SEX

Good sex in fiction

JONATHAN GIBBS

It’s easy to sneer at the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award – sneering at the sneerers, as it were – but it’s no lie that writing well about sex is difficult, and perhaps more difficult in prose than in poetry. I think there are three main reasons for this. Firstly, the vocabulary: the words for human genitalia, when they aren’t puerile or bluntly medical, are semantically loaded with enough sexual-political freight to capsize any sentence. Secondly, the activity itself: however pleasant it may feel to those involved, most variations of the sexual act are pretty obviously open to ridicule. The third reason relates to those feelings. The brain may be “the largest sexual organ”, but orgasm switches important parts of it off. We barely know ourselves when having sex; how should we be expected to write it?

Nevertheless, good sex writing does exist – and here, sticking to the parameters of the award, I essentially mean the sex scene in the literary novel or short story, ignoring outright pornography or its kissing cousin, erotica. Which is not to say the scene should not be arousing, but its primary object should be to serve the story. The writing should teach us about the characters. Ideally, it should teach us about sex, too.

One recent novel that would surely be nominated for a Good Sex in Fiction Award, if such a thing existed, is Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians (2016). McBride’s book, about an Irish drama student who has a relationship with an older British actor, refuses to recognize a barrier between what might be termed “sex acts” and any other part of the characters’ interaction – and further buries the physical descriptions in McBride’s distinctive prose style:

Bit harder? he wonders. I. I. But the mouth on my breasts then – tickle and strange delight of being seen – surprises me, if not to everything, to something. Like first foot inveigle toward what this could be. With the look in his eye. With his body in me. Going and going and harder until Oh fuck, he says Hold still, I’m way too close, any chance you are?

This reminds me of, firstly, Niall Griffiths’s intense novel about a sado-masochistic relationship, Kelly + Victor (2002) and, further back, James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (1967). Salter’s novel of a young expat American’s affair with a French shopgirl in provincial Autun is a frequent reference point for good sex writing. Much of its lyricism comes from the fact that the details of the affair are imagined by the narrator, who seems as much in love with the relentlessly debonair Philip as he is with Anne-Marie. Here they are, in a typical bedroom scene:

With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his fingers, and as he does, he comes like a bull.

“Like a bull” is a false step, to be sure, but this contrast between unabashed, precise physical description and more unexpected, imaginative leaps is characteristic of Salter’s approach to the subject. The image of the bull pales next to another animal simile in Salter’s last novel, All That Is (2013). In it he describes a man as coming “like a drinking horse”, so falling foul of Gibbs’s Law of Reversible Similes: if you can describe something as being like something else, then that comparison should work equally well in reverse. I am yet to see a horse drink “like a man coming”, and hope I never will.

You can see a lot of Salter in the sexual adventures of Geoff Dyer’s novelistic heroes, who for all their frustrations and self-deprecation have immensely enviable sex lives. In Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi(2009), the titular freelance journalist and the woman of his dreams have barely met at the Venice Biennale before they are having sex.

He licked down her stomach and then moved lower so that he could smell and see her. She reached down to hold her underwear aside. He stayed there motionless, inhaling deeply through his nose, exhaling through his open mouth. Only his breath touched her. Neither of them moved. He tilted his head and she moved from the edge of the desk, bending her legs slightly until she was almost touching his tongue and then was. She kissed his face with her cunt, moving over his mouth, moving in synch with him.

Dyer spoke of being inspired to write such passages by reading the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. From The Line of Beauty (2004): “He twisted his own pants down to his knees, and smiled at the liberated bounce of his dick in the cool night air, and kissed his smile into Leo’s sphincter”.

Similarly renowned for her descriptions of lesbian sex, Sarah Waters started out with cunnilingus and strap-on dildoes in Victorian London, in Tipping the Velvet (1998), but showed a particularly gritty realism in The Night Watch (2006), set in the capital during the Blitz.

She had what must have been her four fingers inside Helen, up to the knuckle; but her thumb, outside, was rubbing at Helen’s swollen flesh. Helen raised and lowered her hips, to keep pushing against her. The blankets were rough against her bare back, and as well as the pressure between her legs she could feel Julia’s dry, trousered thigh bearing down on her own naked damp one; she could make out separate points of discomfort – the chafing against her of the buckle of Julia’s belt, the buttons on her blouse, the strap of her wrist-watch… She stretched out her hands behind her head, wishing with some part of herself that Julia had bound her, fastened her down: she wanted to give herself up to Julia, have Julia cover her with bruises and marks. Julia began to push almost painfully inside her, and she liked it. She was aware of herself growing rigid, as if really pulled by tightening ropes.

Naturally you have to look harder for sex scenes the further you go back in time – and I don’t just mean those written by the likes of D. H. Lawrence and Anaïs Nin. Literature has always had sex on the brain, but the eroticism and lyrical beauty in, for example, The Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra tend not to play themselves out through realistically drawn characters, against whom one can directly measure oneself, and one’s experience of the world.

Most of these examples have been of good sex writing (as in sex that is a happy experience for the participants), although your average novel is as likely to have bad (as in unpleasant or unedifying) sex in it as good. One of the sex scenes I’ve read in recent years that has made the strongest impression on me is in Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment(2005). When Olga, dumped by her husband and spiralling into despair, goes to seduce her downstairs neighbour, she does so as much out of fury as desire.

Carrano bent over me, licked my nipples, sucked them. I tried to abandon myself, I wanted to eliminate disgust and desperation from my breast. I closed my eyes cautiously, the warmth of his breath, the lips on my skin, I let out a moan of encouragement for me and for him. I hoped to notice in myself some nascent pleasure, even if that man was a stranger, a musician perhaps of little talent, no quality, no capacity for seduction, dull and therefore alone.

If anyone ever wanted to know what goes on inside the male mind with its mind on sex, I’d push them firmly in the direction of Nicholson Baker’s splendid The Fermata (1994). The book has some perfectly effective pornography in it, but its general schema, of a man who is able to stop time and move around in and manipulate the stopped world at will, produces a frighteningly accurate picture of the male gaze.

But possibly my favourite sex scene in a novel – the one that has best explained to me the meaning of my experience of sex, that filled in the gaps erased by all those rampaging endorphins – is from Flesh, by Brigid Brophy (1962). Flesh is a reverse Pygmalion story, in which the intelligent, intrepid Nancy decides to train and develop the shy, virginal Marcus. Here is the description of their wedding night:

[Nancy] appealed to his body, and roused it, with a couple of caresses. She had small, swift, soft, brown, cool hands. She also had her – as it was in relation to him – gift of tactlessness. She talked to him. Marcus had always imagined that when he did at least make love to a woman it would be in terrible silence, interrupted only by such noises as their bodies might involuntarily make, which he had already conceived might be embarrassing. But Nancy talked to him about what he was to do, about what he was doing, in a low, rather deep, swift voice which provoked in his skin almost the same sensation as her hands. When he entered her body, he felt he was following her voice.

Jonathan Gibbs is a London-based writer and critic. His novel Randallwas published by Galley Beggar Press in 2014, and he lectures in Creative and Professional Writing at St Mary’s, Twickenham.