If you’re going to talk pornography with Russell Smith, a packed Starbucks is a great place to meet. Two minutes into my interview with Smith, a customer to our left noticeably moved to a new section, yet a man to our right seemed to cock an eye up from his economics textbook, glancing our way every other minute. It’s a small survey group, but it’s an apt model for the kind of divisive response Smith thinks he’ll receive for his newly reissued exercise in smut writing, Diana: A Diary in the Second Person.

Since his novels and his weekly Globe and Mail columns are acerbic but genteel, leaning more towards Kingsley than Martin on the Amis scale, some may be surprised that several years ago Smith wrote a filthy wank book in the mould of Story of O. Working firmly within the genre’s limits, Diana maps its female narrator’s erotic journeys through Toronto. The adventure begins — as they so often do — in the classifieds of a free weekly and winds its way through Queen West bars, Yorkville homes and the studio of a private pornographer.

“I started it as an exercise,” Smith recalls. “I found that in all my fiction I was not writing the sex scenes. I was doing the stereotypical pan to a window when a couple fell onto a bed. Why was I avoiding it? Part of it was that sex is difficult to write. There’s such a lack of a vocabulary and in the vocabulary that exists, you have a choice between the clinical and the euphemistic. So I felt I had to practice to get better.” With a full manuscript (made wholly from solicited scenarios contributed by his female friends) Smith also became enamoured of pulling off a literary hoax by hiding behind a distaff pseudonym — a time-honoured tradition in the world of blue books.

Beyond the fun of a hoax, Smith also points out that the pseudonym, Diana Savage, was to be his way of skirting the realities of demographics. “Women are the market you want for any work of fiction. They are pretty much the only readers of fiction left, and particularly of erotic fiction, of which they, statistically, are the only readers.” Diana was initially accepted by Black Lace, the UK publisher of erotica quickies, but Black Lace confronted Smith’s agent at the last minute and demanded proof that Diana Savage was a woman. Not wanting to turn his hoax hobby into professional fraud, Smith put aside his dreams of a second, lucrative career as Diana Savage, chronicler of infernal passions.

Issued in 2003 in a badly printed short run by the then-death-rattling Gutter Press, Smith was soon — as in, the morning after the launch — outed as the author behind the name Diana Savage in an ad hominem attack by Noah Richler in The National Post. Smith retells the event with an obvious amount of wincing in his riposte to critics that begins the new edition of Diana. As to why he accepted the offer by Biblioasis to reissue the book, Smith replies, “It was sad that [Diana] disappeared. It was just an accident of timing. It never got read by anyone.” Like a good pornographer he laughingly concedes, “There was also a small advance involved and I wanted it.”
While Smith and Richler have since achieved a détente, there still stands the sometimes unfairly personal discussion surrounding Smith’s fiction. He chalks it up to his day job as a columnist. In his fashion writing, “It’s a role I’m playing. It’s a persona. I thought it was so obvious that there was a lot of self-deprecation in that persona… kind of a guy with a high stiff collar, a monocle and lavender kid gloves. I guess not.”

He’s also proudly polemical — sans kid gloves — in his cultural writing. For one appropriate example he recently challenged Globe and Mail readers to give him a compelling definition of pornography (cf. “Smith versus jazz” or “Smith versus obtuse Toronto art” for several of his other notable dust-ups). “I was asking for it. I wanted a vigorous debate and I can be very caustic back. I suppose that encourages people to think I need a dressing down when it comes to my art.”

Diana is also a polemic in a way, an attempt to test the viability of the un-reconstructed blue book. When I ask if he looked to Kathy Acker or Georges Bataille (writers who used pornography as an agency against the strictures of literature) as models of what could be done he answers, “No. My goal was to slip into the genre unnoticed.” As much as Smith achieves that, he was “torn between trying to do the genre and trying to improve the genre,” by having his satirical voice present in the text. The book is full of attention to fashion details with a bounty of adjectives for various panty textiles that, even without the author’s true name on the cover, betrays a decidedly male perspective. To humorous effect, cowboy boots and grad-student decor also take a drubbing. 

As a writer of social nuance, Smith leans on dialogue in all his works and Diana ends up chattier porn than most. It’s easy to describe it as Whit Stillman directing Camille 2000 and there is a quantifiable love for Euro-sleaze apparent — especially in scenes involving what can only be described as “erotic torments at the hands of Signora Liscia.”

Smith is obviously having a damn good time and his relish comes through. “It was really fun, but hard. There are only so many sex acts and you’re also stymied by one’s instinct to write a plot.” His plot may be purposefully thin but to Smith’s credit the surprise ending is a turn against the conventions of the genre and a kick against the passive-aggressive terror of apartment-based monogamy.

While Smith is a gracious interview, he has to take leave before too long. With avowed pornographer now a line on his curriculum vitae, my mind makes guesses that I nearly don’t have the nerve to confirm — is it an orgy hosted by a contessa, or maybe a video shoot in a Mississauga motel?

“A black-tie fundraiser for the library” is Smith’s excuse, yet in the back of mind, I wonder.