The Ballerina, Sodomy and The Old Grey Lady
So there we were at the weekend, poring over the New York Times Books section with its "100 Notable Books of the Year". This is one of the family's favourite seasonal traditions. The venerable institution picks its hundred top books and we go through the list to see how many, if any, we've read since January. The presence on the shelf of a few of the titles convinces us that we're not too far from the mainstream. When it comes to books, it's comforting to be in the NYT zone. Anyway, we were skimming the titles when we pulled up short at number 92, The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir by Toni Bentley. Here's the one-line summary that caused us to put on the brakes: "The writer and onetime Balanchine dancer extols the joys, physical and spiritual, of anal sex."
The joys of what! Well, well, things have certainly changed and "The Old Grey Lady", as the New York Times is fondly referred to, is clearly not as strait-laced as she once was. You know: there was a time when anal sex was such a forbidden subject that readers of Lady Chatterley's Lover had to wait until Chapter 16 before Constance and Mellors did it. Back then, along with the critics, D. H. Lawrence had to contend with censors upholding Section 12 of the British Sexual Offences Act, which concerned the offence of "buggery", so he was forced to finesse things when it came to the "back story", as they say. That's why Constance, "a little startled and almost unwilling," is "pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness". The British censors weren't fooled, though. The old buggers.
The Times has changed. The times have changed. And they've changed to such a taboo-less extent that Leon Wieseltier, the respected literary editor of the New Republic, is being quoted as calling Toni Bentley's anal intercourse memoir "a masterpiece". Well, that's what the New York Observer said in its cheeky story "The Ballerina Who Bent". Note: on Sunday, the New York Times presents its 10 Best Books of the Year, chosen from the 100 list. What are the odds that the sodomy story won't make it? These are books for consenting adults, after all. Factoid: the demure black cover of The Surrender folds back to reveal the very same image of a barely clad female bottom that filled the opening shot of the film "Lost in Translation." Well, that could be useful information for a pub quiz some day.
Comments
Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned for describing sexual intercourse, not for describing buggery. It wasn't until 1962, after the book had come off the banned list, that John Sparrow wrote his famous article in Encounter pointing out that Lawrence was writing about anal sex -- something which no previous critic had noticed or dared to point out.
Posted by: Andrew Conway | December 10, 2004 2:10 PM