ON PAGE 95 of author Erica Jong's 2006 memoir, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, she elaborates on an anecdote from 1994's Fear of Fifty, in which she overcomes fierce disgust to bed an unnamed - and very married - poet.
'He wrote me the sexiest letters full of black garter belts and rosy rumps and black stockings and dirty poems and references to The Story of O ... His teeth were Englishly crooked, his shoulders were hunched and he smelled of mothballed tweed and cheap pipe tobacco ... He spoke of his son, who had been accused of rape 'by a rich Jewish girl, with a posh Hampstead house'.'
Jong is, of course, referring to D.M. Thomas, poet and author of the 1981 Booker Prize-shortlisted best-seller, The White Hotel, and, indirectly, to his son, Sean Thomas. Such intrusions are the legacy of inherited literary celebrity.
Once accused of rape by a rich Jewish girl with a posh Hampstead house, Sean Thomas, now 43 and a new father, decided to avoid such surprises by documenting his own misdemeanours with a uniquely beguiling frankness. Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You is his fourth book and his first best-seller. It's also an addictively hilarious memoir in which the confessional journalist analyses the impact of his father's philandering and his own history of falling for women as tormented as Lisa Erdman, the part-Jewish protagonist of The White Hotel.
Thomas grudgingly accepts the professional association with his father. 'When I was just starting as a writer,' he says with a sigh, 'they even put it on the back of my first novel, which really pissed me off. Because you want to make your own name, obviously. The White Hotel was a massive book, but it was 25 years ago, and he hasn't really written much in the last 10 years. It sounds bad, but I'm kind of grateful he's not as famous as he used to be.'
Even though he names Bernhard Schlink's The Reader over The White Hotel as 'the best Holocaust novel ever written', his rage towards his father has, he says, abated to a kind of affection. The second of two children to the poet's unhappy first marriage, Thomas always felt 'slightly protective' of his mother as he felt his 'dad was being a bit of a bastard', but after 'a lot of trouble with drugs', the father and son are now much closer. 'I just had to go down to Cornwall and try to get away from London and all my vices and, you know, problems,' he says. 'He took me in. He's good like that - it turned out my dad is quite a good dad; he was just off shagging when he was younger. But apart from that side of him, he's actually quite a decent bloke. He's still a bit of a bastard with the women, though.'
The ambivalence he feels for his father, described in Millions as possessing a 'distant, opaque charisma, the charm of a largely silent man', is reflected in a life of near-fatal emotional dislocations. Fundamentally detached and ill at ease in person, Thomas seems at odds with the warm, measured, and jovial voice of his memoir. 'Self-destruction is actually the subject of my next book,' he says. 'I still don't know why I took drugs. I think partly the sheer boredom is one reason. I know that sounds like a pretty prosaic answer. I've never had therapy, but I went to NA [Narcotics Anonymous]. I went to a lot of meetings in my first 60 days, and that was a course of antibiotics for the soul.'