Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 13
He dropped the shirt and stood still, looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly, and the erect phallus rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
“How strange!” she said slowly. “How strange he stands there! So big! and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?”
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed. Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of the belly, where the phallus rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid in a little cloud.
“So proud!” she murmured, uneasy. “And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he’s lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying!…” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement….
“Lie down!” he said. “Lie down! Let me come!”
He was in a hurry now.
And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallus.
“And now he’s tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!” she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand…. “And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite different!”
“That’s John Thomas’ hair, not mine!” he said.
“John Thomas! John Thomas!” and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that was beginning to stir again.
“Ay!” said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. “He’s got his root in my soul, has that gentleman! An’ sometimes I don’ know what ter do wi’ him. Ay, he’s got a will of his own, an’ it’s hard to suit him. Yet I wouldn’t have him killed.”
“No wonder men have always been afraid of him!” she said. “He’s rather terrible.”
The quiver was going through the man’s body, as the stream of consciousness again changed its direction, turning downwards. And he was helpless, as the penis in slow, soft undulations filled and surged and rose up, and grew hard, standing there hard and overweening, in its curious towering fashion. The woman too trembled a little as she watched.
“There! Take him then! He’s thine,” said the man.
And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away with the last, blind flush of extremity.
THIS SCENE and other intimate passages in Lady Chatterley’s Lover caused the book to be labeled “obscene” in America for thirty years; but in 1959 a federal judge, influenced by the new definition of obscenity as written by the Supreme Court in the 1957 Roth case, rescinded the ban against Lady Chatterley’s Lover and conceded that the book’s author, D. H. Lawrence, was a man of genius.
Had Lawrence been alive he would have undoubtedly concurred in this opinion, although after completing the novel in 1928, two years before he died, he was more accustomed to hearing himself referred to as a rancid pornographer, a sex fiend, and the source of what one English critic called “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was Lawrence’s tenth and final novel, and it told the story of the frustrated wife of an imperious, impotent aristocrat who had been injured during World War I, and of her affair with a gamekeeper by whom she became pregnant and for whom she left her husband, her home, and her social class. Despite its adulterous theme, Lawrence was convinced that he had written an affirmative book about physical love, one that might help to liberate the puritanical mind from the “terror of the body.” He believed that centuries of obfuscation had left the mind “unevolved,” incapable of having a “proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience”; and so he created in Lady Chatterley a sexually awakened heroine who dared to remove the fig leaf from her lover’s loins and examine the mystery of masculinity.
While it has long been accepted as the prerogative of both artists and pornographers to expose the naked female, the phallus has usually been obscured or airbrushed, and never revealed when erect; but it was Lawrence’s intention to write a “phallic novel,” and often in the book Lady Chatterley focuses entirely on her lover’s penis, strokes it with her fingers, caresses it with her breasts, she touches it with her lips, she holds it in her hands and watches it grow, she reaches underneath to fondle the testicles and feel their strange soft weight; and as her wonderment is described by Lawrence, thousands of male readers of the novel undoubtedly felt their own sexual stirring and imagined the pleasure of Lady Chatterley’s cool touch on their warm tumescent organs and experienced through masturbation the vicarious thrill of being her lover.
Since masturbation is what erotic writing so often leads to, that was reason enough to make Lawrence’s novel controversial; but in addition, through the character of the gamekeeper, Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological detachment that man often feels toward his penis—it does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls them, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man’s life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man’s most honest organ.
It is also symbolic of masculine imperfection. It is unbalanced, asymmetrical, droopy, often ugly. To display it in public is “indecent exposure.” It is very vulnerable even when made of stone, and the museums of the world are filled with herculean figures brandishing penises that are chipped, clipped, or completely chopped off. The only undamaged penises seem to be the disproportionately small ones created perhaps by sculptors not wishing to intimidate the undersize organs of their patrons. In religious art, the penis is often represented as a snake, a serpent crushed by the feet of the Blessed Virgin; and priests since the eleventh century, adhering to the vows of celibacy, have rigidly resisted its covetous temptation. Masturbation has always been considered sinful by the Church, and cold showers have long been recommended to unmarried male parishioners as a means of dampening the first simmerings of rising passion.
While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis, is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication, adultery, or pornography.
Pornography is especially appealing to the penises of men who cannot afford prostitutes or mistresses, or who are too shy or ugly to entice women, or who are temporarily isolated from women (as when incarcerated in prisons or hospitals), or who wish to remain conjugally faithful in every way except when indulging in an orgasmic fantasy with a magazine or when, during marital intercourse, they imagine that their wife is another woman. This is called “superimposition.” It is the most common, and private, form of infidelity in the world, and it does not depend upon pornography for its stimulation.
