The Naughty Bits (2 page)

But if to know the first root of our love
You have so strong a desire,
I’ll tell you as one who weeps while she speaks.

One day, for pleasure simply, we were reading
Of Lancelot, and how love overpowered him;
Alone we were, and free from all suspicions.

Often that reading caused our eyes to meet,
And often the color from our faces went,
But it was a single passage that overcame us:

When we read how the desired smile was
Kissed by so true a lover as he, this one,
Who from me never will be taken,

Kissed me, his body all trembling, on the mouth.
. . . And no more did we read that day.

—translated by Jack Murnighan

from
Lady Chatterley’s Lover

D. H. LAWRENCE

Lawrence delivers. No book in any public library is likely to be as dog-eared from furtive bathroom reading as
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover.
Sure old D. H. had some dubious politics—no small number of sexist and classist remarks suppurate forth from his books—but the man could write a sex scene. First published privately in Italy in 1928,
Chatterley
caused the predicted uproar and was banned in the United States until the late 1950s. Finally, an American judge approved it as the classic it surely is. The first sentence gets us going (“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically”), and it doesn’t lose steam thereafter. Readers who fast-forward a hundred pages to get to the raunch lose out on Chatterley’s nuanced social critique. But don’t worry, that’s just what we’ll do.

What fascinates me about
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is that it manages to present some of the more piquant sex that you’ll find in English literature yet also one of the most brutal dissections of the act that I’ve ever read. Which opens some interesting questions: Did Lawrence like sex? If not, how could he write such arousing scenes? Does not liking sex facilitate writing about it, or was he just honest and saw sex, warts and all, for what it is? I occasionally have the experience of listening to a Caruso aria, then suddenly hearing it as if I was someone who had never listened to opera. Stepping out of the inside of experience, the ordinary, even the beautiful, can become absurd. This is what happens in Lawrence’s description of Lady Chatterley losing sync with her lover: “She lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love.”

It goes on in the same damning vein, but you get the point. And this from a woman who, as you will see in the scene below, had supped at lust’s table, and greedily. It is a curious dichotomy—sex from the inside, sex from the outside—and Lawrence is savvy to present it. If there is a moral, and whether it’s intended or incidental, it is to live from within. Writers, perhaps, have to write from without, but let the rest of us just be there doing it.

He led her through the wall of prickly trees that were difficult to come through to a place where there was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident—he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

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 insider her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, 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. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with the activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. 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 soft and open, and softly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment 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 in to 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.

from
Portnoy’s Complaint

PHILIP ROTH

If there’s a place where Catholics and Jews are in complete accord, it’s in their sovereign deployment of guilt. My childhood home was ostensibly atheist, but the mere fact that Irish Catholic blood flows in half of my veins seems to have consigned me, phylogenetically, to the full complement of nookie neuroses. Had I been Jewish it seems I would have gone through the same issues, at least if one believes Philip Roth. The protagonist of
Portnoy’s Complaint
’s agonized confrontations with his sexuality are meant to be a case study in the effects of Jewish Mother Syndrome on a randy adolescent, but they remind me strongly of my own agnostic fits. As such, Portnoy stands as a larger allegory on the pain and humor of a potently sexual individual scraping against a culture of repression. It’s an old tune, certainly, but few sing it as well as Roth.

So what do frustrated teenagers do to release all their pent-up urges? They masturbate, of course, and Portnoy is a pro. He starts by doing it in hiding, though he gets more and more public as the years pass. He does it in the family bathroom, pretending to have the runs; he does it on the bus sitting next to a sleeping archetypal shiksa; he does it in movie theaters; he does it in the woods; he does it in the beef liver his family had reserved for dinner; and he does it in his baseball mitt, having snuck into the burlesque. It’s this last that I’ve selected to excerpt, for here, more than anywhere else in the novel, Roth spells out the material stuff of Portnoy’s fantasy. And it’s a scream. Earlier in the novel Portnoy’s dream women (and milk bottles and cored apples and his sister’s brassieres) called him “Big Boy” and asked him to give them all he’s got; here he adopts the quaint moniker “Fuckface” and gets it on with a chorus girl. In the best book on masturbation, this might well be the finest scene.

