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Text Acts by Francis Booth
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: AU DÉBUT DE SIÈCLE Arthur Schnitzler Reigen Dream Story Henri Barbusse Hell Pierre Louÿs The Young Girl’s Handbook Three Daughters of their Mother Pybrac Guillaume Apollinaire The Eleven Thousand Rods The Exploits of a Young Don Juan Raymond Radiguet The Devil in the Flesh Aleister Crowley The Nameless Novel Paul Leppin Daniel Jesus Severin’s Road to Darkness Blaugast CHAPTER 3: PUBLISHED IN PARIS: OBELISK PRESS Frank Harris My Life and Loves DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer The World of Sex Lawrence Durrell The Black Book CHAPTER 4: SEX AND SURREALISM Researches Into Sexuality Louis Aragon Irène’s C*** 1929 Robert Desnos On Eroticism Liberty or Love The Devil’s Popess Salvador Dalí Rêverie CHAPTER 5: LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR Pierre Klossowski: Sade My Neighbour Maurice Blanchot: Sade’s Reason Simone de Beauvoir: Must We Burn Sade? Gilles Deleuze: Coldness and Cruelty Roland Barthes: Sade, Fourier, Loyola Angela Carter: The Sadeian Woman Georges Bataille Story of the Eye The Solar Anus Madame Edwarda The Little One The Dead Man My Mother CHAPTER 6: PUBLISHED IN PARIS: OLYMPIA PRESS
'Selena Warberg' (Diane Bataille) The Whip Angels ‘Jean de Berg’ (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) The Image 'Pauline Réage' (Anne Desclos) Story of O ‘Harriet Daimler’ (Iris Owens) Darling Innocence The Organisation The Woman Thing The Pleasure Thieves ‘Louise Walbrook’ (Edith Templeton) Gordon Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers The Thief's Journal Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg Candy CHAPTER 7: SEX AND THE NEW NOVEL Alain Robbe-Grillet A Sentimental Novel Marguerite Duras The Ravishing of Lol Stein The Lover The Malady of Death CHAPTER 8: ’PATAPHYSIQUE/OULIPO ÉROTIQUE ‘Sally Mara’ (Raymond Queneau) We Always Treat Women Too Well
‘Vernon Sullivan’ (Boris Vian) I Spit On Your Graves Harry Mathews Singular Pleasures CHAPTER 9: MY SECRET GARDEN: FRENCH Colette The Pure and the Impure Violette Leduc Thérèse and Isabelle Gabrielle Wittkop The Necrophiliac CHAPTER 10: MY SECRET GARDEN: ENGLISH Anaïs Nin House of Incest Winter of Artifice Delta of Venus Little Birds White Stains Auletris Edith Wharton Beatrice Palmato CHAPTER 11: MY SECRET GARDEN: GERMAN Unika Zürn Dark Spring Elfriede Jelinek Lust The Piano Teacher
AU DÉBUT DE SIÈCLE THE NEW SCIENCE OF SEX
seem too dully moral. Elegant titillation only begins where normal sexual relations leave off. Priapus has become a symbol of virtue. Vice looks to Sodom and Lesbos, to Bluebeard’s Castle, and the servants’ hall of the ‘divine’ Marquis de Sade’s Justine, for its embodiments. The book that would be fashionable must, above all, be obscure. The intelligible is cheap goods for the millions only.
Mere sensuality passes as commonplace, and only finds admission when disguised as something unnatural and degenerate. Books treating of the relations between the sexes, with no matter how little reserve,
That was Max Nordau, from Degeneration (Entartung), his extended rant against fin de siècle modernism, first published in German in 1895 and in English in 1898. He took his ideas on degeneracy from Bénédict Morel, via Cesare Lombroso, who wrote that criminality was inherited and that ‘born criminals’ could be identified by their genetic defects. Nordau extended these ideas into the area of culture, dedicating his book to Lombroso.
Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists… Some among these degenerates in literature, music, and painting have in recent years come into extraordinary prominence, and are revered by numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and heralds of the coming centuries… I have undertaken the work of investigating (as much as possible after your method), the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia. But Nordau’s tirade did not stop the march of the moderns into the early twentieth century with their explicit emphasis on the erotic and the perverse – not at least until the Nazis began to persecute degenerate art (entartete kunst), literature and music in the late nineteen thirties.
Around the time Nordau was writing, the new science of sexology was arising, treating sexual perversion not as a sin against God or a crime against humanity but behaviour that, though abnormal, was on a spectrum of human behaviours and explicable by rational means. At the beginning of the twentieth century, perversion and perversity were to be analysed and understood, classified and clarified, rather than condemned
and criminalised. The most influential study, and one of the earliest was Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1886, where he distinguishes between ‘perversity’ (Perversität) of desires and ‘perversion’ (Perversion), which is a pathological, medical condition. Psychopathia Sexualis is heavily influenced by the ‘decadent’ literature of its time; Krafft-Ebing’s ‘case studies’ are sometimes taken not from observations of life but from his reading of literature; he specifically states that, ‘inversion of the sexual instinct is not uncommon is proved, among other things, by the circumstance that it is frequently the subject in novels.’ Psychopathia Sexualis was published in an English translation
in 1893 and Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion was published in 1897, two years after Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial for sodomy. (It had been published in German the year before; it was later republished as Volume Two of Studies in the Psychology of Sex). Ellis had been a well-known literary critic and editor and his work, like Krafft-Ebing’s, was imbued with literary references; his co-author was the gay poet and critic John Aldyngton Symonds. Ellis’ wife Edith Lees was also gay and they had a decidedly semi-detached marriage but Ellis in his works is very sympathetic to homosexuality and, while still treating it as a perversion, argues that it should not be criminalised or treated as an illness. Unlike Nordau, but like several other analysts he mentions, he does
not regard ‘inversion’ as a form of degeneracy, but potentially a spur to literary and other artistic creativity. ‘It is now widely recognised that we gain little by describing inversion as a degeneration.’ Ellis argues that much of modern literature has been produced by a homosexual sensibility, mentioning several contemporary poets including Symonds. ‘As regards the modern poetical literature of feminine homosexuality,’ he says that most ‘feminine singers of homosexuality have cautiously thrown a veil of heterosexuality over their songs.’ And as for the contemporary novel Ellis says: ‘Novels of a more or less definitely homosexual tone are now very numerous in English, French, German, and other languages,’ and goes on to list many of them over several pages. In his 1898 publication, Affirmations – a work of literary criticism not sexology – Ellis separates literature into two kinds: ‘In its chief but rarer aspect literature is the medium of art, and as such can raise no ethical problems.’ This rare kind of literature is sublime, and above all
moral criticism. ‘Of the literature that is all art we need not even speak… In literature, as elsewhere, art should only be approached as we would approach Paradise, for the sake of its joy.’ The other kind of literature is ‘not all art – literature of life.’ This kind of literature can not only be subject to criticism but can also be used as a window into the morality of an age. ‘In this book I deal with questions of life as they are expressed in literature, or as they are suggested by literature. Throughout I am discussing morality as revealed or disguised by literature.’ As opposed to discussing
morality as revealed by the case studies of individuals, as in most of his sexological work. ‘So far as possible I dwell most on those aspects of my subjects which are most questionable… If a subject is not questionable it seems to me a waste of time to discuss it.’ Ellis then goes on to discuss authors generally considered highly questionable and in Nordau’s terms, decadent:
Nietzsche, Casanova, Zola and Huysmans. In Volume One of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis is very concerned with what he calls autoeroticism, which includes not just masturbation but all forms of sexual feeling and activity that are not directed towards another person. He includes long and very explicit first person descriptions of female
masturbation in the form of case studies, stating that female masturbation is as universal as male. Moreover, he argues that masturbation is neither the evil that religion held it to be nor the destroyer of health and cause of blindness. He says that, although it is not natural, masturbation must not be restrained and that auto-eroticism is essential for artistic creativity. From one point of view it may be said that all autoerotic phenomena are unnatural, since the natural aim of the sexual impulse is sexual conjunction, and all exercise of that impulse outside such conjunction is away from the end of Nature. But we do not live in a state of Nature which answers to such demands; all our life is ‘unnatural.’ And as soon as we begin to restrain the free play of sexual impulse toward sexual
ends, at once auto-erotic phenomena inevitably spring up on every side and there is no end to them; it is impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilisation general, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse. ‘Without a certain overheating of the sexual system,’ said Nietzsche, ‘we could not have a Raphael.’ Ellis includes real-life case studies, often long, explicit, detailed, first-person narratives, including one in Volume Four of female masturbation and another, almost the length of a novella, by a young man recounting his sexual growth, which reads very much like the kind of erotic bildungsroman (coming of age novel) that we will shortly see in the works of Pierre Louÿs and Guillaume Apollinaire, though it is presented by Ellis as unadorned fact. The man recounts
his history of school-age, boys-only mutual masturbation, intercrural sex, prostitution (male and female, sometimes underage), marital infidelity, fellatio (homo- and heterosexual) and cunnilingus, which he ‘had lately heard about’; he does not tell us how. He tries it out for the first time on a housemaid. I soon found I experienced very great pleasure in this, as did she. (I had attempted it with my wife, but found it disgusted me.) I also had intercourse per anum. (This again was an act I had heard about, but had never been able to regard as pleasurable. But books I had been reading stated it was most pleasant to both man and woman.) She resisted it at first, finding it hurt her much; it excited me greatly; and when I had done it in this way several times she herself seemed to like it, especially if I kept my hand on her clitoris at the same time. We can see from this extract, whether it is fact or fiction – either foisted on Ellis by the subject or foisted by Ellis on us – the interplay between scientia sexualis –
‘scientific’ sexology – and creative literature. In fact, the subject himself mentions that an old ‘college-chum’ has lent him some erotic books that ‘had a decided effect. They gave me erections; and it was on top of the excitement thus engendered that one day I got a woman to do fellatio’. Life imitates art imitates life. Although presenting his work as scientific research, Ellis as a writer and editor himself cannot resist the impulse to tell stories, to entertain the reader, to turn the
facts into literature. By doing this, he, Krafft-Ebing and the others provided source material for contemporary and later novelists to internalise and reshape; art imitating science. In Volume Three, Ellis includes several case studies which also reflect the erotic bildungsroman, where he examines, ‘the tendency of young girls to manifest sexual impulses when freed from the constraint which they feel in the presence of adult men and from the fear of consequences. These histories show especially how very frequently nurse-maids and servantgirls effect the sexual initiation of the young boys entrusted to them.’ He quotes several previous studies to this effect, referring to ‘the frequency with which servant-girls (between the ages of eighteen and thirty) carry on sexual practices with young boys (between five and thirteen) committed to their care,’ and another referring to ‘the frequency with which servant-girls corrupt boys by teaching them to masturbate.’ This creative reciprocity between sexuality and literary authorship was well understood by another great
pioneer of sexual openness, Sigmund Freud, who was a friend of Arthur Schnitzler, the first author we will be looking at in this chapter. In Freud’s 1908 paper Creative Writing and Daydreaming, he made a similar point to Ellis, associating sublimation of the sexual drive with artistic activity. Before this, in his ground-breaking 1905 work, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud had introduced the idea that ‘normal’ sexual desires and behaviour in in the normal adult are
arrived at by a series of ‘perversions’ in infancy and young adulthood. Adults who have perverse sexual desires are not degenerate or criminal or mentally ill but have simply not developed properly. In view of the now recognised great diffusion of tendencies to perversion the idea forced itself upon us that the disposition to perversions is the primitive and universal disposition of the human sexual impulse, from which the normal sexual behaviour develops in consequence of organic changes and psychic inhibitions in the course of maturity… We have thus been forced to perceive in every fixed aberration from the normal sexual life a fragment of
inhibited development and infantilism. Even what Freud calls ‘normals’ look upon the ‘milder transgressions’ as ‘other intimacies,’ a part of the range of their sexual experiences. ‘In no normal person does the normal sexual aim lack some designable perverse element.’ Some perversions may be so extreme as to be called ‘morbid’ but, ‘even in these cases one ought not to feel certain of regularly finding among the perpetrators persons of pronounced abnormalities or insane minds.’ One lesserknown sexologist of the time, Iwan Bloch, was even more responsible for the rise of eroticism in the literature of the early twentieth century than Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, and possibly even Freud. He not
only invented the term (Sexualwissenschft) in his 1906 book, The Sexual Life of Our Time and Its Relations to Modern Culture (first published in English in 1908), and not only published in the same year two works on the Marquis de Sade and one on Sade’s critic Rétif de la Bretonne, but had also been responsible for the first publication of Sade’s most extreme work The 120 Days of Sodom in 1904. (Everyone, including Sade himself, thought that the manuscript had been lost.) Bloch introduced the work as not so much a novel as a scientific treatise, as the principal work of the Marquis de Sade, in which he gathered all his observations and ideas on the sexual life of man, and on nature and the varieties of sexual perversions. It is composed according to a systematic plan, with the aim of a scientific grouping of the examples cited. Even Krafft-Ebing, who coined the term sadism (as well as the terms masochism and paedophilia) a few years earlier, had said that the ‘notorious Marquis de Sade, after
whom this combination of lust and cruelty has been named, was such a monster’. Now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, he is presented sympathetically as a classifier and chronicler, a detached scientific mind reporting on his voyages into the uncharted waters of sexuality. Even before this, in 1899, Bloch had placed Sade in the public eye when he published The Marquis de Sade and his Time (Der Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, under the pseudonym Eugen Dühren, first
translated into English in 1948), where he analyses, very sympathetically, Sade’s life and work. Unlike Krafft-Ebing, who considers Sade as an example of a certain kind of sexual pervert, and unlike the French philosophers we will be looking at in a later chapter, who considered Sade as a philosopher, Bloch treats him as a social commentator, regularly comparing his descriptions of Paris to the autobiographical writings of his near-contemporary Casanova. Bloch points out that, although much of Sade’s work was written while he was imprisoned in various institutions, from 1790 to 1801 he was in Paris, ‘in complete freedom.’ According to Bloch, the Paris of Sade’s time, with its rampant prostitution, its ubiquitous debauchery and libertinism, its disregard for human life – all of which had trickled down from the depravity of Louis XV, whose personal brothel, the Deer Park, was constantly restocked with large numbers of young prostitutes at such an enormous cost that it almost bankrupted the country, and was a great source of inspiration for Sade – was so grotesque, so extreme, that
all Sade had to do was record what he saw with, at the most, minor exaggerations, as if through a magnifying glass. Then, in 1909, Guillaume Apollinaire, whom will come back to shortly, published a selection of Sade’s work, calling 120 Days ‘a rigorously scientific classification of all the passions in their relationship to the sexual instinct,’ the founding work of ‘sexual psychopathology.’ Apollinaire predicted, with amazing clarity, that, ‘this man who seemed to count for nothing throughout the nineteenth century might well dominate the twentieth.’
