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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: 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: 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
It was great fun. The AngloSaxon world was being attacked, invaded, infiltrated, out-flanked, and conquered by this erotic armada. The Dickensian schoolmasters of England were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was standing on end beneath their wigs, black-market prices in New York and London for our green-backed products were soaring to fantastic heights. Enough has been said about the influence of the printed word; but never enough about the
liberating influence of the printed four-letter word. Those literary orgies, those torrents of systematic bad taste were quite certainly instrumental in clearing the air, and clearing out a few mental cobwebs. The imbecile belief that sex is sin, that physical pleasure is unclean, that erotic thoughts are immoral, that abstinence is the proper rule which may be broken at rare intervals, but merely for the sake of procreation – all those sick Judeo Christian ideas were exposed for what they are. I insist that no little boys were ever corrupted by bad books of mine, and I do hope that they enjoyed them to the full, and gleaned at least a little useful knowledge therefrom; nobody seems to have died of shock, no reader was ever reported killed by a four-letter word. That was Maurice Girodias, son of Jack Kahane and founder in 1953 of the Olympia press, writing in the introduction to The Olympia Reader about the ‘dirty books’ that he commissioned: serious, ‘literary’ author’s wrote to order for him and
he sold the results on subscription in plain green wrappers under the series title Traveller’s Companion (because the target market was mainly American troops and tourists passing through Paris). Like his father, Girodias could not understand the need for censorship, especially after two world wars. ‘It seems hard to understand how a whole generation of men who had been through the toughest of wars – and won – could be reduced to the level of schoolchildren, and be told what to read and what not to read by a conglomerate of spinsters and bowlerhatted policeman.’ Along with his counterparts Barney Rosset in the US and John Calder in England, Girodias spent most of his life, not to mention his money, fighting them. Also like his father, Girodias wanted to publish a mixture of serious but risky literature and straight erotica, publishing them in English, in Paris as ‘not to be sold in USA and UK’. Like his father, Girodias published Henry Miller. The first manuscript I acquired was Henry Miller’s Plexus; this came out in a two-volume numbered edition together with
Sade’s Bedroom Philosophers (the first and so far only English translation of La Philosophie dans le boudoir), Apollinaire’s Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, and Georges Bataille’s Tale of Satisfied Desire (in French: Histoire de l’oeil – published anonymously under the sweet pseudonym of Pierre Angélique). Apollinaire’s famous exercise in the eroticism of adolescence had been translated by Dick Seaver, and Austryn Wainhouse
had done the English versions of both the Bataille and Sade books. They both were members of a very colourful group whose nucleus was an Englishlanguage, Parisbased literary quarterly called Merlin, which had been founded in the spring of 1952. The erratic pope of that pagan church was Alex Trocchi, of Italo-Scottish extraction, Alex of the sombre, fiery brow – who turned himself into a literary lady of little virtue by the name of Frances Lengel and wrote a novel titled Helen and Desire which was to become the model of a new brand of modern erotic writing.
I have written at length about Alexander Trocchi’s erotica written under the names of Frances Lengel and Carmencita de las Lunas, as well as the serious fiction in his own name, especially Cain’s Book and Young Adam in my book Amongst Those Left, and I have also written at length about the Merlin group and Trocchi’s relationship with Samuel Beckett in Everybody I Can Think of Ever, so I will not say any more about him here, fascinating character though he was. The American writer Austryn Wainhouse was also an interesting character. He was recommended to Girodias by Georges Bataille – the two men, a very unlikely combination, knew each other through the
magazine Critique, which Bataille edited and Girodias published through his French-language publishing operation. Wainhouse had translated Bataille’s introduction to Sade’s Justine along with the novel itself, as well as Bedroom Philosophers, not the most accurate translation of the title but racy enough for Girodias to want to publish it (with Wainhouse credited as Pierallessandro Casavini).
Wainhouse’s wife Muffie became Olympia’s first editor. Her memories of the young, penniless Merlin gang being wined and dined in style and at great expense by Girodias, a serious gourmet who later lost what money he had on a restaurant venture, at a time when the Merlinois were living on $1.50 a day or less, are quoted in John de St Jorre’s wonderful book about Olympia, The Good Ship Venus.
merry evening. We also saw the possibilities of earning money. And Maurice must have seen the possibility of launching the Traveller’s Companion Series. Afterward, we talked of little else in our cafe gatherings: the excitement, danger, was it prostitution or not? There were enough members from McCarthyite America to be paranoid, and the British, with their tourist visas, were worried. Code words were needed, lest we be overheard by FBI spies or by the French secret police. The group around the table would throw out ideas: how about ‘Gid’ for Girodias and ‘DB’ for dirty book? It’s hard to believe how clever we were. Or how young. Girodias wanted to emulate the Série Noire (Black Series) imprint of crime novels published by the very respected publisher Gallimard, but with erotic novels, and he wanted to co-opt these young, uninhibited and starving artists into his venture. Muffie Wainhouse recounts: Slightly avuncular, Maurice was a wonderful host and a storyteller. A convivial group; a
Having lined up his willing stable of clever young authors to write his DBs, Girodias could afford to publish serious, avant-garde literature for very little profit, knowing he had a fall-back plan for when the money ran out, which it did very often. (Incidentally, the later Traveller’s Companion Series books were published from 7, Rue de Saint-
Séverin – Severin is the man in Venus in Furs, the book that gave the world the name masochism, and in the song of the same name by the Velvet Underground.) The Merlin group in the nineteen fifties were a kind of second Lost Generation: a group of young, would-be artists from America and Britain gathering together in Paris after a world war. We have already looked at Henry Miller, part of the first Lost Generation of twenty years earlier. Nothing much had changed. But Girodias understood even better than his father how to exploit this kind of young, freespirited talent – the Merlinois as he called them, or the Merlin juveniles as Samuel Beckett called them with a lot less respect (Olympia published Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; the story of this is told in my book Everybody I Can Think of Ever.)
My publishing technique was simple in the extreme, at least in the first years: when I had completely run out of money I wrote blurbs for imaginary books, invented sonorous titles and funny pen names (Marcus van Heller, Akbar del Piombo, Miles Underwood, Carmencita de las Lunas etc.) and then printed a list which was sent out to our clientele of booklovers, tempting them with such titles as White Thighs, The Chariot of Flesh, The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, With Open Mouth, etc. They immediately responded with orders and money, thanks to which we were again able to eat, drink, write and print. I could again advance money to my authors, and they hastened to turn in manuscripts which more or less fitted the descriptions.
I do not intend to go into detail on the ‘dirty books’, but it is worth pointing out that, as well as giving Alexander Trocchi a female pseudonym, Girodias commissioned several actual women authors for what is normally considered a male genre. Possibly this was because Girodias thought that his male readers would gain an extra frisson of pleasure from reading a dirty book written by a woman. Or perhaps it was because he thought it was better if fantasies of women enjoying being raped and abused were to come from the pen of a woman. Or maybe women were just prepared to work for less money. So as well as looking at what Girodias considered to be his more serious publishing ventures, I want to look at the work of some of these female authors, beginning with three who were the less-famous partners of serious, respected, male French authors, two of whom also appear in Text Acts: Georges Bataille and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The third female author I am considering here was the unofficial partner of respected Academician Jean Paulhan, editor of Nouvelle Revue Française and connoisseur of Sade.
As you might expect, the female partners have received far less attention in the past than their male partners, partly because they wrote under pseudonyms; Virginia Woolf had much earlier pointed out that Anon was probably a woman. As Marguerite Duras, to whom we will return at length, said:
When both members of a couple are writers, the wife says: ‘My husband is a writer.’ The husband says: ‘My wife writes too.’ The children say: ‘My father writes books, and so does my mother, sometimes.’ I said in the Introduction that there were very few books in this survey in which women were physically hurt, and that most of them were written
by women (Alain Robbe-Grillet’s A Sentimental Novel is a dishonourable exception); Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s and Diane Bataille’s novels for Olympia are both in this category, though in both cases the abused women are very young and unwilling, as opposed to the narrator of O, who is a consenting, even encouraging adult, as are Edith Templeton’s masochistic Louisa in Gordon and Iris Owens’ selfdestructive Laura in The Woman Thing, both of which we will look at shortly. Of Olympia’s other female writers, the pseudonymous and eponymous Lela Seftali (the name of the narrator as well as the author, a shadowy figure whose real name may have been Marlene Meline) in Ride a Cock Horse (a very Girodias kind of title) is rather less masochistic than Louisa or O, but like Candy, whom we will also look at later, she gives herself to any man who wants her. I am fantasy. I am masturbation. I am a receptacle for all the male orgasms of the world. To every man I appear to be the perfect lay. Without me they suffer from malnutrition of the soul, I can
read their eyes. I promise what no woman will give, or is capable of giving. I am pliant, compliant. Men would like to masturbate on me, defile me, denigrate me, or put me on a pedestal. They always think of me in extreme situations. There is no in-between. Another female author (if Girodias’ rather unlikely description of her is to be believed) was Ataullah Mardaan, author of Kama Houri (Travellers Companion no. 33). Kama Houri was written by a Pakistani girl who lived in Paris during Olympia’s flourishing fifties. She was married to a Dutch photographer, had been educated at Columbia University, was the daughter of a distinguished Pakistani psychiatrist, and like every one else in Paris needed money. We enjoyed her irregular
trips to our office when she would deliver her latest chapters for our approval. She always wore flowing silk saris, her hair, thick and braided had never been cut or coiffed, she was modest, beautiful, patient, polite, and draped in veils as she handed us the not so innocent product of her cultivated mind. She was, in every way, what my father and I had dreamed a pornographer should be. Girodias may indeed have dreamed her up. Like Alexander Trocchi’s Helen Seferis (more of whom in a moment), the blonde, Western heroine, Ann, has given herself to a rough and swarthy man from the East, Yakub Khan, ‘whose strong hands had brutally violated her body, and for whose pleasure-giving loins she had left behind a lifetime.’ Ann moves to the Hindu Kush to be with her new
husband but she has to sleep in a tent with his other wives until she is called; she never is, only the ‘child bride’. One night Ann tries to get into Yakub’s tent but he catches her and calls in his other wives to punish her. Throwing Ann on the bed he ordered the women to undress her. Ann did not resist, it was a relief to have even the women’s hands touch her naked body. They turned her onto her stomach and held her hands and feet. She heard him open the chest, and before she had even time to wonder what he was going to do, she felt the leather switch cut across her flaccid buttocks. She cried out, reflectively tensing her muscles for the next blow. The switch came down again and again on her hard, white rotundities, streaking them with red welts. Then turning her over onto her back he struck her across the breasts. Ann groaned, her nipples hardened provocatively as if they welcomed this brutal familiarity.
Ann is then made to watch as the tiny, skinny young wife undresses. ‘Like a thin curl of smoke she knelt at his feet and putting her hands on his knees she took his long firm sex into her narrow mouth. With a sudden thrust he pushed it in deep. It seemed almost too big for her delicate mouth, but she accepted it submissively opening her lips wide and running her tongue cunningly over its tip.’ A clue to whether this book was actually written by a woman comes in Yakub’s fondness for cunnilingus (as we have seen, Henry Miller was almost alone among male authors in describing it positively): ‘her dark hairless sex opened like an orchid before his mouth. His lips closed around the smooth mound and his tongue explored the purple depths, like an inquisitive bee. The girl quivered. Ann sobbed.’ ‘Frances Lengel’, author of several pulp-porn Olympia titles was definitely not a woman but the ubiquitous and prolific editor of Merlin, Alexander Trocchi. Girodias said of Trocchi: ‘He was the first of Olympia’s all-out literary stallions; his novel, Helen and Desire, published under the pen name of
Frances Lengel, became a model of the kind. It was the first of a series of Frances Lengel productions, all of them very robust and funny parodies of pornography.’ Among Lengel’s many female characters, Helen of Helen and Desire and its sequel The Carnal Desires of Helen Seferis is the most driven by her sexual instincts. The first novel opens as Helen has been kidnapped by Arabs in the desert, (Trocchi was never afraid of clichés), where she is waiting – in anticipation – to be further abused. ‘Youssef, the poor fool, thought he was humiliating me! How like a man!’ (To digress: regarding the discussion in the Introduction about the distinction between pornography and erotica, one might say that pornography overuses the exclamation mark.) How difficult it is to explain! The terrible mute hunger is in our bodies! If I touch my thigh here in the near-darkness of the tent my whole body is again instinct with the driving urge that brought me here, and I cannot explain it. As always, it is stronger than fear. For me it has always been that
way. It is as though my whole history were contained in that touch, asserted again in the pressure of fingers, all my life laid out with the smooth curves of my body, mature now, but young still, and waiting silently, yes waiting, on these hard sunbaked sheepskins that they threw in after me. Oh, I could laugh! For I have only one feeling. I have only to touch the smooth slab of my thigh again and I feel triumphant.
‘SELENA WARBERG’ (DIANE BATAILLE) Not every author has a cast iron bust of themselves sell for $1m. Diane Bataille (1918-1989) did. But then the 1947 sculpture was by Alberto Giacometti and it was expected to raise more: it was estimated at $1.2 to $1.5 at an auction in Monte Carlo in 2014. Giacometti sculpted several of his Paris friends around this time, including Georges Bataille and Simone de Beauvoir; Giacometti didn’t pay for models. He had known Georges Bataille since 1929 when they were both associated with the Documents movement, longer than Diane, who met Georges in 1943 in Vézelay, France; in 1946 she became his second wife and he became her second husband. Around that time Bataille and the publisher Les Éditions de Minuit
asked Giacometti to provide illustrations for Histoire de Rats (History of Rats), which was later to become The Impossible, a volume that also included and Dianus et de L’Orestie (Diary of Dianus). It was published in September 1947 and included three etchings by Giacometti from a series of thirty one, including several of Diane and Georges. Giacometti made two plaster casts of Diane around this time, one of which was lost. Diane was a popular figure in Georges’ Paris circle: she was born the very exotic-sounding Princess Kotchoubey de Beauharnais, daughter of the even more exoticallynamed Eugéne Lvovitch Kotchoubey de Beauharnais and Xelena Geraldina Kotchoubey de Beauharnais, part of a noble Tartar family from the South of Russia. Diane herself, however, was born on the rather less exotic Vancouver Island, Canada.
THE WHIP ANGELS
Like Anne Desclos, author of Story of O, and Catherine Robbe-Grillet, both of whom we will meet later, Diane Bataille was the partner of a respected French literary intellectual with an interest in pornographic literature, and like them she wrote a pornographic novel herself. The Whip Angels (an appalling title that
has very little to do with the story but sounds like it may have come from the fevered brain of Maurice Girodias) was published as no. 9 in the Traveller’s Companion series, with no author’s name given; it was later republished under the name Selena Warfield and later again, together with The Image by ‘Jean de Berg’ (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) as no. 79 in the New Traveller’s Companion Series, where the author’s name is given as XXX. Unlike these other two women, Diane Bataille seems to have written originally in English, and nicely captured the style of English Victorian pornography. This is not meant as a compliment. Apart from its authorship the novel has very little literary interest; it is a pastiche, even if it is a good one. At least though there can be no suggestion here that the novel was in fact written by the male half of the partnership, as there was with the other two female one-time authors. There are two main points of interest for us: the story is obviously heavily influenced – as is The Image – by Sade’s Bedroom Philosophers, which Austryn Wainhouse had translated for Girodias (though
presumably Diane could have read it in the original), with an older libertine and libertiness debauching a young ingénue, and secondly there is the constant, very un-Victorian foregrounding of the act of writing itself, the idea of the creating of reality by engraving it into a text and the potential unreliability of the narrator – exactly the kind of ideas that Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes and others were starting to
expound around that time and that Pierre Louÿs had used much earlier. The novel’s frame story – like Lolita’s – is written as a preface by someone who claims to have found the text which he is presenting to us. In this case the presenter is an American engineer in the present day who has been left a house in London where he finds two diaries, apparently written in June and July of 1866 by a young woman. The first is ‘filled with a somewhat frantic scrawl, words and sentences that seemed to have been set down at top speed. Some of the pages were stained and stuck, others so smudged by ink blots that nothing remained but a dark blur.’ The second seems to have been written, ‘with care and at leisure, and by a mature girl; but what was her purpose in repeating her sombre, hardly commonplace tale? I don’t know.’ Neither do we, though we are told that the text we are reading is from the second book. We may be meant to assume that the young girl, looking back sometime later has been so successfully debauched by the older couple that she is now proud of what happened and happy
to relive it through the act of rewriting. In this case the young girl is called Victoria and her older cousins – though not much older, they are still teenagers themselves – are the incestuous Kenneth and Angela. The diary covers a three-week period, starting on Victoria’s fourteenth birthday during which the innocent and virginal Victoria is turned into sex-slave, willing or otherwise. Her degradation follows the predictable
pattern of Victorian pornography: at first the young innocent does not know anything about sex and is instructed, brutally, in all its darker aspects by her older seducers/rapists. The writing is clichéd, and the scenes described are formulaic, but the emphasis on the act of writing of itself is of some interest. It is Kenneth – according to Victoria at least – who makes her write these terrible things in her beautiful new book. Her legs are spread wide apart. She is quite naked too, except for her long black hair covering her breasts and a sort of belt with a long thing like Kenneth’s, which from time to time she makes disappear into the black curly hair of her… Kenneth says it is called a cunt. I am a cunt. I am a cunt. I am a cunt. Kenneth has told me to write those three sentences and I have. Angela is looking at me. Her lips are curled. Oh dear Mamma, to think… Kenneth has just stung my back with his belt, and says that if I spoil the diary with my tears he
will thrash me in a way I’ll never forget.
experience, the words fix the images into a final reality.
The narrative constantly refers back to itself in this way. Kenneth seems to believe that, by writing down these terrible experiences, Victoria will freeze them in her memory; by naming the body parts and the actions committed with them they will become real to her. In that sense, the act of writing creates the
2 o’clock. I’d fallen asleep. Kenneth has woken me again. He has told me to pick up the narrative. ‘You shall become a romantic poet, my dear,’ he says, ‘but it will require labour and devotion. To begin with, it’s chiefly sweat… Write down everything. I’m here to watch you do it.’ He is so deliberate, so sure. ‘Write down everything,’ he repeats. I must try. Where was I? The cushion. Yes, the cushion under my buttocks. Angela, with the riding-crop I had already seen her use on him in the forest, was beating his buttocks with all her strength. Faint with terror, I tiptoed back to my bed where I buried my head under my pillow so that I could not hear the slashing of the whip falling on his skin. But I dared not go to sleep. I had this to write in my diary.
