Category Archives: Books

Haruki Murakami : My Greatest Novelist

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I can’t remember when I first came across Murakami, but it was some time in the early 90s, probably his 3rd novel A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). From that first reading I was hooked, entranced by his surreal imagination, the contemporary view of Japanese society and his wide ranging and accurate musical references. You could tell you were taking off on a wild careening ride, destination unknown. In fact this is the way he writes, the novel expands autonomously as he works on it, yet he nearly always manages a satisfying conclusion. As he says “writing itself is like dreaming”. To me this makes him a truly modern novelist, you don’t feel manipulated by the characters and events, the door is ajar and there is simply a sense of mutual exploration. The often bizarre characters grow organically, reacting to strange events in a totally plausible way. These are open books, there is no predestination. He manages this because his writing style is somewhat prosaic, relating them in a very down to earth way, however bizarre they might be.

This unique style is probably down to the fact he never intended to be a novelist and certainly never trained to be one. He found his own unique voice, he explains in Novelist as a Vocation (2022) , by writing in English and then translating this back into Japanese. This gave him the simplified, pared down and highly readable style we know today. He is not in any literary tradition, which lends him an honest and personal voice. In fact the story of how he became a novelist, which he has told several times, could come straight out of one his novels. At the age of 29, he was running his own small jazz club called Peter Cat, when he went see his favourite baseball team and…

The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. 

After the match he bought writing paper and a pen and proceeded to write every night for six months, producing his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979).

Before he became well known in the West, I always felt that Murakami readers were like a secret club. If in conversation with someone unknown and the subject of his books arose and they had read them, a mutual friendship seemed assured. A particularly bizarre experience of this nature happened in Northern Armenia. The country was suffering at the time from a complete breakdown, the Russians had left a few years previously, leading to the closure of farms, factories and even the education system. Nobody seemed to know who ran anything, people were just getting by in unregulated chaos. I was reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), a surreal cyberpunk novel about a crumbling walled town. There were many strange parallels between the book and the situation I found myself in and Murakami has stated that “I was so popular in the 1990s in Russia, at the time they were changing from the Soviet Union – there was big confusion, and people in confusion like my books”. Anyway to my surprise, one of our drivers (in fact from Syria) had read some Murakami, so I had leave my copy of the book with him, it seemed both appropriate and fair in the strange circumstances.

The lack of pretension combined with the acid and surreal wit in Murakami’s work, often makes me reflect on the similarity to British writers like Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll, J.G. Ballard and even Brian Catling. There is an unusual symbiosis between Japan and the UK as islands at the end of continents, which perhaps leads to a unique form of isolated irrationality, as well as a secret understanding of the others situation. While his authorial voice can always be heard, his novels are quite varied, and he appears to have great fun with the design, Norwegian Wood (1987) appearing as 2 small volumes in a box, 1Q84 (2010) had a heavy black burnt look and Killing Commendatore (2017) had bullet holes on the cover. He always entertains the reader.

My admiration for Murakami was cemented by perhaps his greatest novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995). If you read only one of his novels, this is the definitive one, for me at least. Shortly after this I read Haruko Murakami and the Music of Words (2002), a biography written by his translator Jay Rubin. Murakami had always been a quiet and mysterious character but this book revealed both his life story and the vast range of his output once he became an author. He writes translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver as light relief from his novels, as well as a several collections of short stories, interviews and reportage. The novel Norwegian Wood (1987) which ensured his popularity in Japan and led to his living in the USA for several years, is charming, sad and maybe a little dated. Perhaps avoid 1Q84, it is huge and highly repetitive, but let me recommend nearly everything else. There are two semi autobiographical works What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) and Novelist as a Vocation (2022), both of which are fascinating. All of his short story collections are highly entertaining and I thought his most recent novel Killing Commendatore (2017) to be a return to form. Looking forward to The City and Its Uncertain Walls due to published in translation later this year. 

