Fanny and Stella (23 page)

When, after a distinguished career at Yale, John Safford Fiske accepted the position of Deputy Clerk for the New York State Senate in Albany, there were those who prophesied a bright future in the world of politics or the world of diplomacy, or both. He exuded trust and integrity, and he effortlessly married an innate authority with an easy charm. People looked to him and up to him. They relied on him to frame arguments, suggest solutions, resolve disputes and generally make the world a better place.

John Safford Fiske himself entirely concurred with all these estimations and expectations of greatness to come. He had always held that Fortune and Fate helped those who helped themselves, which was why, in the summer of 1867, he had not hesitated to take the bold step of writing directly to Mr William H. Seward, United States Secretary of State, to ask, quite charmingly, for the position of United States Consul in Edinburgh. He was supported in his application by Judge Joseph Mullin of Watertown, New York, who praised his protégé as ‘a young man of unblemished character, perfect integrity and unquestionable ability’.

Appointing Mr Fiske as United States Consul, Judge Mullin wrote, ‘will do no discredit to the department or the country’ and will ‘aid a young man who is destined to do honour to both’. Mr Fiske ‘intends devoting himself to literature’, Judge Mullin continued, and ‘seeks a place abroad with the aim of extending his knowledge of man’.

The application was successful and so, in the autumn of 1867, the twenty-nine-year-old Mr John Safford Fiske arrived in the New Athens ready and eager to take up his consular duties. They were not especially arduous. Much of his work was ceremonial. Going here and going there. Attending this and attending that. Receptions, banquets, balls and dinners. Listening, smiling, being charming. He was admirably suited to such duties. With his strength, wisdom, youth and vigour allied to an absolute certainty of his own destiny, Mr John Safford Fiske was the perfect embodiment of his young nation’s values and aspirations, of its sense of its own importance and of its coming greatness.

John Safford Fiske had a plan. He wanted to marry, and to marry well. He would need a wife, a wife with a fortune to place at his disposal so that he could fulfil his literary and his political ambitions. His present means were more than adequate to meet his needs, but even in the great democracy of the United States, it was money that talked, and talked the loudest; money that opened doors; money that made the world turn; money that bought influence and brought power. He needed money, and the fastest and easiest way to acquire money, and lots of it, was to marry, and to marry well.

In fact, Mr John Safford Fiske was preparing to surrender himself to matrimony. Fortune and Fate had again smiled upon him and provided him with a young, beautiful and charmingly dressed heiress. She was American, born and bred into one of the best and oldest families on the East Coast, so he could be quite sure of her pedigree.

She was coming to Edinburgh in the spring. She was coming to see him. She was expecting him to propose to her and he was determined to do so. They would marry that summer and then, after a year or two in Edinburgh, he would be appointed ambassador, perhaps to London or to Paris, where he would live in splendour and serve with distinction before returning to Washington and the Senate.

John Safford Fiske’s attitude to marriage was modelled on that of the Ancient Greeks. Marriage was a duty and a necessity. The world must turn, children must be born and the sacred cycle of nature perpetuated. Men needed wives for dynastic purposes and for domestic harmony. But he would reserve his love and his lust for boys and for young men, as he had done, carefully, discreetly and quietly, throughout most of his adult life. Women for duty, but boys for pleasure.

Of course there would be curbs on his freedoms. As a married man, he would have responsibilities towards his bride, but as soon as the children came, he hoped that he might be left alone to pursue young men. ‘After we were married I could do pretty much as I pleased,’ he mused. ‘People don’t mind what one does on £30,000 a year, and the Lady wouldn’t much mind as she hasn’t brains enough to trouble herself about much beyond her dresses, her carriage etc.’

