Let Me Tell Ya

Bout the Birds and the Bees

I’m sure many of you read the horrifying news in a recent New York Times Magazine that young people are learning about sex from porn that they see on the Internet.  Yikes!  Fellas!  (And girls!)  It’s not like that!  It’s not anything like that!  I’m not saying don’t watch (what good would that do?), but watch with a jaundiced eye.  Porn on the Internet is about as realistic as one of those Marvel comic book movies.

In the same paper was a funnier and more wistful article by my favorite book reviewer, Dwight Garner, about his attempts to learn about sex from the best-selling authors of his youth, Mario Puzo, Judith Krantz, and Jean Auel.  Sonny Corleone, the man with the huge salami, and his poor wife’s insides, which had been turned into overcooked macaroni.  I too read about Sonny’s exploits, which did not of course keep him from being gunned down brutally later in the story.[1]  Just goes to show you.  I was fascinated to hear that The Clan of the Cave Bear was “the worst novel I’ve read all the way through.”  Quite an admission for a book reviewer.

I identified with Garner.  I too had spent (or misspent) my youth looking for information about sex in works of literature.  But I am a little older than he, and was a lot luckier.  I hit the erotic jackpot.

I came of age at exactly the moment when a number of court cases meant that banned literature from the past was suddenly available at your local newsstand.  I think the court case in question was about Ulysses, but the ruling meant that My Life and Loves and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the banned works of Henry Miller, along with works of Victorian porn like Fanny Hill, all came out at once, in bright mass market paperbacks.  Never had I been so delighted that we had a liberal Supreme Court.  We went from John O’Hara (with the notorious exchange in From the Terrace, “Can’t you put it in me?”  “I can and will, right now”) to the priapic Henry Miller of Sexus.  It was quite a jump.

I vividly remember the review of the Henry Miller trilogy, Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus from the New York Times.  It was written by, of all people, Gore Vidal, whose name I didn’t recognize at the time (I was a teenager) and who was very sex positive (he had actually had a brief affair with Anais Nin, so maybe he shouldn’t have been reviewing Miller at all), but rather disgusted by all these heterosexual antics, to say nothing of the filthy language.  He didn’t see much literary merit in the trilogy.  But reading between the lines let me know I wanted to acquire the first volume as soon as possible.

Buying the book was as much of a thrill as reading it.  I found it at a paperback store in Squirrel Hill, the Jewish section of Pittsburgh, my favorite part of town to this day.  A woman that I took to be in her fifties was the proprietor, and my heart thumped as I approached the desk as if I were going to have sex with her, not just buy a book to read about it.  She said the words I had been dreading, “Are you eighteen years of age or older?” and I was such a rube that I didn’t even know to lie.  “No,” I said.  She actually opened the book and looked at a random page (there was almost no page that didn’t include a filthy sexual act, described in livid detail).  “Well,” she said with a smile, “I guess it’s okay.”  She had adjusted to the times.  (She was also a small business owner.)  Okay it very much was, in the United States in 1965.

Henry Miller was revealed to be a sexist pig by none other than Kate Millett, who tore him apart in her famous book Sexual Politics.  There are any number of scenes in Sexus that would be read with horror by women in the #MeToo movement.  But though Miller was a Brooklyn boy and more than a little rough around the edges, he taught me as a young man that it was okay to want sex and to want lots of it, also that sex was fun, and funny, and wildly unpredictable.  Miller was a man of his day—he had written the book in the forties—but in his own way he loved women, and was a true romantic.  I feel sure Anais Nin enjoyed her time with Miller more than with that sarcastic little shit Gore Vidal.  Miller loved women and loved life.  I don’t think Vidal loved either one.

My Life and Loves was a different kind of book altogether.  Frank Harris was a respectable literary man, editor of the Saturday Review, and had known many of the notables of his day.  Probably if I read the book today, I would read all the passages I skipped, and skip all the passages I read.[2]  In this massive book (1070 pages), he wrote not only about his whole life in writing and publishing, but also, in just as much detail, about his sex life.  I don’t know what the hell he was thinking.  There was no chance such a book could have been published when he wrote it.  The prose was clinical, not nearly as much fun as Miller’s, but he went into enormous detail and told a lot, not only about his methods of seduction, but also about birth control.[3]  The idiom wasn’t much help to me in Pittsburgh in the mid-Sixties (he would say things to his girlfriends like, “You’re such a dear!”  “Oh!  You’re a marvel!”), but he spelled how the act was done in a much more straightforward way than the sex manuals of the day.

But if I were recommending one book of fiction for sex education (and really there’s no book; you gotta just get out there and do it, as if it’s never been done before.  Do it with Beginner’s Mind), it would be the one I read by sneaking up to my sister’s room in the attic (she had since married and moved away, leaving her books behind) and finding the book that she brought back from her trip to Europe, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

That novel was also taken apart by Kate Millett, as I remember (I never read Sexual Politics), but I can’t understand why.  If there was ever a man who was coupled to a strong woman, it was D.H. Lawrence, and the attitude of Mellors towards Lady Chatterley in that book was simultaneously down to earth—he used all the Anglo Saxon words—and worshipful.  He worshiped Lady Chatterley, worshiped sex, worshiped life.  Lawrence wrote this book—three different versions, actually—when he was dying, and it is a paen not just to sex, but to a natural life, a life lived in nature.

People scorn it as a novel—I have no idea why; I’ve read it three or four times, loved it every time—but it is in my opinion a great book, a fitting final book for Lawrence, and the Great Bright Book of Life that he said the novel could be.  People scorn books about sex as if we should be ashamed of reading them, but that’s a holdover from our Puritan heritage.  If you want to learn about sex through literature, you could do a lot worse than Lady Chatterley.

[1] Puzo wasn’t much of a sex educator, and seemed to have fallen for some stories he’d heard around the neighborhood, but I liked him as a novelist (though I was reading him later in life than Garner).  His earlier book The Fortunate Pilgrim was a fascinating story about an Italian immigrant family in Hell’s Kitchen, and I actually enjoyed Fools Die better than The Godfather.

[2] I do remember one fascinating detail about a famous writer.  Guy de Maupassant, who had had as much sex as Harris, could apparently get an erection at will.  Harris questioned this information when Maupassant said it, and the famous writer shut him up with the words, “Look at my trousers right now.”  Good grief.

[3] I’m not at all sure that information was accurate.  I fortunately wasn’t in a situation where I could put it into practice.