The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (28 page)

was an embezzler. His father, a clerk,

made a good living, but was an extravagant spender and ended up in debtors’

prison in 1824. Twelve-year-old Charles

was forced to drop out of school and

work in a factory. After working for

some years as a newspaper reporter,

Dickens giving a reading

Dickens began his first comic serial,

Pickwick Papers
, in 1836. Within a matter of months he had become the most popular writer in England. Over the next 30 years he produced a stream of enormously successful stories, which brought him popularity among rich and poor alike.

Dickens was a source of endless energy. A witty conversationalist, he was always the center of attention. In later life he discovered that it was more enjoyable, as well as more profitable, to give public readings of his works than it was to write new ones. Dickens was a fantastic performer, and his audiences invariably left the theater in a state of emotional exhaustion. The intensity that he brought to these performances, which numbered over 470, is thought to have contributed to his early death at age 58.

LOVE LIFE:
What we know of Charles Dickens’ love life is colored by the fact that while letters written
by
him (over 10,000, in fact) are well preserved, letters written
to
him are almost nonexistent. Acutely aware of his reputation as a symbol of wholesome family life, Dickens once a year made a bonfire and burned private letters which he had received.

When he was 17, he fell deeply in love with Maria Beadnell, a flirtatious 18-year-old who wore her dark hair in ringlets. Maria toyed with him capriciously until, after four years of agony, Dickens—his pride badly wounded—finally gave up the courtship. His experience of rejection was so strong that he learned to suppress his emotions, and many years later he wrote
The Pen Is Prominent
/ that he was still “chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young.”

Not surprisingly, when Dickens chose a woman to be his wife, he approached the relationship in a different manner. Catherine Hogarth (or Kate, as she was known) was quiet and slow-moving, and Dickens made it clear from the beginning that he expected her to bear children and do what she was told. Ten children later, Kate was much fatter and less discerning than when she had married Dickens, and submitted totally to his will. As the years went by, Dickens not only lost his affection for his wife, but came to resent and detest her. He engaged in numerous flirtations and infatua-tions, usually with teenage girls, whom he found to be the essence of innocent perfection.

In fact, the most important woman in Charles Dickens’ love life was not his wife, Kate, but her younger sister, Mary, who was also Kate’s best friend.

When Charles and Kate married in 1836, 16-year-old Mary came to live with them. The three got along remarkably well. Mary was not as pretty as Kate but she had a greater appreciation of literature, and Dickens enjoyed her companionship. Then one Saturday night in May, 1837, tragedy struck. Kate, Mary, and Charles had returned from the theater and bidden one another good night when Charles heard a strangled cry from Mary’s bedroom. Mary had been stricken by a heart attack. The next day she died peacefully in Dickens’ arms at the age of 17. He removed a ring from her finger, put it on his own, and wore it for the rest of his life.

For months he dreamed about Mary every night. He saved her clothes, wished to be buried in her grave, and—a very rare occurrence—was unable to write for two months.

No woman, neither his wife nor any of the young women to whom he was attracted, was able to compare in Dickens’ mind and heart with Mary Hogarth. It was impossible to compete with the memory of someone who was frozen in time as a virginal, uncorrupted teenager.

However, if anyone had the potential to excite similar feelings in Dickens and to relieve him of the boredom of his marriage, it was his first love, Maria Beadnell, whose handwriting he recognized on a letter in his daily mail in February, 1855. Over 20 years after the unfortunate termination of their youthful romance, she wrote to him. She was now Maria Winter, married with two daughters. Although she wrote that she was “toothless, fat, old and ugly,”

Dickens’ heart went immediately back to 1830. Once again he wrote her passionate and suggestive letters and arranged for them to meet—alone.

When the rendezvous finally took place, Dickens’ wild and uninhibited fantasies plummeted back to the real world suddenly and with great force.

Maria had become fat and silly and bore a greater resemblance to his wife than to the Maria Beadnell of his youth. As soon as he saw her, Dickens began the long and irritating process of terminating their relationship.

Although Dickens spent much time in the company of women, it is probable that he had only one sexual affair. Two years after the Maria Winter

debacle, the 45-year-old Dickens met Ellen Ternan, an actress who was 18

years old—the same age as his eldest daughter. Ellen was bright and intelligent, and Kate became jealous of the time her husband spent with young

“Nelly,” as Ellen was known. Less than a year later, a shocked public read Dickens’ announcement of his separation from his wife of 22 years.

Ironically, the separation announcement set off rumors that Dickens was having an affair, not with Ellen Ternan, but with another of Kate’s sisters, Georgina Hogarth. Georgina had moved into the Dickens household in 1842, when she was 15 years old, and over the years she had supplanted her sister as head of the household, even taking over the responsibility of raising the children. It could be that Georgina and Dickens did make love at some point, but there is no evidence to support this possibility. Not only was Georgina not jealous of Ellen Ternan, but she had a genuine fondness for her.

During the last years of his life, Dickens spent much of his free time with Ellen and her family and supported them financially. It has been said that Dickens and Ellen had a child who died in infancy, but this is unproven. He did mention Ellen first in his will.

Dickens may have achieved some romantic satisfaction with Ellen Ternan, but the lifelong feeling of incompleteness which he experienced is best expressed in a letter which he wrote to a friend: “Why is it, that as with poor David [Copperfield], a sense comes always crushing on me, now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?”

