Bussman's Holiday

Kissing, the ancient Greeks believed, is the "key to paradise." If they were right, at least half the human race has been locked out of Elysium since the birth of mankind. They never learned to kiss at all.

Among the Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Eskimos, Malayans and numerous African peoples, kissing has traditionally been looked upon as a kinky Western perversion. Sniffing is held to be more pleasurable and proper. Lovers whisper "Smell me," rather than "Kiss me," and the foreplay of the face consists of nose rubbing and passionate inhalations of the scent of skin and hair.

For all its singular importance to the love life of the Western world, kissing is not nearly as ancient as hugging, squeezing, nuzzling, nibbling, fondling and groping. Nor is it as instinctive. Unlike most forms of amorous behavior, kissing is culturally learned.

As a sign of reverence and humility, the peoples of the ancient world were prone to kiss the hands, feet, hems and dusty footprints of their kings and conquerors. Biblical friends and family members greeted each other with kisses on the head, shoulders, hands and neck. In wooing support for his political ambitions, Absalom, son of old King David, "rose up early, and stood beside the way of the gate," there to kiss not the constituents' babies but the constituents themselves. More selective and appealing were the warm-lipped yearnings of Solomon's beautiful Shulamite, who sang for all the ages to hear: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine." Her lips were like "a thread of scarlet," painted in the manner of the Egyptians and Babylonians, for whom a reddened mouth was supposed to provide protection from demons.

It was not for fear of smearing their lipstick that the Egyptians would never give a Greek a kiss. As the Greek historian Herodotus learned, it was, rather, to avoid religious contamination by the beefeating Greeks, who did not venerate Egypt's holy cows. "Instead of speaking to each other when they meet in the streets, they make an obeisance, sinking the hand to the knee," the unkissed Greek visitor noted—though it still isn't clear whose Egyptian knee got the silent treatment from whose courteous hand. When Persians of slightly different status met in the street, Herodotus observed, their kisses were "given on the cheek," while those of equal rank silently kissed each other "on the lips." The talkative Greeks, however, saluted each other on the cheeks, neck, lips, shoulders and eyes, and planted so many religious smooches upon the bronze mouth of a statue of Hercules that the god's lips and beard were eventually worn away.

It was the insatiability of the habit that led Socrates to philosophize upon the kiss's power to enslave. He warned his young male followers against the bewitching kisses of women. But his pious endorsement of comradely kisses between men and boys leaves little doubt that the erotic was never far from his thoughts, nor from the mind of his pupil Plato. The "Platonic" quality of such kisses was largely a matter of idealized interpretation by later scholars.

The Romans, who seldom took the trouble to idealize their sexual urges, recognized three types of kisses: oscula, or friendly kisses; basia, or kisses of love; and kisses of sexual passion, which were known as savia, or oscula libidinosa. Writing of the last sort, Ovid suavely comments upon the savia of his mistress, her tongue "working around in my mouth, taking all mine into hers. I don't exactly complain of this particular feature." He adds:

Still I have one complaint ...

Only in bed could she get instruction in this kind of kissing.

Who was her tutor, and when?

During the poet Martial's lifetime, kisses of greeting between friends and acquaintances became obligatory. No one escaped the kissers, he complained. "They meet you, stop you, after you they run." There was literally no place in Rome where a citizen was safe from the eager-lipped basiatores:

A chair is no defense, with curtains guarded,

With door and windows shut, and closely warded,

The kissers through a chink will find a way ...

[To kiss] Those who do bathe, or recreate in pool,

Who are withdrawn to ease themselves at stool.

"Every neighbor, every hairy-faced farmer, presses on you with a strongly scented kiss," Martial wrote. "Here the weaver assails you, there the fuller and cobbler, who has just been kissing leather; here the owner of a filthy beard, and a one-eyed gentleman." Particularly obnoxious were the cold, snivel-nosed embraces of the winter kisser. "A hundred times, I'd rather kiss his arse," Martial declared, in one of the earliest literary allusions to that popular form of invitational indignity.

