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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
research on the subject of female fantasy – not so much a taboo subject as one considered nonexistent.
FEMALE SEXUAL FANTASIES wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed. This was the ad that Nancy Friday placed in a magazine in 1968. She was overwhelmed by the responses she received and published many of them in her 1973 book My Secret Garden. At the same time, she was underwhelmed by the responses of the men she had talked to, and the complete lack of serious academic
During the five years I was compiling material for My Secret Garden, I could not find a doctor or psychiatrist who would intelligently discuss women’s sexual fantasies. It was still a taboo subject. In 1968, before I decided to write the book, I did some research in the giant New York Public Library and the even larger British Museum library in London. In the millions upon millions of cards on file in these two vast repositories of practically everything ever written in the English language, I did not find a single book or magazine article that dealt with the subject, even though, by definition, women’s sexual fantasies were of more than intellectual interest to one half of the human race. I spoke to at least a dozen psychiatrists in both the United States and Great Britain. The most any of these learned men
would concede was that perhaps some women did have sexual fantasies when they masturbated; otherwise, they said, the phenomenon was limited to the sexually frustrated and/or to the pathological. They took the initial fact that a woman had sexual fantasies as a sign of sickness. The reviews of My Secret Garden when it was published in 1973 were
largely negative, even hostile. Even in the ‘progressive’ women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, the inhouse psychiatrist, Dr Allen Fromme, wrote: ‘Women do not have sexual fantasies. How do we know? Ask a woman, and she will usually reply, No. The reason for this is obvious: women haven’t been brought up to enjoy sex… Women are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy.’ Sex-positive activist and author Susie Bright, editor of the Best American Erotica and Herotica series has a chapter in her book How to Write a Dirty Story titled ‘Femmechismo,’ where she admits that even today it is difficult to write about women’s fantasies. What comes to a woman’s mind when she shuts her eyes and thinks about sex? What appeals to the female erotic imagination? Before we can courageously reveal the correct answer to this question, we have to admit that it’s a tough one. Women’s sexual expression has been top secret for as long as we’ve been wondering. It’s such a taboo that women themselves don’t share, even with each other, what turns them on.
To reveal a woman’s lust is to admit a sexual power that not everyone is prepared for. In The Sexual State of the Union, Bright said it was time for women to come clean about their sexual desire; without that openness, feminism can never progress. Feminism is not about whether you’re going to be cute or doggy, fucked or unfucked, nice or mean to the other girls. Feminists have gouged each other on such questions because they’ve been in a closet as big and crowded as all of Macy’s basement. But until every last woman comes out about her sexual desire, it’s going to be a bloody mess. Bright herself has got to that point of sexual openness. In Susie Bright’s Sexwise she says: ‘What actually has improved in my sex life is how I see myself erotically — my ease with my body and my fantasies.’ But not everyone – male or female – has. We saw in the Introduction that Andrea Dworkin – whom, as we also saw, Susie Bright both admires and fervently opposes – believed all
erotic writing – which she assumed was entirely a male occupation – brings men together in a kind of club. Friday, who would presumably strongly disagree with Dworkin, nevertheless points out that it has always been okay for men to write about sex: even if the censors banned their writings, the writers themselves were never socially ostracised.
For men, talking about sex, writing and speculating about it, exchanging confidences and asking each other for advice and encouragement about it, had always been socially accepted, and, in fact, a certain amount of boasting about it in the locker room is usually thought to be very much the mark of a man’s man, a fine devil of a fellow. But the same culture that gave men this freedom sternly barred it to women, leaving us sexually mistrustful of each other, forcing us into patterns of deception, shame, and above all, silence. Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae, criticises feminism’s naïve assumption, which she says comes from Rousseau’s Social Contract, that harmony in society and between the sexes is possible and desirable. But, she says, for men – as Dworkin also said though Paglia was by no means on Dworkin’s side – violence is key to their sexual fantasy life; women do not have access to this kind of fantasy.
An aesthetics and erotics of profanation—evil for the sake of evil, the sharpening of the senses by cruelty and torture—have been documented in Sade, Baudelaire, and Huysmans. Women may be less prone to such fantasies because they physically lack the equipment for sexual violence. They do not know the temptation of forcibly invading the sanctuary of another body. Our knowledge of these fantasies
is expanded by pornography, which is why pornography should be tolerated, though its public display may reasonably be restricted. The imagination cannot and must not be policed. Pornography shows us nature’s daemonic heart, those eternal forces at work beneath and beyond social convention. The 1970s also saw several feminist literary critics talking about the idea that women write differently to men, in style as well as content, and that this difference should be encouraged and celebrated. Hélène Cixous, introducing the concept of Feminine Writing (l’Écriture feminine) in the 1976 essay, ‘Laugh of the Medusa,’ said: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women into writing, from
which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement… With the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too,
overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Belgian feminist linguist Luce Irigaray (born 1930), who coined the term parler femme, takes a similar line to Cixous on the importance of a woman’s body in her writing: she says that whereas men have a single sex organ and a single form of gratification, women have a choice of clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, among many other forms of sexual expression; unlike man, ‘woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.’ In the essay ‘This Sex Which Is Not One,’ 1985, Irigaray says: ‘She’ is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious . . . Not to mention her language, in which ‘she’ sets off in all directions leaving ‘him’ unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully
elaborated code in hand. For in what she says, too, at least when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself. She steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an explanation, whisper, a sentence left unfinished . . . When she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere. From another point of pleasure, or of pain. One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an ‘other meaning’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with
words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. For if ‘she’ says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at ‘zero’: her body-sex.
A third female, Francophone semiotician Julia Kristeva, born 1941, also wrote about the differences in men’s and women’s writing. In the essay ‘Women’s Time’ she discusses the idea of a ‘symbolic contract’ in which language fits, but this contract is not equal, but ‘based on an essentially sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences which in this way produces communicable meaning.’ The woman, in this relationship is the one sacrificed; women ‘seem to feel that they are the casualties, that they have been left out of the socio-symbolic contract, of language as the fundamental social bond.’ So the question for a woman, especially a woman writer, is, ‘what is our place in this order of sacrifice and/or language?’ Contemporary women no longer wish to be excluded from this contract or ‘content with the function which has always been demanded of others (to maintain, arrange and perpetuate this sociosymbolic contract as mothers, wives, nurses, doctors, teachers. . .), how can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it?’
Kristeva offers two answers: try to ‘take hold of this contract, to possess it in order to enjoy it as such or to subvert it.’ But this can lead to ‘extremist and often deadly ideologies.’ But there is another approach, which without refusing or sidestepping this socio-symbolic order – consists in trying to explore the constitution and functioning of this contract, starting less from the knowledge accumulated about it (anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics) than from the very personal affect experienced when facing it as subject and as a woman. This leads to the active research, still rare, undoubtedly hesitant but always dissident, being carried out by women in the human sciences; particularly those attempts, in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract. I am not speaking here of a ‘woman’s language,’ who is (at least syntactically)
existence is highly problematical and whose apparent lexical specificity is perhaps more the product of a social marginality than of a sexual-symbolic difference. The ideas of some of the feminist writers came at least in part from Virginia Woolf; she had said in 1929, in ‘Women on Fiction’ that ‘the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.’ The same year, Woolf published A Room of One’s Own in which she says that, to write, a woman must overturn traditional patriarchal ideas of her place, set herself outside traditional social roles, kill ‘the angel of the house.’ Woolf sees that what men had called madness in women was in fact the creative spark, suppressed by their society. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a
suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or moped and moaned about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
The idea of the madwoman as creatrix was taken up in 1979 by Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their ground-breaking, monumental The Madwoman in the Attic, a study of a group of Victorian female novelists in terms of the differences in their writing to the writing of men of the same period. Enclosed in the architecture of an overwhelmingly male-dominated society, these literary women were also, inevitably trapped in the specifically literary constructs of what Gertrude Stein was to call ‘patriarchal poetry.’ For not only did a nineteenthcentury woman writer have to inhabit ancestral mansions (or cottages) owned and built by men, she was also constricted and restricted by the Palaces of Art and Houses of Fiction male writers authored. We decided, therefore, that the striking coherence we noticed in literature by women could be explained by a common, female impulse to struggle free from social and literary confinement through strategic redefinitions of self, art, and society.
Another important book on female writing was Elaine Showalter’s 1977 A Literature of Their Own, another study of nineteenth-century English women novelists, where she defined three stages in the development of women’s writing: imitation of the dominant – male – mode; protest against those modes; the search for identity and a ‘specific aesthetic’. She called these ‘feminine,’ ‘feminist,’ and ‘female.’ In her later book, A Jury of Her Peers, Showalter was amazed that women writers were already on a fourth stage. In the 1970s I could only imagine a fourth stage, a ‘seamless participation in the literary mainstream.’ By the end of the twentieth century, however, American women’s literature had reached the fourth and final stage, which I would now call ‘free.’ American women writers in the twenty-first century can take on any subject they want, in any form they choose. But before all of these women came Anaïs Nin, who had been writing in her unique, female style, since she
began writing in her diaries at the age of eleven in 1914. Much later Nin talked about her feminine focus, a style of writing which many male critics had dismissed, in her polemical work The Future of the Novel of 1968. I situated my vision within various women, to see men in relation to them and seeing the reflection of these relationships in feminine terms. My act of placing
my ‘camera’ within women and elucidating woman’s feelings was immediately met with tantrums by certain critics. They behaved like exasperated men when they feel they ‘cannot reason’ with a woman!’ Of course, many male editors and publishers had refused to publish the work of women writers who dared to write about female sensuality – let alone sexuality – ostensibly afraid of lawsuits but also because, as Friday says, ‘women’s lust has always been feared as that extraordinary force that, left unbridled, could bring down not only individuals but also society itself.’ Fortunately for all of us it hasn’t.
FRENCH-LANGUAGE WOMEN’S FICTION Classic French literature has many examples of ‘women’s lust’ in the novel, many strong and passionate women characters, though they tend to break the bonds of their own and other people’s marriages and be punished for it: Effi Briest, Emma Bovary, Thérèse Raquin, Nana and Marguerite Gautier, with her red camellias, for example. These novels were written by men of course; adulterous heroines in male fiction tend to come to a sticky end. In French books written by women, things are not always so black and white for women of passion: Colette’s Claudine books are late examples of novels about a courtesan who doesn’t come to a sticky end; Colette was following a tradition of novels which treated the grandes horizontales with sympathy; most were written by women who actually were courtesans, like Liane de Pougy, Céleste de Chabrillan and Valtesse de la Bigne.
Earlier than that, at the very beginning of the eighteenth century, France had had spirited, independent heroines created by women, at a time when both the characters and their authors were considered scandalous: Germaine de Staël’s eponymous Delphine falls in love with the man she has arranged for her friend to marry, and her Corinne, a passionate Italian artist, tempts an English Lord away from
marrying the dutiful English girl of his late father’s wishes. (Corinne was translated into German by Dorothea von Schlegel, husband of Friedrich, who scandalously featured her in his novel of free love and marriage, Lucinde but Dorothea published her own only novel anonymously.) Staël said, ‘the desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man,’ a saying that Anaïs Nin and many others bore out much later. Earlier still, in the seventeenth century, long before any other language had psychological novels, let alone psychological novels written by and about women, France had Madame de Lafayette’s (anonymously published) strong, eponymous, heroines: the adulterous Princess of Montpensier; The Princess of Clèves, who is in love with a man who is not her husband, and The Countess of Tende, who thrives on her own after her husband leaves her. Much more recently, France has had strong, transgressive female authors writing strong, transgressive female characters, who have taken control of their lives and are in
charge of their own sexuality. Virginia Woolf said a woman writer first had to kill the angel of the house; several contemporary French woman writers brutally murdered her. Catherine Millet’s autobiographical The Sexual Life of Catherine M is about the orgies she attended, willingly having sex with many men a night; she is their plaything but she is the one in charge.
In the biggest orgies in which I participated, from that time on, there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would deal with the sex machines of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: in my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my arse. Sometimes I would exchanges kisses and caresses with women, but that was always less important. Alina Reyes’ highly erotic The Butcher was the first of several novels about women satisfying their sexual desires with no concern for conventional morality. Putting herself firmly in a tradition of erotic writers while claiming it as a first, Reyes said of it:
In France it was the first erotic novel written by a woman. Yes, there was Pauline Réage, but she was an exception, and nobody knew who she was – she had to hide. Anaïs Nin couldn't give her real name... During the next years there were a lot of erotic novels, especially written by women, and now it's a normal thing, so nobody is surprised now to read an erotic novel written by a woman... women are able to say what they want, and the public can read that and they can write about their own fantasies, their sexuality. And that's a good thing because during the last centuries we had only erotic literature written by men, from the point of view of men.
Among several other novellas, which are too close to pornography and not close enough to literature for Text Acts, Reyes wrote Behind Closed Doors, in which the paperback has two covers and two texts, upside down from each other; one side is subtitled ‘an erotic adventure in which you are the hero,’ the other is subtitled ‘an erotic adventure in which you are the heroine.’ The blurb says, In this highly erotic series of adventures, Behind Closed Doors follows the twin worlds of male and female, spanning the spectrum of desire and possibility. Divided into two halves, one dominated by the perspective of a woman, the other that of a man, it is up to you, the reader, to choose which gender to follow, which sexual fantasy to pursue – and ultimately, which destiny to fulfil.
Catherine Breillat’s Pornocracy (Pornocratie) and the film of it, Anatomy of Hell, which she directed, are about a woman who initiates a game of sexual brutality with a man she meets in a gay bar. She said of it, ‘the basic theme is the dichotomy of womanhood. the woman cut in two. every society creates laws to exercise power over women and exclude certain parts of the woman.’ Virginie Despentes, whose novel, and the film of it,
Baise-Moi (Fuck Me) which, like Anatomy of Hell used real porn stars in the lead roles, has Manu and Nadine on a trail of les vols et les viols (thefts and rapes), murdering and fucking their way round France. Despentes also published the nonfictional King Kong Theory about her relationship as a writer to rape, porn and prostitution. ‘I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls that don’t get a look-in in the universal market of the consumable chick.’ Despentes ironically spells out her views on the place of women writers in the male-dominated world of French literature, including Marguerite Duras, whom we have already looked at as well as Colette and Violette Leduc, whom we will look at next: they had to be ‘good girls,’ and not upset the men. In women’s literature, examples of insolence or hostility towards men are extremely rare. Censored. I come from the sex which doesn’t even have the right to be disgruntled. Colette, Duras,
Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Sagan – a whole history of female writers who all took care to prove their harmlessness, to reassure men, to beg pardon for the act of writing by repeating how much they love, respect and cherish men, and most of all don’t want – whatever they might write – to create too much trouble. Because, as we all know, if you don’t, the pack will certainly sort you out. 1948. Antonin Artaud dies. Genet, Bataille, Breton; men are crashing through the barriers of the expressible. Violette Leduc starts writing what will become Thérèse et Isabelle. A masterpiece. As soon as she reads it, Simone de Beauvoir writes: ‘As regards publishing this: impossible. A story of lesbian sexuality as coarse as Genet.’ Violette Leduc tones down the text, but Queneau refuses it immediately: ‘impossible to publish openly’. She has to wait until 1966, when Gallimard eventually decides to publish. I am of this sex, the one which must keep quiet, which is kept quiet. And which must take it gracefully, once again proving
their harmlessness. Otherwise, you’re wiped out. But, as we will see, neither Colette nor Leduc were obedient, ‘good girls,’ and were definitely not the angel in any man’s house.
COLETTE Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (18731954) was the first female French writer to be awarded a state funeral, though the Catholic church refused her the funeral rites, since she had been divorced twice. She was the first, and so far the only female president of France’s most prestigious literary award committee, the Prix Goncourt, and the only female writer to be covered in On Eroticism, the survey of erotic writing by our old friend Robert Desnos. She created three of France’s most enduringly popular characters: Claudine; Chéri and Gigi. The idea of writing the semiautobiographical story of Claudine, starting with her schooldays, came from Colette’s much older first
husband, a womaniser and minor literary figure known as Willy, who locked her in so that she would write and then published the novels under his own name, starting in 1900 with Claudine at School. This sold very well and Colette wrote four Claudine novels in all, showing her character growing into maturity, all of which sold extremely well, but Colette only managed to gain ownership of the lucrative copyright twenty-five years later when she used the manuscripts to prove she had written them. But although Willy was a libertine and a rogue who cheated her out of her copyright, he did introduce Colette into Paris avant-garde literary and artistic circles, and tolerated her lesbian affairs. Collette divorced Willy and for the rest of her life was a strong,
independent woman, paying her own bills and publishing under her own name, though she married again, twice. After the first divorce, without any income from the Claudine books, Colette sustained herself by dancing on the stage, considered very disreputable at that time, while living with Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, universally known as Missy. Sometimes they shared a stage together but one onstage kiss proved so scandalous that they had to split up, publicly at least. They were both part of the circle of crossdressing, female-tomale Paris society that gathered around the salon of the writer Natalie Clifford Barney. Colette’s hugely popular 1920 novel Chéri concerns the love of a young man, Chéri for older woman, Léa, a wealthy courtesan. He marries a woman his own age but
eventually returns to her, though after one night she sends him away again. Then, in 1944, after a succession of successful novels, Colette introduced her most popular character, Gigi, a sixteen-year-old girl who is being groomed to be a courtesan, but marries the man for whom she is being prepared. Gigi was made into a film in 1949 with Danièle Delorme in the title role, and in 1951 it was adapted for the stage, with Audrey Hepburn, chosen personally by Colette, in her first starring role; in 1958 it became a Hollywood musical starring Leslie Caron, with book and music by Lerner and Loewe, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
THE PURE AND THE IMPURE This strange work, first published as Ces Plaisirs in 1932 and as Le Pur et l’Impur in 1941, feels less like a novel and more like a series of loosely stitched together character sketches, as indeed it is, of the gay and lesbian demi-mondaine societies of the Paris of Colette’s time. All but one of the characters are unnamed but are presumably real people that Colette knew. Janet Flanner, who was Paris correspondent of the New Yorker from 1925 onwards, and published plenty of her own sketches of Paris society, said of The Pure and the Impure: She used her customary semifictional formula to report on the behaviour, the mores, reflexes, instincts of women, especially as sentient, desiring creatures drawn to similarities and even to substitutes. Colette, as author, confronts the reader at the same time in a somewhat fierce intimacy, with her personal remembrances, observations, and exact images, all dealing basically with the phenomenon of
eroticism. Colette’s understanding of the male sex amounted to an amazing identification with man per se, to which was added her own uterine comprehension of women, more objective than feminine. One can think of no other female writer endowed with this double comprehension whereby she understood and accepted the naturalness of sex wherever
found or however fragmented and re-apportioned. She seemed to have a hermaphroditic duality in her understanding and twofold loyalties. Colette is indeed equally at home in the society of adulterous older women, gay men and transgender women in this book, as no doubt she was in real life. Given that it was published only four years after Radclyffe Hall’s banned and despised The Well of Loneliness, which does not contain any references to sex or sexuality – the furthest it goes is a one-sentence description of a kiss between two women – it seems amazing that Colette’s book was ever published, though of course it was written in French and published in Paris. It almost seems as if Colette is trying
to push every button that would make male censors apoplectic. Close to the beginning there is a scene of female orgasm: the male censors, even if they admitted that there was such a thing, would hate to see it in print, especially as it takes place in an opium den – drugs and female sex in one scene: horrors. The narrow staircase of polished wood creaked under some footsteps, which then sounded on the balcony above me, where could be heard the rustling of silk, the light impact of pillows thrown upon the echoing floorboards, and silence closed in again. But from the depths of this very silence a sound imperceptibly began in a woman’s throat, at first husky, then clear, asserting its firmness and amplitude as it was
repeated, becoming clear and full like the notes the nightingale repeats and accumulates until they pour out in a flood of arpeggios… Up there on the balcony a woman was trying hard to delay her pleasure and in doing so was hurrying it towards its climax and destruction, in a rhythm at first so calm and harmonious, so marked that I involuntarily beat time with my head, for its cadence was as perfect as its melody. But wait: there’s worse. We then discover that the woman in question, Charlotte, was not only ‘rather plump and resembled the favourite models of Renoir,’ but that she was ‘probably forty-five years old.’ What, says the censor, going red in the face: even plump, middle-aged women have orgasms? Apparently they do, but that is not even the worst of it: it turns out the man involved in the orgasm was a fairhaired boy, much younger than her.
