The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra

by James McConnachie

  Speke was eventually proved right that Lake Victoria – and not Lake Tanganyika – was the principal source of the Nile, if not for the reasons he gave. Burton’s contributions to East African geography and anthropology were undoubtedly of greater value, but the actual discovery of the Nile’s source was the only feat of exploration that truly resounded in the Western imagination. It was ‘the greatest geographical prize since the discovery of America’. Burton may have better surveyed the ground for imperialism, but Speke had pioneered the road for expansion. Burton’s own disappointment was compounded by the quarrel with his former friend, which played itself out in newspaper articles and bitter private correspondence. Speke eventually shot himself – supposedly by accident – on the eve of the two explorers’ first public debate, in September 1864. Burton wrote to The Times that ‘the sad event… must seal my mouth concerning many things’. Refraining from speaking out, however, was very far from Burton’s habit, and the contentious question of the exact topographic details of the Nile watershed continued to rumble away after Speke’s death, in a national debate that divided geographers and the fascinated public alike. Burton continued to press the claims of his Lake Tanganyika theory until as late as 1881, when the discoveries of his successors in Africa – notably Livingstone and Stanley – caused him finally and publicly to admit defeat. ‘There is a time to leave the Dark Continent,’ he wrote, ruefully, ‘and that is when the idée fixe begins to develop itself.’ In any case, long before 1881, even before Speke’s death, a new obsession had drawn Burton into another, in many ways darker continent: the little-explored realm of erotics.

  In 1863, when the recriminations surrounding the Speke affair were at their peak, Burton and a friend, Dr James Hunt, founded a ‘new religion’ – at least, this was how Burton described his ‘Anthropological Society of London’ in a letter to his friend and sponsor, the Conservative Member of Parliament and literary patron Richard Monckton Milnes. In many respects, the Anthropological Society was Burton’s fighting response to the bitter aftermath of the Nile expedition. Burton’s club emphasized the fledgling, modern sciences of ethnology and anthropology rather than old-fashioned, brute exploration. Its aims were intellectual rather than heroic. Geography had hitherto concerned itself with mapping the physical world and, thanks to men such as Speke, those maps were increasingly complete. Anthropologists like Burton intended, instead, to map the beliefs and behaviour models that underpinned human society. To create such a map, sexuality would need to be discussed, and openly.

  Burton’s first paper was a report on the ‘peculiar customs’ of Dahomey, notably polygamy, phallic worship and the practice of male and female genital mutilation. The Society also earnestly sat through papers on prostitution, fertility rituals and the nautch or dancing girls of South India, who were beginning to aquire Europe-wide fame as custodians of an ancient erotico-spiritual tradition whose details were, as yet, little understood. To say that such topics would not have been well received at the Royal Geographical Society is to put it mildly. Burton’s paper was an early skirmish in what became a lifelong campaign against sexual ignorance, censorship and hypocrisy, with his knowledge of the ‘Orient’, Africa included, as his principle weapon. Burton later protested in the 1886 ‘Terminal Essay’, which concluded his translation of the Arabian Nights, that:

  Few phenomena are more startling than the vision of a venerable infant, who has lived half his long life in the midst of the wildest anthropological vagaries and monstrosities, and yet who absolutely ignores all that India and Burmah enacts under his very eyes… Against such lack of knowledge my notes are a protest.… In this matter I have done my best, at a time too when the hapless English traveller is expected to write like a young lady for young ladies, and never to notice what underlies the most superficial stratum.

