Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism

By Francis Booth

A frank and fearless comprehensive survey of eroticism in twentieth century European literature

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wu Wei Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227182975

Francis Booth

As well as Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938 Francis Booth is the author of several books on twentieth century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive) No Direction Home: The Uncanny In Literature Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant Garde A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman's Novel Francis is also the author of two novel series: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers Young adult fantasy series The Watchers

Book preview

Introduction

Immoral and amatory fiction then claims our study, and must unfortunately be acknowledged to contain, cum grano salis, a reflection of the manners and vices of the times – of vices to be avoided, guarded against, reformed, but which unquestionably exist, and of which an exact estimate is needful to enable us to cope with them.

'Pisanus Fraxi' (Henry Spencer Ashbee),

Index of Forbidden Books

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In his Essay on Novels, the Marquis de Sade advised budding writers to ‘avoid any display of moral earnestness. Morality is not something anyone wants in a novel.’ He himself set a shining example in this regard, but writers in general and novelists in particular have always been suspected of trying to corrupt the vulnerable: Jean Jacques Rousseau said, ‘no chaste girl ever read a novel.’ In The Contract, 1656, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the old man is educating his young niece to become a good wife – to him; her moral education does not include reading novels, or ‘Romancies’.

When she was seven years of Age, he chose her such Books to reade in as might make her wife, not amorous, for he never suffered her to reade in Romancies, nor such light Books; but Moral Philosophy was the first of her Studies, to lay a Ground and Foundation of Virtue, and to teach her to moderate her Passions, and to rule her Affections.

In A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education of 1797, Erasmus Darwin warns that ‘many objectionable passages’ are to be found in novels, but he advises:

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If these passages, from which so few books are totally exempt, were expunged, it might raise curiosity, and induce young people to examine different copies of the same work, and to seek for other improper books themselves; it is therefore perhaps better, when these books are read by a governess, that she should express disapprobation in a plain and quiet way, of such passages, rather than to expunge them.

In Libraries and Their Users, Paul Kaufman quotes an eighteenth-century case of a librarian in Dublin with similar views: ‘when an irate father made a violent protest against the lending of novels too shocking for innocent young girls, Mrs Lord explained that she carefully underlined the passages of doubtful delicacy in Lewis's Monk to warn the reader what to skip.’

Near the start of Madame Bovary, Flaubert makes it clear that the origin of his heroine’s immorality could be located in her early fondness for reading inappropriate literature: ‘Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.’ And after Emma first commits adultery, Flaubert makes sure we get the point: ‘she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her.’

It is true that even great writers – especially great writers, as I will try to show in this book –  have always tended to feature the immoral and erotic side of life rather more heavily than the moral guardians would like. Bradford K Mudge, editor of The Cambridge Guide to Erotic Literature, says in his introduction:

Literary history suggests that the ‘erotic’ was always a diverse and overwhelming menu of possibilities; that genres high and low, elite and popular, literary and not, all made use of romantic and/or sexual content, often for very different purposes; and that the languages of eroticism were as numerous and as varied as the bodies and the desires they describe.

The erotic webzine nerve.com used to have a column called Jack’s Naughty Bits, which printed ‘the steamiest and most scandalous sex scenes from the world’s great books.’ This is more or less the aim of Text Acts. Jack’s bits were mostly from books which were not primarily erotic and certainly not pornographic, they were from serious modern and classic literature; nerve.com’s printed anthology is subtitled Literate Smut, which could be a subtitle for this book. There is also an anthology called Going Down: Lip Service from Great Writers, which describes itself as ‘a book that collects the best written words on a great oral tradition’. That is the kind of thing I will be examining in this book: serious twentieth-century literature which has a strong erotic content but is not primarily erotica, or erotica that was written by a ‘literary’ author taking a break, either for fun or for money.

Literary authors of course have always been short of money, and some accepted commissions to write erotica as an alternative to starvation. Anaïs Nin, who will feature heavily in this book, wrote erotica to order, at one time becoming the mother figure for a group of hungry writers, ‘the madame of an unusual house of literary prostitution... Most of the erotica was written on empty stomachs.’ Nin says, ‘few writers have of their own accord sat down to write erotic tales or confessions,’ though this is not entirely true, as we will see. But even when Nin was not consciously writing erotica, the erotic elements which she felt were a natural part of her life became a natural part of her writing; she was neither afraid nor ashamed to write openly about the erotic but she did not let it take over her life or her writing.

It is one thing to include eroticism in a novel or a story and quite another to focus one’s whole attention on it. The first is like life itself. It is, I might say, natural, sincere... But focusing wholly on the sexual life is not natural. It becomes something like the life of the prostitute, and abnormal activity ends by turning the prostitute away from the sexual. Writers perhaps know this. That is why they have written only one confession or a few stories, on the side, to satisfy their honesty about life.