What if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if . . . In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is too, under our bare bulb (HOTEL flashing just outside our window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock as I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off—then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with “poor”) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark.

from
“Roman Elegy 5”

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

You have found a magic lantern and a few rubs brought forth its occupant. He’s kind of a bottom-drawer djinn so you’re only entitled to one wish and not even one of your own devising. But he’s not all bad, so he asks you, “Whaddaya want, Love or Art?” And which do you pick, the consummate romantic relationship or the great Work, suspecting that having one pretty much negates the chance of the other? Love or Art— that’s how it’s normally presented, and most of us don’t question the dichotomy.

But why should they have to be mutually exclusive? Does every artist need to be tortured and loveless? Must every great lover be consumed by passion to the exclusion of all else? We imagine both artists and lovers as addicts: the artist is Picasso, surrounded by women but loving only himself and his work; the lover is—yes, who is the lover? How would we have heard of him? Each day spent in a rhapsody of sexual bliss—who would have time to paint or write, or even buy milk? I once arbitrated a dispute between a couple over how much sex they should have: she was arguing for four times a day; he said once every other day. Her reasoning was obvious—the more the merrier. His? That he was only able to work because of the sadness of his life. His artistic fuel derived from discontent; having sex every day would make that discontent go away, and with it all his ambition. I advised for once every other day, with marathon weekend supplements.

My own humble life has been an attempt to reconcile impulses in both directions. There are those rare people who seem to have balanced their seduction and career schedules (Wilt Chamberlain, for example, scoring at will in both sex and hoops), but when I want real inspiration, I look to literature. Specifically, to an elegy of Goethe’s. Germany’s greatest writer was a lifelong student of the erotic arts and wrote a number of scurrilous verses. He also had an enormous collection of penis-centric art and curios from around the world, and I suspect he was something of a perv. Yet his
Roman Elegies
reveal his most romantic side, none more than the Fifth (which I’ve translated below). Its theme is not the separation of Love and Art, but how the former can be used to facilitate the latter. And I ask you, if it’s possible, is there a greater synthesis?

I find myself now on classical ground, filled with joy and inspiration;

Voices from past and present speak loudly to me, all full of charm.

I turn the pages of the Ancients and follow their counsel;

My hand doesn’t tire, and each day I find a new delight.

But when the night comes, love occupies me otherwise.

And if the result is that I’m only half as learned, I am still doubly happy.

But then, is it not a kind of learning when the lovely curve of her bosom

I admire, and let my hand slide down her hips?

Then I can truly understand a marble sculpture; I conjure and compare,

I see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.

And if, being with my beloved, I am deprived of some daylight hours

She makes amends by giving me all the night’s hours in return.

What’s more, we’re not always kissing, but often speak with reason;

And when she falls to sleep, I lie beside her and think a good deal.

And frequently while in her arms I have composed beautiful poems,

Softly measuring the beat of the hexameters, tapping my finger

Along her naked back. She breathes softly in a gentle slumber,

And her breath glows through me, to the depths of my chest,

While Cupid stokes the fire . . .

—translated by Jack Murnighan

from
Beloved

TONI MORRISON

Hard-bought, wisdom. Take something away from a man, then he’ll understand. Heidegger says you don’t know the tool-ness of a tool until it breaks. And the heart? I wonder how much we can hurt, how much we can know. I’m listening to some music now, pretending not to be alive, looking down at a book I have read many times, trying to figure out how to describe that feeling you get when something strikes the deepest tuning fork you’ve got in the hollow case in your chest. I’m not always sure I can go on living, but that’s when I think I’m doing it for real. Feeling the accumulated weight of silent tragedy, drunk with how beautiful beauty can be. It seems I have to go on, but feeling this much feeling head-on I don’t know how I ever will.

This is what happens when I reread
Beloved.
Pure, lucid knowledge that I’m brushing against the true. Wondering how I could ever manage not to break beneath the weight. How any of us do. Morrison’s achievement is among the handful of books that take us to the love-ravaged, love-saved heart of human experience. And remind us that we’ve been there all along.

[Note: Sethe and Paul D are in bed, thinking back on how Sethe lost her virginity to Halle in a cornfield, while Paul D, Sixo and others looked on.]