PORN: A PERSONAL HISTORY & A CONSUMER’S GUIDE 11


Marlon Brando and Ewa Aulin in Candy (1968)

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE SEXUAL SAMIZDAT

or TALES FROM A SHOE-BOX

 

Bliss it was to be alive, to cross Wardour Street, walk the length of Old Compton Street’s main drag through Soho’s Dean Street, Frith Street and Brewer Street, through James Street through Golden Square into Bridle Lane sustaining a free erection all the way, to emerge into the leafy refuge of Soho Square. Then – early to mid 1960s, pre shrink-wrap packaging, pre the ‘Countryman Enquiry’, prior to the clean-up campaigning ‘Festival of Light’, certain arrangements go through on the nod throughout Soho. Hence, festerings of false-fronted bookshops first lure the wary, and the unwary, with soft flirtations of merchandise. Until, after an obligatory perusal of this legal window-dressing, prospective purchasers will – as a matter of routine, be invited to view ‘something stronger, Sir?’ in the room behind, and be ushered into a lascivious twilight filled with shoe-boxes crammed to overflowing with well-thumbed imported erotica to browse through at your leisure. And passing through that red-beaded curtain into the hard-core section is like entering the realm of the damned. Emerging empty-handed (more often than not) some half-hour later attempting to conceal the aching hard-on threatening to permanently disfigure the line of your Levi’s, punch-drunk numb and squint-eyed in the sudden street-glare, only to stumble directly into the next false-front shop to begin the cycle all over again.

The 1959 Cliff Richard movie ‘Expresso Bongo’ opens with a long black-&-white tracking shot along Compton Street – past ‘Soho Records’, past the ‘Fun-Fair’ pinball hall, past the Hot-Dog stall perched half-on the pavement and half-on the street, past the ‘Wanna come upstairs, dear?’ seen-better-days tart, and into the ‘Non-Stop Revue’ where stripper Maisie King (Sylvia Syms) dances. It has all the archive authenticity of a lost world. ‘All those bald heads, it’s like playing to an egg-box’ wise-cracks Maisie in a matter-of-fact way, as her dancers shove the boundaries of a 1959 ‘A’-certificate with just tiny conical ‘pasties’ over their nipples. Just as the ‘historical tableaux’ she introduces conform to that curious prevailing censorship of the time which only allowed immobile stage-nudity to be viewed. All this – in a moral climate of censorship where you study coy pin-ups in ‘Reveille’ with a magnifying glass to determine whether that slight darkening of the half-tone photograph is the shadow cast by the bikini-top or whether it could really be the beginning of the aureole’s outer rim. All this – when Harrison Marks’ slim editions of art-study nudes are chastely air-brushed to neuter his models into strange sexless mermaids of puzzling androgyny.

But to me, brought up in the provincial wastes of Humberside, thumb-tripping down the M1 to Soho is an all-too infrequent event. So instead, it’s Midland Street that provides my initiation into the heady and furtive delights of the ‘Sexual Samizdat’. Now, this Hull street is patrolled by parking meters and the bookshop is long-since erased, the docklands that backed onto it have closed down, and even the distinctive smell when the wind blows from the Fish-Dock is muted. But it was the ‘Midland Street Bookshop’ where it all began. On the Soho principle there’s a deceptive disguise of a few token racks of American pulp SF magazines as you go in, but once safely beyond there are library-fashion displays and pulse-pounding mounds of books exploring every literary deviation ever invented by man and inflicted on woman.