What constitutes literature? What separates literature from erotica? And what separates erotica from pornography? These questions, and the definition of obscenity, troubled the legal systems of Western democracies for years. In announcing his decision in the Ulysses obscenity trial of 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey of the New York Federal district wrote that he considered James Joyce’s novel not obscene because the novel was not ‘dirt for dirt’s sake’. The kind of works I will be examining in this book might be called dirt for literature’s sake: as Nin said, they include eroticism, because that is part of ‘life itself’, but do not focus their whole attention on it. They were not, as one author put it, ‘written to be read with one hand.’

Readers of a certain age may remember that bookshops used to have separate sections for fiction and literature: using that distinction, most of the books I will be looking at were written by authors likely to be filed under literature, though I will make very little attempt to justify the difference. My only real test for inclusion in this survey is whether the book is, as TS Eliot said of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, ‘really written’. Eliot also said that Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had ‘passages of writing in it as good as any I have seen for  long time,’ despite its erotic content.

In a similar vein the critic Karl Shapiro said of Henry Miller: ‘I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think. But everything he has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest sense of the word’. And again, Harry Moore, quoting Eliot while giving evidence in court during the trial of Tropic of Cancer: ‘I think that it is splendidly written in an age when not many things are splendidly written. In current American literature, for example, we have only a few people who have – you can put this word in quotes – written.’

The French critic Roland Barthes, in his book The Pleasure of the Text, distinguished between ‘readerly’ texts – conventionally written books like most 19th-century and most contemporary novels, which produce pleasure (plaisir) in the reader, versus ‘writerly’ texts – like experimental novels and avant-garde poetry, which produce joy. The French for joy – jouissance, which is related to the verb jouir, to play, also means orgasm; most of the novels I will be considering in this book play with words to create an intellectual as well as a sexual joy in the reader, in a way that most conventionally-written, contemporary ‘erotica’ does not. As Bradford K Mudge puts it:

The relationship between eros and literature begins with pleasure: pleasure of the body, pleasure of the text, pleasure of wondering how each affects the other... Consideration of the relationship between eros and literature requires, in addition to an ongoing preoccupation with the body, close attention to the pleasures specific to language. Those pleasures might arrive from diction, syntax or narrative; or they might attend character, setting, or plot. They might be tied directly to the erotic body they purport to describe, or they may have an erotic charge specific to language but at significant remove from the sexual and/or romantic body to which they eventually return... They happily attend plays, poems, and novels; short stories, essays, and non-fiction of various kinds.

The editor of a recent anthology of fantasy-erotic writings by literary authors – Love is Strange – makes the distinction between the ‘badly-written’ and ‘literature’ in contemporary erotica. He complains that ‘most of the stuff currently being peddled as erotica is bad because it is essentially dishonest about the way sex really is – quite apart from being for the most part badly written and poorly plotted, with lamentable characterisation and no purpose other than that of temporary arousal.’ But, he says, there is also plenty of good erotic writing around, including the writing included in his anthology; ‘in the hands of writers like these, sexual fantasy becomes literature.’ Susie Bright, editor of the Herotica and The Best American Erotica series takes a similar line in her book How to Write a Dirty Story.

Erotic writing today is not only the best work of its kind that we’ve ever seen in the English-language, it also has had an indelible effect on all of America literature. The flinching factor is gone – the former stigma and prejudice against erotic writing have been exposed for the embarrassing ignorance they represented.

Bright says that, although ‘there is no such thing as a person without an erotic story,’ writing about sex ‘can make even the most confident of us curl up in a ball of anxiety. Erotic speech is one of the few writing themes that has crippled otherwise self-assured authors.’ But, she says, the best erotic writing is done by writers who ‘aren't setting out to write a pornographic tour de force – they just want to include their characters’ sexual lives as they would naturally come up in the course of the story.’ Writing about sex is essential for writers because, ‘it's such a true and vivid part of humanity. The hard part of sex writing is getting to that truth, its most candid expression, instead of the mechanics and morals that we’ve heard ad nauseam so many times.’

One reason authors are afraid of writing about sex – apart from the fact that their mother, partner or children may see it – is that their readers will assume they are either perverts or braggarts, however small the erotic is as a part of their work. They will be seen, either admiringly or with disdain, as experts on the subject; obsessive participants in it. This only seems to apply to writing that contains sex, and does not seem to affect any other genre: no one assumes that only an accomplished murderer can write murder stories, or that only the undead can write zombie novels. A man who writes sex scenes might be worried of being accused of being a libertine, and a woman who writes sex scenes might worry about being called a nymphomaniac, but no one accuses JK Rowling of being a witch, or believes that Stephenie Meyer is actually a vampire. This effect – identifying the author with the actions of her/his characters in their erotic writing – seems, not surprisingly, to be worse for women than men. Discussing the treatment given in interviews to the Nobel Prize-winning, experimental/erotic writer Elfriede Jelinek (more of her later), Ellen Risholm and Erin Crawley make exactly this point.

