The impossibility of eroticism in the suburbs

The good people of Cobham must have been startled to discover this weekend that their town was at the centre of a controversy concerning commerce, sex and literary respectability. When the magazine magnate Felix Dennis sold The Erotic Review to the owner of the skin mag Penthouse, one might have thought it would be the plunge downmarket that would cause the problem - The Erotic Review has a reputation for cerebral skittishness and its contributors have included Barry Humphries, Kathy Lette, Alain de Botton, DBC Pierre and the late Auberon Waugh.

The good people of Cobham must have been startled to discover this weekend that their town was at the centre of a controversy concerning commerce, sex and literary respectability. When the magazine magnate Felix Dennis sold The Erotic Review to the owner of the skin mag Penthouse, one might have thought it would be the plunge downmarket that would cause the problem - The Erotic Review has a reputation for cerebral skittishness and its contributors have included Barry Humphries, Kathy Lette, Alain de Botton, DBC Pierre and the late Auberon Waugh.

In fact, it was the prospect of moving to the suburbs of Surrey that caused the magazine's high-profile editor Rowan Pelling and her entire staff very publicly to resign. "It is just impossible to imagine The Erotic Review being produced out of Cobham," Pelling told the press. "We are a Soho type of publication."

There was more to this decision than mere snobbery - indeed the small spat over a successful but specialist journal points up an interesting hidden divide between the readers for which it caters and the outside world as represented by Cobham and Penthouse. In interviews, Pelling has joked that she is probably the only person to have lost money on pornography but she presumably now realises that the magazine she edited, which provided a perspective on its subject ranging from the quirky and intriguing to the downright creepy, could never seriously compete in the mainstream of sleaze.

The Erotic Review aimed first of all to be interesting and funny, to stimulate the brain before other parts; in the crude company of top-shelf magazines, it had little chance of, as it were, holding its own. There was no way that the magazine could retain its individuality and character from the heartland of Surrey.

As the novelist Leslie Thomas spotted when he entitled one of his comic novels Tropic of Ruislip, a reworking of titles used by that stupendously pretentious prophet of the erotic Henry Miller, British suburbia represents a distinctly functional and unromantic view of sex. It is not, as once was the case, that places like Cobham are embarrassed by the subject - the opposite is true, in fact. They are in the modern world of the bonk, the bunk-up, the affair, where such things are part of everyday life, on television and in the tabloids, enjoyable yet lacking any particular mystery.

In the context of a sex-obsessed society, the contract between, say, Penthouse and its readers is straightforward and businesslike. The magazine offers youth, nudity, sometimes a blank-eyed form of beauty, and, above all else, a conventional and utterly reassuring fantasy for its readers.

The success of The Erotic Review, which reached a circulation of 22,000 under Pelling's editorship, revealed another edgier world of intimacy, one that harked back to the shadows of the past. The subject was treated with the seriousness or humour that it deserves. Contributors recognised that sex was far from straightforward, that it was fraught with complexity, guilt and vulnerability - indeed that was what often what made it mysterious and pleasurable. It could be funny, surprising and, above all, interesting. To understand and write with originality and wit about the erotic takes skill and nerve, which was perhaps why it attracted contributions from writers who would normally never dream of writing for a sex magazine.

Subtly and by example, the magazine pointed up how debased, banal and conventional the publicly erotic has become. Pelling has put down its success to the fact that, almost uniquely, it celebrated "the natural and beautiful flirtatious relationship between young women and middle-aged men" and appealed in particular to "wistful young women who want life to be like in 1940s film and older men who are sick of political correctness". In a culture that is made uneasy by age difference, unless the woman happens to be the older partner, these are unusually daring thoughts.

Although it is traditional to think of readers of The Erotic Review as being well-spoken, corduroyed types, twinkly old parties who belong to the London Library and the Chelsea Arts Club, who take their magazine on subscription and enjoy it over a glass of port and cigar after the lady wife has gone to bed, its success as a literary magazine - which is essentially what it was - suggests that it had a wider constituency.

Of course, a magazine that believed in the romance of bad behaviour, in old-fashioned sin, could only survive in that form when edited from the natural home of furtiveness, Soho.

There is some mystery as to what will happen to The Erotic Review now. Perhaps it will emerge in a few weeks, full of spicy stories and grubby memoirs written by office hacks, an updated version of Forum or Readers' Wives.

For Rowan Pelling, almost certainly the only editor of an erotic magazine who has also written a weekly column for a top Sunday broadsheet and is a judge on the Booker Prize, a glittering career in writing and broadcasting would seem to await.

As for those wistful young women and their jaunty, politically incorrect middle-aged admirers, they will now have to make do with their dreams.

terblacker@aol.com