The Literary Review hosted its annual Bad Sex Awards on Wednesday night, with the inspired choice of Major James Hewitt as the guest prize-presenter. As usual, it was an intoxicating mix of sniggering audience, embarrassed, moist-palmed authors, champagne, some truly awful fictional sex and, as Adrian Gill pointed out, a re-enactment of traditional public-school humiliation rituals. (Gill was this year's winner, by a handsome margin, but he went on to blot his exercise book very badly by making an ill-judged dig at Auberon Waugh. Boo hiss.)
The Bad Sex jamboree always raises the question: could there be an equivalent prize for the best fictional sex scene in a novel published this year? Amongst those of us who have some interest in the matter, at the Erotic Review and elsewhere, it is a tempting idea, but we doubt it's feasible. A public reading of any supposedly erotic passage would raise just as many sniggers as Bad Sex.
Good erotic writing is best enjoyed in private, while sex scenes read out loud to a roomful of rubicund, champagne-fuelled party-goers are never going to be taken seriously. Also, one's taste for what is erotic is highly subjective, and while we can all see that AA Gill or Julie Burchill produce some very grim examples indeed of Bad Sex, who can agree on what turns them on?
A female friend of mine finds Pride and Prejudice a profoundly erotic book: I don't, much as I like it. But for her, all that verbal sparring and passion- aggression between Lizzie Bennett and D'Arcy is exciting in a way that no amount of delicately lyrical but overtly sexual prose ever could be. If it's a toss-up between Anais Nin and Jane Austen as to who produces the most erotic charge on the page, the purse-lipped little spinster from Hampshire wins every time. Whereas bisexual, louche, cosmopolitan Nin knows far too well what she is doing in her erotic stories: she is far too manipulative. Such erotic writing-to-order is the equivalent of a prostitute faking it with ecstatic moaning and groaning, only to be glimpsed checking her watch in mid-gasp.
Good sex writing has to have a context, characterisation, emotion. Otherwise it is only porn: perfectly efficient at a functional level, enjoyable for the sexual arousal it gives, but strictly no more than that. Erotic writing, on the other hand, like any truly imaginative writing, gives you the sense of whole vistas of human experience that you have never before dreamed of. (I nurse a private theory that some of the most erotic writing of all is to be found in fairy tales and children's stories - but it's a tricky one, I know.)
We do not, alas, live in a golden age of erotic writing. In our current state of pornotopia, where brightly pixellated images of every sexual act imaginable (and indeed unimaginable) are available at the click of a mouse, maybe there just isn't enough panting repression and pent-up passion to produce the mysterious sublimation that constitutes great erotic writing. Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, some of the ancient Chinese and Japanese love poets, wrote the most sensual, incandescent passages, without, one suspects, even knowing that they were doing so half the time. A few reads of Cosmopolitan would soon have cured them of that. Hell, they might even have ended up writing like Julie Burchill.
Knowingness is a great enemy of fictional Good Sex, destroying the infinitely subtle, barely conscious impulses that produce fine erotica, and dragging it down to the level of pornography: "whore-writing," literally. Porn/bad sex is the kind of writing that knows a thousand tricks, a thousand ways to pleasure its partner, the reader, while all the time remaining steadfastly uninvolved, uninvolving, mercenary, and rather bored.
It isn't that repression is an absolute sine qua non of good erotic writing. Too much repression can be as bad as too little. During the high Victorian era, amid all those bustles and crinolines and veiled piano legs, there was produced some of the filthiest and most debased pornography. Nowadays such stuff is freely available on the net, and we are still no better off.
Mature erotic writing in mainstream literature is a healthy sign in more ways than one. The golden age of erotic writing in English literature was, surprise surprise, the golden age of literature anyway. From Spenser to Marvell, they knew all about Good Sex without being knowing, jaded and whorish. Their poetry is rich, sensuous, and greedy for the delights of the flesh and the world. Take Robert Herrick's Whenas in silks my Julia goes,/ Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes. Or John Donne's ecstatic O my America! my new-found land . Or, of course, Shakespeare.
If I had to choose a two-volume erotic library, I'd be quite happy with those two old Desert Island Discs staples, Shakespeare and the Bible. Despite, or because of, the fact that we are all such worldly sexperts nowadays, nobody could produce anything as headily erotic as the Song of Solomon (Authorised Version, please.) Whether Solomon himself really wrote it is open to debate: where would he find the time or the energy for erotic poetry, with his harem of a thousand wives and concubines? The early Christian Fathers, deeply embarrassed to find the Song in their holy book, argued that it was an elaborate allegory of the relationship between Christ and his church: perhaps the most unconvincing biblical exegesis in history. No: the Song of Solomon is all about sex, or more precisely, sexual love. (AA Gill's Bad Sex Award-winning Starcrossed - the Song of Adrian - is about anything but.)
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head and his right hand doth embrace me.
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.
Awake, O north wind; and come thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.
Now that really ought to win a Good Sex Award.
• Christopher Hart is literary editor of the Erotic Review
