Kingsley Amis and the Nocturnal Mensurator
• Sexual Health
Kingsley Amis is a favorite of mine. His prose and wit seemed to improve with age. I had no idea that he went through this sad business in his last years.
His experiences with sex therapy were fuel for his novel, Jake’s Thing. The treatments depicted in the story were ‘pretty close’ to his real-life sessions, according to Dr Gillan.
Like Jake, Amis had laboratory tests in which he was given ‘pictorial pornographic materials’ for stimulation (in the novel these provoke Jake’s comparison of female genitalia to ‘the inside of a giraffe’s ear, or a tropical fruit not much prized by the natives’) and had his erections measured by a machine called a plethysmograph.
At night he put on a ‘nocturnal mensurator’, a device for measuring ‘penile tumescence’.
It is astonishing that Amis went through these procedures, but it was a mark of how serious he was about keeping his marriage going and recovering his potency.