Of course, since this is pornography – though pornography written by a woman and told in the first person by the girl – the unwilling ingénue victim eventually becomes the willing, knowing participant. Kenneth gets Victoria’s cat Bluebell to lick her; she begins to like it and seems to have her first orgasm. I now wanted her to continue and it was I who tried to force myself open even further that I might feel that tongue even more, and then, soaked and sweating, I heard myself gasp and then moan in a delirium of mounting excitement. It was a feeling so delicious and at the same time so unendurable that the disgusting way it had been procured, the foul, dirty way left me indifferent… I have been told I have done very well once again, that my prose is making great strides, that even if I fail as a
whore I shall surely manage as a novelist. This is presumably intended to be ironic; Diane Bataille did not attempt any more novels. But, although Victoria has enjoyed her experience of ailurophiliac orgasm (this may not be a first in pornography but I cannot bring to mind any other examples), she is still appalled by what is being done to her and still resists. At this point, and for some time to come, Victoria is still a virgin; in the manner of the Marquis de Sade, Bataille’s debauchers can involve their debauchee in a multitude of degrading sexual activities without taking her virginity, so it is quite late on in the diary when she finally loses it. She tells the diary about it but does not describe it in detail; without Kenneth dictating to her, she cannot bear to fill in this lacuna in the text with a detailed description.
I have no tears left to shed. For now, horror and shame and bewilderment combine to make my predicament seem beyond the limits of human endurance. And that I should be forced to write down in detail these disgraceful episodes makes my plight all the more abominable. The pen is slipping from my moist fingers making it that much more difficult to write at all. My head is spinning, I doubt whether I can see or think clearly. And now, now it is too late for me ever to slip through their fingers, for THE WORST HAS HAPPENED, and I am bound to them for ever by the total nature of my degradation. Victoria understands, as Kenneth has done all along, that it is the recording of the acts, the naming of the sexual organs and acts that seals her degradation. And because it is written, her shame is there for future generations to find, and show to others, as of course they have done. As I look back on what has happened and realise what in the
space of a few days I have become, that I am overwhelmed with horror at my own lust. Oh! there can no longer be any doubt of it! I TOO AM A MONSTER! But even then, even though she has admitted to her own willing participation, she still cannot bring herself, without Kenneth literally looking over her shoulder, to write down the words that fix her shame, freeze her memories in perpetuity. Only that which is written is truly real.
‘JEAN DE BERG’ (CATHERINE ROBBEGRILLET)
Catherine Robbe-Grillet is quite a bit more interesting – as a person if not as a writer – than her far more famous husband, the late Alain, ‘Pope of the New Novel’ (Nouveau Roman). We will come back to him later. Known as France’s most famous dominatrix, and nicknamed the Marquise de Sade, Catherine was
the subject of a Vanity Fair article in 2014 when she was eighty-three. Their reporter was invited to participate in a bondage session at the Robbe-Grillet’s seventeenthcentury château, involving Catherine and her full-time submissive partner, who is much younger than her at a mere fifty-one. This situation is reflected in Catherine’s novel The Image with the woman Claire and the younger Anne. Soon after Catherine and Alain met – on a train to Istanbul when she was twenty-one – she told him she was prepared to do many things for him sexually, ‘but not anything that might lead to a pregnancy.’ This suited him: she said in the Vanity Fair interview that he had no problem with erections, only penetration. ‘I thought it must be the problem that some men have of fearing that the vagina is going to swallow them.’ We have already seen literary expressions of this fear and we will see more later. Like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and his domina Fanny von Pistor, the Robbe-Grillets had a formal, written master/slave contract, though in their case the roles were reversed and the woman was the
submissive. It was titled ‘The Contract of Conjugal Prostitution’ and it opens: The present contract between the undersigned parties has been drafted in order to define special rights which may be exercised by the husband upon his young wife during sessions of a particular nature, sessions – to be compensated in cash – during which the young woman will be subjected to ill treatment, humiliation and torture beyond the extent of customary practice, the limits of which have come to be mutually understood during the course of the first year of their marriage. At the foot of the contract it says, ‘Signed in Neuilly, 22nd September 1958.’ In fact, Catherine did not sign the Contract, though she seems to
have fulfilled its terms. Note that she was to be paid for her services – 20,000 francs per session was specified; many women have pointed out that most wives are in a de facto state of conjugal prostitution, but are not paid. The Contract contains several clauses asserting the husband’s total dominance and the wife’s total submission. The reason for her presence being solely to gratify the husband’s vices, he shall treat her accordingly, with relentless harshness and brutality; no consideration whatever shall be taken of the possible enjoyment or otherwise of the young lady herself. It is of the greatest possible importance to the husband that, for the duration of these distractions, his wife remain exposed and open to him at all
times. Unless otherwise instructed, the least pressure of his fingers shall be interpreted as an invitation to render herself even more accessible, or to offer her husband a better view of any area he might wish to see, caress or torment. Above all, each of the body’s natural orifices should be exposed and easily accessible – insofar as this is possible – in order to facilitate penetration. Anyone not knowing the RobbeGrillet’s relationship or not having read Alain’s later novels might think the whole thing was an elaborate joke, but it wasn’t. The whole contract reads as if it had been written by the character Claire in The Image, published two years earlier, with the young woman Anne as the submissive. And, as well as reflecting Sacher-Masoch’s contract with his real-life domina, it reflects the fictional contract in his novel Venus in Furs between Wanda and Severin; she says to him. You no longer have any rights, and no longer can lay claim to any. There can be no limit to my power over you. Remember, that
you won’t be much better than a dog, or some inanimate object. You will be mine, my plaything, which I can break to pieces, whenever I want an hour’s amusement. You are nothing, I am everything. Do you understand? As well as it being generally known that Catherine Robbe-Grillet was Jean de Berg, it was also widely
thought that she was the mysterious Sabine d’Estrée, who had translated of Story of O, in the third – but first worthy – English version of it. In fact it was probably done by Richard Seaver, one of the Merlinois. Still, the equally pseudonymous author of Story of O, Dominique Aury confirmed in an interview with John de St Jorre that she also thought Catherine had been the translator, though at that time she was still concealing her own true identity – Anne Desclos – and is not to be relied upon. ‘That’s what I thought but I’m not sure. She was a lovely creature, Nabokov fell in love with her.’ According to the Vanity Fair interview, ‘Vladimir Nabokov met Catherine when the Stanley Kubrick film of his best-selling book was being cast and abruptly announced, “I want her to be Lolita!” He was sorry to learn that she didn’t speak English and so couldn’t play the role.’ Catherine is tiny and has always had to wear girls’ clothes. This attracted not only Nabokov but also her husband Alain who, as we shall see, liked young girls, and liked the idea – if not necessarily the reality – of hurting them.
THE IMAGE
The Image was published in 1956, under the male pseudonym Jean de Berg, around the time Alain RobbeGrillet was publishing his early novels and pioneering the Nouveau Roman. It was originally issued by Alain’s publisher, Jérôme Lindon of Éditions de Minuit, but this edition was banned and it was later taken
over in its English version by Olympia. According to Vanity Fair, Lindon, who advanced Alain the money to buy the Robbe-Grillet’s famous château, role-played The Image with them, with himself as Jean de Berg, Alain as the woman Claire, and Catherine as the young girl-slave Anne, for whom Nabokov’s neologism ‘nymphet’ could have been invented; it would be interesting to know if Catherine had read Lolita before she wrote her novel, which was published a year later. It has of course been suggested that The Image was in fact written by Alain Robbe-Grillet not Catherine and that, as an emerging intellectual and leader of a new literary movement he did not want to put his name to it. Certainly this would fit with what we know of the RobbeGrillet’s real-life sadomasochist relationship and, as we will see in the later chapter on Alain, the underage, sadistic fantasies in The Image do seem to reflect his own, as evidenced by his later novels. In terms of literary style, The Image bears some trace of Alain’s spare, detached descriptions and, whoever
the author it is far better written than most of Olympia’s Dirty Books. The Image has a preface, which is signed by PR (presumably referring to Pauline Réage, the pseudonym of the author of Story of O, whose true identity was not to be revealed for many years). ‘Dominique Aury’ told John de St Jorre that it was in fact written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and signed PR as a private joke; this is almost certainly true. The preface starts by asking the question, ‘Who is Jean de Berg?’ saying that it is an opportunity to ‘have some fun at guessing games. First of all, I doubt a man could be responsible for this volume.’ This is also true. In the preface Alain makes the point that, in a master/slave relationship between a man and a woman, it is the woman who is in charge – interesting in view of the Conjugal Prostitution contract he wrote shortly afterwards. Her power increases directly in proportion to her apparent selfabasement. But with a single look, she can call a halt to everything, make it crumble into dust.
Once this is clearly understood by both parties, at the cost of a mutual reappraisal, the game can go on. But its meaning will have changed: the all-powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master’s heels, is now really the God. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the various ceremonies that centre around a sacred object. If he falls from grace, everything is lost… Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them, when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing.
This of course was written by a man purporting to be a woman, and it may have been true of Alain’s own relationship with Catherine, but it hardly seems true of the triangular sado-masochistic relationship in The Image. This relationship is very similar to the one in Diane Bataille’s The Whip Angels, for which the model was also Sade’s Bedroom Philosophers (the title Austryn Wainhouse used for his Olympia translation of Philosophie dans le Boudoir), which both Alain and
Catherine may well have known and appreciated, where an older male and female libertine set out to debauch an innocent young girl. The narrator, who has the same name as the author, knows the photographer Claire, though he does not say how, or what their previous relationship was. ‘She was very beautiful. Everyone said that she was very beautiful. And again, that evening, I thought that it was true.’ That evening he meets her at a party and she smiles at him strangely, ‘or perhaps it was just the shadows on her face that gave me that impression.’ He also sees a ‘very young woman, or girl, in a white dress, whom I didn’t know either.’ Throughout the narration, Jean maintains this ambiguity between Anne as young woman and as girl, an ambiguity that he, along with his author’s husband, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov, finds necessary. He is very attracted to her in any case, though not to Claire; fullygrown women do not interest him sexually. Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably even more beautiful than her friend in the
Jean asks Claire who the girl is. ‘Just a young model,’ she replies, ‘she belongs to me.’ Soon it becomes clear that Claire is offering Anne to Jean – her property to lend if she wants. It is not obvious to the narrator or the reader why she is doing this, why him and not anybody else – perhaps she thinks he will appreciate the offer and use it wisely, as in the end he does. The eroticism in the book begins very subtly, metaphorically and only later becomes physical and sadistic. The first time the three of them go out together is to a rose garden. Claire points out her favourites, with obvious sexual symbolism.
white dress. But unlike the latter, she had never aroused any real emotion in me. This astonished me at first, I even told myself that it was her impeccable beauty, precisely, the very perfection that made it impossible to think of her as a potential ‘conquest.’ I probably needed to feel that some little thing about her, at least, was vulnerable in order to arouse any desire in me to win her.
They were all the same type of flower: large, but not very full, with curled-back petals each quite separate from the other, and a centre, or heart, that was still partially closed. The most beautiful of all, according to our guide, was of a delicate flesh colour, darkening near the centre where the halfopen petals formed a deep pocket of shadow, making the centre appear to be of a much more intense pink.
This symbolism is not lost on either woman. Claire tells Anne to go the flower bed; she stands, ‘as though frozen,’ her eyes lowered, in proper the manner of a submissive. Anne is obviously ‘accustomed to obedience.’ Anne held her right hand out toward the half-opened flower. Very gently she ran her fingertips around the outer edges of the petals, partly closed, barely touching their tender pink flesh she ran her fingers several times around the closed heart, very slowly. Then she delicately spread open the inner petals and closed them again, using all five fingers. When she had, in this fashion, spread wide and closed again the flower’s centre two or three times, she suddenly thrust her middle finger deep inside it, where it almost disappeared entirely. Then she withdrew her finger, very slowly, only to plunge it in again as far as it would go. Symbolism quickly turns into reality, as Claire instructs Anne to lift her
skirt up for Jean. Anne gives him a look of ‘complete despair… Never had her eyes been so beautiful, deep and sombre, suffused with terror and surrender.’ Naturally, Anne is not wearing underwear. The narrator, like the ‘absent narrators’ of Alain Robbe-Grillet, describes what he sees objectively and dispassionately. ‘The short golden
pubic hair appeared under this graceful arc, with its narrow little ruffle. The pubis itself was rather prominent, nice and soft, plump, small but inviting.’ Claire asks Jean what he thinks; he replies, ‘it all certainly seems most agreeable.’ Claire takes the stem of a rose with its thorns and slips it under Anne’s garter belt, ‘the blossom hanging
down, to bring the cruel thorn up against the most sensitive flesh, on the inner thigh up close to the pubis.’ The girl keeps saying no, please, but submissives are supposed to do that so Claire continues. Claire waited a few seconds like this, alternately looking at the face and the flesh chosen for torture, then in one motion, jabbed the thorn in and pulled it
down. The tender skin was ripped about a quarter of an inch. Anne gave a cry of pain, from deep in her throat, and shrank back a step. But she stayed there in front of us, wideeyed, open-mouthed – although trembling all over, her cunt exposed. Claire, leaning back in her chair, contemplated the victim with what seemed to me to be either hatred, or the deepest love. Anne is elsewhere described as Claire’s ‘young companion, her protégée, her victim, her mirrorimage.’ As a drop of blood runs down the ‘pearly flesh,’ Jean thinks ‘it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions.’ This brief flash of irony shows that the author is still having fun, though things are about to get rather more serious. Claire shows Jean a series of photographs of Anne, in increasingly sadistic poses. He describes them to us in the same affectless Nouveau Roman style that Alain RobbeGrillet uses – as we will see later he also uses this device of describing a
picture to distance the narrator from the action, action which has already happened and in which the narrator had and can have no part; the girl has already been hurt, there is nothing the narrator can do except describe the outcome as it appears in the photographs. Of course, this is not true: the narrator could choose to be appalled and hand the photographs back. He doesn’t. She is standing next to a column in the same position Claire made her assume to hide the stolen rose under her dress. Only she is not wearing any shoes and instead of the dress she only has the slip whose thin material she is holding up with both hands, exposing the halfopened thighs and the triangle of her fleece. One leg is straight, the other slightly bent at the knee, the foot only half resting on the floor.
A lace inset decorates the top of the slip but one can’t really make it out because it is pulled to one side, the right shoulder strap not being on at all and the left one having fallen off the shoulder. The black lingerie is therefore twisted around, covering half of one breast and freeing the other breast almost entirely… The face, under the loose curls, is a real triumph: the eyes consenting, the lips parted, and mingled look of ingénue charm and submissiveness. The lighting, while accentuating the shadows, softens the lines as it defines them. The light coming from a Gothic window with austere vertical bars, a part of which can be seen in the background at the edge of the picture. The column in the foreground is of stone, as is the window frame, and is about the same width as the girl’s hips next
to it. Beyond it, at the other edge of the picture, one can see the head of an iron bed. The floor is a chequerboard pattern of very large black and white squares.
This description is strikingly similar to one in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1962 story ‘The Secret Room’; did he copy it from her, did she copy it from him, did he in fact, as some critics said, write The Image, or were Alain and Catherine at this time so closely aligned that they wrote in the same style? Who knows. Either way, the photos – taken by Claire of course – show the victim in increasingly bad shape. There are many pages of detailed description of each photo. In the later photos she is naked and chained and has been beaten. The narrator is still objective, although even he is moved – to pity, shame or sexual excitement he does not say. In any case, he is not moved enough that he can ignore the elegant pattern formed by light passing through the bed frame; he sees the scenes with an artist’s eye, or perhaps a film maker’s eye: Alain directed several films. But if it was indeed Catherine who wrote the
book then perhaps she is simply describing photographs he took of her, or perhaps she is sketching out in detail scenes to be acted out. Certainly, whoever wrote these descriptions seems to be speaking from experience rather than imagination.
The picture of little Anne chained to her bed, her knees in a most uncomfortable position, is obviously more moving because of the cruel evidence of the torture she has undergone. The black iron work forms a pattern of elegant arabesques behind her. The nude girl is bound to the stone column by thick ropes. She is facing the camera, her legs open, her arms raised. A black band covers her eyes. Her mouth is screaming, or else distorted by the extremity of her suffering. The ankles are tied to the pillar on the right and on the left, diametrically opposite each other, so that the legs are wide apart, the knees slightly bent. The arms are pulled up and back, only visible up to the elbows. The
hands, no doubt, are tied together behind the pillar. The ropes bite deeply into the flesh. One goes under the right armpit and across to the other side of the neck, imprisoning the whole shoulder. Others are tied around the arms and the ankles. Others, finally, hold the legs above and below each knee so as to force them back against the stone and as far apart as possible. The tortured body, whose reflexes clearly show that it is struggling against its bonds, has two deep wounds from which blood flows freely. However Jean convinces himself, if not us, that the picture, ‘extremely fascinating in its horror despite the somewhat romantic exaggeration, could only be the result of a trick… But it was done so well that one
could easily be fooled.’ Things inevitably progress into three-way sex, preceded by whipping, which Claire claims makes the girl sexually aroused. She inserts her finger into Anne. The finger entered with a single thrust into the ardent depths. Anne closed her eyes entirely and opened her mouth a little wider. Claire gave me a triumphant look. The ease of penetration proof, in effect, that the girl was nice and moist, aroused, ready for love. ‘You see,’ Claire said to me, ‘how well she has been broken in: when one is about to beat her, she gets all set for her orgasm. It’s a question of training, just like with a dog!’ Inevitably the narrator ends up brutally whipping the young girl
himself. ‘I contemplated the young woman, completely at my mercy, who had by now given up struggling or hoping for any reprieve. And I whipped her with all my strength, revelling in it… And I ravaged her, without any thought of her sufferings, penetrating the halfdead body through its smallest opening.’ In the final chapter, which is titled ‘Everything Resolves Itself,’ we have the final inevitability: Claire gives herself to Jean as his slave, having trained him to be the master. The book ends: She was standing near the bed, wearing a pleated skirt and a white blouse. Then, I gave the order: ‘Get undressed!’ She only hesitated for a second. She knelt in front of me on the sheepskin rug and began to take her clothes off, one by one,
according to the ritual. Her underclothes were exactly like her protégée’s. She too, wore no panties… ‘Say “I love you,”‘ I commanded. She repeated: ‘I love you,’ adding that she was my slave and I could beat her to death if it would amuse me…
When I penetrated her for good she began to cry out, calling me by my first name and repeating over and over that she loved me…
‘PAULINE RÉAGE’ (ANNE DESCLOS)
Who was Pauline Réage? Her identity was a mystery in Paris literary circles for fifty years. Then it turned out that, like Catherine Robbe-Grillet and Diane Bataille, she was the partner of a distinguished literary figure – a member of the Académie Française in fact, and had written the novel as
an offering for him, presumably knowing his sexual tastes, which, like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s must have been violently sadistic. It was not just the literary establishment who were keen to find out the name of the author: the Brigade Mondaine – Paris’ moral guardians and the bane of Maurice Girodias’ life – were also interested in the identity of this wicked pornographer. Girodias tells one of his rambling but amusing stories about this time; he liked to tell stories of how he ran rings around the Brigade. When Story of O appeared, I was still sharing offices with my French colleague, Jean-Jacques Pauvert [who had published the Marquis de Sade], on rue de Nesle. His French version of the book came out nearly at the same time as the English translation published by The Olympia Press. We were anticipating a bit of trouble, and curious as to its nature: the book was unusual, and although it was quite deliberately pornographic, the excellence of its style put it in a class all by itself. It had obtained a literary prize, the Prix des Deux
Magots. It was prefaced by one of France’s most refined and revered writers, Jean Paulhan… When Jean-Jacques was finally summoned to La Brigade Mondaine, he spent a whole day there. He came back fuming with rage, saying that they had tried everything to make him reveal the identity of the author, short of physical violence. He had simply told them that he knew perfectly well who the author was but would never tell the police… The next day came my turn. They gave me the grand treatment, presented me to the chief of the Brigade, cajoled me, threatened, and even went as far as pretending that Jean-Jacques had already given them at the author’s name. I laughed pleasantly at that and interrupted them to ask news of their families, and their projects for the next summer holidays, and so on, as is usual in polite French conversation. ‘So,’ I said, ‘I understand that Jean-Jacques Pauvert has told you that he knew who the author was, but that he would not tell you.’
