H.
J.
KAPLAN
65
universities, by the prevailing conventional wisdom which holds that an
author so offensive-and an antinomian philosopher to boot-must
have something important to tell us. And both these rationales are at
work, albeit differently, in these new biographies, which are the most
recent in English, so far as I know. Neil Schaeffer is a professor of Eng–
lish Literature at Brooklyn College; an all but unconditional admirer of
Justine, The Philosopher
ill
the Boudoir,
and
The
J
20
Days of Sodom,
and a generally sympathetic observer of Sade's career, he has read the
record with care and discernment and produced a full-length portrait
with earnest attempts at the sort of psychoanalytical insight one accepts,
if at all, with reservations, given the wealth of source material which
makes it possible to prove almost anything (and its opposite) about this
strange man. Aside from a citation in his bibliography, Schaeffer makes
little reference to his immediate predecessor in what is now a crowded
field: Francine du Plessix Gray's above-mentioned
At Home With the
Marquis de Sade,
which also produces a portrait, to be sure, rather more
focused than Schaeffer's on Sade's relations with women.
In
his life as in his work the divine Marquis was preternaturally
obsessive and repetitious; and, in view of the thousands of pages of cor–
respondence and family papers collected in the Bibliotheques Sade, the
massive biographies by Maurice Heine, Gilbert Lely, and Maurice Lever,
it must have required more than a dose of masochism to take the mea–
sure of a writer who-despite the violence of his material-distills a
boredom unique, even among the epigoni of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
This is not to accuse Gray (or, for that matter, Schaeffer) of morbidity
or of wasting our time. However differently they approach Sade, they
both proceed from the implicit assumption that the "case" of the divine
Marquis and his
fata
in our culture have something important to tell us
about our post-enlightenment societies; on this point they are clearly
right and at one, even if the writer and thinker whom Schaeffer sees as
a towering genius winds up
in
Gray's profile as a confused and defeated
old man.
In
his own time, to be sure,
it
was his notoriety as an alleged criminal
and confirmed pornographer which-far more than his philosophic doc–
trine and/or his plethoric prose-constituted his personage; and this was
his misfortune, since the various regimes which succeeded each other in
France during and after the reign of Louis XV all felt constrained by pub–
lic opinion to keep this man under lock and key, whether or not he was
guilty of the turpitudes attributed to him. There was an odor of brim–
stone about him from the outset, long before he had ever committed his
fantasies of flagellation and sodomy to paper. On the surface he seemed
