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( Originally Published 1944 )
I am not deaf except to what is said THOUGH the matter will not come up in your joustings with magazine editors, the moot question of sex will strike you pink as soon as you tackle the novel form. It has long been the thought among amateur writers that if they sex up a script it will add to its stink value and cause prurient attention in many quarters. No sex novel has ever been a best seller in this country. And it is my feeling that no sex novel ever will be. By a sex novel I mean one in which the main emphasis is on sex. There are several ways of approaching sex. One of them the best is through a bedroom door. The next best is through an oblique scuttling and shuffling about. Almost all of the best sellers for the past two decades have contained aphrodisiacs, but in every case of which I know this has been carefully tucked in between high falutin writing. The Americano, in my estimation, is the salt of the earth and often the pepper; he is strengthy, rumbustious, and sporting. But, miserably, the American is particularly a hypocrite about sex. He has to have it fed to him in small doses and he must be told that the dosage is therapeutic for some reason. Almost all novels are fundamentally sex novels. And there is the whole difference. One that is obviously a sex novel frightens off customers in droves. One that seems to be belles lettres, and has a scene or two that will be uplifting, has every chance of success. But, just you let the publisher, the literary critic, or the reader catch you at knock-down-drag-out-and-obvious sex and your novel goes into a separate classification. It will be hidden under the counters of book stores and sold only to priests, rabbis, ministers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, and hairy-lipped members of ladies clubs, strictly sub rosa they often claiming that their only purpose in buying the thing is to check on the license literature is taking. Sex, to get by in the novel form in this country, must be tremendously furbished fore and aft by long passages having supposed literary value. It must, in short, be made thoroughly "incidental" to the whole work. You will perhaps note that throughout this rollicking rondo I have not been too positive about any-thing. I have stated my opinion, on the theory that since I do have some experience in the writing racket it may be of practical value. In this instance, however, I shall be positive. I know that you cannot write a novel of which the only purpose is sex and get by with it in the big folding-money division. On the other hand it is equally true that if you entirely leave out sex you will also be played down in the dough department when your royalty statement comes in. In New York there is an organization called The Society for the Prevention of Vice. Its president, Mr. Sumner, is delegated with ex-officio powers of an extraordinary sort. All Eastern publishers are afraid of him. They are not particularly afraid of losing cases to him he almost never wins a case; but they are afraid of what it will cost to win a case from him. When you send in a sex manuscript the publishers will instantly think of Mr. Sumner and look to see if you have protected it in such a way as to make it difficult for him to prosecute. A few Eastern publishers, of no particular distinction, will chance a dispute with him, figuring into the sales cost of their books the legal fees necessary to balk him but only a very few will do this, and these few never have best sellers, because quite aside from Mr. Sumner the country at large agrees that Sex is a sin. The average writer forgets that even if he does not go to church, a lot of Americans do. A sex novel, is largely shunned by Catholics, orthodox Jews, Christian Scientists, and most of the large Protestant churches. Yet all of these will read a novel with purple sex passages in it if the novel, as a whole, is full of dull material that sounds hellish highfalutin. The protection against Sumner is simple. As I say, he has lost nearly every case against a book that he has ever tackled. He depends today on his nuisance value in harassing book publishers. You can ignore him if you live far from New York and have never heard of him, but New York publishers cannot ignore him because they are in his legal jurisdiction. To circumvent him you merely pile up the real or pseudo literary value of a novel to such proportions that the publisher can make out a good case for the theory that the sex is incidental. In this event Sumner has never, lately, tackled a book. A New York judge put him down for the count on this about ten years ago when he tackled "Ulysses," by James Joyce. A decision was rendered to the effect that a book whose primary purpose is literary may contain ever so much diddling and still be classified as literature. It is hard to give an exact summation of this sex business in novels; but, roughly speaking, if about ten per cent of your novel is aphrodisiac, you can be sure of being safe. You might even get by with twenty per cent. An established Big Name might get by with thirty! However, with ten per cent of sex you can do a lot of passion-spreading around the premises. Preface it by a certain amount of dull literary junk, and follow it by some equally hoity-toity prose and you can, in your novel, write seventy-five hundred words of a sex scene that will start the dog howling out in the back yard. |
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