Philosopher of Evil: The Life and Works of the Marquis de Sade by Walter Drummond aka Robert Silverberg (Regency Books, 1962)

In the 1960s, Silverberg was penning just about as much non-fiction as he was writing softcores, SF, and whatever else.  He used a number of pen names, writing books for the YA and trade market in history, anthropology and oceanography, as well as a dozen sexual case histories and research as L.T. Woodward, MD (after the success of Masters and Johnson, publishers put out both real and fake sexology studies in droves).

As Walter Drummod, Silverberg wrote two curious titles for Regency Books: this biography of the Marquis de Sade, and one about how to invest and spend money wisely.

Regency Books was owned by William Hamling, part of the Greenleaf/Cornith arm, and edited by Harlan Ellison.  Ellison published two of his early books with the imprint, Gentlemen Junkie and Memos from Purgatory. Interesting note:  Regency originally published Jim Thompson’s The Grifters. Ellison did have an eye for what was good.

Philosopher of Evil is written for a general audience, not academic; too bad as sometimes we wished for sources of quoted material. But this was a quickie paperback meant to entertain and at times, excite with graphic descriptions of de Sade’s personal sex life and the depravity found in his novels.

Wild Divorcee by Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg), Nightstand Books #1542, 1961

An early Nightstand, their 41st published book, reprinted in 1973 as Nowhere Girl, is about 26-year-old divorcee Carol, who has moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles (a large home in Pacific Palasades) to start her life over, single and confused about the ways of sex — she was virgin when she was 22 and married her older ex-husband.

She’s aware of the image a newly divorced woman her age conjures up — sexually available, lonely, on the rebound.  She does not want to be that; however, she finds herself jumping into all kinds of sexual sitautions the day she moves into her new place…

There’s the painter across the hall, who gets get drunk; he’s short and dark and odd looking but she lets it happen and then feels bad the next day. She later models nude for him and they become casual lovers. He is the second man she has ever been with, and finds him an excellent lover. “I never knew it could be that way,” etc.

She picks up a 19-year-old sailor in the city who first mistakens her for a hooker. She’s lonely and curious…

She wanders to North Beach to check out the beatnik scene.  She goes to a club above a small bookstore. This scene is almost word-for-word a similar scene in a Loren Beauchamp novel, The Fires Within — Silverberg has admitted he re-processed scenes from one book to another in his “My Life as a Pornographer” essay. In both scenes, the wandering lost women get drunk, get picked up by several bearded beatniks and a silent girl, go to a pad, pound on bongos, drink wine, dance, and have an orgy.

Then there is a chamber music composer who lives downstairs — six feet five tall, thin, curious, when he plays his music for her, he wants her to whip him with a riding crop, scatch him, beat him, abuse him…and to her surprise, she does.  She does not feel dirty about it, but is curious why a man would want this.

She gets drunk and meets a lesbian and goes to bed with the woman, and again feels guilty after her twilight experience (a similar scene from several Beauchamp and Elliott books).

So Carol runs the gambit of sexual experiences in the free-lovin’ San Francisco, while her ex-husband feels remorse and wants her back.  he comes to see her, drunk, and asks her to marry him again, and then tries to rape her, but the painter saves her.

She starts to drink more and more, confused with her life; angry with men, she plays with the composer, orders him around, treats him like shit, getting her revenge on the male sex, but the guy likes it…

I’ve never been  disappointed with a Silverberg sleaze novel, whatever pen name he uses; he was/is a craftsman and tells entertaining stories. As noted elsewhere in this blog, most are above average, some average, and some are gems of literature.  This one is average, but worth reading.

Sadism by L.T Woodward (FULL TEXT)

In the human soul, cruelty crouches like a beast, chained, but eager to spring.

—WlLHELM STEKEL

WE DO NOT live in a gentle society. The daily newspapers provide a record of atrocity and violence that will someday appall and terrify the historians of the future, if there is any future. Day by day the grim toll mounts: children maimed at the hands of their angry parents, frightened girls raped in dark alleys, helpless victims hideously mutilated by knife-wielding madmen. The impulse toward acts or cruelty runs like a dark ribbon through the shining surface of our affluent society.

We find cruelty everywhere, at the highest levels of society and at the lowest. The conversation at a fashionable dinner table is edged with razor-keen blades, designed to wound deeply; the nation’s sports fans pay millions of dollars a year to watch men batter each other into insensibility in the boxing ring or on the football gridiron; prisoners are interrogated with frightful ferocity in hundreds of police stations. The television screen is bright with the violent doings of detectives and criminals who rival one another in the ability to do damage. Our popular fiction is repetitiously full of scenes of whipping, torture, beating, and the more refined forms of unpleasantness.