| LIST 46 | 12 Erotic Works by Well-Known Writers |
1
“Priapeum” by Virgil
Ancient Rome's greatest poet, the author of the epic Aeneid, also wrote the poem “Priapeum,” in which he chastises his limp dick: “Goodbye, I am forsaken, wretched cock.” He laments that no “tender boy” or “jolly girl” (it's a British translation) will have anything to do with him, although—for reasons not made clear—he can get it up for an ancient crone with icy skin and cobwebs around her pussy. Pretty racy for the first century BC.
2
Historia de duobus amantibus (a/k/a The Goodli History) by Pope Pius II
I covered this forgotten gem in my previous book, 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, much to the delight of interviewers who loved telling their audiences about a fifteenth-century bodice-ripper written by a man who would soon be Pope. For a book written in 1444 (and published 44 years later), the action is pretty shocking, though not to us jaded members of the twenty-first century. “O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my arms?…O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I am, or more blessed.”
3
Les Bijoux Indiscrets by Denis Diderot
Philosopher Diderot is known to history as a lynchpin of the Enlightenment. For a dozen years, he edited the monumental Encyclopedie, which sought to codify and expand all knowledge at the time. Voltaire and Rousseau were among the contributors. But before helping turbocharge scientific and literary progress in the West, Diderot spent two weeks writing a sexy little book, Les Bijoux Indiscrets (1748). Being a French genius, he couldn't resist adding literary criticism and political satire to this tale of a Turkish sultan who magically discovers the sexual histories of the ladies in his court. An alleged version was published in English in 1968 (as The Talking Pussy), but it was much different than the original.
4
White Stains and other works by Aleister Crowley
Maybe it's not too surprising that occultist Aleister Crowley—“the wickedest man in the world”—wrote a book of unapologetically filthy poetry, but his main claim to fame is his numerous writings on magick. In 1898, he published White Stains, brimming with his raunchy, sacrilegious verse involving necrophilia, bestiality, golden showers, shit, STDs, Jesus, and menstruation (“How my dry throat, held hard between thy hips, / Shall drain the moon-wrought flow of womanhood!”). The poems even have their moments of strange beauty, as in “Abysmos,” when the narrator laments that he will never again “bite her lips, as once my teeth / Met in her cheek, to cull a rosy wreath.”
The year 1904 saw the publication of Crowley's Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden, about which he later wrote: “My object is not merely to disgust but to root out ruthlessly the sense of sin.” It's self-consciously over-the-top, a humorous attempt to massacre every taboo in sight. In describing his adventurous past, the Archbishop says:
At the great Gold Medal competition of the Spunk Society in 1904, I was able to satisfy no less than twenty-seven ladies, besides an exhibition frig in which I extinguished fourteen candles in sixteen attempts, thus taking the eighth prize, and special mention as the sole representative of my cloth who was able to support a child weighing fifty-six pounds on my erect lance-of-love alone, and thus accomplishing the act of sex with my hands tied behind my back. Poor little devil!
In 1910, Crowley—using the pseudonym Major Luity—published The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz (a/k/a Bagh-i-Muattar). It was presented as a volume of Arabic poetry translated by Luity, when actually Crowley wrote all the verse. It's unabashedly homoerotic, as in “The Love-Potion”:
If Suleiman with all his concubines From dusk to dawn consecutively lay,
Yet at thy buttocks' velvet, O Habib, The man would rise erect from mudded clay.
Elsewhere, Crowley published “Leah Sublime,” 26 verses in which he spits filthy commands at his degraded and degrading lover:
Stab your demonical
Smile to my brain!
Soak me in cognac
Cunt and cocaine;
Sprawl on me! Sit
On my mouth, Leah, shit!
As poetry, it's not the greatest, but it works as erotica mainly because Crowley just didn't give a rat's ass about any kind of propriety or correctness.
