Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Coffee-Table Books for High Coffee Tables

  EROTIC ART OF THE EAST, by Philip Rawson. Introduction by Alex Comfort. 380 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

  PRIMITIVE EROTIC ART, edited by Philip Rawson. 310 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973.

  EROTIC ART OF THE WEST, by Robert Melville. With a Short History of Erotic Art by Simon Wilson. 318 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973.

  Here we have a new genre: the coffee-table book that should be kept out of the reach of the children. Higher coffee tables would seem to be the answer; but the Japanese are using all our tall lumber to make bowling alleys with. So the alternative is to raise a generation for whom there is no pudendum, and that can call a vulva a ——. That generation is here, leaning on my coffee table, and when it takes over I fear G. P. Putnam’s Sons will go begging for buyers as avid as I to wallow in the formerly forbidden delights (1,001 pages, more or less) of their so-called World History of Erotic Art.

  These three compendia have texts that, though beside the selling point, in decency should be reviewed. The oldest publication, dating back to staid old 1968, is Erotic Art of the East. Dr. Alex Comfort, well known to loving couples as the master chef stirring the stew of The Joy of Sex, was announced as general editor and contributed an introduction regretting the “Victorian terror sexualis” and our present lack of “a technology of the emotions.” Philip Rawson then, in his long chapter on Indian erotic art, described an elaborate technology based on the notion that semen is a divine substance which prolonged intercourse without orgasm will force up the spinal column into the head, producing enlightenment. By way of technical illustration, there were many tinted depictions of a rubbery prince squatting en face with his smiling, netherly exposed lady, his lingam thrust into her yoni as patiently as the little Dutch boy’s finger in the dike. The Chinese, a later chapter told us, took this Tantric principle—copulation without male consummation—a Confucian step further by making their supreme sex symbol the ancient sage; his longevity and spiritual well-being bore witness to a lifetime of absorbing concubines’ beneficial yin without surrendering any considerable portion of his precious yang. The Chinese, incidently, considered jade congealed dragon semen. Whatever the cosmological delusions behind them, the Asian doctrines of sexual conduct did place value, Rawson argued, on the gratification of the female. And it is true, the women in these representations look much less alarmed than those in Western erotica. This volume was rounded out by David James’s game plea for the skimpy amorous art of iconophobic, homosexual Islam, and by Richard Lane’s fussy monograph on shunga—Japanese “spring pictures,” pictures of sexual activity traditionally part of the printmaster’s production and often given as wedding presents. The shyest bride, after studying the monstrously exaggerated genitals that shunga shows, could only be relieved at the sight of her husband’s.

  Five years later, Dr. Comfort has vanished as general editor and two new volumes sumptuously appear. Primitive Erotic Art, edited by Rawson and written by a variety of hands, suffers from the disparity of material included under “primitive” and from what I take to be some undue haste in the assembling. Rawson’s opening essay, on early sexual art, is excellent, once he has given the Christian missionaries and Western sexual neuroses their compulsory lumps. He takes art to be at the very beginning erotic—a descent, via sinuous caves, into the womb of Mother Earth, there to stimulate her, with rites that included drawings, to continue her generation of the wildlife that fed a hunting society. Primitive magic, Rawson feels, should be understood less as a mechanistic effort to cause a result than an effort of identification and possession through analogy and symbol; rite and its attendant art “exalt the sense of life, and elaborate a mystery-cult to conserve and renew it.” The feminine sex of the earth was the first metaphor; the first works of art appear to be vulva-like cups gouged on the underside of a tomb slab. The maze, as visual pattern or narrative theme, betokens the mystery of the female innards. Until the rise of agricultural society, generic energy was identified as female; with seed-sowing came phallic art. Rawson, as he pursues analogies through pre-history, seems sometimes too agile to be true: “It is not at all difficult to associate these objects both with the feathered phalli painted in the Palaeolithic caves and with the bunched besoms which the medieval witches were supposed to straddle and ride to the Sabbat; supposed examples of witch-besoms even have handles carved as penises. The bunch attached to the end must be a graphic image for the seminal jet, a plastic analogue to the colored water sprayed about at the Indian Holi procession and the rice or confetti thrown at modern Western weddings.” Well, maybe so; but a cigar, as Freud said, can be just a cigar.