And then, just when the censor is about to pass out from apoplexy, the narrator reveals the shocking truth: the woman faked the orgasm to please the boy. I recalled the romantic reward she had granted the young lover, the almost public display of pleasure she had made in that nightingale lament, those full notes reiterated again and again, precipitated until their trembling equilibrium broke in a climax of torrential sobbing… I considered the young lover’s happiness was great when measured by the perfect dupery of the woman who thus subtly contrived to give a weak and sensitive boy the very highest concept of himself that a man can have. Which is the more outrageous for the male, patriarchal, misogynistic censor: showing a woman having an orgasm with a boy, or showing a woman faking that orgasm? ‘Am I,
then,’ she says later, ‘going to find myself, in the first pages of a book, declaring that men are of less use to women than women are to men? We shall see.’ We do and they are. Having now made sure that the censor is dead of a heart attack, Colette feels free to talk freely and in great depth about female sexuality, lesbianism and homosexuality. She even feels free to use the ‘c’ word (le con in French; just to remind you that con is a masculine noun, as are le vagin, le clitoris and l’orgasme). She is talking here with the British-
born, French-speaking Sapphic poet Renée Vivien, the only character in the book who is referred to her real name, as she was already long dead. They are talking about a male poet. Vivian says, ‘I don’t want to hear any more about him or his verses tonight. He has no talent. He is – wait, I know what he is, he’s a cunt, a cunt with a pen. Yes, a cunt with a pen!’ One of the few straight men Colette knows, whom she calls Damien, is a womaniser, a Don Juan; like all men of this type, he is never satisfied by a woman, never feels any form of partnership or equality with them; he has ‘the same concept of a lover that used to be a characteristic of young girls, who could not imagine a warrior except with his weapon drawn or a lover except one ready at any moment to prove his love.’ He tells her that, ‘on that score the women I’ve known have never had any reason to complain. I educated them well. But as for what they ever gave me in exchange…’ The narrator wonders: what would he have said had he ever met the woman who, out of sheer generosity, fools the man
by simulating ecstasy? But I need not worry on that score: most surely he encountered Charlotte, and perhaps more than once. She produced for him her little broken cries, while she turned her head aside, and while her hair veiled her forehead, her cheek, her half-shut eyes, lucid and attentive to her master’s pleasure… The Charlottes of this world nearly always have long hair. Having begun the narrative in an opium den, the narrator tells us that, for her, sex is no more dangerous a habit than smoking tobacco, either for men or for women: ‘The habit of obtaining sexual satisfaction is less tyrannical than the tobacco habit, but it gains on one. O voluptuous pleasure, O lascivious ram, cracking your skull against all obstacles, time and again!’ As we saw, many of Colette’s circle were women who dressed and
acted in the most masculine way possible; after the First World War they were of course very few young men in society and, perhaps subliminally, many cultured and educated lesbians in a certain, closed, secluded part of Paris society – also of course British society, as chronicled by Radclyffe Hall – filled the void as best they could, though that was not always enough. In the breaking down of class barriers that followed the War, these secluded societies found it far more difficult to hide themselves. How timid I was, at that period when I was trying to look like a boy, and how feminine I was beneath my disguise of cropped hair. ‘Who would take us to be women? Why, women.’ They alone were not fooled. With such distinguishing marks as pleated shirt front, hard collar, sometimes a waistcoat, and always a silk pocket
handkerchief, I frequented a society perishing on the margin of all societies. Although morals, good and bad, have not changed during the past twenty-five or thirty years, class consciousness, in destroying itself, has gradually undermined and debilitated the clique I am referring to, which tried, trembling with fear, to live without hypocrisy, the breathable air of society… The adherents of this clique of women exacted secrecy for their parties, where they appeared dressed in long trousers and dinner jackets and behaved with unsurpassed propriety. Many of these crossdressing women had their girlfriend, their protégée, their petite amie, ‘rather rude young creatures, insinuating and grasping. Not surprising, this, for these ladies in male attire had, by birth and from infancy, a taste for below stairs accomplices.’ But not all
Colette’s acquaintances are comfortable with these crossdressing women. One says to her, ‘you see, when a woman remains a woman, she is a complete human being. She lacks nothing, even insofar as her amie is concerned. But if ever she gets it into her head to try to be a man, then she’s grotesque.’ For Colette, the only thing of which she disproves is ‘Sapphic libertinage;’ for her, fidelity rather than sexual gratification is the most important thing. Two women very much in love do not shun the ecstasy of the senses, nor do they shun a sensuality less concentrated than the orgasm, and more warming. It is this unresolved and demanding sensuality that finds happiness in an exchange of glances, an arm laid on a shoulder, and is thrilled by the odour of sunwarmed wheat caught in a head of hair. These are the delights of a constant
companionship and shed habits that engender and excuse fidelity. Colette knew Proust slightly and read all his works. She obviously does not disapprove of his emphasis on homosexuality, but strongly objects to his portrayal of women. She feels, and indeed demonstrates later in the book, that she has an intimate understanding of the homosexual man, but that he does not have the same understanding of women. Ever since Proust shed light on Sodom, we have had a feeling of respect for what he wrote, and would never dare, after him, to touch the subject of these hounded creatures, who are careful to blur their tracks and to propagate at every step their personal cloud, like the cuttlefish.
But – was he misled, or was he ignorant? – when he assembles a Gomorrah of inscrutable and depraved young girls, when he denounces an entente, a collective tea, a frenzy of bad angels, we are only diverted, indulgent, and a little bored, having lost the support of the dazzling light of truth that guides us through Sodom. This is because, with all due deference to the imagination or the error of Marcel Proust, there is no such thing as Gomorrah. Puberty, boarding school, solitude, prisons, aberrations, snobbishness – they are all seedbeds, but too shallow to engender and sustain a vice that could attract a great number or become an established thing that would gain the indispensable solidarity of its votaries. Intact,
enormous, eternal, Sodom looks down from its heights upon its puny counterfeit. Colette seems to have been welcomed into the gay, male society of Paris, though mainly as an observer. If anything she considers them more well-adjusted than lesbian society, especially the transgender lesbians who are obsessed with masculinity: gay men are not obsessed with women. They allowed me to share with them their sudden outbursts of gaiety, so shrill and revealing. They appreciated my silence, for I was faithful to their concept of me as a nice piece of furniture and I listened to them as if I were an expert. They got used to me, without ever allowing me access to a real affection. No one excluded me – no one loved me. I owe a great deal to their cold friendship, to their fierce critical sense. They taught me not only that a man can be amorously satisfied with a man but that one sex can suppress, by forgetting it, the other sex. This I had not learned from the ladies in men’s
clothes, who were preoccupied with men, who were always, with suspect bitterness, finding fault with men. My strange homosexual friends did not talk about women, except distantly and condescendingly… Absent yet present, a translucent witness, I enjoyed an indefinable piece, accompanied by a kind of conspiratorial pride. I heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes of despair – languages with which I was all too familiar, I had heard them elsewhere and spoke them fluently to myself. Colette certainly spoke, and wrote, the languages of passion, one of the first and still one of the best women to do so.
VIOLETTE LEDUC If Violette Leduc (1907-1972) is known at all today it is for her novel La Bâtarde (1964). This is partly because not all her works are available in English translations, but even in France she is quite obscure, and mainly known in relation to Jean Genet – another bastard who, as we saw earlier, practically founded his career on illegitimacy – and Simone de Beauvoir, Leduc’s literary patron and unrequited passion. Leduc’s first two published novels were L’Asphyxie (Asphyxia), 1946, a series of sketches about her early childhood and L’Affamée (The Hungry Woman), 1948, a long prose poem that was basically a hymn of passion for Beauvoir. Both were well received by the Paris literary elite but did not trouble the general public very much.
Leduc’s first major work was Ravages (1955), another autobiographical work in which she explicitly featured her early erotic life; far too explicitly for her publisher. That erotic life had receded by the time she wrote the book; she wrote to Beauvoir, ‘I have noted the gulf that stretches between the life I am leading and the eroticism of the book I’m writing.’ Beauvoir wrote the preface to La Bâtarde, almost guaranteeing it critical if not commercial success. In it she says, ‘eroticism holds a
privileged position in her books, though neither gratuitously nor for provocation’s sake.’ Eroticism is critical to Leduc’s writing according to Beauvoir: ‘it is the one great, unsurpassable key to the world; it is in the light of eroticism that she discovers the city and the countryside, the depths of the night, the fragility of the dawn, the cruelty of chiming bells.’ The first of the three love stories from her youth that she told in Ravages was of a very brief but intense affair with a fellow boardingschool girl when she was seventeen. She did not censor herself while trying to recall the passion of this, her first and possibly deepest erotic experience. I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem any more scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the
end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard. Her publisher did not agree, any more than mainstream publishers had accepted Molly Bloom’s erotic monologue thirty years earlier. That had been considered highly scandalous of course, as was any expression of female sexuality. Beauvoir approved however, saying that Leduc could evoke ‘feminine sexuality as no woman has ever done: with truth, with poetry and more besides.’ But even she knew that it would never be accepted for publication: ‘as for publishing this, impossible. It’s a story of lesbian sexuality as crude as anything by Genet.’ She was right about the impossibility of publication at that time, though the writing is by no means crude; it is as lyrical as Genet but gentler, softer. In 1954 Beauvoir herself presented the manuscript of Ravages to Gallimard, already considerably toned down, but they still refused to publish it as it stood. One of the reading committee said, ‘it’s a book of which a fair third is enormously and specifically obscene
– and which would call down the thunderbolts of the law… The book also includes a number of successful passages. The story about the schoolgirls could, in itself, constitute a rather beguiling tale – if the author would agree to draw a veil over some of her operational techniques.’ He said that, to include the story about the schoolgirls, it would be necessary to ‘take out the eroticism
while keeping the emotions.’ In fact the story about the schoolgirls did independently come to have a life of its own, as we will see in a moment. But even as sanitised under Beauvoir’s guidance, the graphicallydepicted schoolgirl lesbianism at the beginning of the novel, added to a graphic sex scene in a taxi and an extended scene of abortion at the end (abortion was then illegal in France) were too much for Gallimard. Beauvoir offered it to other publishers, to no avail, and Leduc eventually agreed to publishing Ravages with Gallimard in a much-censored version in 1955. It was critically wellreceived but sold very little; it has never been reissued in its original version. But Leduc was devastated by the experience, especially losing the schoolgirl scene.
They rejected the beginning of Ravages. It was a murder. They did not want the sincerity of Thérèse and Isabelle. They were afraid of censure. Where is censure’s true home? What are her habits, her manias? I can’t work her out… I was building a school… a dormitory… a refectory… a music room… a courtyard… Each brick, an emotion. Each rafter, an upheaval. My trowel digging up memories. My mortar to seal in the sensations. My building was solid. My building is collapsing. Censure has pushed my house over with the tip of one finger… I had a pain in my chest the day I learned of the rejection… I was wounded right in my heart. Society opposes it even before my book can be published. My work is broken up, scattered. My
searching through the darkness of memory for the magical eye of a breast, for the face, the flower, the meat of a woman’s open sex… My searching, a box empty of bandages… Continue to write after such a rejection? I cannot. Stumps keep poking out of my skin. Leduc did continue to write and the story of the schoolgirls was published privately, hors commerce – a way of circulating books to subscribers that avoided the censors – as Thérèse et Isabelle. But she never got over the rejection of Ravages, became paranoid and took electroshock therapy. Beauvoir still supported her, even though she was embarrassed at Leduc’s unwanted sexual advances. At the beginning of the 1960s, Beauvoir advised Leduc to use the Thérèse and Isabelle story in her latest autobiographical novel, La Bâtarde; Leduc did, though in a modified form. This novel was published in 1964 and was a commercial success, her first and only one, and because of this success, Thérèse et Isabelle was eventually published in 1966, a
much more liberal environment than the mid-1950s. Ravages had been presented to Gallimard in 1954, the same year as Story of O. Both were rejected – they both dwelt with the taboo subject of female sexuality; as we know, at the time, the whole concept of female sexuality was denied; both women were trying to break new ground, but the ground turned out to be stonier than they expected.
THÉRÈSE AND ISABELLE
Leduc described, in her final autobiographical novel, Mad in Pursuit (La Folie en Tête) how she wrote the scenes that became Thérèse and Isabelle, acting almost as a medium, transmitting their words and sensations from an earlier time and a different place; a present dialogue with past memories, a search for times past,
though very unlike Proust’s. We are already familiar with the concept of books that are meant to be read with one hand; this was written with one hand – the text literally brought jouissance to its author as it would to many of its readers. I was writing, I was writing under their dictation. I wrote with one hand, and with the other… I loved myself to love them, to get back to them, to translate them, to not betray them… One arm was free on the table, my head fell onto that arm. I was speaking to them. My hell is rarefied, Isabelle, my sky is opening up. I want to be an explosion of pebbles thrown at the stars. Thérèse, my prison is dizzy. How will I manage to transcribe it? I am being swept away by the wave, pleasure is lurking. Come back, Isabelle, there you are. Your hair in my arms, my lap, my legs, I have found you again. I’m leaving you, captivity. High-voltage, I am overloaded. Speed and communion.
In another reference in Mad in Pursuit to the writing of what became Thérèse and Isabelle, Leduc again refers to the orgasmic nature of the writing process. (In this next, rather wonderful passage, the imagery of her ‘marrying herself’ and her finger ‘being wed’ are very reminiscent of the refrain of Anne Sexton’s The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator: ‘At night, alone, I marry the bed.’) Just at the critical moment, with terrible timing, someone is knocking at her door. I my dreaming, or did someone just knock? I am marrying myself when nothing exists. Someone is knocking. Impossible, my finger is being wed. The grand wedding for the huge absence. The awesome wordless rambling. Someone is knocking, someone is knocking. Impossible, I’m off to meet Pasiphaë [in Greek mythology she had sex with a bull, and became the mother of the Minotaur]. Someone is yelling outside my door. What a catastrophe, I have her in my body, my sky has shivered. Don’t call me, I’m diving in. Someone in danger outside my door, they’re
calling out to me again. I would kill if I had to stop now. I was the summer, now I am a handful of raindrops. I am dying of gratitude. An open flower, a flower overcome, a wisp of smoke, is wandering inside me. These passages from Mad in Pursuit seem to be that perfect combination of the erotic and the poetic that Anaïs Nin advocated – much more of her in the next chapter.
Jean Genet – perhaps her closest literary, if not sexual, relative; as we saw they admired each other enormously at one time, though she came to hate him. The standalone novella Thérèse et Isabelle covers a very short period during which the two girls are closeted together, literally, as their lovemaking takes place in a curtained bed in the boarding school, a school toilet stall and a strange kind of love hotel. At the start the narrator, Thérèse, is alone and resentful.
The writing that Leduc is writing about herself writing about, Thérèse and Isabelle, also mostly manages to pull this off, and every phrase is bursting with a lyric, highly charged intensity that is deeply erotic; sexual energy bursts from the text. Occasionally Leduc falls off one side or the other of the narrow path between the obscurely pretentious and the explicitly detailed, but mostly the narrative soars and swoops, possibly even more so than
I am the bad student, the worst student in the big dormitory. I don’t care in the least. I detest the headmistress, spit my girl, spit on your polish, I hate sewing, gymnastics, chemistry, I hate everything and I avoid my companions. It’s sad but I don’t want to leave this place. My mother has married someone, my mother has betrayed me. Thérèse says she hates Isabelle but is clearly fascinated by her. ‘I’ll flatten that sarcastic smile of hers… She is scornful because I hide away in the music room.’ Isabelle seems to be
everywhere. ‘Her again, always her, again her on the stairs. I run into her. I would have dressed slowly if I had known she was at the tap fetching water. Shall I run away?’ One night Isabelle visits her in her bed. ‘You want to sleep? I thought you the best sleeper in the dormitory.’ ‘Softer,’ she said. I whispered too loudly, I wanted to be done with this joy: I was elated to the point of pride. Visiting me, Isabelle came no further than my percale curtain. I was suspicious of her shyness, suspicious of her long, loose hair in my cell. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to say no. Say you will say yes,’ gasped Isabelle.’ Isabelle is inviting Thérèse to come to read ‘in my room.’ She does. The following passages constitute one of the most tender, the most beautiful, the most intense seduction scenes ever written. And unlike most seduction scenes there are no power structures being played out here: both participants are exactly equal. Bear in mind that the male editors at
Gallimard refused to publish this. (This fine, sensuous translation is by Sophie Lewis, from 2012.) I sat on the mattress edge. She reached over my shoulder, she picked up my book from the table, give it to me, reassured me. I leafed through it since she was staring at me; I didn’t know which page to stop at. She was waiting for whatever I was
waiting for. I fixed on the capital letter of the first sentence. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ Isabelle said. We wanted to hear the impact and the dying-away of the school clock’s eleven strokes. I stared at words on the first page without seeing anything. She took back my book, turned off the light. Isabelle pulled me backwards, she led me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit with her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The flashiness of her tongue frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn, contemplative. The lips wandered over my lips: a dusting of petals.
My heart was beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself… we descended knot by knot into a night beyond the school’s night, beyond the night of the town and of the tram depot. She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more. You can see why Leduc had an orgasm writing this: it is throbbing with eroticism and they are still only kissing, as they continue to do for many pages yet. But, for Thérèse at least, this is the real thing: ‘we wanted to engulf each other. We have cast off our families, the world, time, certainty. Clasping her against my gaping open heart, I wanted to draw Isabelle inside.’ Isabelle does ‘enter’ her, though they
are still only kissing. She took my head in her hands as if I had been beheaded, she drove her tongue into my mouth. She wanted us wasted, lacerating. We were tearing each other to pieces with stone needles. The kiss slowed in my guts, it vanished, a hot current in the sea… A flower opened in every pore of my skin. I took her arm and thanked her with a purple kiss upon the veins. Thérèse does not have the words to express her feelings: ‘the poverty of my vocabulary discouraged me.’ But words are not necessary, Isabelle knows what to do and Thérèse follows her, soon taking the lead herself.
She sat up on the bed, seized my waist. Isabelle rubbed her cheek against mine, she told a comforting tale with her cheek. She dropped her hands to my chest. We listened to the miaowing of a cat in the main courtyard. Isabelle’s fingers opened, closed again like daisybuds, they freed breasts from roseshaded purgatory. I was waking into Spring with the babbling of lilacs under my skin. ‘Come, come here again,’ I said. Isabelle stroked my hip. My skin caressed became a caress; stroked, my hip shone through my intoxicated limbs into my languid ankles. It was torture, tortures in my belly. Inevitably, things soon go further, though not that night. ‘Isabelle clawed at the fabric over my pubic
hair, she entered, withdrew, while not entering and not withdrawing, she rocked me, her fingers, the fabric, the time.’ But soon it is morning and they have to return to normality, to the routine of the prison-like school – not much like Genet’s prisons but still a stifling, inward-facing environment blocked off from the outside world. But they have their own world; as with Genet, the closing, the narrowing of the physical space, the restrictions on freedom cannot limit the imagination; quite the opposite. ‘I opened the window in my cell. The night and the sky needed nothing of us. Living in the open air would be sacrilege.’ The next night, despite the school routine having broken their reverie, things continue. A hand came to rest on my neck: a winter sun whitened my hair. The hand was tracing veins, downwards. The hand stopped. My pulse was beating against Isabelle’s hand, its mount of Venus. The hand climbed again: it drew widening circles, it dropped away into nowhere, it was extending the waves of sweetness around my left
shoulder while my right shoulder on the pillow was abandoned to the night striated with the other girls’ breathing. I was learning the velvet nap of my bones, the aura of my flesh, the infinities in my shapes. The hand was lingering, bringing dreams of lawn shawls. The sky pleads charity when your shoulder is caressed: the sky was pleading. The hand was climbing back,
fixing a wimple of velour up to my chin, the persuasive hand descending again, pressing, replicating curves. In the end it was the pressure of friendship. Suddenly everything changed. Two alternating fingers were attending on me. How masterly her caress, how inevitable her caress… Closed, my eyes were listening: the finger grazed my pearl, the finger waited. I wanted
to be capacious, to help it. The regal and diplomatic finger was advancing, withdrawing, choking me, beginning to enter, offending the octopus deep inside, bursting the cloud of unease, stopping, starting up, waiting close to viscera. I was clenching, I enclosed the flesh of my flesh, its marrow and its vertebrae. I rose and fell back again. The finger that had not hurt me, the finger come in gratitude came out. The flesh ungloved it. ‘Do you love me? I asked. I was hoping for confusion. ‘You mustn’t shout,’ said Isabel. I crossed my arms over my face, I listened beneath my eyes squeezed tight. Two fingers entered, two pirates. Isabelle was tearing open and beginning the deflowering. They were oppressing me; they wanted, my flesh did not want. ‘My love… You’re hurting me.’ She put her hand over my mouth. ‘I won’t complain,’ I said. The gag was a humiliation. ‘It hurts. It must. It hurts…’
I gave myself to the night and without wanting to I helped the fingers. Sometimes perhaps, the language soars too close to the sun and burns it wings; this is not the best description of an orgasm ever written: ‘the wave came on reconnaissance, it intoxicated our feet, it swept through again. Lianas were released, a clarity grew within our ankles. The unfurling sweetness was complete. My knees crumbled to
ashes.’ Sometimes the language veers off in the other direction too: towards the banal and bathetic, the language of plodding pornography – the phrase ‘she cried in ecstasy’ in this extract is pure pulp pornography; it sounds a sour note in this otherwise lyrical rhapsody of rapture: ‘Yes, yes… Slower. I said slower… Higher. No… Lower down. Almost… Almost there… Yes… Yes… That’s almost it… Faster, faster, faster,’ she said. My tongue was a searching in the salty darkness, in the sticky darkness, over fragile flesh. The more I laboured, the more mysterious became my efforts. I hesitated around the pearl. ‘Don’t stop. I tell you that’s it.’ I was losing it, regaining it. ‘Yes, yes,’ moaned Isabelle. ‘You’re there, you’re there,’ she cried in ecstasy. Go on. Please… There… yes, there… just there…’ When she reaches her orgasm, Isabelle sounds more like a prostitute faking it than innocent schoolgirl: ‘I’m going to come my love. So good: I’m going to come. It’s
too good. Keep going. Don’t stop, don’t stop. Forever, forever, forever…’ But, of course, it cannot be forever; after one more night together, both of them can sense it as dawn is breaking and the dormitory monitor wakes up. The ending of this short work, after the intensity of emotion they have been through, and we have been through with them, is deeply poignant. I play at butting horns with her so as to forget what is dying. The melody of the bird that sings and hastens the morning’s beauty exhausts us: perfection is not part of this world even when we come upon it here… ‘You have to go,’ said Isabelle. To leave her like an outcast, to leave her in secret also saddened me. There were millstones weighing down my feet and I was learning the odour of our sweat by heart. I sat down on her bed. Isabelle raised her desolate face to me: ‘I don’t want you to go. No, go on. It’s too dangerous.’ I loved Isabelle without show, without raptures: I offered her my life without a word. Isabelle
stood up, she took me in her arms: ‘Will you come every evening?’ ‘Every evening.’ ‘We’ll never leave each other?’ ‘We’ll never leave each other.’ My mother took me back home. I never saw Isabelle again.
GABRIELLE WITTKOP
Gabrielle Wittkop, née Ménardeau (1920-2002) was born to a father with a large, wide-ranging library of French literature to which he allowed his daughter free reign (ignoring the advice of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was no doubt represented in his library, that ‘no chaste girl ever read a novel’; Rousseau was right: Gabrielle did not turn into a chaste girl). She started to read her father’s books at the age of four, and by the age of six was particularly enjoying the eighteenth century French classics. By the time she was eight Gabrielle
had read everything and had started writing her own works; her father paid her five francs for each page of the manuscripts she brought him. Her father did not send Gabrielle to school, believing she could be better educated at home. ‘My father declared that school was a place where children were forced into unnatural conformity by the imbeciles whose natural habitat is the classroom.’ Gabrielle was happy with his decision. ‘I detest nothing so much as little children; even when I was a child I couldn't stand their company.’ All her life she was a loner and an outsider; as a teenager she was bisexual and as she grew older she was fascinated by the idea of sexual excess. In Paris during the war Gabrielle met a deserter from the German army, Julius Wittkop, who was gay and forty years older than her. They married and after the war moved to Germany, where she began to write in German, including literary articles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, though her first book, in German, on ETA Hoffmann, was not published until 1966.
