While reading an essay on In Search of Lost Time this weekend, I was reminded of a tale I had come across five years ago about Marcel Proust’s sexual fetish involving rats:
Proust would enter a brothel and ask the Madam if she had a hat pin and any rats. If the Madam informed him that she had both, or could obtain them, Proust would then request that the pin and vermin be sent up to his room. Once Proust was in his room and comfortable, a rat would be brought in by the Madam, in a makeshift cage, along with, preferably, a pearl-headed hair pin. Proust would then instruct the Madam to puncture the rat from its back through its belly with the hair pin. As the pin slowly went through the rat, Proust would masturbate; timing his ejaculation to occur at the exact moment the tip of the pin pierced the rat’s belly, so that its blood and his semen fell in time.
After recalling this fetish of his – which sometimes included a photograph of his mother placed next to the rat – I decided to research other literary greats to find out who else had kinky proclivities. It turns out that he was not the only writer with an unconventional appetite. Below are ten more literary masters and their fetishes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe was heavily into Buchstabegeschlecht, which roughly translates to “letter sex”, the precursor to phone sex – and now text sex. His steamy dispatches with a particular fraulein, at Germany’s hottest Buchstabegeschlecht service, lead to Goethe trying to have a relationship with the woman outside of the letters. The relationship was not to be; the woman was already married. Goethe ceased using the service and, after a few months of depression, took inspiration from the experience to write The Sorrows of Young Werther.
James Joyce
Having to wear an eye patch due to his failing sight, Joyce took the opportunity to role play as a pirate. On Friday nights in Paris he would pick up a prostitute. Under the pseudonym “Cap’n MacCool”, Joyce would escort the woman to a rented clipper ship that he kept docked in the Seine. Inside of the grand cabin, at his request, the prostitute would stream her dirty consciousness upon him.
Jane Austen
The author of Sense and Sensibility would often smear mud all over her body and behave like a tribeswoman, hiding in the forest and preying upon unsuspecting gentlemen.
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen arranged troll dolls around the bedroom – on the night stands, dressers, chairs – facing them and their shock of hair – which was a different color depending on the day of the week – towards the bed so that they could watch and guide him while he made love.
Vladimir Nabokov
Most believe the author of Lolita, to have been able to capture the psyche of Humbert² so vividly, to have lusted after nymphets himself. This is not true. Nabokov was actually a total MILF hound.
Leo Tolstoy
The Russian master would make his wife dress up as God – the costume consisted of a white wig, fake beard, and silvery gown – and then wrestle Him/her until dawn while he was naked and wild.
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson cut a hole in the ceiling of her bedroom in Amherst and installed a lighthouse lantern that illuminated a spot on the floor. She would go about the room normally but if she happened to step into the light, she’d rip off her clothes, dance and then masturbate.
Jonathan Swift
Swift had weekly orgies with giants and dwarves.
Walt Whitman
Whitman was a nature fetishist. If he saw a sinuous branch, steam spurting from a ship and melding with the air, or smelled the scent of fresh sap, he’d be on his back in the grass joyfully masturbating.
Edgar Allan Poe
After finishing a story, Poe would get very drunk, sneak into women’s rooms and, after they entered them, stumble out of a closet or roll out from under the bed and slur, in a high-pitched voice, extending all of the vowels, that he was a ghost and could only be released from Purgatory if they performed the “holy act of fellatio” upon him.