  In 1863, however, the ‘Terminal Essay’ was as yet unwritten – and probably as yet unwritable. In his travel books, Burton was still censoring his own observations in order to salve the prudishness of his readership. ‘As a traveller and a writer of travels,’ he wrote, ‘I have found it impossible to publish those questions of social economy and those physiological observations always interesting to our common humanity, and at times so valuable.’ The Anthropological Society would solve the problem; it would be a refuge for ‘a liberty of thought and a freedom of speech unknown to any other society in Great Britain’. It consequently attracted a small group of men who, like Burton, were unusually willing to challenge the unspoken censorship of public mores, especially when it came to talking about sex. Burton described how he had originally wanted to exercise the ‘liberty of thought’ and ‘freedom of speech’ in print, as well as in private conversation. His motive was

  to supply travellers with an organ which would rescue their observations from the outer darkness of manuscript and print their curious information on social and sexual matters out of place in the popular book… But, hardly had we begun when ‘Respectability’, that whited sepulchre full of all uncleanness, rose up against her. ‘Propriety’ cried us down with her brazen, blatant voice and the week-kneed brethren fell away. Yet the organ was much wanted and is wanted still.

  Sex was just one front opened by the original Anthropological Society in their campaign against respectability and propriety. Another was religion. The discovery of religious cultures such as India’s, which could not be lightly brushed aside as primitive, had opened the doors to a new religious relativism. Scientific empiricism was the driving force behind anthropology, and thanks to its discipline it was becoming increasingly clear to a growing number of scholars and, indeed, dilettante travellers that Christianity’s claim to a unique message was untenable. The discoveries in India, in particular, were increasingly being held up as evidence that God, if God existed at all, must take many forms. Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, an old friend of Burton’s from his India days, was one of the first to comment on the ‘striking’ resemblance between Krishna and Christ. And he went further: pointing out that ‘Christna’, as he called the Hindu god, ‘was mould with years ere Jesus was born’, he declared that ‘the story of Jesus of Nazareth is so identical with that of Christna in name, origin, office, history, incidents, and death as to make it manifest that the latter was copied from the earlier almost entire’.

  Many members of the Anthropological Society were atheist, or at least broadly deist, in outlook – most notoriously Charles Bradlaugh, the founder of the National Secular Society, who later became a cause célèbre in the world of publishing ‘obscene’ books. Burton usually refused to be drawn on his own beliefs, telling the Society: ‘My religious opinions are of no importance to anyone but myself… I object to confessions, and I will not confess.’ That said, he pushed a distinctly relativist and atheist point of view in his long satirical poem, Stone Talk, printed in 1865. The poem, however, was delivered through the mouth of a Brahmin trapped in a paving stone, and it was both anonymously and privately printed. Burton did not remain circumspect for much longer. He was soon pugnaciously declaring to the National Association of Spiritualists: ‘Personally, I ignore the existence of soul and spirit, feeling no want of a self within a self, an I within an I.’ Instead, he put his faith in the brand-new theory of evolution: ‘I cannot but hold to the apes,’ he declared. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection had been published a few years before, in 1859.

  For some, the Anthropological Society was less a forum for atheism than a mask for more primal passions. An inner cabal of Burton’s friends and colleagues met at Bartolini’s dining rooms in London, to drink, dine, tell outrageous stories and indulge in what Burton called ‘orgies’ – though not, apparently, of the sexual kind. Women were not usually tolerated. If the orgiasts became too riotous, a chairman would call for order by thumping the floor with a club – no doubt to raucous cheers. Carved with an African figure chewing on a femur, it symbolized the group’s wilful embrace of the transgressive. The father-figure of this ‘Cannibal Club’ was Richard Mo
nckton Milnes, who was elevated to the peerage as Lord Houghton in 1863. Milnes was also one of the first men both to rise above the earth in a hot-air balloon and to descend into the deep ocean in a diving bell, and he was an ardent (and frustrated) suitor of Florence Nightingale. He was perhaps best known, however, for the weekend house parties at his eighteenth-century Yorkshire home of Fryston Hall, where he gathered explorers, writers, Conservative Party luminaries and other gentlemen of fashion and influence.

