Erotic Passages

Lust is a world of bewildering dimensions, for it is that power to take over the ability to create and convert it to a force. Curious force. Lust exhibits all the attributes of junk. It dominates the mind and other habits, it appropriates loyalties, generalizes character, leaches character out, rides on the fuel of almost any emotional gas--whether hatred, affection, curiosity, even the pressures of boredom--yet it is never definable because it can alter to love or be as suddenly sealed from love, indeed the more intense lust becomes, the more it is indefinable, the line of the ridge between lust and love is where the light is first luminous, then blinding, and the ground remains unknown."

--Norman Mailer in defense of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, from Mailer's landmark work The Prisoner of Sex

Jay Mcinerney The erotic is a treacherous mode for literature, which is why even the best-read among us can count the great successes of erotic literature on two hands. And even some of the alleged successes, read with a fresh eye, can seem ridiculous to the contemporary reader, Lady Chatterley's Lover being my favorite example of the kitsch of euphemism. (Molly Bloom's soliloquy, to my mind, holds up nicely.) Generally speaking, the most successful erotic writing is unself-consciously pornographic and utilitarian, written with the primary goal of stimulating sexual arousal--The Story of O or My Secret Life comes to mind. Why this should be so seems both self-evident and baffling.

Like the best children's stories, good pornography depends on formula and repetition to achieve its effects. Readers of both genres want the semblance of surprise and novelty, but in the end they know what they want, and they do not wish to have their tastes and predispositions challenged. The princess must eventually be rescued; the maid must submit to her punishment. Neither type of reader is apt to complain about cliches, formula and ritual being the point of the exercise. Literary fiction, on the other hand, aspires to originality of expression and form. Occasionally, in the hands of an artist, utilitarian prose rises above the level of utility and approaches the condition of literature, but typically the creative and experimental impulse to reconfigure form and language is at odds with the aims of pornography. Hence the dearth of erotic literature.

One of the best and best-known examples--at least among writers and students of contemporary literature--is Harold Brodkey's "Innocence," a 20-page account of an act of cunnilingus, which in turn was probably the inspiration for Susan Minot's Rapture, an entire novella devoted to a blow job. Both Brodkey and Minot are heavily digressive, the act itself leading to reflection and association, both ultimately more mental than physical. Not so with part four, chapter 28 of Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama, one of the steamiest and sexiest pieces of writing in recent decades. Ellis's exhaustive account of an hour in the life of a ménage à trois. It's purely mechanical, like a very well-written transcript of a hard-core porn film scene--and indeed it's not entirely clear that what we're reading isn't a scene in a film, although that's too long a story to get into here; we need to stay focused, unlike Brodkey and Minot, on the sex. One thing that distinguishes it as a piece of writing is its utter unself-consciousness, its near total avoidance of euphemism and metaphor.

When I first read the scene--two scenes if you count the fact that it moves from the shower to the bedroom, several dozen if you count each sex act--I was almost embarrassed at how stimulating I found the experience. Embarrassed because this is a threesome that involves two men and one woman, and virtually no permutation of that configuration is left unexplored. And the orgy is presented in the most direct and seemingly transparent fashion--devoid of hyperbole and/or literary indirection. I have since compared notes with other practicing heterosexuals of both sexes, and I've heard the same reaction: Hey, like, I'm not...you know...I mean, I have nothing against it, but I'm not usually turned on by, you know.... And yet....

Perhaps my sample group and I are not representative, perhaps we are more sexually ambiguous than the mainstream, or perhaps Ellis knows that most of us are more polymorphously perverse than we imagine ourselves to be. In Ellis's fictional universe sexual identity is inherently fluid, and by the time we arrive at this little orgy, some 400 pages into the novel, it seems like an almost painfully delayed and diverted climax to the ambient sexual tension of the story. After a daisy chain of numbingly glamorous parties and fashion shows and nightclub openings, this sexual outbreak seems like an explosion of authenticity. The rapid progression of events and sexual acts seems ineluctable and inevitable. Somehow Ellis manages to hypnotize the reader into checking his judgment at the shower door, although somewhere along the way he may find himself amazed and possibly even a little shocked at his own complicity.

Jay McInerney's most recent book is A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine.

Jane Smiley "'Stanley...Stanley...' I whispered undulating in response to him. 'We've done remarkable [sic] well for our first attempt. Don't you agree?'

