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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
‘PATAPHYSIQUE/OULIPO ÉROTIQUE
After the end of the Second World War, many whimsical, mischievous post-surrealist French writers and artists, including Raymond Queneau, Eugène Ionesco, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian, looking to inject some fun into the austerity of post war Paris, became members of
a new Collège de ‘Pataphysique, the ‘Pataphysical College: ‘a society committed to learned and inutilious research’. ‘Pataphysics was a term coined by Alfred Jarry, the wacky and scandalous author of Ubu Roi who was a cult hero to younger poets like Apollinaire; the members celebrate his life and work by being equally wacky and scandalous. Jarry said that ‘Pataphysics deals with ‘the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one,’ but there is never any actual definition of ‘Pataphysics: that would be very unpataphysical. It is all glorious nonsense and an outlet for much literary and artistic fun. The college has many offshoots worldwide and still exists, under its permanent but fictional head, the Inamovable Curator, Dr Faustroll, the character created by Jarry. Its senior nonfictional member is the Vice-Curator, currently Tanya Peixoto of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and the Bookartbookshop in London. She was elected in 2014 to succeed Her Magnificence Lutembi, who was a crocodile. You can join as an overseas phynance héroïfique for 70
Euros. Their websites are college-depataphysique.fr (and patakosmos.com. If you need to know more, ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide by Andrew Hugill is in fact a very useful guide to this strange universe. The Oulipo (OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, Workshop of Potential Literature) was founded in 1960 as a branch of the College of ‘Pataphysics, and originally headed by Raymond Queneau. Its raison d’être was (and still is) to produce literary works constrained by voluntary restrictions that the writer places upon himself (Oulipians are mostly him not her). For instance there are lipograms: works that omit a certain letter. Leading Oulipian Georges Perec wrote one of the most famous
Oulipian works: La Disparition, published in 1969, a 300-page novel concerning the mysterious disappearance of the letter ‘e’ that does not contain the letter ‘e’. It was heroically translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void (not, of course The Void). Perec also wrote a 1,300 word, palindromic story that begins, ‘Trace l’inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule. Le brut repentir, cet écrit né Perec. L’arc lu pèse trop, lis à vice-versa. Perte,’ and ends, ‘Désire ce trépas rêvé : Ci va ! S’il porte, sépulcral, ce repentir, cet écrit ne perturbe le lucre : Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l’écart.’ Another Oulipian technique is The N+7 procedure (S+7 in French), where every noun is replaced by the noun seventh after it in the
dictionary. This can produce some charmingly surrealistic results. Lolita, light-year of my lifetime, firecracker of my longings. My single-decker, my south. (There are now apps that will do this for you.) Even though these outcomes are produced by strict rules in a non-surrealist methodology – totally unlike Robert Desnos’ trance-like, shaman-style utterances – the randomising effect
of an external source like a dictionary does achieve the surrealist aim of disconnected, logicfree texts which are often very satisfying. The title of Mallarmé’s seminal typographical poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) could be a good rallying call for Oulipians. American Oulipian Harry Mathews argued that constraints increase, rather than decrease creativity: ‘If you can say anything,
where do you start?’ Marcel Bénabou, in Rule and Constraint, agrees. Constraint is thus a commodious way of passing from language to writing. If one grants that all writing – in the sense both of the act of writing and of the product of that act – has its autonomy, its coherence, it must be admitted that writing under constraint is superior to other forms insofar as it freely furnishes its own code. All these obstacles that one creates for oneself – playing, for example, on the nature, the order, the length, or the number of letters, syllables, or words – all these interdictions that one postulates reveal their true function: their final goal is not a mere exhibition of virtuosity but rather an exploration of virtualities. Key texts of the Oulipo methodology are Queneau’s late The Foundations of Literature where he analyses literature as if it were algebra, and Italo Calvino’s The Uses of Literature. There are several collections of Oulipiana in print,
including Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren F. Motte, Jr and Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie. Oulipianism is alive and well today, and has spread to other artistic areas; there is an Oulipopo (Ouvroir de Littérature Policier Potentielle) for crime fiction, an Oumupo (Ouvroir de Musique Potentielle; John Cage was never a member but his aleatoric – literally, dice-governed – music, determined
by the I Ching was highly Oulipian avant la lettre), an Oupeinpo (Ouvroir de Peinture Potentielle; its members call themselves Les Oupeinpiens), and an Oucinépo or Oucipo (Ouvroir de Cinéma Potentielle). There is even an Oucuipo (Ouvroir de Cuisine Potentielle), initiated by Harry Mathews and Noël Arnaud, that seeks to link literature and food, following a French tradition that goes from Anthelme BrillatSavarin’s 1825, eight-volume Physiologie du goût, ou Méditation de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour (The Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendent Gastronomy, a Work Theoretical, Historical, and On the Order of the Day) through to Roland Barthes’ ‘Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food’. The French, even at their most avant-garde, never neglect their food.
‘SALLY MARA’ (RAYMOND QUENEAU) The first work of the Oulipo, still one of its finest works, and indeed the work that caused it to be founded, was Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes by Raymond Queneau (1903-1976). Queneau was working on a sequence of ten sonnets, to be printed in a kind of flick book in which each page
would be sliced through under each of the fourteen lines of the poem; Queneau got the idea from children’s books, where people or animals can swap parts. Each of the poems has the same rhyme scheme, so that by individually turning each of the fourteen strips, any combination is possible. The result is 1014 or 100,000,000,000,000 potential poems.
(Naturally there are now apps that will generate poems for you in either English or French.) Queneau asked his friend, the science educator and broadcaster François Le Lionnais, a Regent of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, for help; together they co-founded the Oulipo. Another of Queneau’s works is also a paradigm of Oulipianism: Exercises in Style. This consists of a short description of a trivial event which is repeated in ninety-nine different versions (later expanded to a hundred and ninety-five), each having the title and the form of a style of composition or a grammatical trope. The original version is: In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having
a tug-of-war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it. Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: ‘You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat.’ He shows him where (at the lapels) and why. Some of the variations (brilliantly translated by the wonderful Barbara Wright, who knew Queneau and translated most of his works, as well as the works of many French avant-garde writers) are:
Synchesis Ridiculous young man, as I was on an S bus one day chock-full by traction perhaps whose neck was elongated, round his hat and who had a cord, I noticed a. Arrogant and snivelling in a tone, who happened to be next to him, with the man to remonstrate he started. Because that he pushed him he claimed, time every that got off anyone. Vacant he sat down and made a dash towards a seat, having said this. Rome (Cour de) in the I met him later two hours to his overcoat a button to add a friend was advising him. Word-composition I was plat-bus-forming comassitudinarily in a lutetiomeridional space-time and I was neighbouring a longisthmusical plaitroundthehatted greenhorn. Who said to a mediocranon: "You’re jostleseeming me." Having ejaculated this he freeplaced himself voraciously. In a posterior spatio-temporality I saw him again; he was
saintlazaresquaring with an X who was saying: "You ought to buttonsupplement your overcoat." And he whyexplained him. Queneau was undoubtedly the joker in the pack of French intellectual/philosophical writers in the post-war period, but was also taken very seriously by his peers. He was a member of the reading panel at the highly respected publisher
Gallimard – as we will see later he was one of the people who told Simone de Beauvoir that Gallimard could not publish Violette Leduc’s lesbian reminiscences – and from 1951 he was a member of the Académie Goncourt. Before the war Queneau had been associated with the surrealists and been a friend of André Breton, but he had never really been convinced about automatic writing and broke with the group as it moved to the far left and towards communism. By 1930 he had distanced himself enough to take part in George Bataille’s antiBreton pamphlet Un Cadavre (A Corpse). Between 1933 and 1968, Queneau published sixteen novels under his own name, ten volumes of poetry and many other volumes of essays and journals. His most well-known novel is Zazie dans le Métro, 1959 (published by among others, our old friends Olympia Press), largely because of the 1960 Louis Malle film of it. Like Ulysses it takes place in a single day, following the precocious (though not in the sexual sense) and foul-mouthed ten-year-old Zazie on an eventful journey around Paris on a day when the Métro is closed.