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
It is difficult now to describe just how important Arthur Schnitzler was at the end of the nineteenth century in a Vienna that was then at the heart of the heart of European culture. A distinguished Yale historian wrote a book about the rise of the European middle-class and called it Schnitzler’s Century. In my book Everybody I Can Think of Ever I tell the story of Schnitzler’s meeting with Ezra Pound, George
Antheil and Antheil’s wife, who was Schnitzler’s niece. Pound – who had very little respect for anyone – was almost in awe of meeting this distinguished old man. He had been a member of the group of writers in the 1890s known as Young Vienna, who met in the Café Griensteidl, which included Hugo von Hofmannsthal, among other things Richard Strauss’s librettist, and Felix Salten, who wrote both Bambi and the pornographic novel The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher. Schnitzler’s first play, Das Märchen (The Fairy Tale), was performed when he was thirty-one. He was both a pioneer of literary modernism – an early exponent of the interior monologue, which as an acquaintance of Sigmund Freud and analyst of his own dreams, was very important to him – and a political satirist; both got him into trouble with the authorities. He was born into a Jewish family where practically everyone was in the medical profession. His father was a doctor, his mother a doctor’s
daughter, his brother became a surgeon and his sister married another doctor. Because Schnitzler was one of the first writers to explicitly describe erotic fantasies, critics have often called him the Freud of fiction, though he would not have liked the comparison. However, like Freud he was interested in the experiments in hypnosis conducted by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris and hypnotised many people himself until criticism forced him to stop. Freud was certainly an admirer of Schnitzler’s though, even if his admiration was not requited. Freud wrote to him, ‘your determinism as well as your scepticism – what people call pessimism – your preoccupation with the truth of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives in man, your dissection of the
cultural conventions of our society, the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity’. Although Schnitzler’s brother Julius played cards with Freud every weekend and his brother-in-law diagnosed Freud with cancer of the jaw, Schnitzler was not entirely convinced about Freud and Freudianism. He wrote in his diary: ‘His whole character attracted me, and I sense a certain desire to talk with him about all the abysses of my work (and my existence) – but I don’t think I will’. Schnitzler kept the diary for most of his life, hardly ever missing a day – the manuscript runs to around 8,000 pages. He recorded his erotic thoughts and experiences as well as over 600 of his dreams. Schnitzler also recorded all the
orgasms he experienced and added up the total at the end of the month: sometimes as many as eight a night and usually about fifty a month. He also recorded how many times he made love to any particular woman – there were a lot of women and there was a lot of lovemaking. With one of his mistresses he records that in the 11 months since they have met they have made love 326 times. By the time the relationship ends he has recorded 583 instances. It is not known whether Schnitzler had seen Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with its famous catalogue aria, but he did not need a Leporello to record his sexual conquests for him.
REIGEN Schnitzler’s play Reigen is best known now for the two French films of it, both called La Ronde – one directed by Max Ophüls in 1950 and one by Roger Vadim in 1964 – and in David Hare’s 1998 adaptation The Blue Room. (Coincidentally, Nicole Kidman starred in the Broadway production of Hare’s play and also starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which is based on Schnitzler’s Dream Story.) It is sometimes translated as Round Dance – Cassel’s German Dictionary of 1893 gives its meanings as: procession; row of dancers and singers; chain or round dance; roundelay; refrain; dance and song. It can refer to a kind of formal dance in which the dancers regularly change partners, or it can refer to the dance of death – the todentanz or danse macabre – as well as to the old English tradition of young unmarried people symbolically dancing around the maypole in the fertile season of Spring before having sex in the woods. Even by Schnitzler’s standards Reigen is cynical and amoral. It has the world-weariness of much fin de
siècle literature, which is well described by the German word weltschmerz. In fact, although Schnitzler had written it in 1896 and 1897 he hesitated for the rest of the century before having it printed privately in an edition of 200 copies for friends and colleagues in 1900. He said in a letter, ‘it is quite unprintable, not of much literary importance, but, dug up after a few hundred years, might throw a unique light on part of our culture’. Reigen was printed for public consumption in 1903 and sold 40,000 copies before it was banned
in Germany in 1904. Much later Schnitzler authorised the first stage performance for 1 February, 1921 in Vienna but it was banned by the local police on 17 February as a threat to public order. The first comprehensive critical work on Schnitzler, by Sol Liptzin, who knew him, was published in 1932, the year after Schnitzler’s death, and contains an excellent summary of the play. For Liptzin, Schnitzler is not a cynic at all but an unmasker of cynicism in others. Reigen is a series of 10 dialogues depicting the roundelay of sexuality. Like the dance of death, which the mediaeval artists were fond of portraying, the dance of sex may also lay claim to universality. In dispassionate, melancholy conversations, Schnitzler seeks to sketch the
pettiness, brutality, and absurdity of the sex experience whenever it is purely a physical expression devoid of spiritual meaning. With painful accuracy, he dissects what some people dare to call love but what to him is a ghastly desecration of this sacred term. He points out how much of human life is wasted in pursuit of a moment’s pleasure, how little this fleeting experience really should mean to reasoning creatures, and how horrible and inevitable are the disappointments that such moments bring in their wake. With outstanding courage, he tears off the mask of hypocrisy that covers sexuality. With amazing frankness, he reveals the technique of the game of sex as played by the many who seek the gratification of physical desires without the participation of their psychic personalities. He
shows how the man showers the woman until he succeeds in arousing in her a dangerous emotional wave, and how he then ruthlessly holds her away. He portrays the woman for whom, whether she be huntress or hunted, the sensual experience always ends in utter disillusionment. The play has no plot and no action, apart from the sex, which is merely indicated in the text by a row of dots across the page. In each of the ten
short scenes, one person from the previous scene meets a new person, they talk briefly, have sex and the scene ends. In the final scene, the prostitute from the first scene reappears, closing the circle. The characters come from all walks of life, from a Duke to a prostitute, but are not given a backstory or even names in the character list – they are merely characters, representative types, not individuals. Neither does the play or its characters really have any eroticism, not to mention tenderness, passion or love. There is almost no foreplay, no seduction; the women are at least as willing as the men, sometimes more so, and both parties approach the forthcoming sex act purely mechanically. Afterwards, there are no signs of tenderness, nor of remorse or regret on either part. The only scene in which the sex does not seem inevitable, the only one which has any real eroticism, any seduction, any hesitation on the part of the man, any reluctance on the part of the woman, indeed any sexual tension between the couples at all, is the one between the Young Master and the Maid.
YOUNG MASTER. (suddenly). Marie, come over here. MAID. (coming a bit closer). Yes, sir? YOUNG MASTER. Closer. That’s right. I was, um, just thinking… MAID. Yes, sir? YOUNG MASTER. I was just thinking… I was just wondering… your blouse… what kind of, erm…? Why don’t you come a bit closer, I won’t bite. MAID. (coming closer). What’s wrong with it sir? Don’t you like it? YOUNG MASTER. (stretches out to feel the blouse, pulling her down close to him). Is that blue…? What a lovely shade of blue. Simply. I like the way you’re dressed, Marie. MAID. Oh, sir. YOUNG MASTER. What?… He has unbuttoned her blouse. Matter-of-fact. You’ve got beautiful skin, Marie. So pale. MAID. Oh, sir, you make me blush. YOUNG MASTER (kissing her breasts). There. That didn’t hurt, did it?
MAID. No, sir. Sighs. YOUNG MASTER. Listen to you! What’s the matter? MAID. Oh, Master Alfred. YOUNG MASTER. And those sweet little shoes you’ve got on…
MAID. But, sir… Someone might ring… YOUNG MASTER. Who’s going to ring now? MAID. But, sir… it’s broad daylight. YOUNG MASTER. You needn’t be shy in front of me. Or in front of
anyone… someone as pretty as you. Honestly, Marie, you’re… you know, even your hair smells wonderful. MAID. Master Alfred. YOUNG MASTER. Don’t give me that, Marie… I’ve seen you… the other evening, when I came in late. I went out to the kitchen for a glass of water… your door was open, and… the cover had slid off your bed… MAID (covers her face). God, I never thought you could be so –
YOUNG MASTER. And I saw you then, all right. I saw this, and this, and… this… and… MAID. Master Alfred… YOUNG MASTER. Come on… here… yes, like that… that’s right… MAID. But what if someone rings the doorbell… YOUNG MASTER. Stop fussing… anyway, they can wait… ................................ ................... The doorbell rings.
DREAM STORY
Again, Sol Liptzin provides a perfect introduction to Schnitzler’s late novella, Traumnovelle, which was the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, with its notorious central orgy scene (borrowed from Paul Leppin’s Daniel Jesus, which we will look at shortly). In Traumnovelle, Schnitzler depicts dream hours that blend so
perfectly with waking hours that the reader is unaware when the former begin and when the latter end. This tale, which appeared in 1926, centres about a couple… The Viennese physician Fridolin and his wife, Albertine, have attended a masquerade ball. The insignificant flirtations which brushed past them at this affair pursue them in their dreams. The suppressed desires and ‘extramarital’ longings of both seek expression in illicit visions, when the rational faculties are dulled. After the ball, during which they have resisted the temptations of anonymous infidelities, the couple confess their emotions to each other. They are interrupted when Fridolin is summoned to a dying patient. This is the start of a number of strange experiences for him: when he arrives the patient is dead but his daughter confesses to Fridolin that she has always loved him and embraces him in front of her father’s dead body. When her fiancé arrives, Fridolin leaves and he is followed in the street by a prostitute. Later he gains entrance, uninvited, to a
figures in glorious full bloom; and the fact that each of these naked beauties still remained a mystery, and that from behind the masks large eyes as unfathomable as riddles sparkled at him, transformed his indescribably strong urge to watch into an almost intolerable torment of desire.
private club where masked, naked women dance with rich men. The room opposite was suffused with dazzling light, and there the ladies were standing motionless, each with a dark veil covering her head, brow and neck, and a black lace mask over her face, but otherwise completely naked. Fridolin’s eyes roved angrily from sensuous to slender figures, and from budding figures to
Here we have the male erotic fantasy of anonymous, naked women with no faces, no names, no stories; having no desires of their own except to be possessed, they are desirable women who are all available to anyone who desires them. One beautiful, masked woman tells him that he is in danger of being found out and should leave but he stays with her. When he is discovered, the woman saves him from danger by using her body as ransom, though he does not know why: had his, Fridolin’s, sudden appearance brought about some miraculous reformation in her? After everything he had experienced that night, he found it impossible – and he was not
conscious of any affectation in the idea – to believe in such a miracle. But perhaps there are times, or nights, he thought, when some strange irresistible magic does emanate from men who under normal circumstances are not imbued with any particular power over the opposite sex? And here again we have the fantasy, common to all pornography, of the ‘strange irresistible magic’ that makes any woman available to the male consumer. Later, when Fridolin arrives home, Albertine is asleep but wakes up laughing hysterically. She tells him that she has had a dream of herself sleeping with different men, while he remained faithful to her, resisting the seduction of a beautiful, naked young princess, even while he was being tortured and crucified. Albertine tells him that in the dream, her hysterical laugh was at the sight of him being put to death. Fridolin is appalled, seeing his wife’s true nature revealed as being unfaithful and cruel; as he says to her later, ‘no dream is altogether a dream’. He tries to get revenge by
continuing his earlier experiences, but none of them excite him anymore. The daughter of the dead man holds no attractions for him, the prostitute has gone to the hospital and the mysterious masked woman has disappeared; it is not clear to him or to the reader whether she has committed suicide and is in fact the body in the morgue that he visits. Was it her body? That wonderful, blooming body that yesterday
had tortured him with longing? He looked at the yellowish, wrinkled neck, noticed the two small girlish, yet slightly sagging breasts, between which the breastbone stood out under the pale skin with gruesome clarity, as if the process of decay already had set in; followed the contours of her lower body, noticing the way the well-formed thighs spread out impassively from shadowy regions that had lost their mystery and meaning. Fridolin now sees how fleeting physical attraction is, and how closely eroticism and death are intertwined; his pursuit of the erotic mystery has led him into a danse macabre very similar but more explicitly outlined than the one in Reigen. Even if the woman he was looking for, had desired and for an hour perhaps loved were still alive, and regardless of how she continued to conduct her life, what lay behind him in that vaulted room – in the gloom of flickering gas lamps, shadow shades, as dark, meaningless and
devoid of mystery as they – could now mean nothing to him but the pale corpse of the previous night, destined irrevocably for decay.
