Writing about Sex

Writing about sex is hard, as everybody knows. Unless you’re as breezily unafraid of double entendre as Kathy Lette, or as secure in the knowledge of your own literary genius as Philip Roth – whose depictions, in successive novels, of liaisons between septuagenarian men and thirty-something women, are offered without a trace of humour – then you’re stuffed, frankly. Because either you avert your gaze when you get to the bedroom door, and risk having your writing dismissed as anodyne, or you take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and find yourself a candidate for the least covetable literary prize of them all.

The fear of just such an eventuality was suggested only last week by Andrew Motion, the chair of the Man Booker Prize judges, as a reason why so few of the novels under consideration had any sex in them. Of this year’s long-list, he remarked: ‘it’s as if they were paranoid about being nominated for the Bad Sex award.’ This dubious distinction, by the way, is conferred annually by the Literary Review for what it decides is ‘crude, tasteless…[and] redundant passages of sexual description’ in a given contemporary novel – and, for all its jokiness, is symptomatic of a wider reaction, in recent years, against the libertarianism of late 1960s and early 1970s fiction.

That, after all, was the era of Portnoy’s Complaint; of Fear of Flying, of Couples… and in case anyone thinks that writing frankly about sex was confined to Americans, of Crash, The White Hotel, and Delta of Venus. A Golden Age – at least by some accounts – of sexual freedom, and openness. In fiction, as in life, apparently, people shed their clothes and their inhibitions at the drop of a hat. Descriptions of activities once confined to the pages of specialist magazines only to be purchased in plain brown wrappers in Soho now popped up in otherwise inoffensive literary novels. Nor was this kind of explicitness unknown before the Summer of Love.

One has only to contrast present-day squeamishness about describing the act with the much mocked but still, by today’s standards, astonishingly frank account of love-making in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – published in 1928 – to see how far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The unease – amounting to embarrassment – that has greeted Martin Amis’s most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, with its sexy 1970s romps beside Tuscan swimming pools – to say nothing of the almost universal execration of Craig Raine’s no less sexually explicit début, Heartbreak, is indicative of this. One wonders if Molly Bloom’s celebrated soliloquy, in Ulysses (1922), which so inspired Updike and a generation of 1960s writers, would pass muster with a publisher today.

Which brings me to my own case. Over the years, I’ve written quite a lot about sex. My first novel, A Mild Suicide (1992), set in Edinburgh in 1977, concerned what was then quaintly referred to as an ‘adulterous triangle’. As a novice at this kind of game, I recall that I tried to make the sex as ‘arty’ as possible – the point being that my characters, a trio of graduate students, were incapable of perceiving anything except through the ‘lens’ of Art and Literature. Undiscovered Country (1997) also dealt with a couple of extra-marital affairs. Since the novel was set in 1950s Venezuela, I tried to convey something of that era’s attitudes to sex, and to show how people who’d lived through the turbulent events of the Second World War, as my characters had, would have been profoundly affected by them – not least in their sexual relationships.

Revising the book now, with a view to re-publishing it this autumn (with Arbuthnot Books in Sept 2010), I’ve tried to make the sex scenes more in keeping with the period. Anything too jarringly ‘modern’ – and that includes some of the more explicit language – has had to go. I think it’s an improvement. With my most recently published novel, The Dark Tower – which is set in South Africa in 1879 – I tried to exercise a similar restraint. For whilst I wanted to show the emotional and sexual conflicts to which my characters were subject, I had to make this consistent with the overall tone of the novel. The Victorians were of course as interested in sex as we are ourselves; the difference was that such matters were not talked about in ‘polite’ society. Sex was a topic for the barrack room and the brothel – certainly not for the drawing-room.

Having said that, it does seem a shame that our own time should have seen a return to Puritanism, after all the struggles of the past to free literature from hypocrisy and cant. After all, it isn’t so very long ago that books were banned for their sexual content alone, or that language we now taken for granted in novels (and in films and TV dramas) could result in a publisher’s being prosecuted for obscenity. And whilst I think that sex as a subject for fiction should be treated with exactly the same amount of care and sensitivity as one would apply to any other subject, I would hate to see it disappear entirely. Yes, there’s a lot of bad writing about sex – but then there’s a lot of bad writing about everything. It shouldn’t be a reason for taking refuge in a row of dots…