A respected male author of the high culture variety would never be grilled in this manner: ‘Why didn't you have any children?’ ‘What turns you on?’ ‘Do you watch porn videos’ ‘Do you take notes while you have sex?’

Jelinek herself, in her novel Lust, said that sex is neither central to her writing nor to her life: ‘Sex is the downtown of our lives, shopping precinct and leisure centre and red light district all in one, but it isn’t where you live. We prefer a little elbow room, a bigger living room, with appliances we can turn on and off.’ However it is not true that men are immune to this phenomenon, which is reminiscent of the old joke that ends, ‘but I make love to one sheep...’ Despite his glittering literary achievements, Nabokov always was and always will be referred to as ‘the author of Lolita’ and everyone will always wonder how close his personal taste was to Humbert Humbert’s. Another author who has fallen victim to this effect is the American Nicholson Baker, a very stylish, minimal and literary author who has written several completely non-sexual novels, as well as three that are very sexy. An interview with him in the heavyweight New York Times is indexed online as ‘Nicholson Baker’s Dirty Mind’, and headed ‘Nicholson Baker: The Mad Scientist of Smut;’ it opens, ‘Nicholson Baker does not look like a dirty-book writer. His color is good. His gaze is direct, with none of the sidelong furtiveness of the compulsive masturbator.’ This is because Nicholson’s mind is precisely as dirty as the average straight adult male’s. 

Not that Baker seems to mind. He talks about us being in a ‘post pornographic’ era, where porn is everywhere and has become part of everyday life. In writing his ‘raunchy’ books he said he ‘wanted to avoid the flavour of arty erotica,’ and, as with a porn movie, he was not interested in developing the characters. ‘It has characters, but how deeply do we know them? It’s not like plumbing the depths of each person's soul.’ But even though Baker's style is very cool and detached, ‘it has to be arousing. A book with this level of smut, filth, whatever – there would be no point if it wasn’t arousing to write. There’s nothing like writing a sex scene. You're writing a little slower. You're in a world that you’ve invented, and you're slowly describing it. It’s a turn on, no question. It’s self-seductive.’ Baker says that, as far as he knows, his children have not read any of his books.

Violette Leduc (more of her later too) wrote about self-seduction, about herself writing the highly erotic, autobiographical sex scene between herself and her friend at a girls boarding school: we have come across the concept of books that are meant to be read with one hand: hers was written with one hand.

I was writing, I was writing under their dictation. I wrote with one hand, and with the other... I loved myself to love them, to get back to them, to translate them, to not betray them... One arm was free on the table, my head fell onto that arm. I was speaking to them... I am being swept away by the wave, pleasure is lurking.

Susie Bright makes the point that being good at sex does not guarantee that one will be able to write about it well. Marguerite Duras said that she believed that things were exactly the opposite way round, and she was speaking from a position of considerable personal experience: ‘I’ve noticed that writers who are superb at making love are much more rarely great writers than those who are scared and not so good at it.’ Duras also said, ‘I rarely gave those lovers my books to read. Women should not let their lovers read the books they write.’

As well as the quality and texture of the writing itself, one of the essential differences between pornography and literary eroticism is that, in pornography, there are no characters, no individuals, no emotions, no past or future, no before or after – all the things which are central to literature – to ‘readerly’ literature at least. There are no ‘stories’ in pornography, though of course this is also sometimes true in modernism. The stereotypes of pornography are, sometimes literally, faceless; they are just de-faced bodies – often not even bodies, just sexual organs. As Jean Baudrillard says of contemporary pornography in Seduction:

the body here becomes monstrously visible, it becomes the sign of a monster called desire... the total triumph in pornography of the obscene body, to the point where the face is effaced. The erotic models are faceless, the actors are neither beautiful, ugly, or expressive; functional nudity effaces everything in the ‘spectacularity’ of sex.

Pornography, says Baudrillard, amplifies everything, drowning out the background noise, the verisimilitude which gives literature its depth; it is the ‘quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules.’ Whereas eroticism veils reality, pornography reveals, not reality but an obscene hyperreality, ‘the inexorable, microscopic truth of sex.’

Beatrice Faust, in her book Women, Sex and Pornography, makes the related point that in pornography, not only are the performers anonymous but so are the authors: pornography ‘lacks a maker’s style as well as a maker’s name’. The works considered in Text Acts, however, all carry the individual literary style (if not the name) of their creator. As George Steiner says, in his essay Night Words, ‘where a Diderot, a Crébillon fils, a Swinburne or an Apollinaire write erotica, the result will have some of the qualities which distinguish their more public works’. Iwan Bloch, the pioneering sexologist who first published the lost manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s most extreme novel The 120 Days of Sodom in 1904, made a similar point in The Sexual Life of our Times.