Walking on the Ceiling

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I read the book above in 1976, after I had taken LSD aka acid for the first time. It was a profound, yet relatively short lived experience. The book itself is an entertaining, if over the top read. Let’s not forget Timothy Leary was a well educated university lecturer with a Ph.D, he knew how to write, lecture and entertain. The Politics of Ecstasy was first published in 1966 in the USA and would become the foundational story of the late 60s hippie drug culture. It was first published in England in 1970, and I read it with a pinch of American salt, I already knew exaggeration when I saw it, yet it had an authority and intellectual chutzpah which was invigorating. I was already well aware of the profoundly spiritual and dangerous properties of this drug, having quizzed the few people I knew who had taken it, they had my admiration at the time. I had done my my homework, but nothing could prepare me for the reality. I believe it was on this first trip that I discovered how disorientating it could be, since I was at a concert in Pathfoot, Stirling University. Feeling spaced out, I realised I should be lying down and relaxing, so I departed early. As I was leaving through a long, large corridor I discovered I could rotate the whole corridor until I was walking on the ceiling. This was a great feeling until I start thinking too much about it and realised that this might not be a good idea since the corridor was not under my full control, it seemed to to have a mind of its own and I did not wish to fall to the floor – hey where is the floor, what is a floor, I thought gravity was supposed to exist, apparently now it does not… Most of Leary’s musings are based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, and that should tell you before venturing any further that we are in dangerous territory. This territory was politely called a “bad trip”, yet it could destroy lives. We all knew what had happened to Syd Barrett, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd. For a good example of the foggy synaesthesia brought on by LSD, listen to his 1969 album The Madcap Laughs.

The “shit hit the fan” on my second trip a few years later, when I was back at Stirling. That night I kept notes of this profound experience, which do not make much sense now, but do provide a few pointers which I will attempt to interpret and explain:

No.1 : Everything was melancholy and industrial because we were probably listening to Escalator over the Hill by Carla Bley, not the best choice in the circumstances, but I liked it. It is also possible we were listening to Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, in particularly the tracks In The Light and Kashmir. These notes begin when we had retreated to my little room and I was choosing the music. There was a lot of chaos in the next door flat (of which more later) and I had determined to have a spiritual experience by listening to cool music lying on my bed.

No.2 & 3 : These were my flatmates, also tripping – everyone was, and no doubt we were arranging ourselves in my tiny bedroom, with most people lying on the floor, finding cushions and trying to get comfortable.

No.4 : Any minor interruption seemed freighted with meaning back then.

No.5 : No doubt this was me playing the album Big Fun by Miles Davis, released in 1974, an electronic jazz album with an Eastern drone vibe, and probably the track Great Expectations which goes on for 27 minutes.

No.6 : Fweejum is a made up word that has stayed with me. I was attempting to express the noise a a large vehicle or other object makes sweeping past you, think of it as the imaginary noise that time makes when it is moving very fast, with a doppler effect. Pronounce it without enunciating the letters and you might be getting close to the sense of dropping through the floor, through time and space at great velocity.

No.7 : My flatmates were probably getting fed up with the music and had decided to use the experience to make some unconsciously inspirational art. I have no idea really, it could easily be an imagined drawing in the great dome of starscape enveloping us. Pretty sure I wasn’t physically drawing.

No.8 : Here we are in proper meaningless drug addled territory, there seem to be an infinity or maybe just 166 rabbit holes, blind alleyways or dark caves to plunge into. They multiply as you examine them and it is easy to get confused, you might choose the wrong one. At least it wasn’t 666.

No.9 : By this time I am probably listening to Go Ahead John, the third side of Big Fun and featuring the jazz rock guitarist John McLaughlin. On acid anything visualised tends to mutate and expand, yet seem real.

