Genius likes to fuck (and even be jerked off by a monkey)

Procreative lives
Is a supercharged libido an essential part of being a genius?
By Winston Fletcher (from the good olg Guardian)

The recent revelations proving Einstein was a horny lecher should have come as no surprise. He was a notorious ram and was, he admitted, not good at being married. But then well-endowed creative thinkers, writers and artists all too often have similarly well-endowed libidos.

Way out in front comes the crime writer Georges Simenon. To keep his creative juices flowing he claimed the needed to make love three times a day. In his seventies he confessed to the film director Federico Fellini that "since the age of 13 _ I've had 10,000 women, of which 8000 were prostitutes".

Chasing Simenon over the jumps was Pablo Picasso. A whoremonger like Simenon - as was Van Gogh - Picasso treated most of his innumerable women, whom he called 'goddesses or doormats', like tubes of paint, to be squeezed and discarded. At the age of 90 the artist grumbled: "Sex and smoking - age has forced me to give them both up, but the desire remains".

Is a supercharged sex drive, then, an essential component in creative success? Manifestly not. Some of history's greatest creators have shown little interest in the bedroom except as a place to kip. Degas was almost certainly a celibate, as it seems were both Spinoza and Henry James, who is not known to have done anything more wanton than kiss and cuddle a few likely lads. But Karl Marx was a always on for a bit on the side (as of course was Groucho).

Naturally there is a difficulty about chickens and eggs. Creative men - throughout history it has inevitably mostly been men - are especially attractive to many women. And they usually have more opportunities to philander than other chaps. But they could disregard the opportunities - as some do - were they not keen to take full lascivious advantage of their chances.

And seeking to study this seemingly simple subject is somewhat stymied by the lack of hard data. Before investigative journalism became as probing, and as prurient, as it is today, most creative chaps, like most lesser mortals, cloaked their sex lives in secrecy. Even the most assiduous biographers have frequently been forced to admit that - though rumours of scandals were rife at the time - the gossip cannot be made to stand up.

Yet we have so much information, about the intrigues of so many, that it strongly suggests there must be a great deal more we do not know. If some magic time machine allowed us to indulge in a little spicy voyeurism and peep into the bedrooms of history's greatest creative achievers we would surely discover that most of them also achieved greater feats between the sheets than has ever been revealed.

Great painters - and photographers - have constantly dallied with their models. According to the celebrated limerick describing the unpainterly activities of the Venetian artist Titian:

When Titian was making rose madder
His model posed nude on a ladder
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition
So he climbed up the ladder and had 'er

Modigliani was little short of insatiable, as was Gustav Klimt who fathered 15 illegitimate children with his models. In Victorian times models were seen as only one step up from tarts, so it is hardly surprising that many of the pre-Raphaelites used their studios as knocking shops. (Sir Edward Burne-Jones kept his studio out of bounds to his family.) The painter Gwen John, sister of Augustus - another zealous bed-hopper - was a model who famously became one of Rodin's many lovers. And over in the Pacific Gauguin was, literally, screwing himself to death.

In the music room the performers have generally been more dissolute than the composers - but Wagner and Liszt were infamous libertines. Wagner "starts a new love affair in every town he happens to visit" wrote one of his closest friends. Of Puccini his biographer Mosco Carner wrote, echoing descriptions of Picasso: "There appears to have been in Puccini an abundance of animal sexuality".

Back among the bookshelves Scotland's greatest bard, Robbie Burns, probably out-gunned even Ted Hughes and Laurie Lee. Poets characteristically have plenty of lead in their pencils: Byron, Brooke, Graves, Shelley, Thomas and Yeats to mention but a wristful. Not that prose writers come far behind. H.G. Wells would have run Simenon a close race, as would young Hemingway. Showing that once they got the chance women were no slouches, Colette, who was almost a contemporary of Simenon's, was certainly almost as libidinous, as was her predecessor Georges Sand. Among today's top writers the count of those not obsessed by sex would be infinitely shorter than the library list of those who are.

