Walter's secret life BOOKS

4

M. L. ROSENTHAL

For even the Paphian Venus seems A goddess o'er the realms of love, When silver-shrined in shadowy grove : Aye, or let offerings nicely placed But hide Priapus to the waist, And whoso looks on him shall see An eligible deity . . .

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jenny How glad with all my starry lore I'd buy the veriest wanton's rose Would but my bee therein repose.

Herman Melville, After the Pleasure Party Etc.

Swinburne, Bridges, et al.

Roaming through Kinseyland a few years ago, Professor Steven Marcus came upon the anonymous My Secret Life and made it the central exhibit in his study The Other Vic- torians, an attempt to gauge the light thrown by pornographic literature on the life and psyche of Victorian England. Naturally My Secret Life has now been made available to us polloi (two volumes, Grove Press, New York, $30; introduction by G. Legman), for who—I ask you—ain't a student of Victorian England? For some, it is true, this will be the one item they have read in the immense bibliography of the period; but progress, after all, trudges onward one mire-sunk step at a time.

My Secret Life is the sexual autobiography, literal or fictional (doubtless a bit of both), of a Victorian 'gentleman' who early in life be- came voyeuristically obsessed with female genitals and decided to pursue erotic pleasure to the virtual exclusion of anything else. The pur- suit was generally more quantitative and com- pulsive than exquisite, and in the main he kept it as impersonal as it is possible for sexual ex- perience to be.

For these reasons, and despite the fact that most of his conquests belonged to the poorest classes, to whom the shillings he jingled were all but irresistible, the career he chose for himself was quite expensive. He managed, however. There was always at least some family money handy, various legacies and investments kept him going, and he married for money—the only relationship with a woman he seems ever to have complained about. His neglected and embittered wife died conveniently, though, leaving him comfortably fixed.

Something of a pre-Kinsey himself, he took voluminous notes on his own experiences and in old age decided to make a book of them

that would be truthful, he says, in every respect except such details as would enable readers to identify him. Privately printed abroad, in an edition of six copies towards the end of the last century, it led an underground life like the suppressed realities of its time. Those realities were open secrets, known to the novelists, poets and other knowledgeable adults in the male population of the day as well as to all those respectable women who were so fearful of the abyss marked by such words as 'ruined' and 'fallen.' As Rossetti wrote, even the children knew—

Jenny, you know the city now, A child can tell the tale there, how Some things which are not yet enroll'd In market-lists are bought and sold Even till the early Sunday light, When Saturday night is market-night Everywhere, be it dry or wet, And market-night in the Haymarket. Our learned London children know, Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe; Have seen your lifted silken skirt Advertise dainties through the dirt . . .

But 'Walter' (as he calls himself), if he actually existed, was no Rossetti. At least, I hope he wasn't—he had not Rossetti's delicate sympathies, and would not have spared Jenny even in imagination, from the looks of it. Still, internal evidence shows that he was born at about the same time as Rossetti, or probably a few years earlier. He could have been Ros-., setti, or Matthew Arnold, or Coventry Patin-ore, or George Meredith, say, in fictional guise. G. Legman suggests that he may well have been `the great bibliographer of erotica "Pisanus Fraxi," otherwise known as H. Spencer Ashbee.' My own admittedly facetious guess is that he was Groucho Marx, in a previous incarnation.

I base this guess mainly on the facts that he had a moustache and that Groucho's famous walk suggests the same constant, furtive state of excitation that bedevilled Walter. Then, too, Walter had the great comedian's talent for sneaking hastily into rooms and out of them, raising an enormous racket and yet escaping authority undetected. He shoved the women and girls he was after about with the ruthless speed of an old-time newsreel, in a frantic effort to see and touch as much of them as he could in whatever time was at his disposal, and have them do the same to him, and to have intercourse with them on the spot or make a quick assignation for a short time later.

As many of them were servants with duties to perform and bells to answer and the other servants to watch out for, some of the scenes described are hilarious in their combined frenzy, complexity, grossness and alertness. Alice's White Rabbit, in such a terrible hurry and timing himself and plung;ng into Mother Earth as soon as ever he could, had nothing on Walter. Think of Groucho making love to those splendid plump widows in his films (Walter had some of this type, too, though ser- vants, whores and the impoverished children of the streets were most often his fare)—but really having at them, at top speed—and

scrambling upstairs and downstairs to tackle the ingdnue and any other passing female in the intervals, and stopping to peer through key- holes on the way up and then down again. That's how Walter is in parts of this book.

The trouble is that if Walter is telling the truth, or even if he is just writing a very realistic fiction, he is not, after all, so funny. There are appalling things in My Secret Life, and the worst are those aspects of nineteenth century life that were so commonplace, so taken for granted, that their vileness could hardly be recognised by the mass of people experiencing them. When Walter was quite young, for instance, an equally randy cousin told him that the field-girls on his family lands were easy marks. He spotted an attractive child of fifteen, engaged her in conversation and got her to walk a way with him. She refused to accommodate him, however, in spite of the shillings he offered her, and at last he simply raped her.