That was the sensible part of the evening. Beforehand an older and I thought wiser friend, also on drugs, had been violently sick. I looked on dispassionately at the fabulous technicolour mess, containing a wonderful mass of imaginary writhing creatures, just grateful I hadn’t experienced the nausea of feeling the soft organs of my body decide to leave home. Never mix drink and serious drugs I thought selfishly to myself. Meanwhile next door my fellow students were in full on LSD party drinking mode, which soon turned sour. Among our number was a garrulous French student, who spoke perfectly good English. As the evening progressed she was picked on and her every utterance became a source of great hilarity, purely due to her French accent. At an early point I had tried to intervene, to no avail, which was probably when I sloped off to my bedroom to listen to music. At dawn, many hours later, I returned, and she had been reduced to a gibbering wreck, who could no longer speak in any language, completely incoherent. She was truly in a state, yet the barbs continued and I felt powerless by this time to intervene. The behaviour of my fellow students, despite being on drugs, had been appalling. After several days she did recover the power of speech, but I believe she left Stirling and went back to France.

By this time I was trying to look after myself, sleep seemed impossible, life extended emptily, all desire had gone leaving yawning emptiness. That next day I attempted to behave normally and attended a lecture. I was beyond caring, nothing went in and it appeared nothing ever would. I had heard about flashbacks, when you regress to a drug induced stupor, and I was in fear of a slowly repeating chaos. Had I ruined my life? Would this go on forever? Of course not, after 36 hours with no sleep I was simply at my wits end and exhausted. Still it would take a good few days before I re-assembled my life, and determined to slowly clear up my mental state.

The fact that drugs were everywhere at Stirling can be clearly seen in the covers of The Student Handbook for the years 1975-1977. In addition drugs were openly traded in the Students Union, Alangrange, while the University itself hit the headlines in 1976 when a student broke his leg while “attempting to fly” from a third floor window. The young man broke his leg, and in court claimed he was high on LSD. A few months later, to my horror, there he was in our kitchen high on LSD. I did not think this was a good idea as we were on the top floor. I also vividly remember talking down a minor member of the Royal Family who had taken too many mushrooms. I was a bit annoyed since I had to buy him lunch and midday seemed to be the wrong time to take drugs. He had probably been up all night, I guess. Closer to home my flatmate, who was a big burly motor-biker from Dundee, decided to decorate his room with black bin-bags, which covered every surface – walls, floor and ceiling, and I nicknamed his room the black hole of Calcutta. What started off as a bit of fun soon descended into something more serious, he refused to leave this room and I presume he was taking lots of drugs. A form of psychosis crept in, he didn’t listen to any of us and stopped attending lectures. Suddenly he became obsessed with saving frogs. It was spring and the frogs were migrating across a road from the large lake at the centre of the University. There were literally thousands of frogs and it seemed inevitable a few would be killed on this quiet road. I was concerned enough to try and help my flatmate save some of these frogs, but I soon realised it was a pointless exercise, and that this formerly robust human being was being brought low by a serious mental illness. He disappeared at the end of term, never to return.

After promising myself that my LSD days were over, I believe I did take it once again, but it was a much milder experience, I am glad to say, and have little memory of it. I was lucky, and never did experience a bad trip, but I could easily see how that could happen if taken in the wrong circumstances and without due respect to the dangers. Later in life I did try ecstasy and MDMA briefly at festivals, pleasant but nothing compared to the mind curdling power of the acid trips mentioned above. I had lost the desire to lose control in this way, although I still knew a few people who ended up in hospital due to imbibing so called soft drugs. I certainly do not regret taking LSD, it was a remarkable lesson in the powers of the mind and how sanity can be paper thin. However, much to my disappointment, this experience was no spiritual shortcut. I did not arrive in Nirvana, but maybe discovered there are other ways to get there.

If you want to hear the real atmosphere of these times and the liturgical, obsessive nature of the promotion of LSD listen to Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out by Dr. Timothy Leary, a motion picture soundtrack album made by Mercury in 1967.
Here is a taster from a track called The Trip: Root Chakra:
“…Drift single celled in soft tissue swamp, sink gently into dark fertile marsh, drift beyond the body, float to the centre (I’m Drowning!) float beyond life and death, down soft ladders of memory.”