For this is the domain of a publishing sub-sub-genre of diverse independently produced paperbacks that conform to a protective pattern of anonymity and share a sleazy range of distinguishing characteristics. They all have white covers with black block-lettering titles. The author’s alias (if it is acknowledged at all) is posted beneath. There is no imprint and no trace of a publisher’s address. They are low-cost, low-tech, and appallingly printed on private back-room presses – some pages ink-flooded to double-vision intensity followed by pages so grey-pale they are scarcely legible. Sometimes pages are forgotten entirely and left virgin-white. Margins are w-i-d-e, but often disproportionately distributed around the blocks of smudgy text so they might bleed off the edge of one page and vanish beneath the staple of the next. They are crammed with misprints in worn hunch-backed typography. They are grubby, dog-eared – and half-price on return! Yet this extinct species was a literature to set the head aspin…

For this was an entire erotic underground. A ‘Sexual Samizdat’. A Bootleg Porn – written with half a brain and intended to be read with just one hand, which fires such lurid imaginings as wet dreams are made of. To an adolescent troubled with obstinate risings and stiffness of the groinal area this is a kindergarten Karma Sutra, a proletarian’s ‘Perfumed Garden’, a joyless ‘Joys of Sex’, a hand-job handbook. It is an illicit sex traffic of rampant manflesh and ever-receptive females who never ever say no, lecherous lesbians and languid sex-slaves in cut-away leathers, venal alsatians and vengeful hermaphrodites armed with twelve-inch gradated rubber dildos, the naked urgencies of incest and omnivorous nymphos gorged on a diet of raw semen, toe-suckers and cunt-lickers, cruising gangs of rapine Hell’s Angels and prurient priests, all lubricated by the primal call of the ever-hungry snatch and the liquid lure of the well-parted thighs. And there’s a perfectly good argument that, because porn is an internalised medium that deals only in fantasy, it should have no limits. Why not a flounce of gays, a lick of lesbians, a clutch of penises, a lodge of beavers (I like that one!), and a deliquescence of vaginas…?

I remember insatiable spermaholic girls with ‘dart-like nipples’ (were nipples ever dart-like?) that quiver aggressively up against the chests of rampant studs with alabaster never-subsiding cock-stands. Page after blurry page of penis-flytrap blondes and multi-adjectival ejaculations spurting into every conceivable (and many inconceivable!) human orifices either singularly, multiply, or en masse. A world in which contraception is never used, yet conception never occurs. Where women never menstruate, and reality NEVER intrudes.

Sure, they were sexist and absurdly phallocentric, as – by their nature, they have to be. Yet, unlike the American ‘Men’s Action Adventure’ magazines they run in parallel with, there is no rabid anti-Redism, no titillation masquerading as sub-Kinsey mock-sociology, and no gratuitously hysterical exposes. For despite their ineptitude, there is a kind of dumb honesty here. The poor anonymous hack’s target is purely the erectile tissue. The orgasm is Reichian, uncomplicated by any hint of emotional commitment. Sperm – administered in regular and massive doses is a universal panacea, and the erection is god-like, a totem, an ivory tower.

‘Worship the rod’ instructs the protagonist (of ‘The Rule Of The Rod’), and she worships it first anally, then orally, and finally vaginally (the penetration sequence is deliberate to emphasise maximum servility). He takes her to a Mexican Motel room. Meets a teenage Hispanic boy who is ‘pissing a thick stream of yellow urine’ in the men’s room, and hires him as a third party, both of them using her in tandem working their way through the standard permutation of poses and positions. The boy more usually whores to Gay American Tourists, so between bouts he can’t resist trying to trap the worshipful organ in his own greedy mouth. The message being that the hero’s priapic prick – and by implication, the reader’s too, is so universally desirable that it is lusted over by everyone privileged to lay their eyes upon it, regardless of gender.

The characters are uniformly less than one-dimensional. All plot continuity, motivation, and denouement is razored down to that absolute minimalism of inducing arousal. The only detailed descriptive passages relate to genitalia. All problems are caused by lack of sex. All plotlines concern the quest for it. And all the questions of life, the universe and everything are solved by doing it – repeatedly. Another epic – ‘Fever Heat’, portrays a sleepy ‘Under Milkwood’ village of suffocating conformity and hermetically suppressed desire, kissed (and well, yes – a little more) to life by a leather-clad couple of sexual athletes on a vibrantly powerful Harley Davidson. From the moment of their arrival they systematically, with inexhaustible energy, and in ways expertly tailored to suit and gratify the hidden personal kinks of each and every libido, they fuck – or are fucked by, the entire populace, before moving on to liberate the next village. In their wake they leave a community of men released onto a higher plane of sexual performance, and women both grateful and deeply deeply satisfied.

