The Naughty Bits (25 page)

RUPERT BROOKE

I always feel a certain amount of guilt and queasiness writing about people who died early deaths, especially if, at the time I’m putting pen to paper, I’m already older than they were ever to be. Stranger still if they were authors or artists, and strangest of all if they accomplished in their abbreviated lives more than I am likely to achieve in mine, even if I live to 100.

Rupert Brooke was one such brief, bright flame. His one score and eight-year life was as though scripted for a BBC biography: born in England in 1887, with considerable erudition and Galahad good looks, he entered Cambridge in 1913, wrote a few dozen exquisite poems, joined the Royal Navy to go off to the Great War in 1914 and died in the Aegean seven months later. The artist/soldier is a kind of hero that has not been present in cultures on either side of the Atlantic in decades, but World War I vaunted and cut down many. Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Alan Seeger: all dead, all in their prime.

And though Brooke remains famous primarily for his war poems, he wrote a number of love poems as well. The sonnet “Libido” is his most elegant; its theme is a burning bed–inspired midnight visit to a sleeping paramour. There is little more beautiful than the image of a milky Adonis leaving his tangled sheets to slip into his lady’s bedroom and wake her with a kiss, until we recall Brooke’s fate, and know that only the embracing arms of war awaited him on his final night.

How should I know? The enormous wheels of will
Drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet.
Night was void arms and you a phantom still,
And day your far light swaying down the street.
As never fool for love, I starved for you;
My throat was dry and my eyes hot to see.
Your mouth so lying was most heaven in view,
And your remembered smell most agony.

Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver
And suddenly the mad victory I planned
Flashed real, in your burning bending head . . .
My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river
In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand
Quieter than a dead man on a bed.

from
The Arabian Nights

Good advice is hard to come by. And yet, every blue moon or so in my lusty wanderings among the deepest darkest library stacks, I stumble upon a poem or snippet from the classics that can be readily applied to life’s tough situations. In various parts of the book, I have argued that Rabelais gives good advice for keeping your partner faithful, that flirting lessons can be learned from Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene,
that Goethe shows you how to balance ambition and eros, and that Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” was a more convincing version of “Let’s Get It On” than even Marvin Gaye’s. Who’s to say that High Art and Self-Help have to be at opposite ends of the shelf?

This excerpt has it both ways. Taken from one of the crown jewels of the Arabic tradition, the incomparable
Arabian Nights,
it provides a useful stratagem for convincing your lover to let you take the road less traveled. Few people read Scheherazade’s tale in its entirety; most often because it comes in expurgated editions, bowdlerized by its translators and editors. Not so in Sir Richard Burton’s original, nineteenth-century rendition, which is as licentious and brilliant as Burton himself. The great British ambassador, who spent much of his life sampling the pleasures, peculiarities, and perversions of Arabic cultures, was a superman if there ever was one. He spoke more than twenty languages, was among the first English translators of the
Kama Sutra, The Arabian Nights,
and countless other Eastern classics, and he lived a life of highest adventure and eroticism. Like the anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, Burton made no separation between sexual and cultural exploration. As a result, he probably achieved as great a synthesis of learning and loving as anyone in history. I modified his translation a bit to remove some obscurities and infelicities, but what remains is a rhetoric for encouraging what’s sometimes called The Catholic Girl’s Compromise. Who would have guessed at the incidental benefits of population control?

“My soul thy sacrifice! I choose thee out
Who are not menstrous or oviparous:
Should I with women mell, I’d beget
Brats till the wide world grew straight for us.
“She respondeth (sore hurt in sense most acute
For she had proffered what did not besuit):
“Unless thou stroke as man should swive his dear,
Blame me not when horns on thy brow appear.
Thy wand seems waxen, to a limpness grown,
And more I palm it, softer grows the clown!”
And I to her: “If thy coynte I do reject
There might be elsewhere we could connect.”
And yet, she showed again her tender coynte,
And I was forced to cry: “I will not roger thee!”
She drew back saying, “From the faith
He turns, who’s turned by Heaven’s decree!
And front-wise futters, both night and day,
Most times in ceaseless persistency.”
Then swung she the round and shining rump
Like silvern lump she showed me.
I cried: “Well done, O mistress mine!
No more am I in pain for thee!
O thou of all that Allah oped
Showest me fairest victory!”

