2-12-2002
HISTOIRE D'O
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Semaine du jeudi 8 août 2002 - n°1970 - Livres
Après un tirage confidentiel, ce chef-d’œuvre de l’érotisme écrit par une femme, Dominique Aury, pour l’amour d’un homme, Jean Paulhan, s’est vendu à 850000 exemplaires. Petite histoire d’un grand scandale littéraire du xxe siècle
Par Jérôme Garcin
Pauline Réage s’appelait en vérité Anne Desclos. Petite, elle pleurait en
écoutant les chants religieux et, si le destin l’avait désignée, eût volontiers
choisi d’entrer dans les ordres. Car elle était attirée, sinon par la chasteté,
du moins par les vœux de pauvreté et d’obéissance.
A Rochefort-sur-Mer, où elle était née en 1907, elle avait appris pendant les
leçons de catéchisme que l’amour absolu commande l’abandon du corps et de l’âme
à Dieu, exige une consentante désappropriation de soi, et promet, pourvu qu’on
soit patient, la jouissance dans l’abdication. Elle trouvait d’ailleurs la
prière aussi ardente et impudique que l’amour. C’était une nouvelle Héloïse.
Très tôt, car elle était précoce, elle avait alterné la fréquentation de l’enfer
du xviiie et la lecture des textes mystiques: Crébillon ajoutait à Fénelon.
L’érotisme menait au quiétisme. Et les licencieux «Hasards du coin du feu», aux
«Maximes des saints». Sous la plume de l’évêque de Cambrai, elle avait lu cette
phrase que, dans un roman bref et scandaleux, elle allait bientôt s’appliquer à
illustrer à la perfection: «C’est l’amour qui rend véritablement humble; car
il avilit infiniment tout ce qui n’est point le bien-aimé. Il s’en occupe
tellement, qu’il fait qu’on s’oublie.»
Fidèle à sa vocation, qui fut la clandestinité, Anne Desclos laissa son nom de
jeune fille au seuil de «la NRF», cette chartreuse littéraire où elle publia, en
1943, sous le pseudonyme de Dominique Aury, une «Anthologie de la poésie
religieuse française» et où elle allait vivre pendant un demi-siècle. On
reconnaissait la moniale contrariée à son visage pâle, sa peau d’incunable, ses
habits stricts et gris, son goût du silence et aux visitandines qu’elle
confectionnait, le dimanche, pour les membres du comité de lecture.
C’est pendant la guerre, dont elle aimait la fraternité, le danger et le mépris
de la mort, qu’elle rencontra Jean Paulhan. Elle distribuait «les Lettres
françaises» sous le boisseau; il faisait de la Résistance. Elle trouva à cet
homme marié qui avait les épaules larges et les cheveux longs un visage romain,
une prestance cardinalice, une faculté d’émerveillement et le don du bonheur.
Elle devint, en 1950, la secrétaire générale de cette prestigieuse «NRF» dont il
était l’incontesté patron. Sans leur secrète liaison, «Histoire d’O» n’eût
jamais vu le jour. Car Dominique Aury n’ambitionnait pas de faire un livre. A
l’origine, c’était une lettre d’amour, écrite pour la simple et belle raison
qu’un homme lui avait déclaré avoir envie de la lire. Et cet homme était Jean
Paulhan, que l’amante voulait garder, la romancière, troubler, et la styliste,
épater. Une manière, aussi, de combler la distance que mettaient entre eux les
week-ends et les vacances, de prolonger sur le papier leur liaison secrète et de
prendre des risques. L’O et le feu.
Chaque nuit, d’une traite, elle rédigeait un chapitre que, sans garder ni double
ni brouillon, elle envoyait, au petit matin, à son destinataire, poste restante.
Avec l’angoisse de qui craint d’en faire trop, d’être un peu ridicule, de tomber
dans le cliché érotique. Mais, séduit par cette langue si pure dans l’impureté,
il réclamait la suite, voulait d’autres sévices, d’autres fantasmes –
«Continuez!» Elle se remettait alors à la tâche. Celle qui avait fait sa
devise du mot de Luther: «Pecca fortifer» (pèche avec courage) prenait un
infini plaisir, une religieuse volupté à raconter l’histoire de cette jeune
femme, O, qui jouit d’être soumise et que son amant prostitue aux membres – sans
jeu de mots – d’une sorte de société secrète. Au château de Roissy, où elle est
emmenée, O accepte le masque, le collier à chien, les chaînettes, les coups de
fouet et les caprices des hommes. Parmi eux, sir Stephen, son nouveau maître, la
marque au fer rouge et perce son sexe d’anneaux sur lesquels sont gravées ses
initiales. Quand l’«Histoire d’O» est terminée, Jean Paulhan note: «C’est la
plus farouche lettre d’amour qu’un homme ait jamais reçue.» Il avait raison.
Hors un bref «Retour à Roissy» et deux recueils d’études littéraires, Dominique
Aury ne publia plus. Comme si elle était la femme d’un seul amour, l’auteur d’un
seul livre, où le calvaire se confond avec l’ex-voto et l’érotique avec le
cantique: «O est sous le regard de son amant comme on est sous le regard de
Dieu, avec la même foi, la même certitude révocable.»
En 1951, le manuscrit est donc sur la table de Jean Paulhan. Il veut que cette
lettre devienne un livre. Sans jamais révéler l’identité de l’auteur ni celle du
dédicataire, le directeur de «la NRF» essaie, pendant deux ans, de convaincre
Gaston Gallimard de le publier, s’engage même à rédiger une préface, «le Bonheur
dans l’esclavage», où il invoque «l’inconcevable décence» du texte.
Gallimard rechigne. Une fiche de lecture finit de le convaincre de refuser
«Histoire d’O». Elle est signée Jean Dutourd: «Gaston, tu ne peux pas publier
ce genre de livres!» Paulhan est amer. Il confie le manuscrit à René Defez,
l’éditeur des Deux Rives, qui l’accepte, puis se rétracte: pour avoir publié un
ouvrage où les officiers français en Indochine en prennent pour leur grade,
Defez a en effet des ennuis politiques. Il ne veut pas plonger plus bas. Il cède
alors le contrat à un éditeur de 27 ans qui vient de créer sa maison d’édition:
un certain Jean-Jacques Pauvert, lequel a du goût, du flair et ne cache pas son
enthousiasme. «Ce livre, annonce-t-il dans un prospectus, fera date
dans l’histoire de toutes les littératures.»
