PREFACE (1992) In spite of the long war waged against it by the politically correct and the religiously wacky, erotic writing in English is currently enjoying a renewal of its popularity and literary potential. Snugly shelved in large, well-lighted American bookstores belly to back with science-fiction and mysteries, Dickens and Faulkner, dirty books are back-and a welcome sight they are, too; for they discreetly offer in traditional narrative form the safest, and some of the most imaginative sex possible. In these dark times they recall the pleasures of the body and the claims of eros. Dirty books (surely it is a vital genre of writing upon which is imposed such a fecund title) that are almost promiscuously available today were hard to find, except in some European cities, before 1962. Then a series of legal decisions breached the wall of Censorship in America, and a renaissance of writing occurred that produced in ten years between 1965 and 1975 the fresh, exuberant beginnings of a native American erotic literature. The Secret Record is the first survey of this period. The novels of this renaissance derive much of their electric energy from the countercultural revolt of the sixties. In them women writers defiantly challenge male fantasies, homosexuals freely describe their lives and desires, and a bedroom mirror is held up to the sexual revolution. These dirty books are often dark and experimental, and sometimes neglectful of their responsibility to arouse a physical as well as emotional response in the reader. They are not sentimental, seldom lubricious, but often profane. Based on provocation, dirty books are the controversial literature of sexual desire. Almost two decades later, the erotic writing of our own fin-de-siecle is not-yet at least-quite as deliberately provocative. Fantasy, for instance, is more important now than it was then; politics much less so. Many of the rough edges of the genre have been smoothed, sometimes so much that the rift between the sexes over what turns them on-romantic or explicit writing?-seems reconciled. There is a new sophistication and understanding of the function of erotic writing. Although few critics pay it serious attention, its role is recognized in studies like Sexual Personae, in which Camille Paglia writes: "Pornography shows us nature's daemonic heart, those eternal forces at work beneath and beyond social convention. Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other...." Art or not, dirty books make people uncomfortable. Otherwise sophisticated people snigger at the thought of assigning literary values to them, and find it difficult to understand how one dirty book might be different from the next. Their argument is with sex itself, of course-with the possibility of seduction by a book from a genre of forbidden writing that subversively criticizes social conditioning. In a society in which sex is both a major obsession and a major taboo, dirty books offend because they confront the impulse straight on. But since they also entertain so many who see no reason to limit the literary depiction of sexuality to John Updike, their popularity is growing. There is a wide range of new erotic writing. It is romantic, historical, experimental, and even philosophical: The signs of its renewal are as ubiquitous as green shoots in spring. New mass market publishers, a burgeoning underground of small press books and magazines, and the appearance of some landmark works about the erotic impulse are signs that something is happening. There is a new receptivity to thinking and writing about the sexual dimension. In New York four publishers have been issuing classic reprints and new fiction of varying quality. Legendary Grove Press founder Barney Rossett published classic Victorian erotica and new fiction by capable novelists like Akahige Namban and Richard Manton under his Blue Moon imprint in the late 1980's. Richard Kasak's Masquerade Books has reprinted many classic works and frequently publishes exciting new novelists like Alice Joanou, whose Cannibal Flower marks an auspicious writing debut. Lyie Stuart's Red Stripe Books publishes new fiction. The firm of Carroll & Graf has a large backlist of classic erotica. In London the late Marco Vassi's novels The Saline Solution and The Gentle Degenerates are available in glossy reprints from Nexus. (Vassi, an important figure in the development of the modern erotic novel, died of AIDS-related complications in January, 1989.) Mainstream publishers in America routinely publish material that would have been banned thirty years ago. Catherine Roman's Foreplay (Random House) gives us an erotic On The Road for the nineties. Frisk (Grove Weidenfeld) goes a long way toward establishing its author, Dennis Cooper, as the leading homosexual exponent of the literature of evil. The case of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho,canceled by one major publisher and snapped up by another, demonstrates that the profit motive transcends old taboos in American publishing. And when Anne Rice, whose sexy vampire novels have become enormous bestsellers, acknowledged that she was also A. N. Roquelaure, the author of a trilogy of explicit SM novels, it seemed apparent that most barriers had been lifted. Both major and small presses have made available a wealth of material by gay and lesbian writers. Amethyst Press published gay fiction in attractive paperback editions by writers like Bo Huston, Patrick Moore, and Dennis Cooper, while lesbian presses like Banned Books in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh's Cleis Press produce anthologies of lesbian erotica. Edmund White's fine anthology, The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, collects some of the best new gay writers. In his foreword to that book, White acknowledges the role in gay fiction of what he calls "the ambition to excite." Like erotic writers, many new gay writers-male and female-deliberately seek to provoke a physical response in their readers. Among them is Pat Califia, whose book Macho Sluts is a brilliantly hard-edged collection of stories about the world of lesbian SM. Readers looking for a more politically correct, soft-focus erotica turn to anthologies like Yellow Silk (Harmony) and Deep Down: The New Sensual Writing by Women (Faber and Faber). While the new erotic novels function as entertainment as well as literary provocation, non-fiction books about the influence of sexuality in our lives attempt to create an erotic perspective for the 1990's. In addition to the many translations of Georges Bataille's work now available, some key books on the non-fiction shelf include Michael Hutchison's The Anatomy Of Sex And Power, Sylvere Lotringer's Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion In America, and Thomas Moore's Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism. Prometheus Books prints a number of serious books about sexuality every year, including an interesting new line of life stories from the sexual underground-the porn star Jerry Butler's Raw Talent and the dominatrix Mistress Jacqueline's Whips & Kisses: Parting the Leather Curtain appeared recently. And Torch Books published Post Porn Modernist by performance artist Annie Sprinkle, a playful collage of life on the cutting edge of sexuality both pre- and post-AIDS. The briefest survey of recent trends in erotic writing indicates a rebirth of interest in the genre of literature that reflects the secret, complex state of our erotic natures. In feudal Japan erotica was given to young people in the form of pillow books so that they might be instructed in lovemaking. Why can't we create a contemporary erotica that is human and various enough to instruct the young and comfort the lonely? That is both intelligent and stimulating? It was the cool critic Lionel Trilling who foresaw the possibility years ago, writing, "I see no reason in morality (or in aesthetic theory) why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire...." Michael Perkins |
