A Reader on Reading

When a couple of years later I was able to compare my readings to the actual sensation of my hand brushing for the first time over my lover’s body, I had to admit that for once, literature had fallen short. And yet the thrill of those forbidden pages remained. The panting adjectives, the brazen verbs were perhaps not useful to describe my own confused emotions, but they conveyed to me, then and there, something brave and astonishing and unique.

This uniqueness, I was to discover, brands all our essential experiences. “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another,” wrote Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, “but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.” Even in the moment of greatest intimacy, the erotic act is a solitary act.

Throughout the ages, writers have attempted to make this solitude a shared one. Through ponderous hierarchies (essays on gender etiquette, texts of medieval love courts), through mechanics (lovemaking manuals, anthropological studies), through examples (fables, novels, poems), every culture has sought to comprehend the erotic experience in the hope that perhaps, if it is faithfully depicted in words, the reader may be able to relive it or even learn it, in the same way that we expect a certain object to preserve a memory or a monument to bring the dead to life.

It is amazing to think how distinguished a universal library of this wishful erotic literature would be. It would include, I imagine, the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates discusses the types and merits of love; Ovid’s Arsamatoria of imperial Rome, in which Eros is considered a social function, like table manners; the Song of Songs, in which the loves of King Solomon and the black Queen of Sheba become reflections of the world around them; the Hindu Kama Sutra and the Kalyana Malla, in which pleasure is regarded as an element of ethics; the Arcipreste de Hita’s Book of Loving Well in fourteenth-century Spain, which pretends to draw its wisdom from popular sources; the fifteenth-century Perfumed Garden of Sheik al-Nefzawi, which codifies the erotic acts according to Islamic law; the German Minnereden, or medieval amatory discourses, in which love, like politics, is given its own rhetoric; and poetic allegories such as the Roman de la rose in France and The Faerie Queene in Britain, in which the abstract noun Love acquires once again, as Eros had, a human or divine face.

There would be other, even stranger works, in this ideal library: the ten-volume novel Clélie (1654–60), by Mademoiselle de Scudéry, which includes the Carte de tendre, a map charting the erotic course with its rewards and perils; the writings of the marquis de Sade, who, in prolix and tedious catalogues, noted the sexual variations to which a human group can be subjected; the theoretical books of his near-contemporary Charles Fourier, who devised entire utopian societies centered around the sexual activities of its citizens; the intimate journals of Giacomo Casanova, Ihara Saikaku, Benvenuto Cellini, Frank Harris, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and John Rechy, all of whom tried to recapture Eros in autobiographical memoirs.

Curled up in an armchair in my father’s library and in other, later armchairs in more houses than I care to remember, I found that Eros kept appearing in all sorts of unexpected places. In spite of the singular nature of the experiences hinted at or described on the private page, these stories touched me, aroused me, whispered secrets to me.

We may not share experiences, but we can share symbols. Transported into another realm, distracted from its subject, erotic writing at times achieves something of that essentially private act, as when the swoons and agonies of erotic desire become a vast metaphorical vocabulary for the mystical encounter. I remember the excitement with which I read, for the first time, the erotic union described by Saint John of the Cross.

This is Roy Campbell’s translation:

Oh night that was my guide!

Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,

Oh night that joined the lover

To the beloved bride

Transfiguring them each into the other.

Lost to myself I stayed

My face upon my lover having laid

From all endeavour ceasing:

And all my cares releasing

Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.

And then John Donne, for whom the erotic and mystical act is also an act of geographical exploration:

License my roving hands and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land.