People of Interest
Molly Parkin
Molly Parkin was the fashion editor who painted pictures of naked people, the artist who wrote novels about sex, and the television personality who said the unsayable every time. A new biography reminds us how much she got away with.
Molly Parkin was born in 1932 in Pontycymmer, a small mining village in the Garw Valley in South Wales, and she left as quickly as she could and spent the next several decades making up for the head start everyone else seemed to have on her. She arrived in London in the 1950s with her art training, her looks, her accent — which she declined, with characteristic stubbornness, to eradicate — and a conviction that the world had more to offer than the Garw Valley had been in a position to provide. She was right, and she found it in considerable quantities.
The biography — whose precise title is noted with the customary caveat in the footer — covers the full arc of a life that proves, on examination, almost impossible to summarise without sounding either disapproving or breathlessly adulatory. Both responses are understandable. Molly Parkin was, by any reckoning, a good deal of trouble. She was also, by any fair assessment, a genuinely interesting figure: an artist who became a journalist who became a novelist who became a television presenter, in each incarnation pushing against the boundaries of what women in her position were expected to do and say, and in most cases finding that the boundaries were more negotiable than advertised.
The fashion career is where most people start, and reasonably so, since it produced some of the most vivid material. She was fashion editor of Nova and then Harper's Bazaar UK during a period — the late 1960s and early 1970s — when British fashion journalism was as visually radical as it has ever been. Nova in particular was a magazine that had concluded that there was no point in publishing a women's magazine that treated its readers as less intelligent than they were, and was producing pages of a kind that would look extraordinary today and were genuinely shocking in 1969. Molly's contribution was not merely editorial but temperamental: she was someone whose aesthetic sense was sufficiently extreme and sufficiently confident that it gave the magazines a character they might otherwise have lacked, and she wore her own clothes with the full commitment of someone who regarded self-presentation as a serious artistic activity.
She wore her clothes as though they had been painted on by someone who was making a point — which, more often than not, they had.
Alongside the journalism, she painted. This is the part of the Molly Parkin story that tends to get lost in the more colourful details of the rest, but the biography apparently restores it to its proper weight. She was trained as a painter — she studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art — and continued to make art throughout her life, with a characteristic focus on the figure that was celebratory and sensual and, by the standards of the time and many subsequent times, considerably more explicit than was felt to be entirely appropriate. She was not deterred by the felt inappropriateness. Being deterred by felt inappropriateness was not, in general, her mode.
The novels came in the 1970s, and were considered scandalous with what, in retrospect, looks like rather too much enthusiasm. Her fiction — beginning with Love All in 1974 — was sexual in content and satirical in intent, which combination British literary culture has always found simultaneously compelling and faintly alarming. The novels were bestsellers, read widely and reviewed in the tone that sexually explicit fiction by women tends to receive: a mixture of prurience and condescension that says more about the reviewers than the reviewed. The biography handles this phase with appropriate scepticism about the condescension, while being honest about the fact that Molly's own relationship to the work was not uncomplicated.
The television work is a chapter in itself. She was a natural in front of a camera in the way that certain people simply are — present, unpredictable, in possession of opinions she was willing to share without the conventional social editing that most television presenters were expected to apply. She appeared on various talk shows and panel programmes during the 1970s and 1980s and was reliably the most memorable thing in them, for reasons that were not always entirely comfortable for the other participants. The art of saying the unsayable is not merely a matter of nerve; it requires an understanding of what the sayable is that most people never develop, because developing it requires paying close attention to the gap between what people are thinking and what they are saying, and most people are too busy being polite to notice the gap is there.
Through all of this ran the alcoholism, which is addressed in the biography without sensationalism and without false redemption. She was a serious drinker for a serious length of time, and the consequences were serious: relationships damaged, work lost or compromised, years consumed. She became sober in 1982, and the biography's account of that transition — and of the forty-odd sober years that followed, in which she continued to paint and to write and to be, in full, Molly Parkin — resists the narrative shape that such stories tend to attract. She didn't become sober and then become a different person. She became sober and continued to be herself, which was more interesting.
Her daughter Sophie Parkin is a writer; her granddaughter has continued in the same direction. Talent, it appears, is not the only thing the women in this family have declined to keep to themselves.
Her daughter, Sophie Parkin — herself a writer and artist of considerable accomplishment — is woven through the biography as both source and subject: the daughter's account of what it was like to be raised by Molly Parkin is presumably part of the record, and the ways in which the family talent expressed itself across generations is one of the more interesting sub-themes available to a biographer working this territory.
The biography's achievement is to make the case for Molly Parkin as a serious figure — not in spite of the outrageousness but because of it. The outrageousness was not a personality quirk that sat alongside the art and the journalism and the novels. It was the method by which someone born in 1932 in the Garw Valley, female, Welsh, working-class in origin however far she subsequently travelled from those origins, found ways to operate at full capacity in a world that had built considerable structural resistance to exactly that sort of thing. The getting-away-with-it was not luck. It was the project.