Text Acts Chapter 3: Obelisk Press

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Text Acts by Francis Booth CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: AU DÉBUT DE SIÈCLE Arthur Schnitzler Reigen Dream Story Henri Barbusse Hell Pierre Louÿs The Young Girl’s Handbook Three Daughters of their Mother Pybrac Guillaume Apollinaire The Eleven Thousand Rods The Exploits of a Young Don Juan Raymond Radiguet The Devil in the Flesh Aleister Crowley The Nameless Novel Paul Leppin Daniel Jesus Severin’s Road to Darkness Blaugast CHAPTER 3: OBELISK PRESS Frank Harris My Life and Loves DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer The World of Sex Lawrence Durrell The Black Book CHAPTER 4: SEX AND SURREALISM Researches Into Sexuality Louis Aragon Irène’s C*** 1929 Robert Desnos On Eroticism Liberty or Love The Devil’s Popess Salvador Dalí Rêverie CHAPTER 5: LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR Pierre Klossowski: Sade My Neighbour Maurice Blanchot: Sade’s Reason Simone de Beauvoir: Must We Burn Sade?

Gilles Deleuze: Coldness and Cruelty Roland Barthes: Sade, Fourier, Loyola Angela Carter: The Sadeian Woman Georges Bataille Story of the Eye The Solar Anus Madame Edwarda The Little One The Dead Man My Mother

CHAPTER 6: OLYMPIA PRESS 'Selena Warberg' (Diane Bataille) The Whip Angels ‘Jean de Berg’ (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) The Image 'Pauline Réage' (Anne Desclos) Story of O ‘Harriet Daimler’ (Iris Owens) Darling Innocence The Organisation The Woman Thing The Pleasure Thieves ‘Louise Walbrook’ (Edith Templeton) Gordon Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers The Thief's Journal Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg Candy CHAPTER 7: SEX AND THE NEW NOVEL Alain Robbe-Grillet A Sentimental Novel Marguerite Duras The Ravishing of Lol Stein The Lover The Malady of Death

CHAPTER 8: ’PATAPHYSIQUE/OULIPO ÉROTIQUE ‘Sally Mara’ (Raymond Queneau) We Always Treat Women Too Well ‘Vernon Sullivan’ (Boris Vian) I Spit On Your Graves Harry Mathews Singular Pleasures CHAPTER 9: MY SECRET GARDEN: FRENCH Colette The Pure and the Impure Violette Leduc Thérèse and Isabelle Gabrielle Wittkop The Necrophiliac CHAPTER 10: MY SECRET GARDEN: ENGLISH Anaïs Nin House of Incest Winter of Artifice Delta of Venus Little Birds White Stains Auletris Edith Wharton Beatrice Palmato CHAPTER 11: MY SECRET GARDEN: GERMAN Unika Zürn Dark Spring Elfriede Jelinek Lust The Piano Teacher

OBELISK PRESS I have already written at length in my book Everybody I Can Think of Ever about the Manchester-born, Paris-based Jack Kahane, his Obelisk Press and his relationships with his son, Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press, and with Henry Miller and others, so I will be brief here.

Kahane founded Obelisk to publish in Paris books which could not be published in England or America and sell them to English and American tourists. The story of Obelisk and Kahane is also told at length in three other books: Of Obelisks and Daffodils by Gary Miers and James Armstrong; Obelisk by Neil Pearson and Kahane’s own autobiography Memoirs of a Booklegger. In the preface to a recent reissue of this, Kahane’s granddaughter, who is also Girodias’ daughter, but who had never met Kahane or read his book,

compares the two men through their two autobiographies.

The intentions and the intonations of one and the other are sometimes astonishingly close, perhaps more confident and open with Jack, more sombre and subversive with Maurice. Same kind of humour, same mixture of generosity and cynicism, of austerity and donjuanism, same intent pursuit, sometimes to the point of blindness of what Jack calls the French ‘bonhomie’, a lightheartedness of morals and outlook that would have the power to transform everything, including tragedy, into melodrama vaudeville, and which Maurice adapts to his post‘sexual revolution’ era by provocatively proclaiming himself ‘Prince of Porn’.

FRANK HARRIS I wrote at length about Frank Harris (1856-1931) in Everybody I Can Think of Ever, so I will also be (mercifully) brief about him here.

This is no great loss; although he was connected to many interesting people on the literary scene – including his fellow-Irishmen Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw: he wrote biographies of both of them – and had a fascinating life, travelling around the world at key moments in history and having great adventures, his fourvolume autobiography is not of any literary merit; if it were not for the many explicit and deliberately provocative sexual reminiscences it would have been completely forgotten, as his novels have rightly been. It is only included here because it is of relevance to the history of the Obelisk Press and

because Harris was an important and influential figure on the turn-ofthe-century literary scene; at various times he was editor of the London Evening News, the Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review.

He appointed George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm as drama critics and printed works by Oscar Wilde and HG Wells, who does not seem to have been alone in respecting but not much liking Harris.

His dominating way in conversation startled, amused and then irritated people.

That was what he lived for, talking, writing that was loud talk in ink, and editing. He was a brilliant editor, for a time, and then the impetus gave out, and he flagged rapidly. So soon as he ceased to work vehemently he became unable to work. He could not attend to things without excitement. As his confidence went, he became clumsily loud.

MY LIFE AND LOVES The first of four volumes of Harris’ autobiography, with illustrations of young, naked women, was first published privately by Harris himself in 1922 – the year of modernist landmarks The Waste Land, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and ee cummings’ The Enormous Room. But Harris’

autobiography is neither modernist nor a landmark; it is firmly stuck in the Victorian era when the prolific Anonymous wrote all those gentlemen’s erotic adventures.

(There is a fifth volume in existence, but it is a hoax perpetrated by Maurice Girodias and Alexander Trocchi of Olympia Press; more about them in Volume Two of Text Acts and in my books Amongst Those Left and Everybody I Can Think of Ever) Harris was in his late sixties in 1922, and continued to write his autobiography furiously; the subsequent volumes came out between then and 1927. Kahane acquired the rights in 1931 and began publication in 1934. In his book on Obelisk, Neil Pearson, as a dealer in and historian of erotic literature, is offended by the quality of the writing rather than the amount of sex it contains. He describes it, justly, as a turgid one-thousand-page exercise in autohagiography, occasionally enlivened by unlikely bouts of sex with women who get younger and younger the older Harris gets. A deranged

monument to egotism, and by the standards of the 1920s shockingly explicit, My Life and Loves destroyed Harris’s reputation, crippled him financially and, for all the other accomplishments of his life, reduced him in the eyes of literary history to a bumptious loudmouth, a man who was little more than vanity wrapped in skin.

