Recently, I wondered aloud about the seemingly substantial number of Great Writers who suffered brothel-related misadventures/trauma in pubescence. Someone appropriately named “tlon” simply replied “Borges,” and sure enough, here it is in this month’s Harper’s (and elsewhere, no doubt) in a review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life:
Williamson has Borges caught between the noble sword of his heroic grandfather and the gaucho knife. His mother enforced the one; his father, the other. Borges went off to his first day of school with a knife his father gave him for fighting duels on the playground.
[...]
When Borges was a shy adolescent, his father made an appointment for him at a Swiss whorehouse. He couldn’t bring himself to go. The trauma of this reluctance, Williamson explains, remained with him throughout life: he had let down his father’s chivalric ideal of a man wielding sword and penis with equal fervor, a man with balls enough to engage in a bloody knife fight at every opportunity. On the other hand, he had lived up to his mother’s ideal of moral purity.
Somewhere, surely, a Freudian is smiling.
Magic Hours by Tom Bissell: This marvelous collection of essays chronicles everything from film shoots to novelists rescued from oblivion. (The essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, with its portrait of raucous factions, unexpectedly reveals how soft today's literary world has become.) But if you peer between the cracks of these smart pieces, you may very well see how cultural lives are formed from the most unexpected life choices. And as we follow Bissell's development as a writer over the years, that goes for Bissell as well. (
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway: Harkaway's latest novel greatly improves on his previous book, The Gone-Away World, which I'm already on record as praising. Angelmaker adopts genre elements without ever feeling like a genre book, and it leads me to believe that Harkaway is well on his way to a narrative grace close to China Miéville's. Yet inexplicably this very fun book, which includes an eightysomething badass named Edie Banister, a mysterious mechanical object that may destroy the world, farcical scenarios involving lawyers and the police, and some unexpectedly moving moments about fatherhood, doesn't appear to be getting much attention in American newspapers. Nothing from the snobs at The New York Times Book Review, nothing from The Washington Post. And since I can't get Harkaway on Bat Segundo, I hope this Jump Up and Down mention gets you hopping as well.
The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel: Unless you're really pressed for time, forget Jonah Lehrer. If you want to understand creativity and its relationship to neuroscience, then the bowtie-wearing Nobel laureate is your man. In addition to being a physically beautiful book (you will drool over many of the paintings), there are helpful overviews on optical illusions, science, biographical backgrounds, and many vital figures from the Vienna Secession. Kandel's enthusiasm (and his call for greater unity between the humanities and science) is contagious.
My favorite in this category has got to be Boswell, who I think qualifies as both a Great Writer and a Great Curiosity. Of course, he didn’t confine these to pubescence. I highly recommend seeking out a book called “Boswell’s Clap: (Really Long Subtitle I Can’t Remember Off the Top of My Head).” He just never learned.
There’s a nice one mentioned in one of Jonathan Ames’s column collections, which I think took place when he was 12. I’m not sure that he could be yet counted as a Great Writer, though. Maybe a great writer?
(The story involves a drunk Ames, who shouts to a hooker, from whom he’s just received a BJ, that he loves her. She throws hot tea into his face, and her prostitute friends, who are all lined up beside her, laugh at him..)
Which makes me wonder, has anyone ever had a good experience in a whorehouse?
If a young writer went to a brothel and lost his virginity to a soiled but compassionate prostitute, would the experience be worth writing about?
The only one I can think of is Biloxi Blues.