Musical Biographies

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Mezz Mezzrow in his office, New York, 1949

I greatly enjoy reading musical biographies, they are usually informative and take you closer to the music. A really good one let’s you hear the voice of the composer, through quotes and interviews. They are are also quite surprising and strange, all these people are different and defined, usually working in a very specific and often quite mannered way. My favourite author at the moment has to be John F. Szwed, an American anthropology professor who really knows and loves music. His defining work is Space is the Place : The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, which explores of the life of Herman Blount (Sun Ra), despite his many attempts to conceal his real-life origins. The amount of research is staggering, yet Professor Szwed does not lose sight of the invented character Sun Ra became, revelling in both the fantasy life and unique music that was created by the Sun Ra Arkestra. He quotes, pays respect and provides a personal exegesis of the crazy life led by this man, always understanding when he can. In the other books I have read by him, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth and So What: The Life of Miles Davis, he uses the latest biographical information to update the standard stories with many insights, never pandering to the accepted formula, while always accenting the musical development.

Many biographers simply tell the life story, they seem to forget the musical history. We all know that music can be difficult to write about, but the critical faculty appears to vacate many a biography. Hey, tell me why something – an album – is good and why we should love it, that is surely part of any good musical biography. I will mention here just 2 books which were really appalling: View from the Exterior by Alan Clayson about Serge Gainsbourg, so badly written and patronising I threw it across the room in anger. Then there is Hey Hi Hello by Annie Nightingale, a lovely DJ, who seemed to lack a sub-editor, never mind a fact checker, writing a cobbled together self-serving mess.

So maybe here I should tell you about a good English biography of Serge Gainsbourg, A Fistful Of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons. She is herself a real music writer and part time musician, but her masterwork is surely I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. This great biography appears to have been written with the full participation of the subject, featuring many interviews, but does not seem cloying or hagiographic. It appears definitive, details all the music, all the scandal, that is all that I want. The same could be said for Different Every Time by Marcus O’Dair, the authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, and I also greatly enjoyed All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt. To mention a classic, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald is fabulous, especially the “Introduction: Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade”, but it’s hardly a biography as such. Naturally I loved Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer by Philip Watson, but it is a huge and detailed tome, so first you you have to know and love the music. In terms of general music books, two stand out, The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the 20th Century (2007) by Alex Ross and Improvisation – Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980, revised 1992) by Derek Bailey. For an interesting overview of popular music try Let’s Do It and Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley. If you’re a fan of Soul music then the trilogy of Detroit 67, Memphis 68, Harlem 69 by Stuart Cosgrove are a fascinating read. For a more literary, poetic approach I recommend Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, an imagined life of Buddy Bolden in 1905 New Orleans.

Another interesting area is the ghost written biography, you are never quite sure who you are listening to, although they can be entertaining. Certainly Life by Keith Richards was better than expected, you can hear his voice and his love of the music. Also quite readable, if formulaic, are the Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend autobiographies. My own favourites include Morrissey (arch and selective), Tracey Thorn (honest and now local), Tony Visconti (Bolan and Bowie) and Cosey Fanni Tutti (proper artist). I also enjoyed Words Without Music by Philip Glass, a stranger journey than you might have imagined. Special mention should be given to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, fabulous chapters in a life, but not the whole story, so we await Volume 2, ha ha. For a truly eclectic and well written blog about music try The Blue Moment by Richard Williams, he knows everyone and is always interesting.