Roman soldiers, slaves and pupils kissed their masters' hands in respect, and kissing one's own hand to the statue of a god was a form of adoration. Promiscuous top-to-toe kissing was perhaps the tamest of activities at orgiastic religious rites—but Roman lip service to pagan fertility gods failed to produce so lasting a ritual as the ancient Nordic custom of kissing under the mistletoe. However, something more than a mere kiss was undoubtedly due the female who placed herself beneath the sacred sprig. Scandinavian legend has it that the custom originated when Balder the Beautiful was mortally wounded by a mistletoe arrow that had been fashioned by Loki, the god of mischief. After Balder was miraculously restored to life, the mistletoe was placed in the care of the goddess Frigg, who ordained that the plant should thenceforth be hung from the ceiling, out of the reach of mischievous hands, and that persons passing beneath it be obliged to embrace in a kiss of love and peace.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Christian savior had been betrayed by the spuriously peaceful kiss of Judas Iscariot, the kiss of peace was religiously exchanged by the members of several early Christian sects. "Salute one another with an holy kiss," the apostle Paul had enjoined on several occasions. "Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss." But, in time, there were rumors that some sects held "feasts of love" at which the kisses were far from holy. Saint Epiphanius reported that "they used first to tickle each other" and "gave each other very immodest kisses" to judge "the degree of their faith." Worse yet, it was alleged, one Picardus "invented a new sect of Adamites, to go naked as Adam did, and to use promiscuous venery.... When the priest repeated that [commandment] of Genesis, 'Increase and multiply,' out went the candle in the place where they met, and without all respect of age, persons, conditions, catch that catch may, every man took her [that] came next, etc."

Abuses of the kissing ritual caused councils and synods to denounce the sectarian love-ins. Much approved, however, was the reverential kissing of holy relics. The kissing of a crucifix was said to bring blessings and happiness. In times of danger, it also warded off catastrophe—and if no crucifix was handy, feudal peasants prayerfully kissed their crossed thumbs, making the X sign that has served as the symbol of a kiss ever since.

Throughout the feudal period, princes of the church and realm were humbly saluted with kisses on the hand and foot—but seldom with such unfortunate consequences as befell that most hapless of feeble-minded French monarchs, Charles the Simple. Having, by some fortunate stroke of ineptitude, achieved ascendancy over Rollo, the Norman viking, Charles foolishly insisted that Rollo should render unto his foot the customary token of respect. Rollo, who bowed to no man, fulfilled his feudal obligation by yanking the king's foot up to his mouth—dumping Charles upon his royal rump, "whilst mirth around did ring."

Young or old, ladies of a noble medieval household were expected to kiss the lips of any titled visitor, "whether he came as an ambassador, expected guest or chance passer-by." This get-acquainted gimmick was a part of womanly etiquette even in the 16th Century, when a guest at one royal welcoming party declared that he felt as if he "had been present at the Rape of the Sabines." Kissing receptions were often followed by an evening of kissing dances. And, since many upper-class "maidens" made a habit of "going by night into the men's chambers and kissing and embracing them in their beds without candle," it is not surprising that medieval literature is replete with parental warnings against kissing, fondling and wanton glances. In compliance with their elders' advice that they keep to the straight and narrow, Italian lovers squeezed into specially built kissing lanes—two of which still survive as the shortest and narrowest streets in Italy. Bacciafemmine—or Kiss the Woman—Lane in Spoleto measures but six yards in length and narrows to a snug 27 inches, while a much-frequented cul-de-kiss in Città della Pieve is some 14 yards longer and six inches narrower.

While Italy can boast of its kissing lanes, Ireland draws countless tourists to its kissing stone at Blarney Castle, which was built for Cormack MacCarthy in 1446 A.D. The Gaelic gift of gab and powers of glib persuasion are said to be granted to those who kiss the Blarney stone. Since the stone is located near the top of the castle, on an outside wall, this takes a bit of doing. But despite the risk of vertigo, the superstition has endured somewhat longer than the medieval German belief that the best cure for a toothache is to kiss a donkey on the chops.