Wittkop’s first novel, the virtually unpublishable The Necrophiliac (Le Nécrophile) however was written in French and published in 1972 by her friend, the anti-moralist crusader and outsider publisher of erotica, Régine Desforges; in changing moral times it was republished in 2005 by the highly respectable Gallimard, translated into English as a result of a French government grant and published in Canada, for a long time the last bastion of literary censorship. Wittkop subsequently published a strange mixture of books on fashion and travel, in both English and German, Hemlock, a memoir of her time looking after Julius, who developed Parkinson’s disease and more novels, including La Mort de C, 1975, about the death of a gay tourist in Bombay, which sounds reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and a novel actually set in Venice, Murder Most Serene (Sérénissime assassinat), 2001, about murder and sexual shenanigans in the eighteenthcentury. A collection of five novellas, Exemplary Departures, about ‘exemplary’ deaths in different parts
of the world was published in posthumously in 2012. Helped by a friend, Julius had died of poison rather than suffer from his illness; in 2002 Gabrielle, finding out that she had cancer, herself committed suicide.
THE NECROPHILIAC The grey eyelashes of this little girl cast a grey shadow against her cheek. She has the sly, ironic smile of those who know a lot. Two uncurled locks frame her face, descending to the hem of her blouse, which has been pulled up under her armpits to reveal a stomach of the same bluish white seen in certain Chinese porcelain. The mound of Venus, very flat, very smooth, shines slightly in the lamplight; it seems to be covered in a film of sweat. I spread the thighs to study the vulva, thin as a scar, the transparent lips a pale mauve. But I still have to wait a few hours; for the moment, the whole body is still a bit stiff, a bit
clenched, until the heat of the room softens it like wax. This little girl is worth the trouble. It’s truly a very beautiful dead girl. This is easily the most shocking first page of any novel in Text Acts, and perhaps of any book anywhere. The clue is in the title of the book: the narrator steals and has sex with dead bodies, regardless of age, gender or whatever physical attractiveness they may have had while alive. Like Lolita or AM Homes’ End of Alice, the first person narration adds to the shock value: the person talking into your ear is a pervert, dangerously so, and possibly insane. This is a very difficult literary trick to pull off: engaging the reader’s sympathy with someone who is so far outside normal society. Nabokov does it – or attempts it – with Humbert’s high,
seems to come from the heart of the earth, from the empire where the musky larvae trudge between the roots, where blades of mica gleam like frozen silver, there where the blood of future chrysanthemums wells up, among the dusty peat, the sulphurous mire. The smell of the dead is that of the return to the cosmos, that of the sublime alchemy.
mannered literary style, Homes does it with a flat, deadpan narration. Wittkop pulls it off with a lyrical, poetic style – on the face of it, completely inappropriate to the subject – that is deeply erotic, as erotic as any writing in Text Acts, and worthy of Anaïs Nin, of whom Wittkop is in many ways a successor. (Nin had earlier written a story about necrophilia – ‘Pierre’ – but it was not published until after The Necrophiliac.) Their fine powerful odour is that of the bombyx [silkworm]. It
This text does not at all read as if it were written by a woman, let alone in the 1970s. If you did not know, you might think it was an lost, unknown work by Lautréamont or Huysmans, considered unpublishable at the time and hidden away. The fascination with death and decay however is perhaps closest to Edgar Allan Poe, with his horrified fascination with pale, dead tragic heroines: Berenice, Lenore, Madeline. I do not intend to quote much more of this short novel; nothing very much happens, there is no plot, there are simply many repeats, presented as diary entries in loving, erotic detail of the narrator’s highly physical contact with dead bodies,
his ‘boyfriends with anuses glacial as mint, my exquisite mistresses with grey marble bellies.’ But, having shocked us to the core of the first page, Wittkop needs to escalate the horror; she succeeds when the narrator has sex with two dead Swedish teenage twins, boy and girl: ‘I put them to bed in the arms of one another, interlacing them tenderly, placing the lips of the brother against those of the sister, putting the sleeping sex of the one between the delicate nymphs of the other.’ [Nymphae can mean labia minora.] Their sexes: two infant molluscs, quite soft, flaccid, and covered with that pinkish hue that appears on the skin of the dead when the flesh is going to start changing. My excitation had put me into a sort of delirium, and I’d hardly started passionately licking the point of encounter where these beautiful dead creatures united my desire, when I thought I would die myself and inundated myself, moaning. And unexpectedly, for that matter, for it had been months since I’d managed any sort of ecstasy.
October 22, 19... My angels radiate a rainbow. How beautiful they are. Their union: Trionfo délia Morte . . . October 28, 19... From time to time, I correct their position, for my beautiful dead ones with the white nails are deteriorating. They opened their sad shadowy mouths; their necks are folded like stems touched by frost.
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE WOMEN’S FICTION You may have noticed that most the books in Text Acts so far have been written either by French authors or by American and British authors living in Paris: the first and second Lost Generations. The Parisian artistic café culture encouraged this; many artists and writers met to talk literature, philosophy, and whatever else in Parisian cafés like Les Deux Magots and Café Flore, though these literary circles did not normally include women – with the notable exception of Simone de Beauvoir. There were café-based literary circles in other cities around Europe too, but they mostly didn’t include women either: we have seen Schnitzler and other writers meeting in the Café Griensteidl in Vienna and Paul Leppin and the Young Prague group at the Café Arco; there were also the Café Odeon in Zurich, where Stefan Zweig, Frank Wedekind and Karl Kraus met, and the Café des Westens in Berlin, whose circle included Wedekind again, Hugo Ball (founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and the Zürich
Dada movement), Georg Heym and, unusually, a woman: the influential expressionist poet Else Lasker Schüler. Outside of the café circles, Paris also had various artistic ‘salons’ that attracted literary and society women, the ‘cliterati;’ salons that were hosted by women writers like Gertrude Stein or wealthy patrons like Natalie Clifford Barney (whose circle included Colette) and were very welcoming and encouraging to women, including, even especially, lesbian, writers. But most women writing outside Paris were also writing outside any kind of literary group; in the case of German women writers in particular, apart from Lasker Schüler there were no role models to emulate and no mutual support organisations. Writers’ groupings in England were very different: rather than meeting publicly in cafés or semipublicly in salons, they tended to centre around private meetings in people’s homes. The Bloomsbury Set is named after an area of central London but during the First World War the members mostly moved to the country and subsequently met on each other’s estates in Sussex:
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Charleston; Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House and Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s Sissinghurst. Also in Sussex, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose’s Farley Farm was home to visiting surrealists, including several female artists: Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, who was a novelist as well as an artist. And in 1932/33 the heiress, gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim rented Hayford Hall in Devon and played host to a group of modernist cliterati that included Antonia White, Emily Coleman and Djuna Barnes, who wrote Nightwood there. These small, private groups encouraged experimental writing and gave female writers a support network but did not lead to any significant
erotic writing by male or female authors in the twentieth century. Although English literature was traditionally rich in erotica, native English critics have generally been scathing about it. The great collector and cataloguer of erotic literature, ‘Pisanus Fraxi,’ the pseudonym of Henry Spencer Ashbee, whom we met in the Introduction to Text Acts, wrote one of his bibliographies largely about English fiction: Cantena Librorum Tacendorum of 1885. He said: English Erotic Novels, I repeat, are sorry productions from a literary point of view, the only one which could excuse them in the eyes of a cultivated man. It would appear indeed that the English language does not lend itself to the composition of amatory works, and that the delicacy of treatment is with us next to impossible. But this was not true then and it is not true now, especially in regard to the erotic portrayal of strong female characters: Even more than French, English literature had a long tradition of passionate women in the
novel – written by men as well as women – running from Moll Flanders, Roxana and Fanny Hill through Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, Catherine Earnshaw, Lucy Snowe, Becky Sharp and Eustacia Vye to Connie Chatterley and the Brangwen sisters. Like the latter, Maria and Mary, the heroines of the two novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both find outlets for their passion outside marriage. In the late Victorian period there were also the New Woman novels in England, mostly about women forced to become independent when their parents died before they were married; though they usually exert their independence through success in business rather than in bed. In Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman the heroine becomes a journalist after her father dies and has to swim in the sharkinfested waters of Grub Street. After their photographer father dies, the sisters in The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy decide to carry on his business. One of the sisters however is ‘behind the age. She was an anachronism, belonging by rights to
the period when young ladies played the harp, wore ringlets, and went into hysterics.’ But the more modern sister tries to convince her. Think of all the dull little ways by which women, ladies, are generally reduced to earning their living! But a business – that is so different. It is progressive; a creature capable of growth; the very qualities in which women’s work is dreadfully lacking.
American literature has no such long tradition of strong women authors; Anne Bradstreet was a pious Puritan and despite Emily Dickinson’s occasional Wild Nights she was a quiet homebody. Louisa May Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and wrote spicy novels with strong women, like A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline’s Passion and Punishment but she published them under a gender-neutral pseudonym (AM Barnard); in the books she published under her own name and became famous for, the dutiful Little Women grew up to become dutiful Good Wives. Not only is there a lack of strong female characters written by female authors in earlier American
literature, there is also a lack of strong female characters written by men; think of Poe’s pale, decaying women, Hawthorne’s literally ghost-like Alice Pyncheon. Pocahontas was a strong American woman, but she was first popularised by an Englishman, John Davis, and later made more famous by another Englishman, William Makepeace Thackeray. If you count Henry James as an American you have Isabel Archer and Daisy Miller, but the fluentFrench-speaking James had moved permanently to England by the time he created them; his friends and influences were all English and French. (James lived in Lamb House, later occupied by EF Benson,
who was a neighbour of Radclyffe Hall, and by Rumer Godden.) Hester Prynne, despite her scarlet letter, was not actually a sinner at all, even by Puritan standards, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie was just a victim of circumstances. The Amazonian women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland were just her fantasy, while the lot of the narrator in Yellow Wallpaper – shut up, in both senses, by her husband – was her reality. Kate Chopin’s Désirée meekly walks off into the wilderness with her baby and disappears when her husband rejects her for being black, though Edna Pontollier in Chopin’s The Awakening of 1899 finds outlets for her passion, outside marriage, with two men; naturally she comes to a sticky end, drowning herself like Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native. Tess Durbeyfield, meanwhile, is executed for killing her rapist. Early death by wasting disease or suicide seem to be the twin redemptions of choice for adulteresses – though not adulterers – created by men: Zola’s Thérèse Raquin is paralysed by a stroke, his Nana gets smallpox, Flaubert’s
Emma Bovary drinks poison and Dostoevsky’s Anna Karenina throws herself under a train. Effi Briest dies aged twenty-nine after her husband kills her lover; the flirtatious Daisy Miller dies of ‘Roman fever.’ Hester Prynne survives, though she still wears her scarlet letter; passionate women in novels written by women do much better than in novels written by men.
ANAÏS NIN
I was living in a furnace of love, a blaze all around. Obsessional loves, passionate loves, sensual loves, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in contrast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination. Loving maternally, loving as the artist can love with all my senses. A passion for man, for woman, for change. Anaïs Nin
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (1903-1977) was possibly the most erotic writer of all time: practically every sentence she ever wrote was sensuous, sinuous and seductive. The diaries for which she is most famous are shot through with eroticism, even when she is describing the most ordinary events. She seems to see people, male and female, through a shimmering haze of sensuality. Nin believed women needed a different language to men to express their sensuality: ‘I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate.’ The only time Nin’s writing is completely unerotic is in the ‘erotica’ she wrote to order for the wealthy collector whom we have already mentioned in the Introduction: as we saw, he told her to take out the poetry and concentrate on the sex; he wanted pornography not erotica. Left to herself, everything Nin wrote was poetic and, even though sex is always hovering in the air, it is rarely explicit, coarse, or crude – unlike the writing of her lover Henry Miller, which we looked at earlier.
Nin’s love of revelling in the luxuriance of language is possibly explained by the fact that she was trilingual: she was born in Paris to Spanish parents but lived most of her life in New York. Nin’s father was the composer and pianist Joaquín Nin, who was born in Cuba but grew up in Spain; her mother was Rosa Culmell y Vaurigaud, a classical singer, who was the eldest daughter of the Danish consul to Havana; Nin’s grandmother was Anaïs Vaurigaud y Bourdin, of French descent but born in Cuba. Nin had a very exotic heritage. When Nin was still young the family moved to Berlin and then Brussels in pursuit of the father’s
career. Then, after the father whom she idolised – rather too much, as we shall soon see – left the family for another woman, Anaïs moved with her mother and brothers first to Barcelona, where Joaquín’s family looked after them, and then to New York, where her mother’s sister lived, when Anaïs was ten. Nin’s earliest journal entries were in French though most of her works are in English (the diaries switch to English in 1920); somehow the seductiveness of the French language seems to bring out the eroticism in writers, perhaps especially female writers, and Nin never lost that sensuality when she wrote in English. Also, her childhood environment had added the fire and drama of Spanish into the mix of Nin’s unique linguistic world (Anaïs’ brothers always spoke Spanish to each other). Meeting her father after an absence of twenty years, she notices the books leaning against each other, the soft backs of French books yielding under the stiffbacked English books… The lightness and swiftness of his Spanish voice, his Spanish words
bowing and smiling between the French. Note that she sees French as soft, English as hard and Spanish as light and swift. In her book The Future of the Novel, in which she advocates poetic writing in the novel, Nin talks about her fascination with and passion for the English language while it was still new to her in the period after she had moved to New York, how her relationship with the language – always as something of an outsider – shaped the experimental, exploratory nature of her writing. For many of the foreign-born, studying English means discovering the extent and possible expansion of it, not taking it for granted. I was as fascinated with the range of
English as a musician would be with hundreds of new chords, new instruments. I resisted colloquialisms not per se but because they are limited, flat, and inexpressive… There is nothing to equal the fervour of the foreign-born for a new language. Every word is new. Every word is reconsidered, reborn. I was studying at Public School no. 9 when my English teacher advised me kindly to go around the corner and buy up an armful of magazines to learn everyday English because she was alarmed by my ‘affected’ use of literary English. My reaction to this was to revolt and to drop out of school. I felt I could educate myself more by reading than by the methods employed at the time.
It is easy to forget that, despite all her many parallel and serial affairs, with both men and women and sometimes both at once, Nin was a married woman from the age of twenty until her death in her seventies. She married Hugh Guiler, a banker and later an artist and film maker, in 1923. He had an exotic background too: born in Boston he lived in Puerto Rico as a child, went to school in Scotland and then to Columbia University in New York. Hugh’s parents did not approve of the poor, Cuban Catholic Anaïs, so naturally they married in a Catholic church in Cuba: Anaïs was always contrary. She returned to Paris with him in 1924 and they lived there until 1939, when the invasion of the Nazis forced almost all the American expats, including practically the whole literary scene, to move back
to America. Guiler was astonishingly tolerant of his wife’s sexual adventures but, throughout everything, he was the only man she ever completely trusted, the harbour where she could return to shelter from the stormy waters that she sailed solo, without map or compass, in search of erotic adventures. Sometimes in the diaries, even in the early 1940s when she is in the depths of paranoid despair – perhaps especially when she is in the depths of paranoid despair – she returns in her thoughts to Hugh. April 13, 1940 I only trust Hugh. Wind in the street appears malicious, People’s slightest word is a humiliation. I see desertion all around me. I feel hatred, rebellion, resentment, loneliness. I am very near to absolute despair. It is a lie, it is madness. With it,
violent erotic longings. I dream of whorehouses, of being possessed by many men, of being possessed to the point of exhaustion, saturation, of touching the depths of sensuality such as one touches only at the beginning of passion. Strangest of all, I write, I create, and stranger still, I am physically stronger than I have ever been. Until the first extracts from Nin’s diaries were published in 1966 – all her journals have since been
published: her original, handwritten notebooks run to 35,000 pages – she was a little-known writer, though connected very closely to many literary and artistic figures both in Paris and New York. She had already published five novels between 1946 and 1958: Ladders to Fire; Children of the Albatross; The FourChambered Heart; A Spy in the House of Love and Seduction of the Minotaur, which were collected and republished together as Cities of the Interior in 1959. These were all selfpublished by Nin’s own press and none was a commercial, or even especially a critical success until A Spy in the House of Love, which sold 100,000 copies in the late 1950s, well after it had been first published. But after the diaries and especially the erotica were published, Nin became famous and popular, not to say adored, especially posthumously. Virtually all her works are in print, including unexpurgated versions of the diaries; in the thirty years after her death in 1977 at least twenty books of new, original Nin material were published, including nine volumes of her diary and three volumes of letters, as well as two volumes of
erotica and several books including selections from them. She even has a magazine devoted to her: A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal. I have written in depth about Nin’s three-way relationship with Miller and his wife June Anderson, as well as her relationships with many of the Paris and New York avant-garde and her dealings with Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press in Everybody I Can Think of Ever and I wrote about Nin’s book of literary criticism, The Future of the Novel, in my book Amongst Those Left, so I will not go over this ground again. But I will look here at some of her fiction, including the so-called erotica, though, as I said in the Introduction, she did not think these works were at all erotic, and I agree, even though they are amongst her most popular works.
HOUSE OF INCEST In this intense novella-length prose poem, published in 1936 by Nin’s own Siana Press (Anais backwards), the incest is not literal – though Nin did have incestuous thoughts about her father, as we will see in more detail later. Here she says: Joy of the father’s hand upon the daughter’s breast, the joy of the fear racking her. Her costume tightly pressed around her so that her breasts heave and swell
under his fingers, while the city is rent by lightning, and spits under the teeth of fire, great blocks of a gaping ripped city sinking with the horror of obscenity and falling into the sea with the hiss of the eternally damned. In this work the word incest is not meant literally, it is a metaphor for her self-love, from which she cannot break free: ‘If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other.’ Later, in the novella Lilith, she attributes the origins of this selflove as well as the obsession with her father, her ‘other,’ to the time she started to write her diary at the age of eleven: her adored father had left and was an ocean away; her mother was always out looking for work. And so, little by little, I shut myself up within the walls of my diary. I hold long conversations with myself, through the diary. I talk to my diary, address it by name, as if it were a living person, my other self perhaps… Only in the diary could I reveal my true self, my true feelings. What I really desired was to be
left alone with my diary and my dreams of my father. In solitude I was happy. My head was seething with ideas. I described every phase of our life in detail, minute, childish details which seem ridiculous and absurd now, but which were intended to convey to my father the need that we felt for his presence. When she had finished the first volume of the diary, Nin wanted to
send it to her father in France, but her mother told the eleven-year-old Anaïs that it would never reach him in the post. Many years later, Nin was in therapy with the psychotherapist Otto Rank, formerly a close colleague of Sigmund Freud, who had earlier published The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend. She was seeing him at the time she wrote House of Incest, with its obsession with the other. I borrowed your visibility and it was through you I made my imprint on the world. I praised my own flame in you. THIS IS THE BOOK YOU WROTE AND YOU ARE THE WOMAN I AM Only our faces must shine twofold – like day and night – always separated by space and the evolutions of time. Nin’s narrator is here addressing her other, the mythical (in the sense of
being mythologised) Sabina, a name she reuses in her later novels: Her feeling of fragility was so strong that she was startled by the appearance of a woman at her left, who walked in step with her. Sabina glanced at her profile and was comforted by her tallness, the assurance of her walk. She too was dressed in black, but walked without terror. And then she vanished. The mirror had come to an end. Sabina had been confronted with herself, the lifesize image walking beside the shrunken self, proving to her once more the disproportion between her feelings and external truth. At many other times Sabina had experienced smallness, a
sense of gigantic dangers, but she faced in the mirror a tall, strong, mature woman of thirty, equal to her surroundings. In the mirror was the image of what she had become and the image she gave to the world. In House of Incest, Sabina mirrors the narrator, her other: ‘We lived in Byzance. Sabina and I… she and I, we recognized each other; I her face and she my legend.’ The narrator rhapsodises the calm mutuality of relationships between women, so very different to the restless, combative relationship between woman and man. ‘There is no mockery between women. One lies down at peace as on one’s own breast.’ She apostrophises Sabina, her mythical mirror-image: ‘Your beauty drowns me, drowns the core of me. When your beauty burns me I
dissolve as I never dissolved before man. From all men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you.’ Despite the mythologizing, Sabina and the narrator are both sexual as well as mythological creatures, not just with each other, but with men too. Sabina’s face was suspended in the darkness of the garden. From the eyes a simoun wind shriveled the leaves and turned the earth over; all things which had run a vertical course now turned in circles, round the face, around HER face… A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance; a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm… The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman – like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession,
shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again… Deep into each other we turned our harlot eyes. She was an idol in Byzance, an idol dancing with legs parted; and I wrote with pollen and honey. The soft secret yielding of woman I carved into men’s brains with copper words; her image I tattooed in their eyes.
