We Brits have a way of feeling guilty about our pleasures, as if there were something morally dubious, or beyond the merely vulgar, in the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the constitution of our more overtly fun‑loving American cousins. This is not an issue addressed by Paul Martin in his extensive survey of the pros and cons of pleasure, and its bittersweet role in all our lives. Mercifully, however, he does seem to conclude that pleasure-seeking is, on balance, a good thing, for all the efforts of religious and (often) socio-political forces to persuade us otherwise.
But pleasure is also, as he insists from the outset, “a slippery beast”. Plato argued that it was “the greatest incentive to evil”, Aristotle the opposite, and so it has confusingly continued ever since, via the likes of Nero and Casanova to Schopenhauer, Freud and beyond. For Martin, a behavioural biologist, the “holy trinity” of pleasures that can inevitably lead to pain, not least in the shape of potentially lethal addiction, are those of his title – sex, drugs and chocolate.
Sex is discussed in blindingly obvious, at times somewhat alarming, detail and is generally recommended, “preferably with someone else”. In this, as in most of the other pleasures on his menu, Martin is commendably non-judgmental, short of pornography and paedophilia, even when discussing the more exotic sexual variants to which some societies have seen fit to attach a death sentence. Recreational drugs don’t get off so lightly; however tantalising readers might find his evidence that some can apparently evoke sensations 20 times as pleasurable as an orgasm, these kinds of drug can also kill you – which is deemed, on balance, not such a good thing.
For the traditional sex, drugs and rock’n’roll mantra of the Sixties, Martin inexplicably (for this reviewer) substitutes the latter with chocolate – a pleasure, to be sure, but is it really an obsession to more than a worried-about-its-weight minority? Even his dust jacket boasts a sultry set of female lips oozing an overdose of unattractively molten chocolate (which could, in chapter three, be quite another viscous fluid). One can only conclude that this particular vice, if so it be, is dictated either by his publisher’s commercial imperatives or the author’s unspoken guilt as to his own personal predilections. When making his point that most pleasures can (and should) reach a point of satiety, his climactic example turns out to be: “Even eating chocolate in the bath will eventually pall.”
I rest my case.
Beyond this titillating trio, many daily pleasures for most of us don’t make the cut. There are detailed and well-informed discussions of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, porn, gambling and guzzling, and such recreational drugs as ecstasy, plus thumbnail sketches of dissolute figures from Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars to Elvis Presley, Errol Flynn, Janis Joplin and the 17th-century libertine Lord Rochester. While arguing that boredom “reveals more about the person than it does about the world around them”, Martin wheels on such troubled if delightful souls as the late Peter Cook to suggest that the pursuit of self-destructive pleasures can, for some, prove the only alternative to dying of boredom with the quotidian banality of life.
Sleep and dreams are granted a high place amid life’s unavoidable pleasures. But less obviously harmful delights such as reading, dancing, sport, opera, game-playing, conversation get short shrift amid Martin’s concentration on the links between pleasure and pain – the latter of which, ironically enough, prompts one of the book’s best passages. What he gives with one hand, he invariably takes away with the other. Without sex, we wouldn’t be here. Without drugs, many showbiz celebrities still would. But Coleridge wouldn’t have written “Kubla Khan”.
Even with such vivid subject matter, Martin has a prose style which is pedestrian to the point of tedium; there is many a moment, amid his impressive assemblage of facts and statistics, at which one aches for an articulate philosopher to take over. But it is hard to disagree with what appears to emerge as his general conclusion: we all get only one life, and – hey, what the heck – it’s our right, if not exactly our duty, to get out there and enjoy it to the full
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