Speaking generally, it is a remarkable phenomenon (and one which is in flat contradiction to the assertion so frequently made that pornography and true art cannot possibly be associated) that so many spirits of the first rank, great artists either in literature or plastic art, have enriched pornography themselves by works of their own, or, failing this, have at least been notorious lovers of pornography... we must always keep clearly before our minds the distinction between ‘pornography’ and ‘eroticism.’ A book can justly be called obscene only when it has been composed simply, solely, and exclusively for the purpose of producing sexual excitement, when its contents aim at inducing in its readers a condition of coarse and brutish sensuality. This definition clearly excludes all those literary products which, notwithstanding the existence of isolated erotic, or even obscene, passages, are yet composed for purposes radically different from that above described.

In another work, Ethnological and Cultural Studies of the Sex Life in England (according to the title page it was ‘Privately Issued by Subscription to Cultured Adults Only’ in New York in 1934), Bloch makes it clear that he does not hold any brief for the ‘wretched trash’ of pornography, which is ‘erotic literature in its narrowest sense and is rightfully condemned by society for its pernicious influence in arousing perverse lusts and desires in both young and old.’ It is not that Bloch disapproves of all literature that features sex: ‘The arousing of sexual excitation by literature may often be of the greatest aid to frigid or indifferent wives and husbands,’ by allowing an outlet for the reader’s ‘sexual emotions,’ which he calls katharsis. It is only when a work ‘attempts to arouse perverse desires, not to relieve them by sublimity of language, style, motive etc., that we can rightfully call the book pornographic, or, in the ambiguous legal sense obscene.’

Although Bloch was not impressed by English fiction, he does call Lady Chatterley’s Lover a ‘supreme modern work enabling sex passion,’ a ‘genuine erotic novel, perhaps the finest of its kind, not only in England but in modern literature.’ He also calls Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves the ‘greatest erotic autobiography in the world,’ and Harris himself ‘a colossus who strode across this puny world.’ (The German Bloch and his American publisher use the word English rather too broadly: John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill, which he discusses, was Scottish and Harris was Irish.) In the introduction Bloch talks about the fact that an age and a people may be judged by the eroticism of their writing.

This universal agreement on the significance of eroticism in the prose and poetry of a people may best be tested for correctness of judgement by an examination of the crassest and grossest expression of eroticism as it is revealed in the so-called ‘obscene’ literature, in the narrower sense. And, in fact, the character of the English people is mirrored very clearly and distinctly in their erotic literature. Those extreme developments of the English national character, brutality, grossness, eccentricity, stolid pride, are the elements which attract our immediate attention in a far greater degree than in the ordinary works of belles lettres and poesy which, in turn, expose the entire solidarity, profundity, sentimentality, hypochondria and affected prudery of the inner mind of the English nation.

Bloch was not wrong about British prudery. In Volume Six of Studies in the Psychology of Sex – published, like Bloch’s works in Germany and America – British sexologist Havelock Ellis talks ruefully about how he had naïvely hoped that his scientific studies would be accepted with some degree of respect in his native land. They weren’t.

When only one volume of these Studies had been written and published in England, a prosecution, instigated by the government, put an end to the sale of that volume in England, and led me to resolve that the subsequent volumes should not be published in my own country. I do not complain. I am grateful for the early and generous sympathy with which my work was received in Germany and the United States, and I recognise that it has had a wider circulation, both in English and the other chief languages of the world, than would have been possible by the modest method of issue which the government of my own country induced me to abandon.

In the introduction to the book Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology, the editors equate the rise of both modernist literature and of the literary eroticism that so often accompanies it, with the prevailing social and technological conditions around the turn of the twentieth century that nurtured the works on sexology published by Bloch, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and others, as well as the associated rise of psychoanalysis.

The various transformations in the concept of human sexuality, and thus of the erotic, that occurred in both sexology and psychoanalysis at this time were closely related to specifically modern socio-cultural developments, including secularisation, capitalism, the advent of scientism and positivism, and rapid technological advances, not least in the field of communication... When conceptions of sexuality change, literary representations of the erotic will tend to reflect these changes, either by embracing them or by engaging critically with them. This is certainly the case with modernism, in which sexuality and erotic experience play a central role, and in which the heritage of sexology and psychoanalysis is very much in evidence. Diverse forms of sexual desire are at the heart of many of the major avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.

In Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850 – 1930, one of the same authors, Anna Schaffner, makes a similar point: the turn of the century saw a rise in interest in and expression of what had been considered the unsayable, which led to new ways of saying it: hence the modernist revolution in literary style as well as the inclusion of formerly taboo content. ‘The modern sexual perversions, which include homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism, preoccupied the cultural imagination.’ And similarly, in Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship & Experiment 1900 – 1940, Rachel Potter shows how modernist writers stretched ideas of what could be written about as well as the ways in which it could be written about.