—translated by Sir Richard Burton

from
An Unseemly Man

LARRY FLYNT WITH KENNETH ROSS

It takes a bold man to confess to having had sex with a chicken. And bold is certainly an appropriate word to describe Larry Flynt, publisher of
Hustler
magazine, subject of the biopic film
The
People vs. Larry Flynt,
who had enough gall (and, from some perspectives, sense of humor) to put a woman coming out of a meat grinder on the cover of his magazine and to confess in his autobiography to having done it with Ms. Little. And then having killed her.

As someone who has never wrung the neck of my coital partner in that slow-down time normally reserved for a cigarette, I can say that I was a bit taken aback by Flynt’s confession. I figure the least a chicken deserves having (counter to the usual meaning of the word) just been boned is a handful of corn kernels or a pat on the back. I once had the grave misfortune of looking after a chicken coop. The first night I was sitting, two dogs broke in and offed half my flock. I shed no tears. Chickens are nasty, pathetic, heinously filthy creatures whose brains are as small and hard as their beaks. After the massacre, one chicken was left wounded and unable to walk; when I put food next to it, the other chickens would come take it away, even though they had plenty for themselves. In an act of grim mercy, I eventually had to kill the poor bird with the back of a shovel, though the truth is I would have liked to have barbecued the lot.

The thought, then, of putting my privy member into the rump or whatever it is of a chicken could not be more anathema. But leave it to Flynt, who certainly has done more than almost anyone else to propagate the relatively grody aspects of the male libido, to lead the charge. Such noble campaigns as Freedom of Speech and Right to Sexual Expression often have unlikely heros; Flynt, in all his tasteless glory, is not least among them.

I have always had a voracious appetite for sex. I usually describe my sexual proclivities as pedestrian, and although my sexual behavior has ranged over the years from the bizarre to the heroic, only one of my early experiences could actually be considered “deviant.” This was the occasion when, at age nine, I had sex with a chicken. Yes, this is what the old preachers called bestiality. In the hollows of eastern Kentucky it wasn’t all that unusual. Sexual relations with animals — particularly cows, sheep, and horses — were common. Some of the older boys in the area told me that a chicken was as good as a girl — that its egg bag was “hot as a girl’s pussy” and “chickens wiggled around a lot more.” In fact, they added, it was better in some ways because you could just grab the first chicken that came by — no wooing, no waiting. Anxious to experiment, I caught one of my grandmother’s hens out behind the barn, managed to insert my penis into its egg bag, and thrust away. When I let the chicken go, it started toward the main house, staggering, squawking, and bleeding. Fearing that my grandmother would see the hen and want to know what had happened, I caught it and wrung its neck, then threw the bird in the creek. I decided that I liked girls better.

from
The Kisses

JOHANNES SECUNDUS

For most of my adult life I’ve been obsessed with the issue of devotion—about commitment and our deep desire to have it shown. In one of my
Nerve.com
columns, I tried to get across how difficult it is to express the true goodness of our hearts, how much love we have inside but how little of it gets out and how, even when it does emerge, it’s often misconstrued or unseen. Not a happy thought, but I think a true one. This time I want to talk about those times when we do find a way, when the necklace really fits, when the words come out right, when the shoulder is there to receive the tears, when we arrive with blooms in hand (and not just to make up). The human heart, like an under-prepared tourist, is not terribly good with the language, but sometimes finds ways of making itself heard.