WE ALWAYS TREAT WOMEN TOO WELL
In addition to his ‘official’ novels, Queneau wrote a novel under the pseudonym Sally Mara in 1947 for Jean d’Halluin’s Éditions du Scorpion, which we will look at in more detail in the chapter on Boris Vian. Like Vian (and like Pierre Louÿs with his discovery of the ‘ancient Greek’ Songs of Bilitis), Queneau pretended to have found a
novel in a foreign language that had been translated into French, We Always Treat Women Too Well (On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes, literally, ‘we are always too good with women’). In Queneau’s case the novel was supposed to have been written in ‘Irish’ by the young, unknown Sally Mara. Mara became to Queneau something of what Rrose Sélavy was to Marcel Duchamp: a female alter ego through whom he could say things he would not otherwise say. Like Sélavy, Mara took on something of a life of her own, and in 1950 Queneau ‘uncovered’ and published her ‘diary’, Le Journal Intime de Sally Mara (sadly not available in English), which portrays a slightly naughty adolescent who, as has been said, could be Zazie’s older sister, if Zazie’s elder sister was a mistress of puns and verbal acrobatics. Then, in 1962, Gallimard, not too pompous to get in on the joke, issued Les oeuvres complètes de Sally Mara. In the preface Queneau wrote:
It is not often given to a supposedly imaginary author to be able to preface his complete works, especially when they appear under the name of a socalled real author. So I thank the Gallimard editions for offering me the chance. Mara manages to combine the styles of two of Queneau’s favourite authors, James Joyce and Lewis Carroll, though the author ‘she’ most resembles is the pseudonymous Irish writer Flann O’Brien, whose At Swim Two Birds and The Poor Mouth – An Béal Bocht in the original Irish; O’Brien wrote in both
English and Irish – were published in English before Sally Mara started to write. (O’Brien’s real name was Brian O’Nolan – Brian Ó Nualláin in the Irish spelling – but he worked as a journalist and columnist under another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen.) I do not know whether Queneau ever read O’Brien or vice versa but the two men would surely have loved each other’s works. We Always Treat Women Too Well is set in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916. (Perhaps the French did not appreciate that no Irish or British author could have written such a light-hearted work about this brutal, bitter and bloody battle.) It borrows a lot from Ulysses, including the locations – Queneau had never been to Dublin, he got all the place names from Joyce – and many of the characters’ names: the central figure, Gertie Girdle resembles Joyce’s siren/temptress Gerty MacDowell in more than just her name. And, in case you the reader are still missing the point, the Republicans’ code word and rallying cry is ‘Finnegans Wake!’ To add to his little joke, Queneau invents a translator from the ‘original Irish’ into French, Michael
Presle, who adds ‘scholarly’ footnotes about obscure aspects of the language of the original text. And, in yet another twist of metatextual irony, Sally Mara ‘herself’ also adds footnotes occasionally. One of them occurs when the Republican Caffrey says: ‘Anyone can see we are in the land of James Joyce.’ Mara’s footnote is: ‘There is a slight anachronism here, but Caffrey, being illiterate, could not have known in 1916 that Ulysses had
not yet appeared.’ The setup for the minimal plot is that Gertie, who is loyal to the British Crown, is trapped in the toilet of the post office in Dublin where she works when an armed band of Republicans take it, and her, over. To this extent, but no further, Mara’s novel reflects the ultra-hardboiled No Orchids For Miss Blandish of 1939 by the pseudonymous British author James Hadley Chase (René Brabazon Raymond), who was trying to outnoir James M. Cain’s 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice; the blurb on the original dust jacket of No Orchids calls it ‘the toughest novel you ever read,’ though Chase toned it down considerably in a 1962 rewrite. It concerns an upper-class girl who is kidnapped by a gang for her diamond necklace. Miss Blandish (she has no first name) is held captive, during which time she is drugged by the mother of the brutal and violent gang leader Slim so that he can repeatedly rape her. In a case of what we would now call Stockholm Syndrome, Miss Blandish turns out to be in love with Slim. No Orchids (Pas d'orchidées pour miss Blandish) had been published
in French in 1946 with great commercial success by Gallimard, no. 3 in their Série Noire (Black Series), set up to publish noir novels. (numbers 1 and 2 were translations of Lemmy Caution novels by the British author Peter Cheyney, which became a series of films, the most famous being JeanLuc Godard’s Alphaville.) This was the spur for Jean d’Halluin to found Éditions du Scorpion with a similar aim; in 1948 he published his own James Hadley Chase novel N’y mettez pas votre nez under Chase’s other pseudonym Raymond Marshall. But Queneau hated No Orchids: it is in practically every way the opposite of his own light, linguistically playful and charming writing, and he no doubt objected to the violence, sadism and female submission. So Queneau’s
Gertie is in some ways a counter to Miss Blandish: although she is a virgin at the beginning, engaged to a member of the British forces attacking the Republican outpost, and from an upper-class background – Queneau makes much of her highfashion, Parisian undergarments; so unlike the women the rebels know – she herself is the initiator of the sexual acts with members of the gang. Gertie appears to have no motivation for turning from ingénue to sexual predatrix: she is not doing it to survive or to escape, though the gang have already killed several people, including at least one woman. They interrogate her, Catholic Irishmen asking a British woman her views on the Virgin Mary; Gertie tells them she is an agnostic.
