So What About The Good Sex In Fiction Awards? Catherine Czerkawska

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’
          This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that they can’t bring themselves to point out the obvious: that when it comes to writing about sex, so many of the literary elite seem to resort to bolting crude, physical – and all too often hilarious - encounters onto their otherwise excellent prose.
          Many years ago, when the late Pat Kavanagh was my literary agent, she phoned me, right after I had submitted a manuscript to her.

It was, in fact, The Amber Heart, so if you want to know what she was on about, you can download it when you've finished reading this, but she called to say ‘one thing’s certain, Catherine. You can definitely write about sex!’ I also remember the young woman who line edited a previous novel, The Golden Apple, for Century, telling me that she had never before fallen in love with a character quite so much as she had fallen in love with Luis, the hero of that story. I thought at the time – as I’m sure did Pat – that it would be a point in my favour when it came to traditional publishing. Back then, though, I’m not sure that it counted, although more recently, it has become apparent that rather a lot of women of all ages appreciate novels with pretty ‘explicit sexual content’. I’m not going to quote the obvious example here, but it strikes me that we can't complain too vociferously if we chicken out, while somebody else elects to give readers what they want. Or some variation of it, anyway. 

          But hey, Christmas is coming, and I'm not aiming to be contentious here. I just think that part of the problem with so many of the nominees for the bad sex awards seems to be a reluctance to engage with those appetites in any but the crudest form. You’ve got to wonder, sometimes, if the more consciously literary the writer, the more problem they seem to have with the senses. You get the distinct impression of somebody taking a deep breath and thinking ‘Oh God, now I have to write the bloody sex scene!’ You have to relish writing these things or decide not to do them at all. I don’t mind a bit when a writer leaves a pair of protagonists at the bedroom door so long as he or she spares us the contrived metaphors and the explicit bragging. 

          When I started thinking about possible ‘good sex’ awards, it was quite difficult to find genuine celebrations of the physical. There’s James Joyce, of course. There’s the obvious D H Lawrence. But my personal response to his descriptions of female sexuality are right up there with Mrs Grisham’s. And nobody who has ever read Cold Comfort Farm can take Lady C seriously again. Visions of sukebind and Seth with his mollocking tend to come before your eyes at inappropriate moments.

Who wouldn't want to do a bit of mollocking with Seth Starkadder in this incarnation?

          Everyone will have his or her favourites, and I’d love it if you posted some of them below. Let’s hear what turns you on, rather than what turns you off in fiction.  Meanwhile, here are two of my personal favourites. Not the only ones, of course. And not because they’re explicit, which they certainly aren’t, but because they seem to me to involve writing which is deeply, rewardingly sexy, so whether they’re explicitly so or not doesn’t much matter.

First of all, Wuthering Heights. (So, I’m obsessed by this book, I admit it!) The really explicit thing about this novel is the sadism, which runs through it, red in tooth and claw. But the sensuality of the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy is never avoided. It is there, right from our first perception of the rapport between them, which always involves a physical proximity truly extraordinary in a novel of this time and place. The first half of the novel builds inexorably, full of frustrated sensuality and raw sexual yearning, to the scene when the couple finally come together in a way which is as close as Emily can get to physical consummation, something which even my fourteen year old self understood and appreciated. 

‘In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species: it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.’ 

          Another writer who does sensuality like no other is Stevenson. I dramatised Catriona for radio in five hour-long episodes. It’s not a well known novel. Most people read Kidnapped, but seldom move on to the sequel, which was written much later and is a more demanding, more complicated and much more sophisticated read. But there’s a longish episode towards the end of the story, when David Balfour has found himself alone in Holland with Catriona MacGregor Drummond. They must pretend to be brother and sister, for the sake of propriety, and they take rooms together in a house in Leyden. The succeeding chapters are one of the most suffocatingly vivid depictions of youthful sexual frustration I have ever read. Dramatising them was such an intense pleasure. The passages where the young couple realise that they fancy each other like mad, while convention dictates that they can’t do anything about it, are tantalisingly sexy. Here’s something to give you a flavour of the whole, especially that unavoidable, irresistible sense of being drawn towards the beloved.