They later made a hippie movie called ‘Candy’ (1968) along similar lines. It was based on an Olympia Press novel written by ‘Maxwell Kenton’, an alias for Terry Southern. The similarities are probably coincidental. Because writers of legit fiction, interviewed for Colour Supplement profiles or Melvyn Bragg TV bio-progs tend to look serious and talk of the great novelists who first inspired them to write – Franz Kafka and James Joyce, James Conrad or Marcel Proust. But not one of them remember – or if they do, no-one dares acknowledge the names, aliases or aka’s from the Sexual Samizdat. The Max Speed, or Rufus T. Firefly’s. The Rudi D’Bono, or Dick Sharpe’s. Perhaps even the Wharton Mycoch, or Cosmo Smallpiece’s. Or lost titles such as ‘Lick My Love-Pump’. Yet there are word-pictures from this great trove of vintage licentiousness welded indelibly to the inner linings of my brain just as vividly as anything from the mainstream presses. And the writers responsible deserve at least one retrospective’s-worth of credit!

Only Brian Aldiss – a brave and honest writer as well as being one of Britain’s finest, wrote with some historical authenticity about ‘Michael Meatyard’. It is, claims his semi-autobiographical conscript alter-ego Horatio Stubbs, ‘the best book ever written, after the Bible’ and it ‘provoked a flow of laughter as well as semen in our barrack-block’ (quoted from ‘A Soldier Erect’, Corgi Books 1971). And only Ian Watson – another successful and well-respected author (when asked if, like many other struggling formative SF writers, he’d ever been forced to write soft-porn to pay the bills) actually owned up. ‘No, not soft-porn’ he allegedly replied, ‘I wrote hard porn!’ Perhaps he merely found the teasing riposte irresistible? Yet Anais Nin and Henry Miller acknowledge writing porn (at one-dollar per page) for an anonymous ‘Collector’ in 1940s Paris. And the tradition has other honourable precedents. There are current writers – libel laws forbid me naming names (but hello ‘Mark D’Fountain’!) who, with guilt or twisted pride, have similar episodes enlivening their otherwise drab careers.

And why indeed should the artful and salacious stimulation of the erogenous zones be considered a lesser achievement than the stimulation of other, more cerebral, parts of the human anatomy? Not that the ‘Sexual Samizdat’ of Rodney Gudenuff, Lance O’Toole – or Michael Meatyard, should ever be confused with connoisseur’s erotica. Because here, we are most decidedly NOT talking of the American ‘Essex House’ classics (like Philip Jose Farmer’s juicily inventive ‘Image Of The Beast’ (1968) and ‘Blown’ (1969), the ‘Ophelia Press’, the subversively green-backed Paris ‘Olympia Press’ (for Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Frank Harris’ ‘My Life And Loves’ 1922 etc), or Jack Kahane’s ‘Obelisk Press’ (responsible for Lawrence Durrell’s notorious ‘Black Book’, 1938). We’re not talking poet Christopher Logue, who wrote porn novel ‘Lust’ in the 1940s under the pseudonym ‘Count Palmiro Vicarion’. Neither are we talking the Robert Silverberg soft-porn novels issued under aliases – ‘Sex Thieves’ (1961 as by ‘John Dexter’). ‘Nympho’ (1963 as by ‘Dan Eliot’), ‘Dial O-R-G-Y’ (1963, as by ‘Dan Eliot’) or ‘Orgy Slaves’ (1965 also as by ‘Don Eliot). We’re not even talking Hanif Kureishi, who wrote porn as ‘Antonia French’. No, here, we are NOT talking quality. Here, we are talking trash aesthetic.