‘And what does it mean?’ asked Callinan. ‘That she doesn’t believe in anything,’ said O’Rourke. ‘Not even in God?’ ‘Not even in God,’ said O’Rourke. There was a silence and they all considered her in terror and consternation. ‘That isn’t quite accurate,’ said Gertie, in a soft, sweet voice, ‘and I think you are simplifying my thought.’ ‘The bitch,’ murmured Caffrey. ‘I do not deny the possibility of the existence of a Supreme Being.’ ‘Fuck,’ murmured Caffrey. ‘Now we’re for it.’ ‘Make her shut up,’ said Callinan. ‘And,’ Gertie continued, ‘I have the greatest respect for our gracious King George the Fifth.’ Once again, silence and consternation. ‘But look here,’ MacCormack began. He did not, however, continue. Sudden bursts of machine-gun fire came rattling against the wall, and the panes of the
barricaded windows went splintering out into the street. She starts her seductions with Callinan, who considers it ‘blameworthy and stupid to be holding in his arms a female of the English race, the cause of all the miseries of his nation, and a hellish spoilrebellion.’ Without her, they would be free to shoot at the British and ‘there, clearly laid out in front of them would be the path to glory and
Guinness, or, conversely to a heroic death,’ whereas they now have ‘on their rebel hands, an unbearable burden, and perhaps even a speculatrix.’ The ‘translator’ adds a footnote on the word speculatrix: ‘Latinism (from speculatrix, female spy). Untranslatable into French which, as everyone knows, is a somewhat inadequate language.’ Barbara Wright, the non-fictional translator into English, then adds her own footnote, joining in the fun herself: ‘English must therefore be a
somewhat less inadequate language, for this word can in fact be found in our dictionaries, even if only as an archaism.’ Gertie starts to press herself to Callinan and he becomes ‘a prey to shedders, spasms and surgesences which reminded him that he was only a poor sinner, a man of the flesh, but he was still thinking of his duty, and of the need to correctness.’ But he finds her hard to resist. As for Callinan, who was a bachelor, he knew little of the blandishments preliminary to the radical act, never having hunted anything other than fubsy totties, or slatterns harvested on piles of hay or tavern tables still greasy with everything. He found this caress hard to bear, therefore, and began to foresee that this series of gestures would lead to a quite different conclusion from that of an honest refusal. But where would this conclusion take place? – that was what he was asking himself, now that he found himself in extremis. He still had one penultimate scruple: the social level of his Iphigenia, and then one ultimate one: the girl’s
virginity. But then, thinking that this maidenhoodity was perhaps no more than probable, he abandoned all thought and devoted himself without arrièrepensée to the sexual activity triggered by the provocation of the young lady post office employee. Callinan thinks about his fiancée, Maud: if ‘an independent and national Republic was established in Dublin, he was going to marry her in the autumn.’ Meanwhile, Gertie’s fiancé, Commodore Cartwright, an officer in the British forces attacking the Republicans, is thinking of her, ‘the young lady postal clerk at Eden Key, Dublin.’ The British are about to attack the post office, not knowing that Gertie is there. He thinks of her ‘engaging personality’ and their impending marriage, which he looks forward to ‘in order to consummate with her the act that was just a little intimidating to a chaste young man.’ Meanwhile, we go back to Callinan and his thoughts. But all these thoughts didn’t stop Callinan committing an abominable crime. And in any
case they arrived too late, these thoughts, this ideal of a faithful betrothal. Too late. Too late. The British virgin, spread-eagled on a table, legs hanging down and skirts tucked up, was sniveling over her lost maidenhood, which astonished Callinan for, after all, she’d certainly been asking for it, he reckoned. Maybe, though she was sniveling because he’d hurt her; and yet he’d been careful to do it with the least possible brutality. His wicked deed
accomplished, he remained motionless for a few seconds. His hands were still exploring the body of this girl and he thought it odd that she had so little on under her dress; certain details even surprised him strangely. For instance, she wasn’t wearing any drawers, or any frilly, Irish lace petticoats. She was certainly the only well brought-up Dublin girl who thus disdained dishabilles with layers and complications. Maybe, Callinan told himself, it was a new fashion, imported from London or Paris. This disturbed him immoderately. His loins were on fire. He gave three or four jerks and then, abruptly, it was all over. He withdrew, in great embarrassment. He scratched the tip of his nose. He pulled out his
big green handkerchief with the Irish Harps embroidered in all four corners, and wiped himself. He thought it would be kind to render the same service to Gertie. Gertie had stopped sniveling, and was lying still. She shivered slightly when he dabbed at her, very delicately. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and did up his buttons. Then he went and fetched his rifle, which he had put down in a corner, and tiptoed out of the room. Gertie had stopped sniveling and was lying still. Her thighs were shining milkily in the greyish rays of the dawning day. Not much later, Gallager comes upon Caffrey, who is too preoccupied to notice, being concerned with ‘a girl spread-eagled under him on the table, legs dangling and hair disheveled, her skirt pulled up beyond her waist.’
Gallager looks from Caffrey to ‘the feminine object lying underneath him, and very precisely to its long, white thighs, on which fulgurated the outline of a garter. It could only be a question of the young lady post office clerk, who was thus, abruptly and horizontally, making her reappearance.’ Gallager thinks about the other woman clerk, whom they killed the day before: ‘they certainly did have attractive thighs, all these girls in the Eden Quay post office.
And that garter, whose slender, elastic outline seemed merely to have been made to render that flesh softer and more luminous.’ Caffrey never finalises the act with Gertie as British shells hurtle towards the Republicans. ‘The fourth carried off Caffrey’s head.’ The body continued its rhythmic movement for a few more seconds, just like the male of the praying mantis whose upper part has been half-devoured by the female but who perseveres in his copulation. At the first shot, Gertie shut her eyes. Opening them, possibly for no other reason than a certain curiosity about what was happening outside herself, a curiosity no doubt consecutive to a momentary appeasement of her desires, she perceived, her head being tilted to one side, that of Caffrey lying, severed, near a wicker chair. Then more things happened she didn’t at first understand. But the kind of disembrained mannikin still surmounting her finally lost its momentum, stopped jerking and collapsed. Greater spurts of blood
came gushing out of it. Whereupon Gertie, screaming, wrenched herself free, and what remained of Caffrey fell inelegantly onto the floor, like a sawdust doll mutilated by the tyranny of a child. Gertie, now on her feet, considered the situation with some horror. She thought very rapidly: ‘That’s one less.’ Fairly impressed, even so, by the dead, shell-devastated Caffrey,
she retreated to the window, her thoughts in some disarray, trembling, covered all over with blood, and moist with a posthumous tribute. This is a completely different kind of necrophilia from the one in another hoax translation for Éditions du Scorpion that we are about to encounter, this time by Boris Vian.
‘VERNON SULLIVAN’ (BORIS VIAN)
The story is completely true since I made it up from beginning to end. Its material realization – to use the correct expression – consists basically of a projection of reality, under favourable circumstances, onto an irregularly tilting, and consequently distorting, plane of reference.
That was Boris Vian, from the foreword to his novel Mood Indigo, with as good a description of modernist writing as you will find anywhere: a refutation, deliberately or otherwise, of Flaubert’s realist view that the novelist walks down the road carrying a mirror; in Vian’s formulation, the mirror is warped and twisted. Boris Vian (1920-1956) was a novelist, poet, music journalist, jazz trumpeter and friend of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir – Vian wrote a regular column in Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes, though he never accepted existentialism – and almost everyone on the Paris literary scene, including the ubiquitous Raymond Queneau. Vian was also a key figure on the post-war Paris jazz scene, acting as a kind of agent for Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, as well as presenting jazz on the radio and writing pieces for magazines like Jazz Hot, which are collected in English translation in a volume called Round About Close to Midnight. They have the hard-boiled style that Vian used in his faux-noir novels published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan;
hour? I tried to get my head together. Maybe a policeman had come to arrest me for outraging public decency under the covers of jazz magazines.
here he sounds like a jazz-obsessed Philip Marlowe: The doorbell rang like a fast Brownian lick. I listened more carefully. There was no doubt. Somebody was imitating the trumpet solo on Ray Brown’s ‘One Bass Hit’. Sluggish with sleep, I got out of bed, slipped into my pants and a sweater and went to open the door. Who could it be at this
Vian published seven plays, three volumes of poetry, four collections of stories, four novels as Vernon Sullivan, and six novels under his own name (by no means all are available in English), none of which sold well or were particularly influential during his lifetime but have since become more popular as Vian himself has become more appreciated. The most well-known is L’Écume des jours, published in 1947 by the prestigious Éditions Gallimard; it has been translated into English as Foam of the Daze – probably the most pataphysical rendering – Froth on the Daydream, and Mood Indigo, under which title it was made into a film in 2013. It is a rather charming, lightly surreal tale about a young man, Colin, who lives with his Jeeves-like butler Nicholas and several talking mice. It is as ingenuous and sex-free as a PG Wodehouse novel though rather more romantic.