HENRI BARBUSSE
Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was born in France to a French father and English mother. He served in the First World War, when he was in his forties, in order to fight imperialism. But he became rapidly disillusioned and in 1916 wrote his most well-known work, a naturalistic novel about his war experiences called Le Feu (The Fire, first translated as Under Fire). In May 1919 Barbusse co-founded and
led the Clarté movement, a group of internationalist, anti-war French intellectuals, which was to become ‘an International of the Mind’. The British section, including Bertrand Russell, was formed soon afterwards. But Barbusse lost the support of many intellectuals as he led the movement towards Russia and the Bolsheviks and after the Third communist International in 1922 took part in the founding of the French Communist Party. Barbusse also founded a magazine called Clarté and the political journal Monde which he ran from 1928 to 1935, in opposition to the traditional literary and political publications in French, which were unsympathetic to avant-garde and left-wing material. Like Karl Marx, Barbusse believed that no two working classes should ever be at war with each other; that the enemy of the working class is the upper class of their own country, not the working class of any other. There are but two nations in the world – that of the exploiters and that of the exploited. The more powerful is the prisoner of the other, and we all belong,
proletarians of battles, to the one that is vanquished. Such is the tragic, mad, shameful reality. All the rest is but foul superannuated sophisms which will bring the world’s end by mere force of absurdity if slaves remain slaves.
HELL
Barbusse’s earliest novel, Hell (L’Enfer) of 1908 was astonishingly successful for a philosophical novel in which fundamentally nothing happens. In 1917 alone, the year after Barbusse won the Prix Goncourt for Under Fire, it sold over a hundred thousand copies in France. It is in the tradition of
Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Goncharov’s Oblomov, and has a solipsistic, solitary narrator who does nothing but simply watch others. But it is also a proto-existentialist work, bringing to mind Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people,’ not to mention Camus’ or Beckett’s novels. (While she was Samuel Beckett’s lover, Peggy Guggenheim used to call him Oblomov.). The narrator is a single, 30-year-old man who tells us very little about himself except that he lost his parents when he was young and that he has come to Paris to work in a bank. Was I happy? Yes, I had nothing to mourn or regret, I had no complicated desires. Therefore, I was happy. I remembered that since my childhood I had had spiritual eliminations, mystical emotions, a morbid fondness for shutting myself up face-to-face with my past. I had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become submerged in the positive nothingness of every day.
The narrator does not talk about his work, which seems to mean nothing to him, nor does he seem to have any friends or relatives. Although he is fundamentally not unhappy, he wishes that ‘something partaking of the infinite would happen to me. I had no genius, no mission to fulfil, no great part to bestow. I had nothing and I deserved nothing but all the same I desired some sort of reward.’ He has moved into a
boarding house and has discovered that there is a small hole in the partition between his and the next room, through which he can see and hear. ‘I possessed that room. My eyes entered it. I was in it. All who would be there would be there with me without knowing it.’ But of course they are not ‘with’ him at all, and neither are they, in any deep emotional sense, ‘with’ each other. Like Schnitzler’s couples onstage in Reigen, pairs of people of all ages and situations, without names or back stories briefly come and go, parading unknowingly in the peepshow for which he is the sole audience member. He turns out to be a committed voyeur, watching silently a selection of brief, loveless, angst-ridden couplings that include lesbianism, underage sex, adultery and death. The narrator raises the question, a question which is today important in any discussion of pornography: does the passive watching of the intimate moments of others do harm? And what if the others are not aware of being watched? He has, at least at the beginning, a strong sense of propriety. ‘I had a sense of good and evil. I would not have committed an
indelicacy, even if certain of impunity… If everyone were like me, all would be well.’ Would it? He sees the boarding house’s maid in the room next door; she of course believes she is alone. ‘She was in that perfect innocence, that purity which is solitude. I desecrated her solitude with my eyes, but she did not know it, and so she was not desecrated.’ Wasn’t she? And what about all the others who follow? Neither the narrator, nor his novelist, tell us what to think, though this is deeply philosophical novel, an early formulation of existentialism, as well as an early example of the controlling nature of what Freud had identified in his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as scopophilia; what Laura Mulvey much later called the male gaze. His first act of voyeurism has an erotic charge for him, even though the maid does nothing but sit down and read a letter, which the narrator assumes is from a boyfriend; after reading it she kisses it. ‘I witnessed her love as no other person had. And that simple gesture of kissing the paper, that gesture buried in a room, stripped bare by the dark, had something sublime and awesome in
it.’ And this experience, like all lonely acts of voyeurism, simply increases his feelings of isolation. ‘I returned to my corner lonely, more terribly alone than before… This woman entered into my intimate life and took a place in my heart. How? Why?’ The next couple he sees are a ‘little boy and a little girl, twelve or thirteen years old’, who may be cousins or may be brother and sister.
They sat down on the sofa, and looked at each other in silence. Their faces were almost alike. The boy murmured: ‘You see, Hélène, there is no one here.’ And a hand pointed to the uncovered bed, and to the empty table and empty clothes-racks – the careful denudation of unoccupied rooms. Then the same hand began to tremble like a leaf. I heard the
beating of my heart. The voices whispered: ‘We are alone. They did not see us.’ ‘This is about the first time we’ve ever been alone together.’ ‘Yet we have always known each other.’ A little laugh… Then I heard one of them stammer and say sadly, with almost a sob: ‘We love each other dearly.’ Then a tender phrase rose breathlessly, groping for words, timidly, like a bird just learning to fly: ‘I’d like to love you more.’ To see them thus bent toward each other, in the warm shadow, which bathed them and veiled the childishness of their features, you would have thought them two lovers meeting. Two lovers! That was their dream, though they did not yet know what love meant… No doubt it was the first time that the two had sought to leave friendship and childhood behind them. It was the first time that desire had come to surprise and
trouble two hearts, which until now had slept. And all, unknown to them, under the eye of their neighbour. ‘They nestled as close together as they could. They brought to each other as much as they could. But they did not suspect what it was that they were bringing.’ He watches as the boy holds out ‘his awkward arms, without daring to look at her.’ And as the girl, the ‘skin of her neck, taut and satiny,
quivered. Half-blown and waiting, a little voluptuous because voluptuousness had already emanated from her, she was like a rose inhaling sunlight. And I – I could not take my eyes from them.’ And he does not take his eyes from them all the time they are ‘leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance;’ like Adam and Eve watched by a godlike observer, they ‘wandered in the penetrating light of paradise without knowledge.’ These underage ingénues have the closest emotional bond of any couple in the book. Next comes an adulterous couple who have no passion left and are simply going through the motions, trying to keep something, anything, alive. She merely murmured: ‘I am yours, I am yours. I give myself to you. No, I do not give myself to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong to myself?’ ‘Are you happy?’ she asked again. ‘I swear you are everything in the world to me.’ * * * * * * * * * *
suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are not going to love me always. You are going to leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything. Afterwards, when I return from – this – for good, to the great sorrow that will never leave me again, I shall say, “I have had a lover,” and I shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for a moment.’ According to the philosophy of this novel, that is all any of us can expect. As Barbusse’s narrator says:
Now, she felt, their bliss had already become a mere memory, and she said almost plaintively: ‘May God bless the bit of pleasure one has.’ A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer blasphemous yet divine. I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to give him. There was a
What richer alms could you bestow on these two lovers, when again love will die between them? For this scene is not the last in their double story. They will begin again, like every human being. Once more they will try together, as much as they can, to seek shelter from life’s defeats, to find ecstasy, to conquer death. Once more they will seek solace and deliverance. Again they will be seized by a thrill, by the force of sin, which clings to the flesh like a shred of flesh.
Yet once again, when once again they see that they put infinity into desire all in vain, they will be punished for the grandeur of their aspiration. I do not regret having surprised this simple, terrible secret. Perhaps my having taken in and retained this site in all its breadth, my having learned that the living truth is sadder and more sublime than I had ever believed, will be my sole glory.
PIERRE LOUŸS
Like his older contemporary and fellow Symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck, Pierre Louÿs (18701925) was born in Ghent in Belgium but lived in France and wrote in French. He was a distinguished literary figure and a member of the French literary establishment –
made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his services to French literature. Louÿs, born Pierre-Felix Louis, was a friend of and influence on Paul Valéry and Stephane Mallarmé as well as André Gide and Oscar Wilde – both well-known homosexuals, though Louÿs’ own sexuality appears to have been firmly hetero: there is an (over)abundance of voyeuristic lesbianism and young girls in his erotica but no male homosexuality or young boys. In fact at one time Louÿs gave Wilde an ultimatum: as Wilde described it in a letter of 1896: ‘Three years ago he told me I would have to choose between his friendship and my fatal connection with A.D. [Lord Alfred Douglas]. I need hardly say that I chose at once the meaner nature and the baser mind.’ Earlier, Wilde had asked Louÿs to read the proofs of the French edition of Salomé and had dedicated the play to him. He may also have asked Louÿs to turn into a French sonnet a love letter from Alfred Douglas, which was one of the most devastating pieces of evidence against Wilde in his disastrous trial for homosexuality.
Although Louÿs apparently disapproved of homosexuality, he was very attracted by lesbianism: one of his most famous works today, the elegant and mildly erotic Songs of Bilitis of 1894 – now mainly remembered for his close friend Debussy’s settings of three of them – has strong lesbian elements. The work was originally published as a literary hoax, Louÿs claiming that it was his translation of unknown poems by an early Greek poet of the
same era and sexual preferences as Sappho. It is currently available in an English translation with charmingly erotic drawings in the style of Aubrey Beardsley by Willy Pogány, which were originally commissioned for a private 1926 edition, though there have been several French editions illustrated by various other artists. Louÿs had started to publish very soft-core erotica alongside his serious fiction in 1891 with Astarte, a collection of erotic poetry that he included in his own literary magazine La Conque (The Conch). During his life it was rumoured that Louÿs wrote but did not publish some much more explicit literature, but it was only after his death that the true scope and explicitness of his erotic output was discovered. In his house were around 400kg of erotic manuscripts, none of which he had ever even attempted to publish. Like another contemporary, Franz Kafka, he wanted his unpublished works destroyed; he wanted, ‘to burn everything before dying, with the satisfaction of knowing that the work will remain virgin, that one will have been the only one to know it as well as create it… that it will not
have been prostituted.’ This is ironic, since the word ‘pornography’ literally means ‘writing about prostitutes,’ and some of his erotica heavily features prostitutes. In On Eroticism, Robert Desnos discusses Bilitis and the equally mildly erotic Aphrodite, but had probably never read or even seen the more explicit works. Talking of Pierre Louÿs in relation to eroticism would make one smile if the destiny of the writings had not given us these astonishing examples of a high literature assimilated by the
vulgar. In spite of his detractors, Pierre Louÿs is not a banal writer, everything he wrote always revealed a sympathetic sensitivity and among poets from the end of the last century, he is one of the few who has never consented to low work and whose attitude has always been worthy. He might not have said that if he had read Three Daughters of Their Mother, more of which shortly. All the unpublished erotic manuscripts were auctioned after Louÿs’ death and went to many different collectors; most of them have never been published or translated and may not even have been seen except by a handful of specialists. Louÿs’ English-language biographer, HP Clive, hardly mentions his erotic output except to say, in discussion of the despairing poems he wrote in his late years of illness and poverty: It is generally believed that certain erotic and even obscene poems and other writings which were published after his death date from this same period. The assumption is probably correct, although it must be pointed out
that not all such poems attributed to Louÿs are authentic. In any case, there can be no doubt that he never envisaged the publication of these works. But Louÿs cannot have written so much in a state of depression. His erotic works all show great joy in their writing, and a great relish for life, especially sexual life, even when their subject matter is dark. One can always sense that Louÿs is having fun, poking a stick at conventional Gallic morality with great glee. In his French-language biography (Une Vie Secrète, not available in English) Jean-Paul Goujon claims that, at least in terms of sheer volume, he was ‘probably the greatest French writer of erotica’, though this is quite a claim, especially in view of the output of the Marquis de Sade. In her essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ Susan Sontag claims that pornography is immune to parody. However, Louÿs parodied not only others’ but also his own works, sometimes writing not-forpublication pornographic versions of his published works; a rare exception being his most popular, non-erotic, novel (perhaps because
it does not have a classical theme) The Woman and the Puppet, which was made into movies in 1920, 1928, 1935 (as The Devil is a Woman by Josef von Sternberg, starring
Marlene Dietrich), 1959 (as La Femme et le Pantin by Julien Duvivier, starring Brigitte Bardot), and 1977 (as That Obscure Object of Desire by Luis Buñuel). It is available online, with other Louÿs works, at archive.org in a 1908 English translation by GF Monkshood. You can also find,
second-hand, an English-language Collected Works of Pierre Louÿs published in 1932, which includes the novels Aphrodite, Woman and Puppet, The Songs of Bilitis, The
Adventures of King Pausole, The Twilight of the Nymphs, Sanguines and Psyche.