Pearson might have added that Harris is, even for his time, sexist, racist and patronising, and genuinely seems to believe that the women he seduces enjoy the experience as much as he does; he even seems to believe that they do in fact experience orgasm with him; unless of course they are frigid, one of the only two things – to Harris – that would explain his failure to satisfy any woman. The other ‘reason why girls don’t give themselves freely is the fear of getting a child: they are usually too ignorant or too trusting to feel the fear of getting some disease.’ What a nice man he must have been. Of course, all pornography must show women as being enthusiastic and orgasmic participants, but then most

pornographers understand that they are writing fiction, whereas Harris purports to tell the truth. At the beginning of Volume Two, he seems amazed and aggrieved that the ‘first volume of my autobiography was condemned savagely from one end of the English-speaking world to the other and especially by self-styled men of letters and journalists.’ He continues to plead that he is simply telling the truth: ‘I thought that if I used Truth and described the

intense sex-urge of my youth simply, at the same time showing how passionately eager I have always been to learn and grow at all costs, that at any rate the porch of the temple would be significant and appealing.’

But throughout the work Harris seems neither to learn nor to grow. I do not intend to quote extensively from this huge, and hugely depressing work, but one extract, from Volume One, will I hope suffice to prove the above points (except the racism: the sections where he has sex with black women are too embarrassing even to read, let alone quote from). You will simply have to trust me when I say that this is as good as it gets; if, for some reason, you enjoy it, you are free to plough through the whole thing yourself in your own time. In this extract Harris is talking about a young woman named Rose, whom he is trying to ‘educate’.

I had a very soft spot in my heart for Rose: her beauty of face and form always excited and pleased me and her mind, too, grew quickly through our talks and the books I gave her… She let me study her beauties one by one; but when I turned her around and kissed her bottom, she wanted me to stop: ‘You can’t possibly like or admire that’, was her verdict.

‘Indeed I do’, I cried; but I confessed to myself that she was right; her bottom was adorably dimpled; but it was a little too fat, and the line underneath it was not perfect. One of her breasts, too, was prettier than the other, though both were small and stuck out boldly; my critical sense could find no fault with her triangle or her sex; the lips of it were perfect, very small and rose-red and her clitoris was like a tiny, tiny button. I often wished it were half an inch long like Mrs Mayhew’s.

Only once in our intercourse did I

try to bring her to ecstasy and only half succeeded; consequently I used simply to have her, just to enjoy myself and only now and then went on to a second orgasm so as to really warm her to the love-play; Rose was anything but sensual, though invariably a sweet and an excellent companion.

orgasms. One in which the woman lay passive, acquiescent, serene: the orgasm came out of the darkness, miraculously, dissolving and invading. In another kind, there was a driving force, an anxiety, a tension which made the woman grasp at it as if it would elude her, and the movements became confused and inharmonious, crosscurrents of forces, short circuits which brought an orgasm that did not bring calm, satisfaction, but depression. The first wrought a flowerlike peace, the second, depression, as if the woman had not been possessed.

How did DH Lawrence find out about this?

DH LAWRENCE Frances [Brown] and I talked about woman’s hunger for an impossible bond with man. We wondered how DH Lawrence knew so much about how woman felt in sexual intercourse. How well he described two kinds of

That was Anaïs Nin in a diary entry of 1942, proving that not all male writers have Frank Harris’ unembarrassed lack of concern for a woman’s pleasure. (Nin connects three of the writers in this chapter; I will be looking at her work with great respect and in great depth in Volume Three.) Nin wrote a book on Lawrence, An Unprofessional Study, published in 1932. In it she supports Lawrence’s centring of sexuality as

part of a drive for the liberation of humanity. ‘Imprisoned in our flesh lives the body’s own genie, which Lawrence set out to liberate. He found that the body had its own dreams, and that by listening attentively to these dreams, by surrendering to them, the genie can be evoked and made apparent and potent.’ And, unlike some who argue that Lawrence (and Henry Miller) only sought to liberate their own penis, Nin paints him in an almost feminine, if not exactly feminist light. ‘The woman for whom the phallic worship is only half of creative divinity is the builder-artist.

Lawrence was not meddling with that builder-artist direction taken by women, but with the woman within the builder-artist.

Woman pure and simple — or neither pure nor simple.’

Lawrence initially appears to contradict Nin’s view of him in his

1929 essay Pornography and Obscenity, saying: ‘if a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.’ But he redeems himself later when he talks about his experience of ‘ordinary healthy-seeming sort of men, in railway carriages, or the smoke room… Individuals of this sort have a disgusting attitude toward sex, a disgusting contempt of it, a disgusting desire to insult it. If such fellows have intercourse with a woman, they triumphantly feel that they have done her dirt, and now she is lower, cheaper, more contemptible than she was before.’ Lawrence of course disagrees with this and shows his disagreement in his novels, especially and most famously in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

In the Introduction I quoted Lawrence’s view that pornography is caused by what he calls the Puritans,

or grey ones, insisting that sex be hidden and therefore dirty.

Pornography thus downgrades and degrades sex; sexual feelings are dirty and must be kept hidden. ‘They insist that real sex-feeling shall only be shown by the villain or villainess, low lust.’ In the ‘degraded human being sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt, and any sign of sex in a woman becomes a show of her dirt.’ Pornography thrives in this environment and ‘is an invariable stimulant to the vice of self-abuse, onanism, masturbation, call it what you will.’ The Puritans can understand that, in complaining that ‘the young man and the young woman went and had sexual intercourse, they are bewailing the fact that the young man and the young woman didn’t go separately and masturbate.’

For Lawrence, a true natural woman, as much as a true natural

man, will give free rein to her sexual feeling; sex between two people is always a celebration, not dirty, not a thing to be hidden. But ‘sex must go somewhere, especially in young people.’ And if they cannot have sex with each other, they must have sex by themselves. Masturbation however is a dead end, creating nothing, simply exhausting individuals and society.

The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs. Something quite new is added as the old surcharge is removed. And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return.

Note that Lawrence includes intercourse between members of the same sex as a natural, productive act, even though it cannot create anything, cannot create a child, cannot people the future. Lawrence understands, and demonstrates in his fiction, that ‘two people may destroy one another in sex’, but insists that sex between two people, openly conducted and discussed, is necessary for a free society.

However, he knowledges that too much sexual liberation can be bad for society. Those who have become ‘free and pure’ in their sex lives, in killing the ‘dirty little secret’ – that people have sex – may kill ‘dynamic sex altogether, and leave only the scientific and deliberate mechanism.… they have mentalized sex till it is nothing at all, nothing at all but a mental quantity.’ This is especially true for what Lawrence calls ‘emancipated bohemians’.

The bohemian is ‘sex free’. The dirty little secret is no secret

either to him or her. It is, indeed, the most blatantly open question.

There is nothing they don’t say: everything that can be revealed is revealed. And they do as they wish.

And then what? They have apparently killed the dirty little secret, but somehow, they have killed everything else too. Some of the dirt still sticks perhaps; the sex remains still dirty. But the thrill of secrecy is gone. Hence the terrible dreariness and depression of modern Bohemia, and the inward dreariness and emptiness of so many young people of today.

This is a very astute prediction of the fiction of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book – we will come back to both of these shortly – with their restless, dissatisfied bohemian narrators who get none of the joy from sex that Lawrence described in such unpublishable detail.

