Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (44 page)

Curll was ordered to pay a small fine and stand in the pillory for one hour. Depending on the public’s opinion of an offender, even such a short stand in a pillory could be a terrible ordeal. Sodomites were pelted with filth and dead cats. Mother Clap, the notorious molly house keeper, nearly died there. Ann Morrow, who was found guilty of marrying three women while impersonating a man, was blinded in both eyes by objects flung at her by spectators. Yet Curll had thought ahead, and made sure he would suffer no such indignities. According to one contemporary report:

This Edmund Curll stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, but was not pelted nor used ill; for being an artful, cunning (though wicked) fellow, he had contrived to have printed papers dispersed all about Charing Cross, telling the people that he stood there for vindicating the memory of Queen Anne; which had such an effect on the mob, that it would have been dangerous even to have spoken against him; and when he was taken down out of the pillory, the mob carried him off, as it were in triumph, to a neighboring tavern.
¹⁶

Curll died in 1747, just before a no-account writer and civil servant named John Cleland was sent to jail. Cleland, future reteller of the Catherine Vizzani story and author of
Fanny Hill
, had returned to England several years earlier from a failed career with the British East India Company and had found no success at home. His debts multiplied, leading to his arrest and a one-year stretch in debtor’s prison. While incarcerated, the bookseller Ralph Griffiths offered him a small sum to write some drivel about a fictional London prostitute. The work—
Fanny Hill
—was published with huge success while Cleland was still behind bars and became the key event in the history of English-language pornography and a flashpoint in Anglo-American obscenity law for more than two centuries. It was not until 1966 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the book was protected from censorship. England first permitted the entire book to be sold in unabridged form in 1970.

Reading through
Fanny Hill
, it is hard to see what all the fuss was about. There is not one obscene word in the work, the sex is mostly conventional, and the story resolutely middle-class. Fanny is a young girl from the hinterland who comes to London as an orphan and ends up in a brothel. There she loses her virginity to Charles, with whom she falls in love but to whom she must bid goodbye when he is sent to the South Pacific. In his absence, she achieves success in the business of pleasure, eventually opening her own establishment and inheriting the fortune of one of her clients. Finally, Charles returns, they marry, and Fanny lives out her life “in the bosom of virtue.” The book ends on a suitable tone, with Fanny telling her readers that the sensations of vice are “spurious,” “low of taste,” and “inferior” to the joys of a moral life: “If I have deck’d [vice] with flowers, it has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner sacrifice of it, to Virtue.”

Pretty mild stuff, but after the Curll case the publisher took no chances. Griffiths had kept his name off the book, while Cleland was represented only as a “person of quality.” Neither measure fooled the authorities for long. In 1749 a warrant was issued to seize the author, printer, and publisher. Cleland had none of Curll’s courage. He told the court he regretted writing
Fanny Hill
, and that he had only done so to escape poverty. The indignities he had already suffered were, he claimed, punishment enough: He was “condemned to seek relief . . . from becoming the author of a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my soul, buried and forgot.” Cleland’s groveling worked, and he was given a hundred-pound annual pension in exchange for his agreement to stop writing pornography. For Griffiths’s small investment, he had made about ten thousand pounds.

From that point forward, unexpurgated versions of
Fanny Hill
went underground and multiplied. Repeatedly abridged, translated, illustrated, and confiscated, no work of pornography has ever been as popular. It was a favorite of soldiers and snobs, a barracks-room staple during the American Civil War, and even a token of international goodwill: The future Duke of Wellington took along eight copies on an extended voyage to India, presumably both for his own shipboard pleasure and to give as gifts. In 1819–20,
Fanny Hill
was the subject of the United States’ first prosecutions for the sale of obscene literature, when two traveling booksellers were fined and imprisoned for trying to sell the novel to Massachusetts farmers. By 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court would be sharply divided over the question of whether or not the book should be sold. Long after much more explicit material had survived obscenity charges,
Fanny Hill
was still too much for three of the nine justices to stomach. “Though I am not known to be a purist or a shrinking violet,” wrote Justice Tom C. Clark in his dissent, “this book is too much even for me.” Despite Clark’s qualms, the Court’s majority ruled that the book had some merit, and therefore could not be banned.