As old superstitions go, however, donkey kissing was downright aesthetic. Woodcuts of the German witches' sabbath depict "his Satanic majesty in the guise of a goat or cat, sitting on a high seat, while his worshipers reverently approach and kiss him under the tail." (continued on page 178)Bussman's Holiday(continued from page 86) According to the testimony of those who kissed and told, Satan had beneath his tail "a sort of face," to keep his followers on target—and, for Satan's convenience in sitting, the face had no protruding nose. "You can kiss me where I have no nose" consequently became a favorite in the German lexicon of folk insults.

Prior to the Renaissance, the deliciousness of kisses had been compared with that of honey or wine. With the introduction of sugar cane from the New World, kisses suddenly became "as sweet as sugar," and the 16th Century French kisser sang praises of his sweetie's bouche su-crine, or sugary mouth. But it was England's Elizabeth I who bestowed an appreciative kiss upon the "faire cloth" on which a spread of sweets was laid, and inspired the courtly habit of referring to small, sweet dainties as kisses.

While hand kissing was royally sanctioned, knee kissing was out at the court of the Virgin Queen. Even in the case of kings, courtiers were now instructed to bow low and close, as though merely wishing to kiss the royal kneecap. "Those who make a great many reverences, dragging their feet, kissing their hands and caps, and bowing and scraping to the ladies of their choice, though they think to gain thereby can only lose," courtly amorists were warned, "for their fawning manners make them unpleasing and wearisome to the said ladies ... as Galateo saith." Galateo was one of Europe's most widely read treatises on manners and had been written by none other than Giovanni della Casa, the Archbishop of Benevento, who held—as Voltaire tells us—that "people can kiss each other from head to foot."

But into the sunny light of ubiquitous courtly smooching, dark clouds of puritanical criticism had already begun to gather about the heads of Elizabeth's kissing poets and peasants. In detailing the age's Anatomie of Abuses, Phillip Stubbes, the prominent English kill-joy, took sanctimonious umbrage at all aspects of youthful courtship and roared his condemnation of the lively lipwork displayed at rural May Day frolics. "What kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering one of another, what filthie groping and uncleane handling is not practiced in those dancings?" he scolded. "There be honest kisses I deny not," the delightfully gloomy Robert Burton declared in his Anatomy of Melancholy. "Kissing and embracing are proper gifts of nature to a man: but there are too lascivious kisses, too continuate, and too violent; they cling like Ivy, close as an Oyster, bill as Doves, meretricious kisses, biting of lips, with other tricks, mouth suckings (saith Lucian), such as the lips can scarce be withdrawn from, with bitings between, and with open mouth caressing the paps, etc., assaulting the neck, etc."

In describing what was to be deplored, Burton unwittingly provided the unimaginative with a list of hints on how to employ oscular stimulation in promoting acts of what the Puritans of Colonial America called folly and filthy dalliance. Kissing itself was actionable in the New England courts—as was made evident in the case of Tuttle vs. Murline, which took place in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1660. Young Sarah Tuttle, it seems, visited her neighbor to borrow some thread and, "finding the house filled with a merry, lewd and congenial company, stayed on." One Jacob Murline, it was charged, snatched up Sarah's gloves and held them for the ransom of a kiss. "Whereupon they sat down together, his arm being about her and her arm upon his shoulder or about his neck; and he kissed her, and she kissed him, or they kissed one another, continuing in this posture for about half an hour." Upon hearing of this shocking episode, Sarah's father brought suit against Murline. When Sarah candidly admitted her enthusiastic participation, the case against the kissing glove snatcher was dismissed, but Sarah was smacked with a large fine and censured for being "a bold virgin."

Despite Puritan moralizing, lusty Britons kissed with accustomed fervor during Cromwell's dreary Protectorate. The long-sitting Rump Parliament, which followed Pride's Purge, caused London street boys to shout, "Kiss my Parliament!"

