ANOTHER VOICE
An important literary discovery: D. J. Enright lives
AUBERON WAUGH
It is a familiar and slightly unnerving experience, even at the age of 48, to read the obituary of someone who has just died and to discover that this person, about whose existence one was only dimly aware, was not only the greatest figure in his particular field, but universally known and loved.
For many years now I have been haunted by the name of D. J. Enright, feeling sure I should know all about him. `Ah, yes, DJ,' I say with a light, knowing laugh whenever his name comes up, with- out having the faintest idea why he is famous. One sees his name as a contributor in various magazines and newspapers to which, on the whole, I do not contribute, like the Times Literary Supplement and Encounter, but nobody has ever become famous by writing in literary magazines. I imagine him as a Cambridge-educated don at some provincial university, probably a disciple of Leavis, who has either written a seminal work of criticism which I somehow missed or in some other way distinguished himself, like Chesterton's donkey, in one far, fierce hour and sweet when my back was turned. The newspaper and magazine articles, which I have occasionally tried to read, were printed in tribute to some greater achievement elsewhere, rather than by virtue of anything they actually contained. Or so one supposed.
Then, on Sunday, I saw that in a forthcoming collection of essays, called Fields of Vision (to be published by OUP next month), D. J. Enright — I cannot bring myself to call him Enright — has enunciated a theory which so exactly cor- responds with a perception of my own that I cannot refrain from applauding, even as I surrender the patent with a bitter little shrug. It appeared in the Sunday Telegraph under the heading 'The copulation explo- sion'. 'The poet D. J. Enright says that, after years of trying, artists still cannot describe sex.'
The revelation that D. J. Enright is a poet explains much. One cannot help feeling that such a perceptive man might have been spending his time more usefully, but there it is. This is what the Sunday Telegraph extracted from his essay, and what may yet go down in the history of English literature as the D. J. Enright Theorem:
What is interesting about the sexual act, from our present point of view, is the impossibility of representing it. The more operatic the style, as in Updike's writing, the greater the failure. Those who have come nearest to succeeding are those who have abstained from attempting to depict [it]. Those old printed dot-dot-dots have come to seem pregnant with significance: they invite us to press the imagination into service. Perhaps Aids, with its threat of a full stop, will do so with greater urgency.
I am not sure what the last sentence means, nor that I agree with it if I do. Is he saying that the risk of Aids will put a stop even to ordinary heterosexual activity, and that the sex act will in future occur chiefly in the imagination? If so, it should be a great bonus for would-be erotic writers, but of course he is wrong. As I never tire of pointing out, it is very hard indeed even for uncircumcised males to catch Aids through ordinary heterosexual intercourse. It is the alienation of the sexes, such as one sees in towns like New York and in some feminist literature, rather than Aids, which threatens to reduce the sex act to various forms of self-stimulation.
But that is a separate subject and might reasonably be excluded from the D. J. Enright Theorem when it comes to be learned verbatim by all students of English literature. The basics of the D. J. Enright Theorem were originally set out 94 years ago in — of all places — the first issue of the Yellow Book but there the writer, Arthur Waugh (1866-1943) takes a more moralistic line than is nowadays fashion- able. Frankness, he argues, is a manly virtue, and the habit of speaking out is a peculiarly English one. But even virtues can be indulged to excess: 'every man . . .knows that the habit of turning the right cheek to the smiter of the left, the universal gift to the beggar of our coat, is subversive of all political economy, and no slight incentive to immorality as well'.
More particularly, as Waugh argued in April 1894, 'every good thing has, as Aristotle pointed out so long ago, its corresponding evil.' Reticence is essential to all human relations: frankness can soon degenerate into brutality. 'Midway be- tween liberty and licence, in literatures and in morals, stands the pivot of good taste, the centre-point of art.' He goes on to suggest that in order to avoid brutality, the point of reticence in literature should be set by the point of reticence in conversa- tion: 'It is unmanly, it is effeminate, it is inartistic to gloat over pleasure, to revel in immoderation . . . literature demands as much . . . reverence as life itself.'
Oddly enough, my grandfather in 1894 suspected that much of the trouble came from women: 'we are told that this is part of the revolt of women, and certainly our women writers are chiefly to blame. It is out of date, no doubt, to clamour for modesty. . .
Possibly it is less out of date in 1988, but, oddly enough, Arthur Waugh's rule of thumb, that what is unacceptable in con- versation fails to work in literature, still holds good. Even nowadays, and among the young, it is not normal or even accept- able to discuss the details of sexual inter- course. Perhaps when that changes, writ- ten descriptions of the sex act will be read with pleasure and without embarrassment, but I doubt it.
My own theory is that the reason artists cannot describe the sex act — and the same consideration applies to painters and sculp- tors as to writers — is that it is indescrib- able, even by demonstration. If I am right, then this is a limitation which applies not only to sex, but also to many of the other great pleasure of life, like eating, drinking, swimming and most forms of bodily exer- cise.
Let us take eating. I have often observed that Bernard Levin, who writes as well as any man alive when he is on form, is simply disgusting when he describes a meal. The best writers about food are all cooks, like Elizabeth David, describing the prepara- tion of a meal. Writers can evoke the strongest possible sense of anticipation, and make their readers drool as they read it, but they cannot successfully describe the satisfaction of such desires, for the good reason that the reader's disappointment in not having his desires satisfied overwhelms any tendency towards vicarious gloating. The same, as I would maintain, is true about descriptions of the sex act. A good erotic writer will maintain sexual tension for a hundred pages; as soon as he de- scribes its resolution, except by lacunae, he loses everything. If D. J. Enright's poetry has long since disappeared down the sink of oblivion, let him at least be remembered for this.
Previous page
