{"id":82843,"date":"2015-02-18T19:17:41","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T00:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82843"},"modified":"2015-02-19T13:15:31","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T18:15:31","slug":"my-mother-taught-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/18\/my-mother-taught-me\/","title":{"rendered":"My Mother Taught Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

A poet\u2019s misadventures in erotica.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"bee-0455-my-mother-taught-me-by-tor-kung-eb\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

GILBERT<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written prose. I\u2019ve written several novels that no one has seen. Well, one was published.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

My Mother Taught Me<\/em>, an erotic novel, wasn\u2019t it?\u00a0<\/p>\n

GILBERT<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about sexuality. You have to understand, people were writing sex books but no one was writing them well. I thought pornography should be as much of a genre as cowboy stories. But pornography is boring. Childish. Unhealthy. I thought, Why not have a novel of sexuality that\u2019s not paralyzed by the need for orgasm? So I wrote a good pornographic novel to show it could be done. An enjoyment rather than a momentary excitement. There were so many pornographic novels written; why weren\u2019t they effective? A momentary spasm. Some people will have an orgasm if you say a dirty word or say, What he did to her body was\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009But what if you approach it as a real novel? The idea of entertainment intrigued me at the time\u2014so I wrote one.<\/p>\n

\u2014The Art of Poetry No. 91<\/a>, 2005<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jack Gilbert, who would\u2019ve been ninety today, actually published two erotic novels: My Mother Taught Me <\/em>and Forever Ecstasy<\/em>, both coauthored with Jean Maclean and published under the opaque nom de porn<\/em> Tor Kung. Olympia Press, a short-lived purveyor of smut and other wonders, foisted both titles upon the unsuspecting public, and in time they became the most requested books in the publisher\u2019s oeuvre.<\/p>\n

The premise of My Mother Taught Me<\/a><\/em>, which appeared in 1967, is absurd, even farcical\u2014and in its outlandishness, it seems designed to effect what Gilbert called \u201can enjoyment rather than a momentary excitement.\u201d But what kind of enjoyment? Our hero is Lars, a naive Swedish schoolboy who was raised in an all-male orphanage. The place was so strict, so straitlaced, that Lars in his nonage had never so much as laid eyes on a woman\u2014not even a photograph of a woman. <\/p>\n

Imagine his confusion and delight, then, when his foster family turns out to be full of beautiful women who partake of the new freedoms. He gawks and swoons and is promptly inducted into a realm of incest and carnal rapture that comes to consume every member of the household, including the family dog, Gustav. Even the novel\u2019s dedication suggests a kind of sexual engulfment: \u201cThis book is for my wife Louise, that country of flesh inhabited who provides its major inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe immediacy of the writing here is perhaps unparalleled in erotic fiction, with our Lars so earnestly describing every new sensation,\u201d the jacket copy reads. But despite praise like that, and despite what Gilbert says in his Art of Poetry interview, this is not a bottom-up reinvention of smut. Even as his prose is competent and often very funny in its heavy-handedness\u2014he doesn\u2019t hesitate to have Lars\u2019s parents invoke Freud to justify their unfettered lifestyle\u2014there\u2019s not much to separate My Mother Taught Me <\/em>from other \u201csex books.\u201d It\u2019s still rife with full buttocks, heaving breasts, downy hair, dreamy ecstasy, mounting passion, et cetera. I suppose there\u2019s no way around such tropes, though Gilbert\u2019s batty premise helps him swerve from a few clich\u00e9s. This scene toward the beginning, in which Lars\u2019s sister Gunilla first seduces him, gives a good sample of the novel\u2019s charm and tedium:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cDo you feel this elastic band, Lars? Reach inside it now! Come on, don’t be afraid! Reach inside, Lars. I have some wonderful gifts for you in my pants. All you have to do is have the courage to push your hand under the elastic. Daddy gives me a hundred kroner just for this. I give it to you Lars, I give everything to you. Reach under, Lars. Feel in my pants. Feel me, little brother. Feel your little sister Gunilla.\u201d<\/p>\n

