All credit to Alexandra Petri, by the way, for bringing this fact into my life completely unsolicited and of whom I will always endeavor to be worthy. But, yes, W. Somerset Maugham, who described himself in his own autobiography as being “in the first rank of second-raters,” (which, !!!!) one time had a sex dream about Percy Shelley (NOT BYRON NEVER BYRON), and like, guys, do not worry, he got specific:
“Wescott, a fund of information about Maugham’s sexuality, recorded a rare example of one of Maugham’s sexual-literary fantasies. ‘Last night in a dream,’ Maugham told him, ‘– you may scarcely believe it, but it is true – I dreamed that I went down on Shelley. I remember saying to myself that I mustn’t try to bugger him; he wouldn’t have liked that.’ The ethereal Shelley, rather than the more robust, bisexual Byron, was his obscure object of desire. On another occasion Wescott found Maugham gazing at Pavel Tchelichew’s signs-of-the-zodiac illustrations for Wescott’s Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers, which portrayed two men entwined in a sixty-nine position. Pretending to be sexually naive, Maugham remarked that, ‘having been struck by the beauty of it when he was here last, he had tried it and, alas, found it not perfectly feasible.’”
If you are looking to have a good time, I do not recommend that you read the paragraph immediately following that one in the book. Close that tab! What a world! I mean! Mustn’t try to bugger him; he wouldn’t have liked that.
Eeee! Life is beautiful.
I can’t not read something after I’ve been told not to read it, so… yikes.
It me 🙁
MALLORY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN MENTION THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH OF COURSE WE’RE GOING TO READ IT NOW
man do i wish i hadn’t
I can’t open the ebook to read the second para, and also hate myself, so could you please sum it up for me thank you!
Maugham loved having sex with young boys; young girls, he could resist, but not lithe pubescent young males.
Thank you, I will now activate my time machine and go back to the happy era before I’d read your answer (AHHH really though why did I ask)
Let’s just pretend that in that time, “young boy” could mean any man under forty and let’s leave it at that.
Unfortunately, here it very clearly means 14.
Honestly because if I felt like I DIDN’T say anything a lot of you would maybe merrily continue reading and then feel super freaked out because it’s a REAL CHANGE IN CONTENT!!!
OK I read the next paragraph but I’m going to pretend I didn’t. IN SEX DREAM NEWS, umm.. anyone else commonly have sex dreams about the first person they slept with? I feel like an abstinence-only cartoon. I haven’t seen this guy in 10+ years! The sex wasn’t even good. why.
Not a sex dream, but last night I dreamed I was watching a porn movie (in a college class) and at some point in the film, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd (don’t ask me, I never even read Merry/Pippin fic for godsake) were inflating a giant penis balloon on a river bank and I started laughing and woke myself up.
Also I am taking y’all’s advice and not reading that next paragraph because I enjoy learning from other people’s mistakes.
I cannot give your dream enough thumbs ups. This is my one sorrow.
I don’t often remember them, but when I do, my dreams are aces.
But that absolutely sounds like something Billy and Dom would do???
ABSOLUTELY
This is a pretty entertaining not-quite-sex dream!
I love my dream life and I wish I remembered more of it.
Last night I dreamed that a woman gave birth to a tarantula and then someone threw it at my head. I screamed and woke up. (Partner claims the scream only happened in my imagination.) Your dream sounds much better.
(Is that someone’s toe continuosly popping up in the right-hand corner?)
Sheepish hand raise. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
I have a lay theory (based in the thinnest psychology knowledge that your brain prioritizes memories of your teenage/young adult years, maybe, there’s some controversy, but whatever) that stuff that happened in your teen years is more likely to show up in dreams. Like how people still dream about surprise math exams decades after leaving high school.
It’s a preferable theory to “You’re still in love with said ex,” anyway. Because definitely not still in love with that guy.
I still have these dreams about one of my former profs, whom I haven’t seen in at least 7 years. (We never had anything other than a very proper student-teacher rapport, much to my regret at the time.) One dream in particular left me very frustrated because my subconscious spent so much time detailing the dress I was wearing on our date that I woke up before it got good. In hindsight, though, that is proper subconscious prioritizing.
My sex dreams always either stop before the act itself, or are exclusively about waking up in bed with the person the next morning. So really, I only have sex-adjacent dreams.
OY, yes. I have a lot of “trying to find a place to have sex” dreams, or “getting interrupted” dreams.
There’s also a subset of dreams in which I have sex with someone I can’t actually stand — e.g., condescending, misogynist, Yankees-loving, goggle-eyed former co-worker. *spits*
I have a lot of arguments with Freud, but the idea that dreams are wish-fulfillment is near the top of my list.
