It is sexual.

I suffer from it.

Which brings me to the pornographic novel.

Each genre has its particular attractions, some of which appeal to the most serious writers, others to the most cynical. The attraction that the pornographic novel holds for the serious writer is a chance to organize a structure with which to explore his own, inchoate fantasies; the temptation to the cynical writer is that he can make minimal moneys while indulging his. And it is a bold writer who can claim he or she has a clear and certain view of the illusive line, especially here, between indulgence and exploration.

Nevertheless, this is the sexual syndrome—the truth behind the novel’s standard, moral stance—that I have chosen to explore:

Power in our society is overwhelmingly allotted to men; no matter how socially marginal a man is, the power situation is maintained in all ways when it is at the expense of women. Women are almost always society’s victims, when society deigns to consider them at all—which is rarely.

That is the didactic template under Hogg.

It is not Sade’s.

Still, do not mistake it for the standard lie. …

Though if any woman wishes to construct a proof that I have, indeed, fallen victim to it, at any level, subtle or overt, I bow to her argument sight unseen. It is all too possible. It is all too probable. I can only say: “Produce some fiction that contradicts it. That is the novel I wait for more eagerly than any other.”

In 1963, Marilyn and I, returning at dawn to our apartment on East Fifth Street, found a young woman asleep on a schoolyard bench on West Fourth. She had been the manager of a coffee house where I occasionally played guitar and sang for what Greenwich Village tourists would leave in the wicker basket—it was “seeded” with a dollar bill, but we were happy if there were quarters. We took her back to our second-floor apartment at the end of our dead-end street, and a complicated and harrowing story followed to explain why she was sleeping on a schoolyard bench in the first place: the only detail I remember was that, among other sordidness, someone had hired three men to rape the woman friend she had been staying with; and, indeed, such hirings, in certain circles, were common.

Once, I spent a boozy evening at a Clancy’s on Twenty-third Street, listening to a man regale me till closing with a tale, verging on psychotic incoherence, of the years he had spent as a “rape artist,” when he had been paid to sexually molest women—usually strangers to him. His account was punctuated by unfathomable statements like: “But I never killed none of ’em. Not one—at least not on purpose …”—a sort of line frequently used to lend ironic poignance to certain romantic fictions but, when encountered in life, somehow says more about fiction than about the incidents under discussion.

These, among other things, are the basal subject matter for Hogg.