The Naughty Bits (13 page)

Eating ass is one thing; writing about it is another. Never have I lingered so long over my clay tablet as when I tried to describe that most curious of tastes (odder still than either the durian fruit or fresh sea urchin). The sad truth is that the excerpt that follows—Joyce’s description of Bloom’s bum-kissing—dodges the issue slightly. Joyce opts for cadence and mellifluence instead of hard adjectives—he describes the act more than the experience—and it’s a shame, for nothing would have given me more pleasure than to see the consummate wordsmith butt up against the aggressively corporeal—in all its ineffability.

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

The visible signs of postsatisfaction?

A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a solicitous adversion: a proximate erection.

from
The Symposium

PLATO

Hunchbacked, bad-skinned, defaced, abject, and generally hideous, could you love him for his brain alone? I am not referring to my high school self (though the description is not far off), but to the great ugly duckling of intellectual history, Socrates. Although there is a long tradition of physically repugnant philosophers (Plotinus, for example, was leprous and nosable at some distance), Socrates’ physical monstrosity is the most legendary. No real surprise, then, that philosophy has always insisted on a distinction, if not a conflict, between mind and body, for the better part of the guys writing the stuff down would have loved to saw themselves off at the neck.

Yet no matter how hideous Socrates was, the boys continued to line up behind him (or in front, as the case may have been). So what was the draw of this guy who was not only twice their age but unbelievably self-satisfied, condescending, and always on the move? Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary: the brain. Big brain, historical brain, still-respected-after-two-millennia brain. You can imagine how comforting this idea was to a dateless high school pedant, believing that one day he too might woo with cognition alone. Ah, but then few are born with Socrates’ brain (even Nietzsche, who was no troglodyte, had a hard time getting lucky). But don’t despair, in most cases, brains do prove sexy in time. So for those of you out there who have prayed and hoped, waiting with a candle in the window, I give you this, a parable of the pull of the perspicacious: Alcibiades’ account of trying to seduce Socrates.

When I looked at his serious purpose, I saw in him divine and golden images of such fascinating beauty that I was ready to do in a moment whatever Socrates commanded . . . Now I thought that he was seriously enamored of my beauty, and this appeared to be a grand opportunity of hearing him tell what he knew, for I had a wonderful opinion of the attractions of my youth. In the prosecution of this design, when I next went to him, I sent away the attendant who usually accompanied me. Well, he and I were alone together, and I thought that when there was nobody with us, I should hear him speak the language of love as lovers do, and I was delighted. Not a word: he conversed as usual, and spent the day with me and then went away. Afterwards, I challenged him to the palestra; and he wrestled and closed with me several times; I fancied I might succeed in this way. Not a bit. Lastly, as I had failed hitherto, I thought that I must use stronger measures and attack him boldly and not give him up until I saw how the matter stood. So I invited him to supper, just as if he were a fair youth and I a designing lover. He was not easily persuaded to come; he did, however, after a while accept the invitation, and when he came the first time, he wanted to go away at once as soon as supper was over, and I had not the face to detain him. The second time, still in pursuance of my design, after we had supped, I went on conversing far into the night, and when he wanted to go away, I pretended that the hour was late and that he had better remain. So he lay down on the next couch to me, the same on which he had supped, and there was no one else in the apartment.

All this may be told without shame to any one. But what follows I could hardly tell you if I was sober . . . I have felt the pang, and he who has suffered, as they say, is willing to tell his fellow-sufferers only, as they alone will be likely to understand him . . . I have known in my soul or in my heart or in some other part, that worst of pangs, more violent in ingenuous youth than any serpent’s tooth, the pang of philosophy . . .

When the lamp was put out and the servants had gone away, I thought that I must be plain with him and have no more ambiguity. So I gave him a shake and said, “Socrates, are you asleep?”

“No,” he said . . . and so without waiting to hear more I got up, and throwing my coat about him, crept under his threadbare cloak, as the time of year was winter, and there I lay during the whole night having this wonderful monster in my arms . . . and yet, notwithstanding all this, he was so superior to my solicitations, so contemptuous and derisive and disdainful of my beauty—which really, as I believe, had some attractions—hear, O judges, for judges you shall be of the haughty virtue of Socrates, that in the morning when I awoke (let all the gods and goddesses be my witnesses), I arose from Socrates’ couch as from the couch of a father or an elder brother!

