Up Pompeii!

The Victorians invented pornography. This was the central assertion of a documentary on the history of pornography that I found myself watching last night, and, well, they seemed to have a very good case. Pornography, it seems, has its inception with the archaeological uncovering in the eighteenth century of the previously buried city of Pompeii. Those who uncovered the city were shocked and ashamed to discover that their ancestors, who had bestowed upon them their culture, lived their daily lives surrounded by 'obscene' artefacts and murals. These were, it appeared, on full public view. In other words, sex, or at the very least, images of sex, were simply not seen as something to be separated from the rest of life in any way. The programme showed one statuette in particular as an example of what so shocked those early excavators. It depicted the god Pan in sexual congress with a nanny-goat. This, like the other artefacts and images, was something that would have been on full public view. One of the scholars interviewed went so far as to say that the very idea of privacy was lacking in Roman society, that this was a later, Victorian invention. The Victorians, it seems, were afraid that images such as those found at Pompeii might encourage people to indulge in masturbation (gasp of horror!). The Romans, apparently, would never have dreamed of using the images for such purposes. They were simply pleasant and humorous works of art. You could say, therefore, that the Victorians invented privacy to accommodate their need to masturbate.

Now, how much of this is speculation and retrospective interpretation, I don’t know. But what does seem certain is that the discovery of the 'obscenity' prevalent in the ancient world led eventually to the coining of the word 'pornography' and to the Obscene Publications Act (1857). The artefacts collected from Pompeii and from other countries were circulated amongst an elite of middle-class male scholars (purely for research purposes, you understand). They considered themselves the arbiters of taste. In other words, it was necessary that someone should look after this very important cultural material, but it must be kept from the eyes of the vulnerable and the ignorant, whom it might tend to corrupt. And so it was sectioned off into 'secret museums'. This, in effect, is the invention of pornography, the empowering of sexual concepts and images by making them forbidden.

Watching this programme I felt vindicated. I have long held an instinctive belief that, sexually speaking, we are still living in the Victorian age. Everything in the programme seemed to support this belief. At first I was overcome with anger and indignation at the barbarism and hypocrisy of the Victorians who would take it upon themselves to call a whole area of life and art obscene. Then I discovered that my feelings were more ambiguous than that. I am, after all, very much a product of this Victorian society. Let’s restate our central assertion – the Victorians invented pornography. Perhaps we should even be grateful to them. I am reminded immediately of Woody Allen’s quip, "Sex can be dirty, but only if it’s done right." Did the Victorians, then, 'do it right'? And now I am thinking of quote from Larkin, describing women’s undergarments as "natureless in ecstasies".

The gentlemen connoisseurs of the Victorian age who were the custodians of pornography, it seems, had the attitude that they must control their animal natures, they must contain it with the coolness of their intellects. It seems to me that this is an attitude central to British (certainly to English) identity and to the image of the English internationally. The Victorian English shock at the sexual images of foreign cultures has something about it of penis envy, by which I mean, the Woody Allen version of penis envy, which obtains in the male rather than the female. The English envied more virile cultures that made them feel rather limp in comparison. In order to cover up their limpness, the English began to cast a cold, ironical eye on life, and appeared to other cultures as somehow inherently homosexual.

This tradition of impotency manifest as coldness, irony and homosexuality (real or apparent), is also easily discerned in English comedy and art. The first example to leap to mind – for obvious reasons – is the comedy Up Pompeii!, which featured the talents of homosexual comedian Frankie Howerd.

"Up Pompeii! Up Pompeii! I can never get it Up Pompeii!"

So runs the gloriously un-subtle theme tune. Frankie Howerd plays the slave Lurcio, who lives in old Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. He is surrounded by sexual farce, upon which he casts, yes, a cold ironical eye as he makes his double-entendres (which smack somehow of Woody Allen penis envy) and his knowing, long-suffering asides to the camera throughout. On the one hand, he seems to be faintly disgusted by the bodies that surround him. On the other he gives off the sighing sense that he's 'not getting any'. He can 'never get it up'. Witness how he averts his eyes in horror in this picture:

We see a similar pattern in Kenneth Williams, another homosexual English comedian. Whatever his onscreen persona, I believe Frankie Howerd was actually rather highly-sexed in real life. Kenneth Williams, on the other hand, was in real life the embodiment of Howerd’s onscreen persona. He was a homosexual who avoided sex all his life because he felt it to be somehow wrong or dirty.

Both of these comedians, with their innuendo, create a secret museum of comedy in which sex is humorously empowered because it is always alluded to, but never talked about in an open, direct manner. They are the direct descendents of the earlier connoisseurs who administered the real secret museums in the Victorian era.

My namesake, Quentin Crisp, can also be said, to some extent, to belong to this tradition. Witness his remark at how he had found the Americans to be angered by the book and film The Naked Civil Servant, because both had treated the sexual element too coldly.

And let us not forget Morrissey, who summed up the whole impotence/coldness/real-or-apparent-homosexuality in the song Pretty Girls Make Graves, which is replete with lines such as, "Sorrow's native son, he will not rise for anyone."

I rather think that, like it or not, I must also fall into this tradition. Anyone who reads my work might discover that I am, in fact, the custodian of a nation's sexuality in a secret museum whose artefacts I handle with cold leather gloves.