The Naughty Bits Read online

  from “Roman Elegy 5”

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  You have found a magic lantern and a few rubs brought forth its occupant. He’s kind of a bottom-drawer djinn so you’re only entitled to one wish and not even one of your own devising. But he’s not all bad, so he asks you, “Whaddaya want, Love or Art?” And which do you pick, the consummate romantic relationship or the great Work, suspecting that having one pretty much negates the chance of the other? Love or Art— that’s how it’s normally presented, and most of us don’t question the dichotomy.

  But why should they have to be mutually exclusive? Does every artist need to be tortured and loveless? Must every great lover be consumed by passion to the exclusion of all else? We imagine both artists and lovers as addicts: the artist is Picasso, surrounded by women but loving only himself and his work; the lover is—yes, who is the lover? How would we have heard of him? Each day spent in a rhapsody of sexual bliss—who would have time to paint or write, or even buy milk? I once arbitrated a dispute between a couple over how much sex they should have: she was arguing for four times a day; he said once every other day. Her reasoning was obvious—the more the merrier. His? That he was only able to work because of the sadness of his life. His artistic fuel derived from discontent; having sex every day would make that discontent go away, and with it all his ambition. I advised for once every other day, with marathon weekend supplements.

  My own humble life has been an attempt to reconcile impulses in both directions. There are those rare people who seem to have balanced their seduction and career schedules (Wilt Chamberlain, for example, scoring at will in both sex and hoops), but when I want real inspiration, I look to literature. Specifically, to an elegy of Goethe’s. Germany’s greatest writer was a lifelong student of the erotic arts and wrote a number of scurrilous verses. He also had an enormous collection of penis-centric art and curios from around the world, and I suspect he was something of a perv. Yet his Roman Elegies reveal his most romantic side, none more than the Fifth (which I’ve translated below). Its theme is not the separation of Love and Art, but how the former can be used to facilitate the latter. And I ask you, if it’s possible, is there a greater synthesis?

  I find myself now on classical ground, filled with joy and inspiration;

  Voices from past and present speak loudly to me, all full of charm.

  I turn the pages of the Ancients and follow their counsel;

  My hand doesn’t tire, and each day I find a new delight.

  But when the night comes, love occupies me otherwise.

  And if the result is that I’m only half as learned, I am still doubly happy.

  But then, is it not a kind of learning when the lovely curve of her bosom

  I admire, and let my hand slide down her hips?

  Then I can truly understand a marble sculpture; I conjure and compare,

  I see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.

  And if, being with my beloved, I am deprived of some daylight hours

  She makes amends by giving me all the night’s hours in return.

  What’s more, we’re not always kissing, but often speak with reason;

  And when she falls to sleep, I lie beside her and think a good deal.

  And frequently while in her arms I have composed beautiful poems,

  Softly measuring the beat of the hexameters, tapping my finger

  Along her naked back. She breathes softly in a gentle slumber,

  And her breath glows through me, to the depths of my chest,

  While Cupid stokes the fire . . .

  —translated by Jack Murnighan

  from Beloved

  TONI MORRISON

  Hard-bought, wisdom. Take something away from a man, then he’ll understand. Heidegger says you don’t know the tool-ness of a tool until it breaks. And the heart? I wonder how much we can hurt, how much we can know. I’m listening to some music now, pretending not to be alive, looking down at a book I have read many times, trying to figure out how to describe that feeling you get when something strikes the deepest tuning fork you’ve got in the hollow case in your chest. I’m not always sure I can go on living, but that’s when I think I’m doing it for real. Feeling the accumulated weight of silent tragedy, drunk with how beautiful beauty can be. It seems I have to go on, but feeling this much feeling head-on I don’t know how I ever will.

  This is what happens when I reread Beloved. Pure, lucid knowledge that I’m brushing against the true. Wondering how I could ever manage not to break beneath the weight. How any of us do. Morrison’s achievement is among the handful of books that take us to the love-ravaged, love-saved heart of human experience. And remind us that we’ve been there all along.

  [Note: Sethe and Paul D are in bed, thinking back on how Sethe lost her virginity to Halle in a cornfield, while Paul D, Sixo and others looked on.]

  Both Halle and Sethe were under the impression that they were hidden. Scrunched down among the stalks they couldn’t see anything, including the corn tops waving over their heads and visible to everyone else.

  Sethe smiled at her and Halle’s stupidity. Even the crows knew and came to look. Uncrossing her ankles, she managed not to laugh aloud.

  The jump, thought Paul D, from a calf to a girl wasn’t all that mighty. Not the leap Halle believed it would be. And taking her in the corn rather than her quarters, a yard away from the cabins of the others who had lost out, was a gesture of tenderness. Halle wanted privacy for her and got public display. Who could miss a ripple in a cornfield on a quiet cloudless day? He, Sixo, and both of the Pauls sat under Brother pouring water from a gourd over their heads, and through eyes streaming with well water, they watched the confusion of tassels in the field below. It had been hard, hard, hard sitting there erect as dogs, watching corn stalks dance at noon. The water running over their heads made it worse.

