The Grafters
Shrinking Lily Press, 1927

Seven years after the first human xenotransplantion was conducted in 1920 by Dr. Serge Voronoff, Chesley published her most insightful commentary on the perils of science practiced without conscience in her brilliant novel The Grafters. The double entendre was an apt title for the book, which described in horrific detail the annihilation of the human race caused by dubious medical practitioners making illicit profits by grafting the gonads of chimps, baboons and a wild assortment of other prolific primate fornicators to those of desperate men hoping to revitalize their limping libidos. Chesley’s was a seminal work not only because it appeared two years before Félicien Champsaur published his novel Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora, the Monkey Turned Woman) – also inspired by Voronoff’s peculiar experiments – but also because it was the first to speculate on a deadly virus that attacks the human immune system some 50 years before AIDS actually emerged in the early 1980s.

Chesley’s inspiration for the novel came from her personal acquaintance with Voronoff, who she met in 1907 while living in Pablo Picasso’s Paris atelier. Voronoff, who was born in Russia but moved to Paris to study medicine, had been living in Egypt where he busied himself rejuvenating eunuchs. He had come back to Paris for a fortnight to observe the sexual prowess of Picasso, a former patient of Voronoff’s whom he had heard was screwing everything that moved. It was during his brief visit that Emily learned much about vivisection, evisceration, transplantation and the powerful relaxation properties of vodka. She was simultaneously disgusted and intrigued by such meddlings with the procreative tools God granted mankind. As she wrote in her memoirs, Speculations: “Pablo’s stamina since the operation has given me some of the best butt-humping I’ve ever had the pleasure of receiving, but I’m greatly concerned that Serge’s perverse surgical techniques could have dire consequences if they fall into the wrong hands.”

It wasn’t until she returned to Paris in 1926, however, that Emily began to write The Grafters. Living it up at Gertrude Stein’s famed “27” with a variety of writers and artists who had also benefited from Voronoff’s miraculous medical procedure, she became down-hearted when Picasso rebuffed her attempts to rekindle their old romance. It seemed that the restorative effects of Picasso’s surgery some eight years prior were beginning to wear off. His disinterest was not aided by the fact that Emily’s age was slowly beginning to show itself. In a word, Emily was bitter with this turn of events, and she began to write.

Her novel begins in France, where murderers and the criminally insane are being castrated by the thousands. Corrupt prison and asylum officials have found that the testicles of young men fetch a handsome price on the black market, where they are purchased by aging aristocrats who’ve lost their pep. The wealthy wankers take their ill-begotten gonads to one Dr. Dack Dewshaker, who concocts a mysterious elixir that mysteriously helps failing geezers regain lost vigor. For patients more advanced in age or more desperate for immediate results, Dewshaker surgically affixes the animal testes to those of his patients in order to achieve the desired effect. Little does anyone suspect, however, that Dewshaker is in fact an alien from the planet Scrotilium who is plotting to take over the world. By enslaving men to the will of their ‘wee heads,’ compelling them to screw themselves silly, Dewshaker hopes to render all of mankind compliant and easy to rule.

Dewshaker’s evil plot takes a turn for the worse when the testicular supply dries up in Paris. But he heads to French Guinea to exploit the seemingly limitless supply of chimpanzees and baboons. The opportunity to breed the beasts for his nefarious purposes gives Dewshaker the wherewithal to expand his grafting and elixir service across the globe.

The heroine of the tale is Muriel Slotter, an Irish cross-dresser who catches on to Dewshaker’s plans while travelling across the African continent in a row boat. She fails in her attempt to intervene when she is subverted by one of Dewshaker’s alien minions, the duplicitous John Thomas Longfellow. Tragically, Longfellow proves to be the British tour guide Muriel hires at the outset of her journey, and he infects her with nasty bit of syphilis after an amorous roll in a cheese bin. Muriel snuffs it in the end, along with the rest of the human race thanks to a lethal air-borne virus spread by the flatus of old men in baggy trousers.

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