October 10, 2008
Great Moments in Literary Sex (Part II)
Here's further evidence of the odd ways sex and authors intersect:
* George Sand:When the novelist spent the night with Propser Merimee, the result was a mutual disappointment. She wrote to Marie Dorval: "I slept with Merimee last night. He is less than nothing." For his part, he left a five-franc piece on her dresser.
* Jean Jacques Rousseau started out in life on the wrong foot when his father blamed him for his mother's death giving birth to him. The elder Rousseau would say, "Let us talk of your beautiful mama," and little Jean-Jacque would reply, "Very well, Father, and then we will cry."
* D.H. Lawrence: An apothecary's wife told her friend about sex with the author of "Lady Chatterley's Lover": "I had to. He was over at our house struggling with a poem he couldn't finish. So I took him upstairs and gave him sex. He came downstairs and finished the poem."
* Edith Wharton: Up until her wedding day, Edith Wharton was ignorant of sex, and it didn't help that her mother emphatically refused to discuss the subject. When she worked up the nerve to ask, a few days before the ceremony, her response was "I never heard such a ridiculous question!"
Unfortunately for Edith, her sexual life with Teddy Wharton was a disaster. Her marriage was unconsummated for several weeks, and when it was, she wrote that sex between them was "agonized." In fact, it wasn't until 20 years later that Wharton learned what the fuss was all about.
* Leo Tolstoy: A line in his diary he wrote 60 years ago came back to haunt him. Four months before his death in 1910, his wife discovered his secret diaries and read aloud to him: "I have never been in love with women . . . I have fallen in love with men very often."
* Aristophanes: In Los Angeles, a warrant was issued for his arrest Aristophanes for obscenity over his controversial play, Lysistrata. Fortunately for the Greek playwright, the warrant was retracted after someone pointed out that he had been dead for at least 25 centuries.
Born: Ivo Andric, novelist, short-story writer, Dolac, Bosnia, 1892; R(asipuram) K(rishnaswami) Narayan, novelist, short-story writer, Madras (now Chennai), India, 1906; Claude Simon, novelist, Tananarive, Madagascar, 1913; James Clavell, novelist, Sydney, Australia, 1924; Harold Pinter, playwright, East London, 1930; Frederick Barthelme, author, 1943.; Nora Roberts, novelist, Silver Spring, Md., 1950.
Died: Christian Schubart, poet, Stuttgart, Württemburg, 1791.
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