The Book of the Dead

from the house.

Forbidden to become a doctor and fascinated by her inability to enjoy sex, Princess Marie formed the idea that she would become an expert on frigidity. Her father was bedridden for months before his death, and Marie sat with him, quietly reading books on psychology. Freud’s works particularly inspired her, and in 1924 she went to Vienna to be analyzed by the master, prior to becoming a psychoanalyst herself.

Freud had plenty of material to work with. Marie’s mother had died when she was a tiny baby and her childhood was lonely. Brought up by servants, she was kept away from other children because her grandmother, Princess Bonaparte, thought that having too many friends was common. Marie developed a range of phobias (including an irrational fear of buttons) and an unhealthy interest in reading anything she could about gruesome crimes, especially articles about Jack the Ripper’s victims and anarchists’ executing people with bombs. Her earliest memory of sexual pleasure was when her nursemaid sat her astride her foot and bounced her vigorously up and down but, as she explained to Freud, such pleasure eluded her as an adult. She wondered if this might have been caused by a repressed memory of her nursemaid having sex with a groom, but Freud suggested she was a lesbian, and that matters had been made worse because her husband was probably a homosexual. Marie became obsessed about her sexuality and even sought out the groom and asked him if it was possible that he had had sex in her presence when she was a small child. He confessed that it was.

In 1926, supposedly now sane, Marie cofounded the Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris and started taking on her own patients. She had unusual methods. She crocheted while she listened, analyzed her patients in the garden, and sent splendid, chauffeur-driven cars to collect them. Sometimes she would take patients away with her when she went on holiday to Athens or Saint-Tropez. As a child, men in the Bois de Boulogne had frightened Marie by exposing themselves to her. Confronting her fears, she returned to the scene of the trauma on a regular basis. When a man did flash her, she would walk up to him, give him her card, and say, “Put that away, I’m not interested! But please come and see me tomorrow, I would like to talk to you.” When a senior Parisian academic came to her for analysis, she told him that his daughter’s phobia of touching the soap in the bath was related to her wish to massage his testicles. The professor was appalled and fled the room in horror, with Marie chasing him down the corridor, shouting, “But you cannot behave this way.”

One of Marie Bonaparte’s few practical achievements was to recruit 243 women and measure the distance between their clitoris and their vagina, concluding that if they were too far apart it would be impossible to achieve orgasm. Marie’s own anatomy convinced her that this was her problem, too, and she volunteered to have surgery to move her clitoris closer to her vagina. When it didn’t have any effect, she had it done again, but there was still no improvement.

Marie Bonaparte’s association with Sigmund Freud developed into a close friendship and when he fled Austria for England, she gave him financial assistance. They also collaborated professionally, and she respected his controversial belief that vaginal orgasms were superior and more natural than those involving the clitoris. She confessed to him that she had been tempted to commit incest with her son Peter, and took Freud’s advice not to try it. When she visited a rival analyst—with whom she also had an affair—she immediately confessed her “analytic infidelity” to Freud, and (when he gave his permission) she felt so guilty that she vomited. Marie and Freud shared a love of dogs, and she gave him a Chow as a present. She wrote four books about her own dog Topsy, another source of anxiety in her life: She lived in terror of the dog’s eventual death. She and Freud spent a lot of time analyzing the nature of interspecies love. Apart from her books about Topsy, she also published a study of female sexuality and a seven-hundred-page psychoanalytic interpretation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who Marie was convinced was a necrophiliac.

Marie continued as an analyst until her death in 1962. One of her last public duties was to represent her nephew, King Paul of Greece, at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. She struck up a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to her, offering to analyze him. He agreed and they spent the rest of the ceremony in deep conversation. His name was Francois Mitterrand, the future president of France. It was to Marie that Freud made one of his most famous pronouncements: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” In 1920 the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi produced his own answer. Immortalizing Marie Bonaparte in sculpture, he unveiled his portrait of her at the Paris Salon. Titled Princess X, it consisted solely of a giant bronze phallus and testicles.