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER Lady Chatterley is a young woman, whose husband was wounded in the First World War. They were married at the beginning of the war; he comes back wounded so that he is crippled and paralysed from the waist downwards and unable to have sexual intercourse. The book describes how that woman, deprived of sex from her husband, satisfies the sexual

desires – of a sex starved girl – with a particularly sensual man who happens to be her husband’s gamekeeper. There are 13 episodes of sexual intercourse, which are all described in the greatest detail, except for the first.

This description comes from notes prepared for the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, in the famous British 1960 obscenity trial, where Griffith-Jones famously asked the mostly lower-middle-class jury whether they would like their wives, daughters or servants to read it, thus assuring the novel’s acquittal and the end of literary censorship.

The Department of Public Prosecution had carried out a page by page analysis of the novel for counsel which is detailed in Alan Travis’ wonderful book on literary censorship in the UK, Bound and Gagged. They included such notes as: ‘Intercourse unsatisfactory to Connie to start with but alright the second time (full details and fourletter words).’ The DPP also provided Griffith-Jones with notes under the heading Gratuitous Filth, where they kept a count of offensive

words. They counted thirty occasions of the word fuck or fucking; fourteen cunts; thirteen uses of the word balls and six each of shit and arse. Amazingly, they only counted four cocks (Lawrence mainly called it the phallus).

The story of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its many legal battles with obscenity laws is too well-known to bear repeating here though, because it was unavailable for such a long time, some people may not realise that it was originally published as long ago as 1928 (the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness), that it was the twelfth and last novel by Lawrence (not counting the novellas), written in a late burst of creativity after he developed tuberculosis. And they may also not realise that the version which was finally published was the third

Lawrence had written – each version getting more ‘obscene’ and less publishable. Lawrence had asked Jack Kahane to publish it and Kahane, at least according to his autobiography, wanted to take it on.

But at that time – he had not yet founded Obelisk as a separate entity – he was tied to a French publisher (under French law, any publisher had to have a French national at the head, at least nominally) whom he did not trust.

DH Lawrence rang me up from Paris. I had never met that great writer, of whom I had long been a profound admirer, and for whom I had an abundance of sympathy, as for a man who was fighting a colossal battle for free expression.

He had read about my publishing business, and was telephoning to propose that I

should take over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. My heart leaped. Here was a huge step in the direction I was planning. And then I thought rapidly. This was in a special sense one of the most important books of the day, and it would not

be I who would be responsible for it, but a man over whom I had no practical control, and whose reliability I questioned. I dared not risk it. I told Lawrence I was afraid to take it on for his own sake. He could not understand me, and it was difficult for me to

tell him over the telephone that I was not in command of the business, but only financially interested in it, and that it seemed to my mind to be heading towards insolvency. Lawrence thought I was afraid because of the contents of the book, and I could hear his disappointment even over a very bad line. It was a hideous dilemma, but in the existing circumstances I would have been mad to take on the book.

Kahane wasn’t mad and didn’t take it on; it was first published in Florence in 1928 in an edition of 1,000 copies, privately funded by Lawrence himself. But, as a ‘result of that incident, I became more and more determined to found a publishing house which should be a natural sanctuary for those writers whose books could not be published in England or America on account of censorship restrictions.’ He did, and Obelisk was born, as it were, ready to publish Lawrence’s book. But by that time Chatterley had already got the kind of reputation that made it attractive to forgers and pirates, so Lawrence had issued several small

editions in different countries to try to establish copyright, some of which were expurgated. It had become very complicated for the sick Lawrence – he died in March, 1930 – and the whole saga was a nightmare until Obelisk finally obtained the rights and published it in 1936.

Despite its title, the novel is not about Connie Chatterley’s lover – in fact she has two lovers – so much as about Connie herself; it is that very

rare thing, an erotic story told from the point of view of a woman and a woman who, as Nin says, has two kinds of orgasm. Connie and her sister grow up as intelligent, freethinking women in an intelligent, freethinking family. They lose their virginities naturally and without drama before Connie’s marriage (though, in a reversal of the proper novelistic form in these matters, her husband doesn’t –

Lawrence is already breaking multiple taboos and we are still on chapter one); both sisters are presented as having bodily needs – which Lawrence portrays as perfectly natural and not at all sluttish or wanton, nor as a sign of their subservience; a woman can be in charge sexually.

But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have sufficiently taken into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away… she could use this sex thing to have power over him.

For she only had to haul herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.

Note Lawrence’s rather odd use of the word crisis to describe something that he portrays as perfectly natural and universal for a woman – against all received

wisdom. Note also how radical this is, especially in 1928: not only do women have orgasms, they do not need a man to get there. Indeed, men are portrayed as fairly useless at satisfying a woman sexually – no wonder it was banned for so long by male censors.

After her husband Clifford’s war injury leaves him paralysed, Connie has to look elsewhere to satisfy her needs. Even her father supports her in this. ‘I hope, Connie, you won’t let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge.’ Clifford himself understands: ‘She knew that he didn’t mind whether she were demivierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn’t absolutely know, and wasn’t made to see.’ Clifford says to her, ‘you do agree with me, don’t you, that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived together?’

Remember the outrage at Raymond Radiguet’s narrator, whose unforgivable sin in the eyes of press and public was not adultery but traducing a serving soldier?

Well, here we have the same thing, but this aspect of the story is not what caused the outrage among the grey ones – it was overshadowed by

the sheer amount of sex in the book and Lawrence’s obvious revelling in it.

Because, again, Lawrence does not present Connie’s adultery as wrong; it is not even portrayed as socially unacceptable of itself. The social unacceptability comes from the fact that both her lovers are outsiders to society; society’s and her family’s disapproval is more of the men she chooses than of the acts

she does with them. The gamekeeper, Mellors, is a ‘mere’ servant (and of course, we know from Pierre Louÿs’ handbook on etiquette that women should not cohort with the servant class), though Lawrence is sufficiently snobbish himself to make sure we know that Mellors had been an officer in the army and chose the life of the gamekeeper; even Lawrence couldn’t let his heroine have sex, let alone orgasms, with someone genuinely of the lower orders.

Connie’s first lover, Michaelis, is an outsider because he is Irish and at that time could never be a full member of English society. He is rich, having written successful, ‘smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realised that it had been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and bounderish.’ Lawrence never really explores Connie’s apparent attraction to outsiders – maybe because even Lawrence couldn’t bring himself to make her attracted to a ‘real’ gentleman; that would perhaps be beyond the pale, even for him. He describes their first sexual

encounter with no explicit detail; it is very uncharacteristic of the later descriptions in the book. It is also uncharacteristic in that Connie, who has so far been presented as completely in charge of her sexuality, is ‘utterly incapable of resisting’ the ‘awful appeal in his full, glowing eyes… From her breast glowed the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything… To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at length he

ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still.’ Without of course any concern for her orgasm.

Michaelis ‘was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and was finished,’ and has apparently no idea how to satisfy a woman – why would he: women were not supposed to get pleasure from sex. But his Irish roguishness gets Connie excited and she needs to be satisfied.