During Charles II's reign, it was the "merry monarch's" pleasure to kiss and tumble any woman who took his royal fancy. Courtiers were honored to kiss the king's hand, but the kiss of greeting between English males was now thought too primitive to be fashionable. As the modish Witwoud put it in Congreve's The Way of the World, it. was only "in the Country, where great lubberly Brothers slabber and kiss one another when they meet."

"O fie, Miss! you must not kiss and tell," another Congreve beau was obliged to inform "a silly, awkward, Country Girl." Smart London belles knew better. Writing of the hazards of kissing an 18th Century London beauty, the rakish attorney William Hickey complained that it "cost me a coat each time," because the material was ruined by the "quantities of pomatum and powder" that women wore on their hair and faces.

"Somebody gave it out that I lov'd Ladies; and then every body presented me their Ladies (or the Ladies presented themselves) to be embrac'd, that is to have their Necks kissed," a 73-year-old American gentleman wrote from Paris in 1779. "For as to kissing of Lips or Cheeks it is not the Mode here, the first is reckon'd rude, and the other may rub off the Paint." The gentleman was Benjamin Franklin, minister plenipotentiary from the revolutionary United States to France—where, in the opinion of John Adams, the "Life of Dr. Franklin was a Scene of continual discipation." That the politically envious Adams exaggerated, there can be no doubt, but Franklin's intimate friendships with French ladies were numerous and self-confessed. Madame Brillon lamented the gossip concerning "the sweet habit I have of sitting on your lap" and chided her "cher Papa" for the kisses he lavished on other, ofttimes younger women—some of whom came knocking at his door "to have the honor to be kissed by Monsieur Franklin."

Unquestionably, Franklin's ability to charm the ladies of France worked wonders in winning French assistance for the American cause. But for strategic effectiveness, his kisses were no match for those of his fellow countrywoman, Mrs. Loring. The persuasive kisses of this ardent patriot diverted the British general Sir William Howe from launching an attack on Valley Forge until the Americans had time to send a flotilla of powder kegs down the Schuylkill River and blow the British ships out of the water:

Sir William, he, snug as a flea,

Lay all the time a-snoring.

Nor thought of harm, as he lay warm,

In bed with Mrs. Loring.

It was Lord Byron's wish "That womankind had but one rosy mouth / To kiss them all at once from North to South." But the 19th Century frowned on such wayward bussing and social osculation suffered a severe decline. "It has, for a length of time, been customary to salute the ladies upon a first introduction to them," the Earl of Car observed in 1830, "but these liberties having occasioned, at times, a great deal of unhappiness, the custom is dropped in polite companies, and a well-bred man now never attempts it. He introduces himself only with a distant bow."

The Earl of Car maintained a gentlemanly silence concerning the unhappy occasions that had inspired the new male reserve. But ample justification for continued standoffishness is to be found in the decision rendered by Her Majesty's court in the unfortunate case of Thomas Saverland, an impetuous kisser of the old school, who charged that one Miss Caroline Newton "had bitten a piece out of his nose for his having tried to kiss her by way of a joke." Considering that a woman's no is often tentative and flirtatious, while a man's nose is invariably one of the tenderest and most vulnerable things about him, one might have expected any court in the civilized world to find in Mr. Saverland's favor. But to the everlasting dismay of all well-bred Englishmen, the judge acquitted the nose-nipping Miss Newton and ruled that "when a man kisses a woman against her will, she is fully entitled to bite his nose, if she so pleases."

Significantly, this startling decision was handed down in 1837, the first year of Victoria's reign. Widely disregarded by orthodox historians, it nevertheless serves to explain much regarding the rapid rise of prudish inhibitions in polite society and the Victorian gentleman's eagerness to undertake expeditions to remote corners of the globe, where he might with greater safety consort with wild beasts and cohabit with friendly savages. In a larger sense, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the entire British Empire sprang from the injury done to Mr. Saverland's nose.