5
Various novels by Robert Silverberg
Here we have the first of many science fiction giants who took pen and penis in hand to write one-handed material. The prolific winner of five Nebula awards and five Hugos, while trying to make ends meet, cranked out almost 200 erotic pulp and stroke novels, almost all between 1960 and 1967. He most often used the name Don Elliot when speed-writing such nuggets as The Bra Peddlers, A Change for the Bedder, Cousin Lover, Dial O-R-G-Y, Dyke Diary, Les Floozies, Kept Man, Love Bums, The Orgy Boys, Sex-teen, Till Love Do Us Part, and 26 titles beginning with the word Sin.
During this time, Silverberg also wrote sixteen nonfiction books about sex under various pseudonyms. Titles include 90% of What You Know About Sex Is Wrong, I Am a Nymphomaniac, Sex and the Armed Forces, and Virgin Wives.
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Image of the Beast and Blown by Philip José Farmer
Farmer is one of the big names of science fiction. His best-known works are two series: Riverworld and World of Tiers. Besides having won three Hugo awards and one Nebula (the Grand Master Award), Farmer is credited with introducing sex into science fiction in 1960-61 with Flesh, A Woman a Day, and The Lovers, all of which are extraordinarily tame by today's standards. What's not tame—and probably never will be viewed as such—are the erotic SF/horror books that he wrote in the late 1960s.
Image of the Beast was the first of these, opening with a scene that will live in infamy: Police are watching a homemade film that was anonymously mailed to them. In it, one of their detectives, tied down, has his cock bitten off by a woman with razor-sharp metal teeth. The penisless man's detective partner, Herald Childe, determines to find the people responsible for gruesomely killing his partner. It turns out that they're a bunch of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other strange beings. Really strange.
In one of the most memorable scenes, Childe is in a secret passageway of the mansion that serves as the headquarters for the weirdos. Looking through a one-way mirror, he spies the incredibly beautiful Vivienne masturbating. But then “a tiny thing, like a slender white tongue, spurted from the slit. It was not a tongue. It was more like a snake or an eel.” This long, thin creature with smooth, white skin lives in the woman's womb and comes out during sexual activity. Its head, the size of a golfball, “was bald except for a fringe of oil-plastered black hair around the tiny ears. It had two thin but wet-black eyebrows and a wet black Mephistophelean moustache and beard.” The vagina-snake with a man's face puts its head in the woman's open mouth, sliding in and out. The woman appears to have a long, violent orgasm, and the strange being withdraws, with a “thick whitish fluid” leaking from its mouth. It then retreats back into the woman's womb.
In the sequel, Blown, we find out that the various beings are two groups of aliens stranded on earth. One faction draws its power from sex, the other from blood. Childe, it just so happens, is the only person who can get the space creatures back to their home world by drawing on his sexual energy. He takes part in an orgy with the aliens, and while Vivienne is blowing him, another man yanks the pseudosnake out of her vagina:
Vivienne fell apart.
Childe stood with her head between his hands and his penis in her mouth. The eyes stared up at him with a violet fire, and the lips and tongue kept on sucking and thrusting. The other parts of her body, having gotten onto their legs, began to scuttle around the room. The big black who had been sucked off by Vivienne picked up the many-legged cunt and stuck it on the end of his cock and began sliding it back and forth. The cunt's legs kicked as if it were having an orgasm.
Farmer's two other ventures into weirdcore are A Feast Unknown, featuring Tarzan and Doc Savage, and the gothic horror Love Song.
8
The Gas by Charles Platt
Platt is a hard guy to pin down. He's written some well-received science fiction, such as The Silicon Man, plus a lot of articles on cyber-topics in Omni, Wired, and mainstream newspapers. Then there are his numerous interviews with legendary science fiction writers and his Christina erotic horror trilogy. Before Christina, though, there was The Gas. In this outrageous novel from 1970, an experimental biowarfare gas leaks in Southern England, causing people's inhibitions to vaporize and their most primal urges to surge to the forefront. A nonstop carnival of sex, violence, and combinations thereof ensues. Everyone is fair game for the unleashed lust and bloodlust—men, women, children, animals, priests and nuns, corpses, immediate family members, anything….