WINTER OF ARTIFICE
The time during which Nin was in love with both Henry Miller and his wife June Anderson was covered in the book Henry and June, the unexpurgated version of her diaries of the period October 1931 to October 1932, but it was also fictionalised in a novella called Djuna, which was included with two
other novellas in the rare, indeed almost unknown, original edition of Winter of Artifice, her third published book and her second volume of fiction: her first book was a study of DH Lawrence and her second was House of Incest. Winter of Artifice was originally published in 1939 by Obelisk Press, in their signature plain cover with the drawing of an obelisk. It was part of the three-way deal which we saw earlier, between Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Nin, where they agreed to subsidise each other’s works to avoid the stigma of vanity publishing. The timing was terrible. In her diary for 17 October 1939, Nin wrote: ‘My beautiful Winter of Artifice, dressed in an ardent blue, sombre, like the priests of Saturn in ancient Egypt, with the design of the obelisk on an Atlantean sky, stifled by the war, and Kahane’s death.’ Kahane had indeed just died and the Nazis had just invaded Poland; the American expats were beginning to leave Paris. Very few copies of the original book were published and those that were had mostly disappeared. Nin was unwilling to mail them to the United States because of her fear of censorship
and when she went back to New York herself in 1939 she did not dare take copies with her. But censorship was not her only problem with America. In Paris, in the thirties, many writers around me were breaking the molds of the conventional novel and experimentation was encouraged. More than that, French literature at that time was dedicated to war against the cliché, the obvious, the traditional, and the conventional – all energies were engaged in innovation. Even those who were not dogmatic surrealists were influenced by its spirit. Chapters of House of Incest were included in the last number of Transition [the Paris-based avant-garde
literary magazine that featured dada and surrealism]. I did not realize that with war and emigration to America would come a totally different kind of struggle. In France we felt a part of a pioneering group, but in America we found ourselves isolated and in the minority. Literature was for the masses, it was in the hands of the social realists, dominated by the social critics, all more concerned with politics than psychology or human beings in particular. In America the aim was not to be original, individualistic, an innovator, but to please the majority, to standardize, to submit to the major trends. One of Nin’s first acts when she got New York was to try to get Winter of
Artifice published but she could not drum up any interest. ‘When I submitted Winter of Artifice and the stories from Under a Glass Bell, I was told that no one would be interested in books dealing with life in Paris, and that the style was too esoteric and subjective… My answer was to buy a printing press and handset and print three hundred copies of the two books which were sold by the Gotham Book Mart.’ This was in 1942 and she called the press Gemor after her then lover Gonzalo Moré. Nin made many textual corrections for the new edition, but most significantly she omitted the Djuna section, so that this novella was almost entirely unknown – though some of the scenes from Djuna reappeared, heavily rewritten, in the second section of the 1946 novel Ladders to
Fire – until a facsimile of the original Obelisk version was published in 2009 by Sky Blue Press, which specialises in Nin’s work. Djuna describes almost exactly the same events as those covered in in Henry and June, but in a lightlyfictionalised – I intend to ignore the difficult question of how fictional her diaries, indeed any diaries, are – and more poetic version. The diaries were of course published much later, and at the time they were written were not intended for publication, so Nin clearly did not want the story of the triangular, bisexual relationship, in either version, to be available at the time. In this fictional version, Henry is Hans, June is Johanna and Nin herself is Djuna. (It is not obvious
why she chose this name: there is no obvious connection with Djuna Barnes, who had left Paris in 1931, though Nightwood was exactly the kind of book that Nin loved; in her diary for this period, Nin said the name Djuna was based on the ‘mystic Anaïs,’ though Barnes herself said that her name had been invented by her father, based on combining her brother’s way of saying the word moon as ‘nuna’ when he was a baby, and a book her father had read, called
Prince Djalma.) There are often parallels between the diary and novella versions of the story: in most cases the diary is more explicit and the novella is more poetic. Here is an example: the first extract is from Henry and June, the second from Djuna. Later, a small dark room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately, the richness of Henry’s voice and mouth. The feeling of sinking into warm blood. And he, overcome with my warmth and moisture. Slow penetration, with pauses and with twists, making me gasp with pleasure. I have no words for it; it is all new to me. The first time Henry made love to me, I realised a terrible fact – that Hugo [Nin called her husband Hugo] was sexually too large for me, so that my pleasure has not been unmixed, always somewhat painful. Has that been the secret of my dissatisfaction? I tremble as I write it. I don’t want to dwell on it, on its effect on my life, on my hunger. My hunger is not abnormal. With Henry I am content. We come to a climax, we
talk, we eat and drink, and before I leave he floods me again. I have never known such plenitude. It is no longer Henry; and I am just woman. I lose the sense of separate beings. And here is a very similar scene in Djuna. All things were born anew in the shabby room when my dress fell on the floor. I could not hear his words. His voice rumbled over the surface of my skin, like another caress. I had no power against his voice. It came straight from him into me. I could stuff my ears and still it would find its way into my blood and make it rise. ‘I’m afraid of breaking you,’ he said. ‘I feel a little embarrassed
with you. You seem so fragile.’ He covered me with his coat. ‘Only come to me again, come close to me, come close. I promise you it will be beautiful. I will never hurt you. I could never hurt you.’ ‘But I don’t care if you do,’ I said laughing. ‘I want you to be always yourself, and I know there is cruelty in you too. I want to grant you all the privileges; you can be undivided, artist and saint, hungry animal and clown.’ The fictional Hans, like the actual Henry Miller, as self-revealed in Tropic of Cancer and elsewhere, has difficulty seeing Djuna/Anaïs as anything other than an inferior being (as we saw earlier, Miller tended to refer to all women as cunts and treat them accordingly). Hans says to Djuna:
‘I’ve never fucked a woman with a mind, you know. A woman who has written books. They always scared me away but you… Well, you don’t look like a writer at all! You have the loveliest, loveliest ass.’ The exact compliment every female writer needs. The arrival of Henry’s/Hans’ – wife changes everything. This is how Nin describes first seeing June in her diary, as it appears in Henry and June. A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry’s wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a pure beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even
imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything she asked of me. Henry faded, she was color, brilliance, strangeness. And this is how she describes their first meeting in Djuna. As she walked heavily towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the doorway, I saw for the first time the woman I had always been hungry to know. I saw Johanna’s eyes burning. I heard her voice so rusty and tragic saying: ‘I wanted to see you alone’ and immediately I felt drowned by her beauty, felt that I would do anything Johanna might ask of me.
In Djuna, Johanna is even more mythologised than is June in the diaries, and it is made even more clear that June is Anaïs’ other, her mirror-image, herself seen through a glass darkly, as was Sabina in House of Incest. The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna. I have infinite possibilities for delicate perversions. I have the capacity to burn like a torch, the love of suffering, the love of terror and death and of descending. Evil is life; I want to live out the evil in me. I want to surrender to Johanna. I want the life she led, desecration, humiliation, poisons, savagery. The demon in me is like the demon in Johanna. It is a demon of frenzy. I feel such exaltation at the thought of burning and dying quickly. I want to live out my caprices, my fantasies, my erotic desires. In Johanna I love the darkness, and the abyss. With Johanna, Djuna/Nin can be herself: Johanna does not take anything from her. With Hans she
has felt herself being drained, ‘caught in the immense jaws of his desire,’ felt herself ‘dissolving, yielding up to his dark hunger.’ But this, perhaps, is what she wants. ‘Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods and my body, take all you want. I am being fucked by a cannibal.’ She only resents Hans when what he steals from her is her work. She feels that Hans is not only draining her sexually, but is feeding off her writing. ‘You stole a phrase
from me only the other day, do you know? You take what you need like a beast feeding.’ But perhaps, she thinks, this will cause her to become more independent, both as a woman and as a writer. It’s good. He forces me back again into isolation. I have no more devotions. I am hungry and I am going to eat; I am going to steal, to sell myself, to wander. I’m going to love my own books better than I love Hans’. No more sacrifices for him. If he acts ridiculously, insanely or sentimentally enough for me to hate him I will be able to attend to my own growth and become a magnificent woman. Until now I have been a woman in whose womb men could rest in security… Make literature! Seek new words in the dictionary, chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mold. Style, form, discipline. Whip yourself and others into a frenzy. Lie. Exhaust yourself and your capacity for emotion. But meeting Johanna has brought Djuna to a literary crisis of a
different kind: ‘I’m ashamed of all that I have written,’ she tells Johanna, ‘I want to throw away everything and begin anew for you, in a new language.’ Neither version of the story of this love triangle includes any explicit descriptions of any physical activity between the two women, but in Djuna, strangely, the fact of a physical relationship is made more clear than in Henry and June.
Johanna and I in a taxi. My arms becoming strong. It is I who am throwing back Johanna’s head. It is I who am kissing Johanna’s throat. And Johanna melting. An orgy of soft flesh. Johanna in my arms taking refuge from her fears of me, so that I might not judge her, not measure her. I would not see her while she lay in my arms. I could see only the forked lightning of her fear. And later it is made clear that this relationship is consummated, though, again, nothing is described explicitly or crudely: this is a mythical, mystical passion, a union, metaphorical as well physical, between Nin and her other, a completion of herself, described lyrically in this extended extract – a
marvellous example of poetic, erotic writing of the kind that Nin advocated and excelled at herself. We stood before the night which belonged to us as two women emerging out of sleep. We stood on the first step of our timidity, of our faith, before the long night which belonged to us. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of calculation, of premeditation, or of experience… She wanted to stand at the beginning of all things. And I wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells… Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. I trod into it lightly. Caresses of down, and Johanna could do nothing against the moth invasion. Myrrh between
our breasts. Incense in our mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the passing of wind in the tips of our fingers. The skin flowered under the brushing of lips and we discovered a softness like that of clouds about to burst and spill their honey. Clouds about to burst. Kisses curling into the conch-shell necks. The soft raised mounts touching as the salted pollen burned a passageway. Tendrils of hair bristling and between our closed lips a moan, a sigh, a sob. Pounding of drums delirious sensual diffusions. Effulgence of face and breasts… Cool. Green-eyed fury and passion. The defence of lies. Weaving lies swiftly, like spiderwebs. Lies. Lies. I love no man. I love no man. ‘But I see his image in your eyes. I feel him in you.’
As we saw, Nin reworked part of the Djuna story and inserted it into the second half of the 1946 novel Ladders to Fire. Here, the physical relationship between the fictional Nin and the fictional June, now called Lillian and Sabina, is only implied, but their status as mirrors of each other, the completion of each other, which was brought up with the Sabina of House of Incest, is reinforced. Lillian wanted to reach out to her, into these violet shadows. She saw that Sabina wanted to be she as much as she wanted to be Sabina. They both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. There was in both of them the dark strain of wanting to become the other, to deny what they were, to transcend their actual selves. Sabina desiring Lillian’s newness, and Lillian desiring Sabina’s deeply marked body.
The second novella in the Winter of Artifice collection is called Lilith. It is apparently unconnected to the first story, though the women from both stories return in the third story in the collection, The Voice. In Gnosticism, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, but she would not submit to him. He sulked, she went off and God made Adam another wife. Lilith became a succubus, coming to men in erotic dreams and stealing their semen. She is something of an underground feminist icon and is surprisingly underrepresented in erotic writing, especially in erotic writing by women, though this may perhaps be because she also steals children. Lilith is however well represented, though not erotically, in Victorian poetry: George William Russell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George MacDonald all wrote poems about her, and she was the subject of
a mystical, votive text by Aleister Crowley, which is deeply erotic: ‘To those chaste chants I wooed thee by, the moment that touching thee, my fruit dissolved to dust. Fair-seeming Sodom-apple! Yet thy kisses smote all my spine to shuddering ecstasies!’ What woman would not want to be called a fair-seeming Sodom apple? Lilith is first described in the Zohar, the mystical book of the Jewish Kabbalah, as dwelling outside the Garden of Eden, living ‘by that flaming sword, for she emerged from the side of that flame. As the flame revolves she flees and roams the world, finding children who deserved to be punished. She toys with them and kills them.’ Lilith is the name the narrator gives herself in this apparently autobiographical tale, of Nin’s relationship with her father: he
leaves the family for another woman when Nin is eleven and she goes with her mother to New York; it is not until twenty years later that she meets him again. The father is everything to her: ‘Everything springs from him, even the lies which originated from the books I had read in his library.’ In her mind, she concatenates her physical father with her spiritual one. ‘My true God was my father. At communion it was my father I received, and not God. I closed my eyes and swallowed the
white bread with blissful tremors. I embraced my father in holy communion.’ But Lilith is not only writing to her father, she is writing to her other self; this is where the other begins to emerge, the other represented by Sabina, Johanna and many of her female characters is created at this early age by the act of writing, an act that Nin was never to give up. In this record which I have faithfully kept for twenty years I speak of my diary as of my shadow, my double; I say I will only marry my double. As far as I knew this double was the diary which was full of reflections, like a mirror, which could change shape and colour and serve all kinds of imaginative substitutions. This diary which I had intended to send to my father, which was to be a revelation of my love for him, became by an accident of fate a secretive thing, another wall between myself and that world which it seemed forbidden me ever to enter.
It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in every one; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him. It emerges later that her need for the other goes back to a simple remark Nin’s father had made to her when she was young. ‘My father had said once that I was ugly.’ He had only meant that she had been born ‘full of bloom, dimpled, roseate,’ but when she nearly died of a fever at the age of two she lost the ‘bloom, the curls, the glow.’ Nin took this to heart and never forgot it. ‘It took the love of others, the worship of painters to
save me from its effect.’ Whatever she saw in the mirror, ‘I remained unconvinced. All I could see was this phrase of my father’s… His paternal role was summed up in the one word: criticism.’ This explains both Nin’s need for the other in herself and in other women, and her need for men to desire her. Virginia Woolf said that ‘women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,’ but for Nin it is the opposite. From that moment on it was not the mirror which served me but others. It was the reflection of myself in desirous eyes which I relied on. What I saw in the mirror until the age of sixteen was not myself but my father’s
phrase. Even today I do not look into the mirror… I look into men’s eyes, into the mirror of men’s eyes. When she finally meets her father again, it is twenty years later, he is fifty-five, she is in her early thirties. She is nervous, overawed. He flirts with her as he always had with all women. ‘I do think,’ he said, ‘that we should give all this up for the sake
of each other. These women mean nothing to me. But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing adventure to something far more marvellous and deep, appeals so much to me… You know I’ve been your only great love.’ I did not want to say: ‘not my only great love,’ but he seemed to have guessed my thought because he turned his eyes completely away from me and added: ‘Remember, I am an old man, I haven’t so many years left to enjoy you.’ In the story Lilith it is not clear whether the father is simply being flirtatious in saying this, or whether he means it purely paternally; he does not at least seem to mean it sexually here. In the hotel where they stay together, they seem to have separate rooms; she talks about: ‘The white mosquito netting over my bed like an ancient bridal canopy… The mystical bride of my father.’ Nevertheless, there is a sexual tension crackling in the wires overhead and Nin interrupts the narrative to give us a long – several pages long – prose poem digression
using the metaphor of a classical orchestra, with her father as the conductor. Conductor of course can be understood in two senses: the person who directs the orchestra and the person through whom the music is conducted to the audience. This section, which, in Nin’s unique way, is both poetic and erotic, draws attention to the similarity between musical instruments and a woman’s body – as in Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres, where he draws the F-holes of a cello on the back of a portrait of a nude woman – and the sensuousness, the erotic potential, of drawing a bow over a string. It can be read as a very indirect, highly veiled sex scene – ‘the cello weeping, and the violins trembling, the beat of sex breaking through the middle and splitting the white notes and the black notes apart’ – but Nin says specifically here that music was a replacement
for a physical relationship between her and her father, not a metaphor for it. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that carried us into serenity, the voices which made the drum beat in us, sex, sex, sex, sex, desire, the bow of the violins passing between the legs, the curves of women’s backs yielding, the baton of the orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the strings snapping, the dissonances, the hardness, the flute weeping… music in the tongue, in the fingers, when the fingers seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in the fingers on the violin cords, and all desire mounting in space to fall again on the bellies, the bellies of women he fingered like a musician, their cries rising and falling with the heaving wind of
the question-marked opening of the cello, borne on the orchestra’s wings, and hurt and wounded by its knowledge of me… music falling from his finger-tips in place of caresses, music exchanged between us instead of love, yearning on five lines, the five lines of our thoughts, our reveries, our emotions, our unknown self, our giant self, our shadow. In the end, exposure to the reality of her actual, physical father disappoints her and love turns to resentment and hatred. ‘My anger and despair, my hatred and love of my father grew immense, smudged the whole world, tainted the sky.’ Nin ends the story Lilith with a reference to the abortion she had in 1931, which is also referred to in her diaries: The last time I had come out of the ether it was to look at my dead child, a little girl with long eyelashes and slender hands. She was dead. The little girl in me was dead too. The woman had been saved.
And with the little girl died the need of a father. Although Lilith is ambiguous as to whether Nin had a physical relationship with her father, her diary entries are not. When the unexpurgated version of the journals for this period were published as Incest in 1992 (a confusing title, given the earlier House of Incest; a cynic would suggest the publishers were hoping for scandalised reviews:
if so it worked), the ‘truth’ emerged: there was a physical relationship when they took a holiday together. However, we know that Nin rewrote and reshaped her journals over time, and we also know that she did not always tell the literal truth, even to her other self in the diaries: Nin did not do literal. So we ‘know’ that, while they did have separate rooms, she slept with him at night, though she did not have an orgasm with him. ‘I had the man I loved with my mind; I had him in my arms, in my body.’ She talks about how, ‘timid
and unwilling, yet passionately moved,’ but with a ‘strange violence,’ she lifts up her nightdress and lays on top of him. ‘My yielding was immense, with my whole being, with only that core of fear.’ At night – caresses. He begs me to undress and lie at his side. His caressing suppleness and mine, the feelings which run from head to toes – vibrations of all the senses, 1000 new vibrations… A new union, a union of delicacies, subtleties, exaltations, keener awareness and perception and tentacles. A joy which spreads in vaster circles, a joy for me without climax because of that deeper, inner holding back. Yet missing only the climax and revealing by this very absence what intensity he and I could bring to the envelopment, to the radius and rainbows of a climax… Endless stories about women. Exploits. Teaching me at the same time the last expertness in love – the games, the subtleties, new caresses. I had at moments the feeling that here was Don Juan indeed, Don Juan who had
possessed more than a thousand women, and I was lying there learning from him, and he was telling me how much talent I had, how amazing and amorous my sensibility, how beautifully tuned and responsive I was… ‘You walk like a courtesan from Greece. You seem to offer your sex when you walk.’ The third story in Winter of Artifice is The Voice, a strange interlinking of the first two stories, through the medium of a psychiatrist – presumably based on Otto Rank, who was both Nin’s therapist and lover – who is treating both Djuna and Lilith, who of course are aspects of the same woman, both of whom are Nin herself – but is never seen. One of them – it is not specified which, though it does not matter –
refers again to her stillbirth as part of a very long monologue to the unseen Voice. I wish I could see your face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, and I was not told why, I was told it was for appendicitis, and when I was well I found out I had no more woman’s parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can’t have a child. But that is good. I don’t like men, they have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child, that means I am a cripple, men want to love me. (In fact, it was not true that she could not have children: in her diary for August 22, 1940 she says that she has found she is pregnant.) The two women, the two aspects, the mirror images, do meet: Djuna is the more
sensual of the two, the aspect of Nin who relates to, responds to June/Johanna, Lilith the more repressed aspect, the one who can only relate to her father, until the need for him dies along with the child inside her. ‘Djuna felt everything in her skin, her fingertips, her hair, the soles of her feet… Djuna ate and drank people; they passed into her.’ But Lilith herself begins to feel more like this: ‘before she looked at the day like a stranger. Now she felt the day all over her body, the temperature of it, the sensual touch of it.’ Djuna walked slowly after leaving Lilith. The day was softer and the snow was melting under her feet. She felt in love with everyone, in love with the whole city. She remembered the tendrils of wild hair on Lilith’s neck, and felt herself inside of Lilith, burning with the cold fire which devoured
her. She heard again her voice charged with secret pain, a voice wet with tears passing through a wide mouth made for laughter, a wide, laughing mouth, avid and animal. In the end, as Djuna and Lilith merge, so do the Voice, Hans and the father – who is never named: he is simply The Father, the universal father image, the father figure she spends her life looking for; all the male figures in the book, arguably in her whole life, are aspects of the father. However, as we have seen, the actual father does not live up to this mythologizing. She recognised him. He was the transformable man. He was the man without identity. He came into the dream and acted like a lover. He took her, but if she looked at him a second time he was no longer the man she had given herself to, he was
changed. He was not the lover, he was the father. Or if it was the father who first came into the dream now he turned into the Voice, or oftener still into a woman with dishevelled hair as in moments of love… The faces changed. All the personages were constantly altering, and the moment she recognised them they became someone else. She was wearing a light, airy green dress. She was expecting the Voice, but it was Hans who came. She felt his tongue in her mouth. He began to embrace her but then he vanished. She felt in great despair. The atmosphere was yellow and heavy. When she came back the Voice had killed himself with a knife. He lay crumpled up and he looked like a child. She begged him to come to life. In the corner, watching, was the father. She was embraced and possessed by Hans, but when she looked at him it was the father. The father had more sperm than any man. The richness of the father in sperm was frightening. He said: ‘My daughter, I have no more god. I
have no more god.’ He was the god. His embrace awakened her because she had come to an unutterable place. She was struck blind. She had no more feelings. She let this inhuman, this impossible flow of sperm into her from the God and she became blind. The other women around him wept because the daughter was being loved by the father.
DELTA OF VENUS It is an interesting fact that very few writers have of their own accord sat down to write erotic tales or confessions. Even in France, where it is believed that the erotic has such an important role in life, the writers who did so were driven by necessity – the need of money. At the time Nin wrote this, in the 1940s, it was largely true; it was still largely true when Nancy Friday
published My Secret Garden. We saw in the Introduction that Nin and some of her equally impecunious writer friends in the New York of that time wrote erotica to order at a dollar a page for a wealthy collector. He had originally asked Henry Miller, who did write some pieces for him but stopped when he was offered a contract by Doubleday for the book which became The AirConditioned Nightmare. Nin offered to finance the book tour and to raise money she offered to take over the writing of the erotica. She showed the collector’s agent, Barnette Ruder (Miller always suspected that Ruder was in fact the client rather than just the agent) a version of her 1932 diary which contained the descriptions of her relationship with Miller and June, asking if she could take over the job. As Nin relates in her diary: New York, November 30, 1940 Again I opened up to Henry – he had to woo me again. We lay in bed in his hotel room, and talked about my idea which is bearing fruit – that while Henry could no longer write erotica for the old millionaire I could give him
copies of the diary in exchange for money for Henry’s trip… Faced with Henry’s dependence again, I suggested we show the diary to Barnette Ruder, the collector of rare books. This is a strange story – he is a Jew who looks like [Otto] Rank. I have never seen him, only a snapshot of him. When Henry came to New York, Ruder liked him and often invited him to dinner, gave him presents and a little money now and then… One day he told Henry that he had a client who was an elderly man, very rich, who had no sensual life at all, was interested in Henry’s writing, especially the sexual element, and thought it might have a miraculous effect on his own paralyzed life. He was
willing to pay Henry one hundred dollars a month to write one hundred pages or so especially for him, mostly on sex. And then, almost like in Dante’s Inferno, Henry was condemned to write about sex. Ruder agreed with Nin’s proposal, and between 1940 and 1942, Nin herself was wracked by the flames of the inferno. She wrote at least 850 pages of erotica, not including the ones written by the group of starving writers she conscripted to satisfy the demand. As we saw, Nin regarded herself as the mother confessor for such a group… the Madame of an unusual house of literary prostitution. It was a very artistic ‘maison’, I must say, a one-room studio with skylights, which I painted to look like
pagan cathedral windows… Most of the erotica was written on empty stomachs. Now, hunger is very good for stimulating the imagination; it does not produce sexual power, and sexual power does not produce unusual adventures. The more hunger, the greater the desires, like those of men in prison, wild and haunting. So we had here a perfect world in which to grow
the flower of eroticism… As for me, my real writing was put aside when I set out in search of the erotic. These are my adventures in that world of prostitution. To bring them into the light was at first difficult. The sexual life is usually enveloped in many layers, for all others – poets, writers, artists. It is a veiled woman, half-dreamed. But the literary atmosphere in New York was completely different from that of Paris, as she had already discovered: the conservatism of styles matched by conservatism of content, a puritan prudishness unknown in France. ‘France has had a tradition of literary erotic writing, in fine, elegant style. When I first began to write for the collector I thought there was a similar tradition here, but found none at all. All I had seen was shoddy, written by secondrate writers. No fine writer seemed ever to have tried his hand at erotica.’ But, as Nin relates in a diary entry in October 1941, she and her cohorts would start a new tradition; they agreed that ‘vulgarity was excluded’ from the writing of this ‘snobbish literary house of
prostitution… I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.’ But, as we saw, the client wanted sex rather than poetry, and would not ‘allow us to make a fusion of sexuality and feeling, sensuality and emotion.’ This fusion of course is what all Nin’s writing, left to itself, achieves. Nin kept the carbons of all of these stories, even though she thought they were of little worth; in 1970 her lover, Rupert Pole – who became her literary executor after her death – suggested she should publish them. (She bigamously married Pole in 1955 while she was still married to Hugh
Guiler.) Nin was unwilling, but Pole persisted. He asked the editor John Ferrone, who in his time edited writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, for his opinion. Ferrone agreed that they should be published and took on the task of selecting and editing them into coherent stories and collecting them into two volumes. By this time, Nin was so ill that she could take no part in the process. The first volume, Delta of Venus, was published just after Nin’s death in 1977, and a second collection called Little Birds was published two years later (a selection from these two was later published under the title Eros Unbound; it does not contain any new material). Ferrone said that Nin’s estate got ‘more royalties from the sales of Delta alone than from all her previous books put together.’
