This anthology through which we’re slowly walking, The Pulps, spends too much time on what its editor, Tony Goodstone, calls “under the counter” magazines, ones that were too graphic in their sexual content to be sold with the regular fair. Some of these, such as Spicy Detective, which we’ve already discussed, had a modicum of fame and influence, but many of the others are largely (and better left) forgotten. If Goodstone’s aim was to rehabilitate the reputation of the pulps by showcasing their quality and variety, he might have done better to leave the “under the counter” pulps under the counter where they belong. It is primarily because of these exploitative stories that this collection varies wildly in its quality, with Pulitzer winners rubbing shoulders with pornographers—but I suppose one could argue that this characterizes the pulps as a whole, a mixed bag of themed magazines whose readers never quite knew what they’d get when the next issue came out.
Speaking of pornographers, the next work in the collection is “Hot Rompers” by Russ West, which Goodstone describes as “passing as pornography in its day.” Although mild by the standards of the jaded internet age, we could argue that it still passes for pornography, assuming that we use pornography’s customary definition—a work designed for sexual titillation with no redeeming artistic quality. The titillation “Hot Rompers” offered in 1931, when it appeared in Parisienne Life, might fail to move the modern reader who can see harder fare simply by turning on the television, but it is certainly designed to titillate, and it certainly lacks redeeming artistic quality. This is the worst story in the collection, hands down.
The story is mildly interesting when it begins, but it quickly derails. Our protagonist, the Frenchman Ferdinand de Brissac, is intent on murder: He has recently discovered that an American interloper has been sleeping with his wife. Gun in his pocket, he tracks this American scoundrel to a strip joint called the Club du Nord, where he finds him dallying with ladies of the evening.
This premise of vengeance in the sordid streets of Gay Paree is halfway interesting, but the plot ceases to exist after five paragraphs. A spotlight strikes the stage, a nude woman begins dancing (described in breathless detail, of course), and all is forgotten: Ferdinand follows this woman backstage, has a dalliance with her in her dressing room … and that’s about it. That’s the whole of the story.
“Hot Rompers” pretends to be nothing other than what it is, a work of light pornography, so we need say no more about it because it deserves to have no more said about it. Pornographic literature is very probably as old as human writing, and most of it has been easily forgotten dreck.
But since we’re on the subject, it calls certain other thoughts to my mind, so I will segue: It has long been my opinion that literature, for almost a century now, has been suffering under a curse first laid on it by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who wrote Lady Chatterly’s Lover among other things, believed that pornography could be rehabilitated, that it could be made sweet and tender, and that even the word fuck might be lovely and musical in certain contexts. Despite Lawrence’s own failure to make fuck sound and nice and gentle despite herculean effort, our literati have taken him at his word and have thus frequently subjected their readers to sex scenes that even the “under the counter” writers would blush at, scenes that mar otherwise competently written novels.
I used to follow a social media account that collected such scenes, though I decided to stop after it became too graphic. This account, run by a crotchety feminist, characterized badly written sex scenes as the fault of “men writing women,” but it became clear over time that the problem was neither men writing, nor men trying to describe women, but men trying to describe sex.
C. S. Lewis once explained why writing sex well is impossible. Among his other projects, he took on D. H. Lawrence’s premises and exploded them. He first did a linguistic study that proved, contra Lawrence, that swear words like fuck did not have some noble history that needed to be recalled and rehabilitated; rather, it is the custom in every language to set aside certain words associated with bodily functions and use them for the dual purpose of evoking belly laughs and inciting anger. Fuck is an ancient word that has always served these two purposes.
Lewis also, when interviewed for television on the subject of erotic literature, explained briefly and pointedly why explicit sex scenes are always so badly written—because an author who wants to describe sex explicitly is limited by the very nature of language; he can use the terminology of the operating theater or the terminology of the gutter, but he has no third option.
That is why the best literature dealing with sex does not address its subject directly but instead talks of gardens in bloom and scented unguents and leaping gazelles and flitting butterflies. The Bible itself teaches us this in the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, one of the world’s greatest works of erotic literature. The reader who studies that book will notice, above all, that it contains no explicit or direct description of its subject. Indeed, it does not even dare to have a narrative structure but is instead content to be a powerful collection of evocative vignettes.
In the written word, metaphor is sexy but sex itself is not. In fact, this is true of any medium, not just writing: Bodies ramming into each other, when viewed by a third party, are gruesome, and that is why Hollywood made better romantic movies under the Hayes Code when it had to represent sex with waving curtains.
A writer of fiction who wishes to write about sex should avoid directly describing it for the same reason he should avoid giving dialogue to God: Because it inevitably diminishes the subject.