With no copyright, no traceable address or point of origin, and so downmarket they could barely make the cut-price basement, the ‘Sexual Samizdat’ felt itself sufficiently immune from prosecution to pursue and exploit (with admirably diligent thoroughness) every dodgy avenue of fetish and pervy fantasy. So, inevitably, it was in Midland Street that I was puzzled to first discover flagellation, bondage and sex-torture. And while not adverse to a little fictional spanking as a Hors D’oeuvre I felt cheated to find that – after a tediously detailed catalogue of reddening buttocks, swingeing canes, open-palm slaps, welts, whacks and bruising blows – the novel’s only actual penetration is relegated to a perfunctory middle paragraph on the penultimate page!

I marginally preferred ‘The Great White Swallow’ in which two ‘Midnight Cowboys’ hire themselves out to a wealthy but grotesquely obese canine-obsessed heiress. She has them perform doggy-fashion on two obediently nude serving wenches while she, clad only in thigh-high boots, choreographs each copulatory grunt and thrust with flicks of her Ring-Master’s whip. She even signals the… wait for it…! exact moment when their co-ordinated ejaculations should occur. Miraculously they’re both capable of delivering the spermatic goods on schedule to the admiring appreciation of all three female participants.

The humour is, of course, ludicrous. It’s there, apparent without even the usual one-step-back objectivity. But then again, lit-crit detachment is not easy when your high-arousal countdown-to-ecstasy is about to go critical mass in your y-fronts. And the ‘Sexual Samizdat’ never needed the sophistication of double-meaning. For never in the history of penmanship has the single entendre been so relentlessly single-minded. Nevertheless, an awareness of the sub-genre’s inherit illogic, and its more consciously deliberate manipulation can succeed in kicking even these shoddy text into a slightly different ballgame.

TIDES OF LUST…’

As the decade matures I happen across ‘A Mouth For Dick’, with its excuse-for-a-plot concerning the exploits of (what must be considered) its eponymous hero (?), a well-hung wandering Folk Singer. A dour but manic fusion of Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley. Utilising one of the latter’s legendary stage props ‘Dick’ positions a hefty length of rubber hosepipe conspicuously down the inside leg of his skin-tight Levi’s, while musing on his respect for Presley through his appropriation of such tactics – ‘he knows his audience, knows what they want and how to reach them.’ It must rate as Rock ‘n’ Roll’s unlikeliest tribute – yet there are further oddities. Resembling one of the male leads in a Russ Meyer movie our picaresque Folkie is something of an innocent abroad, forever beset by predatory females. Brought down in a pre-coital flying tackle by an aggressively naked vamp with his hosepipe on her mind he grumpily complains about her thoughtlessness – ‘there could have been broken glass there where we fell!’ Later, hired to play a huge house-party-cum-orgy ‘Dick’ is first fellated by the Mother, then by the teenage daughter, even-handedly conceding that what the daughter’s oral technique ‘lacks in her Mother’s skill and expertise, she compensates for in her untutored eagerness.’ The orgy is the novel’s set piece climax with formation-fucking between the flowerbeds and free-style multi-sex events by (and in) the swimming pool, all chronicled in staggering goose-pimple detail. Yet the book lurches to a close with ‘Dick’ bemoaning the meagre size of his performance cheque!

The ‘Sexual Samizdat’ seldom came as knowingly inventive. And at least the reader comes away believing the writer (who was probably making considerably less than Anais Nin’s one-dollar a page) had been TRYING. Even if only to lower his own boredom threshold.

Yet there’s also an innocence of a kind. Innocence seems an odd word to use in the context of such a sordid and cheapskate genre located at the slum-end of publishing. Yet here there is a total freedom to meander through obsessions and fetishes into the darkest and most perverse cul-de-sacs of fervid imaginings. The only limits imposed are those of the hack’s own lurid ingenuity, and there’s a certain cathartic value to such unrestricted self-indulgence. There’s a liberating energy to the release of all those nasty suppressed fantasies. By contrast, the calculated idiosyncrasies and vaguely defined mine-field of censorship that determined the content of their more legit equivalents – which necessitates a cynical and meticulously contrived form of erotica, is in many ways more morally disturbing.

