Literary note

During my daily wander around the Internet, I came across this curious short prose piece called "Girls". It begins:

I read this short story in a magazine where a girl student goes into her professor's office and sits at his desk and passes him a note which he opens and which reads: 'Girls like to be spanked.' But I've lost it. I've lost the magazine. I can't find it. And I can't remember what happened next.

I wouldn't bother to post this here, except that the author is the late Harold Pinter, famous playwright and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

As you can see, the start of the piece sounds like a lot of posts on the forum here. Pinter goes on to speculate about what this lost short story is about. It's all a bit meandering, though to his credit Pinter is keenly aware that the key question in all this is: "Was she spanked?"

And then there is the enigmatic final paragraph, which frankly has me befuddled. (This is Nobel prize caliber literature after all, so no surprise it goes over my head.)

Anyway, worth a look if you want to see how a literary giant deals with spanking.

It is a strange and intriguing piece, definitely worth a look. The natural question (which actually fits perfectly with Pinter's theme) is whether Pinter was a spanko. Impossible to know, but it would be a strange thing to write for somebody who wasn't interested at all...

An intriguing story. I agree with Alef that it suggests Pinter certainly found the idea of girls liking to be spanked highly alluring. I think that's the purpose of the story, too - to express that almost-out-of-reach allure. And the story he can't find or remember is actually the story he's writing, and it was all inspired by a passing interaction with a beautifully-bottomed girl ('wiggling to the cab') who smiled at him...

I think TEM's interpretation is right on the money.

I can't help but think that the woman in the last paragraph is one that the narrator wishes he could have spanked. That pondering over the lost story enviably led to him thinking about her, that woman who wiggled so delightfully that day.

But that's just my take.

Goodgulf
(Who thought he posted this last night, but somehow forgot to hit to post)

I don't think the second part has anything to do with spanking. Isn't the key fact that both the story and the woman are lost for ever, and he wishes they weren't?

It would be really strange if he wasn't. Though casual google searching doesn't reveal any spanking gossip about Pinter, and he doesn't seem to be the sort of writer who littered his work with spanking references.

I agree with Rick on TEM's opinion, too.

Ian Fleming used to drop casual spanking references into his work, but this was largely because he was a spanko, something that was formed by his experiences at boarding school (one of them Eton) where he was regularly beaten. His former housemaster at Eton is actually described in the school's history as a sadist.

I think this is true. Partly b/c in the third paragraph, Pinter makes several of what could be considered quasi-sexual references/double entendres when talking the girl who may have wanted to be spanked. He mentions:"beating about the bush," "girls born at Cockfosters" "breathtaking spasms of spectacular candour," "(girls like to be spanked) might have been the climax of a long, deep . . . ," It seems he uses these words and phrases more for their sexual potential rather than as actual descriptions of what the girl might have meant when she gave the professor the note. So, yeah, I think he was turned on by the idea of spanking. Or at least, he thought the girl would have been.


And I think this is an extremely astute reading of the article, and likely even truer.