Douglas Mercer
October 7 2024
HP Lovecraft said that if one can stare into the madness of life in perfect sanity and be cool about it one must be insane. Had the Marquis de Sade got wind of that statement he would have smirked, shrugged his shoulders and simply told him to grow up.
It’s always instructive to think about which great artists of the past would have liked living in our contemporary world. Nearly absolutely to a man they would have been appalled at our lack of taste, our vulgarity, and the banality and triviality that passes for our life. Perhaps Wilde might have found something to enjoy but even he once he got a good long look might have sobered up and counseled moderation. The one great exception to this rule is the Marquis De Sade; he not only would have enjoyed our world he would have savored it with exquisite delectation and infinite amusement. After all he would have found the pickings rather easy and it’s not often that a kid finds himself in a candy store; in sheer infantile omnipotence he would have opened up his umbrella and saw the rain of Moet coming down.
It's not everyone who gets a word named after him—Kafkaesque and Shakespearian don’t count, one needs to know those writers to understand the meaning; but some words slip beyond the model’s ken and take on a life of their own. Burnside got sideburns, just in reverse, a hotelier to Kings no one’s ever heard of got ritzy, Lynch gave us the means to solve the negro problem, sandwich came from a portly Lord who was so besotted with gambling that he could not bear to leave the table and so sent out a lackey to rummage up some bread and meat. Silhouette is elegant, and maverick is laudable; and mesmerism is beautiful and of course guillotine moves us closer to our subject: a perfectly precise and incisive cold machine for pure clean killing. But the apogee and marquee word is sadism—masochism is a mug’s game—eponymous for the man with a fearsome reputation for bone chilling implacable ice-cold cruelty combined with a rarefied mind and intellectual brilliance and elan, nonchalance and verve to spare. Certainly there were stone cold killers before Sade but no less a person than De Quincy lamented that for the most part they lacked the connoisseur’s fastidious and precise taste and thus what they had done in that line was always going to be unsatisfactory; that is compared to the master who put the enterprise on solid footing they were knock offs and pale imitations, for with him the life never left the building—it was never there to begin with.
Sade is the consummate killer, a perfectionist really, refined, exquisite, one who rolls the possibilities over in his mind in delectation, an aficionado, a connoisseur. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know his irrepressible high spirits made him a roaring boy but one with a solitary nature; he made Nero look like a model citizen, and would have made Caligula blush, he was putting on a clinic and giving master classes in the School Of Night, even Kit Marlowe might have been given pause, Burroughs and Mailer were doormats, Artaud and Genet were pikers, Celine was a mendicant and schoolmarm, he thought Lucifer was overthinking things when he wanted to make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell—France was good enough for him. He would have looked askance at Jack The Ripper, admired the name, but deplored the methods, he was a hacker and an amateur one at that (a kind of charlatan really) and no one likes a skulking Jew. As for the other proliferating serial killers we have he would have treated them with a haughty disdain—Dahmer was a knuckle dragging cretin with a wonky eye, Bundy all superficial charm—only Manson would have piqued his interest, for he too was trying to rearrange the life of the upper classes and when he woke up there was always a cold wind blowing. When he was launched from the Bastille that July day no one had found himself in such a paradise of golden opportunity—the Goddess of cold reason was on her throne and chaos abounded—not until in 1967 when Manson was released to a San Francisco overflowing with freaked out acid gobblers, wild theories of the cosmos, odd notions of love, and frail and needy girls from broken homes.
Sade was to the manner born, came from a good home, one of the most ancient and best families in France, time out of mind and time immemorial the Sades were imperious supercilious and free, they made the Capets look like jumped up upstarts and certainly his sneering condescension stemmed from bluest of bloods, that long and august lineage and ancestral heritage. Nihilism was for him not the most uncanny guest, it was much better than that, it was license to kill, what does one care after all if one finds oneself in a devious labyrinth with no way out as long as the amusement and the thrills were flowing or if one was lost in the woods so long as an altar was nearby and the knife was whetted and dripping with blood.
He has six bodies on his record—six that we know of—but I am sure if one went digging around the estate you’d find more than one’s share of human gristle and perhaps it’s best just not to look. But the number is likely to be somewhere around 200, and certainly in three digits. He even denied all the six but then when you are a cold blooded blood curdling sociopathic killer lying comes easy; what he would do when he retreated to his cavernous Castle Keep was go out to the town and with sweet promises lure prostitutes back home to play funny games involving torture, rape and murder, he was a skilled pick up artist before his time—he could have written a Machiavellian tome on Power---and he was all charm and charisma, a silver tongued devil, handsome and comely—in his hose, ruffles and lace he was the pretty picture of elegance and wit, well beyond libertinage—it was a feeding frenzy.
The god in his workshop crafts bodies in space and Sade too was an artist, but for sure no one knows what he was doing. We have the precis of his books but writers are known to exaggerate for effect, few want the facts to get in the way of a good story, especially when that most precious of things—literary immortality—is at stake. What we know is that his Castle was on a relatively isolated and large expanse of land and his privacy was respected and he fully expended his rights as a gentleman—and as he would bring the poor wretches back he would have his lackeys and sentries patrol the limn on their horses looking for any sign of authority which, if found, they were to gallop swiftly back to notify him so he could make what arrangements he needed to. That’s really all we know and as for the rest, we can only fill in the blanks with our imagination, enflamed by his words or not, and one can always be forgiven for thinking the worst.
Modern Deconstructionists idolize him as a precursor to their destabilization of texts and life—he was a brave forerunner of getting lost in the maze and with equanimity taking it all in stride, and as for the pleasure principle he was the first to realize that it had no bottom and that whatever dizziness is caused was only a hangover of guilt—which he banished along with all the other ghosts. Of course in the end Napoleon had to have him locked up, you can’t build an Empire and promulgate new Law Codes with a mad psychopathic genius filled with insatiable blood lust roaming around, the Goddess Of Reason demands such things. They say that in his last captivity he was speaking with another inmate and his interlocutor asked him about his time during the Revolution when Sade, like so many others, was conscripted to write propaganda pamphlets for the ever revolving juntas who succeeded one another in such rapid and furious fashion, pamphlets which appeared on kinds of kiosks in the market square; and no sooner would one of his patrons or parties go the way of the world to the scaffold then Sade would be picked up by the next right away to scribble his screed in favor of this or that, always with the highest of dudgeons and the unsurpassed eloquence which was his very niche; a process which repeated itself over and over. The question the person had was a very cogent one: how in that time when everything was in such a helter skelter flux and state and chaos and pell mell ruled the day, when all the values were being overturned and then overturned again without a thought, when reason was dethroned from its longstanding perch even as its effigy was on a public Pedestal, and when everyone was losing his head figuratively and literally—how had he managed to keep his on his shoulders? The Marquis had a quick answer to this as he always did, words never failing him in any of his many extremities. He said it was simple, he had two invaluable advantages over everyone else. First, he believed in absolutely nothing whatsoever and, second, he could write like a dream; a thing, one supposes, which covers a multitude of sins, be they ever so flagrant and chilling and bloody as long as no one ever catches you red handed and you get hung up on nothing.
