HIS ADVICE: Tolstoi’s advice regarding lust is summed up in his diary: “The best thing one can do with sexual desire is (1) to destroy it utterly in oneself; next best (2) is to live with one woman, who has a chaste nature and shares your faith, and bring up children with her and help her as she helps you; next worse (3) is to go to a brothel when you are tormented by desire; (4) to have brief relations with different women, remaining with none; (5) to have intercourse with a young girl and abandon her; (6) worse yet, to have intercourse with another man’s wife; (7) worst of all, to live with a faithless and immoral woman.”
—A.S.M. and L.L.
The Man Who Loved His Wife
MARK TWAIN (Nov. 30, 1835-Apr. 21, 1910)
HIS FAME: One of the best-known American novelists and humorists, Twain wrote such enduring classics as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
HIS PERSON: Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Mo. His pen name, Mark Twain, was derived from a call boatmen used when sounding water depths. He began his writing career as a journalist and eventually turned to fiction. Though he was a brilliant writer, there was a tragic side to his life. Yielding to convention, Twain funneled his writing into a socially acceptable mode; he did not complete or attempt to publish many of his beloved creations. His work was successful financially, as were his many lecture tours, but he repeatedly lost fortunes by sinking money in bad business schemes.
Twain with two Angel Fish
LOVE LIFE: Twain’s amorous life was dominated by a single figure—that of his wife, Livy Langdon. Although he had had sweethearts before he met her, he was probably a 34-year-old virgin when they married in 1870. Shown Livy’s picture by her brother, he instantly fell in love with her. Her family was highly respectable, and even though Twain was making good money as a lecturer, it wasn’t easy to convince her parents that he was worthy to marry their Livy. But marry her he did. Besides giving him three daughters, Livy set about reforming him. She waged war on all of his bad habits: tobacco (he had smoked since the age of eight), drink, cardplaying, and the irrepressible cussing that was his trademark. Looking upon him as a wayward child, her pet name for him was “Youth.” Twain told a friend, “After my marriage she edited everything I wrote. And what is more—she not only edited my works—she edited me!” He added, “I would quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral.”
Twain positively worshiped Livy. Believing her to be the essence of female perfection, he never criticized her. And though he delighted in teasing her and playing practical jokes on her, he generally obeyed her. Livy was a partial invalid all her life because of a fall on the ice in her youth, so Twain happily doted on his wife and nursed her. He remained madly in love with Livy until her death in 1904. The loss for Twain was enormous; he never recovered his happiness and barely wanted to live without her.
SEX LIFE: Twain may well have been impotent most of the time by the age of 50. This is strongly indicated in a number of his humorous writings which have not been widely read. But he never said it directly, stating in his memoirs that he would tell the truth about himself, but not the sexual truth, since Rousseau had taken care of that in his Confessions. He probably never made love to anyone but his wife, although his longtime personal secretary, Isabel Lyon, set her sights on him after Livy died. He found the woman repulsive and wrote to a friend, “I could not go to bed with Miss Lyon. I would rather have a waxwork.” He explained that she was “an old, old virgin, and juiceless, whereas my passion was for the other kind.”
QUIRKS: A curious fact about the great Mark Twain is that he delighted in writing obscene poems, ballads, and essays. He had them printed privately in very small quantities, if he had them printed at all. He complained, “Delicacy—a sad, sad false delicacy—robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: family-circle narratives and obscene stories.”
The most famous of his sexual and scatological works is 1601: A Tudor Fireside Conversation. This hilarious essay was written in Elizabethan language; in it, Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others exchange lewd tales and insults. Twain sent a copy of it to his dear friend Rev. Joseph Twitchell, and the two of them would take it to a favorite spot in the woods and roar with laughter over it.
One of Twain’s poems begins, “Constipation, O constipation,” and an address to be given to a men’s club (the Stomach Club) is entitled Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism. The Mammoth Cod is a song and speech written for another men’s club, the Mammoth Cods, who were devoted to cod fishing, drinking, and revelry. (Cod is an old-fashioned euphemism for “penis.”) From the song:Of beasts, man is the only one
Created by our God
Who purposely, and for mere fun
Plays with his Mammoth Cod!
He called the song a hymn and imagined it “sung by hundreds of sweet, guileless children” in Sunday schools. In the Cod essay he wrote:I fail to see any special merit in penises of more than the usual size. What more can they achieve than the smaller ones? … In this, as in everything else, quality is more to be considered than quantity. It is the searching, not the splitting, weapon that is of use.
I really don’t know whether I have such a thing as a “Cod” about me. I know there is a conduit about my person which is useful in conveying the waste moisture of the system, but that is the only use I have ever put it to, except the natural one of procreation. I may be excused for this, for it would be a shame to have the kind of man I am die out with myself. As for what men of the world call pleasure … I know nothing about it and care less. My recollection of it is, that while it was, perhaps, pleasant, it was so brief and transitory that it was not worth my while to repeat.