Each day the penis is prey to sexual sights in the street, in stores, offices, on advertising billboards and television commercials—there is the leering look of a blond model squeezing cream out of a tube; the nipples imprinted against the silk blouse of a travel-agency receptionist; the bevy of buttocks in tight jeans ascending a department store’s escalator; the perfumed aroma emanating from the cosmetics counter: musk made from the genitals of one animal to arouse another.
The city offers a modern version of a tribal fertility dance, a sexual safari, and many men feel the pressure of having to repeatedly prove their instinct as hunters. The penis, often regarded as a weapon, is also a burden, the male curse. It has made some men restless roués, voyeurs, flashers, rapists. It is what conscripts them into military warfare and often sends them to a premature death. Its inane seductions can lead to marital discord, divorce, child separation, alimony. Its profligacy in high places has provoked political scandals and collapsed governments. Unhappy with it, a few men have chosen to rid themselves of it.
But most men, like the gamekeeper, admit that they cannot deliberately kill it. While it may typify, in Lawrence’s words, the “terror of the body,” it is nevertheless rooted in a man’s soul, and without its potence he cannot truly live. Lacking it, Lord Chatterley lost his lady to a social inferior.
The fact that Lord Chatterley had been a war victim, paralyzed while serving his country on the battlefields of Flanders, made the story of his wife’s departure with a lusty gamekeeper all the more tragic and obscene to many Englishmen; and after Lawrence had completed the final draft of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, his publisher and agent both refused to be associated with the book.
When other publishers also rejected it, Lawrence took the manuscript to Florence, where, with the help of Italian printers who did not understand a word of English but who reacted nonchalantly to Lawrence’s verbal translation of the sex scenes—“But we do it every day,” said one printer—he produced a limited hardcover edition of one thousand copies. Each copy, printed on creamy hand-rolled Italian paper and handsomely bound, bore his autograph and was priced at ten dollars. The books were then smuggled into England and distributed through his friends to many readers who, curious about the work that critics were calling an “abysm of filth” and “the foulest book in English literature,” were possibly more anxious than ever to read it.
The first edition quickly disappeared, and a second printing followed. Soon the book became exceedingly scarce in England as agents from Scotland Yard began raiding the homes of Lawrence’s friends in search of copies to confiscate. Censors were also alerted in the United States, where customs officials in New York intercepted several shipments and, according to Lawrence, resold many books to black marketeers. Underground publishers made facsimile copies of the Italian edition and sold them by the thousands. Some of these books were cheaply bound unfocused editions copied photographically; others were expensive black-bound volumes designed to resemble Bibles or hymn books.
While Lawrence was as irritated by the pirates as by the censors, being deprived of royalties by both, most of his admiring readers were thankful to the pirates for making available to them what Lawrence’s Italian printers could not efficiently provide; and while large profits were made in the underground by such distributors of the books as Samuel Roth, these men usually paid a price for selling the words that Lawrence had written. Twice during the 1930s Roth went to jail for trafficking in the novel, and these and his other dealings in illegal literature all contributed to the five-year term that Roth received in 1956 and was still serving after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was declared legal in the United States during the summer of 1959.
The liberation of Lady Chatterley was achieved after the United States Post Office had been sued by a rather romantic young radical named Barney Rosset, a man who knew Roth and who owned an avant-garde publishing house in Greenwich Village called Grove Press. Had Rosset been born a decade sooner, he might have become a fellow prisoner of Roth’s, since he shared Roth’s passion for independence and abhorrence of censorship. But it was Rosset’s good fortune to have published many erotic books at a time when the nation itself was becoming more sexually permissive about literature and life; and Rosset’s business success was additionally enhanced by the fact that, unlike Roth, he had been born wealthy and he thus had the resources to formidably defend in court such books as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and other sensuous novels and films that would be distributed by Grove Press from the late 1950s through the 1960s.
The initial source of Rosset’s affluence was his father, an ambitious Chicago banker and businessman who, descendant from a hapless Russian Jewish patriarch who made corks for champagne bottles, celebrated his prominence and patriotism during World War II by bequeathing his yacht to the United States Navy. Rosset’s mother, who married the banker in 1921 after she had won a beauty contest and attracted his attention, was the daughter of a militant Irish-Catholic exile from Galway who worked as a sewer contractor in Michigan, spoke Gaelic, and felt such contempt for the English that he would not allow the color red to appear in his house because he associated it with red-coated British soldiers. Barney Rosset, the only child of the marriage, was also aware of anti-Semitic comments made by his mother in private about her Jewish neighbors in Chicago, and at times he could not help but wonder if at least part of her disapproval of Jews might be directed toward him.
