[I wrote this for The Dabbler in 2011. I thought, to tip my grubby hat to slang’s conventions not to mention the topic considered below, that a dozen years on I might get it up again. As usual, I have slightly embellished the original. Think of it as the counter-language’s small tribute to the Mayday festivities.]
‘And in such indexes, although small pricks…’
Shakespeare Troilus & Cressida
The index is a thing of beauty, one that may possibly transcend, for all the labours it demands, the contents whereof it lists. To that end, let me offer a candidate for indicatorial glory. And let me start at the beginning.
If lexicography qualifies as an art, let it never be said that your correspondent is immune from suffering for its furtherance. Once upon a time, in pursuit as ever of citations, I undertook a labour rarely assumed and more rarely still concluded. Why did I do it: because, of course, it was there. I should explain. And, though such adjurations cut my libertarian soul to the quick, let me also warn. As stated in the catalogue of William Dugdale, a pornographer – perhaps the pornographer – of 19th century London, ‘every stretch of voluptuous imagination is here fully depicted, rogering, ramming, one unbounded scene of lust, lechery and licentiousness.’ Dugdale was puffing a list that included The Lustful Turk, Flossie, a Venus of Fifteen, The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon and Nunnery Tales. I am talking of My Secret Life.
Between the years of 1888-94 ‘a gentleman’ (as ever: those seeking anonymity do not, unsurprisingly, categorize themselves as ‘a guttersnipe’) summoned regularly from Amsterdam to his residence in London a printer well-versed in the publication of pornographic literature. To this individual he entrusted the manuscript of his erotic memoirs, garnered from some thirty years of sexual adventuring. This memoir, entitled My Secret Life, runs to some eleven books, as near one million words as makes no difference. No author was ever declared, although the writer appears, from conversations he recounts, to be called ‘Walter’. Popular belief, based on the scholarship of the late Gershon Legman, unrivalled analyst of erotic folklore, and more recently on Ian Gibson’s biography The Erotomaniac, ascribes it to Henry Spencer Ashbee. Ashbee’s day job was respectable commerce; his ‘hobby’, writing as the coarsely punning ‘Pisanus Fraxi’, was the compilation of three massive bibliographies of erotic literature. It was based on a personal collection of ‘facetiae’1 and ‘curiosa’ which would form (after the prurient philistines of Great Russell Street had done their castratory worst to the thousands of volumes left them in his will)2 the core of the British Library’s Private Case3.
For ten seemingly endless days I battled the brute, tamed the monster, mounted and rode the juggernaut. I read it from start to end. And my verdict – as we chaps piously intone: honest, really, size doesn’t matter. I am aware that ‘Walter’s’ unarguably mag. op. is an ‘erotic’ memoir and not some tacky stroke book; but I’m sorry, vast it may be but erotic it ain’t. Repetitive, definitely; act follows act, partner upon partner, physical variation upon variation, but erotic . . . gertcha! I don’t know how many couplings our hero enjoys, how often his engine / pego / cunt-rammer / doodle / cucumber / stretcher / gristle is employed to poke / shove / baste / roger / bullock / mount / whop his partner’s grummet / machine / article / sperm-sucker / pin-cushion / pleasure place / pouter. A couple of thousand perhaps. (I should add: for all such nudge-nudgery, there is a vast range of obscenities too: ‘Walter’ is no euphemiser, and certainly not literary).
I do know that for whatever reason (he suggests discretion, claiming therefore to have omitted but for a very few instances his equally numerous experiences with supposedly respectable bourgeoises) he prefers servants and whores (the former reluctant then, invariably, enthusiastic; the latter merely enthusiastic, albeit mercenary) plus the odd teen virgin. He is admirably cosmopolitan – Europe provides as a happy a hunting ground as does the UK – and despite being a Victorian (with all the clichés that we have learned to attribute to that confused and often paradoxical century) remarkably egalitarian, at least sexually. He’s no feminist – we can’t have everything – but for all that he treats servants as one might expect, he assumes no special superiority for the crested above the cloven. His synonymity is equally impartial. My Secret Life offers 49 variations for the penis; the vagina offers the same. As for the mindset that convinces not merely the Victorians, but their 21st century descendants to condemn certain acts and enjoyments as sexually ‘abnormal’, ‘Walter’ has no time. If he condemns any practice as ‘aberrant’, e.g. his occasionally consummated desire for homosexual fellatio (given and gotten both) or his intermittent obsessions with either brand of ‘scat’, then it is never the acts, but simply his own reluctance to perform them that is found wanting. No modern polyamorist could fault him on his omnivorous appetites. However, weak and/or squeamish, we might not always wish to follow him all the way on his voyage of sexual self-discovery. Let us pass, for instance, the chapter which finds our hero crouched at a glory hole, gazing rapturously upon the defecating women within.
