A Criminal History of Mankind (79 page)

And so the conquest is completed. And in story after story, for the next eighteen issues, the same kind of thing happened, varied with floggings and mixed orgies. It seems probable that the magazine expired because the writers could think of nothing new to say.

Spencer Ashbee, the author of the
Index of Prohibited Books
, is also suspected of having written the enormous sexual autobiography
My Secret Life
, published in eleven volumes in Amsterdam between 1888 and about 1892. It reveals a mind totally obsessed by sex from a very early age. As a small boy, ‘Walter’ seizes an opportunity to look at his baby sister’s genitals, hides behind lavatories to watch elder sisters urinate, and creeps into the bedroom of female cousins on a hot night to spy on their nakedness. While still a schoolboy he seduces a maidservant, then the cook. He and his cousin Fred hide in a basement to peer up women’s skirts through a grille in the pavement. This enormous work - of over four thousand pages - gives the impression that ‘Walter’ thought about sex for every waking moment of his life. He obviously found it all so delicious and exciting that he settled down to describing it in detail when he was in his early thirties.

It is instructive to compare
My Secret Life
with the memoirs of Casanova, written a century earlier. Casanova loved sex; but he also loved travel (preferably in his own carriage), mixing in society, eating good food and conversing with intellectuals (such as Voltaire and Rousseau). He loved attractive women because they were essential to his picture of himself as the complete man of the world; but his attitude towards them was as straightforward as that of a hungry man towards a good dinner. By contrast, Walter is apparently interested in very little besides sex, and his attitude towards it is that of a
thief
. Every woman has a secret, which he longs to steal. They can be fat or thin, tall or short, dark or fair; he still longs to know the exact appearance of their genital organs. As a lover, he has no finesse; his idea of seduction is ‘entreating her to let me see and feel her cunt, using all the persuasion and all the bawdy talk I could.’ ‘I watched my opportunities; my conversation... was one repetition of lustful wants and prayers; I used to pull my prick out, beg her to see and feel it.’ And once he has achieved his objective, he needs to tell himself he has achieved it. ‘I put my hand down and felt around. What rapture to feel my machine buried! nothing but the balls to be touched, and her cunt hair wetted with my sperm, mingling and clinging to mine; in another minute nature urged a crisis, and I spent in a virgin cunt, my prick virgin also. Thus ended my first fuck.’ He enjoys making the girls describe what is happening: ‘What’s that inside you?’ ‘Your prick.’ ‘What am I doing?’ ‘Fucking me.’ We can see that he is trying to make himself
more conscious
of what is happening; in fact, sex is simply a means to an end: to making himself more conscious. He writes about it because he feels that the experience has not engraved itself deeply enough on his consciousness. His attitude is as far as possible from that of Casanova or the Elizabethans. They accepted sex as a pleasure, but then went on to something else; for Walter sex is the most deliciously intense of all experiences because it is the most forbidden.

It is interesting to note that this feverish interest is not simply a matter of a physical need. From the beginning, his obsession has a distinctly romantic element that relates it to the raptures of Young Werther and Rousseau’s St Preux. He describes reading novels as a schoolboy, ‘thinking of the beauty of the women, reading over and over again the description of their charms, and envying their lovers’ meetings.’ As absurd as it sounds, Walter is a true worshipper of the ‘eternal feminine’. His passion may express itself in the crudest physical forms, but it springs from the imagination. And, like all idealists, he finds it hard to reconcile dream and reality: ‘These feelings got intensified when I thought of my aunt’s backside, and the cunts of my cousins, but when I thought of the heroines, it seemed strange that such beautiful creatures should have any.’ His lifelong craving for women is based on a feeling that there is something untouchable, unpossessable, about them. His quest for ultimate sexual satisfaction is a kind of mystical pilgrimage, like Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail.

And here we come to the heart of the matter. Walter lacks the self-confidence for knight errantry. He sees himself - with some slight justification - as coarse, boring and stupid. If he possessed the panache of a Don Juan or Casanova, he would devote himself to pursuing the beautiful, slim-waisted girls he sees riding in the park, who are closer to the romantic heroines who fire his imagination. But he lacks the courage, and so is willing to settle for less - far less. In order to satisfy the itch in his loins, he deliberately lowers his aim. This lowering of the aim, this decision to take a short-cut, also constitutes the essence of criminality.

