Smut and Literature By Jeet Heer Toro (August & September 2003). Despite its name, the Gutter Press only recently achieved a reputation as a purveyor of porn. Founded in 1992 by Toronto cultural entrepreneur and scene-maker Sam Hiyate, the Gutter Press for most of its first decade been known as a scrappy upstart publishing house willing to take chances on young writers with edgy and unusual books. While some of these books were raw and nervy, the publisher really started raising eyebrows in CanLit circles with its 2001 release of Tamara Faith Berger's Lie With Me, a novel that looks like a dainty kid's book but is definitely adult-only reading. "the man raised my dress as I climbed him," Berger writes in the first of many sex scenes. "My naked ass was exposed and I felt it clench in his hands." Fulminating in The Globe and Mail, Michael Posner dismissed Berger as a "professional pornography writer" whose book is "unabashedly XXX-rated — virtually every page describes sexual activity in language that would make even a Scandinavian blush." Despite some scowling book reviews and snickering press coverage, Lie With Me was a hot seller. In the wake of its success, Russell Smith, the novelist who had discovered Berger and shepherded her book into print, announced that he was editing a second erotic novel for the Gutter Press. Released in the halting spring of 2003, Diana: A Diary in the Second Person was, ostensibly, another torrid erotic novel told from a female point of view. "You know he is looking down on you, holding onto your hips, controlling your movement, the globes of your ass quivering with every thrust, your asshole open and exposed, and you can feel this exciting him," wrote the novel's author Diane Savage in one of the book's tamer moments. Soon, however, it turned out that Diane Savage was a pen name for Globe and Mail columnist and writer Russell Smith. "Russell wanted to write this book basically based on what happened with Lie With Me," explains Ed Sluga, who recently took over control of the Gutter Press from Sam Hiyate. "Russell was so jazzed up by the whole notion of it. He and Sam had been talking about erotic books for a long time, so Russell thought, I want to take a shot at it but I want to write it from a female perspective, under a pen name." "I don't think the book stands up as a novel and its not intended to be a novel," Smith admits. "Its goal is plain and simple: to titillate. I'm happy to be writing pornography." Smith's authorship of Diane raises all sorts of interesting questions about men pretending to be women and well-known authors taking pseudonyms. But perhaps the most intriguing fact about the novel is how it reveals the hidden affinity between porn and highbrow literature. Why would a fine writer like Smith want to write a porn book? Why would the Gutter Press publish it? With its rage to classify every book into an appropriate category, the publishing industry sometimes resembles South Africa in the days of apartheid. In order to remain fine and pure, good writers are supposed to keep their distance from those grungy pulp writers who inhabit the slums and shantytowns of literature. And, at the very bottom on the publishing hierarchy is porn, which carries the dank and unwholesome reek peculiar to a teenage boy's bedroom. In the normal course of the publishing world, serious literature — published in upscale hard covers or trade paperback — has little traffic with porn (usually marketed as tawdry paperbacks under pseudonyms). However, just as the ideology of apartheid was always undermined by the existence of millions of mixed-race individuals, in the real world where writers have to earn a living, porn and literature have a history of playing footsy. Long before the Gutter Press made a sideline publishing "erotic fiction," serious writers often found themselves trafficking in the red-light district of prose. In 1911, H.L. Mencken took over the editorship of The Smart Set, a failing literary magazine. A brilliant editor and essayist, Mencken soon revitalized The Smart Set, aesthetically if not financially, by bringing on board writers like Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, and James Joyce. Unfortunately, too few readers appreciated the fine jewel Mencken had crafted and the magazine was always on the verge of losing money. In 1915, Mencken decided that if "the morons" couldn't appreciate fine literature, he would give them the swill they deserved. According to biographer Terry Teachout, Mencken's solution was to start up pulp magazines: Parisienne Monthly Magazine, which featured "trashy short stories and novelettes set in France." Parisienne Monthly was successful enough to spawn two other Mencken-edited pulps, Saucy Stories (where the smutty action takes place in the United States) and The Black Mask (featuring hard-boiled detective stories). Mencken funneled the profits he made from these magazines into The Smart Set, rather in the spirit of a drug dealer who drops large bundles of cash into the church collection plate. Mencken always gave the back of his hand to Parisienne Monthly and its siblings, calling them "the louse magazines." Yet these cash cows (or cash lice) had more merit than their haughty editor was willing to allow. Parisienne Monthly was often targeted by the puritans in the United States Post Office, which was the agent of government censorship at the time. In order to keep publishing stories about sexy flappers in Paris, Mencken often had to battle against government censorship and soon became a feisty and committed civil libertarian, willing to use his resources to defeat the prudes who tried to thwart publication of writers like Dreiser and Herbert