Doing Some Measuring ahead of Time

Richard Davenport-Hines

• Letters from Prison by the Marquis de Sade, translated by Richard Seaver
  Harvill, 401 pp, £20.00, October 2000, ISBN 1 86046 807 1
• De Sade's Valet by Nikolaj Frobenius, translated by Tom Geddes
  Marion Boyars, 242 pp, £9.95, November 2000, ISBN 0 7145 3060 3

‘I learned to ski in prison,’ Gregory Corso wrote, having discovered that there’s nothing much for prisoners to do except imagine, fantasise and, what often follows, masturbate. Although the chief interest in Sade’s Letters from Prison lies in tracing the stimulus incarceration gave to his literary imagination, one should honour in passing his phenomenal achievements in solitary vice. At the age of 44 he was claiming to masturbate eight times daily. ‘One good hour in the morning for five manilles, artistically graduated from 6 to 9, a good half hour in the evening for three more, these last being smaller – no cause for alarm there, I should think.’ The noisiness of the final stage of these performances must have increased his unpopularity with his jailers. ‘No matter what precautions I may take I am quite certain that these convulsions and spasms, not to mention the physical pain, can be heard as far as the Faubourg St Antoine.’