A further loss of innocence occurred when independent publishers suffered the market freeze-out of the now-institutionalised Sex-Shop chains. A walk through Soho today seems squeaky-clean and imaginatively-sterile compared to the endearingly haphazard disarray of false-fronted emporia that preceded it.

It was ‘Operation Countryman’ that brought corruption at the Met to a high-profile end. The beginning of the end came in August 1971, when the new Commissioner of Police – Robert Mark, set about cleaning up Scotland Yard. He realised that only officers from outside his force would have the impartiality necessary to go for those bent London coppers, so he brought them in. Despite deliberate opposition and institutional obstruction, they uncovered that, yes, money had been changing hands. Certain Soho operations – porn, prostitution and racketeering, run by ‘The Syndicate’ were allowed to flourish without Police harassment. The highly dubious activities of Bernie Silver and ‘Big Frank’ Mifsud were detailed in ledgers seized from their associate James Humphreys. And the Obscene Publications Squad was exposed as a ring of extortionists, with senior officers raking in £100,000 a year from fifty porn shops. But such kickbacks to the ‘dirty squad’ – running a protection racket for the dirty-book trade, was only part of an even wider pattern of corruption.

In 1977 eleven ‘Sergeant Bung’ policemen were arrested on bribery and corruption charges, resulting in jail-sentences totalling ninety-six years. They included Commander Ken Drury, Commander Wallace Virgo, and Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Obscene Publications Squad who were jailed for twelve years each. In the end, subsequent exposures forced the prosecution, dismissal or early retirement of almost 400 Metropolitan Police officers who left the force in disgrace while a score were sent to jail. Events that add a cautionary warning against nostalgically romanticising the rectitude of the ‘Dixon Of Dock Green’-era bobby.

‘Thank goodness the Obscene Publications Squad has gone’ sighed a fraught Mr Justice Mars-Jones in 1976 as he sent down Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick and four of his colleagues for taking bribes from Soho sleaze merchants – what he termed ‘corruption on a scale which beggars description… I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.’ Damage, yes, yet some indefinable aspect of the Soho ‘Red Light District’ ended around then. At least, the crackdown provides a convenient punctuation point. Since then, from its Soho enclave, the sex industry has become universalised, available everywhere. Bob Hoskins wanders poignantly through Soho, down Brewer Street, camera-tracked by director Neil Jordan for ‘Mona Lisa’ (1986). He’s a recently-released convict working as a driver, ferrying prostitute Cathy Tyson to her appointments. It is 1986. Bookshops. Peep-Shows. The ‘Festival Of Erotica’…

But, back-tracking a little before then, why did those lumbering dinosaurs of bootleg prose become extinct? Was it due to climatic changes in market taste? The ‘Sexual Samizdat’ could never really compete with cheap video and full-colour split-crotch fold-outs – but at least they delivered what they promised. There was no slick shrink-wrap come-on. No up-front implied hard-core with soft centres. No strident related merchandising or hyped-up circulation con-games. The Samizdat came out of nowhere. It was uniformly tacky. It was abysmal. And it wrecked my head.

 The ‘Midland Street Bookshop’ must accept at least some of the credit for that.

So – Max Speed, Lance O’Toole, Dando Spear, Dick Bush, Isidro Crudz, Caesar Mycock, Mahatma Khote, Delmer Bland, Percy Little – this one is for you, by way of thanks.

