Literary Miscellany

by Alex Palmer

  Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent

  Again she stretch’d, again she bent,

  Nor knew the gulph between;

  (Malignant Fate sat by, and smil’d.)

  The slippery verge her feet beguil’d;

  She tumbled headlong in.

  Did You Know?

  The “Favorite Cat” of the poem was that of Gray’s friend the gothic novelist Horace Walpole, whose cat actually did die in a china vase.

  The ode really came into its own during the Romantic era. Its meditative and lyrical possibilities dovetailed nicely with the Romantics’ appreciation for nature and self-exploration. The big odes of this time include Coleridge’s “France” and “Dejection: An Ode,” Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” and “Ode to Duty,” as well as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1820). Of course, the master of the ode was Keats, with the string of six gems written in a little over half a year (when the poet was a mere twenty-four years old): “On a Grecian Urn,” “To a Nightingale,” “To Autumn’” “On Melancholy,” “On Indolence,” and “To Psyche.”

  Romantic poets including Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge (and later poets like Swinburne and Hopkins) were much looser about the form and subject matter of odes than its classical counterparts. They also did not shy away from dedicating them to unhappy situations as often as to upbeat ones. Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” sees nature not as some benevolent force, as Wordsworth does, but claims that our own imagination assigns it those feelings. Keats’s “On Melancholy” and “On Indolence” are less than upbeat.

  Did You Know?

  Coleridge, unhappily married, originally addressed Dejection: An Ode to Sara Hutchinson, with whom he was in love. In a later version he changes this to his friend, “O Wordsworth,” only to bring Sara back (though this time anonymously referred to as “O Lady”) in the final published text.

  Few odes have been able to touch these massive works since, but Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Willington” (1852) and Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” as well as Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone,” have been hailed for their quality and inventiveness.

  As far as quirkiness, it may be hard to touch the great Spanish-language poet Pablo Neruda, who published a collection of Odes to Common Things that gives the lyric treatment to everything from tomatoes, a large tuna in the market, and scissors. Though he is not quite as formal and complex as the ode usually calls for, it’s easy to forgive lines like “two immense blackbirds, / two cannons, / my feet were honored in this way / by these heavenly socks,” in “Ode to My Socks.”

  WHEN DID LITERATURE FINALLY GET SEXY?

  How Shakespeare and others slipped sex into their works

  Philip Larkin famously begins his poem “Annus Mirabilis” (1967) with the lines, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me).” While sexual intercourse obviously began well before the 1960s, Larkin’s words point to the often secretive existence that sex has had in literature throughout the centuries. While idealized notions of love are the foundation for a vast range of literary works, the physical consummation of these emotions has generally been addressed in coded language while explicit discussions of sex have caused scandal.

  Erotic writing about sex and sexual love can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, when writing shifted from epic stories of heroes and gods to choral songs that described everyday life—which for poets, such as ancient Greek writer Sappho, included sensual descriptions of sex.

  Did You Know?

  Sappho often wrote about the beauty of women, and her female speakers expressed love and infatuation for members of their own sex, which explains why the word “sapphic” derives from her name and “lesbian” derives from Lesbos, the Greek island where Sappho was born.

  One of the earliest depictions of sex in literature is Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), which features subtly raunchy tales of love and coded references like “making the nightingale sing” and “riding the horse” in its 100 novellas. This was followed by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), which follows the progress of a love affair between the two characters, describing their pursuit of courtly love in high-minded, though erotically charged terms.

  While Troilus and Criseyde elevated love to divine heights, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provides some early examples of sex used for laughs. The collection includes fabliaux (short, bawdy poems) such as The Miller’s Tale, with its protagonist’s elaborate scheme to cuckhold his landlord, and The Reeve’s Tale, in which two students get revenge on a dishonest miller by bedding his daughter and wife. Chaucer’s contrasting approaches to sex, both highbrow and lowbrow, set the pattern for centuries to come.

  The next landmark of erotic literature is Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598). Rather than building to a climax of marriage (as was typical of works in this period), the poem ramps up to a monumental sex scene. After swimming across the strait of Hellespont and convincing Neptune not to drag him to the bottom of the sea, Leander arrives at Hero’s door stark naked and ready for love. With the sexual tension at a peak, Hero’s attempts to “defend her fort” are no match for Leander’s advances:

  Yet there with Sisyphus he toiled in vain,

  Till gentle parley did the truce obtain.

  Wherein Leander on her quivering breast,

  Breathless spoke something, and sighed out the rest.

