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In Paris I had been lent Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and had been struck by what seemed to me Lawrence’s perverse insistence upon presenting copulation as a sacred activity. I had read Cleland’s
Fanny Hill and his Amatory Experiences of a
Surgeon; those I could understand because the author had presented them honestly as examples of pornography, but the hieratic overtones of
Lady Chatterley enraged me, and I would not hear of D.H. Lawrence. John Widdicombe, still at the university, tried to interest me in
Sons and Lovers. I made a not very serious attempt and was unsuccessful. Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human being totally ridiculous. At least the former could be conducted in private, but the latter by definition demanded a partner. I discovered, though, that whenever I ventured this opinion, people took it as a joke.
-- Paul Bowles, Without Stopping
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