Those expressions can range from the comic to the sublime, and either type can be effective. To try to prove the point, I have chosen excerpts that exemplify each end of the spectrum. On the sublime side, there’s an absolutely delicious section of the small, soft, deft, witty and incomparably romantic sixteenth-century book
The Kisses
by Johannes Secundus. But first, on the comic side, I thought I might as well share a relic of my misspent youth: a list of anagrams I made of my thengirlfriend’s name. (Bear in mind this is only an excerpt: in my devotion, or dementia, I drew out fifty full variations.) True, penning a Petrarchan sonnet would have been a more recognizably amorous act, but we do what we can. As with most things in life, it doesn’t matter so much what one does to show one’s love, only how.

Is a polish to his nail
Is a nail to his polish
His all, his pain too
I hop on a thin lil’ ass
I halt, I splash in, oo . . .
Hail hot lip, ass, loin
Alias: hot loin/hips
Ha, I top his stallion!
Ah! ah! spill it in soon!

Kiss V

When you, Neaera, clasp me in your gentle arms, and hang upon my shoulder, leaning over me with your whole neck and bosom, and lascivious face; when putting your lips to mine, you bite me and complain of being bitten again; and dart your tremulous tongue here and there, and sip with your querulous tongue here and there, breathing on me delicious breath, dulcet sounding, moist, the sustenance of my poor life, Neaera when you suck away my languid breath, my burning, parched breath, parched by the heat that rages in my bosom, and extinguish the flames that consume me, exhausting their heat by your inhalations; then I exclaim, “Love is the god of gods and no god is greater than Love; but if there be any one greater than Love, you, you alone, Neaera, are in my eyes that greater one.”

—translated by Walter Kelly

from
“Lucky Pierre”

GUILLAUME IX

Guillaume IX, a now little known poet of eleventh-century France, is the earliest of the traveling troubadours who survives on the page, and thus, in a certain sense, could be called the first love poet in medieval Europe. As both the count of Poitiers and the duke of Aquitane, Guillaume was a true philosopher king—but not exactly the kind Plato had in mind. No, instead of forging reason and wisdom into a perfect alloy, Guillaume neglected his civic duties in favor of versifying and skirt chasing, concerning himself less with the laws of state as what he calls the “leis de con” (the laws of pussy). Writing in Old Provençal, Guillaume is widely considered the father of the courtly love lyric. And although in later hands these lyrics would become ornately stylized jewels on the nobility of love and the sanctity of the emotive heart, Guillaume’s prototypes are ribald, raunchy, and brazen. In one, he asks to outlive the war so he can get his hands beneath his neighbor’s mantle; in another, he can’t pick between his two steeds (you know what kind); in a third, he sums up his life philosophy with the words:

I don’t like women who put guards on their quim,
And I don’t like ponds that don’t have fish to swim,
And I don’t like braggarts with their “Me, me, me”
For when you look at what they’ve done, there isn’t much to see.

But despite his dislike of boasting, Guillaume isn’t shy about proclaiming his bedroom artistry. He says he’s called the “Sure Master” for “so well have I learned the sweet game / that I’m a hand up on all other men.” But apparently things don’t always go his way, despite his skills. Pussy’s law, as it turns out, is that, unlike most things, it gains from being detracted from, like a forest, where if you cut down one tree three grow back. Leave your lover alone and she’ll replace you with three others.

My favorite of his poems is a tale of how he tricks his way into a threesome with two married women. Like Petronius before him, and Boccaccio and Rabelais after, it’s another case of brains winning beauty but, in this case, not without a few scrapes.

In Auvergne, just out of Limousin,
I was walking all alone
When I came upon the lady Garin
Strolling beside the lady Bernard
Both of whom said meek hellos
In the name of Saint Leonard.

And this is how I answered that day,
I didn’t say “yeah” or “nay,”
Nor one word of sense did they hear me say,
Just: “Babariol, Babariol,
Babariay.”

Then Agnes says to Ermessen:
“We’ve found what it was we sought.
Sister, by God, let’s take him in
For he is mute
And so he’ll never dispute
Or tell what we do with him.”