The Unsinkable Fanny Hill

That Tall, black-eyed, redheaded, high-breasted and round-heeled lass from Liverpool, Fanny Hill, has come a long way from her humble beginnings. Conceived in a debtors' gaol in 1748 by an eccentric littérateur and vagabond named John Cleland, who then cast her out into the world for a paltry 20 guineas, she went on to ignite the erotic imagination of millions of readers in every major language; and now, 217 years later, Fanny has made her debut as the most triumphant fille de joie the movies have ever known.

But it hasn't been easy.

Fanny's woes began less than a year after she first appeared on the Strand in London. Her Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, at six shillings the copy, were already circulating freely, reaching a public whose appetite for the new literary form of the novel had been whetted by the success of Fielding's Tom Jones and Richardson's Pamela, when the censors suddenly woke up to the fact that she was no ordinary heroine. At the instigation of the local bishops, a warrant to seize everyone connected with the book was issued by the Crown on November 8, 1749.

The harassed author immediately penned an urgent letter to the office of the Secretary of State. In this document, which has only recently come to light, Cleland actually tried to escape prosecution by denying that he was the legitimate father of Fanny. "The plan of the first Part," he wrote, "was originally given me by a young gentleman ... above 18 years ago, on an occasion immaterial to mention here. This I never dreamt of preparing for the Press, till being under confinement in the Fleet, at my leisure hours, I altered, added to, transposed, and in short new-cast." In an obvious reply to the bishops who had cast the first stone at Fanny, Cleland slyly wondered how her Memoirs "could so long escape the Vigilance of the Guardians of the Public Manners, since, nothing is truer, than that more Clergymen bought it, in proportion, than any other distinction of men." In the same embarrassing vein, Cleland went on to state that in the story of the flagellant in Part II. relating how Fanny is compelled to flog a limp and worn-out roue into potency, "and which I fished for in actual life, I substituted a Lay-character to that of a Divine of the Church of England, of whom the Fact, with little variation, is sacred Truth: as may, if doubted, on a slender enquiry be traced, and verified." That, he trought, would hold them.

Even Fanny's publisher, Ralph Griffiths, a suave and wily operator who is said to have ultimately earned £10,000 from the wench, tried to turn his back on her in this first crisis. He invented a brother called "Fenton Griffiths"--record of whom has never been found, just as there is no evidence of that "young gentleman" referred to by Cleland--and blamed this illusory sibling for the book's publication.

Surprisingly enough, the authorities seem to have been placated--or intimidated by fear of scandal in high places (shades of Profumo!)--for no further action was taken. But what might have impressed the Secretary of State more than any other argument was Cleland's canny reminder that "they can take no step toward punishing the Author that will not powerfully contribute to the notoriety of the Book."

Just four months later, though, in March of 1750, after the hue and cry against her seemed over, Fanny came out on the town once more; this time as a chaste and proper young miss, carefully expurgated of all indelicate passages, with nothing left to remind anyone of her former incendiary charms but her name itself. To this bowdlerized version, for which publisher Griffiths now took full responsibility, the following demure motto (borrowed from Fanny) was affixed: "If I have painted Vice in its gayest Colours, if I have deck'd it with Flowers, it has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner Sacrifice of it to VIRTUE." Ever one to insure an investment, Griffiths then wrote an anonymous review of the scrubbed edition of the Memoirs for his own magazine, The Monthly Review, in which he declared with straight-faced innocence that although he had never laid eyes on the original, the present work was endowed with an uncommon "delicacy of sentiment and expression" which could hardly make a maiden blush--let alone a grown man.

However, the Bishop of London, Thomas Sherlock, not only blushed but fumed, then blazed off a letter to the Secretary of State demanding that he take instant action against "this vile Book, which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners, and a reproach to the Honour of the Government, and the Law of the Country." Once again warrants were issued--but once again the case was never brought to trial. It may well have been because of Griffiths' oily influence, or John Cleland's family connections with the powerful Lord Granville of the Privy Council, or, indeed, the threat of an unsavory ecclesiastical scandal vis-à-vis the book: but whatever the reason, the bishop's fire was quietly doused. Cleland himself not only went unpunished a second time, but was generously bought off with a £100-a-year pension by the levelheaded Lord Granville on the promise that he would be a proper fellow and never create a successor to his notorious nymph.

