The Pursuit of Laughter (20 page)

Whores in History
might qualify as soft porn, and thus caters to the English obsession with sex. It is too long and dauntingly heavy to hold. But you can’t have too much of a good thing.

Dr Johnson once said: ‘I always talk bawdy at the table, then everyone can understand.’ His words have been taken to heart in a big way by publishers.

Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society,
Roberts, N.
Evening Standard
(1992)

Not so long ago we had forbidden bestsellers in England.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita,
Ulysses
and others poured into the country and were burned if discovered. Now
censorship
is relaxed and books must take their chance without the boost of being forbidden.

Robert Darnton announces he spent twenty five years of research to discover exactly what the French read in the eighteenth century and whether their reading helped to cause the French Revolution. It is almost impossible to discover what people in fact read, as opposed to what adorned their libraries. Voltaire’s works fill a large shelf but probably, apart from
Candide
, they were not much read.

There was strict censorship, not only of political books but of bawdy, and jokes and scandals about the royal family, or wicked cardinals and licentious abbés. Blasphemy was almost as popular as sex. When found, the books were burned, but they were easily
hidden
and became bestsellers. They came to France from Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, many of them printed by Huguenots.

King Louis XV was a gift to writers of scandals, his love life so public, his mistresses so powerful in making and unmaking governments, his ministers so unpopular and
incompetent
. It was very easy to hold him up to ridicule and contempt, as he grew older and
corruption
ruled. He was powerful and dangerous, distributing
lettres de cachet
to people who annoyed him, exiling them and imprisoning them for years without trial.

Taine, after deep research throughout France and writing one hundred years later,
considered
privilege, in all its unfairness and stupidity, had more to do with making revolution than any other factor. Doubtless the forbidden bestsellers amused their readers, with their unedifying tales of those in authority, King and Church, but people heartily disliked the police state and arbitrary injustice. As to the Terror, it grew year by year until it reached a climax four years after the taking of the Bastille. Unlike the Gordon Riots in London a few years earlier, the French Revolution was backed by the educated middle class, which
had real grievances. But when every owner of property, however modest, became the target for pillage and murder by the mob the bourgeoisie took fright and has been frightened on and off ever since.

Robert Darnton’s researches and his potted French history don’t take us far in
understanding
what happened in 1789 and beyond, but they permit him to include lengthy translations of soft porn:
Thérèse Philosophe
, or stories of Mme Du Barry—always
popular
. Truth to tell, his book is disjointed, prolix and rather dull. The dust jacket, a
reproduction
of Jean François de Troy’s masterpiece
The Reading From Molière
, is a colour-
printing
disgrace, the faces and hands of the elegant ladies and gentlemen bright scarlet. For a work of ‘scholarship’ the proofreading is shoddy and one of the French advisors mentioned might have told the author that Mme Du Barry’s house near Marly was at Louveciennes, not ‘Lucienne’.

The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
, Darnton, R.
Evening Standard
(1996)

Oscar Wilde said he took his diary with him when he travelled, to have something sensational to read in the train. Anaïs Nin would have loved to have her diary with her, but it was enormous. It grew and grew, to about a hundred volumes. It was her end all and be all. She stored it in vaults of which she kept the key.

She was part Spanish, part Danish, part French, of a mixed-up Cuban family abandoned by her musician father, who left his wife to bring up the children as best she could. Very beautiful, she considered herself a great artist, but her writing was refused by publishers over and over again, which made her furious. She lived near Paris with her rich banker husband, Hugo, and distributed the money he gave her for housekeeping among her penniless lovers, chief of whom was Henry Miller. Terrified of starvation he insisted upon his stipend, as he called her largesse. Everything went into her diary, her
innumerable
affairs, including one with her own father, every compliment she received, her rows with publishers and lovers.

Anaïs spent every day with Henry Miller, and when Hugo was away on business he moved in with her. There were many abortions, and she and Hugo spent fortunes on doctors and psychoanalysts. When the war came they all went to America, where she bigamously married a much younger man in California.