GREAT WHITE SWALLOWS

While on a geographically wider scale, to venture into erotic publishing it helps to have the approval of the monopoly distribution networks, and to have the use of a good lawyer on tap. As Manchester ‘Indie’ publishers ‘Savoy Books’ discovered to their cost when they dared republish lost classics of porn by Charles Platt (‘The Gas’, 1968), and Samuel R. Delany (‘Tides Of Lust’, 1973). For transgressing the laws of licensed vice and vested interests they wound up hounded to bankruptcy and imprisoned. Happily, they survived to publish again.

Part of the ‘New Worlds’ ‘New Wave’ of science fiction, Charles Platt had already conjured up the delightful concoction that is ‘Garbage World’ (Panther, 1967) in which Kopra – the asteroid of the title, is used as a dumping ground for the waste products of an entire planetary system. Garbage-pods are excreted from orbit to thump ‘down into the waste-strewn surface of the asteroid and burst like giant, fifty-foot-long sausages.’ Eventually Kopra becomes unstable, explodes, and showers the shining sterile cities of the worlds with its accumulated load of garbage. And for garbage, read shit, in ‘a vast cloud of filth’. Then ‘The Gas’ is copyrighted 1980 for Savoy Books, but there was at least one earlier incarnation (1970, ‘by a press which specialised in books containing specifically erotic scenes but enclosed in remarkably chaste covers’). The time-period is hinted at by references to turning on the BBC radio to hear ‘music from the Forties’ or the Northern Dance Orchestra. As Philip José Farmer points out in his introduction there’s more to this book than just perversity.

A yellow gas is released from a research project – which is possibly a germ warfare centre, inducing a kind of violent John Wyndham post-apocalypse landscape. ‘It’s biological effect (of the gas) is to stimulate the production of sex hormones. Its secondary effect is to relax some of the conscious thought processes and mental controls’ explains Vincent. ‘In English, that means…?’ queries hitch-hiking Cathy after they’ve enjoyed triple-entry sex. ‘It makes you sexually aroused and less inhibited’ he concedes. There’s more plot and scene-setting than is usual for porn, as the group of survivors head north to escape the gas. It’s a ‘Shaun-Of-The-Dead’ comic nightmare, except for brain-munching zombies there’s a sexually-voracious populace on a single-minded gender non-specific thrust for orgasm. Although the sexually-charged passages are explicit, they’re written with set piece choreography worked out with Busby Berkeley precision. There’s fucking in parachute free-fall over North Kensington, a blasphemous erotic crucifixion with a cunnilingual daisy-chain of phallus-worshiping Nuns, and ‘a party of suburban wives (who) had tied their husbands down naked on the floor in a long line, and were playing a sexual variation of musical chairs on the men.’

It’s as though Platt is working systematically through a tick-list of perversity, from father-son and mother-daughter incest, through bestiality, excrement and vomit, and – contrary to conventional porn where bodies are usually idealised, by way of repellent bodies (‘she smelled of sweat and old condoms’). The final confrontation occurs in Cambridge where there are full-on confrontations with religious figures, but where his most extreme vehemence is reserved for the horrific torture-experiments carried out by the University’s Engineering and Psychology students. Perhaps an in-joke that he repeats as an ironic aside when a kid tears pages from a science fiction magazine and wipes his arse on them.

But Platt’s book is more than just an exercise in shock-horror overkill. It not so much teases away the consensus that has underlined the ‘moral revolution’ all the way from DH Lawrence, through the anonymous ‘Fever Heat’ and ‘Candy’ (1958), by way of Wilhelm Reich. It inverts it. It delineates the tipping point from the naïve idealism of the Love Generation, into the more problematic uncertainties that follow. Since Freud’s discovery that sexual repression is at the basis of society’s ills and psychosis, guilt-free sexual expression through the therapeutic orgasm has been seen as a positive beneficial experience. The cure to all that’s most evil and unhealthy. Yet Vincent explains to the Priest that the gas ‘catalyses the animal lust in us – the aggressions and sexual drives. It kills mental controls, releases everything underneath’. And what lies underneath can also be viciously nasty. Platt reunites sex with violence. The Priest argues back ‘all you are saying is that I revealed my true soul and spirit… if the whole world succumbs, it only proves that we are all in the grip of evil.’ He casts the dilemma into a moral framework. But the novel reaches the same conclusion through its very amorality. Sex is not only a loving sharing union of consensual souls, it can be a driving force that becomes an end in itself, regardless of the rights or sensibilities of the victim, legitimising all manner of vile corruptions. It destroys lives as casually as it creates them.

