Bodies Behaving Badly
A Guest Post by Aled Maclean-Jones (plus a bumper Rattle Bag)
Catch-up service:
Centrism’s Anger Problem
George Eliot’s Blind Spot
All Hail the Putter-Togetherers
How Not To Use AI
The Stamina Gap
Has Paul McCartney Read My Book?
I’ve had a very busy but very fun week, which included my birthday on Tuesday and a hugely exciting night talking John & Paul at Union Chapel in Islington, on Thursday. Thanks to those of you who came along, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Thanks to Intelligence Squared, to Waterstones, and to Helen Lewis for being such a perceptive, funny and charismatic conversation partner.
Since I knew this week was going to be busy I had the good sense to ask a very talented writer called Aled Maclean-Jones to prepare a guest post for me. I recently linked to Aled’s terrific pieces on the Swiss watch industry and Tom Cruise. For The Ruffian, Aled has written about bawdy writers and messy bodies. This is free to read. Enjoy!
One of my favourite Youtube binges is the Channel 4 series After Dark. First broadcast in 1987, the concept was achingly simple: take the extra time at the end of each evening’s schedule, add some knackered old sofas and a well-stocked drinks cabinet, invite a few luminaries, and let them talk. The subjects ranged from War and Peace, to the death penalty (featuring an actual hangman), to the life of Sigmund Freud. The show lasted as long as the conversation did. When they’d wrapped, that was it until morning.
It became known for two things. First, the breadth and erudition of its guests. Norman Mailer, Patricia Highsmith, Edward Said and AJ Ayer (booked for the ‘Football Crazy’ episode) were among the hundreds who, during the show’s four-year run, graced the tired couches of West London. Second, the bad behaviour. In a 1988 episode simply titled “Sex,” Andrea Dworkin and Anthony Burgess declared all-out-war. In another, a young Billy Bragg trolled a Tory MP until they walked off set. Most famously, Oliver Reed turned up, drank himself blind, insulted every guest, and threatened to expose himself on live television. Not long afterwards, the show was taken off air.
Today, it feels like a relic from a cruder, baser time: Clive James discussing Proust in a pool with the bunnies at the Playboy Mansion; Robert Hughes cruising around Wall Street in a red convertible firing potshots at Le Corbusier and extolling the virtues of shit; and Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens locked in debate in the Gay Hussar over what, just what, made Margaret Thatcher so alluring.
Yet enter any eighteenth-century coffee house and it’d be clear this was in a long and august tradition. From Tristram Shandy’s circumcision at the hands of a window sash, to Gulliver’s first instinct for extinguishing a Lilliputian fire, the path to sincerity ran through crudeness. These writers saw their bad behaviour as engaging with an essential truth: ribaldry was not an addendum to a thriving intellectual life, but a fundamental part of it.
Bawdiness requires two things: humour and the body. Both need to exist together to truly earn the epithet. You can be funny without being embodied. Think of the cerebral, comic rages of Thomas Bernhard, his narrators almost always minds in fury, not bodies in the world. The same goes for the inverse. Ben Lerner’s recent NYRB essay about his heart surgery is as embodied as they come: ‘I suddenly became aware of a space — the pleural space — inside my body that I did not previously know existed, that hadn’t existed until they pulled something out of it.’ Genius? Yes. But not funny.
What makes this blend – wit and the flesh – so intoxicating? I suppose it’s the only way we can access both parts of us at once: our official and unofficial selves. In his 1965 study Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin distinguished between the classical body and the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, the classical body is closed, smooth, complete: the ideal we present to the world. The grotesque is open, rough, imperfect: who we actually are. You cannot have one without the other. The contradiction makes the whole.
From this unholy union comes truth — or so the bawdiest of writers have always insisted, in defence of their bad literary behaviour. Henry Miller, responding to criticism of Tropic of Cancer, argued that the purpose of his rude, crude tour of Paris was ‘to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality.’ Years later, Somerset Maugham found himself reviewing another such tour: Tom Jones, romping and rollicking his way through Fielding’s picaresque masterpiece — eighteenth-century England as told by a sub-editor at The Sun. He located Fielding’s achievement in a similar place: ‘he had described, for the first time in English fiction, a real man.’
My examples so far reveal the problem. It’s been a list of men behaving badly. No wonder bawdiness came to seem like a casualty worth accepting, collateral damage in the pursuit of a kinder world.
But at heart, the bawdy is a question of style, not content. You can be bawdy and woke, a combination often found in today’s most successful comedians, from the crude, bewitching body horror of Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman to the alt-left podcast perennial Stavros Halkias. Bawdy and tender: think of Deborah Levy’s throbbing, poetic memoirs in which desire and domesticity happily coexist. Or bawdy and intensely highbrow: as in the case of Geoff Dyer, for some time the sole plougher of the male bawdy furrow in literary culture (the LRB review of his most famous novel is enjoyably titled ‘How Dare He’).
Yet these are the exceptions. For the past few decades, the bawdy has been in exile. In 2021, Raquel Benedict coined the sharpest shorthand for the now homeopathic levels of desire that define most media: ‘everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.’ Directors and producers regularly decry the death of the big screen comedy. The same goes for literary life, in which a cooler, sharper sensibility has for some time been ascendant. You’ll find no greater admirer of Sebaldian intrigue, or Cuskian chill, than I. But at some point, you miss the books that make you feel something in your body.
