Their turn-ons…

There’s evidence that D.H. Lawrence enjoyed an erotic power exchange relationship with his wife, that James Joyce was into scat (among other things), and that Oscar Wilde — well, most of us know what Oscar Wilde liked. These literary geniuses explored radical sexual agency and desire in their work and in their relationships, but little beyond rumours and personal letters exist to tell us what they themselves thought of their turn-ons and the ways in which those dovetailed with their writing. Even if space for such a discourse and community had existed back then, Lawrence, Joyce and Wilde couldn’t freely discuss their sexuality. As it was, they faced censorship and generated scandal wherever they went, and of course Wilde went to prison for his sexual behaviour.

Arielle Greenberg – Introduction to writing while deviant

Structures that live in “spectral communion” with one another…

There are some cities that are entirely transformed by the writers who reproduce them. Dickensian London is a unique entity entirely distinct and yet strangely akin to the real city that spawned it. Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg is a dark mirror of its more tangible yet no less monumental counterpart, filled with strange characters that channel the warped, often fantastical spirit of their surroundings. James Joyce’s Dublin is made up of multiple, unique voices and their own experiences of the city, a tapestry of individual spaces.

These real cities have been transformed by the hands of those that lived within them, reborn in the shadow of their authors that in the minds of many readers, have come to possess, even command, the metropolises that dominated their own lives.

Missing from this list is Gustav Meyrink’s Prague, a city so viscerally evoked in the pages of The Golem that it seems to be as much a character as our narrator, with “hidden, vital arteries” and structures that live in “spectral communion” with one another. This is the same place that Meyrink would later describe as “the city with the secret heartbeat”, and where the Austrian author lived for twenty years from 1883. The alluring prose…goes a significant way towards intensifying the details of a narrative that can often feel difficult to grasp and casts Prague as a mysterious, sometimes malevolent entity that is no less seductive for being either.

Brontë Crawford – The Golem

darker than the swoon of sin

Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Paris and Poets

In a diary entry of May 1959, while still living with her parents in Buenos Aires, shortly after the publication of her third poetry collection, the twenty-three-year-old Alejandra Pizarnik wrote:

Je voudrais vivre pour écrire. Non penser à autre chose qu’à écrire. Je ne prétend [sic] pas l’amour ni l’argent. Je ne veux pas penser, ni construire décemment ma vie. Je veux de la paix: lire, étudier, gagner un peu d’argent pour m’independiser [sic] de ma famille, et écrire.

(I would like to live in order to write. Not to think of anything else other than to write. I am not after love nor money. I don’t want to think nor decently build my life. I want peace: to read, to study, to earn some money so that I become independent from my family, and to write.)

Bold and assertive in tone, these words are less of a confession than a daring conviction, a resolution, a literary plan. Circumstantial? Purposely stylized? Perhaps the more essential question here is: Why did the Argentinian-born poet turn to a foreign language that, until then, she’d almost exclusively employed just to read French literature?

The younger of two daughters to Jewish immigrants who settled in Argentina during the thirties, Flora Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29, 1936, in Avellaneda — a port city located within the greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Her parents, Ela Pizarnik and Rejzla Bromiker de Pizarnik, had left Równe, then part of Poland, two years earlier to flee the rising wave of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The family spoke Yiddish and Spanish at home, and the two sisters, Myriam and Alejandra, attended a progressive Jewish school. Alejandra grew up among these two languages, along with the accepted Latin American notion of French — of France — as inseparable from high culture, especially for those with fine-art or literary aspirations.

After Pizarnik sketched out a literary plan, in the same spiral-bound gray Avon notebook, she noted:

Tengo que ir a Francia. Recordarlo. Recordar que debo quererlo mucho. Recordar que es lo único que me queda por querer, en este mundo ancho y alto.

(I have to go to France. Remember it. Remember that I must want it badly. Remember that this is the only thing left to want, in this world wide and deep.)

Not many today would disagree that this “obligation” resulted from a condition, partially elective, partially brought on by historical pressures. A quick glance at the biographies of some of the great European and North and Latin American writers of the past century reveals, more often than not, a single beacon, a common destination — one unrivaled city, sought after for its bohemian cultural scene.

By the early twenties, with literary modernism at its apogee, Paris was the creative centre of the western world, with Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and César Vallejo, to name but three, among the many foreign authors who took up residence there. The list is extensive. Some even abandoned their mother tongue and made French their writing language, as is the case of Vallejo’s compatriot César Moro, or, in the late thirties, the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran — one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century in French. Paris lured the rich and the poor, the established and the aspiring, the singular and uninspired.

Within a few decades, the City of Light had become home to a large community of expatriate authors and artists from around the globe. The French capital and, to some extent, the genius of the French language, came to be equated with a rite of passage — the grand yet tangible myth.

Patricio Ferrari – Where the Voice of Alejandra Pizarnik Was Queen

Kiss

Give me a kiss, she said.

His lip would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her.

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in the frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were a vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

that cry that has rung through the ages

Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It’s the bazaar fireworks. But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremor went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as to not fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hot-blooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she’d never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirt-dancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn’t do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors’ photographs and besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did.

And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and they all saw it and shouted to look, look there it was and she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was flying about through the air, a soft thing to and fro, dark. And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms for him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft! Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl. He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been. He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell.

[…]

Ah!

Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant. Still you have to get rid of it someway.

James Joyce – Ulysses

flogging fantasies

The Irish writer, James Joyce (1882-1941), confessed his flogging fantasies in letters to his wife, Nora. In 1909 he wrote, “Punish me as much as you like. I would be delighted to feel my flesh tingling under your hand … I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh. […] I would love to have done something to displease you … and then to hear you call me into your room and then to find you sitting in an armchair with your fat thighs far apart and your face deep red with anger and a cane in your hand … Then to feel your hands tearing down my trousers and … to be struggling in your strong arms … to feel you bending down … and to feel you flog, flog, flog me viciously on my naked quivering flesh!”

Dr Kate Lister – ‘Punish me as much as you like’: When flagellation was a national obsession

Touch me

Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. Sad too. Touch, touch me.

 James Joyce – Ulysses

Winds of May

Winds of May, that dance on the sea,
Dancing a ring-around in glee
From furrow to furrow, while overhead
The foam flies up to be garlanded,
In silvery arches spanning the air,
Saw you my true love anywhere?
Welladay! Welladay!
For the winds of May!
Love is unhappy when love is away!

James Joyce

your hand hard at work

20 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

My sweet naughty girl

I got your hot letter tonight and have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit? It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck half-way out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shite ready to fall put your arms around my neck in shame and shit it down softly. The sound will madden me and when I pull up your dress

No use continuing! You can guess why!

The cinematograph opened today. I leave for Trieste on Sunday 2 January. I hope you have done what I said about the kitchen, linoleum and armchair and curtains. By the way don’t be sewing those drawers before anybody. Is your dress made. I hope so – with a long coat, belted and cuffed with leather etc. How I am to manage Eileen’s [note: his sister] fare I don’t know. For God’s sake arrange that you and I can have comfortable bed. I have no great wish to do anything to you, dear. All I want is your company. You may rest easy about my going with ________ [note: a word is omitted by Joyce in the original, presumably “whores” or similar. His infidelities with prostitutes had upset Nora] You understand. That won’t happen, dear.

O, I am hungry now. The day I arrive get Eva to make one of the threepenny puddings and make some kind of vanilla sauce without wine. I would like roast beef, rice-soup, capuzzi garbi, mashed potatoes, pudding and black coffee. No, no I would like stracotto di maccheroni, a mixed salad, stewed prunes, torroni, tea and presnitz. Or no I would stewed eels or polenta with…

Excuse me, dear, I am hungry tonight.

Nora darling, I hope we will pass a happy year together. Am writing Stannie [note: his brother, Stanislaus] tomorrow about cinematograph.

I am so glad I am now in sight of Miramar. The only thing I hope is that I haven’t brought on that cursed thing again by what I did. Pray for me, dearest.

Addio, addio, addio, addio!
JIM

James Joyce
Letter to twenty-five-year-old Nora Barnacle
Selected Letters of James Joyce
edited by Richard Ellman