Nothing in Common goes South, the Last Day

I would like to tell you about Mississippi, anything and everything about Mississippi, because Mississippi was surprising in a multitude of ways; not that I was surprised that Faulkner was born there and died there, in a sanatorium in Byhalia that has since been razed to make room for a gas station (we were not sure whether it was the Gulf or the Sunoco), or that Eudora Welty was born there and died there and had piles of books on very surface in her house, because I expected those things. But still.
Here it is already the holiday season that traditionally fills some of us – me – with sticky peppermint anxiety and jingle-bell-induced neuralgia, and it seems like a good idea to jump ahead and wrap up the Nothing in Common Southern Road Trip Annals.
So it was our last day. On our second to last day we visited Asheville and got a tiny bit lost in the lovely cemetery where Thomas Wolfe is buried, before visiting the Sliding Rock in the Pisgah National Forest where CSB fondly recalled certain youthful debaucheries, but I won’t go into that because we are jumping ahead to the last day.
On our last day we departed North Carolina and entered Virginia at 7:10 am. For some reason I noted that time, even though I had not done so on previous occasions of entering or exiting a state. CSB’s father was born in Virginia; he was a Branch of Virginia. Having entered Virginia so early no sites of note (neither the Museum of the Confederacy nor the Edgar Allen Poe Museum) were actually open when we arrived in Richmond. This was fine. We drove around and made several U-turns at the behest of Lorelei, our GPS. So it was that we discovered one of CSB’s illustrious ancestors: John Patteson Branch, a man so clean that he wanted the whole city to be clean.
It was definitely time to head north. I realized that while CSB’s forebear was promoting “good public health”, my own ancestor, Auguste (or Gustav) Brancart was busy publishing erotica in Belgium and the Netherlands, promoting another kind of health. It seems unlikely their paths crossed. But then, here we are.

Some people can look with pride upon their family trees, pointing out the mad scientists, cattle rustlers, burlesque dancers and Ping-Pong champions inhabiting the familial branches like the homicidal squirrels in our black walnut tree. A friend of mine can even claim a genuine saint (St. André Bessette) as a forebear. (It goes without saying that I am rendered a lurid shade of lime green with envy when she flaunts this relation.)

For years we have sought such illustrious ancestors, and come up – how shall we say this? – short. Until recently, when a certain cousin of mine(maternal side), the only member of our generation to carry the illustrious name of our Belgian grandfather in the New World, discovered an ancestor we can wholeheartedly claim.

Auguste Brancart was born in St Quentin, Belgium in 1851. From 1880 to 1885 he was a bookseller and publisher in Brussels. He then moved with his wife and young son to Amsterdam, where he fathered four daughters, and gained his worldwide reputation as a man on the cutting edge. He published the first known edition of My Secret Life, originally anonymous, now attributed to Henry Spencer Ashbee*; Rachilde’s The Mysteries of Venus, Fanny Hill and countless other books with titles in the vein of The Adventures of the Cross-Dressing Abbot, The Callipygian, or The Delights of the Penis; Lessons of a Voluptuary, or General Confession, and The Phallic Hotel: Vaudeville in Two Acts.

Yes, our ancestor was “one of the most important, and prolific, publishers of erotic books at his time.”

Or put more succinctly, a pornographer. A distinguished pornographer, to be sure, the founder of the Société des bibliophiles cosmopolites. A publisher credited with being the “link between the 19th and 20th centuries, between the ‘quality’ publishers …and the sordid colporteurs like Elias Gaucher.” A pornographer wanted by the police in two countries, but still, a pornographer.

It has always been a dream of mine to share with my children and grandchildren stories of their Old World ancestors. Now I can. While your forefathers and mothers were building railroads, wiping out indigenous populations, sailing to China and making fortunes in soon-to-become-endangered natural resources, ours was pandering to the public’s eternal and invincible demand for porn.

So what happened to the family fortune? After too many unfortunate interactions with the Amsterdam police, Brancart fled to Antwerp in 1894 and disappeared from the public record. There remains much to be discovered.

*Another interesting character of which I may write more later. For the time being, it is worth noting that one of his various pseudonyms was Apis, which as you know, means Bee. See his personal bookplate.