Colin was flat on his belly, cuddling the bolster and drooling like a big baroque cherub. Chloe started laughing and knelt down beside him to give him a vigorous shake. He woke up, raised himself on his wrists, sat up and kissed her before he opened his eyes. Chloe allowed him to do all this without objecting, carefully guiding him to all the best places. Her golden skin was as soft and sweet as marzipan. The grey mouse with the black whiskers climbed all the way up the ladder and came to tell them that Nicholas was waiting. The novel gently satirises Vian’s existentialist friends, renamed Jean Pulse Heartre and the Marchioness Thighbone de Mauvoir. Colin’s friend Chick is so obsessed with Heartre that he has all of his works,
collecting them at the expense of ignoring his girlfriend. Colin is as chivalrous as Bertie Wooster when the girlfriend, Alyssum, offers herself to him. She stood up, pulled the little ring at the top of her zip, and her dress fell to the ground. It was a light woollen dress. ‘Mmmm…’ Said Colin. It became very light in the room and Colin could see every inch of Alyssum. Her breasts seemed ready to take off, and the calves and thighs of her long nimble legs were firm and warm to the touch. ‘Is one allowed to kiss?’ said Colin. ‘Yes,’ said Alyssum. ‘I’m very fond of you too.’ ‘You’ll catch cold,’ said Colin. She went close to him. She sat on his knees and tears began to stream silently from her eyes.
ten-year project that Chick is saving up to buy, having already spent all his money on Heartre’s books in multiple editions, including his most famous work Breathing and Stuffiness (a reference to Being and Nothingness). ‘It’s going to be very boring to read,’ Heartre tells her, ‘because it’s already terribly boring to write.’ Vian doesn’t waste the opportunity for another gentle dig at existentialism.
‘Why doesn’t he want me anymore?’ Colin gently cuddled her. ‘He doesn’t understand. You know, Alyssum, he’s a good kid, all the same…’ ‘He used to love me lots,’ said Alyssum. ‘He thought his books would be willing to share him with me! But that’s impossible.’ ‘You’ll catch cold,’ said Colin. Alyssum goes to see Jean Pulse, to ask him to hold up publication of his
‘Why?’ ‘Why? Because Chick spends all his money on buying everything you do – and he hasn’t got any money left.’ ‘He’d be far better off buying something else,’ said Jean Pulse. ‘I’d never dream of buying any of my own books.’ ‘But he likes what you write.’ ‘He has the right to,’ said Jean Pulse. ‘He’s made his choice…’ ‘I’m going to kill you because you won’t postpone publication.’ ‘But you take away my only means of existence,’ said Jean Pulse. ‘How do you think I’m going to get my royalties if I’m dead?’
Your Graves, in a moment; although it was written at the same time as the light and airy Mood Indigo, it is extremely dark, darker than any of its hard-boiled American models, as is its sequel Les morts ont tous la même peau (The Dead All Have the Same Skin), which itself was written at the same time as another charming novel published under the Vian name: L’automne à Pékin (Autumn in Peking); in fact all four of the Sullivan novels were written at the same time as ‘official’ Vian novels; the light and the dark sides of Vian co-existing.
The novels that Vian published under his own name were never commercial successes but, ironically, the speedily-written pastiches of American noir novelists like Chandler, Hammet and Cain that he published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan became much bigger sellers. We will come back to the first Sullivan novel, I Spit On
The third ‘Vernon Sullivan’ novel is very different however. Et on tuera tous les affreux (translated as To Hell With the Ugly, though the title actually means something more like And We’ll Kill all the Ugly) is a kind of sci-fi romp concerning a mad scientist, Dr Schutz, who clones beautiful people so he can populate the world, starting with the American government, with beautiful people. Reading it with no
idea of who the author was or when it was written, one would never think in terms of American 1940s noir writers but, with its jazz-loving hero and conspiracy/fantasy theme it is perhaps most reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, especially Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, or Dance, Dance, Dance. Again, there is very little sex in it, and even what there is is charming, gentle and harmless, especially since the narrator, nineteen-year-old athlete Rock Bailey, has forsworn sex until he is twenty. He doesn’t make it, losing his virginity to Sunday Love, after seeing beautiful, naked clones having sex with each other at Dr Schutz’s lab. ‘Will I know what to do? I don’t even have a beginner’s manual.’ She joins him in the shower and tells him that he’s ‘the type that girls fall to their knees for.’ She does. ‘There’s not much for me to do, but she, in any case knows her way around.’ He throws them both on the bed. ‘Let me show you the way, Rocky. I mean, since it’s your first time.’ He doesn’t resist. ‘Sweet Jesus… This is even better than pineapple ice cream… And time flies… like an airmail letter.’ After his eleventh orgasm they finally quit.
But this encounter has opened the floodgates and the next morning he is seduced by two other young women, who fight over him. For chrissakes, this’ll be the twelfth time since this morning. I mean there is such a thing as abuse… ‘Not so fast, Mona,’ Beryl protests. ‘Give me some time to get into the proper attire.’ Mona slithers around me… She’s kept on her panty hose and some little thing made out of blondish lace that she uses to attach them… They’re exactly the same colour as…well, exactly the same colour as… whatever… She’s hot and smells good in that way a woman can, and ol’ Rocky is maybe not so beat as he seems… She pulls off my shirt and pants…
I just surrender… She’s having a hard time with my underpants, which are getting caught on… ‘I’m not kidding, Mona,’ says Beryl. ‘I’m telling you, we’re going to draw straws for him!’ Rock’s final sexual encounter is also with two women, though in this case they are two identical – and of course beautiful – clones from the lab. His friend Mike tries to get them to ‘make use of what the Good Lord has given you, children.’ They don’t want to. ‘But… we’ve never done that.’ Mike assures them it will be ‘quite pleasant. Rock agrees, ‘I must say, it really is enchanting to watch two pretty girls make love. It’s kind of new to me, but I’d have no trouble getting used to it.’