The New York Times Book Review called it ‘joyous’ and Cosmopolitan magazine, which had dismissed Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden only four years earlier, called it ‘highly elegant naughtiness.’ But, whatever the reviewers said, these stories are not worthy of Nin, and it is tragic that for some people these are the only writings of hers they will ever encounter. In retrospect, one wishes that the collector had never accepted her offer and looked elsewhere for less literary and poetic writers who would have done a better job at giving him what he wanted; there were plenty of starving male hack writers in New York in 1940 who would have written cruder, raunchier stories for him – many of them had recently fled occupied France and, with America indecisive as to whether to join the war, jobs were hard to find. Fifteen years later, back in Paris, Maurice Girodias did a much better job of finding starving American writers who were able to turn off their literary conscience like a light and turn out dirty books for him. But then, Girodias didn’t ask writers who were principally poets and he had a
whole new Lost Generation of starving writers to draw on. In fact, reading the ‘unexpurgated’ versions of Nin’s diaries, all of which are now published, she could write a very good sex scene when she was writing for her diary, for her other, and not for a stranger; the sexually explicit interludes in the diaries are often more erotic than the published stories, because they are more personal, she is personally involved, she participated as a writer and wrote as a participant; usually she
wrote up the event only hours after it occurred. This extract is from Mirages, a volume of the unexpurgated journals, for October 17, 1940, and concerns the couple Max and Nina. Nin likes Nina’s ‘boylike simplicity, her youth and her shyness,’ she is ‘so slender, long like a boy, straight dark hair, sensitive.’ The three of them go to bed together; Anaïs is willing to take part in a threesome, but Nina is not. I asked him to lie next to her. I said: ‘Caress her.’ At first she continued to be rigid, and then Max caressed me. I tried awkwardly and gently to caress her, and to my great surprise, her legs slowly relaxed and the honey began to flow. She was such a child – a tiny sex, almost no breasts. I never liked kissing a woman’s sex, but I felt I had to. Meanwhile Max was taking me from behind. After a while he kissed her sex, and she responded. Then timidly, awkwardly, she began to caress me. Naturally I could not respond completely because I was not stirred. I felt estranged
The stories Nin wrote to order are successful neither as pornography nor as literary eroticism – the collector would probably have preferred stories more like the one above to the ones he got. But of course Nin knew that. It is easy to wish that Nin had banned publication of these stories – they do her literary reputation no favours even if they are her bestselling works; perhaps if she had not been so ill at the time they were being
prepared for publication she would have stopped them. Still, she did agree and in the 1976 preface to Delta of Venus she gives her reasons. Here in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure from a client who wanted me to ‘leave out the poetry,’ I believed that my style was derived from a reading of men’s works. For this reason I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. I put the erotica aside. Rereading it these many years later, I see that my own voice was not completely
suppressed. In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman’s language, seeing sexual experience from a woman’s point of view. I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men. If the unexpurgated version of the Diary is ever published [it has since been], this point of view will be established more clearly. It will show that women (and I, in the Diary) have never separated sex from feeling, from love of the whole man.
I do not intend to quote at length from these stories as, in the context of our study of literary eroticism, they are neither literary nor particularly erotic. However, as Nin says, occasionally her true voice is audible over the moaning, the humping of the bodies and the creaking of the bedsprings, so there are enough occasional quirks and points of literary interest along the way to make these two volumes worth a short detour and some passages worth quoting.
One of the stories in Delta is mildly interesting because it is almost avant-garde, being selfreflexive, and containing nested stories within the story, which is possibly even a true story, concerning Marianne, who was – according to the story at least – the secretary of Nin’s erotica collective. This young woman, Marianne, was a painter, and in the evenings she typed to earn a living… She had read Proust, Krafft-Ebing, Marx, Freud. And of course, she had had many sexual adventures, but there is a kind of adventure in which the body does not really participate. She was deceiving herself. She thought that, having lain down with men, caressed them, and made all the prescribed gestures, she had experienced sexual life. But it was all external. Actually her body had been numb, unformed, not yet matured. Nothing had touched her very deeply. She was still a virgin. I could feel this when she entered the room…
I could not help wondering, as I gave her my erotica to type, how it would affect her. Together with an intellectual fearlessness, curiosity, there was in her a physical prudishness which she fought hard not to betray. Marianne gives the narrator – Nin – a copy of a story she herself has written, which also purports to be a true story. In the story Marianne tells how, while she is painting, she receives a visit from a young man who wants her to paint him, naked. He gets an erection while standing in front of her, and maintains it while she draws him. Marianne’s story ends there, but Nin quizzes her about what happens next. It turns out that, after several similar sessions, Marianne discover has discovered that the man is an
exhibitionist, not interested in having sex with her at all. But she cannot help thinking about him. Marianne was growing thin and perishing with unsatisfied desire. She was also affected by the continuous copying of other people’s adventures, for now everyone in our group who wrote give his manuscript to her because she could be trusted. Every night little Marianne with the rich, ripe breasts bent over her typewriter and typed fervid words about violent physical happenings. Certain facts affected her more than others. She liked violence. That is why this situation with the young man was for her the most impossible of all situations. She could not believe that he would stand in a condition of physical excitement
and so clearly enjoy the mere fact of her eyes fixed on him, as if she were caressing him. The more passive and undemonstrative he was, the more she wanted to do violence to him. She dreamed of forcing his will, but how could one force a man’s will? Since she could not tempt him by her presence how could she make her desire him? She does persuade Fred to sleep with her but he will not penetrate her. ‘All he would do was to place his hands between her legs. While she caressed him with her mouth his hands opened her sex like some flower and he sought for the pistil.’ Eventually, it occurs to her to show him the stories that she has been typing. ‘They lay on the bed and read them together. He read the words aloud, with pleasure. He lingered over the descriptions.’ But even this is not enough to make him want to
penetrate her. Perhaps, as the collector suggested, this is because the stories written by Nin’s collective are not pornographic enough. Marianne suggest that Fred should write his own story, which he eventually does. Naturally she types it. It talks about how his exhibitionism started at the age of fifteen, when a woman would watch him naked on the balcony in Paris. Reading it, Marianne despairs. Fred wants her to take him to her painting classes so he can be a model, but Marianne feels this amounts to infidelity on his part, and is jealous: she cannot bear the idea of him being excited by the gaze of other women. ‘She raged. She tore up her drawings of him as if to tear his image from her eyes, the image of his golden, smooth, perfect body.’ And so ‘Marianne was left alone to type our erotica.’ The next story, ‘The Veiled Woman’ also concerns voyeurism: a
man is paid to have sex with a woman in a room completely surrounded by mirrors and only finds out later that they were twoway mirrors and he was being watched the whole time by wealthy voyeurs. Then there is another story in Delta about artists and models called ‘Artists and Models.’ (There are several more stories about artists’ models in Little Birds: Nin worked as a model herself at the
New York Art Workers’ Club for Women soon after she left school at the age of sixteen; in The Future of the Novel she talk about skipping lunch to write her diaries while working fifteen-hour days modelling.) One of the characters in this story is a hermaphrodite: not a common figure in pornography, but potentially a rich seam of erotic potential; sadly the story does not exploit it. ‘Everybody feels that I am not a boy. The women feel it. The men don’t know for sure. I am an artist.’ ‘What do you mean, Mafouka?’ ‘I mean that I am, like many artists, bisexual.’ ‘Yes, but the bisexuality of artists is in their nature.’ There is also a story in Delta called ‘Lilith,’ who is the semen-stealing, child-abducting succubus of Gnosticism and the name of one of Nin’s alter egos in Winter of Artifice. Lilith is ‘sexually cold, and her husband half knew it.’ In fact she is only cold in relation to him; he cannot understand her animal sexuality. The writing here – not to
mention the subject matter: women’s animal sexuality – is a lot more Nin and a lot less pornography than the client probably wanted. Lilith’s husband did not know the preludes to sensual desire, did not know any of the stimulants that certain jungle natures require, and so, instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle teasing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into his mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation – indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute
desert… if he had appeared with the same jungle body, treading heavily and wanting some pretext to leap out, embracing fury, feel the warmth and strength of his opponent, then they might have rolled down together and the biting might have become of another sort, and the bout might have turned into an embrace, and the hairpulling might have brought their mouths together, their teeth together, their tongues together. And out of the fury their genitals might have rubbed against each other, drawing sparks, and the two bodies would have had to enter each other to end this formidable tension. Another example of good writing in Delta – not of the poetic kind that we would expect from Nin but a very vivid and evocative description of a
taboo act, the kind of writing that does not draw attention to itself but brings a scene realistically to life – is a description of necrophilia in the story ‘Pierre.’ Although the ‘Pierre’ story had been written much earlier, Delta was not published until after Gabrielle Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac, so Wittkop could not have read it before she wrote her novel, but Nin’s tender, erotic description of the sexual attraction of the dead body is close to Wittkop’s, though Nin writes in the third person which takes away some
of the shock value. The erotic obsession here with a young, dead female body also recalls the Alain Robbe-Grillet novels we looked at earlier. Pierre has seen a man trying to get a body out of the water, he is waiting while the man goes to fetch the police. She lay stretched out, with her legs slightly parted, her arms straight along the sides. The sun was turning her skin to gold, and her wet hair look like seaweed. How he loved the way her body lay, exposed and defenceless. How he loved her closed eyes and slightly opened mouth. Her body had the taste of dew, of wet flowers, of wet leaves, of early morning grass. Her skin was like satin under his fingers. He loved her passivity and silence. He felt himself burning, tense. Finally he fell on her, and as he began to penetrate her, water flowed from between her legs, as if he were making love to a naiad. His movements caused her body to undulate. He continued to thrust himself into her, expecting
at any moment to feel her response, but her body merely moved in rhythm with his. Now he was afraid the man and the police would arrive. He tried to hurry and satisfy himself, but he couldn’t. He had never taken so long. The coldness and wetness of the womb, her passivity, his enjoyment so prolonged – yet he could not come. He moved desperately, to rid himself of this torment, to inject his warm liquid into her cold body. Oh, how we wanted to come at this moment, while kissing her breasts, and he frantically urged his sex within her, but still he could not come. He would be found there by the man and the policeman, lying over the body of the dead woman. Finally he lifted her body from the waist, bringing her up against his penis and pushing violently into her. Now he heard shouts all around, and at that moment he felt himself exploding inside of her. He withdrew, dropped the body, and ran away.
LITTLE BIRDS
The stories in Little Birds are of very much the same type as those in Delta, though here even more of the stories are about artists and models and, again, many of them are probably not what the collector was expecting. ‘The Woman on the Dunes’ is about erectile dysfunction, which is not a common problem in pornography. ‘Then at the moment
when he most desired her, his power suddenly failed him. She lay waiting for him, smiling and moist, and his desire wilted.’ There are also more stories about women’s raw but repressed sexuality. Lina is a liar who cannot bear her real face in the mirror. She has a face that proclaims her sensuality, lightning in her eyes, an avid mouth, a provocative glance. But instead of yielding to eroticism, she is ashamed of it. She throttles it. And all this desire, lust, gets twisted inside of her and churns a poison of envy and jealousy. Whenever sensuality shows its blossom, Lina hates it. She is jealous of everything, of everybody else’s loves… She was not meant for gentle Paris, for the cafés. She was meant for the African jungle, orgies, dancers. But she was not a free being, rippling in natural undulations of pleasure and desire. If her mouth, body, voice, were made for sensuality, its true flow was paralysed in her. Between her legs she was impaled on a rigid pole of
puritanism. All the rest of her body was loose, provocative. In ‘Two Sisters’ Nin has a quick sideswipe at censorious but hypocritical puritans. ‘In the cellar of their house their father made a ceremony of burning DH Lawrence’s books, which betrays how far behind this family was in the development of the sensual life. In spite of this, their father, with his eyes wet and
brilliant, liked to take the girls on his knees, slip his hand under the little dresses and caress them.’ One of the artist/model stories is called ‘The Maja’ – referring to Goya’s two paintings of a reclining woman, identical except that in one she is clothed and the other she is naked. The painter Novalis ‘no longer desired his wife when she was awake, with a puritanical expression and stern eyes. He desired her when she was asleep, abandoned, rich and soft.’ His wife realises that she has ‘lost his love. She did not know how to win it back. She became aware that he was in love with her body only has he painted it.’ She goes into his studio. And this is what she saw: on the floor of the studio, a painting of herself; and lying over it, rubbing himself against it, her husband, naked, with his hair wild, as she had never seen him, his penis erect. He moved against the painting lasciviously, kissing it, fondling it between the legs. He lay against it as he never had against her. He seemed driven into a frenzy, and all around him were the other
paintings of her, nude, voluptuous, beautiful. He threw a passionate glance at them and continued his imaginary embrace. It was an orgy with her he was having, with a wife he had not known in reality. At the sight of this, Maria’s own controlled sensuality flared up, free for the first time. When she took off her clothes, she revealed a Maria new to him, a Maria illumined with passion, abandoned as in the paintings, offering her body shamelessly, without hesitation to all his embraces, striving to efface the paintings from his emotions, to surpass them. Another story that combines the themes of artist’s models and women’s ‘animal’ sexuality is ‘A Model.’ The narrator has become an artist’s model; one Sunday she is
asked to pose by an illustrator. He says she is a ‘sexual angel.’ I have known other sexual angels. It is wonderful to see the change in them. These clear eyes that you can see through, these bodies that take such beautiful harmonious poses, these delicate hands… how they change when desire takes hold of them. The sexual angels! They are wonderful because it is such a surprise, such a change… There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transform at night from idealised, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.
The story ‘The Queen’ also combines a plot about artists and models with the idea of the sexual siren. Bijou ‘had been a whore and was colder than a statue.’ An artist who paints her says that prostitutes make ideal artist’s models because ‘in the whore the cold womb, constantly subjected to desire, produces a phenomenon. All the eroticism comes to the surface.’ Somehow or other even the hair of a whore seems impregnated with sex. The woman’s hair… It was the most sensual hair I have ever seen. Medusa must have had hair like this and with it seduced the men who fell under her spell. It was full of life, heavy, and as pungent as if it had been bathed in sperm. To me it always felt as if it had been wrapped around a penis and soaked in secretions. It was
the kind of hair I wanted to wrap around my own sex. It was warm and musky, oily, strong. It was the hair of an animal… She was like a womb turned inside out. Her mouth, not a mouth that made you think of a kiss, or of food; not a mouth to speak with, to form words, to greet you – no it was like the mouth of a woman’s sex itself, the shape of it, the way it moved – to draw you in, to rouse you – always moistened, red and alive like the lips of a caressed sex… As it undulated, like a wave about to curl and engulf one, it ordained the undulation of the penis, the undulation of the blood. As it grew moist, it drew out my erotic secretion.
WHITE STAINS
White Stains is not by Anaïs Nin. Probably not, anyway. It is hard to imagine why anyone ever thought it was, especially with such a crude title – Nin was never crude. Left to herself, Nin never wrote an inelegant sentence; even in the acknowledged
erotica her prose is poised and controlled. As we saw, ‘vulgarity was excluded’ from her house of ‘literary prostitution.’ Even in the diaries – perhaps especially in the diaries – when she is writing only to herself, every line of every entry of every day for the many years she wrote them is sinuous, sensuous, seductive. Nevertheless, White Stains was attributed to Nin some time ago, and the attribution stuck: it has been republished under her name several times since, including one incarnation as Olympia’s New Traveller’s Companion no. 129 (it sits on their alphabetic list next to White Thighs by ‘Frances Lengel’). Its history is complicated; it is partially unravelled in an essay called ‘Adventures in the Skin Trade: or, the Enigma of White Stains’ by Benjamin Franklin V, a Nin specialist. Even he cannot unequivocally say who wrote it, though he thinks it likely it was by Caresse Crosby (a fascinating woman whom you can read about in my other book, Everybody I Can Think of Ever). Crosby was a friend of Nin’s and a member of the house of literary prostitution, though she was not impecunious like the others
– she ran the avant-garde Black Sun Press with her wealthy husband Harry and published the kind of avant-garde writers that Nin associated with, including DH Lawrence. Crosby herself was exceptionally artistic and elegant, well connected with some of the best writers of the time, many of whom she published, and it is hard to imagine her stooping to these depths, even in fun, which was presumably why she was involved with Nin’s erotica collective in the first place. White Stains was originally published as being the work of Ernest Dowson, a minor English decadent poet who had died in 1900. The title was taken from a strange and mildly erotic work by Aleister Crowley (which I did not include in the section on him, partly because it was published in 1898, before my start date, but mainly because it is terrible). The earlier stories in the text do in fact read like badlywritten English Victorian pornography, but one of the later stories is specifically set in New York and dated 2 September 1919, when Dowson was long dead. It seems to me that these very crude stories
were not written by a woman at all, though I have no suggestion to offer as to who the real author might be. Like Delta of Venus and Little Birds, White Stains is a collection of unrelated pornographic stories. But whatever anyone thinks about the stories in those first two collections, they are at least competently and professionally written; the stories here are truly dreadful in both style and content. A few, mercifully short examples will save you having to read this awful book for yourself.
The first story, ‘Memories,’ is a pastiche of the kind of erotic bildungsroman – the coming to maturity of a young man – that we have already seen in the early part of the century, where the boy is seduced by a servant girl and goes on to have erotic adventures at school and afterwards. ‘Esmeralda’ is a kind of dirty fairy story, again written – I use the word written in its broadest sense – as a pastiche; it concerns a virgin and a swashbuckling soldier who has, naturally, a very big sword; he kisses her and ‘each drank in from the other a long draft of love.’ At this her ‘langor gave place to ardor… as she looked upon his rod for the last time before it ravished away her virginity.’ Then, after what seemed an age of pleasure, when the
inexperienced girl had been thrilled through and through by this embrace, he moved down just a little, placed one leg over hers, and allowed the heat of his tool to nestle in the mossy fringe a little above that love spot where their supreme love was soon to be consummated. It was too much for her equanimity; at that near approach of the male engine she cried out, and pressed her hot lips close against him. Firmly she held her body to that steel… But each was careful not to separate far enough to take for very long that fiery spur from the mossy nest where its red head was buried, only a couple of inches above the amorous lips, beyond which lay paradise, and directly under that mossy covering, already drinking in, through the skin, the magnetism of that lusty steel, was her
exquisitely sensitive clitoris, fully distended, and throbbing with mad anticipation.
And so on. And on. The title character in ‘Florence,’ the story set in New York, is ‘nineteen, dainty, but not slender, with rosy cheeks, and the brightest shining eyes, vivacious, jolly.’ She is a virgin, but not for long. ‘Her maidenhead gone, she offered not the slightest resistance to his onslaught, and scarcely had he penetrated to the citadel of love when she spent all over him, in the exuberance of nature.’ One story is called simply ‘Cunts;’ it begins: ‘Pretty young girls have nice tickly little cunts between their legs for ardent young men to put stiff pricks into. Let any young man see a young girl’s pretty. hairy cunt,
if it were written by a woman, and certainly not by Nin herself. It also uses the non-American spelling of arse, indicating it was written by a British writer; perhaps Dowson did write this section. It defines its terms early on: ‘Fucking is the introduction of the manly prick into the female cunt, and the action of the couple in moving it in and out until the spunk of the male is spurted into the woman’s vagina.’ Thank goodness we’ve sorted that out. Chapter II begins: Methods of Fucking Described
and watch how his prick will come up standing.’ Impossible as it may seem, things go downhill from there. This, surely, was not written by a sophisticated, literary woman like Nin or Crosby but by a very immature man. Appended to all of the additions of White Stains is a very explicit sexinstruction manual called Love’s Cyclopaedia: ‘This book is a complete manual on sexual indulgence between man and woman.’ This really does not read as
There are, broadly speaking, five different and distinct methods for a man and woman to enjoy the pleasures of love. First: Ordinary Fucking; second: Bottom or Arse Fucking; Third, French Fucking or Sucking; Fourth: Hand Fucking or Frigging, and Fifth: Body Fucking. It then goes on to describe all of these in detail. Later on, there is one section that really does not read as if it were written by a woman, unless it
were written with tongue firmly in cheek (innuendo intended). It is a well-known fact that the male sperm or stuff has certain medical and healthful properties. Famous singers have found that the best way to keep their marvellous voices fresh and clear was by sucking a man’s prick, the hot stuff spurting through their vocal cords strengthening them and making the voice softer and richer. At the same time the exercise of sucking brings into play certain muscles of the neck and throat that are otherwise slight, and the sperm whitens the teeth. Many women vary the swallowing of the stuff by pulling the prick from their mouths at the critical moment, receiving the essence of love spurting on their faces, neck or busts. This makes the skin soft and white, removes freckles and blackheads and keeps them from having a sallow or muddy complexion. There are hundreds of women whose soft white hands are the envy of their friends, and who attribute the fact to the practice of frigging and allowing the stuff to bathe
their hands. The woman’s stuff is as beneficial to the man for the same reason. The French people have the reputation of being the handsomest of any, their complexion being kept in condition by means of sucking, and from which fact the term ‘French fuck’ is obtained. There is practically no taste to the sperm of the man and woman, aside from a slightly salty one. It is not unpleasant. On the contrary, it is agreeable or sucking would not be in such favour.
