The Confession as a novel

The Century of De Sade

MARY

GRAHAM

THE FRENCHPOET Guillaume Apollinaire

prophesied that the figure of de Sade
would dominate the twentieth century. In
the 1950s Lawrence Durrell wrote four
novels abundantly blessed with epigraphs
from the Marquis who gave the word sadistic, to the English language, and claiming by the title of the first volume of his
famous Quartet his rightful place as godson of the idol of the Surrealists. Critic
Cecily Mackworth says that Mr. Durrells
Alexundria is a city inflated into the Sadian dream of the unleashed subconcious.
Actually, the Sadian dream was within the narrow limits of perversity. Sades
work in its totality was a confessiony
revealing a fascinating, if somewhat monotonous, human secret, a catalog, in
fact, of sexual depravities-an
extraordinary anticipation of the scientific work
of Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and others. Sade
was the founder of a new science, that
concerned with sexual abnormalities, and
he was its principal victim. He brought
his own living, palpitating human heart
under the microscope and used the scalpel

LUND

with the indifference of the scientist. The

secret of de Sade, says Jean Paulhan in
a preface to a new edition of Infortums
de la Vertu (Editions du Point du Jour),
is not sadism, but masochism.
Pierre Klossowski, in an essay, Sade,
mon prochuin (Editions du Seuil), would
annul the myth of Sade as liberator of
mankind. Apollinaire called de Sade a
free spirit; the Surrealists named him
as precursor because they thought he had
given man the key to absolute liberty.
On the contrary, says Pierre Klossowski,
Sades message is one of defeat, not of
victory. The atmosphere of Sades novels
has nothing in common with surrealist
hedonism or sensuality. The vocabulary
of Sade is that of guilt. But the unique
passion of the novels is indifference.
Nothing proves his failure so completely
as the tragic monotone in the repetition
of the luxuries and the vices of Sodom.
The Surrealist boasted of his amorality,, which may be another name for indifference. The beatnik calls it detachment., Eluard thought that Sade gave
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back to civilized man his primitive instincts, and Breton saw him as the perpetrator of real, plausible, deliberate
sins. It is true that,Sade threw to the
flames society, law, God, humanity itself.
He tried to subordinate all things (at least
in the field of eroticism) to human desire;
yet he was obsessed by the threat of evil.
It was Sades avowed purpose to help
the reader explore his own mind: his was
the voice of the condemned man judging
his judges, the pervert mocking the normal man, the poor accusing the rich.
Sade was probably the first writer to
use the term modern novel. He was
speaking of the Gothic strain which had
come to him through Horace Walpole and
M. G. Lewis, which he was trying to use
to convey the new discoveries in psychology which a few years of debauchery had
revealed to him. In the Sadian view of
psychology, as in the Freudian, the lusts
are innate. It takes imagination to discover them. Modern scientists have surpassed Sade in theory, but they have not
yet discovered a dynamic psychology
which will link will and passions, mind
and sex in a systematic manner. That is
what Lawrence Durrell is seeking along
the continuum of the new novel form
he has invented.
When Gertrude Stein was asked, What
makes for real greatness in literature?
she answered, Lust for life, and pointed
to Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe as examples. Then she explained that the
phrase was not to be mistaken for an interest in sex, but rather that it implies
a sense of wonder and awe and the ability to be aware of the dimensions of life
and to give significance to them. What
the serious modern novelist seeks is the
wholeness of life, and a n understanding
of the individuals relation to the universe.
That is the purpose of Mr. Durrells
Sadian dream. His Alexandria is a city

of love and he succeeds pretty well in doing what Norman Douglas in hoking
Back claims he attempted to do in Love
Among the Ruins,--picture
in brief
flashes the development of every variety
of human love. Douglas admits that his
characters were always an amalgam of
several people.
No authentic child of
man will fit into a novel. Thus he approved,
almost three decades before the fact, of
Mr. Durrells practice, frowned upon by
some of his critics, of using bits and
pieces of experience to fashion the mosaic
of his Alexandrian world. Experience is
raw, chaotic, unpatterned, but the fictional
world of Mr. Durrell is ordered to focus
on his particular theme, which seems to
be that of the eighteenth century novels of
the infamous Marquis-a portrait of man in
his wholeness of body, mind, and soul.
American critics have alleged that Mr.
Durrells novels are mere travel books. If
this is so, are they of less value? Norman
Douglas, reviewing a travel book, wrote,
bb It offers a triple opportunity of exploration-abroad, into the authors brain, and
into our own. The last is the supreme
accolade. The Douglas irony is bitter, the
satire stained with the authors egotism
and fear of life. He was in the Sadian tradition, but he lacked the vision, the singleness of purpose, the missionary zeal that
drove Sade and Miller and Durrell.
Henry Miller, like Sade, accepted humanity in its most revolting reality. As an
expatriate in Paris, living a lumpenproletarian life on a dirty street which was
filled with brothels, amid hunger and
squalor, nights spent in the open, endless
struggles for cash, battles with the immigration officials, Miller was enjoying
himself. The aspects of life that filled the
French writer CBline with horror the
American Miller found exhilarating. He
tells his story in The Tropic of Cancer

