The Essex House Novelists
Start building up a new erotic literature based on beginnings rather than anticipating the end. - -David Meltzer
While The Olympia Press published the new erotic literature, dozens of other firms were cashing in on the public's appetite for pornography. For the most part, what these marginal publishers printed bore only a generic resemblance to serious erotic writing. In fact, there was only one other publisher of erotica in America to undertake a program as artistically ambitious as Olympia's. He was Milton Luros of Parliament News, Inc., located in North Hollywood, California. Parliament News was the parent publisher of a number of magazines and book lines-all dealing with sex-but only two, Brandon House Library Editions and Essex House, were devoted to serious erotic writing. In 1967, a young musician and book dealer named Brian Kirby was given the responsibility of editing these two lines, and the credit for their success must go solely to him. In 1967 foreign and classic erotic fiction began appearing under the imprint of Brandon House Library Editions. Olympia Press books of the fifties were reprinted with new comments by the authors, along with editions of Sade, John Wilmot, Chinese classics, and a wealth of similar material; production values--beautifully designed covers, good printing and paper-- indicated a strong commitment to quality in the publishing program. Brandon House Library Editions made the classics of erotic literature available, but the contemporary writers published in the series were at best skillful entertainers in the Marcus van Heller tradition. It wasn't until Kirby initiated the Essex House line of serious erotic novels in early 1968 that Parliament News became the West Coast equivalent of The Olympia Press. In all, over forty erotic novels were published by Essex House in less than two years. If there is one distinguishing feature that comes to mind when the forty-odd Essex House novels are considered as a body of work, it is a heady sense of liberation. Most of these writers played, in the most open-ended, experimental way, with the form. They came fresh to it, were not hampered by any restriction other than the obvious one of telling a story with sex in it, and so the books they produced strike the reader who senses a unifying tone in them as either exuberant or immature. If he feels this exuberance, he may also detect idealism at its base, an idealism that is moral and political in its vision of present and future American society. If, on the other hand, he finds these same writers immature in outlook and expression, the reason may be that the use they made of their freedom was insufficient considering the possibilities open to them. Kirby's stated intentions in editing the Essex House line were to encourage poets to experiment within the genre, and to offer more established writers a haven for their occasionally-produced erotic work. Among the poets to write for Essex House were David Meltzer and Charles Bukowski. A few established writers expressed interest in the opportunity, but of them only science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer was actually published by Kirby. Kirby's policy was to find writers he thought might do good work in the genre, and then give them their freedom. To ensure a high level of effort, he decided that Essex House authors would not be allowed to use pseudonyms. Soon handsome-looking paperbacks bearing the Essex House imprint were appearing at brief, regular intervals. One of the first was David Meltzer's The Agency (1968), the first novel in a trilogy consisting of it. The Agent, and How Many Blocks in the Pile? Perhaps as important as the novel itself were some thoughts about erotic literature Meltzer added in the form of an afterword. Along with similar comments in his other novels, they constitute the first manifesto on the subject of American erotic literature. He begins with the idea that one of the functions of erotic literature is to reveal America's secret life.
America's secret life is revealed in its wars and religious tracts certainly as well as in its fuckbooks. The so-called fuckbook pop-sub-culture is nothing more than a record of dreams. Lovemaking is, after all, more than what a man needs or what a woman insists on. It is something confronted every second and something still, as our culture would indicate, unknown and unrealized.
"Fuckbooks" take as their subject the part of our lives that we don't talk about. The genre expresses the unsayable, re-creates the original mystery, and does so at its highest in moral terms. Thus Meltzer describes his trilogy as "fierce moral tracts." In a later chapter we shall return to explore the implications of this statement, but for now it and Meltzer's other comments will serve as an introduction to the contribution made by Essex House novelists to American erotic writing. The novels of these writers were even more stylistically and thematically varied than those of The Olympia Press writers in New York. Essex House published rather conventionally written novels on psychosexual themes, as well as fairly experimental fantasies, memoirs, short stories, comic novels, erotic science fiction novels, and a variety of other hybrids. The one characteristic shared by most of these novelists was a political orientation that revealed a determination to explore America's secret life. Directly or indirectly, the Essex House novelist is interested in dissecting his or her society in order to examine its forbidden organs for signs of disease. Unlike The Olympia Press writers, Essex House novelists were relatively uninterested in the creation of erotic fantasies. That is perhaps the only marked distinction between them, but it is an important one. In discussing modern French erotic literature I noted some basic categories in the genre, placing them in a pyramid, with erotic masterpieces like Story of 0 at the top, formula work at the bottom, and serious work done within the conventions of the genre in the middle. Essex House novels fall generally in this middle area, but at this point our pyramid requires more elaboration. What is needed is a distinction between "pure" erotic novels and the hybrid erotic novel that grafts an erotic vision onto a previously established form like science fiction or the detective novel. Both the top and the bottom of the pyramid--hackwork and masterpieces--are made up of "pure" erotic novels. Hybrids generally make up the middle category. This hybrid concept is important because so many Essex House novels mix the conventions of other genres with the conventions of erotic literature. The results are often startling. Season of the Witch (1968) by Hank Stine is a case in point. Using some of the speculative devices of science fiction, Stine manages to create in this novel one of the few believable portraits in erotic fiction written by men of what it feels like--sexually--to be a woman. In a California of the future, Andre Fuller chokes a woman to death while making love to her on drugs. He is brought to trial for his crime, but the court instead of condemning him orders a less wasteful punishment: He must become the woman he killed. Wisely, Stine does not elaborate on the obvious futuristic devices he employs; rather, he focuses on what it feels like when an aggressive male is suddenly thrust into a woman's body. His use of another genre's conventions becomes a means for the powerful expression of the theme of sexual transformation. The struggle between the male psyche immured within a woman's body and the female psyche that eventually emerges is related in the form of an interior monologue in the second person singular, which has the effect of forcing the reader to identify with the character's emotional upheaval. Stine manages to extend this identification to his character's sexual encounters with men, depicting with painful accuracy how women are victimized in these meetings. Stine examines sex roles with androgynous neutrality, while at the same time insisting on the real distinctions between the sexes. Finally, however, Stine's approach is moral: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you would not be an inaccurate statement of his theme, but by his use of a device from science fiction, he particularizes the Biblical injunction so that one person is put quite literally inside another person's skin. Stine's effort to get inside a woman's physical being and sympathetically voice her reactions to the crudities of the men she gets involved with is essentially political, in the sense that he is revealing the secret life of America. The fact that that secret life is exploitative and brutal in many instances is at the center of his second novel for Essex House, Thrill City (1969). In Season of the Witch Stine told his story in a form--the interior monologue --frequently used in modern fiction, but seldom in erotic novels. Thrill City breaks even further with the straight first- or third-person narration generally preferred by erotic novelists. Thrill City is a collection of fragmentary stories and unidentified wisps of conversation that is unified by an inadequate plot device ("the Master" of the universe observes humankind in its misery) and a powerful sense of compassion for a country in which people are becoming increasingly brutal and brutalized. Like David Meltzer, Stine's vision in his erotic fiction is urgently moral. He is repelled by how we use each other.
We use each other. Frightened and alone in the bone caverns of our minds we reach out to manipulate others. Not content to suffer, we create suffering. We are black with sin, and yet we move.
Thrill City is a horrific, phantasmagoric portrayal of an America in which sexual assault is a metaphor for the violent disintegration of society. Stine sees the destructive side of Dionysus emerging not from individual men--the Sadean angle--but from society as a whole. Sexual repression inevitably results in psychic explosions. (The Essex House Novelists continues...) |