Sexualised obscene bodies, bodies that deliberately violated historically specific religious and legal taboos – Connie and Mellors having sex in the grounds of an aristocratic estate in Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Leopold Bloom masturbating while listening to the church choir in Ulysses – were common in modernist texts. But there were also representations of the obscene boundaries of the human form: Molly Bloom’s menstruating flow at the end of Ulysses, Fresca pissing in the street in the first draft of The Waste Land, the description of Bloom ‘easing his bowels’ in Ulysses, or Nathanael West’s journey up the anus of the Trojan horse in The Dream Life of Balso Snell, explored and stretched the fluid boundaries of the human subject... Other taboo bodies appeared in modernist and avant-garde texts, such as the sexualised physical parts of Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack. There were the colloquial dirty words that were shouted from modernist texts: the fucks, sluts, bitches, and cunts of Joyce’s, Lawrence’s, Henry Miller’s, Lawrence Durrell’s, and Barnes’ texts.

Most modernist literature of course is ‘really written’ in TS Eliot’s sense, though, as I argued in my book Amongst Those Left, stylistic experiment in literature, or at least in the novel, more or less ended around 1980 and around that time literary transgressiveness became more about content – especially taboo-breaking sexual content – than literary style.

I will be excluding from Text Acts works which, in my opinion, do not have this literary or writerly quality; as Pisanus Fraxi said of the works he had chosen to include in his monumental, three-volume Index of Forbidden Books in the 1890s, ‘I have been attracted by masterpieces, and have neglected the unartistic.’ I will also exclude work which, in framing the 1857 Obscene Publication Act in the UK, Lord Campbell would have described as being ‘written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind.’

This definition was intended to exclude works from the Act which had ‘literary merit’, a term which was severely tested  in the courts much later. Charles Rembar, the attorney who defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill in their American obscenity trials, wrote a detailed and fascinating history of obscenity trials in twentieth-century America in his 1966 book The End of Obscenity. The book details the rapid evolution of the concept of ‘literary merit’ as a defence against the charge of obscenity and the banning of books.

In 1956 the concept did not exist at all. In 1966 it was full-grown and dominant, and turned a hard hand against censorship, and laid an exceedingly gentle one on the freedom to write and publish.

The idea was this: no matter what the courts and the legislatures had traditionally deemed ‘obscene’ – no matter what the term meant to lay men or to lawyers – the government could not suppress a book if it had merit as literature.

In the intervening ten years, the trials of the three books Rembar defended completely changed the landscape.

Before these cases, literary merit had occasionally been a factor in obscenity prosecutions, but a subordinate one. The ultimate question was whether the writing was lustful – that is, whether it excited a sexual response. If it did, it was obscene, and if it was obscene it could be banned and its author and publisher sent to jail. Now, only a few years later, the law is that the sexual content of a book, and the sexual stirrings it may provoke in its readers, cannot condemn work that has any literary value.

This was something of a reversal of previous norms, which amounted to the idea that good writing makes the content even more offensive. In 1959, when Barney Rosset’s Grove Press had taken the American Post Office to court to try to reverse the ban on mailing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (Rosset himself tells this and other stories wonderfully in My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship), the Post Office told the court that ‘the excellence of Lawrence’s descriptions make it all the more necessary to ban the book.’ Much earlier, during the First World War, a police solicitor in the UK, referring to the seizure of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow said in similar terms that the book was obscene despite the fact that the obscenity ‘was wrapped up in language which I suppose will be regarded in some quarters as an artistic and intellectual effort’.

Sometimes it worked the other way though: works that were ‘really written,’ in other words, works that obscured their subject, and were not likely to be read or even understood by the general public, might escape censorship – it didn't help Ulysses but the realistic Well of Loneliness was banned because of its lesbianism, despite never going further than, ‘and that night, they were not divided,’ whereas the modernist Nightwood wasn’t. There is even an argument that the very quality of the writing, by a literary author with a moral intent, might increase our disgust with the subject: in the spoof foreword to Lolita, the fictional John Ray argues that it is precisely the quality of Humbert’s writing that turns us against him: ‘how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!’

As Rembar says, ‘up to 1966, some judges denounced good writing on the ground that it made a pernicious book all the more effective: well-written obscenity was the worst kind.’ He points out that the police generally turned a blind eye to ‘whip and jockstrap one-shots’ while prosecuting what purported to be serious literature: ‘nothing infuriates the vigilante so much as the combination of sex and intellect;’ that combination is the exact subject of Text Acts.

By 1966, Rembar says, ‘the law recognised two kinds of books: literature, which produces cortical responses, or in any case emotional responses from somewhere above the belt, and pornography, which gets you in the groin. The categories were treated as mutually exclusive.’ In her 1967 essay The Pornographic Imagination, the critic Susan Sontag, along with Rembar (and of course me in this survey), disagrees with this mutual exclusivity.