Ashbury (the author of Gangs of New York). Moreover, after Mencken happily sold off The Black Mask in the mid 1920s, the pulp magazine would go on to publish the early work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the authors of such classic thrillers as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. The very stone rejected by Mencken became a cornerstone of American popular culture. The Mencken formula — using profits from sex to finance more serious work — remained a standard technique in the publishing industry for the rest of the 20th century. In the 1920s, the Random House impresario Horace Liveright published such modernists classics as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's Personae. It would take years for Eliot and Pound to find their audience. In the meantime, Liveright specialized in "naughty" books like Replenishing Jessica and Flaming Youths to pay the rent. One of his biggest successes was a collection of the smutty excerpts from the Roman historian Petronius, priced at US$30 (about $300 in today's money) so that it could only be bought by scholars, collectors and "other mature and incorruptible persons." Liveright's scam of republishing historical and classic porn to give a patina of respectability was later used by Barney Rosset, who founded the legendary Grove Press in 1951. Rosset, a war veteran who was disappointed with the reactionary drift of American life in the early Cold War, was willing to publish anything that shook people up. He specialized in books by black radicals (notably The Autobiography of Malcolm X) as well as giants of late modernism like Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. The real staple of the Grove Press line, however, was old-fashioned erotica. Rosset was a collector of Victorian pornography. With the help of scholar Stephen Marcus, Rosset amassed a huge collection of dirty books that had been covertly and shamefacedly published in the nineteenth century. To his delight, Rosset found he could make money reprinting dusty titles like My Secret Life (allegedly the private diaries of a Victorian gentleman who enjoyed having his way with chambermaids) and Harriet Marwood, Governess ("a whip-me-shame-me-make-me-write-bad-cheques Victorian flagellation novel," according to former Grove Press editor Gilbert Sorrentino). Grove Press's great rival in the 1950s and 1960s was the Olympia Press, under the stewardship of the Maurice Girodias. Like Rosset, Girodias was a man of high culture and refinement who enjoyed low things, including a taste for the retro porn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both men were genuine heroes in the cause of cultural freedom, fighting lengthy court battles to publish books that more prissy publishers refused to touch. Aside from Vladimir Nabokov's great novel Lolita, which had been rejected by every mainstream publisher in New York, Girodias published books like Under the Birch: The Story of an English Governess by Miles Underwood (actually a pseudonym for the Canadian writer John Glassco) and There's A Whip in My Valise by Greta X (an anonymous writer who has never been identified). However, in order to keep their presses running, Rosset, Girodias, and other porn publishers, had to rely on an army of pseudonymous writers to keep churning out an ever-fresh supply of lewd material. Who were these unknown writers who wrote quickie paperbacks like Love Addict and the Sins of Seena? Many of them, as it turns out, were science fiction writers whose careers eerily resemble that of Kilgore Trout, the fictional sci-fi hack who keeps popping up in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. As readers of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Slaughterhouse-Five will remember, Trout dreamed of being taken seriously as a writer but his pulpy sci-fi stories (with titles like "Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass") always ended up in the back pages of tawdry men's magazines like. Many real-life science fiction writers earned money the Kilgore Trout way, by supplying fodder for the porn industry. The Sins of Seena, for example, was written by Robert Silverberg, now a major science fiction writer who hopes people will forget the nearly 200 porn novels he published under the pen-names like Don Elliott from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In his peak year of 1962, Silverberg was writing a porn novel every two weeks (in addition to a large number of mysteries, westerns and sci-fi potboilers). In Campus Sex Club (1960), Silverberg told the torrid tale of co-eds who run an exclusive salon devoted to invitation-only orgies. "Marge kneeled in the middle of the floor — nude, as were the circle of eager watches," runs the description of the initiation rite for the sex club. "Les Haberman, a tall muscular senior, stood over her cupping her breast in his hands and gently massaging the already-swollen tips." Harlan Ellison, a close friend of Silverberg, is now famous for his short stories and television scripts (including popular episodes of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone). However, in the early 1960s he was a struggling writer who, under the penname Cordwainer Bird, wrote "numerous extremely soft-core stories in such magazines as Adam, Knight, Adam Bedside Reader and other Los Angeles-based girlie journals." Typical Ellison/Bird titles include The Girl With the Horizontal Mind, Tramp, and The Fine Art of the 15-cent Pick-Up. Ellison remains slightly embarrassed by these stories. "While they could bring me a desperately needed two or three hundred per appearance, they were — how shall I put it — less memorable works," he once