The Pearl
makes it clear that Walter’s attitude to sex was not unique; the Victorian male was subject to all kinds of obsessions. He longed for virgins and under-aged girls, for incest and rape, for spanking and flogging. How had this change come about in a mere century? Victorian prudery cannot be wholly to blame, for these trends were apparent a decade before Victoria came to the throne; moreover, the
Index of Prohibited Books
makes it clear that this was also true of France, which was far less inhibited than England.

The answer begins to emerge if we think of the most basic differences between the Europe of Dr Johnson and Voltaire and the Europe of Tennyson and Flaubert: the factories and railways. Casanova lived in an age of adventure; Walter lived in an age where adventure was fast disappearing. Walter, like Casanova, travelled all over Europe; but wherever he went, he was surrounded by Victorian domesticity, and his travels seem tame by comparison. Casanova hardly strikes us as a fully mature adult; but Walter seems a permanent adolescent. He devotes his life to sex because it is the only thing left to conquer, the only satisfactory outlet for his will.

Zoologists have observed that monkeys in zoos copulate far more than monkeys in the wild; it is the only thing left to do. The same is true of a civilisation that has achieved a high level of security. Chesterton remarked that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered, and that an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. The aim of civilisation is to do away with inconvenience; in doing so, it also does away with adventure. Adventurous individuals may even turn to crime - like Hornung’s Raffles or Chesterton’s Flambeau - because they find civilised life unbearably dull. Unadventurous individuals, like Walter, may seek ‘adventure’ in seduction and the quest for sexual variety. The element of danger may be absent, but the ‘forbidden’ provides the excitement.

All this enables us to see that the stories in
The Pearl
are, in fact, a form of imaginary sex crime. Victorian pornography only magnified a process that had been taking place since man built the first cities. When a man lives a complex social life among his fellow men, he can no longer allow free expression to his spontaneous impulses. He could be compared to someone who has become accustomed to driving at ninety miles an hour on the open highway, and then has to get used to the heavy traffic in a city. Our minds have a brake as well as an accelerator (and, for practical purposes, we could say that the right brain is the accelerator, the left the brake). The more civilised we become, the more we have to learn to stamp on the brake. Every impulse has to be monitored and checked.

We can see the result in any shy adolescent. The tendency to blush and stammer springs out of a nervous habit of applying the accelerator and brake simultaneously. And ten thousand years or so of civilisation have turned us all into permanent adolescents. We do not all blush and stammer; nevertheless, at almost any point in our daily-lives, we are equally ready to apply the accelerator or the brake. This also means that we have a ‘double’ view of any challenge. Part of us is inclined to go ahead; part holds back. Part of us sees it as a wonderful opportunity; part sees it as a dangerous trap.

In effect, it is as if every one of us contained a kind of Faust and Mephistopheles. Goethe’s Mephistopheles describes himself as ‘the spirit that negates’. He is the perpetual doubter. But, as William Blake remarked:

If the sun and moon should doubt

They’d immediately go out.

Man’s life is a permanent state of ‘ambivalence’, a continual attempt to negotiate minor hurdles and overcome inhibitions. This explains why man is the only creature who goes insane and commits suicide.

In many of us, ‘ambivalence’ is so much a way of life that we are not really sure we want to go on living. We do, of course. Any sudden danger makes us aware that the desire to live constitutes the very foundation of our being. And this is why human beings voluntarily expose themselves to dangers - drive racing cars, pilot single-handed yachts, climb mountains. Danger raises them above the ‘ambivalence’ and fills them with the certainty that life is strange and beautiful.

This also explains why the history of civilisation is largely a history of wars; war is like driving at ninety miles an hour. And when man is not at war, life becomes a search for what William James called ‘the moral equivalent of war’ - forms of excitement, of
purpose
, that sweep away our doubts.

