Misanthrope's Corner.(misrepresentation of Marquis de Sade as hero in movie "Quills")(Brief Article)(Column)

The movie Quills has come and gone, but this sympathetic portrait of the Marquis de Sade will turn up on TV in a year or so. It will be "edited for content," of course, but cutting the worst of the sex and violence will not diminish its disastrous overall message, to wit: Sade was a misunderstood genius who was persecuted by a hypocritical establishment.

This is a good time to review a murder case in which the writings of Sade played a precipitate role.

It happened in a place that most Americans know only as the setting of a famous love story, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but Bronte also penned some lines of poetry that are chillingly prescient in view of the macabre events that would one day unfold there: "I dream of moor and misty hill . . . what have these lonely mountains worth revealing?"

England's "Moors Murders" were committed between 1963 and 1965 by a young couple, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who worked together in a chemical-supply firm in Manchester, he as a stock clerk, she as a typist. They lived together as well, first in her grandmother's grimy row house in the city slums; later, when the slum was cleared, in a "council house" on a faceless suburban "overspill estate," i.e., public housing. The only atmospheric touch in this dreary corner of the Welfare State was a sweeping view of the moors.

Brady, a Scot, was the illegitimate son of a Glasgow waitress named Peggy Stewart. She farmed him out to a slum family named Sloan, whose name he was given, and visited him from time to time in the guise of a family friend, not telling him that she was his mother.

Three incidents from his childhood are noteworthy. He was drawn to pictures of vast empty spaces, he buried a cat alive, and he became obsessed with the movie The Third Man, memorizing Orson Welles's line as he looks down from atop a Ferris wheel at the people below: "Would you feel any pity, old man, if any of those dots stopped moving forever?"

In his teens he was arrested for petty crime and sent to a reformatory. He was released on the condition that he live with his mother, now married to a man named Brady and living in Manchester. He had already guessed that Peggy was his mother, and so he moved to Manchester, took his stepfather's name, and got a job at the chemical-supply firm, where he stayed six years.