I NEVER have sex dreams, is this weird? My sleeping brain is way to busy inventing infinite staircases into the void, clone armies, animal transformation and gigantic insects to ever get anywhere past a few kisses.
Man, I wish I had more dreams about infinite staircases into the void. Most of my dreams are distressingly mundane. This leads to an actual problem where I dream that I’ve completed a work task, and never do it in real life.
I have dreamed multiple times that I have kissed Benedict Cumberbatch, and then wondered if I should tell him I’m a fangirl with a tumblr and everything, and then I wake up.
Apparently I don’t worry whether or not Matt Smith will care, because I’ve had multiple sex dreams about him.
My first two sex dreams were as follows:
1) With a dog. I DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING, I JUST KNOW SOMETHING HAPPENED.
2) With Ben Linus from Lost, but I’m pretty sure he was made up of robot parts and dismissed me when I tried to go down on him.
This probably says way more about me than I want it to.
That second dream is one I would love to have, if I could choose. Not because it’s sexy, but because it’s just all around TERRIFIC.
That happened to me last night. I woke up and was PISSED OFF.
No, but the other night I dreamed I was going to bed (for sexy times, not sleeping) with Penn and Teller. We were all wearing flannel jammies. Teller still doesn’t talk, not even in the bedroom.
Woke up creeped as hell.
Most of my sex dreams are about, um, sex with myself, which seems awfully unfair. If I’m not getting laid in real life, can’t I at least get laid in my dreams?
I will follow your advice and not read it. I am content to live in the bliss of partial ignorance and gay literary fantasies.
. . . man, I could go for a dozen quivering oysters right about now.
P.B. Shelley was not too ethereal for sexy-times, Somerset. Do not worry about it.
I too read the next paragraph, but this one is too glorious a sun to be overshadowed. I can’t blame him. Shelley was dreamy.
Slightly unrelated, but I went to the Keats House this summer. Keats is my favorite poet ever, and I have a literary crush on him. And this visit totally ruined it. They have a bust of him on a short platform, and the guide helpfully explained that it was actual height. Keats was like 5’1″ and stocky. He had a major complex about being short and used to be a belligerent pugilist in school. He was basically Scrappy Doo, and was not remotely the lithe ethereal god I was picturing in my head.
I’m ignoring that truth and continuing to picture him as Ben Whishaw from Bright Star.
Haha dang I love finding out famous dudes are short. I’m short too so we’d have something to bond over. It’s part of why Wolverine had long been my fave male X-Men.
According to Ms. Marvel, upon meeting powerless Wolverine, “So, you’re just a short angry guy?”
I hate that I know this.
you cannot convince me that he isn’t 100% like Ben Whishaw from Bright Star aka my go-to crying movie aka a masterwork of quiet beauty
I’ve been wondering if I should give that movie a shot. This sounds like a ringing endorsement to me. (Really, I need to get around to watching more Ben Whishaw. I only JUST saw The Hour.)
Ben Whishaw is SO GREAT – he’s in London Spy right now, which is really cool (well I’ve only seen 1 episode of a 5 episode miniseries), Brideshead Revisited is more fun than reading the book because you get way less of the boring final chapters, his section of Cloud Atlas is really great, he’s wonderful as Q and he was REALLY GOOD IN LILTING
I have a joke about how he’s contractually obligated to cry in pretty much every role he’s ever in. In the first episode of London Spy, he cried 3 times, which pretty much proved my point.
Well, I think Whishaw was an up-and-comer at the same time as James McAvoy and Hugh Dancy, all three of whom ascribe to the “beautiful crying British men” school of acting.
I think you explained my tv crush type.
Oh man, I have also described Bright Star as my go-to crying movie and recommended it to a friend with ‘If you ever need to cry until you’re almost physically ill, have I got the movie for you!’
This is the absolute perfect description of Bright Star. When I watched it for the first time, my roommate thought someone (real and in my life) had died. I was sobbing for a solid half-hour after the movie ended. But oh is it wonderful. I can’t read Keats anymore without hearing it in Ben Whishaw’s voice.
Noooooooo! Keats is the only one of the “Big Six” Romantics whose poetry I really do like. (I mean I want to like Blake, but I’m just too lazy for it.) But now I’m just going to imagine Scrappy Doo’s voice asking for a beaker full of the warm South or going on about being awake forever in sweet unrest and I’m not gonna like it.
“He was basically Scrappy Doo.”
So much coffee ALL over this legal file right now.
