The Naughty Bits Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  from Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  from Portnoy’s Complaint

  from “Roman Elegy 5”

  from Beloved

  from Hopscotch

  from Falconer

  from “One Thing, Baudoin”

  from “The Rape of Lucrece”

  from Roughhouse

  from Pan

  from Elegy XIX: “To His Mistress Going to Bed”

  from Le morte d’Arthur

  from Cat and Mouse

  from Moby Dick

  from The Floating Opera

  from A Moveable Feast

  from My Secret Life

  from “A Rapture”

  from Serve It Forth

  from Ironweed

  from Sexing the Cherry

  from Portable People

  from The Theogony

  from Singular Pleasures

  from Poems

  from Near to the Wild Heart

  from The Decameron

  from Giovanni’s Room

  from Orlando Furioso

  from Vox

  from A Man in Full

  from “The Imperfect Enjoyment”

  from “Pretty Judy”

  from Ulysses

  from The Symposium

  from Justine

  from “This Condition”

  from Pantagruel: Third Book

  from Voluptuous Sonnets

  from The Starr Report

  from Hell

  from The Plaint of Nature

  from Sexus

  from Rabbit Redux

  from Crash

  from The Canterbury Tales

  from Justine

  from The Death of the Novel

  from Astrophil and Stella, “Sonnet 59”

  from Clit Notes

  from Money

  from In Praise of the Stepmother

  from “To His Coy Mistress”

  from “Cleanness”

  from Gravity’s Rainbow

  from “Anactoria”

  from Neuromancer

  from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

  from The Book of Margery Kempe

  from The Thief’s Journal

  from The Faerie Queene

  from Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

  from The Exeter Book

  from “Elena”

  from The Satyricon

  from The Name of the Rose

  from The Life I Lead

  from Breakfast of Champions

  from The Kama Sutra

  from Fear of Flying

  from The Art of Love

  from The Romance of the Rose

  from Autumn of the Patriarch

  from “Libido”

  from The Arabian Nights

  from An Unseemly Man

  from The Kisses

  from “Lucky Pierre”

  from A Man for the Asking

  from Adam Bede

  from J

  from Child of God

  from The Old Testament

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Jack Murnighan

  Credits

  Copyright Page

  Edited and Introduced by

  JACK MURNIGHAN

  Also by Jack Murnighan

  Full Frontal Fiction:

  The Best of Nerve.com

  To my grandparents, whose decades of industry have allowed me to spend my life reading and to turn the poets’ pages with uncallused hands.

  Do you ask why I fill all my books with wanton poems? I do it to repel dull grammarians. If I sang the warlike exploits of magnanimous Caesar, or the pious deeds of holy men, what a load of notes, what corrections of the text, I should have to endure! What a torment I should become for little boys! But now that moist kisses are my theme, and the lusty blood tingles at my prurient verses, let me be read by the youth who hopes to please his virgin mistress, by the gentle girl who longs to please her new-made spouse, and by every sprightly brother poet who loves voluptuous ease and mirth. But stand aloof from these frolic joys, ye sour pedants, and keep off your injurious hands, that no boy, whipped and crying on account of my amorous fancies, may wish the earth to press hard upon my bones.

  —JOHANNES SECUNDUS, BASIA, 16TH CENTURY

  Introduction

  Three and a half years ago, my best friend Rufus told me he and his girlfriend were going to start a smart sex magazine on the Internet. They were calling it Nerve, and it was supposed to appeal to men and women and pick up where Playboy left off. I was in the middle of doing a Ph.D. in medieval literature and was steadily getting as moldy as most of my books. Rufus wanted to hire me and offered to triple my salary. I had been making a whopping four digits at that point and thought it high time to break five. I packed my suitcase.

  My first assignment was to do an article on banned books and to compile some sexy excerpts from banned classics. Putting together the predictable Boccaccio, Henry Miller, James Joyce, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the Marquis de Sade, I jokingly argued that book banning was a good thing; it confirms the power of the books banned and gives people a decent idea of what to read. It also gave me another idea: namely, that there was a lot of sex in the history of literature and a lot in places you wouldn’t expect. I suggested doing a weekly column on the steamiest scenes from books past. The Naughty Bits was born.

