My Secret Life [antikvár]

NOTE ON THIS ABRIDGMENT OF m SECRET LIFE As e reader will see from the descriptions in tihe Publislier's Preface and Iniroduction follow, the underground classic My Secret Life is an enormOMS work» As originally printed privately for its anoiiymous author, aft consisied of eleven volumes ©f approxi«» mately 380 pages eadi» The irsi public edition, prepared by Grove Press in 1966, uses a snudi larger page size, but the text still occu° pies some 2,400 pages bound m ^o volumes and sold as a boxed set for $30. This abridgment was found necessary because ift proved impos" 9'ible to produce a single°vo1ume paperback edition containing the entire work in readable forssa and at a reasonable price. Every eflForft has been made, however» to make the abridgment as representative of the full text as possibfeo Episodes from childhood and youth» maturity and later years are toduded, as well as selections reflecting the au&or's experiences In ^!arious social milieus and European countries. Sections describing bis relations with the three most Important women of his life liave been retained, as well as his reflections on sex. Therefore, while this is an abridgment it is not an expurgation, and represents ^e entire text as faithfully as could be done wl&out Including al ©f it The Publisher s Preface and 4he Introduction to the full Grove Press two-volume edition are ancluded here as they originally appeared, because they contain much that is indispensable to an understanding of My Secret Life. The reader will understand, however, that where Aey describe the edition as "complete" or ¦"integral," they refer not to this paperback edition but to the cloth-bound boxed set described above. PUBLISHER'S PREFACE My Secret Life is one of tíie longest erotic autobiographies ever written. As such memoirs go, it has no equal, both for the variety of sexual experiences described and for the frankness of the language employed. Not even Frank Harris' near-legendary exercise In frankness and fantasy—which, some scholar may one day prove, snight well owe more of a debt to My Secret Life than its author ever acknowledged —¦ can vie with it Despite considerable speculation concerning the authorship of tíiis work, Including an interesting attempt by G. Legman in the Introduction to the present edition to make a convincing case for the famous Victorian bibliographer and collector of erotica, H. Spencer Ashbee, concrete proof of authorship remains to be discovered. Whatever his name, he was a well-to-do English gentleman who, judging from the Internal evidence of the work itself, must have been bom some time between 1820 and 1825. From his account, he was one of several children, and some indication of the family's wealth and social position can be had by an enumeration of the maidservants living In the household at various times during the author s youth, and also from the fact that at one point he remarks that, when he was a boy, he "was carefully kept from the grooms and the other man servants." As the future author moved írom childhood to adolescence, however, the family fortimes seem to have taken a tam for the worses he relates how his father "got Into difiSculties, we moved to a smaller house, [and] I was sent to another school" Shortly tíiereafter his father went abroad for a year, presumably to some English colony to try and recoup his waning fortune, for Öie author refers to his having to "look after some plantations." After a year away, however, his father returned home, "broken hearted, I have heard, and ill," and, two or three years later, died, "nearly bankrupt." These monetary considerations are not without their bearing upon the author and his work-to-come, for the life he describes could never have been lived, and the work he penned could never have been written, by a man without money. At the time of his father s death, the author, who refers to him-