REMEMBERING PURPLE PASSAGES
It’s all about online pornography now, isn’t it? That’s all
the journo-world can talk about today. There used to be ‘dirty books’ and ‘blue
movies’; both genres beyond the pale for ordinary folk. Now there are High
Definition moving pictures in colour of people doing all kinds of things to
other people and they are available to anyone who can afford a computer and can
learn how to use it. Heaven only knows what the viewing of such explicit,
graphic, acts will do to us all. Might it just excite us and pep up our sex
lives? Might it turn us into sex-obsessed monsters looking for a dark corner to
hang around? The journos believe that we
shall all be led down the slippery slope to paedophilia. We’re all doomed! Only
time will tell.
But there used to be a middle ground – well, there still is
actually. It fell short of those extremes. It was a literary thing. Words not
pictures. Books might occasionally enter the arena of the erotic – as they
still do today, of course. Possessing scenes describing sexual activity or the
possibility of sexual activity did not turn a book into a dirty book but it did
make us rather more interested in a literary work than, perhaps, the literary
work itself merited. Such scenes were known then as Purple Passages. It was, in
terms of titillation, all we had.
The Purple Passage was something that teenagers - and others
- thumbed their way through books to
find. It was an erotic passage and it could often be found in a book that was
otherwise quite bland. It sort of got you going. It didn’t turn you into a
ravening sex maniac but it might well produce a physical manifestation of
sexual excitement. It, the Purple Passage, was probably responsible for a
certain amount of solitary pleasure but that was the limit of its influence.
What is the difference? Where does erotica end and
pornography begin? That must lie in the eye and mind of the beholder but it is
quite easy to distinguish between them at their outer extremes. I know of a
passage in Dickens that is gently erotic, for example; nothing pornographic
there. Pornography has no subtlety at all; it hits you full in the face with
sex. In a poem by Clive James, ‘Oval Room, Wallace Collection’, he comments on
pictures painted for the French court by Boucher and Fragonard (I referred to
this in my last blog) and says of one:
Surprised by Vulcan, Venus doesn’t care
A fig, and Mars is merely given pause.
The reason for the cuckold’s angry stare
Might be that her sweet cleft is draped with gauze.
The cuckold obviously wanted porn and got erotica.
When I was a small boy, when there was no internet, I never
saw the hard printed stuff. It was illegal to publish, to sell it and to own
it. I didn't know it even existed but it did; it was usually brought into the country by sailors and
travellers who, passing through the Suez Canal, stopped off at Port Said I did, however, find my own surprises. One of the first was
in a book, It was in The Jacaranda Tree, by H.E. Bates, published in 1949 when I
was eleven years old, that I read a passage that made me go red up to
the ears, so much so that I have never forgotten the experience. H.E. Bates was
not known as a writer of erotica but maybe he knew the pulling power of a
little bit of eroticism. Try this:
***
(From The Jacaranda Tree by H.E. Bates)
It is Burma Paterson
It was a gown of pure straw-coloured silk that folded over
and tied with a sash of the same colour and she knotted it with a single tie.
Mrs Portman wants to make contact with Paterson
playing with the sash of her gown with her fingers,
loosening it and tying it tighter then loosening it again.
She stops by the near front wing of the car and calls out
for him in a whisper, Mr Paterson. She repeats it:
When Paterson Paterson
tying and untying the sash of her gown with the fingers of
both hands
She says she wants to apologise for an earlier incident :
She gave the sash a sudden jerk, nervously, so that it
tightened across her waist. She stood with her legs pressed against the wing of
the car and the silk of the gown seemed to take on a sort of ripened shining
tautness over the curve of her breasts and legs
Brief inconsequential conversation follows with Paterson
Her hands picked nervously at the sash, which fell loose
before she suddenly tightened it up again . She moved several paces nearer to
him, her hands not playing with the sash of the gown, so that its knot fell for
a moment completely away.
Her hands moved down to the sash as if to keep it from
falling completely away but she did not grasp it and after a moment she felt
the sides of the gown sliding gently apart and then at the last moment she held
them with the tips of her fingers, so that they were just together.
She says that she is getting chilly standing there with
nothing on her feet. This remark causes Paterson
I’ve only to open my fingers and everything will be
different. Just two fingers. Not yet. In a moment.
And she feels her fingers slipping away:
The silk of the gown slid through them softly and she felt
for a moment the air beginning to creep coolly on her legs and breast …
She throws back her head and looks up into the night sky:
Her body was very brown between the pale lapels of yellow
silk …
In that moment she put her hands up to her throat, feeling
the sun-smoothed skin, and she let the gown slip away.