«Histoire d’O» est mis en vente, au prix de 24,63 francs, en juin 1954, trois
mois après «Bonjour tristesse» et au moment où Mendès France forme son
gouvernement dans lequel François Mitterrand hérite de l’Intérieur. Le tirage
est confidentiel: 600 exemplaires. Pauvert rêve en effet que l’achat de ce livre
licencieux s’apparente à un acte d’incivisme. Dominique Aury, à qui Paulhan
apprend que ses lettres vont paraître, choisit pour la seconde fois de sa vie un
pseudonyme. Pauline, à cause de «deux célèbres dévergondées», Pauline
Borghèse et Pauline Roland. Et Réage, nom du hameau de Seine-et-Marne où elle
s’était réfugiée avec ses parents pendant la guerre. Le nom d’emprunt met à
l’abri du scandale Anne Desclos, qui est une gentille fille: «Je ne voulais
pas embêter ma famille.» Elle réussira la prouesse de garder le secret
pendant quatre décennies et attendra d’avoir fêté ses 87 ans pour confesser en
1995, dans le «New Yorker», être l’auteur d’«Histoire d’O».
Mais les premiers lecteurs de ce texte où la femme est prostituée, fouettée,
écartelée sont convaincus que l’auteur est un homme. «Ça ne peut pas avoir
été écrit par une femme», proclame, sûr de lui, Albert Camus chez Gallimard.
Des noms circulent: Mandiargues, Robbe-Grillet et surtout Jean Paulhan, non
seulement parce qu’il a signé la préface mais aussi parce que Pauline Réage est
l’anagramme d’Egérie Paulan. Seul Gilbert Lely, ancien surréaliste, poète
subversif et auteur d’une «Vie du marquis de Sade», découvre qui se cache
derrière le pseudonyme. Dans une longue et savante lettre adressée à Dominique
Aury, il met en parallèle son étude sur Fénelon et des fragments d’«Histoire
d’O» pour conclure: «On pourra me dire tout ce qu’on voudra, c’est vous,
Madame, qui l’avez écrit.» Flattée d’être si bien démasquée, elle ne répond
pas à son subtil correspondant.
Si le livre intrigue et excite les initiés, il ne fait guère événement. En un
an, il ne s’en vend que 2000 exemplaires. Les libraires se disent choqués. Pour
le trouver, il faut d’ailleurs être obstiné. Car il est interdit à l’affichage,
à la vente aux mineurs et à la publicité. Requise, la commission consultative
rend un rapport accablant: «Considérant que ce livre entend retracer les
aventures d’une jeune femme qui, pour complaire à son amant, se soumet à tous
les caprices érotiques et à tous les sévices. Considérant que ce livre
violemment et consciemment immoral, où les scènes de débauche à deux ou
plusieurs personnages alternent avec des scènes de cruauté sexuelle, contient un
ferment détestable et condamnable, et que par là même il outrage les bonnes
mœurs. Emet l’avis qu’il y a lieu à poursuites.» Dominique Aury à Paulhan:
«De deux choses l’une: ou nous allons en prison, vous et moi, ou le roman
sera en livre de poche.» Paulhan: «Vous rêvez!» 2002: «Histoire d’O»
est dans le Livre de Poche, n°14766.
C’est en janvier 1955, grâce au prix des Deux Magots (au jury duquel siège
Michel Leiris), qu’«Histoire d’O» cesse d’être une curiosa, devient un
objet de scandale et commence sa longue vie de best-seller (850000 exemplaires
vendus). Au même moment, Pierre Poujade décrète la grève des impôts, tient de
grands meetings au Vel’ d’Hiv’, et le Saint-Office condamne «la Quinzaine»,
l’organe français des catholiques progressistes. Les éditeurs de Sade et de
Miller sont poursuivis. «La NRF» passe pour le repaire parisien de l’Antéchrist.
Le climat est brûlant.
Dans «l’Express», François Mauriac, pourtant vieil ami de Jean Paulhan, lui
reproche sèchement d’avoir osé préfacer «les confidences d’une Belle» et
regrette le temps béni où les abeilles faisaient leur miel sur les lèvres de
Platon endormi: «Les muses de notre temps bourdonnent au-dessus des latrines
des maisons de correction.» Colère de Paulhan: «L’amour qui ne
s’accompagne pas du don, du sacrifice et de la souffrance n’est pas un amour
authentique. Voilà qui est à l’extrême opposé de cette complaisance à l’érotisme
que vous semblez supposer. Mais, de toute évidence, vous n’avez pas lu le
livre.» Réplique immédiate de Mauriac: «Cher ami, très sincèrement, je
n’ai pas envie de lire "Histoire d’O". Non par scrupule moral, mais nous sommes
à un âge où c’est l’imagination qui supplée à l’engourdissement de l’instinct.
D’où tant de vieillards obsédés.» En somme, pour ne pas devenir un vicieux,
il faut être un saint. Fréquenter Pauline Réage, ce serait entrebâiller la porte
de l’enfer, et l’auteur de «Génitrix» craint d’y prendre du plaisir: «C’est
dans la mesure où je suis l’être le plus naturellement porté aux désordres de
l’imagination que je dois me montrer prudent.» Dans «l’Express», Mauriac
continue de condamner «des mœurs littéraires qui [le] font vomir».
Cette fois, c’en est trop, Paulhan exige de lui qu’il cesse d’accabler un livre
qu’il n’a pas lu et dont, rappelle le casuiste, plusieurs critiques ont mis en
lumière «le sens mystique». Mauriac n’en démord pas: «L’érotisme est
un chemin mort – un cul-de-sac et je n’aime pas la chair traitée à part.»
Formidable pugilat d’alcôve et de sacristie. Sans doute, l’ultime dialogue
moderne entre le diable et le bon Dieu.
Les critiques invoquées ici par Paulhan ont tardé à paraître, mais elles sont
éloquentes. L’une est signée de Georges Bataille, dans «la NRF» de mai 1955, et
l’autre d’André Pieyre de Mandiargues, dans le numéro de «Critique» du mois de
juin, sous le titre: «Les fers, le feu et la nuit de l’âme». Pour contrer ces
brillants avocats, l’ordre moral désigne Pierre de Boisdeffre qui, après avoir
lu «Histoire d’O», parle de «musée des horreurs» et même d’«univers
concentrationnaire». Le débat fait rage. Dans son coin, Dominique Aury ne
bouge pas et juge, avec la Junie de «Britannicus», qu’elle ne mérite ni cet
excès d’honneur ni cette indignité.
Pendant ce temps, la justice fait son travail. C’est une vieille dame acariâtre
et opiniâtre. Elle ne veut pas seulement punir un livre «violemment et
consciemment immoral», elle veut savoir qui l’a écrit. Et elle n’y arrive
pas. Ça l’exaspère. Le 5 août 1955, Jean Paulhan, «homme de lettres,
demeurant 5, rue des Arènes, à Paris», est convoqué à la Brigade mondaine.