THE YOUNG GIRL’S HANDBOOK
wit, irony and self-awareness differentiate it from pure pornography. The so-called handbook is ostensibly addressed to young girls, who are assumed to have a detailed knowledge of and interest in sexual matters. It begins: GLOSSARY
The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners: For Use in Educational Establishments (Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles à l'usage des maisons d'éducation), first published posthumously in 1926, is a highly pornographic, paedophile parody of the books on etiquette for young people of the time; despite the title, it is wholly unsuitable for use in educational establishments. Although it is clearly intended to arouse the average male reader, its
We have deemed it unnecessary to explain the words: cunt, slit, pussy, snatch, prick, cock, dick, ball, cum (verb), cum (noun), hard-on, jerk off, suck off, lick, blow, fuck, screw, lay, frig, bugger, ejaculate, dildo, lez, dyke, sixty-nine, going down, quim, slut, whorehouse. These words are familiar to all little girls. In this book I am generally considering only English translations, without going back to the original, but sometimes it is interesting to see how translators have approached the problem of scatological, slang and extremely
enfiler, enconer, enculer, décharger, godmiché, gougnotte, gousse, soixante-neuf, minette, mimi, putain, bordel. The imaginary girls whom Louÿs is addressing seem to inhabit a kind of slutty, pornographic version of a St Trinian’s world. Do not spit on passers-by from the balcony – especially if you have cum in your mouth. Do not pee from the top of the staircase to make a waterfall.
rude words; so for the interest and possible amusement of French speakers, here is the above list in the original French: Nous avons jugé inutile d’expliquer les mots: con, fente, moniche, motte, pine, queue, bitte, couille, foutre (verbe), foutre (subs.), bander, branler, sucer, lécher, pomper, baiser, piner,
The nicest gift that a little girl can give is her virginity. As that can only be given once, offer the gift of your bottom a hundred times over, and in that manner you will be able to perform a hundred courtesies. Among many other things, Louÿs satirises lesbianism, incest and class distinctions: ‘rim jobs are not appropriate things to give to your domestics. [Ne faites pas feuille de rose à vos domestiques.] This is a service that you may ask from them
but one less proper to render.’ He even, in one paragraph, manages to combine all three. If your dear father asks you to suck him, do not carelessly blurt out that his prick smells like the maid’s cunt. [Si monsieur votre père vous prie de le sucer, ne dites pas étourdiment que sa pine sent le con de la bonne.] He might wonder how you are able to recognise that scent. Louÿs also mercilessly satirises religion. He advises that if the priest gets in the habit of fucking you, buggering you, or discharging into your mouth, [Si votre directeur prend l’habitude de vous baiser, de vous enculer ou de vous décharger dans la bouche], before absolving
yourself of all that and everything else, keep him as a lover if you find him goodlooking, but find another confessor. From the canonical point of view, the former is inadequate. If you suck someone before going to communion, do not swallow the cum, as that would break your fast. You may drink it on Fridays, though. Cum, like milk, is not considered a meat product. Sometimes an overly supervised young girl will buy a little Virgin of polished ivory and use it as a dildo. This is a usage condemned by the Church. You may, on the other hand, use a candle to this effect, provided that the candle has not been blessed.
THREE DAUGHTERS OF THEIR MOTHER
old prostitute and her three nymphomaniac daughters, one of whom is distinctly underage, though all three are also prostitutes. As in most pornography of this kind, every imaginable combination of people and positions is gone through repeatedly, though all four women seem to prefer their sex to be anal, even if this is not necessarily to the narrator’s taste. However, Louÿs constantly tries to subvert the genre by drawing attention to himself as a mere reporter of the facts rather than as a novelist, thus excusing the repetition and lack of plot. That is the trouble with memoirs: they get monotonous. In a novel, this kind of repetition can never be excused, but in life it has to be accepted.
This long novel, Trois Filles de Leur Mère, also translated as Mother’s Three Daughters and as The SheDevils, is fundamentally pure pornography, very much in the mould of Victorian romps, where the narrator purports to be a student who is seduced by a thirty-six-year-
These short erotic scenes have as little connection with dramaturgy as with love… Please be kind enough not to think that I am making up these childish programs. If you can accept my style as not being that of a primer, have the grace also not to think that these dialogues are the fruit of my imagination.
youth, embarrassed by having to relate such experiences. ‘It is really more than painful for me to relate the following scene in detail. In fact, I cannot. It makes me ashamed of myself.’ And he even claims not to be excited by the relating of his experiences. The calm tone of the remarks I have made here are simply out of distraction (for this story excites me as little as if I were explaining to you how I finally learned Greek grammar)… In fact, I am becoming so distracted that I have now begun to start sentences without knowing how to finish them, something that never happened to me before. She climbed down into exactly the same position as the first time. If I ever write a novel I’m going to make sure that I vary the positions that the people take, but I’m writing this exactly as it happened and there is nothing to be done. The narrator, who gives his name only as X, presents himself as an inexperienced, naïve and unwilling
The narrator also purports to be ashamed at showing himself in a bad light: ‘I would have taken much more pleasure in inventing a story where I could give myself (so easily!) a sympathetic role… But why say any more? I’ve already written enough to hang myself in the eyes of my readers.’ At several points the narrator hands over his role, as it were, to the women, who relate their life stories to him – again, he
apologises for having to put his reader through such things but he is not, he says, making them up, simply relaying them. When she once again took up her narrative after a long interval, she said: ‘and now I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, just as if I were confessing…’ ‘What are we going to call this history of yours?’ ‘The story of all the hairs in my arse!’ said she, laughing. ‘We’ll never get finished. There’s enough material there to fill a hundred volumes.’ ‘This will only be a condensation for use in elementary schools!’ Sometimes the narrator claims the stories are too
extreme to relate, even for him. I used to have the words she uttered at this time written down, but I’ve ripped up the page. I don’t even have the courage to reread it to the end. There are two things my reader will never know: the words that Charlotte spoke on this occasion and the haste with which I am finishing this chapter. Scenes taken from life are much more difficult to relate than those invented by the author because the logic inherent in life is less clear and less easily seen than the logic of the tale. As with Young Girl’s Handbook, Louÿs ostensibly addresses himself to an imaginary young, female reader, who is assumed to be sexually knowing and experienced, as opposed to the
adult male who is the actual consumer of this kind of book. ‘You women will understand what I am trying to say much better, and that’s a good deal of consolation, for this book will obviously be more read by free women than by husbands.’
on top of her mother. I have only done it once, but I would gladly take the opportunity should it be presented to me again. I am speaking now to the young women who are holding this book and I would like to say… I am not
Without ever letting the slightest trace of surprise across my face, I saw that beyond the shadow of a doubt she was masturbating poor Charlotte only in order to drive her even wilder. My young female readers will have understood by this time what I am getting at, but for the others I will explain that Teresa, instead of hastening Charlotte’s orgasm, was indefinitely retarding it, making the girl wait and hope for it from one moment to the next. Despite the fact that my sexual exercises are ordinarily as reserved and conservative as my language, my moral scruples do not go so far as to prevent me from fucking a mother on top of her daughter and then deflowering the same daughter
trying to shock you, miss. Of course he isn’t.
PYBRAC Pybrac is almost certainly not just the filthiest poetry ever written, but the longest filthy poem ever written. It has only quite recently been translated to English; there are now two translations available, though one is only available in a private edition. One has to admire the sheer stamina of a writer who can write this volume of literate pornography and of a translator who can take 313 four line verses, written in rhyming
Alexandrines – the six-foot, iambic metre of classical French poetry, the vers héroïque, or grands vers – and translate them into rhyming, sixfoot English poetry. It could hardly have been a labour of love; possibly one of lust, though the translator (Geoffrey Longnecker, who also translated the Young Girls Handbook – in the tradition of pornographic writing, this may not be his real name) says in his preface,
‘regarding the sense of moral outrage, the reader may rest assured that in translating Pybrac, this translator’s moral sensibilities were as outraged as the reader’s will be upon reading it.’ Apparently, there
were originally even more verses, possibly many more, but they were dispersed when the original manuscripts were sold at auction in 1936. This is an amazing thought: just reading – let alone writing or
translating – the 313 verses we have would defeat all but the most determined and obsessive erotomane, but then Louÿs seems to have been the most determined and obsessive erotomane since Sade. Again, this poem is a parody as well as a pastiche, in this case of a long, moralistic poem by the 16th century Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac; this is an obscure reference even for the most educated French reader at the beginning of the 20th century and an unlikely target for such an extended pornographic tirade, during which Louÿs leaves no perversion unexamined. But Louÿs was an avid collector of early manuscripts and apparently spent much of his time studying them; towards the end of his life, when he was living in poverty, only the selling of these books kept him afloat. According to its translator, in Louÿs’ monumental, repetitive, fauxclassical epic: one quatrain follows another into what threatens to become a hypnotic, maniacal descent into the infinite. Almost every conceivable form of sexuality is represented at least once
throughout these rhymes. Louÿs’ pet predilections for sapphism, incest and prostitution find ample representation here, as do the typical scenarios involving fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation, and exhibitionism. But we also have, to varying degrees, paedophilia, analingus, urolagnia, bestiality, sadomasochism, sacrilege, coprophilia, and such less common – and darker – territories as necrophilia, rape, castration, emetophilia,
heterophilia, maschalagnia, mucophilia, and piquerism. That about seems to cover it. I intend to quote only a small number of verses, not including ones from the ‘darker territories’, but I think they will demonstrate both the humour and the poetic craft that are maintained throughout this epic journey through the furthest reaches of the sexual underworld. I will also include the French original just to show the skill, ingenuity and sheer heroics of the translator. All the verses begin ‘I do not like.’ I do not like to see little Lucille in bed, who holds her poor flushed cunt and questions with a moue, ‘Sucking’s easier, ma, can I do that instead?’ And is quickly cut short: ‘You’re going to fuck too’. Je n’aime pas au lit le petite Lucille, Qui prend son pauvre con douillet et cramoisi Dit: ‘J’aime mieux sucer, maman, c’est plus facile’ Et qu’on gifle d’un mot: ‘Tu baiseras aussi.’
I do not like to see the naïve future spouse Who pulls on the prick of her little intended And says, lifting up her petticoat and her blouse: ‘what has been rended once need not be defended.’
I do not like to see the Englishwoman clutch With her mouth a large cock that’s passionately firm I do not like to see her enjoy it so much That she gets off before her lover squirts his sperm.
Je n’aime pas à voir la naïve promise Qui tire par le vit son petit prétendu Et dit, en soulevant sa cotte et sa chemise: ‘Ce qu’on s de fendu, ça n’est pas defendu.’
Je n’aime pas à voir la bouche d’une Anglaise Avaler un grand vit qui bande éperdument. Je n’aime pas à voir surtout qu’elle s’y plaise Jusques à décharger plus tôt que son amant.
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE Our 20th century is much more passionate than the 19th. Guillaume Apollinaire Whereas some of the authors and books in this chapter seem to belong to the nineteenth century more than the twentieth, Guillaume Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitsky (18801918) was well ahead of his time and firmly of the 20th century. A precursor of the European avantgarde in general and the Surrealists in particular, he was a friend of Picasso and Alfred Jarry and is usually credited with having coined the words cubism, orphism (a branch of cubism that uses bright colours) and surrealism (to describe the work of Erik Satie) as well as having written
the first surrealist work: the 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias), which 30 years later was set as an opera by Francis Poulenc (but has never been published in English). Although he wrote in French, Apollinaire was a true pan-European – born in Rome, the illegitimate son of a young Polish noblewoman and an older, wealthy French/Italian Swiss army officer. He was educated in Monaco and Nice but did not become a French citizen until just before his death, though he fought in the French army during World War I and was badly wounded in the head. He was trepanned and survived but died in November 1918 of the Spanish flu, which killed more people in Europe than the whole of the war. His Calligrammes, first published in a book in the year of his death are typographical poems arranged in the
shape of objects; along with Mallarmé’s typographical experiments they were the precursor to the much later concrete poetry of the 1960s. Earlier, Apollinaire had published a group of animal poems he called a bestiary, with illustrations by Raoul Dufy (Apollinaire was inspired by Picasso’s experiments with woodcuts, but Picasso did not want to illustrate the book) and several novels including the tongue in cheek, semi-
autobiographical Le Poète Assassiné about a poet whose birth is celebrated by the ‘erection’ of the Eiffel Tower, rises to proclaim himself the greatest living poet and is promptly massacred by the mob. For a time in the early 1900s, Apollinaire worked in the L’Enfer (Hell) section of the French National Library in Paris, modelled on the library of the same name in the Vatican, which contained all the books
prohibited from general viewing, usually because they were considered pornographic. With two other people, Apollinaire published its first ever catalogue, which is still available. While there, he researched and wrote a book about the Marquis de Sade, which he published in 1909 under the title L’Oeuvre du Marquis de Sade; it has recently been translated into English as The Divine Marquis. While writing this work, Apollinaire clearly had many of Sade’s original manuscripts in his hand and was clearly revelling in them, as an explorer discovering the source of a river or an alchemist discovering a lost scroll on transmutation. ‘I have in front of my eyes the original manuscript – which has never before been mentioned – of the first version of Justine, the first spurt, the first draft of this work with all its erasures.’ He also has access to several letters, which he proudly reprints. ‘I now present the text of these letters in versions that are more exact than any published so far.’ Apollinaire, one of the great virtuoso jugglers of the French language himself, clearly appreciates Sade’s own unique use of language. ‘It should be understood that in Sade’s works, feelings that
come from the language of the words are very powerful.’ Like some of the later French writers we will examine, Apollinaire argued that Sade was by no means misogynistic. A large number of writers, philosophers, economists, naturalists, and sociologists from Lamarck to Spencer, met with the Marquis de Sade, and many of his ideas which terrified and disconcerted the minds of his time are still quite new… It seems that the time has come for these ideas –
which matured in the atmospheric hells of infamous libraries – and for this man – who appeared to count for nothing during at all the 19th century – to dominate the 20th century. The Marquis de Sade, the freest spirit that ever lived, had specific ideas on women and wanted them to be as free as men. These ideas, which will be published one day, gave birth to two novels: Justine and Juliette. It is not by chance that the Marquis shows heroines, not heroes. Justine is the former wife, enslaved, miserable and less than human; Juliette, on the contrary, represents the new woman that Sade foresaw, a woman that no one else had any idea of, who emerges from humanity, who has wings and who will renew the universe. Apollinaire ends his study: And to conclude this essay on one of the most amazing men who has ever appeared, it is advisable to transcribe this phrase in which the Marquis de Sade, aware of what he was, and with quiet pride
announced to a shocked world filled with terrified men: ‘I address only the people who are able to hear me, for they will read me without danger.’