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without omitting or excusing incidents

that would forever humiliate a lesser man.
In Tropic of Capricorn he relives his
early years in New York and Brooklyn.
The last sketch in The Intimate Henry
Miller (a Signet paperback) gives the
flavor of those years-the petty economics,
pain needlessly endured, the usually unmentioned horrors of ordinary everyday
life. Miller mentions them, at the risk of
having his writings banned for obscenity,
and reveals a whole world which exists
in everyones mind but which is usually
considered incommunicable. Henry Miller
communicates : he exposes the uttermost
imbecilities of the inner mind, and thereby breaks down, at least momentarily, the
solitude in which each human being lives.
When you read how Henry weeps, unassuagedly and unashamedly, see how the
barriers fall. He admits that there may
be too much activity in the modern world.
Is it a sign of approaching death? He says,
Before I could make a proper start, I
had to go through my little death. He
claims that the strong odor of sex which
his books purvey is really the aroma of
birth. The Tropic of Capricorn represents for him the transition from consciousness of self to consciousness of purpose. He declares that a new world is
i n the making, a new type of man is in
the bud. We are enveloped in a sea of
forces which seem to defy our puny intelligence. Sex is largely a mystery. Life
has no other discipline to impose . . . than
to accept life understandingly.
After we have lived we may examine
the record, run the tape again through
memory to glean what knowledge we can
from experience. For men like Sade and
Miller and Durrell everything is fresh,
newborn to significance, as if by a miracle.
The Intimate Henry Miller contains
the authors essay on Obscenity and the
Law of Reflection. He does not apologize

for the obscenity in his early works; he

explains it: The obscene . . . is vast as
the Unconscious itself and as amorphous
and fluid as the very stuff of the Unconscious. . . . Acknowledged by all, it is
nevertheless despised and rejected, wherefore it is constantly emerging in Protean
guise a t the most unexpected moments.
When it is recognized and accepted,
whether as a figment of the imagination
or as a n integral part of human reality,
it inspires no more dread or revulsion
than could be ascribed to the flowering
lotus which sends its roots down into the
mud of the stream on which it is borne.
Miller tells us that obscenity is the violence of language. The artist in words
. . . when he fully understands his role
as creator, substitutes his own being for
the medium of words. But . . . when exalted by his vision . . . and not yet fully
conscious of his powers, he resorts to violence. Lawrence Durrell, who learned to
know Henry Miller as a friend at this time,
suggests that the writing of these early
works was a necessary cleansing process.
Miller came through it with cries of exultation akin to those of the revivalists
at the early American camp meeting:
Hallelujah, tis done! Miller confesses
to a frantic appeal for communion, and
thinks that violence, in deed or in speech,
is an inverted sort of prayer. He quotes
from Jacob Boehme, the German shoemaker-mystic of the seventeenth century:
My writings exist only for the end that
a man may learn to know himself, what
he is and what he was in the beginning.
This is probably being wise after the fact,
Henry Miller recognizing what he himself
had heen and what he had been doing in
his writings.
Miller delights in recalling that Boehme
calls play the perfect state of man. I n
play, life expresses itself in its fullness;
therefore play means that life in itself has
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intrinsic value. But, Miller is reminded,