Vian gave a lecture on ‘The Uses of Erotic Literature’ (not available in English but reprinted in French, collected with some of Vian’s ‘erotic’ poetry under the title Écrits Pornographique by Livre de Poche), which is largely incomprehensible – or perhaps just pataphysical – where he equates eroticism with revolutionary, anti-government intent. ‘Since love, which is, I repeat, the center of interest of the majority of healthy people, is barred and hindered by the state, how surprising that the present form of the revolutionary movement is erotic literature?’ Yes, the true propagandists of a new order, the true apostles of the future, future and dialectic, as is well understood, are the socalled licentious authors. To read erotic books, to make them known, to write them, is to prepare the world of tomorrow and to pave the way for the true revolution. Vian sets out to define erotic literature, knowing in advance that he is going to fail, and his circular discussion is charming but not very
enlightening. Along the way, he talks briefly about the Marquis de Sade, whom, like most of the Paris-based intellectuals of the 1940s we have already looked at, he respects. He quotes with approval Jean Paulhan, a great lover of Sade for whom ‘Pauline Réage’ wrote Story of O. Sade, with his glaciers, chasms and terrifying castles, with. . . his repetition and his appalling platitudes, with his systemic spirit and ratiocinations as far as
the eye can see, with his stubborn pursuit of sensational action but an exhaustive analysis. . . with this strange disdain of literary devices. . . Sade has nothing to do with analysis and choice, images and theatrics, elegance and amplification. He does not distinguish or separate. . . He is repeating himself and continuously rehashing himself. Vian himself is rather more prosaic than Sade. ‘I have arrived at the point I mentioned earlier; we cannot classify Sade’s works as erotic literature because we cannot classify them as literature; and I would be personally tempted to put them under the heading of erotic philosophy, which brings us back to our point of departure: how to define erotic literature?’ After this digressive lecture, we are no nearer
knowing. Vian did write erotic poetry, some of which is included in the anthology I mentioned above; the poems are sometimes rather juvenile (as we have seen, French poets are often reduced to giggling schoolboys when they get dirty) and pornographic rather than erotic. Still, some of them have an amusing pataphysical/surre alist whimsy and are often antiestablishment (as Vian said, all pornographic writing is antiestablishment); the following poem is also scabrously anti-clerical, and ends with a flourish that is reminiscent of Robert Desnos’ equation in Liberty or Love of Bébé Cadum from the soap advertisements with Jesus, and anticipates Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
To sodomize all those snotty kids Let’s put on our black cassocks Like the balls of the plane trees Our black testicles are nervous We are naked under our blouses Pass a beauty with long hair… Clearing with a stroke of the hip She turns and looks On the stunted stick And disgusted with mistigris She has great periwinkle eyes And sucks me my gris gris MIRACLE! FRIENDS, IT WAS WHITE TEETH!
Mass in Jean Minor Friends I want to cum All the old cum accumulated In the shop of my balls I feel the stiffening of my sausage It’s no longer time to go back Male, female, donkey or pumpkin Tonight I’ll bugger everything It’s in church that I want
Apotheosis then breaks out A beautiful scarlet cardinal Bugger the kids in the choir Who sing falsely with all their heart Tossing off in a tomato The priest discharges – winner ... A show offered by COLGATE! After his last novel under his own name, L’Arrache-coeur (The Heartextractor), Vian stopped writing fiction and went into other fields: collaborating on operas and screenplays as well as writing and performing his own songs, touring
as a singer-songwriter in 1954; he released an album Chansons possibles et impossibles (Possible and Impossible Songs) in 1955, though it was not successful until many years after his death, when his work was being reappraised. Vian was an influence on Serge Gainsbourg, who supported Vian in turn. Vian collaborated on what are probably the first French rock ‘n’ roll songs with Henri Salvador, who performed under the name Henry Cording, and wrote ‘Java Pour Petula’ for the multilingual Petula Clark’s first Paris concerts. Vian had always had a weak heart and knew he would not live very long: at the age of twelve his heart had been affected by rheumatic fever, and at fifteen it suffered more damage when he had typhoid fever. On 23 June 1956, when Vian was thirty-three, he was at a special a preview of the film version of his novel I Spit On Your Graves (no relation to the 1978 ‘video nasty’ I Spit on Your Grave, which is about a different kind of revenge). He hated the film and had been fighting the producers for years; they would not accept any of his treatments and insisted on producing their own. He
was so agitated that he had forgotten to take his heart medicine and died in the cinema seat; his last words were reported to be: ‘These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!’ A very existential, even pataphysical way to go.
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVES
I Spit On Your Graves (J’Irai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes) was published in 1946 in Paris, under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan. In the manner of Pierre Louÿs’ faux-Greek Songs of Bilitis and Queneau’s fauxIrish Sally Mara books, it purported to be a translation into French, done by Vian himself, of a pulp thriller by
a little-known American noir writer that Vian claimed to have discovered and translated. He claimed that it was too incendiary to ever be published in the United States and that the author had handed it to Vian, wanting it to be translated into French so it could be published in more liberal France. It certainly would have been impossible to publish it anywhere else, especially America, with its outright anti-racist message combined with explicit interracial and underage sex, necrophilia, and the murder of two young, white girls by a black man. The miscegenation alone would have guaranteed no American publisher would touch it – and probably still wouldn’t, even today. Vian was of course extremely sympathetic to African-Americans because of his love for jazz; after the Second World War, as after the First, many black musicians had gravitated to Paris where they and their music were appreciated – in Paris they could enter the clubs they played in through the front door, unlike in America. Still, despite Vian’s sympathies, the pale skinned, African-American narrator is very unsympathetic:
unfeeling and amoral, a sexual predator and murderer, he has sex with a number of underage white girls and a twelveyear-old black prostitute, murders a fifteen-year-old white girl, the daughter of a plantation owner, with whom he has been sleeping, then murders her sister, who is pregnant with his child and has sex with her dead body. And all in revenge for his brother’s lynching. This is blacker than noir, harder than hard-boiled; it is far grimmer than No Orchids for Miss Blandish or The Postman Always Rings Twice. The anti-hero narrator is neither a great role model nor a great advertisement for AfricanAmericans and hardly likely to change the mind of anyone already inclined to racism. Despite, or probably because of this, by 1950 I Spit On Your Graves had sold half a
million copies in France. In 1947 it was the best seller in the country, outstripping anything published by Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir or Malraux. But the whole thing was a hoax, perpetrated by Vian and a publisher friend. It arose because the aspiring publisher Jean d’Halluin, whom we met in relation to Sally Mara, was starting a new imprint, Éditions du Scorpion and wanted a bestseller. He wanted to emulate the existing publisher Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard, who had just launched the Série Noire (which still exists), mainly set up to publish French translations of noir writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – Duhamel even published African-American writer Chester Himes, who could not get published in his own country. Trying to emulate this success, d’Halluin
approached Vian, whom he knew through a jazz connection, and asked whether he could find an obscure, hard-boiled American novel and translate it into French for him. Instead, Vian wrote one himself, dashed off in two weeks during a family holiday in August 1946. Vian had never been to America, and although he had written two novels, he had never had anything published. I Spit On Your Graves came out in November of the same year. It sold very poorly until two things happened: in February 1947 a right-wing moral crusading group, the Cartel d’Action Sociale et Morale, already involved in trying to ban books by Henry Miller, issued a lawsuit against the – non-existent – Vernon Sullivan; the case was finally settled in 1950: Vian had to pay a fine of one hundred thousand francs, wiping out all the money he had made from the book,