recalled. Ellison's friend and fellow science fiction writer Barry Malzberg is equally queasy about his days of youthful porn writing. Malzberg's first two books — Oracle of a Thousand Hands (1968) and Screen (1970) — were both written for Olympia's porn line. Like Silverberg, Malzberg wrote his porn novels with astonishing speed. He tossed off one novel, Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid (1969), in sixteen hours. When I tried to contact Malzberg to find out about his days writing for Olympia, he rebuffed my requests for an interview. "I don't know if I want to do this," he e-mailed me. "I do know that I don't want to be characterized as Would-Be Literary Writer... [who] Wrote Porn!" Despite their shame, writing porn probably helped Silverberg, Ellison and Malzberg develop as writers. Up until the 1960s, science fiction had been a singularly sex-less genre. Bug-eyed-monsters might put their throbbing tentacles around blond heroines, but the heroes of sci-fi rarely seemed to have any sexual passion themselves. All this started to change when Silverberg and company started hitting their stride in the late 1960s, writing an array of taboo-breaking books that remain shocking in their audacity. Silbverbeg's The Book of Skulls, Ellison's Deathbird Stories and Malzberg's Beyond Apollo are passionately written books filled with lurid sex. Arguably, writing porn gave these men the courage to achieve their best work. Younger writers and artists are much less embarrassed about doing both porn and serious work. To get a sense of the contemporary scene, I met up with Ho Che Anderson, a Toronto-based cartoonist who just finished his decade-long work on King, a much-praised graphic novel retelling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the very start of his career as an alternative cartoonist, Anderson had done a very different work, I Want to Be Your Dog, a graphic graphic novel about sadomasochism, set in a Toronto black community. Although named by his parents after Ho Chi Mihn and Che Guevara, Anderson with his horn-rimmed glasses and steely manliness reminded me of another great radical: Malcolm X. Quaffing back beers at a grungy downtown bar, Anderson told me about how desperate he was as an aspiring young cartoonist to land a job, leading him to answer an anonymous call for submissions from a firm called Eros Comix in 1991. (Eros, as it turned out, was the porn wing of Fantagraphics Books, a leading alternative publisher that would bring out King.) Anderson had no qualms about working for Eros. "Finally someone was offering me a job," Anderson recalls. "I was trying to break into the business for years before that and been getting nowhere. Finally someone said if you want to do something for us here is your opportunity. Plus, I like sex. I like drawing naked people doing the deed." When talking about porn, Anderson exudes an unflustered confidence very different from earlier writers, who seem like blushing teenagers taking a peek at Penthouse in the corner newsstand. As with other porn writers, Anderson was liberated by his experience. Writing and drawing porn taught him to be honest, a quality that shines through his more mainstream work. Unlike most biographies of Martin Luther King, Anderson avoids the trap of hagiography. He deals, for example, with King's raw sex life. "The way I see it, nobody wants to read about a saint," Anderson says. "I sure as hell don't. I can relate to a person who messes up as much as everyone else. I want to read about a real person, not some who is saintly all the time. I don't think because you're character is flawed in certain ways it makes you a bad person. In fact, I think it enriches your character. It makes you one of us." Anderson's self-assurance is shared by the many young feminists who are now taking a crack at the porn lit biz. I got a taste of the new female take on porn when I went to a Queen street bistro to meet Jenn Bowers and Kate Gilliam, two twenty-something activists who plastered downtown Toronto with posters asking for submissions to their new magazine, S.M.U.T. "We were talking about doing a magazine and then we thought, who are we kidding?" Gilliam explains. "What people want to read is smut, what we want to write is smut, so let's just call it S.M.U.T." In their unabashed enthusiasm, Bowers and Gilliam are emblematic of the new wave of pro-porn activists. The fact that they are young women is equally characteristic: it's a well-known fact in the publishing industry that majority of porn writers and readers these days are women. This feminization of porn-writing has many causes (the fact that men can now easily down-load hard-core images from the web which makes reading seem too slow a process, the convincing arguments made by pro-sex feminists which have made many young women friendlier to erotica). A genre which was once the domain of dirty-old-men now has an energetic female readership. "Smut should be fun," Gilliam notes. "It should be used to provoke humour, laughter and experiments. It should loosen people up a little bit. People get really get excited when we say we're making a magazine called SMUT." Earlier writers and editors used porn to finance their careers and fought in the censorship wars to make erotica available. But these pioneers were ashamed of the very freedoms they had won: they always kept the porn separate from their serious work. Now a new generation of creators, heirs to a hard-won liberty, are willing to fuse porn and serious art as never before. "I do think that there is something happening in that porn and literature are converging," Smith notes. "What I would hope to do is eventually erase the barrier between them."