          ‘That was the best walk yet of all of them; she clung near to me in the falling snow; it beat about and melted on us, and the drops stood upon her bright cheeks like tears and ran into her smiling mouth. Strength seemed to come upon me with the sight like a giant’s; I thought I could have caught her up and run with her into the uttermost places of the earth; and we spoke together all that time beyond belief for freedom and sweetness.
          It was the dark night when we came to the house door. She pressed my arm upon her bosom. ‘Thank you kindly for these same good hours,’ said she, on a deep note of her voice.
          The concern in which I fell instantly on this address, put me with the same swiftness on my guard; and we were no sooner in the chamber and the light made, than she beheld the old, dour, stubborn countenance ... Methought as I read I could hear my heart strike like an eight-day clock. Hard as I feigned to study there was still some of my eyesight that spilled beyond the book upon Catriona. She sat on the floor... and the chimney lighted her up and shone and blinked upon her and made her glow and darken through a wonder of fine hues. Now she would be gazing in the fire and then again at me; and at that I would be plunged in terror of myself...’
          I’m feeling my way towards some kind of conclusion here and I think it’s this. The clue is at the beginning, in those words ‘crude and perfunctory.’ The best writing about sexuality takes its time and is an integral part of the whole novel. It is generous, brave, and should be a pleasure for the writer as well as the reader. If you are prepared to dive into those deep waters, unselfconsciously, letting go, living with your characters and their feelings, the result will probably sweep the reader along too, even if he or she feels (as somebody once said of one of my books) that it is a ‘guilty pleasure.’ It needn’t be explicit, but it has to be honest. For Emily Bronte, the truth of the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy was physical as much as spiritual. For her to avoid writing that central, intensely physical scene would have been a cop-out. Stevenson was tackling something generally avoided in the fiction of the time: the fact that young women experience extreme physical desire quite as much as young men. He’s a fine writer - one of the finest, in my opinion - and we feel the sexual tension vibrating between Catriona and Davie as strongly as they do themselves.
          I’m going to finish with an extract from one of my own books. Not because I’m comparing myself in any way to the greats above, but just because a literary agent, whom I greatly respected, told me it was one of my skills and she never said these things lightly. Ice Dancing, of everything I’ve written, is a novel about the lightning strike of irresistible physical attraction and everything that comes after. Joe is ten years younger than Helen, their backgrounds could not be more different, and yet – as sometimes happens in life –sexual attraction, inexplicable, irresistible, is what brings them together. In retrospect, I can see that I had to find ways of describing something absolutely central to the novel, something that didn’t feel bolted on or embarrassing or ‘perfunctory’. I'm not going to quote anything explicit here although I don't always - or even very often - leave my characters at the bedroom door. But on this occasion, Helen is at a village dance with her husband and a group of friends. Joe is there. He has danced with a few women but Helen, already deeply attracted to this exotic interloper and charismatic sportsman, assumes he won't ask her.

          'I was just thinking of seeing if Annie might want to get up and dance with me. Lots of the women were dancing with each other  because the men were so pathetic - when Tim asked her instead... so that left me sitting alone at the table, all by myself with an empty glass, and then I felt a little tap on my shoulder. I looked round and there he was. Joe Napier. Holding out his hand. Smiling at me.
          So I got up and danced with him, just as the music changed from fast to slow. Hungry Eyes. They were playing Hungry Eyes. There was something old-fashioned about the way he danced. I mean he held me in his arms for a start, although not too close. He was big and tall and solid. We talked a bit but not much. Talking meant bellowing in each other's ears and I was afraid of spitting at him. Eventually he started laughing and shook his head, so we just danced. We danced, and I swear to God I never wanted it to stop. I found myself wishing that the man up there with his fancy suit and his sleek hair would just sing for ever. And I hadn't felt like that for so long. For so very long. If ever.
          In the middle of dancing with him, I had two thoughts, one immediately after the other. One was - how warm he is - because he was. He was warm in every way, like a good fire, like the sun. And the other was - I hate my life. But that was a frightening thought, and I tried to shove it to the back of my mind and just concentrate on dancing instead. All the same I didn't really want to dance at all. I wanted to rest my head against his shoulder and stay there in a kind of blissful limbo. I remember thinking it was as well he couldn't read my mind, because he would have been out of there like a bat out of hell. It was that crazy. I hardly knew him, but I wanted to stop everything and just be in that one place, with this one man, holding me.'

                       

          Over to you, dear reader. In the words of another sexy Joey ‘How are you doin’?’

          Find out more about Ice Dancing here