Posted on 11/28/2005 10:12:25 AM PST by Millee
BAD SEX WRITING, LIKE A POORLY made blue film, is a repository of cliché: a world in which male members are invariably firm, breasts pert and limbs permanently entangled. But the good stuff — ah! — that has a power beyond the finest moving image, beyond, even, the memory of sex itself; it is unbounded by time constraints, regrettable haircuts and poor lighting.
Written sex also has the distinction of being the only erotic art one can indulge in on public transport without fear of arrest. This is a truth well known by schoolgirls, who from the age of 13 onwards pass round dog-eared paperbacks, the good bits underlined for easy reference, as if they held the secret to life itself. Schoolboys, by contrast, are slaves to images, while we girls knew that in just a few years’ time we’d have our own three-dimensional versions of what the lads spent so much effort trying to catch a photographic glimpse of. Though some at least try the pictorial version of pornography: one girl at my school smuggled in a copy of Knave but the headmistress caught wind of her plan to unveil the illicit images to a paying audience in the first-floor toilets after last period. Those of us who didn’t get our 20p back learnt our lesson. Stick to the books.
Clan of the Cave Bear was a particular favourite among my contemporaries. Jean Auel’s series of prehistoric tomes, while hardly the stuff of great literature, are memorable in their description of sex as unexpected, dirty, brutal. When you’re at such an age it makes a thrilling change from the fairytale rubbish heaped on girls from the nursery. No light-suffused drawing rooms in which chaste desires are played out in slow motion for her readers. Sex, you learn, is a different animal from love — visceral, gripping in a way that Darcy’s icy manners could never be.
Within the year, everyone was similarly gripping hand-worn copies of The Lord of the Flies because the pig, apparently, represented a woman. Or something. It was a desperately disappointing read, and here I learnt the first don’t of the well-written sex scene: don’t make anything an analogy for sex. Sex is sex. It stands on its own. Unless you’re Henry Fielding.
Dodgy paperbacks notwithstanding, though, school provides some legitimately literary erotic opportunities for the dedicated reader. Poets and playwrights rarely got to the point, as far as I could see, in the interminable pages of school anthologies. Passion was usually depicted in terms either of innocent desire (any of Browning) or harrowing jealousy (Medea). The Wife of Bath was glossed over quickly, and with a minimum of detail. We must have been made to read something like several thousand odes by passionate shepherds to their loves, each more boringly festooned with rose petals than the last. Only a few pages on though, Donne, in To His Mistress Going to Bed, exhorted his lover to “License my roving hands, and let them go/ Before, behind, between, above, below.” That, as Paris Hilton would say, is so hot. I wondered if his hands would go the same places I hoped they would. Oddly enough that poem was left out of the year’s curriculum.
Only later, free of prescriptive reading, does the full flower of erotica make itself apparent. A model-pretty man with one tooth missing gave me my first Anaïs Nin; he quickly exited the picture but the books stayed. When she describes the fire that cool reserve inspires, in The Veiled Woman — “Her yielding almost made him want to hurt her, so as to rouse her in some way” — I felt in myself the very response the narrator must have hoped to inspire in the mysterious lady. Which is probably, in retrospect, why the man who left the book also left me. I have always been plagued with too little reserve, too much arousal.
What is the nature of good sex writing? It should be surprising, sometimes shocking, but stopping short of vulgar; tender, observant, but stripped of romantic illusions. Writers of memorable sex scenes bewitch the mind as well as the loins and above all, good sex writers trust the reader: to fill in using imagination what literary art demands be left out; to not judge the passions of the characters but to engage, enjoy, and just perhaps, whimper in concert with their desires.
It is no surprise, then, that brute force is as effective an instrument as seduction in sexy writing, because it exactly opposes the limp-wristed balladeering typically associated with romantic love. I love someone who just throws the sheets aside and gets on with it. Most published writers being male, and male writers being what they are, the reciprocal enjoyment of the female is taken for granted. Or if not, her distaste is fairly charming, the repulsion of a displaced goddess to a mere mortal, as when Lolita reads the paper while she is yet again subjected to Humbert’s needs of a summer afternoon.
“There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.”
Just as there would be no immortal Dolores Haze had not Humbert’s heart been broken in boyhood, so there would be no Lolita without Colette. Her story The Tender Shoot (as in a tender shoot for an old bough) concerns the recollections of Chaveriat’s dalliance with a girl a third his age. His justification echoes Humbert’s reveries on pubescence (spanning the age at which Rahab began her harlotry to the brownness of Egyptian princesses’ bodies) some several decades later. “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to judge me and, above all, to pity the tender ewe lamb . . . Queens were married at 13. To search even higher than thrones for my justification, do I have to remind you what Juliet meant, at 15, by ‘hearing the nightingale’?”
The affair ends badly, but not before he has thoroughly enjoyed his nymphet: “Louisette was avid in the way children are . . . she was vicious with grace, with majesty.” Colette does not hold back, either in Chaveriat’s loving or in the retelling of it: “From the smell that came from her already bared bosom . . . I could have guessed all her rose and russet tints.” Later, Nabokov will describe Lolita using the same smells and colours.