  Burton’s wife, Isabel, described Milnes’ stately home in an article on ‘Celebrities at Home’ for the magazine The World. At the heart of Fryston, she reported, was its library. Its style reflected contemporary Oriental fashions. It was ‘a long, handsome, comfortable room, soft-carpeted, and replete with ottoman and sofa luxury’. The nagaraka’s ideal home springs inevitably to mind. Fryston was ‘walled with books, as indeed was the whole house, not in formal rows but in separate cases, each with its own subject – Poetry, Magic, French Revolution, Oriental Thought, Theology and Anti-theology, Criminal Trials, Fiction, from Manon Lascaut to George Eliot’. The subjects Isabel listed were almost uniformly unconventional, from the books on ‘anti-theology’ to those on the French Revolution. Less orthodox still was the section on ‘criminal trials’, which in fact covered a variety of school punishments. An interest in the Orient was hardly unusual, but Milnes’ thinking went against the usual grain. In his 1844 collection of poetry, Palm Leaves, he complained that ‘We have taken our notions of Eastern domesticity much more from the ballet than from reality, and have coloured them with so much ferocity and vice, that what is really commonplace becomes paradoxical.’

  There was one set of bookcases that Isabel did not choose to describe. Secretly, and illegally, Milnes had accumulated the finest library of erotica in Europe, a collection so extensive that intimates of his freethinking inner circle admiringly referred to his house as ‘Aphrodisiopolis’. (Curiously enough, Fryston Hall began life as a monastery and is now the Monk Fryston honeymoon hotel.) As well as collecting erotica, Milnes gathered around him a small, rebellious coterie of well-to-do gentlemen with shared passions for rare and pornographic books, Oriental travel and sexual experimentation. The wild young poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was one intimé of the circle, Richard Burton another. Swinburne described Milnes as ‘the Sadique collector of European fame’. As Milnes wrote, riddlingly, in Palm Leaves,

  Who can determine the frontier of Pleasure?

  Who can distinguish the limits of Pain?…

  And life will be dearer and clearer in anguish

  Than ever was felt in the throbs of delight.

  The chief procurer of erotic books for Milnes’ library was a former Captain of the Guards, Frederick Hankey, who had retired to Paris to take advantage of the city’s relatively relaxed moral climate. Hankey’s methods were ingenious and he made full use of his well-to-do contacts. Some pornographic books found their way to Milnes courtesy of the deep overcoat pockets of the manager of the Opera House, a certain Mr Harris, some were buried among dispatches sent to Lord Palmerston from Constantinople – Hankey knew the Queen’s Messenger personally; others were simply popped into the diplomatic bag, addressed to one of Hankey’s Foreign Office friends. In April 1862, Hankey was visited by the Goncourt brothers at his apartment on the rue Laffitte. In a notorious passage expurgated from their published diaries – and only revealed in the Monaco edition – the Goncourts described him with horror as ‘un fou, un monstre… one of those men on the edge of the abyss’. ‘Henkey’, as they called this ‘terrible eccentric’, was ‘about thirty years old, bald, with temples swelling out like an orange… his head – and this is strange – is the head of one of those emaciated and ecstatic young priests who surround the bishops in old pictures’. Hankey showed the horrified brothers books with metal clasps resembling phalluses, skulls and torture instruments, and described how he liked to pierce prostitutes with pins until they bled. He also pointed out a book which, he regretted, still lacked a decent cover. Looking down at his fingernails in an ostentatious fey manner, Hankey said he was ‘waiting for the skin of a young girl… But it’s disagreeable… the skin has to be taken from a young girl while she is alive… I have my friend Dr Barth, you know… the one who travels in Africa and at the time of the massacres… he has promised to get me a skin like that, from a living source.’ Hankey was a man devoted to the fantastical, but in this he was telling the truth. ‘Dr Barth’ was none other than Richard Burton, who had visited Hankey in Paris, in 1859. It was Milnes who had introduced them. Burton described the West African festival of massacres in his 1864 travelogue, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, and he actually wrote to Milnes from Dahomey to say: ‘I have been here three days and am generally disappointed. Not a man killed, not a fellow tortured… Poor Hankey must still wait for his peau de femme.’