We often get the low-down on authors, as with painters, from their work if not from their known amours. In addition to the semi-pornographers like Petronius, Chaucer, Boccaccio, de Sade, John Cleland, Frank Harris, Henry Miller and the rest, great writers who wrote smutty stuff include Balzac, Zola, Joyce - especially his erotic letters - and of course Nabokov and DH Lawrence. Goethe wasn't in the Byron or Burns league, but had many lovers and a more than a passing interest in salacious erotica.

Philosophers have similarly long been distinctly prey to distinctly unphilosophical urges - from the early St. Augustine, through Rousseau and Voltaire - who had a secret affair with one of his nieces, among many others - via Karl Marx and up to Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Freddie Ayer.

Nor have we yet peeked into the pink parlour.

"Might I remind you", as Philip Larkin put it to Kingsley Amis, "that the greatest artists and philosophers did not enjoy the benefits of heterosexuality". Since ancient Greece - Aristotle, Aristophanes, Plato, Socrates - and ancient Rome - Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid - an extraordinarily high proportion of writers, thinkers and more recently painters, have been homosexual.

Here is a quick tally of the most celebrated and most talented. Artists: Bacon, Hockney, Hodgkin, Michaelangelo and almost certainly da Vinci. Composers: Britten, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Poulenc. Writers: Auden, Baldwin, Camus, Capote, Forster, Gide, TE Lawrence, Marlowe, Maugham, Proust, Sassoon, Whitman and Wilde. Plus no fewer than four of the last century's finest playwrites: Coward, Orton, Rattigan and Williams. To whom might be added the 20th century's two greatest economists and philosophers, and at least one of its most inventive scientists: John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan Turing. In the performing arts - theatre, ballet, music - gays would almost certainly comprise the majority of entries in any who's who of performing artists.

On the other side of the argument, the facts are more difficult to grope at. Many of those who have been faithful to their spouses may well have got down to all kinds of debauchery in the privacy of their marital beds. Who is to know? Bach fathered 13 children, by two wives. Starting late, Darwin fathered 10. Goya, as well as having been the lover of the Duchess of Alba, is reputed to have sired 20 progeny - and even if this figure is an exaggeration it reflects contemporaries' view of his virility.

The correlation between sexuality and creativity is not absolute: biology isn't physics. Not everyone who smokes gets cancer, and not everyone who gets cancer is a smoker. Similarly, not everyone who is creative is highly sexed, and not everyone who is highly sexed is creative. But just as a preponderance of smokers get cancer, a preponderance of creative people seem, not to out too fine a point on it, to be incorrigible shaggers.

Comments
Tarpaulin:
Hmmm...the main, er, thrust of this article seems lost behind the sexploits of the artists name-dropped.
While we're, um, at it though, we might mention that Guy de Maupassant was a frequenter of whorehouses and indeed on one occasion, visiting Swinburne in Kent, received the services of Swinburne's monkey, which had been trained to wank its owner off. Allegedly. According to my French lit. tutor.
But spare a thought for such lyrical celibates as Manley Hopkins (Catholic priest) and Rilke (for whom one biography says the emotional commitment of owning a dog was too great, and who lived apart from wife and daughter - so he managed it once at least).
Funny the reverse isn't true - I mean no one would say Hugh Hefner was a creative genius, would they?

Belsam:
So being homo means being highly sexed means being creative. Where, then, does Alan Bennett fit into the scheme, who seems to have been the first and the last, but not the in between? Careful with those stereotypes, Winston: you're surely at your sharpest when you lay down that disclaimer, that correlations are not absolute.

Zussy:
I think it is simply a truism that male sexuality is such that when an opportunity presents itself, nine times out of ten, a man will take whatever sexual liaison is available to him. It overrides the morality of monogamy. The sexual drive and imagination is so strong that it will seek to gather in all it can.
Creative geniuses lead bohemian, unconventional lives, unconstrained by nine to five commuting boundaries, often financialy when they find success they are fairly rich to indulge in their material passions, and fame and talent are attractive to many women. Add all those things up, and you get opportunity meeting impulse and sexual overdrive.