By Cosmo Adair
“I am deeply honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award. Kudos to all my distinguished fellow finalists, you have all provided me with many hours of enjoyable reading over the last year.” James Frey was so thrilled with his prize that you’d imagine it was a Booker, a Nobel, or at least a Costa. But no, he’d just won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, awarded to him for an egregious passage in his novel Katerina which reads: “Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one”: a ridiculously awful sentence, which makes you question not only the limits of stream-of-consciousness narration, but whether anyone should ever be allowed to write about sex again.
The Bad Sex Award was bestowed annually by the Literary Review until 2020 when they decided that simply “too many bad things” happened that year to justify exposing its readership to more. It was set up by Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh with the intent of ‘[drawing] attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ It was, John Maier writes in The Times (“Bonk, bonk! Why it’s time to bring back the Bad Sex Award”), “the one literary prize where you felt the recipient truly deserved to win.” Look at the Roll-Call of its Victors: of the twenty-seven prize winners, only three of them were women. And so, not only did it highlight egregious, unnecessary, or else simply bad writing, but it constitutes a kind of send up of established male authors, letting you see the Narcissists, the Male-Power obsessives, and the Nerds: by that I mean that it gave the impression that most of these writers (including Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe, and John Updike, amongst others) were not only terrible at writing about sex, but that they were terrible at sex. For a few days every year, the public could think to themselves: I might be no Shakespeare, but at least I’m better at Sex.
Some of the more brilliant entries are: Giles Coren’s Winkler (“… and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands, he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.”); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am (“He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.”); Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (“I slid down the bed and took his cock in my mouth, shlurping away as if I’d just discovered a particularly juicy pear.”); and John Updike, winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award, in The Widows of Eastwick (“Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room … She laid her head on his pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism.”).
But, as Julian Gough wrote in The Guardian (“I was nominated for the Bad Sex Award. Don’t laugh”), the competition’s light-hearted nature started to disappear with the rise of social media and its mob of illiterati. People who’d never read his nominated book, Connect, trolled him online. He wrote, “It deliberately and successfully encourages the worst, and dumbest, misreading of fiction; the conflation of authors with their characters in order to publicly shame them. This is regressive cyber-Victorianism in progressive drag.” He discusses how the nature and tone of these ridiculed sex scenes can be understood (surprisingly) when placed back into the context of the book. Connect is about socially awkward teenagers and the nominated passage concerns the protagonist’s first sexual experience: “He sucks on the hard nipple. He has never done this before, and yet; no, wait, of course, it’s totally familiar. The first thing he ever did.” That is the only extract of his fiction which most people have read, and it hardly inspires you to read much more of his writing.
Auberon Waugh’s involvement in creating the Bad Sex Award was surely influenced by what is the most awkward, strained and poorly written passage of his father, Evelyn’s, oeuvre: “It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.” (Brideshead Revisited) Evelyn Waugh himself, questioned on that passage, would argue that the English Language had developed at a time when sex was not freely discussed, let alone written about. Thus the words and phrases which the Dictionary offers for its description are, invariably, crude, if comic in a schoolboy way, whilst most attempts to write it through metaphor feel like uneasy euphemisms. In this way, bad sex writing breaks the third wall: the reader becomes aware of the inadequacy of language and of the writer themselves to discuss such a natural occurrence. This is why it becomes so easy to conflate the author with the sex scene: because poor writing is often the result of the writer becoming too conflated with the work. Martin Amis was right to say that “Very few writers have got anywhere with sex … My father used to say that you can refer to it but you can’t describe it. It’s inherent in the subject. It’s not that someone’s going to hit upon the right way; it’s that there’s no right way … The novelist, unlike the poet, has to be a universal figure and our sexual urges are deuniversalising. There is a Bad Sex prize but there’s no prize for Good Sex. That is probably significant.”
And so, whilst it’s hilarious to think of willies flying about like loose shower-heads and blowjobs in culinary terms, most sex writing vindicates Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis’ arguments. Most sexual descriptions — be they deliberately comic or highly serious — are funny. Few writers do sex well, since it’s a unique, subjective experience and good writing requires an impersonality that’s hard to achieve when discussing sex. Still, most writers persist: and I respect their noble effort which might, one day, land them unwanted laurels. But, for now, I implore the Editor of the Literary Review to revive the Bad Sex Award, so that whoever writes sex badly does so at their own peril.