On le presse de questions. Il se refuse à donner Dominique Aury. Et, en
grand comédien, profite de l’occasion pour infliger aux inspecteurs un cours de
littérature. Extrait de sa déposition: «Il y a environ trois ans, Mme Pauline
Réage est venue me trouver à "la Nouvelle Revue française" et m’a soumis
un gros manuscrit qui s’appelait "Histoire d’O". Il m’a frappé à la fois par sa
qualité littéraire et, dans un sujet parfaitement scabreux, par sa retenue et sa
décence.» Le mot «décence» fait bondir un flic. «Oui, explique
l’auteur des "Causes célèbres", j’ai eu le sentiment d’être en présence d’une
œuvre très importante, relevant de l’ordre mystique beaucoup plus que de l’ordre
érotique, et qui pouvait être à notre époque ce qu’ont été en d’autres temps les
"Lettres de la religieuse portugaise" ou "les Liaisons dangereuses".»
Guilleragues et Laclos font leur entrée à la police des mœurs. «Je ne pense
pas, ajoute-t-il, que ce livre soit à mettre entre toutes les
mains, mais il suffit de le lire avec attention pour s’apercevoir qu’il n’est
d’aucune manière assimilable à une production pornographique.»
Alors que la Brigade mondaine s’apprête à interdire «Histoire d’O», la vie
mondaine, elle, fait un miracle. Le médecin de Dominique Aury s’appelle Odette
Poulain. Et Odette Poulain est la bonne amie d’Edouard Corniglion-Molinier,
général d’aviation, compagnon de Malraux et surtout garde des Sceaux. Mise dans
la confidence, Odette Poulain organise à Croissy un déjeuner entre Dominique
Aury et le ministre. Au menu, poulet, courgettes et conversation sur l’air du
temps. D’O, il n’est point question. A la fin du repas, Corniglion-Molinier,
très galant, reconduit son invitée à la porte et se tourne vers Odette Poulain:
«Je voulais voir quelle tête a la petite bonne femme qui a écrit un livre
pareil.» Grâce à son intervention, la procédure est déclarée nulle. O vient
d’échapper, sur un lit de courgettes, à la censure. Dominique Aury, stoïcienne,
retourne alors tranquillement à sa lecture de la Bible anglaise et des poètes de
la Renaissance, à ses traductions (Evelyn Waugh, Powys, Fitzgerald), à ses
études sur Restif, Beauvoir et Guyotat, où elle montre qu’elle s’en remet aux
écrivains comme O à sir Stephen: pour le plaisir d’être gouvernée par des textes
supérieurs. De «Lolita», en 1959, elle écrit dans «la NRF»: «Ce n’est pas un
scandale, c’est un chef-d’œuvre.» L’article est signé par Dominique Aury
mais rédigé par Pauline Réage.
On pourrait croire que l’histoire s’arrête là et penser que le temps, surtout
après 68, adoucit les mœurs. Or il suffit de l’adaptation cinématographique de
son livre par Just Jaeckin et de la une de «l’Express» consacrée, le 1er
septembre 1975, à «Histoire d’O» pour que resurgisse le scandale. Aux cris de:
«Pas d’argent sur notre corps!», des militantes du MLF prennent d’assaut
l’hebdomadaire de JJSS sur les murs duquel elles tracent au rouge à lèvres des
inscriptions vengeresses. Elles sont soutenues par Mgr Marty, archevêque de
Paris, qui condamne «le spectacle de la personne humaine dégradée»; par
Michel Droit, qui signe aussitôt un pamphlet intitulé «La coupe est pleine»; et
par François Chalais qui, dans une «Lettre ouverte aux pornographes», écrit
d’«Histoire d’O» que c’est «la Gestapo dans le boudoir». Les deux
Georges, Marchais et Séguy, s’y mettent à leur tour pour vitupérer le
capitalisme corrupteur et pour-rissant. A la Chambre, on interpelle le
gouvernement pour réclamer des sanctions. Devant cette étrange ligue
bien-pensante qui compte des pétroleuses, des prélats, des syndicalistes, des
gaullistes et des communistes, les législateurs décident de classer X les films
à caractère porno et créent pour eux la taxe exceptionnelle de 33%.
Ainsi donc, vingt et un ans après sa parution, «Histoire d’O», ce livre
«intolérable», selon le mot de Mauriac, continue de choquer la France sans
troubler pour autant Pauline Réage, qui garde le silence comme on porte le
voile. Adepte du «never explain, never complain», la plus célèbre des
clandestines vit très bien avec son secret et ses regrets. «C’est
insupportable, lui disait Paulhan, mort en 1968, vous trouvez moyen de
faire remarquer que vous êtes effacée.» Une seule fois, la petite dame de
«la NRF» s’est coupée, pendant un comité de lecture de Gallimard. On discutait
d’un manuscrit érotique. «C’est mieux qu’"Histoire d’O"!», lâche un
lecteur. Et Dominique Aury, d’une voix de confessionnal: «Oh, ce n’est pas
gentil pour moi...»
Jérôme GARCIN
Jérôme Garcin raconte «Histoire d’O»
Pour
la sixième année, et forte de son succès, la grande émission littéraire de
France-Inter, «Un été d’écrivains», de Brigitte Kernel (photo) et Eliane
Girard, est diffusée en direct, du lundi au jeudi, à 20 heures, jusqu’au 30
août. Cette émission est l’occasion d’écouter de grands auteurs, mais aussi de
découvrir des romanciers moins connus: tous acceptent de se soumettre à des
questions d’enfants et de se prêter à un quiz surprenant. Chaque jeudi du mois
est consacré au dossier littéraire du «Nouvel Observateur». Ce soir, 8 août, à
20 heures, Jérôme Garcin raconte «Histoire d’O»...
A
lire
«Histoire d’O», par Pauline Réage, Livre de Poche, 284 p., 6,10 euros.
«O m’a dit. Entretiens avec Pauline Réage», par Régine Deforges, Pauvert, 172
p., 14,94 euros.
«Vocation: clandestine», par Dominique Aury, entretiens avec Nicole Grenier,
Gallimard, 118 p., 12,20 euros.
«Anthologie historique des lectures érotiques. De Félix Gouin à Emmanuelle», par
Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Ramsay, 750 p., 41,16 euros.
«La Nouvelle Revue française», hommage à Dominique Aury, n° 550, 14,48 euros.
«François Mauriac et Jean Paulhan. Correspondance», par Claire Paulhan, 368 p.,
28 euros.
GUERNICA / a magazine of art & politics
June 2011
Carmela Ciuraru, The Story of the Story of O
Read this article, here
LES OBITUAIRES DE DOMINIQUE AURY - 1998
Thursday, 7-5-1998
Dominique Aury, writer and editor,died on April 30, aged 90. She was born on September 23, 1907.
