The Literati of the Four-Letter Word

We live in a time when descriptions of the sex act have come to be expected, even required, in literature which pretends to any seriousness. But this is by no means our worst indignity, for we live also in a time when it is fashionable to deplore such descriptions, to complain that they are banal and ineptly done (this is too often true), or that they bore us (which is, of course, a lie). Primary sex – our own sex life, inadequate, harried or routine – may bore us, but vicarious sex – fantasies, projections, even the most clinical accounts of our imperfect experiences – never! It is vicarious sex, which never flags, falters or fails, that sells toothpaste and nylon stockings, as well as Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Peyton Place and the obscene newsprint pamphlets bootlegged to adolescents.

In all of us, there is a need not only to dream utopias in which desire never outruns performance, but also to make speech of our actual spasms, images of our instincts. The pornographer has always cooperated in the imperative task of humanizing our animal inheritance; and the same necessity on which he trades has impelled many recent writers of fiction to take on themselves his obligation of trying to say the unsayable: to describe not only sexual foreplay and the aftermath of sex, but the moment of orgasm itself – the indescribable instant of climax. Unfriendly critics of recent fiction sometimes compare writers who have attempted to capture the orgasm in words, D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce, Edmund Wilson or Norman Mailer, to the small boy writing dirty words on sidewalks and fences; and such critics are, in a sense they do not suspect, quite right.

The unexamined life, Socrates once remarked, is not worth living; he might have gone on to note further that the unexpressed act is not fully lived. What we cannot say we cannot examine, and what we cannot examine we do not really experience. These are the simple truths which make clear why literature has meaning in our lives, and our lives total meaning only when they have become also literature. This the small boy with the chalk in his hand somehow realizes; and this writers like Lawrence, Joyce, Wilson and Mailer have neither forgotten nor felt obliged to pretend to forget. Until he has written for his own sake and that of the little girl he fears and desires the four-letter name of desire, the small boy has no sense of owning what racks him, his own sex; and until the writers of a society have written their versions of the four-letter words, that society has no sense of controlling its deepest torments and pleasures.

For too long, the writer, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, was forced to deny in himself the small boy with the piece of chalk; and denying that boy lost the power to evoke and humanize passion. There is plenty in life for the writer to call up and control besides sex; but sex has come to seem to us the essential subject for our time, not only because (as Alberto Moravia has argued) it represents the last survival of Nature for the city-dweller, but also because it is what a hundred years of literature left out, what almost all of American literature, for (Continued on page 125)Literati(continued from page 85) instance, ignored completely until our century had begun. And in the century of official silence, the language for speaking of the physical aspects of love decayed, fell apart into brutal vulgarities and polite cliches.

To write about sex, however, means, like all writing, finding a language first of all; and the language problem baffles us still, In painting and sculpture, a long and unbroken tradition of the Nude serves to formalize and dignify the erotic appeal of naked flesh; but in poetry and fiction, no similar tradition survives – only, until just the other day, the underground tradition of pornography. It is as if we possessed only the famous calendar picture of a naked Marilyn Monroe, but no Venus of Botticelli. To speak of the "sex act," as I have done, or of "coitus," as doctors prefer, is to suggest experiences hopelessly different by virtue of their names from the one the boy knows how to spell before he has learned to perform it. In our deepest minds, most of us, I presume, use still the childhood words for the seed we spill and the act of spilling it; and no one surely describes to himself the climax of love as "having an orgasm."

To use the boy's language, however, the old, once disowned language, as Lawrence, for instance, decided to do, is to risk seeming shocking or rebellious when one may wish rather to be tender or merely matter of fact. Lawrence wanted to shock, to protest; but there is no point in a second-hand protest, and for post-Lawrentians the shock value of street language is irrelevant, a drag. Yet a hundred years of taboo seem to demand a hundred years of anti-taboo – a long, more and more pointless quarrel with grandma. Chaucer and Boccaccio, we know, could use the schoolboy words for the sexual organs unself-consciously; but we are hypocrites when we pretend to ignore the titter they still stir in some quarters, and fools when we do not face up to the fact that in books we must invent anew each time the language for talking about sex. It is Norman Mailer's decision to use in his story The Time of Her Time a newly invented poetic language based on the hippest new slang at once gross and elegant, which makes that story both good literature and good pornography.

The treatment of sex in fiction is, however, hampered not only by language difficulties. Given the subtlest of vocabularies, one would have to confront, too, the felt sameness of human experience between the sheets, the lack of variety in sexual intercourse. To be sure, one can explore with such a writer as the Marquis de Sade all the kinks possible to a cruel and imaginative mind bent on relieving the monotony of the sex act; but the moment of orgasm is unredeemably the same and the changes wrought in the approach to it more ingenious than satisfactory. A French scholar who complied and edited the fabliaux, Twelfth Century merry tales, many of them prototypes of the modern dirty joke, complained at the end of his long job about "the incredible monotony of human obscenity"; and John Cleland bringing to a close Fanny Hill (surely the most distinguished piece of pornography in English), with his heroine in the arms of her long-lost first lover, observed, "But, as the circumstances did not admit of much variation, I shall spare you the description."