He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed, disappointed, lost.

But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he stayed firm inside her, giving to her, while she was active, wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.

This is Nin’s second kind of orgasm, the one that does not bring peace or happiness. Partly because of this, their affair is never close and they only meet infrequently; as long as she ‘still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him by her own activity, his little orgasm being

over.’ You can see why Anaïs Nin was impressed with Lawrence: he presents men’s orgasms as being little and unimportant while the woman’s are – potentially at least – dramatic and profound. But Michaelis eventually comes to resent Connie’s self-relief; it puts her in charge.

‘You couldn’t go off at the same time as a man, could you. You have to bring yourself off! You have to run the show!’

This little speech, at that moment, was one of the shocks of her life.

Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real mode of intercourse.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I’ve gone off and I have to hang on with my

teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions.’

She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of love for him…

‘All the damned women are like that,’ he said.

‘Either they don’t go off at all, as if they were dead in there, or else they wait till the chap’s really done, and then they start in to bring themselves off, and a chap’s got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who went off just at the same moment as I did.’

Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She was only stunned by his feeling against her, his incomprehensible brutality. She felt so innocent.

‘But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don’t you?’ she repeated.

‘Oh, all right! And quite willing. But I’m darned if hanging on waiting for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man.’

This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie’s life. It killed something in her.

Being a man, Michaelis cannot stand this affront to his treasured masculinity, and Connie cannot

stand the realisation that probably no man will ever be her sexual equal.

‘The whole sexual feeling for him, or for any man, collapsed that night.’

But then, of course, she meets the one: Mellors, the gamekeeper. And not before time. ‘Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless. What hope was there?

She was old, at twenty-seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh.’

To make things worse, ‘Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat.’

The first time Connie and Mellors have sex, it seems to bring peace rather than passion to them both, quite unlike her experience with Michaelis. ‘And he had to come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of the woman… She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The activity, the orgasm was his, all his; she could strive for herself no more.’

From here onwards the descriptions of their sex acts become

more explicit, arguably more crude and less erotic. In fact, even Connie comes to see the sex act as rather ludicrous. ‘That thrust of the buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous. If you were a woman, and a part in all the business, surely that thrusting of the man’s buttocks was supremely ridiculous.’ But after a while Connie manages to signal her needs to Mellors, and he is responsive enough to understand and cooperate; for the first time in her life, she has Nin’s first kind of orgasm. Although this next passage may not be the best ever description of woman’s orgasm, it may well be the first one from a woman’s point of view to be published. (Not counting Molly Bloom in the famous ending of Ulysses, 1922: ‘I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’) This is Lawrence; you can see why Nin liked him so much.

He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and

quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her.

Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft clams, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last… she could no longer

harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon it. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone.

Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment

for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.

The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her.

And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert.

However, despite passages like this, Mellors’ use of the ugly Derbyshire vernacular, at least Lawrence’s transcription of it, completely

destroys the eroticism of the writing in the second half of the book; Connie hates it too, not surprisingly.

(Lawrence of course makes it clear that Mellors does not have to speak this way; he is a gentleman at heart and can speak ‘proper’ English when he wants to.)

Perhaps the least erotic sentence in any novel is: ‘Eh, but tha’rt nice, tha’rt nice! he said, suddenly rubbing his face with a snuggling movement against her warm belly.’

And when Connie tells Mellors she does not love him, he replies: ‘Canna ter? Well, dunna fret! There’s no law says as tha’s got to.

Ta’e it for what it is.’ Very romantic.

But Connie does come to love him, and even find beauty in his body, though the bathos of Lawrence’s description of it is more farcical than erotic. ‘The unspeakable beauty to the touch of

the warm, living buttocks! The life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness. And the strange weight of the balls between his legs! What a mystery! What a strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in one’s hand!’ Connie seems to have lost all her feminist credentials and can still love a man whose idea of a compliment is: ‘Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody.

It’s the nicest, nicest woman’s arse as is! An’ every bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha’rt not one o’ them buttonarsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha’s got a real soft sloping bottom on thee.’ In the same scene, Mellors seems to contradict Lawrence’s idea in Pornography and Obscenity that it is the association of excrement with sex, the physical proximity of the organs of defecation and urination to the organs of sexual

pleasure, that has led the ‘Puritans’ to associate sex with dirt.

And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.

‘An if tha shits an’ if tha pisses, I’m glad. I don’t want a woman as couldna shit nor piss… Tha’art real, even a bit of a bitch. Here tha shits an’ here tha pisses: an’ I lay my hand on ‘em both an’ I like thee for it.

The most terrible writing, surely, comes where Connie has discovered the beauty of Mellors’ penis – he calls it John Thomas, and her vagina lady Jane – and seems to accept that the mere possession of a penis gives man his rightful power. Possibly Connie is being ironic here, or maybe Lawrence is – the woman biting her lower lip in ‘fear and excitement’ is one of the most clichéd tropes in pornography – but Lawrence didn’t do irony.

‘So proud!’ she murmured, uneasy. ‘And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he’s lovely,

really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.

The man looked down in silence at the tense phallus, that did not change. – ‘Ay!’ He said at last, in a little voice. ‘Ay ma lad!

Tha’re theer right enough. Ye, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? An’ ta’es no count O’ nobody! Tha ma’es nowt O’ me,

John Thomas. Art boss? of me?

Eh well, tha’re more cocky than me, an’ tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my lady Jane? Tha’s dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an’ ha comes up smilin’. – Ax ‘er then, Ax lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads, O ye gates, that the King of glory may come in. Ay, the cheek on thee! Cunt, that’s what tha’re after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt O’ lady Jane!

This earth-shaking, groundbreaking, radical, proto-feminist novel, the novel which singlehandedly ended censorship as we knew it, ends not with an orgasm, not with a climax, not with a bang but with a simper: a letter from Mellors to Connie – the formerly fearless pioneer of the female orgasm in literature – that closes: ‘John Thomas says good-night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, and with a hopeful heart.’

HENRY MILLER

Henry Miller is the first nonEuropean to appear in this book so far and he will be the last until we reach the 1950s. Of course he was living in Paris when he wrote his early novels, but then so were many American novelists who wrote nothing even slightly erotic. Possibly this is something to do with a strain of puritanism that ran through American writers, but that is far too big a subject for this book.

As I said earlier, I have already written at length in Everybody I Can Think of Ever about Henry Miller (1891-1980) and his relationships with Jack Kahane and Anaïs Nin; also, Miller is too well-known for me to spend any time here discussing his very long life, interesting and fascinating though it is. I will simply look here at the first of the three of his novels that were published by Obelisk – surprisingly perhaps, the only one to have a serious erotic dimension – and his short, unclassifiable but autobiographical, self-justifying The World of Sex, published later but originally written

in 1940. It was in fact published by Kahane’s son Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press.

TROPIC OF CANCER It is set in the Paris of the 1920s, 30s. It has no plot or story and is autobiographical in style. It describes in a series of changing scenes, long and short, the leftbank world in which Miller lived at the time.

