WILL SELF

Each month, Esquire commissions an unsparing inspection of Will Self’s body. This month: the back

The award-winning writer’s monthly anatomical check-up targets the back

MOST OF THE TIME, I’m afflicted by the sort of liberal-guilt-about-my-privilege that makes the simplest and most uncomplicated of pleasures an ordeal: how can I enjoy the sun on my face, when millions are dragging their way through the dust to a polluted water source? But every so often I’ll bask unashamedly in the amniotic fluid of my own emolument. One such occasion was when a well-connected friend took me into The National Gallery, late at night, to ogle the daubs. As a trustee, she had an actual key that admitted us through a semi-concealed door. One moment we were standing in Trafalgar Square, listening to some mop-headed lost boy play the didgeridoo, the next we were wandering those marmoreal halls, my friend waving her arm magisterially to activate the motion-sensitive lights, as we drifted from the Renaissance to the Early Modern. Our objective was the Velázquez exhibition then on. I’m a sucker for Velázquez, for the near-edible qualities of his flesh-tones, but this was a major show and if I’d gone with the hoi polloi in daylight, all I’d’ve seen would have been their backs, obscuring those magnificent brush strokes.

As it was, we were alone, and the faces of the dissolute prelates and gourmandising hidalgos stared down at me, so very present I could almost smell their rotten breath. I was interested in the portraits of popes and ecclesiastics, but ensorcelled by another, yet fleshier image that glowed from the far side of the gallery. Velázquez’s painting, “La Venus del espejo” (better known to British oglers as “The Rokeby Venus”), is unusual for a 17th-century Spanish work: this was a period when everyone expected the Spanish Inquisition, and what those cross-dressers particularly objected to was the naked female form. Velázquez’s Venus

is beautifully, triumphantly nude: reclining fulllength on a swathe of puce damask chucked over a chaise longue, at the end of which kneels her son, Cupid, holding up a mirror which reflects her face. For the most salient thing about Velázquez’s gaze is that it’s focussed not on her breasts, pubis or belly, but on the goddess’s amazingly beautiful back.

Ooh! I do love a beautiful female back. True, I’m not averse to a beautiful male one either, although on the rare occasions that I’ve made love to a man, it’s been his back I’ve found the biggest turn off. Way too muscular, you see — too muscular and too stiff; really, when you consider its bifurcated form, the toned male back is an erect penis, writ frighteningly large. The female back, though, is soft and curvaceous and, when well-proportioned, it’s of a delightful piece with the still more lovely female derrière. Let’s face it — if you’ll forgive the pun — a culture that is preoccupied with the front of the human body betrays a crude and instrumental mentality. One that elevates fucking above lovemaking and orgasmic self-satisfaction above mutual sensual pleasure. Moreover, neglect of the back strongly implies a dull, pedestrian, missionary style of sex, by the sort of peckerwood who really deserves an auto-da-fé. But to exalt the female back is to understand that all eroticism consists in progressive — and hopefully infinite — revelation. To the true lover of women, the backless evening dress is the very acme; for what does it reveal, if not the possibility of further revelations?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some weirdo back-fetishist who gets his jollies solely from behind: I want the whole woman — not just a bit of her. However, I do think the time has come for the back to be redressed and otherwise compensated. I strongly suggest that all you young esquires out there pay the back due obeisance before you leap into the saddle; and before the backs you encounter become too warped and knotted by the stresses of contemporary life for their possessors to warm to anything but the touch of a good physiotherapist. Because, of course, besides being a site of special sensual interest, the back is also prone to getting righteously fucked. A valetudinarian I know once said to me: “I can’t bear seeing my peers anymore, because before we talk about anything else, there has to be the bloody organ recital!” By which he meant the listing of their respective ailments.

However, when it comes to the back, from early middle age we stop talking about it much: why? Because everyone has back trouble. As the adage has it: if your back’s breaking it’s because you’re in a back-breaking situation — and contemporary life often seems to me to be one back-breaking situation

Everyone has back trouble. As the adage has it: if your back’s breaking it’s because you’re in a back-breaking situation — and contemporary life often seems to me to be one back-breaking situation after another

after another, as we rise from our posturepedic mattresses to fold ourselves into cramped metal boxes; the necessary preliminary to hunching all day over keyboards and screens. Decades of tense typing have done for my back, and so have my four children, who, throughout their childhoods, made unceasing demands for piggybacks on my shoulders. Just think of all that weight rhythmically hammering down on your spine, grinding the vertebrae together like monstrous… gnashers!

Thank God for Nasser, my philosophically-minded physio, who massages me with expert fingers while musing on the mind/body problem. Nasser is so very good, I only have to see him once or twice a year, but while his fingers may be as nimble as his dialectics, it’s actually his very common-sense advice that’s saved me from the rigours I see so many endure. “Whatever inclination you have, basically,” he told me, “to basically move this way, or basically that way…” (Nasser says “basically” a lot, I suspect it could be because of his basal occupation), “you should basically take it. It doesn’t matter if you’re basically in public, or private — you must stretch, and flex, and keep stretching… basically.”

Which is why, had you happened to be with me in that night-time gallery, standing before that incomparably beautiful back, you would have witnessed me bending this way and that, like the proverbial stook of barley, shaken by the wind. I’ve no compunction when it comes to these extravagant motions: I’m often to be seen standing in the middle of the road, like some superannuated kindergarten pupil, who’s been told to make himself “as tall as a house”, with my arms straight up in the air. As I am, in fact, as tall as a house, this can be confusing for passers-by — but do I care? No, I do not. After all, if I don’t take my back in hand, how long will it be before I’m unable to take any others?