Dear Readers,
Until now, I have been shielded from the costs of disability because of our wonderful and vital NHS. This will change when I get home due to the considerable costs of remodelling the house, and my need for round the clock care.
I ask, therefore, that if you enjoy The Kureishi Chronicles, believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
A young writer once asked me why it was so difficult to write about sex. I answered glibly that all writing was difficult. Writing about marriage, death, landscapes, historical characters, or whatever, none of it was easy. Nor should it be easy. There should be some friction in your method, between you and your subject matter. Think how crazy it would be if you could just sit down and write a masterpiece followed by another masterpiece. You’d have to be Shakespeare to do that. Frustration and difficulty are integral to the process. But I also regretted my reply to the young writer because now, looking back, it is obvious that there was much more to be said.
It is difficult to write about sex, just as it is difficult to write about music, the sensations are so intimate and intense, it is hard to find the vocabulary to suit the occasion. Words like member, thrust, or cried out, etc, always sound banal, if not ridiculous, when compared to the complexity of the sexual situation, where there is so much going on.
It seems odd that in the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up, no one was allowed to write explicitly about sex. In those days, books were still censored, or prosecuted. There were trials for Henry Miller, Nabokov, and of course D.H. Lawrence, all of whom attempted to write about copulation, and only from a male perspective, of course. It is ridiculous that such harmless works were ever considered censorable. Anyone now can write what they like about sex, and no one will complain, at least in the West. But perhaps another sort of repression has been established, by making sex banal or mundane, it has perhaps lost the charge and meaning it once had. But that might just be me, because of my injury, with sex now seeming to exist in an alternate universe, or only in the past.
Last night, here in the hospital, I was talking to a promiscuous, bisexual friend of mine who has prostate cancer; he was amazed by how much of his life had been taken up by sex: fantasising about it, planning it, shopping for it, deceiving, lying, doing it and recalling it. We discussed why it had meant so much to us, and wondered how we could think about it now. It was as though we had been possessed, and when the fever had gone, we could only speculate what it had all been about.
Literature has always dealt with sexuality, it has been there, but subtly and disguised. You find it in the theatre, from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams, buried in the language. I was only thinking the other day about how much sex there is in the second part of Middlemarch, a novel I much enjoy, but not a novel known much for its sexuality.
What a shame it is, and also an absurdity, that there has not been more explicit sexuality in great literature. I would have loved to have learned what the characters we are most fond of liked to do in bed: what they wore, what they said, how they behaved, what their kinks and fetishes were. Freud told us that sexuality was at the centre of all of us. Now that seems something of an exaggeration. We are more likely to say now that violence is at the core of our souls and our civilisations. But still, I would have relished the opportunity to hear from the great masters of literature - Tolstoy, Chekhov or E.M. Forster – what they would have said about sex, had they been free to write without inhibition.
What a wasted opportunity that for centuries the public and their censors were unable to bear writing or reading about the activity of copulation. There are marginalised sexualities, particularly gay and lesbian preferences, which have been doubly repressed over the years. We could have learned so much about pleasure and desire if we had not been so afraid of a writer describing to his readers what he or she thinks about an orgasm. If sexuality is such a driving and defining aspect of human behaviour, it must seem a mystery that it has been so excluded from literary description. Sexual censorship seems absurd now, which isn’t to say it doesn’t exist in a good deal of the world still.
It is true, and there is no doubt, that sex is difficult to write about. The vocabulary is often impoverished, it is like trying to trap music or water in language, you have to be delicate, and you’d probably be better off describing the act from the inside, from the character’s point of view, what each action means to them, and why they wanted to do it. After all, sexuality is as individual as any other act, like conversation or laughter, and to describe a character fully in a play or a novel, you’d probably want to have an idea of what they like to do in bed. That would tell you a great deal about them. How could you leave such a thing out? What a motivating factor it is, particularly when you are young.
Since it has been impossible to explicitly present overt sexuality in novels, films and plays, artists and directors have had to find creative ways of portraying these acts. You can see it in Shakespeare’s sonnets, which as we know are soaked in sexuality. You might argue that leaving sexuality out creates a sense of mystery. But censorship, even though it may inspire creative solutions, is never to be welcomed. If we abolish sexuality in literature we lose something that drives us, that makes us love and laugh. It confuses and amazes us, it is a force so powerful that I can see why it may need to be hidden. But my view is that it should be celebrated, explored, and protected, since it is something that makes us creative and fascinated by others.
For a short time, in the mid 1970s, I wrote some pornographic pieces for what were then known as glamour magazines. This was before the internet, and it was a time when these top shelf magazines would run pornographic short stories for the entertainment of their readers, who would, I’d imagine, be more interested in the pictures, then in these little written sketches. But nonetheless, in those days, unpublished young writers like me could supplement their dole money by writing so-called one-hand reads. These stories would often involve manual workers like plumbers or gardeners with bored housewives. This was a fundamental fantasy and it was repeated endlessly with the same words used over and over again. It was dull to write and boring to read. I guess we writers try to make these pieces as original and lively as we could, but there wasn’t much you could do; originality wasn’t required, all you had to do was repeat a few trigger words to create excitement in the reader, who would then, presumably, jerk-off to the images. It seems funny now, if not a bit desperate, that people would turn to writing, rather than images, for stimulation. In those days, I lived in a house with a basement, and as I wrote and rewrote my pieces, I would screw up the rewritten pages into a ball and throw them out of the window into the garden of the flat below. Later, I came to know the couple who lived downstairs, and the woman said to me that she had been horrified to open out these balled out bits of typed paper and read such obscenities. She told me she’d had romanticised ideas of writers and she wondered whether I was something of a young Graham Greene living upstairs, rather than a purveyor of filth.
Hanif
That anecdote about the neighbor discovering the balled up, tossed out drafts is pure gold.
Such an important facet of human life. Writing about sex matters so much to people - people need to explore and find out about themselves and others in this way. Of course Hanif your books & films have been absolutely instrumental in bringing sex, and different kinds of sex, into our lives in different ways. It helped me hugely as a young person - I just wish there had been more openness and even more writing available. Also - the bad writing in sex awards bring me so much mirth. Maybe writers don’t find it as entertaining... but come on - this corker: “Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.”