The people in the book are for the most part writers, artists and whores: everyone is broke. They talk, philosophise, eat, drink and copulate, all in abundance.

There are passages which are coarse, bawdy, ribald, and disgusting, depending on how you feel (e.g. pages 5, 6, 16, 41, 95, 109, 102, 126, 130, 195, 211 to 215) though some of these I also found very funny. Words such as cunt, fuck and shit appear on almost every page but after the eye has been

initially caught they seem quite natural in their context. The book reveals an unusual command of language on the part of its author and there are some fine prose passages.

This is a very fine description of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, though it is not by literary critic. It was written by the literary reader in the U.K.’s Department of Public Prosecution, who was asked for his opinion on a possible prosecution for obscenity in 1963, many years after its first publication, and is quoted in Alan Travis’ Bound and Gagged.

When he first saw Miller’s text some thirty years earlier, Jack Kahane was bowled over.

I began it after luncheon in the shadow of the great copper beech

tree that is one of the arboricultural wonders of France, and the twilight was deepening into night when I finished it. ‘At last!’ I murmured to myself. I had read the most terrible, the most sordid, the most magnificent manuscript that had ever fallen into my hands; nothing I had yet received was comparable to it for the splendour of its writing, the fathomless depth of its despair, the savour of its portraiture, the boisterousness of its humour.

Walking into the house I was exalted by the triumphant sensation of all explorers who have at last fallen upon the object of their years of search. I had in my hands a work of genius and it had been offered to me for publication. The name of it was Tropic of Cancer and Henry Miller the man who wrote it.

That was Kahane himself, from his autobiography Memoirs of a Booklegger; the year was 1932.

Kahane published Tropic of Cancer under his Obelisk imprint in Paris, the costs largely underwritten by Miller’s partner Anaïs Nin – but I have also told that story at length in Everybody I Can Think of Ever, and I will not repeat it here (though I will be returning at length to Nin’s works), except to say again that the lurid, green, pulpfiction cover of the original edition with a huge crab holding a helpless woman in its claws was drawn by Kahane’s thenteenage son, Maurice Girodias, future founder of the Olympia Press and the subject of another chapter in Text Acts. The cover is in no way justified by the book and neither is Kahane’s breathless enthusiasm above; Tropic of Cancer is basically just a seedier La Bohème, which Puccini’s librettists took from Scènes de la vie

de bohème, 1851 by Henri Murger; like Tropic of Cancer it is a rambling series of loosely-connected scenes about penniless artists trying to make a go of it in the Latin Quarter in Paris.

And I can reveal here the shocking truth about it, the truth that dare not speak its name: there isn’t actually any sex in it. There, I’ve said it. And this is the book that caused, and continued to cause for the best part of 30 years, apoplexy in the censorship-minded and forced

the defenders of literary freedom to line up on its side. In my Introduction I have already quoted several critics who regarded, or said they regarded, Tropic of Cancer as high literature, even poetry. Ezra pound said: ‘at last an unprintable book that is fit to read’, and even the dry, dusty TS Eliot said, probably through clenched teeth, that it was a ‘very remarkable book, with passages of writing in it as good as any I have seen for a long time.’

(Unsurprisingly, Miller did not reciprocate Eliot’s praise; at one point in Cancer he describes a square in Paris: ‘In the middle of the square four black trees that have not yet begun to blossom. Intellectual trees, nourished by the paving stones. Like TS Eliot’s verse.’)

On the other hand, an American state Supreme Court judge spoke for many people when he said of it: ‘Not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity’. Actually, although this is meant as an insult, it is not a bad description of the book; it is in fact what Miller was aiming for. Miller himself says, at the very beginning of the novel:

will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse…

The allusion to the poet singing is a respectful nod to Walt Whitman, whom Miller praises in the novel: ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself’ is the beginning of Whitman’s Song of Myself, and, perhaps even more famous Whitman first lines are:

Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book.

This is a libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I

I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

This is not a bad summary of Miller’s intentions. And as Miller

was thinking of the fallen angels of the Paris Lost Generation, he may also have been thinking of Milton singing of the original fallen angels, in another famous first verse: Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse If Miller is the heir of Whitman he is also the precursor of Allen Ginsberg and Cancer is more of a Howl or a roar than a song. The reason there are no actual descriptions of sexual acts in the book – well, there is a brief one, which I will quote later – is that sex is of no great significance to Miller; finding sex is less significant for Miller and his penniless artistic companions than finding food – both are simply necessary to maintain the body so that it can create art. (I realise that it is generally dangerous to identify the

narrator of a book with its author, but Miller himself does this: in his later work The World of Sex, he says that Tropic of Cancer is purely autobiographical.)

What upset the conservative elements was not descriptions of sex but the repeated use of the word cunt. Miller uses it equally to refer to the vagina and its owners; women are identified with, reduced to, dismissed as their cunts throughout.

And, whereas DH Lawrence uses the word almost with reverence, Miller and his friends use it with disdain,

almost revulsion, and sometimes with something approaching anger and hatred.

Oh Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed… I am fucking you, Tania, so that you will stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces.

Only once in the book does Miller come close to a genuine appreciation of the female sexual organ (referring to it, for once, almost affectionately, as a pussy). Referring to an incident in a ‘five franc room’ with the prostitute Germaine, who has approached him on the street, he does not describe the sex, just saying, ‘She didn’t rush things, Germaine.’ Afterwards, she chats him to him while sitting on the bidet.

As she stood up to dry herself, still talking to me pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing towards me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it. There was something about her eloquence at that moment and the way she thrust that rosebush under my nose which remains unforgettable; she spoke of it as if it were some extraneous object which she had acquired at great cost, an object whose value had increased with time and which

she now prized above everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a particular fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing – and none the less so

because she traded it day in and day out for a few pieces of silver.

But even here, any affection soon disappears. ‘As we stepped out of the hotel I looked her over again in the harsh light of day and I saw clearly what a whore she was – the gold teeth, the geranium in her hat, the rundown heels, etc., etc.’

Nevertheless, he does later think fondly about her and ‘that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately and I liked them together.’ But he does not think lovingly about her. ‘I could no more think of loving Germaine than I could think of loving a spider; and if I was faithful, it was not to Germaine but to that bushy thing she carried between her legs.’

Still, Miller does seem to have popularised cunnilingus among some of his readers who might otherwise have considered it something men just did not do, and certainly did not talk about. In Gay Talese’s documentary book Thy Neighbour’s Wife, about sexual freedom in pre-AIDS nineteen seventies America, he relates the case of an Army veteran called Goldstein. ‘Having read most of Miller’s books, Goldstein was not

only impressed with the author’s vivid description of cunnilingus but was convinced that Miller himself greatly enjoyed bringing pleasure to a woman in this manner and so did Al Goldstein… as his mouth was upon her he was conscious not only of the luxuriance of her loins but also that he was making a literary connection with Henry Miller.’