‘That is so,’ they answered, ‘but of course he won’t get away with that. We have our own sources of information and all we want is to check them. We don’t really need your confirmation or your friend’s, but you have no right to withhold information from us. On account of his attitude he will be severely sentenced. Would you like to act like a fool too? You have quite enough trouble as it is, don’t you?’ ‘Oh my, yes,’ I sighed, ‘but this is also confusing. You see, you say you know who wrote the book and I can’t say that I do, myself. As to Pauvert, he says he knows but he won’t tell. Well it is understandable that you should resent his attitude. But he was wise not to speak because I know who he believes the author to be. Well, gentlemen, all I can tell is, firstly, that I don’t know myself who that person really is, and, furthermore, knowing as I do who Pauvert thinks wrote the book, I know that he is wrong in his assumption, and that is about the only aspect of the matter on which I can proclaim any kind of certainty.’
They were puzzled. One of them asked me: ‘but you could at least tell us who you think you know did not write the book that Pauvert thinks did write it?’ ‘Listen, gentleman,’ I pleaded, ‘Pauvert is a very old friend of mine and I don’t want to displease him stupidly by reporting our little quarrels to you. Would you like me to betray his confidence? No, and it would be such an error to bring up somebody’s name who has nothing to do with all this, in my opinion. And furthermore I don’t even know that person’s name…’ ‘So you say that you don’t know the name of the person who you say you know did not write the book?’ ‘That is correct. Disturbing, maybe, but correct.’ I told my tale of confusion to Pauvert when I got back to the
office, after a full day of dialectical exercises. Pauvert picked up the phone and called the chief of the Brigade. ‘I have something very important to tell you in connection with that book, Story of O,’ he said. ‘Girodias tells me he told you that he knew who I knew was the author of the book but that he was convinced that I was wrong. Well, that’s a lot of nonsense. He always refused to tell me who he thought I thought was the author of the book: so how can he assume that I was wrong? That fellow’s been reading too much pornography or something; he’s simply illogical. No, my position is unchanged: I know who wrote the book, and I won’t tell you. And even if you ask me if Girodias wrote it himself, I won’t answer.’ And so we went out for refreshments.
In 2004, as a result of his research for his history of Olympia The Good Ship Venus, John de St Jorre interviewed the woman who claimed to be the author of Story of O: the distinguished writer and critic Dominique Aury, then eighty-six. She had been the only woman reader at Gallimard (Albert Camus was on the same committee) and she had a Légion d’Honneur. She had been the lover of Academician Jean Paulhan, her boss, the editor of Nouvelle Revue Française, who was twentythree years older than her. He wrote
the introduction to the original edition (which you might think would have provided a clue, though Paulhan, along with André Malraux and Henri de Montherlant was himself considered as a likely candidate for authorship). Paulhan was a keen admirer of the Marquis de Sade, and had told Aury that no woman could write that kind of book. She proved him wrong. But even now ‘Aury’ was fooling everyone. Dominique Aury was itself a pseudonym, for Anne Desclos, a member of the French resistance during the war, and a distinguished literary translator who had translated, among others, Swinburne, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald into French. Despite her affair with Paulhan and a brief marriage, Desclos was bisexual and had an affair with the novelist and pioneer of women’s history, Édith Thomas, who was probably the inspiration for Anne-Marie in Story of O. They met during the war in the Comité national des écrivains (Writers’ National Committee), a part of the resistance led by Louis Aragon.
STORY OF O
Even though she is not chronologically the first of her kind, O is the original, the mother – the parthenogenetic precursor – of all such women in novels, including her most famous successor, Anastasia Steele from EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey franchise (though James was apparently not thinking of O but of Bella from Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series). This is a very pale grey compared to Story of O that has
in its turn spawned a tide of even paler epigones. O has been the cause of much feminist anger, understandably: a woman who, apparently willingly, submits herself to the increasingly brutal whims of her boyfriend and the men to whom gives her is not a feminist hero. O has not only offended anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon; even Angela Carter, who, as we saw earlier argues in The Sadeian Woman that Sade was not anti-women, objected to it. Many pornographic novels are written in the first person as if by a woman, or use a woman as the focus of the narrative; but this device only reinforces the male orientation of the fiction. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and the anonymous Story of O, both classics of the genre, appear in this way to describe a woman’s mind through the fiction of her sexuality. This technique ensures that the gap left in the text is just the right size for the reader to insert his prick into, the exact dimensions, in fact, of Fanny’s vagina or of O’s anus.
But we do not see into O’s mind as we do into Fanny Hill’s. She too willingly gives her up her virginity, knowing it will hurt, but we see her doing it, she confides her feelings to us. ‘Alas! it was enough I knew his pleasure to submit joyfully to him, whatever pain I foresaw it would cost me.’ It does cause her pain, and she does submit to Charles, ‘to whom I was now infinitely endeared by his complete triumph over a maidenhead where he so little expected to find one,’ and Fanny
‘presently drowned all sense of pain in the pleasure of seeing him, of thinking that I belonged to him: he who was now the absolute disposer of my happiness, and, in one word, my fate.’ But Charles is no sadist, he does no relish her pain; he ‘employed himself with so much sweetness, so much warmth, to sooth, to caress, and comfort me in my soft complainings.’ O does not speak to us, and hardly at all to the men in the story; unlike Fanny we have no access to her thoughts. We have no idea why she submits to rape and torture. O in fact appears to have no thoughts at all, no personality, no ‘character’ in a literary sense (as we have seen, one of the differences between erotica and pornography is that in pornography there are no characters, only bodies). She is dispossessed and disenfranchised from the beginning: she has no name and no voice. At one point O even has no face: she is taken to a party, like the ones in Leppin’s Daniel Jesus and Schnitzler’s Dream Novel and paraded in front of strangers with her face masked but her genitals exposed. She is an empty vessel for her rapists to fill
with their fantasies – literally, since they fill all her orifices with their masculinity, even fitting her with increasingly large anal plugs to make her smallest absence bigger and available to be filled. Not that the men in the story are given any more in terms of motivation and character either, they only have a function – to fill O’s empty circles; both the story she is in and O herself really do have an absence at their centre, like the letter O which, in lieu of a name, represents her. It is also the character that represents zero, the absence of anything, as well as representing the pursed mouth, anus and vagina of the woman, holes waiting to be made whole by being filled and fulfilled, the only purpose of a hole – nothing – being to be filled, completed, to become something; Carter is undoubtedly right about this. O says to her lover – or Desclos says to Paulhan – ‘I am nothing but the thought of you, the desire of you, the obsession of you.’ Thought, desire and obsession are all forms of absence, of an emptiness inside that can only be filled by another – a literal Freudian penis envy. As Carter says, referring to the
most basic and reductive form of pornography: In the stylisation of graffiti, the prick is always represented erect, in an alert attitude of enquiry or curiosity or affirmation; it points upwards, it asserts. The hole is open, an inner space, like a mouth waiting to be filled. From this elementary iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences
– man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist, waiting. The male is positive, an exclamation mark. Woman is negative. Between her legs lies nothing but a zero, the sign for nothing, that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning. An earlier literary O is the eponymous Marquise of O, in Heinrich Kleist’s novella of 1808, who may have been raped by a soldier and is now pregnant though she cannot remember the incident, which is not described in the text; neither she nor we can explain the lacuna in her story which is represented by the empty centre of the letter which represents her name (as with Desclos’ O, we are not given the Marquise’s real name).
In a completely different vein, the key Buddhist idea of emptiness at the centre is represented in Zen calligraphy by a simple circle drawn with a single brushstroke, which is called enso in Japanese, representing both eternity and the idea of nothingness. In Zen, this is an important concept, and not a negative one: clearing the mind of externals is essential to reach the stillness at the centre of one’s being. This may be what O is trying to do, though that is not how things turn out. O is a nonperson. She is not described and given no back story. She is not allowed to speak in the presence of the men, except to say ‘I love you’ to the boyfriend who pimps her to his sadistic friends. It starts in the taxi where the boyfriend calmly tells her to undress and she calmly does, without question. It is never
clear why she accedes to his initial, relatively harmless request and continues to accede, though only passively, to all the horrors to come. I do not intend to quote at length from the novel’s scenes of increasingly sadistic torture and humiliation – in this case, the word sadistic is accurate: the ever more sickening things that are done to O reflect the arc of 120 Days of Sodom,
which, presumably, Desclos knew that Paulhan liked. Instead I want to talk a bit about the literary aspects of the work, which was, as we now know, written by a woman who was a reader at Gallimard and a translator of modernist English fiction and, we must presume, knew what she was doing. But although the actual writing in O is not of a particularly high quality, and certainly not of the quality of the literature that Anne Desclos translated, it does have one interesting aspect. Unlike most of the other Olympia female-written novels (counting Frances Lengel as female for these purposes) about submissive women it is not, as I said, written in the first person, that is it is not narrated by O herself. To have written it this way would have been to give O a personality, a life outside the story, which Desclos could not have done. This is not in fact the story of O, it is a story; she must have had many other stories before this one, but we do not know what they are any more than we know her name or Lady Macbeth’s. In fact, O does have a name, because at one point her lover ‘pronounced her name,’ though not loud enough
for us to hear him. As far as the man is concerned, O’s mouth is for his and his friends’ use, not for speaking, apart from the three words she is allowed. René said: ‘say it once again. Say “I love you”‘. O said: ‘I love you,’ said it with such delight that she scarcely dared touch her lips to the tip of his sex, still protected by its mantlet of soft skin.… It was with her mouth still half-gagged
by the hardened flesh filling it that she brought out, again, thickly, the words: ‘I love you…’ O was aware of the splendour of her mouth, of its beauty, since her lover deigned to enter it, since he deigned to make a spectacle of its caresses, since he deigned to shed his seed in it. She received him as one receives a God, with thanksgiving heard his cry. Desclos could have chosen to give us a back story to explain why O submits so totally, completely gives up her freedom, including the freedom to speak, but she is not interested in explaining O’s motivation, just in describing her degradation in lurid detail. Her other rapists are not interested in hearing her speak either, though they are ‘eager to hear O howl, the sooner the better. Proud, she steeled herself to resist, she gritted her teeth; but not for long. They soon heard her beg to be let loose, begging them to stop, stop for a second, for just one second.’ We are not told what words she used to try to persuade them, they were never going to work anyway.
But this third person narration is not entirely Flaubert’s style indirect libre (free indirect style), the form of narration told by an omniscient narrator that is the hallmark of most nineteenth-century novels and almost all pornography. Desclos, as if anticipating writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and the Nouveau Roman, subtly disrupts the narrative with a hint of the first person. ‘Still blindfolded, she passed one or two doors and then found herself alone, the blindfold gone, standing in a
darkened room where she was left for half an hour, for an hour, for two – I don’t know, but it seemed as though it were an age.’ ‘And then I know that they released O’s hands.’ ‘What I do know is that…’ This, however, is not sustained and does not lead to anything – it is not used as a structural narrative device. Story of O has two endings: the main book ends with her being abused but not spoken to: ‘not once did anyone address a word to her.’ But there is, in italics after the end, another paragraph: ‘There existed another ending to the story of O. Seeing herself about to be left by Sir Stephen, she preferred to die. To which he gave his consent.’ This in fact is more consistent with the arc of the story: the increasing abuse of O’s body continually points towards this being a snuff novel; earlier on we are told: She did not want to die; but if torture were the price she was to have to pay for her lover’s continuing love, then she only hoped he would be happy because of what she had undergone, and she waited, very mild, very mute, for them to take her back to him.
‘HARRIET DAIMLER’ (IRIS OWENS)
Harriet Daimler is the pseudonym of the author of five Traveller’s Companions, which makes her the foremost female writer for The Olympia Press. She lives frequently in New York, where she was born, and prefers to remain anonymous in order to avoid the confidences of New York’s numerous phone freaks. Like most of the crowd who wrote for Olympia through the
fifties, the main inspiration was the charcuteries, cheeses, and wines of Paris. She believes that she does not have a dirtier mind than other people, though her facility and speed in writing out those extended sexual fantasies makes her wonder what she was really dreaming about while getting all the college degrees, marriages and divorces that are requisite in a normal American woman’s life. Currently writing a book for publication in New York, Harriet Daimler struggles against her impossible tendency to write more explicitly than the courts will tolerate. That was Girodias’ introduction to Daimler in The Olympia Reader. She was in fact called Iris Owens (1929-2008), born Iris Klein in Brooklyn, New York. Ironically, writing ‘dirty books’ for Olympia was supposed to give writers the time and money to write their serious works but whereas Owens published five books for Girodias – one of which was co-authored – she only published two novels under her own name: After Claude, 1973 and Hope Diamond Refuses, 1984, both
written well after she returned to New York from Paris in 1960. Owens was introduced to Girodias by the ubiquitous Alexander Trocchi at a particularly disastrous financial time in her life. He asked her for twenty-five sample pages. ‘I have never, in my girlish innocence and Americanisation, read an erotic book, but I sure had entertained some erotic thoughts and I made up for lost time.’ She wrote the pages quickly and dropped them off. Two days later he contacted her.
Yes, I could write, he told me. Yes, he wanted the book, yes, he’d start giving me the two dollars a day for which we wrote, yes, yes, but, hesitantly, he suggested to me, gently, possibly, maybe I could tone down the book a bit. He explained that every single word I wrote did not have to be sexual! The book was just a little more than what his readers seemed to go for. So I tried hard to rein in my sexual fantasies. But I was young and passionate and quite crazy, and the book went its merry course. This book was to be called Darling, Girodias decided – an odd title for a rape fantasy perhaps. It must have sold well for Girodias to commission another four books from Owens, though the fact that she was apparently very beautiful and stylish with a New York feistiness probably helped. Terry Southern, in ‘Flashing on Gid,’ talks about Girodias’ feelings for her while at the same time making his own feelings about her, feelings which he seems to have shared, pretty clear.
Gid’s great love, as is generally known, was the fabulous Iris Owens, brilliant Junoesque authoress of the two excellent novels After Claude and Hope Diamond Refuses. Under the pen name ‘Harriet Daimler,’ she also wrote several of Olympia Press’s top-of-the-line titles, including The Woman Thing, Innocence, and The Pleasure Thieves (with ‘Henry Crannach,’ who was, in fact, her best friend, the ultra-cutie-pie Marilyn Kanterman [Meeske]). Aside from her Junoesque beauty, Gid was smitten by her rapier wit and devastating logic. She was a pre-Sontag Sontag, and he was determined to get the best of her. He had a typical Frenchman’s attitude toward women – i.e., that they were all bimbos – so Iris Owens, with a
chess-playing poet’s head on her, was an infuriating enigma. At first he was prepared (in selfdefense, of course) to write her off as a ‘dyke mathematician,’ until he got a glimpse of her very endearing feminine charms. Then he was hooked. I got the impression that she was fond of him, but she certainly never reciprocated the total adulation he obviously had for her. Owens’ Traveller’s Companion books are obviously written in a hurry and contain enough sex to keep Girodias happy but they do nevertheless have a very individual style and treat the issue of being a woman – a woman who willingly and openly has sex with men and feels no need to be ashamed of it – with a combination of wit and seriousness that she managed to make her own.
DARLING
Darling of 1956, no. 19 in the Traveller’s Companion Series, involves a woman artist who is raped as a virgin and immediately turns nymphomaniac, unable to be satisfied by anyone except her rapist, whom she wants to find so that she can repeat the experience. And then kill him. Apart from the very
questionable subject matter, I do not intend to quote at length from this book as it has almost no literary merit. And it is easy to see why Girodias told her to tone it down, it is very filthy indeed. However, it does have a couple of redeeming features. It is set in and around Greenwich Village in New York, the birthplace of the beat generation and future cradle of the LGBT movement. Owens obviously knew and loved the area and gives us a very charming pencil sketch of Washington Square. Gloria turned her head and looked at the couples – old ladies and turtle-necked aesthetes sitting on benches. Their voices droned on… ‘Nothing’s been written since Harry James…’ ‘Joyce was the end of the novel’... ‘So I said to him, I’m no easy lay…’ ‘I mean he’s a bore, and compulsively clean. Always picking things up after me.’ … She crossed the lane, stopping over the cement steps of the Circle in the Square. Some unshaven intellects were playing the guitar and singing Harry Chapin songs.
They seemed contented and complete. The other redeeming feature of the book is the way it shows gay and straight life integrating naturally; gay and straight porn would normally be completely separate things but Darling contains both, equally explicitly, not to mention an extremely explicit bisexual threeway with Gloria and two gay men. Gay life was a feature of Washington Square at this time and Owens was obviously completely comfortable with it. However, one has to wonder how comfortable Girodias’ intended audience would be with it – his ideal client was an American serviceman returning home, who presumably then lent the book, perhaps even rented it, to several friends; surely, none of them would want their friends to know they had read a book that featured graphic portrayals of homosexual acts. Here again, Owens takes in the scene like a painter; Tom of Finland perhaps in this case. The park was alive with people. Young beautiful boys walked in pairs, their tightly blue jeaned
legs outlining the curved space between their thighs and their bulging sex. Size was the absolute standard for gay boys. Size queens. And they so arrogantly pushed their ten inches of maledevoted pricks before them. Walking at the side of the lovers, like precious children, muscled boxers and sleek Dalmatians sniffed at neighbouring dogs. Even the dogs
in Washington Square were faggots, sniffing with equal interest at male and female. One of the boys turned and looked at her and recognised her. His eyes were soft and pained like a poodle’s. ‘Gloria, the most beautiful woman in New York.’ ‘Hello, Jack.’ ‘Honestly, honey you make me want to go straight.’ ‘Maybe we should try.’
‘Babycakes, set a date.’ ‘Now, right here in the middle of the Circle in the Square.’ ‘I don’t think Harry would forgive me.’ ‘Bring Harry along. We’ll make a threesome.’ And so they do.