In many ways, Dominique Aury was the epitome of a French cultural éminence grise. As a fine translator, occasional editor of literary anthologies and an important figure at the country’s leading publishing house, Gallimard., she rarely came under the spotlight. And yet this refined, intellectually passionate woman will be remembered as the author of perhaps the best-known work of erotic literature this century, Histoire d’O published under the pseudonym Pauline Réage in 1954 and since translated into 20 or more languages.
Although the revelation was preceded by scandal sheets, a hint in Elle, and even a statement made by the more prudent Le Monde, this seemingly incongruous connection was confirmed only in 1994, when The New Yorker published an extract from a book by Lohn de St Jorre about Maurice Girodia’s notorious Olympia Press in Paris (the publisher also of Henry Miller and Nabokov’s Lolita). St Jorre had interviewed Aury and she had admitted having written the book, which was by then firmly entrenched in its own eccentric canon as a classic of eroticism. As Aury later put it, “Histoire d’O c’est moi. “ It seems unlikely, however, that future editions will bear her name.
In fact, Dominique Aury was itself a pseudonym derived from the maiden name of her mother, Louise Auricoste. She was borne Anne Declos in Rochefort-sur-Mer. In her early childwood she was brought upby her grand mother in Brittany and later she studied at the Licée Fénelon, in Paris. After an English degree at the Sorbonne, she went on, like her father, to teach, working at the Paris-based Teacher’s College of Columbia University.
All this changed, however, at the beginning of the war, when Aury met Jean Paulhan, the highly esteemed outgoing editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, then the country’s most respected literary review. She was introduced to him by her father, in the hope that Paulhan’s influence would help her to secure publication for an anthology of religious poetry she had been compiling. It did. The side-effect was that Aury fell passionately in love with Paulhan, who was more than 20 years her senior.
The couple begin a productive working relationship. She helped on Les Lettres Françaises, which Paulhan founded when the Nouvelle Revue Française was pulled into the sphere of the pro-German tendency under the new editor, Drieu la Rochelle. After the war, Aury and Paulhan edited a book of Resistance writings. She was also beginning to work as a translator and editor at Gallimard, putting her name to the French version of books by Evelyn Waugh and others. She eventually won the Prix Denyse Clarouin for translation.
However, it was her waning affair with Paulhan that prompted her leap into the literary unknown. Although his wife had been stricken with Patkinson’s disease, Aury, now in her forties, felt that her lover was slipping away from her. So, remembering his taste for the Marquis de Sade and his superior remark that “women are incapable of writing an erotic novel”, she set about proving him wrong. The result was what Paulhan later described as “the most ardent love letter that any man has ever received”.
In cool, precise prose, the heroine of Histoire d’O gives herself up to the sadistic fantasies of her lover, René, his friend, the Englishman Sir Stephen, and the anonymous figures to whom she is yelded. She is blindfolded, chained, whipped, made to wear a mask and taught to be “constantly available”. The prose is graphic, the style elegant, detailed.
Aury claimed that the writing was quite easy, saying she was drown on fantasies she had had as a solitary child in Brittany. Certainly she produced a remarkable image of extreme male desire.
Paulhan was delighted. When Gallimard refused O, he managed to persuade the up-and-coming publisher of Sade, Jean-Jacques-Pauvert, to take it on. Histoire d’O was presented in a lavish, arty edition, with a preface by Paulhan entitled “Happiness in Slavery”, in which he argued that sadomasochism is as nothing to the tortures of amorous dependency.
But 1954 was hardly a permissive moment in French life. Although it won the 1958 Prix-Des-Deux-Magots, O was banned. Its admirers included Graham Greene and that great explorer of eroticism, George Bataille. Of the many names suggested as the possible author – Malraux, Montherlant, Peyre de Mandiargues and Paulhan himself – none was a woman. Speculation focused on the arcane significance of the single-letter name, O (in fact, an abbreviation of Odile, chosen to spare a friend with the same name) and of Pauline Réage (a reference to two of Aury’s heroines, Pauline Borghese and the 19th-century French feminist Pauline Roland).
Histoire d’O became an international bestseller, its fame heightened by a rather crude screen adaptation of 1975. And while the truth about Aury soon became known in literary circles, and even drew the attentions of the police (which ended after a civilised lunch with the Minister of Justice), she managed to avoid shocking her parents.
Her career continued on its discreet, high-cultural path. She worked with André Gide on the review L’Arche, maintained her editorial responsibilities at Gallimard, and published the occasional book. Lectures pour tous won the Grand Prix de la Critique in 1958. Aury also sat on the juries for literary prizes, and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
She is survived by the son of her brief marriage.
02 Mai 98 - CULTURE
La maison Gallimard a révélé que l'écrivain Dominique Aury, qui travailla longtemps pour son compte, est morte à l'âge de quatre-vingt-dix ans, dans la nuit du 26 au 27 avril. Elle a été inhumée jeudi dernier, dans la plus stricte intimité. Secrétaire général de la Nouvelle Revue française (NRF) durant de nombreuses années, Dominique Aury demeure avant tout l'auteur d'un récit fameux au parfum de soufre, 'Histoire d'O', publié en 1954 par Jean-Jacques Pauvert et qui souleva d'emblée un scandale considérable. Ce roman sur la soumission d'une femme, jusque dans ses plus cruelles conséquences, écrit selon les canons du style le plus rigoureusement classique mis au service d'un précis de composition sado-masochiste, fut d'abord attribué à Jean Paulhan, 'patron' de Dominique Aury à la NRF. Le nom apocryphe de l'auteur, Pauline Réage, a souvent donné à penser, par une presque anagramme ('Egérie Paulhan'), que celui-ci était l'auteur du livre. Il fallut attendre 1994 pour que Dominique Aury crache le morceau dans un entretien accordé au journal américain 'The New Yorker'. Elle confessa avoir écrit 'Histoire d'O' comme une 'lettre d'amour' à Paulhan, qu'elle chérissait et redoutait de perdre. 'Je n'étais pas jeune, dit-elle. Je n'étais pas jolie. Il me fallait trouver d'autres armes. Le physique n'était pas tout. Les armes étaient aussi dans l'esprit.' Paulhan lui avait dit: 'Je suis sûr que tu ne peux pas faire ce genre de livre.' Elle répondit: 'Eh bien, je vais essayer.'
Dominique Aury expliquait ensuite que son pseudonyme de Pauline Réage venait en même temps de Pauline Borghese, belle figure de la Renaissance italienne et de Pauline Roland, fervente avocate des droits de la femme dans la France du XIXe siècle, le nom de Réage ayant été élu au hasard dans un registre immobilier. Quant à l'héroïne, à l'origine, elle se prénommait Odile, une amie. 'Après quelques pages, disait Dominique Aury, j'ai pensé que je ne pouvais imposer toutes ces choses à cette pauvre Odile et je n'ai gardé que les initiales.'
'Histoire d'O', d'abord interdit, souvent saisi, vendu sous le manteau dans les cinq continents, maintes fois traduit clandestinement, a été diffusé à des centaines de milliers d'exemplaires. En 1955, il avait obtenu le prix des Deux Magots.
Ce coup d'éclat ne doit pas faire oublier que Dominique Aury, qui avait commencé par être journaliste, fut une résistante active et qu'on lui doit de beaux livres moins courus, tels, en 1943, une 'Anthologie de la poésie religieuse' (pas si loin d''Histoire d'O', à tout prendre) et, en 1958, 'Lecture pour tous', qui lui valut le grand prix de la Critique. Il y aura ensuite 'La littérature est une fête' (1986) et 'Traité des jours sombres' (1992). Dominique Aury, par ailleurs, a été la traductrice de Mishima et d'Evelyn Waugh, entre autres.
J.-P. L.
WHEN DOMINIQUE AURY DIED
THIS
YEAR, AN UNFLINCHING
NOTION
OF SEXUALITY
WENT
WITH HER.
BY MOLLY WEATHERFIELD | Dominique Aury, who (as "Pauline Reage") wrote the classic "Story of O" in 1954, died on May 2 at 91. Naively, perhaps, I was surprised that more thoughtful notice wasn't taken of the event. Searching the Web for comment or tribute, all I found were obituaries like "Dominique Aury: Frenchwoman who wrote an erotic bestseller to keep her lover."
"Bestseller" hardly covers it. "Story of O" has sold millions of copies, and hasn't been out of print in more than 40 years. It has influenced numerous erotic fictions, been made into two (wretched) films and given shape to countless fantasy lives.
But it's a difficult book to think about right now, its structure and assumptions somehow out of tune with our times. O, a young fashion photographer, goes with her lover to a mysterious chateau, where she's whipped, chained, exposed and humiliated, all in the supplest, most finely poised sentences imaginable. Elegantly choreographed and costumed, "Story of O" seems a bit of a period piece now -- like 1950s haute couture in a world of latex and piercings.
But it's the novel's pre-feminism that makes it seem so foreign to us. The chateau is run entirely by and for the pleasure of men: No male submissives or female dominants need apply (though in the character of Anne-Marie, there's a suggestion that some of the middle management is female). Sexual power and privilege in "Story of O" are rigid, systematic, almost metaphysically encoded -- O is like a supplicant joining a religious order. But what seems most out of sync with our time is "Story of O's" utter lack of that therapeutic quality that pervades so much contemporary porn: that remarkable insistence that this stuff is good for you, bringing with it self-knowledge, autonomy and the ability to love.
O doesn't have to learn to love -- if she learns anything, it's her utter need to be dominated by love. And she certainly doesn't have to learn to live, since the novel ends with her death or abandonment by her lover, convincing us that the two eventualities are equivalent. Time away from a lover -- a master -- is dead time for O. In popular contemporary pornographies, on the other hand, time away from the lover is almost a convention, an opportunity for healthy soul-searching before the books' happy -- even wholesome -- endings. Beauty and her prince cuddle in the saddle in Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" trilogy. Pat Califia's lesbian biker girls ride off clean and sober at the end of "Doc and Fluff." Even John Preston's eponymous leatherman, Mr. Benson, goes a little sappy on us, piercing his young partner with a diamond stud and growling, "I guess we're hitched now, asshole."
It's easy to smile at these simplified happy endings -- supermarket romance laced with the banalities of consciousness raising. But they also represent an achievement: a faith that it's possible to integrate daily life and supportive relationships with the extreme demands of the sexual imagination. And even if the stories get a little preachy at times, there's still a cheerful community spirit to them, as well as a nice dose of irreverence and a willingness to laugh at oneself. Contemporary sex radicalism's public conversation is in some way reminiscent of an earlier, equally pornographic era, the recklessly public and talky Enlightenment. Think of the Marquis de Sade's whacked out discourses on sex, power and "nature;" think of his dramatic dialogue "Philosophy in the Bedroom" as the proceedings of a group self-help session, perhaps with a hot tub nearby.
But is it possible to assimilate "Story of O's" lonely, pristine quest toward self-negation into this clamorous, self-actualizing, "sex positive" culture?
The answer to this question lies in the mysterious facts of the novel's genesis, first described by Jean de St. Jorris in a 1994 New Yorker article. As the obituary said, Aury did write the book in order to keep her lover, the critic and literateur Jean Paulhan. She'd become his mistress during the Nazi occupation, when both of them, unbeknownst to each other, worked for the same underground resistance journal. Their love affair, which spanned three decades, continued to follow wartime rules of silence and clandestineness -- the secret meetings, the meticulous planning. Though Paulhan never considered leaving his wife, who had Parkinson's disease, he expected her to accommodate to the affair, just as he expected Aury to fill in the lonely Sundays and vacation times. I think of the famous photograph of François Mitterrand's funeral, wife and mistress both in attendance, and what a fearsome investment of female tact and anxiety such an arrangement must entail.
For Aury, the anxiety came to a head in the early 1950s. She was in her middle 40s, and she began to fear that Paulhan might leave her for a younger woman. "I wasn't young, I wasn't pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons," she said. ("And he was fuckin' 70 at the time," my husband marveled, not quite managing to conceal his admiration.)
"I could also write the kind of stories you like," she told him one day. Paulhan admired the work of de Sade; he'd written the introduction to an important edition of his work. When he had voiced his doubt that a woman could write compelling S/M, Aury said she knew that she could. The fantasy lay buried in the half-forgotten depths of her dreams, conceived before she had ever met Paulhan, before she had ever known sex or love. "Story of O" is in no way a humble entreaty by a woman terrified of abandonment. It was clearly meant to overwhelm. Revealing a fierce, complete and unsparing sexual imagination, it was every bit as much a dare as a love offering.
And it's in this way that the novel transcends the circumstances of its creation -- the history, the manners. Foreign to our own manners and circumstances, it's as much a dare to us as it was to Paulhan -- an invitation to rediscover a dimly remembered place in the imagination. In an essay called "A Girl in Love," Aury remembers "those oft repeated reveries, those slow musings just before falling asleep, always the same ones, which the purest and wildest love always sanctioned, or rather always demanded, the most frightful surrender, in which childish images of chains and whips added to constraint the symbols of constraint."
At the bottom of Aury's elegant and urbane pornography lies the fantasy life of an impressionable child -- the sort who listens carefully to the overheated perorations of an overzealous religious school teacher, who pores endlessly over the lurid imagery of a comic book or an illustrated saint's life. Because pornography's power doesn't reside in the extremity of its images and motifs, but in their naiveté and redundancy -- in the pornographer's need to employ the symbols of constraint, and to spell out the abstractions of power and passion in the most primitive terms possible.
