Seducing the Demon (7 page)

The excitement of writing sometimes leads to sex, or at least autosex, by which I don’t mean sex in a car. The excitement of words can stimulate bodily juices. And why not? The white heat that makes words assemble on the page also affects the hormones. When I feel I am telling my truth, my glands also catch fire. The muse screws.

In the days before D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Henry Miller, when writers were not allowed to describe sex, when the road to the bedroom had to be paved with asterisks, many of us thought that once we had the freedom to describe the sexual act, everything would be different. For a while it was.

There was a brief period of exuberant sexual freedom in American literature that began around 1967 with John Updike’s
Couples,
continued with Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
and led to my own
Fear of Flying
in 1973. All these breakthroughs were really born out of Henry Miller’s 1934 Paris novel,
Tropic of Cancer,
written and first published in France, that finally became a legal immigrant to America in 1962.

It was not long, however, before pornography overwhelmed literature. The same freedom that allowed real writers to chronicle the powerful sexual drives most of us experience also allowed pornographers to make fortunes off trash. And it was not long before the line between garbage and literature became hopelessly blurred.

I’m often asked what the difference is between pornography and literature? I have a simple distinction. If a piece of work is merely utilitarian, if it stimulates and facilitates only masturbation, it is pornography. If it illustrates human feelings, it is something more. That something more may not rise to the level of art but at least it aspires to it. Pornography aspires to nothing but getting the customer off. It is the massage parlor of literature. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting the customer off. But its function is always strictly limited. The buyer of pornography doesn’t want any hint of poetry to distract him from what Vladimir Nabokov called his “tepid lust.”

Henry Miller, who was always accused by stuffy critics of being a pornographer, could not, in fact, write pornography. When he was most broke in the thirties, his lover Anais Nin put him in touch with a rich connoisseur of the pornographic who was willing to pay handsomely and by the page. Henry Miller didn’t meet the connoisseur’s standards. Too much literature apparently distracted him from his tepid lust. Nin
was
able to do it.
The Little Birds
is the result of her commission.

 

 

Most societies have been far more open to eroticism than ours. The ancient Greeks and the ancient Hindus had no problem imagining and worshipping lusty gods and goddesses. They knew that Eros was dangerous and tricky, but they also knew Eros was human. We Americans seem to need sex and contrition at the same time. Christianity and Islam have not eradicated lust but have managed to make it dirty—the worst of both worlds. No wonder we specialize in perverts and pedophilia. No wonder we have no idea what to do with teenagers but preach abstinence to them. We also have no idea what to do with ourselves. All our media use sex to sell products, yet we constantly demand that teenagers join the Anti-Sex League. Porn has become the most profitable category on the Internet while our hypocritical pundits and preachers denounce sex in the name of keeping the children pure. But how can we keep our children pure except by example? If we need sexual hypocrisy to get off, won’t they?

Judaism has a less hypocritical relationship with sex than Pauline Christianity. Sex in marriage is celebrated, even mandated. But Orthodox Judaism is also full of prohibitions. And prohibitions beget hypocrisy. When a dominatrix invited me to her lair to witness sadomasochistic rites (research for one of my novels), I noticed that her waiting room was full of young men in yarmulkes. Strict prohibitions beget transgressions.

Lately, there is more sex in books by rebellious women writers. Susie Bright and Toni Bentley, among others, are continuing the psychological exploration of sex through writing about once forbidden subjects like anal sex, bisexuality and masochism. My brilliant former poetry student Daphne Merkin has had the courage to write about the dark delights of spanking. In prose so precise it might well be poetry, she has dared to report desires we still experience despite their political incorrectness.

D. H. Lawrence notwithstanding, I’ve always thought that the most revealing sex takes place inside the head. How else could the demon lover conquer when usually he turns out to be an ordinary guy? Fantasy has always fueled my hottest encounters. Without fantasy, sex is not much more than friction.

In
Fear of Flying
, I wanted to slice open my protagonist’s head and reveal the fantasies within. There was far more fantasy than reality. Most of the sexual escapades were disappointing compared to the lavishness of Isadora’s fantasy life. Perhaps that’s the case with most people. Our fantasies are a shortcut to revealing ourselves. Remember Virginia Woolf’s reaction to James Joyce’s
Ulysses:
“... a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” She found the book disgusting. It aroused her class prejudices: “... an illiterate, under-bred book . . . the book of a self-taught working man.” The physicality of
Ulysses,
which has delighted so many readers, made her squirm.

What were Virginia Woolf’s fantasies? I think we see them in
Orlando,
where she imagines herself effortlessly switching genders with the centuries. She is always the aesthete, the bodiless romantic, whichever gender she inhabits. It is never easy to see her as a totally physical being. She is Ariel to James Joyce’s Caliban.

The hardest thing for me about writing sex scenes is that I know when writing them that I am revealing myself totally. There’s no place to hide. My fantasies reveal me no matter how I ornament them with eighteenth-century wigs or sixteenth-century chopines or ancient Greek tunics. My fantasies
are
me.

In my twenties, I used to ride the train from Heidelberg to Frankfurt four days a week to visit my analyst. In the rocking of the train, in my early morning drowsiness, I allowed my fantasies to bubble up into consciousness. Suppose on that train I saw a man who moved me, whose face, whose walk, whose smell stimulated lust? Suppose the train entered a gallery or grew suddenly dark and it was possible for us to make love secretly, without ever knowing each other’s names? That’s how the fantasy of the Zipless Fuck was born.