Fanny, however, was by now irrepressible. Within a few years other publishers took her in and tricked her out in new editions, sometimes adding bawdy illustrations and even spicing up the already lusty text of the original. Justly enough, the only instance of anyone being convicted for associating with Fanny occurred when a bookseller named Drybutter was pilloried in 1757 for having inserted gamy details of a homosexual encounter in Part II of the novel. One can be sure that Cleland as well would have been indignant at Master Drybutter's liberties with his craft, for in spite of his every disclaimer, it is obvious that he loved Fanny and composed each of her lines with the devotion of a literary craftsman-biographer.

What he had tried to achieve, as Fanny herself put it, was a style "tempered with taste," avoiding "gross, rank and vulgar expression" on the one hand and "mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions" on the other. His success in forging such a style, with its incandescent power of insinuation, made him the most celebrated erotic novelist of his-- and perhaps of any--time. Fanny has survived as much for the stylish purity and grace of her expression as for her spirited gambols in the hay.

Without question, the man who could conceive of Fanny had to possess the finesse of a literary artist as well as the worldliness of an 18th Century rake. Through his father, Colonel William Cleland, who held the important office of Commissioner of Taxes, and was a close and lifelong friend of the great poet Alexander Pope, young John was introduced to fashionable society at a tender age and soon became familiar with the poets, politicians, wits, fops and coxcombs who assembled in the clubs and coffeehouses of London. After graduating from the Westminster School, and barely out of his teens, his father obtained for the precocious youngster the post of consul in Smyrna, Turkey; and after a few years of service in that exotic land, at the age of 27, he joined the British East India Company in 1736 and moved farther eastward to Bombay. The Arabian Nights splendor and sensuality of the East, in contrast to the rational daylight world of Protestant England, understandably made a dramatic and lasting impression on the budding young writer.

Since Cleland was a privileged member of the British ruling class, available to him were all the rare Indian and Turkish delights that had once been the private reserve of rajas and sultans. But he was also somewhat of a language scholar and was thus able to study the culture at first hand. Among the Sanskrit works he read was that most famous of Oriental love manuals, Kama Sutra; one can easily imagine Cleland putting into practice among the harem girls and nautch dancers of the East the various gymnastic techniques of lovemaking recommended by the poet-sage Vatsyayana. Fanny herself, especially in the famous orgy scene from the Memoirs, seems in many respects the quintessence of these erotic experiments distilled and refined in Cleland's imagination a decade later.

But in the midst of these scholarly researches, the author, for reasons still cloaked in mystery, was suddenly dismissed by his superiors in the East India Company and forced to quit Bombay. In a nearly destitute condition, we are told, he managed to reach western Europe, where for the next several years he lived a precarious, bohemian, on-the-road existence. Yet this experience as well was to go into the creation of Fanny. In Paris, Cleland encountered a new kind of amorous art which the libertine Louis XV, his court and his mistress Madame Pompadour (who stocked the King's famous harem, the Deer Park, with a choice collection of virgins as extensive as any Oriental seraglio's) had inspired among the painters and writers of the period.

Chief among these writers was Claude de Crébillon, only two years Cleland's senior, who was producing erotic novels in the form of letters and dialogs, such as A Lady of Quality, which won him a wide reputation. To Créhillon's more ethereal French touch, Cleland was to add a robust English appreciation of the flesh--the difference, say, between the work of that voluptuous French court painter Fragonard and the lip-smacking, middle-class sensuality of Hogarth. In addition, the advanced social ideas of the French Enlightenment, with its new respect for the dignity of the individual in his pursuit of happiness, must also have played its part in the unconscious molding of Cleland's democratic-minded, independent and pleasure-loving heroine.