Alright, the greatest ever music biography has to be Really the Blues written by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe in 1946. This is the best because it is easily the first and written in a unique hip argot. It breaks all the rules since it is evidently ghost written and grossly exaggerated, by an average accompanist to the great Sidney Bechet. Nevertheless it contains all the musical fervour, the drugs and the polemic (re race) a funky biography requires. To realise this book was published in 1946 was a revelation, it predates On the Road by Jack Kerouac by more than 10 years, and is counter-cultural before the term existed. Eat your heart out Bukowski, and of course Tom Waits loves it. Even now this pre-beat book is forthright and hip, there is nothing new under the sun, folks.

Update 23/08/24
Just read Straight Life (1979), the autobiography of saxophonist Art Pepper (1925-1982). It is both vividly real and scarifying, even more so than “Really the Blues”. I thought I had already read this, since I followed and enjoyed Art’s music for many years, and even saw him at Ronnie Scott’s in the early 80s, but I was wrong. This nearly incredible story (rather full of drugs and jail) is both visceral and moving. It has been brilliantly edited by his wife, Laurie Pepper, incorporating many contradictory interviews from Art’s jazz contemporaries and family. It may not go into sufficient detail in terms of explaining the music, but as a portrayal of the brutal reality of a classic jazzman’s life, it is without peer. Highly recommended!

W, A Personal History Part One

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First Rule of Life Club
1. Never talk about any of these things 

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This is a story rarely told, yet apparently we nearly all do it. The subject may upset you, if so stop reading now. The subject of wanking aka masturbation aka self-abuse has not been covered in most of my reading, and in my researches I have only found two recent articles which mention it, by Lily Allen and Giles Coren. In 2009 NHS Sheffield published a controversial leaflet called Pleasure stating “An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. A more recent booklet titled Masturbation (see above) expresses the current medical opinion succinctly: “Masturbation is a natural, healthy expression of sexuality, which can have a large number of health benefits, not least that of sexual pleasure.” Anyway, for better or worse, here is my personal take on the subject, of which the keynote is honesty. I hope it will be amusing, informative and kinda bizarre.

I have no particular memories of erotic stimulation before my adolescence, although it was a subject of mystery and fascination. Come adolescence and the floodgates opened and haven’t closed since. The utter shock and mess of my first ejaculation was totally unexpected, despite having been told the “facts of life”. Obviously they had censored a few chapters, I soon realised. A veiled enquiry was made to my mother, and I gathered that everything was normal and I was perfectly healthy. “Night emissions” were apparently to be expected from someone of my age. However I found all the semen a great inconvenience, and it made masturbating in bed rather problematic. I decided to use the toilet, where tissues were available. A box of Kleenex by the bed was not a good look in those days.

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Anyway new doors and avenues of exploration were opening before me, but where could I find real information? I had no idea and amongst my peer group it was either a no-go area or just filled with nudge-nudge wink-wink big boys talk. I was on my own and for me the answer was books. I tried the dictionary and yes in those days it simply described masturbation as “self-abuse”, which wasn’t very helpful. However my father was a doctor and I found a huge volume called Cunningham’s Text Book of Anatomy from the Oxford University Press 1937. This 1500 page academic tome was well illustrated with photographs of naked men and a whole chapter on the Uro-Genital System with graphic illustrations. It was highly informative, but not very sexy. To make up for that I found on the bookshelf nearby the classic photo documentary book The Family of Man, created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Now I am sure this was not the intended usage of a book documenting the greatest photographic exhibition of all time, but already on page 3 there is a naked lady lying in a forest. There is a lot of reality, wonder and romance in the many photographs, but of much more importance to me at the time was the appearance of a few naked ladies. I was desperate.