AULETRIS
This rare work, which has only recently been published by the Nin specialist Sky Blue Press, has an even stranger history than White Stains. It originally had the ultimate in small print runs: it was typed on onion paper, with four carbons, making five copies in all. These were bound into books and printed in
1950 by The Press of the Sunken Eye in Carmel, California. (This was the same process Henry Miller used to produce his Opus Pistorum, a pornographic work commissioned to order in 1941 – pistor is Latin for miller, hence ‘miller’s work’ – which was also published by Sunken Eye in the same year. It was republished in 1983 by Grove Press as Under the Roofs of Paris.) The story behind this work is more interesting than the work itself, though it is good to have it in print. It contains two novellas/short stories: ‘Life in Provincetown’ and ‘Marcel,’ which is the original version of a story in Delta, three times longer than the version edited for publication by Ferrone. Nin knew Provincetown: Sabina in A Spy in the House of Love is an actress who works with the Provincetown Players, a collective of progressive artists and writers most associated with Eugene O’Neill. Like Linda in the story of the same name in Delta of Venus, and Bijou in ‘The Queen’ in Little Birds, the woman in ‘Provincetown’ has a mouth which draws everyone to her; naturally she is an artist’s model.
In one studio there lived one of the artist’s models, whose mouth was so big, so full, so prominent, that one could look at nothing else… As one knew she was a model, well-known in the Village in New York, one assumed she had a beautiful body, but somehow one only looked at the mouth. Somehow or other one imagined the other mouth to be equally luxuriant, equally
prominent. Just as one felt that the thin-lipped mouths of Puritan women must be the exact replicas of their thin-lipped sexuality. She lives next to a handsome young Portuguese man, the only one in Provincetown she cannot seduce. The partition between their apartments is very thin, and every night he hears ‘a particular grunt of satisfaction from some heavy body, and then a woman’s delighted laughter, such laughter as he had never heard.’ It is the laughter of an animal, ‘dark, rather with strange sounds. Animals do laugh. Women become animals at night, surely, as these legends told us.’ This is the same idea we have already seen in ‘A Model,’ of women turning into maneating creatures at night. The Portuguese boy listens to her every night; one night she does not laugh or scream. He expected her to cry out any moment from uncontainable ecstasy. Instead there came out of the darkness, a long, prolonged low laughter, guttural, rich, low, obscene…
The other mouth – surely the man had opened his way into the other mouth, the luxuriant, thick, rich sexual mouth she carried almost exposed for everyone to see in the twin mouth of her face… For everyone to see the thickness and fullness of her sexual feelings… Ripe and open and red… Ah… Ah… came the voice. Unlike everyone else in Provincetown, the boy cannot bring himself to take this body which ‘belonged to everyone and could enjoy everyone’s caresses equally… I don’t want to love a monster like that. She is just like her mouth, big and voracious and always hungry.’ But, since this is pornography, the boy relents. It is okay for him as long as she does not laugh. ‘If she had laughed obscenely with her pleasure he would have tightened his hands, perhaps strangled her,’ but she doesn’t, she just moans ‘in the grip of such a deep joy that she wept.’ There are other stories, other characters in the ‘Provincetown’ section, including an incest story about a man called Pietro who meets a young girl and gives her candy. She
has not been taught about stranger danger, so she talks to him and even hugs him. He gets an erection. ‘You get like my papa when he kisses me in the morning,’ she says, ‘‘he makes me kiss it too, quickly.’ She does the same to Pietro, though only briefly. ‘Is that all you do to your father?’ asks Pietro. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘after a little while he let me go and calls for my mother.’ We also get urination, a trapeze artist whose bottom is slashed by an English Lord, and a woman who was raped in a concentration camp and cannot bear to have sex with men; she tells Pietro about a Catalan friend who had a collection of heavy rubber sex aids with large rubber spikes all over them, which, amazingly, she enjoys. ‘It seemed to me that I was being raped all over again, only this time I was enjoying it.’ Of course she was.
EDITH WHARTON It seems strange to put Edith Wharton (1862-1937) in Text Acts: surely the aloof, patrician New England stylist Edith Wharton never wrote an erotic sentence in her life? Born during the American Civil War, she wrote more than forty books in English, including novels like The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, chronicling from the inside the morals and mores of the upper-class American society into which she was born, as well as books on gardening and travel. Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Roosevelt all visited her, and she was a close friend of Henry James. Wharton was in her lifetime considered one of the greatest American writers, not just American female writers: she was the first woman to be a full member in her own right of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the first woman to be awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Yale University.
But Wharton was bilingual and spoke fluent French, crossed the channel over sixty times in her life and lived permanently in France from 1913 until her death. She did not leave during the First World War and did a lot of good work helping the French. It is true that there is not so much as a kiss in any of her novels, but nevertheless she left in her papers an unpublished – she called it unpublishable – fragment of a planned novel, which is highly erotic, if not pornographic. It was found among her papers long after her death by one of her biographers, who dated it to 1919; another of her biographers dated to 1935, but either way she was living in France when she wrote it. Although it is only a fragment, and not included in her complete works, it has been published online; it has probably caused more comment than any of her novels, simply because it is so shocking to think that such a grande dame could think, let alone write a scene like this.
BEATRICE PALMATO Wharton’s papers include a twopage synopsis of a planned novel to be called Beatrice Palmato, in which: Beatrice Palmato is the daughter of a rich half-Levantine, halfPortuguese banker living in London, and of his English wife. Palmato, who is very handsome, cultivated and accomplished, has inherited his father’s banking and brokering business, but, while leaving his fortune in the business, leads the life of a rich and cultivated man of leisure. He has an agreeable artisticliterary house in London, and a place near Brighton. The wife becomes ill and is sent away to the country, Beatrice, ‘a musical and artistic child, full of intellectual curiosity, and at the same time very tender and
emotional; a combination of both parents,’ remains with her father. Attached to the plot synopsis in Wharton’s papers was a scene, just a few pages long, of incest, very graphically described – unlike Anaïs Nin’s father/daughter scenes. She let herself sink backward among the pillows, and already Mr. Palmato was on his knees at her side, his face close to hers. Again her burning lips were parted by his tongue, and she felt it insinuate itself between her teeth, and plunge into the depths of her mouth in a long searching caress, while at the same moment his hands softly parted the thin folds of her wrapper… As his hand stole higher she felt the secret bud of her body swelling, yearning, quivering hotly to burst into bloom. Ah, here was his subtle fore-finger pressing it, forcing its tight petals softly apart, and laying on their
sensitive edges a circular touch so soft and yet so fiery that already lightnings of heat shot from that palpitating centre all over her surrendered body, to the tips of her fingers, and the ends of her loosened hair. The sensation was so exquisite that she could have asked to have it indefinitely prolonged; but suddenly his head bent lower, and with a deeper thrill she felt his lips pressed upon that quivering invisible bud, and then the delicate firm thrust of his tongue, so full and yet so infinitely subtle, pressing apart the close petals, and forcing itself in deeper and deeper through the passage that glowed and seemed to become illuminated at its approach ... ‘My little girl,’ he breathed, sinking down beside her, his muscular trunk bare, and the third hand quivering and thrusting upward between them, a drop of moisture pearling at its tip. She instantly understood the reminder that his words conveyed, letting herself downward along the divan till
her head was in a line with his middle she flung herself upon the swelling member, and began to caress it insinuatingly with her tongue. It was the first time she had ever seen it actually exposed to her eyes, and her heart swelled excitedly: to have her touch confirmed by sight enriched the sensation that was communicating itself through her ardent twisting tongue.
GERMAN- LANGUAGE WOMEN’S FICTION Like the English and French traditions, Scandinavian literature can boast a very strong cast of very strong women who wear their sensuality on their sleeves: on the stage, Strindberg’s Miss Julie has sex with a domestic, outraging both her sex and her class, and the Mother in The Pelican flirts
outrageously with her daughter’s husband. Almost all of Ibsen’s women are the strongest and most attractive personalities in their dramas: Hedda Gabler; Helene Alving; Rita Allmers and Nora Helmer, who is so strong-willed that she simply walks out of the play that Ibsen wrote for her; it is as if she won’t even let her own author control her, let alone her husband. Swedish women writers have also had early role models in novelists like Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, her partner Sophie Elkan, Moa Martinson and of course Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking is literally very strong indeed. German-language literature was not as well served as French, English or Scandinavian in terms of strongwilled women: not surprising perhaps with forbears like Nietzsche, with his ambivalent views on women: although he sometimes seemed in awe of women – ‘the perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare’ – Nietzsche also said: ‘From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to
woman than truth – her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.’ Sometimes he was even more withering.
Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the ‘powerful’, the ‘strong’, the men.
Woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant... she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak – she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong...
Another forebear to the portrayal of women in twentieth-century German-language novels was Sigmund Freud, with his discussions of women’s ‘hysteria’ and penis envy; hardly descriptions of the strong independent woman; Freud admitted he didn’t understand women, couldn’t penetrate their dark continent. The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian – an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own. The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization. The sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ At the turn of the century the German-speaking world also had Max Nordau’s Degeneration, arguing that: ‘In the mental life of a sane man, woman is far from filling the part she plays in that of the degenerate;’ the modern portrayal of woman in literature as a ‘force of nature,’ says Nordau, is a sure sign of degeneracy. These relations are quite otherwise in the degenerate. The morbid activity of his sexual centres completely rules him. The thought of woman has for him the power of an ‘obsession.’ He feels that he
cannot resist the exciting influences proceeding from the woman, that he is her helpless slave, and would commit any folly, any madness, any crime, at her beck and call. He necessarily, therefore, sees in woman an uncanny, overpowering force of nature, bestowing supreme delights or dealing destruction, and he trembles before this power, to which he is defencelessly exposed. If, then, besides this, the almost neverfailing aberrations set in, if he, in fact, commits things for woman for which he must condemn and despise himself; or if woman, without its coming to actual deeds, awakens in him emotions and thoughts before whose baseness and infamy he is horrified, then, in the moment of exhaustion, when judgment is stronger than impulse, the dread
which woman inspires him withal will be suddenly changed into aversion and savage hatred. The erotomaniac ‘degenerate’ stands in the same position to the woman as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks. Pre-Second World War German literature is in fact sadly lacking in strong women whose passion leads them to act outside of their society’s morals; Heinrich von Kleist’s novella
The Marquise of O of 1808 (unrelated to Story of O) concerns a woman who may, by the standards of the time, have betrayed both her sex and her class by getting pregnant with a soldier, but it turns out that she was raped without her knowledge, so she hardly counts. When Goethe’s Gretchen gives in to Faust it is out of innocence and naivety not passion, and Faust of course has Mephistopheles helping him, but she still comes to her allotted sticky end – a particularly grisly one in her case – though she is redeemed after her death, which may have been some consolation. On the stage, Mozart set to music two willful women: Lorenzo da Ponte’s feisty-servant-girls-who-getabove-themselves, Susanna and Despina, both premiered in Vienna, but they were singing in Italian. Mozart did set the Queen of the Night in German, but she turns out to be evil and is cast into eternal darkness. Another strong German operatic heroine is Wagner’s ‘wild woman’ Kundry, both seductress and Grail keeper, though she is hardly a role model for earthly women.
There are however two German female literary characters who are exceptions to all this, though both were created by men: one is Frank Wedekind’s outrageous Lulu, also a wild woman, also striding fearlessly through her own opera as well as two plays. She is ‘the true, the rare and lovely beast,’ a rare example of a female outsider for later Germanspeaking female authors to draw on – though since she has sex with men for money and is killed by Jack the Ripper, perhaps not an ideal one.
And the other woman is Theodor Fontane’s eponymous and oftenfilmed adulteress Effi Briest, married at seventeen to an older, passionless Prussian who takes her to a small town where he runs everything before going off to Berlin and leaving her alone for weeks on end; Effi refuses to be alone. ‘We have to be seductive, otherwise we are nothing,’ she says. Love comes first, but right after love come splendour and honour, and then comes amusement –
yes, amusement, always something new, always something to make me laugh or weep. The thing I cannot endure is ennui.’ Naturally Effi comes to a sticky end: her husband kills her lover, who turns out to be a cynical womaniser, divorces her, takes their daughter away from her and her parents disown her, only reconciling themselves with her in time for her to die young. Much later, as in France, young, transgressive female authors emerged at the end of the twentieth century to challenge what they saw as the stuffiness and hypocrisy of German society. Charlotte Roche (born 1978), a former German TV youth music presenter, was born in England but raised in Germany. She left home at seventeen to form an all-female garage band then for the next few years she did everything she could to shock including making paintings with her blood, shaving her head and cutting herself. Roche worked as a video jockey on the German youth channel Viva and presented her own show, Fast
Forward on the sister channel Viva Zwei. Roche’s astonishing first book, Wetlands, (Feuchtgebiete), 2008, was a novel celebrating women's body fluids. It has no plot and no real story but an awful lot of smegma, blood and hemorrhoids: the narration takes place during the week in which the narrator is in hospital having an operation on her anus. ‘And they talk about pus and an engorged blister that's hanging
out of the wound on my butthole’ Against all the odds it became the bestselling novel in the world in 2008. Erotic is absolutely the wrong word for it – this is definitely a case of the emetic rather than the erotic: Roche tries hard, too hard for most people, to be as revolting and disgusting as possible, especially to squeamish male readers but the book still sold. Taking over the role of baddest and youngest girl in the German literary playroom from Roche was the precocious – in all senses – 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, she directed her first movie, Torpedo at the same age, wrote her first novel, Axolotl Roadkill, 2010, when she was sixteen and had it published when
she was seventeen, then went on to direct the movie of the novel in 2017. The sixteen-year-old narrator of the novel, 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; she describes it all in the same flat, bored, affectless prose. There is very little sex in it – heroin does nothing at all for the sex drive – and what there is is perfunctory and meaningless, 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 disgorges all over my face; funnily enough there’s something pretty operatic about it. To paraphrase Alain Robbe-Grillet: for this generation of female narrators, sex is neither meaningful nor absurd, it simply is.
UNIKA ZÜRN Unica Zürn (1916-1970) was not as much of an outsider as many nonnative French-speaking women writers in Paris, where she mostly lived, though she wrote in German. Zürn was closely associated with the Paris-based surrealists we looked at in an earlier chapter, mainly through her partner, the provocative artist Hans Bellmer. This circle included Louis Aragon, André Masson (who illustrated Irène’s Cunt), Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Man Ray, René Magritte and Jean Cocteau. The drawings for which Zürn is mostly remembered now are very surrealist: freely drawn using techniques similar to automatic writing. These were quite successful in her lifetime and she had several shows in Paris, starting with an exhibition of her automatic drawings at Galerie Le Soleil dans la Tête in 1953. Zürn’s prose fiction, however, is not all surrealist, and neither are the anagram/poems she produced both on her own and with Bellmer, who is most famous for his disturbing photographs of erotically-charged
dolls and close-up photographs of Zürn tied up with rope, which echo the dolls in stark, unromantic, unerotic images in which Zürn apparently willingly collaborated.
The anagrams Bellmer and Zürn devised together are governed by very formal principles, unlike surrealism which is based on freedom and dream states, exemplified by the writing of Robert Desnos. In fact her poems are more like the rule-and pattern-determined works of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle – workshop of potential literature), which we looked at earlier. Bellmer and Zürn’s rule was that each successive line had to contain exactly the same letters as the line before it but in a different order. Ten of these were exhibited in Berlin in 1953 and then published in 1954 in the volume Hexentexte (Witches’ Texts) accompanied by her drawings. These ‘poems’ are of course essentially untranslatable by their nature but here is a particularly successful one, which does indeed read like a surrealist dreamsequence, with my literal English version following.
WIR LIEBEN DEN TOD Rot winde den Leib, Brot wende in Leid, ende Not, Beil wird Leben. Wir, dein Tod, weben dein Lot dir in Erde. Wildboten, wir lieben den Tod. WE LOVE DEATH Red wind of the body, bread turn to suffering, end of hardship, axe becomes life. We, your death, leave your lot to you in earth. Wild messengers, we love death.
Zürn was born in Berlin and from 1933, when she was seventeen, until 1942 she worked for UniversumFilm-AG, helping to produce Nazi propaganda movies. She married, had two children and divorced, losing custody of the children because of her incipient mental problems. Some of these experiences are turned into a kind of grotesque, horrifying, autobiographical fantasy in her novel The Trumpets of Jericho, written between 1963 and 1965, which darkly portrays the horror of childbirth and motherhood. This does read to some extent like a surrealist novel, but it is based on suffering and bitter experience, not dreams and the freeassociation of ideas. Zürn was born in Berlin and from 1933, when she was seventeen, until 1942 she worked for UniversumFilm-AG, helping to produce Nazi propaganda movies. She married, had two children and divorced, losing custody of the children
because of her incipient mental problems. Some of these experiences are turned into a kind of grotesque, horrifying, autobiographical fantasy in her novel The Trumpets of Jericho, written between 1963 and 1965, which darkly portrays the horror of childbirth and motherhood. This does read to some extent like a surrealist novel, but it is based on suffering and bitter experience, not dreams and the freeassociation of ideas.
Zürn continued working in films, for the German state movie studios, until she met Bellmer at an exhibition of his work in 1953 at the Maison de France in Berlin. The exhibition was showing Bellmer’s trademark sadomasochistic, deconstructed and reconstructed dolls; his successors today are Jake and Dinos Chapman as well as the Japanese photographers of childlike but erotic ball-jointed dolls such as Mari Shimizu, Amano Katan, Simon Yotsuya and the very disturbing Ryo Yoshida. Some girls in Japan now like to dress as dolls inspired by these images; when Bellmer met Zürn, he is reported to have said, ‘here is the doll’. He talked about deconstructing and reconstructing her the way he did his dolls. Zürn moved to Paris to be with Bellmer and together they embarked on a series of erotic photographs with her as the model, bound with
string biting tightly into her flesh. Fifty of their works together were exhibited at the Ubu Gallery in Brooklyn in 2012 and can be seen on the internet; her face is never shown, she is just a torso. As well as the photographs there are drawing by Bellmer of Zürn, including one titled Unica (The Eye, Vulva), in which her foreshortened vulva looks like an eye observing the observer. As she makes clear in her autobiographical novella Dark Spring, Zürn got pleasure from a submissive and even masochistic role. She was always looking for a male figure to dominate her; Bellmer seems to have obliged. In a 1957 essay she talked frankly about this. I was allowed to accompany Bellmer during all the portrait sittings: Man Ray, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Michaux, Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Hans Arp,
Victor Brauner, Max Ernst… There are those who must be adored and others who adore. I have always belonged among the latter. Being full, constantly full of wonder, admiration and adoration. Remaining in the background, watching, looking — that is the passive manner in which I lead my life. As she mentions above, as part of the surrealist circle, Zürn met the poet/painter Henri Michaux; he introduced her to mind-altering drugs and from 1962 onwards she moved between a series of mental institutions. Zürn documented these experiences, in more or less fictional form in her most famous novel The Man of Jasmine – the Man being Michaux. Zürn committed suicide in 1970 after Bellmer, who had had a stroke in 1969, told her he could no longer look after her; she jumped from the window of the Paris apartment they shared. Bellmer died in 1975 and is buried next to her in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
DARK SPRING
The novella Dark Spring (Dunkler Frühling) was written in German in 1967 and published in 1969; it was Zürn’s last completed work before she committed suicide, in the exact manner of the girl in the novella, joining that select band of writers who foretell their own deaths in their writing. Despite Zürn’s exposure to surrealism and the surrealist nature of her drawings, the writing here is very spare,
emotionless and matter of fact, the very opposite of the phantasmagorical grotesquery of The Trumpets of Jericho. It is written in the third person present, though the unnamed girl’s focus is also the focus of the narration: we see the world through her eyes and with her imagination the whole time, except at the very end where, as it were, the camera pulls away and we see her dead twelve-year-old body on the ground. It is hard to think of anything more tragic than a paragraph from the last page: ‘She wants to look beautiful after she is dead. She wants people to admire her: Never has there been a more beautiful dead child.’ There is no reason to doubt that the girl is Zürn herself: she described the book as ‘the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood.’ Twelve years after Lolita was published, we have another twelve-year-old girl with a sex life, but this is even more shocking as the girl’s erotic thoughts are not filtered through the imagination of an older man. And at least Lolita gets to live long enough to have something of a normal life.
though she gets to learn something about sex. She knows that women wear skirts and men wear pants, and sees what is under those pants while watching her older brother.
The book starts with the girl’s birth but quickly moves to a point where she begins to understand the difference between men and women, if only symbolically: looking at a window, ‘how the two lines intersect in the shape of a cross, she thinks about man and woman: The vertical line is man and the horizontal line is woman. The point where they meet is a secret. (She does not know anything about love.)’ And she never does know anything about love,
What she sees between his legs when he takes off his clothes reminds her of a key, whose lock she herself carries in her lap. She discovers the purpose of the two sexes, as all children must. When she is alone and unobserved, she searches for instructive illustrations in her father’s library. She discovers the encyclopaedia, and she discovers the anatomical drawings that resemble herself and her brother. This marks the beginning of a long period under the sign of the male body. Her fascination is allencompassing. Her father, whom she watches curiously when he dresses, senses her intention to discover that which is prohibited. Embarrassed, he hides his sex from her. She, however, is hopelessly plagued by curiosity. Late one Sunday morning, she crawls into her mother’s bed. Suddenly she finds herself startled by a large, heavy body,
which has already lost its beauty. This frustrated woman attacks the little girl with her wet, open mouth, out of which slithers a long naked tongue. It is similar to the thing hidden in her brother’s pants. Terrified, she scrambles out of bed, feeling deeply hurt. A deep and insurmountable aversion to both mother and woman is welling up from inside of her. From then onwards she never does like her mother, who is always in any case locked in a room writing. She continues to revere her father, though he is always away on some kind of business – the young girl does not understand what it is, so the narrator cannot tell us, though Zürn’s actual father was a writer and army officer stationed in Africa who did in fact bring her exotic gifts.