  While much of Shakespeare’s legacy rests on his treatment of romantic love, he delved into more explicit eroticism in his poetry. Venus and Adonis (1593) includes what may be the most graphic description of sex in Shakespeare, as Venus takes Adonis’ hand and, “Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust,” and soon enough, “was she along as he was down, Each leaning on their elbows and their hips.” Racy stuff.

  Shakespeare was also of course a master of sexual puns and dirty jokes. Entire books compiling his innuendos have been written, but a few favorites include:

  “It must be an answer of most monstrous size that must fit all demands.”—The Countess to Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, whose “bountiful answer ... fits all questions,” or serves the sexual needs of all.

  “By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus makes she her great p’s.”

  “With thou, whose will is large and spacious, / Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?”—in Sonnet 135, the Bard uses his own first name to refer to the sexual organs of himself and his would-be lover.

  Sex took a more cerebral turn with metaphysical poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who crafted elaborate metaphors, known as metaphysical conceits, using their verses as tools of seduction. Donne turns the title creature of “The Flea” (1633) into a stand-in for sexual intercourse as it “sucks” the speaker and his would-be lover and “swells with one blood.” Pointing out that neither of the two are any weaker for this loss of bodily fluid, the speaker slyly argues that “Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me, / Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.” In “Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1633), Donne compares fondling his love to the exploration of America.

  Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681) is perhaps the masterpiece of the metaphysical seduction poem, complete with references to “vegetable love” and an urging to “Roll all our strength and / Our sweetness into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife.”

  Did You Know?

  John Donne was the first writer to use the word “sex” in its present sense in his poem “The Primrose” (1631)

  For should my true-love less than woman be,

  She were scarce anything; and then, should she

  Be more than woman, she would get above

  All thought of sex, and think to move My heart to study her, and not to love.

  When England’s theaters reopened in 1660 after the monarchy was restored under Charles II, t
he gates of raunchiness were yanked open wider. The Restoration comedies of the late seventeenth century took sex talk back to its fabliau roots, with rakish behavior and debauchery as central to works like William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677)—Behn, the first woman playwright, proved that bawdy talk was not just a man’s game.

  The Country Wife is loaded with sex so thinly disguised it would make Shakespeare blush. The lead character, suggestively named Horner, feigns impotence, which allows him to bed the wives of his comrades right under their noses (and just out of the audience’s view). The famous “china scene” features an extended double entendre in which, after making love with one woman, another accosts Horner and demands she, “have some china too.” Horner responds, “Do not take it ill, I cannot make china for you all.”

  As much fun as the Restoration period was for theater fans, it pushed the envelope a bit too far for some. Theater critic Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) asserts that “nothing has gone farther in debauching the age than the stage poets, and play-house.” His essay led to a pamphlet war among critics and playwrights, which prompted theaters to dial down the crude humor and restored a sense of propriety for decades to come.

  Did You Know?

  When two ladies complimented Dr. Samuel Johnson for omitting naughty words from his Dictionary, the writer responded, “What! My dears! Then you have been looking for them?”

  Once the sex talk had entered the literary conversation, it was hard to silence it. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), which graphically chronicles the exploits and adventures of a young prostitute, caused a major scandal as the first erotic novel, and the publication of the second installment led to the prompt arrest of both Cleland and his publishers. The battle between smut-peddlers and the straitlaced would continue for the next two centuries, with the former gaining ground after every uproar.

  The Romantics flirted with eroticism, but were more preoccupied with imagination and fantasy than discussing the act itself (Lord Byron was better known for his real-life sexual adventures than any descriptive poetry). This would shift into more frank treatments of sex, followed by predictable scandal, in the mid-nineteenth century.

  In France, the sexual descriptions in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary caused an outcry when it was serialized in La Revue de Paris in 1856, eventually going to trial. It won acquittal and instantly became a bestseller. In America, Walt Whitman sang the praises of sex in raw and graphic terms throughout his landmark Leaves of Grass (1855); critics were offended, and the publisher considered holding up the publication of the second edition. The depictions of homoerotic love in particular did not sit well with some reviewers, with one suggesting Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.”

  Did You Know?

  Although Whitman was often explicit in his poetry, he was a bit guarded in his own diary. When writing about his longtime lover—Irish bus conductor Peter Doyle—he would refer to him as “16.4,” as “P” is the sixteenth letter in the alphabet and “D” is the fourth.

  A victory for graphic sex in literature came in 1959, when an effort to ban D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill in America was overturned in court. Both Miller’s and Lawrence’s books were lauded by literary critics when finally published and were smash hits with audiences eager to see what was so scandalous.

  After this high-profile victory for explicit literature, efforts at censorship became increasingly tricky, and sex became less taboo. In the second half of the twentieth century, celebrated authors like Philip Roth and John Updike wrote explicit accounts of the male’s sexual experience with comparatively little sensation from the public, while nonfiction works like Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (1973), and Erica Jong’s autobiographical novel Fear of Flying (1973) became bestsellers. As Larkin said: sexual intercourse had arrived—and not a moment too soon.

  Did You Know?

  For reasons probably only known to her, Gertrude Stein referred to orgasms as “cows.” When she writes, “a wife has a cow,” or about “making a cow come out,” Stein is not talking about farming.

  WHY IS SATAN THE GREATEST BAD GUY EVER?

  Literary villains and why we love them

  Heroes get the girl, but villains win the reader. We may hiss at the bad guy when he pops into the story to wreak his (or her) havoc, but the villain is most likely to stick with us long after we’ve closed the book. Despite the important role they play in many great works, baddies have not always been a fixture of great literature.

  Monsters are present throughout classical as well as early English works, from the intimidating Cyclops in the Odyssey to the towering Green Knight with a removable head in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, villains as we traditionally understand them actually originated in medieval English plays.

  Did You Know?

  The word “villain” actually comes from the Anglo-French term villein, which means “farmhand.” The phrase referred to those who were bound to the land and were therefore of a less than genteel status. This came to simply mean “not chivalrous” and a term of abuse that implied the corrupt character of rapists and criminals, eventually acquiring its modern meaning.

  Shakespeare refers to the original meaning of the word in As You Like It, when he writes, “I am no villain; I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys; he was my father, and he is thrice a villain that says such a father begot villains.”

  Early plays were mystery and morality dramas, based on biblical stories that delivered a poignant Christian message to audiences. Angels and devils (and sometimes God and Satan) were integral parts of this storytelling. The devil entered the drama and tried to lure the protagonist into sin, while the angels urged him to resist, and usually won out, bringing the play to a happy close.

  The devils were easily the most entertaining part of these otherwise stodgy moral lessons. They were slapstick clowns telling bawdy jokes, getting chased around the stage, and falling down. It should be no surprise that these satanic troublemakers remained a staple of medieval theater through the seventeenth century—long after the angels ceased to play key roles. It would seem the angels’ victories were short-lived.

  Over the decades, devils evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective), becoming more human, while some of the sketchy human characters became more diabolical, bringing us to the first traditional villains in literature—the evildoers of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

  These diabolized humans include such charming characters as D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), who has his brother killed and tries to do the same to his nephew before going insane and, in an exhibition of considerable will, killing himself with an ax. There’s Ferdinand from John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623), whose creepy attraction to his twin sister drives him to have her executed in a jealous rage. Afterward, he goes insane and runs around exhuming graves (derangement was apparently in vogue at the time).

  Did You Know?

  If there was one individual who can be credited with spawning modern villainy, it was Niccolò Machiavelli. The philosopher, diplomat, and playwright offered cutthroat advice to politicians and royalty in his famous treatise The Prince, first published in 1532. Tossing humanistic idealism out the window in favor of pure self-interested ambition, he provided an outlook equally seductive and abhorrent to right-thinking Renaissance readers at the time—and a compellingly amoral example that remains an inspiration to writers to this day.

  The ghost of Machiavelli cameos in Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta (1592). As a character, he introduces the story of a man who lost his fortune and poisoned his own daughter and an entire nunnery before dying at the hands of the Turkish army.

  Unlike the devils, these
human miscreants weren’t born bad; they were often wronged early in the story, which led them to villainy. This style of “revenge tragedy” was huge during this time, sparked by the plays of the Roman poet Seneca, whose Ten Tragedies were translated into English between 1559 and 1581.

  Leave it to William Shakespeare to add intriguing complexity to these sinister rogues. His plays feature some of the most brilliant villains literature had ever seen, both in their calculating evil and their recognizable humanity. Hamlet’s duplicitous uncle Claudius—or as Hamlet calls him, “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”—is a calculating, ambitious politician, driven by his sexual appetites and his lust for power, but who also shows signs of deep guilt and human feeling. The ambitious Lady Macbeth is certainly remorseless, yet is suicidally conflicted about her crimes. Of course, figures like the calculating Iago, ambitious Richard III, and just plain nasty Aaron the Moor may be a bit harder to relate to, but are no less compelling as villains.

  Killer Lines

  Villains, particularly those in Shakespeare, have all the best lines—here are some memorably sinister ones:

  “If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.”