DAVID HOCKNEY

V by John Updike

V for venereal, of course, and for victory. These days it is the venereal diseases which are achieving victory: these few decades after penicillin banished syphilis and gonorrhea to the backwash of history. AIDS and herpes, both with palliations but without cure, have reattached a high price tag to sex. The existence of venereal disease at all argues against Providence and on behalf of a demonic Nature, which hormonally incites us to mate then invents a spirochete, a gonococcus, and a viral group that thrive at the thrilled point of contact. ‘Love has pitched his mansion in,’ Yeats wrote, ‘the placement of excrement.’ The place, certainly, of humid and susceptible membranes. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it in its usual level-headed fashion, it all seems natural and mild enough: the micro-organism behind gonorrhea simply has a ‘predilection for the type of mucous membranes found in the genito-urinary tract and adjacent area’; the ‘delicate’ syphilis microbe, like all of us, is saddled with ‘a requirement of moisture for life and transmission’. The HIV virus, in its complicated transactions with the human immunity system, just can’t help itself, and is doing, in rhythm with its macrocosmic carriers, what comes naturally. In the meantime, or venery, rather freshly armed with Freud’s blessing, feels inextricably bound up with our vitality and even our virtue, as well as our vanity and, in love’s cause, occasional villainy. It does not seem hard that, having so recently absorbed Freud’s blessing, we should now have to flinch from Nature’s curse.