Of course, for Miller and his friends, prostitutes, like all women, actually crave sex; they are not really in it for the money.

Germaine was, ‘a whore from the cradle; she was thoroughly satisfied with her role… Most of the time she enjoyed it – or gave the illusion of enjoying it. It made a difference, of course, whom she went with – or came with. But the principal thing was a man. A man!

That was what she craved.’ Whores – and all the women anyone seems to have any contact with are whores

– do not need to have minds; ‘while it’s all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature, from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.’ In fact, for an aspiring male writer or artist, women are to be avoided: they want to take hold of the man, own him and drain him of his creativity. As Miller’s friend Van Norden says: ‘You get spiritual like… Until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera.

Why do all these cunts talk about love so much, can you tell me that? A good lay isn’t enough for them apparently… they want your soul too.’

Although these words are put in Van Norden’s mouth, we can assume that Miller agrees with them – his role in the book seems almost to be Miller’s mouthpiece. He refers to all women simply as cunts – his girlfriend is just his Georgia cunt and so on. Like Miller, the actual act of sex does not

seem sensuous, erotic or even memorable to him.

One gets tired of chasing after new cunts all the time. It gets mechanical.… Women only help me to dream, that’s all. It’s a vice, like drink or opium. I’ve got to have a new one every day; if I don’t I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I’m amazed at myself, how quickly I pull it off – and how little it really means. I do it automatically like.

Sometimes I’m not thinking about a woman at all, but suddenly I

notice a woman looking at me and then, bango! it starts all over again. Before I know what I’m doing I’ve got her up to the room.

I don’t even remember what I say to them. I bring them up to the room, give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it’s all about it’s over. It’s like a dream…

You know what I mean?’

Miller does. For Van Norden, sex is simply a shortcut to oblivion. ‘I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself… And in a way, that’s what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second like I obliterate myself. There’s not even one me then… there’s nothing… not even the cunt.’

The one actual description of the sexual act in the book is of Van Norden with a prostitute while Miller watches – Van Norden has paid fifteen francs for both of them, but Miller does not want to do it. His description is the opposite of erotic, the opposite of sensual, the opposite of affectionate. The sexual act is meaningless, mechanical, even absurd.

As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I’m looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped. Left to themselves, they could go on this way for ever, grinding and slipping, without ever anything happening. Until a hand shuts the motor off. The sight of them coupled like a pair of goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs, washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman one of satisfying my curiosity.

Miller and Paul Leppin have very little in common, though Paris appears as a character in Tropic of Cancer in a similar way to the way Prague does in Leppin’s novels: ‘Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.’ But one thing they do have in common is the connection of sex with death, particularly through syphilis, the Mephistopheles who must be rewarded for any small acts

of pleasure he allows in an otherwise miserable life. If you are wondering where the title of the book comes from, this passage may help.

At the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: ‘Mondays and Tuesdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis’. In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with ‘Défendezvous contre la syphilis!’ Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

THE WORLD OF SEX

Miller wrote this originally in 1940 and then revised it for republication in 1957. He has a lot to say in the later version about Tropic of Cancer.

It is a strange work: kind of an essay about himself and his work, combined with autobiographical elements that would not have been out of place in his novels. It starts:

The bulk of my readers, I have often observed, fall into two distinct groups: in one the group of those who claim to be repelled or disgusted by the liberal dosage of sex, and in the other those who are delighted to find that this element forms such a large ingredient.

However, as I have just shown, sex of itself does not form a large ingredient of Tropic of Cancer, at least not actual descriptions of it which would excite anyone looking for sexual stimulus. However, a few pages later, he phrases it slightly differently, saying that it is, ‘liberally larded with the sexual’, which is a better way of putting it. He also says that, ‘the concern of its author was not with sex, nor with religion, but with the problem of self-liberation’, which is also undoubtedly true, though, as I said earlier, some female writers have pointed out that Miller, DH Lawrence and writers like them were only interested in liberating the penis, not society in general, and certainly not women in particular. This criticism goes back at least to 1915, when a male critic of Lawrence called The Rainbow ‘a

monotonous wilderness of phallicism;’ this would not be an unfair description of Tropic of Cancer and other of Miller's novels.

The problem is, Miller doesn't seem to like women much; like their cunts they even seem to repel and disgust him. Here is a passage from Sexus, where he is lying on the sidewalk with Mara.

My cock was staring her in the face. She bent over and gobbled it greedily. I pushed the things aside and pulled her over me.

When I had shot my bolt she kept right on coming, one orgasm after another, until I thought it would never stop… I walked her to the door of her home and as we stood there embracing one another she grabbed me impulsively and whisked me off.

‘I can't let you go yet,’ she said.

And with that she flung herself on me, kissing me passionately and reaching into my fly with murderous accuracy… when I tried to draw it out she got frantic. ‘Don't ever take it out again’ she begged, ‘it drives me crazy. Fuck me, fuck me!’ I held out on her a long while. As

before, she came again and again, squealing and grunting like a stuck pig. Her mouth seemed to have grown bigger, wider, utterly lascivious; her eyes were turning over as if she were going to have an epileptic fit.

Note Miller's hate-filled, spiteful, spitting language – hard, staccato and consonantal: gobbled it greedily; murderous accuracy;

grunting like a stuck pig; utterly lascivious. It seems that Miller is not asserting his power over Mara but sees himself being overwhelmed by this whirlwind of a heartless harpy ruthlessly and relentlessly using him for her own gratification. Not everyone would agree with this. One of Miller's early female critics was Kate Millet, whose 1970 Sexual Politics was a feminist broadside against the degradation of women by sexist writers like Miller and

Norman Mailer (though she loved Jean Genet, as we will see later).

Discussing Sexus, she describes a scene where the woman Ida is ‘hooked’ by the male character’s sexual skill; Millet portrays Miller as the fisherman rather than the fish.

The hero’s ‘prick,’ now very centre stage, is still a hook and Ida metamorphosed into a very gullible fish… The power nexus is clearly outlined. It remains only

for the hero to assert his victory by the arrogance of his final gesture: ‘after a while I made her stand up, bend over; then I let her have it from the rear.’

What the reader is precariously experiencing at this junction is a nearly supernatural sense of power – should the reader be a male. For the passage is not only a vivacious and imaginative use of circumstance, detail, and context to evoke the excitations of sexual intercourse, it is also a male assertion of dominance over a weak, compliant, and rather an intelligent female. It is a case of sexual politics at the fundamental level of copulation. Several satisfactions for the hero and reader alike undoubtedly accrue upon this triumph of the male ego, the most tangible one being communicated in the following: ‘She had a small juicy cunt which fitted me like a glove…’ In answer to her question ‘you don't really like me, do you?’ he replies with studied insolence, ‘“I like this” said I, giving her a stiff jab’. His penis is now an instrument of chastisement, whereas Ida’s

genitalia are but the means of her humiliation: ‘I like your cunt, Ida . . . it's the best thing about you.’