Relatively uncommon as they may be, there are writings which it seems reasonable to call pornographic – assuming that the stale label has any use at all – which, at the same time, cannot be refused accreditation as serious literature.

However, Sontag then goes on to identify four reasons why literature and pornography may be considered mutually exclusive by some people: pornography is single-minded where literature is complex; pornography does not have a beginning a middle and an end; pornography is not concerned with the means of expression, since it seeks to evoke ‘non-verbal fantasies;’ literature is concerned with complex emotions and interpersonal relationships between fully-formed individuals whereas pornography is only concerned with the physical. It seems to me that Sontag is wrong about this: many works of modernism with no hint of the erotic – Waiting for Godot for example – fail all four of her tests while undoubtedly being literature.

Another critic who wrote about the status of eroticism in literature, but much earlier, was the surrealist poet Robert Desnos – whose erotic novel Liberty or Love we will be looking at later – in his short book On Eroticism: considered in its written manifestations and from the point of view of the modern spirit (written in 1923 but not published until 1953 and still not available in English). Desnos echoes Rembar’s distinction of the ‘above and below the belt’ effects of different kinds of writing and in the preface he introduces some useful definitions.

Eroticism: All that relates to love to evoke it, to provoke it, to express it, to satisfy it, etc.

Erotic literature: Which possesses one or several of the attributions of eroticism – which treats of love.

Obscenity: all that contradicts customs and prejudices in love and modesty

Pornography: obscene literature limited to the lower faculties (cerebrospinal). Pejorative or not, according to the cerebricity [cérébralité] of who employs it.

In general, the novels included in this study are by authors with a high degree of  cerebricity, including DH Lawrence, who, in addition to a string of novels with a high erotic content, wrote a pamphlet called Pornography and Obscenity, 1929, where he discussed this issue. Although he does not use the words erotic or eroticism, Lawrence does distinguish between the ‘sex appeal’ that is a key part of great art and literature (of which he approves), and that which is mere pornography (of which he doesn’t).

Even quite advanced art critics would try to make us believe that any picture or book which had ‘sex appeal’ was ipso facto a bad book or picture. This is just canting hypocrisy. Half the great poems, pictures, music, stories of the whole world are great by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal.

Lawrence says that pornography is not bad because it ‘arouses sexual feelings... I think not. No matter how hard we may pretend otherwise, most of us rather like a moderate rousing of our sex. It warms us, stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day.’

But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously. It would not be very difficult. In the first place, genuine pornography is almost always underworld, it doesn’t come into the open. In the second, you can recognise it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit.

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable.

Lawrence says that whereas writing like his celebrates sex, pornography degrades it. Pornography, he says, encourages masturbation whereas writing that celebrates sex encourages openness between sexually-aware, adult individuals. Masturbation produces nothing, generates nothing and encourages narcissism, which focus on the self rather than on others and on society. For Lawrence, masturbation is the opposite of passion: his ultimate goal in life. In Women in Love, Birkin criticises Hermione for her lack of it: ‘what you want is pornography – looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’ For Lawrence, the physical always trumped the mental. However, in his book Sexual Fiction, Maurice Charney denies that Lawrence’s analysis of pornography is helpful.

One could protest that Lawrence’s sanitized and pornography-less sex is sex without demonic energy. In most sexual writing, secrecy is a necessary stimulus to the erotic imagination. Lawrence hardly offers a logical definition at all, since he uses ‘pornography’ as a dirty word... Lawrence’s argument about pornography is thoroughly circular.

Henry Miller, who, like Lawrence was attacked throughout his life by the censors, also wrote a pamphlet discussing pornography and obscenity called The World of Sex, 1940. Talking about the writing of Tropic of Cancer, he says: ‘Liberally larded with sex as was that work, the concern of its author was not with sex, nor with religion, but with the problem of self-liberation.’ Although Miller does not himself make this point, writers of pornography are not generally concerned with self-expression or self-liberation but with the sexual release of the reader. Miller was far more concerned about himself than his reader.

Tropic of Cancer is a blood-soaked testament revealing the ravages of my struggle in the womb of death. The strong odor of sex which it purveys is really the aroma of birth; it is disagreeable or repulsive only to those who fail to recognise its significance.

This ‘strong odor of sex’ that Miller evokes relies on graphic and unflinching imagery; the use of words designed to shock rather than to arouse: they are in fact deliberately obscene rather than erotic or even pornographic. Discussing Ulysses, Arnold Bennett said that it was ‘not pornographic, but it is more indecent, obscene, scatological and licentious than the majority of professedly pornographic books.’ And so it is. In one of his many letters to James Joyce objecting to what he considered Joyce’s gratuitous emphasis on the lavatorial, Ezra Pound coined the wonderful word ‘arsethetic’, which sums it up nicely. Anyone buying Ulysses for the naughty bits would be very disappointed to have struggled through over seven hundred pages of the densest, most writerly writing before coming to Molly Bloom’s monologue of pure jouissance, which contains what Joyce called the ‘four cardinal points... the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt.’

Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I make him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose that's what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want £1 or perhaps 30/

You may or may not consider this to be great writing but it is definitely ‘really written’ and it is certainly not pornography; Ulysses is much too heavy to be read with one hand. Another very writerly writer accused of being a pornographer was Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita is perhaps even more shocking today, with our greater awareness of paedophilia, than it was then. It is also by no means pornography, though, as Nabokov pointed out in an essay called ‘A Book Entitled Lolita’, some people bought it for that reason, ‘assuming that this was going to be a lewd book. They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when they stopped, readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down.’ Pornography, as Nabokov points out, has to keep delivering on its promise; it needs to be, as Barthes would say, readerly – oriented toward the reader’s immediate needs – not writerly  – oriented to the writer’s self-expression. In pornography, the jouissance needs to be literal not metaphorical, the gratification physical not intellectual. As in any genre fiction, style and structure, as well as content, must follow a well-defined arc; this precludes, is incompatible with, originality and individuality. As Nabokov says:

In modern times the term pornography connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action upon the patient. Old rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his patient fed the same security of satisfaction as, for example, fans of detective stories feel... Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust. The novel must consist of an alternation of sexual scenes... Moreover, the sexual scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the number of participants.

The Nabokov specialist Alfred Appel, a former student on Nabokov’s Literature 311-312 course at Cornell University – dubbed Dirty Lit because it covered the likes of Madam Bovary and Ulysses – recalled in his later introduction to Lolita how he had bought the book while in the American army in Paris. ‘Hey, lemme read your dirty book,’ says a fellow soldier. ‘Read it aloud,’ says another. He does. But, while still on the first page, he throws it against the wall in disgust. ‘It’s God-Damn Litachure!!’ In How to Write a Dirty Story, Susie Bright tells a similar story of how, when she was thirteen, a friend gave her The Godfather – not, admittedly the greatest literature – and told her to read page twenty-seven. Bright did.

‘Did you read the good part?'

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But, you know, the whole book is really good; I'm way past page twenty-seven now.’

‘You're reading the whole book? You are such a moron!’

Of course, since most people are put off by the idea of literature, it is in the publisher’s interest for serious, literary work to be labelled pornography and banned. Books by respected but formerly obscure literary authors – Nabokov's Lolita, Joyce's Ulysses, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Ginsberg’s Howl – benefited enormously in terms of sales from being banned or labelled as pornography. How many of Nabokov’s other novels can most people name? He himself said that it was Lolita who was famous not himself. When the novel was first published in 1955 it had no reviews and almost no sales. Then, the next year, the British novelist Graham Greene listed it in the highly-respected, establishment British newspaper The Times as one of the best books of the year. The editor of the Daily Express immediately accused Greene and The Times of peddling pornography, and the rest is history. Nabokov was soon able to give up his university teaching job and concentrate on writing more literary but obscure novels.

In the Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter agrees with the idea that well-written pornography is more dangerous than badly-written, but for a different reason. Pornography in general, she says, ‘is made by and addressed to the politically dominant minority in the world, as an instrument of repression, not only of women, but of men too.’ Pornography is ‘the orphan little sister of the arts,’ and there can be ‘no question of an aesthetics of pornography. It can never be art for art’s sake.’ Pornography is necessarily conventional and predictable, ‘there is no room here for tension or the unexpected’. Pornography thus supports the existing power structures. But well-written pornography can change people's ideas, ‘the more pornographic writing acquires the techniques of real literature, of real art, the more deeply subversive it is likely to be in that the more likely it is to affect the reader’s perceptions of the world.’ However, says Carter, the more ‘writerly’ the pornography, the fewer people will read it: ‘once pornography is labelled art or literature it is stamped with the approval of an elitist culture and many ordinary people will avoid it on principle, out of fear of being bored’.

The British novelist JG Ballard, writing about his own novel Crash – which some people saw as fetishist pornography – argued that, while it is true that pornography reflects current male/female power structures, the revealing of those structures is, or at least can be, a positive political act on behalf of the writer. ‘In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way’.

Unlike written-for-purpose pornography, the Litachure I will be looking at in Text Acts, though it may be Dirty Lit, is not generally designed to assist the reader’s lust, tepid or otherwise. Therefore it is not limited to cliché and does not necessarily have to involve any overt sexual acts or explicit sexual words: arguably, the more explicit the language the less erotic the effect; Joyce’s ‘arsethetic’ language and DH Lawrence’s very blunt use of sexual terms are examples. And comparing the coarseness of Henry Miller’s language to the refinement of his lover Anaïs Nin’s makes this point very well. She differentiates between ‘Henry Miller’s explicitness and my ambiguities; between his humorous, Rabelaisian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships’. Nin herself wrote ‘poetic’ novels and published a book advocating the poetic novel; virtually every sentence she ever wrote was erotic, partly because she never used crude language. After meeting Henry Miller she tried it his way, unsuccessfully. ‘I have dipped into obscenity, dirt, and his world of shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch and am on the way up again... Again and again I have traversed the regions of realism and found them arid. And again I return to poetry.’ Nin said that women needed a different, less explicit, more poetic language, free of obscenity and crudity to describe their experiences. ‘I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate.’

