APHRODITE travels well. The Goddess of Love has felt at home in Ireland. Aphrodisian wiles are universally alluring, and nowhere resisted less strenuously than here.
Because of the severe proscriptions of Church and State, however, Irish sexuality, though evidently prolific since the dawn of prehistory, was covert until the latter part of the 20th century. As David Marcus points out in the introduction to his civilised anthology of more or less erotic Irish literature, before the promulgation of the late Brian Lenihan's liberating Censorship of Publications Bill (1967), there used to be a long, official blacklist of books of explicit sexual content or coded sexual implications which the people of Eire were legally forbidden to read.
"At a stroke," with the passage of the Lenihan Bill, Marcus writes, "the threat of proscription on the grounds of indecency or obscenity was largely removed. For Irish readers the result was akin to multiple literary orgasm with virtually no foreplay." Literary freedom was welcomed, as sex is a subject that most people are interested in during the fleeting years between birth and death. Quite soon in the past three decades, of course readers' excitement became less than orgasmic. Freedom from censorship, quite reasonably, is taken for granted by the present generation. Literary eroticism may now be judged by literary, rather than merely erotic, criteria. "Perhaps," Marcus hopes "now that most of us have become well inured to the change this anthology's day has at last arrived." He offers prose and poetry on sexual themes arranged in ten categories, chronologically from "adolescent stirrings, gropings, intimations and excitements on the sexual threshold" to marriage, adultery and senescent "Going Without Distance, death, denial - the trauma of deprivation and the torture of recollection." Readers in search of libidinous stimulation may be disappointed. Marcus says he chose stories and poems which "encompass far more than exaltation of the body and sexual congress". Dare one mention the word love? And there is humour as well, which some unfortunates find an aphrodisiac.
Marcus has brought mature editorial intelligence to bear on the difficult task of selecting works to comprehend the gamut of human sexuality, and has succeeded in achieving a nice balance of sensuousness and sentiment. Here is sex depicted in the three dimensions of the real world, rather than the two dimensional caricature of pornographic fantasy. Here are lyricism and passion in terms of the commonplace, with all the romanticism of an adulterous tryst in a Dublin pub on a rainy afternoon. And here, even under the new, liberal dispensation, are traces of the apparently inescapable Irish sense of guilt. Anything that feels this good must be bad.
Discuss.
The anthologist has found a great assortment of apt quotations, some of them not unfamiliar, to use as epigraphs introducing each of the book's ten sections. Some samples are representative of the variousness of all that follows: "Flirtation is merely an expression of considered desire coupled with an admission of its impracticability." - Mary Mannes.
"Love, the itch, and a cough cannot be hid." - Thomas Fuller. "Few experiences so savour of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman's fanny." - John Updike.
"Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse - it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives." - Bertrand Russell.
"Sex was the most fun I ever had without laughing." - Woody Allen. "When an old man marries, death laughs." - German proverb.
The Irish writers are wonderfully varied, such as John McGahern, Neil Jordan, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Yeats and Thomas Moore; Bernard MacLaverty, Ewart Milne, Terry Prone . . . The quality of the writing is generally high.
Marcus modestly allows himself a couple of entries only as a translator of other men's poems. One of them, "Woman Hot with Zeal", which was written originally in Irish by Scathrun Ceitinn, makes suitably melancholy reading as autumn approaches. However, reading about sex is less tiring than doing it.