The Professional Viewpoint

Published (abridged) in 20th Century Studies, November 196929

‘Incidentally, I doubt if the act of love, with its permutations, has ever been described with such detailed freedom in a modern novel.’

 

It is the date of this pre-publication trade reference to my first novel Travelling People which brings to my attention how much and how remarkably quickly the situation has changed: it was as recent as 1963.

I have already written³⁰ of how an attempt was made by the printer to censor this novel, and re-reading the passages in question for the purposes of this article I am still unable to understand how anyone (unless psychologically unstable) could have found them objectionable. Technically, the problem with writing about the sex/love correlate in Travelling People was the old and basic one of vocabulary: whether to use clinical, Latinised English or Anglo-Saxon derivatives compromised by use as expletives. I cannot at this point remember how much trouble the passages cost me, but I do recall being very pleased with them when I had finished: that is to say, they said all I wished to say in the way I wanted to say it. I avoided the naming of private parts, and I excluded euphemism and the sentimental velleities of flatulent imagery: the only images used are (if I may be permitted) organic to the situations. The result seems to me, some eight years after writing Travelling People, rather too careful and studied: I avoided the obvious traps only at some loss of precision and explicitness.

Albert Angelo had little about sex in it: but the point of breakdown between fiction and truth which I came to and dramatised in my second novel very much influenced the treatment of sex in the third, Trawl. Since I was trying to write absolute (that is, solipsistically absolute) truth within the novel form, explicitness and completeness were necessary as much for sex as for any other part of the material. The chief problem here was the embarrassment first of facing the truth and then of writing it down, exposing it for other to see. This was particularly acute in the sexual passages, and re-reading them today I still feel the same embarrassment (amounting to pain) nearly as much as when I wrote them.

The problem of vocabulary was not as difficult in Trawl, since the whole novel was an interior monologue and it was appropriate for the nearest word to hand, so to speak, to come tumbling out. Where necessary, two or more alternative words for the same thing could be used successively as the mind strove for accuracy. Attitudes towards sex in a particular situation were also distinguishable by use of either the cant or the clinical word, cunt or pudenda, John Thomas or penis.

It has always seemed important to me to mention contraception, or lack of it, in descriptions of heterosexual lovemaking: and in Trawl I took this concern so far as to mention branded products.

The Unfortunates (completed 1967, published 1969) was similarly an interior monologue, but there was (like Albert Angelo) comparatively little about sex in it. What there is seems to me as successfully written as I could wish it to be given its own terms of reference. And it is a source of some relief to me that I can now write about similar material far less self-consciously than in Travelling People, though I of course recognise that I am nearer to The Unfortunates than to my first novel. But there is still for me the problem of self-consciousness in writing about onanism: and this I am facing at the moment in writing a short story provisionally entitled ‘Instructions for the Use of Women’.

At the age of the nineteen I was lent (by what I now know to have been a poodle-loving lesbian of indeterminate years and motive) the four limp volumes of Frank Harris’s My Lives and Loves in the Obelisk Press edition. It is to that library borrowing that I trace my interest in trying to write down everything, my whole truth: and I particularly remember his observation that one-third of anyone’s life is passed in the bedroom but is ignored by unbalanced novelists. That Harris was himself a great liar in print I discovered only much later, when I was both too far committed and had moved on anyway.

The present freedom of expression, which from my point of view is absolute (that word again) in that I feel there is nothing to stop me publishing about anything I choose, is really the only part of my youthful concept of what the future would be that has actually been realised. More objectively, I see such freedom as being for nothing but good for the novel form: since at the very least no other medium has such freedom at the present time.