  Every Monday since then, I’ve introduced and excerpted everything from Greek myths to Japanese cult novels, Sanskrit lyrics to New York slam. I wanted to include books from the entirety of world literature, but I knew that there was no way I could be exhaustive— or even include all the most famous passages. But in a sense, that’s not what I was after. Alongside all the usual suspects, I wanted to feature writers and works that most people would be unlikely to associate with sex. Anaïs Nin, sure. Chaucer, of course. But Dante on erotica? Joyce on rim jobs?

  So, although it might have been nice to call this book The Best Sex Scenes from the History of Literature, that’s not what it is. Such a thing cannot really exist. Sex is too varied, personal, and intricate to qualify for Bests; what works at one point for one person doesn’t necessarily work for someone else, or even for that same person at a different time. I also realized that the column would be a lot more interesting if I included scenes that reflected the truth and diversity of sex, not just idealized fantasies. Cormac McCarthy writing about necrophilia, a medieval poem equating homosexuality to bad grammar: these are not what you’d expect to find in your basic erotica anthology, and I’m happy about that. The Naughty Bits is ultimately less a book of sex in literature as much as a book about sex in literature. If you come looking for brief and steamy diversions, you’ll find them, but if you are looking for the ecstasy, agony, absurdity, and poignancy of sex, you’ll find that too.

  Although I’m often asked if I’m close to exhausting all the naughty bits out there, I’ve found that the more I read, the more it’s clear that sex has permeated literature to such an extent that I could probably collect naughty bits for the rest of my life. Sex is everywhere in writing, but it’s not always there in the form we think it’s going to take. And not all authors are up to the challenge. I often joke that half the sex scenes in the history of literature consist of only one word: afterwards. And it’s almost true. You get all the buildup, perhaps even some heavy breathing and the taking off of shoes, and then “Afterwards, Gary and Bunny picked up their fallen clothes and . . .” Yeah, yeah. Cop-outs we have known.

  The Naughty Bits is a celebration of all the writers who decided that a single word wasn’t enough, that something
in the knocking together of the bodies, the mixing of memory and desire, the slip of skin and sweat on skin and sweat was an integral part of the human experience—something vital to their characters and thus their stories, not to be missed.

  Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people believe that sex is better left behind closed doors and that to bring it out for public scrutiny somehow demystifies it, strips it of its magic. To me, all human experience shimmers with the luster of miracles, if we can bring ourselves to see it. Poets and fiction writers do their best to point it out; in those rare moments that they succeed, they are really creating art. Yes, sex is full of mystery, but it would take a lot of monkeys sitting at a lot of typewriters for a lot of eternities to begin to capture any of that magic on paper. When we are examining what’s worthy of spilled ink, we should be less concerned with robbing something of its mystery as catching some measure of it. It’s doubtful that any art, even photographs, steals the soul of the subject; the bigger question is whether, when the negatives are tweezed out of the fixer, any soul is visible on the film. We have to hope there is. And if sex is so likely to be divested of its gravity by writing about it, then what of love? And what of death?

  The irony, of course, is that the accomplished sex writer, not unlike the capable psychiatrist, neurosurgeon, or relief worker, undoes the need for his or her labor in the very act of doing it. You write well about sex and your readers close the book—to move on to the real thing. That’s why the most archetypal of all naughty bits in the history of literature is also my favorite: Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno. Banished to Hell for adultery, Francesca tells how it was a book that did them in. They were reading the tale of Lancelot when things got a bit steamy. Paolo looked at her, they kissed, and the book fell to the floor. Now that I’ve got the best of the naughty bits together in one volume, I hope you find ample occasion to drop it too.

  FROM The Inferno by Dante

  . . . There is no greater pain

  Than to remember happy days in days

  Of sadness . . .

  But if to know the first root of our love

  You have so strong a desire,

  I’ll tell you as one who weeps while she speaks.