From the moment of his arrival in Edinburgh he had sought out ‘adventures’, as he called them, and had established a delightful network of charming and handsome young men, including the brothers Donald and Robbie Sinclair. It was Robbie to whom he felt closest, Robbie with ‘his smiling face’, his ‘clear gray eyes’ and the ‘vivid roses’ in his cheeks – or so it was until the fateful moment when Stella Boulton swept into Edinburgh like the devouring North Wind and turned his world upon its head.

There were women and there were men and then there was Stella. John Safford Fiske had never before met anyone like her and he knew for a certainty that he would never do so again. She was fascinating. She was compelling. She seemed to him to be half-man and half-woman, but more, infinitely more, than the sum of her two parts. Stella was, he wrote, ‘Laïs and Antinous in one’. An amalgam, a coalescence, of Laïs the Corinthian, the most famous, the most beautiful and the most expensive courtesan of the Ancient World, the muse of Demosthenes, and Antinous, the most beautiful and most beloved boy of the Emperor Hadrian. It was, he wrote, ‘a ravishing thought’.

Who could fail to fall in love with two such beings, united in one perfect body? Fiske knew he was powerless to resist. It was more than love, more than lust. It was a kind of madness. A rapture. He could not sleep and he could not eat. Thoughts of Stella, in drag or out of drag, as a man, as a woman or as a hermaphrodite, filled his waking and sleeping hours. His chambers became a secret shrine to Stella, where he would worship her votive images in the privacy of his bedroom and hold her four carelessly written little notes about inconsequentialities in a bundle to his heart and feel a terrible joy and exultation.

He wanted her. More than he wanted anything else. More than he wanted a wife and a fortune. More than he wanted power and glory. More, perhaps, than life itself. He knew only too well that the more he wanted her, the more he risked all. But he was prepared to give up everything for her.

‘Come love,’ John Safford Fiske hastily wrote in pencil to Stella. ‘Always for ever thine.’ Despite its brevity, despite its drunken scrawl, this torn and crumpled half-sheet of paper was nonetheless as ardent and authentic a declaration of enduring love as Stella had yet received, which was perhaps why she treasured this brief note so much and kept it clasped to her breast.

18

Un Souvenir d’Amour

All Cracks are found so full of Ails

A
New Society
prevails

Call’d Sodomites; Men worse than Goats,

Who dress themselves in Petticoats.

John Dunton,
The He-Strumpets:
A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club
,
1707

M 
iss Fanny Winifred Park, also known as Mrs Fanny Graham, as Miss Vivian Gray (and by a variety of names unfit for polite ears), was beginning to feel decidedly worried. The sore on her bottom which had first appeared in January had not gone away. If anything, it was getting worse and becoming more painful. At first she had assumed, quite naturally and quite reasonably, that it was a mere wound of love; a passing soreness and discomfort; a consequence of being rather too energetically sodomised. In any event, she had decided to rest up for a few days and be deliciously
hors de combat
. She would allow things to settle, to right themselves, before venturing forth again with renewed vigour and renewed appetite. Not that her appetite in that department could ever be described as feeble.
Quite
the reverse. But the soreness had not gone away, and now she was feeling extremely uncomfortable and very low.

It was a nuisance that both Stella and Harry – the two people who might best advise her – were in Scotland: Stella selfishly still ensconced in Edinburgh with her former paramour, Louis Hurt, and Harry officially still in disgrace and in hiding, though Stella had confidentially informed her that Harry was being
very
indiscreet. Short of travelling all the way to
l’Ecosse
, she had no one to give her counsel. One or two friends, though, had bravely hazarded a look at her bottom, and amid some extremely vulgar and very unwelcome general observations, the particulars of which she need not enter into, said they thought that her poor cunny looked
very
sore.

What was she to do? If it was – horror of horrors – the pox, she could hardly go to the family doctor, explain that she had been sodomised to the point of insensibility and was now suffering from
un
souvenir d’amour
. She was not sure she could trust him to keep quiet, and if it got out it would kill her poor Papa. Even if she went to another doctor, there might well be tiresome questions, and there was no guarantee that the police would not be dragged in.