What he gives in the place of a proper description runs as follows: "We were well under weigh, with a fair wind up channel, and full-freighted; nor indeed were we long before we finished our trip to Cythera, and unloaded in the old haven ..." And even when he is more circumstantial, which is frequently enough, Cleland is just as flowery and quite as careful to avoid what he calls "natural expressions." Like the mystical experience, the erotic must finally be rendered in terms of one metaphor or other even in societies less concerned with "fashion and sound" than Cleland's; but almost invariably the metaphors of the Eighteenth Century pornographers were silly or platitudinous or both. Regrettably, the metaphors of the Twentieth Century heirs of those pornographers are equally hackneyed and absurd. Here, for instance, is D. H. Lawrence attempting to adorn the language of sex, even as his lovers attempted to adorn each other by twining flowers in their public hair: "And softly, with that marvelous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire ... And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame ... And oh, if he were not tender to her now, how cruel, for she was all open to him and helpless!" This is the last stand of bad Nineteenth Century Romantic poetry, driven from the hills and the streams into the refuge of the bedroom; or rather it is the next-to-last stand, for in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, the same kind of pseudo-poetry is used to render what can only seem pseudo-love: "Now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them." Hemingway was never very skillful at dealing with real encounters in the living flesh between lover and lover. His best effects come in such quasi-necrophilic scences as the close of A Farewell to Arms, in which Lieutenant Henry tries to kiss a corpse, or in the baffled striving to achieve an impossible union between Lady Brett and the impotent Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Since For Whom the Bell Tolls, however, Hemingway has tried to evoke actual erotic scenes and has provided instead a case history of an aging man's nympholeptic dreams. Fortunately, his reputation depends less on his efforts along these lines than on his ability to create a man's world – a world of comradeship in field and on stream.

In Lawrence, all the typical modern errors are made, all the false notes struck, now familiar to us as our own names; but he was a man of great talent, capable of contriving for the first time a pseudo-poetry and sentimentality proper to sexual frankness, as well as a kind of moralizing and special pleading which threatens to make even passion a bore. Lawrence never merely renders a love scene; he cites examples to prove points, demands of his lovers that even in each other's arms they act out allegories demonstrating the superiority of instinct over intelligence, the sterility of the English upper classes, the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, etc., etc. And from this stems such tendentious sexual fiction as that of Norman Mailer, for instance, with its advocacy of the "Good Orgasm" and its pseudo-mystical, finally incomprehensible theories which equate sex with time – propaganda rather than poetry, for all the poetic trimmings. Since Lawrence, at any rate, it has become clear that more is necessary to telling the truth about sex than the breaking of old taboos.

The dedication of certain earlier writers, willing to risk poverty, infamy, even legal persecution, has produced in our generation publishers convinced that carrying on their fight can mean profits, acclaim, court decisions which make theoretically possible the freedom to write about anything in any language that seems appropriate. Books formerly smuggled past customs are offered on newsstands in supermarkets; and old men who have missed their planes fall asleep in airline terminals with copies of Lady Chatterley in their hands. But how does the writer in a time of new "freedom" avoid the pitfalls into which the pioneers of genius fell at the moment when the lines between pornography and "decent literature" were still clearly drawn? Trying to avoid the sentimentality and faked poetry of the first break through, he is likely to be betrayed with Edmund Wilson into the pedestrianism of the clinician's report: "She gets a sensation, she says, like a thrill that goes all through her – sometimes it makes her toes curl. 'I want to scratch or bite – I don't know where I am or anything.' The doctor in the hospital had said that she must be very passionate because the opening of her womb was so small.... She is now so responsive to my kissing her breasts that I can make her have a climax in that way."

But this, too, is an evasion, equal though opposite to the first, one more way of not coming to terms with the complex truth about our sexual experience, which, on the one hand, we are driven desperately to know – and, on the other, cannot bear to confront. Though on some level the mass audience yearns for a book about physical passion as straight and direct as the boy's scrawl on the sidewalk, given the choice, it will turn to the romantic prose-poem, the fake doctor's report, the hot-breathed expose, the heavily moralistic plea for more sex or less.