  One day, for pleasure simply, we were reading

  Of Lancelot, and how love overpowered him;

  Alone we were, and free from all suspicions.

  Often that reading caused our eyes to meet,

  And often the color from our faces went,

  But it was a single passage that overcame us:

  When we read how the desired smile was

  Kissed by so true a lover as he, this one,

  Who from me never will be taken,

  Kissed me, his body all trembling, on the mouth.

  . . . And no more did we read that day.

  —translated by Jack Murnighan

  from Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  Lawrence delivers. No book in any public library is likely to be as dog-eared from furtive bathroom reading as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sure old D. H. had some dubious politics—no small number of sexist and classist remarks suppurate forth from his books—but the man could write a sex scene. First published privately in Italy in 1928, Chatterley caused the predicted uproar and was banned in the United States until the late 1950s. Finally, an American judge approved it as the classic it surely is. The first sentence gets us going (“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically”), and it doesn’t lose steam thereafter. Readers who fast-forward a hundred pages to get to the raunch lose out on Chatterley’s nuanced social critique. But don’t worry, that’s just what we’ll do.

  What fascinates me about Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that it manages to present some of the more piquant sex that you’ll find in English literature yet also one of the most brutal dissections of the act that I’ve ever read. Which opens some interesting questions: Did Lawrence like sex? If not, how could he write such arousing scenes? Does not liking sex facilitate writing about it, or was he just honest and saw sex, warts and all, for what it is? I occasionally have the experience of listening to a Caruso aria, then suddenly hearing it as if I was someone who had never listened to opera. Stepping out of the inside of experience, the ordinary, even the beautiful, can become absurd. This is what happens in Lawrence’s description of Lady Chatterley losing sync with her lover: “She lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love.”

  It goes on in the same damning vein, but you get the point. And this from a woman who, as you will see in the scene below, had supped at lust’s table, and greedily. It is a curious dichotomy—sex from the inside, sex from the outside—and Lawrence is savvy to present it. If there is a moral, and whether it’s intended or incidental, it is to live from within. Writers, perhaps, have to write from without, but let the rest of us just be there doing it.

  He led her through the wall of prickly trees that were difficult to come through to a place where there was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident—he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

  He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then, as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling insider her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with the activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was soft and open, and softly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up in to her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.

  from Portnoy’s Complaint

  PHILIP ROTH

  If there’s a place where Catholics and Jews are in complete accord, it’s in their sovereign deployment of guilt. My childhood home was ostensibly atheist, but the mere fact that Irish Catholic blood flows in half of my veins seems to have consigned me, phylogenetically, to the full complement of nookie neuroses. Had I been Jewish it seems I would have gone through the same issues, at least if one believes Philip Roth. The protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint’s agonized confrontations with his sexuality are meant to be a case study in the effects of Jewish Mother Syndrome on a randy adolescent, but they remind me strongly of my own agnostic fits. As such, Portnoy stands as a larger allegory on the pain and humor of a potently sexual individual scraping against a culture of repression. It’s an old tune, certainly, b
ut few sing it as well as Roth.

  So what do frustrated teenagers do to release all their pent-up urges? They masturbate, of course, and Portnoy is a pro. He starts by doing it in hiding, though he gets more and more public as the years pass. He does it in the family bathroom, pretending to have the runs; he does it on the bus sitting next to a sleeping archetypal shiksa; he does it in movie theaters; he does it in the woods; he does it in the beef liver his family had reserved for dinner; and he does it in his baseball mitt, having snuck into the burlesque. It’s this last that I’ve selected to excerpt, for here, more than anywhere else in the novel, Roth spells out the material stuff of Portnoy’s fantasy. And it’s a scream. Earlier in the novel Portnoy’s dream women (and milk bottles and cored apples and his sister’s brassieres) called him “Big Boy” and asked him to give them all he’s got; here he adopts the quaint moniker “Fuckface” and gets it on with a chorus girl. In the best book on masturbation, this might well be the finest scene.

  What if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if . . . In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is too, under our bare bulb (HOTEL flashing just outside our window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock as I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off—then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with “poor”) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark.