Where’s the Love?

WHEN Doug Wright’s Quills was an Off Broadway play, I lambasted it in New York magazine. Now, in Wright’s movie adaptation, it is much more elaborate and, if possible, worse yet. There is an essay by Wright in the press kit that reveals his sub-literacy. He refers to Sade as “a professor emeritus of Evil,” obviously not knowing the meaning of “emeritus.” He says that as Sade’s name is the root of the term “sadism,” the Marquis’s contribution to culture was “entomological.” And he is a lousy reader, averring that in La Philosophie dans le boudoir, “an elderly dowager is forcibly infected with syphilis,” even though Madame de Mistival is neither a widow nor over 32, which makes her ineligible for either possible meaning of Wright’s pleonasm

Here is how Wright writes: “The stories seem to spring—like gorgons—from a vast, ever-replenished well of rage.” Gorgons, of whom there were only three, did not spring from any well; they were the malformed daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Sade, we read, “writes to vent at the hypocritical forces which oppress him,” which, aside from the misuse of “vent” without an object, speaks well for Sade. Yet “he registers as an amalgam of our basest appetites, stripped bare,” which, besides being a mixed metaphor, speaks, contradictorily, ill of him. And Wright gets his facts wrong: Sade did not spend “over 30 years” in prison, but 27, which, to be sure, is bad enough.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

WHEN Doug Wright’s Quills was an Off Broadway play, I lambasted it in New York magazine. Now, in Wright’s movie adaptation, it is much more elaborate and, if possible, worse yet. There is an essay by Wright in the press kit that reveals his sub-literacy. He refers to Sade as “a professor emeritus of Evil,” obviously not knowing the meaning of “emeritus.” He says that as Sade’s name is the root of the term “sadism,” the Marquis’s contribution to culture was “entomological.” And he is a lousy reader, averring that in La Philosophie dans le boudoir, “an elderly dowager is forcibly infected with syphilis,” even though Madame de Mistival is neither a widow nor over 32, which makes her ineligible for either possible meaning of Wright’s pleonasm

Here is how Wright writes: “The stories seem to spring—like gorgons—from a vast, ever-replenished well of rage.” Gorgons, of whom there were only three, did not spring from any well; they were the malformed daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Sade, we read, “writes to vent at the hypocritical forces which oppress him,” which, aside from the misuse of “vent” without an object, speaks well for Sade. Yet “he registers as an amalgam of our basest appetites, stripped bare,” which, besides being a mixed metaphor, speaks, contradictorily, ill of him. And Wright gets his facts wrong: Sade did not spend “over 30 years” in prison, but 27, which, to be sure, is bad enough.