As early as the Eighteenth Century, when modern pornography was invented, authors were aware that their readers demanded of the sex book something more than mere titillation; that even ready-made erotic daydreams had to be provided with the semblance of a moral. Cleland, still avidly read after two hundred years by those who can lay hands on his work, assured his first audience in a "tail-piece of morality" that sex without true love is only a "vulgar" joy, "whether in king or beggar," and that, of course, Virtue is preferable to Vice. And these final unexceptionable sentiments are echoed by the infamous Marquis de Sade, who prefaces an account (still not publishable even in France) of horrendous defilements and rapes with the declared hope that his readers will be moved to cry out: "Oh, how these renderings of crime make me proud of my love for Virtue! How sublime does it appear through tears! How 'tis embellished by misfortunes!" Hypocrisy, hypocrisy! the disenchanted modern sighs and turns away with a shrug; but even when such sentiments are not (as they are not in Lawrence) blatant hypocrisy, they involve a subtler form of deceit, a falsification of what we seek when we choose to read erotic literature: pleasure rather than profit, and the chill of terror at knowing we prefer pleasure to profit: the dangerous joy of self-knowledge rather than the smug satisfaction of determining to reform.

It is because he renders this joy without excuse or equivocation that James Joyce seems at this point the greatest of recent erotic writers, the final soliloquy of Molly Bloom in Ulysses the Twentieth Century masterpiece of the genre. And it is from Joyce that such later successful fictionists as Samuel Beckett (in his novels) and J. P. Donleavy (in The Ginger Man) have learned their craft; though the most successful young American in the field, John Barth, the author of The Sotweed Factor, apparently stems rather from Rabelais and the Marquis de Sade. Most other practitioners of amatory fiction, even Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, owe more to Lawrence than to life, and are, like their master, tempted into dealing with sex as a kind of metapolitics or religion rather than as terror and joy. Indeed, the terror and joy proper to erotic literature strike many readers as well as writers as peculiarly limited emotions; for they are available, fully and directly, to only one half of the human race, which is to say, to males. Certainly, women do not often write pornography; and as readers they are likely to prefer the tearful but relatively "clean" masochism of the soapopera, which performs for them the function entrusted by men to the "dirty" book in classic or subliterate form.

The investigations of Dr. Kinsey have statistically confirmed the impression of casual observers that women by and large do not respond to pornography and literary eroticism with the intensity of men. It is not the little girl who takes up the piece of chalk; and, indeed, the scrawled obscenity fails to move her as its little boy perpetrator dreamed. In the end, he writes for himself. To speculate on why this is so is (for the male at least) a fascinating though obscure enterprise; but even this side of such speculation, one thing is clear: pornography is "for men only" because – in a very special way – it is about women, more precisely perhaps about what men imagine women to be, pretend that they are. The girlie magazine "for men only" contains, as everyone knows, pictures of naked women, but there is no corresponding "boyie" magazine "for women only." A magazine full of photographs of male nudes or almost nudes is for male homosexuals, that is to say, for the nearest thing to a woman which a man can, in pain and deviousness, become. Since Lawrence, of course, the old lines between specialized pornography and general literature have become blurred, so that women, who are the chief consumers of books in our society, find themselves more and more often with books in hand the authors of which insist upon speaking for them in ways which they must find baffling.

In light of this, it is possible to consider the history of erotic literature in the modern world an episode in that absurd war of the sexes which was one of the unforeseen consequences of Christianity's coming to terms with a pagan world. There have been two main stages in the development of erotic literature (and of the struggle between men and women which it reflects) since the end of the Middle Ages: a comic-sadist stage and a masochist-pathetic one. The first, which left important traces in such eminent writers as Chaucer, Boccaccio, Rabelais and Shakespeare, began with the fabliaux, verse tales sometimes innocuous, often obscene, but almost universally dedicated to the vilification of women as lecherous, sly, disloyal, lying, domineering and destructive. Character- istically farcical (the serious literature of the Twelfth Century and just after was largely devoted to the conventional praise of woman), breezy and superficial, the fabliaux represent the chief activities of females as the betrayal of husbands and the indulgence of insatiable sexual appetites. It is all a little like the "comic" literature about Negroes in Nineteenth Century America, and reflects analogous guilts and fears in the face of an oppressed segment of society. Chaucer's Wife of Bath is a supreme example of the concupiscent man-eater, the heroine of a hundred thousand wet-dreams verging on nightmare; but she fares better at the hands of her sympathetic creator than most female figures of her time, who personify the shame of their makers, dimly aware that they have conspired to treat as less than human certain of their fellow humans.

Just as in the case of the Negro, however, a literature of comic-sadism was succeeded (with considerable overlapping) by one of pathetic-masochism. As the movement for female "emancipation" developed, the Western world ceased to laugh at victimized woman and began to weep over her. The detachment which makes comedy possible yielded to the kind of identification which encourages sentimental melodrama. The modern novel itself begins in the mid-Eighteenth Century with such sentimental melodrama, with an invitation to its readers to weep over the plight of raped or seduced women; and it is nearly a century before pornography is finally separated from fiction in general by the genteel revolution in manners against which Lawrence was to struggle much later.