Watts's book thudded on the floor beside the bed.

'Unquestionably, Sheila.' Stanley grinned at me.

'Do you want to fall asleep this way?'

'I'm afraid I've passed the point of no return.'

I kissed him wildly. 'Oh, God! Darling...darling...so have I. So have I!"

--from Robert H. Rimmer's The Harrad Experiment, page 167 (25th anniversary edition)

I read this exchange now and it makes me laugh--college students Stanley and Sheila are expanding their sexual powers by attempting to have penetration and read up on erotic theory at the same time--and there's also a comma missing between whispered and undulating. It is Alan Watts, author of dozens of books on Buddhism and the West, who is the climax. No doubt the book that thuds on the floor is Nature, Man and Woman, Watts's Taoist-inspired treatise on human relationships and man's relationship to, well, nature. Though I hadn't personally read any Watts by the time I discovered The Harrad Experiment, at 18, I was willing to believe its author, Robert H. Rimmer, of whom I also hadn't heard (and who subsequently wrote a guide to X-rated videotapes, among other works), probably because Rimmer's very name evoked mysterious sexual practices simultaneously with professorial erudition. As for me, I was tall. I wore glasses. I was almost uniquely naive because I was from the Midwest and my family never ever talked about sex. I went to Vassar. I read The Harrad Experiment alone in my upstairs bedroom, between my freshman and sophomore years, the summer sunshine streaming through the windows. The six student protagonists plan to engage in every form of sexual congress and also streaming through the windows. The six student protagonists plan to engage in every form of sexual congress and also transform the very nature of male-female relationships. Although there's hardly any actual evocation of erotic arousal, this passage excited me, and because of it I planned to lose my virginity very soon--and as intellectually as possible. Within six months I did. He was Yale, Marxist, a Presidential Scholar, an ideal candidate for admission to Harrad College.

But we made a few mistakes. Sometimes he would "borrow" books from the stacks at the Yale library. Unfortunately, he never brought home Watts, the Kama Sutra or even My Secret Life, Victorian porn that the other boys were reading. It was always William Carlos Williams's very own copy of The State and Revolution (by V.I. Lenin) or a volume of Hegel. And then, the next summer, when we should have been lolling on a beach somewhere, eating oysters and learning foot massage, we were living, not in a Harrad-like group of lovely young persons who were comfortable having sex with each other in every permutation, but in a quite puritanical Marxist commune where most of the members weren't having sex at all and those of us who were did our best not to offend the others by flaunting it. All over America the revolution was caving in to free love, but not in New Haven. Our ideal was a "good-struggle relationship." (I never quite understood what that was, but it had something to do with thesis, antithesis and synthesis.) We worked in factories and discussed the Vietnam war and the bourgeois commodification of sexuality. It was such a setback to my Rimmerian aspirations that when I met my next partner--who had blue eyes and dark luxuriant ringlets, who tended bar, drove a motorcycle and visibly, even to me, lived for getting laid--I automatically asked him if he considered himself "elitist" in his views of the working class. Marx had won! But he humored me, sat me right down on the back of his motorcycle. Still, while we once looked into the Kama Sutra, we actually never did get around to reading the Watts. Since then, I'm afraid, I've passed the point of no return. Oh, God.

Jane Smiley's new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, will be published in winter 2007.

Junot Díaz Like a lot of brothers of my generation, I grew up with a whole grip of erotic material at my disposal: movies, magazines, books, you name it. (This was before the Internet made porn more common than air.) I might have had a wider variety than most since I lived right next to an active landfill, and the men who worked there made a habit of piling up all the porn they came upon in fantastic mounds near the front entrance, a pile we local boys would happily raid on a weekly basis. Kind of ironic then that I learned to write about sex, desire and the consequences of both from a comic book, the groundbreaking and much lauded Love and Rockets. Specifically Gilbert Hernández's magnum opus, Poison River, which began appearing in 1988, just as I arrived at college a wannabe writer desperate (continued on page 198) Erotic Passages (continued from page 138) for models, for compasses, for anything to show me the way.

