At a local library sale, I not long ago picked up for fifty cents a clean copy of The Olympia Reader, an anthology from the Paris publishing house that in its day printed the best high-class pornography then going. Olympia Press published the Marquis de Sade, John Cleland, Pauline Réage, Frank Harris, Henry Miller, Genet, William Burroughs, and, perhaps most famously, the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The Olympia Reader was a bestseller when first published in 1965.
The book has been sitting on my shelf for several months now without my opening it. Pornography, even at a putatively high literary level, is not my cup of absinthe. This wasn’t always so. I remember as a college student a slight frisson when a friend brought back from Paris two plain-green-covered copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. I slogged through all of Miller’s boring disquisitions on Indian philosophy and other intellectual sludge to get to his slightly comic bonking bits. Fifty years later all I remember from those books is a scene in which the Millerish narrator is making love standing up with a woman in a Parisian hallway, and Miller writes (best I can recall): “Her purse dropped. A coin rolled out. I made a mental note to pick it up later.”
I would like to be able to report that my own boredom with pornography is representative of a decline of interest in pornography generally. The other day, though, I read that one of the uses of the Kindle, the iPad, and other reading machines is that they allow people to read pornography without having to display books with lurid covers. Books that might quietly die in print out of embarrassment thus sometimes live on as ebooks.
I’m not sure what is the proper age to have a settled view on sex. My view is that it is an awfully nice, sometimes a really quite grand (mostly) indoor sport played with someone you love. Besides, sex is essentially a comic activity—all sex, that is, except one’s own. Without underestimating the power of sex, then, one ought not to go all Freudian-nutty and begin thinking it is the motive force behind all significant human conduct.
A generation of novelists—John Updike, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth—who thought it was such a force is, in my opinion, doomed to lose future generations of readers for putting sex at the center of their fiction. For these writers sex was the central drama, the bedroom the main scene of action, elaborately fancy fornication often its denouement. Hard to read these novelists these days, when sex is no longer viewed as so dramatic an event as it once was, without laughing, usually in all the wrong places.
The poet Kenneth Patchen titled one of his novels Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, a book I have never read but a title I have always liked. As a writer of short stories whose characters sometimes wander off into bedrooms, I have come to think of myself as The Sly Pornographer. Inevitably, I close the bedroom door on these characters, for I cannot imagine myself writing up a sex scene, with all its mechanics, without giggling.
In a story of mine called “The Count and the Princess,” one of my characters, the Count, “retired to bed, there, as was distinctly not his custom, to dream of making passionate love to Sheila Skolnik.” Wouldn’t you know, one day this same Mrs. Skolnik shows up at his apartment and events conspire so that “they embraced and she took him by the hand into the bedroom, where they did things together that the Count hadn’t even dared to dream.” Was it Greyhound that once ran a commercial with the tagline “Leave the driving to us”? As a sly pornographer, I leave the porno to my readers, or at least to their imaginations.
In another story of mine, “Bartlestein’s First Fling,” the middle-aged owner of a firm that manufactures sinks, tubs, and faucets has sex with a young employee one evening on the floor of his office, but thinks less about the actual sex than that “he is a grandfather.” He also remembers that “he has had back trouble of late, and hopes he will not throw something out of whack before this session on his office floor is over.” When it is over—without any detailed description provided by the author—he recalls that “the Polish cleaning women . . . come on at nine.” He notes that he is still garbed in T-shirt and black socks—the latter “executive length,” as the saleswoman at Marshall Field’s described them to him. The Sly Pornographer, in other words, has struck again.
If anyone would like to acquire my copy of The Olympia Reader, it’s yours for 75 cents, plus shipping and handling. Forgive me, but I’d like to show a small profit on the deal.