Pornography is not only shocking -- it's embarrassing, a return to a time when we hadn't yet learned to defend ourselves against the outrages of our imaginations. But Aury wasn't embarrassed. She almost, I think, saw the humor of the thing ("Return to the Chateau," "Story of O's" muddled and largely unsuccessful sequel, contains a few wildly self-parodic passages). But she didn't seem to see the need (as I do, for example, in my porn) to use irony to bridge the gap between the outer and inner lives. Vastly literate, circumspect, living a life of quietly constrained passion, she was as unshaken by the same raging desire within her as Emily Brontë.
And so this is the essay I
couldn't find -- my tribute, recognition, thanks, to Aury for showing me, and
others, the way into the chateau. Or the ways -- in the first pages of
the novel O enters the chateau twice, once blindfolded, once not -- take your
pick, it doesn't matter. Just as it doesn't matter how we stumble in, stupidly,
haphazardly, purposefully, sex-positively -- the door will open to disclose our
own half-forgotten, naively imagined visions waiting there for us. Just as
Aury's imagination waited for her to write this most serendipitous of
masterpieces, this most inevitable of visions.
SALON |
Aug. 6, 1998
Molly Weatherfield is the author of the comic S/M novels "Carrie's Story" and "Safe Word: Carrie's Story II," and the online bibliography "Pornography, in Theory and in History"
Pêle-Mêle
Chroniques
de l’Humanité, tome I
Fayard,
1998
Régine Deforges
Voyages, rencontres, lectures, indignations, paysages, événements de l'actualité, et toujours des poèmes et des poètes. Tel est le "pêle-mêle" dont sont faites ces chroniques hebdomadaires de Régine Deforges, parues dans l'Humanité entre mai 1997 et mai 1998.
5 mai 1998
O s'est tue
" Grâce au Ciel, mon malheur passe mon espérance. "
|
Elle s'est tue, la voix de la scandaleuse, de la secrète, de l'enfant amoureuse de son père et de la mer, de la nonne laïque, de la douce et tendre, de l'amante, de la fidèle, de la liseuse, de la passante, de la sueur... La voix de l'auteur d'Histoire d'O : Dominique Aury, alias Pauline Réage, dont le véritable prénom était Anne...
Je l'ai connue il y a
une trentaine d'années. J'étais une jeune libraire enthousiaste ; elle,
l'écrivain d'un seul livre. Mais quel livre : Histoire d'O ! Je l'avais
lu presque en cachette ; j'avais vingt ans et j'étais à la recherche de textes
forts, bouleversants. Cette fois-là, j'avais été servie ! Ce livre devait
m'accompagner de nombreuses années durant. A chaque nouvelle lecture, j'y
découvrais des univers inconnus de moi et dans lesquels je ne pénétrais qu'avec
trouble, ravissement et, quelquefois, réticence. Au fil des ans, ma perception
du roman a changé. Au début, je me figurais très bien en sir Stephen. Plus tard,
devenue amoureuse à mon tour, j'ai vite su que je pouvais être O, la soumise,
celle qui ose, celle qui a le cœur d'aller au bout de ses désirs, de ses
phantasmes les plus obscurs, les moins avouables. |
|
C'était cette dame sobrement
vêtue de bleu marine, qui parlait d'une voix douce comme une caresse de ce
qu'elle était, avec des cheveux clairs encadrant un visage fin, de belles mains,
cette dame à l'air calme et réservé, qui était l'auteur de ce livre que j'aimais
et dont il ne fallait parler qu'à mots couverts ? Nous sommes devenues
amies, vite unies par notre amour des livres et notre curiosité des choses de
l'amour. Elle confiait que j'étais tout ce qu'elle n'était pas : audacieuse,
lumineuse, forte et fragile à la fois. Elle nourrissait pour moi une indulgence
de grande sœur, m'appelait " ma petite enfant " et sa main vint me guider dans
mes premiers écrits. Elle faisait montre à leur égard d'une bienveillance qui ne
s'est jamais démentie. Et son amitié fit qu'un jour elle accepta de répondre à
mes questions, puis que cela devienne un livre. Nous nous réunissions deux fois
par semaine, tantôt chez l'une, tantôt chez l'autre, tantôt au bar des hôtels
que nous aimions. Je branchais mon magnétophone et nous parlions. D'érotisme.
bien sûr, mais aussi de Dieu, de poésie, de la mort, de la guerre, de
l'humiliation, de la torture, de l'enfance, de littérature, de Bossuet, des
hommes qui avaient traversé sa vie et de la jalousie quelle prétendait ignorer.
De ces entretiens est sorti O m'a dit. Et je dois à ce témoignage
d'amitié d'avoir surmonté ma peur d'écrire. De cela, je suis à jamais redevable
à Dominique Aury. O m'a dit est un livre sincère où ni Pauline Réage ni
moi n'avons triché. Il a su lui prêter de l'aide quand elle supportait un deuil.
Il m'a permis de devenir écrivain.
Si Dominique Aury
n'a écrit qu'un seul roman, elle a par contre traduit beaucoup d'auteurs de
langue anglaise et rédigé de remarquables préfaces. Lecture pour tous, le
titre sous lequel elles furent réunies, devait d'ailleurs donner son nom à une
émission littéraire, célèbre dans les années soixante et soixante-dix.
Elle était aussi
poète, un poète sensible et exigeant. Ses vers n'ont été publiés qu'en revue et
je rêvais de leur offrir un habillage digne d'eux et de mon affection. Cela
faisait sourire Dominique Aury car, disait-elle, " qui voulez-vous que cela
intéresse ? " Je n'ai pu mener à bien cette publication. Tout juste ai-je pu
glisser quelques-uns de ses vers dans une anthologie de poésies écrites par des
femmes.
"
Dans la prison enchantée
L'envers du "tonde brodant
Fallait-il tant désirer
Quitter l'ombre
pour le vent
Fallait-il poursuivre un songe
Au passant fallait-il croire
Il n'a dit qu'un seul mensonge
Le mensonge est
dans l'espoir... "
Ma douce amie, mon
enfant, ma sœur s'en est allée. Je la sais dans l'air du soir, entre les pages
d'un livre aimé, enfin délivrée d'elle-même.
" Vous n'êtes plus à vous, vous
vous reposez de vous, vous êtes emportée dans le tumulte et la flamme à quoi
vous vous êtes donnée. " J'espère qu'elle s'est abandonnée à Celui qui sait et
qu'entre ses mains, l'herbe noire reverdit.
