Lawrence Block's Campus Tramp

Campus Tramp is one of the many sleaze novels penned by Lawrence Block very early in his career. He wrote this one in 1959 under the pseudonym Andrew Shaw.

Linda Shepard Is a new student at Clifton College. She managed to get through to graduation from high school with her virginity intact. Now that she’s a college girl she intends to lose her virginity as quickly as possible. Nice girls don’t have sex with boys at high school but it’s different for college girls.

Clifton College might not be the nation’s most prestigious seat of higher learning but from the female point of view it has one very big thing in its favour. The men in the student body outnumber the women three-to-one.

The first boy she meets is Joe. He’s a really nice boy, very kind and considerate and obviously hopelessly in love with her. Naturally she’s not interested in him.

Then she meets Don Gibbs, the editor of the student newspaper. Don is cynical and sarcastic, totally self-obsessed and has a reputation as an inveterate womaniser. He obviously doesn’t love Linda but he does want to get her into her pants. Naturally she falls for him. Soon she’s spending so much time having sex with Don that she doesn’t have time for boring stuff like going to classes.

When their relationship predictably crashes and burns she decides to devote her life to the only thing she considers herself to be any good at - having sex. Pretty soon she’s had sex with most of the men on campus. She does try to keep within reasonable limits - no more than two men per night. Except for gang bangs, but even then she doesn’t take on more than half a dozen guys at a time.

She even has a fling with her female roommate.

She discovers another passion in life - gin.

She feels that she’s achieved her destiny. She’s the college tramp. Every man on campus knows he can have her. He just has to ask. Sometimes she’s happy with her new life of non-stop sex but then the self-pity kicks in and she starts to hate herself.

And life throws her a few extra curve balls to keep her on her toes.

Like a lot of sleaze fiction of this era this is essentially romantic melodrama but with lots of sex (although the sex is described very coyly).

What’s most interesting is what the novel says about the sleaze fiction genre in the late 50s and very early 60s. Both writers and publishers had to tread very carefully. And what’s interesting about that genre is what it says about a society both fascinated by and terrified of sex. A sleaze writer could certainly get away with a book in which the heroine has sex with dozens of men (and Linda’s score probably runs into the hundreds rather than the dozens), as long as the author was careful to give the impression of disapproving of such wickedness. The author had to make it clear that bad girls like Linda always pay for their sins. He had to go through the motions of appearing to hold to rigid traditional moral standards.

In fact most of these writers did not share these traditional moral views at all, so the challenge was to write a book in such a way as to avoid getting into trouble with the law whilst also sneakily suggesting that maybe girls like Linda were not monsters of depravity and did not deserve to suffer horrible fates. So you always have to bear in mind that the reader is not necessarily supposed to take everything literally. When Linda indulges herself in orgies of shame and guilt over her sexual adventures we’re not necessarily supposed to agree with her savage self-denunciations. Some readers at the time may have judged such characters harshly but the writers may have hoped that their readers would be less condemnatory.

Endings also presented a challenge. The writer again had to be careful not to outrage traditional morality, but would often try to come up with an ending that wasn’t merely a straightforward punishment for breaking the moral rules.

Exploitation movies of the 50s would often include a “square-up” - sometimes a prologue in which someone purporting to be a psychiatrist or a cop would warn of the deadly menace to America of immorality, while the movie itself gleefully exploited that very immorality. Sleaze fiction often did something similar (although not so obviously) with endings that managed to have it both ways - with the bad girl redeemed without being destroyed.

So on the surface Campus Tramp is a very conventional moral tale but it’s a bit more intriguing when you read between the lines. It’s not one of Lawrence Block’s finest moments but it has points of interest.