What seems to have brought Cleland home to England, at last, was the death of his father in 1741, two months after the old gentleman had been dismissed from his post as Commissioner of Taxes by the administration of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The prodigal son now found himself back in his native land after an absence of many years, with no inheritance or other means of support, and with his father's political influence a thing of the past. Out of necessity he began to scrounge a hand-to-mouth living as a sometime journalist and hack writer. Fanny herself, as Cleland has told us, was conceived during one of those barren seasons when his stuff was not selling, creditors were howling, and the former British Consul had to make one of his enforced visits to debtors' prison.

Cleland was to remain a hired pen during the rest of his long life (supported by his yearly pension of £ 100). and to end his days as a retired literary gentleman of modest circumstances in Westminster. He had managed to write a number of plays, scholarly works, translations and even novels after Fanny--including a rather stiffly stylized and disappointingly dull narrative entitled The Memoirs of a Coxcomb--but none matched the success, acclaim and notoriety of his first book and only masterpiece.

Long before he died at the age of 80, in 1789, Fanny's fame had already spread throughout Europe, and she was especially cherished by the more advanced social theorists of the age. The famous French encyclopedist, Diderot, whose ideas helped prepare the way for both the French and American Revolutions, was an enthusiastic admirer of Fanny. In England the Memoirs occupied an esteemed place in the library of the so-called Hell-Fire Club (playboy, June 1961), whose members were drawn from the ruling elite in society, literature and politics, and included among them John Wilkes, the noted Parliamentarian and political friend of the American colonists. When Benjamin Franklin was in England in 1772, seeking support for the American colonies against the repressive policies of George III, he was made an honorary member of the club, participated in their erotic revels in the pleasure-dome abbey of Medmenham, and through this felicitous union of politics and pleasure, became acquainted with Fanny.

Always the initiator, the author of Poor Richard's Almanack returned to Colonial shores with the Memoirs tucked firmly beneath his arm. It can be confidently assumed that through old Ben other of our founding fathers, including the young Jefferson and Hamilton, joined Fanny's fan club. For with her pluck, self-reliance and freewheeling enterprise, Fanny embodied the revolutionary spirit of the times--at least in terms of sexual and social morality. All were qualities which qualified her for success in the New World.

The first American edition of her Memoirs appeared sometime during the 1770s, published by the well-known printer and historian of the Federalist period, Isaiah Thomas of Massachusetts. Other domestic editions quickly followed in response to the lively demand, some of them sumptuously illustrated with lithographs and engravings that graphically depicted the raciest episodes of the book. As the new nation expanded, and immigrants from all over the world arrived, many of them brought with them plainly wrapped editions written in their own tongues. In French she was La Fille de Joie, in German Das Frauenzimmer von Vergnügen, in Italian La Meretrice Inglese. But in plain English A Woman of Pleasure, then as now, continued to grow in popularity.

But then as now, Fanny continued to arouse the wrath of the local Mrs. Grundys and their hatchet men. She became, in fact, the object of the first American prosecution of a book on grounds of obscenity when two Massachusetts printers, Peter Holmes and Stillman Howe, were arrested in 1821 for publishing a profusely illustrated, unexpurgated edition--which was then ordered destroyed. No matter, for Fanny continued to circulate sub rosa, and her trade was as brisk as ever. Many of these banned editions tampered with Cleland's style, using all the privy words then in vogue, and adding other four-letter details for good measure--which was not unlike spraying a bouquet of wild flowers with five-and-dime perfume.

When the War Between the States exploded, Fanny became a camp follower of both the boys in blue and those in gray, dispensing her charms impartially as if to remind them of the other things they were fighting for. During the gilded age that followed, she gave herself to generals as well as to enlisted men, tycoons as well as ditchdiggers, statesmen as well as the rank and vile. A copy of the Memoirs now in the New York Public Library was at one time the property of Samuel J. Tilden, a famous New York reform governor and Democratic nominee for the Presidency against Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. On the record, then, Fanny has played a unique role in American life from Colonial times to the present.

But it has only been within the past two years that her Memoirs have been able to emerge from bottom drawers and from under false covers. The change in sexual mores since World Wars One and Two, reflected in the greater boldness and realism of contemporary novelists, gradually prepared the way for Fanny's own liberation and acceptance in the front parlor. Perhaps the most important single event in this struggle for freedom by writers to mention the unmentionable was the decision by Justice John M. Woolsey in 1933 that lifted the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses. A week after this verdict, the well-known liberal lawyer Morris L. Ernst, who defended the book, predicted: "It should henceforth be impossible for the censors legally to sustain an attack against any book of artistic integrity, no matter how frank and forthright it might be."