INNOCENCE
Innocence, also published in 1956, as Traveller’s Companion no. 33, is a completely different kind of narrative and has a completely different kind of central female character to the worldly-wise native New Yorkers of Darling and The Woman Thing. Adrian, the narrator
of Innocence is a pale, fragile, virginal, dying and house-bound young rich girl, apparently doomed to an early death by her decaying family’s defective genes. It reads more like a Southern Gothic novel – by Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty perhaps – and, apart from her sexual needs the narrator could be a character from a Shirley Jackson novel. She decides to lose her innocence in spectacular fashion, having decided that she is ignorant rather than innocent. Her aloof, patrician father has never given her ‘the kind of love that fathers lavish on daughters. Instead, he has given me the acknowledgement, the unspoken assurance that if he had a dinner party, I would be invited.’ But he does allow her access to his books, which she devours. ‘I live through my books and through my acute awareness of the house’s life.’ Her parents treat her ‘like an angel,’ because, ‘they know I will die a virgin. “She is a nun,” I have heard my father say with the special pride of the debauched. It seems to me an ugly worship.’ Adrian is given a naive and submissive young nurse called Rose to look after her; Rose is from a
family who have served Adrian’s family for a long time. Rose knew I was to be obeyed, deferring to me as to a vestal virgin who could give life or take it away. At my command, she would swallow a poison or get beside me in the bed to share my death. She was compelled by a force that drives those much
older and wiser than she; by the fascination of cruelty, of the virgin who represses her sexuality and lets out an odour of burning flesh. Rose was, I suppose, in love with me. That I was a woman was an important. I was a being that gave her freedom by giving her no liberty. Adrian decides to lose her innocence on the buxom Rose – she is fascinated by Rose’s breasts. They start by fondling each other but then Rose appears to know when ‘the feeling began to spread like spilled honey throughout me… She knew the second that my passion grew too heavy in my thighs and between them.’ Her chin burrowed my thighs apart, and her tongue licked my hair and the delicate exposed flesh under my belly. She got inside the taut lips, where I had never touched. She hunted for a moment with her hands, looking for the centre of the shocks that were radiating from there to my head. She found the tiny hill with a grunt of satisfaction. Her fingers barely touched it and I
could feel the still lake explode like a waterfall down a steep cliff. When her fingers had given it shape, she stiffened her tongue and sought again for the gnawing insect that had been sixteen years latent in my body… My hands clutched my breasts. Then, in search of a hook to hang onto, I sank my finger into her ass and my thumb into the hair-covered opening, sister to the one that she was now torturing… I couldn’t hold on; my limbs trembled with the rattle that announced death, my mouth, open for my exhausting gasps, was wide and dry. All my blood and moisture had rushed to the agonised area. Then I began to fall down, down, and with joy I knew I was dying, coming at last
to the flat white rock. But just at the moment when I should have been finally crushed, my body screamed a loud lustful song and I escaped into space. Adrian’s petit mort is not the actual death of her, at least not this time. She continues to have sex with Rose until she has another idea. She knows she will ‘never be able to have a man’, as her body is ‘too feeble.’ But she sees a way: ‘I would not die without knowing the secrets of a man, and maybe it was right, if right or wrong touched my sensuality, for my educator to be my father.’ She decides she wants Rose to have sex with her father while she is on the same bed. Rose reluctantly agrees, and her father is not hard to seduce; Adrian is ostensibly asleep on the bed when they first have sex there, Rose
looking into her eyes, her father seemingly unaware of her presence. My father, his head now resting on my knees, groaned. My own hand slipped between my thighs, but lay useless there. I could not satisfy myself any more than I could have been surprised by a letter I had written to myself. My time would have to come after, and my beating heart told me that an instant caress would
satiate me. I could still see the enormous swell of my father in her mouth, but she loosened her hold on him, her eyes glassy and distant. Her body jerked violently, and she released a long primitive howl. As the sound of her climax filled the room, my father’s rod lay restless at her lips… He dragged her body around, and as if he were a party to our plan, he placed her so that her triangle of dark red hair mixed with my long flaxen hair. Now was the moment I was denied. I did not want it. All I wanted was to feel her tongue in me, not this monstrous probing weapon with which my father had captured my mother and carelessly created me. In Part Two of the book, the narration switches to André, Adrian’s cousin, come from France to live with them and go to school in America. Andre is spiteful, vicious and gay. His father is a rampant heterosexual and assumes his son is the same. He thought we were all like him. That I was like him… just close
your eyes and jam your cock in and tomorrow we’ll all eat caviar. Well, I closed my eyes and put it in, but it went in the wrong place. And I liked it. And I like to get it put in me, too, in the same place. I hate cunts, and the cunthappy cunt-lover he pretended to be. The phony, the phony with the well-geared tool. Telling me he enjoyed all the women he’d laid. He fucking well would have liked to get his prick in the doorman’s ass, but he was scared, so he fucked women and insulted us… No dark dungeons for me. I liked to see where I was going. Put it in a man and you know you’ll get it back. This idea that gay men are afraid of losing their penis inside a woman’s vagina had also appeared in Darling, and again one wonders how the typical customer of The Traveller’s Companion series regarded this, even assuming they would be happy with the foregoing lesbian scenes. In the end, André discovers what Adrian and Rose get up to in her room and, despite his horror of the female body – both of Rose’s
voluptuousness and of Adrian’s pale, skeletal, blue-veined emaciation, and especially of the female vagina – he beats, dominates and anally penetrates Rose in order to humiliate and blackmail Adrian. He steals her jewellery and makes her alter her will, leaving her money to him. Then finally, one day with Rose, ‘I let her push it in her cunt. It felt so big and stiff and able to take care of itself.’ But just at that moment, Adrian dies. Andre realises that he cannot trust Rose. She’d talk. She’d tell them. She was flushed with the final needs of my maleness. She was all my power, all my plan taken away from me. ‘But I don’t want her to be dead,’ I wailed in terror. ‘Adrian!’ and I flung the will at her rigidifying legs. ‘Here,’ and the jewels poured out of my pockets, ‘take them, take them, take, take…’
THE ORGANISATION
An even stranger book than her previous novels, and one on the face of it even less likely to appeal to Girodias’ audience is Daimler/ Owens’ The Organisation of 1957, republished in 1962 as The New Organisation, no. 40 in the Traveller’s Companion Series. This renaming and reissuing of Travellers
Companion titles was Girodias’ way of getting round the banning of his books in Paris, so that, for example, Candy was at one time reissued as Lollipop: A rather silly name to conceal the book’s identity from the French police, I admit. But I knew that the inspectors from the Brigade Mondaine would be fooled by that simple device, which we had used in a number of similar cases (the notorious Helen and Desire [by Alexander Trocchi writing as Frances Lengel] after it was banned was reissued as Desire and Helen, The Organisation as The New Organisation, etc.; the idea being that the banned titles were listed in alphabetical order, and a policeman’s imagination seldom goes beyond the first letter of a word when it is not under orders to go further. In Owens’ bizarre novel, a group of people calling themselves the Organisation, speak in a strange private language, slightly reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. They role-play, or as they call it dramaguise, famous novels, in this
case Sade’s Bedroom Philosophers, which of course was translated by Austryn Wainhouse, appearing as Traveller’s Companion no. 49. In a series of dialogues, as in the original, they play out the three main characters: the libertine Dolmancé, the libertiness Madame de SaintAnge, and the young girl they ‘educate’ into the mysteries of sex, Eugénie. Owens’ book is turgid and almost unreadable, unlike its original, though there is one quite amusing scene where, with pencil and paper, they try to unravel Sade’s complex physical couplings, almost as if it were a game of Twister. Her pencil paused. ‘Eugénie,’ she complained, ‘is on top of me, my head is between her legs, you are sucking her cunt…’ The pencil poised and hesitated. ‘Eugénie is on top of me…’ She drew intently in the silent no clockticking room. ‘The only way I can subfuge it,’ she finally conceded, ‘is with Eugénie lying on my back, her back against my back, like some kind of illusiomat Siamese twin. Her head lies on my ass, but it’s a considerable distance away from my hole, not at all interfering
with your subfuging, Dolmancé. She spreads her legs, bends them slightly at the knee, thereby raising and exposing her illusiomat cunt, and straddling my head.’ She held up the picture, ‘Does that give all of us the same subfuge?’ she believes questioned. And Dolmancé and Eugénie subfuged tout de suite. ‘All right then, Dolmancé, continue.’ With clearing throat, and wilting cock, ‘Thus,’ he ambled, ‘I’ll cause her to jet her fuck a second time. Next I will lodge my prick in her anus; you will avail me of your ass, t’will take the place of the cunt she had under my nose, and now you will have at that cunt in the style she shall have employed, her head now between your legs.’
THE WOMAN THING
This novel was published in 1958 as part of the Traveller’s Companion Series and reissued in 1965 as Woman, no. 61. It concerns a couple, Macdonald, a Scottish doctor, and Martha, a Brooklynborn, struggling writer living in Paris, who are constantly bickering; ‘always either sleeping or fucking,’ as she says. McDonald may be based on the Scottish Alexander Trocchi and Martha seems like she might
well be a self-portrait of her author. She gets a letter from her mother enclosing money – apparently Martha’s only source of income – which has the authentic ring of a nineteen fifties Brooklyn-Jewish mother. Macdonald reads it to her in bed. Aren’t you writing anymore? I should think you could make some money that way. I don’t expect you to be a great serious genius like Edna Ferber or Fannie Hurst, McDonald’s face tinged yellow and the words thickened, but at least you could get something in ‘Ladies Home Journal’ or ‘Saturday Evening Post.’ Don’t they pay anything for stories? You used to write such nice stories. I always said, and I still say, why not a happy ending? You know what I mean dear, it’s the same thing as it’s easy to love a rich man as a poor man. I never could understand why you had to kill off all your characters, unless your stories were detective thrillers and it’s just too deep for me. ‘Did you explain to her that you couldn’t have orgasms at that stage of your
literary development,’ demanded Macdonald seriously. Martha stared at the wallpaper opposite the bed. Martha has in fact told Macdonald that he was the first man to give her an orgasm, though this seems to make her despise him even more. ‘Can I only be satisfied by someone I despise?’ she asks him. The sex is satisfying physically but tears them apart emotionally, as they constantly need to hurt and belittle each other, very much like the couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – she is also called Martha – though this was not staged until 1962 and the film was not released until 1966. Nevertheless, it would be quite interesting to read this next extract with the voices of Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in mind. ‘Come, your great mind has stimulated my great cock.’ ‘I want to sleep,’ of all things. ‘Later,’ he pulled her against him, ‘I’ve had enough of being together, I’m sick of you. Let’s fuck and be apart. Let me suck your cunt and forget you’re here,’ he jammed a finger into her, ‘a few minutes’ peace, then we can be lovers. Do you like it when I suck your cunt?’ he snarled. ‘You know,’ she relented, feeling the brush of his head between her thighs. ‘Then I’ll begin neglecting you there.’ ‘You make me feel so alone.’ ‘Be a big girl now,’ he sank his lips over the protecting pinkness
of her pulsing womb, whispering an answer. ‘I don’t want to be alone,’ she pressed against his skilful mouth, down to her deepest secret. ‘Don’t leave me alone,’ her hips rotated in perverse obedience to McDonald’s insulting tongue. His fingers punctured her anus and hooked her cunt higher and tighter into his sucking mouth, ‘I’d rather be a slave,’ she whispered, ‘than be so alone and you’re so alone, you don’t even want slaves for company. Fuck me Macdonald, fuck me with your prick.’ He moved up to her in the bed and she sucked her female juices from his lips. ‘Fuck me Macdonald, be with me.’ ‘Don’t eat me up,’ he warned, just be a bitch and fuck me till I’m dead.’ McDonald fixes Martha up with a rich American artist called James, who copies Picassos, almost acting like a pimp, though she is ostensibly just going to model for him. ‘Goodbye, MacDonald,’ she called grievously, and inside of her a child’s voice long dead echoed, ‘goodbye forever.’ As the elevator up to
James’s atelier ‘carried them silently to the top floor, it separated her from Paris and Macdonald as surely as a rocket fired to remote planets.’ His studio is furnished like a Bollywood film set. They immediately bond over French plumbing and lack of refrigerators. At first it appears if he has no sexual interest in her, he merely wants to tell her how bored he is with everything, but then he suddenly asks her to suck his cock. ‘I hardly know you,’ Martha stuttered. ‘I’m not asking you to know me,’ he conceded agreeably, ‘just my cock.’ ‘But it looks so much like you,’ Martha quibbled, ‘it looks enough like you to be your twin.’ And it did. His cock was an enlarged miniature of the rest of him. It was very white, very long, the exact thickness of his neck, small and quizzical at the head.
‘It’s fantastic,’ she touched it hesitantly, ‘it’s repulsive.’ His balls seemed inconveniently and comfortably forward, pushing the entire massive machine within easy reach of a mouth. The prick was colourless, erect, strong, healthy and somehow bored! A fond mother couldn’t have distinguished between James Dykes and his privates… ‘Does it have your tastes in music and literature and such
trifles,’ she pressed. ‘Mouths,’ he enunciated, ‘mouths, assholes and cunts, that’s all I know about its tastes. For the rest, we leave each other alone… Ahhh,’ he threw himself into the piece, how hot it is, ahh, and burning, suck, suck,’ and she choked obediently on the gross raft that whipped her into a whirlpool of shooting sperm. ‘Now drink,’ he panted, ‘don’t let a drop escape. Quench your thirst, it will make you thirstier, drink,’ he ordered, ‘suck it all out.’ ‘So you’re one of the talkers,’ she fell away from him on the mat. ‘Nothing like fucking a cheerleader, my team always loses.’ James gives Martha 10,000 francs and she goes back to Macdonald. They return to something like their former life though not quite as competitive and argumentative. But before long she tires of Paris and beside she wants to move somewhere warmer. McDonald refuses to go with her, preferring to stay in ‘this stinking little dungeon.’ ‘Stinking little dungeons, as you accurately describe our home,
comfort me.’ She keeps threatening to leave, he keeps not believing her, she says he and Paris ‘chilled me and I want to scream and be vulgar and loud and hate all of you for being dry and dreary.’ McDonald replies, ‘remember, we gave you the courage to hate us.’ ‘I want to love,’ Martha wept in the empty room. ‘I want to be loved,’ the banal words slipping out of her brain as if they’d been hiding back there, spying on her all these days. Her legs kicked the mattress in infantile fury, and she clawed at the hard round tree trunk of a pillow struggling to release the gracious tranquil loving woman thing crushed under the anger.
THE PLEASURE THIEVES
No. 32 in the New Traveller’s Companion Series was written jointly by ‘Harriet Daimler’ and ‘Henry Crannach’, who, as Terry Southern said, was actually an American woman writer, Marilyn Meeske. Girodias said of her: Henry Crannach is no descendant of that distinguished
Flemish painter, though obviously his admirer, but an American girl, vintage Detroit, Michigan. She left Detroit as soon as she was able to figure out the train schedules, settled first in New York and then made Paris a second, or third home. In Paris she pulled out of her trunk a film scenario that she had written with Terry Southern, which she and Harriet Daimler easily transformed into The Pleasure Thieves. Henry went on to write another baroque Traveller’s Companion. She has since published articles in leading New York magazines and currently works as scout and reader for a New York publisher. ‘Crannach’s’ other ‘baroque’ book for Girodias was called Flesh and Bone, a piece of straightforward, fairly harmless pornography that need not concern us. In The Good Ship Venus, John de St Jorre compares and contrasts the two women.
Olympia’s women pornographers were led by Iris Owens who soon introduced Marilyn Meeske to the joys of erotica. They had much in common. Both were American and had experienced one marriage apiece. They were young, pretty, sexy, witty and hip. Miriam Worms remembered them coming into the Olympia officers together ‘like two Spanish widows, all dressed in black with
kohl around their eyes’ … Iris came from New York where she lived in Greenwich village and was already writing. But she was twenty years old and decided it was time for a move. And where did aspiring writers and freethinkers go in the 1950s? Where else but to Paris. She had never read a pornographic book in her life, as none were available in America at the time, but this was no impediment as her first book, Darling, a steamy concoction, revealed. Girodias was extremely pleased and turned her into ‘Harriet Daimler’. Marilyn Meeske came from the Midwest and was married to a Dutch sculptor when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1950s. Her marriage did not last long and pressing financial need lead her to the slopes of Mount Olympus where, with Iris Owens, she wrote The Pleasure Thieves. When Marilyn sat down to write she was in a state of literary virginity, also never having read a pornographic novel. Now launched, she selected her own pseudonym, ‘Henry Crannach’, which was inspired by one of her
favourite artists, Lucas Cranach, the fifteenthcentury Flemish painter. Inspired herself, she went on to write her own DB, its noholds-barred content reflected in the title, Flesh and Bone. Mason Hoffenberg, co-author with Terry Southern of Candy, had his own opinions of Marilyn: he seems to have liked her a lot less than Southern, and thought even less of her than he did of Girodias. Again, despite his subsequent vitriol about Girodias, as well as writing dirty books for him, Hoffenberg was also involved in the setting up of the short-lived magazine Olympia Review in 1961 when Marilyn arrived. He wrote about her in a letter to Southern. Along about there was the arrival of M. Meeske. Any illusions I may
have had about how I would now have a buddy with whom to discuss the mag, engage a fruitful dialog etc., were rapidly dissipated. For me, she had a patronizing, insulting, maddening attitude – the head nurse’s relationship with harmless Uncle Bob, the oldest and baggiest schizo in the hopeless ward; and for Gid, the bar none, most deadly nose of brazen brown I’ve observed in my life (which includes, as you know, 34 months in The Air Corps). The Pleasure Thieves is again no ordinary pornographic book. It shows its origins as a film script and is basically a heist movie-turnednovel with gratuitous pornographic inserts, rather than a book of straightforward pornography. It would probably have made a better film than a novel – especially if
Southern had written the script – and would probably have made a better novel without the sex scenes, which again encompass the gay, straight and bisexual. Again there is a strong, sophisticated female New Yorker, Carol, as a lead character; she is the editor of Femme, a magazine for sophisticated female New Yorkers and is and is more likely to be seen uptown on the corner of 57th and Madison than in Greenwich Village. She is more than a match for the two international art and diamond thieves, Henry and Phillip, for whom she acts as a fence. They are a little bit like bisexual versions of the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin characters in Ocean’s Eleven, though this was not released until 1960. In this analogy, Carol would be played by Angie Dickinson, which would be quite fitting. The only quirk in Carol’s characterisation is that, due to a childhood illness, she has no body hair and wears a blonde merkin – men presumably expected to see pubic hair on women in those days. Neither is there anything interesting in the writing of the sex scenes, which tend towards the assumption in pornography that both men and
women can keep going and having orgasms indefinitely. The male gay scenes however do read as though they were written with some knowledge of the subject, rather than by two female first-time pornographers. And again, the issue is raised that gay men may be afraid of losing their penis inside a woman: ‘he couldn’t fuck her anymore; her cunt felt like a trap, like a swamp.’ Then she moved her mouth and lips in such a manner that he thought she was eating him up alive and nothing would be left… Then something beyond his control pulled all the seeds from his soul out of him… The only movement was his sperm running endlessly from the side of her mouth, like blood.
