11. Eros on the loose: David Loth, The Erotic in Literature
The busy reader should concentrate on the last three chapters and the appendix of this book. It is there that Mr. Loth has something useful to say. He gives a pretty full and very damaging history of the law's confused and largely futile attempt to control or even to define, pornography. He also casts serious doubts on common assumptions as to what will or will not correct the young reader. Who would have thought that George Eliot or Motley's ‘Dutch Republic’ would prove inflammatory!
But the truth is, as most of us know from experience, that no one can predict what will inflame an adolescent any more than what will frighten a child. Read Lamb on ‘Witches and Other Night Fears’. The ‘fountains are within’. The ghost story and the erotic book merely provide a channel for what would have made its own channels without them. We have better evidence of this than the answers to questionnaires. For surely most of us, receiving a set of impertinent questions from a stranger, drop it in the wastepaper basket and turn to our own work or pleasure? Those who answer are not, I suspect, a fair cross section. They betray their abnormality by the very act of answering.
The Appendix, on the ‘Lady Chatterley’ affair, was doubtless written before the Warden of All Souls’ article appeared in Encounter. This reopens a good many questions. It is no answer to accuse the Warden of ‘muck-raking.’ If the ‘muck’ is there and if the prosecution was too stupid to see it and the defence too prudent to mention it, a little raking was just what was needed. Mr. Loth anyway might welcome the Warden's thesis as fresh evidence for his own main theme – that the law's an ass.
On law he is at his best. But even there he commits himself to strange statements. We are told that ‘communications is [sic] the only industry catering to [sic] the carnal nature of man which is not controlled in practice by those who work in it.’ In civilised countries every industry is subject both to civil and criminal law. Again, lawyers are scolded for trying ‘to apply their rules outside the courtroom.’ But all laws except those against perjury and ‘contempt’ are designed to regulate what people do out of court. Nor do I understand why the author jeers at an American judge for acquitting ‘Ulysses’ because it was ‘emetic’ rather than ‘aphrodisiac.’ If it is the intention of the law (as it certainly was) to ban what allures it obviously ought to permit what disgusts.
Mr. Loth's literary dicta are among the strangest I have ever read. He describes Ford as treating incest ‘with a light touch.’ He classifies ‘Tristram Shandy’ among ‘worthwhile adventure stories.’ Worst of all is the chapter on pornography in the Ancient World. Here he accepts all the confusions which a good book on this subject would have cleared up at the outset. Anything which mentions copulation – for whatever purpose, in whatever tone – is for him ‘pornography’ – a hymn from a Sumerian fertility rite, the story of Judah and Tamar, Sophocles' ‘Electra.’
The nearest we get to a distinction is an unemphatic admission that Aristophanes is a ‘more obvious’ example. He seems wholly unaware that ‘language which later generations call obscene’ – the ancient equivalent of ‘four-letter’ words – is almost exclusively confined to satire and farce. You find it in Catullus’ hate poems, not in his love poems: in Horace's satires, not in Ovid's Art of Love.
But history of any sort is not Mr. Loth's strong point. ‘The Serpent of Shame entered the garden of sex some years after the reign of good Queen Bess’ is a statement that leaves one gasping. It would be difficult on this view to explain why the Book of Genesis has an aetiological myth about the birth of shame, why the Greeks spoke of aidoia and the Romans of pudenda or Dante of ‘the member that man hides.’ Mr. Loth, I believe, has wholly misunderstood the comic indecencies in earlier writers. He does not see that it was funny to mention these things precisely because they were to some extent – not, of course, to a Victorian extent – unmentionable.
The truth is that most of this book is merely a romp. The author is mainly concerned to pull snooks and score debating points. But he keeps his shafts exclusively for one side. There is room for a book which would chasten the cant and confusion which can be found on both. It ought to be made impossible for the repressive party to include the scatological under the pornographic or to call a book immoral because it offends their taste. It should equally be made impossible for the other party to make remarks like ‘sex is innocent.’ If sex means the biological fact, it is no more innocent or guilty than a turnip. If it is meant that human sexual behaviour is all, and all equally, innocent, we want to be told why. No one claims a similar liberty for all economic or political behaviour.
Such a book would draw far more clearly than Mr. Loth has done the real moral: that when the morality embodied in the law departs too widely, either for better or worse, from that really current in a society, the law must sooner or later either sink or rise into conformity. Till it does, confusion and inconsistence are inevitable.
The author treats erotica as a singular and orgiastic as the adjective of orgasm.