Pornography
The abridged edition of the Oxford Dictionary, which is the only dictionary within my reach at present, defines pornography as (1) ‘description of manners, etc., of harlots’ (an etymological definition that the word has long since outgrown); and (2) ‘treatment of obscene subjects in literature; such literature.’ Looking up ‘obscene,’ I find ‘lewd’; looking up ‘lewd,’ I find ‘lascivious’; and looking up ‘lascivious,’ I find ‘lustful; inciting to lust.’ (Is there something especially wicked about the Ls?) So the definition finally appears as ‘literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’
Now I have nothing at all against dictionaries. I find them entertaining reading, pithy, diversified, pleasantly alliterative, well informed but never tedious. Indeed, appreciation of the dictionary is growing steadily. Its influence on the arts is strong and increasing. In literature, as far back as E. F. Benson’s Dodo it could be faintly discerned, while to-day it shines unmistakably in such books as Compton Mackenzie’s Sylvia Scarlett or in any novel by Stephen McKenna. As for the movies, they are fairly suffused with the spirit of the dictionary. For example, a two-dimensioned heroine is going to make a visit. You see her enter her motor car, ride in her motor car, descend from her motor car. From what does such bright thoroughness derive if not from the thoroughness and inevitable logic of the dictionary? Predictable; prediction; predictive(ly). Nevertheless, the dictionary is imperfect. For it defines only the literal meaning of a word, which is less than half its significance. All valuable words grow hazy with connotation, and this luminous haze becomes a true part of their meaning. What sort of definition is ‘sprite or goblin of Arabian tales’ for ‘genie’? In fact, there are a number of words that to a great many people mean nothing but their connotation, the haze that has risen around them; ‘Bolshevism,’ for instance.
This emanation or glow or haze about words infinitely enriches language; it makes poetry possible. But one does not always want to use language emotionally; often one desires merely to express accurately a prosaic thought. Then the richness clogs one. It is as though a commercial traveller in olive oil, setting out to go from Naples to Smyrna, were to find himself not traversing the eastern Mediterranean, but adrift on the confused enchanted sea of Odysseus. Mediaeval saints frequently had visions of the Madonna that rendered them ecstatic with joy. But the celestial light that shone from her face was so dazzling that they were seldom able to give any satisfactory account of her features.
Thus with words. Thus with ‘pornography.’ ‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust’ is no explanation of the shuddering sense of evil, arousing a desire to cross oneself, that the word evokes. Good gracious! we have all listened to dirty stories—in the smoking-room of Pullman cars if we are men, at our finishing schools if we are women—and, whether interested or bored, we certainly felt no shuddering sense of evil. The truth is that the connotation, the emotional significance, of a word may be so different from its original prosaic meaning as almost to kill the thing the word purports to define. This has happened in the case of ‘pornography.’ So powerful is the maleficent exhalation of the name that it has, if not actually destroyed the thing itself, at least repressed and stultified it. It is a pity; for pornography is capable of becoming, and, despite its handicap, has at times in the employ of skilful writers become, one of the most delicate of minor arts. By our terrified taboo we keep it out of the hands of artists, and so a gross and especially a childish thing at the primitive level of the coarse words scrawled on latrines by little boys.
This is all the more unfortunate since there are certain fine and fastidious artists who are at their best when writing pornographically. Sterne was one. Norman Douglas and James Branch Cabell are examples to-day. South Wind contains some of the daintiest pornography ever written, done in so candid and virginal a way that to read it is like hearing a girl of seventeen say sweetly to a group of her parents’ friends: ‘I always tell my mother everything.’ As for Jurgen, its pornographic passages are as fresh and delightful as the Contes Drolatiques themselves. I have no patience (and I dare say Mr. Cabell has none) with those persons who defend Jurgen by denying that it is pornographic, and I have still less patience with those who assert about any book of the kind that it is not pornographic, but teaches a great moral lesson. No doubt there are dull inferior books that ‘treat the phenomena of sex very frankly’ and thereby ‘teach a great moral lesson’; but they bear no relation to pornography, which is either an art in itself or nothing.
‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’ H’m... I fear the dictionary has failed us all around. For the definition is not only inadequate but inaccurate. Oh, it will hold, I suppose, for the lowest forms of pornography—for, say, certain passages in Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom or in Richardson’s nasty Pamela. (It is a significant fact that the authors of such primitively and grossly pornographic books as these nearly always protest that they are not pornographic, but teach that ‘great moral lesson’ referred to above, whereas the authors of first-rate grown-up pornography take pride in their calling). But when one progresses beyond such elementary pornography, which can be of interest only to children or to men with the minds of children, the definition collapses. Really good pornography for grown-ups simply does not ‘incite to lust.’ For example, I read with delight the conversation between Jurgen and the Hamadryad (and if that is not pornography, and of the best, then I don’t know what pornography is, and had better give up trying to write about it), but it did not give me a desire to go downstairs and assault the cook. It is probably true that to a person incapable of desire for the opposite sex such a passage as this would be without interest, but the passage itself does not incite desire; it plays mentally with the idea of the emotion. In short, one must be capable of desire in order to like pornography, but that liking itself is something quite different from desire. Jurgen, you may remember, though scarcely a weakling, soon wearied of the conscientious perversities of his wife, Anaitis, but he loved to get off by himself in her magnificent pornographic library (the run of which I envy him) and read about such things. That is profoundly true and illuminating.
The history of civilization is the history of man’s effort to enrich the simple world he was presented with. He transforms handsome but monotonous primeval forests into complicated cities furnished with bathrooms and radios; he builds music up from a few primitive sounds to the elaborate symphony; in eating he progresses from the rending of raw meat and the consumption of wild berries to a dreamy dinner at Paillard’s. And you may be sure that he would have done the same with the sex-relationship had he been able. Alas, there he was baffled! The facts of sex are immutably simple. There are so few things that one can do. Heroic efforts have been made to increase on these, but, though many men have given their whole lives to the cause, without avail. New meats and vegetables for the table were continually being invented or discovered—foie gras, the grapefruit, the alligator pear; no satisfactory new ways of love were possible. Even so, man was not defeated. On the contrary, he won a great moral victory. The facts of sex were unalterably simple, but the atmosphere of thought and emotion surrounding those facts he discovered to be a luxuriant tropical forest. Three thousand years of thrilling exploration have not exhausted its richness or exorcized its dangers—for the forest breeds monsters as well as gods, and men have been lost and have gone mad there. In fact, in this rich region one may find anything one looks for (besides startling surprises), from harpies to shapes of serene loveliness. It is a Swiss-Family-Robinson kind of forest, save for the delightful uselessness of the discoveries.
To this world pornography belongs. But it is not an earnest-minded art, and so does not concern itself with either the beauties or the horrors, both of which its mocking, reasonable, eighteenth-century nature finds excessive, but with all the minor mysteries of the wood—the fantastic tricks and illusions, the dainty mischievous sprites, the malicious imps who make faces from behind trees then vanish with a burst of clear laughter.
This gay hide-and-seek elusiveness is the precise spirit of pornography. It is always saying one thing while pretending to say another. Why the pretence of something to be something else is art, I don’t profess to know, and of course it is not great art. But pornography lays no claim to be anything but one of the minor arts—and that is what the minor arts all do. In architecture it is no doubt a mistake for a railway station to look like a cathedral, but in fine cooking it is proper for a potato to look like a rose. So—perhaps even especially—with pornography. For it must be remembered that those few facts of sex from which pornography derives are solid, stern and tragically intense. So there is all the more reason why pornography, playing delicately above them, but bound to them none the less, should adopt every possible artifice to display its iridescent lightness. Almost alone among the arts, it runs no danger in this—as does poetry or painting; it can never become thin or empty, since its feet are anchored in those eternal facts. The Siegfried theme beneath the leaping flickering fire-music. Given this foundation (to say nothing of the stupid opposition to the art), it is amazing what delicacy pornography has, at its best, achieved. But that is of course the point. The difficulties of working in such material explain the appeal the art makes to those fine and fastidious artists who practise it.
There must be some reason beyond the mere sound of a word for the popular horror of pornography; and, in fact, as soon as one begins to dig down, one discovers all sorts of reasons, such as they are. There is, for example, especially in America, a buried remnant of puritanism, which makes people feel obscurely that something is wrong with anything conveying such intense pleasure as the sexual relation, which therefore should be considered morosely, if at all, and should certainly not be made the starting point for all sorts of agreeable fancies. (It is only fair to add that most of the people who feel this would deny quite sincerely that they feel it; nevertheless, they do). More obscure than this objection, but probably even more potent, is another, based on the average individual’s inharmonious attitude toward the whole question of sex. He has been taught, and holds firmly, that the sexual relation is a grave and sacred thing to be celebrated as a holy married rite; but, considering himself honestly, he perceives that it is, instead, a wild physical ecstasy with nothing of grave and little that is perceptibly sacred. Desiring to be honest, he is baffled and exasperated by the contradiction between what he thinks and what he feels, and it is probably this which makes him avoid explaining the facts of sex to his children. He is right about this emotionally; it is an indication of moral integrity for which he should be admired, rather than censured. How in the world can he explain the sexual relation to his sons as something grave and sacred when he knows in his heart that it is not that at all? Pornography stirs up and intensifies this latent discomfort in him. Gambolling about and impudently joking, it obviously considers sex neither as something grave and sacred (which he is convinced is the way it ought to be considered, at least publicly) nor yet with the shrinking fear due it, if it is, as he knows it to be, a shattering earthquake among emotions. It is as though pornography were sticking out its tongue at him personally. He is upset by it.
Among more maturely self-conscious persons, who, knowing more about themselves, care less, the sole objection to pornography is one of taste, and is felt only for its grosser primitive forms.
Now it is true that good taste is not a creative thing, but even something of a drag. Great art frequently violates it, and forces subsequent modifications of its criteria. But for minor art, and by and large in the world, taste is valuable. It tends to level things down to a standard—but it only tends. Good taste preserves the amenities. It is taste that makes existence agreeable; with life it has little to do. Used with discretion, it is of great service. For instance, good taste objects to violent noise, violent smells and all monstrous deformities; and while it is true that what at first hearing sounds as violent noise may be made by a Stravinsky, and what at first appears a monstrous deformity be created by a Baudelaire, most noises and deformities are really such, and deserving of suppression. Anyway, no permanent harm is done by good taste; it cannot crush genius. Aristophanes was unable to demolish Euripides. Good taste objects to emotional unrestraint, whether at a prize fight or at a religious revival. It aims at moderation in everything; and the proof that moderation is not fatal to achievement is that the Greeks professed to love it beyond all else.
Especially, taste is averse to anything that inspires disgust, the most sterile and desolate of all emotions. Now there are certain things that almost universally inspire disgust—why, it does not matter; they do. The odour of hydrogen-dioxide, for instance, goitres, or a disfigured human face. And in gross unworthy pornography there are brutal or distorted forms that do so for most of us: Le Rideau Levé, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, or Cleland’s Memoirs of Fanny Hill. These offend against taste. They do not in a mature man arouse a shuddering sense of horror, but they do arouse disgust, which is a much worse sensation. But it would be as absurd to condemn all pornography on account of these books as to condemn all music on account of ‘Yes, We Have no Bananas.’