‘Tides Of Lust’ (Savoy Books, 1973) is another complex exercise in taking pornographic literature into previously unexplored zones. Samuel R Delany is one of the most beautifully mythopoetic writers ever to grace science fiction with his presence. Young, gifted, black, bisexual and dyslexic, he was born and raised in Harlem and educated in the Bronx, publishing his debut novel – ‘The Jewels Of Aptor’ (1962) at just nineteen. Between the years 1962 and 1968 he cranked out a further six highly regarded novels, including his breakthrough work ‘Babel-17’ (1966). And by twenty-six he’d won four Nebula awards and was regarded by many as the finest practitioner working in the SF genre. He went on to spend much of the late 1970s and 1980s crafting his ‘Neveryon’ cycle, although he also wrote several semi-autobiographical books drawing on the themes of race and sexuality, including the Hugo-award winning memoir ‘The Motion Of Light In Water’ (1988).  More recently Delany has assumed the mantle of grey-bearded essayist, academic, and elder statesman, lecturing in universities in Amherst and Buffalo.

In ‘Tides Of Lust’ he inserts a quote from Thomas M Disch’s considered SF classic ‘Camp Concentration’ (1968). Then he uses a kind of heightened spontaneous prose which gives every impression of being written quickly, with few – if any revisions, yet it’s obviously the product of concentrated bursts of salacious prose invention. A fractured fragmented highly impressive prose. Divided into seven sections, it charts the odyssey of the ‘Captain of the Scorpio’, with his crew – the girl Kirsten and her brother Gunner, who he bought in India and are bonded sexually to him. Sex is the over-riding motivation regardless of gender, age, orifice, or even species. With the living… or the dead. And the flow is interrupted by frequent detours into character back-stories and memories. Proctor the artist. Nazi the biker. Catherine the mystery woman. The ‘poor monster mad in the cellar’. Yet it is not so much a work of porn, as an experimental prose in which a porn content is an incidental ingredient. A psychedelic novel which contrasts poetic flourishes – ejaculation as ‘a white orchid from bud to bloom’, water that ‘lisps and whispers’, and with erection ‘the hood slipped from the punctured helmet’, with the horrific double-rape of Peggy-Anne, and the hallucinogenic excess of the ‘Hall of Mirrors’. His penis is described as ‘the colour of bell metal, longer than a big man’s foot, thick as a small girl’s wrist. Veins made low relief like vines beneath with wrinkled hood.’ His thumb ‘tobogganing’ her into moistness.

Delany writes ‘I lie frequently, for I am a man whose interest in the truth is only its aesthetic fascination in a landscape of lies.’ It’s not often that porn deals such conundrums, or that a writer can juggle his own fictional strategies so concisely.

The hugely-prolific Robert Silverberg was contributing garish pieces such as “Stalin’s Slave Barracks” for pulp-mag ‘Sir’ (March 1959) and similar shockers for ‘True Men Adventures’. Maybe something of his taste for vivid extremes persisted into his more legitimate fiction. Such as the intricate intimacies involved in marrying Landy, a Suvornese alien in his touching and amusing “Bride 91” (in ‘If’, September 1967). Then there is Philip Jose Farmer, and the products of what he terms his ‘sexobiological phase’. If there is to science fiction what David Cronenberg is to movies, then it’s Philip Jose Farmer. Except that Farmer was doing it first. And he can be truly amazing.

We’ve journeyed a considerable distance from the Midland Street bookshop…

 

 

 

 BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

 


By Andrew Darlington

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