C 
hancre of the anus or a pox in the arse was rather more common – at least in women – than most doctors either knew or cared to admit. It was a distasteful aspect of an already disagreeable branch of diagnosis. National honour no less than national decency was at stake. William Allingham, a doctor specialising in diseases of the rectum, was, like many others, convinced that anal sex (and in consequence, anal syphilis) was altogether a Continental, and specifically a French, phenomenon. ‘In France this cannot be uncommon,’ he asserted. ‘I trust it is not common in America. I cannot say that in this country it is altogether unknown, but I hope and think it is infrequent.’

William Acton, the most celebrated venereologist of the age, agreed. Appearances were deceptive. The ‘immense prevalence’ of anal warts in female prostitutes in the metropolis of London might lead some to conclude that there was an equally immense prevalence of anal sex. ‘Foreigners noticing these appearances in our foul wards go away fully convinced that unnatural crimes are very common in London,’ he wrote. But ‘a greater error than this cannot occur’. According to Acton, anal warts in female prostitutes were simply vaginal warts that had migrated.

This theory of migration was equally useful to Acton and his colleagues in explaining away those cases of anal syphilis which did present themselves. Syphilis in the vagina migrated to the anus either by discharges from syphilitic chancres in the vagina ‘running down’ to the anus, or through menstrual fluids following the same route. Sometimes anal syphilis might be the consequence of accidental or stray contact between the penis and the female anus, of the sort that might reasonably be expected to occasionally occur in the throes of passion. But the most obvious explanation, that anal syphilis was a consequence of anal sex, was an unwanted and unwelcome truth, a truth better buried than bruited abroad.

In a break with tradition, George Drysdale, a doctor and pioneering sexologist, was considerably more frank than most of his English colleagues when he stated that anal syphilis was ‘frequently to be seen in the female venereal hospitals’. Anal sex was, he said, commonplace among female prostitutes. ‘There are very few of the older prostitutes’, he said, ‘who do not lend themselves to these practices, as well as many of the younger ones; however, they always maintain an obstinate silence when questioned on this point.’

There was a long-held suspicion that some men turned to sodomy as a way of avoiding venereal disease. As early as 1707, in
The He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club
, the playwright John Dunton attributed the growing popularity of sodomy to an epidemic of the clap among female prostitutes. The poem ‘Don Leon’, a paean in praise of sodomy supposedly written by Lord Byron, suggested that sodomy with boys was a specific against being ‘infected with rank disease’. And the anonymous author of
Extraordinary Revelations
, the penny pamphlet about Fanny and Stella, described sodomy as an ‘abomination by which lust defies disease’.

Although reports of rectal syphilis and gonorrhoea in men were uncommon, they were not unheard of. In 1851, the French syphilologist Philippe Ricord recounted the cautionary tale of ‘G—’, a young man of twenty-five, ‘of a good constitution, and enjoying excellent health’, who consulted him about ‘a recent cutaneous eruption’ of ulcers around his anus ‘for which he pretended he could assign no cause’. Ricord was convinced that these ulcers were syphilitic chancres. He cross-questioned the young man who finally confessed that:

after a dinner party, when too liberal a quantity of generous wine had made him lose his reason and forget his manliness, he had slept with a friend, to whose beastly appetite he had sacrificed himself. He remembered having suffered greatly during the connection, and having passed blood on the following and subsequent days.

George Drysdale was once again out of step with his colleagues when, in 1861, he asserted that ‘sodomy is common enough, especially in the prisons, where the most uneducated and degraded of the community, being shut up together, and left in idleness, take this mode of passing the listless hours’:

Instances now and then occur of gonorrhoea and chancre of the anus, which the patients, when pressed hard, either confess, or tacitly admit to having been contracted by these unnatural practices, though at first they always deny that the disease has such an origin, and ascribe it to an unclean water-closet &c.