After the
Fanny Hill
decision, a book could claim protection under the First Amendment if it had an iota of “redeeming social value,” even as a curiosity. The
Fanny Hill
case was all the more critical because it concerned such a substandard piece of writing. Other works that had squeaked through the courts over the years, such as Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
and James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, were ambitious works of literature.
Fanny Hill
, by contrast, was “nothing but a series of minutely and vividly described sexual episodes.” If it had social value, then social value was very easy to find.

No one would have been more surprised by the
Fanny Hill
decision than John Cleland himself. When he wrote the book in a stinking jail, he never could have imagined that its artistic merits would be seriously scrutinized by the most august court in the English-speaking world. Based on Cleland’s later disavowal of the book, he would have been the first to agree with Justice Clark that it was “bankrupt” in “both purpose and content.”
¹⁷

AS PROBLEMATIC AS
Fanny Hill
has been over the years, it is completely apolitical. Nowhere does Fanny or any other character show any interests beyond their next erotic adventure, which well suited the tastes of Cleland’s readership. English pornography was a private affair; the middle and lower classes could enjoy reading about the sexual foibles of the aristocracy, and books about fantasy prostitutes such as Fanny Hill were appealing to all, but no harm was done. No one really believed that the state was ever put at risk by a sexy book.

Not so in France, where pornographic attacks on the upper crust were weapons of rebellion. The tradition of printing pamphlets about the real or imagined debauches of the powerful, called
libelles
, started in the mid-seventeenth century when thousands of them clogged the shops of Paris. The main targets were the Italian cardinal Jules Mazarin and Anne of Austria, the mother and regent of Louis XIV. Mazarin and Anne were charged with running the country while the future Louis was still a boy, and lost no time in making enemies. By characterizing them as perverts intent only on satisfying their unnatural desires, the pamphlets were accusing them of being unfit to govern. Their passions were, said the
Mazarinades
(as the early
libelles
were known), satisfied to the ruination of the state. Mazarin and Anne were often depicted as indulging in anal sex, which to French audiences served as shorthand for the basest form of immorality. As one
Mazarinade
put it:

The Cardinal f[ucks] the Regent;
What’s worse, the bugger boasts about it
And steals all her money from her.
To make the offense less grave,
He says he only f[ucks] her in the a[ss].

The poet’s solution to the scourge of Mazarinism was simple enough: “Cut off his balls.” The “Sicilian bugger’s” abuse of his genitals was the same as his misuse of his authority:

Constable with a rod of Sodom,
Exploiting the kingdom left and right,
Buggering bugger, buggered bugger,
And bugger to the highest degree,
Bugger this way and bugger that way,
Bugger in large and small size,
Bugger sodomising the state,
And bugger of the highest carat,
Investing the world in the stern,
That is to say, in the rump,
Bugger of goats, bugger of boys,
Bugger in all ways,
Bugger directly descended
From Onan, the notorious masturbator,
Doctor of buggery in both kinds,
Swindler as well as sorcerer,
Man to women and woman to men.

The
Mazarinades
’ charges against Anne were only slightly less extreme: She was, they said, a serial adulteress who abandoned the state and her royal son. Mazarin was her god, for whom she would sacrifice every Frenchman:

Jules, whom I love more than the king of the state,
I want to show you my intense passion
By ruining the realm, by ruining myself.

Sexual misconduct at the top of the state was worse than simple bad behavior; it was a contagion. The “cursed pus” that flowed from Mazarin’s “tool” into Anne was infecting the kingdom. The only cure, according to the
Mazarinades
, was to castrate him, torture him, or administer the legal penalty for sodomy and burn him alive.

