Is there REALLY a relationship between sex and creativity?

Tonight I watched a very excellent documentary - Beryl’s Last Year. Shot by her Grandson Charlie, it’s a fly-on-the-wall type affair which follows Beryl Bainbridge, for one year - hence the title. Not just any year though, it’s the year that Beryl is convinced she will die, since many other close relatives have died aged 71, and the film begins with a celebration of her own 71st birthday. The film just finished, and already I want to watch it again. In the first instance, I watched it because it was about a writer’s life, and I thought I would get an insight into how a novelist works - and I did. But it was about so much more than that. Take away the writer, and you are left with a woman who has led a fascinating life, and is a remarkable character.

Don’t get me wrong, the bits about her writing life were fascinating. Like anyone else, she has writer’s block, and she procrastinates. She writes on a computer that’s over twenty years old and ought really to be in the Science Museum. While she writes, she smokes, one cigarette after another (though at the end of the film she was trying to give up and had cut down considerably). But her writing wasn’t going well and when we left her, she had abandoned a novel. Maybe there’s hope for us all.

For 71, she’s in great shape, it seems to me - especially since she smokes non stop and drinks rather a lot. If I’m anything like her at 71, I’ll be a happy woman. As I write, I’m wondering if she has an autobiography; it would be a great read. Ironically, at the end of the film, she found that actually, her parents had both died when they were 70, not 71, so she has already out-lived them.

Anyway, I’m not going to paraphrase the whole thing - BBC4 has a habit of repeating everything at least eight times, so I strongly advise you to watch it if you see it listed - and you can read a review of the film here. However, Beryl said one thing which struck a chord - hence the subject line of this post. According to Beryl, we are at our most creative when we are sexual. Now there’s a thought! She used to worry about what would happen when ‘that part’ of life was over, but (thank God!) she reports that it’s fine, ‘you just feed off of the past’. It made me laugh, and it made me sad. Can this really be true?

It would make an interesting experiment, don’t you think? Take some of the most creative people and find out how much they think about sex. And does it follow that single people less creative than coupled people? Could this be the reason I can’t write?! If that isn’t a thesis in the making, I don’t know what is.

Good old Beryl.