Somehow despite knowing this I still have a wicked crush on Keats in general. Man may have been short but have you READ the Eve of St. Agnes? Man knew what was going on.
BRIGHT STAR
I read a review that said she wanted to show it to her daughter as an example of how very sexy not having sex can be. Speaking as someone whose first real love affair was conducted 95% through letters (real ones! in envelopes and everything!) I totally agree. (her point wasn’t slut shame-y, more like “maybe wait until you’re an adult? It’s an idea worth considering.”)
The height of heightism! I am 5′ so he’s mine anyway, just have to tell you stay out of our roseate bower with your shallow scorn.
stay out of our roseate bower
I love this.
So many other people were short then, too, though.
But yes, he was a tough little punk who could get drunk on words, which is not very Whishaw but has its own kind of charm. If they recover historical evidence that he sounded like Scrappy Doo. . . I will reevaluate.
CRYING at Keats basically being Scrappy Doo. Thank you.
I’m always alarmed to discover that phrases like “going down on” and “bugger” were in use so long ago, even though it was not that long ago, history-of-the-world-wise.
I really want to know when “going down” showed up first because frankly, I wouldn’t be the least surprised to find a variant thereof in something written in Ancient Egypt.
I just love the juxtaposition with the roundabout/formal/old-fashioned-feeling locution of things like “he had tried it and, alas, found it not perfectly feasible.’”
Bugger’s a REALLY OLD term, and it used to be a legal term – they called laws against anal sex “buggery laws” in Britain.
Poet crushes, go!
Byron. I feel like he would actually be kind of awful, but I’d still go there?
Millay!
Donne.
DONNE.
Byron would be solid for all your kinkiest fantasies. Whatever it is, he’s probably done it or at least heard of it.
But he’d spend the entire time thinking about artistic ways to describe what you were doing, and also making sure the light was hitting him in the most flattering way possible.
I really don’t think I’d mind.
And he’d probably give you syphilis.
Eh, STDs don’t exist in my fantasy world.
Byron WOULD make you swap sides in bed so you saw his left profile. And probably be a really selfish partner. BUT NONETHELESS…
Another vote for Donne over here. I would license his roving hands and let them go anywhere, in every room in the house, and twice on Sundays.
Yet another vote for Donne, and also Aphra Behn.
SAPPHO.
I feel like she would have been just as awful as Byron but also probably better at sex.
I don’t care how shitty she may have been (and lbr we have zero evidence of her character) as a person; I just want to sit at her feet and adore her as she plays amazing music.
I agree with this with all my heart.
You know that anecdote about the dude who heard her playing and demanded to know what song it was “so I may play it and then die?”
Well, all I would want out of the arrangement is that I may bang her and then die. And it would be a blissful death and every ladyqueer on Earth would feel inexplicable joy on that day, for one of their number had finally heard a complete Sappho poem.
One of my favorite scenes in HBO’s “Rome” was the one where Atia calls on the cook to sing to them, and the cook sings a song that’s recognizably Sappho’s Ode to Aphrodite. (And then she dies from poisoning before she can sing more than a couple of bars from it, but up until that point my classicist’s heart was full of glee.)
YES especially for the glowering poetess vibes
I want to have a comfortable midcentury menage with Ogden Nash and be buds with Muriel Rukeyser.
But also to have a fling with that gorgeous dirtbag Robert Lowell.
I know it’s a cliche but I’d totally go there with Shakespeare, even if it was just for the story. Plus Venus and Adonis is hot.
Shakespeare would be fun, definitely. Also maybe Marlowe…
Was Marlowe ever in doubt? I kind of heard a silent “other than Marlowe, of course” at the end of the question.
I feel like Marlowe would be just as up for having it all the time as Byron, but would be less focused on doing “impractical but sounds cool and poetic” shit, and more dedicated to just having a marvelous, filthy good time. There’d be less posturing and more giggling.
Marlowe would be A RIOT
Marlowe would wear you out and ruin you for other men. And give you gossip about important people in other countries, while not telling you how he learned it.
Yes! And Byron would be a dick about it and Marlowe would never think less of you for what you had or hadn’t done with him.
Agreed on Marlowe. There’d probably be a lot of incredibly lewd jokes involved.
And so, so much oral sex. ‘Tis Marlowe that hath ravish’d me, is what I’m saying.
Man, I wish these subcomments would go straight to fan-fic.
He wasn’t, I was just reluctant to admit how I was (weirdly?) turned on by “Dr Faustus”. I shall cast aside my shame.
I fell for a professor of mine because he used the term “cacophonous paraphernalia” to mean cell phones & pagers*. Alas he was all respectable and never noticed my restrained longing.
