My Secret Life

"This book is an amazing document. It hovers between fictionality and memoir. It’s unlikely that everything is true, because it describes this man’s sexual exploits for seventy years. The sheer length shows a kind of energy that I think would be impossible. It borrows from all kinds of narrative forms, such as the novel. He’s very interested in making characters out of the women he’s encountering; he describes his own domestic life in very novelistic terms. No, it’s very strange. The first experience it describes occurred around the 1830s, and it goes to the 1880s—a long history of debauchery. But what’s fascinating to me is the author’s eye for detail in descriptive writing. There’s so much attention to the kind of conditions of rooms in which he meets prostitutes; there’s attention to the kinds of food, drink and clothes women are wearing. There’s an amazing sequence where he finds himself ill on a railway trip. He leaves the train—or maybe doesn’t even get on the train, I can’t remember—but goes into the bathroom, and has diarrhea. He realises while he’s sitting on the toilet that there’s a little peephole into the ladies’ room. So he sits there and watches women urinate and defecate! The other thing that’s quite interesting about this book is that he watches a woman pull out rags from her menstrual cycle. So he’s really paying attention. You get a lot of grotty detail about Victorian life in this book. It was privately published in the 1880s, but it wasn’t published as a text until late in the twentieth century. It was privately known, but because it was so explicitly pornographic, it circulated in a very small coterie. No! Some people think it was Henry Spencer Ashbee , who edited a large index of pornographic literature called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum . Much of Ashbee’s text is in English, but all of the entries on homosexuality are in Latin, which is amazing and so perfect. But the dates are off. If My Secret Life is Ashbee, he’s hyper-fictionalizing himself. It’s somebody like him, though – relatively well-to-do and with a connection to the pornographic underworld. The other thing that’s quite interesting about the My Secret Life is ‘Walter’ describes experiences of sexually transmitted infections and his own experiences with homosexuality. There’s a wealth of information about the variety of sexual experiences that people had, and what was possible in the nineteenth century. “There’s obviously a deeply misogynistic impulse in a document that catalogues every woman that a man has slept with for seventy years. But there’s also a sensitivity to women’s actual lives” There’s obviously a deeply misogynistic impulse in a document that catalogues every woman that a man has slept with for seventy years. But there’s also a real sensitivity to women’s actual lives. He asks a lot of questions about their lives, and seems interested in them. That’s what shocks students when I teach this book—that this rapacious sex addict is surprisingly sensitive to the lives of the women he’s encountering. Not always, but sometimes. Exactly. And of course, it is presented as a memoir, so the factual quality of part of its appeal. It’s clear that it was written in the nineteenth century. It’s also clear that it involves some elaboration or exaggeration. But I also think you can take quite truthfully the descriptions of sexual life. He doesn’t make himself seem too appealing as a person, either. There’s a kind of honesty in moments of his brutality. He’s not just flattering himself. But the details about daily life are extremely valuable for anyone who’s interested in the Victorian period. You get information about the kinds of things you want to know that aren’t in novel. How people went to the bathroom, where they went when they got sick on the train, how they felt about certain sexual acts, whether or not people knew about them. What people ate, what they drank. What kinds of clothes prostitutes wore, what their living situations were. How people put on and took off their petticoats. Yeah. It’s amazing in that way. It has so much detail that it’s impossible not to see it as a valuable document. As long as you know that it has obscure origins, you can still appreciate just how encyclopedic it is as a text."