It was said that sex arrived in Ireland with television, but our books were bursting with it
02 May 2006
Sex came to Ireland in the sixties. We know that to be a fact because a Dáil deputy said so. Oliver Flanagan said there was no sex in Ireland before we had television and seeing that the telly arrived in the sixties, sex must have come then, too.
It was the recent death of John McGahern that made me think about sex in the sixties. Books were banned in those days but banned books we easily obtained and clandestine sales of a book were helped by a ban.
John McGahern's book The Dark was banned. I'm not sure why it was banned (perhaps it was because McGahern had married a foreign divorcée even though she was a woman). There was quite a bit of child abuse in the book but we didn't take that very seriously then, so I think it must have been due to the dreadful treatment a man gave a sock.
It is not possible for me to describe what he did to or with the sock but it was the worst possible. I was particularly sensitive about the treatment of socks, ours, as children, always being knitted by my mother or grandmother who were two regular Medames Defarges. Our summer holidays in Youghal were marred by the sight of them sitting on the beach knitting our dreaded winter vests which it took until Christmas to break in and make itch-free.
Back to the socks - one had to respect one's socks, turn the foot inside out and pull them on carefully. The man desecrated the sock so the book was banned, and that must be it.
As I said, we didn't take too much notice of child sex abuse in those days and I doubt if Lolita was banned because it was about child abuse. Recently I read a novel called Reading Lolita in Tehran and not having read Lolita since it was banned in the sixties, I re-read it. It really is a dreadfully sad book. A child, described as a "nymphet" by her abuser to make her seem otherwise than his victim, is so bereft of adult protection that, as Humbert Humbert says, she has to sleep with him because she has no one else to turn to. The author's foreign name was quite enough to have it banned - it appeared to be Russian and since the novel wasn't all that long it couldn't be one of their classics.
If we didn't bother too much about child sex abuse then is it any wonder we had that volcanic explosion in recent years of pent up decades of disasters?
We were well able to detect and expel from our shops and libraries totally undesirable books about desirable girls like Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls and The Girl With Green Eyes. There was a Mr Gentleman in these books whose unsuitable behaviour may have been the cause of their expulsion but like The Tailor and Ansty, I've never been sure what was wrong with them. (There was in the books a young man nick named The Body who wanted the girls to do bold things with him. We real girls knew a young man we used to refer to as "The Body". I met him thirty years later at a party and could I remember his real name? No. All I could do was mumble. When I confessed my dilemma later to a friend of his, he said I should have called him "The Body" - he'd have been very pleased.
Lady Chatterly's Lover was an obvious no-no. It wasn't tolerated even in London where a barrister asked a jury if any of them would dream of allowing his wife or servant to read it. Lady Jane and John Thomas certainly were not going to cross the water except with brown paper wrappers on to make them respectable.
I still have a copy of An Apology for Roses by John Broderick which is about a brazen young one called Marie who used to entertain in a very friendly manner Father Moran, the local priest. Indeed, they "knew" each other in a biblical sense so why we were surprised by this sort of thing at a later date I don't know.
Plays were banned. My roommate in college went to the first night of The Ginger Man. When she came home I asked what it was like. "OK" was all she said. It lasted one more night and then it was banned because of something to do with a pound of sausages, I think. We were very domestic in those days.
Films were banned but how did Fellini's "Satyricon" get in? I remember seeing that in the sixties in the Astor on the quays and it was very explicit. It was also very confusing, which, perhaps, is the reason it wasn't banned.
But the sexiest book of the lot was never banned as far as I know, and that was The Third Policeman. To me Flann O'Brien was magic, The Hard Life being my favourite and The Poor Mouth only a little behind. Flann (Brian O'Nolan) told us in The Hard Life that he could remember only half his mother and that was the lower half-what a wonderful way to describe a very small orphan child's memory of his late mother. In The Third Policeman we were off with the musings of an orphan again. Delightful as these were, it was Sergeant Pluck's theories on sexuality which were the drama in the book.
In the days of The Third Policeman freedom to explore had come to the people of Ireland thanks to the bicycle and I think, quite apart from what Oliver Flanagan said, sexual freedom may have been included. People were constantly racing across the rough roads on their bicycles, men always with coattails flying.
Now Pluck had an interest in physics, especially the atomic theory, with all those atoms going around and around. People were cycling so much that Pluck feared the atoms of the person and the atoms of the bicycle might become intertwined so that a person would become part man, part bicycle - 54 per cent, 73 per cent, etc. depending on how much the person cycled.
The Sergeant caused himself great distress by expanding the theory to consider what would happen when a man rode a woman's bicycle and vice versa. Talk about sexuality - this was wild. Winsome little women's bicycles were always trying to seduce men and handsome cross-barred ones making conquests on corners. There was a lot of sex about in the sixties but we didn't take it seriously.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
