Sex and the Sinful Girl
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Sex and the Sinful Girl By Stanley Edgar Hyman Books are getting sexier as censorship retreats, bloodied by Lady Chatterley and battered by Henry Miller. I can see my own...
...To my reading, Naked Lunch is a serious book about the horrors of drug addiction for about the first 50 pages, and after that a gumbo of wild rhetoric, horror fantasy, and pornography that gets its frisson from the perverse and the sadistic...
...I do not doubt the seriousness of Burroughs' intention, and his introduction, an impassioned plea against drug addiction, rings with conviction on that subject...
...his images are inept ("The black wind sock of death...
...Janet doing a striptease that starts with the loud closing of her umbrella...
...These "Eros Aphorisms," probably written around the third century A. D., are presented by the introducer, John W. Spellman, as a "marriage manual," and by Vatsyayana himself as "for the good of people, and to teach them the ways of guarding their own wives...
...A typical example is Donald Henderson Clarke's Millie, which appeared when I was 11 and was read by me at an impressionable age...
...Between these events the reader dodges gouged-out eyes and torn-off genitals, coming at him through a thick smoke of burning flesh...
...In the book's long pornographic scene, after Mary has had her will of Johnny's body with finger, tongue, mouth, and a rubber penis named Steely Dan III, she kills him by hanging, "sucks out his eyes with a pop," and "lunches" on his genitals...
...Sarah herself, convinced "that men were contemptible," finds that she is less interested in sex than in power and money, refuses to take her turns with the clients, and ends up trying to blackmail the headmistress out of 50 pounds and convinced that the future "will offer me scope, I am sure, for my special talents...
...One should practice those difficult congresses, "the mare's position" and "the top," but one should also teach parrots and other birds to speak, point out the different planets and stars to one's beloved, and complete verses begun by others...
...The book is coyly pornographic ("up come that cute lil ol thing"), and in its preoccupation with Jimmy as a "bumblebee" doing "turnabout" on Kitten, coyly perverse where Naked Lunch is at least openly perverse...
...Portrait of the Lesbian Madam as a Young Girl, I am afraid...
...she looks up from Johnny's half-eaten genitals, her face covered with blood, eyes phosphorescent...
...Vatsyayana is an inveterate classifier...
...Kitten's language, which Jimmy characterizes as "pornographic slang and insincere endearments," may be perfectly faithful to the speech of illiterate 14-year-old Negro prostitutes, for all I know, but reading any great quantity of it is like listening to heavy static...
...This is pious fraud, and about as convincing as Burroughs' disclaimers...
...while girls are forward, brave, brash, eager, active, and lecherous as minks...
...Almost all of the sexuality in the book is sodomy committed on boys by men or by women acting as men...
...One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is the story of a weekend spent together by James Cartright Holland, a conventional middle-class college boy, and Kitten, an illiterate 14-year-old Negro prostitute...
...I do not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity.'" In truth this is a non-esthetics, and anyone acting on it is a non-writer...
...The title means exactly what one expects it to mean, orogenital sexuality, here carried to the point of cannibalism...
...They tell alternating chapters in their own languages, which have little overlap...
...Possibly even Beatnik...
...Burroughs is a terrible writer...
...There is an absurd Pastoral section where Jimmy's bourgeois meanness is contrasted with the proletarian manliness and generosity of Harry, a college-educated railroad worker who understands Negroes, brings Kitten to orgasm, and departs in the morning leaving a $10 tip in a comically appropriate place...
...Rosalind Erskine's The Passion Flower Hotel (Simon and Schuster, 189 pp., $3.75) is a comedy about five upper-class British boarding school girls who start a brothel in the school gymnasium for the boys of a nearby school...
...The book seems merely an innocent tease, since the prostitution never goes beyond looking and fondling, with no girl actually deflowered...
...I am a recording instrument...
...It seems a welcome kind of normality and calm...
...The comic techniques by which other girls are corrupted into prostitution include blackmail and physical threats...
...Some of it is terribly funny: a conversation between Sarah, the organizer of the brothel, and a "lecherous but cowardly" boy named Colin...
...Men and women are classified by the size of their genitals, the intensity of their passion, and the duration of their performance...
...he even teaches courtesans how to extort more money...