The Eighteenth Century shift from erotic farce to erotic pathos was, moreover, accompanied by a tendency to deal with the inward rather than the merely outward aspects of sex, to get beyond physiology and into psychology. Through the time of Chaucer the writer remains oddly uninterested in anything but sexual action itself, ignoring reaction, response, awareness, as in The Merchant's Tale, for instance, where at the climax (a young woman has climbed into a tree with her lover, while her husband, old and blind, stands below), Chaucer simply tells us:

...and with a spring she thence – Ladies, I beg you not to take of-fence, I can't embellish, I'm a simple man – Went up into the tree, and Damian Pulled up her smock at once and in he thrust.

Not a word about the special titillation of such indulgence and deceit, much less any analysis of regret or strife between conscience and desire, just the facts. With such "facts" no one after the Eighteenth Century has been content; for even the most vulgar pornographer has tended to reach beyond the question of who laid whom to the question of how did it feel. But this has involved getting inside the female head, the female loins, the womb itself; for the inwardness with which even the earliest writers of psychological sex literature were concerned is woman's inwardness, and the problem that has really vexed them from the start is: how does it feel to her?

Certainly, this has not been less true as pornography has become first advance-guard and then standard literature, A.E. Coppard's Justine and Fanny Hill yielding to Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and the second Justine by Durrell. The very names of the books betray their authors' eagerness to assume the female role, the female voice; and even the apparent exception has been shortened in popular speech to Lady Chatterley. This is fair enough, for Lawrence's book belongs finally to the Lady and not her lover, being, in its sexual aspects, a rendition through a woman's eyes of male narcissism and anxiety, a series of variations on the theme: what is it like to be possessed by one of us? Lawrence is by no means exceptional in this regard; and, indeed, if an anthology were to be made from the classic passages in contemporary literature dealing with the climaxes of love, most of them would be projections of the woman's view, whether culled from the master himself ("And this time the sharp ecstasy of her passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her..."), or Joyce ("pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldn't let him touch inside my petticoat.... I tortured the life out of him tickling him.... I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him..."), or Faulkner ("With her hips grinding against him, her mouth gaping in straining protrusion ... dragging his head down, making a weeping moan.... 'Please. Please. Please. Please. You've got to. I'm on fire I tell you...'").

Not only in the prose of our time but in our most distinguished poetry, too, the pattern is repeated: the assumption of female self-consciousness, the attempt to give words to the woman who lies moaning or in silence beneath the male, but who will not – perhaps cannot – tell how it is with her. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is not ordinarily thought of as erotic literature, but in it the poet plays like Lawrence himself the male ventriloquist to various female dummies.

He's been in the army four years,he wants a good time,And if you don't give it him, there'sothers will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Somethingo' that, I said ...

"... By Richmond I raised my kneesSupine on the floor of a narrowcanoe.

... After the eventHe wept. He promised 'a new start.'I made no comment. What should Iresent?"

And in his notes to the poem, Eliot gives to himself as transvestite and ventriloquist, to the character who represents that self, a mythological name. "Tiresias..." he writes, " is yet the most important personage in the poem... all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias."

But who was Tiresias? A blind Theban prophet, we remember, who, asked by the Gods to judge their argument over who got more pleasure out of the act of love, male or female, answered blithely: female – and for the presumption of his response was turned by Juno into a woman. It is, on the one hand, a punishment which fits the crime of male pride, pluming itself on the pleasure bestowed by the thrust of maleness; and on the other, an allegorical representation of what happens to the male writer when he sets himself the task of imagining the female response to his jutting sex, his butting buttocks. Once more, it is D.H. Lawrence who naively gives away the game, putting in Lady Chatterley's mouth the hyperbolic praise which the male likes to think he reads in the mirror of a woman's eye at the moment before orgasm: "And now she touched him, and it was the sons of God with the daughters of men. How beautiful he felt, how pure of tissue! Such utter stillness of potency and delicate flesh!... The roots, root of all that is lovely, the primeval root of all full beauty."

It is not, however, mere masculine narcissism which demands the fantasies of erotic fiction; it is also the deep need of the male to know what he is to someone utterly other, to be told, as if by that other, what he seems at the moment of his fullest maleness. Without this, he cannot help feeling, he will never realize his truest self, fail forever to attain self-knowledge. The act of male penetration which we are likely to call "possession" was spoken of in Biblical Hebrew (and is spoken of in the King James Version) as "knowing" a woman; but how can a man "know" himself unless he can become vicariously for an instant the woman knowing his "knowing," become, that is to say, Tiresias. The boy with the chalk and the blind bisexual before the walls of Thebes – these are the two ideal forms of the erotic writer: scrawler of dirty words in his beginnings, prophet in his end.