Miserable and furious, she threatened to report him to the magistrate, but was put in her place by the foreman, an old hand at this game, who came up and promised her trouble if she persisted in her complaints. Walter was perplexed but hardly ashamed; he had had a virgin—that was to his credit, though there had been no great pleasure in it. 'I kept chinking the gold in my hand. What a tempta- tion bright sovereigns must have been to a girl who earned ninepence a day, and often was without work at all.' Much younger children were easy prey, too, of course, and the wives of workmen.

This aspect of the spirit of the Restoration and of Boswell's London continued throughout the nineteenth century, but Walter's sly bold- ness—unaccompanied by truly aristocratic glamour or sophistication or wit or by the aura of association with the great—brings out the true squalor of that spirit. For instance, he loved the quite common sight of women squatting to urinate in fields and in city lanes. For Walter, and quite clearly for many other men, the sight was irresistibly exciting—apart from the fact that it rendered women vulner- able to assault. He, though, was an extremist in his voyeurism.

He once spent more than two days watching women in a railway station privy in France, through a hole in an adjoining room. Though he had had a train to catch, he could not tear himself away from this unex- pectedly rich resource. He left only at night when the trains stopped running, and returned the next morning, twice, on schedule, knocking off from his vigil only long enough to have intercourse a few times with the woman attendant who abetted him in all this. Here is a theme for a new Beckett, though I tremble to say so for fear someone will actually get to work on the production.

Nothing I have so far said will quite sug- gest the atmosphere of this 2,359-page book.

The flavour, sound, smell of ordinary life in England—the degraded state of so many of the common people, the arrogant insensitivity of the well-to-do, the unselfconscious assumptions of a class society with its exuberances as well as its cruelties—all are here as we would gauge them from Dickens and other writers and from present-day survivals, but evoked even more sharply by the flat, factual literalism of the extrovert sensualist who does the talking. Almost entirely preoccupied with sex, he uses the vernacular always and, incidentally, shows how he employed it as a weapon in his con- frontations with women, shocking and challeng- . ing them with his blunt speech as he did by the physical directness of his actions.

Walter showed no respect for the persons of these women, except in regard to the pleasure they could afford him in generally short-lived relationships. Several were clearly suffering, or retarded, or pathological. Some he must have caused great difficulties in their later experience, for prostitution or Olives of drudgery were their most obvious consequent fates. As Professor Marcus shows, in the atmosphere of the times (a direct continuum from the whole past, of course) the cultivation of rigid standards of moral respectability was absolutely necessary if lower-class women were to liberate themselves from the morass of sexual degradation, and if women in general were to move freely in the new society as intellectuals or professional people or simply as independent citizens free from insult and attack in most of their movements.

I am certain, though, that it is for its porno- graphic character that My Secret Life will be bought and read. Sex play and intercourse in all its varieties and perversions are the subject of Walter's tirelessly zestful reporting and speculation throughout the book. In this re- spect it is like any other pornographic work. However, the author has a strong parallel in- terest in the psychological history of his own sexual awareness and behaviour—his forma- tive childhood impressions and relationships, his motives for doing certain things, his failures as well as his successes. Unlike most porno- graphy, My Secret Life does record failures, self-questionings, humiliations; and while its portraits of a number of the women lack ulti- mate compassion or even interest in them beyond the physical data, elaborated again and again, concerning their sexual organs, their physiques generally, and their erotic capacities, nevertheless the author's observationk.of them are so accurate that they do remain memorable, sometimes, as people. The freshly elitusiastic and wanton young Charlotte, Walter's first mistress, is memorable in this sense. So is the - disillusioned, stubborn Sarah Mavis, and so are a number of the others.

Apart from his gyrations as the ithyphallic ritual hero of comic tradition and his remorse- less activity as the archetypal Sexual Man, Walter makes his presence felt within the con- text of a given society and time. Some student4 of this book, notably the Drs Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, in Walter, the English Casanova (Polybooks 60s), seem to be advanc- ing him as a sort of star witness to the virtues of erotic liberation (despite certain qualifica- tions of this position that they fall back on). The Drs Kronhausen are impatient with Pro- fessor Marcus's sympathy for those women and girls who were, or just escaped being, Walter's victims rather than his happy playmates. They profess not to understand what Professor Marcus means by stressing the importance of sexual repression to people of this sort if they were to change the old hierarchies a bit. They seem not to understand that Walter's behaviour was something less attractive than Adam's un- inhibited sporting with Eve in the shade of the Tree of Life, before everything went wrong in Eden.

Still, Walter is unquestionably, as both Marcus and the Kronhaussen seem to agree, a forerunner of our current 'sexual revolution,' for better or for worse. One can hope that our period will ultimately be distinguished by its humanised understanding of love, in spite of certain stupidities in the air. That understand- ing should be sharpened by what Walter re- opens our eyes to in the past. As I have tried to suggest by the epigraphs to this piece, he can help us realise with a certain new clarity the literal bearing of a great deal of the literature of the last century whose candours, like its indirections, we might otherwise gloss over in the complacent assumption that the writers of that era neither really saw nor really thought about sexual realities.