In one scene, a passing car sputters out, and its driver—a young punk—angrily hops out. Repeatedly screaming “fuck you!” at his ride, he gets an idea. After taking the cap off the gas tank:
He pulled out his prick. “I'll make you fucking go,” he muttered. “Fuck you, fuck this!”
He lunged forward, jamming his prick into the pipe, and started fucking it with crude angry movements. He groaned, spurting jism down into it, whipped his prick out, zipped his jeans up again.
Vincent watched him trudge back to the front of the car, open the door and get in. He started the engine, revved it, drove off down the street and out of sight.
The novel could never be published in its original form today, which is why even bad-boy publisher Loompanics—when reissuing The Gas in 1995—cut out a lot of the forbidden sex scenes.
9
The Repentance of Lorraine by Andrei Codrescu
Those of us used to hearing the highly literate, Romanian-accented thoughts of Andrei Codrescu on National Public Radio might be a little shocked to find out about his porn novel, The Repentance of Lorraine (originally published under the pseudonym Ames Claire).
We will, however, be less shocked when we read it and find that the highly accomplished author, poet, and essayist has applied his intellectual power to the task of writing an explicit but psychologically convincing novel about a triad of a male budding writer, a female business student, and a female professor. You don't see much porn peppered with words like “curvilinearly,” “pedagogue,” “petit-bourgeois,” and “Huysmanesque non sequitur.”
Not that it isn't enjoyable. Codrescu is witty and regularly uses memorable turns of phrase: “Colline is virginal, in that sexy French-nun way”; “She exuded sexuality and mystery like an oriental stage set”; while looking at two naked women holding each other: “The view of their two graceful backs, buttocks and legs is my coat of arms.” There's humor throughout, and things get downright hilarious when, while the threesome is in Paris, Lorraine is kidnapped by a left-wing terrorist group, from whom she learns about “the people's orgasm.”
When the writer and the prof have their first encounter: “I unbuttoned the top of her loose garment, and her beautiful breasts bounded into view, her nipples sublimely erect. It is unfortunate, but nature has decreed that one breast must be chosen first over the other. I chose the left. Beginning at the outermost edge, my tongue climbed toward the pink aureole in the middle of which the nipple rose. A flicker of my tongue would set this sheikhdom on fire.”
The narrator comments on the second time all three of them get together: “The frenzy of a bacchanalia seized us. We made love to each other in a timeless furor. This prolonged activity (it was midnight when we finally stopped to order a pizza) brought to the surface the amazing fact of our absolute compatibility. We fit into each other like a three-way lock. Our pleasures fitted together at their jagged edges as described by the Continental Drift Theory.”
Reflecting on the 1973 novel 20 years later, Codrescu said that it was written purely “for money,” yet he didn't want to write a stroke novel. “I felt that sex was transcendental, which is to say, untranslatable. What made the flesh rise was precisely what sank the page.” With its sex scenes far between and too short, Repentance is meant more for the cerebrum than the genitalia.
10
The Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice
After making a name with her debut novel The Vampire Chronicles, and in the midst of writing The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice published three erotic SM novels, one each year from 1983 to 1985. Under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure—so as not to alienate her fans—she works an erotic retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, with Beauty becoming the willing submissive of the Prince who awakens her. The three books—The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, and Beauty's Release—are generally regarded as excellent erotic lit. All three have now been issued under Rice's real name and are easily available.
Also easy to obtain are the two erotic novels Rice originally wrote under the pseudonym Ann Rampling. Belinda is really mislabeled as erotic, since there's almost no onstage sex, but Rice does venture into forbidden territory with this story of the love affair between a man and a slightly underage girl. Exit to Eden is literate SM that was all but ruined by Hollywood. The portions of the film that are faithful to the book are quite good, and seeing this love story between a dominant woman and her male slave is pretty radical. Too radical for the studio execs, who ham-fistedly inserted a hackneyed detective plot featuring Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd, so as not to frighten the proles too much with all the whips and chains. The film would be much better if some rogue videographer would make an unauthorized edit—a la The Phantom Menace—in which all the detective scenes are left on the cutting room floor like the trash that they are.