Equally revealing is this excerpt from Letters from the Earth:During 23 days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is 7 years old til she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle—yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.
But man is only briefly competent; and only then in the moderate measure applicable to the word in his sex’s case. He is competent from the age of 16 or 17 thenceforward for 35 years. After 50 his performance is of poor quality, the intervals between are wide, and its satisfactions of no great value to either party; whereas his great-grandmother is as good as new. There is nothing the matter with her plant. Her candlestick is as firm as ever, whereas his candle is increasingly softened and weakened by the weather of age, as the years go by, until at last it can no longer stand, and is mournfully laid to rest in the hope of a blessed resurrection which is never to come.
Twain goes on to calculate that while a man is good for 100 acts of love a year for 50 years, a woman is good for 3,000 a year as long as she lives. This averages at 10 acts a day for her. And it puts man’s lifetime total (according to Twain’s arithmetic) at 5,000 “refreshments” and woman’s at 150,000. Twain therefore recommended that men receive a one-fiftieth interest in one woman, while women receive a male harem.
Perhaps the most telling work of all is a poem entitled “A Weaver’s Beam,” which has a wonderful pun in the first line of its second stanza:Behold—the Penis mightier than the Sword
That leapt from Sheath at any heating Word
So long ago—now peaceful lies, and calm
And dreams unmoved of ancient Conquests scored.
Twain possessed one other quirk. In his later years, he became obsessed with little girls. His interest clearly bordered on the sexual. He formed his favorite little ladies into a club and called them Angel Fish separately (each was given an angelfish pin) and the Aquarium en masse. The average age for an Angel Fish was 13, and girls over 16 were rarely eligible. When one Angel Fish abandoned Twain for the company of young men, Twain was extremely jealous. His secretary wrote, “his first interest when he goes to a new place is to find lit
tle girls” and “off he goes with a flash when he sees a new pair of slim little legs appear, and if the little girl wears butterfly bows of ribbon on the back of her head then his delirium is complete.”
HIS THOUGHTS: “Love seems the swiftest, but is the slowest, of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”
Written in his notebook during Livy’s final illness: “Men and women—even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.”
—A. W.
Domestic Claustrophobia
H. G. WELLS (Sept. 21, 1866-Aug. 13, 1946)
HIS FAME: Wells emerged from literary obscurity in 1895 with publication of The Time Machine, followed by The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). But these science fiction endeavors were only a small part of his total output of over 100 books. Among his best-known works were Kipps (which established him as a novelist) and The Outline of History (an encyclopedic study a million words in length written in one year).
Wells at age 56
HIS PERSON: Born in Bromley, Kent, England, Herbert George Wells was the fourth and last child of Joseph and Sarah Wells. His easygoing and self-indulgent father ran a china shop and earned extra money by playing cricket. His mother was a rigid, domineering, deeply religious woman who constantly reminded her husband that his entire life was a failure. Wells once said that his parents had a foolproof method of birth control: They slept in separate rooms.
To escape the drudgery of his lower-middle-class surroundings, young Wells turned to reading books and daydreaming.
His fantasies often centered on the glories of war—victorious battles with Wells as supreme commander. As he said: “I used to walk about Bromley, a small rather undernourished boy, meanly clad and whistling detestably between his teeth, and no one suspected that a phantom staff pranced about me and phantom orderlies galloped at my commands to shift the guns and concentrate fire on those houses below….”
After unsuccessful attempts at being a draper’s—and then a druggist’s—apprentice, the 17-year-old Wells was sent off to school in Midhurst, where he earned a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London. There he came under the influence of Thomas Henry Huxley, otherwise known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Subsequently, Wells received a degree in zoology and taught in various schools before he became a full-time writer.
Wells was not a handsome man. He was 5 ft. 5 in. tall (he blamed his mother for that, claiming that she kept him in a short bed for too many years), with small hands and feet and a robust, heavyset body. His face sported a drooping mustache, bushy eyebrows, and penetrating blue eyes. His chestnut-brown hair usually looked as if it had been glued to his head. To his chagrin, Wells had a very high-pitched voice, and his speech was peppered with a cockney accent.
H.G. was self-centered, irascible, unpredictable, and upon occasion crude. His associates in the Fabian Society—like George Bernard Shaw—and his literary peers—like Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham—were sometimes exasperated, other times entranced, by his overpowering personality. As one of his biographers said: “With all his faults, you could not help loving him. Bursting with brains, bubbling with humor, he was full of a boisterous vital stimulating charm that made it nearly always a pleasure to be in his company, and you either rode the storm or were swept onto the rocks.” There were many women who could have testified to the truth of that analysis.
SEX LIFE: Wells was obsessed with finding the ideal sex partner. As a young boy, “Bertie” was first sexually aroused by semidraped Greek statues, and he was to search forever for their real-life equivalent—his “Venus Urania.” It was a quest that led him through two marriages, several serious affairs, and countless passades (defined by H.G. as “a stroke of mutual attraction”).
