with Maurice Chevalier; Cuissardes en cuir: women’s thigh-length leather boots.  Frankpledge is corporate responsibility, so in ‘frankpledge of two’ I’d be responsible to you for your good and bad behaviour and vice versa.  This suggests that our lovers are acting as one, as lovers are always said to do, and mutually devoted to erotic adventurism.  Jackboot: symbolic of Nazism and its creed of ‘Aryan’ racial superiority, hence ‘incest of one race’.

Alan Marshfield

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