She tells him that she wants to continue the long journey
with him. I’d rather be with you …
Then she realises that Paterson
And suddenly her body between the open edges of the gown
felt chilly and she whipped the sash across it, tying it savagely.
As she hurries back to the tents:
She felt herself trembling violently, half-crying with dry,
tearless anger as she folded her arms across her chilly body. ‘No Mr Paterson,’
she thought ‘is going to tell us what to do.’
You would never imagine that you would find a purple passage
in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, would you? Well I did. Perhaps The Jacaranda
Tree showed me that there were hidden treasures lying elsewhere waiting to be
discovered.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Alexander Dumas (published 1831)
Captain Phoebus is closeted with the young gypsy girl, La
Esmeralda, and is hellbent on her seduction. Unknown to them both they are
being watched through a crack in the door by a very unpriestly archdeacon , Dom
Claude, who is being driven crazy with envy and lust (he finds it hard to hear
what they are saying, ‘through the humming of the blood, which was boiling in
his temples’).
I have reduced the text largely to the dialogue between
Captain Phoebus and the gypsy, Esmeralda.
La Esmeralda remained silent for a moment, then a tear
dropped from her eyes, a sigh from her lips,’Oh, monseigneur, I love you.’
This remark emboldened him: ‘You love me!’ he said with
rapture, and he threw his arm round the gypsy’s waist.
‘… ‘Twas of you that I was dreaming, before I knew you, my
Phoebus … your name is Phoebus; ‘tis a
beautiful name. I love your name; I love your sword. Draw your sword, Phoebus,
that I may see it.’
‘Child!’ said the captain, and he unsheathed his sword with
a smile. (Oh, the phallic significance of it!)
The gypsy kissed the sword saying, … You are the sword of a
brave man. I love my captain.’
Phoebus profited by the opportunity to impress upon her
beautiful bent neck a kiss which made the young girl straighten herself up as
scarlet as a poppy.
Phoebus sits more closely to her. ‘Listen, my dear …’.
The gypsy asks him ‘Do you love me? I want you to tell me
whether you love me.’
‘Do I love thee, angel of my life!’ exclaimed the captain,
half kneeling. ‘My body, my blood, my soul, are all thine; all are for thee. I
love thee, and have never loved any one but thee.’
‘Oh!’ she murmured, ‘this is the moment when one should
die!’
Phoebus found ‘the moment’ favourable for robbing her of
another kiss … ‘Oh! How happy you will be!’ continued the captain, and at the
same time he gently unbuckled the gypsy’s girdle.
The captain, emboldened by her gentleness, clasped her waist
without resistance; then began softly to unlace the poor child’s corsage, and
disarranged her tucker to such an extent that her beautiful shoulder emerged
from the gauze, as round and brown as the moon rising through the mists of the
horizon.
The young girl allowed Phoebus to have his way. She did not
appear to perceive it. The eye of the bold captain flashed. Then she raised the
matter of marriage which causes the captain’s face to assume ‘an expression of
mingled surprise and disdain, or carelessness and libertine passion.’
‘My beautiful love,’ resumed Phoebus, ‘what nonsense is
this?’
While speaking thus in his softest voice, he approached
extremely near the gypsy; his caressing hands resumed their place around her
supple and delicate waist, his eye flashed more and more, and everything
announced that Monsieur Phoebus was on the verge of one of those moments when
Jupiter himself commits so many follies that Homer is obliged to summon a cloud
to his rescue.
All at once, Phoebus, with a rapid gesture, removed the
gypsy’s gorgerette. The poor child, who had remained pale and dreamy, awoke
with a start.
… red, confused, mute with shame, she crossed her two
beautiful arms on her breast to conceal it. She asks him to return her
gorgerette. Phoebus says in a cold tone, ‘Oh, mademoiselle! I see plainly that
you do not love me!’
Esmeralda, very emotionally, declares her love and says that
she will be his mistress, ‘thy amusement, thy pleasure, when thou wilt; a girl
who shall belong to thee. I was only made for that, soiled, despised,
dishonoured, but what matters it?’
So saying, she threw her arms round the officer’s neck; she
looked up at him, supplicatingly, with a beautiful smile, and all in tears. She
writhed on her knees, her beautiful body half naked. The intoxicated captain
pressed his ardent lips to those lovely African shoulders .The young girl, her
eyes bent on the ceiling, as she leaned backwards, quivered, all palpitating,
beneath this kiss.
The action never reaches culmination point for at this stage
the lust-maddened priest forces his way into the room and stabs the captain,
again and again, with a poignard. And sadly for Esmeralda the priest rapidly disappears and
she is accused of the murder.
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