  By comparison, the following essays on Celtic, Indian, African, and Pacific art seem plodding and bereft of a thesis. Tom Harrison’s account of Borneo and New Guinea has the strength of testimony from the field, mixing art objects with anecdotes and with artifacts like the all-too-vividly-depicted penis bar. Cottie Burland on sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, seems rattled by the richness of his vast topic, grateful for all signs of “restraint” from the frequently “violent” artists, and prone to take refuge in the undefined concept of “naturalness” and “close to nature.” Very bothersomely, the plates, many of them beautiful, are not well related to the texts. Though the two other books in the series usefully key the plates to the discussion by means of numbers in the broad margin, this device is not employed here; nor are the plates included in the index. There are almost as many pictures without explanation as there are descriptions without illustration. The tribal name “Colima” identifies eight of the American pottery pieces, including one on the cover, yet the word doesn’t occur in the index or, that I can find, in the text. An editorial disservice has been done to both the scholarly authors and the compilers of the photographs: they should have been introduced to each other.

  Erotic Art of the West, however, is a singular production. Robert Melville, art editor of the New Statesman, has not so much written a history of erotic art in the West as he has threaded an essay on eroticism through a personal anthology of works of art. Medieval to modern illustrations range unchronologically under chapter heads like “The Toilet,” “Violence and Violation,” and “Treatment of the Parts”; sensitive and lively explications of visual images mingle with startlingly physical speculations—“few men could honestly claim that they have not at some time or another desired to urinate inside the beloved.” Melville has an engaging way of concerning himself with the physical comfort of the figures in Renaissance tableaux, nude on their sometimes awkwardly placed pillows. He rarely says too much, though his eye sees worlds, and his sense of flaws is as keen as his warmth of response—Renoir’s later nudes became “a kind of slow-breathing earthenware,” the uneasy perspective in Vermeer’s At the Procuress’s betrays that the “real psychological situation is between the woman in the yellow bodice and the painter.” His discourse on the ways and parts of love touches on a number of works that, by the standards of the Asian book, are not erotic at all; indeed, one of the fascinations for the reader, if he looks at the pictures first, is to discover how the author will work each one of them in. To be sure, Melville’s fine fancy can become merely tricksome—William Copley’s women “come forth in their bras and suspender belts as the issue of a drop of sperm that fell on to an advertisement in a woman’s magazine”—and even for a personal anthology, the choice of reproductions seem unbalanced. There are seven Hans Bellmers but not one George Grosz; seven Dalis but none of Arp’s or Moore’s suggestive biomorphs; no Bonnard, though there is a section devoted to “The Bath”; no Courbet, though his nudes are described as revolutionary and (figuratively) seminal; no obscene or priapic Gothic gargoyles or miserichords, though many exist; and no modern pornography, though Victorian, 18th-century, and Renaissance examples are given. A British bias shows, I think, in the generous sampling of post-war English painters (plus Jim Dine, who lives in London) and the almost total ignoring of American Pop Art, which reeks
of sex as heavily as Art Nouveau. The entire New York Pop scene, indeed, is represented only by one rather bland Marisol—better, for this book, her slyly ithyphallic “Guy” or the Coke-bottle fellatio of “Amor.”

  Yet Melville has made a book to please himself, that begins and ends in air (with a quote from Henry James that means as near nothing as grammatical English can) and that by its very blitheness somewhat refutes the imputations of Western anti-sexuality made by the exponents of primitive and Asian art. Broadly, one might say that the purpose of primitive erotic art is to participate (in the processes of vitality; an art whose phallic emblems double as initiatory dildoes), that of Asian erotic art is to show (as marriage manual, as religious illustration), and that of Western civilization seems to be to divulge, to confess, to expose. The resonances of a shared mythology are replaced by those of private psychology; from Bosch and Botticelli on, personal meanings subvert and supercharge overt symbolism. The atmosphere of Western erotic art is relatively “anxious,” to use Alex Comfort’s word; the very surface of many paintings feels tangled and restless. Whatever the lovers are portrayed together or one is the rendered model and the other the unseen artist, a dimension of individual psychological invasion has been added to sexual possession. The faces, even in ecstasy, are not masks. Melville’s book, at least to this Westerner, never is monotonous in the way the other two are. A variety of blind men have touched the sexual elephant standing in our midst; here are their impressions. If a spirit of anthropological dispassion is to be applied consistently, the repressions that Christianity and then industrialism asked of the West need be no more deplored than the genital mutilations common in primitive societies or the cruel rigidity of Oriental social structures. Nowhere is love free, any more than men are free, even in a wilderness. The beautiful whores of the Hindu temple “heaven-bands” smile out at us from a historical remission that ended; Moslem Puritans came and mutilated them. Now we stand in a moment when again sex seems worth studying and celebrating. More, it now appears our last uncontaminated act, the sinuous passageway down into the womb where worship is possible, in a unifying darkness of instinctive purpose. In this sexiest of times, as a tug of reaction begins to be felt, our set of three volumes offers us a comradely perspective, as wide as the world and deep as history, into the erotic images with which other men have sought “to exalt the sense of life.” “Exaltation,” indeed, in the sense of lifting high into visibility, describes the crudest lavatory graffito as well as the noblest nude.

  And what of these pictures themselves? Having passed my eyes over so many images of copulation, flirtation, erection, and excitation, I feel as if, like the weary headmaster surveying his June ocean of unruly eternal youth, I should bestow a few prizes. Best Phallus: Aubrey Beardsley Best Vulva: Hokusai (shunga tradition generally leaves the lovers clothed; the heads show and, at an often unlikely remove, the cloth parts to reveal genitalia like hairy actors on a puppet-stage). Erotica with Least Hangups: Mochica (Peru) pottery vessels (produced, surely, in a joking spirit, as are the obscene Cherokee pipes “smoker” jokes). Nicest Couple: a very dearly drawn Chinese pair, from a 19th-century album, he with a dark but honest penis, she with a bib and bound feet, both with tiny, utterly kindly smiles. Most Repulsive Couple: four-armed goddess with Shiva in two aspects, 20th-century Bengal painting. Most Disturbing Artist: Hans Bellmer, who combines pornographic fury with linear facility; can erotic art have any further to go? Best Venus: Lucas Cranach. Masterwork Most Missed: Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Wimpy fellating and gamahuching one another, in comic book circulating in southeastern Pennsylvania in the late 1940’s.

  Before the Sky Collapses

  XINGU: The Indians, Their Myths, by Orlando Villas Boas and Claudio Villas Boas, translated from the Portuguese by Susana Hertelendy Rudge. 270 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.

  Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths is certainly one of the best books of 1974 whose title begins with “X.” The volume shows love, from the publisher’s handsome two-color printing job to the lifetimes of service the authors have devoted to the Brazilian Indians. Since 1946, the Boas brothers (a third brother, Leonardo, died in 1961) have dwelt with small intermission among the dozen or so tribes that live in villages along the Rio Xingu and its tributaries, in virtual isolation from the modern civilization that dominates and threatens them. This book, edited from the brothers’ journals by Kenneth S. Brecher, an American anthropologist who himself spent two years among the Xinguanos, consists in the main of thirty-one tales, or “myths,” transcribed from oral narrations in, evidently, the rough Portuguese of bilingual Indians. The Boases state, in their introduction, “There were no pressures of time; instead, our interest was to transmit with the greatest possible accuracy everything heard and understood over … twenty-five years of daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute communal living with the Indians.” The stories are shared, with some exceptions, among the tribes, and they are prefaced by a brief but affecting description of the region’s geography and fauna and climate and history. Affecting, that is, in its sense of achieved intimacy with the alien, of modern men willfully dissolving their calendars and chronometers in the joyous cycles of the natural year:

  In April the rains taper off and the waters recede.… The clouds turn white and vaporous and are propelled by cold gusts of wind coming from the south and the southeast. It is the beginning of “summer.”

  At this time of the year, it is common to see birds flying across the skies, beautiful formations of jabiru storks, flocks of white herons, and pairs of colhereiros in search of lagoons and igapós.

  As the waters recede from the shores, gulls, bacuraus de coleira branca, ducks, and marrecãos fly in. The tracajas [fresh-water turtles] and small alligators, who at flood time had clung to floating tree trunks, search for sandy shores to enjoy the heat of the sun.

  There are worlds sequestered from our world; there is a history remote from our history:

  As a result of violent attacks unleashed on them by a nation called Aussumadí, who invaded their lands, the Trumái decided to move. Under the leadership of two great chieftains, Auaturí and Jaquanarí, they headed for “where the sun sets.” After trekking through extensive forests, they arrived at the banks of a river that they said was the Kuluene (the Xingu, in our nomenclature).

  Amid our human multitudes, how much such history has been hidden and lost! Even within the microcosm of the Xingu, there are mysteries, problematical events just beyond the reach of memory, and tribes that are “hostile” or “asocial”; they have the vividness of the half-seen:

  In temperament, the Txikão are nervous and restless, reacting to any novel stimulus or situation that crops up. This trait, very pronounced in them, may be a natural result of the isolation in which they live.

  Isolation within isolation. More exotic still are the reports of the Mnatá-Karaiá. In a bygone time, a legend among the Kamaiurá tribe runs, some of their men, travelling, heard a whistling sound:

  Curious to know what it was, they walked in the direction the sound was coming from. After a while, they reached the village, which belonged to the Minatá-Karaiá. The village was full of people, and the men had a hole in the top of their heads that produced the whistle the Kamaiurá had heard from far away. The Minatá-Karaiá had another peculiarity: from underneath their armpits bunches of minatás [coconuts] grew, and they were constantly snatching the fruits off, breaking them against their heads, and eating them.

  What the Boas brothers in their introduction call “the human mind’s natural penchant for the marvellous” does become, as the white introducers yield to the Indian tellers of the thirty-one tales, wearing. These myths make stiff reading. Some of the fault, perhaps, belongs to the translator. There seems an unnecessary plethora of italicized un-English terms; in the passages already quoted, why not simply say “turtles” and “coconuts” instead of “tracajas [fresh-water turtles]” and “minatás [coconuts]”? Is there no sufficiently accurate English equivalent of jakuí, püa, itóto, irra
cuitáp, imurã, tucunaré-aruiáp, moinrucú, etc., etc.? A conscientious, if not ideal, reader of this volume would be turning to the glossary several times for every page. An ideal reader would know Portuguese and the relevant Indian languages and would have already read the Boas journals in the original. While an excessive verbal pedantry constantly pricks the eye, footnotes are rigorously excluded, where a clarifying note on ritual, or animal habits, or Xingu customs would often be helpful. And though the original was probably not a masterpiece of style, does the English have to be quite so flat, colorless, and arhythmic? “The Jurana had everything when the waters began to grow with the rains.” Was there no more concrete way of putting that? “She had plunged into a murky part of the woods, and finding the ladder by way of a shortcut, she climbed up and was gone.” Is “by way of a shortcut” really the thought? For me, it imposes upon the murky part of the wood a suddenly urban pedestrian, saving valuable seconds on the way to an appointment on an upper floor.