All good stuff but as far as erotic goes – thanks but no thanks. Nary a frisson for mind nor body. Or not mine. But, and here I promise is the point, what I do like – and yes, everything you ever believed (if you even gave us thought) about lexicography is true – what I really like is the Index. It may be discursive at times, and even mis-paginated, but bugger me, it’s unique. Some entries are (and I omit the page refs.) self-explanatory; checking the text almost takes away the fun. ‘Virginities, women want to piddle after defloration’; ‘Sodomites, put pestles up arseholes’; ‘Thrusts of prick, number given when fucking’ (average 45 thrusts/min. apparently); ‘Fucking, with another man present and sucking man’s prick whilst’; ‘Farting, one left in a closet by self’; ‘Cunts, felt in church by me and frigged’; ‘Anus, toothbrush up a man’s while he’s gamahuched’. Others, however, have a mystery all of their own and the mind struggles, after 2300 pages of in, out and equally often round-and-about, to recall the specifics of ‘Apprentice dress-makers, three in a cab’; ‘Barn-loft, page frigging himself in’; ‘Champagne and sperm, singular letch’; ‘Bloody nose and broken pisspot’; ‘Kid gloves and cold cream frigging’; ‘Postage stamp, a woman got by gift of’ and ‘Double-cunted harlot’. The Index also points up another of Walter’s pleasures: philosophy: ‘Prick, is an emblem of the Deity’; ‘Fucking, is obedience to the Divine command “increase and multiply”’ (that said, Walter procures as many abortions as he fathers bastards); ‘Gamahuching, man is superior to the beasts therein’; and ‘Cunts, are divine and not obscene organs.’ Even De Sade, philosophizing in his boudoir, would surely have been impressed.
In a way the forty odd folio columns that make it up are the biggest tease of all. Promising so much and, as I have tried to suggest, delivering all too little. For all the charm of the entries, once accessed the relevant anecdote lends itself too regularly to the same old thing. But then as Walter himself affirms, intercourse itself is repetition (‘the old in and out’ to quote Anthony Burgess), it is but the preliminaries and the posture that differentiate one copulation from another. Elaborate if innately empty form has to offer up a garnish to predictable content.
There were but six printed copies of the mighty tome, they cost an eye-watering £100 a pop when ‘normal’ porn, itself far exceeding the working-man’s pocket, asked two quid, and were thus beyond all but the most minted masturbator) and but three, apparently, survive (one, fittingly, in the Private Case). Grove press printed a facsimile in 1966 and I have little doubt that www.bookfinder.com will track one down one if you so desire. There are many access points on line. Or maybe give it all a miss. Had professional duty not called, that’s what I would have done. In the event it wasn’t even a dirty job, but someone had to do it.
Ashbee's mighty ‘Index of Prohibited Books’, an unashamed nod to the original list issued from 1560-1948 by the Catholic church's long-standing literary censorship department, fell into three parts. The first, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books appeared in 1877. (A facsimile appeared in 1966, its publisher also offered readers the tales of schoolboy anti-hero Billy Bunter). Volume 2, the Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (‘One Hundred Books that should be Hidden’) followed in 1879 and the set is rounded off by the Catena Librorum Tacendorum (‘Further Books which should not be mentioned’) in 1885.
Mayhew, in London Labour & the London Poor vol. I (1861) quotes a street book-stall keeper, ‘Anything scarce or curious, when it’s an old book, is kept out of the streets; if it’s not particular decent, sir,’ (with a grin), ‘why it's reckoned all the more curious, — that’s the word, sir, I know,— “curious.” I can tell how many beans make five as well as you or anybody. Why, now, there’s a second-hand bookseller not a hundred miles from Holborn—and a pleasant, nice man he is, and does a respectable business— and he puts to the end of his catalogue […] two pages that he calls “Facetiae.” They’re titles and prices of queer old books in all languages— indecent books, indeed.’
Ashbee left the Library some 15,229 volumes in all; not all were lubricious and it has been suggested that the Librarian only accepted the smut to get at his world-renowned collection devoted to Cervantes.
Not for the first time playing catchup with France in matters cultural, the Case followed the older Enfer (‘Hell’) by which the royal library and later the Bibliothèque nationale categorized its filth and other items deemed ‘contrary to public morality.’