But since Miller and Lawrence, readers have come to expect rude words in their dirty books. The foreword to Lolita ‘warns’ the reader that there is ‘not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by the absence here.’ Introducing a 1959 surrealist exhibition, André Breton, one of the cofounders of surrealism, says: ‘It goes without saying that the surrealist concept of eroticism rejects, to start with, anything in the nature of vulgar suggestiveness.’ And this is not, according to Breton at least, prudishness, but because vulgarity is the opposite of eroticism. He quotes with approval the author of the preface to the Dictionnaire Érotique Latin-Français of 1885:

Despite all the reasons that may be put forward in favour of speaking frankly and avoiding prudery, I am inclined to share the aversion of many people towards those words which we are told are the language of love, which smell bad and make dirty stains on the paper on which they are written.

Breton agrees: ‘it is indeed only at this price that eroticism, rescued from shame, can claim the high place to which it is entitled.’ Breton's secretary and collaborator, the philosopher and art historian Sarane Alexandrian, in the introduction to his Histoire de la Littérature Érotique, said that erotica was merely pornography with ‘something else added’ and that the important distinction was between the erotic and the obscene. ‘In this case, we believe that eroticism is everything that makes the flesh desirable, that shows it in its best light or in the blossom, gives an impression of health, beauty, delightful play; whereas the obscene degrades the flesh, associated with filth, infirmities, scatological jokes, dirty words.’ And the novelist Italo Calvino, in his essay ‘Definitions of Territories: Eroticism’ said, ‘sexuality in literature is a language in which what is not said is more important than what is.’ Roland Barthes agrees:

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no ‘erogenous zones’ (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis as so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.

In fact, to be erotic, a text need not even mention sex: in his book The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity, Vernon A Rosario points out that the French word érotique first occurs in a printed text in 1825 in a manual on gastronomy, in reference to truffles. ‘Who says truffle, pronounces a great word that awakens erotic and gourmand memories among the sex in skirts, and gourmand and erotic memories among the sex with beards.’ As Fiona Pitt-Kethley says in The Literary Companion to Sex, ‘erotic literature and literature about sex are not necessarily the same.’

Anaïs Nin wrote, unwittingly, a perfect description of what is pornographic versus what is erotic, describing the time when she and her collaborators were writing ‘erotica’ to order at a dollar a page. But in fact what was required was not erotica but pornography. The collector who was paying them kept saying: ‘Less poetry. Be specific.’ But for Nin, poetry was the necessary aphrodisiac; she could not write about ‘clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love – orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, background music, mood, atmosphere, variations.’ The collector ‘knew nothing of the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters.’ He wanted to read pornography, they wanted to write erotic literature. They wrote him a letter.

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have to water it down. More than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its colour, flavour, rhythms, intensities.

You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. That is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

In The Future of the Novel, Nin defined erotic writing – as opposed to sexual writing – in positive, rather than negative terms in relation to the American novelist Maude Hutchins (I have written at length about Hutchins in my book Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in Mid-Twentieth Century Women’s Fiction):

She is one of our few erotic writers, and by erotic I mean something quite different from sexual. We have many direct anatomical sexual writers. Very few erotic. By erotic I mean the totality of sexual experience, its atmosphere, mood, sensual flavors, mystery, vibrations, the state of ecstasy into which it may plungers, the full range of the senses and emotions which accompany, surround it, and which the explicit flat clinical descriptions destroy.

Rowan Pelling, the founder and former editor of the magazine Erotic Review also wrote about the delicate, subtle and allusive nature of the erotic compared to the crudity and explicitness of the pornographic. Distinguishing between them in the introduction to the magazine’s Bedside Companion she said that the office’s motto was, ‘the erotic is what you do with a feather; the perverse involves the whole bird.’ Using similar above- and below-the-belt terms to Rembar and Desnos, she says that this motto

reminds us that the erotic, at its finest exposition, is at ease, that the tickling of a feather can keep a victim in a frenzy of anticipation without ever releasing the prisoner to the blessed relief of orgasm. The evanescence of a feather evokes the subtle nature of eroticism, with its instant appeal to the mind before it triggers a response in the groin (unlike the hard-core stuff, where the appeal to the groin is instantaneous).

In the home page of Pelling’s latest online magazine venture, she makes a similar distinction: ‘The Amorist seeks to counter the modern tendency to see sex