Brancusi’s sixteen-inch-long artwork would have been of great interest to the American academic Alfred Kinsey (1894–1955), who measured more than five thousand penises in his lifetime. Their dimensions appeared in his painstaking scientific study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). Dry and statistical in tone, and based on more than eighteen thousand intimate case histories, the book was distributed by a medical publishing house, which expected around five thousand sales. Instead, the book shot straight to the top of the bestseller list, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Buried in the text, for those who could be bothered, was every possible bizarre detail of how Americans had sex, how often, with whom or what, and which bits of their bodies were involved.

Kinsey took his inspiration from the pioneering sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1921) helped establish sex as an appropriate subject for academic research. Ellis had coined the word homosexual and made his own (controversial) stab at answering Freud’s question by stating that “women’s brains are in a certain sense… in their wombs.” But the author himself was spectacularly unqualified in terms of his own experience. He was impotent until he was sixty years old, and it’s doubtful he ever consummated his marriage. His wife Edith used to refer to his penis as “the Holy Ghost” and wrote a novel about a woman married to a man made impotent after a mining accident. She conducted numerous lesbian relationships during their marriage. When Henry finally got the hang of sex (with the help of his younger lover, Francoise Delisle, after the death of his wife), he became quite addicted to it. Until then he much preferred masturbation. The thing he found most arousing was the sight of a woman urinating, something he put down to having seen his mother caught short in a London park as a child.

Kinsey, too, was something of a late starter in the bedroom, and also like Havelock Ellis, bore the scars of a deeply religious upbringing. He hated his childhood. The son of a carpenter, he grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from rickets, which gave him double curvature of the spine. He was frequently ill as a boy, and as well as suffering all the usual childhood diseases, he had rheumatic fever and typhoid. He was bullied at school because his clothes were so heavily darned. Like H. G. Wells, everyone was convinced that Alfred would die young, and because of his frequent absences from school through illness, he made very few friends. The abject poverty of his youth left him with a lifelong horror of debt and a furious hatred for the potato, which had often been the only food available when he was a boy.

His father, Alfred senior, was a religious zealot and a bully. Every Sunday, he dragged the family along to three interminable church services and Sunday school as well. On the Lord’s Day, no entertainment or activities of any kind were permitted, not even reading the paper. The milkman was forbidden to deliver milk and Mrs. Kinsey had to cook all of Sunday’s meals the day before. Alfred’s aunt was turned out of the family home for playing the piano on the Sabbath. Suspecting his neighbors of lax moral standards, Alfred’s father used his son as bait to see if shopkeepers would sell cigarettes to a minor. All references to sex were taboo, no adult was ever seen naked in the house, and Alfred was banned from seeing girls.

Kinsey finally escaped to study biology (against his father’s wishes). For the first twenty years of his scientific career there was nothing to suggest that this polite, shy man was going to unleash a sexual revolution. Instead, he forged a reputation as the world’s foremost expert on North American gall wasps. After earning a doctorate from Harvard, he traveled across the United States collecting three hundred thousand wasps from thirty-six states and posting them back to Boston. Many of these hatched before he got back, causing chaos in the postal service. Kinsey took twenty-six individual measurements on every single wasp, enabling him to identify seventy new species unknown to science. He always did everything obsessively—he collected irises and planted more than 250 species in his garden; he plaited homemade rugs twice as thick as anyone else’s; even as a Boy Scout he had amassed seven years’ worth of merit badges in just two. His talent for extreme detail and meticulous research stood him in good stead when he began to tire of wasps and take an interest in human beings.

Kinsey followed up his study of male sexual behavior with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which was also an immediate bestseller. Having grown up in a family where nudity was anathema and sex never mentioned, Kinsey realized many of his undergraduate students were as ill informed about their sexual needs as he was. He also came to see that repressed sexual urges were psychologically