by Sara Nelson
So Charlotte’s Web—along with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Just So Stories—provided an opportunity for both Charley and me. These were the three books Charley chose from his reading list, books which, he informed me, he had to read by himself. Feeling guilty—as if the school knew how bad I was at this—I said we’d have to establish our own, different kind of reading ritual. From now on, I told him, we’d read as a tag team: he’d read a chapter, I’d read it right after him—both of us silent, on his bed—and then we’d discuss it.
Charlotte’s Web, as any third-grader can tell you, is the story of a pig named Wilbur who is on his way to the slaughter by his farmer/ owner until Fern, the farmer’s daughter, rescues and befriends him. Banished to a neighbor’s barn, Wilbur grows up among the animals, one of whom—Charlotte, the spider—teaches him to believe in himself as a terrific and “radiant” pig. Wilbur becomes the prize animal of the county fair, which assures him a place in history; but even fame and security can’t change the inevitable. Soon, Wilbur loses his friend and mentor, Charlotte, to the spider’s life cycle. He lives beyond her, but he never forgets her.
I knew the general plot before we started, and frankly, I was a little worried. It sounded awfully bucolic and, well, sweet. I’m a city girl through and through, and stories about farms generally don’t do it for me. I know adult titles like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, and Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River were critically acclaimed and/or bestsellers, but I always have to force myself to read them, so slow and distant do they seem. As for sweet . . . well, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Lou Grant, who once told Mary she had spunk and “I hate spunk,” I have a problem with it. What if I hated Charlotte’s Web? What if Charley approached it with the same prejudices? (Worse, what if he loved it and immediately wanted to move to a farm?) I mean, I knew the book was a parable—I’m not that out of it—but I wasn’t sure that Charley would get it.
In the days that followed, I came to see that even a beginning reader—or at least my beginning reader, at this stage of his development—approaches a text with the same sort of expectation and demand all the rest of us do. And Charley, despite the weeks he loves spending on Liza’s farm amid her bevy of horses, dogs, and cows, is about as drawn to country tales as I am. His initial reaction to the first chapter: “I don’t like it, Mom,” he said. “It’s about a girl and a pig. Why should I care?”
Oh, boy, I thought, here we go: another generation of Nelson readers shunning bucolic childhood classics. “Try reading a little more,” I said, hopefully.
The next two nights weren’t much better, as E. B. White laid out the rural particulars. (“The barn was very large. . . . It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses.”) Don’t these descriptions remind you of Aunt Liza’s farm? I asked him.
(I was trying hard.)
“I guess,” came the bored reply.
I started thinking we should have begun with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It might be about a candy company owner, but at least there’s nothing else sweet about it.
But then, when Charlotte appeared, so did a miracle. “Can we read two chapters tonight?” Charley asked me as soon as Wilbur had met the spider and had a very human reaction to her. “Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like,” White has Wilbur think. But then, the author explains, “Wilbur was merely suffering the doubts and fears that often go with finding a new friend.”
“Sure, Charley,” I said. “How come?”
“I like this book now,” he said. “The animals are like people, Mom,” he replied, with the unspoken “Du-uh” even elementary schoolers have perfected. “They’re like kids I know.”
For the next few nights, we talked about Templeton, Wilbur, Charlotte, the goose, and the gander more heatedly and more often than we discussed the actual humans in the book. When we looked at the reading form and saw that he was to name the “most interesting” character, he didn’t hesitate. “I pick Templeton,” the gluttonous rat, he told me. Why? “Because he reminds me of R———,” he answered, naming a kid with whom Charley has his first love/hate relationship. “He’s funny, but he’s mean, too. He only cares about himself.” (Or as Charlotte says, “You know how he is—always looking out for himself, never thinking of the other fellow.”) When we got to the next to last chapter, in which Charlotte dies, Charley didn’t miss a personifying beat: “You know what makes me really sad about this?” he asked. “This line: ‘No one was with her when she died.’ ” He waited a beat and then asked about the only dead person he knows anything about. “Was Poppop alone when he died?”
If it hadn’t fully occurred to me before, it did now: even an eight-year-old wants to read about what he knows, to have his own world explicated for him. And if a book is good enough, the venue and the biological classification of the characters don’t matter much. This, of course, is the reason Charlotte’s Web is a classic, and why everybody in the world except me and maybe my brothers and sister remembers it so clearly and so fondly. It is not just about “a girl and a pig,” or just about life on a farm; as Eudora Welty wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1952, it’s about “friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain and the passing of time.”
“So who was your favorite character, Mom?” Charley asked me when we’d finished.
“I think Charlotte,” I said.
“That figures,” he replied. “She’s sort of like you.”
Deep in my heart, I’d hoped he’d say that. I secretly thought of myself as Charlotte, especially when I read White’s epitaph for her: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” Could it be that my son also believed these things about me?
“Yeah? Why do you think so?” I was fishing.
“Well,” he said seriously, “she’s a girl, but she’s still sort of nice. And also, she’s really, really bossy.”
Finally, we’ve both got a Charlotte’s Web memory to wax rhapsodic about.
September 25
Sex and the City
I’m reading a dirty book,” I wrote, in Instant Messenger, to my friend Ralph across town.
“Is it hot? Do you like it?” he IMed me back.
A fair question, but one I didn’t quite know how to answer. I was sitting in my office at the magazine, feet up on the desk, leafing through The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a memoir that apparently has been all the rage in France and was on its way to bestseller lists here. (“An epic new sex memoir . . . is keeping the French up late,” announced Vogue.) By page 30, author Catherine Millet had participated in several orgies, announced her nearly exclusive interest in anal sex, and done it outdoors a couple of times. I’ve barely, uh, penetrated the book but by now I’m kind of bored and Catherine should rightfully have contracted repetitive stress disorder.
But I’m nothing if not a trouper, so I decide to persevere. Maybe the reason the book is leaving me cold, I think, is that I’m reading it under the wrong circumstances. Sitting fully clothed, surrounded by a few dozen chic female colleagues going about the business of putting out a women’s magazine is hardly conducive to sexual stimulation. Better to take the book home, put it on the bedside table, and wait for insomnia to strike. Maybe I’ll have a different reaction at three A.M. while all cozy in my bed, my sleeping husband at my side.
So that’s what I did. (“What are you doing?” Leo asked groggily as I turned on the light. “Oh, reading a sex book,” I told him, hoping to tantalize with understatement. “Oh,” he said as he fell back to sleep.) Still nothing. By six A.M., I was propping Millet’s confessional up on the StairMaster and climbing away. Any sweating or heavy breathing came from the Pro Climber, not the writer’s prose.
So no, I would have to tell Ralph later, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is not hot, and I’m not sure I like it. But then maybe it isn’t supposed to be. Mill
et is a French art critic, and she couches her tales of exploits in a kind of Gallic philosophizing we Americans might rename rationalizing. “I am docile,” she says, stepping back from a long description of a not completely consensual blow job to write, “not because I like submission . . . but out of a deep-seated indifference to the uses to which we put our bodies.” It’s passages like this that suggest Millet’s intention is for provocation of the intellectual, not the sexual, kind.
The cerebralizing of sex has been done before, many times, of course, but the title that Millet’s reminds me of, suddenly, is Richard Rhodes’s Making Love, a clear-eyed 1992 memoir in which the author meticulously recounts his sex life, complete with his total number of partners (a surprisingly low eleven for someone who lived through the sexual revolution), the length of his erect penis (five and a half to six and a half inches, depending whether you’re measuring along the top or the underside), and long, detailed descriptions of his efforts to bring his wife to orgasm. While Catherine M. has more narrative thrust, shall we say, than Rhodes’s treatise, they’re both strangely distant from their subject matter, overly concerned with numerology (Millet seems obsessed with counting partners, orgasms, everything up to ants on the ground or cracks in the ceiling) and, well, dull.
But there’s also one important difference between the two. When Making Love came out, nobody went around calling it erotica. It wasn’t and it didn’t pretend to be. But Millet’s confessional—which is published by Grove Press, the house known for works by Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, et al.—on the other hand, seems to be trying to hedge its bets. Like everybody, Millet has her sexual tropes—two or three activities she really likes—and if you’re lucky enough to share her taste, you might get turned on. But if you don’t—and who is totally, completely, and continuously in sync with another person’s sexuality?—you can at the very least admire the author’s unflinching honesty. (It’s not easy, I’d guess, to commit to paper the fact that one likes to be forced into fellatio, or gets off on groups of men lining up and screaming abuse at one another while waiting their turns, or finds something particularly appealing about extremely dirty—as in unwashed—partners.) And if all else fails, there’s the philosophizing to keep you warm at night.
I wouldn’t know how to begin discussing the difference between erotica and pornography, and minds far greater than mine have analyzed the philosophy of sex, but as the old saying goes: I know what I like. And it seems that what’s out there advertised as “sexy” isn’t it.
Take Susan Minot’s Rapture, for example, a novel that takes place during one illicit act of fellatio. It’s listed on Amazon.com under erotica; in fact, on the day I looked, it was the only novel in the top ten. (The others were increasingly specific collections; had I continued on through all four dozen listings, I’m pretty sure I would have discovered the ultimate in niche marketing: a book, say, for left-handed hermaphrodite lesbian cross-dressers who own dogs.) The problem is, there is nothing sexy about the book, which in fact reads more like The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing than Fanny Hill. The engaged-to-be-married man and the fellating woman scan back through their memories of their relationship and banally ponder questions of attraction, commitment, and loss—and once every few pages (the book, mercifully, has only 115 of them), Minot offers up a tiny detail about the act they’re engaging in.
This is sexy? I don’t think so.
So I’m frustrated, in more ways than one, and decide to ask friends about their erotic favorites. Not a one mentions Rapture or Catherine M. Nicholson Baker’s Vox gets tapped, but mostly, I think, because it’s a title people know, thanks to Monica Lewinsky having given it to Clinton. (No one—and I’ve talked to dozens of people, most of them avid readers—even mentions Baker’s execrable The Fermata, which made Vox look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.) I was amazed at the number of people who immediately blurted, “Page 28 in The Godfather” (mass-market paperback edition), and even more amazed that I knew, immediately, just what scene they meant. (You know: Sonny and the bridesmaid doing it against the bedroom door as the wedding is starting downstairs.) My friend Mark chose a story called “Innocence” by Harold Brodkey, all about a man trying to give a woman an orgasm (take that, Richard Rhodes!), a couple of people—men, natch—favor Richard Ford. And then there were the middle-aged guys who pointed to the meat-masturbation scene in Portnoy’s Complaint, and the baby-boomer women who cited the zipless fucks in Fear of Flying. One of my friends said, “I have just three words for you: Lo-li-ta.” Me, I have a strong memory of the toe-sucking scene in Lloyd, by Stanley Bing. The image of the heroine, Mona, sitting on a conference table bare-legged—and more important, bare-footed—as her colleague Lloyd tries desperately not to pop her toes in his mouth provokes out-loud laughter, and something more. (It’s proof positive, if anyone doubted it, that humor is a necessary component for sex.) Lloyd’s tortured fantasy remains such a strong memory that when I expect to see Bing, whom I know socially, I pay careful attention to my footwear.
What I find interesting in all this is that except for a couple of votes for The Story of O, the readers I know define as sexy specific scenes from specific works of fiction rather than, say, Nancy Friday’s nonfiction fantasy-fest My Secret Garden; Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall and Mark Levinson’s recent Satisfaction, a manual so explicit it came in a shrink-wrapped bag; or anything labeled erotica or porn. Could it be that what attracts us is the surprise of an unexpected lovemaking scene in an otherwise linear narrative? Maybe. Or maybe it’s that such scenes are what formed our perception of sexy books in the first place.
I once was interviewed for a women’s magazine article about the role and importance of alcohol in a college woman’s life, and I half-jokingly told the writer that had it not been for drinking, I would never have learned about sex. (She then told me a lot of people had said that.) But the truth is, I owe a lot of the knowledge and appreciation I have for sex to writers and to books, particularly to the late Harold Robbins. In junior high, my best friend Becky and I were 79 Park Avenue and A Stone for Danny Fisher junkies. Every day after school, after we’d put on the stereo and competed to see who could hold the last note in the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” as long as Grace Slick did, we’d retire to one or the other of our bedrooms to read from the Robbins oeuvre. We were so committed to the author, in fact, that we each compiled a complete set of the books and kept them in boxes under our beds. That way, we’d always have a sex scene to read, no matter whose house we were visiting.
A lot of people have this kind of sex-scene sense memory. My friend Judy says she used to read and reread a certain breast-fondling scene from Exodus and she and her then best friend would go hide in the friend’s father’s trailer (!) to reread a particularly hot seduction passage from James Michener’s Hawaii. Even Leo, who as we know is something of a reticent reader, admits he used to carry around a dog-eared copy of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. A Catholic-school boy all the way through college, Leo kept the book in his knapsack instead of, say, under his bed like the proverbial teenage Playboy fan, because that was the one place neither his parents nor the nuns would ever look. Like Becky and me, he had favorite passages, which he marked by turning down the corners of the pages but not, he emphasizes, by writing anything in the margins. That would be too obvious, he explains. Should somebody have found the book, they might have known what he was thinking.
In scouting books for the magazine, I recently came upon a new novel, called The Art of Seeing, by Cammie McGovern. For the most part, I didn’t like it. But I was struck by one aside that comes late in the book, in which the narrator explains that the heroine and her parents often listened to books on tape while riding in the car. It was a great educational and family bonding experience, she says, unless the book they chose happened to have a sex scene.
I can definitely relate. Except for those afternoons with Becky, I don’t think I’ve ever read a favorite sex scene aloud to another person—or had one read to me—a
nd I’ve never understood the sex-manual advice suggesting that couples should read such passages to each other. Am I prudish about sex? I don’t think so. I’d say it’s actually a matter of having correctly ordered priorities. The mingling of bodies and emotions and fluids is one thing, I say. But reading about it: now, that’s personal.
October 2
Sex and the City-Across the
Pond
I was talking books with Susanna,5 one of the twenty-somethings who works at the magazine, when I mentioned the novel Fear of Flying.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a book from the seventies about women and sex that kind of changed the way several generations have relationships,” I said, adding that Erica Jong—who coined the term “zipless fuck”—was the first mainstream female writer to talk about sex the way male authors had always done. “You know,” I said, “I could probably scare up a copy for you if you want to read it.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I don’t really read historicals.”
There are probably a dozen appropriate responses to that comment—loud guffaws, for example, or a healthy session of eye-rolling—but I was too stunned to make them. Fear of Flying is a historical? I thought. Dated, perhaps. A period piece, maybe. But a historical novel? I didn’t think so, but I was struck too (uncharacteristically) speechless to respond at all.