THE ELEVEN THOUSAND RODS
No book better illustrates Roland Barthes’ idea of jouissance and the writerly text playing (en jouant) with words to evoke (sexual) joy in the reader than Apollinaire’s 1907 Les Onze Mille Verges, Ou Les Amours d’un Hospodar, starting with the title itself, translated variously into English
as The Eleven Thousand Rods and as The Debauched Hospodar. The French word verge is today normally used to mean penis but traditionally meant rod, as in the French phrase equivalent to the English ‘to make a rod for one’s own back’, or ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. A French-English dictionary of Apollinaire’s time gives its meaning as: rod; shank (of an anchor); handle (of a whip); birch, so the title gives a clear indication to the potential reader that it is a novel concerning flagellation – which, among many other things it is. But the title also refers to the story of les onze mille vierges, the eleven thousand virgins who, along with Saint Ursula, were murdered in Cologne for refusing to have sex with the Hun army. It is Apollinaire’s joy with wordplay that lifts the novel well above pure pornography, even though it contains all the elements of the most determinedly pornographic novel – every conceivable kind of sexual and scatological description appears on practically every page, but always described with an almost ecstatic rejoicing (réjouissance) in the possibilities of the French language itself. Apollinaire’s close friend Picasso said that Les Onze Mille
Verges was the best novel he had ever come across – there is a copy extant of the book with Apollinaire’s dedication to Picasso as an acrostic on his name. The surrealist poet Louis Aragon was more ambiguous in his praise: ‘it is perhaps this book of Apollinaire where his humour appears the most purely’. Robert Desnos, who, as we saw wrote his own book on eroticism, said ‘Apollinaire’s entire work is a testimony to love’. Desnos
understands that this work is Apollinaire’s homage to the Marquis de Sade, especially to the 120 Days of Sodom, which is also ‘an exact catalogue of the forms of love.’ Traversing the adventures of an extreme fantasy, in the eulogistic sense of the word, our heroes revel themselves without baseness or filth as scatologists, sadists, masochists, masturbators, sodomites, flagellants. [A travers des péripéties d’une fantaisie extrême, au sens élogieux du mot, ses héros se révèlent sans bassesse ni ordure, scatologues, sadiques, masochistes, masturbateurs, sodomistes, flagellants.] Flagellants mostly! And it is to the dull sound of rods on the robust and blond flesh that the lyric voyage unrolls… [Et c’est au bruit mat des verges sur les chairs robustes et blettes que se déroule le lyrique voyage] But the tone is not as serious and tragic as de Sade… On this double point of love and humour [de l’amour et de l’humour] The Eleven Thousand Rods is a modern book and with Calligrammes the most
From the standpoint of social and psychological phenomena, all pornographic texts have the same status; they are documents. But from the standpoint of art, some of these texts may well become something else. Not only do Pierre Louÿs’ Trois Filles de leur Mère, Georges Battaille’s Histoire de l’Oeil and Madame Edwarda, the pseudonymous Story of O and The Image belong to literature, but it can be made clear why these books, all five of them, occupy a much higher rank as literature than Candy or Oscar Wilde’s Teleny or the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom or Apollinaire’s The Debauched Hospodar or Cleland’s Fanny Hill.
important work of Guillaume Apollinaire.
In her essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, however, Susan Sontag relegates this work to the realm of pornography not literature.
This seems a questionable judgement: we have already seen that Louÿs’ novel is not of the highest literary quality and it is certainly not in the same league as The Debauched Hospodar. One can only assume Sontag had not read it in the original French. Neither of the available English translations (one was issued in the New Traveller’s Companion Series, which we will examine in detail later) manages to capture the playfulness and the sheer joy of revelling in language of the
French original – though almost certainly no translation could. In English translation it does indeed seem flat and uninteresting linguistically, even though the humour of the extreme, surrealist situations still shines through. In quoting passages from the novel I will include the original French for comparison and try my best to point out some of the ways that Apollinaire has fun with the French language in this erotic romp. The anti-hero, Mony is a pretentious and ridiculous Romanian self-titled Prince recently arrived in Paris, who claims the absurd ancient title of Hospodar. One of the first women he meets there is Culculine – which might translate into British English as Arsearseine and American English as Assassine; she has a friend called Alexine Mangetout (Eat-all). Alexine turned round then and proffered her prettily roseate rear to the enormous prick which penetrated her rosebud, while she, impaled, cried out and shook arse and tits about. But Culculine, laughing, separated them. The two women resumed their gamahuching… it was thus he
discharged in long jets sucked from him by the avid anus of Alexine Mangetout. Like me, you may be surprised to know that gamahuche is a genuine English word, as well as a French one, meaning an act of fellatio or cunnilingus. But, apart from that word this passage and indeed the whole chapter, once translated into English, reads like pure, conventional
pornography. However, in the original French, it is far more euphonious and playful, revelling in its linguistic tricks; it is ‘really written’ and, despite Sontag’s rule that pornography has no maker’s mark, has a very strong and individual style. Alexine se retourna allors et présenta ses belles fesses rougies à l’enorme vit qui pénétra dans la rosette, tandis que l’empalée criait en agitant le cul et les tétons. Mais Culculin les sépara en riant. Les deux femmes reprirent leurs gamahuchage… c’est ainsi qu’il déchargea à longs jets tétés par l’anus avide d’Alexine Mangetout. The flatness of the English translation, of any English translation, compared to Apollinaire’s wonderful French is even more apparent in a later scene in the same chapter, which reads like a pornographic version of a Feydeau farce, and which involves the three people just mentioned plus two male passers-by. The coachman, thinking they were making fun of him, flew into a terrible rage.
Ah! Whores, pimp, carrion, dung, cholera, so you are making a fool of me? My whip, where is my whip? And catching sight and hold of it, he laid about him with all his might at Mony, Culculine and Alexine, whose naked bodies leapt about under the lashes that left bloody welts. Then he began getting another hard-on and, jumping upon Mony, started to bugger him. The front door had remained
open and the copper, not seeing the coachman return, had gone up and at that moment entered the bedroom; it didn’t take him long to produce his regulation prick. This he introduced into the arse of Culculine who clucked like a hen. In French, this reads like crazed, surrealist poetry: the English ‘you are making a fool of me? My whip, where is my whip’ in the original contains the play on words, ‘vous vous foutez de moi? Mon fouet, oú est mon fouet?’ And in the original the final sentence of the third paragraph above scans like poetry; if it were laid out in short lines like a poem it would read: Il se mit à rebander Et, sautant sur Mony Se mit à l’enculer Finally, in the original French of the next paragraph, ‘the arse of Culculine’ is the far more euphonious ‘le cul de Culculine’ and Apollinaire then mischievously rhymes ‘cul’ with ‘poule’ (hen). These are just some of the examples of Apollinaire’s joyful wordplay, which sometimes extends to the inclusion of actual poems, supposedly improvised on classical
themes by Mony, that are actually pure Apollinaire proto-surrealism. Hercules and Omphale reads The arse Of Omphale Overcome Collapses. Do you feel My phallus Acute? Some machine!! The dog Splits me!… What dream?… …Hold tight? Hercules The sodomite. Le cul D’Omphale Vaincu S’affale. Sens tu Mon phalle Aigu? Quel mâle!… Le chien Me crève!… Quel rêve?… …Tiens bien? Hercule L’encule
THE EXPLOITS OF A YOUNG DON JUAN Les Exploits d'un Jeune Don Juan, has also been translated as The Memoirs of a Young Don Juan, and The Amorous Exploits of a Young Rakehell. This 1911 book was also made into an French/Italian film with the original title. It is basically straightforward pornography and very far from the wordplay of Eleven Thousand Rods; it was apparently written to order at a time when Apollinaire was very short of money. It takes the form of a conventional Victorian erotic romp concerning the coming of age of a teenage boy (a pornographic version of the genre known as bildungsroman, though such novels usually involve moral and spiritual growth rather than sexual) who, while still young, has
sex with his sister, his aunt, and various local women. There is nothing particularly interesting about it, except its author. However, as John Atkins points out in his book Sex in Literature, it does contain one of the best descriptions of a boy’s first productive masturbation (though Portnoy’s Complaint took the lead in this field when it was published in 1969 and held it until Harry Matthews published Singular Pleasures in 1988: a whole book of short stories entirely about that singular pleasure). Here it is. A feeling of unspeakable pleasure made me stretch my legs out in front of me and push against the table-legs, while my body slid down and pressed against the back of the armchair. I felt my face flush. Breathing grew difficult. I found
I had to close my eyes and open my mouth. In the space of a moment or two a thousand thoughts raced through my head. My aunt, in front of whom I had stood naked, my sister whose pretty little pussy I had viewed, the two farm girls and their powerful thighs – all these images whirled through my mind. My aunt tugged faster and faster at my prick and an electric shock coursed through my body.
My aunt! Berthe! Ursula! Hélène!… I felt my member swell, and from the dark red glans spurted forth a whitish substance, a thick jet to start with, followed by a series of lesser squirts. I had just discharged for the first time. At the end of the book, all five of the women with whom he has had sex – including his aunt and sister – become pregnant, though none of them publicly acknowledge him as the father, and all are either already married or marry someone else before their babies arrive. The narrator ends, modestly, ‘I hope to have many more and thereby fulfil a patriotic duty, that of increasing the country’s population.’ Interestingly, the declining French population was a genuine problem at that time; a study showed that the French birth rate was only half that of Germany; Apollinaire’s near-contemporary Pierre Louÿs wrote pamphlets on the subject in the year 1900, advocating that, if the government really wanted to encourage a rising birth rate it should develop a more enlightened attitude towards
unmarried mothers, servants and factory workers to protect them against dismissal during pregnancy and immediately after the birth, offer poorer women the chance to place their children in publicly funded childcare for two years after the birth and make marriage easier. At that time many documents were needed in order to get married and the law forbade any man under the age of twenty-five and any woman under the age of eighteen to marry without their parents’ consent. Louÿs may seem an odd advocate of sex within marriage, but he himself did his part: his last wife gave birth to their third child three days after his funeral.
RAYMOND RADIGUET
It was at one of Apollinaire’s parties in 1919 that the 15-year-old Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) met the poet and playwright Jean Cocteau – Cocteau’s valet introduced him as ‘an infant with a cane’. Cocteau later drew him (above) as did Picasso; Man Ray took his photo. Although Radiguet was only a boy in terms of physical age, in his mental outlook and in his presentation of himself to the world, he was already a well-read, smart,
cynical adult. Radiguet was born just outside Paris to an artist/cartoonist father, the eldest of seven children who enjoyed a bourgeois, suburban childhood until his teen years when he discovered decadent and risqué literature – he was certainly well aware of Baudelaire and Rimbaud at an early age. Then, at the age of fifteen, two experiences encouraged him to give up school and become a writer: he had an affair with an older woman – the basis for his semiautobiographical The Devil in the Flesh – and he had his first poems printed in Le Canard enchaîné, the well-respected satirical newspaper founded in 1915 and still going today. Cocteau was smitten by his new infant – though Radiguet appears to have been straight and had several affairs with women – and he became Radiguet’s mentor, introducing him to the inner circle of avant-garde Paris-based artists and writers that included Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Brancusi, Picasso and Modigliani, who painted him at least once. Cocteau drew him many times also, and there are several photographs on the web of the two of them together, including some nude
bathing pictures. At first Cocteau did not much like Radiguet’s poetry, but he told him not to despair: ‘Arthur Rimbaud didn't write his masterpiece until he was seventeen.’ It was Cocteau who encouraged, indeed practically forced, Radiguet to fulfil his literary destiny, taking him on holiday and forcing him to write (in between the nude bathing). They founded a very short-lived literary review together, wrote a play, The Pelicans and with the composer Erik Satie they produced a comic opera. But Radiguet died of typhoid fever at the age of twenty (he got it from eating contaminated oysters, a very bohemian way to die), having only published some poetry and one novel – another was published soon after his death. His funeral was attended by le tout Paris, except for Cocteau, who was apparently too upset. One of Radiguet’s lovers, the British artist Nina Hamnet, wrote about the funeral in her 1932 autobiography Laughing Torso: The church was crowded with people. In the pew in front of us was the negro band from the Boeuf sur le Toit [the Paris café
the artists used; after Radiguet’s death wags called Cocteau ‘le veuf (widower) sur le toit’]. Picasso was there, Brancuși and so many celebrated people that I cannot remember their names. Radiguet's death was a terrible shock to everyone. Coco Chanel, the celebrated dressmaker, arranged the funeral. It was most wonderfully done. Cocteau was too ill to come.
THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH
The only novel published in Radiguet’s lifetime, The Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au Corps), first appeared in early 1923, nine months before his death. With Cocteau’s prompting it was published by the prestigious Bernard Grasset, who also published his five literary M’s: Paul Morand, Henry de
Montherlant, François Mauriac, André Maurois and André Malraux – a serious and distinguished literary stable. Grasset realised that the book by this – literally for once – enfant terrible would be considered highly scandalous and, rather than minimising its impact he sought to maximise it with what we would now call a pre-publication PR blitz. It worked in the sense of raising awareness and sales – 46,000 in the first month of publication – but it also put the backs of many critics up. They decided that someone so young could not write from his own experience, though in fact the novel is at least partly autobiographical. But what upset people the most – though it didn’t stop them buying it – was that the nineteen-year-old girl with whom the fifteen-year-old narrator has an adulterous affair is married to a serving soldier in the First World War. So soon after the war had ended, this was seen as being almost treasonous. To make it worse, the affectless narrator seems almost unaware of the war going on, despite the novel being set in 1917, and to have no moral scruples of any kind. He of course is too young to serve. But none of this stopped the
book selling and it has twice been made into a film – in 1947 and 1986. Although the narrator seems indifferent to the war, he gives it as an excuse for his lack of a moral compass. ‘I am sure to incur a good deal of reproach. But what am I to do? Is it my fault that I celebrated my twelfth birthday a few months before war was declared?’ He also says, ‘I have never been a dreamer,’ and his narrative is indeed very down to earth and flat. Until the age of twelve he says he has had ‘no sweetheart’ but then he gets involved in a letter exchange with a girl at school which gets him into trouble, though his teacher seems quite impressed with him. ‘In an ironical tone of voice the master addressed me as Don Juan. I was extremely flattered by this, especially as he was alluding to a
work that was familiar to me but not to my class-mates.’ But the narrator is more interested in reading than in girls. ‘In 1913 and 1914 I got through two hundred books. And not what might be called bad books; they might even have been considered the best, at least from a literary point of view, if not as training for a young mind.’ When, through his parents, the justteenage narrator first meets Marthe, the young woman with whom he will have the affair, then eighteen and engaged, he is more concerned with her literary taste than her sexual attraction. I was pleased that she had read Baudelaire and Verlaine and delighted at her reasons for liking Baudelaire, though they weren’t mine… In her letters her fiancé talked of what he was reading; but although he had advised her
to read certain books, he also forbade her to read others. He had forbidden her to read Les Fleurs du Mal. I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that she was engaged, but delighted to know that she disobeyed a soldier who was silly enough to be afraid of Baudelaire. When they part after their first meeting he promises to see her again and to bring her all his copies of the magazine Le Mot – which was published by Cocteau – and Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. ‘She laughed. “Another title my fiancé wouldn’t approve of!”’ Surprisingly, this turns out to be a successful seduction technique. Like his author, the narrator does not go to school, but spends his time with Marthe, intending to seduce her. ‘Happiness must be like this,’ he says, though his only idea of happiness has come from books. He senses that Marthe wants him to want her and feels that he ‘would soon tire of this silent room if she did nothing to bind me to herself.’ Although he does not say so, the virginal narrator may be afraid of
initiating full sexual contact; for all his worldly wisdom he is physically inexperienced and awkward. While they are lying, chastely, together on the floor, ‘I took advantage of her feigned sleep to breathe in the smell of her hair, her neck, her burning cheeks, no more than brushing them with my lips so as not to wake her. Such caresses are not, as is commonly believed, the small change of love, but on the
contrary its highest denomination, which only passion can afford.’ Or so you would think if you had read two hundred books but never had sex. He believes that he is staying ‘within the permitted bounds of friendship’ but he wants more than this: he wants rights over her. ‘I could quite well do without love, I thought, but I could not bear never to have any rights over Marthe.’ So he plucks up the courage to kiss her, though in fact it is she who has ‘drawn my head towards her mouth. Her hands clung to my neck; they would not have held me so fast in a shipwreck. And I did not understand whether she wanted me to save her or to drown with her.’ In the end, she does drown – metaphorically – but he does not go down with her. She tells him that he has to go, she’s too old for him, he’s just a child. ‘And whatever emotions I experienced subsequently, nothing could be quite like the delightful feeling of seeing a nineteen-year-old girl cry because she thought she was too old.’ But he doesn’t go and in the end he does get power over her as she submits, rather masochistically to him.
Marthe was mine; and it wasn’t I who said so, but she. I could touch her face, her eyes, her arms, dress her, hurt her; she was mine. In my ecstasy I bit her in places where her skin was exposed, so that her mother would suspect that she had a lover. I would have liked to mark her with my initials. In my childish savagery I rediscovered the ancient significance of tattoos. Marthe said: ‘Yes, bite me, mark me. I want everyone to know.’ The narrator then begins to resent Marthe’s husband, away at the front. He wishes that the war would take away his competitor. ‘I owed my newfound happiness to the war; I hoped the war would now complete its task. It must commit the crime for me, like a hired assassin.’ This of course was the kind of thing that upset patriotic French readers so much. But he soon becomes rather bored with Marthe and meanwhile all her friends and relatives have shunned her, so she now has no one. Uncaring, he decides to seduce a young Swedish girl. ‘I wanted Svea
not out of lust, but out of greed. If she had refused her lips, her cheeks would have satisfied me.’ He gets her drunk. Afterwards, I felt sorry for her: it was like making a little bird drunk. I hoped, nevertheless, that this would serve my purpose, for it did not matter to me whether she offered her lips willingly or not… I held her hand in my own clumsy hands. I would have liked to undress her and rock her to sleep. She lay down on the sofa. I raised myself and bent my lips to the fine down at the nape of her neck. I did not assume from her silence that my kisses had given her any pleasure; but she was incapable of indignation and could think of no polite way of rejecting me in French. I nibbled at her cheeks, fully expecting a sweet juice to squirt out, as from a peach. At last I kissed her lips. My patient victim submitted to my caresses, her mouth and eyes closed. Her only gesture of refusal was to move her head feebly from left to right, and from right to left. I did not delude
myself, but my mouth took this to be the response it desired. I felt with her as I had never felt with Marthe. This resistance which was no resistance gratified both my boldness and my indolence. I was naive enough to imagine that things would continue in the same fashion and that I would succeed in raping her without difficulty. I had never undressed a woman before; on the contrary they had always undressed me. As a result, my attempts to do so were clumsy in the extreme. I began by taking off her shoes and stockings. I kissed her feet and legs. But when I tried to undo her bodice, Svea fought like a tigress, for all the world as if she was a little girl who had refused to go to bed and had to be undressed by force. She kicked out at me wildly. I caught hold of her feet, held them tightly and smothered them with kisses. At last I reached the point of satiety, just as one’s greed is blunted by too much cream and too many cakes. I had to admit my deceit and tell her that Marthe was away. I made her promise that if she ever
saw Marthe again she would not tell her about our meeting. I did not admit openly that I was Marthe’s lover, but I hinted that I was. It was this area of mystery that prompted her to reply, when I asked out of politeness whether we would see each other again, that she would see me the following day. Of course, it is significant that this happens in Marthe’s room. ‘Would I really have wanted her anywhere else but in Marthe’s room? But I felt
no remorse. I abandoned her not out of regard for Marthe, but because I had taken all the sweetness from her.’ Marthe becomes pregnant and tells the narrator the baby is his. When she moves back to her parents’ home, the situation arouses him again. ‘Sexual fatigue and my unavowed desire to sleep alone disappeared. I never slept at home. I was aflame. I acted with all the haste of someone who is to die young and consumes life at the double. I wanted to have as much as I could have of Marthe before motherhood spoiled her.’ And of course Radiguet did die young, very young. But in the book, it is Marthe who dies, just after the baby is born. ‘My jealousy pursued her to the grave and I hoped that there was nothing after death… My heart was at an age when one does not yet think of the future.’ There is a very poignant postscript to this story. Radiguet and Cocteau always insisted the novel was fiction, but it wasn’t; it was based on Radiguet’s real-life affair when he was fourteen. And it ruined the lives of the real-life Marthe and her real-life husband. In 1952, now dying of leukaemia, he claimed that
the novel was fiction, the affair had never happened, but the story had been based on his recently-deceased wife’s wartime diary which Radiguet must have read and turned into a story, inserting himself into the narrative. She had not died young as in the novel, and her life and her reputation as well as that of her husband had been shattered. He had spent thirty years poring over the novel and annotating it, adding agonised notes pointing out correspondences and discrepancies between the novel and the diaries. Although the husband said he believed his wife, he had always had his doubts. He abandoned their child, even though he had polio, and the couple continuously moved to avoid real or imagined gossip. By the end of the Second World War, they had finally made peace with each other but then in 1947 the film appeared with the young lover being played by handsome and popular actor, ‘it began all over again’, he said. Perhaps fortunately for him, he did not live to see the 1986 Italian version of the film, which is quite raunchy, though the plot has less connection with Radiguet’s novel than it has with The Graduate.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ said Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), labelled by the press the wickedest man in Britain and by himself as the Great Beast 666, among many other titles. But although he studied and promoted Sex Magick and although he had a famously libertine lifestyle, Crowley is an unlikely participant in this book. Crowley travelled widely in India and China, studying their religions along the way, while doing some serious mountaineering. On his honeymoon in Egypt he claimed to have been visited by a spiritual being who dictated to him The Book of the Law, which became the basis of much of Crowley’s thinking and writing. His writings on Sex Magick are not in fact even slightly erotic, though they are esoteric. His fundamental view was that males and females are incomplete without the other, that the highest form of human activity is procreation and that by approaching a state of sexual ecstasy humans can encompass the
divine consciousness, dissolving the separation between ourselves and the divinity in moments of orgasm. However, the practice of Sex Magick is very demanding physically and spiritually and not simply a matter of the mass orgies that Crowley was, sometimes correctly, identified with.
THE NAMELESS NOVEL As well as the great bulk of his esoteric writings, Crowley also wrote poems and novels, which are less discussed and less well-known.
Almost entirely unknown is a piece of riotous pornography known as The Nameless Novel which was published in France in 1904 with some of his pornographic poetry in a
collection known as Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden. The socalled novel – it is in fact hardly even a novella, with no real plot – was apparently written to amuse his wife Rose while she was seriously ill. Although it is unquestionably deeply pornographic, the playfulness and excess of Crowley’s language lift it well above functional pornography and into the realms of the writerly text, full of Barthesian jouissance; one feels Apollinaire would have liked it. As with Apollinaire the descriptions are so gross, so outlandish, so obscene that they would hardly arouse the typical reader sexually; as pure pornography it would be a complete failure. The narration within the narration purports to be by an Archbishop, who tells his wildly over-exaggerated, proto-surrealist sexual history. The woman who features most prominently in the story is his first sexual encounter, the monstrous Leila. By race a full-blooded negress, by profession a three pennyuprighter, by education a woman of singular charm and
spirituality, by inclination a sapphist and cock-sucker, by disease a barrel, she was as delicious a rabbit-pie as I ever laid this knife to. Over six feet in height, she measured even more round her waist, owing to a dropsy on the one hand, and on the other to the presence in her uterus of a constant stream of elderly gentlemen engaged in a futile search for their headgear. Leila Waddell was in fact real woman, a professional violinist and
Crowley’s long-term mistress and drug-taking partner; she was not black, though rumour had it she was part Maori. Crowley referred to her at various times as the Divine Whore and the Scarlet Woman and dedicated books to her. In the novel she takes on truly legendary status. Her vade mecum had vibrated to the lusty rolling-pins of Sir H…t S…t’s column in the dusty Square of Abu Klea: she had held up the dying hero’s head with her black knees and received the last spending he ever spent this side of Heaven in her capacious mouth. She, and she alone, had avenged Arabi Pasha, when on the stricken field of Tel-el-Kebir, she pitched her cunt and poxed eleven thousand Tommies in one night. She was the veteran who stood by statued Memnon at sunrise, and with the music of her farts outsang the storied stone. She, uncrowned Empress of mankind, she, carrion of a million stallion men, she was my love, my dove, my undefiled! To me, the mere boy bugger of the Bay of Biscay, this peerless rantipole offered the squittery
slime of her arse-gut and the slithery spunkings of her forcepump, as well as the no less fucksmoothed dumb-oracle, her blubber potato-trap. To me! To me! To me all the juicy gamahuches of the morning! To me the fucks that give one zest for lunch! To me the buggerings of the early afternoon, and the bub and armpit joys that occupy the wise from five o’clock to dinner. To me the nameless raptures of the
evening and the night! O fucking! what fun you are! What fun indeed; Apollinaire would surely have approved of this riot of obscene invention and alliterative wordplay. (Note the use of the word gamahuche again.) It certainly seems as though Crowley had great fun writing this book, and although erotic is hardly the right word for it, and although literature is hardly the word for it, it is great fun to read.