"On coming near to one of the huts I was much amused by seeing in due form the ceremony of rubbing, or, as it would be more properly called, pressing noses," Charles Darwin wrote, in describing life in far-off New Zealand. "The women, on our first approach, began uttering something in a most dolorous plaintive voice; they then squatted themselves down and held up their faces; my companion standing over them, one after another, placing the bridge of his nose at right angles to theirs, and commenced pressing.... During the process they uttered comfortable little grunts."

When Darwin's journal appeared in 1839, thoughtful Englishmen could hardly fail to contrast the grunting amiability of the nose-rubbing New Zealanders with the unyielding prudery of proper Victorian ladies. Nose pressing was not precisely the British cup of tea, perhaps, but it was better than nose biting, by Jove! How much simpler it was to sin among the South Sea Islanders, the Eskimos and the Orientals. A rum lot, really, but when you lived among 'em, the girls began to look jolly good!

'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,

An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat—jes' the same as Thee baw's Queen,

An' I seed 'er first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,

An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot.

As England's scholarly, multilingual explorer of the erotic, Sir Richard Burton, had discovered in translating the Kama Sutra, "Christian kisses" were mere slipshod smacks compared with the kind of artful osculations the Hindus had been laying on each other for well over 1000 years. "The Kiss should be imprinted on the following parts of the body: the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, the chest, the breast, the lips and the interior of the mouth," the sage Vatsyayana instructed. "But the natives from the province of Lat also kiss the following parts of the body: the thighs, the arms and the navel."

Whether one saluted a woman in the province of Lat or between the Indus and the five rivers, the Kama Sutra's kissing capers were a far cry from the decorous old American game of post office—a stirring defense of which had appeared in Harper's magazine in August 1859. "There was an element of gallantry in the simple old games," the author declared, in deploring the fact that such simple parlor pastimes had been supplanted by lascivious waltzes and polkas. "Our honest grandfathers and grandmothers, who saw no scandal in a modest swain imprinting a hearty smack upon a sweet maiden's cheek, would have found no words to express their indignation at the spectacle of a bearded man holding a gentle girl a quarter hour in his embrace in the whirl of a giddy dance, under the spell of entrancing music and after draughts of maddening wine."

Such dalliance naturally bred other detractors. "Young women of America, if you knew how lightly you are estimated by those who so earnestly and passionately seek your favors, you would certainly deny them, if the effort cost your lives," warned Professor William H. Walling in the 1904 edition of his popular, plain-wrapper treatise on Sexology. But, increasingly, such warnings fell on deaf ears. Plied with cotton candy, giddy with draughts of maddening sarsaparilla, frivolous American maidens risked the loss of both reputation and hairpins by submitting to surreptitious kisses in the cabins of fairground Ferris wheels and while drifting in the perilous darkness of the tunnel of love. Lost to all virtue, habitual osculators sent each other symbolic kisses through the mails by positioning postage stamps according to a prearranged code, by filling entire pages of note paper with Xs and by brazenly indicating that an envelope had been sealed with a kiss by marking the flap with the cryptic initials S. W. A. K.!

In the opinion of many clergymen, educators and parents, the sensual appetites of the young were being stirred by racy novels and exacerbated by the new "moving pictures." The silver screen portrayed exotic female "vampires," such as Theda Bara, sapping the vital forces of strong men in kissing close-ups that made their passionate lips loom as large as a pallor sofa—an article of furniture that now had to compete with the back-row seats of movie theaters as a favorite trysting place for kissing couples. The suave cinematic lipwork of Francis X. Bushman caused women to riot and swoon when the "great lover of the screen" visited Chicago in 1913. Armageddon was just around the corner, the watchdogs of American morals predicted. But when Armageddon arrived, in the guise of World War One, it served only to make kissing more prevalent and promiscuous.

"Mademoiselle from Armentières/Hasn't been kissed for 40 years," American doughboys sang, and they did their best to remedy the situation. On the home front, there were kisses of farewell and kisses of encouragement. There were good-time, last-fling kisses and kisses given to sell war bonds. There were victory kisses and home-coming kisses—but it wasn't until 1920, when young F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, that the nation began to realize how free with their kisses young Americans had become.

