Volume 1, Number 5 · October 31, 1963
The Harlot's Progress
By V.S. Pritchett
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
by John Cleland
Putnam, 319 pp., $.95 paperback (paper)
Every age gets the pornography it deserves. The people who are now making a fuss about Fanny Hill, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, do nothing about the real pornography of today—the incitement to violence, torture, maiming, and killing, often topped up with sexual perversity, which are presented with a sickening kind of pleasurelessness, on the screens of television and cinema and in pulp fiction. It can be suggested (as Havelock Ellis once did) that some kinds of pornography are socially useful; they may allay evil desires by acting as a sort of imaginative distraction. They may lead us away from action into harmless fantasy. Whether this is so or not, the real test is not what the average man thinks; it is the test of artistic merit, and if he is called upon to judge, it is the average man's duty to find out what artistic merit is. He will find himself considering man's often brilliant exploration of his own imagination. Nothing could be more horrifying and inciting to sadistic action than those terrible pictures of Goya's called The Fantasies and The Disasters of War; however, one sees, at once, that Goya's art transmutes them and places them in that area of our minds where the difficult but indispensable moral and civilizing process can operate. The same transmuting process can be seen in the treatment of the classical but surely sordid encounter of Leda with the Swan; in the brothel paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, in the pathos and laughter of Maupassant's Maison Tellier. I believe one can see it also in that minor amatory exercise, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. No one is asked to say how meritorious an artist is in these matters, but it is essential for the transmuting element to be recognized.
Review, 1875 words
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