which was then banned. Then, in April a man murdered his girlfriend in Montparnasse in a frenzy. Police found a copy of Sullivan’s novel in the room; certain passages were highlighted, including the one in which the central character strangles a young woman. The publisher printed plenty more copies but that was not enough: people wanted to know about this Vernon Sullivan and people wanted to see the ‘original’ English version. Vian produced it – literally: the English version is in fact a translation of the French original, not vice versa. To add one more twist to the irony, Vian’s French ‘translation’ led to his first commission to translate a genuine American thriller into French: Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock of 1946, after which he translated actual Raymond Chandler into French, as well as the science fiction
works of Ray Bradbury and AE van Vogt. To complete the circle, the science fiction theme later turns up in Sullivan’s work To Hell With the Ugly. The narrator of Graves, Lee Anderson, is African-American but light enough skinned to pass off as white, which he does. He is seeking revenge for his brother’s lynching – though we only find this out later – and is looking to kill two white women: two for one. He moves into a small southern town to run a bookstore, a job fixed up for him by a friend. Vian/Sullivan has some self-referential, post-modern fun when Anderson meets the man in the bookstore he is taking over from. ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Write,’ he said. ‘Write best-sellers. Nothing but bestsellers. Historical novels; novels where colored men sleep with white women and don’t get lynched; novels
about pure young girls who manage to grow up unblemished by the vicious small-town life which surrounds them.’ He chuckled. ‘Yep, best-sellers. And then some very daring and original novels. It doesn’t require much to be daring in this part of the world. All you’ve got to do is write about things everybody knows, and take a little trouble in doing it.’ ‘You’ll get there,’ I said. ‘Sure I’ll get there. I’ve got six of ‘em ready right now.’ ‘Never tried to get them published?’ ‘I’m not pals with any publisher, and I haven’t got enough dough to pay for them myself.’ Although he is much older than them, Lee soon integrates into the local society of underage bobby-soxers: ‘Girls of fifteen, with their little pointed breasts under their tight sweaters… And
always sitting on the ground with their legs spread so you could see their flesh undies [sic]. Yes, I liked their looks, the bobby-soxers.’ Lee plays the guitar and sings the blues, with a voice like Cab Calloway’s; the girls like this. The girls and their boyfriends take Lee skinny-dipping in the river, where everyone has casual sex with everyone else. I was hot enough to have jumped a monkey. She must have realised it, for she gave me a tough tussle. I broke into a happy laugh. I liked that. The grass was high in that spot, and soft as a rubber mattress. She slipped onto the ground and I went down too. We wrestled about like a couple of savages. She was tanned to the tips of her breasts, and didn’t have the brassiere-marks that disfigure so many nude women. As smooth as
silk, and naked as a babe, but when I finally got her under me, I learned right quick that she was no baby. She gave me the best sample of technique I’d had in many a moon. My fingers felt the hollows and curves of her back, and farther down, her buttocks, hard as a watermelon. In a riveting but appalling scene, local man Dexter takes Lee to a house that is actually an underage brothel, they are both drunk. Reading it is like watching a car crash: you want to look away but you can’t, you are hoping for a chink of light in the darkness, but none comes. Of course, Vian is writing a parody of the hard-boiled American novel, but no American novelist, especially in 1946, would combine miscegenation and underage sex, and only a French publisher in Paris would even think about publishing
it. This, remember, is nine years before Lolita. A fat colored woman answered when he rang. She turned around without a word and Dex followed. I shut the door behind me. On the first floor she stood aside to let us pass. We went into a little room with a couch, a bottle and a couple of glasses, and two little girls about eleven or twelve years old. One of them was red-haired, chubby and very freckled. The other a colored girl,
a little older than the other, it seemed to me. They were sitting very properly on the couch, both dressed in a blouse and a very short skirt. ‘Here are some gentlemen who will give you some money,’ said the colored woman. ‘Be very nice to them.’ She shut the door, leaving us alone. I looked at Dexter. ‘Take your clothes off, Lee,’ he said, ‘it’s very hot in here.’ He turned to the red-head. ‘Come and help me, Joe.’ ‘My name is Polly,’ the child said. ‘Are you going to give me some dollars?’ ‘Sure, sure,’ Dex said. He took a crumpled ten out of his pocket and gave it to the girl. ‘Come and help me take my pants off.’ I hadn’t even moved. I watched the red-head get up. She must have been a little bit over twelve years old. Her can was nicely rounded under her too short skirt. I knew that Dex was looking at me. ‘I’ll take the red-head,’ he said.
‘You know that they’re jailbait, don’t you?’ ‘Maybe it’s the dark meat that’s bothering you!’ he said harshly. So that’s what he was driving at. He was still looking at me, with his damn lock of hair hanging down over his eye. He was just waiting for me to say or do something. I think I didn’t show anything. The two kids just sat there, a bit terrified. ‘Come on, Polly,’ Dex finally said. ‘How about a little drink.’ ‘No please, thank you,’ she said. ‘I can help you without drinking.’ In less than a minute he had his clothes off and had taken the child on his knees and lifted up her skirt. His face had become flushed, and he was breathing hard. ‘You’re not going to hurt me, are you?’ she said. ‘You keep quiet,’ Dexter replied, ‘Or you don’t get any money.’ He pushed his hands between her legs and she began to cry. ‘Shut up!’ he cried, ‘Or I’ll make Anna beat you.’ He turned his head toward me. I still hadn’t moved.
‘Is it the dark meat that’s bothering you,’ he said again. ‘Would you rather have this one?’ ‘No, it’s all right this way,’ I said. I looked at the other girl. She was scratching her head, quite indifferent to what was going on. Her body had already taken the shape of a woman. ‘Come over here,’ I said to her. ‘You can let yourself go, Lee.
They’re clean,’ he said to me. Then, to the girl: ‘You stop that whimpering!’ Polly stopped crying and just sniffled for a while. ‘You’re too big for me,’ she said, ‘That hurts!’ ‘You keep quiet,’ Dex said, ‘And I’ll give you another five dollars.’ He was panting like a dog on a hot day. He grabbed her by the thighs and moved rhythmically on the chair. Polly’s tears rolled down without a sound. The little colored girl looked at me. ‘Take your clothes off,’ I said to her, ‘and lie down on the couch. I took my jacket off, and loosened my belt. She uttered a slight cry when I went into her. She was as hot as an oven. At a party, Lee meets the two Asquith sisters: twenty-year-old Jean and fifteen-year-old Lou – ‘as smooth and slender as a blade of
grass, and as fragrant as a perfumeshop’ – daughters of a wealthy plantation owner. Both are very promiscuous and both immediately give off very strong signals that they want to sleep with him. At their house, he first goes to Lou’s room, drunk. I caught her in my arms and kissed her with all I had. I have no idea what my left hand was doing then. But she fought back and I caught on my left ear one of the best socks I’ve ever caught in my time. I let her go. ‘You’re a brute,’ she said. Her hair was done up in the usual way, loosely, and parted in the centre, and she looked just delicious. I kept myself calm however. The rum helped me… I went at her again and opened up her night-gown. I managed to tear at her panties before she could hit me again. Then I caught her wrist and held her hands behind her back she rested easily
in the hollow of my right palm. She fought without a sound but with all her anger. She tried to butt me with her knees, but I slipped my left hand around the small of her back and pressed her tight against me. She tried to bite me through my pyjamas. I couldn’t get my damn shorts off. I suddenly let her go and pushed towards the bed. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve put on a pretty good show, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to wear myself out for nothing at all.’ She looked as though she were going to cry, but her eyes shone with anger too. She didn’t even try to cover herself, and I got an eyeful. She had a thick black muff, shiny like astrakhan fur. I just turned my back to her and went to the door.
