Privacy: Writes and Sarongs (part 2)

In Part One [Privacy: Rights and Wrongs (part i.)]: The pulse-pounding tale of the public humiliation of one whose privacy has been stripped was salaciously exposed. A famous writer in a crystal tower gave some sage advice, and the senses-shattering secret inner world of writers’ and porn performers’ pseudonyms was laid bare. A Cautionary Tale was told. The importance of reputati0n and privacy was discussed, along with piquant anecdotes about the pseudonyms of porn actors, actresses and writers.  And now …

Identity is something that we take for granted — as a given; we’ve always had it, never remember NOT having it (unless, as in my case, one learns that my FIRST identity is on a Carnation Milk ad card, listed as “Baby Boy Williams”), and, as numbers and permanent records attach to it, it becomes, at last, the name chiseled in hard granite for a gravestone.

When our identities are “stolen” we get a sense of how important and interlinked our “identity” might be, but we generally don’t pay it no never mind, as they say.

When actors move to Hollywood, and writers move into publishing, a sudden new thing appears: the alter ego. Archibald Leach is little known by his given name, but as “Cary Grant” you’ve probably heard of him. I doubt that you’ve ever heard of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant, but you probably know her as “George Sand.”

The odd thing about identity — some Buddhists note — is that the closer you look at it, the more difficult it becomes to define. We shall not assay that question here. This is just an ephemeral blog entry, after all. But “identity” is a peculiar concept, and we often see the shocked and horrified neighbors on television, explaining what a nice fellow that serial killer had been. They are invariably shocked that so many OTHER aspects of the killer’s personality were at odds with all those mutilated corpses buried in the basement that it doesn’t seem possible that it could have been HIM.

Our comic book superheroes are generically some schlub who, in his secret identity wears a mask to cover his “civilian” identity. Think of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, the Lone Ranger, Spiderman, Batman, the Flash. Tony Stark. The Count of Monte Cristo. Our literature abounds with multiple identities; which moves back to the Famous Writer’s Admonition to always write as if your name was on it, because sooner or later it would be.

In the sexual underground of, say, the past 2000 years, the identities split even further. Many authors decided to write about matters sexual under a pen name — from Ovid onwards (the Emperor Augustus blamed Ovid’s The Art of Love for a sexual scandal, and exiled the poet):

In 8 AD, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge, an event which would shape all of his following poetry. Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile was carmen et error — “a poem and a mistake”, claiming that his crime was worse than murder, more harmful than poetry.The Emperor’s grandchildren, Agrippa Postumus and Julia the Younger, were banished around the time of his banishment; Julia’s husband, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was put to death for conspiracy against Augustus, a conspiracy about which Ovid might have known. The Julian Marriage Laws of 18 BC, which promoted monogamous marriage to increase the population’s birth rate, were fresh in the Roman mind. Ovid’s writing in the Ars Amatoria [The Art of Love] concerned the serious crime of adultery, and he may have been banished for these works which appeared subversive to the emperor’s moral legislation. However, because of the long distance of time between the publication of this work (1 BC) and the exile (8 AD), some authors suggest that Augustus used the poem as a mere justification for something more personal.

Thus, pseudonyms.

Dear Penthouse Letters:  I recently had an experience
I would like to share with your readers … 

Benjamin Franklin wrote erotic material anonymously or pseudonymously, but he ALSO liked to play sockpuppet games with the Mainstream Media. From The Writings of Ben Franklink, [STET] as he writes a pseudonymous letter to The Pennsylvania Gazette, July 10, 1732:

Anthony Afterwit

Mr. Gazetteer, I am an honest Tradesman, who never meant Harm to any Body. My Affairs went on smoothly while a Batchelor; but of late I have met with some Difficulties, of which I take the Freedom to give you an Account.

About the Time I first address’d my present Spouse, her Father gave out in Speeches, that if she married a Man he liked, he would give with her 200 l. on the Day of Marriage. ‘Tis true he never said so to me, but he always receiv’d me very kindly at his House, and openly countenanc’d my Courtship. I form’d several fine Schemes, what to do with this same 200 l. and in some Measure neglected my Business on that Account: But unluckily it came to pass, that when the old Gentleman saw I was pretty well engag’d, and that the Match was too far gone to be easily broke off; he, without any Reason given, grew very angry, forbid me the House, and told his Daughter that if she married me he would not give her a Farthing. However (as he foresaw) we were not to be disappointed in that Manner; but having stole a Wedding, I took her home to my House; where we were not in quite so poor a Condition as the Couple describ’d in the Scotch Song …

Er, and he liked to manipulate the media …

And there follows a long-winded letter, seemingly to stir up controversy. He FOLLOWS with another pseudonym two weeks later in the same Gazette, COMMENTING on his first letter, The Pennsylvania Gazette, July 24, 1732:

Celia Single

My Correspondent Mrs. Celia, must excuse my omitting those Circumstances of her Letter, which point at People too plainly; and content herself that I insert the rest as follows.