<L
the pure joy of activity is only a point
in time, a moment to be passed through.
Pleasure may turn into desire and thus
a tragedy develops. Play is necessary for
the relief of tension, for the detachment
practiced by all the great figures of history which have most influenced the
world, men like Laotse, Gautama the Buddha, Christ, St. Francis of Assisi. Men of
truth, he asserts, are men of action,
single-minded and invincible, The drama
which their lives symbolize, and which
therefore have for us the quality of the
eternal, consists in acting out the truth.
T,he pattern of their lives is as clearcut
as a jewel.
Miller warns that what modern writers
and critics are calling detachment differs greatly from the single-mindedness
of these great men of the past. Too often
it is merely a refusal to look at reality.
D. H. Lawrence is recognized as a great
Sadian, though perhaps in a narrower
sense than Miller and Durrell. Norman
Douglas pointed out that the American
Edgar Allan Poe is also of this company:
prodigious in intellectual versatility, i n
variety of material singularly poor . . . .
his influence upon literature was civilizing
and purifying. A great anti-vulgarian. As
such, he discarded the ethical moment,
and in doing so he followed in the footsteps of the masters of all ages.,
Poe has been accused of pornography.
The poverty of his resources narrowed
his vision, but could not blind it. Like
D. H. Lawrence,he explored his own
soul. One thing he knew instinctively, one
thing he had in common with the writers
mentioned-he knew that the value of life
is in the act of living, that for true friendship or a true marriage there must be a
total integration of the self, and that creative spontaneity is possible only in isolation. Poes pornography does not consist

of four-letter words, but of terror, of vi-

olence and fear and dread. So we put him

on the reading list for schoolboys, along
with Huck Finn and Moby Dick. But its
all right. Theres no sex. Or is there?
Sade was the most spectacular spokesman of the revolt of the eighteenth century. The legendary outcasts and rebels of
history were redeemed during the Romantic revival of that period: Prometheus,
Cain, Judas, the Wandering Jew, Faust,
even Lucifer. In an essay on the new
novel which was later to be known as the
Gothic Novel, Sade explains that such
books are the inevitable fruit of the revolutionary shocks felt by all of Europe.
. . For those who knew all the miseries
with which scoundrels can oppress men.
. . . It was necessary to call hell to the
rescue . . . and to find in the world of
nightmare images adequate to the history
of man in this Iron Age.
The writers of Gothic novels looked on
the times in which they lived as corrupt
and detestable. They were avant-garde in
literature and radical in politics. The spirit of Voltaire broods over their haunted
castles. Of course Sades novels were suppressed. Some of his writings were published in the 1930s, but some of his manuscripts are still under lock and key in
the British Museum, to be revealed only
in the presence of the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Like Bunyan and Raleigh and others,
Sade wrote in prison, where, in solitary
confinement, he had time to review some
five years of debauchery and make discoveries in the realm of the mind which
anticipated Freud. He raised a standard
at the crossroads of depth psychology
and revolution. Not only did he illuminate
the ambivalence of the mind of man, but
he instigated the attack on the Bastille.
When very young, the impoverished
Marquis was forced to marry the elder

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daughter of a rich merchant, much against

his will, for he was in love with her younger sister. After five years during which he
several times tangled with the police, he
and his young sister-in-law eloped to Italy,
where they lived and traveled for a year
and a half before lack of funds forced
them to return to France. This his motherin-law could not forgive, for it was her
chief aim in life to see her young and
beautiful daughter honorably married.
She might yet accomplish this with the
help of a magnificent dowry, if her son-inlaw bore all the blame. With unlimited
funds, it was easy to manufacture evidence
to send him to prison. His wife helped him
to escape, and used what money she could
get to fortify her husbands ancestral castle, where for four years the young couple
lived with their two children, seeing no
one but servants and tradesmen and lawyers.
At the death of Louis XV in 1774, the
lettre de cachet against the Marquis de
Sade lost its validity, and he and his wife
ventured to Paris. But again his motherin-law had him arrested, and this time he
was forced to endure solitary confinement.
After a year, he was able to procure books
and writing materials, and seriously began
his vocation as a writer. In 1784 he was
transferred to the Bastille. He foresaw the
approaching revolution. In 1789 he scattered notes from the window of his prison,
inciting the people against the Bastille. On
July 2, he improvised a loudspeaker from
a tube and a funnel and called on the mob
to rescue the prisoners. The next day his
mother-in-law had him transferred to an
asylum for the insane. On July 14, the
Bastille was stormed and many of Sades
manuscripts were lost.
In March, 1790, the Assembly of the
Republic released all prisoners held by
lettre de cachet. At the age of fifty, Sade
re-entered the world, homeless, and almost

penniless. When he regained the administration of his estate, he accepted a deed of

separation from his wife, and set up housekeeping with a widow whose son was his
devoted pupil. To augment his income he
became a playwright, with considerable
success. He also worked for the Revolution
as speaker and secretary. But when the
senseless butcheries of the Terror occurred, he withdrew from the Party. His
wifes parents, who had caused him so
much misery, were among the victims of
the mobs fury. As president of the bench
before which they were brought to trial,
he voted against their execution. For this
display of moderation, he passed through
four prisons, each more ghastly than the
last, but was saved from execution by a
change in the government. He went back
to writing as a means of support. In 1800
he published a novel in which the chief
characters were recognized as Napoleon
and Josephine. For this he was arrested,
and after a year in prison, declared mad
and transferred to an insane asylum. Here
the director permitted him to institute a
theater in which the inmates acted out
plays which he wrote and directed.
Censorship was a fact to be reckoned
with in those days. From the files of the
Library of Royal Censorship in Paris, the
following speech is given as deleted from
a play produced in that city in 1761:

