Again, it is curious how neatly Theroux sheds his complexities when he writes left-handed. Sunrise with Seamonsters is more a holiday from authorship than an extension of it. (The writing is much looser than the fictional prose, with many a ready-made formulation: ‘howling snobs’, ‘stifling heat’, ‘whiff of romance’, ‘hive of activity’.) Why do writers travel and then tell their tales? Graham Greene, whom Theroux much admires, travels to escape spleen and to embrace nostalgic. V.S. Naipaul, another mentor, attempts to take psychological readings of foreign cultures by way of a risky self-exposure. With both Greene and Naipaul, the traveller and the writer are the same man. Paul Theroux, who has more readers per book than either, tells traveller’s tales mostly for the hell of it: long letters home. His mature responses to the things he sees are to be found elsewhere — in Jungle Lovers, Saint Jack, The Mosquito Coast.
Observer 1985
Gay Talese: Sex-Affirmative
Just over half-way through this interminable book (Thy Neighbour’s Wife), we are given a welcome pen-portrait of Dr Alex Comfort, the aged author Joy of Sex and its sequel, More Joy of Sex. Comfort is glimpsed in one of the rumpus-rooms of Sandstone Retreat, a Californian holiday camp dedicated to the proposition that everyone should go to bed with everyone else. Strolling naked through the clumps of threesomes and foursomes, the pot-bellies and appendix scars, suntans and tattoos, Dr Comfort regularly megs his cigar to ‘join a friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.’
But what is ‘the nude biologist’ up to here? You or I might think that the old goat was simply having a good time at the expense of equally deluded, undignified — but much younger — married couples. Actually, though, the Doc is hard at work. In the argot of Gay Talese (similarly engrossed in another part of the room), Comfort is a ‘participating sex researcher’ working in a ‘non-laboratory situation’: i.e. getting laid. Well, it’s a living.
This is sexual quango-land. Mr Talese took a very long time to write and ‘research’ Thy Neighbour’s Wife. His nine-year mission: to explore ‘the social and sexual trends of the entire nation’. The research might have been fun, but the writing was a waste of time. As Mr Talese naïvely snoops from porno film-set to massage parlour, from obscenity trial to the offices of Screw magazine, as he talks to ‘ordinary’ troilists, wife-swappers and haggard masturba-tors, it slowly becomes clear that he has nothing of any interest to say on his chosen subject. Mr Talese calls this clueless style ‘non-judgmental’ – and he isn’t kidding. Out goes judgment, and in comes jargon, stock-response and humourlessness through the same door. The book is a rag-bag of cliches, most of them about twenty years out of date.
Language is the key to the imposture. Although Mr Talese thinks that, for instance, a ‘voluptuary’ is a woman with big breasts, his book is not particularly ill-written. It is conscientious, even earnest. The trouble is that almost anyone could have written it. Mr Talese’s prose has the stilted, rolling, lip-smacking nullity that has been satirised by Kurt Vonnegut and, more subtly, by J.G. Ballard. The style may be parodied at random: ‘Each evening that summer, Keith Krankwinkel would motor out in his cream convertible to the Santa Monica duplex of Doris Dorkburger. As Doris prepared their first evening drinks, Keith would admire the graceful contours of her…’ Ballard, most notably in Vermilion Sands, uses this style to suggest a kind of existence that is at once affluent and denatured, an existence free of volition or irony. Non-judgmental Talese, however, doesn’t ‘use’ this style: it uses him.
In one of his many chapters on wife-swapping, Mr Talese explains that ‘body pleasure’ is ‘wholesome’ and ‘therapeutic’, it contributes to everyone’s ‘welfare and personal growth’, leading to ‘a healthier, more sex-affirmative and open society’. As Barbara Williamson sleeps with David in one chalet bedroom, and John Williamson sleeps with Carol next door, Barbara feels that she and her husband are sharing ‘a gift of loving trust’, in Mr Talese’s ghastly phrase. Having slept with David again at dawn, Barbara makes breakfast, and is ‘greeted in the living room by her husband’s approving smile and kiss’.