Andrea Workin on The Story of O
The Story of O, by Pauline
Reage, incorporates, along with all literary pornography, principles and
characters already isolated in my discussion of children's fairy tales. The
female as a figure of innocence and evil enters the adult world--the brutal
world of genitalia. The female manifests in her adult form--cunt. She emerges
defined by the hole between her legs. In addition, Story of O is more than
simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is, what
she needs, her processes of thinking and feeling, her proper place. It links men
and women in an erotic dance of some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion
of O is not trivial--it is formulated as a cosmic principle which articulates,
absolutely, the feminine.
Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what
its defenders claim--the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacral
destiny of women. The book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic, secular
Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I experienced
O with the same infantile abandon as the NEWSWEEK reviewer who wrote: "What
lifts this fascinating book above mere perversity is its movement toward the
transcendence of the self through a gift of the self . . . to give the body, to
allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of
consequence, if it is done with love for the sake of love." Any clear-headed
appraisal of O will show the situation, O's condition, her behaviour, and most
importantly her attitude toward her oppressor as a logical scenario
incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universal
notions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstrating the psychology of
submission and self-hatred found in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of
astounding political significance.
I wrote the story of O
It's an erotic classic yet it was written anonymously by a shy, intellectual French woman in honour of her secret lover. Fifty years on, Geraldine Bedell goes in search of Dominique Aury, one of the first women to write frankly about sex
Geraldine
Bedell
Sunday July 25, 2004
The Observer
Fifty years ago, an extraordinary pornographic novel appeared in Paris. Published simultaneously in French and English, Story of O portrayed explicit scenes of bondage and violent penetration in spare, elegant prose, the purity of the writing making the novel seem reticent even as it dealt with demonic desire, with whips, masks and chains.
Pauline Reage, the author, was a pseudonym, and many people thought that the book could only have been written by a man. The writer's true identity was not revealed until 10 years ago, when, in an interview with John de St Jorre, a British journalist and some-time foreign correspondent of The Observer, an impeccably dressed 86-year-old intellectual called Dominique Aury acknowledged that the fantasies of castles, masks and debauchery were hers.
Aury was an eminent figure in literary France, and had been when she wrote the book at the age of 47. A translator, editor and judge of literary prizes, for a quarter of a decade, Aury was the only woman to sit on the reading committee of publishers Gallimard (a body that also included Albert Camus) and was a holder of the Légion d'Honneur. She could scarcely have been more highbrow, nor, according to de St Jorre, more quietly and soberly dressed, more 'nun-like'.
The French state has not always had an easy relationship with Story of O, but, this year, the government has announced it is to be included on a list of national triumphs to be celebrated in 2004. Dominique Aury died, aged 90, in 1998, but many people who knew her well are still alive and a number feature in a fascinating and, as yet, unseen documentary about the book and the secrecy that for so long surrounded it, made by an American film-maker, Pola Rapaport.
It turns out that Story of O has had considerable influence. In the 1950s, such a book could arguably only have been written in France. It would certainly never have been published in England or the United States, both of which were in the grip of censorship laws. Now, of course, women are expected to write about their fantasies and what they get up to, and they do it with enthusiasm: this month sees the publication of One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bedtime, by 'Melissa P', who, we are told, is a 15-year-old Sicilian girl with a taste for blindfold sex with several men at once.
We've had swinger-sex from Catherine Millett and pensioner sex from Jane Juska, who advertised in the New York Review of Books for men who would also throw in some conversation about Trollope. The burnings of Story of O by American campus feminists in the 1980s have, it seems, had a less enduring and subversive effect than the book itself.
But first things first. Story of O is not a book to read on the bus - or not the first 60 pages, anyway, which are written with an almost hallucinatory, erotic intensity that you would have to be rather peculiar not to be left hot and bothered by.
A young woman, O, is ordered into a waiting car by her lover, René, commanded to remove her underwear, and driven to a chateau in the Paris suburb of Roissy. Here, she is initiated into a secret society with complicated rules: she is not to look any man in the eye nor speak to any of the other women. She must wear a corseted dress that exposes her breasts, a leather collar and cuffs. Any man may dispose of her as he wishes. O welcomes all this, understanding that the harsher the treat ments she endures, the more she proves her love.
These are the pages that, in a third-person account written nearly 20 years later, the author described herself writing at night, 'lying on her side with her feet tucked up under her, a soft black pencil in her right hand... the girl was writing the way you speak in the dark when you've held back the words of love too long and they flow out at last. For the first time in her life, she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting or discarding; she was writing the way one breathes, or dreams... she was still writing when the street cleaners came by at the first touch of dawn.'
Dominique Aury, lying on her side in bed with her pencil and her school exercise books, did not intend the work to be published. She wrote it as a dare, a challenge and an enterprise de seduction for her lover, Jean Paulhan. They'd met during the German occupation, when she distributed a subversive magazine, Lettres Françaises, which he edited. Probably, they were first introduced by her father, in the hope that she might solicit Paulhan's aid in publishing the volume of 17th-century devotional poetry she had collected. (She did, and it was.) Subsequently, they worked together at the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française and at Gallimard.
Paulhan was a towering literary figure, handsome in an imperious way, with features that most readily expressed amusement and disdain. In film footage from 1986, when she was 81, and which she stipulated was not to be shown until after her death, Aury remembers him as 'tall, broad-shouldered, somewhat heavy-set, with a Roman-like face, and something both smiling and sarcastic in his expression'.
Nearly two decades after his death, her eyes had a faraway look when she talked about him. 'Existence filled him with wonder,' she continued. 'Both the admirable and the horrible aspects of experience, equally so. The atrocious fascinated him. The enchanting enchanted him.'
Literature was a shared passion. Dominique Aury once boasted that she had read all of Proust every year for five consecutive years. Novelist and cultural critic Regine Desforges, who became Aury's friend (and who interviewed 'Pauline Reage' in 1976, publishing the conversation as 'O m'a Dit, Confessions of O') remembers: 'Dominique Aury was fascinated by intelligence. The intelligence of Paulhan was obvious. And for her it became a kind of obsession.' Theirs was a relationship of minds as well as bodies, so it was fitting that, when she started to worry about losing him, she should try to win him back with sex in the head.
Jean Paulhan, a generation older than Dominique Aury, and in his early sixties when she wrote Story of O, was married twice. The first alliance produced a son; the second, to Germaine Dauptain, was overshadowed by her long illness with Parkinson's disease (she was already an invalid when he met Dominique Aury, although she would outlive him by four years). Jacqueline Paulhan, who married his son, told me that in addition to his long relationship with Dominique, there were also other women: 'My father-in-law was quite the ladies' man.'