Expanding my search through the bookshelves I finally found a cache of sexual classics, not hidden exactly, but well out of the way. These books were to be my window on a hidden world. I started with the Kama Sutra which proved interesting, but rather frustrating, not sexy enough. There was also The Jewel in the Lotus by Allen Edwardes, written in 1959 and apparently a historical survey of sexual culture in the East. More down to earth and sometimes plain obscene was The Perfumed Garden by Sheik Nefzawi, a fifteenth century Arabic sex manual, translated in 1886 by Sir Richard Burton. Now this book was really the business, both serious and lascivious, I found it very arousing. Of course I could not take these books away, I could not not wank while reading them, they had to be read surreptitiously and immediately replaced in the bookcase. They were my secret. Then I discovered Walter, My Secret Life. This book was closer to home, allegedly being the memoirs of an unknown Victorian gentleman and his erotic life, involving many prostitutes and brothels. It has been prosecuted for obscenity many times and was only finally legally published in 1995. This was an edited two volume set, apparently there were eleven volumes in total and Wikipedia describes it as “one of the strangest and most obsessive books ever written”. Opening the book at nearly any page there was a panoply of detailed sexual encounters.

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So after the brief period of night emissions I would get home from school, read a bit from the from the naughty library, carefully replace the book and then retire to the toilet with a Sunday Colour magazine or a copy of Vogue. In retrospect I am pretty sure my mother knew what I was up to, but nothing was ever said. At this time, and for many years, I did not have any “dirty“ magazines. I was far too intimidated to purchase them, if not too young, and in any case there seemed to be no safe place to hide them. This was not the case at school, where there was a lively blackmarket for copies of Parade. This remarkably cheap pinup weekly, had originally been named Blighty Parade and aimed at servicemen. A bit more raunchy was Fiesta, which as the cheapest “porno“ magazine (bare breasts only at the time), became very popular. The sexuality portrayed was down to earth and blatant, reinforced by having the first Readers Wives section. Playboy was occasionally available, but regarded as too expensive, classy and American, although with better printing. I believe it was the centre spread from Fiesta, which was attached to the inside of the new boy’s desk in our class, who had no truck with such publications. We all enjoyed the look of horror on his face, yet the irony was that he would become the biggest heart throb in our school only a few years later. At the time he would not believe that his parents could possibly have had sex. O tempora, o mores!

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Sex education at school was relatively farcical, and none of the teachers wanted to undergo the embarrassment. Different teachers tried, they all failed, there was no textbook. As part of these occasional lessons we were invited to write down our questions on bits of paper, to overcome our own apprehension. I wrote “What is menstruation”, leading to a prolonged bout of blushing by our teacher when read out in class. I never did receive an accurate explanation, although I already knew the answer. There was one event of note which has stayed with me, there was a school cinema trip to see Helga, a West German Federal Government sex education documentary. This was a very graphic movie including a live birth, and we needed special permission to see it, being under age. Pretty sure my parents had to sign the dispensation, and as a result only half the class made it to the cinema. It taught me more about sexuality than any of our lessons, and I was very taken with Helga herself. For many years this was the most explicit movie I had the privilege of seeing.

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I started experimenting with different places, our toilet did not feel right. Down the end of our road was a wild piece of bracken and paths next to the golf course. While exploring there I found a damp stash of abandoned dirty magazines, which proved to be an exciting discovery. After a few visits on my bike, they disappeared and I thought about making my own secret stash there. Nothing came of it, simply too uncomfortable among all the brambles. Another time I found a building site  with a stack of magazines left by the builders, I became a regular visitor on Sunday when no-one was about. Pictures of Lily solved my childhood problems sang the Who, and how right they were, they helped me feel alright. Once on a long boring holiday drive through France I had been amusing myself with sexual fantasies. We stopped at a mountain lay-by and I ran off to have a wank over the glorious view, quite risky but eminently worthwhile. Sometimes the urge to wank would simply overcome me, this happened particularly in afternoon history lessons at school, teacher droning on, dull as ditchwater. Yes I got caught in flagrante by a schoolmate, said I had itchy balls, but this did manage to rather put me off the idea. Later I had a fondness for wanking in other peoples bathrooms, always made it seem more dramatic. Must have been a consummate red-faced liar by this time.

