Quote: Across 60 chapters, and over 600 pages, Dan Davies attempts to reveal the real Jimmy Savile. Savile was ubiquitous to those who grew up in the UK during the 60s, 70s and 80s, through his successful TV shows, charity fund raising, TV adverts, and relationships with senior establishment figures. Since his death in 2011 he was also been revealed as Britain’s most notorious and prolific sex offender of all time. This book gets to the heart of how he was able to operate with impunity and avoid prosecution.

Born into poverty in Leeds in 1926, Jimmy Savile rose to become a knight of the realm, and a confidant of Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, and the Prince of Wales. Along the way, he invented the concept of the club DJ, gave the BBC two of its most iconic shows (Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It) and pioneered the celebrity as charity worker and fund raiser. These achievements alone make for a fascinating read, however it is Savile’s prolific and serial abuse of young and frequently vulnerable people that beggars belief. Clearly what helped Savile to operate “In Plain Sight” was his celebrity status. It is easy to forget just how popular he was during the 1970s - and to a lesser extent in the decades before and after. Unlike many reviewers, I never remember thinking Savile was dodgy or creepy. A bit weird perhaps, but not in a dangerous way. I grew up with him on “Top of the Pops” - which he pretty much invented, and of course “Jim’ll Fix It”, a Saturday night staple on BBC1 along with The Generation Game. I can well imagine being 12, 13 or 14 and being in awe of him and also trusting him - as did so many young people who encountered him. He was well practiced in grooming kids, and when necessary their parents too.

In addition to being a huge celebrity he also cultivated relationships at all levels of British society which included members of the Royal family, and Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister. He was also given the run of three hospitals and was able to lure children to his car, flats, caravans etc. No wonder he considered himself untouchable and, despite many a close call, and even dropping heavy hints in interviews, he got away with abuse on a horrendous scale.

One of the most harrowing parts is the testimony, quoted verbatim, of a 12 year girl he raped whilst she was in hospital. This account powerfully brings home the monstrous nature of this type of abuse. The girl tried to get the nurses and a doctor to believe her account. The inference is that staff at Stoke Mandeville were well aware of what Savile was up to, even advising children to pretend to be asleep if he came round at night.

Savile was too canny to ever give much away over numerous interviews despite, in hindsight, some obvious clues. Sadly it was only after he had died that his victims were taken seriously and the substance of the old, dark rumours were finally heard. Savile always insisted that his great secret was that he had no secrets. Nothing could have been further from the truth - there were numerous people and establishments (BBC, the Police, doctors, nurses, friends etc.) whose complacency, corruption and complicity allowed him to systematically ruin hundreds of lives. This makes 'In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile' a compulsive and deeply disturbing read, and one that avoids any sensationalism. Depressing, distressing and essential.

   

Quote: In André Gide’s great Modernist novel The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1926), the schoolboy Boris, at the age of nine, comes under the influence of a boy called Baptistin, a year or two older, with whom he enjoys certain ‘clandestine practices’ - mutual masturbation - which they both, understandably, consider to be magical. Although Boris cures himself of this ‘vice’ for a while, he later takes it up again, masturbating alone, essentially as a consequence of being bullied. His sexual pleasure (volupté) is all the more intense for the recidivism it involves (‘mais il prenait plaisir à se perdre et faisait, de cette perdition même, sa volupté’). Gide himself had been removed from school at the tender age of eight because of certain ‘bad habits’ which he made no attempt to cover up, being naïvely unaware that there was any need to do so. Prior to this, he and the son of the concierge had been in the habit of masturbating - not each other but themselves in each other’s close company - underneath his parents’ dining table.
No book so intensely redolent of the frenzy of male puberty could well avoid mention — or implication, at least — of masturbation. But there is more to the raising of this topic than the dully mirroring requirements of realist plausibility. The whole of The Counterfeiters is vibrant with onanistic promise. Its complex of intrigues and affairs between adolescent boys thrives upon the purposive conjunction of hands and penises. The motivation for this is not just Gide’s indulgence of a personal interest - although that is likely to be a part of the matter. Given that the novel is so profoundly and extensively concerned with education and socialisation, masturbation takes its place in a thematic whole as the definitive exercise in sexual self- or co-education. It constitutes the boys’ best way of establishing a firm (and pleasurable) mode of relation to the physical world. This is no incidental detail in Gide’s broader, intellectual explorations of criminality and liminality: for the perception of physical matter is, as it always has been, sited near the base of all metaphysics.

   

Quote: MARTHA: . . . I know nothing about this sort of thing, that’s the whole trouble. I never knew one of these people before coming to Rome. I knew about them, but not even that, really, no—but believe me, Oscar is not one of those people, he simply isn’t, I can’t believe it. The ones I knew in Rome were not at all like him. In the first place, he is not effeminate. He is lean and hard, not muscular exactly, but he is firm. And he is wonderfully sure and deliberate in his movements. It is marvelous to see him walk, specially in dangerous places. I feel always so secure with him, so protected. Besides, I don’t have to tell you why he isn’t. Of course he isn’t! But then what is this story? Tell me. Is it just a fad? Some new and strange experience he wants to have? Then let’s get it over with, I say it again. He couldn’t possibly continue afterward, I don’t think. 


OSCAR: But the fact remains that the word is out. You see—it concerns a rather unusual friendship I have with a boy of thirteen. Please don’t squirm in your seat: it is not what you think—it is almost nothing, in fact, which is why I so much prefer that you should learn it from me, rather than from someone else, as eventually you undoubtedly would: you know how such rumors spread. It is the one accusation that is always believed, from which no person is safe. 


OSCAR: There was almost nothing at first. I had noticed the boy last year, and though we never talked, except the very last day, the very last hour, which is when I told him, too, that I would be back this summer, I had entertained for him a friendly and curious feeling. Which is why I wrote to him later, during the winter, and why there grew between us a strange and increasingly “sympathetic” correspondence. It turned out that he had noticed me no less than I had noticed him—which, when I think of it, he could have hardly helped, since I held him constantly under my eye. Such is his beauty. It alone would make me stop. It is unique: if you saw him but once you would understand. So he was aware, of course, of attention, annoyed by it too, perhaps (but I don’t think so, on second thought: I often observed him when he played with his friends, apparently intent on the game, but suddenly he would glance my way and search for me, almost anxiously, whenever I moved from my post; at other times, passing close to where I stood, he would affect that he did not see me, but then he revealed himself by a change in his movements, an almost imperceptible raise [as though to say: I’m quite at my ease] and by a certain rowdiness which he otherwise never displayed; or else, when he was alone, he passed by very quickly, without looking at me—but I would see him smile . . .). However he was not aware of the cause, of that I am certain; his beauty went quite unnoticed: it is what makes it unique and what allowed it to blossom. Like a beautiful bird or like a platinum fox in a forest. He was unaware . . . until I told him about it, until I embarked, was forced to embark, on this road of folly—but more about this later.

Quote: Told through a series of twenty-four letters, The Mail Boat is the story of Martha Baker and Oscar Tower's meeting in Rome at a bar catering to artistic people (read gay) on the Via Babuino, their relationship, and their subsequent time together on a tiny Tyrrhenian island where Oscar plans to work on his next novel. The mail boat that stops twice a week at the island anchors the activities of daily life.

Oscar corresponds with his friend Andrew (André) MaCloy, initially in Paris and later in Venice. Martha writes to her mother, Olga Baker and Janet Picard, a friend in New York, as well as Thomas Purdon, a former love interest and a professor at Yale. The recipient of the letter seems to determine the level of candor about the happenings on the island and Martha and Oscar's relationship.

Martha is deeply in love with Oscar and certainly has plans for their future. Oscar is much cooler and more casual about the relationship. He enjoys spending time with Martha but tends to ignore Martha when she suggests a more committed situation. Oscar is also distracted by a 13-year-old boy named Mario, the most beautiful of the local boys, with whom he would much rather spend his time. Martha is incensed at being ignored in favor of this street kid but also knows Oscar isn't really that way because he isn't effeminate at all. While Oscar won't admit it, even to himself, Martha is very clear in her understanding of Oscar's relationship with Mario, even going as far as telling Thomas in her letter that if Oscar would "just do something with the boy...it would be over in no time at all." (p.87)

Oscar's nature, although seemingly invisible to himself, is made clear by the author when friends visit from America, a literary agent and his 'esthetic' boy friend who plays tennis. In Martha's letter describing the visit and the dinner, she says, "They argued about a French poet who sounds like rainbow," (p.76) clearly a reference to Rimbaud. Later in passing, she also mentions that Oscar was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, which belonged to Martha.

Randolph is a bit coy in describing the island as Tyrrhenian. About half way through the book, when Martha is describing the day she and Oscar went to see the lighthouse, the description, while not a perfect match, comes very close to describing the Punta Carena Lighthouse on Capri. Given the long history of gay artists and authors on Capri and their relationships with the teenage locals, it seems fitting that Randolph would suggest this location.