My Uncle Oswald

An unnamed narrator introduces his uncle, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, as a peerless womanizer, bon vivant, and collector. He has previously published two excerpts from Oswald's extensive diaries and now releases a third section from Volume XX, written in 1938 when Oswald was 43. The narrator warns that famous names appear and calls the document historically and scientifically important.

Writing in 1938, Oswald flashes back to 1912, when at 17 he wins a science scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge a year early. With 12 months to fill, his father sends him to Paris. On his last evening in London, he hosts a farewell party at which Major Grout, an old friend of his father who works in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, tells the guests about the Sudanese Blister Beetle. Found only in a small area north of Khartoum, the insect can be dried and ground into a powder roughly 10 times more powerful than the common aphrodisiac Spanish Fly. Grout recounts how he accidentally swallowed a whole beetle that fell into his whiskey, experienced temporary paralysis followed by an overwhelming erection, and spent two weeks in a Khartoum hospital packed in ice. The story plants a daring plan in young Oswald's mind.

In Paris, Oswald boards with the Boisvain family and has a humbling encounter with their eldest daughter, Nicole, then departs for the Sudan. In Khartoum, he buys five pounds of Blister Beetle powder from a hotel porter for 100 English pounds and returns to Paris within 10 days. He tests the powder on himself: exactly nine minutes after licking a pinhead-sized dose, he experiences temporary rigidity and a powerful erection. He visits Nicole's room for a final test and performs with extraordinary vigor, confirming the powder's potency.

Drawing on his chemistry knowledge, Oswald manufactures 24 large red pills, each containing one precise dose, and packages them in boxes labeled "Professor Youssof's Potency Pills." Using his father's diplomatic connections, he visits Lady Makepiece, wife of British Ambassador Sir Charles Makepiece, who invites him to a grand Embassy dinner. There he joins Sir Charles and nine powerful men, including ambassadors from several nations, and spins a fabrication about a professor who discovered a sexual stimulant inside pomegranate seeds, then distributes a pill to each man. The pills are a sensation. The next morning, embassy messengers flood in with orders. Mr. Mitsouko, a Japanese guest, orders 20 pills at double price, paying in gold coins. Oswald moves into a grand apartment, and when a Russian noblewoman accidentally swallows a pill and proves the powder works on women, he manufactures half-strength Ladies' Pills. Sales treble. By the end of his year in Paris, Oswald has approximately 100,000 pounds in the bank.

Oswald returns to England and enters Cambridge. World War I interrupts; he serves four years, earns a Military Cross, and returns in 1918. His chemistry tutor, A. R. Woresley, a middle-aged bachelor, becomes a close friend. Woresley shares a secret: beginning in 1905, after observing a goldfish survive being frozen in pond ice, he developed a method for preserving spermatozoa indefinitely at extremely low temperatures using liquid nitrogen and glycerol. A single bull's ejaculation can be divided into 250 frozen doses, each sufficient to impregnate a cow.

That night, Oswald conceives a grand scheme: collect and freeze sperm from the world's greatest living geniuses and royalty, then sell it to wealthy women who want children fathered by extraordinary men. Woresley objects that great men would never cooperate. Oswald bets him: within three days he will obtain Woresley's own sperm, freely given, with a signed certification. He recruits Yasmin Howcomely, a half-English, half-Persian biology student of extraordinary beauty from Girton College. Together they devise the method: dose targets with Blister Beetle powder concealed in a chocolate, use Yasmin's beauty to manage the encounter, and collect the semen in a condom, first obtaining a signature.

Yasmin visits Woresley's laboratory posing as a student. Nine minutes after eating the doctored chocolate, Woresley erupts into uncontrollable arousal. A chaotic encounter follows, and Yasmin escapes with the semen. Woresley, outraged but forced to accept that every future target will be equally compromised, joins the partnership. He agrees to build a portable liquid nitrogen container and maintain the central freezer, the "Semen's Home," in the cellar of a house Oswald purchases called "Dunroamin."

By June 1919, the trio compiles lists of targets: 10 European kings and 26 geniuses including Renoir, Monet, Einstein, Freud, Proust, Stravinsky, Puccini, Conrad, Shaw, and Kipling. To access royal palaces, Oswald forges letters on fabricated Buckingham Palace stationery introducing Yasmin as "Lady Victoria Nottingham," King George V's secret mistress.

Their first target is King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who invites "Lady Victoria" within hours. Yasmin executes the routine and escapes after an hour using a hatpin. In France, she visits the elderly Renoir and emerges in a state of awe, carrying a small painting; she visits Monet at Giverny and returns with a waterlily painting. Stravinsky and Matisse are collected smoothly, but Picasso produces their first failure: he springs at Yasmin before she can administer the powder or apply the condom. For Proust, who is entirely homosexual and protected by a vigilant maid-servant, Yasmin disguises herself as a beautiful young man, persuades Proust to wear the condom by calling it an invention of Oscar Wilde, and redirects his aim so he believes he is penetrating a man.

The tour continues through Europe. D. H. Lawrence in Capri proves sterile and is crossed off the list. Puccini requires no Blister Beetle: Yasmin sings an aria from Madame Butterfly outside his studio window at midnight, and the composer leaps out to embrace her. Freud provides a comic highlight when the Beetle strikes at the nine-minute mark, confirming Yasmin's fabricated diagnosis and intellectually staggering him. Einstein nearly discovers the scheme, the only target ever to suspect the chocolate. George Bernard Shaw, a lifelong vegetarian who would refuse chocolate, receives a triple dose in a Muscatel grape; the resulting explosion of energy is so powerful that the apparent virgin chases Yasmin's car down the garden path stark naked.

Over Christmas 1919, they undertake a Royal Tour, collecting from eight of nine remaining monarchs. In Oslo, disaster strikes: Yasmin accidentally eats the doctored chocolate herself and gives King Haakon the plain one. She loses self-control, lunges at the horrified King, and is dragged out by guards. They flee Norway.

Back in Cambridge, Yasmin insists on a month's rest. Privately, Oswald plans to steal the Semen's Home and keep 80 percent of future profits. But when he arrives at "Dunroamin" on May 15th, he finds a letter pinned to the door. Yasmin and Woresley have married and disappeared with the entire collection, leaving Oswald only 50 Proust straws. Yasmin's note explains that Arthur invented the process and she did all the hard work.

After raging through the house, Oswald's resilience reasserts itself. He returns to the Sudan, corners the market in Blister Beetles, and manufactures Potency Pills on an industrial scale. By 1925 he has agents in eight cities worldwide. He eventually sells the operation to a syndicate, making himself a multi-millionaire. The 50 Proust straws also serve him well: 14 children in France have Proust as their biological father.

The diary's final entry, from 1935, reports that the Woresleys have purchased the largest private property on the Côte d'Azur and an ocean-going yacht named SPERM. Oswald grudgingly admires Yasmin while confessing he cannot understand what she saw in Woresley. The diary closes with Oswald's characteristic dismissal of goodness in either men or women.