a fair crack of the whip

Sade: A Biography by Maurice Lever, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, published by HarperCollins, 626pp, ISBN 0246136669

The life of that perennial favourite of the disaffected bourgeoisie, the marquis de Sade, has been appropriated by yet another biographer who, like all dedicated Sadologists, betrays his subject with the insufficient compassion that inevitably results from a fascination with cruelty. Despite his impressive efforts, Maurice Lever only succeeds in partially demystifying "the divine marquis". This success is not due to the quality of his analysis or perception, but to a paralysing 626 pages of meticulous research.

As a child, de Sade was both neglected and materially indulged. His mother abandoned him to fulfil her religious inclinations in a convent, leaving him in the hands of his atrociously narcissistic father, whom the deluded marquis would never cease to revere. "Some may say," Lever writes, "[that] the void [left by the mother] was more apparent than real, for the child did not want for surrogates." It seems surprising that a man as pedantic as Lever should be so cretinous as to suggest that the attentions of the marquis’ father's mistresses should be an adequate substitute for his mother. And it is precisely this kind of analytical paucity that so weakens what could have been a very fine book.

"In a departure from the normal course of developments," he later informs us, "the shape of de Sade’s initial conflict was determined not by hatred of the father but by hatred of the mother." Quelle betise, mon Dieu! In this case, both the terminology and the content are inaccurate; the shape of de Sade’s "initial conflict" was determined by the absence of the mother and by the inappropriate interests of the father. It is a simple error to make. De Sade misleads his readers with his intensity, most always using hatred as a mask for pain and pleasure as a mask for release. Lever misses such subtleties and, as a consequence, forfeits real insight into his subject.

The greater probability is that de Sade hated his father - a dementedly promiscuous, flagrantly bisexual and avaricious aristocrat who turned to religion later in life as a means of condemning those who could indulge in that which he could no longer. This man - whom Lever calls "fond" - allowed his son to be regularly exposed to psychotics such as the comte de Charolais, who murdered his infant son by a prostitute with a glassful of spirits, and his brother the abbe de Sade, whose love of religious reading matched only that of whoring.

De Sade's "fond" father was also a great documenter of his escapades and left these works to his son, who could not bear to be parted from them. In examining this, Lever once again falls foul of the perception police: "These [writings] too nourished the imagination of the marquis." Far from "nourishing", the writings would have deformed the boy’s imagination by associating libertinage with paternal love, with comfort, with familiarity (in its truest sense) - a problem which eventually emptied de Sade’s life of any real enjoyment.

Like all abused children, the marquis believed that it was not parental neglect but a superfluity of outside affection (and probably pity) that so distorted his nature, and later claimed that "this ridiculous prejudice made me haughty, despotic, and angry". At no point did he ever consciously acknowledge the true source of his fury, the fury of the abused.

To illustrate: his ambitious father enrolled him at Louis-le-Grand, the most exclusive school in the kingdom and a school that also happened to be run by deviant Jesuits. This fact was, to him, irrelevant - the only thing that mattered to him was that his son do him social justice in his later years. "Noone escaped whipping [at the school]," Lever documents, "[and] sodomy ... was known to be widespread ... and if public opinion was to be believed the good fathers made a specialty of it."

Public opinion appears to have been accurate. A number of these persecuted students were so damaged by their oppressors that they murdered their persecutors. The enormity of such reactions is the clearest indication of the horror the boys suffered. De Sade internalized his rage instead of expressing it, incorporating the loathing of self that he had been taught was his due into his everyday behaviour and later rationalizing it as a philosophy.

Lever fails to connect de Sade’s "hysterical hatred" of priests, his sacrilegious sexual use of religious paraphenalia, and his abusive schooling. As an adult, de Sade would demand that his sexual partners defecate on religious icons or use them as masturbatory aids. These were the only ways in which he was able to expel his justified sense of outrage, and the events which caused such psychological aberrations can only be imagined with a shudder.

"Oh, if only I had done what gave me pleasure," de Sade once wrote in a letter, "I would have spared myself so much suffering." Lever brutally dismisses this as a pose - as "the role of the repentant son", ignoring its profound implications. De Sade’s words, like his actions, were a palimpsest disguising his agonies; unable to safely express his emotions, de Sade lived life as a symbolic act, locked as he was in a self-perpetuating cycle of staged torments and composed perversions, forever seeking the punishments he had been instructed to feel he deserved.

His sad humanity is perfectly captured in the minutiae - the haemorrhoids which plagued him and made it impossible for him to sit without crying out; his passion for chocolate cake "as black inside ... as the devil’s ass is black from smoke"; his paranoid rages and jeremiads; his thirteen-year incarceration, during which he would regularly request that his wife send him special flasks with which he could sodomize himself; the fact that he was forced to write the notorious Cent Vingt Journees de Sodome in microscopic handwriting on four-inch sheets which he then glued together to form a strip that could be hidden from his gaolers.

Disaster is always easily mythologized, and de Sade was - and still is - glamorized as a symbol of the decadence of the Ancien Regime. This decadence is only "interesting" when viewed with detachment; the reality of it was vicious and powerfully depressing: it was criminal. Like many, Lever continues the misrepresentation of his subject through his insistence that de Sade’s actions were enquiries into the period’s morality and not disclocated dramatizations. At the age of 63, the marquis was again incarcerated for his beliefs, this time in a mental asylum.

Still incarcerated at the age of 74, he was regularly sodomizing a 15-year-old girl whose services were sold to him by her entrepreneurial mother, a nurse. Lever almost seems surprised to find his subject in this state. No longer the "dashing nobleman" or manifesting any chic "divinity", de Sade was visibly the tragedy which he had always been within.

As if his life could have had any other conclusion.

*Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald