How to get it down
Victoria Glendinning
THE JOY OF WRITING SEX by Elizabeth Benedict Souvenir Press, £9.99, pp. 244, ISBN 0285636421 Aman at a party once handed me a round red lapel-button saying 'What's Love Got To Do With It?' That could be the subtitle of this book, which is a 'how-to' guide for fiction writers; the American novelist Elizabeth Benedict, who is also a teacher of creative writing, will help you to craft 'smashing' and 'wonderful' sex scenes. The sex itself doesn't have to be any good, but the writing must be.
The Joy of Writing Sex, which doesn't have enough jokes in it, first appeared in 1995. Three phenomena have provoked Benedict into updating and amplifying it: 'Cyberspace. Monica. Aids'. What she means is, firstly, that e-mail and the internet now provide a whole new arena for flirtation and sexual fantasy, in fiction as in (virtual) reality. Then, the Monica Lewinsky story 'seriously shifted the standards for what we can talk about at dinner parties and in casual conversation.' (Maybe — though it's almost 100 years since Lytton Strachey, famously, pointed at a stain on Vanessa Bell's dress and said, 'Semen?) As for Aids, how you write about it must crucially depend on the year in which your novel is set. Right now, when in the rich West our grief, rage and astonishment at its ravages are no longer so raw, and there are advances in drug treatment, it's the statutory preliminary 'talk' between new lovers as to HIV status and tests which may have to be sensitively addressed.
This is not a primer for writing pornography, nor is it a set of instructions, as for building a model aircraft, though the author lays down some ground rules. These are sensible and obvious. The sex scenes should be connected to the larger concerns of the book, and should he driven by the 'needs, impulses and histories' of the part ners. The exact details of the setting bed, car, broom cupboard, underpass — are important. The nature of the relation
ship casual, longstanding, illicit or whatever — is critical to what happens, and it's generally not the mechanics of coupling which are interesting or revealing, but what is going on in people's minds, and how they arrive at the moment of physical connection.
More pointed is her insistence that in a good sex scene at least one of the partners must want it really badly, and there must be an element of surprise in what happens. She remarks on the curious fact that married sex remained taboo in literature long after adultery became a staple topic — was this because of an assumption that it was not worth writing about, or out of some residual delicacy and respect for the institution? Fiction writers are urged to examine and face up to their own inhibitions and hang-ups, and to stop worrying about what their families will think. This particular difficulty is illustrated by interviews with writers, both straight and gay (new in this edition is an eloquent contribution from Edmund White).
The text is punctuated with short passages which she considers to exemplify good sex-writing from modern novels — including some English and Irish ones, plus a lot from successful mid-list American authors with whom British readers may not be familiar. Reading all this stuff should be instructive and fun. But it begins to pall because, as Benedict has already stressed, it's only context and character which make sex in books really interesting.
And what's love got to do with it? Precious little. Readers may find what Benedict has to say about this more startling
than anything else in the book even more startling than the story of the Siamese twins, born in 1811, fictionalised in Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss, who between them fathered 21 children, (The sex scenes in this, Strauss tells Benedict, are 'a big hit at the readings.) Love, you see, is 'rather retro'. Nowadays, writes Benedict,
when love fails us, we routinely divorce, go into therapy, and find another spouse, whom we will find deficient sooner or later. My own sense is that the novel of love has been superseded by the novel that explores the primacy of our sexual selves.
Anyone who believes that hasn't read many good modern novels recently and is in danger of disappearing up her own literary orifices.
Nevertheless, there is much that is rare and strange to be learned from The Joy of Writing Sex — for example, that in the states of Georgia, Alabama and Texas it is legal to own a gun but not a vibrator.
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