The Nocturnal Spectator
I was attracted to the new English edition of Monsieur Nicolas, or the Human Hear( Laid Bare by the discovery that its author, the cele-
brated eighteenth-century pornographer Restif de la Bretonne, liked to be known as the Nocturnal
Spectator. The book itself, a kind of Nocturnal Spectator's Notebook, will be reviewed by Simon Raven in a subsequent issue of this paper, so I won't say any more about it here. But I couldn't help being struck by the marked decline there has been in this genre of literature since Restif's time. For most eighteenth-century writers on the sub- ject- sex was fairly straightforward, frequently funny, and always subject to a code of morality and propriety no less important for differing from the conventions of polite society. In writing about it the best of them succeeded in achieving a happy blend of delicacy and matter-of-factness. By contrast, their modern successors make sex seem nasty, brutish and long and can only write about it in words that are nasty, brutish and short (or pseudo-scientific, which is even worse). One reason for the decline may be that in this permis- sive age only those with no literary ability what- soever need produce obscenities or starve. Even Restif would have been satisfied with the freedom enjoyed by the average American novel of the 1960s—although probably not by its literary merit.
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