It is perhaps time to say that Hogg is certainly not pornography for women, despite my concern—no, I can be more honest: despite my honest guilt.

Having said that, it is only fair to say: neither is it pornography for most men.

Though the majority of the goings-on inside depict sex between males, I would be astounded if even a plurality of male homosexuals found these goings-on particularly to their tastes. And I suspect it will be the rare lesbian who enjoys contemplating the ensuing scenes.

But it is the most rigorous and honest fictional exploration I can remember of what crawls and wriggles and grubs among the roots in my own scorpion garden.

That is its only excuse.

The Scorpion Garden is a dangerous place.

I have worked and reworked my map carefully over the last four years. It will take you, certainly, past a few of the more interesting growths. Followed carefully, it will even lead you out again—but a warning: These gardens are far larger than they appear. Are they pretty? I would not dare suggest it. But when you have browsed on the excrescent foliage; when you have observed the wet, sloughed bark, whose odor of decay is its most savory feature; when you have glimpsed the dark things glittering beneath the shadowy overhang, perhaps you will find something to make you look harder. … Listen!

The hinges are grating behind us.

How long have we been within?

—London

September 1973

^* Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797) are, of course, as much manuals by a man for women’s behavior as were Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) fifty years before. Indeed, Justine and Juliette may be read as parodies of their English forebears in much the same way that Gulliver’s Travels (1726) can be read as a parody of the phenomenally successful Robinson Crusoe (1720) that had appeared six years before it. But while Sade’s and Richardson’s works share the same respective physical proportions, the pornographic (i.e., fantasy) element in Sade allows a margin of interpretive play Richardson sorely misses.

A note on the titles of the two novels is appropriate here:

In 1787 while in prison for his revolutionary activities, Sade wrote a novel he entitled Les Infortunes de la vertue [The Misfortunes of Virtue]. Several times Justine has been translated into English under the title Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, which is a good approximation of this early title. In 1791 under the title Justine, ou les malheurs de vertu [Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue], an expanded version of the novel was finally printed in Paris, chez Girouard on the rue du Bout-du-Monde in two octavo volumes, with a frontispiece depicting Virtue between Licentiousness and Irreligion. At the place on the title page generally reserved for the publisher’s imprint there appeared the vague description: In Holland, At Associated Booksellers. The novel sold quite briskly in Paris until 1797, when an immense book appeared, in ten volumes, entitled La nouvelle Justine—which the 18th century French reader would have read as: A New [version of, or edition of] “Justine.”