Sexology - Confession, Jealousy, Marriage

Sexology : The Magazine of Sex Science was a magazine founded by Hugo Gernsbach ('the father of Science Fiction') and seems to have flourished in the 1930s. It had many anatomical diagrams and articles about 'female inverts', pregnancy, infibulation, venereal disease etc. It probably sold well. 80 years later it appears highly dated and sexist but the  question of 'confession', jealousy and former partners, covered  in this article, is inherently problematic - Julian Barnes deals with it in his 1982 novel Before She Met Me and in an interview he referred to John Lennon having problems about former lovers of Yoko Ono. The story towards the end of the lawyer with the revolver and poison tablets is straight out of Hitchcock..We had another posting from Sexology on 'Homosexuality and its Cure' last year.

Sex Confessions of Wives

"I simply must make a clean breast of it, and tell • my husband." Here is an expression which, I am sure, must have been heard many times by every physician. What is there in the feminine make-up which insists that they bring drama–even tragedy–upon themselves? I know of so many homes that have been blasted and lives wrecked, through a wife’s insistence that she “unburden her soul,” that I hardly know where to begin.
An explanation for this feminine characteristic takes us back across the centuries. The annals of history reveal quite plainly that all such ideas of bringing the old skeleton out of the closet date from the beginning of masculine dominance. The sacred archives of many lands disclose what may be a very astonishing fact to the regal male of today; namely, that he was not always the ruler.

Coded Diaries etc.,

I had been reading about nicknames coined by Swinburne for some of his contemporaries - Fuxton Boreman for Buxton Forman and Soddington Symonds for John Addington Symonds when this piece arrived about a diary of that period with sexual code. Of course Pepys used a mixed language code and Anne Lister (1791–1840) the wealthy Yorkshire landowner, mountaineer and traveller kept coded diaries which chronicled the details of her daily life, including her lesbian relationships. RH who obviously  possesses a good size archive of ephemera and manuscript material sent in this. He is our third contributor and we could use many more who want to share their collections with a waiting world.

Pepys used a code when describing sexual activity and I think and Boswell did too. The sexologist Krafft-Ebing went Latinate when describing what he felt was a sexual perversion. And now we know that in his sex diaries Maynard Keynes used the letters C. A. W. to denote particular sexual activities—though the editor of the diaries cannot, even with the help of Oxford don, Professor Diarmid Macculloch, arrive at any sound conclusions as to what they denoted. All this suggests that many more of the unpublished diaries that the industrious J. S. Batts listed in his superb British Manuscript Diaries (1976), may also have contained codes to denote sexual activity.

I say this because I think I have discovered a monogram, which in the context of bedtime, denote sex in a diary I own, the yet unpublished ‘Travel Journal of Sir George Arney’, which dates from 1834. Arney, an English lawyer from Salisbury, who emigrated to New Zealand to become its second Chief Justice in 1858, spent several month touring Germany, Bohemia and Austria aged 24 —mopping up German literature, praising the music of Beethoven and being rude about the bribery system and continental inns. 

Arney was a passionate fellow, with a roving eye for a pretty face,and was liable to erupt into a violent outburst when recording the conduct of the bad mannered and the plain ignorant, whether English tourists or foreign upstarts. Accompanying him was his new wife Harriett, with whom he was totally besotted. In fact, a more uxorious husband can hardly be imagined. Often, while recording everyday sight-seeing, Harriett’s name is shortened to an elaborate monogram, but the same monogram is also used when Arney wishes to note sex with his wife. On one particular occasion, as we see here (next to the monogram) he is more explicit ---‘I put it in‘. [RH]

Inadvertencies

I have found a curious pamphlet from the rather neglected Mill House Press which was run by Edward Gathorne- Hardy whose pic is below. Printed on mould made paper in 1963 It is one of 200 copies only and called Inadvertencies collected from the works of several eminent authors.

Basically a collection of inadvertently obscene passages from mostly 19th century classics. The double entendre game. This passage from Charles Dickens gives the flavour -- 'She touched his organ; and from that bright epoch, even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable, as he had thought, of elevation, began a new and deified existence.' My favourites are from Henry James. There is always a faint air of embarrassment with the Master anyway and Gathorne- Hardy has found some corkers.

"'Oh, I can't explain,' cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. 'I've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings - it's this.' And he swung his tool." (Roderick Hudson)

 "You think me a queer fellow already. It's not easy to tell you how I feel, not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how many ways he's queer." (Passionate Pilgrim)

'What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other....' (The Sacred Fount)

"It 's just like Longueville, you know," Gordon Wright went on;"he always comes at you from behind; he 's so awfully fond of surprises." (Confidence)

"Then she had had her equal consciousness that within five minutes something between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but come."  (The Wings of the Dove)

"This time therefore I left excuses to his more practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct appeal from a young lady next whom, in the hall, I had found myself sitting.' (The Coxon Fund).

 For more on Eddie G-H go to Bookride. If anyone has a tape of the man talking please send it over.The sound of his voice and his eccentric delivery are still talked about in these parts...