It is to be noted that books such as those I have just cited are not really sophisticated; they are unaware of the mental richness enveloping the facts of sex. This is as true of De Sade’s novels, for all the complicated aberrations they record, as of Cleland’s puerile story. They concern themselves solely with the facts, and are still at the stage of trying to increase the number of these, whereas the aim of civilized pornographers is to get away from those monotonous facts into a richer region. A common trick among lesser pornographers is to hint mysteriously that the facts are more numerous than they really are. For example, in an absurd novel by Catulle Mendès, the author, after describing with wearisome detail what the hero and his mistress did together (which was pretty much all of the little that can be done), sends them out into the night. ‘When they returned,’ he says, ‘they did not dare look at each other; they had committed the unforgivable sin; henceforth they were cut off from humanity’—or words to that effect. A puerile and ridiculous piece of bravado. One cannot alter the facts or stare them out of countenance. In truth, it is intolerable to stare at them at all. The sexual act itself, while thrilling to the two concerned, must be depressing and even faintly revolting to a mentally adult observer of it—in part because the violent unrestrained expression of any emotion is distasteful (I can still remember with a touch of nausea Mrs. Leslie Carter in Zaza), but chiefly because such a spectacle can only remind us drearily of the elementary paucity of those facts on which all life is constructed. I am told that there are sordid resorts in Paris, where, for a price, one may gaze through a peep-hole at this primitive exhibition. It is incredible to me that any one should want to. I should go home and weep. ‘“Dust and ashes!” so you creak it... what’s become of all the gold...?’ There are enough barren unsought-for moments, God knows! when all life seems but a skeleton affair, unendurably indigent—merely greed, hunger, passion, passion, hunger, greed—without one’s deliberately going in search of others.
In a way it is a shame that we cannot permit the movies to become appreciably pornographic. Still, we cannot. As a virtuous man I admit that at once. Pornographic books and spectacles seem to do something physiologically harmful to immature boys and girls, and while we can (possibly) keep such books out of their hands, we cannot forbid children the movies, which are obviously made for them. Appealing only to the eye, the cinema could not, anyway, achieve such richness as can literature; still, some very pretty pornographic effects might be obtained. Even with the heavy-handed censorship and the determination of producers to run no risks, something now and then slips through. I remember a delightful film in which Miss—no, I had better not mention her name, because perhaps she or her press-agent might assert that the film taught a great moral lesson, and sue me—in which the heroine, when wearing a scandalously alluring bathing suit, paused for a full minute, arms upstretched, before diving—because the water was cold. Later, there was a lovely scene in which the heroine, in the daintiest of nightgowns, was surprised in her bedroom by a young man. The beauty of this scene was that neither he nor she was thinking any harm, both being absorbed in the solution of I forget what innocent problem, whereas the audience, including myself, was thinking all the thoughts that pretty girls in bedrooms normally arouse; just as in the bathing picture the heroine was convincingly thinking about the chill of the water, while we were not. This was really good pornography—something pretending to be something else.
Delight in the pretence of something to be something else is not in itself a sophisticated emotion; it is, like most others, a primitive emotion capable of great sophistication. If you find it in the ceiling decorations of the Settecento, where frescoes are mockingly made to look like architectural reliefs, you also find it in the humblest Italian houses, where an outer wall is grossly painted to represent a window with a blind half-open and a woman looking out. For that matter, you find it—or might have found it thirty years ago—in the American folding-bed (in which incarnation it was certainly not art—not even minor art). This extraordinary piece of furniture really solved no problem of space (a couch would have done that much better), and existed, for a time, solely because it was something pretending to be something else. It disappeared, partly because it was uncomfortable, but chiefly because it did not keep its promise, since the most ingenuous observer could never possibly have mistaken it for a sideboard or a chest of drawers. Children themselves rejoice in examples of this pretence.
It is well that this is so, that the emotion is primitive, since thus, even when the pretence of something to be something else is refined upon and made acceptable to civilized adults, a fresh youthful quality inspires it. One’s delight in words that say one thing while pretending to say another, is not at all due to a sense of one’s own cleverness in detecting the real meaning, and is only in part due to the richness created by the allusions and by thinking of two things at a time; there is, besides, that gay light-hearted relish of pretence. Nothing, for example, is more delightful than a conversation with a woman whom one does not really desire—well, at least not very much—that is all made up of very risky sous-entendus (and the riskier they are, the daintier they must become), leading to nothing at all, indulged in for their own sake.
Precisely this is what pornography does. It plays about the idea of sex with all the art and wisdom and trained fancy of experience—but it plays. Good pornography is always gay, which is the more to its credit since the subject it is being gay about is so grim. We should welcome such gaiety, not suppress it.