THE SHY AND FEARFUL LITERARY REVOLUTION: JAMES CUMES
EXTRACT
As we entered the 1960s, the pace of our flight to freedom or licentiousness in the real world quickened.
British poet Philip Larkin told us that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three.”
More or less concurrently, our literary treatment of sex was transformed from a patient evolution into a virtual revolution. From hinting and teasing, our literary flirtation with the intimacies of sex now took us – and quite quickly - “all the way”.
But the revolution still remained, except at the more extreme literary edges, somewhat shy and fearful.
It gathered pace as the second half of the 20th century brought a wholesale revolution in our every day – and overnight – attitudes to sexual behaviour.
This real-life revolution accepted not only heterosexual frolics using a variety of positions, techniques, sex-toys and the rest, but also homosexual relationships between two men or lesbian love between two women. A variety of other activities also received a high degree of acceptance, whether among straight or other couples.
A reasonable hypothesis is that these permissive attitudes towards sex compelled at least some superficial acceptance in the literary world. With some lag, this did occur. The revolution in the real world was accompanied by a broadly similar revolution in the ways that the literary world dealt with what had been, especially in Anglo-Saxon societies of the Victorian Age, a pretentiously “delicate” and, at the same time, irresistibly titillating subject.
It is hard to say to what extent the somewhat shy and fearful literary revolution helped quicken and intensify the everyday sexual revolution. It may have been the other way round. Probably each felt an empathy in which one lent reinforcement to the other: more sexy literature encouraged more liberated sex; more liberated sex encouraged the sophistication of its literary counterpart.
Whatever the relative influences, the revolution is still far from complete. In launching Martin Amis’ novel, The Pregnant Widow in January 2010, the publisher Jonathan Cape wrote:
But the revolution still remained, except at the more extreme literary edges, somewhat shy and fearful.
It gathered pace as the second half of the 20th century brought a wholesale revolution in our every day – and overnight – attitudes to sexual behaviour.
This real-life revolution accepted not only heterosexual frolics using a variety of positions, techniques, sex-toys and the rest, but also homosexual relationships between two men or lesbian love between two women. A variety of other activities also received a high degree of acceptance, whether among straight or other couples.
A reasonable hypothesis is that these permissive attitudes towards sex compelled at least some superficial acceptance in the literary world. With some lag, this did occur. The revolution in the real world was accompanied by a broadly similar revolution in the ways that the literary world dealt with what had been, especially in Anglo-Saxon societies of the Victorian Age, a pretentiously “delicate” and, at the same time, irresistibly titillating subject.
It is hard to say to what extent the somewhat shy and fearful literary revolution helped quicken and intensify the everyday sexual revolution. It may have been the other way round. Probably each felt an empathy in which one lent reinforcement to the other: more sexy literature encouraged more liberated sex; more liberated sex encouraged the sophistication of its literary counterpart.
Whatever the relative influences, the revolution is still far from complete. In launching Martin Amis’ novel, The Pregnant Widow in January 2010, the publisher Jonathan Cape wrote:
Where to purchase Sex and the Short Story:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=vI9Cn9TESiQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22James+Cumes%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VQ9KU8GZKc2XkwWR24CwCg&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Short-Story-James-Cumes-ebook/dp/B00CAY26RY
https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/sex-and-the-short-story/id634315304?mt=11
http://www.asenseofplacepublishing.com/sex_story.html
