Why are you telling me all this?

Kingsley Amis

The Literary Editor asked two distinguished novelists whether increasing, almost total freedom of expression has been a benefit or hindrance to literature. Next week, Piers Paul Read will put an opposing point of view.

Reading almost any piece of writing above the emotional level of a guide book or a public notice is like listening to someone talking to you in private, talking to you alone. However well aware you may be that the words have reached and are continuing to reach countless others, you feel, in the act of reading, I suggest, like an audience of one, that is to say in a relation of peculiar intimacy and immediacy, less intense than when in company with a real person but otherwise very much the same, and unique in being so.

Accordingly you respond to what you are being told, if it is told well enough, very much as you would in life, thrilling to the adventures, chuckling at the funny bits, feeling a touch of the tender emotions when these are appealed to. This more or less simple correspondence breaks down when what you are being told consists of a passage of explicit sexual description, or ESD.

In life, the recounting of sexual confi- dences by one man to another (I know there are other possible combinations) is governed by an unspoken but pretty strin- gent contract if they are to be admitted at all. Even in the most favourable circumst- ances, venturing into physical detail is in danger of producing discomfort in the hearer. This discomfort is not really shock, not at any rate the sort that old ladies are supposed to feel at being reminded, or perhaps more fully informed, of the dis- gusting things people get up to. It is more like embarrassment, born of uneasy spe- culation about what sort of fellow it can be who is prepared to tell you all this. Whether he does it to boast, to indulge his fancy, to advertise his emancipation from something or other, to shake you out of your bourgeois sedateness, etc., will hardly concern you. Nor will you take the slightest notice of any pretences he may make of increasing the store of human knowledge, affected or half-baked protestations of wonderment at the mystery of it all, or suchlike. Whereas if his theme is the horror or nastiness of it all you will already have left. Very well, let it be shock, but at his telling it, not at whatever he might or might not have done.

Try as he may, the writer of such things is seized by the same trap as his social counterpart. No matter that, by the very act of agreeing to read his tale, you have given him something of the privilege of a close friend, and that the conditions of reading make him at the same time secure from interruption and available for pondering ad libitum. Indeed, the fact that he well and truly has your ear only makes it worse for him. A writer has none of the real-life excuses of drunkenness, caprice, boredom. It is his considered judgment that you should be told exactly what he or what's-his-name got up to. No matter either how sincerely he thinks, or would say he thinks, that his intentions are immaculate, how loudly he protests his devotion to art, truth, love, self- understanding, the essential holiness of sex or anything else; the unbreakable connec- tion between literature and life reduces him to the same moral level as the chap you make sure of avoiding in the pub.

It is often said that the sexual act is ludicrous to a detached observer, though opportunities to check this on the ground, so to speak, must be rare. Certainly sex is a subject very well suited for comic treat- ment, so much so that some accounts of sexual behaviour notoriously attract laugh- ter against that writer's intention, and Lady Chatterley's Lover might be a master- piece of unconscious humour but for the boring non-sexual bits in between. The book also provokes in full measure the irritation that is never far from the reader's mind in such cases, expressible perhaps by the grumble, 'Well, all I can say is if it was me doing it, I wouldn't be doing it like that.'

A full ESD in comic terms, if possible at all, would be a dubious venture; what little I have seen along those lines has indicated that a little goes a long way. But obviously enough the real sight of a copulating couple would to most people not be funny in the least. Most people finding them- selves somehow faced with it would, from feelings I need not indicate, get out as fast as they could. A minority would stay; more practically, they would have fixed it up in the first place.

In life, that minority is a small one; among readers, not so small. These readers, voyeurs at one remove, are, of course, purposeful and responsive readers of por- nography, obtaining sexual excitement from what purport to be accounts of others' behaviour. Pornography is unlike any other kind of writing. It has no analogy with the social act of talking to someone and its reader has no sense of an author; places, time, individuals and their motives and reactions and whole lives vanish too. In this sense, as in others, it is dehumanis- ing. And it is no respecter of motives. I mean that any detailed account of copula- tion, however 'purely' intended, is liable to excite sexually those whom it does not revolt, bore or move to laughter. That is in the strict sense the dilemma of the explicit describer. Some writers cheerfully ignore it and may make a lot of money, for instance Harold Robbins, whose The Storyteller shows its very Robbins-like 'hero' writing a rape-scene in a visibly worked-up state.

Well, if you don't mind your readers seeing you in that light, go ahead and run off all the ESDs you fancy; forget that there are those to whom another fellow's sexual excitement is the least engaging thing in the world. In the present context to infer its presence is to realise that you have crossed the frontiers into pornography-on-purpose. Like many fron- tiers this one is often hard to draw precise- ly, but you can tell straight away which side of it you are on.

To argue in this way is not — obviously, I hope — to interdict sex as a literary subject. The special importance of that subject, however, imposes special res- traints on those setting out to deal with it.

Such restraints are not constricting to a writer of any care or skill. Quite the contrary: the tension between the need to make matters clear enough and the need to do so tactfully can be turned to artistic account, like the poetic tension between metre and natural speech. In Jude the Obscure it is not just that Hardy succeeds in telling us all we need to know about Jude and Arabella, and Jude and Sue, without ever taking us into the bedroom; the manner of his success is part of the literary success of the novel. In Henry NeWbolt's poem, 'The Viking's Song,' a less familiar example, we hear how the raider's first forays were not welcome to the recipient territory. But, approaching the shore now,

Where once but watch-fires burned I see thy beacon shine, And know the land hath learned Desire that welcomes mine.

Nothing could be clearer, or less explicit; and again, the poem would not just be less good if Newbolt had said, 'Darling, when I first started to . . .' etc., it would not exist at all.

The ESD-merchant's greatest disservice is not that of offending briefly and efface- ably against good taste and good sense too, though he or she asks to be reminded that at a time when anything may be published there is a particular duty to be responsible.

It is that the very nature of the enterprise reinforces the assumption that physical sex is the important part or the most interest- ing or only interesting part of sex. Life and a great deal of literature teach the import- ance and interest of those moments and days and whole relationships which are deeply sexual, but in which nobody even looks like touching anybody. Of course, the trouble with that sort of thing is that it can be quite difficult to write about. Breasts and buttocks are child's play.