QI The Book of the Dead

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 analysing the nature of inter-species love. Apart from her books about Topsy, she also published a study of female sexuality and a 700-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 analyse him. He agreed and they spent the rest of the ceremony in deep conversation. His name was François 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. Immortalising Marie Bonaparte in sculpture, he unveiled his portrait of her at the Paris Salon. Entitled Princess X , it consisted solely of a giant bronze phallus and testicles.

     

    The organ itself was 15.9 inches (40.5 cm) long. This would have been of great interest to the American academic Alfred Kinsey (1894–1955) who measured more than 5,000 penises in his lifetime. Their dimensions appeared in his painstaking scientific study Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948). Dry and statistical in tone, and based on over 18,000 intimate case histories, the book was distributed by a medical publishing house, which expected around 5,000 sales. Instead, the book shot straight to the top of the best-seller 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 if 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, Françoise 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 ofa 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, got 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.