Book Review: The Compleat Lover

Merry Christmas, Gentle Readers! I'm not physically online, and I don't imagine you are either, so Christmas Day may be a good time to discuss a book that's considerably more explicit than I usually discuss here...

A Fair Trade Book (congratulations!)

Title: The Compleat Lover

Author: Derek & Julia Parker

Date: 1972

Publisher: Mitchell Beazley (UK), McGraw-Hill (US)

ISBN: none

Length: 256 pages including index and image credits

Illustrations: many, including original color photos of the authors

Quote: "While the poems and paintings we have chosen form a personal anthology of our own favourite pieces...they come as near as any human utterances can come to expressing 'the life force', the extraordinary, delightful and infinitely complex phenomenon of love."

Well, it was 1972. The Parkers had written a book called The Compleat Astrologer and wanted...more money, likely, from an international "seller." Why not revive their romance by writing a book about that? "[W]e incorporate a gentle guide to the discipline and understanding of the body," they promise in the introduction.

The result is not a book of pornography, although it does contain a few nude images. It's meant to be an erotic guide for couples--although of course the problem with erotica is not keeping it away from the people who don't need it, but predicting whether it will serve its purpose for the people who do. If you remember the early 1970s as an exciting period, I can say that this book will be an exciting nostalgia trip. Beyond that, who knows. A sequence of full-color paintings of people who look as close as the artist could make them to the photographs of the Parkers, on the inside jacket flaps, does nothing for me but undoubtedly was great fun for the Parkers.

A sequence of psychological "games" at the end may encourage some couples to understand each other better, or discourage others into imagining that someone else might understand them more easily. This is not, of course, a discussion of the manipulative Games People Play to get their own way without admitting it; it's what U.S. magazines usually call "quizzes" about what each person prefers. Results are predictable and intuitive--and not scientific at all. Some couples who seem perfectly compatible split up; some couples who seem altogether incompatible, and don't spend much time together, have successful long-term monogamous marriages. People who don't have enough in common to be best friends and working partners to each other sometimes seem to keep romance alive by intentionally being exotic and alien to each other.

The Parkers' taste is bland, nice, and specifically British--there are a couple of images from India, many from medieval England, and a majority from modern England. Everybody isn't blond; there is a sequence of "stages of love," from youth to old age, where every young person even in crowd scenes has red hair. (Derek Parker, at this stage of his life, has black hair.) Everybody has fair skin and, except for one drawing from India, European-type faces.

The Parkers acknowledge that at many periods of history, as C.S. Lewis mentioned in The Allegory of Love, romance and marriage were perceived not only as separate but as opposed to each other. Seeing that romances tend to fade, many cultures have favored contract marriage with an emphasis on uniting families and producing heirs. Often this led to an understanding of "love" as an excuse for adultery rather than a part of marriage. Love between wife and husband was expected to be a matter of loyalty and public spirit, not passion.

Since people have realized that passionless marriages were promoting prostitution--well, actually there was an argument that, when young men were killed in war, prostitution offered some benefits to young women who couldn't find husbands--and that prostitution was promoting sexually transmitted diseases, there has been a preference for marriage at least to begin with passion. Hence the market for books whose purpose is to revive passion, to help couples stay together. It's a valid purpose and, in discouraging teenagers from poring over erotic material, adults don't need to pretend that we'll never need to make a conscious effort to interest ourselves in what still interests our Other Halves. Our day is likely to come, and those who denigrate the effort are likely to be those who failed in it.

That said, a distinction can then be made between affiliative and counter-affiliative erotica--the kind you share with your wife or husband, and the kind you hide from him or her. The Parkers have, I think, made a genuine effort to ensure that this book would be affiliative for everybody. More words are addressed to the female (remember, in 1972, psychologists assured us that everyone would really be heterosexual if their emotional problems could be straightened out!) and more images chosen to appeal to the male. The emphasis, as they say in the text, is always on tenderness. If men in pictures are carrying women about, the women are obviously enjoying it. If an eighteenth-century "swinger" is portrayed kicking off her slipper for one man to catch while another man is pushing the swing--oh, obviously to any British reader, raising an arm would spoil the charm of the upper class (sweat stains would show), so the chap pushing the swing is an employee who doesn't care what the young couple do. If people are moving away from each other, they're looking over their shoulders. No frustrations, no perversions, no kinks.

Most of the people are not, to my eyes, attractive. I think this, too, is by design. A nude woman is bottom-heavy, with such undefined "abs" that you wonder if the woman is pregnant. A nude man is less than halfway to the stage at which most men prefer to be seen naked. Most people have their clothes on. There's a sequence of images of skin, in such soft focus that although the skin seems perfect it's not immediately clear which part of a body it covers. The pictures seem to have been selected with an intention of not making any forty-year-old spouse feel insecure. Whoever you are, you give more pleasure to the eyes of anyone who shares this book with you than these pictures do.

Apart from the mere idea of an erotic book, or a book that was erotic for someone else, what I find not to like about this book is the emphasis on eroticism in a book about "love." "Tenderness" and appreciation of the body seem to me to belong in the category of sex, not love. In a book about sex as such, an emphasis on mutual appreciation and enjoyment is nice. In a book that claims to be about love, the elements of self-sacrifice, commitment, loyalty, patience, and prudence deserve their share of emphasis; in this book they don't get it.

I find this unrealistic. Love is not the physical sensation that nature supplies liberally to the young, dreaming or waking, coupled or alone. Love is the bond that sharing that sensation can help to form between two people. Of course cuddling up with him or her feels nice--cuddling up with anyone who doesn't disgust a young person always feels nice. Hormones can make music we hear with him or her more than music, and bread we eat with him or her more than bread. I may be nitpicking here, but for me, it's when hard work we do with him or her becomes joyous work, and sitting up with sick relatives with him or her becomes tolerable, that we can call our attachment to the person love. Because shallower definitions leave us to conclude that even happily monogamous adults have, in youth, "loved" dozens if not hundreds of people, not all of whom we necessarily ever met, and many of whose names we've forgotten if we ever knew them. Advertisers have always known that putting an appealing face in an ad makes nagging and begging more than nagging and begging--the whole concept of TV commercials rests on this well documented fact--and yet, although the "attractive" faces ameliorate the annoying quality of the commercials, what we feel for the models in TV commercials is a long way from being love.

For me, personally, the only erotic effect this book has would come from reading it as half of a couple. Possibly if it had come from my husband's collection it would hold memories. Since it came from a truckload of books I bought for resale, well, it'll be easy to resell to any married person above age thirty who asks for it. It will not be displayed.

Since the book won't be displayed, I should reiterate that although it's not suitable for displaying on a coffee table it's the sort of object that's described as a coffee-table book. Those 256 pages are mostly the kind of thick, slick paper that can be printed with color pictures on both sides. The content is certainly "light" but the book will be "heavy," even exhausting, to read in bed. Only one book ($5) will fit into one package ($5) for a total cost of $10 by U.S. postal money order, or $11 by Paypal.

However, one fun fact about the Parkers may give their book a special redeeming value. They're still married. They're still practicing astrology together. Their book may be a celebration of romance more than love, but they do, in fact, know something about love.