List of Clues that Stewart Home is Belle de Jour

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CLUE 1: Belle refers to ‘SH’ in the weblog

As readers of ‘Belle de Jour’s’ book will know, Belle mentions several male friends and lovers. However, there is one male friend who gets mentioned in the weblog but not in the book.

This is ‘SH’, a reference to Stewart Home, the real author. Here is what is said about him in the Belle weblog, entry for ‘vendredi, le 3 septembre’:
 
“SH has gotten out of hand, and this has ballooned into what he is now calling ‘The Lie.’”

(http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_belledejour-uk_archive.html)

Home has a long record of including himself as a character in his fiction, a device he picked up from skinhead author Richard Allen, whose works were a major source for ‘plagiarism’ in his early novels. ‘Richard Allen’ was the pseudonym of James Moffatt, who often wrote a ‘writer’ character called Jim Moffat into his books. Home has previously used both ‘Kevin Callan’ (or ‘K L Callan’) — his own birth name prior to his adoption as a child — and ‘Karen Eliot’ as such characters. This time, writing the Belle diaries under a pseudonym, he includes a ‘me’ character who bears his own real initials, ‘SH’.

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CLUE 2: From the Belle book: “Home?” “Home it is”

Dialogue from p.285 of the Belle diaries, from the entry for ‘dimanche, le 20 juin’:


This clue seems to have been written specially for the book, and does not appear in the weblog.

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CLUE 3: Tracking down all one’s former partners

In the Belle book, the character ‘N’ is described as seeking out all of his former sexual partners (p.119, entry for ‘mercredi, le 21 janvier’).

This is exactly the theme of Home’s novel Cunt, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1999, in which the same is done by protagonist David Kelso.

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CLUE 4: Serpent’s Tail, publisher

Serpent’s Tail published four of the novels Home wrote under his own name.

They also tried to acquire the Belle diaries, before losing out to Weidenfeld and Nicholson. From the Belle weblog, entry for ‘mardi, le 4 janvier’:

“I was shut in a room and told to edit, edit, edit (apart from Pete at Serpent who bought me an artichoke salad and bruschetta, but that was very early on).”

(http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_belledejour-uk_archive.html)

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CLUE 5: Research for Down and Out

“I’m sampling a lot of Defoe and Fanny Hill, all of these narratives written by men as though they’re female prostitutes. It’s quite interesting.”

Interview, discussing his award-winning novel Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton

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CLUE 6: ‘Belle’s’ ability to adopt the persona of a Kung Fu fan

In the entry for ‘samedi, 13 mars’, ‘Belle’ lists 11 ‘pub games for whores’, including pretending to be a lesbian, making up a fake job, and coming across as a crashing-bore member of the chattering classes (pp.186-89).

Many of these doubtless really would be useful training for high-class call girls (or spies); as well as amusement for inveterate wind-up merchants who have spent years honing their skills at “unreliable first-person narration”. But what is one to make of the following game that ‘Belle’ recommends (p.187)?

“ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?
‘…So I was running arms out of Serbia, right? And I was stopped by UN troops at the border. Little did they know I was high on speedballs and had a sawn-off shotgun cocked and locked in my inside jacket…’ The Travis Bickle option. Be a scary bastard. Pepper conversation liberally with references to Kalashnikovs, John Woo films as lifestyle, and Soldier of Fortune magazine.”

Hardly a turn-on for many johns!

The clue here is ‘John Woo’. In his youth, Stewart Home enjoyed watching Kung Fu films, and when he was on ‘art strike’ during 1990-92 (aged 27-30) he watched “hundreds” of them. (Source: ). One of the most famous directors of such films is John Woo. Home’s appreciation of this genre also came out in his novel Red London (1994), in which one of the female characters is an ultra-violent “kung fu chick”.

(http://www.spunk.org/library/groups/iww/sp000926.txt)

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CLUE 7: ‘Belle’s’ familiarity with northern Sutherland

In the Belle book, entry for ‘jeudi, le 15 avril’, the supposed diarist lists possible escape hatches, including the Mediterranean, Fulham, North America, South America, and New York (p.239).

The very first place in the list is Kyle of Tongue. This is a remote area of northern Sutherland in Scotland that very few people in the UK have visited, but our diarist appears to know very well:

“Kyle of Tongue. Pros: […] fantastic scenery. Cons: bleak isn’t the word. What can you say about a place where the incoming tide swallows up the main road?”