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Pornucopia and The Magical Fart by Piers Anthony
Certainly one of the most prolific writers of SF and fantasy, Anthony has written many series, including Xanth, which now includes almost 30 volumes. A lot of his novels are tinged with playful T&A, but he went balls-out in a couple of his books. Pornucopia was originally written for Playboy Press, but they rejected it as “too gross for words.” They were probably expecting mainstream porn in sci-fi clothing and had to pick their jaws off the floor after reading this insanely imaginative, explicit novel, which somehow manages to retain the humor and lightheartedness of the Xanth works.
The plot revolves around Prior Gross, who has an uncircumcised dick that measures 3.97 inches when erect. As it turns out, the smegma that Prior's penis produces has curative properties, and this makes his organ the target of an abduction by the beautiful doctor Tantamount Emdee. The rest of the novel focuses on Prior's attempts to regain his pilfered gland. Anthony has commented that when writing this book, he tried to break every taboo he could think of, even those of the erotic publishing industry itself. Indeed, Pornucopia brazenly ventures into such verboten areas as smegma, VD, small penis size, bestiality, circumcision, tampon insertion, and a three-pronged prosthetic penis(?!):
Oubliette got on her hands and knees again and presented her handsome posterior. “Stations, men,” she said.
Seeing her there, Prior finally realized what this weird divided member was for. The two small penises lifted as his hot blood filled them.
He came at her as he had the prior night, but with a difference. He had three members to insert. The long one passed between her legs and curved by her falling breasts to reach her mouth. The two lesser ones prodded simultaneously at her vagina and anus.
It was tricky getting them aligned, but with patience and steady nerves, he made it.
The Magic Fart catches up with Prior a year after recovering his cock. A succubus tells him that his dream woman—the one he's destined to marry—has been abducted to Fartingale, and he has one week to rescue her. As you may have surmised by now, this sequel adds a record amount of toilet humor to the mix, in the time-honored literary tradition of Chaucer, Rabelais, Swift, Twain, and Benjamin Franklin.
In the land of Fartingale, people break wind as a greeting, make their buildings out of dried shit, engage in literal pissing contests, and community life centers around a gigantic central public bathroom (the homes in Fartingale have no private loos). Eliminatory functions and sexual functions are entwined. As a female character tells Prior while seducing him: “Folks who poop together, whoop together. We have shared shit.”
Honorable Mention 1: Two speeches by Mark Twain
Twain's love of tweaking convention shows up most strongly in some of his rarer writings on religion, farting, and sex. In the latter category we find his speech “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” in which he devilishly propounds on masturbation:
Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence.
Scarcer still is his speech “The Mammoth Cod Club,” in which he gives several facetious reasons why he won't join. The fourth one being:
Largeness of organ is proof positive that it has been cultivated. The blacksmith gets an enormous arm by constantly exercising that limb, and I suppose a man by constantly using his private member will increase the size of it. Membership in your Society is a confession of immorality.
Honorable Mention 2: The love letters of James Joyce
Literary giant James Joyce destroyed and redefined every notion of what a novel could be with his stream-of-consciousness masterworks Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce wasn't just an experimentalist on paper, though. He was pretty kinky in the sack. Although his works stirred up trouble because of some racy passages, it's his letters to his common-law wife Nora Barnacle that are downright filthy. So filthy, in fact, that Joyce's literary estate has sworn that they will never again be published. But they were published around 40 ago in The Selected Letters of James Joyce. If you can get your hands on a copy, you'll read things like “my dirty little fuckbird!” “pull out my mickey and suck it like a teat,” “I would love to be whipped by you,” “the heavy smell of your behind,” and “a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers.” Yep, Joyce reveled in the sound and smell of Nora's farts and turds. “I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere,” he wrote on December 8, 1909. “I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”
On December 2, 1909, he explained to Nora the twin feelings of love that he has for her—the spiritual side and the earthy, physical side:
It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tales with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in my behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.