PAUL LEPPIN Leppin was the truly chosen bard of a painfully disappearing old Prague, its infamous side-streets and debauched nights… Now a servant of the devil, now an adorer of the Madonna. Max Brod The Czech writer Paul Leppin (18781945) was a member of the circle of Prague German writers that included Oskar Wiener, Gustav Meyrink and briefly Rainer Maria Rilke, but not Leppin’s near-contemporary France Kafka (1883-1924), though they did share a connection through Max Brod, who called Leppin ‘the German-Bohemian Baudelaire’ because of his decadent lifestyle. This is reflected in that of the protagonists – one can hardly
call them heroes – of the three of his novels we are going to look at; like Leppin’s, own, all of his characters’ erotic journeys proceed inexorably downwards through darkness, dirt and decay. Leppin edited two literary publications: Frühling (Spring) and Wir (We) and published works by other writers of the anti-establishment Jung-Prag (Young Prague) group in the first decade of the 20th century. Although he attacked and was attacked by conservative elements in Prague, which considered him a blasphemer and pornographer – while being celebrated by the Expressionists in Berlin – he still considered himself ‘a monument to times past,’ a creature of the dark and spooky old city which appears like a gloomy and ghostly but strangely familiar character in most of his works; it is
the very centre of Leppin’s literary universe as it was of his life. When he married, his wife wanted them to move to Vienna but Leppin would not leave what is now the Vinohrady district — Prag-Weinberge as it was then. The critic Pavel Eisner said in a 1930 essay ‘Prague as the Fate of the Poet’: At the time of Czech Decadence, with which he had an affinity in his depiction of dark spiritual derangements, but from which his naturally unaffected disposition and passionate blood kept him apart, Paul Leppin, senses readily receptive, absorbed all the poisons present in the atmosphere of Prague, all those spectres avoiding the daylight, and captured them in his books with an ardent single-
mindedness and intensity… Leppin’s prose presents in the purest form the traditional experiences of a German poet in this seemingly completely familiar but at the same time strangely unfathomable Slavic city, from whose feverish hallucinations he invokes his artificial paradises and infernal chasms. Unlike most of his German-speaking friends, Leppin was sympathetic to and friendly with many contemporary Czech artists and writers. He translated Czech poetry and wrote about Czech literature for German magazines and had his own work published in the Czech decadent magazine Moderní Revue. For a time he was even secretary of the Union of German Writers in Czechoslovakia. In
recognition of this, Leppin was awarded the Schiller Memorial Prize in 1934 and was recognised by the Czech Ministry of Culture in 1938 but things then went rapidly downhill for him. After the German occupation of Prague in March 1939, he was temporarily detained and interrogated by the Gestapo – the Nazis did not like decadent art (entartete kunst). Leppin’s only son had died in 1937 and, after being released by the Nazis he suffered a stroke which left him paralysed, though, encouraged by his wife, he did continue writing almost until his death, even if no one would publish him. Leppin died of syphilis in 1945, virtually unknown and, appropriately, was buried in the Vinohrady cemetery in Prague.
DANIEL JESUS
Earlier we looked at Schnitzler’s Dream Story with its central masked ball scene; that scene was taken from Paul Leppin’s 1905 novel Daniel Jesus. It made Leppin’s name while he was still in his twenties, and still under the influence of Gustav Meyrink, now most famous for The Golem and his Prague ghost stories (like Aleister Crowley, Meyrink was a member of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn). It is currently only available in English, together with Leppin’s Severin’s Road to Darkness in a volume called The Road to Darkness from English decadence specialists Dedalus. Daniel Jesus is a wealthy, decadent hunchback and like all of Leppin’s protagonists suffers from a weltschmerz that makes him delve deeper and deeper into the dark dingy recesses of the city to try, always unsuccessfully, to evoke some semblance of passion. Schnitzler’s friend Sigmund Freud understood this; in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, also published in 1905, he says, ‘something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realisation of complete satisfaction.’ The life he was leading was no life at all. It had no goal, no end, just like the road stretching out in front of him. It consisted of nothing but dreary dissipation, a hollow sham with nothing to satisfy the cravings of a deepfeeling heart. The orgy he had given in his house last night for young Baron Sterben’s twentieth
birthday, did it have the grandeur, the cruelty, even the slightest flicker of the great glory of iniquity? Fire and sin? Destruction? No and no! It had not even been shameless. A few naked girls who had got drunk on champagne and been sick on his beautiful, blood-red carpet that was worth a king’s ransom. Where in that was the blind infamy that would alone be worthy of him? He should have found a Princess! Princess of the soul, chaste and pure, to give the whole affair a touch of tragedy, a hint of force, violation and sin. There should have been a saint sitting on his knees, stark naked, strewing roses over his ugly hunchback with her white hands, kissing his deformed feet… He needed to see souls when they were naked and drunk. He loved that. Fuddled and fervent, debauched and delirious. The young Baron, like Daniel, has ‘already seen through the glittering facade of life to its sterile depths. Now he went along with anything that had a taste of the singular, the aloof, with any adventure as long as
the price was high, with any sin, if he still found a thrill in it.’ Sterben (the verb sterben means ‘to die’ in German) meets the young gypsy barefoot dancer Hagar; ‘his pure body, tormented by love, would compel him to possess her.’ In the Bible, Hagar is the handmaid of Sarai, who gives her to Abraham so she can bear his child, Ishmael. Hagar also relates to the Rumpelstiltskin-like Daniel Jesus rather as the gypsy dancer La Esmeralda relates to the hunchback Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as Miranda relates to Caliban in The Tempest or Beauty to The Beast. She goes with Sterben ‘in mute amazement.’ He takes her to his home. With the tip of his patent-leather shoe he pushed open a beautiful, wide door and let the mute Hagar down on his bed of silk. He pushed a costly, sad, deepblue pillow under her brown neck, then knelt down by the bed and, breathing slowly, began to take off her clothes one by one. At that Hagar turned her head towards him and looked at him.
Then she uttered some words that swept over the hot skin of his face like a caress. He gave a cry and kissed her with all the sickly fervour of his body, shattered under the impact of love. He kissed her until the blood ran down from her lips onto the white polar-bearskin on which he was kneeling. Then he took hold of her with both hands and tore apart the shift over her heaving breast so that she lay there naked before him, completely his. Since then many weeks had passed, weeks during which she had tormented him with her love, had made him the slave of her small, thin body, which was slowly destroying him. Hagar was ruthless and without pity. She would dig her brown, trembling fingers into his soft flesh and bite at his chest like a cat until she drew blood. Her demanding, uninhibited love was like a deep dream in which he was enmeshed beyond hope of waking. Like most of Leppin’s women she is a seductress, a temptress who will cling on to her man and drag him
with her down to hell. But Hagar then falls in love with Anton, the giant cobbler, who tries to convert her to his belief in God. At first she thinks God is what she is seeking but then she realises: ‘she loved Anton and lusted after him, only she had
not been aware of it. Now it has suddenly become clear to her that she yearned for his huge, proud body, for his ugly mouth with the flaming scars. And he was God’s and would crush her if she went to him.’
Daniel Jesus, meanwhile, has seduced the young girl Valeska, who clings to him, not realising that he has destroyed her already. ‘In me she feared the man who had been the first to light the fire in her soul and in her blood which, at the age of thirteen, she only half understood, but which had already destroyed her happiness… Her heart froze and her soul disintegrated.’ Valeska’s failed attempt to kill Daniel in his sleep and steal all his money is described in typical Leppin terms: sex, blood and death all linked in a single erotic image, and as in a later image where Leppin describes a young woman whose ‘nipples on her little breasts glittered like two wounds,’ the whiteness of young female flesh is sullied by red gashes. (This may relate to the horror of menstruation found in decadent writers like Edgar Allan Poe, JK Huysmans and Charles Baudelaire). Before me was Valeska, standing there in her nightdress which has slipped down over her shoulders so that I could see her nipples. In the white light they stood out blood red, like two wounds. She had her left hand round my
throat, and the warm blood that her nails were gouging out of my veins was already trickling down my skin. In her right hand she was holding my dagger, razoredged and beautifully fashioned, with a large, dark ruby on the hilt, like a bloody tear-drop clinging to it. But Daniel wakes up and she confesses. It proves to be a kind of redemption for both Daniel and Valeska. ‘It was the most precious night of my whole life. In Valeska’s eyes I saw everything anyone ever said to me, or ever will. In her eyes I recognise myself, woman, fate and love. And in those eyes I found the path that leads between thorns and sorrow to happiness and peace.’ She also transforms. ‘All her harshness, coarseness, dullness dissipated like a mist and turned into radiance, goodness and painful devotion.’ Daniel says he is going to build her a house with ‘high windows and exquisite rooms’, but redemption is not the way for either of them; Valeska leaves and goes back to her father. ‘I never saw her again. She beat out her own brains on her father’s door.’
Anton the cobbler turns out Hagar, who returns to the Baron, who dies in bed with her. ‘His delicate, febrile heart had collapsed in the wild frenzy, amid the kisses and cries, the lust and passion of the young gypsy girl, who had killed him with her lean body just as surely as if she had cut his throat. Love had burst his heart open and torn his soul apart like a piece of cloth.’ Hagar then spitefully but truthfully taunts Anton that his wife ‘is in Villa Jesus, in bed with the rich hunchback, kissing his hump as if it were a crucifix.’ Exhausted and blind with blood and horror, he fell at the gypsy girl’s feet, filled with a strange aching which consumed him, which sucked all the yearning out of him and left his throat as bitter as decay. He could feel the gypsy girl’s hands on his neck, could hear her breath singeing his hair. He was like a wall which a storm had blown apart, a door someone had pushed open for sin. Once more he pulled himself up and thrust her back into the darkness. She had slipped her dress off her shoulders and was standing
there, naked but for her shoes and stockings. She crept up to him like a cat. He turned his face away and tried to keep her from him with his arms. She undid his shirt, and when the cobbler felt her hot, lascivious tongue on his chest, when her spittle ran down his skin in scorching trails, his hand fell to the ground like a lump of iron, and he did not resist as the gypsy girl devastated the huge body she had lusted after for so long, like hail flattening a field of corn.
The novel ends as it began, with a decadent and depraved masked ball at Daniel Jesus’ house in a ‘huge, silvery room with flowers and candles, with shimmering glass beads on the chandeliers and coloured crystals in front of the flames’ like the one in Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story and Kubrick’s film version of it, though neither Schnitzler’s prose nor Kubrick’s cool visuals come nowhere near the sweaty, deranged, lustfuelled nightmare of Leppin’s ball, which is more like a depraved, erotic version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Hagar takes Anton to see it, leading him past ‘the quivering women and their partners’ stuttering lust to the window, which stood ajar… His face rose over the edge, wild and deathly pale, and his eyes looked round the ballroom. “Can you see your wife beside Daniel Jesus? Can you see his fingers on her hot flesh, her mouth opening with delight?”’ Our (anti-)hero, triumphant at the end – unlike his successors Severin and Blaugast – is seen sitting on a scarlet throne with Anton’s wife; then, like his namesake, Daniel Jesus is finally
crowned with thorns by servants ‘whose tongues he had cut out so they would remain mute for the rest of their days’. In the middle of the room Daniel Jesus was sitting on a scarlet throne beside a massive, naked woman who had wound her hair round her head like a crown and was looking at the hunchback with shining eyes. Round them the people were dancing with that wild, feverish intoxication that the music laid on their hearts, that came over their blood as they danced, as heavy and red as love. All the women wore masks and were naked… Two mute lackeys carry in a black crown, the precious stones in it as deathly pale as tears. Daniel Jesus took the black circlet and placed it on his huge, grotesque head.
SEVERIN’S ROAD TO DARKNESS
Leppin’s second major novel Severins Gang in die Finsternis was published in 1914 and written just before the First World War; it captures darkly the febrile atmosphere of Eastern Europe at that tense time. It is currently available in two English translations, one from the English publisher Dedalus, published together with
Daniel Jesus in a volume called The Road to Darkness and one from the Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press, where it is translated as Severin’s Journey into the Dark. (This publisher took its name from a quote by Apollinaire: ‘I know myself only as rapture, reptilian motion: blood, blood, blood. My hands, leaden spoons, twist and melt’). The protagonist’s name comes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs of 1870, from which of course we get the term masochism. Like Daniel Jesus before him and Blaugast after him Severin undertakes a metaphorical, spiritual and physical journey into the darkness of old Prague which, more even than in the other two novels, hovers menacingly as a brooding, gloomy presence; inescapable and all-consuming, Leppin’s night time Prague is both grim physical setting and dark metaphor, as is Paris in Lautréamont’s Maldoror and London in James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night. Although this novel contains less explicit erotica than the other two discussed here, Severin’s downfall is still linked firmly to his inability to
escape, let alone transcend, his sexual desires or shake off the weltschmerz he shares with Daniel Jesus and Blaugast. ‘His own barrenness often brought him to the brink of despair. He was full of a bitterness that squandered its strength in futile causes, and of a lassitude that craved perverse pleasures.’ One of Severin’s few male friends is the old bookseller Lazarus Kain – another redolent name: his first namesake was resurrected, his second killed his brother. SacherMasoch intended that Venus in Furs would be part of a series called Legacy of Cain. He was close on fifty, but women were still his great passion. At home, on the top shelves in his bookshop, were the choice volumes he kept for connoisseurs and his best customers: dangerous and flagrant books, privately printed editions from France and Germany, copper engravings, rare translations from the time of Rétif de la Bretonne. He felt a lover’s tenderness for these treasures, which he would take down again
and again to gloat over, stroking them with his thin fingers. (Rétif, or Restif, is just the kind of character who would appeal to Leppin, as well as Pierre Louÿs: he probably coined the word pornographer [le pornographe] in a 1769 paper arguing for state-run brothels; he wrote the pornographic Anti-Justine as a political riposte to de Sade; and the term retifism, meaning shoe-fetishism, is derived from his name. Like Leppin’s characters, he liked to wander the dark city – Paris in his case – at night.) Apart from his books, Lazarus’ only passions are his pet raven and his young daughter Susanna, with whom, as you would expect, Severin has sex, with her as a willing participant, even perhaps the initiator. Unlike in the other novels though, the experience with an underage girl does not return to destroy Severin. And unlike in the other novels the experience is not awe-inspiring or earth-shattering and is not described in horrifying detail.