Lee immediately goes to her sister Jean’s room, but Jean can smell Lou’s perfume on him. ‘Does that bother you,’ I asked her. ‘No-o,’ she murmured. ‘Can I touch you?’ I stretched myself out along her and made her get down too. She slid her hands timidly over my body. ‘You’re very strong,’ she said softly. We were now on our sides, facing each other. I pressed softly on her body and rolled her over and then snuggled up against her. She spread her legs a bit to let me in. ‘You’re going to hurt me,’ she said. ‘Of course not,’ I said. I did nothing more than run my fingers over her breasts, cupping them and then coming up to her nipples, and I felt her
tremble against my body. Her warm round buttocks fitted tightly into my thighs and she was breathing hard… ‘Hurting you?’ I asked. ‘No, but caress me some more. Caress me all night long.’ ‘That’s just what I’m going to do,’ I said. I took her again, this time roughly. But I stopped before she was satisfied. ‘You drive me crazy,’ she murmured. She rolled over on her belly, hiding her head in her arms. I kissed her back and her buttocks, and then I got on my knees on top of her. ‘Spread your legs,’ I said. She didn’t say anything but spread her legs slowly. I slipped my hand in between her thighs and I again directed my penis,
but I hit the wrong spot. She stiffened again, but I insisted. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘Get on your knees.’ ‘I don’t want to.’ But she arched her back and pulled her knees forward. She still had her head hidden by her arms, and, very slowly, I did what I wanted to do. She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her stomach rise and fall and her breath quickened. I dropped on my side without withdrawing from her, pulling her with me, and when I tried to see her face I saw that there were tears under her closed eyes, but she told me not to withdraw. Jean tells Lee that she wants to marry him; he suggests to Lou that she should come away with the two of them. Lou refuses but tries to seduce him anyway. Out of
ostensible deference to Jean he refuses to have intercourse with her, but only just. I sat down and bent over her and kissed her between her thighs on the little ridges where a woman’s flesh is as soft as eiderdown. She drew her legs together, but spread them again almost at once, and I again bent down, but a bit higher this time. Her shiny, curly muff caressed my cheek and I began to lick it tenderly. Her vagina was hot and moist, the lips thick under my tongue – I wanted very much to bite it, but I straightened up. She got up suddenly and grasped my head to put it back. I tried to release myself. ‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to as long as I’m not
sure I’m free of Jean. I can’t marry both of you…’ ‘Oh, do it to me,’ Lou cried. ‘Do it right away.’ She trembled, and each time that my hand rose she withered in response. I slipped my head in between her legs, and then turned her over with her back to me. I lifted her leg and moved my mouth in between her thighs and took her vagina in my lips. She suddenly stiffened and then relaxed immediately. I sucked for a moment and then withdrew. She was lying flat on her face. ‘Lou,’ I murmured. I don’t want to screw you. I just don’t want to screw you until we can feel sure of ourselves. I’m going to marry Jean and then we’ll manage. You’ll help me.
Jean tells Lee that she is pregnant. She wants him to go away with her, she will be able to provide enough money to keep them. ‘I certainly didn’t intend to let myself be supported, even by a girl I expected to kill.’ This is the first hint of what Lee is intending to do. He realises how difficult it is going to be to kill both sisters and almost gives up his plan, but he does not want to be like ‘men more or less like me who try to forget their blood and who go over to the side of the whites for all purposes, not even having the decency to refrain from knocking the colored race when occasion demands it.’ He has had plenty of chances to kill the bobbysoxers but ‘they didn’t interest me too much. They weren’t important enough. The Asquiths would be my first test-case. Then after I’d gotten that over with, I thought I’d go after
something really big.’ But first, he has to think about ‘how I’d get away with it, once I had those two dead females on my hands.’ Not that he wants to get away with it completely: ‘when the whole business was over, I expected to let their parents in on it. They’d know that their darling daughter had got it from a nigger.’ Lee tries to convince Lou that if they can get rid of Jean they can be together, but they have a row, Lou pulls out a gun and shoots her, though not fatally. He ties her up, undresses her and starts to hit her, now sexually excited. He thinks she is too, but ‘she told me I wouldn’t have her because she had just telephoned to Dex to tell the police and she thought I was a horrible monster ever since I’d talked about getting rid of her sister. I laughed and I slugged her jaw with my fist because
she seemed to be smiling too… She called me a dirty nigger and said that Dexter had told her that, and that she had come with me to warn Jean.’ He tells her that ‘white men had killed my brother and that they’d have a tough time getting me and that she was going to die in any case.’ Lee beats Lou to death, her screaming getting him more and more excited: ‘all of a sudden I felt that I was shooting off in my shorts. It affected me stronger than any other time in my life.’ She keeps fighting back but he kicks her and then finally ‘I put my foot across her throat and put all my weight on it. When she had stopped moving, I felt myself go off a second time.’ Now he needs to do the same to Jean, and ‘feel again what I’d felt twice while I was wiping out her
sister. I found what I’d always been looking for.’ He drives Jean to a hidden place by the roadside and lays her on the ground. ‘I took her right there, but I didn’t let myself go all the way. I tried to keep myself calm, in spite of her wriggling; I was able to make her go off without having gone off myself.’ He asks her if she always likes it so much when she gets ‘laid by a colored man.’ Lee tells Jean how his brother had fallen in love with a white girl and been lynched by the girl’s brother and father, how he wants to kill both sisters in revenge. He shows Jean Lou’s watch as proof that he has killed her, ‘and then said I was sorry I hadn’t been able to bring her one of her sister’s eyes, but they were in too poor condition after the special treatment I had given them.’
She lay there on the ground, with her eyes closed and her skirt pushed up on her belly. I again felt that strange sensation that ran up my back and my hand closed on her throat and I couldn’t stop myself; it came; it was so strong that I let her go and almost staggered to my feet. Her face was all blue, but she didn’t move. She was still breathing I think. I took Lou’s gun from my pocket and I sent two bullets into her neck, almost pointblank; the blood started bubbling out, slowly, in spurts, with a squirting sound. All you could see of her eyes was a white thread between her lids. She jerked
suddenly, and I think that that was when she died. I turned her over so I wouldn’t have to see her face anymore, and while she was still warm I did to her just what I had done in her bedroom. After this, the narration switches to third person for the remaining couple of chapters as the police hunt down and catch Lee. The last chapter is: The townspeople hanged him anyway because he was a nigger. Under his trousers, his crotch still protruded ridiculously.
HARRY MATHEWS
The Oulipo is not a literary school. It is not even concerned with the production of literary works. It is first and last a laboratory where, through experiment and erudition, possibilities of writing and arbitrary and severe restrictions are investigated. The use of these possibilities is the business of individual writers, Oulipian or not. All the same, several members of the Oulipo have exploited Oulipian procedures in their work. I suggest that
these procedures have provided them with home grounds. How is this possible? How can methods based on deprivation become the comforting terrain on which a writer sets out in pursuit of an object of desire? Why would anybody not a masochist want to determine a sequence of episodes according to the tortuous path of a knight across the entire chessboard? Or use the graphic formulations of a structural semiologist to plot a novel? Or limit one’s vocabulary in a story to the threadbare words contained in a small group of proverbs? Or, if a poet, why write using only the letters of the name of the person the poem addresses? Or conversely exclude those letters successively in the sequence of verses? Or create a poetic corpus using the ape language of the Tarzan books? Nevertheless, these are some of the things Perec, Calvino, Jacques Jouet, and I chose to do, with acceptable results.