"I've kissed dozens of men. I suppose I'll kiss dozens more," 19-year-old Rosalind Connage confessed, after kissing the novel's hero "definitely and thoroughly," minutes after meeting him. "None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed," Fitzgerald wryly observed. Giddy with jazz and bootleg booze, college couples climbed into motorcars and vanished into fraternity house bedrooms for bouts of "heavy petting." There was talk of "soul" kisses, kisses that were "deep" and "French." "Hot lips" became a flattering nickname. Ninety percent of all young people indulged in kissing, Judge Ben B. Lindsey estimated in describing The Revolt of Modern Youth. Half of the 90 percent performed "halfway sex intimacies." Up to 25 percent "went the limit."

Sensationalized accounts sent most of the older generation into a state of prurient shock and caused others to embark on a belated quest for the thrills they had missed. Hollywood capitalized on the joy jag with lurid Hicks—Flaming Youth, Flapper Wives, Forbidden Fruit. Theater posters wooed would-be flappers and elderly farmers with promises of "neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers ... the truth—bold, naked, sensational." Threatened with censorship, the film producers appointed Will Hays to impose a code of self-regulation upon the industry. The new movie "czar"—a former Postmaster General of the United States—set rigid rules by which cinematic post office might be played. Lengthy, "lustful" kisses were taboo, and oscular embraces were timed with a stop watch.

Throughout the Twenties, Hollywood countered criticism by arguing that its movies did not instigate immorality but merely reflected American life. Weighing the evidence decades later, the English social historian E. S. Turner found that Hollywood had, indeed, influenced Anglo-American courting habits but that the influence had been more civilizing than salacious. Hollywood "showed boys how to walk with girls, how to pilot them in public places.... It taught them how to hold a girl, how long and how tight. It familiarized them with the looks which mean 'I won't be kissed,' 'I don't mind if I'm kissed,' 'I want to be kissed,' 'Stop it, I like it,' 'I like it, but stop it,' and a dozen others." There was evidence, Turner found, "that the cinema taught girls the trick of closing their eyes when kissed.... It encouraged them to kick up one heel (or even two heels) when embraced."

The ability to live on kisses had never been put to a more severe test than during the Depression Thirties. "Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers," George and Ira Gershwin tunefully shrugged, "Long as you've got a kiss that conquers?" Strength and stamina were the admired virtues. In a "kissathon" spin-off from the dance-marathon craze, a couple in Chicago copped the prize for endurance with a kiss that didn't quit for six hours and 37 minutes. Long novels and double features gave customers their "money's worth" and provided escape from drab reality. As romantically packaged by novelist Margaret Mitchell, even the Civil War seemed like a picnic. At the expense of a little eyestrain, every woman with a library card could palpitate with Scarlett O'Hara as Rhett Butler "bent over her and kissed her with a savagery and a completeness that wiped out everything from her mind."

Happily, most Americans could afford the price of admission by the time the movie version opened in 1939, with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh cast as the leading kissers. The smooth Gable technique was admired by women and imitated by men of all ages, but the slick perfection of movie love scenes made life difficult for many younger males—a fact that Grace Metalious was to recall in re-creating the Forties frame of mind of a callow young kisser named Rodney Harrington, in Peyton Place. "Helen's biggest trouble, thought Rodney, was that she had seen too many movies.... His kisses left her unmoved if they were not of the expert, no-noses-bumped variety. Too bad, thought Rodney, that they had not yet begun to make the sexual act a part of every motion picture, for then Helen would have fallen into his hands like an overripe grape."

The Metalious novel was a cavalcade of carnal osculation, ranging from the pediphilic ("Once he had kissed the sole of her bare foot and she had been aroused to the point of powerful and immediate sexual desire") to the mam-miferocious ("Her nipples were always rigid and exciting and the full, firm flesh around them always hot and throbbing.... 'Hard,' she whispered. 'Do it hard, honey. Bite me a little. Hurt me a little.' "). The book did much to make the sexual act a fictional commonplace of the Fifties. But it wasn't until the closing years of the Sixties that copulation began to be "a part of every motion picture." Love was no longer consummated with kissing fade-outs and soaring fiddles. The cameras kept grinding and everything bumped—including noses.