As he went out into the street Susanna came towards him through the evening mist. She looked at him with a smile which made his whole body tremble, as if from an electric shock. Mechanically and without hesitation he took her hand. It felt warm. ‘Come’, Susanna said to him, the same smile still on her lips. He went back into the house with her. The light had not yet been lit on the stairs. He kissed her on the back of the neck, which her dress had left uncovered. ‘Your father’s in the shop’, he said. Susanna merely nodded and led him up narrow stairways and the long passages to her room. The office worker Zdenka meets and falls in love with Severin – unlike most of the women in these novels she is not a temptress but simple, straightforward and sweet, though she is not a virgin; she has previously had affairs with men, for which she apologises to him with ‘quivering tenderness’. Although for her, ‘Severin was a miraculous experience,’ she arouses no passion
in him, he ‘treated her as casually as ever.’ She was a convenient pastime in the emptiness of his jaded heart, which stood firm amid the trusting radiance of her love. When she told him how happy she was, he listened to her lilting alto, amused at the naivety of her expression, but basically she left him cold. She had nothing of the consuming fire, that elemental incandescence his soul needed.
She was a minor event, trifling and cloying, with nothing of the power of destiny, of no deeper interest to him. Severin visits brothels but finds ‘nothing erotic about a gathering where, with brazen elegance, a few models pulled their skirts up above their knees… More than ever he thirsted for real life, for the life that brought flowers and horrors and storm winds that blew away the banalities of the mundane world.’ His mystically-inclined friend Nikolaus tells Severin: ‘Women are nothing to you. I believe something greater lies in store for you.’ Then the mysterious death of a young man he hardly knows – who may have been killed by Nikolaus – draws him to the idea of death. ‘There was something in the dull sound of that one syllable that seemed to him more stimulating, more suggestive than all the drowsy expressions of a sheltered life.’ Severin becomes obsessed and finally goes to see Nikolaus, ‘wasted and hollow-eyed.’ As he grasped the hand Nikolaus held out to him, he let out a cry which gave vent to all his
torment and distress. He knelt beside the young man’s bed and burrowed his head into the pillows. ‘Nikolaus’, he cried, ‘what was it like… When you killed your friend?’ Nikolaus looked down at Severin. His body was stretched out on the floor in unspeakable convulsions, fear suffused his face with blood and he raised his arm, holding it in the air with the fingers splayed. There was a deep, pitying sadness in his voice as he repeated the other man’s name, and ‘Severin! Severin!’ (This is the beginning of the refrain of the Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs, which begins with the very erotic line: ‘Shiny, shiny. Shiny boots of leather. Whiplash girlchild in the dark.’) Severin starts to sink into a dull state, sleeping in the afternoons after work and walking the dark streets of Prague at night. ‘The city, which he was used to wandering around by day or in the evening, had acquired an unknown, covert power over him. It was dragging him out of his timid dreams into his dark womb.’ He
does commit a murder of sorts, poisoning Anton, the bookseller’s raven with a piece of blood-red, raw meat. ‘“This is death”, he said, holding it under its beak. The bird snatched it from him and back up to its perch with it.’ Eventually, Severin does discover a woman worthy of his depraved imagination: Mylada, who is employed as a singer by the Spider tavern to attract the men. It works. ‘Within a few weeks all the men had fallen in love with her… She… could captivate the ponderous, intoxicate the fickle and overwhelm the debauched. She was a new and provocative star in the torpid nightlife of the city’. After she becomes Severin’s mistress: Rapturous depths opened up before him in which he submerged his wild and bewildered senses and his paralysed soul. Mylada understood his body. With the shrewd and experienced intuition of her depraved youth, she grasped his nature and submitted to every whim she could discover there. She uncovered the secret recesses of
his desires and pursued them to the roots of his nerves. She taught him her bizarre and unbridled love-games and intoxicated him with her caresses. Her kisses were inventive and the joy they brought him was a sinful and despairing lasciviousness. Often, when her arms were around his neck and her eyes clouded with lust, he lost all sense of the present… Her weak and fragile body had an unsuspected power of love within it. There was a
passion in her which she squandered without restraint, which clung to Severin and exhausted him. Finally he has found a woman who is not a ‘disappointment to him’. But after just a few weeks she tires of him and revels again in the attention of the tavern’s many other customers. She leaves him ‘to the icy shades once more… enveloped in a terrible and lonely horror. The fires
of passion had burnt out his soul, leaving nothing but an empty shell.’ Severin collapses into despair, the ‘tough vital force which he possessed, and which had withstood all his debauchery and crises, crumbled and broke under the pressure of a sadness beyond hope.’ He now realises he belongs to the brotherhood of people ‘for whom the glory of life was nothing but marsh fire: cynics with an unlucky touch, pariahs handed through the streets by abject fear, murderers, men with the Mark of Cain.’ Finally, he thinks of the wife he has abandoned: ‘The sweet image of a woman, buried beneath rubbish and debris raised a sorrowful face towards him.’ He goes to see her. Zdenka looked at him and waited. Her nightdress was slipping down over her naked breasts and she hunched her shoulders with the cold. He stretched his arms out in a rehearsed, mechanical gesture. Then he dropped them again. ‘Why have you come?’ He turned and went out of the door.
Severin goes to the Spider, where Mylada’s birthday is being celebrated. ‘Her supple shamelessness delighted the men and exhilarated the younger folk. One after the other they drank to her and she dipped her red tongue into each single glass. Lust danced like a flame across their faces.’ Someone suggests a raffle; Mylada proclaims that she will sleep with the winner. As Severin enters, there is only one ticket remaining, despite the high prices. She offers it to him. He wins. ‘You’re in luck, Severin’, she says to him. But Severin has come to kill Mylada, not to sleep with her; he has stolen a bomb and has brought it to the Spider. Nikolaus gently takes it from him. She asks him why he wanted to kill her. ‘Because I hate you.’ ‘And why didn’t you do it?’ whispered Mylada, looking up at him, her lips apart. She straightened up and her breasts brushed against him. ‘I’ve won the raffle!’ A deathly shame threw him to the ground. He knelt down and put his head in her lap. He was overcome with something and he
cried. But the laughter of the drunken crowd flowed over him, transforming his tears into filthy, searing mud.
BLAUGAST
When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, three years after Leppin’s death, they were no more keen on decadent literature than the Nazis had been; it was not until the 1960s that interest in the now-forgotten Leppin reemerged, and not until the 1980s that his later works were finally published, including his late, last novel Blaugast. Written in the early 1930s, it had been seen by some
friends and critics but never published. It would have been lost for ever but, in a bizarre, benign twist of fate rare in Leppin’s life and completely unknown in his works, two carbon copies of the novel’s typescript were found by a passer-by on the pavement outside his house after his death among the rubbish. Leppin’s final novel was following its protagonist and its author on their painful journeys into filth and oblivion, but unlike them it was eventually and miraculously restored to a kind of former glory: in a resurrection not shared by its central character, the novel was taken by the passer-by to the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague’s Strahov monastery; they knew what they had and nurtured it until it was finally ready to be published in 1984, the first of his works to be published since his death. The original typescript is still there in the monastery. The eponymous protagonist of Blaugast goes on a journey even darker and more depraved than his predecessors Daniel Jesus and Severin and ends up having lost even more than them. Despite its late date it is a true work of
decadence, and one of its subtitles is A Novel of Decline. But it is even darker than the darkest of 19thcentury decadent novels like Huysmans’ Là Bas and far darker than anything in Baudelaire or Rimbaud. Its only rival for bleakness is probably Lautréamont’s Maldoror, which was being rediscovered and championed by the surrealists in the 1930s. Even more than its predecessors, Blaugast looks through a glass darkly at the carefree romps of Louÿs and Apollinaire where the young men mature joyfully into a world of mutually-satisfactory, no-regrets sexual liberation appreciated equally by men and women; in Leppin’s syphilitic Prague underworld, sex for both men and women leads to destruction and decay, depravity and desolation, not to liberty, enlightenment and joy. While he is still a youth, Blaugast’s decline begins with his first experience of sex: With the violent grip of an incomprehensible power, malicious and sly, the monster that was sex approached him from an obscure realm… Already
as a small boy, when he folded his hands for his nightly prayers before bed, he was tortured by knowledge of the Devil, He who ruled Hell, deep underground, beyond the land of naivety. Now, the gates of Hell were unbolted, fire licked at the wood, and the breath of Satan’s children came in gasps. Like Daniel Jesus and Severin, Blaugast has sex with an underage girl, but in his case it is when he is young and it scars him for life. His
early experience with the young daughter of the grocer, ‘barefoot, her naked legs growing white in the darkness,’ always returns to haunt him; whenever he ‘experienced the seamy, sensuous side of life, moments when he felt released from his self-torment, this afternoon in the attic would always return to him… An unholy child’s lips hotly sought his mouth; her dress slid up higher; his hands clumsily lost their way.’ Afterwards, for him, sex and horror are always linked. ‘Filth gurgled in the ghostly, vaulted cellars where lepers shuffled lost in the labyrinths, greedily begging for pleasure. Where was the hand that tortured its creatures with flames? And where was love?’ The graceful, domesticated, feminine women he reads about in his books do not represent the reality of womanhood for him, a reality that repels him: ‘in their addicted, dilated eyes flickered a fire that consumed the whole world. Under their deceptive garments they had naked, scandalous thighs like the girl in the laundry. Blinded, Blaugast searched for a way out.’ Later, after he has given up his job and begun to live in the filth of the
homeless beggar, he is bought drinks in bars where people call him the Little Baron and make him do bird impersonations. Then comes the final degradation on Blaugast’s downward spiral into hell. A waiter calls him into a bar, ‘always keen to offer a special service’ to his clients. The half-naked women in the arms of their gentlemen had their fun with the bewildered Little Baron. Then, it happened. After downing a few glasses of schnapps generously given to him, he was ordered to masturbate onto a plate in the presence of all for the succour of a meagre fee. His groaning, and then his ejaculation – both served to guarantee a precious good time. But things are not yet over for Blaugast. He seduces another young girl, though it seems to him that she is seducing him. Her ‘coquetry, meeting him so diffidently, made him bolder as she shamelessly unbuttoned her underclothes. For a short moment, flaming tongues of desire crept upward, nibbling brazenly at his jacket sleeve,
leaching the sweat from his paws. Then it was over.’ He gives her money then screams at her to go, but she keeps returning wanting more money: ‘where the scorching foul breath of ratty furnaces fought in vain against the cold, where the clattering accounting ledgers and the dirty lavatories spoiled the day’s work, the shadow darted around him, eagerly whispering the promise of gratification.’ He cannot resist her; the ‘puppeteer behind the scenes was stronger than his resolve. Her withered face, smutty and impure, greedy to turn a quick profit, pursued him on the street.’ For Blaugast, as for Daniel Jesus and Severin, lust and the desire for women are the source of all evil: ‘it was Woman, the disastrous weight of her seductive denominator, that had upset all his order, altered all calculations.’ Whenever he was enjoying the favours of loose women, indulging in the licentious adventures of youth with an ecstasy that had characterised his relationship with the opposite sex from the very beginning, it was nothing more than a pact
with the Underworld, infused with a hopelessness that went round in circles, torturing his conscience with anguish.
And it appears that he has made a pact: with the mysterious character Schobotzki, an old school friend, who is in fact a kind of Mephistopheles, offering the temptations of sex and money to the bourgeois of old Prague and later claiming their souls for himself by ruining them physically, spiritually
and financially; he was a ‘sexual predator gone wild in the bloody haze of the scent, finding pleasure in the perishing of his prey.’ Schobotzki is ‘an exquisitely rare specimen, anointed in hell. In partnership with the restaurant waiters and the black marketeers of the erotic’. He finds young women, vulnerable and alone in the city, makes sure they have syphilis and then offers them to his clients. ‘A new arrival. Vivacious and extremely striking, fair and innocent, too –’ Stooping in a manner both patronising and brash, the guest of honour made note of the victim’s description. ‘Where is the young thing? What can she do? Does she have any talents?’ ‘The brunette over there. Barely a month over fifteen.’ ‘I can imagine it. A child with curly hairs between her legs.’ Then, flaring up, lecherously: ‘Is she already infected?’ ‘Guaranteed infected!’ Like his author’s, Blaugast’s syphilis ensures his continuing decline into
despair and desperation, hastened when he is paralysed after being knocked down by a car in which Schobotzki is a passenger; Leppin himself was also paralysed when he wrote the novel, though by a stroke. But as Leppin was looked after in his last years both his wife and a young female friend, the wife of a doctor, who brought him medication – he was unable to get the Nazi party membership necessary to receive medical care – Blaugast meets the Mary Magdalene figure of Johanna, a whore with a heart who uses the money she makes from men to care for him and bring him ‘calmative medicines, tablets in gold-coloured cylinders… fine foods, sugar plums for his ravaged appetite, seasoned fish and exotic fruits whose aromas appealed to him;’ sensual satisfactions not loaded with lust and lasciviousness at last. But more important than her physical care is the way she brings him at the end a kind of redemption. ‘Say it again, Johanna! – I beg you, tell me. Am I your sick brother?’ Incarcerated within the brilliance of a star that had never
dared turn to love, the answer came resoundingly and without fail: ‘Yes, Klaudius Blaugast, you are.’