Excerpt
Having agreed that Simone de Beauvoir's feminism
is a bad joke
That Sartre is a has-been and a stupid
Jansenist muddlehead
That Camus posessed more integrity than talent
That there are no longer any poets in France
Worth mentioning
That much the same could be said for her novelists
And that, in general, French culture
Is in a parlous condition, if not actually dead
Not having cared to move
A single centimetre beyond Flaubert and Valery
And that no one except the two of us
Seemed to know what is happening in that wretched country
Having agreed politely to disagree
About Hemingway, Rimbaud, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Brecht,
Lawrence, Moravia, Jaspers, Kafka, Strindberg, and Psternak’s
Dr. Zhivago having dismissed politics as a betise and religion
As a folie
AND
Having inevitably but cautiously left the high ground
Of literary and philosophical discussion
To speak of more personal, more mundane matters
I.e. one’s dissatisfactions with conventional marriage, one’s
Adulteries, fornications, venereal diseases (there were none)
And given a description of the circumstances attendant on one’s
Best and worst fucks
Having slyly dropped two or three hints
About one’s favourite erogenous zones and the best means
For stimulating them
And having led from this to the over-riding, paramount need in
Sex for tenderness, mutual esteem, humour, delicatesse and for
Similar though not necessarily identical tastes in literature, music,
Philosophy, art, theatre, and contemporary films
We are now ready to make love
