New novels!

I've just put two new novels up on Smashwords - as well as a couple of free short stories.

A Grand Tour is based very loosely around the travels of Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray. These two young men met at Eton, and took the Grand Tour together; they were both fascinated by ancient Rome, and - unusually at that time - also by the Middle Ages. They were both literary, both art lovers, and, I think - though there's no proof - both in love.

Half way through their tour, they fell out of love, and didn't speak to each other for years afterwards.

I've rewritten the ending. Hell, I've rewritten pretty much everything. It's been fun.

The other novel, Natural Sympathies, follows the progress of a young-ish couple in the 1670s. Margot has married the rather older John Oldcastle in preference to two younger, rather unlovely suitors - but when he proves unable to consummate the marriage, she applies her scientific mind to finding a remedy. This being the early days of the Royal Society, the days of Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, science should provide a cure - but it doesn't, and it's only when a young scholar from Cambridge comes on the scene that things get moving...

They're all available on my author page at Smashwords.

Why? - some thoughts about historical erotica

All writers read. Sometimes they read for pleasure - I recently caught up with G.R.R. Martin's latest instalment in his epic Song of Ice and Fire - and sometimes for education.

I've recently been reading some French erotica - Gamiani, anonymous but possibly by de Musset; de Sade's Justine and 101 nights of Sodom, a bit of Restif de la Bretonne, and two little porn works by Apollinaire - The 11,000 Pricks and Exploits of a Young Don Juan.

All by French writers. And all, also, by men.

What intrigues me is that in almost all of them, there's a fascination with incest. de Sade, of course, has his two sisters, Justine and Juliette, virtue and vice - though they're not incestuous, many of the other characters in the novels are (including Saint-Fond, who fucks his own daughter). Restif de la Bretonne builds incest upon incest, with schemes of impregnating his mother or a sister and then bringing up the resultant children as future objects of his own lust. Apollinaire too keeps his desires in the family - not just the maidservants, but sisters and aunts, are objects of satisfied desire.

I'm bemused by this. Apollinaire's Don Juan and Restif de la Bretonne end up practically like roosters in a barnyard, surrounded by plump hens of ambiguous relationship to themselves. Why did incest have such appeal for the French writers?

In de Sade, it's easy to explain. His obsession with breaking down the structures of the Enlightenment, his antinomian cravings, make mere sex ineffective in its appeal. After all, it's only natural; and what de Sade is after is the sin against nature. For de Sade, incest is one pole of his erotic cravings, and murder the other (echoed by Apollinaire in the 11,000 pricks, which ends with the martyrdom of its hero by bludgeoning to death with cocks, and pretty much runs the gamut of sexual perversion - though without incest, unless I've missed something.)

But I wonder what was the pull for the other writers? I just can't get on their wavelength. Equally, I find it difficult, in the end, to read novels where the women are simply objects - counters in a game, interchangeable - and where the maidservants of the family are quite simply exploitable sexual resources (though that was, of course, the attitude of many men of the 18th and 19th centuries).

Which leaves me putting this reading firmly in the 'educational' camp. But also still puzzling on why incest had such an appeal for these writers.

Full of Holes

I've just read Nicholson Baker's House of Holes. I was rather hoping it would be an interesting book, given his previous intriguing work in Vox (a book which builds up a world through reports of phone sex conversations) and The Fermata (a man who is able to stop time uses it to take women's clothes off, but doesn't seem to know why he does it). It wasn't.

One of the problems is the language. Nicholson Baker can write wittily when he wants to - he makes up words, he uses the thesaurus with glittering abandon - but he doesn't do it here (with a few exceptions; I chuckled at the renaming of one man's John Thomas as his Malcolm Gladwell, and the idea of a Cock Ness Monster). Instead, the work seems almost to parody the threadbareness of porn narrative - fuck me fuck me, MWONGGGG!, clitty, jizm, and wank... It's all rather juvenile.

There's no real narrative structure. There are a couple of tiny amusing narrative threads - the silver couple who end up inside a little egg that we've already seen in someone's pocket, for instance (I imagine it as a kind of netsuke, like the ivory carvings of clams that open up to display a pornographic scene), but overall there's no plot, just a series of encounters.