—translated by Benjamin Jewett,
modified by Jack Murnighan

from
Justine

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Although Henry Miller remains part of the constellation of stars in twentieth-century literature, Lawrence Durrell, his close friend, correspondent, occasional editor, and author of the great
Alexandria Quartet,
seems to be on the wane. Perhaps Miller’s legend endures because we associate him with brash and raucous sexuality; Durrell, meanwhile, is kinder, gentler, and considerably more modest than old Hank. Yet the two bear strong comparison in both life and work. Both set their principal novels in the sexual humus of squalid foreign cities (Alexandria, Paris); both write in a rambling first-person voice, almost memoir style; both loved and feared women and spent their lives, in Durrell’s narrator’s words, trying to “know what it really means . . . the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself.” Sex, here, is clearly meant to stand for life, and Durrell and Miller consciously made writing careers on the fruits of that synecdoche.

Written in the late 1950s, the
Quartet
(
Justine,
Balthazar, Mountolive,
Clea
) is truly a tour de force. The title characters are sculpted impeccably in the contradictions of Greek myth: they are as gods in form and substance, yet have fallen into the banal tragedies of real living. Durrell’s treatment is tender and thoughtful in a way Miller’s mind would have bulldozed over. Through him we negotiate a series of fantastic infatuations and aggrandized, empty loves to find, at the end, the heart of compassion. Where Miller teaches the irreducible sanctity of the moment, Durrell recites the sermon of long process, of brushing aside romantic delusions and finally embracing what is hard won but true.

The scene that follows is the narrator’s first encounter, in the bedroom of his reliable girlfriend, with the mysterious Justine, the femme fatale who, as in many novels if not in life, sets all the relationships in motion. Like Genet, Durrell chronicles the seductive power of the intractable and fierce, of those beyond or incapable of love, hardened, gemlike, in their beauty and resolve. It is hard not to love Justine, but you do so only with regret.

Across all this, as across the image of someone dearly loved, held in the magnification of a gigantic tear moved the brown harsh body of Justine naked. It would have been blind of me not to notice how deeply her resolution was mixed with sadness. We lay eye to eye for a long time, our bodies touching, hardly communicating more than the animal lassitude of the vanishing afternoon. I could not help thinking then as I held her lightly in the crook of an arm how little we own our bodies . . .

But she had closed her eyes—so soft and lustrous now, as if polished by the silence which lay so densely all around us . . . We turned to each other, closing like the two leaves of a door upon the past, shutting out everything, and I felt her happy spontaneous kisses begin to compose the darkness around us like successive washes of a colour. When we had made love and lay once more awake she said: “I am always so bad the first time, why is it?” . . .

. . . I held her, tasting the warmth and sweetness of her body, salt from the sea–her earlobes tasted of salt. . . .

It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears . . . I felt . . . in the words of the dying Amr: “as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.”

from
“This Condition”

LYDIA DAVIS

Time, the bugger. Oh, how the phrase “Too late!” has haunted the length of my waking days: Born too late; too late to change; too late in the day; it’s too late, baby, it’s always, invariably, a bit too late. I never seem to get the drift until the drift is gone, the bandwagon I’d jump is ever on the egress and I don’t appear capable of figuring out a situation before a new one has come to take its place.

This is how I felt the first time I came across Lydia Davis’s short-short story “This Condition.” A dear friend read it to me over the phone, and I was livid.

“Damn! Damn! Damn! That would have been perfect for Nerve! I can’t believe we didn’t get it,” I ranted. “Jack,” she responded soothingly, “it was published in 1997, a few months before Nerve launched.” Alas, too true. The same old condition: born too late.

So even though I’d argue that “This Condition” defines what I was always seeking in Nerve fiction (top shelf writing that’s sexy as much for its emotion and wisdom as its erotic content), I didn’t get to publish it first. But at least I get to reprint it here in its entirety. For Davis, ever the master of the shortest shorts, manages in this one to create one of the most beautiful, rhythmic, elegant, sexy, Freud thumb-nosing bits of writing you’ll ever find. Read it out loud; read it to a friend, a lover, a partner. Davis does more to demarcate desire in 400 choice words than most people do in volumes. She’s got an itch; she’s got it bad, and we have it right along with her.

