Sacherism

THE FIRST MASOCHIST by James Cleugh. 220 pages. Stem & Day. $6.95.

History has been cruel to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In his day--the latter half of the 19th century--he was an enormously popular writer. Hardly anyone knows him today except as the sick mind who, like the Marquis de Sade, lent his name to the glossary of psychiatric terms. This first English-language biography by a journeyman translator and biographer (Pushkin, Brighter than a Thousand Suns) tries hard to deal coolly with its subject, but Sacher-Masoch was such a bumbler that the reader cannot take him seriously. The poor fellow was really a kind of romantic, who always hoped to find the worst in women and hardly ever did. He was born in 1836 in Galicia, then part of Austria, the son of a police commissioner. His early books were histories, which critics found competent enough. But when he turned to fiction, he was a Jekyll gone Hyde. His short stories and most of his 90 novels all dealt with depravity. The theme: girl beats boy. Venus in Furs, his most widely read book, was typical of the rest, though hardly as explicit as some of today's sex fare: Wanda von Dunayev, an imperious Amazon, swaggers through a series of near pornographic episodes, whip in hand, abject lover at her feet. Domestic Treaty. In real life, Sacher-Masoch lived out the imaginings of his books. The model for Wanda was one Fanny Pistor Bogdanoff, a strapping lady with whom he spent six tawdry months in Venice. With his first wife, an aspiring writer named Aurora Ruemelin, whom he preferred to call "Wanda," he worked out a bizarre set of domestic arrangements. After they married, his job around the house would be to wait on her hand and foot. His royalty checks were earmarked for furs and fine whips. For her part, Wanda was expected to chastise him regularly, and in general she promised to dishonor, disobey and degrade him. To that effect, they signed a "treaty." But the marriage went wrong. Biographer Cleugh does not succeed in explaining why, but it is fairly obvious that Frau Sacher-Masoch had no intention of keeping her vows. His entreaties notwithstanding, she refused at first to be unfaithful to him, even when he went so far as to place advertisements for cuckolders in the Vienna Tageblatt. Anguished Divorce. She did try to make little compromises that might have held the marriage together. Occasionally she flew off the handle and slapped her husband around. During a literary quarrel with him, she gave him a good thrashing with one of the whips he conveniently left lying around the house. But it was not enough: by now, Sacher-Masoch wanted the recriminations and anguish of a divorce. After ten years of talking about it, he got it. Biographer Cleugh is noncommittal on the matter of the complaint; but it is safe to assume that Sacher-Masoch did not charge cruelty. He married again, this time to a more accommodating woman. In his later years, he suffered fits of violent madness; at 59, he died of heart failure. In a somewhat facile analysis, the biographer suggests that Sacher-Masoch's depravity may have been caused by a dominant mother, a dominant nursemaid and a dominant aunt. This could explain why he was so upset when he heard that Dr. Krafft-Ebing had singled him out for inclusion in his Psychopathia Sexualis and coined the term masochism. After all, Masoch was his mother's family name, and he was concerned that her feelings would be hurt. He would have preferred that the condition be called "Sacherism."

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