Flickering with leaf shadow, dawn fled over his face. In the middle of the rush of light, his lips put a blue shadow aslant his yellow teeth. Between the rags of his shirt, wide open with most of the buttons gone, sun shook in his sunburned chest’s hair.

“Hey, cocksucker … tell me what you’re thinkin’.”

Holding the wheel with one hand, he dropped the other to tug at the crotch of his pants, getting comfortable, and lifted his butt to let an ass-flapping fart. His forearm filled the rolled-up sleeve like a ham with hair. His elbow, through the tear, and his knuckles, on the wheel, were dark as wrinkled fruit skins. (If we stopped soon, I could make like I was going to the bathroom or something and get away and be back to Red, Rufus, and Crawhole in an hour.…) Hogg put his hand back on the wheel. His thumb lay up over the taped plastic. His gas, rising, made the cab smell rich and good. I looked at the grime-rimmed nail gnawed back on a nub like an oversized acorn of callus.

“Come on, cocksucker—” Hogg glanced at me again. Then a frown tried to fight its way in among the lines in his three-day stubble, into the lines around his close, green eyes. But a bigger smile kept it out. “Hey … is everything all right?” He looked at the road. “What’s the matter?”

I turned to watch the fleeing trees. “Nothin’.”

—San Francisco, New York, London

March 1969–October 1973

“The Scorpion Garden” Revisited: A Note on the Anti-Pornography of Samuel R. Delany

“The Scorpion Garden” Revisited:
A Note on the Anti-Pornography of Samuel R. Delany

by K. Leslie Steiner

In his preface, “The Scorpion Garden,” holding up a witty exchange between W. H. Auden and a Life Magazine interviewer, Delany introduces his novel Hogg as pornography. I acknowledge the writer’s opinion—and maintain, by the same emblem he cites, the ability to produce erection (and one presumes, vaginal dilation and lubrication …?), he has erred. Though the material of Hogg (and his previous “pornographic” novel Equinox [published as The Tides of Lust, New York: Lancer Books, 1973]) is the constantly perverse aspect of sexual mechanics (does a page go by without the intense exploration of their textures, their smells, their tastes?) and remains insistently so and at a density greater than numerous more exploitative and cynical works, I think I can say that while there may be places here and there which stimulate the average male (or female) reader, frankly, there aren’t many!

What he has written I would call anti-pornography—in the sense, say, Samuel Beckett’s novels have been called anti-novels.

Let me explain.

The novel is traditionally rich, in description and design, in incident and action, in social reflection and psychological density. In contrast, the anti-novel is traditionally thin, a minimal presentation of a minimal consciousness at a minimal level of activity.