Her parents appear to have affairs; she is so jealous of her father’s lover that she destroys the doll the other woman gives her – dolls of course being very important in the older Zürn’s life – she ‘takes a knife and cuts out the doll’s eyes. She slices open the belly of the doll and tears her expensive clothes to shreds.’ The lover’s husband then appears in the house and it seems that the two couples have swapped partners. In her mind, the adults are complete, through sex, but she is not. She thinks about finding something that would complete her, too. She takes all the long, hard objects she can find in her room into her bed, then puts them between her legs: a cold, shiny pair of scissors; a ruler; a comb; and the handle of the brush. Gazing fixedly at the crossshaped panes in the window, she
searches for a male counterpart that would complete her. She rides the cold metal bars of her white bed. She takes off her gold necklace, sliding it back and forth between her legs. She becomes feverishly active until she begins to feel pain… One morning she awoke and remembered that something monstrous had happened to her during the night. However, playing with her body is extremely exhausting. Soon her heart is beating so fast that she can barely breathe. She begins to grow pale, with dark circles under her eyes. Her father is infatuated with her delicateness, calling her ‘little ivory.’ Until she is twelve, he remains the one man she prefers to all other men. Not many girls in literature start masturbating with objects this obsessively at this young an age (Regan MacNeil does in The Exorcist, but she’s literally possessed; German literature would have to wait until Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands for another book with such an unblinking focus on the vagina). This activity however does
not make her happy and does not make her feel complete. At school she has two friends, both boys: Franz and Eckbert. They play robbers and princess, chasing her until they catch her, when they become Indians and tie her to a totem pole.
The game turns dangerous and this is what she wants. They blindfold her. They build a fire so close to her that her dress catches fire. They pull her hair. They pinch and punch her. Not a single sound utters from her lips. She
suffers silently, lost in masochistic daydreams and free from any thoughts of revenge or retaliation. Pain and suffering bring her pleasure. As she struggles to free herself from her bonds, she experiences enormous pleasure as the ropes cut more deeply into her flesh. She is mocked, derided and humiliated. This of course is exactly what Hans Bellmer did to her many years later and published the result for the world to see – did this childhood event actually happen, or is it just
something she always fantasised about? Was she attracted to Bellmer because she had already seen his tied-up dolls, or is she making up this fantasy in retrospect? We don’t know. But perhaps the clue is in the word ‘masochistic’, which seems to me to jar in this description: everything in the book is seen through the eyes of a young girl, but she could not be expected to know, let alone to understand the term masochistic – it feels like the older Zürn is inserting herself retrospectively into the story of the younger Zürn. A big part of the girl’s fantasy life are the images of men, dashing and heroic men as they are in her mind, of whom there are pictures in the house; at night they silently ‘positioned themselves to stand guard around her bed.’ They include Douglas Fairbanks as the pirate in Thief of Baghdad, the two ‘dark, handsome robbers’ from Rubens’ painting The Rape of the Sabine Women and Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; ‘she takes pleasure in being frightened by the giant octopus tentacles that force their entry into the submarine.’ But
these men do not in fact protect her when she needs them most. Her first and only experience of actual sex is when she is raped by her brother: this scene certainly does not feel false, it feels like a very acute memory. One afternoon during this still, hot month of July, with an oppressive heat signalling the threat of a thunderstorm, her brother sneaks into her room and throws her onto the bed with an uncanny silence and glassy eyes, he unbuttons his pants and shows her the elongated object between his legs. She is plagued by curiosity and fear. She knows what he wants to do. But she despises him. To her, he is nothing but a dumb sixteenyear-old. With all her strength, she resists. But he is stronger. She
is unable to free herself. She despises him because he is so young. He throws himself on top of her and drills his ‘knife’ (as she calls it) into her ‘wound.’ His weight presses down upon her small body, as he breathes heavily. She senses a sharp pain, nothing else. She feels ashamed and disappointed. Yielding to the dark circle of men surrounding her bed each night provides her with enough pleasure and excitement. She can do without this pathetic reality coming from her brother. After a while, which seems long to her, he rolls off the bed and leaves without saying a word. After another while he returns, his face red and his expression furious: ‘I’ll kill you if you tell mother about this.’ She looks at him in silence and with contempt. She feels humiliated and full of rage.
The last time she was humiliated by boys it seemed to give her pleasure, but not this time. However, it does seem to drive her to more depravity. Sometimes, when Franz visits, he makes her laugh so hard that she ends up wetting her panties. The smell of it attracts the dog, who puts his head between her legs. This gives her an idea. She goes down to the basement and over to the dog pen, where she lies down on the cold cement floor with her legs spread apart. The dog starts to lick in between her legs. The cold only increases her sense of pleasure. Feeling the ecstasy, she arches her belly towards this patient tongue. Her back hurts from the hard stone. She loves to be in pain while enduring her pleasure. She is gently aroused, even more so because of the possibility that, at any given moment, someone might come to watch her. Through the door she can hear the sound of her father’s secretary typing. While she yields to the dog’s tongue for hours, her brother discovers something new upstairs. Sitting at his mother’s
dressing table, he busies himself with the electric vibrator their mother uses for her beauty care. The vibrator stimulates whichever part of the body it is applied to. The mother massages her face with it; the son puts it into his open pants. When she comes upstairs from the basement, weakened and dizzy, she sees her brother lose his semen, his head thrust back and his eyes closed. The sky has darkened. There is the threat of a thunderstorm and the
atmosphere is tense. But all this sexual activity still does not make her happy. While looking at her father’s illustrated erotic books, ‘she masturbates while looking at the pictures. She is unable to think of anything else. Unfortunately this feeling of pleasure, repeated all too often, is followed by an oppressive emptiness. She searches for something that would really complete her and she cannot find it. Everything is false.’ But then she finds someone she thinks she can love, though he is a complete stranger and she has only seen him at the public swimming pool. ‘This is the most profound feeling she has ever experienced.’ Of course, this is ironic, she is only twelve. Nevertheless, she feels ‘she’s going to die from this powerful feeling. For who could be in love without dying from it?’ Love, in this
case, is completely divorced from sex: she does not fantasise about having sex with him. He is completely unaware of her, and does not even look at her; fortunately for her, because ‘she knows she could not endure his gaze. She believes that if he were actually to look at her, those black eyes would consume her in an instant like fire.’ This is surely a reference – conscious or otherwise – to Rilke and the angels of the Duino Elegies who, ‘even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.’ She does in fact go to the man’s flat when he is sick, using her pocket money to buy him Californian peaches. Nothing remotely sexual happens, though she keeps the stone from the peach he has eaten as a
memento and asks him for a single hair from his head and a picture of himself. He gives her a small photo, easy to hide, but she can still not think of anywhere where it will be safe so she eats it and has now, ‘united herself with him. The ceremony reminds her of the ceremony for blood brotherhood.’ Her brother, whom she hates ‘with all her heart’ tells their mother about her meeting with the stranger; she is prohibited from going to the pool again and sent to her room. She wants to talk to her father, but of course the father is absent as always. She is ‘surrounded by enemies. Nothing but fences and obstacles. She looks out of the window and thinks about her approaching death.’ She herself is not happy and so she cannot imagine anyone else being happy either: ‘Do happy people even exist? Right now, how many people on earth are standing at their windows, considering whether they should jump?’ The book ends:
From her closet she takes her most beautiful pyjamas and puts them on. One last time, she admires herself in the mirror. She imagines how her body will hit the ground, and how these beautiful pyjamas will be covered with blood and earth… She steps onto the windowsill, holds herself fast to the cord of the shutter, and examines her shadow like a reflection in the mirror one last time. She finds herself lovely. A trace of regret mingles with her determination. ‘It’s over,’ she says, quietly, and feels dead already, even before her feet leave the windowsill. She falls on her head and breaks her neck. Strangely contorted, her small body lies in the grass. The first one to find her is the dog. He sticks his head between her legs and begins licking her. When she does not move at all, he begins whimpering quietly and lies down beside her on the grass.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK It’s not just to keep world peace, that men dish out a load of lies to women, to make them dependent, while women indeed have something better to offer, all their thinking and feeling and a lot of things made of brightly coloured wools. It’s understandable, of course, that we, especially those of us with the older sex organs – who haven’t seen much through the little escape hatches of the
body, must remain strangers to ourselves nevertheless… So as not to jeopardise your little bit of lover’s bliss which depends on deception, like every other kind, I’d better take over the telling of the story myself now. Don’t interrupt! Elfriede Jelinek, Greed The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) certainly divides opinion. After she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, an eighty-two-year-old member of the awarding body, the Swedish Academy resigned in protest. In a letter to a Swedish newspaper he said that her work was ‘whining, unenjoyable public pornography;’ awarding her the prize ‘has not only done an irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art.’ The official award speech by Professor Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy took a completely different line, concentrating on her literary lyricism and language, rather than the accusations of pornography that have always surrounded her –
arguably at her own instigation and with her encouragement. What first perplexes when reading Elfriede Jelinek is the strange, mixed voice that speaks from her writing. The author is everywhere and nowhere, never quite standing behind her words, nor ever ceding to her literary figures in order to allow the illusion that they should exist outside her language. There is nothing but a stream of saturated
sentences, seemingly welded together under high pressure and leaving no room for moments of relaxation. Elfriede Jelinek deliberately opens her work to the clichés that flood the news media, advertising and popular culture — the collective subconscious of our time. She manipulates the codes of pulp literature, comics, soap operas, pornography and folkloristic novels (Heimatsroman), so that the inherent madness in these ostensibly harmless consumer phenomena shines through. She mimics the prejudices we would never admit to, and captures, hidden behind common sense, a poisonous mumble of no origin or address: the voice of the masses. She has said that she taps at language to hear its hidden ideologies, much as a doctor will tap on a patient’s chest. Aghast, we discover how class oppression, sexism, chauvinism and the distortion of history echo through everyday conversation… As always with women writing what some would call pornography, other
women are divided also. Some are firmly on her side, congratulating her for subverting conventional pornography and concentrating on the joy of the text rather than the joy of the sex. Some feminist writers have seen a novel like Jelinek’s Lust as a parody of the genre of pornography from a woman’s point of view. Heike Bartel, in an essay comparing Jelinek with Charlotte Roche, ‘Porn or PorNO: Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust and Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete’ (collected in German Text Crimes: Writers Accused, from the 1950s to the 2000s, edited by Tom Cheeseman), says Lust is not of itself pornography, but shows a ‘selfreflexive approach towards pornography that refers to and depends on the genre in order to subvert its structures and deconstruct it.’ She points out that Susan Sontag, in ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ had said that pornography cannot parody itself, but that in fact parody can be applied to pornography, as a ‘critical commentary on the source. This way of writing both uses and refuses the structures and categorisations of the source and this bears in itself the potential for alternative vision…
by engaging with the genre of pornography, Lust deliberately sets out to disclose the impossibility of such an alternative narrative.’ So perhaps Lust is what a postmodern, female pornography looks like – what Hélène Cixous might have called une écriture pornographique féminine. (Or perhaps Jelinek represents one end of a spectrum of female erotic writing, and Anaïs Nin the other.) In a 1987 interview, two years before
Lust was published, Jelinek said she was working on ‘an erotic novel, a female counter-draft (weiblichen Gegenentwurf) to George Bataille’s Story the Eye,’ and has used both the terms female porn (weiblicher Porno) and anti-pornography to describe her work. Male pornography, she says, is directed towards an end goal; it is functional: as the end goal of an IKEA leaflet is an assembled bookcase and the end
goal of a SparkNote is a passed exam, so the end goal of male pornography is an orgasm. After the bookcase is assembled, the exam is passed, the orgasm is achieved, the text has no more function. Perhaps a female pornography would be less goal-oriented: a continuous stream of sensuality, where the orgasm is postponed indefinitely or from which multiple orgasms may proceed. In ‘The Audacious Art of Elfriede Jelinek: Tour de Force and Irritation’ (collected in Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation and Identity, ed Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger), Lamb-Faffelberger ignores the issue of pornography completely and concentrates on Jelinek’s specific use of language: a feminine, even perhaps feminist language that undermines the whole basis of the male domination of speech. The author creates an archetypal artificial language, Kunstsprache [art speech], a hybrid comprised of existing language material that undercuts the traditional expectations of the communicative function of our
spoken and written language. Her artistic approach compares to the sharp and calculated observations of a scientist. Attempting to illuminate the hidden truths shadowed within the deep-structure of meaning, Jelinek transforms existing images by creating texts of association that the chain the conscious to the unconscious. She excavates the deep structure by penetrating the topography of language. The phallocentric use of language disappears and a new form emerges by releasing images that are hidden within the semantic canons of Western society. Lamb-Faffelberger quotes Jelinek saying that she uses ‘literary techniques, such as permutations, alliterations, metathesis, and the anagram, where sounds, syllables and words – entirely reorganised – reveal, perhaps against their will, a higher knowledge that is embedded within.’ Lamb-Faffelberger says this allows Jelinek to take out the psychology and the depth, the illusion of reality.
Consequently, Jelinek does not write about real people but about people as they materialise as speech patterns… Maintaining a scientific distance that allows her to refrain from any psychological analyses, the protagonists remain as distant as their images on a photograph… Language itself is thus the protagonist. Language is the actor. Language is the subject.
she is for them a direct descendant of Roland Barthes.
In the essay ‘Lust and Jelinek: Violating the Commonsensical’, by Ellen Risholm and Erin Crawley (collected in High and Low Cultures, German Attempts at Mediation, ed Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand) the authors also focus on Jelinek’s unique use of language, denying any connection with pornography and concentrating instead on Jelinek’s literary lineage:
In her desire to write a female pornography she found it impossible to negotiate a language which was already occupied by the male construction of sexuality… Pornography is not at issue here; instead, Lese-Lust and SchreibLust [the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of writing] inscribe the text through the play of language as the commonsensical is subverted… She allows for no simple consumption of the text, refusing to negotiate an accessible pornography. Heavily influenced by Roland Barthes, she concurs with his ‘rejection of story, anecdote, psychology of motivation, and significations of objects.’ But, rather than playing with language in a subtle way, as the modernists in Barthes’s analyses did, she enjoys the hyperbolic and employs excess as a decisive force in the text. The pleasure generated in the process of reading results from this play of language, not from the
expected voyeuristic penetration and the devouring of a pornographic text. However, the authors also point out how Jelinek manipulates her public image, creating a persona of herself just as she creates literary characters, only more rounded and believable. Like her texts, her ‘self’ is disruptive, non-linear, untrustworthy; there is no Barthesian ‘death of the author’ for the manipulative Jelinek; although reclusive, she is always giving stagemanaged interviews. She had an anxiety disorder when she was younger, which caused her to give up her studies and move in with her parents, rarely leaving the house and then only with her mother. The result perhaps is a need to control their environment. Some have even suggested that the reason she did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in person was not that she is selfeffacing but exactly the opposite: because that way she could stage manage and control her image completely, an image that appeared on huge video screens in the Swedish Academy Hall.
Unable to access the text, the critics turned their attention to Elfriede Jelinek in the hopes of probing and uncovering the author. But the authentic Jelinek is a myth. The author plays with familiar constructs: on the one hand, the suffering, enigmatic artist and, on the other, the media personality – there is a star quality about the way she positions herself. In this manner, she collapses high culture’s notion of the creative, private individual with mass culture’s reproduction of the star as public property.
This Jelinek persona is meticulously assembled. She claims a place of her own within the modernist JewishAustrian tradition that was annihilated by the Nazis. Paradoxically, this place no longer exists. She tells stories of a child genius: the suffering Jewish father who goes insane; the repressive, authoritarian Catholic mother who reads Goethe to her; dance, piano, and organ lessons; a breakdown at the age of eighteen – all of which sets the creative process in motion. Jelinek of course is more than just a novelist: she has published poems – her first publication was a volume of poetry – has had over twenty plays staged, worked with fellow-Austrian film director Michael Haneke on his adaptation of The Piano Teacher,
produced literary translations (a typically eclectic mix: Christopher Marlowe, Eugène Labiche, Georges Feydeau, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Pynchon) and written an adaptation of David Lynch’s film The Lost Highway, in English, as a libretto for fellow-Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s wonderful opera of the same name. She has won every major German literary prize. She studied music and composition at the Vienna Conservatory, where she got a diploma for organ playing, and studied art history and theatre at the University of Vienna. Jelinek is also very politically concerned, which naturally alienates many people on the other side. She has been particularly critical of far right Austrian politics – she was a member of the Austrian Communist Party and was later very publicly critical of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party. Her critics feel she has gone
too far, to the extent that some Austrians feel she has damaged their country’s reputation, but she was not the first novelist to satirise Austrian society: Thomas Musil had been doing it long before her and Thomas Bernhard at around the same time, though in both cases rather more subtly. In any case, Austria’s reputation has since been damaged far more badly by real cases of sexual abuse in so bizarre that no novelist could invent them: the 2006 case of Natscha Kampusch, who was kept prisoner in a cellar for over eight years by Wolfgang Prikopil, who starved, beat and sexually abused her there, and the 2008 case of Elizabeth Fritzl who had been held captive by her father for twentyfour years, was also raped and had given birth to seven children. Perhaps
the sickness that Jelinek seeks to uncover at the heart of Austrian society is not, after all, the figment of her imagination. The publisher’s blurb for Jelinek’s novel Wonderful, Wonderful Times spells out nature of this sickness. It is the late 1950s. A man is out walking in a park in Vienna. He will be beaten up by four teenagers, not for his money, he has an average amount, nor for anything he might have done to them, but because arrogance is their way of reacting to the maggot-ridden corpse that is Austria where everyone has a closet to hide their Nazi histories, their sexual perversions and their hatred of the foreigner. Elfriede Jelinek, who writes like an angel of all that is tawdry, shows in Wonderful,
Wonderful Times how actions of the present are determined by thoughts of the past. Jelinek must have upset Germans as well as Austrians when she contributed a preface to a collection of the 1960s essays of Ulrike Meinhof, cofounder of the Red Army Faction, better known as the BaaderMeinhof group, a late 1960s terrorist organisation. Meinhof was for many years the most despised woman in Europe, but Jelinek treats her texts as texts, not explosive devices – Meinhof had been a journalist – with a message that we today ‘could understand if only we wanted to.’ Jelinek speaks of her sympathetically and without condemnation: ‘Ulrike Meinhof is a historical riddle, an enigmatic woman, who like most people, can only be understood within the context of her time. She seized a
historical moment and the possibilities it offered.’ Jelinek is even scathing about the smug self-satisfaction of her home city, ‘Vienna, the city of music!’ Note the ironic exclamation mark. In The Piano Teacher, she says: ‘Its buttons are bursting from the fat white paunch of culture, which like any drowned corpse that is not fished from the water, bloats up more and more.’ But Jelinek’s Austrian artistic collaborators are neither smug nor bloated: Haneke and Neuwirth are both astringent and challenging. Haneke’s Funny Games, it is original German version is quite possibly the scariest film ever made (instead of letting Hollywood ruin it by remaking it in English he ruined it himself by remaking it in English).
LUST Jelinek’s media manipulation seems to have come to perfection with the
release of Lust in 1989. Heike Bartel shows how Jelinek, with the active participation of her publisher’s media-aware marketing and PR team knowingly and skilfully manipulated her image, highlighting the sexual rather than the textual. Lust’s arrival on the market in 1989 was a wellplanned media and marketing spectacle, preceded by interviews in magazines like Brigitte and Stern but also Playboy and Lui, highlighting the novel’s depiction of violence and its references to pornography, and by the prepublication of sexually explicit excerpts… It played deliberately to the interest of a mainstream audience that was fascinated by Jelinek’s alleged masochistic tendencies in her private life, saw
her as a Literatur-Domina (literary dominatrix) (Quick) or as a schriebende Erotomanin (erotomaniac writer) (Vogue) and expected a thrilling read. But they didn’t get it; like the soldier who read Lolita in the story we saw in the Introduction and threw it away after only one page, they thought they were going to get a dirty book but instead they got ‘Litachure.’ And those expecting serious, high literature would be disappointed, if not offended, by the monotonous and repetitive sexual violence. Bartel says: Whilst clearly subjected to the forces of a mass-orientated book industry, Jelinek displays awareness of its structures, plays with them or rather plays them
off against each other ‘in a postmodern gesture [that] deconstructs the validity of […] categories’. Lust follows this pattern: it borrows the stylistic and iconographic characteristics of pornography, an endless and monotonous series of depictions of a male penetrating a female, and drives them to an extreme where everything is sexualised and sexualising. This can only disappoint the reader who expects mainstream porn but finds it adorned with a mass of highly sexualised imports from literature, culture and linguistics which distort and disturb the anticipated scenes. In the meantime, the reader aiming to tune into references to so-called high culture finds these charged
with sexual connotations, following the monotonous rhythm of porn films and thus distanced and distorted. The text denies the usual stimulation of lust or triggers of sexual relief found in mainstream pornography, but there is also nothing that would allow an escape into any other nonsexual sphere. Risholm and Crawley agree that Jelinek and her PR team aimed to have the best of both worlds: a novel that would appeal both to those interested in the textual kind of jouissance, in Barthes’ terminology, as well as the sexual kind. The arrival of Lust on the market was carefully orchestrated down to the last detail. Interviews and published excerpts preceded its appearance, piquing public interest. Cloth-bound, printed on
expensive paper, Lust was ripe with the promise of consumption while adorned with the accoutrements of high culture. Not everyone agreed however that Lust achieved this aim of merging consumption and culture. Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger takes the side of those expecting literature, expressing a very dim view of the novel, with its continuous repetition of the same act of sexual violence: a repetition that pornography is expected to provide, not serious literature; even as serious literature, she sees it as a failure. Lust is a fierce and forceful textual composition consisting of bathetic and well-beaten idioms and proverbs, sayings and jokes
from the biblical to the modern and to the perverse and vicious language of the everyday media and advertisement industry. Reading this text requires discipline and stamina since there is no rest, no calm, no respite. It is true that the banality and everyday nature of marital sexual violence is betrayed very harshly in Lust; whether this is good or bad depends on your viewpoint. In her foreword to an English translation of Jelinek’s Sports Play, Karen Jürs-Munby places Lust, with its continuous litany of sexual violence, in the context of her novels, which she says Jelinek intends as nightmare descriptions of a nightmare world in which women are – literally in the case of Lust – held down.