QUIRKS:
While he was living with Kate, Dickens would occasionally divert his frustrations and nervous energies into mock passions. For example, he pretended to be hopelessly in love with the youthful Queen Victoria, and he greatly annoyed his wife by parading about the house singing:
My heart is at Windsor,
My heart is not here,

My heart is at Windsor,

A-following my dear.

When the queen married, Dickens told his friends that he was considering suicide. He continued this charade long after it ceased to be funny, and rumors spread that the great author had gone mad.

HIS ADVICE:
From
Pickwick Papers
: “Wen you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste.”

—D.W.

The Late Bloomer

FËDOR DOSTOEVSKI (Nov. 11, 1821–Feb. 9, 1881)

HIS FAME:
Obsessed with human suffering and man’s capacity for evil,

Dostoevski became famous for writing

novels which addressed these themes—

most notably
Crime and Punishment
,

The Idiot
,
The Possessed
, and
The Brothers
Karamazov
. He is one of the most widely read 19th-century authors today and is

recognized as having had a profound

influence on world literature.

HIS PERSON:
Short, frail, and awkward, Dostoevski had such a strong

tendency toward nervousness that his

face and lips twitched in social situa—

tions. Nervous attacks in his teens

developed into epilepsy in his 20s, and during one attack he damaged his right eye, causing it to become permanently distended and giving his eyes an asym-metrical appearance. In every way a passionate man, when Dostoevski became excited about something, he worked himself up into a frenzy, gesticulated wildly, and, some say, even foamed at the mouth.

Personal events intensified Dostoevski’s preoccupation with sorrow and crime. When he was 13 his mother died of consumption, and five years later his drunken, miserly, and lecherous father was killed by his serfs in an act of retribution. Soon afterward Dostoevski abandoned his career as a military engineer to become a writer, and at 25 his first novel,
Poor Folk
, was well received. Yet a few years later he was charged with revolutionary conspiracy for his involvement with a socialist circle and placed before a firing squad. The death sentence was com-muted at the last minute, and he was exiled to Siberia instead. It was 10 years before he was able to return to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) and resume writing, and another seven years before he began producing his major works. Despite fragile health and a life fraught with tragedy, failed love affairs, and poverty, Dostoevski lived to be 59 and died a happily married man, having achieved relative creative and financial stability and a recognition commensurate with his work.

SEX LIFE AND PARTNERS:
Called “the Russian Marquis de Sade” by his contemporary Turgenev, Dostoevski did not have a major affair until he was 34, and did not find any semblance of sexual fulfillment until his mid-40s. His lack of romantic involvement in his 20s was probably due to a lack of both self-con-148 /
Intimate Sex Lives
fidence and opportunity; it is thought that he did sleep with prostitutes. After being transferred from hard labor to soldiering in Siberia, his sex life became more active. He dallied with several attractive young ladies before becoming involved with the pretty, soon-to-be-widowed Marya Isayeva, whom he later married. Dostoevski was as attracted by Marya’s suffering (she was consumptive and her husband had been an alcoholic) as by her feminine virtues. He had a major epileptic fit on their honeymoon, which set the tone of their romantic life together. They were very unhappy (he once said that the more they suffered, the more he loved her), and neither received any sexual satisfaction from the union.

Marya died seven years later, and Dostoevski continued an affair he had begun with Apollinariya Suslova. The proud, red-haired, fiery “Polina” was an emancipated woman, 20 years his junior, with a formidable intellect and personality, but after their first year together she kept Dostoevski at arm’s length, teasing and torturing him for several years before ending the affair. (Later it became evident that she was sadomasochistic and sexually cold.) The highly sexed Dostoevski began finding release in gambling, and his passion reached such a frenzy while traveling with Polina that he would pawn their valuables and beg his relatives for money. His gambling mania did not abate until the happiness he experienced in his second marriage encouraged him to stop.

After Polina, Dostoevski was determined to marry a woman with whom he could establish some sort of domestic order and attempt to normalize, or at least stabilize, his sexual energies. Following two unhappy relationships, fortune finally smiled on the long-suffering lover. Dostoevski was 45 when he married his 20-year-old stenographer, Anna Snitkina, who idolized him and wrote that she was “prepared to spend the rest of my life on my knees to him.” Young and inexperienced, Anna found nothing strange in the extreme passion, and sometimes violence, of her husband’s lovemaking, during which he could reach a blind frenzy similar to that he experienced in his epileptic fits, and after which he sometimes lay as rigid as a dead man. His erotic fantasies were highly diverse and sometimes involved the simulation or actual act of corporal punishment. Unfortunately, Anna obliterated the truly salacious details of Dostoevski’s letters to her. However, by the time of their marriage his penchant for violent and unusual forms of lovemaking was well known. The letters do show that Dostoevski enjoyed vast amounts of sexual pleasure with Anna, that a feverish physical longing would overcome him after not seeing her for a short while, and that he continually had nightmares over the possibility that she was unfaithful. (She never was.) His passion was intensified by the awareness that his young, attractive wife found him sexually satisfying as well, and he often pleaded with her to speak more frankly on the subject. Dostoevski’s love and lust for Anna actually grew more intense during their 14 years of marriage, and at 57 he was able to say that “[my] ecstasy and rapture are inexhaustible.”

QUIRKS:
Dostoevski was a foot fetishist. There is often mention, in his letters to Anna, of his longing for her feet: “I go down on my knees before you and I kiss your dear feet a countless number of times. I imagine this every minute and
The Pen Is Prominent
/
I enjoy it.” Anna had been a little diffident about the matter, and hence he insisted: “I bear witness that I long to kiss every toe on your foot and you will see I shall achieve my purpose.”