In this condition: stirred not only by men but by women, fat and thin, naked and clothed, by teenagers and children in latency; by animals such as horses and dogs; by certain vegetables such as carrots, zucchinis and cucumbers; by certain fruits such as melons, grapefruits and kiwis; by certain plant parts such as petals, sepals, stamens and pistils, by the bare arm of a wooden chair, a round vase holding flowers, a little hot sunlight, a plate of pudding, a person entering a tunnel in the distance, a puddle of water, a hand alighting on a smooth stone, a hand alighting on a bare shoulder, a naked tree limb; by anything curved, bare and shining, as the limb or bole of a tree; by any touch, as the touch of a stranger handling money; by anything round and freely hanging, as tassels on a curtain, chestnut burrs on a twig in spring, a wet tea bag on its string; by anything glowing, as a hot coal; anything soft or slow, as a cat rising from a chair, anything smooth and dry, as a stone, or warm and glistening; anything sliding, anything sliding back and forth; anything sliding in and out with an oiled surface, as certain machine parts; anything of a certain shape, like the state of Florida; anything pounding, anything stroking, anything bolt upright, anything horizontal and gaping, as a certain sea anemone; anything warm, anything wet, anything wet and red, anything turned red, as the sun at evening; anything wet and pink; anything long and straight with a blunt end, as a pestle; anything coming out of anything else, as a snail from its shell, as a snail’s horns from its head; anything opening; any stream of water running, any stream running, any stream spurting, any stream spouting, any cry, any soft cry, any grunt; anything going into anything else, as a hand searching in a purse; anything clutching, anything grasping; anything rising, anything tightening or filling, as a sail; anything dripping, anything hardening, anything softening.

from
Pantagruel: Third Book

FRANÇOIS RABELAIS

Each of the major literary languages of medieval Europe had a comedic author par excellence, a ribald trickster whose tawdry wit continues to charm even today. Italy had Boccaccio, England Chaucer, and France the great Rabelais. In five works (four finished, one unfinished and posthumously published), he tells the supremely satirical tale of Gargantua and Pantagruel, debauched giants of gluttony, flatulence, and vulgarity. They drink hogsheads of ale, piss rivers, fart windstorms, flout armies, and scandalize women. They are, in effect, enormous frat boys having their way with the theology and politics of sixteenth-century France. No storyteller has ever taken as many liberties as Rabelais, no tale has ever been more over-the-top, and, thus, the history of literature provides few things that are more fun to read. In the excerpt that follows, Rabelais takes a feather from Boccaccio’s cap, having a friar tell an ingenious trick for how to keep a wife faithful. Like Boccaccio (and Petronius before him), Rabelais knew how to mix sex and riddles, stimulating the reader both above and below the neck. Here’s a prime example.

“I’ll teach you one way,” said Friar John, “to prevent your wife from ever making you a cuckold without your knowing about it.”

“I beg to you, my friend,” said Panurge. “Tell it to me now.”

“Use Hans Carvel’s ring,” said Friar John . . . and went on to explain. “Hans Carvel was a intelligent and worthy man . . . In his later years he married . . . a young, attractive, flirtatious girl who was exceedingly friendly with their neighbors and servants. So after only a few weeks, Hans became jealous as a tiger and suspected that his wife was getting her back end tambourined elsewhere. To try to prevent this from happening, Hans started telling her stories about what misery can arise from adultery and read to her from the Legend of Chaste Women . . . Yet he still found her so resilient and so joyful with the neighbors that he got ever more jealous. Then one night among others, while sleeping beside her, he dreamt he was talking to the devil and explained his concerns. The devil comforted him, and put a ring on his middle finger, and said, ‘I will give you this ring. While you wear it on your finger, your wife will not be shared by any man without your consent and knowledge.’ Hans thanked the devil . . . and the devil vanished. When Hans awoke, he was pleased to find his finger up the whatchamacallit of his dear wife, who, I forgot to mention, drew back as if to say, ‘That’s not what you’re supposed to put in there!’ And she squirmed and squirmed, but he wouldn’t let her take off his ring!