In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Pornography and Censorship In 1947, a Life Magazine reporter interviewing W. H. Auden came up with the question: "Buthow,Mr.Auden, do you knowwhat you're reading is really pornography?" "That's simple," replied the poet. "It gives me an erection." In the interview, Auden went on to decry the pornographic. He felt that physical arousal distracted the reader from any rich and complex aesthetic response; thus, Auden felt, the pornographic was to be avoided by the serious writer. It'sa reasonable argument and,in this age where license and repression are forever trading names and places, an argument we might reviewwith some profit, even if we don't agree with it—and I don't. In the early eighties, some years after Auden's death in 1973, in the gay press Harold Norse published a journal account of an afternoon's sex with Auden. I do not have the article to hand. But memory tells me that the encounter involved a pounce by the older poet; the coupling was brief, desperate, and—while, by Norse's description, the encounter was consensual in that he had known certainly that the pick-up was sexual —nevertheless the physical exchange between them verged on rape. The word that remains with me from the writer is that he found the experience "appalling." My autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Plume/New American Library, 1988), gives an account of a similar sexual encounter thathappened to me about 1960, which, to my mind, has many things incommon with Norse's encounter with Auden. When I waseighteen, whilewe were at the piano bench together, a musician friend in his late thirties, with whom I was collaborating on an opera, suddenly, and clearly in a state of great distress, pounced on me and physicallydragged me to his bed. So I know first-hand the sort of thing Norse was recounting. We shall get back to this in abit. I don't believe we really have to dwell on what pornography is. It's a 13 Pornography and Censorship 293 practice of writing—i.e., it's a genre; and genres simply do not yield up their necessary and sufficient conditions, i.e., they cannot be defined. But they can be functionally described in terms clear enough for any given situation. And for our situation here (that is, assuming we are all bored with, or unhappy over, or simply angry at the mystifications that have come along with the various pornography/erotica distinctions), we can probably describe pornography as those texts which arouse, either by auctorial intention or byaccident—if not those texts that are assumed to be arousing, either to the reader currently talking about them, or to someone else: That is,pornographic texts are generally those that can be organized around some elaboration of the emblem Auden set up fortyfiveyears back. Arguments over pornography—whether pro or con—seem most intelligent when the critic him- or herself admits to having been aroused (Auden;Jane Gallup on Sade). Those arguments become their most lunatic when the critic,unaroused by a given text, starts speculating on the results of possible arousal in other people—the "general community," "ordinary men and women," "children," etc.—and inveighs against the dangers that might result should someone from one of these groups—to whom clearly the critic does not belong—stumble over an arousing text on bookstore rack or library shelf. I mentioned Auden's and my musician friend's sexual practices not to vilify them—unpleasant though they were. In either case it might simply have been an anomalous afternoon. But it's also possible that they weren't anomalous at all. And if they weren't, they might tell us something of the context that might cast meaningful light on Auden's disapproval of the pornographic. The context is, of course, the wayin which situations of arousal generally fit into the rest of one's life. If such desperate and nonmutual pounces were most of Auden's sex, it mightjust give us pause. Though we have no wayto know for certain (for such things were not generally chronicled), we can still make an educated guess that up until fairly recently,a good deal of sex—not only homosexual but heterosexual —was much like those precipitous encounters. We have the evidence for it in the date rapes and the marital rapes that still too frequently mar the sexual landscape today. In a population that basicallyfeels that Sex Is Bad—or...

Share