I timidly slipped my hand inside the band, and found the skin of her belly soft but firm. With growing interest and excitement I pushed it further, down. I encountered incredibly fine hair right above where I supposed her penis was.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not long afterward, as if to subvert erotica\u2019s schlocky norms, Gunilla begins a vocabulary lesson. \u201cThese are my tits, darling,\u201d she says. \u201cThe people of the world call them mammary glands or mammae. The same dreary people with their withered souls call them bosoms. The ugly people call them boobs or boobies, or knockers, or cantaloupes, or headlights, or handles, or milk factories, or breastworks, or bumpers. You can call them breasts, and it’s all right, but they are really tits or titties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilbert has a way with metaphor, too. \u201cGunilla was screaming with me,\u201d he ends the scene later, \u201cas we burst together with the din of exploding cellos.\u201d<\/p>\n

From there, Lars undergoes a rollicking sentimental education, fucking his sister, mother, and maid in turn, often simultaneously. The sexual tension never really lets up\u2014there\u2019s no sign of the \u201cmomentary spasm,\u201d because every moment contains a lifetime of spasms, whole orchestras of exploding cellos. \u201cThe book comes from the intense fringe end of the erotic spectrum,\u201d one reviewer wrote, as one must, when a book culminates in a Doberman\u2019s anal penetration of the maid.<\/p>\n

My Mother Taught Me <\/em>is titillating to excess, and it revels in a kind of tongue-lolling stupidity. But it\u2019s also a knowing satire of sexual discovery, and believe it or not, it has an ethical code. This is a novel of free love, and I think Gilbert was doing more than simply getting his rocks off here. A part of him saw how a book like this could function, in its fucked-up hyperbolic way, as a metaphor for the ideal romance. He includes a philosophical, strangely tender epilogue in which he writes,<\/p>\n

\n

In total love, where touch, communication, lust, and spirit-intercourse are absolute\u2014where we become so close not even a hair can pass between us\u2014there woman is sister, daughter, lover, mother, whore, and friend, separately at some times, and totally, simultaneously at others. Man is her counterpart in each. Relationships and people atrophy when all these elements are not present between them. They thrive, mature, and flower only when they are.<\/p>\n

I do not think finally that anyone can achieve his birthright\u2014can be totally alive and beautifully whole without this relationship.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a daringly sensitive way to cap off a novel that contains such phrases as \u201cmy tongue dug into her hole savoring the thick juice\u201d and such questions as \u201cHow does it feel, Son, to see that you make Mother so hot it pours out of her?\u201d It\u2019s endearing to see how deeply Gilbert\u2019s heart was in the right place, and it was smart of him to put this sort of disclaimer at the end of the book, where its effect is retroactive. Suddenly, you can read between the smutty lines of My Mother Taught Me <\/em>and see some of the enchanting, lovelorn pleas from his poems: \u201cLet me fall \/ in love one last time, I beg them. \/ Teach me mortality, frighten me \/ into the present. Help me to find \/ the heft of these days.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A poet\u2019s misadventures in erotica. GILBERT I\u2019ve written prose. I\u2019ve written several novels that no one has seen. Well, one was published. INTERVIEWER My Mother Taught Me, an erotic novel, wasn\u2019t it?\u00a0 GILBERT It\u2019s about sexuality. You have to understand, people were writing sex books but no one was writing them well. I thought pornography […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[17098,17096,7924,17097,71,207,16692,8323,17095,7221,165,179,7519,17099],"class_list":["post-82843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-of-sex-ed","tag-bestiality","tag-erotic-novels","tag-erotica","tag-experiments","tag-fiction","tag-freud","tag-incest","tag-jack-gilbert","tag-my-mother-taught-me","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-sex","tag-the-art-of-poetry","tag-tor-kung"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJack Gilbert\u2019s Experiments in Erotica<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The poet, who would be ninety today, co-authored two rare erotic novels that, in their bizarre way, expand his vision.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/18\/my-mother-taught-me\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Mother Taught Me by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 18, 2015 \u2013 A poet\u2019s misadventures in erotica. 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