Nor is there really any concept behind the work. There are occasional flashes of satire - the woman who wants to have sex with a man 'without being judged', and finds a headless man; the woman whose tattoos are removed, and public hair restored, to restore her to 'real nakedness', the nakedness of someone who isn't hiding behind anything - but overall, this is just a slippery, slimy fuckfest.

Oh, and the heterosexuality. Did I mention the heterosexuality? (Put it this way, I don't think I've ever written a full length erotic novel that doesn't at least play with bisexuality or cross-dressing; in fact one of the things I enjoy about using certain historical settings for my non-erotic work is that I'm able to show homosexual relationships as normal.)

In fact, apart from penis-trees, cunt-cradles, penis-sandals (er... what?), and separable genitalia, this is really a tedious, predictable romp through Penthouse fantasies. A line-up of men waiting to be sucked, a line-up of women waiting to be fucked, glory holes and orgy rooms.

And there are no characters. The figures are two-dimensional, just as they are in porn; the housewife, the policeman, the artist, the milkman, are just uniforms stuck on interchangeable bodies in any porn film, and so they are here. There's nothing invested in the characters - and there are no stakes to play for. It's all a bit aimless.

If this had been a shorter book, or if it had been a fake travel essay describing the House of Holes, it might have been amusing. But I just couldn't get the point. It wasn't even all that arousing. Oh dear.

Now if you want real sex, in my opinion, go to Iain M Banks and his Culture - the totally over the top scene of Sharrow having an orgasm to the accompaniment of a thermonuclear device exploding, the idea of changing sex slowly, through some kind of mutation. You don't read Banks for the sex scenes (two pages in three hundred), but because his characters and his worlds are such strong creations, when it happens, it really packs a punch.

A new story

Every Night Erotica has just published another of my short stories; "Being an Actor".

I have to say that in my experience dressing rooms are very unerotic places. There's too much going on - dressers and actors rushing in and out, costumes to be changed, wigs to be dressed, makeup to be touched up, the incessant murmur of the stage action over speakers. But then on the other hand, it's terrifically dangerous to be an actor; particularly when you're 'playing' at being attached or attracted to someone, it's quite difficult to disentangle the real emotion from the acting at times... hence this little fantasy.

Another story!

I've just had a story accepted by Every Night Erotica, a site which publishes short erotic stories (and does pay for them - not a lot, but it pays).

I quite enjoy penning the occasional short story. However I find the process rather different from a novel. In a novel, I've got the space to explore characters and their world at leisure. I can build in various subplots, little obsessions or coincidences, journeys, all kinds of stuff. In a short story, on the other hand, I have to get one single neat concept to work. It's a bit like writing metaphysical poetry - the kind of conceit/concetto that Marino, or Donne, or Crashaw or Marvell uses. I need that conceit to turn the story from 'what we did on our holidays' into something satisfying. For me, 'reader's wives' isn't satisfying in a literary way.

So that conceit might be, let's say, a painting which someone sees and which sets off a memory... returning to the picture at the end (the birth of Venus... 'and yes, she smelt of the sea'...), or a neat revenge, or a sort of amorous duel or challenge. And it still has to be sexy (while the 120 days of Sodom might be a fascinating literary or metaphysical concept, I'm afraid de Sade turns it into a scabrous anarchist-atheist tract rather than an erotic novel).

That means the challenge is to pack the tiny suitcase neatly. As opposed to the novel, which is a kind of unpacking, throwing clothes all over the hotel floor before we get to jump into bed in the final scene, so to speak.

Oh yes, the story. Here it is:
http://www.everynighterotica.com/revenge-is-sweet-anna-austen-leigh/

Sumptuary law

I've been toying with the idea of a new re-enactment character. I've played peasants, burgess's wives, ladies and a prioress (Benedictine, if you're really interested), but I've never played a whore. Now, I'm thinking of a career in the stews.

I don't suppose it will go down very well at the kind of history fair where they bring innocent children to be educated. But it might be great fun for the other re-enactors (though I wouldn't want to give them too many ideas).

Anyway, I was doing a bit of research - on the grounds that 'Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted'. Even if I never create the costume and the character, I'll probably end up using the information in a novel. And I came up against the sumptuary laws.

Now the intriguing thing about sumptuary laws is the way they crop up time and time again as a way of forcing people to expose their identities through their clothing - and to conform to a persona and an existence laid down for them by the state. Interestingly, the early Middle Ages only expected clerics and monks to dress the part. But as the merchants grew increasingly wealthy, laws were passed to stop them wearing clothes that aped the nobility. That only happens in the 1340s and later.