These gloriously filthy, unashamed missives are truly some of the best erotic writing I've ever read. Joyce's literary genius, his raging horniness, and his devotion to Nora are a combination that can never be beat. It's a crying shame that his heirs now deprive the world of such high-caliber smut.
Honorable Mention 3: “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” by Larry Niven
Like Philip José Farmer and Piers Anthony, Niven is another name familiar to SF fans. Winner of five Hugos and one Nebula, his crowning creation is the Ringworld series. In his 1971 essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” he meditates on the problems that Superman and “a human woman designated LL” would have if they tried to make a kid. One of the problems is that Superman might kill LL while spasming during orgasm. Even if that didn't happen, “he'd blow off the top of her head. Ejaculation of semen is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other forms of terrestrial life. It would be unreasonable to assume otherwise for a kryptonian. But with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet.”
Niven suggests artificial insemination, but this too presents challenges. Superman's supersperm would be unstoppable: “A thickened cell wall won't stop them. They will all enter the egg, obliterating it entirely in an orgy of microscopic gang rape.” But they won't stop there; all several billion of them will travel outside of LL's body and fly around Metropolis, causing all kinds of microscopic damage and immaculate conceptions.
Honorable Mention 4: “Sisters” by Lynne Cheney
The novel Sisters has become legendary for two reasons. First, it was written by Lynne Cheney, the rigidly uptight fundamentalist wife of oil baron Vice President Dick Cheney. Second, almost no one has ever read it. It was published by New American Library's Canadian division in 1981, and almost instantly went out of print. You simply cannot find a copy, even among rare book dealers.
Consequently, rumors about its contents swirl. For instance, legend has it that Sisters contains lesbian action. Having read it, I can tell you that this isn't correct. The misunderstanding stems from the fact that the main character's sister, dead by the time the novel starts, was a lesbian. Just like the Cheneys' daughter Mary.
Sisters is thought of as a romance novel, but that's a misnomer. Although it was packaged as one, it's more correct to call it a Western mystery novel. In 1886, successful Sophie, the New York publisher of Dymond's Ladies Magazine, goes to Wyoming to find out why her sister died. Independent and intelligent, Sophie carries with her a little lacquer box filled with contraceptives. Goodness gracious!
There's only one sex scene—if you can even call it that—in the whole book. When Sophie can no longer resist the studly James Stevenson, she joins him in the library room after hours:
He turned to her, leaned down, and put his hand gently on the side of her face. “You are extraordinarily beautiful,” he said quietly. They kissed, and then she lay with him in the firelight, unmindful of the past, unmindful of anything except this moment, this man, and herself.
That's how the chapter ends. When the next one starts, it's the following morning. The scene of attempted rape, on the other hand, is much longer and more detailed (which gives us some psychological insight into Lynne). Sophie is attacked by a drunken homesteader in his shack:
He let his thick, blunt fingers slide down to her throat, then over the front of her dress, over her breast and down until his hand rested on her thigh….
He kissed her, forced her lips open with his mouth. She could taste the whiskey he had been drinking, feel his whiskers and the scab on his face. A wave of revulsion swept over her, and she pushed him away. As he fell back, the white bulldog moved toward her, his growl becoming louder.
“Ah, feisty, ain't she, Luper?” Wilson stroked the dog. “Well, sometimes that kind's the most fun.”
The scene goes on for another page, ending when Wilson passes out before he can complete the attack. His abused wife had spiked his whiskey.
Besides the sex, rape, lesbianism, and contraception, Sisters also contains disfiguring violence, animal cruelty, feminist thought, anti-corporate messages, and several instances of taking the Lord's name in vain. What would Jesus say? What would Dick say? 