These novels, each within the framework of its own problem complex, present a pitiless world where the reader is confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey. Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry’s clichés seep into people’s consciousness and paralyse opposition to class injustices and gender oppression. In Lust Jelinek lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilisation by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture. Heike Bartel sums up the fairly simple, basic story of Lust very
neatly; not that telling stories is Jelinek’s primary goal, here or elsewhere. The ‘plot’ of Lust can be quickly summarised. It centres on the abusive and violent marriage of the upper-middle class Austrian couple Gerti and Hermann. Her attempts to escape, for example through alcohol or by attaching herself to an equally abusive young student, fail. There is no way out of this existence for Gerti and the novel ends with her killing her son, Hermann’s offspring. The dehumanising and anonymising effect of Hermann’s constant need for brutal and unfeeling sex with his wife is exaggerated by not only a lack of descriptions, back stories or family names given to any of the characters
but by the fact that they are referred to as just the Man (or the Direktor: he is the boss of a paper mill), the woman, the son, the mother. And, though his name is hardly used, Hermann is Herr Mann, doubly male and doubly to be feared and respected. (A note on the translation: because of her linguistic games, Jelinek is obviously extremely difficult to translate and Michael Hulse does a splendid job. However, there are some points worth noting about the English version. Firstly, the title, which is Lust in both languages: in English it has an unavoidable sexual connotation – though it can also be used in the sense of ‘lust for power’, which the Man undoubtedly has – but in German it can also mean pleasure, desire or joy that are not necessarily of the sexual kind; ‘lustig’ means merry or funny, with absolutely no sexual connotation. Second, the word ‘man’ is more resonant in German than in English: in German the word for both man and husband is Mann; ‘my husband’ was traditionally ‘mein Mann’, traditionally used respectfully by
obedient wives who were expected to be only interested in Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, kitchen, church. Women were not expected to hold their own opinions – that was the husband’s role; if asked they would be expected to answer mein Mann sagt: my husband says. Finally, in German, nouns are capitalised, so ‘the man’ is der Mann.’ Hulse translates it as ‘the Man’, adding the connotation of authority, control and – male – power. He also leaves ‘Direktor’ with both its stern, Teutonic ‘k’ and its capital letter, but leaves ‘woman’ in lowercase.) The woman cannot refuse the Man, though she would like to; he is relentless and totally unconcerned about her wishes. She starts to speak, to say no, but ‘she thinks of his strength and shuts her mouth again. The Man would play his tune even in the bosom of the mountains, his violin would echo off the rocks, he’d stroke his rocks off. Time and again the same old song. This resounding banging tune. So astoundingly terrible. To the accompaniment of resentful looks.’
He tells the woman he’s going to have her real good now. Twice. At least. Women are planted full of hopes and live off memory, but men live off the moment, which belongs to them and, when carefully tended, can be gathered into a little heap of time which likewise belongs to them… The Direktor’s cumbrous cranium worries amongst her pubic hair, he bites, his desire is always at the ready, ready to desire something of her. He raises his head to the air and now presses hers to the neck of his bottle, here, taste this. Her legs are in a tight grip. He is touching her up. He cracks her skull on his prick, vanishes inside her and gives her derrière a good hard pinch to help things along. He forces her head back so that her neck cracks, an ungainly
sound, and he slurps at her labia, gripped and gathered tight, the life gazing silently from his eyes up to her. Patience: the fruit’ll ripen yet. That’s what you get if you stack your human habits one atop the other to pick something off the top of the tree, only to find you don’t like the taste after all… She is flattened on the table and her breasts, big warm steaming cowpats of breasts, flop apart. The Man lifts his leg in his own garden and then off he goes and lifts it at every corner he comes to, too. Not even the easiest patch of ground is safe from him. It is as normal as erotic love, which has never started a fire in their dry wood, the dryness they are born to but do not want on any account to remain in. The Man keeps down the workers in the way he keeps down the woman,
but ‘he doesn’t have to lie upon them’ physically, his signature on a piece of paper is enough. ‘He bites the woman’s breast, and her hands jerk forward. This only excites him more, and he hits her on the back of the head and tightens grip on her hands, his enemies of old. For his slaves he has no love either.’ Once a day is not enough for the Man to subjugate the woman and he ‘returns to ride the woman like a boat for his flood. The hills and valleys plus branches etc. offer prospects of plenty, true, but that final perfection, conferred by degradation is still lacking. The man, buoyed up on the breeze, creates the woman.’ At this point, the author inserts her voice, an unmistakably female, if not feminist, voice: I rather think he would burst his banks, if it weren’t that he’s rudderless. He’d be giddy, up there on his own path. All in all, men would quite stand over us if we didn’t enclose them within us from time to time, till they are
tiny and quiet and quite surrounded. This raises the whole issue of the feminist debate around enclosure versus penetration which is far too big for me to tackle, but at least shows where Jelinek stands on the issue of male dominance. And that is the issue: in order to ‘command the woman to observe their marriage contract… For her enlightenment and his own satisfaction, he shoves his electricity main up her arse. She tries to shake him off, but quickly tires and has to go through with it, eyes shut.’ The Man ‘distributes Creation’ in the brightness of his own light; ‘Only within the woman is it dark. He enters her arse and bangs her face against the edge of the bath. She cries out yet again. The pilot settles in for a lengthy session in his cockpit. He himself may already be at rest, but his cock is pitting itself against the elements, ever onward, cliff to crag.’ This treatment never stops, even in bed early in the morning.
In the half sleep of the mornings, he’s already fumbling at the furrow in her rear while she is still sleeping, from behind he gropes at her soft hillocks, light, where are you, the heart is already wide-awake. The tennis match at his club can wait. It’s antiseptic there. First, obedient as children, in go two fingers, into the woman, and then the compact firelighter package is stuffed in to follow. The whole music box where our wishes are stored in the memory of the Supreme Being starts playing music into the ethereal realms. All things will be fulfilled. We have a right to expect it will be so. Take a deep breath! We well know what is best, it’s back home on the sideboard. The Man takes hold of his wooden ding-aling and batters at the woman’s astounded rearentry.
(Just one more word on the translation: having admitted the near-impossibility of translating Jelinek’s word games into English, it does seem to me that sometimes Hulse goes a bit too far, and adds things to what is already there. The original of the last sentence is ‘Der Mann ergreift seinen ruhigen Binkel und drängt damit an die erstaunten Hintertüren seiner Frau.’ I have been unable to find Binkel in any German dictionary or list of sexual slang, though in context it must refer to the Man’s penis. The literal translation of the sentence would be: ‘the Man seizes his quiet Binkel and pushes it in the astonished back door of his wife’) There is more of this candid description, too much, too horrible, too relentless, and this of course is entirely the intention: Jelinek is doing verbally to us what the Man is doing physically to the woman, what man in general does to
woman in general: gratuitously abusing and re-abusing until we just want it to stop. Of course, as readers we can make it stop, we can simply put the book down, unlike the woman, unlike all women who are subjected to endless, routine domestic sexual violence. If this is pornography, it has the opposite intention to the one Andrea Dworkin identified as being the aim of male-authored pornography: the collusion of the consumer in the dominance of women. Jelinek pulls out all the stops to ensure we are repelled rather than attracted by this Man and all men like him. Still, we may press on reading if only to marvel at how many different images and metaphors Jelinek can dream up for describing the sexual act; the brutality of the act being described is relentless in its monotony, but the words describing it are in constant play. In this sense, Jelinek is the opposite of male writers on sex from Sade to RobbeGrillet who, using ‘neutral,’ ‘objective’ language, which does not vary, need to vary the act being described and escalate it to literally unbelievable heights.
The woman’s only respite from all this is the son, but he has no sympathetic qualities either. He watches what goes on, gleefully, with neither innocence nor sympathy. And the boy? What of the boy meanwhile? He’s pondering a present he wants bought in return for not having seen any of his plug-and-socket parents’ secrets. From every shop he sets eyes on, the child wants another slice of life, cut fresh, only the best, just for him. The child is a devious little rat. The new generation, this. The best is barely good enough. To escape from the Man, the woman finds the young man, Michael, though at first she is not sure. In a car with her, he ‘leaned across to the woman who has withdrawn a little to natter with her nearest and dearest, her secret dreams and longings. From her big eyes the tears well up and fall into her lap. Where desire abides, biding its time, clipping its nails.’ But although her ‘inmost self is calling from her cleavage,’ she feels as though she has ‘barely escaped the safety belt of her house
but this young man of law wants to grope in her glovebox.’ They get a room together. Michael yanks the woman’s legs about him like the legs of hightension masts. In his exploratory zeal he gives intermittent attention to her untouched cleft, a gnarled version of what every other woman has on her person in a discreet shade of lavender or lilac. He pulls back and takes a good look at the place where he is repeatedly disappearing, only to reappear, a huge great thing, fun for one and all. A funster, this fellow. But flawed. Sport being one of his flaws, and hardly the least. The woman is calling him. What’s got into him? Why hasn’t it got into her? Since Gertie didn’t have an opportunity to wash, her hole looks murky, as if it were plastic-
coated. Who can resist jamming a finger in (you can use peas, lentils, safety pins or marbles if you like), try it and see what an enthusiastic response you’ll get from your lesser half. Gerti wanted ‘a love that lasts, at last,’ but even before the sex is over she realises he is not what she needs. She already has everything she needs; women do. Of course we can don hygienic caps if we like, to avoid the risk of disease. Otherwise, we have everything we need. And though the lordsandmasters cock their legs and slash their waters into their women, they can’t remain but must hurry on, restless, to the next tree, where they waggle their genital worms till someone takes an interest. Pain flashes like lightning into women? But it does no permanent damage, no need to
cry over chard furniture on molten appliances. At out it dribbles again. But in the end, despite Jelinek’s attempt to write a feminine pornography that undermines male penetration and domination, Lust underwrites it: the Man still has its power, the young lover cannot be faithful, the son is dead and the woman, who is no longer the mother, is even worse off than she was at the beginning. Then again, knowing Jelinek’s power over words, perhaps she is simply showing us how bad things are so that we will want to do something about it, throwing down a gauntlet for other women, especially for other writers to pick up.
THE PIANO TEACHER
The Piano Teacher (1983), published six years before Lust, and Jelinek’s first novel to be translated into English is in some ways its obverse: here we have a woman controlling her own sexual experience – perverted, predatory and voyeuristic, she is the opposite of Lust’s Gerti and by no means the traditionally obedient, subservient
Austrian Hausfrau. Although we know that Jelinek resists any reading of her work as autobiographical, many aspects of the heroine do reflect Jelinek’s own life: the musical education, the close, claustrophobic love/hate relationship with the mother, though not necessarily the perverse sexuality. Linguistically, The Piano Teacher is far more straightforward than Lust, mostly written in plain, unadorned German with minimal language games; much easier to render into idiomatic English, a job done here by Joachim Neugroschel. The central character, Erika Kohut teaches the piano at the Vienna Academy, having earlier failed to make a career as a solo pianist. She lives with her domineering mother who allows her no freedom, ‘puts Erika against the wall, under interrogation – Inquisitor and executioner in one, unanimously recognised as Mother by the State and by the Family. She investigates: why has Erika come home so late?’ Whatever Erika says, ‘Mother never believes her because Erika tends to lie.’ Erika consoles herself in many ways, not all sexual: in her briefcase,
her mother finds that ‘four volumes of Beethoven sonatas indignantly share cramped quarters with an obviously brand-new dress.’ Erika will never wear the dress, just keep it in her wardrobe to look at. ‘Mother is an absolute ruler. She decides what Erika will wear outside the house.’ For Erika, the dresses she buys ‘are merely supposed to wait here until she comes home in the evening. Then, after laying them out, she drapes them in front of her body and gazes at herself in the mirror. For these clothes belong to her!’ Although Erika has her own room within the apartment, ‘her own realm, her own roost, which she rules and is ruled in. It is only a provisional realm; mother can walk in at any time. There is no lock on Erika’s door. A child has no secrets from her mother.’ The mother can ring her when she is at work, when she is playing chamber music with friends, even though Erika begs her not to embarrass her. ‘Erika visits a café once a month but her mother knows which café, and she can ring her up there too.’ And woe betide Erika if she does not come straight home from teaching piano.
SHE will feel the hot flame of her mother’s blowtorch and SHE will be burned to a pile of ashes because SHE is late in getting home. No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place. The mother has never forgiven Erika for failing in her concert career. ‘She’s so gifted, she could have easily become a nationally renowned pianist – if only she’d left everything to me, her mother.’ But unfortunately, fate ‘will not turn her into a pianist. Erika is hurled to the ground as sawdust.’ She has as little luck finding love. ‘Erika is not pretty. Had she wanted to be pretty, her mother would have promptly ordered her to forget it.’ When Erika’s grandmother was still alive, the two older women ensured that no man would ever beat a path to Erika’s door.
The two elderly women, with their dried, sealed vaginas, throw themselves in front of every man, to keep him away from their fawn. The young female should not be bothered by love or pleasure. The vaginal lips of the two old women have turned into siliceous stone. Rattling dryly, their snatches snap like the jaws of a dying stag beetle, but catch nothing. So the two women hold on to the young flesh of their daughter and granddaughter, slowly mangling it, while their shells keep watch to make sure no one else comes along and poisons the young blood. One of Erika’s secret consolations as an adult is cutting herself with a razor blade; she takes the blade with her everywhere, it ‘smiles like a bridegroom at a bride.’ The cuts do not hurt but she likes to watch as ‘a slit gapes in the previously intact tissue; then the arduously tamed blood rushes out from behind the barrier.’ Sometimes she cuts herself elsewhere: ‘spreading her legs, she makes a cut, magnifying the aperture that is the doorway into her
body… Like the mouth cavity, this opening cannot exactly be called beautiful, but it is necessary.’ Erika’s other secret vice is her voyeurism, her need to watch and control the sexual activities of others without being involved. This need starts early. While she is still a child, on vacation with her family, her slightly older cousin, a ‘good-fornothing’ wrestles with her. She watches when, as the edge of his bathing suit shifts by, ‘the strings on
which his testicles are suspended come in to view.’ She looks at ‘the long, fair, downy hairs on the upper thighs.’ She kneels in front of him, one holiday child in front of the other.’ The mother is ‘shocked at how badly her child is treated by the local adolescents – this gifted daughter, who is usually admired by one and all.’ The red genital pouch sways and dangles, it swings seductively before HER eyes. It belongs to a seducer, whom no one can resist.
She leans her cheek against it for only a split second. She doesn’t quite know what she’s doing. She wants to feel it just once, she wants to graze that glittering Christmas-tree ornament with her lips, just this once. For one split second, SHE is the addressee of this package. SHE grazes it with her lips or was it her chin? It was unintentional. The guy doesn’t realise he’s triggered a landslide in his cousin. She peers and peers. The package has been arranged for her, like a slide under a microscope. Just let this moment linger, it’s so good. Erika goes to peep shows in seedy parts of town, ‘areas you don’t enter if you don’t have to,’ immigrant areas where Turks and Serbs live. One of them is set up under a viaduct. ‘The Turks are, no doubt, vaguely familiar with the arch shape from their mosques. Maybe the whole thing recalls a harem. A viaduct arch, hollowed out and full of naked women… This little shop of whorers, in which naked women stretch and sprawl, fits precisely into the arch.’ The men – and Erika – insert money into an ‘insatiably
gaping slot… One hand inserts, the other pumps and dumps the virile strength.’ Erika comes to ‘look at something that she could see far more cheaply in her mirror at home.’ But here, watching, ‘in this booth, she becomes nothing.’ Erika is personally assigned a deluxe booth. She doesn’t have to wait, she’s a lady. The others have to wait longer. She holds her money ready the way her left hand clutches a violin. In the daytime, she sometimes calculates how much peeping she can do for her saved coins. She saves them by eating less at her coffee breaks… Erika lifts up a tissue from the floor; it is encrusted with sperm. She holds it to her nose. She deeply inhales the aroma, the fruits of someone
else’s hard labour. She breathes and looks, using up a wee bit of her life… Erika doesn’t want to act, she only wants to look. She simply wants to sit there and look. Look hard. Erika, watching but not touching. Erika feels nothing, and has no chance to caress herself. Her mother sleeps next to her and guards Erika’s hands. Erika has an admirer, her younger pupil Walter Klemmer, who watches her playing, as she watches others. ‘He sees the play of muscles in her upper arm, he is excited by the collision of flesh and motion… He masturbates in his seat.’ Finally, after a lot of nervous dancing around the edges, the two of them do get together, Walter even gets invited to the apartment. Erika wants him to dominate her, but only in the precise
ways that she has detailed in a letter to him: a contract for masochism like Sacher-Masoch had with Wanda and Alain Robbe-Grillet had with Catherine. ‘Erika would like to show weakness, but determine the form of her submission herself.’ She wants to control Walter’s controlling of her, and control it precisely. Erika is what one might call an auto-masochist: when she cuts herself, ‘she is entirely at her mercy, which is still better than being at someone else’s mercy.’ Walter is happy to hurt and dominate her, but not according to her schedule. Having admired her from beneath, as it were, he now sees himself as above her. ‘Klemmer is now a concordat made up of bureaucracy and lust. Lust that knows no limits, or if it does know them, does not respect them.’ Erika may be the teacher, but she is ‘also a child. Klemmer may be a student,
but he is the adult here.’ At one point, when he has her trapped in a dirty toilet stall, Erika gives in, she ‘gives herself up as a person. A present wrapped in slightly dusty tissue paper, on a white tablecloth.’ Walter Klemmer pulls Erika out of the toilet stall. He yanks her. For openers, he passes a long kiss on her mouth; it was long overdue. He gnaws on her lips, his tongue plumbs her depths. After endlessly ruinous use, his tongue pulls back and then pronounces Erika’s name several times. He puts a lot of work into this piece known as Erika. He reaches under her skirt, knowing that this means he’s going places. He goes even farther, he feels that passion has permission. Passion has carte blanche. He burrows around in Erika’s innards as if he wants to take them out, prepare them in a
new way. He reaches the limit and discovers that his hand can’t get much farther. Now he pants as if he has run a greater distance in order to reach this goal. He must at least offer this woman his exertion. He is unable to force his entire hand inside her, but maybe he can manage one or two fingers. No sooner said than done. Feeling his index finger slipped in deeper and deeper, he jubilantly transcends himself and bites Erika all over, promiscuously. He covers her with spit. In this sexual power struggle, Walter briefly triumphs. ‘He sobs lustfully. But he also weeps, because he is overwhelmed by how easy the whole thing is. Erika has cooperated like a good girl.’ But controlling Erika is not done yet. She holds him at arm’s
length while she ‘pulls out his dick, which he has already slated for deployment. It only needs the finishing touch.’ But Erika refuses to finish it off, resisting him ‘with her entire weight so she can remain upright. She holds Klemmer’s genitals at arm’s length while he fumbles about randomly in her vagina.’ She tells him to stop but has a ‘hard time getting through to him and his rutting fury.’ She regains control. ‘This woman has not a spark of submission. Erika starts kneading the red root between her fingers. She demands a privilege, but refuses to grant it to the man.’ He refuses to give up, ‘he is a horseman and she the horse!’ But Erika threatens to ‘stop masturbating his cock if he doesn’t stop grazing down her lower body.’ Finally he obeys her.
This is unpleasant for him. He has nothing to do, and she works on him. It would make more sense the other way around, and that’s how it goes in class. Erika holds him far away. A yawning abyss, made up of seven inches of dick, plus Erika’s arm, and ten years difference in age, gapes open between their bodies. Vice is basically the love of failure. And Erika has always been trained for success, although she has never managed to achieve it. But she achieves success here. ‘She inserts her fingernails under his foreskin and orders him not to let out a peep, whether in joy or in pain.’ Klemmer is approaching a climax, ‘he can’t hold back. He asserts that he is doing everything
he can to hold back and that his efforts are to no avail. Erika digs her teeth into the crown of his dick, the crown doesn’t lose any points, but the owner shrieks nonetheless. He is told to shut up.’ As he is about to come, Erika ‘removes the tool from her mouth and instructs its owner: In the future she is going to make a list of all the things he can do to her.’ Klemmer doesn’t understand. ‘Whimpering, he begs her not to stop for God’s sake,’ but she will not touch it anymore, ‘not for all the tea in China.’ He tells her he won’t even be able to walk home in his state with his ‘blue balls’. She tells him to take a cab. ‘Klemmer stealthily tries to play with himself (the score doesn’t exist). But a sharp shout pulled him back. He should simply stand in front of the teacher until she commands otherwise.’ He wants to
tell her all the things that a woman should not do to a man. ‘She tells him to keep quiet. It is a final demand. Klemmer does not go mute, he promises retaliation.’ When Klemmer gets Erika’s letter, with her masochistic fantasies, he treats as a joke. She says things like, ‘I will writhe like a worm in your cruel bonds, in which you will have me lie for hours on end, and you’ll keep me in all sorts of different positions, hitting or kicking me, even whipping me!’ Erika’s letter says she wants to be ‘snuffed out.’ She tells him that if she appears to be pleading, he should merely tighten the ropes, ‘the tighter the better. There’ll be old nylons lying around. Just stuff them into my mouth as deep as you can.’ But of course she wants to stay in command. ‘By becoming a master, he can never become her master? So long as she dictates what he should
do to her, some final remnant of Erika will remain unfathomable.’ But Klemmer is not a sadist, ‘he doesn’t enjoy other people’s torments.’ He infers from the letter that ‘this woman wants to be devoured by him. Thanks but no thanks; Klemmer isn’t very hungry.’ He believes that a woman who ‘plays Chopin so marvellously can’t possibly mean that.’ And in fact, she doesn’t. She ‘pleads for rape, which she pictures more as a steady announcement of rape.’ The expectation for her is more important than the fulfilment. ‘Please, always talk about more than you actually do! Tell me in advance that I’ll be beside myself with bliss when you treat me brutally but thoroughly.’ The letter and its instructions are ‘the fruit of Erika’s years of silent reflection.’ She says that she wants him to ‘shoot in her
mouth, if you please, until her tongue almost breaks off and she may have to throw up. She imagines in writing, and only in writing, that eventually he should even piss on her.’ Only in writing. We saw how Barthes said that shit, written down, does not smell, but we also saw how Bataille, Genet and others refuted this. Having said that, to some extent, this is an autobiographical novel, to what extent are Erika’s fantasies also
Jelinek’s? And to what extent has she acted them out? Do they exist only in writing? We don’t know, and it is not relevant to the text, here or in the works of any author who writes about eroticism.