Doug Wright, who adapted his play for the film of Quills, cites the fuss involving the US Republican senator Jesse Helms over the now notorious Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in 1989 as among his motivating ideas. Helms was stringently opposed to the concept of public money being spent to mount an exhibition likely to deprave and corrupt the public. The struggle between his side of politics and the New York art establishment was titanic. The prospect of radical ideas being given free rein, allowing them to stampede to whatever conclusion the elements allow, is an attractive notion. Yet there will always be restraints imposed as much by the fallibility and elusiveness of perfection as by societal impediments.
Temptation is inherent in contradiction.
Bugger the consequences. De Sade's own correspondence, however, brings him to life in the full swing of the pendulum from sweet reason to cruel indulgence. Richard Seaver's splendid new edition of Letters From Prison illuminates the man in his own context. It reveals his tender side, his spirit and his intellectual rigour. The surviving novels offer abundant evidence of de Sade's anarchic mindset and his commitment to confrontation.