Every generation thinks they invented great sex, and, of course, every generation is wrong. It can be fun to peek into what great academic minds thought of more biological aspirations, though.
A Kink by Any Other Name: Secret Sex Lives of Great Authors
If teachers had told us just how kinky writers could be, I’d have been a lot more interested in the classics.
Honore De Balzac | A Kink of Precious Substance
Talk about retaining fluids. Balzac revealed to friends that, while having sex, he preferred not to ejaculate, fearing that it would sap his creative energy. “Lovely-dovey and amorous play, up to ejaculation, would be all right,” a confidante reported, “but only up to ejaculation. Sperm to him meant emission of purest cerebral substance, and therefore a filtering, a loss through the member, of a potential act of artistic creation.”
Or, as Balzac himself once put it after climaxing during intercourse with many of his Iovers: “This morning I have lost my novel!”
George Gordon, Lord Byron | A Kink of Niece and Daughter
Byron’s many paramours may have included his own half-sister, Augusta Leigh. She was married at the time, but hey, if you’ re going to commit incest, why not go all the way and commit adultery as well? Many scholars now contend that Augusta’s daughter Medora was in fact the product of Byron’s loins, making him, well. an even more complicated figure than we thought.
William Shakespeare | A Top Billing Kink
A randy Shakespeare once snookered his friend and fellow actor Richard Burbage out of a romantic rendezvous with a young lady who lived near the theatre.
The Bard overheard that woman making plans for a secret assignation. “Announce yourself as Richard III,” she told the actor.
Thinking quickly, Shakespeare hustled off to the woman’s home, gave the agreed-upon code name at the door, and was admitted to her boudoir for a spirited rogering session. When Burbage showed up a few minutes later, Shakespeare sent down a note: William the Conqueror came before Richard III.
W. B. Yeats | Monkey-Man Kink
In the days before Viagra, older men often resorted to quack remedies and experimental procedures to address their erectile dysfunction. Yeats was no exception. Determined to put a little lead in his pencil, the aging poet traveled to Vienna to undergo the fabled “Steinach Operation,” a revolutionary vasectomy touted by its namesake inventor as a surefire way to rejuvenate male potency. (Sigmund Freud had been “Steinached” some years earlier, to no effect.)
The 15-minute operation, in which monkey glands were implanted into Yeats’s scrotum, when off without a hitch. Yeats got his groove back. He later credited the surgery with reviving not only his creative powers but also his “sexual desire; and that in all likelihood will last me until I die.”
He soon began enjoying the fruits of his “strange second puberty” with a new mistress, 27-year-old actress and poet Margot Ruddock.
James Joyce | Kink of an Artist as an Old Perv
To say that Joyce had an active sexual imagination would be a profound understatement. “The two parts of your body which do dirty things are the loveliest to me,” Joyce wrote in one of the numerous erotic letters he sent to his Iongtime Iover, Nora Barnacle. “I wish you would smack me or flog me even,” he gushed in another. “I would love to be whipped by you, Noralove!”
And those are just a couple of the tamer passages. Joyce’s love letters abound with explicit descriptions of sex acts he shared or wished to share with her. Among the graphic anatomical references, which Joyce used as a masturbatory aid, are repeated salacious encomia to Nora’s “big full bubbies” and “arse full of farts.”
Indeed, Joyce seemed to have a special place in his, er, heart for the aroma of a woman’s wind and the sight of her soiled underwear. Weird? Yes. Sexy? That’s debatable.
Was Nora on board with the panty sniffing? Her letters back to him have not survived, although some of his notes suggest that she was every bit as dirty-minded as he-perhaps even more so.
“You seem to turn me into a beast,” Joyce wrote in yet another lusty missive. “It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl. who first led the way.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald | Kink of the Foot Fancier
Fitzgerald had a serious foot fetish, and his tendency to link feet with sex dated from early childhood. All his life, he refused to let others see his unshod feet, which he associated in his mind with his own nakedness. “The sight of his own feet filled him with embarrassment and horror,” noted a 1924 interviewer.
