Nicci Gerrard
TONGUE FIRST: ADVENTURES IN PHYSICAL CULTURE by Emily Jenkins (Virago)
I think she is sitting on the floor of her bathroom on the front cover – at least that’s what it looks like. She is wrapped in a short towel so that the tops of her legs disappear into its mysterious shadows; her hair is attractively damp; there is a bold tattoo wrapped around her left upper arm.
The gaze she is directing at the lens is straight, knowing, provocative. The photographs that we have become used to of the heroin addict – collapsed on the mucky, tiled floor near the lavatory, half-dressed and quite wasted – is neatly subverted.
Here is Emily Jenkins, naked yet protected, displaying herself for us and yet in control. She is a thoroughly modern and self-conscious author: living in New York, single, but surrounded by friends, writing a book about being herself; her picaresque adventures are internal ones. The journey she takes is one of fascinated self- exploration – she introduces herself as our guide to urban culture, but really she is showing us her life. Tongue First (the title refers to her first kiss, in which inexperienced tongues met before lips) is unashamedly narcissistic and a curious mixture of the brave and the coy.
In Tongue First, Jenkins identifies the body as a prison and a vehicle for adventures. That contradiction, she says, shapes our culture and our behaviour and that is what she wants to investigate (“interrogate”). She wants to understand nudist colonies, sensory deprivation, heroin addiction, leather underwear, shaved heads, boxer shorts, aerobics classes, goodbye kisses, afternoon naps, happy hour, tattoos, body-piercing.
She goes into her subjects “tongue first”, by which she means she tasted them herself, went to freak shows, tried heroin, shaved her own head, floated in a sensory- deprivation tank, tried out sex techniques she read about in magazines and manuals, met octogenarians, drag queens and one blue man. She drew the line at colonic irrigation.
The sections are labelled “flying”, “decorating”, “fucking”, “revealing”, “healing”, “rebelling” – the lower case is a kind of signpost of emphatic contemporaneity. Jenkins uses lazy phrases such as “bad-hair day” and even, horribly, “white trash”, yet she writes very well, although always with a slangy and intimate self-consciousness.
Each chapter or section is rather like an essay. Indeed, Tongue First is best read as a collection of linked essays, with some nice aperus and likeable self-mockeries, rather than as a slicked-together book.
For you can’t understand heroin addiction by having a quick snort, once – and there are plenty of books written by real addicts. You can’t understand the urge to cover yourself from head to foot in tattoos by having one rather tasteful tattoo (an antique scroll, whose centrepiece is an illustration from Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott) branded on your arm. We don’t learn much about anything when she tries out some uncomfortable positions during sex with her “beloved younger man”. This is upper-class slumming – peeking in at the seedy underworld and thinking you’re being daring.
There’s a kind of narcissistic journalistic writing nowadays, the wrong-way-round genre, in which you don’t just describe what you have experienced, but you experience something simply in order to write about it: take drugs so you can write about it, have a certain kind of sex so you can write about it, endanger yourself so you can write about it. The cover pronounces Jenkins’s unashamed voyeurism, but it is herself that she’s watching.