The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 (review)

Raymond Stephanson's choice of main title - The Yard of Wit - for his study of 'Male Creativity and Sexuality 1650-1750' inspires confidence. 'Yard' was an old-fashioned word for the penis still current during the eighteenth century, and 'wit' connoted more than it does today, namely 'mother wit' or native intelligence, its intellectual exercise, and the witty use of language used therein. In short, that succinct title encapsulates the creative analogies that Stephanson canvasses for male writers of the period: head/groin, quill/penis, and ink/sperm. By no means does the author ignore female writers or normal childbirth, but he is determined to see how books penned by men could be seen as offspring birthed by same-sex reproduction or autogenesis. Stephanson does, however, wish to withdraw from modern feminist controversies back into the cut and thrust of psycho-physiological debates during the eighteenth century. The ahistorical phallus of Freudian or Lacanian theory, he duly demonstrates, does not prove very useful when we are dealing with the empirical specifics of a slenderly endowed Alexander Pope ('Alexander the Little') as so viciously lampooned at the time. Stephanson devotes a well-sustained chapter to the paradox of the period's greatest poetic talent being hung on a pego so diminutive.

Stephanson's range of reading and allusion is impressive. The author takes us back to mythological birthing tropes (Zeus/Athena, and thence to Apollo and the Nine Muses), to the Priapeia (Latin poems that force 'a simple choice between the chaste mythology of poetic reproduction and the rude power of the visible phallus'), to Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Martial, Montaigne, and to French and English legal proceedings that involved a husband's purported impotence. Stephanson also foregrounds important eighteenth-century disputes about embryology and dexterously handles iconographic readings of plates ranging from William Harvey's Exercitationes De Generatione Animalium (1651) and Regnier de Graaf's Tractatus De Virorum Organis Generationi Inservientibus (1668) to Edmund Curll's 1737 shop-sign 'At Pope's Head' and to The Poeticall Tom-Titt perch'd upon the Mount of Love. Being the Representation of a Merry Description in Mr. Cibber's Letter to Mr. Pope (1742) as compared with a voyeuristic scene from the pornographic Histoire de Dom B (1741). The cover to The Yard of Wit displays the frontispiece to the latter book with the closeted author's quill in his right hand as a satyr directs him what to write. That the author displays an engorged penis in his left hand - and that the satyr's member stands spontaneously to attention - is chastely obscured (but not in the reproduction reprinted within The Yard of Wit) by a rectangle emblazoning the title and its author. Stephanson might almost rest his case on the uncensored cut. As Kenneth Tynan once remarked, writing is 95 per cent perspiration and 5 per cent masturbation.

Stephanson is at his least interesting when he takes us through 'figurative linkages' in the marketplace or the 'dynamic [sic] of homoerotic inclusion.' Academic-speak threatens to take over and, on occasion, his fluent prose veers towards the repetitive. A severe reviewer might see The Yard of Wit as no more than a one-trick donkey laden down with gee-whiz specimens. But Stephanson has a sharp eye for shape-shifting in the head/groin analogy. Masturbating, figuratively, with a chaste Muse might be hugely creative; but onanism in words might be symptomatic of social dysfunction. A homosocial reading group like that which Pope enjoyed with such older friends as Wycherley, Caryll, and Cromwell could provide essential literary foreplay prior to releasing a poem to the reading public. Certainly Stephanson will send us back to bland treatises on poetics - one had not, heretofore, thought of scrutinizing Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) for smutty subtexts - with a reinvigorated grasp for icons of male creativity. There are, furthermore, many insights into, say, anal birthing and boghouse walls near Grub...