One of the problems of my adolescence was the unexpected erection. This could occur at any time, no erotic thoughts or stimulation needed, this thing appeared to have a mind of it’s own. That is one of the reasons I have never worn those loose boxer shorts, and I found that even Y fronts appeared to have an escape hole. I was sitting innocently on the train home from school and suddenly the sharp eyed girls noticed a pointy lump in my trousers. I shifted position as if uncomfortable, but it was too late, my dick had escaped from my Y fronts and there was little I could do about it. I went bright puce and shrugged my shoulders. I was powerless to conceal the truth, there we are folks. Even worse was being caught in my pyjamas early one Sunday morning, dick sticking straight out through the loose fabric fly. My mother came into the room and I attempted to hide behind the empty dining room table, shuffling nervously. She asked what I was doing and I mumbled some blatant excuse. I presume she realised what was going on, because I was quickly left in peace. Ever since I have worn good tight briefs, hold it in place man.

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A few years later both my parents were often at work, so if I got off school early I had the house to myself. I proceeded to explore their bedroom and found such erotic classics as Fanny Hill, Portnoy’s Complaint and In Praise of Older Women. In addition there were some old copies of Playboy and Mayfair in the bedside cabinet. Much more exciting was a copy of The Joy of Sex subtitled A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, a British illustrated sex manual. To get round censorship issues this book did not have photographs but pen and ink line drawings. As a result they were highly explicit for the time, while also conveying a certain sensitivity and tenderness. I did not find them highly erotic, the bearded man didn’t help much, but this groundbreaking and popular book was certainly informative. For just a few weeks I did find some copies of the truly pornographic Danish publication Color Climax. This was well printed in A5 format with full orgy photo stories, from the fully clothed meeting, then oral, then anal, of course intercourse and finally the naked ejaculation. Not much has changed from this template. I presume these illegal magazines must have been loaned from a friend, dad had not been to Denmark, where pornography had been legalised in 1969. This was the the first hardcore pornography I had ever seen, it was both highly arousing and intimidating, if not slightly unpleasant. It was though a relief, in some ways, to finally see the real thing: pornography in color.

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The rest of the magazine bares no resemblance to this opening spread…

I spent a year in France as a language assistant, where pornography had been legalised. Here I saw the gamut of poorly made sexploitation movies in the local town cinema. This was still a novelty so the cinema would be quite busy, and it seemed bizarre to be watching this smut with the headmaster of the school where I worked. The French didn’t care, in fact I discovered their sensitivity in these and other sexual matters were quite different to the prim British mores. In the local town there was a red light area, many blatant prostitutes on one lively street. I often walked down this street in fascination, though not temptation, to visit the school where a friend from the UK worked. As well as Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones I did get to see one moving and powerful film in Paris featuring real sex, In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Koriida) by Nagisa Oshima. Well over a million people saw this film in France, it was finally released in the UK in 1991. Fortified by this sexual liberation I was possessed to buy a gift for my parents, which I presumed would be unavailable in the UK. For reasons beyond me I chose Histoire d’O by Pauline Réage, beautifully illustrated with gothic line drawings by Guido Crepax. It was a proper large coffee table hardback edition, very popular in France, despite the S&M undertones. It was welcomed with a forced smile and obviously went nowhere near a coffee table in our house. What was I thinking? I blame the Marquis de Sade.

Lhistoire-dO-double

I have decided to end Part One of this memoir here, while I was still a frustrated virgin. Of course the wanking continued (to my surprise), but the whole situation becomes more complicated, if not compromising, when involved in a relationship. I should make it clear here that somehow my sexual fantasy life and my real sexual life have alway remained separate, though they are interconnected, because that seems to be healthier to me. I can also say that real sex is so much more than having a wank, that I feel embarrassed to put them in the same sentence. It’s the difference between fantasy and reality.

Of the many lurid texts I have read, this simple phrase has proven to be a sincere comfort:

A humid kiss
Is better than a hurried coitus

from The Perfumed Garden 15th c.

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