  In 1860, Milnes recorded Burton’s impressions of Hankey in his commonplace book. Ever the anthropologist, Burton told him, ‘there is no accounting for tastes in superstition. Hankey would like to have a Bible bound with bits of skin stripped off live from the cunts of a hundred little girls and yet he could not be persuaded to try the sensation of f—g a Muscovy duck while its head was cut off.’ The tone is of hearty and perhaps facetious amusement, of delight in transgression rather than the frisson of sexual arousal. This is not to say that Burton did not share Hankey’s sadistic predilections, although in 1889, writing to the pornographic publisher Leonard Smithers about a proposed English edition of Justine, Burton noted that ‘the French of Dr Sade is monstrous enough and a few pages choke me off. But what bile it would be in brutal Anglo-Saxon.’ Perspicaciously, the Goncourt brothers recognized that Hankey was not in fact a madman or monstrous freak, but the product of a particular strain of English society. ‘Through him, as through a torn veil, I glimpsed something abominable, a frightening aspect of a blasé moneyed aristocracy, the English aristocracy which brings ferocity to love, and finds satisfaction only through the sufferings of women.’

  Milnes himself was the quintessential example of this abominable aristocracy. He composed a pornographic flagellatory poem of his own, which Hankey showed Burton during his stay in Paris and which was eventually printed in 1871 – anonymously, of course – as The Rodiad, and circulated among like-minded friends. For Burton, this was an early lesson in how private printing could get around the obscenity laws. A.C. Swinburne, meanwhile, was writing doggerel on beaten schoolboys for the pornographic magazine, The Pearl, and composing an entire mock-epic entitled The Flogging Block. (Even Swinburne’s public poetry was famously sexually charged, causing the critic John Morley to call him ‘an unclean imp from the pit’ and ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’.) Swinburne, too, knew Hankey, describing his collection of erotic books and engravings as ‘unrivalled upon earth – unequalled I should imagine, in heaven’.

  The members of the Cannibal Club were not just socialite transgressives indulging in recreational titillation. Discussing sex openly was a radical political act in itself. Writing to a friend in 1873, Burton confessed, ‘we did not tremble at the idea of “acquiring an unhappy notoriety”. We wanted to have the truth, the whole truth, as each man sees it. We intended to make room for every form of thought, the orthodox and the heterodox; the subversive and the conservative; the retrograde equally with the progressive.’ The Cannibals were scientists, of an amateur sort; they helped clear the way for the professional sexologists and psychologists who would soon follow them, just as the great amateur Victorian archaeologists, anthropologists and art historians paved the way for professionals to follow in their own fields of enquiry. Rejecting what they saw as the hypocrisy of the English Establishment, the members of the club used the Orient – Africa included – as a mirror to reflect back the sexual habits of their own society. The light so produced was found to be harshly revealing. As Milnes wrote, ‘I do not hesitate to say that I can find no superiority in the morals and manners of the West, and am led to fear that the evils con
nected with the relations between the sexes are more productive of suffering and debasement in any, so-called, Christian countries than in those that remain attached to the habits of the elder world.’

  Like all true Victorian amateurs, the ‘Cannibals’ were practitioners as well as observers; they explored the erotic not just in other societies but in themselves as well. Milnes, Swinburne, Burton and their pack of satyrs were not just interested in talking, reading and writing about flagellation. Swinburne referred to his mentor Milnes as ‘Monsieur Rodin’, asking him in one letter of 1863: ‘I suppose I may use schoolboyish tone in addressing my scholastic lord & teacher?’ In another, he mourned the departure of his ‘tempter and favourite audience’ – ‘I may hope to be a good boy again,’ Swinburne mused, ‘after such a “jolly good swishing” as Rodin alone can dare administer… The Captain was too many for me.’ ‘The Captain’ almost certainly referred to Burton’s rank in the Indian Army. Milnes himself wrote approvingly in his commonplace book that ‘Burton says he has remarked several men with the vice of Studholme Hodgson… all men delighting in cruelty.’ Hodgson was a member of the Cannibal Club and gloried under the soubriquet of ‘Colonel Spanker’ – at least until promoted to the rank of General. Burton even dedicated one volume of his Arabian Nights to him, describing him as ‘my preceptor of past times’ to whom he resorted ‘so often for good council and right direction’.