LITMIR.BIZ

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closed to his eye. I think he was probably of the pattern of his generation.”

      According to that pattern, a fuck is now unashamedly identified as just that: a fuck. No longer does a stunned or embarrassed silence greet me when I say or write the “f” word. That a woman wants her man or even just a man to satisfy her sexually is now understood and accepted. If she wants a fuck, she is free to go get it, even explicitly ask for it, with the blessing of most, provided, for some, she’s not too brazen about it.

      She is no longer regarded as a whore because she has sexual desires, even lusts, she is eager to indulge. We are no longer disbelieving of what Gilbert Frankau quoted in Everywoman in 1933:

      “Men, some to business, some to pleasure take;

      But every woman is at heart a rake.”

      Now we are more conditioned to stories that tell us:

      “The feeling of his fingers on the back of her thigh was electric and she felt herself spreading her legs…”

      Such teasing introductory words leave us in no doubt what the couple are going to do and we will expect a frank, detailed account of how they actually do it. Its explicitness should both inform and please us. What they do may even constitute an agreeable model for us to copy - if the fancy takes us.

      In providing the clutch of literary and pragmatic services we expect from them, writers have had to embrace more highly descriptive and idiomatic words than before.-.some of them from the coarser male lexicon or “the gutter.”

      Once introduced into “respectable” life and literature, those words have tended to be used ever more extravagantly within and among ever wider social groups. To some extent, they have become a measure of an individual’s or a society’s “liberalism” or “liberation.”

      Published in 1749, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones told of illicit liaisons, prostitution and sexual promiscuity; but although he is said to be “much more passionate” than other 18^th Century writers, he offered no graphic descriptions of sexual organs or behaviour.

      The text of Tom Jones resembled dictionaries of the period in that it used no four-letter words to describe either our most intimate sexual activities or our organs of sin and rapture.

      Published just six years later, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary included four-letter words on “excretory” functions but omitted such highly evocative words as ass, fuck, cunt and other derivatives. So did later dictionaries until about the second half of the 20^th Century, although there were some curiosities.

      As just one example, the Third Edition of Webster’s Dictionary launched in 1961 omitted the “f” word and derivatives but included what many regard as the even more offensive “c” word.

      Kate Allen says that “The extra level of offensiveness that many people perceive the word [cunt] to carry implies a squeamishness about women’s bits - this attitude is in itself sexist or even misogynist! We’re beginning to get over that squeamishness, reverting the word back to its original meaning and reclaiming it as a descriptive term. This is a positive action, removing its negative connotations.”

      The differences between Dr Johnson’s and the mid-twentieth-century Webster’s Dictionaries reflected some easing both of moral standards and literary freedoms.

      Fiction writers were still hesitant to use a vocabulary of four-letter and other “obscene” words to give colour to their stories and, in societies in which sex education was negligible, to contribute to the sexual enlightenment of their readers. So, although constraints on graphic descriptions of our sexual organs and activities had been, by the middle of the twentieth century, somewhat reduced, the emphasis is very much on “somewhat”.

      Most books of classic status, if they had rude words or obscene images, were cleaned up: they were expurgated. This applied to such classics as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s Plays and Sonnets.

      Pauline Kiernan wrote that “underlying obscenity punctuates the surface decorum” of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Obviously this had to be cleaned up to enable the play to be read by underage Shakespearean students – and others with delicate sensibilities.

      Those writers who published their work uncensored, such as Anais Nin and D.H. Lawrence, had their writings wrapped in brown paper and sold from under the counters of the more sleazy bookstores. Their sale resembled the mode of selling contraceptives from pharmacies before the 1960s, a mode described realistically in one of my short stories, The Edge of a Precipice.

      Despite the constraints, Anais Nin wrote frankly about her own and others’ sexuality:

      “I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."

      The Shy and Fearful Literary Revolution

      As we entered the 1960s, the pace of our flight to freedom or licentiousness in the real world quickened.

      British poet Philip Larkin told us that “sexual intercourse began in 1963.”

      More or less concurrently, our literary treatment of sex was transformed from a patient evolution into a virtual revolution. From hinting and teasing, our literary flirtation with the intimacies of sex now took us.-.and quite quickly - “all the way”.

      But the revolution still remained, except at the more extreme literary edges, somewhat shy and fearful.

      It gathered pace as the second half of the 20th Century brought a wholesale revolution in our every day - and overnight - attitudes to sexual behaviour.

      This real-life revolution accepted not only heterosexual frolics using a variety of positions, techniques, sex-toys and the rest, but also homosexual relationships between two men or lesbian love between two women. A variety of other activities also received a high degree of acceptance, whether among straight or other couples.

      A reasonable hypothesis is that these permissive attitudes towards sex compelled at least some superficial acceptance in the literary world. With some lag, this did occur. The revolution in the real world was accompanied by a broadly similar revolution in the ways that the literary world dealt with what had been, especially in Anglo-Saxon societies of the Victorian Age, a pretentiously “delicate” and, at the same time, irresistibly titillating subject.

      It is hard to say to what extent the somewhat shy and fearful literary revolution helped quicken and intensify the everyday sexual revolution. It may have been the other way round. Probably each felt an empathy in which one lent reinforcement to the other: more sexy literature encouraged more liberated sex; more liberated sex encouraged the sophistication of its literary counterpart.

      Whatever the relative influences, the revolution is still far from complete. In launching Martin Amis’ novel, The Pregnant Widow in January 2010, the publisher Jonathan Cape wrote:

      "The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. The death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete.”

      The items included in some of the collections of my work reflect this evolution as it burgeoned into a gathering storm of revolution.

      Written in 1954, “The

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