Ye Olde Sex

Just when it was becoming fashionably sick, someone had to come along and remind everybody that sex can be fun. The contemporary five-foot shelf abounds in incest, lewd vagrancy, homosexual hanky-panky, reckless driving, and other suburban indelicacies. Such misdemeanors seem thoroughly neurotic compared to the plain if repetitive dalliance of Fanny Hill, heroine of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, originally published circa 1749 and widely accredited as the first deliberately dirty novel in English.

Last week in Manhattan, after hearing arguments on two injunctions to ban sale and distribution of the book (in a new edition by G. P. Putnam's Sons), Justice Charles Marks of the New York State Supreme Court ruled that Fanny is indeed obscene.

The United States Supreme Court has held that the test for obscenity is "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest." Said Justice Marks: "The opinions of authors and critics cannot be substituted for those of the average person in the contemporary community. Neither the quality of the writing nor the so-called literary worth of the book prevents the book from being adjudged obscene."

A Patchwork Past. The rough handling in court was not Fanny's first setback. In 1821 a racily illustrated edition won fame up Massachusetts way, in what is generally regarded as the first recorded case in the U.S. of suppression of a literary work on grounds of obscenity. Her second-class status thus established, poor Fanny found that the boys just wouldn't leave her alone. Like her sister-in-arms, Lady Chatterley, she has been dog-eared, passed around, pirated, smuggled, disguised in Franny and Zooey jackets, and buried under musky sweatshirts in prep school locker rooms the world over.

Author Cleland, the never-do-well bohemian who first put Fanny between covers, wrote the book because he needed money, but sold it for a mere 20 guineas. He thereafter pursued his passion for philology and died a scholar. His publisher, made rich by reprints, died a proper gentleman.

As her story begins, Fanny is a 15-year-old Lancashire lass who arrives in London and promptly falls into the clutches of a sporting-house madam. Her subsequent adventures are detailed in prose that misses nary an 18th century curlicue. Of one memorable orgy for eight, she relates: "It is to be noted that, though all modesty and reserve were banished from the transaction of those pleasures, good manners and politeness were inviolably observed; here was no gross ribaldry, no offensive or rude behavior, or ungenerous reproaches to the girls." After enjoying many another "well breath'd youth, hot-mettled, and flush with genial juices," Fanny finds true love and kisses the oldest profession goodbye.

Enjoying It Less. Perhaps the most damaging case against pornography is stated by Fanny herself: its greatest offense is tedium. She begins her second letter saying: "I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloy'd and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom, or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same."

True enough. But in an age when even serious authors treat the sexual act in terms of a case history or social protest (and the Olympia Press's professional pornographers are driven to exploit De Sadean whips, chains and intricate multiple interlacings to keep ahead of the uncensored press), Fanny Hill's straightforward heterosexuality must come as a shock. None of her escapades, for instance, are as unsavory as the AC-DC boy-meets-boy encounters of James Baldwin's Another Country, nor are they as grubbily explicit as the climactic sexual passage in Updike's Rabbit Run.

Certainly Fanny was no common harlot. Her Memoirs combine literary grace with a disarming enthusiasm for an activity which is, after all, only human. What is more, she never uses a dirty word.

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