Sex may well be all we have to pitch against death, a sort of howl into the wind, as Kit in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky discovers. Having fled the scene of her husband’s death in North Africa she is found by Bedouin who share not a word of language with her, but claim her as theirs: “There was an animal-like quality in the firmness with which he held her, affectionate, sensuous, wholly irrational — gentle but of a determination that only death could gainsay.” Her husband and previous lovers, who were cultured and correct to the point of uselessness, could not save her from the desert; only in allying herself to wild men through sex could she survive, and as a result the power of that alliance makes her fall in love.
Not all great erotic scenes are about force. The reigning king of misogyny, Philip Roth, showed himself capable of touching tenderness in the early novella Goodbye Columbus. After chapters of lascivious, almost clinical observations about his girl Brenda, her body, her wealth, family and position — “She caught the bottom of her (bathing) suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped” — the eventual description of sex with her is, in a word, sweet. He asks himself, us, whether he is capable of relating what it was like, and no, he isn’t, it is too sublime for words. It is something worthy of reverence. The good sex writer, after all, knows what is beyond the limits of his descriptive power. Later he addresses God: “If we meet you at all, God, it’s because we’re carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of you. I am carnal, and I know You approve. I just know it.”
Stendhal also hedged around instants of gentle surrender, as in The Charterhouse of Parma, when the year-long flirtation of Fabrizio, a prisoner, reaches fruition with Clélia, the pious daughter of his jailer. They have but moments in his cell and she is feeling unusually demonstrative, convinced he will be executed. She throws herself at the Italian soldier. “She was so lovely just then, gown slipping off her shoulders and in such a state of extreme passion, that Fabrizio could not resist an almost involuntary movement, which met with no resistance.”
Comedy is a fantastic source of good sex, not least because it doesn’t take itself too seriously — hence, petal-scattering and bath-drawing are kept to a bare minimum. Carl Hiaasen’s novels, in particular, make effective use of coke addicts, strippers, ex-prostitutes and flight attendants, all with a seam about to burst somewhere. In A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole breaks frequently from comedy to interject descriptions of the sort of animal salaciousness the hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, loathes (and yet can not resist, as his cupboard of onanistic sex toys will attest). Early on we meet the haughty — and not a little bit stacked — Miss Lee. “She was a statuesque woman nearing middle age, her fine body covered with a black leather overcoat that glistened with mist.”
For this cruel sexpot he borrows a name from another famous woman whose pot was constantly set to simmer: Lana. You just know trouble is brewing.
But as the girls at school found with Clan of the Cave Bear, the most memorable erotic writing comes not from the usual sources but the unexpected ones. The sensual curves of everyday things, the unnoticed textures of beings we barely notice, their ways and means of reproduction. Many a biology text and not a few religious passages wound their way around my adolescent neurons and have since refused to budge, even when I need that grey matter for more important things, such as phone numbers. I particularly relish the description of Solanaceæ, the Nightshade family, in the Rev C. A. Johns’s Flowers of the Field (1905). Flowers are after all the reproductive organs of plants. The book was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and indeed, with anthers all a-burst and calyces deeply cleft, it could scarcely be more biblical.
“Calyx inferior, deeply cleft; corolla hypogynous, gamopetalous, plaited when in bud; stamens in one whorl, alternate with the petals; anthers bursting either by terminal pores or slits down their inner surfaces; ovary 2-chambered; style 1; sigma simple; fruit a 2-4-chambered capsule or nuculane; seeds numerous.”
From To His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne
Off with those shoes: and then safely tread In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed . . . By this these angels from an evil sprite They set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. Licence my roving hands, and let them go Behind, before, above, between, below. O, my America, my new found land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned . . . To enter in these bonds is to be free, Then where my hand is set my soul shall be. Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa — and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve a system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty — between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Books that will soon be on Max's Christmas list ping...
Men prefer descriptions (pictures, etc...) of the act, in general. Women, being more cultured (and holding the keys to the city, so to speak), seem to prefer written descriptions of the lead-up to the act. Just my $.02.
Thanks Millee. Ladies, keep in mind, I like my books with lots of color photos.
If it'll give the opportunity for real memories, I'll settle for the printed word, to start with... ;-P
Damn,
This person is SOOO on the money!
I can spot a 'guy' written 'romance' (NOT!) from a mile off.
I make no apologies for being sexist and saying that they usually are awful. (at least for the females they write about).
I agree! Has Catherine Zeta Jones written a book???
Go check out this page, you won't be back for an hour: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/jones.jsrpages/scans/jones/s3.htm
It was blocked by my work's server. Rats!
Apples poop???
Good article. If some publisher ever gets the bright idea to release romance novels in an illustrated "graphic novel" format, men would be buying them by the millions. ;)
Red X's on both. :(
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