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My Secret Life, Review
by Maris Lemieux
We’ve always assumed that people rebelled from the stiff-laced code of the latter 1800s -- but how? The Victorians’ public face would have you believe that sex was a degradation one gallantly endured for the sole purpose of having kids. They surgically removed anything remotely sexual from the literature of the day. So it’s always been hard to learn how sexual, how active, and how perverse folks really were "behind closed doors." One thing’s for sure, in spite of society’s ever-patrolling sex-Nazis, Victorians got it on.
And just to make the point, along comes the lusty "Walter." It’s 1888 when 25 or so prints of his sex diary surface, candidly written in bedroom talk. Titled My Secret Life, it certainly proved (if the events he recorded are real and not fictitious as some claim) that Victorians were as horny, hungry, and daring as people in any other era. "Walter" was, of course, a pseudonym. Though a century of disagreement surrounds Walter’s actual identity, the general consensus accepts Ian Gibson’s proof that it was a wealthy gentleman named Henry Spencer Ashbee (see Ian Gibson’s biography of Ashbee, The Erotomaniac). For years Walter had been living a double life, one as a hard working business man and responsible family man, the other as a man who snuck off to shady places and had sex every which way. Walter’s seamy life brought him to the docks, the brothels, the rural farmhouses, wherever he was not likely to bump into "respectable" people, or people of his station. The historical Ashbee also kept (so his family learned on his death) a secret apartment housing one of England’s largest stashes of pornography. Obviously, a double life was the way to go for a lusty fellow in Victorian England. The things Walter chronicled would have straightened some Victorian beard hairs and given some ladies in over-tight corsets the vapors.
Though My Secret Life is long (originally published in 11 volumes) and can be repetitive (wonder what the editor was doing through this repeated action?), it’s about as satisfying as porn gets. No, you wouldn’t want to do a Walter marathon, but taken in small episodes, Walter can get things lubricated. You’ve got your variety, your graphic descriptions, your little historical revelations, your nasty language. Something for everyone.
Walter’s language is as quaint, crude, and natural as a country whore’s. He’s right out there with explicit terms: cunt, cock, fuck. You also get a few flavorful Victorian Anglicisms: quim (vagina), spunk (cum), and gamahuche (oral sex -- either, as in "I gamahuched her and she gamahuched me"). The book often gets accused of sexism, classism and racism. Duh. It’s the real 1800s -- not the movies. And actually, it’s intriguing to see how a sexist, racist, classist rationale worked back in the days when it was considered the norm. As time moves on, we get farther and farther away from being able to reproduce that rationale realistically in any of our art forms. Walter is sometimes quite humorous when he attempts to get into the female mind ("no" usually means "yes" in Walter’s wisdom). Still, only the most delicate and sensitive of readers will be offended by him.
Old Walter was an experimentalist, so you’re going to find just about every act imaginable in the book. You get to follow the details of the man’s sexual progress as he goes from being a guy with somewhat discriminating tastes and definite ideas of what he likes and dislikes (cunnilingus only with virgins, for example) to the insatiable slut we know and love by the end of this debauch. Though his choice of sexual partners falls statistically heavily in the young woman range, you’ll find him dabbling in other areas as well. In the choice episodes, he’s trying something new, or old in a new way: jumping in on a whore and her drunken john for a threesome, dragging a farm boy into a threesome for double penetration on a horny working girl.
There’s something rather fresh (in many senses) about Walter’s tales. They lack the self-conscious deliberateness of more manipulative modern porn. The tales are more robust and earthy than some of the Victorian girl’s school and boy’s school type stories -- none of this "naughty-naughty" kind of winking. Walter is just a man on a journey, love ’im or leave ’im. My Secret Life, is the perfect book for a lover’s night table, especially if you like a little bed time story before your foreplay. There’s something in it for all tastes and sexes. And because it’s so long, you’ll have fresh stories to read for a real long time.
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