As an adolescent he was sensitive, hyperactive, and rebellious. In private school, he coedited a newspaper entitled Anti-Everything, and he once joined a picket line outside a theater showing Gone With the Wind because the film seemed demeaning to blacks. Though he was diminutive and wore thick glasses, he became a star halfback on the high school football team, and dated perhaps the prettiest girl in the class. He was also the senior class president, the first among his group to drive a car, a new beige Packard convertible, and the first to buy an illegal copy of Tropic of Cancer.
At Swarthmore College in 1940 he wrote a freshman English paper on Henry Miller, receiving a B minus; and the following year, restless under the school’s Quaker influence, he transferred to the University of Chicago. Three months later, still dissatisfied, he moved to Los Angeles and attended UCLA. Within the year, in October 1942, he had enlisted in the Army, eventually becoming a lieutenant in the Signal Corps assigned to photographic missions in China, where he sometimes had to be restrained by fellow officers from venturing beyond the approved perimeters.
After the war Rosset returned home, earned a bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, co-owned a small plane in which he skimmed over the city’s skyscrapers, and had an affair with a blond socialite who wanted to become a painter. At a time when it was considered scandalous to do so, the couple lived together openly without being married, first in New York, later in France; and when they finally did marry, in Provence in 1949, the romance was essentially over.
Upon returning to New York she gradually left Rosset for a struggling Jewish-American abstract expressionist painter, and Rosset soon met and later married a young woman employee of Brentano’s bookshop whose father had been a German intelligence officer in World War II. Rosset was thirty when he remarried in 1953, a year after he had acquired Grove Press and began to publish the work of talented writers who were as yet too uncommercial, unconventional, or shocking for the major American publishers, but who appealed to Rosset’s own eclectic taste and his avidity for risk.
Among the writers that signed contracts with Rosset were Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Simone de Beauvoir, and other Europeans and literary exiles who were living in Paris, which was then still the capital of Western culture. Rosset spent considerable time in that city not only in negotiating with French agents and publishers for the American rights to novels and plays that he admired but also in acquainting himself with many young Americans who were editing literary magazines in Paris, or writing first novels there, or merely living the café life along the Left Bank and discovering for themselves what Hemingway meant when he called Paris a Moveable Feast. There was a social and artistic freedom in Paris peculiar to that time and place, and largely due to the presence of one man, an audacious publisher named Maurice Girodias, Americans in Paris could buy English-language books that were as yet too outrageous or realistic to be sold legally in the United States.
Maurice Girodias was, like Rosset, the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, and soon after Rosset had met him in Paris there developed between them a kinship and professional admiration. Girodias’ firm, the Olympia Press, founded in 1953, was the first to publish in English Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Pauline Réage’s Story of O, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Candy, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Like Rosset, Girodias was impulsive and daring, influenced by what he called “individualistic anarchy,” and was resentful of l’esprit bourgeois in all its manifestations. While a portion of what he published in Paris was conventional—Girodias printed books of political essays, Russian classics in French, even a journal devoted to the art of knitting—his name was inextricably linked to libertinage, and among his more carnal contributions to letters were such novels as With Open Mouth, The Chariot of Flesh, and White Thighs.
The last novel, written under the pseudonym of Frances Lengel, was actually the work of a talented Italo-Scottish writer named Alexander Trocchi, the editor of a Paris-based English literary quarterly called Merlin. Girodias also published an adventure thriller entitled Lust, by the British poet Christopher Logue, under the Girodias-inspired nom de plume of Count Palmiro Vicarion. Girodias attributed the authorship of Candy to “Maxwell Kenton” because its American coauthor, Terry Southern, felt that if his true name were associated with this tale of an uninhibited young wench from Wisconsin it might reduce his chances of selling to an American publisher a children’s book that he had just submitted for consideration.
Other writers who wished for various reasons to conceal their identity wrote for Girodias under such names as “Marcus Van Heller,” “Miles Underwood,” and “Carmencita de las Lunas.” When Girodias was short of cash, which he frequently was because of his casual management, he would mail out to his vast clientele of readers in France and overseas advertising blurbs that seductively summarized a new sex novel that he urged everyone to buy; and after he had received a sufficient number of replies with money, he would hire a writer to produce a novel that more or less conformed to the plot that he had concocted.