Poison River. The mad, epic tale of the young, preposterously buxom Luba and her love affair with her musician gangster, Peter Rio, set in Mexico's violent, phantasmagorical underworld. There was nothing like it then, and I'll wager there's very little like it now. One of the greatest works of contemporary U.S. literature--I don't give a shit if you don't consider comics literature--and also one of the most profoundly erotic. Yet flipping back through the comic after all these years I'm struck by the fact that the actual quantity of sex in Poison River ain't all that high. The acts themselves appear sparingly, no more than a panel or two, optical lightning, and all the more powerful for it. (If you want Beto at his most pornarific, you'd have to read his "erotic" graphic novel Birdland, where the semen flows like blood in a Kinji Fukasaku film.) But what Hernández withholds in terms of quantity, he more than makes up for with the giddy heterogeneity of his erotic vision. In Poison River all kinds of bodies have sex in all kinds of combinations, represented with such a frank, matter-of-fact authority that it feels less like a point of view than a shout-out from life itself. And while this may say a lot about my own limited upbringing, Hernández was the first ostensibly straight male artist I encountered who drew as much dick as he did tit, who was as energetic at portraying boy-on-boy sex as he was girl-on-boy sex. (Peter Rio, after all, was not only Luba's lover; he was also married to Isobel, who happened to be a pre-op transsexual.) Hernández, in other words, tossed the entire straight-male-gaze formula I'd been weaned on right out the window. I'm sure the fact that he is a U.S. Latino made the whole thing even more acute for a young Dominican writer like me; at a personal, artistic and cultural level Hernández's sexual aesthetic challenged the shit out of me--one of those crucial moments as an artist when you realize that either you grow or you die.

Those first years in college, while a lot of the other young writers I knew were wrestling with Morrison with Walker with Crouch with Reed with Álvarez with Thomas with Rivera with Cisneros with Carver, I was losing sleep over a comic book.

It would be too much to say that Hernández gave my young writer self the world. But he did give me my first real map of it. A map that took me a long time to decipher but, after much struggle and introspection, led me into another, better world altogether.

Junot Díaz's new novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar, will be published in spring 2007.

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A.S. Byatt When I was a young and innocent girl I was very nearly expelled from school for having got hold of a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which I solemnly read. The authorities needn't have worried--I was vaguely repelled by the preachiness of Lawrence's descriptions of sex and turned off, rather than on, by being exhorted to use the words fuck, cunt, shit and piss. Much more stimulating and dangerously exciting was a 17th century poet I was being encouraged to admire for linguistic daring, John Donne. He is one of the two great English love poets--the other is Robert Graves--mostly because he is more interested in women than he is in himself and talks to them, not at them, in every possible tone of voice. What women like (to answer Freud's question about what women really want) is to be talked to, as people. That is the attraction of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre--it's not his craggy face and black brows; it's the fact that he argues with Jane. The short-story writer Frances Towers once remarked that Donne makes you feel that he has seduced you. He does. Or he makes you wish it were you he is trying so wisely and wittily to seduce.

Probably his most famous sustained piece of erotic writing is the elegy "To His Mistress Going to Bed." It begins, "Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy;/Until I labour, I in labour lie." The poem undresses the woman, girdle, gown, headdress, and makes--as Donne continually does--religious comparisons that are on the edge of blasphemy. She is a good spirit, not an evil one: "Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright." He has a great gift for insinuating a description of an erection. I missed most of these as a schoolgirl and took pleasure in them as a student. He follows this hint with some of the most famous lines in erotic poetry: "Licence my roving hands, and let them go/ Before, behind, between, above, below."

Five dry prepositions with not a trace of squeezed breasts or crushed lips. And yet the female body responds to them--because they hint and do not make explicit--with an arousal Lawrence can't exact. Lawrence is odd because he can put himself, imaginatively, inside a woman--Frieda instructed him--but he can't make his men attractive to women. Donne ends his poem with a demand that the woman show herself to him without guilt or innocence: "To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,/What needst thou have more covering than a man."

Again he makes the woman reader imagine his body and what is going on, or about to go on. He does it with plain words and a conversational voice.

He believed in sex, as in "Love's Progress": "Whoever loves, if he do not propose/The right true end of love, he's one that goes/To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

In "Love's Alchemy" he shows how good he was at disgust and contempt: "Hope not for mind in women; at their best/Sweetness and wit, they are but mummy, possessed."

And yet that, too, I found encouraging as a young reader--to write those lines, he had to have hoped for mind in women, not just seen them as objects of desire. His descriptions of the perfect moment of requited desire and sexual happiness are the words my generation--men and women--used to express bewilderment at happiness. "I wonder by my troth, what thou and I/Did, till we loved? were we not wean'd till then,/But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?"

