Misanthrope's Corner - misrepresentation of Marquis de Sade as hero in movie "Quills" - Brief Article - Column

National Review, June 11, 2001 by Florence King

The movie Quills has come and gone, but this sympathetic portrait of the Marquis de Sade will turn up on TV in a year or so. It will be "edited for content," of course, but cutting the worst of the sex and violence will not diminish its disastrous overall message, to wit: Sade was a misunderstood genius who was persecuted by a hypocritical establishment.

This is a good time to review a murder case in which the writings of Sade played a precipitate role.

It happened in a place that most Americans know only as the setting of a famous love story, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but Bronte also penned some lines of poetry that are chillingly prescient in view of the macabre events that would one day unfold there: "I dream of moor and misty hill . . . what have these lonely mountains worth revealing?"

England's "Moors Murders" were committed between 1963 and 1965 by a young couple, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who worked together in a chemical-supply firm in Manchester, he as a stock clerk, she as a typist. They lived together as well, first in her grandmother's grimy row house in the city slums; later, when the slum was cleared, in a "council house" on a faceless suburban "overspill estate," i.e., public housing. The only atmospheric touch in this dreary corner of the Welfare State was a sweeping view of the moors.

Brady, a Scot, was the illegitimate son of a Glasgow waitress named Peggy Stewart. She farmed him out to a slum family named Sloan, whose name he was given, and visited him from time to time in the guise of a family friend, not telling him that she was his mother.

Three incidents from his childhood are noteworthy. He was drawn to pictures of vast empty spaces, he buried a cat alive, and he became obsessed with the movie The Third Man, memorizing Orson Welles's line as he looks down from atop a Ferris wheel at the people below: "Would you feel any pity, old man, if any of those dots stopped moving forever?"

In his teens he was arrested for petty crime and sent to a reformatory. He was released on the condition that he live with his mother, now married to a man named Brady and living in Manchester. He had already guessed that Peggy was his mother, and so he moved to Manchester, took his stepfather's name, and got a job at the chemical-supply firm, where he stayed six years.

To people of this class, reading books is proof of seriousness, if not stodginess. Everyone thought he had settled down, but his books were pseudo-scholarly paperbacks like The History of Torture, and sensational treatments of the Holocaust. His displays of lunch-hour studiousness impressed the new typist, Myra Hindley, who found him "deep."

Myra's dissatisfaction with her life was expressed by regular changes in her hair color. She went through every shade of blonde and even, once, pink, teasing it into a huge, elaborate bubble. The only other remarkable thing about her was her morbid reaction at 15 to the drowning death of a childhood friend; inconsolable, she wore black until it had to be taken from her.

Myra Hindley did more than sleep with Ian Brady. She turned into him, exchanging her flat Lancashire vowels for his Scottish burr, parroting his Nazi views, and sharing his fascination with the vast, empty moors. They drove there in rented cars, always with a shovel in the back, ostensibly so that Brady could dig peat for her grandmother's garden.

Of the five children who went missing between 1963 and 1965, two were found buried on the moors by police diggers who matched the loci to the snapshots Brady and Hindley took of themselves standing on the graves. Other incriminating evidence included nude photos of their ten-year-old female victim, a tape recording of her screams with Christmas carols playing in the background, and a dog-eared paperback of Sade's Justine. Among its underlined passages were "Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure," and "The crime of destroying one's fellow man is non- existent."

The only study of the Moors Murders published in the U.S. is Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams. Noting that the paperback edition of Justine came out in England shortly before the first murder, he makes a convincing case for charging Sade as an accessory before the fact.

The very first sentence of the Foreword is an example of the indoctrination of an immature mind: 'This is one of the great forbidden books of all time . . . stimulating, mind-prodding . . . its publication at this time is an important cultural event.' . . . Justine is a dirty book without dirty words. If anything, the language is pretty lofty, one of the reasons why the work is defended as literature. The flights are as high in translation as in the original, often reading like bad Walter Scott. The idiocies in the text will pass right over the head of this particular reader, because Brady and his author have in common two negative traits: a want of literary taste and a lack of humor.

Questioned on the witness stand about his pornography, Brady sneered, "Ye'll find worrse in lairds' manors." This is probably true, but there are far fewer lords than stock clerks. The danger of making pornography universally available in cheap editions challenged the socialist views of novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, who, while covering the Moors trial, saw a paperback of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis in a railway-station rack. What need, she asked in her commentary on the case, has the general public for such books?