Sex

‘This man makes a pseudonym and crawls behind it like a worm,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in The Fearful. The weekend’s literary pages were gripped by a story of pseudonyms. R.J. Ellory, the well-regarded and critically acclaimed crime writer, has been caught penning rave reviews of his own work, and damning that of his rivals, under various pseudonyms on Amazon. Ellory ‘wholeheartedly’ regrets the ‘lapse of judgment’. The story recalls Orlando Figes’s dishonesty with Amazon reviews. Now as then, I’m at loss to understand why someone of Ellory’s reputation felt compelled to dive to this kind of petty chicanery.

After the record-breaking success of the Fifty Shades trilogy, publishers are desperately trying to answer the multi-million dollar question, what comes next? What will all those millions of readers who have raced through Fifty Shades want to read now? With a depressing lack of imagination, many publishers seem to have landed on the answer of more erotica. Each week, more and more shiny paperbacks with suggestive covers, claiming they are ‘the next Fifty Shades’, arrive in the bookshop where I work. If this is the future of reading, then it is bleak indeed.

Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to those of different inclinations. In all the dense weight of recollections and memorials published since Vidal’s death on Tuesday, I have not seen a sharper criticism of his writing and its preoccupations than that made by Spectator reader Walter Taplin in a letter to the magazine in 1982. ‘Sir, On page 13 of the Spectator 23 October there was a cartoon of Mr Gore Vidal holding a cane.

Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to this small act of rebellion: Taken outside the display windows at Smiths, @HypnoPeter As Fleur Macdonald wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is a mystery 'why people might want to read it [Fifty Shades of Grey] rather than Réage’s The Story of O, Bataille’s The Eye or any back issue of Cosmopolitan. And that's to name but a few, and none of the masters like Henry Miller. As the Samizdat above tells you, assuming that you are in the market, go forth and find good smut. Please, anything but 'it'.

EL James has a lot to answer for. Yesterday brought news that a British publishing house, Total-E-Bound Publishing, will sex-up some of the classics in the hope of cashing in on the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. In the forthcoming editions: Cathy and Heathcliffe will do a little bondage. Sherlock Holmes will bed down with Dr. Watson (you’ll have to read the books to find out what Mrs Watson makes of that). And Jane Eyre, of course, will get rogered by Mr Rochester, presumably while St. John Rivers plays with himself in his cottage, or perhaps even the schoolroom — the perverse possibilities are almost endless where poor, conflicted St. John is concerned.

Metamorphosis, a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery, London, showcases a range of contemporary artistic responses to Renaissance painter Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto metamorphosis paintings, inspired by Ovid. Daisy Dunn looks at the new poetry inspired by the collaboration.   When the hapless youth Actaeon peeled back a curtain dangling in a forest glade, he might just as well have been uncovering a religious icon as playing voyeur to a bevy of naked beauties. This, at least, is the way Titian saw it when he decided to paint the luscious velvetine hanging before the unwitting voyeur in his Ovid inspired canvas, Diana and Actaeon.

One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant and lyrical biography of the artist, helped shape his genius. Not long before Raphael died, aged just 37, of a malady popularly believed to have stemmed from excessive sexual activity, he painted La Fornarina — a young, brown-eyed beauty (perhaps his last lover), semi-nude but for a diaphanous veil draped beneath her décolletage. Around this date he also painted a heavily veiled woman, La Velata.

Reading a new John Banville novel is like walking into a house you know but finding the dirty old armchair has moved. The shelf, still stacked with the same books, is now bathed in dusty light. The rug has shifted from right under your feet. Time and memory, ‘a fussy firm of interior decorators’, have rearranged the furniture. Whenever a Banville character peers into the recesses of their mind — and introspection is the norm — they experience a similar feeling of disorientation. We last met Alexander Cleave in Eclipse when the former thespian had retreated to wandering around his late mother's house in an attempt to gather his wits following a break down mid-performance.

John Banville's reputation as a master stylist and serious novelist wasn't done any harm by the weekend reviews for his latest book Ancient Light. Familiar riffs on his usual leitmotifs guaranteed the standard standing ovation. 'It is written in Banville's customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery,' Alex Clarke commended in the Guardian. While Patricia Craig in the Independent applauded that: 'Many of John Banville's customary concerns are present in this bedazzling new novel: memory and invention, questions of identity and make-believe, names and aliases, transgressions and transformations'. More unexpected however — given the rather dour face he sports for photo-ops - was his rather fun interview in the Guardian.

Pornography is in the news, and Martin Amis has been thinking about pornography. Those two facts are not related, not necessarily. Tomorrow’s issue of the Spectator contains an interview with Amis, who is on vintage form. Pornography, he says, is an attack on love; it is the repudiation of significance in sex. Pornography has, he says, created a ‘big disconnection for human beings’ between their conceptions of sex and its biological realities. He says, ‘There is no more talk of love in porn than there is about having babies. It’s as if you made babies by some other way, like sneezing.

Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, £16.99) is 24 carat, 100 per cent proof. Now rising 89, Scotty (pictured above in his youth) was for years the go-to guy in Tinseltown for sexual favours. Black, white, short, tall, same sex, opposite sex: he could supply it all. But this was no prostitution ring he was running, good lord no. He didn’t charge for his services. He just liked ‘to help folks out’. And he was winningly discreet — until now, that is. His book is Hollywood Babylon and then some, sharing with that legendary and error-packed volume the advantage that everyone written about is long dead.

When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor Realdus Columbus: in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, this great man claimed to have discovered the clitoris.   But no, there is no comedy, apart from the doings of one Frances, Lady Purbeck, who in 1635, with the son of the Earl of Suffolk, lived happily and ‘adulterously’ in what the author calls ‘the depths of Shropshire’.

Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Slight anxiety when Lindsay Clarke then appeared on the bill at a literary festival I was attending — authors, you may be surprised to learn, don’t always care for these off-the-cuff judgments — was quickly dispelled.