*he was also about 28 and not bad looking which didn’t hurt.
Ugh I understand you… I had such a secret yearn for my anth tutor last year (he was a PhD student from Finland! He had a cute Finnish accent! And wore ugly knitwear and round glasses!). I scraped a pass in that course because I was never concentrating on the material…
Ted Hughes! That is, the Daniel Craig version of him in Sylvia</> – yoww. And Keats, definitely Keats.
Shelley, though I’ve never had any sex dreams about him.
e.e. cummings. he would be kinky and into consent (“may I feel said he”) and also sweet and romantic (“i carry your heart with me”).
I … think maybe you should not read Cummings’s biography.
Browning. (Although he was such a good poet and so generally romantically inert with everyone but EBB–I think I read there was at least one failed courtship before?–I always have wondered if maybe he had terrible breath.)
I wouldn’t touch Shelley or Byron with someone else’s ten foot pole, wearing a wetsuit.
Mm, not quite a poet, but I kind of like James Joyce’s letters? Like, he is definitely a dirty old man but just the rhythm in his writing is hot.
Despite the pederasty, he apparently had “quite a respectable phallus.” Whatever that means.
New life goal: to actually use ‘quite a respectable phallus’ in context.
Colleague: so how was your date last night?
Me: …
“Dinner was good; the movie was meh, BUT”
Dying to know whether it was damning with faint praise, i.e. ‘quite respectable’ being less than respectable, or if it was actually QUITE a respectable phallus, said with some considerable reverence.
I think the latter, based purely on the placement of the word “a”
His john thomas was a real stand-up chap.
youuuuuu
Trufax: a coworker is in an on-again/off-again fuck buddy relationship with a friend of hers named John Thomas, and it makes me giggle every time she mentions him.
*sporfle*
Worst English homework ever! We had weekly glossary lists and one time one of the words was “quite”. Which apparently meant both “exactly, completely” AND “approximately, less than”. How. Why. How is it possible. How would anyone ever stand a chance to get it right.
It was so unfair.
“I’m quite sure” = I’m absolutely sure.
“It was quite good” = It was not particularly good.
Oh, English language. You are ridiculous. (Particularly British English – I hear US English uses “quite” to mean “very”.)
What? Those British people weren’t complimenting me? Jesus. I wondered why their vibe didn’t match their words.
Yeah! If I said “quite good” I, personally (maybe just being very American?) would mean really good. Man, language is so strange!
(Actually, I say “quite sure” means “absolutely sure”, but even here it depends on tone: “I’m quite sure”, said in an unconvinced voice, would definitely have the “not particularly” meaning. Basically, if you are talking to someone from the UK, maybe take anything with “quite” as being fairly lukewarm.)
Welp.
I remember saying to myself that I mustn’t try to bugger him; he wouldn’t have liked that.’
It’s important to respect your partner’s boundaries.
Right? Such dream politeness. Whereas in my sex dreams, the other person(s) generally WANT to do whatever it is I am hoping for, regardless of what their real-world desires might be. In *this* paragraph, he’s a better person than me. In the next paragraph? I get to feel extremely superior.
Maugham remarked that, ‘having been struck by the beauty of it when he was here last, he had tried it and, alas, found it not perfectly feasible.’”
ALAS
That’s how I’m going to talk about any failed sexual experiment.
“The porn stars made it seem easy and pleasurable. Alas, I do not have the core strength.”
“I discovered to my chagrin that I am insufficiently flexible for that pose.”
He’s not wrong though, 69 is the worst.
it really does look uncomfortable and unpleasant.
IT’S FUCKING AWFUL. Or….fucking awfully? Either way. 69 IS TERRIBLE.
Hadn’t seen my husband in a coupla weeks. Had got a hotel and was waiting for him to turn up. Watched the X-files while waiting. Fell asleep.
THANK YOU GILLIAN ANDERSON!
(My trusty subconscious had obviously instinctively chosen the more luscious of the two leads regardless of the nature of the real-life sexy-times I was anticipating.)
Well now I’m jealous that my subconscious hasn’t graced me with any Gillian Anderson sex dreams.
I read that as "cacophonous paraphilia".
I read somewhere that the feeling of hate or anger is very similar to the intense feeling of desire and being turned on so maybe your brain just gets it mixed up and you end up banging people you hate in your dreams? I don't really hate anyone so I can't really remember any weird sex dreams with people I hate but I definitely get the dreams about the first person I ever slept with and it's annoying as hell. Also, slightly related, was once pregnant with a chicken in a dream.
Byron would want to go swimming. Seriously, guys, read Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero. Seriously.