Much later, sex-positive feminist Susie Bright, writer of erotica and editor of the Herotica and The Best American Erotica series, talked about her mixed feelings for Miller in an essay ‘About Andrea,’ written just after Dworkin died in 2006. As I showed in the Introduction to Text Acts, Bright was both an opponent and admirer of Dworkin and is still

opposed to any kind of censorship, whether it comes from feminists or from male prudes. Bright has styled herself ‘the cunt who roars,’ and been labelled the ‘Queen of cunts’ so she is definitely comfortable with the c word, but it all depends on how it is used. In this anecdote it is 1977, Bright is nineteen and she has just been to her first Adults Only store, on an assignment from her college’s women’s studies class.

Driving home, I thought about the ‘classier’ literature I had seen on my parent’s bookshelves. They had elegant photo albums of the Khajuraho temples, formerly banned copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and volumes

by Henry Miller. I remember his passages in The Tropic of Capricorn about ‘The Land of Cunt’. Miller was so prejudiced in every aspect you had to wonder if he was a misanthrope. But he was also transcendent and lyrical on this subject of cunt, and his absolute submission to it. His words were poetic and a turn-on and I wondered, is this erotica?

In her novella Djuna, a fictionalised version of her relationship with Miller by Anaïs Nin, covering the time he was writing Tropic of Cancer, she accuses him of writing with hatred; he replies that it is not hatred but violence and rage that surface in his writing.

You want to know why I’m not published? You think it's just because I use obscene language, dirty little four-letter words which the Post Office objects to?

Nonsense! It isn't the obscene words, as they say. It's the obscene feeling. It's the violence; it's what raging inside me, that bomb in there that goes off whenever I sit down to write – that’s what they fear.

Miller talks in The World of Sex about how he ‘found himself’, both as a writer and as a man in Paris in those years. Millet would no doubt agree that he had found himself, but would say that the self he had found was an arrogant and sexist man;

Miller would not necessarily disagree.

In that first year or two, in Paris, I was literally annihilated. There was nothing left of the writer I had hoped to be, only the writer I had to be. (In finding my way I found my voice.) The 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.

Certainly the odour of sex is everpresent in Cancer, but it is largely a pungent and unpleasant odour, not a sweet and seductive one; and if it is alluring, it is the fatal allure of the siren, drawing the traveller to break himself on the rocks. However, to be fair to Miller, he does not claim at any point to be a great lover, or to understand women and relationships in any depth.

Sex, then, like everything else, is largely a mystery. That is what I am trying to say. I do not pretend

to be a great explorer in this realm. My own adventures are as nothing compared to those of the ordinary Don Juan. For a man of the big cities I think my exploits are modest and altogether normal. As an artist, my adventures seem in no way singular or remarkable.

This is also undoubtedly true; the only remarkable thing about Miller’s book about his time in Paris was that he described it so unsparingly and with such a liberal use of the c word that everyone took notice of it. By the time he wrote The World of Sex though, Miller seems to have changed his view on cunts and he backtracks to some extent on his previous statements.

No matter how attached I became to a ‘cunt’, I was always more interested in the person who owned it. The cunt doesn’t live a separate, independent existence. Nothing does. Everything is interrelated.

Perhaps a cunt, smelly though it may be, is one of the prime symbols for the connection between all things.

To enter life by way of the vagina is as good a way as any if you enter deep enough, remain long enough, you will find what you seek.

At one point, Miller rants at the world – the world he himself was such a key part of – like one of his Puritan critics; this next passage might have come from a hostile review of Tropic of Cancer, but it is

by Miller himself. In any other writer one might think this is deliberate, heavy-handed-handed

irony, but Miller didn’t do irony any more than DH Lawrence.

No one seems to believe in the power of love, the only dependable power. No one believes in his neighbour, or in himself, let alone a supreme being. Fear, envy, suspicion are rampant everywhere. Ergo, fuck your brains out while there is still time!

Miller may have been serious though, or he may just have changed his mind in his later years. He wrote a letter to Nancy Friday, editor of the ground-breaking 1973 collection of women's erotic fantasies, My Secret Garden.

I've always suspected that women had richer, wilder fantasies than men. From my limited experience with women I must also add that I have found them more capable of abandoning themselves completely in intercourse than men. In a good healthy sense I would say, to use an oldfashioned word, that they are more ‘shameless’ than men… Men

are only beginning to perceive the true nature of woman’s being.

They have created a false image of her. She is neither an angel nor a bitch in heat. If she is no longer an enigma, she is certainly an everlasting source of wonder and rich in unexplored possibilities in every domain of life.

Maybe Miller is admitting here that, in retrospect, he himself did not explore those possibilities as well as he might. In a way, The World of Sex

is a retrospective meta-narrative or commentary, even an apologia, on Tropic of Cancer, looking down on it and its author from above; the significance of the events of that time has only become apparent to him with hindsight.

Sometimes the recital of a bald sexual incident is of great moment, laden with unimaginable significance. The cold fire of sex burns in it like a sun; it is never completely extinguished. Thus it is perhaps that the naked description of the physical embrace can sometimes transport us to a state transcending the erotic, can create in us the illusion of being hidden from the sight of the allseeing one, if only for a few breathless moments.

LAWRENCE DURRELL Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was born in India and educated there by Jesuits until returning to England at the age of eleven. He left England soon after his first marriage in 1935 to live on the island of Corfu, taking his mother and his siblings with him – his brother Gerald Durrell was a well-known naturalist.

Lawrence spent most of the rest of his life in various Mediterranean locations; he is now most famous for the Alexandria Quartet, and less so for the later Avignon Quartet, but his earlier works are more experimental in form and more concerned with sex and with the seedier side of life.

Durrell’s earliest sexual experience seems to have been in Paris; in Caesar’s Vast Ghost, his last book, he tells of how he was picked up by a young French student at the Luxembourg Gardens who seduced him after making him a croque monsieur. He does not make it clear whether the girl was prostitute but, like his one-time mentor Henry Miller he had a lifelong affection for Paris brothels and a corresponding contempt for what he called the English Death – the littleness and prudishness of England. Having been initiated into the world of sex, Durrell read much erotic literature, from Sade through Villon, Rabelais, Baudelaire and Freud to Henry

Nin says, ‘Henry had a lively correspondence with Lawrence Durrell, the English poet who lives in Greece. He admires Tropic of Cancer and sent Henry the manuscript of his Black Book.

I wrote him about my response to The Black Book. We corresponded.’ Later, Durrell and his wife Nancy visited Miller; Nin met him in August 1937.

Miller, while at the same time relinquishing Christianity for Eastern philosophy. He also became quite an accomplished jazz pianist and guitarist, often playing to accompany his friends singing.

In the year of his marriage, Durrell first came across Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer; apparently he found an abandoned copy, appropriately, in a public toilet; he said it ‘shook him from stem to stern’. In December 1936 he wrote to Miller, who at that time was living with Anaïs Nin, expressing his admiration. In her diaries,

I walked to Henry’s studio to meet Lawrence Durrell and his wife. What first struck me were his eyes of a Mediterranean blue, keen, sparkling, seer, child and old man. In body he is short and stocky, with soft contours like a Hindu, flexible like an Oriental, healthy and humorous. He is a faun, a swimmer, a sail-boat enthusiast. Nancy, his wife, is a long-waisted gamin with beautiful long slanting eyes.

