On Becoming a Dirty Writer

...They were rather good jokes, too, I feel bound to maintain, in their own grimy way, and quite to the point...

...The authorities in Knoxville are apparently afraid that the game I describe might become a fad— doubtless among those juvenile delinquents about whom it is fashionable to be concerned these days...

...I am not a true lover of pornography in any case...

...and my dirty writers are the Marquis de Sade and Edmund Wilson, Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence...

...he invited us back whenever we wished to consult one of his volumes...

...I do not really believe it myself...

...and a traveling representative of a publisher for whom I am doing a freshman textbook reports that no text of mine will be adopted in a Tennessee school...

...The October issue of Esquire has been banned in Knoxville, Tennessee because of my story "Nude Croquet...

...The heirs of Kinsey are already finding room on their shelves—and you may yet live to be read behind the cretonne curtain in Tia Juana...

...It is to such books that the serious writer about passion must go to school...

...I keep remembering a prophetic lady who once wrote to Partisan Review protesting a spate of pornographic literature, including an earlier story of mine...

...It was all so obviously intended to deliver us from the trap of ignorance, in which sex was felt to be problematical and painful and important, that I could not bring myself to reenter the place even to look at some books that I had been searching for for years...

...you've made it...

...but if there were any such tokens of the avenging Great Goddess at the scene of his actual death, the newspaper accounts did not report them...

...The one time I entered a full-fledged "dirty book store"—where, behind a soiled cretonne curtain which sagged from hook to hook, one could rent for 50 cents an hour items too precious to sell—I felt choked for air...

...He (or someone else—there is a rude equity in events) left behind in its place some twenty copies of old Reader's Digests and one The Tower of Positive Thinking (mint...

...Alfred Kinsey, through whose laboratories and library I traveled once in a group of visitors...

...The good doctor is dead, however, and my letter unsent...

...I had written a story, I thought, about youth and age, husbands and wives, success and failure, accommodation and revolt—and especially about the indignity of the failing flesh—all of which is, it seems to me, a dirty enough story, the dirty story we all live...

...If I could only have said or done something to make it clear that I was not just another provincial American professor on a moral toot (after all, I was precisely a provincial American professor), but a reader who has relished for a long time Nabokov's oblique, unidiomatic war on our culture, and who...

...Perhaps I only imagined it, but she seemed so clearly to condescend to me, so unmistakably to consider it beneath her station to engage in such transactions (she had to make a living, of course, and she did not hold it against me personally) that I left finally without buying the book...

...It is more than amusing, though amusing enough (I am told, for instance, that a paperback reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel murals has been banned in the same town) ; it is a little dismaying, too...

...After boasting to us that he possessed the largest collection of pornography outside the Vatican (a pale-blue, Protestant twinkle to send home the jest...

...Nevuh in an honest Tennessee school, suh...

...It is pornography which has kept open these possibilities: in its lowest, crudest, most nearly illiterate examples, it has preserved sex from sentimentality...

...It is true enough (at least, I cannot doubt it) that only the sex organs and the sex act any longer provide possibilities for images of the failures or triumphs of love strong enough to blast us out of complacency or ennui...

...All of which is a prelude to a confession that I, too, have become a dirty writer and that I do not know quite how to take it...

...More than two months before that, I had held it in my hands in a book store in Athens while a lady clerk, very clean and genteel, stood smirking beside me, having watched me extricate it from a pile of pedestrian pornography composed by hacks called improbable names like Akbar del Piombo...

...I certainly do not like to believe it, but a small, nasty voice keeps repeating inside my head: "Do you think, chump, that the publishers are interested in your technical skill at keeping ten major characters distinct and moving inside so small a compass...

...I hear the dean of some mountain-bound school of education saying—turning it in my imagination into an old-fashioned agit-prop play about the fate of art in the decadent South...

...Somewhere between white tile and greasy cretonne, I take my stand...

...yet to be classed with mere pornography, to be tossed into the same heap as Akbar del Piombo and read behind the greasy curtain, is to endure not only degradation but falsification...

...with Mary McCarthy, and certainly had no influence on the guardians of the newsstands in Tennessee, who do not in any case read the Partisan Review...

...Yet what upsets me most, I must confess, is not finally the excision or the banning, but the fact that "Nude Croquet" is already slated to be the lead story in a paperback collection...

...But they have apparently not read beyond my title, since my point is precisely how hard it is to strip naked—and how terrible...

...A snobbish, tight circle, to be sine, but wide enough to make me kin with men around the world: from the grey-robed Chinese scholar, who led me into a bazaar that apparently paid him a commission on all copies he promoted of bootlegged editions of Huxley and Lawrence, to the anonymous Montana roomer who lived in my house last year and swiped my copy of the uncut Lady Chatterley's Lover...

...and has kept vivid the sense that love lives, after all, intra urinam et faeces...

...Or that they care about how well you have caught the pathos and comedy of success and varicose veins arriving together...

...Either way, it is a trap...

...But it was all so scientific and enlightened, from the moment he first flung open his cabinet full of larger-than-life models of genitalia to the moment he left us before an open, illustrated piece of erotica, in which one had to count all of the naked limbs to get an approximate idea of how many were doing what in which direction to whom...

...I did compose a letter to him in my head, explaining that if it were understood that my interest was completely non-scientific, that in a pornographic book I would, like any slob, be seeking the titillation proper to pornography, I would consider using, etc., etc...

...Especially in America this is a real threat, where Boccaccio is known as the author of a dirty book, and anyone who leans against a drugstore window learns that Bal/.ac is the writer of Droll Stories...

...This fact, once known and confessed by any good orthodox theologian, now is chiefly learned by horny adolescents out of under-the-counter books...

...WRITERS and WRITING On Becoming a Dirty Writer By Leslie A. Fiedler Author, "An End to Innocence IT WAS only a few weeks ago that I succeeded in getting hold of a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita...

...I remember quite vividly my anguish at the antiseptic air of Dr...

...She had, however, confused me hopelessly (and improbably...

...It is not, however, dirty in any of the senses understood by the guardians of morality in Tennessee, or even by the legal advisers of Esquire, who insisted upon the excision of two dirty jokes, thus sparing the youth of Knoxville another assault on their morals...

...It would not really have been the point, even if I could have said it...

...How lonely and silly her protest looked in the back pages of that solidly advanced magazine, and how I laughed at her assertion ! I keep thinking that, things having turned out for me as they have, the only decent thing would be to drop her a belated line and tell her how right she was...

...I once had a dream that he had died and was found in his white office, beside a white chair, with a strand of wet seaweed about his throat...

...Admit it, friend, like Boccaccio and Balzac (might as well name the big ones...