At 25 Wells married his first cousin Isabel Wells, a dark-haired virginal beauty with a slim, graceful body. Except for one unfulfilling experience with an “unimaginative” prostitute when he was about 22, Wells was also a sexual novice. His physical craving for Isabel was almost unbearable as he prepared for their wedding night and “flame meeting flame.” Unfortunately, the flames were quickly doused by Isabel’s tears as she found herself incapable of responding to H.G.’s ardor. The embittered husband embarked upon a string of minor romances before the couple ended their four-year marriage in 1895. In his autobiography Wells concludes that Isabel was not only naive but book-shy and unable to stimulate him intellectually (another requisite of Venus Urania). However, for many years after the divorce Wells could not shake Isabel from his mind. Her second marriage, in 1904, threw Wells into fits of jealousy. He tore up all of her letters and photographs and refused to speak her name. Years later they once again became friends.
Amy Catherine Robbins was one of H.G.’s students at the University Tutorial College in London in 1892. He was immediately attracted to her fair hair, brown eyes, and delicate features. They married as soon as Wells was divorced. Wells, for no apparent reason, decided to call his second wife Jane.
H.G. and Jane remained married until her death in 1927. The 32-year marriage, which produced two sons, was an unusual one. Once again Wells had paired up with a woman “innocent and ignorant” of the physical necessities of life. The dissatisfied husband and the sympathetic wife reached a mutual understanding in which she agreed to give him all of the sexual freedom he desired. From then on, Wells was quite open about his relationships, even keeping pictures of his lovers in his room.
Jane was the most stabilizing factor in H.G.’s turbulent life. She reviewed and typed his books, invested his money, prepared his tax returns, and kept their home in perfect order. In 1908, 42-year-old Wells became involved with 22-year-old Amber Reeves, daughter of one of London’s most prominent families. Jane’s friends were stunned and appalled when Amber became pregnant. However, Jane—the sensible, all-enduring wife—went out and bought clothes for the new baby.
In 1912 Wells finally met the Venus Urania of his dreams. Her name was Rebecca West and she was to become one of England’s foremost journalists and novelists. Writing in a small feminist magazine, West reviewed—and panned—H.G.’s book Marriage. Wells, usually thin-skinned about bad reviews, was intrigued by her humor and style. A year later Wells, then 46, and West, 20, began an affair that was to last for 10 years.
Wells had found the perfect mate. In addition to her beauty and sensuality, she was his equal in wit, imagination, and intelligence. He said, “She was the only woman who ever made me stop and wonder when she said ‘Look.”’ He wrote her many fervent love letters, professing his endless desire for her. On many of the letters Wells sketched a “picshua” of a panther and a jaguar (Rebecca was the panther, Wells the jaguar). They shared intense happiness and had one son, Anthony.
The break with Rebecca came after an incident involving Wells and another of his lovers, Austrian journalist Hedwig Verena Gatternigg. Following a row with Wells, the Austrian woman tried to kill herself in H.G.’s London flat. Wells wasn’t there at the time, but Jane, who often visited her husband’s home-away-from-home, discovered the woman and had her taken to a hospital. Rebecca’s name appeared in the ensuing publicity. Although the episode was ultimately covered up, scandal had come too close to Rebecca’s doorstep. But that wasn’t her only reason for ending the affair. She had become increasingly intolerant of H.G.’s disregard for her career (“He never read more than a page or two of any of my books”) and his restless, irritable moods. His continuing passades (which included birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger) and Rebecca’s social isolation were also precipitating factors. Finally, there seemed to be no boundaries to H.G.’s self-centeredness. At one time he moved his ailing first wife, Isabel, into his home so that his second wife, Jane, could care for her, while he continued to see Rebecca.
After Rebecca, Wells sought comfort in the arms of Odette Keun, a Dutch woman then living in France. A fo
rmer nun turned writer, Odette had sent Wells a copy of her book Sous Lenin (“Under Lenin”), which he favorably reviewed. They exchanged letters and finally met in Geneva in 1924. Their rendezvous took place in her hotel room. She shut off the lights before her Prince Charming arrived and then led him right into bed. Odette later recalled, “I did not know whether he was a giant or a gnome.” The lovers built a house in the south of France, where they spent all of their time together—a situation which made Jane’s life less complicated. H.G. remained a part of Odette’s life for the next nine years.
In 1934 the 68-year-old writer began a full-time relationship with an old acquaintance, Moura Budberg, former secretary to Maxim Gorky. She refused to marry Wells and they kept separate homes in London, but they remained friends and confidants until his death in 1946.
Throughout his adult life Wells was rarely without a woman. Despite his poor health (tuberculosis, diabetes, and kidney afflictions), he was sexually active almost to his death at age 79. According to Somerset Maugham: “H.G. had strong sexual instincts and he said to me more than once that the need to satisfy these instincts had nothing to do with love. It was a purely physiological matter.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 28