First, the contests' finalists, former American author James Baldwin and contemporary English writer Jeannette Winterson, were both describing same-sex encounters in the passages from their writings that were selected for the competition. Oh well, conventional sex between men and women is so very yesterday. Either a gay black male or a lesbian will be the overall winner. The Lit Hub judges can congratulate themselves on being about as politically correct as it gets these days.
Defeated in the semi-finals, or round of four, were Philip Roth (no loss in my view as readers of my earlier posts on this topic will know) and D.H. Lawrence, for whom I have considerable simpathy. Arguably, he more than anyone else lifted depictions of explicit sex out of the netherworld of pornography and the like and into the literary canon.
But let's turn to the sea anemone, which both Lawrence and Winterson's passages made use of as a metaphor for a woman's vagina.
"She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with tides of longing," Winterson wrote in 1993.
While Judge Walter Mosley, an American novelist, gave no reason for picking Winterson over Philip Roth, Lit Hub's short description of what was at issue was Winterson's "poetic immediacy" against Roth's "maniac priapism."
Priapism, by the way, "is a potentially painful medical condition in which the erect penis does not return to its flaccid state, despite the absence of both physical and psychological stimulation, within four hours," Wikipedia says, adding that the condition is considered to be a medical emergency.
So, when it comes to Winterson, the sea anemone is a legitimate an element of "poetic immediacy" in the context of writing about sex.
How about Lawrence?
Well, Judge John Ashbery, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, cites the following excerpt from "Lady Chatterly's Lover," published in 1928, as his reason for rejecting Lawrence in favor of Baldwin.
"She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit and she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anmone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make fulfillment for her."
That, said, Ashbury "is ridden with embarrassing cliches."
Hmmm. In 1928, reference to a sea anonme and the tide as a sexual metaphor was an embarrassing cliche. But in 1993, it was poetry. Go figure, as the saying goes.
But, as reader know, this was not the first significant shortcoming in the judging of Lit Hub's contest.
On to the finals.
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