The Book of Vices

I was thinking about William Bennett's Book of Virtues today--well, scoffing at it, really--and it occurred to me that the world might really benefit from a Book of Vices. In fact, I'm surprised it hasn't already been written. You know, a book full of all the wonderfully decrepit things that literature can teach us about. Why should literature always be morally uplifting? Who said that was supposed to be the point? Sometimes the imagine can be just as titillated by imagining the unimaginable.

So what would go in my Book of Vices, were I to edit such a thing?

The Marquis de Sade, of course, would be an obvious choice. So obvious, in fact, that I hereby banish him and all his works from my collection.

So: instead I start with Chaucer--The Canterbury Tales--and all the CT's wonderful bawdy introspections on married life, mortal sin, adultery, lying, making money, getting drunk, and the rest of it. The Canterbury Tales can really show you how to live it up.

And from there we go to Rabelais, of course--the writer Bakhtin pointed to as the embodiment of Carnival. The body--its noises, smells, sores, and orifices--all delightfully expounded and personified for some seven hundred pages. Wonderful.

And then how about Ben Franklin, the old lech? He knew a thing or two about life. This is the guy who told you to pick an old mistress over a young one, because they're "so grateful." And according to Bill Bryson, he knew what he was talking about. He'd belonged to a couple of rather sordid--but very elite--sex clubs on the Continent. Now there's a guy who definitely belongs in my book.

For poets we've got lots of choices: Andrew Marvell, with his yearning desire to win over his mistress before worms have the honor instead; Ben Jonson--hey, I forgot to mention his plays, too!-- and Robert Herrick....all those carpe diem guys, in fact; we'll just include them here en masse. Then there's Christina Rossetti, with her erotic "Goblin's Market," and Robert Browning, with "Porphyria," "My Last Duchess," and a score of sociopathic others.

And we haven't even reached the twentieth century yet. There's still the scandalous Picture of Dorian Gray; James' Turn of the Screw; anything by Poe, and all those nineteenth century gothic horror novels: Dracula, Uncle Silas, the works of Wilkie Collins...Yeah, yeah: the virtuous usually win out. But that's hardly the point of these books. The point is the gruesome, gothy seductiveness of it all. White-clad heroines are boring. We revel in their strangulations--let's face it.

Yep, this is a book I bet people would read.