For the longest time, women in novels had to be severely punished for their sexual expression. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary died for their sins. That archetype extended far into the twentieth century with a slight change: Loss of a child substituting for death itself. I am thinking of
The Good Mother,
by Sue Miller, and
August Is a Wicked Month,
by Edna O’Brien. We are still not entirely comfortable with sexuality in women going unpunished.

The most promiscuous woman character in
Sex and the City
is rebuked with breast cancer. For all that Samantha bears it heroically, breast cancer is clearly a variant of the old dies-for-her-sins paradigm. I’ve already talked about my own strong unconscious pull toward that paradigm and my deliberate desire not to fulfill it. This is why writing a novel is such a profound self-exploration. In the process, you discover how deeply societal myths have marked you. If you wish to change the world, you must first change yourself. Nowhere is this clearer than in writing about sex.

When D. H. Lawrence wrote in the twenties about Lady Chatterley and Mellors twining gentians in each other’s pubic hair, it was as shocking as it would be silly now. When Lawrence used the word “cunt” it was unheard of. Now it is commonplace.

One of the qualities I liked best about Susan Minot’s lovely novel
Rapture,
which tells the story of two former lovers briefly reuniting sexually, was her ability to get inside intimacy without using four-letter words. This may sound like odd praise coming from a writer who tried to domesticate four-letter words in her early books. But sexual language is more common now, so freshness must be sought by other means. Any writer who writes about sex will inevitably come up against the dilemma that a culture that denigrates sex will have mostly pejorative words for the genitals and for acts of love. “Fucking” is a violent term that means both intercourse and submission. “Cunt” is both a term of abuse and a label for the female genital. “Prick” is also a term of abuse. Our language of sex tells us how much we hate and fear sex even as we yearn for it. It takes a great deal of sensitivity and skill to make sexual language new. English has dirty words like “fuck” and “cunt” and medical words like “intercourse” and “vagina.” Often writers are tempted to make up new words, like James Joyce referring to Molly Bloom’s “plump mellow yellow smellow melons . . . in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”

The language with which my characters talk about sex reveals them as much as anything. A woman who says “down there” is a different creature from a woman who says “my cunt.” When I did a brief stint in Eve Ensler’s
Vagina Monologues
in New York, I was given the monologue of an uptight old lady who could not say the word “vagina.” She could hardly say “down there.” Impersonating that character, I really began to understand how hard it was for certain people to deal with spoken sex. Our sexual speech reflects our discomfort with the whole subject.

Part of the great fun I had in writing
Fanny
was to play with all the rambunctious sexual words that were current in the eighteenth century. Once you have your pick of
pillicock
,
picklock
and
privy member,
how can you ever be satisfied with a mere prick again? Once you have
cunnikin
,
divine monosyllable, altar of hymen, belle chose, centre-of-bliss, cream-jug, Cupid’s cloister, quim, quimsby or quivive,
why on earth would you want
snatch
?

When I have trouble writing about sex with freshness, I retrieve abandoned words from the past—words like “quim” or “quente”—or I content myself with describing the yearning for sex without the mechanics. The yearning is probably the most important part anyway. I find the most difficult aspect of writing about sex to be evoking the spiritual connection between people. Sometimes the things that are most important in life are beyond words.

Not long ago I went to the opening of a movie in which I appeared as a cultural commentator. It was a documentary called
Inside Deep Throat
and basically it took the position that this 1972 porno film had permanently changed the world.

That’s not at
all
how I remember it. I remember the late sixties and early seventies as a time of exuberance and hope. Pornography was only a tiny part of it. Many of us believed that once people were no longer hypocritical about sex, they would no longer be hypocritical about other things—like politics. How naive that was! We never imagined a world where right-wing ideologues might jerk off on their computers and then go to Congress and vote against sex education for teenagers. We foolishly believed that
all
hypocrisy would vanish once people stopped being hypocritical about sex. It’s not that simple. Hypocrisy is always with us. We now live in a world where sex is everywhere but has been utterly degraded. That was the last thing I expected The Sixties to promote.

All the more reason to write about sex honestly today. Sex motivates. Why pretend otherwise? Close-ups on the genitals are sometimes needed, sometimes not. Sometimes close-ups only blur the view.

And what about the fear of disease? How has that changed sex in our time? Larry Kramer has written movingly about the recklessness of young gay men growing up in the age of the AIDS “cocktail,” confident that pills exist for every malady. Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.

 

 

Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

When it is ecstatic, nothing is more powerful than sex. And nothing is more difficult to capture in words than transcendence. It’s not only because sex is embarrassing to many people, but also because ecstasy implies loss of control. This is difficult to acknowledge.

Nobody seems to talk about ecstasy these days. Sex is always talked about in terms of control. Teenage girls giving blow jobs for power not pleasure, middle-aged women boasting of their boy toys, men modelizing for the sake of show. Only gay men admit to being in pursuit of ecstasy, but often their ecstasy is fueled by drugs. If you go back and look at D. H. Lawrence, who has been discovered and abandoned so many times that he bores most literary folk, you’ll see that his great revolution was to get ecstasy down on the page, and ecstasy cannot exist without loss of control.