I shall not allow myself to speak ill of

voluptuousness and to decry its attraction. Its purpose is too august and too
universal. I shall talk to you as if Nature
heard me, Would she not be right in replying to him who speaks ill of itSilence, foolish one, do you believe that
your father would have concerned himself with your birth and your mother
risked her life to give you life, without
this inexpressible delight?
.

..

This was considered censorabIe in a day

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when every man who could aford it kept

a mistress, and every married lady considered it her privilege to have a lover,
when pornographic literature circulated
freely among the rich and was read aloud
at evening parties. But the strictures upon
the printed page and the publicly spoken
word were severe. Voltaire said of his age,
We have lifted modesty out of our hearts
and set it upon our lips.
The play was written by Denis Diderot,
philosopher, encyclopedist, lover of science. He was concerned with understanding the physical and psychological aspects
of love. Near the end of his life he wrote a
series of dialogues which express the poetr y of physiology. The style becomes more
poetic as the subject becomes more physical. Diderot was himself excited by what
he had written. The maddest and deepest
thing ever written, he wrote a friend, but
there are five or six pages that would
make your sisters hair stand on end. He
did not dare to pdblish it. He had been a
prisoner in the Bastille twenty years before because he had been brave enough to
publish his ideas. He no longer had that
courage. He burned the manuscript. Fortunately there were copies made by
friends, and some sixty years later the dialogues were published. Though the science is
outmoded, the charm and daring of the
ideas hold the readers interest.
One idea which modern educators recognize is that to speak of sex purely and
objectively a scientific vocabulary is necessary. Diderot carried out this idea in
the educationof his only daughter by
sending her, in her early teens, to a woman scientist for instruction in anatomy.
Some of his friends were shocked, but he
thought the lessons the best preparation
for marriage. He allowed his daughter unusual freedom. Nothing is innocent, he
argued, even in church, if you bring to it
a corrupted heart. He preached that edu-

Catibn should serve the state without SBCrificing the individual. Man must carry
intact the marks that nature has imprinted
on him and which distinguish him from
others.
Rousseau, a contemporary of Diderot,
was louder in his proclamation of belief
in the natural man. But it was Diderot
who represents a first real awareness (as
Freud represents a final one) that man is
double to the depths of his soul. It WBS
Diderot who said of the English novelist
Richardson, He carries the torch to the
back of the cave.
Implicit in the ideas of Diderot and
Rousseau are the seeds of Sades infamous
novel Justine. The primary meaning of the
Gothic Romance is terror, and in an age
which was attempting to shake off the horror of hell-fire what could more inspire
terror than sin, unspeakable sin? The
Marquis, a political prisoner without hope
of pardon, dared to speakof the final
abomination.
These three men of the eighteenth century have left their mark on the twentieth.
Rousseau anticipated existentialism : like
Kierkegaard, he stressed mans personal
relationship with God; like Heidegger, he
believed in indeterminism; like Unamuno,
he called for individualism ; like Jaspers,
he opposed all forms of scholasticism; like
Comenius, he stressed d e importance of
universal education. It is common knowledge that he influenced education : his
ideas may be seen in Pestalozzis return
to nature, in Froebels belief in the creative possibilities of children, in Horace
Manns insistence on love and compassion.
Rousseaus weakness was that he underestimated the importance of discipline.
Habit, discipline, and concentration are
not ends in themselves, but are necessary
to the development of the spark within the
individual. Beyond discipline is creativity,
beyond concentration is self-expression.

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The painter and the musician realize that

the hand must be trained before its action
can become intuitive. Significant achievement demands unceasing effort and disciplinc.
The main emphasis of Sades work is
upon self-discipline. His total achievement
was a grand failure, his daily life a series
of small successes. He gave all and re-

ceived nothing. He refused to indulge in

remorse, and raised indifference in his
heart as an entrenchment against those
who would interfere with his work of passing on his original ideas. In his solitary
cell Sade pursued all that a man may with
intelligence, imagination, scientific patience, and audacious vision. The results
of his search still lie, i n part unread, in the
archives of the British Museum.

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