The new cinematic candor has, understandably, diminished the impact of kissing as a spectator sport. While the amatory kiss is still a primary source of interpersonal pleasure, low-intensity osculation has tended to become a social substitute for the handshake. Taking their cue from the effusive cheek kissers of showbiz, whom TV has made familiar guests in the home, Americans have adopted the greeting ritual with varying degrees of savoir-faire—from the modishly graceful cheek brush, in which a token peck is given to the air surrounding the ear lobe, to the jarring sideswipe of the sturdy little Volkswelcome buss, mit lip-stick-beschmieren und self-conscious, suburban giggles.

At the moment, there doesn't seem to be any great danger that American social kissing will be carried to the extremes arrived at in ancient Rome. The pace of life in the Seventies makes it highly unlikely that one will ever have to hide indoors to avoid the rude embraces of one-eyed shoemakers, snivel-nosed taxi drivers and overly affectionate garbage men. In recent years, in fact, Rome itself has become so averse to public smooching that several engaged couples whom the police caught kissing in parked cars and movie theaters have actually been arrested for committing "an obscene act."

Even more curious, in light of the historical past, was the recent uproar over screen kissing that broke out in India, where erotic osculation was anciently developed into a national art. "Kissing on the lips, allowed for a time in pre-independence days, is now strictly forbidden in films," The New York Times reported in the fall of 1969, "a reflection of real life in India, where kissing in public is not only considered immoral, but is against the law as well.... To get around the taboos, Indian producers and directors have adopted suggestive devices that include dreamy songs, erotic dances, giddy chases of heroine by hero around sylvan glades, hand-holding, heavy breathing, wriggling, writhing and nuzzling of the neck and bust. All that is permissible, just so long as the lips do not touch."

"Of course, kissing is an import from the West!" a Bombay billboard proclaimed, in publicizing the movie moguls' campaign to legalize cinematic kissing. But the jibe was purely ironic. As her mounting birth rate indicates, kissing is still India's leading form of private enterprise. In the area of erotic smooching, she is the most advanced country in the world, while the West remains a kiss-poor hodgepodge of have-not nations. When publication of the Kama Sutra was made legal in the early Sixties, American kissers were astonished to learn the variety of uses to which the human lips could be put—so much so that many have yet to progress beyond the four basic types of osculatory embrace to the "Kiss of Great Pressure": "This is practiced in the following way: The lover clasps the lower lip in his fingers and brushes it with his tongue, then he seizes it with his lips and presses it with great force."

Granted, the Kiss of Great Pressure is hardly suitable for greeting new acquaintances or welcoming the boss's wife at the airport. But if the Kama Sutra may be taken as a prophetic guide to the future of American kissing, forward-looking osculators would do well to familiarize themselves with the larksome lip grabber, in preparation for the day when American amorists may choose to amuse themselves with what the Hindu love manual calls "a little game of who can seize the other's lips first. If the woman loses, she must sulk, push her lover away, turn her back on him and try to quarrel with him, saying, 'I want revenge.' If she loses a second time, she must pretend to be twice as upset, and then when her lover is preoccupied or asleep, she must seize his lower lip between her teeth so that he cannot pull it away. Then she can burst out laughing, make a great deal of noise, make fun of him, dance around him and, raising her eyebrows and rolling her eyes roguishly, say whatever comes into her head."

Fortunately, there is still time to prevent American kissing from going this strenuously frolicsome route. But if worst should ever come to worst, male losers need not sulk. Rolling their eyes roguishly, they can quickly skip to part two, chapter seven of the Kama Sutra for handy Hindu hints on "The various ways to hit a woman and the accompanying sounds"—"Hinn," "Phoutt," "Phatt," "Soutt" and "Platt."