Victorian Satyriasis

MY SECRET LIFE (11 vols. bound as 2). Anonymous. 2,359 pages. Grove. $30.

The entreporneurs of Grove Press have at last struck real pay dirt, the anti-Comstock lode of lewd literature. It should make queasy readers reach for their Turns, which as everybody knows, is smut spelled backward.

In content, this first commercial publication of My Secret Life makes Fanny Hill look like Mary Poppins. It rivals Casanova's memoirs in sheer size (2,359 pages) and weight (61 lbs.); and in the number of women dealt with (1,250 by the author's own count, 2,500 by another scholar's system), it surpasses all contenders. It is not only the longest autobiography of any kind, it is also the longest sexual memoir ever written. It smacks of pure fantasy, but it is apparently authentic -- at least, so says Gerhson Legman in his 43-page introduction. His erudition on such matters is probably considerable, since he is a freelance writer on erotic literature, and worked briefly as a bibliographer at Kinsey's Institute of Sex Research.

It is also probably the only autobiography in which the author genuinely tried to suppress his identity. Small wonder. This fellow not only told all but did all. He had a lifelong devotion to the female pudenda. He was a mountaineer of the mons Veneris. Why? Well, because it was there. No rational or speculative explanation can serve otherwise to explain his enormous obsession. His book illustrates the Hegelian principle that quantity becomes quality. Art emerges from arithmetic: it could have been written by a computer fed to repletion by a sex-crazed programmer.

Top Hat & Titles. Without rhetoric, moral or otherwise, without fancy phrases, the Victorian author simply describes his exploits in bed, in attics, boudoirs, brothels, houses of assignation, fields, lanes, etc., and in every country except Lapland. The descriptions of the sex act are austerely limited by his own preoccupation with the topography of the erogenous zones. Faces and other physical characteristics of the regiment of women were secondary, though he had some interest in dress -- the package, as it were. He was not an emotional man. He had a cold scientific interest in his own satyriasis.

Who was "Walter," as he refers to himself throughout his immense narrative? The reader finds that he wore a top hat (which he did not always bother to remove), that he lived mostly in London but traveled widely, that he was married, that he occasionally appeared at dinner parties where titled people were present, that he was rich enough to spend 20 golden sovereigns (today's equivalent: about $350) for a woman's favor. He mentions friends only if they went to the same brothel, and his wife only as "that woman" -- a hazard to be circumvented. Sympathy goes to that lady; it is to be hoped that she came to understand that if her husband did not love her, he did not love the other 1,249 ladies either.

It is almost an anticlimax, though a triumph of scholarship of a sort, to learn that the author of this inhuman, all-too-human document may indeed be an identifiable man with a life beyond that which occurred when he had unbuttoned his "trowsers." In his buttoned-up character, theorizes Legman, it seems that he may have been Spencer Ashbee, a rich businessman dealing in essential oils, who died in 1900 at the age of 66. He appears in the British Dictionary of National Biography as the owner of a collection of editions of Don Quixote, which he donated to the British Museum, with the proviso that the museum also accept his lifework: a bibliography of pornography, and his vast library of erotica. My Secret Life was printed at his own expense, and only six copies are known to exist.

Victorian Melodrama. In his recent critical volume The Other Victorians, Columbia University English Professor Steven Marcus cites Ashbee to make a neat sociological point -- that the sexual exploitation of the poor by the middle and upper classes was the tarnished underside of Victorian family probity. Dickens had horrified his readers by a picture of Fagin as a perverter of boyhood who taught starving waifs to steal. Worse surely were those characters who sexually debauched children. Few things are more unpleasant than the picture -- constantly reproduced -- of the remorseless author-actor jingling coins in his long pocket and bargaining for a bout in bed. Outside Blake's dark satanic mills he lurked, offering a day's wages, as little as three shillings and sixpence, for a child's body. It is like a Victorian melodrama, and it is true.

It has been said of the author that "like De Sade, he attempted to act out his fantasies of pornography in real life." Nothing could be more false. De Sade composed his pornography in solitary confinement; this man was never solitary except by choice and never confined except within the limits of his own obsession. What he wanted to do he did, and little imagination went with it. He was not a metaphysical monster but a cold-spirited fornicator. He was different from others of his kind only in that he wrote it all down.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.