‘LOUISE WALBROOK’ (EDITH TEMPLETON)
The male terror of the vagina that ‘Harriet Daimler’ describes several times comes up again in Gordon by ‘Louise Walbrook’, a late Traveller’s Companion, no. 115, from 1966. Following the various victories against literary censorship, especially of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover in England, the books were now printed in England by The New English Library of Holborn, London. This edition has a selfcongratulatory Publisher’s Foreword; as was often the case, Girodias had picked the book up after it had been banned in England and Germany. The Olympia Press, founded in Paris in 1953 by Maurice Girodias, has played a vital role in the movement toward free expression in art and literature. Its major creation, The Traveller’s Companion Series, has included first editions in English of Lolita and The Ginger Man, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers, de Sade’s novels, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Watt and Molloy, some of Henry Miller’s major works and, among many other discoveries, the unique and frivolous Candy. Now that the great battle against literary censorship has been nearly completely won in Great Britain and in the United States, The Traveller’s
Companion Series enters a new phase of its existence, and emerges at last from a long exile. From now on, it will be published simultaneously in London and New York, with the same famous green cover, and under the editorship of Maurice Girodias… Above all, the ambition of the new Traveller’s Companion Series is to become of the image of the newly-won liberties: the right for everyone to think, to write, and to read freely – for pleasure alone. ‘Louise Walbrook’ was a pseudonym for Edith Templeton (1916-2006), whose real life was very much like that of her narrator in Gordon, the sixth of her seven novels to be published, though all the rest were initially published under her own name; Gordon was republished under her own name, with her permission in 2003, when she was eighty-seven years old, and subsequently translated into several languages. Templeton was born Edith Pole into a wealthy Prague family and spent the first years of her life in Vienna. She was educated at the French school in Prague but
left for England in 1938 to enter into a violent, brief marriage with an English engineer named Templeton. In 1946, the year in which Gordon is set, she was living in London and was a captain in the British Army.
GORDON
The semi-autobiographical novel Gordon is far less explicit than the works by Traveller’s Companion’s female authors that we have looked at up to now. It is narrated by a young, sophisticated, intellectual woman and set in an immediately post-war, 1946 London. But despite
her sophistication, Louisa has a masochistic need to be dominated, not just physically, but mentally. She meets the older and very austere Richard Gordon, a psychiatrist about to leave the British Army. The first time they meet he takes her to a ‘decayed and dusty’ garden in South Kensington. ‘He seemed dull and ordinary and I was feeling dull and bored, too, and I could not understand how, less than half an hour ago, he had been able to rouse me to rudeness and anger.’ Without any warning he stops talking and takes hold of her. He took me round the waist and by the shoulders and bent me backwards. I was terrified I would fall, but when I touched a surface of cold stone underneath me, the surprise of encountering the stone relieved me of my fear. He led me down; a hard edge cut into the backs of my knees while my feet were still on the ground; and as soon as I was fully extended, he was inside me. The whole was achieved in a matter of about four seconds. It was speedy and casual and effortless and at the same time seemingly
impossible, like any virtuoso performance. And of course, that was exactly what it was. It came nowhere near a rape, nobody could have called it a rape, there was no struggle and no violence and no menace and no overcoming of a resistance. I was neither willing nor unwilling. I was nothing at all. She feels ‘utterly helpless. I had never before felt so helpless in my life.’ Nevertheless, she continues to see him at his place where he unfailingly tells her dispassionately to undress before having sex with her, never kissing, touching, showing any affection or even talking to her. When I spent the second night in his room he did not, as I have said, hurt me. And as time went on I divided his love-making into these two kinds, when it hurt and when it did not. The kind when it did not hurt was at first much more ordinary, apart from its exceedingly long duration, more similar to shorter experiences with other men, though only Gordon could impart
to me that exquisite feeling of helplessness, of being fastened to him irrevocably, of not being able to get away. But then, perhaps after six weeks of being his mistress, and at first only when I had been having two gins, I began to open up and receive him avidly, with sensations of bliss which dawned and unfolded in those deep regions of which I had only become aware at first by the pain he inflicted on me. It had nothing to do with the sharp flickering climax I had reached so
quickly when he had led me over the edge of the bench in the garden. I was pervaded by a marvellous sweetness which streamed through me, and its spreading flow would have made me willing to die, like Faust was willing to die, for the sake of reaching just such a fleeting fulfilment: ‘Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen, verweile doch, du bist so schön, dann sollst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, dann will ich gerne mit dir gehn,’ when he made his pact with Mephisto. The narrator often quotes Goethe in German – she is very knowledgeable about literature, French as well as German: she lends Gordon her copies of Death in Venice and the ‘bible of the fin de siècle decadence, Huysmans’ À Rebours’. Speaking as a psychiatrist, Gordon tells her about the description of a dream in this book that refers to the ‘classical fear of the vagina indentata… It’s the man’s fear of the woman. The woman has teeth inside her and when he gets in, she will bite his penis off and cripple him.’ As I said earlier, this is the fear that ‘Harriet
Daimler’ mentions so many times. Then later he tells her about the Gorgon Medusa. ‘But do you know what it means?’ he asked. ‘The horrible face surrounded by coils of snakes? – one look at it and you get turned to stone?’ I shook my head. ‘Open your legs,’ he said, and when I did so, he added: ‘it’s this. What you are showing me.’ ‘You mean –?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said; No eye must ever
behold it. And now you’ve made me look at it. Oh, how could you be so cruel?’ And he gave another exaggerated shudder. I stopped laughing when he took possession of me.
Again, this reminds us of Bataille’s narrators’ horror of looking into the vagina. In The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter discusses this mythological view of the male horror
of the vagina in atavistic, Jungian terms. In this view, woman is merely ‘a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled.’ Sometimes, especially under the influence of Jung, a more archaic mouth is allowed to exert an atavistic dominance. Then, if I am lucky enough to be taken with such poetic pseudo-seriousness, my nether mouth may be acknowledged as one capable of speech – were there not, of old, divinatory priestesses, female oracles and so forth? Was there not Cassandra, who always spoke the truth, although admittedly in such a way that nobody ever believed her? And that, in mythic terms, is the hell of it since that female, oracular mouth is located so near the beastly backside, my vagina might indeed be patronisingly regarded as a speaking mouth, but never one that issues the voice of reason. Louisa returns to the Faust story repeatedly, emphasising how her long blonde hair is tied up in the Gretchen manner and how Gretchen
was completely destroyed by her relationship with Faust. It is hinted even that the novel may turn into a version of the Faust story, though it doesn’t: ‘he was the frightening, sinister, implacable, demanding and exacting taskmaster; his looks and his cast of mind were sardonic, like those of Mephisto, whose amusement is based on destroying comforting beliefs and inflicting pain.’ Even when Gordon unexpectedly and unwantedly penetrates her anally for the first time, her first thought is Goethe in German. I gasped as he entered my body slowly and deliberately, and then went on with a fierceness which made me sigh and tremble with delight, as each time he withdrew to the very edge and returned to invade me more deeply. I trembled with longing to receive him as he withdrew once more; and then gave a stifled shriek. He had not returned to me. He had done what Goethe expressed with such heartless elegance in his distich: ‘Knaben habe ich ger, doch habe ich lieber die Mädchen.
Ist sie als Mädchen mir satt, bruch ich als Knabe sie noch.’ At his first painful step of using me as a boy, I was filled, apart from my revulsion, with incredulity, imagining that he had done it by mistake. But while he, as though unaware of my distress, forced himself in further, with an irrevocable relentless determination, I started to scream: ‘no, don’t. You’re not to’… As he pressed down inside me and widened me with each new
step, the disgusting pain gave way to a dull discomfort, dwindled into a vague unease, and then ceased all together. I was now completely and comfortably open to him, and this, the fact that my body had stopped resisting and had thus betrayed me, made me burst into new protests. He went on for a long time, with his usual grim thoroughness.
The relationship continues for a while, though Gordon becomes more cruel and violent. Eventually he tells her he cannot see her anymore and near its end, the novel jumps forward several years to a time when the narrator is married, though by no means happily, and seeing a psychiatrist who was Gordon’s former colleague – naturally, she quotes Goethe at him.
JEAN GENET For a time I lived by theft, but prostitution was better suited to my indolence. I chose to be a traitor, thief, looter, informer, hater, destroyer, despiser, coward… I monstrously departed from you, your world, your towns, your institutions. Jean Genet Unusually for Olympia, Jean Genet’s (1910-1986) works are explicitly and
exclusively homosexual. Of the Travellers Companion authors, ‘Harriet Daimler’, as we have seen, wrote explicit male gay sex scenes, but presumably not from personal experience. Olympia also published John Cocteau’s hymn to growing up gay, The White Paper (Le Livre Blanc), but although it was explicitly illustrated by Cocteau himself, there was nothing explicit in the text and Cocteau – one of Genet’s literary mentors and societal patrons – never acknowledged its authorship. The Foreword to The White Paper says: ‘We publish this work because
its merit far exceeds its indecency and it reveals a kind of morality which prevents an honest man from classing it with licentious books.’ Girodias was an equal opportunities dirty book publisher. Much earlier, his father Jack Kahane had published, and Girodias later republished, The Young and Evil, an affectionate portrait of New York gay life in the nineteen thirties by Charles Ford and Parker Tyler, but again there is nothing explicit in it. Male homosexuality was then of course illegal in most countries of the world and would continue to be
so for quite a long time; Genet spent a lot of his life in prison, though for being a thief rather than for being gay. Publishing novels by an uneducated, gay thief was at that time quite something. Still, by the time Olympia published the first English version a Genet novel, he was already a literary cause célèbre in France. Jean-Paul Sartre, the godfather of existentialism and partner of Simone de Beauvoir – who, as we saw, was an advocate of not burning Sade – wrote a colossal book called Saint Genet, published in 1952. It is longer than any three of Genet’s novels combined, and is neither a biography nor a structured piece of literary criticism, but a sustained (or, to put it another way, selfindulgent and rambling), largely impenetrable meditation on a man he obviously considers an existentialist hero – possibly the existentialist hero; Kate Millet called it a psychoanalytic biography. Genet himself said that he had never read it from cover to cover; ‘it bores me… It bores to death.’ In fact, this unprecedented hagiography of a living writer, this microscopic analysis of the words
that had flowed so freely from him may have given Genet writer’s block, or at least changed his method of writing completely. He told Cocteau: ‘You and Sartre made a statue out of me. I am somebody else. This new me has to find something to say.’ The ‘new me’ wrote, among other things, plays like The Balcony and The Maids and finally gave up writing to become involved in political activism: Genet controversially supported the Red
Army faction of Baader and Meinhof and the cause of the Palestinians. Until Sartre’s book was published, Genet probably had not thought much about his legacy, his position in literary history, or even expected to live long enough to worry about such things: he always seemed more likely to be murdered in prison or die of a sexually-transmitted disease than to live to become a senior and respected writer. Of the writers Verlaine called the poètes maudits (cursed poets) who were Genet’s predecessors, Rimbaud stopped writing at nineteen, and Lautréamont died at twenty-four; both had an extremely short writing career. Corbière did not do much better, dying at twenty-nine. Neither Nerval nor Baudelaire made it to fifty, though Mallarmé, and even Verlaine himself did – though only just in his case and very much against the odds. Genet’s ultimate ancestor, the fifteenth century Parisbased, vagabond/thief, prisoner/poet François Villon only made thirty-one. Of his predecessors among what one might call the romanciers maudites (cursed novelists), Huysmans did not quite make it to 60, though
Céline and Cendrars did; they both died in 1961. Genet’s seventy-five year lifespan and forty-plus year writing career seem a miracle in this company. Genet himself listed some of these names, though fewer than one might expect, in an interview, where he was asked if he held Cocteau ‘in esteem.’ No, he said, ‘my fellowship of poets is very limited. It includes Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, I guess, that’s all.’ His lack of respect for Cocteau as a writer (though not as an artist: Cocteau illustrated Genet’s Querelle of Brest) is to be expected, but Lautréamont is a surprising omission from his list. His lack of respect for Sartre is also not surprising. Genet told Cocteau: ‘it’s me that explained all this to him. His book about me is very clever, but it doesn’t give me anything new.’
Sartre’s book contains passages like the following. Genet drifts from the Ethics of Evil to a black aestheticism. The metamorphosis takes place at first without his realising it: he thinks that he is still living beneath the sun of Satan when a new sun rises: beauty. This future writer was obviously not spoiled at birth: no ‘artistic nature,’ no ‘poetic gift.’ At the age of fifteen, he dreamt only of doing harm. When he encountered beauty, it was a late revelation, a lateseason fruit. Sartre’s view of Genet is a little similar to Barthes’ view of Sade: his most significant transgression is linguistic rather than moral. He is not a realist writer, he is a poet rather than a novelist; he does not describe the world but creates a new one. But, unlike Sade, he actually
lived through what he describes; his world is not just linguistic, it was the real (under)world that was his life. Sade wrote fantasy masturbatory literature while physically isolated in prison and imagining a fantasy world outside it; Genet wrote descriptive masturbatory literature while in prison having sex with other men and only isolated by his imagination. In Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet makes this explicit. It was a good thing that I raised egotistic masturbation to the dignity of a cult! I have only to begin the gesture and a kind of unclean and supernatural transposition displaces the truth. Everything within me turns worshipper. The external vision of the accessories of my desire isolates me, far from the world. Pleasure of the solitary, gesture of solitude that makes you sufficient unto yourself, possessing intimately others who serve your pleasure without their suspecting it. This could be an epigraph to any of Sade’s prison works, though it is rather too well written to be by the
Divine Marquis. (It may be purely coincidence that one of Genet’s most fascinating characters – at least the one who fascinates Genet the most – is called Divine). Unlike in Sade, there is surprisingly little explicit sex in Genet’s work, though all his writing is suffused with eroticism; his very language is erotic. In The Thief’s Journal, he comments on the connection – in his mind, and in his writing – between crime and eroticism, the eroticism of filth and degradation. (Earlier gay French novelists like Proust, Huysmans, de
Montherlant and Gide were mostly fastidious aesthetes, terrified of dirt, disease and physical contact, totally unlike Genet.)
short, to my body and my thirsty soul it offers devotion. It was because it contained these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.
Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten. Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals agree hopelessly to organise the forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. But – criminals are remote from you – as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Theirs smells of sweat, sperm and blood. In
Genet’s writing is often selfreferential, constantly foregrounding the act of writing itself. At the beginning of Our Lady of the Flowers, in a prison cell, not knowing if or when he will be released, he writes: I am going to write a story. My heroes are they, pasted on the wall, they and I who am here, locked up… The story may not always seem artificial and you may recognise in it, in spite of me, the call of the blood: the reason is that I shall have chanced to strike my forehead, within my night, at some door, freeing an anguished memory
that had been haunting me since the beginning of the world. Forgive me for it. This book aims to be only a small fragment of my inner life. One of these heroes (heroines) is Divine, whom to a large extent Genet creates by writing her, as if she were fictional. For all we know she is. Divine is biologically male but lives as a woman; Genet alternately uses male and female pronouns for her/him. As Sartre beatified Genet, so Genet beatifies Divine with his words. ‘It will take me an entire book before I draw her from her petrifaction and little by little impart to her my suffering, little by little deliver her from evil, and, holding her by the hand, lead her to saintliness.’ Another hero, Darling, ‘will continue to be twenty,’ throughout the book, because that is how the narrator sees him, or, more to the point, wants us
to see him. Genet never lets us as readers forget that we are being led by the nose by an admitted deceiver; we have to follow wherever he leads us, which is wherever his whim takes him, the external reality of non-prison life having no relevance here. In a scene in Our Lady of the Flowers, Ernestine has a gun. She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hand, weighty as a phallus in action, she knew that she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse… Ernestine’s gesture might have been performed quickly, but, like Culafroy moreover, she is serving a text of which she is unaware, and which I am composing, a text whose denouement will take place when
the time is ripe. Ernestine is perfectly aware of how preposterously literary her act is, but her having to submit to cheap literature makes her even more touching in her own eyes and ours. (Culafroy sounds a little like Cul à froid, cold ass.) Sartre himself comments on the uniqueness of Genet’s poetic, oneiric, antinaturalistic use of language, a usage which places him in an honourable tradition of transgressive French writers. Genet stands opposed to all realism and all naturalism. Poetic language is a burglary; he steals words and subjects them to wrong uses; this language is artificial and false and has no real basis. Poetry uses vocables to constitute an apparent world instead of designating real objects. For that reason Genet is in the line of Baudelaire and Mallarmé; the Surrealists, who are heirs of Rimbaud and Lautréamont, make of poetry the instrument of their revelations; behind the burning of words one
perceives Being: they are terrorists. For Genet, poetry reveals nothing; when the words burn and turn to ashes, there remains only nothingness; he is a rhetorician. Most senior, literary French authors at the time, however, could not come to terms with Genet. François Mauriac admitted that he was, ‘a writer, even a poet,’ but could not
accept that his subject matter was suitable for literature. ‘On a literary basis, what is more monotonous, restricted, sterile, than vice?’ Paul Valéry said simply, ‘this must be burned.’ Interestingly, although it is hard to find any critic since Genet’s death (other than the openly homophobic) who has a bad word to say about him, female critics seem to especially admire him. We saw earlier how Kate Millet in Sexual Politics excoriated Henry Miller for his portrayal of male dominance and female subjugation. Here she praises Genet for portraying the same – but not the same – male/female relationship from a completely different angle, laying bare social and sexual power structures that mirror those in heterosexual society: in Genet, masculine and feminine are fluid categories and not biologically determined. He is feminine because ravished and subjugated by the male; therefore he must study the slavish gestures of ‘femininity’ that he may better exalt his master. As a criminal he is obliged to controvert every
decency of the property-owning class not only through a life of larceny (material) but through one of betrayal (moral) as well. And as an outcast, his life’s demeanour must be plotted both to imitate and to contradict every notion of the world beyond whose boundaries he lives in exile. Granted that their caricature is grotesque, and Genet himself is fully aware of the morbidity of this pastiche, his homosexuals
have unerringly penetrated to the essence of what heterosexual society imagines to be the character of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ and which it mistakes for the nature of male and female, thereby preserving the traditional relation of the sexes. Genet’s two great novels, Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, are tales of an odium converted to grandeur. But together with the rest of his prose fiction they also constitute a painstaking exegesis of the barbarian vassalage of the sexual orders, the power structure of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as revealed by a homosexual, criminal world that mimics with brutal frankness the bourgeois heterosexual society. The later French critic, playwright and novelist, Hélène Cixous, best-
known for her work on Feminine Writing (l’Écriture Féminine) also praises Genet for the quality of his writing; he is of course himself between the masculine and the feminine. This is from her lecture ‘Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.’ This is the dream of dreams in Genet’s works. We have travelled through a succession of ‘rooms’ and their equivalents (we could follow the same path in a great number of literary works, that is, the exploration of the greater by the smaller, from Rabelais to Swift). One scene is set upon another. The mystic scene and the erotic scene endlessly substitute for one another. Writing does not come from outside. On the contrary, it comes from deep inside. It comes from what Genet calls the ‘nether realms, the inferior realms’
(domains inférieures)… this is where the treasure of writing lies, where it is formed, where it has stayed since the beginning of creation: down below. The name of the place changes according to our writers. Some call it hell: it is of course a good, it is a desirable hell. Another avid Genet fan is poet/musician Patti Smith, who made the documentary Three Stones for Jean Genet (2014) about her homage to him. She wrote about it in her memoir M Train. Some months before our first wedding anniversary Fred [Sonic Smith] told me that if I promised to give him a child he would first take me anywhere in the world. I chose Saint-Laurent du Maroni, a border town in northwest French Guiana. I had long wished to see the remains of the French penal colony where hard-core criminals were once shipped before being transferred to Devil’s Island. In The Thief’s Journal Jean Genet had written of Saint-Laurent as hallowed ground and of its inmates with
devotional empathy. He had ascended the ladder toward them: reform school, petty thief, and three-time loser; but as he was sentenced, the prison he’d held in such reverence was closed, the last living inmates returned to France. Genet served his time in Fresnes Prison. Devastated, he wrote: I am shorn of my infamy. At 70, Genet was reportedly in poor health and most likely
would never go to Saint-Laurent himself. I envisioned bringing him its earth and stone. Though often amused by my quixotic notions, Fred did not make light of this self-imposed task. He agreed without argument. I wrote a letter to William Burroughs, whom I had known since my early 20s. William, close to Genet and possessing his own romantic sensibility, promised to assist me in delivering the stones. You can watch the video on YouTube to see how it turned out. Yet another female admirer was Genet’s contemporary and fellownovelist Violette Leduc, author of La Bâtarde, to whom we will be returning later. They were
introduced by Simone de Beauvoir and started as mutual admirers but came to loathe each other later. In her second autobiographical work, Mad in Pursuit, Leduc talks about Genet’s ‘myrrh and frankincense.’ ‘Each of his books is the commemoration of transfigured sufferings. I arrive early at his high mass to be on the first row.’ Leduc notes her visceral reaction to reading Genet, still strong after all these years. I am rereading Miracle of the Rose. Fever, palpitations, shivers just as when I read it the first time, nineteen years ago. I was a thirty-eight-year-old adolescent, I was discovering the joy of adoration, that of admiration. For whom did I have this fever? By whom was I transfixed? It was Harcamone, the condemned
man. I re-read Genet, I was throbbing. Genet was also an admirer of Leduc: Beauvoir told her in a 1947 letter, ‘he says he admires you for your force.’ Genet later offered to dedicate his play The Maids to Leduc, but she did not like it. She told him so, and told others too. Leduc tells how he – the betrayer betrayed – reacted. ‘He came towards me, he threw me onto my couch as hard as he could, he opened the door of the Fourier, and slammed the door of the landing. I heard him striding across the yard.’ And finally in the category of female authors who were admirers of Genet, Kathy Acker in Blood and Guts in High School fictionalised a relationship between her narrator, the underage Janey and Genet in North Africa. Genet’s giving a small party in his hotel room. I’m standing opposite Genet. ‘Why’re you taking her with you?’ pointing to me a famous older male friend of Genet’s asks him. ‘Oh, she works for me. She’s a gardener.’ I want to laugh in the
guy’s face because Genet doesn’t have a house or a garden. ‘She’s your servant.’ Genet thinks about this. ‘I didn’t mean to mislead you,’ he says. ‘I don’t consider anyone a servant.’ The strange man smiles. I’m accepted in this world. I shake hands with Genet.
OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS
was in court; the authorities burned the novel. Genet rewrote it. When I returned to my cell, the manuscript had disappeared. I was called to the prison warden’s office and punished; three days of total isolation, on dry bread and water, for having used paper that wasn’t made to receive ‘literary masterpieces.’ I felt humiliated by the theft committed by the prison guard. I ordered some notebooks from the store, and I crawled under my covers and I tried to remember word for word what I had written. I do believe I have succeeded.
Our Lady of the Flowers was written in 1942 on the brown paper that French prison authorities provided inmates. A guard discovered this illicit use of the paper while Genet
It was first published, privately and anonymously, in 1943, mainly for wealthy collectors, but distribution did not really happen until after the liberation of Paris in 1944. It was published in a censored edition by Gallimard in 1951 and issued in an English translation in 1957 as Travellers Companion no. 36. Sartre said of it: The style of Our Lady of the Flowers, which is a dream poem, a poem of futility, is very slightly
marred by a kind of onanistic complacency. It does not have the spirited tone of the works that follow. At times it is invaded by a swarm of nightmarish words; at others, it slackens and falls into a melodious softness. We are still close to autism, to the pre-logical forms of thought. Genet, who can be so merciless with himself, frequently lets himself removed by his misfortunes. And Kate Millet: Divine, the hero/heroine of Our Lady of the Flowers, who is also Genet, is uncontestably larger in spirit than Darling, Gorgui, Armand, Stilitano, and all the other pimps. Not only has she greater courage, humour, imagination, and sensibility than the male oppressors before whom she prostrates herself; she alone has a soul. She has suffered, while they have not, because the consciousness required for suffering is inaccessible to them. And in Divine’s mortification, both in the flesh and in the spirit, lies the victory of the saint.
The characters Millet mentions, plus the title character, are the heroes out of whom Genet tells us he is going to weave his story, ‘the story of Divine, who I knew so slightly, the story of Our Lady of the Flowers, and, never fear, my own story.’ Our Lady is a murderer, Divine is a prostitute and Darling is a pimp, as are most of the male characters. This really is a society outside society.
Description of Our Lady of the Flowers: height, 5ft. 1in., weight 156 lbs., Oval face, long hair, blue eyes, mat complexion, perfect teeth, straight nose. Divine died yesterday in so red a pool of the blood she had vomited that, as she expired, she had the supreme illusion that this blood was the visible equivalent of the black hole which a smashed violin, seen in a judge’s office through a hodge-podge of pieces of evidence, revealed with dramatic insistence, as does Jesus, the gilded chancre where gleams His flaming Sacred Heart. So much for the design aspect of her death. All the heroes in the book are biologically male, though Genet may refer to them as female. The
narrator works backward from Divine’s death and then forward again, including more characters as he goes. Since Divine is dead, the poet may sing her, may tell her legend, the Saga, the annals of Divine. The Divine Saga should be danced, mind, with subtle directions. Since it is impossible to make a ballet of it, I am obliged to use words that are weighted down with precise ideas, but I shall try to lighten them with phrases that are trivial, empty, hollow and invisible. And he does indeed mythologise Divine: in a cafe in Montmartre, whereas the other customers are ‘muddy and still-shapeless clay. Divine was limpid water.’ Later he says, ‘slowly but surely I want to
strip her of every kind of happiness so as to make a saint of her.’ One of the other main characters is the pimp Darling, definitely a ‘he.’ ‘Description of Darling, height, 5ft. 9in., weight 165 lbs., oval face, blonde hair, blue-green eyes, mat complexion, perfect teeth, straight nose. He was young too, almost as young as Divine, and I should like him to remain so to the end of the book… He will continue to be twenty, though his destiny is to become the father and lover of Our Lady of the Flowers.’ He appeared before me with the gracefulness that might have been his as he lay naked in a field of pinks. I was his at once, as if (who said that?) he had discharged through my mouth right into my heart. Entering me until there was no room left for myself, so that now I merge with gangsters, burglars and pimps, and of the police who mistakenly arrest me. For three months he regaled himself with my body, beating me with all his might. I dragged at his feet, more trampled than a foot mop… Of the tangible him there remains,
said to tell, only the plaster cast that Divine herself made of his cock, which was gigantic when erect. The most impressive thing about it is the vigour, hence the beauty, of that part which goes from the anus to the tip of the penis. Unusually for a character in a Genet novel, Darling also has sex with women. ‘He rams it in. So hard and
this scene occurs, all three are living together. Note in this scene the interplay between male and female pronouns – all the participants are biologically male – and note also how Genet slips into the mode of omniscient narrator, the style indirect libre of the nineteenthcentury novel.
calmly that anuses and vaginas slip onto his member like rings on a finger.’ To Divine, ‘Darling is everything. She takes care of his penis. She caresses it with the most profuse tenderness and calls it by the kind of pet-names used by ordinary folk when they feel horny.’ But the only sex scene in the book does not involve Darling, it is a three-way involving Divine, Our Lady and Gorgui, who has been Divine’s boyfriend. ‘Divine is jealous of Gorgui. The Negro is her man, and that little tramp of an Our Lady is young and pretty.’ But by the time
The room was filled with the chiaroscuro of poetic mornings. Divine lay down. At once she drew Our Lady to her; his body seemed boneless, nerveless, with muscles fed on a milk diet. He was smiling vacantly. He smiled in this complacent way when he was mildly amused, but Divine did not see the smile until she took his head in her hands and turned towards herself the face that at first had been turned towards Gorgui. Gorgui was lying on his back. The wine and liquor had dulled him, as they had dulled Our Lady. He was not sleeping. Divine took Our Lady’s closed lips into her mouth. We know that his breath was fetid. Divine therefore wanted to shorten her kiss on the mouth. She slid down to the foot of the
bed, licking as she went the downy body of Our Lady, who awoke to desire. Divine buried her head in the hollow of the murderer’s legs and belly, and waited. Every morning it was the same scene, once with Our Lady and then with Gorgui. She did not wait long. Our Lady suddenly turned over on his belly and, holding his still supple tool, roughly thrust it with his hand into Divine’s open mouth. She drew back her head and pursed her lips. The violent cock turned to stone (go to it, condottieri, knights, pagers, ruffians, gangsters, put the stiff prick under your satins against Divine’s cheek) and tried to force open the closed mouth, but it knocked against the eyes, the nose, the chin, slid along the cheek. That was their game.
Finally, it found the lips. Gorgui wasn’t sleeping… He stirred. Divine was playing at offering herself and withdrawing. Our Lady was panting. Divine’s arms encircled his solemn flanks, her hands caressed them, smoothed them, though lightly, so as to feel them quiver, with her fingertips, as when one tries to feel the eyeball rolling under lids. She ran her hands over Our Lady’s buttocks, and behold! Divine understood. Gorgui mounted the blond murderer and tried to penetrate him. Despair – terrible, profound, unparalleled – detached from the game of the two men… ‘That’s life’ Divine had time to think. There was a pause, a kind of oscillation. The scaffolding of bodies collapsed into regret. Divine’s head climbed back to the pillow. She had remained alone, abandoned. She
was no longer excited, and for the first time she did not feel the need to go to the toilet to finish off with her hand. At the end of the book, Genet returns us to Darling. The narrator tells us that he has read ‘moving letters, full of wonderful touches, of despair, of hopes, of songs; and others more severe. I’m choosing from among them which will be the letter Darling wrote to Divine from prison.’ The letter the narrator decides to give us ends the book. ‘Dearest, I’m awfully sorry about what’s happened to me. I don’t have a single pal, keep that in mind. So I’m counting on you to help me out. I only wish I could have you in my arms so I could hold and squeeze you tight. Remember the things we used to do together. Try to recognise the dotting. And kiss it. A Thousand big kisses, sweetheart, from, Your Darling.’ The dotting that Darling refers to is the outline of his prick. I once saw a pimp who had a hard-on while writing to his girl place his heavy cock on the paper
and trace its contours. I would like that line to portray Darling. Fresnes Prison, 1942
THE THIEF’S JOURNAL
Treachery, theft and homosexuality are the basic subjects of this book. There is a relationship among them which, though not always apparent, at least, so it seems to me, recognises a kind of vascular exchange between my taste for betrayal and theft and my loves. The Thief’s Journal, like Our Lady of the Flowers, was first printed
privately in a small edition – 400 copies in 1949. Gallimard then published a slightly modified version of it the same year. It was published in English in 1954 as no. 78 in the Traveller’s Companion series. It is less lyrical and more autobiographical than Our Lady, being mostly an account of Genet and his friends thieving their way around Europe. Sartre mythologises this book, though unlike Our Lady it seems to be simply – this is not a criticism – a picaresque and highly entertaining account of the lives of a group of homosexual vagabonds in the early 1930s. Sartre says: His memories are not memories; they are exact but sacred; he speaks about his life like an evangelist, as a wonder-struck witness… Genet the novelist, speaking of Genet the thief, is more of a thief than the thief, the thief and his double are alike sacred. Thus, there comes into being that new object: a mythology of the myth… behind the first-degree myths – the Thief, the Murderer, the Beggar, the Homosexual – we discover the reflective myths: the Poet, the
Saint, the Double, Art. Nothing but myths, then; a Genet with a Genet stuffing, like the prunes of Tours. If, however, you are able to see at the seam the thin line separating the enveloping myth from the enveloped myth, you will discover the truth, which is terrifying. That is why I do not fear to call this book, the most beautiful that Genet has written, the Dichtung und Wahrheit [Goethe’s autobiography] of homosexuality. Genet himself indicates that memories are necessarily filtered through the present day consciousness of the storyteller; he makes it clear that this is no Proustian recherche.
If I attempt to recompose with words what my attitude was at that time, the reader will be no more taken in the night. We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext-subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. In one of his footnotes to the text, the narrator tells us not to expect the plain, unvarnished truth. He has to recall the facts, but filtered through a poetic language. As with Our Lady,
he tells us he will create heroes in a process which he, as a conduit, needs to undertake to restore himself. The reader is informed that this report on my inner life or what it suggests will be merely a song of love. To be exact, my life was the preparation for erotic adventures (not play) whose meaning I now wish to discover. Alas, heroism is what seems to me most charged with amorous properties, and since there is no hero except in our minds, heroes will therefore have to be created. So I have recourse to words. Those which I use, even if I attempt an explanation by means of them, will sing. Was what I wrote true? False? Only this book of love will be real. What of the facts which served as their pretext? I must be their repository. It is not they which I am restoring. There is very little sex, or graphic description of any kind in this novel but it does keep coming back to the subject of eroticism, the evanescence of which, as we have seen, Genet says is the source of all his writing.
Again, Genet associates eroticism with nausea and criminality. ‘These dangerous nocturnal adventures into which I let myself be drawn by my sombre heroes are thus the elaboration of an erotic ceremonial.’ Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten. Repudiating
the virtues of your world, criminals agree hopelessly to organise the forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. But – criminals are remote from you – as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Theirs smells of sweat, sperm and blood. In short, to my body and my thirsty soul it offers
devotion. It was because it contained these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil. My adventure, never governed by rebellion or a feeling of injustice, will be merely one long mating, burdened and complicated by a heavy and strange erotic ceremonial (figurative ceremonies leading to jail and anticipating it). And similarly: this pursuit of traitors and treason was only one of the forms of eroticism. It is rare – it is almost unknown – for a boy to offer me the heady joy that can only be offered me by the interlacings of a life in which I might be involved with him. A body stretched out between my sheets, fondled in a street or at night in the woods, or on a beach, affords me half a pleasure: I did not see myself loving it, for I have known too many situations in which my person, whose importance lay in its grace, was the factor of charm at the moment. I shall never find them again. Thus do I realise that I
have sought only situations charged with erotic intentions. That was what, among other things, guided my life. I am aware that there exist adventures whose heroes and details are erotic. These are the ones I have wanted to live. One of the key characters in the book is Stilitano, whom the narrator wants but cannot have. Had I obtained what I so keenly desired of him, Stilitano would have remained in my eyes the charming and solid master, though neither his strength nor his charm would have gratified my desire for all the manly types: the soldier, the sailor, the adventurer, the thief, the criminal. By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who rouse me. I was therefore chaste. At times, he was so cruel as to demand that I button the waistband of his pants, and my hand would tremble… Unable to see it, I invented the biggest and loveliest prick in the world. I endowed it
with qualities: heavy, strong and nervous, sober, with a tendency toward pride. Beneath my fingers, I felt, sculpted in oak, its full veins, its palpitations, its heat, its pinkness and at times the racing pulsation of the sperm. It occupied less my nights than my days. Behind Stilitano’s fly it was the sacred Black Stone to which Heliogabalus offered up his imperial wealth.
care. Crushed by that mass of flesh, which was devoid of the slightest spirituality, I experienced the giddiness of finally meeting the perfect brute, indifferent to my happiness. I discovered the softness that could be contained in a thick fleece on torso, belly and thighs and what force it could transmit. I finally let myself be buried in that stormy night.
One character he can and does have is Armand, powerful and frightening, who does gratify his desire for the manly type. Armand ordered me to follow him. Almost without speaking, he took me to his room. With the same apparent scorn, he subjected me to his pleasure. Dominated by his strength and age, I gave the work my utmost
Sadly for the narrator though, ‘I was the friend whom Armand esteemed. Alas, I would have preferred to be chosen as his beloved mistress,’ Genet again identifying himself with the feminine, which for him equates to the submissive role. He is happy to be submissive to Armand who is ‘a man, wearily so. He slept on his muscles, like heroes on their laurels… If, with his fist placed on the delicate nape of a boy’s neck, he brutally rammed the head down on his prick, he did it with indifference.’ Towards the end of the book, Genet issues another disclaimer, distancing himself and his book again from both the factual autobiography on one hand and a work of pure literary artifice on the
other. Also, on the one hand he derides ‘honours and festivals’ while at the same time welcoming them, welcoming the worship of you, the reader for Saint Genet. This book does not aim to be a work of art, an object detached from an author and from the world, pursuing in the sky its lonely flight. I could have told of my past life in another tone, in other words. I have made it sound heroic because I have within me what is needed to do so, lyricism… But am I being clear? It is not a matter of applying a philosophy of unhappiness. Quite the contrary. The prison – let us name this place in both our world and the mind – toward which I go offers me more joys than your honours and festivals. Nevertheless, it is the latter which I shall seek. I aspire to your recognition, your consecration.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
One day in the early summer of 1955, I received a call from a literary agent, a Russian lady by the name of Doussia Ergaz. She told me about an old friend of hers, a Russian emigre now a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University. He had written a book with a rather dangerous theme which had, for that reason, been rejected by a
number of prominent American publishers. The man’s name was Vladimir Nabokov and his book, Lolita, dealt with the impossible amours of a middle-aged man with a girl of twelve who belonged to the seductive species for which Nabokov had invented the word ‘nymphet.’ I asked Madame Ergaz to send me the manuscript, which promptly turned up complete Born 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia. Old Russian nobility. Father eminent statesman of the Liberal group, elected member of the First Duma. Paternal grandfather State Minister of Justice under Czar Alexander II. Maternal greatgrandfather President of Academy of Medicine. Education: Private School in St. Petersburg. Cambridge University (Trinity College), England. Graduated with Honours, 1922. Family escaped from Communist Russia in 1919. England, Germany, France.