When it came to women’s tootsies, however. Fitzgerald was positively batty. He confessed to a prostitute that the sight of a woman’s feet had always excited him and made caressing her feet part of their lovemaking ritual. A bizarre passage in This Side of Paradise in which the main character is revolted by the sight of a chorus girl’s feet may have been Fitzgerald’s attempt in his writing to come to grips with these impulses.
Gertrude Stein | Don’t have a Kinky Cow
For reasons known only to her, Stein referred to orgasms as “cows.” Coded references to “cows” can be found in a number of her poems and stories, including “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story.” Fort the record, she once called herself “the best cow giver in all the world.”
Walt Whitman | Abe the Kinky Babe
Whitman had a serious crush on Abraham Lincoln, whom he eulogized in the 1865 poem, “O Captain! My Captain!”
While working as a nurse in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, Whitman often saw the president with his cavalry guard on the streets. His written description of their encounters leaves little doubt he considered the lanky rail-splitter quite the dish.
“I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. … Probably the reader has been physiognomies (often old farmers, sea captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness or even ugliness, held superior points to subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as wild perfume or fruit-taste, or a passionate tone of the living voice – and such was Lincoln’s face, the peculiar color, the lines of it, the eyes, mouth, expression. … To the eye of a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination.”
Ayn Rand | Kinky Boy Toy
Rand tended to attract acolytes, and none was more devoted than Nathan Blumenthal , the Canadian college student who became by turns her protege, intellectual heir, and personal stud service. They first met in 1950, after the then-19-year-old Blumenthal wrote a fan letter to her. To his surprise, the famous author invited him to her home in Manhattan to take part in one of the floating philosophical bull sessions she called “the Collective.”
Blumenthal (who would soon restyle himself as Nathaniel Branden) quickly ingratiated himself into her inner circle. Rand even served as the maid of honor at his wedding. By 1955, their relationship had turned physical. Rand was 50: Branden was 25. She bragged to friends that she needed to have sex with him at I east two times a week to ward off writer’s block.
Branden parlayed his intimate access to the Objectivist visionary to found the Nathaniel Branden Institute, a think tank devoted to spreading Rand’s selfishness-based gospel. By 1968 the bloom was off the rose, however, and Branden started secretly seeing another of Rand’s disciples. who happened to be a beautiful young model. When Rand discovered the infidelity, she went ballistic and vowed to destroy him. In a public declaration, she officially cast him out of the Objectivist movement. Today, Branden works in Beverly Hills, California, as a psychotherapist specializing in self-esteem issues. He published a tell-all memoir, My Years with Ayn Rand, in 1999.
Jean-Paul Sartre | Kink, the Ladies Man
Despite his ungainly appearance, Sartre was a notorious womanizer who ran through mistresses as ravenously as he did packs of Boyard cigarettes. He even tried to hit on a comely young Brazilian journalist while his lover Simone de Beauvoir was in the hospital recovering from a bout of typhoid. He justified his infidelity by likening it to masturbation and refused to climax alongside his partners-not to forestall pregnancy but simply to deny them unnecessary intimacy.
William Borroughs | How Do You Like Me Now? Kink?
Despite a 12-year age difference, Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg shared a brief, torrid sexual affair in the early l950s. The coupling went down in flames, however, when Burroughs fell in love with his protege. “Bill wanted a relationship where there were no holds barred,” Ginsberg later wrote, “to achieve the ultimate telepathic union of souls.”
When it came time to dump Burroughs, Ginsberg was somewhat Iess eloquent in his word choice: “I don’t want your ugly old cock,” he told him. It took many years for the two men to repair their broken friendship.
From Secret Lives of Great Authors © 2008 by Robert Schnakenberg. Used with permission of Quirk Books.
Wow. Let me not to the marriage of true minds, and all that. Somehow just knowing that blood rushing to parts of the body not responsible for thinking has been an issue for centuries. Having said that, should one run across a particularly hesitant yet erudite lass today, that has thus far resisted your charms (perhaps all too easily), you still might get some play employing at least one of the more sophisticated efforts in history. … Git ‘R’ Donne.