That never happened. Mazarin and Anne both died peacefully, and France survived their rule with the monarchy intact. Louis XIV assumed personal control of the kingdom in 1661 upon Mazarin’s death, and led it into an age of unparalleled grandeur and influence. The chief emblems of royal power were the vast palace and gardens Louis built at Versailles. It was no accident that the center of the palace—the vector from which all power in France emanated—was Louis’s bedroom.
¹⁸

The Sun King’s prestige and relative sexual restraint helped him avoid the worst of the
libelles
. His successor, Louis XV, who ruled from 1715 to 1744, had no such luck, nor did he deserve it. A lackluster monarch, he devoted himself to sensual pleasures, especially in his later years, turning the court into a massive seraglio. The king’s many mistresses, especially the notorious Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, were repeatedly accused (with some good reason) of controlling the king and leading the country toward despotism.

While France feared that it was coming under the rule of corrupt whores, the king retreated to a country estate known as the Deer Park, where he led the life of a dirty old man. There, Madame de Pompadour supervised the delivery to him of a steady flow of young virgins for deflowering. Many of them lived at Deer Park, where they were given maids and footmen and taught singing, dancing, and painting in their spare time. They were told that the man they serviced was a Polish nobleman, a relative of the queen. To believe otherwise, the girls discovered, was risky indeed. One of them, who had mentioned that her lover was actually the king, was sent to a madhouse. If a girl excited more than just a passing interest for Louis, she was given a special house of her own and sometimes jewelry and other expensive trinkets. He sired at least six royal bastards in the early 1760s alone. (The upkeep of Deer Park was costly, as was the maintenance of the service staff to keep the operation going, though the actual expense came nowhere near the
libelles’
accusations.)

The
libelles
went into overdrive when Madame du Barry, an ex-prostitute and the illegitimate daughter of a defrocked monk, replaced Madame du Pompadour as the king’s mistress. The king was accused of being senile, servile to a whore, and unconcerned that the resources of the state were being wasted:

Who’d imagine that a clique,
In the teeth of all critique,
Could turn a wanton, public whore
Into a brand new potentate?
Who’d ever think that, without shame,
Louis would give up the helm
To such a bitch, and let
Founder the imperilled ship of State?

By the time Louis died of smallpox in 1774, it had become unsafe for him to go to Paris at all. The
libelles
followed him to the grave and beyond. One told the story of his departed soul’s search for paradise: On his journey, he asks directions from Saint-Denis (who had been decapitated) and Mary Magdalene, both of whom point him in the wrong direction. When he finally reaches the heavenly gates, Saint-Pierre ridicules him for taking advice from “men with no brains and whores.”
¹⁹

STARTING IN THE 1750s, many of the
libellistes
based themselves in London. England did not allow foreigners to come to its shores and file lawsuits, which made England somewhat of a safe haven for pornographers looking to attack anyone on the Continent. If French foreign agents were unable to kidnap or kill the
libellistes
, the only means of silencing them was to pay them off. This happened often enough to make pornographic blackmail a lucrative profession. Many of the
libellistes
’ works found their way into France anyway, where they were widely read. In many cases, French officials paid London-based
libellistes
to launch sex-slander attacks on their rivals.

One of the best-known
libellistes
was Théveneau de Morande, an adventurer and petty criminal who awarded himself the title “chevalier” to gain admittance into high society. While living in Paris from 1765 to 1770, he made contacts at Versailles and acted as a pimp for high-class courtesans and court mistresses. During these years he also gathered incriminating material for his later career as a blackmailer. In 1770, after his release from jail for loan-sharking, he fled to London, where he drew on his wealth of experience to remake himself as a scandalous writer. The following year he published the
Gazetier cuirassé
, an archetypal
libelle
brimming with salacious anecdotes about the rich and powerful in France.