Odd this day
Two anniversaries of births today, of rather different people: religious ‘maniac’ Christopher Smart, best known for the section of his long poem Jubilate Agno which concerns his cat Jeoffry, who is
the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
And… er Anton Szandor LaVey, who was born Howard Stanton Levey, and founded the Church of Satan in (well, obviously) 1960s San Francisco.
Christopher Smart was a writer who couldn’t make a living — or at least the living he wanted was beyond what his writing could support, so he was constantly in debt, and had to take on gruelling hack work, which may have contributed to a breakdown. Frances Burney said he was a
man by nature endowed with talents, wit & vivacity in an eminent degree, & whose unhappy loss of his senses was a Public as well as Private misfortune
…and (according to James Boswell) Samuel Johnson said he
shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place
He may not have been able to spell Geoffrey (or perhaps he could — who are we to say?), but he was prolific, with noms de plume including Mrs. Mary Midnight and Ebenezer Pentweazle — both of which, as it happens, would be good names for cats. However, Thomas Gray, who knew him at Cambridge, thought him “an incorrigible rake and a drunkard”, and wrote that he
must come to a Jayl, or Bedlam, & that without any help, almost without Pity
…which proved sadly prophetic. He was in at least one asylum for most of 1757–63, and then arrested for his debts in 1770, dying in prison the following year. But not before he had immortalised his cat, principally because he believed that it — like all creatures — demonstrated the greatness of God’s creation in its every movement.
By contrast, a very ordinary man born in Chicago in the 20th century spent rather less time in institutions than he probably deserved. ‘Anton’ as I suppose we must call him, became a musician in the late 1940s, and
started playing burlesque houses in Southern California — in particular, a theater called the Mayan, in Los Angeles. “That’s where I met Marilyn Monroe, at the Mayan,” said LaVey. “The guy who ran it was Paul Valentine.” Monroe was down on her luck and had taken up stripping to get by.
That’s from a piece in Rolling Stone in 1991, in which he also produces a copy of Monroe’s famous nude calendar which she apparently signed for him, inscribing it with a reference to the affair he claimed they had. Then, in the following paragraph:
“I don’t know if Marilyn ever performed at the Mayan,” [Paul] Valentine says, “but I do know she was never one of my dancers.” In any case, Valentine says he operated the Mayan as “legitimate theater — it was never a burlesque, never a bump and grind.” He says LaVey never worked for him, either.
Yes: the most likely explanation is that he signed that calendar himself. In fact, the article suggests that many of his exploits were entirely fictional — a point backed up by LaVey’s daughter after his death. He seems to have been… well, someone who lived on his wits, let’s say, ‘working’ as a paranormal researcher in his early years, and founding something called the Order of the Trapezoid. He took to driving a Jaguar with the number plate SATAN9, and in 1966 founded the Church of Satan, by, er… shaving his head and declaring that he’d founded the Church of Satan.
Three years later, he ‘wrote’ The Satanic Bible, which (because nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people) has been in print ever since. In the last years of his life, he named a child Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey, which on its own is the kind of behaviour that warrants a custodial sentence.
The law did come knocking for him in 1980, when he was implicated in a plot to assassinate Ted Kennedy. In the face of the FBI’s questions, he bravely, nay defiantly, faced them down, telling them
His role as the head of the church was all a charade. Most of the church’s followers, he said, were “fanatics, cultists, and weirdos,” the records show. “[H]is interest in the Church of Satan is strictly from a monetary point of view,” the agents noted
Which is (a) rather splendid, but (b) not even the best bit of that article. That would be the wonderfully deadpan:
In truth, LaVey did not have magical powers.
All in all, I think we can agree that Christopher Smart made the finer contribution to human culture, especially in his paean to his feline friend:
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
…For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
…For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
