Tom Poulton: The Secret Art of an English Gentleman

A unintended companion piece to my essay on the 'Undergrowth of Literature' in the Sexuality-Erotica section of My Books. The cultural history of sexuality is a particular interest of mine.

Taschen publishes erotica with Germanic efficiency. This book is really just a bedroom coffee table portfolio of drawings from a minor figure, Tom Poulton, who produced a small body of work that illustrated the 'seedy' side of London life in the 1950s and the early 1960s.

It is fairly hard core stuff (certainly only for the very open-minded). It cannot really be considered particularly vicious or misogynistic today (certainly not by the sometimes hateful standards of its own day) although, naturally, had it been available and published rather than show more existing as a sort of sexual 'samizdat', it would have been so regarded by feminists between its time and ours.

Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. The tone is minxish and playful with what appears to be something close to a small cast of characters including an elfin 'little tart' who clearly represents Poulton's private fantasy. He seems to like 'sets' where a little narrative is implied - older men and young women, students, navy lesbians surreptiously making out in the bulkheads, couples being caught out by one of their partners.

The work is not worth too much analysis but the themes represent the reality of their times - pleasures are naughty and hidden, undertaken in defiance of authority (teachers, managers, officers) or implicit trades across the authority boundary (perhaps abusive but perhaps just transgressive).

It is hard not to see English post-war sex as naughty rather than vicious in this work - sexual behaviour is wanton but defiant of convention behind closed doors. But remember that this was the age in which Alan Turing was hounded to death for his sexual 'deviancy' by the security services. It is not over-imaginative to see sexual repression by authority as reaching the same intensity of cruelty in contemporary Britain as Soviet repression of political freedom. The net result was ignorance on both sides with immense courage or foolhardiness being shown by both political and sexual 'deviants' in their respective cultures.

It seems no accident that the security elements in the British and Soviet Establishments would both tend to see sexual deviance amongst the ruling elite as a possible sign of political betrayal (not wholly without reason, given that highly educated and cynical homosexuals were so alienated from society that a few British examples did, in the end, find themselves acting for the other side).

But this is a very heterosexual collection. For television watchers, this is also the age of 'Mad Men'. The imagery should be understood in precisely that context of public sexual repression and private vice. It is not unduly exploitative - but, at the end of the day, this is just a lonely male's masturbatory fantasy of loose women, seduction, service lesbianism, swingers 'avant la lettre' and (we may assume) prostitution.

The drawing is fine but it is not remarkable. Few drawings can be called finished. Many appear to be little more than doodles. The erotic drive in it is unsophisticated and the effect transient. It is just a footnote in the history of erotica. However, the book is a useful contemporary source document for any study of sexual attitudes in the London middle classes before the swinging sixties.

Enough time has now passed to look a bit more objectively at that curious and disturbed culture, built on scarcity and memories of war. It was to be blown apart by the pill, sexual and then women's 'liberation', AIDS and now by sex-positive feminism and a highly sexualised celebrity culture. As was said by L.P.Hartley, "The past is another country." show less

This is a superb collection of erotic art which takes the form of soft pencil sketches depicting the a wide range of scenes from the amatory arts, mostly F/M but with some F/F and threesomes. Poulton manages to capture the poses of the human body in a way that emphasises the erotic nature of the scenes in wholly credible scenarios, but perhaps his greatest achievement lies in representing the human face as a potent indicator of the pleasurable emotions being felt in these intense scenarios. This large collection of drawings contains a good measure of either preliminary studies or amplifications, all provided integrally with their related scenes. Poulton also indulged in erotic fiction, and two of his short stories are presented here show more along with German and French versions. The volume is amusingly furnished with a dust-jacket which offers an inoffensive alternative on its reverse side, intended (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) to improve its acceptability when being read in a public place. This identifies the book as Immanuel Kant's (fictitious) 'The Principles of Critical Philosophy'. show less