These ‘doubts’ have become purely automatic reflexes, like a knee-jerk or the salivation of a Pavlov dog. The Norwegian writer Agnar Mykle has a novel,
The Hotel Room
, that enables us to see this point very clearly. The hero has gone to the bedroom of a woman he knows slightly, and tries to force her to make love. They struggle for a long time, and he finally succeeds in gaining entrance. At this, she decides to give way. ‘But already, as he was undressing, he had caught the faint smell from her loins that told him she had made herself sterile for the occasion. For a brief instant that had excited him, but the next moment... the effect had been damping, fatal.’

Why? The girl who has introduced the spermicide is the same girl who excited him so frantically a few minutes earlier. But because she has ceased to resist, she has ‘normalised’ the situation. His will has been allowed to relax, and this has produced a certain automatic reflex, like a hypnotic command. He has ceased to be a man with a clear objective; her acceptance has transformed him once again into ‘ambivalent man’.

We once again confront this basic fact about human beings: that they have a confident sense of their own identity only when the will is firmly connected to its objective, like a water-skier to a motor boat. As soon as that connection is broken as the sense of urgency disappears, ‘mechanicalness’ supervenes, and we become victims of doubt and ambivalence.

The connection may also be broken by sheer fatigue. Civilised life is as complicated as juggling a dozen cups and saucers; in our frantic attempt not to break them, we often drive ourselves to the point of sheer exhaustion. Crime is an attempt to solve the problem by smashing the cups and saucers. That is, an attempt to reduce life to simplicity instead of trying to develop the self-control to cope with its complexity.

There is, of course, a less harmful way of reducing life to simplicity. In imagination, juggling a dozen cups and saucers becomes as easy as tossing a coin. In the past two thousand years, man has deliberately developed his imagination as a counterbalance to his tendency to left-brain obsessiveness. Imagination is a deliberate attempt to allow us to relax by short-circuiting reality. It offers a unique combination of relaxation and fulfilment. It also serves the important purpose of restoring our strength and courage. In short, it is an intoxicant. Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau discovered that when imagination is combined with sexual desire, the result is twice as intoxicating. In
Fanny Hill
, John Cleland carried the process one stage farther, and distilled a kind of raw alcohol. Victorian prohibition turned this form of bootlegging into a major industry.

Sooner or later, the ‘imaginary’ sex crime was bound to be translated into reality. This began to happen towards the middle of the nineteenth century. In
Psychopathia Sexualis
, Krafft-Ebing mentions that between 1851 and 1875, 22,017 cases of rape came before the courts in France, that is to say, about nine hundred a year. He also mentions the astonishing fact that three-quarters of these involved children. It is possible, of course, that sexual offences against children were more frequently reported than those against adult women; even so, it seems clear that sexual violence in the nineteenth century was directed more at children than at adults. It was a question of ‘forbiddenness’. In the streets of Victorian London or Paris, women were fairly easily available - not just prostitutes but (as we can see from
My Secret Life
} shopgirls, factory girls, maidservants. So the aura of ‘forbiddenness’ clung to children more than to adults. In the twentieth century, increased prosperity meant that an increasing number of working-class girls ceased to be sexually available; so the rape of adults increased.

What seems strange is that, in spite of this increase in the crime of rape, the Victorians were still slow at recognising the sexual element in crimes involving sadism. On a Saturday afternoon in July 1867, three children were playing in a meadow near the town of Alton, Hampshire, when they were approached by a young man named Frederick Baker. Baker was known to be subject to depressive fits, and was the son of a man who had attacks of ‘acute mania’; but he was generally regarded (according to the
Illustrated Police News
) as a ‘young man of great respectability’. Baker gave the children a ha’penny each, and persuaded eight-year-old Fanny Adams to go for a walk. It was two hours before the children told Fanny’s mother that she had gone off with Baker (whom they knew). She met Baker returning to the town, and asked him what he had done with her daughter; he seemed perfectly calm and self-possessed, and assured her that Fanny had gone off to buy sweets. It was many hours later that a search party found the body in a nearby hop garden; it had been hacked into fragments and scattered over a wide area. Baker was arrested; he continued to protest his innocence. But his diary was found to contain the entry; ‘Killed a young girl today. It was fine and hot.’ He was sentenced to death, and a huge crowd watched his hanging at Winchester gaol.