Mr. Gazetteer,

I must needs tell you, that some of the Things you print do more Harm than Good; particularly I think so of my Neighbour the Tradesman’s Letter in one of your late Papers, which has broken the Peace of several Families, by causing Difference between Men and their Wives: I shall give you here one Instance, of which I was an Eye and Ear Witness.

Happening last Wednesday Morning to be in at Mrs. C —— ss‘s, when her Husband return’d from Market, among other Things which he had bought, he show’d her some Balls of Thread. My Dear, says he, I like mightily those Stockings which I yesterday saw Neighbour Afterwit knitting for her Husband …

Not merely commenting, but ATTESTING to the reality of his first writer’s WIFE, and so forth. Time has dulled the edge of the wit, perhaps, but not the guile of the hand that penned both letters.

Benjamin Franklin pretending
to be Daniel Boone in France,
with his “coonskin cap” (no foolin.) 

And, as time has marched on, the boundary between “real” and “fictional” has grown ever more blurred. Sarah Palin was recently accused of the old ploy of writing a “letter to the editor” from a fictional third person point of view, and talking a friend or supporter to attaching their name to it. No one is much shocked.

Turns out that the Jon Huntsman biker videos (that preceded his candidacy announcement) featured a motocross biker WEARING Huntsman’s gear, but it wasn’t the actual candidate. That they were selling as the “different” thing …

You take my point.

So, let me tell you three short stories about pseudonyms and a strategy for dealing with the increasingly anonymous cacophany besieging us on every side, even as our privacy is stripped away by both the Monolithic Government, and by the Invisible Hand of the Market. (OK: Sometimes by both.)

Story One.

I knew an editor at a men’s magazine. He was an old-timer who hearkened back to the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler — the latter of whom he had known, but had nothing positive to say about him. He told me stories of the Fifties and Sixties, about the birth of Men’s Magazines (following Playboy’s first 1953 issue) and endless raft of pseudonyms that were the standard price of doing business. (As recently as 2008, the “scandal” of having written in Playboy was the cause of two “SHOCKED! SHOCKED!” scandals during the Minnesota primary season and again during the general election, as the eventual winner, Al Franken, was assailed in a manner that old Emperor Augustus would have appreciated.)

Actually he was the writer who told me about Ovid. He was a historian by avocation, and he was an expert in the history of erotic writing and art going back to the Egyptians.

It was illegal to write anything like “Penthouse letters” back in the ’50s and ’60s.

A letter from Anthony Comstock, President of
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice  

[Parenthetical: You will notice that old Ben Franklin is using the standard lead-in to the (usually fictional) Penthouse letter. "Mr. Gazetteer, I am an honest Tradesman, who never meant Harm to any Body. My Affairs went on smoothly while a Batchelor; but of late I have met with some Difficulties, of which I take the Freedom to give you an Account," which is just an antique form of the standard letter beginning: "Dear Adam Real Letters, I am a twenty-two year old plumber in Cleveland, Ohio. Recently I had an experience I wanted to tell you ...." By the 1980s, "obscenity" was virtually impossible to prosecute in writing, and authorities focused on photographs and movies.]

But the publishers walked right up to the line, using the pre-Miller “without serious scientific, social or literary value.” And the Grizzled Old Veteran would walk up to the line by writing “case studies,” or, as he explained it: “I’d just take psychological case studies and ‘hot’ ‘em up a little.”

But he needed the right pseudonym, so he took his Dog’s name and purchased, mail-order, a Ph.D. for pooch. Thereafter, he signed the rewritten “sex” cases as Such-and-So, Ph.D. to distinguish him as an “authority” (And, to make the columns in question less “actionable.”) And the “hot” case studies performed the function that the Penthouse readers’ “letters” would in future, and which the Sears Catalog brassiere and girdle section had to a prior generation of men.

But, as the “Sexual Revolution” fizzled its way into academia, the Grizzled Old Veteran began to notice a funny thing in the footnotes of the case studies he was pillaging for column material: the dog’s ghost-writing was being CITED in academic psychology papers, and soon enough, the echo effect had established the dog — since deceased — as an authority in the new field of “sexology,” cited and cross-cited in footnotes around the globe.

The lie had become the truth, and the fictitious “Dr.” had become, perhaps, more real than his journeyman creator.

Before he died, he used to have a photo on the wall in his office, with the dog wearing glasses and gripping a pipe in its mouth.

Not the photo in question

(A version of this story appears on pages 172-174 of Christina’s Craving, which I wrote, while working as Fakely St. James.)

Story Two.

Oh what the heck. I’ll finish the last two stories tomorrow. Beginning with where we left off on Thursday (Privacy: Rights and Wrongs (part i.):

But in the early days of the internet, a certain adult performer, who had gone back to “real life” but still wanted to talk about their moment under the sparkly lights as a star …

And Scheherazade perceived the coming of dawn and fell silent….

I shall conclude the tale on the ‘morrow.

Courage.