Good sex in literature: why is it so hard to find?

Julian Barnes claims that British novelists feel obligated to write love scenes and so make a hash of it, replacing euphemisms with cliches. So what is so tricky about literary sex?

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• • Stuart Jeffries
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013

Was it good for you? Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981). Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Who wrote this? "He lifted her on to his hips and staggered around with her mouth locked to his, and then they were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal. He pulled away abruptly, toward the unmade single bed, and knocked over a pile of books and documents relating to overpopulation."

Here's a clue: they came second in salon.com's 2011 Good Sex awards. Guessed yet? Here's how the scene ended. "He began to cry into Lalitha's hair, and she comforted him, brushed his tears away, and they made love again more tiredly and painfully, until he did finally come, without fanfare, in her hand." The answer? Jonathan Franzen, in Freedom.

If Franzen does write well about sex, he does so in part because he allows in humour (that overpopulation gag; and the idea that a really good orgasm might be saluted by a horn section) without letting it overwhelm the scene or destroy its pathos. He also recognises the personality-transcending nature of sex – at least if, and I don't want to be prescriptive, you're doing it right. And it is this very universality or impersonality of sex that creates a problem for those novelists who write about it: in a steamy paragraph of universalisable fatuity, you risk destroying the characters you have spent the preceding pages creating.

Julian Barnes, writing in this week's Radio Times, identifies a specifically British problem about sex in literature. Ever since the ban on DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was overturned in 1960 (when Booker-winning Barnes was 14), what was a blanket prohibition has been replaced by almost the reverse: "not just a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex". On the one hand, at least we were catching up with all those mucky foreign writers – Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Pauline Réage and Georges Bataille – who'd been writing about sex for years without the postmaster general puffing and blowing unerotically in their collective earhole. But post-Chatterley, there was a problem for newly liberated BritLit, contends Barnes. "Sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new cliches." Typical British: they come too late – and then unedifyingly.

Or maybe that's unfair. You don't have to love this passage from Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body to recognise there's nothing in it but writerly desire: "She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gates. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing."
Must all literary sex, such as that in Fifty Shades of Grey, be a realistic representation of the author's love life? Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Why is sex so hard to write well? Perhaps, the most lovely passages of sex in fiction are those that concern the moments before or immediately after rather than in what highbrow critics call mid-rumpypumpydom. Consider, for instance, this sweet scene featuring an elderly couple from Mohsin Hamid's forthcoming novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: "Neither of you reaches your finish. You begin to deflate before that moment comes. But, I should add, you do reach pleasure, and a measure of comfort, and lying there afterwards, temporarily thwarted and a little embarrassed, you unexpectedly start to chuckle, and she joins you, and it is the best and warmest laugh either of you has had in some time."

No doubt Barnes has a point about commercial obligation. Hence, perhaps, Fifty Shades of Grey. Proper literary writers, like shy ones at some orgy, are fearful of such entanglements, or perhaps of ending up in the Bad Sex in Fiction awards – like Alan Titchmarsh with Mr MacGregor, in which a man having sex with a woman becomes "entangled in the lissome limbs of this human boa constrictor". There's a fear, argues Barnes: "that readers may conclude, when you describe a sexual act, that it must already have happened to you in pretty much the manner described". Barnes gives the example of Kingsley Amis, whom he says abandoned a novel in the 1980s because it contained a gay character and he feared "the chaps at the club might think I was queer".

"This seemed, even at the time, a pitiful excuse, and seems the more pitiful with hindsight," Barnes writes. Do we think Winterson had a sexual encounter like the one quoted? Maybe – but really who cares? Similarly, EL James denies the sado-masochistic passages in her novels are based on her own experiences, but even if they were a faithful report of her sex life, that wouldn't make her books any better. The reductive biographical reading of fiction is the least interesting. It's hard to imagine that John Updike or Philip Roth, still less Marilyn French or Rita Mae Brown, would have cared.
Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney get close in Steven Soderbergh's 1998 film Out of Sight. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MCA/Universal

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