(1969) The Seven Minutes (19 page)

Now, in these morning hours, for the second time in his life, a book had created an upheaval in Mike Barrett’s feelings about sex.

He remained unmoving against his pillows, trying to assess his emotions. One emotion predominated. He was bursting with desire. His desire was to rush into the streets of the city and to search out the first female he could find. His need for her was not carnal, not to satisfy lust, but to confess and expiate the sinful insensitivity most men carried into their relationships with all women. He wanted to cry out to her that he had reald a book andseen a light that illuminated completely the true minds and hearts of women, a light that might give him, and other men, a new perception of the opposite sex. In the glare of this pitiless cleansing light, the maggots of shame and fear, guilt and unawareness, would scurry back into primeval darkness, no longer able to gnaw away at the exposed roots of human relationships.

Oh, his thoughts, his hopes were grand tonight.

And all of this desire to spread the news of his find had grown out of these last hours with this remarkable book. It was not the book’s style, its characters, its story that had moved him to a reaction of evangelistic fervor. It was the book’s insight into the deepest womb where human behavior is born, and the book’s naked honesty in exposing every aspect in the evolution of human behavior.

He tried to contain himself, bring his critical faculties to bear on what had moved him so. It was, to be sure, only a novel that he had read. It was no deep study, philosophical or psychological, of humankind. It was simply a brief work of fiction written by a heart, not a head. And if it was considered not as a whole, but piece by piece, if it could be picked apart, it was not without numerous flaws. Certainly, for the brave white hunters, the hunters of the

obscene, there was abundant game - the four-letter words, the coarse phrases, the passages of abnormal and sacrilegious sex. But taken in its entirety, the book was not pornography. It was beauty, the beauty of truth that makes possible self-discovery and self-knowledge.

In total, The Seven Minutes was - and please forgive me, Faye - a work of art.

With respect and affection, Mike Barrett picked up the book once more. To the hand, it felt more substantial than its size would suggest. It consisted of only 171 printed pages.

He opened the book and studied the end papers. The inside of the hardcover board and the page opposite were illustrated with a photographic reproduction of the title page of the original Paris edition. He had not read this before, but he read it now:

THE SEVEN MINUTES

BY J J JADWAY

The Etoile Press 18 rue de Berri Paris

Copyright by The fitoile Press Paris 1935

Printed in France All Rights Reserved

Turning to the more attractive title page of the American edition, Barrett saw that only the typeface and the publishing information were different. Same title, same author, except now the imprint was that of Sanford House, Publishers, New York, and the year of publication was the present year.

The card page listed no previous published writings by J J Jad-way. Then Barrett remembered that the back of the book jacket had explained that this remarkable tour de force had been the author’s first and last novel, and that a potentially great career had been brought to an abrupt end by the author’s untimely death in an accident outside Paris. Jadway had died at the age of twenty-seven. There were no further clues to the novelist’s life.

The dedication paged prove even more enigmatic. It contained only two words:,

For Cassie

The epigraph on the next page, Barrett knew, had provided the author with his structure for the novel. He reread the epigraph:

While there was a great variety in response, the majority of females who had orgasms, whether brought on manually,

orally, or through intercourse, reached the climactic state in seven minutes.

- The Collingwood Study of 100 Women, Ages 18 to 45 (London, 1931)

Those seven minutes, Barrett now knew, had been represented by seven chapters in Jadway’s book, each chapter in turn representing one minute in the mind of one woman who was lying on a bed having sexual intercourse with an unnamed, unseen man. The entire novel was told through the thoughts in this woman’s head her feelings, her memories, her dreams, during the seven minutes of copulation.

That was the framework and method of The Seven Minutes.

Suddenly Barrett wondered whether Jadway had known or had at least met James Joyce during Joyce’s last years in Paris. And whether Jadway had read the Odyssey Press edition of Ulysses that had been circulating in’Paris in those years. Surely Jadway had read Joyce’s novel, or at least the last 25,000-word section of it, the sad and happy and so-called salacious section which was Molly Bloom’s brilliant interior monologue.

The descriptions in the seven sensuous and revealing minutes in the mind of Jadway’s Cathleen bore some resemblance to the stream-of-consciousness reverie in the mind of Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Had Jadway derived the idea for his book from Joyce? Immediately Barrett was curious.

He swung off the bed and padded on bare feet to his bookshelves, scanned the titles, and in seconds he held Ulysses in his hands. He flipped the pages until he found Joyce’s Molly in bed, lying there ‘fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed.’

He read on, joined Molly as she lay in her bed thinking of Blazes Boylan, of young Stephen Dedalus, of her husband, Leopold Bloom, of lovers possessed and lovers desired, of past and future.

Molly’s mind:

I’ll put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him I’ll 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 hand-running 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 don’t believe me feel my belly unless I made 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 rights its all his own fault if Im an adultress …

But in the end, Molly’s joyous mind:

when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and

then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first 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.

Absently, Barrett returned Molly Bloom to the bookshelf and started back to his bed. He was less certain now that Jadway’s heroine, Cathleen, had been derived in any way from Joyce’s Molly. Possibly, possibly, but no matter. What he was absolutely certain about was that Jadway had derived next to nothing from Joyce’s actual writing. This refresher had reminded Barrett of Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions,’ as the jurist Woolsey had put it, of Joyce’s loaded if unpunctuated sentences, of Joyce’s compound words and opaque use of English, of Joyce’s poetry and parody and ear for the comic. Jadway’s The Seven Minutes reflected little of these innovations and flairs. Yet, in a sense, Jadway had undertaken a task as difficult. For, while his entire novel was an inner monologue, while occasionally there were effective passages of free word association, for the most the book was controlled and formal in its use of conventional sentence structure, word order, punctuation, and it built chronologically to a dramatic story revelation. Where Joyce had sought the point of view of the character and sought to reproduce the formless meanderings of a person’s mind, Jadway had sought the point of view of the reader who was probing the character’s mind and translating the occasional word acrobatics of the character’s mind into the more understandable language of conventional speech.