The Kyle of Tongue would seem an odd place for a ‘high-class London call girl’ to think of as a possible ‘escape hatch’, or to have visited without having realised beforehand that it would be too bleak for her tastes. And before anyone looks for a sexual meaning to the word ‘swallow’, they should know that the incoming tide in the Kyle of Tongue really does cover up the main road. So the second sentence here should be read in a straightforward fashion:

Stewart Home has travelled widely in northern Scotland, including northern Sutherland and the Kyle of Tongue in particular. Tours in the Grampian region were a major theme in 69 Things, and tours to Islay and Lewis feature there and in Cunt respectively. In 69 Things (p.60), the narrator writes:

“[in that the beauty of their rugged shores is greatly enhanced by the sea and its surroundings,] both Sutherland and the Western Isles outdo even the peaks of Switzerland. Grand as are the snow-clad peaks of the Alps, the absence of the ocean […] cannot fail to be regarded as a serious want by anyone who has been accustomed to watch the various aspects of that wondrous element”

The Times reviewer praised his “envious skill for describing harsh landscape sparingly and beautifully”. (http://www.canongate.net/69ThingsToDoWithADeadPrin/2003Paperback/Reviews)

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CLUE 8: ‘Not sure she was the real Belle’

According to the Times (14 March 2004), when Serpent’s Tail were trying to get the Belle diaries,
“Peter Ayrton at Serpent was presented with a woman said to be Belle, but was not told her real name. He is not sure that she was the real Belle.”

(http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1037148,00.html)

His suspicions were justified. A clue is in Stewart Home’s following statement about his relations with the media during his ‘art strike’:

“Throughout this hiatus, I maintained my media profile with the aid of various friends who impersonated me whenever a journalist wanted an interview”.

(http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/krim.htm)

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CLUE 9: ‘Belle’ and ancient Egyptian obelisks

In the entry for ‘lundi, le 10 mai’, ‘Belle’ calls it “strange” that the “moderns” have moved Egyptian obelisks around the world singly, whereas the ancient Egyptians put them up in pairs (p.259).

Home’s interest in ancient Egyptian pillars is made clear in Down and Out (p.178). And in Neither Ra nor Osiris: Towards the Supersession of Freemasonry, a poster he wrote under the name Sublatyuh Tempul and sent to hundreds of London’s masonic lodges in 1999, he makes exactly the same point as the one Belle makes in the diaries, observing that:

“All Egyptian obelisks were erected in pairs, but none of the revivalist gangs of 19th century westerners installed the members of a looted pair even intervisibly. Not in London, New York, or Paris. Nor did the Roman emperors, whose stolen obelisks now loomed in the Vatican. Pricks playing with needles, acting out.”

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CLUE 10: ‘Belle’ ‘murders’ N

The diary entry for ‘vendredi, le 30 janvier’ contains a humorous, deadpan reference to ‘Belle’s’ murdering someone (p.132). This is greatly out of kilter with the content of the rest of the diary:

“And in such days as these, only a cad would casually throw out a line like ‘you’ve gained some on the hips.’ Which is why I had to kill N and bury the corpse under a layer of permafrost on Hampstead Heath. No jury would convict.”
But brutal sex murder, described in a matter-of-fact way, has featured in every single one of Stewart Home’s novels, and is recognised by reviewers as one of his hallmarks.
Discussing what distinguishes Home’s depiction of violence from those which appear in the work of a rival, superficially comparable author, Nicholas Lezard writes in review of Down and Out in the Guardian (21 February 2004) that “Home’s violence is almost perfunctorily displayed”:

(http://makeashorterlink.com/?E44A13D5A)

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CLUE 11: ‘Ma petite belle […] Je vais jouir’

In Down and Out (pp.58-59), which Home completed before the start of the Belle weblog, the female prostitute narrator describes how a male literary-type client called her ‘ma petite belle’, thinking she’d find it sexy. Half a page later comes the book’s only example of narration in French:

‘Je vais jouir’,

‘Ma petite belle’ — ‘my little belle’, and ‘Belle’ is indeed described in the diaries as fairly short.

‘Je vais jouir’ — in the first analysis, ‘jouir’ is only one letter different from ‘jour’. As for the phrase itself, whilst an unobservant translator might render it as ‘I am going to come’, the context makes it clear that that’s true of the client, not the prostitute-narrator. The italicisation may suggest a difference in timbre from the prostitute herself, rather than a switch to the viewpoint of the client. On this reading, a better translation would be ‘I am going to enjoy myself’.

And in watching the success of his ‘little Belle’, Home has surely enjoyed himself a great deal!

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