Mr Facing- both- ways

The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middle-aged hands were no longer apt for writing about the erotic Catullus. In his 90th year, Leo Abse manifests no such squeamishness in this psychoanalytic study of Daniel Defoe. Neither embarrassed nor embarrassing, he sees no reason to abate his hot pursuit of the more or less hidden impulses that, he argues, enabled Defoe to impersonate both Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders with such instant insolence.

Defoe has been condemned as a hack, an opportunist and a turncoat. He was, by turns, an outspoken dissenter (put in the pillory for his Swiftian, pseudo-High Tory spoof The Shortest Way with Dissenters) and an eager secret agent for the High Tory Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, after the latter got him out of gaol and sent him to Scotland to spy out the prospects for uniting the kingdom. Defoe had fought at Sedgemoor and saw survivors judicially murdered by Judge Jeffreys, before he made an unlikely idol of that dour Dutchman, William III (though he never gladly bent the knee to the Hanovers).

His imagination lent vividness to his pen. He has been condemned as a fake for passing off A Journal of the Plague Year as the real thing, when he was only five at the time, and as a pornographer for Moll and Roxana, but who can deny the brilliance of his impostures? Defoe’s ‘psychic hermaphroditism’ is said to ensure that ‘neither the man’s voice nor the woman’s predominated’, hence his improbable role as marriage guidance counsellor in Conjugal Lewdness (with its advertisement of a wife’s right to orgasm) and the unnervingly solemn Religious Courtship. He could be everyone but himself.

Abse manages at once to honour the multitudinous work and to present a detailed account of Defoe’s sexual hang-ups: his ‘unresolved incestuous passion for his father’ is said to have determined his indeterminate character.