By
Mark Sadler
My
former Oxford classics professor laid the blame for his permanent
loss of erectile function on a reading of the collected works of the
19th century Czech author, Vilem Franke. When I visited him last year
he was a shadow of the man who, in his academic prime, would stand
atop his desk and recite Larkin's jazz reviews and passages from The
Conference of Birds. He wept into a tweed handkerchief, patched
at its centre with a leather oval, and confessed that even high doses
of Viagra had done nothing to rouse his “little prince” from his
slumber. My suggestion that a kiss from another handsome prince might
do the trick at least raised a smile.
Earlier
this year, I attempted my own Vilem Franke reading marathon: In the
space of only a few months, I managed to clear an impressive, 150
page trail trough the dense, tangled prose of his first novel - The
Obdurate Wife. It was around this time that Mrs Seven (who is
actually my fourth wife and anything but obdurate) remarked upon a
noticeable decline in my sex drive and a general loss in the vigour
of my thrusting. Of course, I ended my experiment with Franke there
and then and, unlike my poor classics professor, appear to have had
a lucky escape: My wife assures me that since I returned to safer
reading material I have regained my previous “tip-top form” in
the bedroom.
I
have since resigned myself to never finishing The Obdurate Wife.
Even the section of this novel's wikipedia entry that provides
details of the plot, tails off halfway through the narrative. I
wonder if anyone has ever reached the end of it.
On
Monday I happened to be in a branch of a popular book seller (one
that rhymes with “Fresco”) and saw that they had on display
various Vilem Franke novels. For some unfathomable reason, there was
also the option of obtaining a sturdy cardboard slipcase, containing
three of the writer's better known works, for the sum of nineteen
pounds and 99 pence.
As
long as the danger posed to the male libido by these novels is
overlooked, I imagine that they will continue to undermine the sex
lives of middle-aged, pseudo-intellectuals like myself. I strongly
suspect that this was Franke's intention all along. He was a bitter,
puritanical man, who was obsessed with the population levels of the
mice living in his cellar, which he believed mirrored the rises and
falls in the population of his native country.
Last
year, at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, I took part in a panel
titled: Whatever is to be done? My fellow panel members were
people who, like me, cut themselves off from the wider world for long
periods of time in order to write novels. Over the course of three
hours, we brought to bear our in-depth knowledge of fictional worlds
on an array of complicated, real-life global issues. I attempted to
raise the danger of Franke's literary canon as part of the discussion
and it was grudgingly added to the bottom of a list of things that we
should all be worried about.
We
parted company later that day, with each of us making a vague
commitment to sign any e-petitions that we forwarded to one another,
via twitter or facebook. I note that very few of my literary peers
have supported my impassioned formal plea to have Vilem Franke's
novels banned. Writers and academics are, for the most part, liars
and frauds. I can understand why Franke didn't want us to breed.
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