Barrett sat down on the bed, and reaching over to the table, he took up the bottle of cognac and poured himself a nightcap. Sipping the brandy, Barrett tried to sort out his reason for troubling to compare J J Jadway to James Joyce. At once he knew his reason. It had not been a literary exercise after all. It had been a legal exercise. Joyce’s work had been published in Paris in 1922, and had been consistently banned thereafter in the United States as an obscene book until it was brought to trial in the District Court in New York before Judge John Woolsey. In 1933 Woolsey announced that, in spite of the book’s ‘unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic’ And in 1934 Judge Augustus Hand of the Circuit Court of Appeals concurred in this opinion.

Now The Seven Minutes must undergo a similar, and perhaps more difficult, trial.

Would a judge or a jury hold that it was not pornographic?

Or would it be condemned as an utter obscenity?

He tried to capsulize the story for himself, posing in the role of ‘the average person, applying contemporary community stand.

ards.’ He reviewed its outlines quickly.

It began inside the mind of this young woman, Cathleen, who was lying on her back, naked, on a bed in a place unknown. It began with her thoughts and feelings as her male bed partner, also naked, made his entry into her and slowly started making love to her. As the sex act progressed, Cathleen’s mind reacted to the coupling on two levels. On the first, she recorded her immediate physical sensations. On the second, inspired by her gradually mounting passion, she recollected fragments of sensual experiences from her youthful past and then she projected these memories into wildly erotic fancies of loves that she had not experienced but tried to imagine. Her imagination acted out scenes of physical lovemaking with Jesus, with Julius Caesar, with Shakespeare, with Chopin, with Galileo, with Byron, with Washington, with Parnell. Mixed through these fancies she imagined fornicating with a black African, an Asiatic, an American Indian.

Conjuring up these vivid mental pictures, she also relived moments of carnality with three actual men in her life who had been her lovers. The three men varied widely in their physical endowments and prowess, as well as in their attitudes toward women and love. Each of the three had offered her something, taught her something, and the experiences with all three had fused into making her an entire woman. And such story as there was in the novel was drawn out of Cathleen’s decision to accept one of these men as her lifetime mate, the one she had taken to her bed this night, the very one who was inside her these seven minutes. Not until the last page, while gasping her love for him in the final paroxysms of her orgasm, would she call out and reveal the name of the one she had chosen.

This was the barest outline of the book that Barrett had read.

Still in the role of ‘the average reader,’ and ‘applying contemporary community standards,’ Barrett felt assured that the outline in itself would not be considered legally obscene, since the sex act by itself was not legally obscene.

But then Barrett realized that he had not reviewed the book with an entirely honest eye. He had substituted euphemisms for the realistic bed language that Jadway had employed. In outlining the essential story line of The Seven Minutes, he had been dishonest to Jadway’s spirit of truth.

In his mind, Cathleen had been indulging in sexual intercourse, copulation, coupling, fornication, lovemaking.

In the mind of Jadway’s Cathleen, she had simply been fucking.

The old Saxon word, on its own, might no longer prejudice a judge or a jury against a work of art. Its appearance in modern literature had been frequent and constant. The word no longer automatically made a literary work pornographic. It had won its natural place during an historic exchange that had enlivened the Ulysses trial.

Barrett remembered.

The language of James Joyce’s novel had been under discussion. And part of the discussion was Joyce’s use of the word ‘fucking.’

Joyce’s attorney had said to Judge Woolsey, ‘Judge, as to the word “fuck,” one etymological dictionary gives its derivation as hom facere - to make - the farmer fucked the seed into the soil. This, Your Honor, has more integrity than a euphemism used every day in every modern novel to describe precisely the same event.’

‘For example?’ Judge Woolsey had asked.

‘Oh - “They slept together,” ‘ said Joyce’s attorney. ‘It means the same thing.’

Judge Woolsey had smiled. ‘But, Counselor, that isn’t even usually the truth!’

In that exchange, ‘fucking’ had been admitted to the printed page.

No, it was not the language of The Seven Minutes that might cause difficulty before a jury of average citizens. It was the context within which the language was used. For Molly Bloom to be fucked by a man named Boylan was one thing. For Jadway’s Cathleen to imagine being fucked by the Father of His Country or the Son of God - that might be something else again.

Then there was another problem: the problem of explicit sex, of scenes which went ‘substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters … matter which is utterly without redeeming social importance.’

He had placed a copy of Lady Chatter ley’s Lover and the English edition of The Trial of Lady Chatter ley on his bedside table earlier, hoping to skim them again after he had finished reading the Jadway novel. It was late now, but he could not resist picking up Lady Chatterley’s Lover and leafing through it. He sought certain passages, until his eyes held on one. Mellors was making love to the lady. Forgive me, Mr Joyce. Mellors was fucking the lady. He read the passage:

… and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crises seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love!

Barrett went on through the novel, and here ‘softly he stroked the silky slope of her loins, down, down between her soft warm buttocks,’ and there ‘Tenderness, really - cunt tenderness,’ and again, ‘she held the penis soft in her hand.’