With Durrell I had instant communication. We skipped the ordinary stages of friendship, its gradual development. I felt friendship

at one bound, hardly a need of talk.

Miller and Nin were at the time living at the Villa Seurat and, with Durrell, formed the idea of a literary series named after it, to be published by Obelisk Press.

The imprint issued three books: Durrell’s The Black Book; Miller’s Black Spring; and Nin’s Winter of Artifice (which Durrell underwrote financially). Jack Kahane said of that time: With Henry Miller as editor I started a new collection, the Villa Seurat Series, which I confidently believe will have an important part in the literary history in our time. Hope is not unfounded of manuscripts from several writers whose literary position is already assured. The first of the Series,

The Black Book, by a young English writer, Lawrence Durrell, was received with much the same kind of acclamation as saluted the appearance of Tropic of Cancer. I have no doubt that Durrell will go far indeed. He is very young and has not yet shaken off all the traces of the influences that have gone to form him, but to my mind he will in a very short time indeed be looked upon as one of the most important living English writers, as Henry Miller is abundantly one of the most important of Americans.

But the manuscripts did not appear and no more books were issued under the imprint.

THE BLACK BOOK

Although Durrell himself was clearly influenced by Tropic of Cancer, the influence does not show up in his writing. Although both are first person narratives about young bohemians drifting aimlessly through a big and seedy city – Paris in Miller’s case, London in Durrell’s – their styles could hardly be more different.

Durrell is poetic, obscure, difficult where Miller is direct and prosaic. The Black Book is in fact almost an experimental

novel, with two narrators and no clear plot or timeline. The London narration is centred around the Regina Hotel, which is a parody of the Queens Hotel in West Norwood where Durrell’s family lived from 1930. As Durrell’s biographer puts it, the hotel ‘combined a pretentious 19th-century grandeur with, by 1930, an air of faded gentility.

The Queens Court annexe and the hotel had become the home of the widows of Indian civil servants, maiden ladies and retired army officers.’ It epitomised for Durrell the ‘English Death’ that he so often refers to in the novel.

Durrell’s narrator – one of them at least – is aware of DH Lawrence: ‘Once I even lectured on the sexual aberrations of Lawrence to an audience of vipers as loaded as myself.’ But although the sexual content of the book prevented it being published by the mainstream press, and although both Miller’s and Durrell’s narrators associate with and even live with prostitutes, there is very little actual sex in The Black Book and

what there is is told in an elliptical, indirect, impressionist style. In fact there is only one extended sex scene in the book and it combines the two taboo subjects of illicit sex and religion: the couple in this extract have driven to a field and are making love there in the open.

We are surrounded with friendly cattle like a Christmascard picture, on the ground, our bodies emptied out of their clothes. It is a new nativity when I enter her, the enormous city crouched between her legs; or a frost-bound lake, absolutely aware of the adventurer, the pilgrim, the coloniser. The snow is falling in my mouth, my ears, my soaked clothes. This is a blunt voyage of the most exquisite reckoning. Enter. She has

become an image in rubber, not the smallest bone which will not melt to snow under the steady friction of the penis… When she comes, it’s all pearls and icicles emptied from her womb into the snow.

The penis like a dolphin with many muscles and black humor, lolling up to meet the sun. The fig suddenly broken into a sticky tip that is all female.

She is laughing hideously.

She is weeping. Her spine has been liquefied, drawn out of her. She is filleted, the jaw telescoped with language, eyes glassy. Under my mouth a rouged vagina speaking a barbaric laughter and nibbling my tongue. Is it all warm and raw: a spiritual autumn with just that scent of corruption, that much death in it, to make it palatable. A meal

of game well-hung pig-scented tangy. Such a venison, more delicate than the gums of babies or little fishes.

One of the prostitutes Lawrence lives with is Hilda; his relationship with her is similar to those of Miller’s narrator with his prostitutes. Hilda is ‘my only anodyne against the white leprosy of the frost… Between the artist I, and Hilda the prostitute, there is immediate correspondence. We recognise

and respect each other, as pariahs do; we love each other, we do not understand each other.’ She tells him he should get tested as she has contracted a sexually-transmitted disease, ‘you better run along and have a blood test because I copped it at last.’

I am remembering Hilda’s great rufus vulva like a crowded marketplace; the great conduit choked with blood and paper and cigar ends which we must accept before we can go any farther.

The great luminous symbol of the cunt, glowing softly in history like the Grail, the Genesis of the living, the blithe plush cushion of life. Hilda lying there like Tibet, glowing in her convalescent secrecy among the snow-bound craters and jewels. (There are so few of us left with the murderous gift of love, so few.)

Immediately after he finds out about Hilda’s infection he goes to see his friend Chamberlain, who

is out; the wife invites him in.

They have joyless, guilt-ridden sex.

Presently she switches of the light and turns on the wireless. The room is ringing with a symphony. I sit there in the dark, trembling, expecting I do not know what. Pitch darkness and the strings slamming away at some obsolete figure. Then I put out my arms and touch her. She is standing in front of me in the dark, and as I touch her she topples softly to the armchair, breathing shakingly. The skull and crossbones goes slowly down to half-mast. ‘You won't say anything, will you?’ she whispers. ‘For Godsake, you won't, will you?’ I promise her faithfully, trying the effects of a sardonic grin on the darkness. I am filled with a profound weariness and disgust. I go through it, yes, but with this gnawing misery of disgust. I don't know why.

The whole room smells of Chamberlain. I am stifled in his musk. His books, his bed,

his dogs . . . Even when she is whimpering like a crazy woman in the darkness I am so agitated that I force my hand over her mouth. Her breasts are rocking with tears.

It is a beautiful, satirical ballet we are acting together, like gorgeous toads; the motive is hate in some obscure way.

Afterward I shut my eyes and try to forget that she exists. I will not speak to her, and this puts her in a rage. I suppose it is comfort and tenderness she

wants—well, I just haven't any. Not a scrap. If I put out my arms and comfort her it is Chamberlain I am petting: to fuck her is like an act of sodomy with him.

One of the reasons The Black Book could not have been published in England or America is the complete acceptance of homosexuality; not that the gay (in the contemporary sense) life is described as being gay (in the older sense of carefree and jolly) any more than heterosexual sex is presented as joyful. This is Tarquin talking, ‘whining, protesting.’

‘It’s not sex,’ he says, larghetto. The ache of the strings sends little shooting pains through my teeth. The clarinet. The delicate variation. O the bassoon as mellow as port, cherries, cigars, mahogany, black bile.

‘For a long time I thought it was. But it only disgusts me – even with him. Listen, we borrowed Durrell’s car and went out of London. Imagine us locked in the back seat, O Christ, buggering each other like a couple of billy goats. I thought my heart was broken.

I was sick and sick.