Mrs. Grundy, however, was not giving up without a fight. When D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover appeared publicly for the first time in America (1959) and England (1960), the book was prosecuted in both countries and won a notable double victory. Then followed the vindication of Henry Miller's Tropics, which had been carried (continued on page 140) Fanny Hill (continued from page 80) in the knapsacks of thousands of GIs during World War Two, just as Fanny had been in the Civil War. As a result, such works as William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, translations of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden, and Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers were able to appear unchallenged. But Fanny Hill, the most famous of all, was still considered too hot to handle.

The first attempt to make a proper literary lady out of Fanny took place as recently as 1963, when G. P. Putnam's Sons published the Memoirs in a legitimate trade edition. At once the D.A.s of all five boroughs of New York City moved to prosecute. The issue was plain: If Fanny were allowed to pass, then any other so-called pornographic work that celebrated the pleasures of the flesh without preaching any moral or pleading any cause could also come out into the open. In August of 1963, the case of the Corporation Counsel of the City of New York us. G. P. Putnam's Sons was argued before Justice Arthur G. Klein of the state Supreme Court.

The defending attorney, Charles Rembar, introduced a half-dozen respected literary figures as Fanny's champions--J. Donald Adams, then a contributing editor to The New York Times Book Review; John Hollander, poet-critic and Assistant Professor of English Literature at Yale; Louis Untermeyer, poet and former Librarian of Congress; Gerald Willen, Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College; Eric Bentley, drama critic and Chairman of the Program of the Arts at Columbia University; and Walter J. Minton, president of G. P. Putnam's Sons. To refute these witnesses, Seymour B. Quel, the prosecuting lawyer, called to the stand The Reverend Dr. William F. Rosenblum, Rabbi of Temple Israel of Manhattan; Father Edward Soares, of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; Julius Nierow, a social worker for the New York City Youth Board; and The Reverend Canon William S. Van Meter, of the Protestant Council of the City of New York.

All of these witnesses for the prosecution were confidently expected to testify that Fanny was, indeed, "patently offensive to current community standards of morality." However, to Mr. Quel's surprise and consternation, The Reverend Canon Van Meter had a change of heart when he took the stand:

Q. (from Mr. Quel): Canon have you read Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure?

A. Yes, sir. I read it last night in some detail, and have somewhat changed my views as a result of this; that is, I didn't find in it what I expected to find, but I read it last night until four o'clock this morning.

Q. Have you an opinion as to whether the book conforms generally with community standards? Just answer that yes or no.

A. Yes.

A brouhaha ensued among the judge, the attorney for the defense and Mr. Quel, accompanied by objections, exceptions and counterobjections. Then The Reverend Canon was cross-examined by Mr. Rembar.

Q. Dr. Van Meter, you said just now that after reading the book your views of it had changed somewhat. Would you please expand on that statement?

A. Well, I had looked at this book very hurriedly. It came into my possession at 10:15 yesterday morning....I was expecting to find a quite different kind of work....Something which was titillating, or some such thing, and looked at passages which looked, at first examination, as quite lurid, and then I read the book as a whole, and I came out with a quite different view.

Q. What view did you come out with?

A. I came out with a view that this was a serious book, that there was some serious consideration of plot and character development, that it had some sociological importance, if a person were concerned with that period.

In an attempt to recoup, Mr. Quel later called his heretical witness back to the stand, but this proved to be even more damaging for the prosecution.

Q. Well, so far as the contemporary times are concerned, what is your opinion of the book?

A. I think that qualitatively it doesn't vary from a great deal of the literature which is currently available.

And that, it seems, was the decisive turn in the case. For in his decision upholding G. P. Putnam's publication of the book, Justice Klein declared:

"If the standards of the community are to be gauged by what it is permitted to read in its daily newspapers, then Fanny Hill's experiences contain little more than what the community has already encountered on the front pages of many of its newspapers in reporting of the recent 'Profumo' and other sensational cases involving sex.