Acquired considerable fame in emigre circles as novelist and poet. Married in 1925. One son, b. 1934. Emigrated to the United States in 1940. Became an American writer. American citizen since 1945. Since 1940 taught literature at various American universities, combining this with a Research Fellowship Entomology at the Museum of Comp. Zoology, Harvard (1942-48). Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University since 1948. Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1943, and again in 1952. American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded in 1951. List of published works attached. That was Maurice Girodias, followed by the résumé on Nabokov that Madame Ergaz sent him. In 1955 Nabokov had published very little and was almost entirely unknown outside a small literary circle; arguably
he still would be if it were not for Lolita. No one in America would touch his book but Girodias agreed to publish it, seeing it as ‘a rather magical demonstration of something about which I had so often dreamed, but never found: the treatment of one of the major forbidden human passions in a manner both completely sincere and absolutely legitimate.’ But Nabokov did not like Girodias and did not want to be published by such a shady operation; Girodias almost immediately
encountered Nabokov’s hostility. One of the bones of contention was that Nabokov did not want his own name on the cover: he was frightened of losing his job at Cornell. Girodias of course did want his name: minor but highly respected literary authors turning out dirty books was his core business; if no one knew who wrote it, what would be the point? Over the years, things between Olympia and Nabokov became increasingly fraught; Girodias details it all at depressing length in ‘A Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita,’ including details of the inevitable court cases. Girodias, still obviously deeply wounded years later by the attitude of an author whom he believed – with some justification – he had made rich and famous, included the essay in The Olympia Reader when Nabokov refused to allow extracts from Lolita to be published in it. The history of the censorship of Lolita, much of which Girodias fought with little help or gratitude from Nabokov, is beyond the scope of Text Acts except to say briefly that, in one
bizarre episode, due to the absurdities of the French system, the French language version of Lolita was allowed in France but not the English language version. Girodias threatened to sue the Ministry for unfair treatment of a French citizen, which of course violates France’s most sacred principle. They relented.
LOLITA
What do Lolita, 1984, Catch 22 and Brave New World have in common? They are all novels that gave the English language new words and phrases (yes, I know Brave New World is Shakespeare, but it was Huxley’s use of it that entered the language). Lolita gave us two: the name in the title and the word
nymphet. Neither of these existed before 1955. Now they are everywhere, including places Nabokov cannot possibly have had in mind, like Japan, where the Japanese male fascination with schoolgirls is called roricon (lolicon, short for Lolita complex). And for those very schoolgirls there is an enormous Lolita fashion sub-culture, with sub-sub cultures like Lolita Goth Punk. Lolita did not sell well at first. But then the censors stepped in, ensuring, as they always do, that the book they wanted to ban would sell millions; without the zeal of the prudes, Lolita might well have sunk into oblivion, and Nabokov might have been happy to watch from the shore as it sank, a literary work just bought by a few American servicemen in Paris, Olympia’s intended audience. The Nabokov specialist Alfred Appel, a former student on Nabokov’s Literature 311-312 course at Cornell University – dubbed Dirty Lit because it covered the likes of Madam Bovary and Ulysses – recalled in his later introduction
to Lolita how he had bought the book while in the American army in Paris. ‘Hey, lemme read your dirty book,’ says a fellow soldier. ‘Read it aloud,’ says another. He does. But, while still on the first page, he throws it against the wall in disgust. ‘It’s God-Damn Litachure!!’ Instead the scholarly, butterfly-collecting litachure professor went from obscure litterateur to notorious lecher, becoming became (in)famous, worldwide and for ever as the man who wrote that dirty book about the man and the young girl. Girodias himself tells the story of how this effect worked. Lolita appeared… in September, 1955, but was not noticed or reviewed anywhere, and sold very poorly. It was only at the end of the next year that things started to happen – strange things indeed. In an interview by the London Times Literary Supplement, Graham Greene mentioned Lolita as one of the ‘three best books of the year.’ That immediately provoked a
demential reaction on the part of John Gordon, editor of the popular Daily Express, who accused Graham Greene and the Times of helping sell pornography of the lewdest variety. The rest is of course history. Lolita is too well-known for me to need to quote very much of it, but I would make a few points. Firstly, as a digression, there is the issue of cover design. Nabokov wanted a plain cover with no image, and that indeed is what he got in Olympia’s standard green Travellers Companion publication (no. 66). French books published by the likes of Gallimard traditionally appeared in the plain, text only cover almost entirely unknown in the UK and America. But outside France, publishers have to decide what image to put on the cover of a book which they consider to be literature but which contains erotic elements. There is a book called Lolita – The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design, which illustrates
dozens of covers that have been used over the years for Lolita, and dozens of other suggested covers by a selection of invited artists; probably no other book has had so many different versions and so many different types of cover design. They range from the typographical through the slightly naughty to the extremely salacious. Some use the iconic red, heart-shaped sunglasses and red lollipop made famous by the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s film, though these have nothing at all to do with the novel, or even the film, which is in black-and-white. Nabokov presumably never approved any of them. The current Penguin Classics paperback edition has a classical still life painting with a vase and fruit, for reasons that I cannot understand, yet the same publisher uses blurred pictures of nude women on the covers of Anaïs Nin’s books. AM Holmes’ The End of Alice, which I will look at in the next chapter, has a picture of a butterfly in a jar, an obvious reference to Nabokov’s butterfly collection and Tampa, also discussed in the next
chapter, has a close-up of a blouse buttonhole that might suggest a vagina, which was changed in later editions. This is an issue that has been close to my own heart, as I tried to find a cover image for Text Acts that was somewhere in between those two extremes. In the current world of publishing, you really can tell a book by its cover: every genre has its own cover style which can be easily recognised when seen as a oneinch thumbnail on the screen; erotica is usually illustrated by ‘erotic’ covers but what do publishers do when designing the covers of reissues of the kind of works featured in Text Acts? There is no single answer, but looking at the covers of all the books I have been discussing has been a very interesting exercise.
Back to Lolita: the other point I wanted to make was that, despite Humbert’s pretentious literary euphemising and his often tender, sensuous feelings for her, he certainly does have sex with Dolores Haze at the age of twelve; of course, because Humbert sees Lolita as seductive, as paedophiles do, he sees her as the seducer. Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.
Of course, since Humbert is writing this from prison as a mea culpa and we only have his word for everything, we only see Dolores Haze and her actions through Humbert’s eyes and his perverted mind; we do indeed see her through a haze. Even the name we know her by, Lolita, is not her own but one Humbert has made up for her. As Angela Carter said of Anne Desclos’ O, Lolita’s status in the text is to be an empty hole, a lacuna, an orifice for Humbert to insert his mental and physical presence. In his mind, she is not even Dolores, but the recreation of an earlier passion. I was still walking behind Mrs Haze through the dining room when, beyond, it, there came a sudden burst of greenery –
‘the piazza,’ sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue seawave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. It was the same child – the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polkadotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my ageing ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognised the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my
southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts – that last mad immortal day behind the ‘Roches Roses.’ The twentyfive years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished. Humbert’s first orgasm with Lolita is described in great detail; they do not have sex, and it is unclear whether she even realises
what is happening. At the beginning of the description, Humbert says, ‘I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is… So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.’ He then describes the scene: ‘Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candystriped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks.’ Dolores is wearing a ‘pretty print dress,’ and holding in her hands a ‘beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple… My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, her skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit.’ He
takes the fruit from her, she takes the magazine he has been reading and sees that there was, I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely nymphet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped – and because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin – just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child – just that – and: ‘Oh it’s nothing at all,’ she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my
moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crashed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known… I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact… The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. Really Vladimir?
POSTSCRIPT TO LOLITA It is hard to imagine many novelists being brave enough to write a first-person narrative from a paedophile perspective, and since Nabokov very few have, and then mostly women. AM Homes wrote a point-ofview paedophile character in The End of Alice, 1996, to a very hostile public response: in an attempted act of censorship probably unprecedented in the UK since 1960, the National
Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children tried to stop bookshops stocking it. The thenmajor bookstore chain W. H. Smith agreed, despite Homes’ unquestioned ‘literary merit’ – she is a superb and virtuosic author and the book gained glowing reviews from the serious press. But because there was no legal action the literary merit defence was never tested in court. Like Lolita, The End of Alice is narrated by a middle-aged paedophile who is in jail for his crimes: he is in several ways reminiscent of Humbert Humbert – deliberately so: Homes does not try to hide the fact that her book is a homage of a kind to Nabokov. He has been imprisoned for twenty-three years because, unlike Humbert, he killed the object of his affection. He does not however tell us this until close to the end because he is mainly concerned with telling us about the letters he is receiving from a nineteenyear-old girl who is writing to tell him that she plans to seduce a twelve-year-old boy. Like Humbert, the narrator here is
very concerned with literary style and does not give us the girl’s letters verbatim: they are written in a kind of teenage shorthand that he abhors – he knows nothing of course about the modern world. Instead he weaves fantasies around her story, even though boys are not to his precise taste, so that we do not know what the girl is actually saying, or even if she exists at all outside of his fantasy. But either way we have one first person paedophile narrative nested within another. The narrator at one point imagines the scene as the young boy first encounters the older girl’s vagina; a male paedophile narrating a scene with a young female paedophile and an even younger boy. And when he finally gets there, when his investigation leads him south, he says, ‘Oooohhh, gross, it’s all wet. Did you pee in there?’ He peels her apart, asking, ‘Is it supposed to be like this?’ ‘Like what?’ ‘I don’t know, like this?’ ‘Yes. . .’ ‘Show me the clip.’
‘Clip?’ ‘You know, your clip. It’s supposed to do something.’ She reaches down, exposing the gemstone, the dancing dot of perfect pleasure. ‘Clitoris,’ she says. ‘Clit, not clip.’ A short course in pronunciation. ‘What’s it do?’ He with his great erector set, his bursting birthday toy, the wondrous wand that rises and falls, launching rockets, firing jets of joy, the juiciest jizz of the jungle, he with that
magnificent mechanical manhood is not impressed: hers is the wind-up model. ‘It feels good when you rub it.’ Piling provocation on provocation, as if to guarantee moral outrage, Homes’ narrator, like Genet, also goes into grisly detail about the homosexual sex he has with other inmates. Homes said in an interview: ‘It’s a voice that’s not really represented anywhere. I wanted
to try to capture it, in part to give people something to respond to. I think it’s very terrifying and discomfiting, which is fine.’ Another recent book that has a paedophile narrator, also by a female author, is about another paedophile, but this time a female one: Tampa, 2013, the debut novel of Alissa Nutting, which concerns a twenty-six-year old woman teacher seducing a fourteen-year-old boy pupil; it was based on a real-life case involving a teacher Nutting knew personally. Again, it is made more shocking and arguably more offensive because it is narrated by the paedophile herself, who seems to have no moral qualms, no hesitation and no shame. She revels in her own sensuality, gleefully describing her excitement, her cynical planning and her constant anticipatory masturbation. In this scene she is spying on him from her car with binoculars. I could see the shape of a body contrasting against the darkness. I focused the lenses further, my fingertips
to push against my pubic bone with the full force of my wrist, as if to try to muffle the insanity-producing sensation. The shock effect is heightened because the narrator is a young and very attractive woman, lusted after by adult men, and she has an extremely goodlooking husband, whom her female friends envy. The book was never tested in court and never officially banned, but some bookshops refused to stock it. sweating. It was indeed Jack. His right arm rose and fell in repetitive motion, tugging against his crotch. The windowsill blocked me from seeing below his pelvis—the tip of his penis was visible, but nothing beneath it. Yet there in full view was the entirety of his torso, his flexed arm. What caused me to nearly scream as I shoved my fist into my underwear and began grinding my clit against my knuckles was the oddity of his posture and gaze; I came immediately, then continued
Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, 1984 is written from the point of view of the girl. It opens with a scene between tenyear-old Janey and her father. Janey’s mother died when she was a baby and her father is finally starting to date; Janey is terrified that he is going to leave her. ‘Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father.’
Janey: You tell me you love someone else, you’re gonna kick me out, and I shouldn’t push. What do you think I am, Johnny? I love you. Father: Just let things be. You’re making more of this than it really is. Janey (everything comes flooding out): I love you. I adore you. When I first met you, it’s as if a light turned on for me. You’re the first joy I knew. Don’t you understand? Father (silent). Janey: I just can’t bear that you’re leaving me: it’s like a lance cutting my brain in two: it’s the worst pain I’ve ever known. I don’t care who you fuck. You know that. I’ve never acted like this before. Father: I know… That night, for the first time in months, Janey and her father sleep together because Janey can’t get to sleep otherwise. Her father’s touch is cold, he doesn’t want to touch her mostly ’cause he’s confused.
Janey fucks him even though it hurts her like hell ’cause of her Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. (Janey later meets Jean Genet in Mexico; they travel across North Africa and end up in prison together.) Another book narrated by a teen girl and written by a woman came from British author Rebecca Ray, who was a teenager when she published A Certain Age (published in America as Pure). The fourteen-year-old narrator, like all her friends, is completely blasé about sex, and everything else. The novel opens: ‘I was about thirteen when I started letting the boys feel me up.’ She later has an affair – though it is not a love affair, there is no love in this novel – with a twenty-seven-year old man. I pushed Oliver's trousers down to round his hips. I didn't look at what I was doing. I just didn't want to see. I felt his hands move from my chest. Down, over skin. My stomach and further. I felt him
push my trousers down as well. The elastic of my pants was stretching. And then I felt him touch me. It wasn't nice. Not really. But when I thought about it, it wasn't quite as bad as Robin. At least I didn't hate him. And I didn't think he'd laugh. His fingers moved in. Not gentle. Not roundabout like he had been with my tits. I guess it was do or die by now, though. I guessed he might as well. He put his finger inside. Burning and stretching but he
didn't seem about to stop. It hurt. It hurt a lot. But it didn't matter. I suppose that nothing ever matters, not really. Also a teenager writing in an affectless, amoral way about having meaningless, passionless sex with older men was German wunderkind Helene Hegemann (born 1992). She had her first play premiered in Berlin when she was fifteen, soon after which it was broadcast on the radio, directed her first movie, Torpedo at the same age, wrote her first novel, Axolotl Roadkill, when she was sixteen, had it published when she was seventeen and went on to direct the movie of the novel in 2017. Axolotl was controversial for two reasons: one because the sixteen-year-old narrator (Hegemann was sixteen when she wrote it) Mifti is on drugs throughout and drifts through a world of clubs and lowlife characters with no respect for authority and no apparent parental control; and second because Hegemann was accused of plagiarising large parts of it
from the internet – Nobel prizewinner Günter Grass led a campaign against her in defence of writers’ intellectual property. Worse than the plagiarism accusations though was the suggestion that the book had in fact been written by her father, a critic, writer and for several years Professor of Dramaturgy at Leipzig University. (By no means the first time a woman author’s works has been thought to be by her father.) In response, Hegemann wrote a scathing
article for Die Zeit in which she said – presumably in jest – that, yes, her father had written it but only after she had slept with him. There is very little sex in Axolotl – heroin does nothing at all for the sex drive – and what there is is perfunctory, meaningless and affectless, as is everything else the narrator and her friends do. And then he’s standing there smoking, and I wonder if this is all about drugs or sex or a nice cool night breeze. He comes towards me, I take the cigarette out of his hand, and as I take a drag he bites my neck. At some point I’m lying on the wet concrete ground with my legs akimbo, gravel aggregate digging into my back. Pörksen on top of me, my sequined tights round my ankles. In this position, I let
him fuck me in the mouth for an incredible length of time, for various reasons. As the sun rises, warm cum runs down my throat. It discourages all over my face; funnily enough there’s something pretty operatic about it. In this next scene, Mifti agrees to have sex with a taxi driver, although she has already been to a cash machine to get money to pay his fare. He doesn’t give me a second glance until he stops the car in the empty car park of an exhibition space for designer furniture reached via a spiral ramp, and gets out. I wind down the window to give him my half-smoked cigarette, cold hitting me with an aboveaverage and pleasant bite. Disgust, pure lechery, egoism, a farewell to all intellectual
fads and to the romantic idea of a life-affirming night out. He tugs my head up, I can’t remember how I got rid of my underwear, I have a dark red, wrinkly penis in my face and I’m watching its owner as the beastly bastard fucks his way rhythmically through the situation, plunging with his extenuated hairy balls all over the body parts I made out as my own less than an hour ago. He sticks his index finger in my mouth and attempts to look like Enrique Iglesias in the video for Hero. His dribbling tongue licks my rib cage in such an uncivilised manner that his saliva gland secretions seem to drip off my skin by the litre onto the beige leather seats. I prop myself up to arch my back, thereby pressing my torso into his face, which by now is twitching uncontrollably out of lechery. Somehow, the two of us entirely independently existing individuals continue along this road as if we were a single entity, until we stop, and at this point of pause for
thought he says, completely out of breath after trying to stick something or other down my throat again, I don’t know whether it was membraneenclosed muscle or his shin or his dick. Several young female Japanese writers in the twenty-first century express the same affectless attitude to sex, drugs and relationships among young teenagers as the Europeans, using the girl as narrator, including Hitomi Kanehara’s Autofiction, Mari Aksaka’s Vibrator, Ai Sakurai’s Innocent World and the (not so young but writing as a teenager) Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris. There is plenty of sex in these books but no eroticism; to paraphrase Alain Robbe-Grillet: for this generation of female narrators, sex is neither meaningful nor absurd, it simply is.
Even in France, novels about paedophiles run in to trouble from activist groups, if not from the law. Rose Bonbon, 1996, by Nicolas Jones-Gorlin, a novel about a man in his thirties that describes in detail his sexual encounters with children under the age of ten was attacked in print and by the children’s rights group L’Enfant Bleu, which said that the book risked ‘shocking both public opinion and victims of paedophilia.’ Jones-Gorlin was expecting the response: I knew of course that it was a sensitive subject, but I did not think I would find the antipaedophile associations lined up against me… My character is not a sympathetic one and the book also shows the complaisance that can often surround paedophilia. The book contains a genuine critique of society. The publisher was the most highly respected and respectable Gallimard, who were asked to withdraw Rose Bonbon from publication but not threatened by
legal action. This seems to have caused some internal confusion: on the one hand Gallimard officially refused to withdraw it but at the same time they failed to resupply some book shops. Activist groups, like the courts, still fail to understand that attacking a book for immorality will increase its sales at least tenfold.
TERRY SOUTHERN & MASON HOFFENBERG
In his book The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy, Nile Southern compares and contrasts the authors of Candy, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, who met in Paris in 1948 on the GI Bill and were supposedly studying at the Sorbonne.
