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In The American Grain In the years between 1926 and 1956 erotic literature flourished in France; unhindered by government prosecution, The Olympia Press and its French language counterparts Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Les Editions de Minuit enjoyed a freedom unknown to publishers in other countries. Then, in 1956, French authorities began a series of prosecutions of Olympia Press books which gained such momentum that by the early sixties Girodias was confronted with an eighty-year ban on his publishing activities, a six-year prison sentence, and a sizable fine; every book he published--including Lolita--was banned as soon as it appeared. By one of those coincidences that so often affect publishing history, the rigid censorship which had prevented the printing of erotic works in America since the early nineteenth century was ended for all practical purposes by the mid-sixties, when a Supreme Court decision opened the gates to the dam behind which erotic literature had been held for a century and a half. The legal particulars of these decisions are not important to our purposes here; the effect is. Suddenly, anything could be published in America, and the country was flooded with crude assembly-line pornography. Of the dozens of opportunistic publishers who took advantage of this new freedom to publish, only one. Parliament News in California, demonstrated an interest in encouraging a native erotic literature by publishing its Essex House line of serious erotic novels. For years Grove Press in New York had been the only American publisher to insist in court on its right to publish erotic writing; starting in 1959 with the first unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Grove published and defended in the courts My Secret Life, Naked Lunch, and the works of Sade and Henry Miller. When Girodias moved The Olympia Press to New York in 1967, he joined Grove Press and Essex House as one of the three publishers in America to insist on standards of literary competence in the publication of erotic writing. The stage was set for the first appearance of an American erotic literature. Unlike French erotic writers, American writershad almost no indigenous tradition of draw upon. Until the sixties American censors had been so effective that it is only possible to name a few books and note a few trends before exhausting the subject of an American tradition in the genre. We remember, for instance, the story that Benjamin Franklin enjoyed collecting erotica, and was the first American to own a copy of Fanny Hill; we remember Mark Twain's clandestine forays into the field, "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism," and 1601; we know there were a few counterparts to Victorian erotica, such as The Memoirs of Dolly Morton, a novel about a young girl's abolitionist efforts during the Civil War; the remainder of the works available are either trashy, like M. Fontaine's Establishment, or collections of jokes about sex, like those collected in Anecdota Americana. Fearful of censorship, American writers did not write specifically erotic novels. Instead, they inserted timid bedroom scenes in mainstream novels. Thus the erotic element in twentieth-century American literature is contained in a few passages in a few novels by almost every notable American writer, from Erskine Caldwell through Norman Mailer. Bestsellers like Forever Amber were expected by the public to contain just enough sex to make things interesting, but not enough to be shocking. This trend continued to accelerate into the sixties; books like Peyton Place seemed to sell in proportion to the number of elliptical sex scenes they contained. The novels of Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins continued this tradition. The reading'public was voraciously interested in literary descriptions of sexual activity--as long as the treatment of the subject was reasonably discreet. Sexuality had to be sneaked into fiction by the back door. The only alternative was equally hypocritical: suggestive novels in which the plot and characters revolved around a sexual situation but in which specific descriptions of eros were eschewed. This "soft-core" eroticism flourished in the fifties, when paperback publishers like Pyramid, Beacon, and Midwood specialized in suggestively salacious fiction by writers like Jack Woodford and Orrie Hitt, whose book Hotel Woman (1959) epitomizes this branch of the genre. Hotel Woman is a novel about the opportunistic manager of a Catskill resort hotel and the women he manages to bed. Hitt went a little further in his descriptions of sexuality in Hotel Woman than other soft-core writers, but the cliches are perfectly representative, as in this scene.
He pulled off her shorts and threw them on the floor beside the bandana. She lay naked on the bed before him. Her body convulsed with desire. Hurriedly he undressed and lay down beside her.... "Take me, Al! Take me!"
Soft-core eroticism is distinguished from true erotic writing by its sentimentality and its respect for the social conventions. It does not enlighten, nor does it threaten the reader. As the critic Peter Michelson writes in The Aesthetics of Pornography, soft-core eroticism is the opposite of hard-core-or erotic literature as we have discussed it.
"Soft-core" pornography evades threat and fear both by sublimating the primitive energies that are their source into socially approved activities.... Thus "soft-core" pornography flirts with animality, but does not descend into the naturalistic depths of its mythos....
Literary sex, before 1966, was mostly divided in America between one kind of suggestiveness and another. G. P. Putnam's, after successfully publishing Fanny Hill in 1963, came out with the first hardcover edition of Candy just as Girodias was establishing The Olympia Press in New York. Various pirate publishers were taking advantage of the holes in American copyright law to issue reprints of almost all of the novels he'd published in Paris in the fifties. He had to start fresh, with new American writers he presumably hoped would be the equals of Trocchi, Daimler, Hoffenberg, and company. He began slowly by republishing many of his old successes, but by 1970 an anthology of new Olympia writers bore testimony to the fact that American writers, despite the lack of a native tradition to nourish them, possessed a vision of eros that was both innovative and energetic. Like the Olympia writers of the fifties, many of them used satire as a vehicle for comments on sexuality within American society: Ed Martin, Jett Sage, and George Kimball are part of this group. Others, like the poet Diane di Prima, wrote erotic autobiographies, or disguised their life histories in fiction. A large number of the new Olympia writers employed a surrealistic approach that was introspective and even claustrophobic: Leia Seftali, Renee Auden, Barry Malzberg, and Deneen Peckinpah. A few--among the brightest talents--chose to write in a naturalistic narrative form: Marco Vassi, Angelo d'Arcangelo, and Clarence Major, among others. The list of new Olympia writers is a long one, so we will touch only briefly on the most important books of some of these writers. The first Olympia novel to attract wide attention was a story about the hippie generation of the sixties in Provincetown, Massachusetts, called Barbara (1968). The author, poet Sam Abrams, published Barbara under the pseudonym Frank Newman. The title character is a twelve-year-old girl who comes to a guru-figure named Max for her sexual initiation.Max is a strongly conceived Svengali figure who in the first chapter rapes a young couple he sees making love on the beach. Like Barbara they become his disciples, joining him in a series of powerfully described orgies. Newman's characterization of Max as a teacher--not only of sexuality, but of how to live the best life--is an instance of a recurring motif in erotic writing: the erotic artist as teacher. It is a theme which is most powerfully developed in the novels of Marco Vassi; we will return to it in a later chapter. The problem with Barbara is that it is too episodic to achieve any kind of unity, or to make any point other than the obvious one that free sexuality was a major element in the hippie movement. As an erotic portrait of that generation, Barbara is of some value, and Newman's vivid sex scenes are excellent; but when he strays into politics or attempts to create characters other than Max, the reader loses interest. What Newman lacks is a sense of humor in Barbara, a deficiency that is more than made up for in the work of Ed Martin. His first Olympia novel, Busy Bodies, appeared in 1963, followed in 1968 by Inch by Inch and then The Masterpiece and Frankenstein '69 in 1969. Martin's novels are refreshingly vulgar fantasies in which the action moves with the speed and humor of a burlesque comedian's monologue. Busy Bodies, a novel that opens with an hilarious scene at a seance and which employs a cast of characters who are buried in coffins, remains his funniest book. Crazy Wild and its sequel, Crazy Wild Breaks Loose, were published in 1968 under the pseudonym of Jett Sage. The two novels possess an almost satanic energy. Full of sex and violence, they read like a Hell's Angels version of Kerouac's On The Road. The protagonist is an exaggerated version of Kerouac's Dean Moriarty who gets himself into absurdly violent scrapes as he travels by car and motorcycle across America. The author doesn't slow his roaring narrative once to allow for reflection on the part of his characters; they carom off each other like the moving parts in a pinball machine. Poet George Kimball's Only Skin Deep (1968) is an equally energetic comedy about a midwestern high school, narrated in the first person by a teenaged heroine more wide-eyed than Candy. Kimball's sex scenes are superficial but arousing, although his use of Eastern sex manual techniques as a preface to each scene is a tiresome device. Worse, however, is his tendency to employ satire as a bludgeon rather than a cutting tool, which is one of the weaknesses of Olympia satire. The new generation of Olympia satirists used the erotic novel as a vehicle for criticisms of their society, unlike the writers of the fifties who satirized the erotic situation itself. In the American Grain continues... |
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