Thankfully, the wait is now over. Turning over Miranda July’s All Fours, I’m told to expect a ‘profound and bawdy’ tale. July’s exploration of the distinction between ‘mind-rooted and body-rooted fuckers,’ in which hands are pissed on, bodily fluids shared, and tampons erotically inserted, comfortably fits the bill. The same goes for Jen Beagin’s ‘satisfyingly dirty — and perhaps a little deranged’ Big Swiss, with its ‘scenarios that might make even Philip Roth’s protagonists blush.’ Harriet Armstrong’s debut, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, combines digressions on Žižek and Louise Bourgeois with reflections on pencil-based penetration.
The observant reader will have noticed what these novels have in common. They are written by women. For while the male author has spent the past few decades retreating from the body, women writers have found theirs much harder to leave behind. It’s fitting. The most foundational figure in the English bawdy tradition was a woman: Aphra Behn, whose Rover, a sort of Restoration version of the Inbetweeners movie (median line: ‘this one night’s enjoyment with her will be worth all the days I ever passed in Essex’) and whose poem ‘The Disappointment,’ about premature ejaculation (the ‘excess of love his love betray’d’), out-bawdied even the most committed rakes of seventeenth-century London.
Where Behn led, and the men fled, a handful of writers stayed the course. Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick veers like a trolley between lust and RB Kitaj, masturbation and Genet’s The Prisoner of Love. When asked what drove her to write it, Kraus replied: ‘I consciously set out to see if I could say “cunt” and “Kierkegaard” in the same sentence.’
More recently, Patricia Lockwood keeps the end up for the tender and bawdy: in her memoir Priestdaddy, a debate over whether to touch semen-stained sheets (chapter title: ‘The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place’) becomes the unlikely vehicle for a mother-daughter reconciliation. And, as one reviewer wrote of Sheila Heti – that great admirer of Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade’s – most recent work, The Alphabetical Diaries, ‘Heti writes so creaturely, so bodily, that it feels like a whole new genre is being formed as we read.’
There’s an obvious case for this return, and a less obvious one. The rude and the ribald captivate us. They demand our attention, something literary culture is sorely in need of. I remember watching a documentary once in which Jeff Koons was asked what his role as an artist was. He said it was to give art the attention it deserved in an ever more crowded world. He had a point. Mistake austerity for seriousness, dryness for depth, the absence of pleasure for intellect, and you end up with the kind of books that, once you put them down, you can never pick back up again. People will still come for the ideas. They just want to have some fun getting to them.
As for the less obvious: there simply are things in life, often indeed, the highest of things, that can be said only irreverently. These things, unsurprisingly, mainly relate to the body. This is perhaps most nakedly clear in All Fours. As July said in an interview shortly after the book was published: ‘Where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life — those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here.’ Whatever else might be said of All Fours, the tale of paunches slapping against stomachs, of shitting ‘everything that could come out,’ of ‘the whole body was tits,’ you won’t fail to have noticed by the end.
Fortunately, there are now signs men are re-entering the arena. After winning the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalay described his motivations for writing Flesh: ‘I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.’ His István is not quite at Tom Jones levels, but is not far off: sleeping his way to London oligo-royalty, leering at his wife’s topless friends, and roughing up a stepson. Benjamin Myers last year followed up the resolutely un-bawdy Cuddy with its polar opposite: a retelling of Klaus Kinski’s infamous 1971 Berlin performance as Jesus. In this the actor – half prophet, half pervert – simultaneously attempts to tell ‘mankind’s most exciting story’ while raging at the ‘interminable skid marks’ and ‘naive overweight hogs’ of the world. Knausgaard’s latest novel will, at some point, have involved a debate with translator Martin Aitken over how best to render the phrase ‘touching cloth.’
Looking again at the back cover of All Fours, it seems I missed a bit. ‘Profound and bawdy and deeply human.’ The last is the one that really matters. Bawdiness endures not because of the thrill of transgression but because it is the ultimate way into the real, the embodiment you cannot aestheticise away. Break open the bone and suck out the marrow. Truth, yes, but a different kind. As Geoff Dyer put it: ‘Logic aims to arrive at a truth by eliminating contradictions. This style achieves truthfulness by their accumulation.’
It’s a return we should welcome, a reminder that intelligence works best when it isn’t embarrassed by its own body. And that joy and seriousness are simply the same thing at different temperatures. There’s more to a sofa, a wine bottle, and a loose prompt than we give them credit for. I’ll leave the last word to Lord Byron, writing to a friend in 1819, unsubtly humble-bragging about Don Juan. ‘It may be bawdy but is it not good English? It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing?’
It was. It is. It will be again.
Please share this piece freely as it’s free to read. You can read more of Aled’s work at his Substack, Rake’s Progress.
Next, for paid subscribers (if you haven’t made the jump yet this is a good time to check it out, a free trial is available, it’s all very easy…):
- Thoughts on the persistence of our Prime Minister
- How to think about those alarming ‘AI will take all the jobs’ pieces
- The misuse of focus groups by Dominic Cummings and others
- A Rattle Bag of juicy links, including the first-ever painting by a genius, what I’ve been reading and watching and listening to, and a consideration of the lobster.