They were an odd pair. Mason’s Peter Lorre-like, hunched, bug-eyed demeanor (very New York) was in sharp contrast to Terry’s Presbyterian, Texas-bred, hawklike features and reserved manner. At times they were like a comedy team – entertaining each other and those around them. They shared a similar extreme distaste for the clichéd or hackneyed – the two of them could be very dismissive – and very funny. In a later interview, Terry Southern (1924-1995) talked about the atmosphere in the post-war Paris of 1948 to 1952, where expats hung out in the cafes, smoking hash, drinking Pernod and going to jazz clubs, where ‘all the great black musicians – Bird, Diz, Thelonius, Bud Powell, Miles, Kenny Clark’ were playing.’ However, as Southern says, the dilemma was that in this relaxed, bohemian atmosphere, it was uncool to try too hard; almost
embarrassing to actually sell work to the literary establishment, ‘like you had sold out or something. If it was corny enough and square enough and bourgeois enough to get accepted by some of these asshole editors how could it be worth anything?’ The work ethic, actually finishing a work, was not considered cool: the thing for a writer was to read other cool writers and ‘turn people on’ to them. It seems that Hoffenberg (1922-1986) was the more cynical of the two, but perhaps the more dirty-minded. Southern recalls a girl they used to see in a cheap student restaurant they frequented: although the food was terrible, he thought if it was good enough for her it was good enough for him. ‘I had this image of her being so delicate and fastidious that nothing could possibly touch her lips unless it was perfect.’ He mentions this to Hoffenberg, who replies: ‘are you kidding? She’s probably been sucking cock all day!’ Neither man ever subsequently equalled the financial or critical success of Candy, though
Southern went on to become a successful journalist and screenwriter. He also wrote another novel, Blue Movie of 1970, about an Oscar-winning and financially-successful film director who has been watching stag movies and decides he can do better. ‘Why isn’t it possible to make one that’s really good – you know, one that is genuinely erotic and beautiful.’ So he does: he makes a porn film with the highest possible production values, writing and acting.
Although hip and quite funny, the quality of the writing does not lift it far enough up from pure pornography for it to be worth our consideration here. It does however contain one serious thought that is relevant to this survey. From his point of view, the stag movies they had just seen were more relevant, albeit unwittingly, to the crucial aesthetic issues and problems presented by the film of today, than were those of the master film-makers, including himself. He was aware that the freedom of expression and development in cinema had always lagged behind that of literature, as, until recent years, it had lagged behind that of the
theater as well. Eroticism of the most aesthetic and creatively effective nature abounded in every form of contemporary prose – why had it not been achieved, or even seriously attempted on film? Was there something inherently alien to eroticism in the medium of film? Something too personal to share with an audience? Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy was published under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton by a very appreciative Maurice Girodias, but Hoffenberg later expressed a deep contempt for Girodias in 1973 interview for Playboy. ‘The publishers pulled some stuff you wouldn’t believe. They feel it’s fuck or be fucked. Maybe they’re right. But Maurice Girodias is really terrible.’ In the
same interview he said that he had stopped writing after Candy, but that ‘I came to the end of the Candy money a little while ago. I’d been telling myself I wasn’t going to do any writing until I was broke.’ Nevertheless, even before Candy, which was Traveller’s Companion no. 64, Hoffenberg had already written two novels for Olympia: the highly schlocky and appallinglytitled novel Until She Screams, Travellers Companion no. 21, under the pseudonym Faustino Perez and Sin for Breakfast, originally published under the pseudonym Hamilton Drake as no. 46 and later republished under Hoffenberg’s name. This is basically pure pornography, though of the very soft variety, unredeemed by the
quality of the writing and not even very erotic. I quote a sample only to show how terrible it is. In this scene, Vivian has a fever and her husband is checking her temperature rectally; he ‘carefully opened the cheeks of her bottom and, for the first time since he’d been married to her, was accorded a look at his wife’s anus.’ He knelt in such a way that his stiff member was held between his thighs and, involuntarily, he worked it back and forth in its area of confinement. The thermometer had at last been positioned suitably and he was waiting now for when it would be time to take it out. He knew he was going to come and he was holding back till the moment when, once again spreading her buttocks,
he withdrew the glass tube… He feared she might suspect something on hearing the sudden movement he had made as he doubled over, so with the orgasm still pulsing in him, he managed to twist the thermometer and focus his eyes until the thin column of mercury caught the light. ‘Well, thank God for that,’ he gasped, ‘it’s normal.’ In his introduction to an extract from Sin for Breakfast in The Olympia Reader, Maurice Girodias is far more kind and affectionate to Hoffenberg than vice versa and seems genuinely to have liked and admired him. Born in New York, Mason Hoffenberg is one of the few American soldiers who permanently settled in France. He came back to France, where he had been stationed, in 1948, with a GI Bill safely buttoned in his pocket; only fair since the army had drafted him out of Olivet College. He married a French girl, Coquitte, the
granddaughter of the distinguished French art historian Dr Elie Faure, in 1953. They have three children and a house somewhere behind Montparnasse. Mason has worked for the Agence France Presse in Paris, and has, through the years accumulated a vast stack of his ‘automatic writings’ which some enterprising editor will one day have to struggle through. He’s currently working on a novel to justify
the munificent advance Putnam’s presented to him for the rights to what they hope will be another best-selling Candy. But Mason, student of Chinese and Hebrew, poet, linguist, stylist, man of the far-out mind, is not to be predicted. Putnam’s were of course disappointed.
CANDY ‘Good Grief,’ as Candy Christian might say, ‘it’s funny!’ At last, we come to a book with lots of sex scenes that does not take itself even slightly seriously and is at times quite hilarious. It is a picaresque romp, ostensibly based on Voltaire’s Candide, though that has a male protagonist, whereas Candy is decidedly female. In in many ways, she is more like heroines in the English tradition of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, Richardson’s Clarissa or Pamela or Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, though she is not at all like the Marquis de Sade’s Justine or Juliette. In fact, the connection with
Candide may have been invented by others in retrospect: Hoffenberg later said: Terry Southern and I wrote Candy for the money. Olympia Press, $500 flat. He was in Switzerland, I was in Paris. We did it in letters. But when it got to be a big deal in the States, everybody was taking it seriously. Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So right away I went back and re-read Voltaire to see if he was right. That’s what happens to you. It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go
back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree… I’ve changed the way I feel about the book three, four times. But it was a manuscript. When it was a little fuckshit Olympia book, I thought it was dumb. Then, when it was a big deal in the States, I read it again and I thought, well, it is pretty cool, because everybody was taking it very seriously. Southern himself said the book was in fact more like an erotic version of The Perils of Pauline – a 1914 film serial and later a 1947 film, where in each episode Pauline is in danger and manages to escape – he and Hoffenberg were simply ‘putting the girl in different erotic situations.’ (Southern probably did not know the British comic
strip Jane, drawn by Norman Pett for the Daily Mirror from 1932 to 1959, where the naïve, unfortunate heroine is always getting into difficult situations and losing her clothes.) Maurice Girodias, in The Olympia Reader, discusses how he met the two men, soon jointly to become the pseudonymous author Maxwell Kenton. In December, 1956, Mason Hoffenberg brought over to The Olympia Press headquarters on the rue de Nesle his friend Terry Southern, who, then living in Geneva was on a short visit to Paris. Mason and Terry were anxious to write a book for The Travellers Companion
Series, Terry being at the time in acute financial need. According to Girodias, they agreed an outline for what was to become Candy, and agreed a fixed fee, the standard arrangement for Olympia’s commissioned DBs (dirty books), to be paid partly in advance and partly on completion, with all rights being handed over to Olympia. Southern remembers it slightly differently: he later said that he had offered a short story called ‘Candy Christian’ to Alexander Trocchi who wanted to publish it in Merlin but would not offer any money. Southern says that Trocchi encouraged him to turn it into a full-length book. ‘And he might have done so, had not another great friend of mine, Mason Hoffenberg, poet and hemp-maven
extraordinaire, surfaced at almost the same moment and been doubly keen for the opportunity.’ Southern’s own recollection of his first meeting with ‘the urbane Monsieur Maurice Kahane, aka Gid Girodias,’ looking back reflectively in a late piece called ‘Flashing on Gid’ from 1991, is slightly different and paints quite an affectionate picture. Like everyone else, I found Girodias irresistible – boss charm and what at first appeared to be an extraordinary generosity. He seemed to fancy himself one of the last of the grands seigneurs and tried to act like one. Our first meeting was a casual happenstance. Gid was screening some porn footage that featured a dead ringer for the
young Simone Signoret, whom, indeed, he claimed it to be (I was later assured by Roger Vadim that it was not she but a saucy doppelgänger), and insisted afterward on taking me to lunch ‘at an amusing little hole-in-the-wall I’ve just discovered.’ Girodias, says Southern, offered him a ‘grand-sounding’ ten thousand francs a month for four months ‘or until we finished the book, which ever happened first.’
But, at the rate of around a hundred francs to the dollar, this was not a large amount of money and Southern complained about it to Trocchi. ‘That’s four hundred dollars, man,’ Trocchi replied, ‘Nabokov only got twofifty.’ The finished manuscript of Candy was due to be delivered in time for the Spring 1957 list but took a lot longer than the planned four months and was not delivered until 1958. Girodias wanted to put Terry Southern’s name on the cover but Southern was trying to sell a children’s book at the time and pleaded that, ‘I am not as yet that well established,’ and that his name would help neither reviews nor sales. So the book was released under the name Maxwell Kenton who, in the blurb for the initial release, which is as hilarious as the book itself, is described as an American nuclear physicist, formerly prominent in atomic research and development who, in February 1957, resigned his post, ‘because I found the
work becoming more and more philosophically untenable,’ and has since devoted himself fully to creative writing… The author has chosen to use a pen name because, in his own words again, ‘I’m afraid my literary inclinations may prove a bit too romantic, at least in their present form, to the tastes of many of my old friends and colleagues.’ First published in 1958, Candy feels much later, more like a product of the 1960s counterculture West Coast of America than of the 1950s Paris of the second Lost Generation, though Southern was very friendly with the Merlinois, especially the ubiquitous Trocchi. Nile Southern explains Candy’s appeal at the time.
The wild success of Candy can be attributed to America suddenly growing up after the relaxation of the ‘decency laws’ that had kept such works as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Howl, and Last Exit to Brooklyn from sullying America’s Doris Dayhallucination of cheerful, neutered perfection. The release and embrace of Candy in some ways symbolized America’s heralding of its own sexual transformation: out of the repressive Styx of (Eisenhower’s) sleepy Wisconsin and into the happening hipness of (Ginsberg’s) Village. Sex and humor were anathema to the Eisenhower era, and in ‘heavy combo,’ as Terry would say, they were its knockout punch.
On the front lines of thawing the ‘50s ice was an army of adolescent readers – male and female – who were consuming the book urgently with one hand by night, and reading it aloud to the uninitiated by day. Candy, who was born on Valentine’s Day, is a sophomore in a Wisconsin college and a virgin when the novel opens. She writes a paper on ‘Contemporary Human Love’ for her admired Professor Mephesto. He approves of her thesis that one should give oneself fully to others according to their needs. ‘I believe you know my great need of you!’ he says, when he has her in his office for sherry, slipping ‘his hand around her neck, along her throat and toward her breast.’ She drops her glass, he gets on the floor next to her. ‘“You won’t deny me,” he pleaded, “I know you are too wise and too good to be selfish . . . Surely you meant what you wrote.” And he began to quote urgently “. . . The beautiful, thrilling privilege of giving fully.”’ But before Candy has chance to
decide whether or not to give in, they are disturbed and she leaves. ‘And that night Candy went to sleep trying to decide which she should do: give herself to the Mexican gardener, or run away to New York City. In the end, she does both, in that order, though, again she is disturbed when trying to give her virginity to Emmanuel, the gardener. ‘Oh, you do need me so!’ the closed-eyed girl murmured… But when the gardener’s hand
closed on her pelvis and into the damp, she stiffened slightly: she was quite prepared to undergo pain for him . . . but pleasure – she was not sure how that could be part of the general picture. So she seized his hand and contented herself for the moment with the giving of her left breast, to which his mouth was fastened in desperate sucking. ‘Oh my baby, my baby,’ she whispered, stroking his head; but the hot insulting hardness of him between her legs was distracting, and somehow destroyed the magic of her breast sacrifice. She closed her eyes again and called upon Professor Mephesto’s words; ‘The needs of man are so many . . . And so
aching.’ ‘Oh how you ache for me, my darling!’ She flung both her arms around his neck, as he found her tiny clitoris and pummelled it with his calloused fingers, causing her to cry out and stiffen once more in his arms; but now she fought down the desire to seize his hand, thinking how this was the price of loveliness and the key to the beautiful thrilling privilege of giving fully – and so the gardener would have entered her then, with a terrible thrust to the hilt, so to speak . . . had not a padded scurrying sounded at that moment in the hall. ‘Good Grief,’ cried Candy, in a very odd voice, ‘it’s Daddy!’ Her father is obviously outraged, but not for the reason she may have thought.
in the grand finale, by all of them at once grouped around different parts of her, though it was (in the finale) she who was the aggressor, she who was voraciously ravishing them, frantically forcing the bunched and spurting organs into every orifice – vagina, anus, mouth, ears, nose, etc.
It was not as though he couldn’t believe his eyes, for it was a scene that had formed a part of many many of his most lively and hideous dreams – dreams which began with Candy being ravished, first by Mephesto, then by foreigners, then by Negroes, then gorillas, then Bulldogs, then donkeys, horses, mules, kangaroos, elephants, rhinos, and finally,
Daddy and the gardener fight and the gardener plunges his trowel into Mister Christian’s head. His twin brother, Candy’s uncle Jack, comes to the hospital. Jack’s wife, Livia is, he says, very cold and he needs Candy’s warmth. ‘Oh my poor darling,’ says Candy to him while he puts his head under her sweater and takes her breast in his mouth. Meanwhile, uncle Jack’s hands were not idle, but had found their way beneath her skirt and along her legs into the sweetening damp. ‘Give me all your true warmth,’ he said, one hand fondling her tiny clitoris, the other pulling down her white panties.
‘All my true warmth,’ breathed Candy, ‘oh how you need my warmth, my baby,’ and she lay very still while he undressed her and then himself; but when he thrust himself into her, forgetting her taut hymen, the girl cried out, and apparently this was overheard by the nurse in the corridor – because she rushed in at that moment, flinging the door open wide and shrieking in horror at the sight of these two, stark naked, hunching wildly half beneath the sickbed. Candy, the nurse and the twin brothers all crash to the floor. ‘“Good Grief!” cried Candy, in genuine alarm. “It’s Daddy!”‘ As part of the fallout from the incident, Candy meets Doctor Krankeit, author of the book Masturbation Now! Which advocates that ‘heterosexual lovemaking is the root of all neuroses, a shabby illusion which misleads the ego, that we must endeavour to keep it in its true place – as an aid, and adjunct to masturbation, which is the only
sex-mode that permits complete fulfilment and mental health.’ Candy moves to New York where she meets, on the street, a hunchback – the latest of several Rumpelstiltskin-style hunchbacks we have encountered in this survey. ‘I want fuck – suck you!’ he says. Candy says she does not want to. Is it because of the hunchback, he asks. ‘No, you poor darling, of course it isn’t! No, no… You silly darling!… I hadn’t even noticed.’
‘Oh, darling, no!’ cried the girl, but it was too late, without making a scene, for anything to be done; his stubby fingers were rolling her little clitoris like a marble in oil. Candy leaned back in resignation, her heart too big to deprive him of this if it meant so much. With her head closed-eyed, resting again on the couch, she would endure it as long as she could… It means so much to him, Candy kept thinking so much, as he meanwhile got her jeans and panties down completely so that they
dangled now from one slender ankle as he adjusted her legs and was at last on the floor himself in front of her, with her legs around his neck, and his mouth very deep inside the fabulous honeypot. ‘If it means so much,’ Candy kept repeating to herself, until she didn’t think she could bear it another second, and she wrenched herself free, saying ‘Darling, oh darling,’ and seized his head in her hands with a great show of passion. Afterwards, ‘she cast a last glimpse at herself in the glass, blushing at her own loveliness, and trembling slightly at the very secret notion of this beauty-andbeast sacrifice… Candy appeared before him, standing for a moment in full lush radiance, a naked angel bearing the supreme gift.’ The hunchback believes that Candy wants to be beaten and begins hitting her on the backs of the legs. ‘Yes! Hurt me! Yes, yes! Hurt me as they have hurt you!’ She then appears to lose it completely.
With a wild impulsive cry, she shrieked: ‘Give me your hump!’ The hunchback was startled for a moment, not comprehending. ‘Your hump, your hump!’ cried the girl, ‘GIVE ME YOUR HUMP!’ The hunchback hesitated, and then lunged headlong toward her, burying his hump between Candy’s legs as she hunched wildly, pulling open her little labias in an absurd effort to get it in her. ‘Your hump! Your hump!’ she kept crying, scratching and clawing at it now. ‘Fuck! Shit! Piss!’ she screamed. ‘Cunt! Cock! Crap! Prick! Kike! Nigger! Wop! Hump! HUMP! and she teetered on the blazing peak of pure madness for instant . . .
and then dropped down, slowly, through gray and grayer clouds into a deep, soft, black, night. We have had hunchback sex in this book before, but never like this. Candy’s next sexual encounter – not that she knows it is going to be sexual – is with a Doctor Johns whom she meets in a bar. He is a gynaecologist and persuades her that she needs an examination, right now, in the men’s toilets. He takes out his medical kit and clamps her ‘darling little labias’ to test her ‘clitorial reflexes’. But as he grabs her, she slips into the toilet bowl, which floods the bathroom, bringing in the bartender and the manager. They bring in the police. ‘He’s a doctor!’ Says Candy to the policeman. ‘Doctor Caligari, I suppose,’ he replies.
At the end of the book, having encountered a self-styled mystic in a religious cult who tries to convince her that sex is a mystical rather than physical act, Candy travels to Tibet via India where she meets what she assumes is a holy man. She sits next to him in front of a Buddha statue, concentrating on the Buddha’s nose to aid her meditation. There is a loud crash and the Buddha statue falls onto Candy and the holy man, leaving them unscathed, but trapped. Candy’s ‘shift had been forced well above her waist and her shapely nether limbs now were locked about the holy man’s loins.’ She tries to wriggle free but only succeeds in ‘agitating her precious and open honeypot against the holy man’s secret parts.’ The Buddha statue shifts and the Buddha’s nose slips into Candy’s ‘marvellous derriere.’ The Buddha’s nose has been lubricated by the rain and it was ‘not a wholly unpleasant sensation for the adorable girl as it gracefully eased into her perfect bottom… The Buddha, too, needed her! Simultaneously
she forces the holy man’s member into her ‘honey-cloister’ but then she looks at him again: she was stricken stone dumb by what she saw – for the warm summer rain had worked its wonders there as well, washing the crust of dung and ash away completely, leaving the face clean, bright, and all too recognisable, as the eyes glittered terrifically while the hopeless ecstasy of his huge pent-up spasm began, and sweet Candy’s melodious voice rang out through the temple in truly mixed feelings: ‘GOOD GRIEF – IT’S DADDY!’