  Paul D sighed and turned over. Sethe took the opportunity afforded by his movement to shift as well. Looking at Paul D’s back, she remembered that some of the corn stalks broke, folded down over Halle’s back, and among the things her fingers clutched were husk and cornsilk hair.

  How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.

  The jealous admiration of the watching men melted with the feast of new corn they allowed themselves that night. Plucked from the broken stalks that Mr. Garner could not doubt was the fault of a raccoon. Paul F wanted his roasted; Paul A wanted his boiled and now Paul D couldn’t remember how finally they cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel.

  The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt.

  As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free.

  No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

  How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.

  from Hopscotch

  JULIO CORTÁZAR

  It’s a standby among parlor-room conundrums: If you had to be deprived of all your senses save one, which would you keep? Taste, perhaps, if you were Paul Prudhomme and lived down the block from La Tour d’Argent; or smell, if Carolina wisteria bloomed outside your bay windows; some would say hearing, transfixed by the rapture of Beethoven or Bessie Smith; but most people would cling to sight, “the prime work of God” (as Milton called it after he lost his), and hope to fight back the haunting darkness.

  Not I. For my money, if I could only retain one means of interacting with the world, it would be touch. Touch, soft like the powder on a moth’s wing, the cool parabola of a slow-traced finger along my brow. I imagine myself blind as Borges, reading the Braille dots that circle a nipple or stroking the soft harp strings of down on my lover’s belly. Deaf as the desert amid the seesaw s
cissoring of body on body, hearing through contact the syllables of joint and sinew, learning through movement the grammar of friction. My brain is full of visual images I won’t soon forget; the jukebox of the mind contains innumerable tracks; I can recall the smell and taste of my favorite things almost at will; but of touch I require a constant transfusion. Something about touch defies memory—it is diffuse, complex, and difficult to render in language. Aristotle was probably right that we receive all our knowledge through our senses, but touch is the only one I trust, and sex the language in which I’m least willing to lie. Fingers working like self-aware brushes on the electrified canvas of skin, a hundred million nerve endings in constant communion with the brain—that is the source of touch’s appeal.

  We’ve all temporarily experienced what it would be like to have only one sense (at least under ideal circumstances): headphones on and eyes closed, surrendering to the tweeter and woof, or full-mouthed and chewing, head thrown back in communion with the flavor of a morel. With porn, especially, we limit ourselves to a one-sense experience, even if more would be merrier. Internet smut is the worst: sitting unfeelingly in a desk chair, gazing through the blue flicker to unreachably distant, odorless, 2-D bodies gathering themselves in their pixels for our delight, the crotch and the eye connected by a single, throbbing nerve—not how I prefer my arousal. I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion. Among allies in the cult of contact I can number the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Cortázar’s chef d’oeuvre, the avant-garde novel Hopscotch, contains one of my favorite love scenes in modern literature. He paints it in a few hundred words, and in all five senses, but it’s clear that touch is sovereign. Two eyes, two ears, one tongue, one nose, ten fingers. See what I mean? Reach out.

  I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.

  You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth. . . . Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

  —translated by Gregory Rabassa

  from Falconer

  JOHN CHEEVER

  Some fiction, seeking to shock, asks you to visualize the most extreme acts of human behavior. Other, more confident narratives demonstrate that the extreme doesn’t reside at the margins but at the center of who we all are, not in monstrous aberrations of humanity but in the unknown, perhaps best unexplored, innermost natures of each of us. We see tapes of wartime atrocities and can’t help wonder what made it possible for ordinary men to become concentration camp guards. Could it happen to you? Of what are we capable? Few of us want to know. But it’s not only the possibility of evil that we are afraid of; more personal questions can be almost as daunting. Would you drink urine in the desert? Or eat human flesh if starving? We never know for sure what capacities we have inside us—or what desires. How perverse are we at heart? Would you be able, or under certain circumstances even want, to have sex with an animal, a child, a corpse? It seems unlikely, but how would you know? All these questions can be speculated on, but we’ll never really be certain. The possibility can’t be denied, and that’s what creates fear. For many men, the threat of homosexuality creates just such an anxiety. In a bunker, in prison, in an orgy, could you take pleasure from another man? Would you succumb to temptation, to desperation? And if so, would you find yourself liking it? John Cheever’s great prison novel, Falconer, dives unflinchingly into the heart of these questions. At every turn, Falconer acknowledges, without glorification, the sexuality that permeates the men’s prison. Whereas writers like Genet portray prison sex like scenes out of Tom of Finland, Cheever is as gentle as Tom’s of Maine. He’s at his best, and most subtle, when he depicts how homosexual encounters occur among men who the rest of the time act straight. The waspy married protagonist Farragut has an extended affair with a fellow inmate; there is a urinal trough where the men line up side by side to masturbate (which includes one of the most ample descriptions of the range of human penises anywhere); and, in the scene below, the little-liked candy-fat Cuckold tells his story of the first time he crossed over. His response is a poignant combination of resistance and resignation, a slow—and eventually happy—acceptance of what lies within.

  “I scored with a man,” said the Cuckold. “That was after I had left my wife. That time I found her screwing this kid on the floor of the front hall. My thing with this man began in a Chinese restaurant. In those days I was the kind of lonely man you see eating in Chinese restaurants. You know? . . . The place, this Chinese restaurant, is about half full. At a table is this young man. That’s about it. He’s good-looking, but that’s because he’s young. He’ll look like the rest of the world in ten years. But he keeps looking at me and smiling. I honestly don’t know what he’s after. So then when I get my pineapple chunks, each one with a toothpick, and my fortune cookie, he comes over to my table and asks me what my fortune is. So I tell him I can’t read my fortune without my glasses and I don’t have my glasses and so he takes this scrap of paper and he reads or pretends to read that my fortune is I am going to have a beautiful adventure within the next hour. So I ask him what his fortune is and he says it’s the same thing. He goes on smiling. He speaks real nicely but you could tell he was poor. You could tell that speaking nicely was something he learned. So when I go out he goes out with me. He asks where I’m staying at and I say I’m staying at this motel which is attached to the restaurant. Then he asks if I have anything to drink in my room and I say yes, would he like a drink, and he says he’d love a drink and he puts his arm around my shoulder, very buddy-buddy, and we go to my room. So then he says he can make the drinks and I say sure and I tell him where the whiskey and the ice is and he makes some nice drinks and sits beside me and begins to kiss me on the face. Now, the idea of men kissing one another doesn’t go down with me at all, although it gave me no pain. I mean a man kissing a woman is a plus and minus situation, but a man kissing a man except maybe in France is a very worthless two of a kind. I mean if someone took a picture of this fellow kissing me it would be for me a very strange and unnatural picture, but why should my cock have begun to put on weight if it was all so strange and unnatural? So then I thought what could be more strange and unnatural than a man eating baked beans alone in a Chinese restaurant in the Middle West—this was something I didn’t invent—and when he felt for my cock, nicely and gently, and went on kissing me, my cock put on its maximum weight and began pouring out juice and when I felt of him he was half-way there.

  “So then he made some more drinks and asked me why I didn’t take off my clothes and I said what about him and he dropped his pants displaying a very beautiful cock and I took off my clothes and we sat bare-ass on the sofa drinking our drinks. He made a lot of drinks. Now and then he would take my cock in his mouth and this was the first time in my life that I ever had a mouth around my cock. I thought this would look like hell in a newsreel or on the front page of the newspaper, but evidently my cock hadn’t ever seen a newspaper because it was going crazy. So then he suggested that we get into bed and we did and
the next thing I knew the telephone was ringing and it was morning.”

  from “One Thing, Baudoin”

  THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE

  A twelfth-century French poem by Thibaut de Champagne asks an important and difficult question: When alighting on your beloved’s doorstep, what should you kiss first, her lips or her feet? Although the question seems a little dated by the last eight hundred years of sexual relations, the issue of how best to express devotion is not yet cut and dried. Devotion is a dicey thing; different women require different kinds of signs, and anybody who wants a fast and steady rule might as well stay home memorizing it; it ain’t gonna be worth much in the real world.

  For a long time, I was obsessed with a not dissimilar question: which should you kiss first, a woman’s breasts or between her legs? Now conventional wisdom tells you that one kisses the breasts before—in Monty Python’s fine phrasing—“stampeding toward the clitoris.” But it was precisely that conventionality that irritated me back in those years when I thought the bedroom a fine site for personal politics. So I made it my one-man mission to invert the conventional kissing narrative and refuse to kiss the breasts before crossing the Mason-Dixon. This form of political resistance met with no small confusion from the women so implicated, you can be sure. As we were all in college, my partners were a bit too young to know to say something along the lines of “Son, what in the bejesus are you up to muff-diving me before you give my sweet rack the slightest consideration?” But that’s really what I needed to hear. Because, and I say this to would-be iconoclasts everywhere, sexual conventions evolved that way for a reason. A bit of prepping goes a long way, and gentle/rough breast attention—however anticipated—is still welcomed by most women. Although I thought that my partners would think of me as a truly independent-minded lover, unfettered by everyone else’s precedents, Lewis-and-Clarking my way up the proverbial flood, no, they just thought I was a twit who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And they were right.