Today I am absolutely thrilled that the guest blogger for my series Sexy Stories: fiction that turns me on is renowned editor and writer Maxim Jakubowski. Over to you, Maxim....
I've always been a great believer in the
virtues of popular fiction.
I
began my writing career in the science fiction & fantasy field before
making a diversion later in life into the world of crime and thrillers. However,
my own efforts in these wonderful genres tended to attract mixed reviews and
barely average sales due to the fact that it was always self-evident to me that
even if I was working in genre, this was no reason not to have believable
characters constructed out of flesh and blood rather than cardboard. So, my
characters always felt real to me, and in order to make them even more real and
credible they shared many of my own tastes, obsessions, quirks, whatever, and
as a result sex often reared its pesky head in my writing, which didn't help in
making me overly popular to genre readers.
This explains how I eventually came to erotic fiction.
As an editor with a long career in
traditional book publishing, I have always subscribed to Sturgeon's law that
states that '90% of everything is crap, which leaves 10% of quality'. A simple
piece of maths that applies to all literature, whether it be deemed literary/mainstream
or be within recognisable genres such as those evoked earlier.
Having been accused of allowing too much sex to permeate my genre
fiction, I naturally became more curious about erotic literature and, having
been educated in France where there is a healthy tradition in the genre, from
Sade onwards through the surrealists, STORY OF O and a wonderful assortment of
contemporary authors, I began investigating the genre in the English language
once I had established that Victorian erotica and its upstairs/downstairs
spanking traditions did nothing for my libido. Beginning with erotic SF, exemplified
by Philip Farmer and others once published by the legendary Essex House 60s imprint, I embarked on a journey of
discovery which unveiled so many hidden treasures in the genre that I was
prompted to assemble what became the first volume of THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF
EROTICA, if only to demonstrate that erotic writing could be well-written,
non-exploitative and full of 'real' people. This was an immediate success,
which would later go on to encourage me to take the crime and thrills out of my
own novels and write straight erotica, something that now comes to me naturally
and continues to this day.
Shortly after the first volume appeared I
was on a break in Paris and came upon a second-hand book that seemed
interesting on a bouquiniste stool by the Seine and picked it up, without
knowing anything about it, attracted by its brief cover blurb. It was a novel
by a French writer called Vanessa Duries, titled LE LIEN. It was a thinly
autobiographical story of a young French student's acceptance of her sexual
submission and traced the moving trajectory of her relationship with her
dominant cum Master. In itself not a strikingly original story, although I had
been previously piqued by similar tales of BDSM dynamics like STORY OF O, and Anne
Rice's early excursions into erotica as Roquelaure and Rampling, which struck a
chord inside of me.
Vanessa's story touched me immensely. She
had an authentic voice which spoke to me directly at every level,
intellectually and sexually. The story made me cry, made me hard, made me scared
for her and her future and Vanessa felt so real that I immediately began
researching her. The book had appeared three years earlier and there was no
sign of any follow-up. I made contact with her French publisher, Franck
Spengler (who was later to become mine in France and also a good friend, with
whom I have since edited a collection of French female erotica as OOH LA LA!)
only to learn that the young woman who wrote as Vanessa Duries died shortly
after the book's publication in a car accident, and Franck was able to fill in
the gaps and tell me more about her and her story, the facts that were not in
the book, and privately showed me many photographs of her, some in extreme
sexual situations which had been taken by her dom, and which she had trusted to
his care. I was moved to tears.
Had she lived, Vanessa would, I believe
have become a major author and not just in our restrictive erotica field.
Considering that she was only 20 when she wrote the book, she was a born
storyteller, stylist, and could convey emotions and the sense of loss sexual abandon
can often provoke. She had begun a second novel before she died and Franck
would publish it unfinished some years later as L"ETUDIANTE (The Student).
Never before had a work of erotic writing affected me so strongly because
through the lines (and despite some often intemperate philosophising that only
the French are sometimes prone to) the characters depicted (and of course based
on real life) felt so immensely authentic, vulnerable, imperfect, flesh and blood
and guts and semen and fluids as we all are. It was also a demonstration of the
sheer power of erotic writing can attain when it is done right, and doesn't
meekly aspire to just being entertaining smut. From that day onwards it became a
standard I swore to reach for in my own writing and in my editorial choices.
From that intense discovery onwards, I had
no cease to convince an English-language publisher to get the book translated.
The times were not right but, eventually, I was given the opportunity of
editing the Eros Plus shortlived line for Titan Books and jumped on the
opportunity of releasing the book in the UK as THE TIES THAT BIND after which
that great erotic entrepreneur, scoundrel and innovator, Richard Kasak at
Masquerade Books took the bait and acquired it for the USA where it went into
several editions. The book appeared with a long essay/foreword by me about my
post mortem relationship with Vanessa the writer and her photographs...
Years have now gone by and both lists no
longer exist but when I was asked last year by Constable Robinson to edit a new
digital-only imprint for them of Modern Erotic Classics, Vanessa's book was one
of my obligatory initial selection, so it is now finally available again
(alongside 19 other crucial titles that all demonstrate how bloody good erotica
can be, away from the dross of self-published rubbish now flourishing on the
Internet and electronically and giving the genre a bad name, titles by Samuel
R. Delany, Elissa Wald, Michael Perkins, David Meltzer, Marilyn Jaye-Lewis,
Julie Hilden, Michael Hemmingson, Paul Mayersberg and others...; please look
them up and download at the first possible opportunity).
But my heart still belongs to Vanessa.