Or the great poem which adjures that "Busy old fool, unruly sun" not to peer in at the windows or disturb the lovers, who are in fact the whole world: "She's all states, and all princes, I,/Nothing else is./.../Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;/This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere."

He has an absolute way of centering his world--and therefore the whole world, and the light and heat of the sun--on the bed in which they are. Anybody could say, at the moment of perfect happiness, "Nothing else is." But it was Donne who did say it, and Donne we quote, and imagine. The great writers about sex are not always the great writers about love--Donne could do both, together and apart.

Love poems, we were taught, compared women to flowers, and happiness to spring, etc. Here is Donne, in a poem called "Love's Growth," which is indeed about the spring: "Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,/From love's awakened root do bud out now."

As a young girl I didn't get the precision of that "awakened root." Once I did, I was pleased and excited by the further precision of "blossoms on a bough." (You couldn't paint it as an image of an orgasm, but you can precisely feel it in the language.) Or, from the same poem: "If, as in water stirred more circles be/Produced by one, love such additions take"--which is a better description of female pleasure than D.H. Lawrence's swooning bliss. Donne knows what is going on. He is assured and male. But the "love deeds" rising from the awakened roots are "gentle," and that is somehow enticing, as well as reassuring. Donne's brief metaphors are infinitely more exciting than Connie winding flowers in the red pubic hair round Mellors's John Thomas.

A.S. Byatt is at work on a new novel, her ninth.

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Lauren Weisberger To this day my mother does not know we were reading soft-core porn on the Parkway Manor Elementary School playground in suburban Pennsylvania. Never mind that it was soft-core porn she had selected and purchased and bestowed upon me with a smile. "Enjoy it, honey," she said as she handed me the paperback. Mom thought Forever... was just another Judy Blume classic, an age-appropriate novel no more titillating than Superfudge or Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, a book that might mention tampons or first kisses but no s-e-x.

Thankfully, Mom was very, very wrong.

The truth is that from the opening chapter to the closing paragraph, there's more memorable groping in Forever... than in any desperate housewife's bodice ripper. I can't always remember the names of ex-boyfriends--or sometimes current ones--but I can quote the sex scenes in Forever... with a court reporter's accuracy. I am not alone. Merely mention the book's title and women of every age swoon. "You're going to write about Kath and Michael going at it on the woven rug in her parents' den, aren't you?" a 36-year-old friend pleaded as she moaned audibly and white-knuckled her coffee cup. Another girlfriend recited verbatim the scene in which the young lovers spend an unchaperoned weekend at an older sister's ski house. A third pronounced--with husky voice and lowered lashes--that she was "physically, emotionally and spiritually awakened" after first reading the book. Forever... is to young girls what a sneaked copy of Playboy is to prepubescent boys: an earth-shattering introduction to the Good Stuff.

From the electrifying descriptions of heavy petting to the sweetly fumbled attempts at actual intercourse, the girls of Parkway Manor and I read with such fervor that the pages of my book detached from the binding. It was delicious reading then, but it wasn't until recently, in my late 20s, that I realized the book is so intensely erotic not for what it describes but for what it leaves out.

In my favorite passage--both then and now--Katherine and Michael get excited by a soapy water fight as they do the dishes together. Afterward they shampoo each other in the bathroom sink and take turns towel-drying each other's hair. When he follows her to the bedroom so she can change out of her sopping shirt, Michael swears he'll just watch. But when she removes her wet, clinging bra and reaches for a dry one, he presses his body against hers, cups her breasts from behind and kisses her neck. They are interrupted before anything else happens, but I don't really mind.

Blume, like her young heroines (and "good girls" the world over), understands that the heat of sexual tension comes from frustration, and frustration comes from abstaining. In actuality a whole lot of nothing happens in Katherine's bedroom, but it is because of this--and not in spite of it--that the passage is so powerful. Noticeably absent is any suggestion from Michael that he has a bondage fetish or desperately wants to have a threesome with Katherine's best friend or thinks it would be "awesome" if she got implants. Nowhere does he advocate crotchless panties. Or anal sex. He's happy just to be close to her, and he desires her in the pure, blindly appreciative way only a man who has yet to sleep with a stripper, cheat on his wife, request a happy ending or watch Sorority Girls IX can manage.

Lauren Weisberger is the author of The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing.

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