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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"There are tough poems in here that might be very uncomfortable for some people to read," Dennis told me on the afternoon before the reading, sitting at a Dennis Publishing conference table in Midtown Manhattan, wolfing a roast beef sandwich and smoking Silk Cut cigarettes. "But I don't think there are sentimental poems in here, and if there are I would like you to point them out to me." Dennis defended "An Old Dog Is the Best Dog," his loving ode to an aged canine, claiming, "When I read the old dog one, as I will tonight, you'll see I don't deliver it in a sentimental way. In fact, you can sometimes hear people sucking in breath when I actually call a female dog what it is."
Sure enough, later that night, you could smell the old dog coming a mile away. In a special installment of the tour, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company had agreed to mix readings of Dennis' work with those of the Bard for a $200-a-head benefit for the theater troupe. Actor Mark Hadfield came to the mike clutching a large stuffed dog and read Launce's exhortation to his mongrel from "Two Gentlemen of Verona."
"O, 'tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies!" lamented Hadfield as Launce. Then it was Dennis' turn to prove his unsentimental mettle.
An old dog is the best dog,
A dog with rheumy eyes;
An old dog is the best dog
A dog grown sad and wise,
Not one who snaps at bubbles,
Nor one who barks at nowt,
A dog who knows your troubles,
A dog to see you out.
But the poet's subtext became clear as he spat out the second verse, which began, "An old bitch is the best bitch." Dennis emphasized both instances of the word "bitch." As promised, people in the audience sucked in their breath. Or spat their wine into their napkins. It was hard to tell.
When I asked the childless, never-married Dennis how his feelings about women had changed over the years, he said, "I believe I've always been immensely generous with women. I was brought up by a single mother -- a very unusual thing in the 1950s. So I didn't have to be taught by Germaine Greer about equality in work and sex. My mother was earning the money in my house." Dennis, who worked with Greer on Oz and appointed former Marie Claire editor Clare McHugh to be Maxim's first chief, added, "I don't have some of the concerns that I see some men having. For example, if I didn't own my own company, it wouldn't be the remotest problem for me to report to a woman."
When I asked him about his repeated use of the possessive construction "our women" in his poem "The Summer of Love," about the hedonism of 1967 ("And we scolded non-believers and we taunted the police./ And our women made us teas while we puffed the pipes of piece ... And we lived in San Francisco, or else in Notting Hill,/ And we made a lot of babies though our women took the pill"), Dennis said it was intentional provocation.
"That's quite deliberate when you're writing poetry," he said, "when you think, That's great and that'll really upset some people! I'm gonna go and do it again!" Here he let out one of his frequent, self-appreciative staccato laughs, and recalled a day 30 years ago when the women working at Oz "got so fed up with all the guys getting all the glory that they went and started their own magazine called Spare Rib. Literally, some of them were the secretaries, and we were all stunned. We just couldn't believe it! Where had they gone?" Here Dennis looked under the table, in mock confusion, seeking the secretaries of his youth.
One on one, at least with a female reporter, Felix Dennis seemed pretty tame: charmed to be asked about his verse, but almost shocked when questioned about whether it's getting him laid. He recovered enough to say, "When you've got hundreds of millions of dollars, getting laid is not your problem," and giving another loud laugh before continuing: "I'm getting older, you know?" He offered a parable about a Chinese fisherman realizing that he has missed the tide and continued, "The tide has gone. You start to think, Thank Christ for that, now I can have a decent conversation with a young woman without...'" Dennis trailed off.
"I'm 57 years old now. When I was in my 20s and 30s, if I didn't have sex loads of times a week I'd think something appalling was happening. Now I tend to mock myself and even sex, because it's not as important to me as it used to be." But Dennis was quick to clarify, using his stiff palm to chop at the table for emphasis: "When it's important, it's very important! But for many years I would argue that even making the money was to feed the sexual appetite. That is certainly not true anymore."
His most voracious appetite right now appears to be for readers of his poetry, of which he claims many. When "A Glass Half Full" was published in England last year, it sold through its 10,000-copy print run. Miramax Books has printed 15,000 copies here. Even with corporate offices around the world, homes in Warwickshire, England; Connecticut; and Mustique, the tiny sandbox of the ludicrously wealthy, Dennis identifies more strongly with his hardscrabble beginnings, and fancies himself a bard of the masses. He burbled happily about the "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters and e-mails" that come "literally from dentists and housewives and doctors and just the weirdest broad catholic readership."