Prostitutes come in for special notice, because of course they would use any means they could to make themselves attractive - and that generally meant adopting aristocratic fashions. Look at Altdorfer's tart (pictured above) - she's got a plumed hat, an extravagantly pleated chemise that must have used yards of thin linen, an extensive décolettage, slashed sleeves; everything money could buy.

So the sumptuary laws try to rein back this excess;

• No fur! - London, 14th century; no "budge" or "revers"
• No precious metals! - Paris, 1427: no gold or silver buttons or belt buckles, or pearls. (And no fur.)
• No head covering! - Arles: modestly covered hair was the mark of the virtuous married woman.

And then there are also laws which try to make prostitutes easily distinguishable from virtuous women. They might have to wear striped hoods (London, 14th century) or red rosettes (various French towns), just as Jews had to wear yellow in some towns.

However, I think my whore will have fur. The very fact that it was forbidden surely shows that prostitutes were definitely wearing it - and if my prostitute is rich enough to afford fur, she's probably also rich enough to afford it being confiscated. In fact, if she's lucky enough to have as her client a merchant dealing with the Baltic trade, say in Norwich or London, she might well get furs as a present from time to time.

What is sad, though, is how many women entered the brothels because they had no other choice. Orphan girls ended up there - so, terribly often, were women who had been raped and lost their 'honour'. So I think my character, though she may be a rich and fortunate woman in some ways, will have a story to tell that certainly isn't all high life... and maybe that will have to come out in a book, rather than re-enactment.

Sex in the Renaissance

I've just been reading Brantome, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and a gentleman of the French court at a time when the Renaissance was shining its light on France. His 'Lives of Gallant Ladies' is racy stuff indeed; a book about sex, not to put too fine a point on it.

Brantome's voice is very personal, his way of tackling the subject driven by his own tastes, not by any desire to create some great theory of love. He sometimes breaks off and says, simply, 'That's enough of that, or 'But this is more interesting'.

His morality is difficult to define. He's not an out and out hedonist; the emotion he most often admits to himself is pity - pity for women murdered by jealous husbands, pity for lovers separated by death or fate. He genuinely seems to feel that happiness is the purpose of human existence; he comments on the complaisant old husband who allowed himself to suppose his wife's children might, after all, have been his - "so they lived happily, and had a fine family." Or the menage a trois where the husband was in love with his wife's lover; "Whence came a solution of the problem..." Brantome is unshockable. Or rather, only two things shock him; cruelty, and coldness.

Anyway, I found the most beautiful and poetic passage in his first discourse. (And this is something that sets Brantome apart from the regular canon of 'erotic' texts, like Fanny Hill and the Kama Sutra, or the Marquis de Sade for that matter; he has a sense of poetry, he's of the same generation as Ronsard and du Bellay.) He speaks of a Spanish lady

"who would have it to be winter when she loved, & her lover a fire, so that when she came to warm herself at him by reason of the great cold which she felt, he should have the pleasure of warming her, and she of absorbing his heat as she grew hot, and so little by little to expose herself thoroughly to his gaze...
And then she would desire the coming of spring, and her lover to be a garden full of blossons, wherewith she might crown her head, her fair throat and her shapely breasts, and loll among them with her sweet body all naked between the sheets.
And likewise following this she would wish for summer, with her lover a clear fountain or a shining brook, for to receive her in his fair fresh streams when she went to bathe and sport therein, that he at last might see her fully and touch, caress and handle her lovely wanton limbs.
Finally at the close she desired him in the autumn to return once more to his proper shape, that she might be a woman and her lover a man, so that they might both have the spirit, sensibility and reason to contemplate and recall all their past delights, and live again in those fair imaginings and reveries, and to consider and discuss between them which season had been most apt and delicious for their loves."

That's lovely. It's a riff on the old folk song (and fairytale motif) of the two magicians - performed by Steeleye Span on Youtube - the multiple transformations of the maiden and the seducer. But the way Brantome tells it, it has the gentle poetry of a Ronsard sonnet, rather than the boisterous rough and tumble of the ballad.

So I'm now wondering whether I can take this story of the seasons, and perhaps make it into a nice little erotica novella...