That was from a lecture called ‘Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese’ by Harry Mathews (1930-2017), known as ‘the American Oulipian’ – he was the first American ever to be admitted – and a rare native-English speaker in the group. Though many of Mathews’ works, particularly his novels, do not seem especially Oulipian, he was one of its leading theorists and proponents in the Englishspeaking world. One of his contributions to Oulipian method was the Mathews Algorithm: a way of arranging words in a 4x4 grid and rearranging them to produce new meanings. Matthews was born into a life of some privilege in the northeast of the United States, attending Groton School and then Princeton University, which he left to join the Navy, followed by taking a music degree at Harvard university. He then continued his musical studies abroad, taking composition courses at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where he lived with his young daughter and new wife, the avant-garde painter and
sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, a childhood friend, who later became famous for her monumental, brightly coloured sculptures of women that question female stereotypes. Having taken up writing, Mathews was very prolific, though many of his works are unclassifiable; only a few are more or less conventional novels. One, My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973, purports to be a memoir of his time working at the CIA, but may well be fiction. Other works include journals, poems,
stories, theory and criticism, mostly in English but some in French. At the time of his death, one more novel, The Solitary Twin, was due to be published by Dalkey Archive, who publish most of Mathews’ work. His novels are complex, experimental, playful, metatextual, though not, or at least not obviously, generated by rules and procedures in the Oulipian sense. In the lecture ‘Translation and the Oulipo’ Matthews looks at literary translation from an Oulipian point of view. Having said that ‘an editor would be mad to employ an Oulipian as a translator,’ Mathews argues that Oulipian translation does not necessarily mean rendering the sense of a text from one language into another; there are other, less literal approaches to ‘translating’ texts. One of them is to translate the sound of the original into the target language rather than its sense, and then translate that back. Mathews quotes Marcel Bénabou’s sound translation of the line, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ using this method.
Bénabou comes up with a French sentence that is close to the original in sound, but not in sense (read it out loud in an outrageously exaggerated codFrench accent): ‘Ah, singe débotté, hisse un jouet fort et vert,’ which translates back into English as the nicely surreal line, ‘O unshod monkey, raise a stout green toy.’ Matthews suggests that in a way all creative writers are translators, but ‘what they must translate is not something
already known but what is unknown and unpredictable,’ something from their imagination not from the real world; unlike Flaubert, it is not a mirror they are carrying along the road but, as Boris Vian said, ‘an irregularly tilting, and consequently distorting, plane of reference.’ Imaginative writers officially disclaim reasonableness and honesty. That’s what imaginative (or creative) signifies: they’re lying. Poets and novelists are outright liars. They promise to provide no useful information unless they feel like it. Three advantages accrue immediately. First, you are released from
all responsibility to the dead world of facts. Second, your readers are ready to believe you, since by admitting you lie, you have told the truth at least once. Third and best, you can discover the unforeseen truth by making it up. You are condemned to possibility: you can say anything you like. At the end of the lecture, Mathews ‘explains’ its subtitle, ‘The Case of the Persevering Maltese’ (also the title of the collection of essays in which it is reprinted). It refers to a story concerning a Maltese dog in Vittore Carpaccio’s painting ‘The Vision of St Augustine.’ In the middle of the floor to the left of the saint’s desk, a little Maltese dog sits bolt upright. He is bathed with
celestial light, to which he pays no attention as he stares at his master in an attitude of absolute expectation… He is as unconcerned by the momentous event now occurring as he is by literary theory. His attitude might be translated as the human question, What next? Like children and Oulipians he probably wants to play, but he can’t be sure of that or anything else. He has to wait to find out. What next? What next, and what after that?
SINGULAR PLEASURES
One of Mathews’ unclassifiable works is Singular Pleasures, 1988, illustrated by the Italian artist Francesco Clemente; it is the only one of Mathews’ works to be even slightly concerned about sex. It contains sixty-one very short stories, what would now perhaps be called flash fiction, though in a way they are very deadpan prose poems also.
There is no apparent Oulipian organising principle, though each single-paragraph story has the same elements: a person is masturbating, their age, gender and geographical location are given. No euphemisms are used – masturbation is always masturbation – but neither is there any explicit description or arousing language. This is definitely not pornography, though this is possibly the only book ever devoted entirely to this most singular pleasure. The writing is restrained, laconic, dispassionate; capturing the universal in a single moment in the way of Japanese poetry, posing questions rather than giving answers like a Zen koan. Lying on his bed, a man in Bahia has just finished masturbating for the first time in his eighteen years. He did not enjoy it. The following one could almost be by Bashō. A man is masturbating as he contemplates a finely brushed
poem by Wang Wei, seated on a straw mat in his garret in Mukden. An ‘ascetic sensualist,’ he has striven all his life to unite in one moment of revelation the pleasures of poetry and masturbation. On this warm spring morning of his sixtieth year, he senses that the sublime fusion may finally be at hand. Occasionally the language becomes slightly more explicit. A twenty-fouryear-old ‘cellist is a sitting naked on a stool in her bedroom in Manila. Her legs are spread; her left hand pulls back the folds of her vulva; her right hand is drawing the tip of a ‘cello bow over her clitoris in a fluttering tremolo.
A couple of the masturbators are, disturbingly, underage girls. Dressed in a cotton playsuit, an eleven-year-old girl is masturbating in empty sitting room in Glasgow. She is squatting astride a rugby ball, rocking back and forth at moderate speed. On the television set in front of her, running barelegged rugby players keep smashing into one another. As she reaches a climax, she tilts the blunt tip of the ball hard against her pubis. This next one introduces MAID, which recurs in some of the stories. It seems like a kind of Oulipo for masturbation. (Oumapo? The word masturbation is the same in French; it is a feminine noun.) It is reminiscent of Robert Desnos’ Sperm Drinkers Club in its
underground but universal existence and its emphasis on the difficulty of achieving its bizarre goals. A quasi-subversive organisation founded recently in Prague encourages its members to invent obstacles to overcome while masturbating. The organisation is called Masturbation and Its Discontents – MAID for short. The first task set by the English chapter is to complete masturbation while reciting Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ to no less than three listeners. The feat is first accomplished in Durham by a male, aged fiftyseven, who ejaculates at the line ‘While the bee with honeyed thigh’ Like Oulipian writers, MAID masturbators use the constraints imposed to increase creativity, as in the following two, complete, chapters. A member of MAID in Bangkok, a woman of sixtyseven, becomes the first to
reach orgasm under the dentist’s drill. At the age of forty-two, a male member of the Tiflis chapter of MAID undertakes to masturbate when he goes jogging in the outlying hills. His plan is aborted by a compassionate shepherdess who brings it to a conclusion of her own choosing. Although protesting his innocence, the man is expelled from MAID at once. He marries the shepherdess three weeks later.