...Vatsyayana knows as many perversions as Burroughs, but he disapproves of all but the gentlest violence, as "painful, barbarous, and base, and quite unworthy of imitation...
...I can see my own reviews getting sexier, perhaps in self-defense, perhaps not...
...Why not as a tract against Metrecal...
...Virginia receiving her first client in a quilted dressing-gown with pajamas underneath and woolly knickers under the pajamas...
...Vatsyayana lists 13 reasons that entitle a man to resort to married women, he outlines the techniques of "mouth congress" by homosexual shampooers, he explains how to use one's own wife in seducing another woman...
...The sexy novels of my youth (the lending libraries called them "spicy" novels) can now be seen to have had an engaging innocence...
...I'm a little doll,' she whispered ecstatically...
...He does a pointless trick with verb number ("Mugwump push a slender blond youth to a couch and strip him expertly") and pronouns ("her got the coke horrors...
...It is in this world of the perversely erotic that William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (Grove Press, 255 pp., $6.00) appears and is welcomed by Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer and others in terms more appropriate to King Lear...
...Sex is right but "fightin an killin" is wrong, "spiteful Whitefolks crap" that originates in frustration and repression...
...Burroughs interrupts the book to explain his esthetics: "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing...
...he puns inanely ("See, see where Christ's blood streams in the spermament...
...Some of this is meant to be funny and all of it is meant to be meaningful, but it is just nasty and boring...
...Burroughs defends the propriety of this scene, I presume, in the introduction...
...Both characters are caricatures...
...And in depraved middle age, when she summoned the Irish janitor to her bed, Millie tipped him five dollars, which went quite a long way in 1930...
...The Passion Flower Hotel is funny, but ultimately I think that it too is nasty...
...One turns for relief to ancient India, to the new edition of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana in Sir Richard Burton's old translation (Dutton, 252 pp., $4.95...
...The introduction explains that the title of Naked Lunch was suggested by Jack Kerouac, that at first Burroughs did not understand it, and that he now knows it to refer to "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork...
...The scholars are right, too, but they never notice the puns in the language that confirm it: "at the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this...
...Come in-Brute," Millie cried passionately on her wedding night...
...Robert Gover's One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (Grove Press, 192 pp., $3.95) was, it has been announced, originally turned down by Grove, then accepted after the English publication...
...It is always accompanied by violence, and generally the passive partner is executed by hanging and dies in orgasm...
...Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic," he writes brazenly, "were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal...
...Just below the surface, however, is a Black Book...
...Now we live in a world of the bound quarterly magazine Eros, a low Horizon, with its survey of the male prostitutes of Bombay, or an article by the editor explaining the new scholarly discovery that the delights to which Mellors introduced the panting Constance Chatterley were those of sodomy...
...It is the seriousness of his achievement that I would question...
...Ultimately, this funny old book leaves one with a feeling of sanity...
...and he has no feeling for language ("It's a wildly unpretty spectacle...
...we are taught the six places on which to strike the woman's body during intercourse, the four kinds of striking, and the eight crying sounds properly produced by this striking...
...In eager girlhood, Millie stared in the mirror at her "firm, faintly blue-veined breasts, with rosy nipples...
...In his quest for truth, Burroughs has achieved a revolting pornographic book, about which he is then prepared to be less than honest...
...Worse, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is hopelessly didactic...
...It constitutes a fine warning against having second thoughts...
...He warns us that some of his exotic postures are "learned only by practice," and that a fat woman should be spared some of them...
...At the end of the book, after Kitten has supped Jimmy a mickey and taken his hundred dollars, she banks the money toward her Education...
...These passive boys and active girls are Burroughs' Johnny and Mary of the next generation...
...Jimmy's remarks are ham-handed parody ("She's downright Bohemian...
...Hardly...
...Ho hum...
...The only formal principle I can see operating in Naked Lunch is that everything is repeated endlessly...
...Kitten inarticulates a great deal of protest against television violence...
...Miss Erskine finally cuts off her long joke with melodrama, and Sarah is last seen on her way to a new school in Switzerland, musing on the possibilities of a brothel there...
...The joke is that boys are backward, timid, frightened, reluctant, passive, and afraid of physical contact...
...In any case, this survey of the subject should dispose of it for a while, and we can return to the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, as they are sometimes encountered in review copies...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 23