Then began a wild life of lies, two husbands, trying to believe in ‘jobs’ she pretended to have in Los Angeles and New York, commuting between Rupert and Hugo. As usual, Hugo paid. When no publisher would take her work she bought a printing press and
published
it herself.

Although the diary and her outsized ego filled her life, she was also a wonderful wife
to her two husbands; they found her indispensable and swallowed the lies in order to keep at least half of her. Her avid self-promotion worked up to a point, and she often lectured at universities, charming dons and students. Hugo left the bank, and there were moments of financial disaster. Her old lover Henry Miller behaved well; as Anglo-Saxon Puritanism changed into permissiveness his
Tropics of Cancer
and
Capricorn
became best-sellers, he was rich, and considered a major writer. He allowed Anaïs to sell his love letters to her, a great help.

She herself had written a good deal of porn, which came in very handy. It was a little pot of gold for the old age of her husbands after she died. In her lifetime she was
rewarded
by becoming a cult figure, her old novels and edited diaries selling at last.

Deirdre Blair’s book is immensely long, with copious scholarly notes. It is very funny in parts, which Anaïs would not have approved of. Nothing is left out, but far from
boring
the reader this biography fascinates from beginning to end. American dream or American nightmare? In any case, American.

Anaïs Nin: A Biography
, Blair, D.
Evening Standard
(1995)

The image is familiar. Robert Louis Stevenson was a delicate, sickly child, terrified by
hell-fire
, full of dreams and nightmares, whose parents took him to the Riviera when the Edinburgh climate became too raw for him. The father, a prosperous engineer who hoped his only son would join the family firm, was bitterly disappointed when Louis decided to be a writer. It was even more bitter when Louis told him he had lost his Calvinist faith.

He made so little money with his writing and had such wretched health that his father, unwillingly, had to support him until he was 30.

At 30, he provided his parents with another dire disappointment by going to America to try to marry an American; she had a husband to divorce, several children and was ten years older than Louis. Yet, like all his decisions, it turned out to be the right one.

Fanny was tiresome, vain, possessive, jealous, but she looked after him devotedly. He suffered from frequent haemorrhages, was as thin as a rail with a concave chest, and his survival seems almost a miracle. Fanny did all he wished, living for months at a time on board a small yacht in the Pacific despite her seasickness because Louis felt relatively well at sea.

After his marriage, he wrote best sellers:
Treasure Island
, and
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
one of his nightmares put to good use. Finally, with Fanny and her children, he settled in Samoa, built a house and cleared the wild land round it. He wrote letters to his literary friends, including Henry James and Gosse, but had no wish to return to civilisation. He died, aged 44.

The South Sea islanders revered him, and he loved them. They carried him up the mountain to his grave, to which, Ian Bell tells us, there is now a chair-lift for tourists. The great charm of the man comes across in this biography, and Ian Bell, though unable to like her much, is perfectly fair in giving Fanny her due.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile,
ed. Bell, I.
Evening Standard
(1992)

In the nineteenth century syphilis played the dread part Aids does now. Until a cure was discovered, mercury kept it at bay, but Gustave Flaubert changed in a few years from a beautiful young Viking to a fat, bald, middle-aged man with one tooth, his mouth
blackened
by mercury treatment.

Was Louise Colet the muse of this genius? They had a short, passionate love affair, but to her disgust Flaubert left her to devote himself to his art. Louise suffered from his neglect and consoled herself with other men, usually well-known writers,
sometimes
Immortals from the Académie Française. She was a poet, who won the poetry prize of the Académie several times. Whether it was awarded for her beauty or her verse is unclear.

Flaubert wrote her love letters from Normandy, where he lived with his mother. She was forbidden to visit him, but they sometimes met at Mantes for a day or two of
lovemaking
at a hotel. Louise had a little daughter at home, which made her small Paris flat less than ideal for her countless affairs.

She had several great qualities; she was beautiful and extremely courageous, and almost more than politically correct, really a red revolutionary, extravagantly anti-clerical,
anti-Bourbon
, anti-Bonapartist. After the disastrous Commune she went to Italy to help Risorgimento, and insult the Pope.