"If the standards are to be measured by what the public has of late been permitted to view in the so-called 'foreign art' movies, and, indeed, some of our domestic products, then it is equally clear that Memoirs does these standards no violence whatsoever ...

"While the saga of Fanny Hill will undoubtedly never replace Little Red Ridinghood as a popular bedtime story, it is quite possible that were Fanny to be transposed from her mid-18th Century Georgian surroundings to our present-day society, she might conceivably encounter many things which would cause her to blush."

Soon after this victory, however, a 16-year-old virgin, approximately the same age as Fanny herself when she first went to the wicked city of London, was directed by her crusading bluenose mother to buy a copy of the Memoirs from a local Manhattan bookstore. A chance was lost to test the late Mayor Jimmy Walker's memorable dictum, "No girl was ever ruined by a book," for her mother immediately snatched it from her, had a summons issued against the bookseller, and Fanny once again was haled into court. This time (January 1964) she was indeed branded a whore by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court and the bookseller was convicted of corrupting the morals of a minor.

But finally, in the spring of last year, before the state's highest court (the Court of Appeals), Fanny was vindicated of all charges and can now take her place side by side with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women on any respectable bookshelf. In only three states of the union--New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts--does she still wear an official badge of shame.

In fact, Fanny is now more at home in America than in the land of her birth. A London bookseller who advertised the Memoirs as "Banned in America" was brought to court in January of 1964 under the Obscene Publications Act. The prosecution, unwilling to allow a jury to decide the issue since its 1960 defeat in the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover, brought action against the seller rather than the publisher--which in English law meant that a judge would have the sole power to decide the case. The defense called in as witnesses an array of authors and literary critics, including the distinguished biographer Peter Quennell, ex-M.P. and scholar H. Montgomery Hyde, and British novelist Marghanita Laski, while the prosecution produced no witnesses whatsoever except the two bobbies who had seized the book. Nevertheless, after listening to four days of testimony, the judge summarily convicted Fanny in a verdict that took him little more than a minute to deliver. As a result, only a bowdlerized version of the Memoirs can be obtained in Pecksniffian Britain at this time.

On this side of the Atlantic, however, Fanny unadulterated may be procured not only in book form, but is reaching an even greater audience through records and cinema. Two albums of her amorous misadventures, cut on the Fax and Recorded Literature labels, have been available since last September. A legitimate theater effort is scheduled for production at Los Angeles' Ivar Theater with hopes of an eventual trip to Broadway. And as a movie heroine, Fanny can now be seen on both European and American screens.

The adaptation now showing abroad is a substantially budgeted Albert Zug-smith production, filmed last year in Berlin and directed by Russ (The Immoral Mr. Teas) Meyer, which features a creamy new dish of zabaglione named Letitia Roman as the unsinkable Fanny. The American version is only nine minutes long but in color and on a wide screen. Entitled A Comedy Tale of Fanny Hill and starring pert beauty-contest winner Judy Cannon, it was on the bill at the premiere of Chicago's Playboy Theater. Yet a third celluloid incarnation of Fanny has been announced by the London theatrical producer David Pelham.

At this writing, quite in keeping with her two-centuries-long battle for acceptance, the Zugsmith Fanny has not been given a seal of approval by the Motion Picture Association of America. For the first time in the history of motion-picture self-censorship, a title itself, plain old Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, has been sufficient to preclude issuance of the seal. Seal or no, Fanny is scheduled to make her U.S. bow shortly, after having opened in Israel. Undaunted by his troubles with the censors, Mr. Zugsmith plans to produce a sequel that carries on where Fanny left off, this one to be called Fanny Hill Rides Again.

Despite all the attempts by Grundys, bowdlers and kill-joys to suppress her, generations to come may very well wonder what all the fuss was about. To quote the poet William Blake:

Children of the future age, Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time, Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.

Compared with most other novels that attempt to deal realistically with sex, Fanny's Memoirs are a paean to the pleasures of copulation without guilt or shame. Joy is the only message she preaches. As Miss Laski succinctly put it, "It is a jolly book."