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No sex please, we’re British.

Good piece in the Guardian about the melancholy long withdrawing roar of sex from British novels. “[N]o one [is] writing much about sex any more.”

Some people blame it on the annual, hilarious Bad Sex Award, pantingly chronicled on this blog year after year. Writers live in dread of it.

Some say it’s a generational thing, with ‘sixties people (Martin Amis, for instance) still into it, but younger types bored.

I dunno. I doubt it’s even much of a trend.

But the article cites an exchange from the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial that UD very much likes. The author of the essay quotes from Kenneth Tynan’s reporting from the proceedings fifty years ago:

“[The crucial incident of the trial] occurred on the third morning during the testimony of Richard Hoggart,” [Tynan] observed, “who had called Lawrence’s novel ‘puritanical’. Mr Hoggart is a short, dark, young Midlands teacher of immense scholarship and fierce integrity. From the witness box he uttered a word that we had formerly heard only on the lips of [prosecutor] Mr Griffith-Jones; he pointed out how Lawrence had striven to cleanse it of its furtive, contemptuous and expletive connotations, and to use it ‘in the most simple, natural way: one fucks’. There was no reaction of shock in the court, so calmly was the word pronounced, and so literally employed.

“‘Does it gain anything,’ he was asked, ‘by being printed f-?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Hoggart, ‘it gains a dirty suggestiveness’.”

Margaret Soltan, August 1, 2010 11:16AM
Posted in: extracts

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