When Arctic Monkeys won the Mercury prize in 2006, frontman Alex Turner’s reaction was to say “Somebody call 999!” on the grounds that a worthier winner on the shortlist had been “robbed”. Had Morrissey turned up to collect the Literary Review’s bad sex award this week, he might have said the same, for, in terms of the prize’s rubric and the evidence offered on the night, it wasn’t obvious how he emerged on top.
The former Smiths singer and lyricist clearly merited his place on the shortlist for the scene in his debut novel, List of the Lost, in which Eliza and Ezra form “one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation … a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth”. By sex-writing standards, however, this is remarkably coy and vague; the scene’s jumble of daft metaphors avoids the detailing of bodily moves and the anatomical terms that previous winners have revelled in – Eliza’s vagina mysteriously becomes “the otherwise central zone”; Ezra’s penis (which somehow “whacked and smacked” the rest of her, as if detachable) his “bulbous salutation”.
There’s also the question of eligibility, as the Literary Review – which rules out genre writing, including overt erotica – describes the books that might qualify as “literary novels” and (with an implication of boundary-pushing) “modern fiction”: does List of the Lost really fit the bill? Another version of the criteria states that the eye-catching erotic passages must occur in “otherwise good” novels – something that can’t be said of the 2015 winner, which (as an article on theatlantic.com points out) was rubbished by everyone except Moz devotees.
The bad sex award is close to unique in being given for individual passages, and because the works in contention are read out in their entirety at the prize-giving (not the previous evening, not selected extracts) before the announcement, meaning the guests are unusually well placed to decide between them. And the ceremony’s biggest laughter was earned by the actors’ performance ofa scene from Erica Jong’s Fear of Dying that awkwardly combined the sexual nitty-gritty shunned by Morrissey with references to Genesis and yogic philosophy (“he opens my silk robe and touches my cunt as if he were Adam just discovering Eve’s pussy”; after an orgasm, she tells him, “You raised the kundalini” – a life force compared to an “electric snake” – to which he replies: “You betcha. Kundalini, schmundalini, it’s great stuff.”).
Jong thus offered exactly the blend of humdrum porn and lofty pretension that normally wins, and the feeling that she had been robbed was reinforced by a write-up of the shortlistees in the Literary Review’s December/January issue (which guests carried away in their goody bags, along with miniature cucumbers) that singled out her passage in its headline, “The Hunting of the Kundalini”. Why Morrissey, then? Perhaps the judges simply went for the biggest name and hence the most publicity; perhaps they were really punishing him, on behalf of the literary world, not for the prickly pop idol’s rather quaint attempt at a sex scene, but for the double past crime of publishing his autobiography as a Penguin Classic and outselling all but a few full-time writers with it.
Each year the bad sex award comes under attack for being (in the words of Peter Bradshaw) “a terribly English display of smug, gigglingly unfunny, charmless and spiteful bullying”. But a more telling argument for putting a stop to it might be that its work is done, in the UK at least. Morrissey (who lives abroad) is the first British-born winner since Rachel Johnson (who also arguably wasn’t eligible) in 2008 – a reflection of the change from the award’s first decade from 1994 to 2004, which saw nothing but home wins, to the subsequent honouring of titans such as Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Jonathan Littell, David Guterson and Nancy Houston. Grandees of the English novel are now hardly ever shortlisted because even the likes of Ian McEwan and Howard Jacobson now eschew sexual description, quite possibly in part due to awareness that such scenes could be performed to a baying, champagne-guzzling audience at the In And Out club the following December; and newcomers emerge from their creative writing degrees equally convinced that they’re best avoided. With only one Brit as a result on this year’s US-dominated shortlist, after two in 2014, the late Auberon Waugh’s aim in setting up the prize (scaring his literary compatriots out of the bedroom through ridicule) appears to have been achieved. It now looks as if the award’s main business is teaching our less prim transatlantic cousins a lesson - and awareness that this is not a good impression to give may explain why Morrissey and his bulbous salutation were chosen and Jong and her kundalini were chucked.
