I'm a Total Prude

Over at The Paris Review Daily, it's James Salter month. Lots of wonderful people are writing about Salter, and why shouldn't they? The man writes the kind of sentences they make my brain want to explode. They've got flavor crystals, you know what I mean? And today they posted an essay by my friend Alexander Chee, who wrote about his time on porno shoots.

This got me thinking.

I am a total prude.

And it's hard to be a prude.  I don't mean that it's hard for me in my daily life (crossing the street), or in my personal life (sleeping with my husband), but when writing fiction, I have Major Prude Anxiety. People love to read about sex! I know this to be true. And yet I find it challenging to write all the way through a scene in which two people (or one person) are naked and thinking sexy thoughts without backing out the way I came, gently closing the door behind me. I can get it started, even take some clothes off and describe some nice foreplay, and then I'm out. Think of it this way: on one end of the spectrum, you have James Salter, and on the other end, five miles down the road, you have me.

One of my friends, the only female butcher at New York City's best butcher shop, greeted me thusly after reading my book of short stories: "You said 'boobs'!" This is a woman who cuts up animals for a living, who forms phallic sausage after phallic sausage, who has blood on her hands all day long. "I didn't know you knew the word 'boobs,'" she seemed to be saying, as though addressing a Mennonite nun. If fiction is one of the ways that we can experience other lives, then surely having a rompingly-good sex scene should be a part of that. I felt that I had let both her and her delicious sausages down.

I reread James Salter's "A Sport and a Pasttime" the same way I reread Norma Klein books as a pre-teen: trying to pace myself and not hurry towards the sexy bits. The book isn't just sexy, it's famously sexy, like "A Last Tango in Paris," or "Jules et Jim," and rightly so. The book tingles with sensuality, and I've starred passages in the margins, underlined entire paragraphs. Of course, Salter writes about the entire world with a lush tongue, not only the breath-taking sexual encounters. He writes about leaves and sidewalks and cafes and silence and somehow all of it begins to hum like a tuning fork. But it is the sex that people always talk about, the sex that makes booksellers raise an eyebrow when they recommend it.

Another friend of mine, a male writer who recently published a story about a girl having sex with a lobster, also remarked on my book's lack of sex. "You keep closing the door!" He admonished me. Which I suppose is true. Can I be the only writer alive who occasionally wants to give my characters some privacy? I don't show them going to the bathroom, either, unless it's to sit on the toilet and cry a little bit. But James Salter never closes the door, not even when one of the characters gets her period or has bad breath. If we are inside the relationship, Salter implies by including these scenes, then by all means, let's be inside it. The novel is brave and reckless, like people in love for the first time, noticing everything around them through the lens of their newly discovered parts. No one ever cares about the other's body odor, or imperfections.

What strikes me the most about Salter's sex scenes is the bravery, the nakedness not only of the character's bodies but of their actions. This goes here, that goes there. He is direct and unsqueamish. Take the word 'prick,' for example: Salter says it and it's just the right word, both playful and aggressive at once. I wonder if James Salter's friends go to him for sexual advice, or whether they're too cowed by his reputation to mention their own meager efforts. Maybe this is what my lesson should be: write the kind of the book that will make a lover have a new idea, that will make a friend blush.  It could start gradually, with a nipple pressing against the fabric of a shirt instead of an angular shoulderblade, or a bare bottom revealed underneath a short skirt. I'm working on it, James, I'm working on it.

Yours,

Emma