By the early 1950s, Aury was worried that his attention might be shifting. Well aware of his liking for erotic literature (he had written a preface to de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom), she said she thought she could do something similar. Paulhan was dismissive: erotica wasn't a thing women were capable of. In the footage, licensed by Rapaport to show in her documentary, she explained: 'I wrote it alone, for him, to interest him, to please him, to occupy him. I wasn't young, nor particularly pretty. I needed something which might interest a man like him.' (Pressed as to why she wrote in pencil, she replied mischievously: 'So as not to stain the sheets.')
Aury gave the notebooks to Paulhan, who thought the writing was too good not to be published and urged her to turn it into something longer, a proper novel. Aury admitted that after the initial explosive burst of energy, the writing slowed, and you can tell. The erotic charge seems less intense. O has a job and answers the telephone and moves around Paris, which is all a bit awkward and pointless when you are supposed to be in thrall to an identity-crushing sexual cult. There are high points: the sex with women is obviously strongly felt (Aury was actively bisexual at times in her life) and she introduces the dark character of Sir Stephen, an Englishman to whom O is handed over. Sir Stephen, she told Regine Desforges, 'links to a desire for one's father. He is a father figure'.
This is clearly an interesting development, from a Freudian point of view, but the switch of allegiances suggests she might have run out of steam with her first thought. And, generally speaking, the energy seems to fade. Regine Desforges, an impressive redhead who remains a household name in France, confirmed to me that Aury had never initially intended what she was writing to be made public. Another friend, Elizabeth Porquerol, now 90, says, however, that, like all writers, Aury wanted to be published and was flattered by Paulhan's conviction that what she was doing was good.
Aury wrote the further chapters and read them aloud to Paulhan as they were parked in the Bois de Boulogne or outside one of the cheap railway hotels where their assignations took place. (He did not drive, and she used to ferry him around Paris.) She apparently found this reading business quite difficult: 'It was a written text,' she explained, 'not meant to be spoken.' It is impossible not to wonder whether there is a faint echo, in Dominique Aury's consenting to finish and publish the book, of O's progressive self-annihilation. As O's tortures worsen and her torturers multiply, O attains a kind of calm, a purity of being, what Susan Sontag has called 'an ascent through degradation'. Clearly, submission to higher authority held an enormous attraction for Aury.
Aury succeeds in giving her book a novelistic shape. But as Colette complained when asked to comment on Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness : 'Obscenity is such a narrow domain. One immediately begins to suffocate there, to feel bored.' If events become ever more extreme (which they must), at some point you are going to lose all but the most committedly sadomasochist readers. It's tough to maintain the tempo of pornography, and Dominique Aury's final, rather pedestrian chapter was left out of the published novel. In its place were two alternative, perfunctory endings. In one, the action dribbles out with no resolution; in the other, Aury merely says: 'Seeing herself about to be left by Sir Stephen, she preferred to die. To which he gave his consent.'
Dominique Aury told John de St Jorre: 'One day I found that I couldn't go on and that was all. Paulhan said it was all right. "You can stop now," he said.' Despite taking this level of direction, Aury insists that Paulhan had nothing to do with the writing beyond recommending that she remove one word, 'sacrificial'. (You have to wonder if this is some kind of in-joke, since the book is about nothing but sacrifice).
There seems no doubt that the style is all hers. Paulhan contributed a preface whose sentences have none of Pauline Reage's limpid clarity, and which is, in fact, extremely difficult to understand. Aury herself told de St Jorre even she couldn't make head or tail of it.
Paulhan took the book to their joint employer first. 'Gaston Gallimard said, "We can't publish books like this,"' Dominique Aury grumbled in the one television interview she gave after the news broke, when she was 87, 'though he had published Jean Genet, which was much nastier.' Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a young publisher who had already made a name for himself with 120 Days of Sodom and for whom resisting censorship was close to an ideology, remembers being given the book one December afternoon, reading it overnight and calling Paulhan excitedly the following morning. 'I woke him and said, "It's marvellous, it'll spark a revolution. So when do we sign the contract?"'
Pauvert, a round-faced man who looks scarcely any different now from the way he did in photographs when he was in his twenties, says he had known Dominique Aury 12 years before he was handed the book. 'I recognised her style immediately when I saw the manuscript. She is a great writer and absolutely uncopyable.' Paulhan, he adds, could not write like that; his style was drier and more academic.
While many people speculated that O had been written by a man, or was the work of two or more authors, Regine Desforges always saw it as a quintessentially female work (she also had good reason to know who the author was, because she had a serious relationship with Pauvert). 'I always knew it was written by a woman. It is absolutely a feminist work, empowering to women. For the first time, a woman is revealing her sex life, and it is the woman who dominates the situation, her feelings, her responses, her trajectory.'
It was agreed that the book would be published simultaneously in English by the Paris-based Olympia Press, a strange outfit which published a good deal of pornography, mainly for sale to sailors, but which was also the original publisher of Lolita, The Ginger Man, Naked Lunch and some works of Samuel Beckett.
Story of O came out quietly in June 1954 and didn't attract much attention until it won the Prix Deux Magots, nearly a year later, which also brought it to the notice of the Brigade Mondaine, the French vice squad. Pauvert, who had already faced 17 prosecutions in the preceding three years, noted: 'They were really very nice. We knew each other well.'
Paulhan, with his rather different reputation, was also hauled up to testify and dealt with them magisterially. After discoursing on the book's literary qual ity, he added that: 'Madame Reage, who is from an academic family which she feared to scandalise, has refused until now to reveal her name. If she should change her mind, I will ask her to get in touch with you.'
Dominique Aury's adored father had his own collection of erotic literature, which she had read as an adolescent (Les Liaisons Dangereuses was her favourite). Her mother was very different. 'She didn't like men,' Aury said. 'She didn't like women, either. She hated flesh.'
It may well have been to protect her that Dominique kept secret her authorship for so long. (She also, of course, had her position at Gallimard, and the publishing house's reputation, to think of.) Pola Rapaport thinks Aury's parents must have known; despite the secrecy, the Brigade Mondaine came to the apartment Dominique shared with them. On another occasion, a friend from the provinces reported that in her district it was rumoured that Dominique was the author.
Aury's son, Philippe d'Argila, the child of her very brief marriage in her twenties to a Catalan journalist, was himself in his twenties when O appeared. 'I didn't know she was the author,' he told me, speaking at the farmhouse outside Paris which he inherited from his mother. 'She never told me, really. I only found out in 1974, when there was talk of making a film and people came round to discuss it.' (A film, generally reckoned to be a rather pallid version of the book, was made, by Emmanuelle director Just Jaeckin). D'Argila says he was not shocked: 'I already knew her as a writer, and it is a very good book.'
Jacqueline Paulhan didn't find out Dominique was the author until the day of her father-in-law's burial. 'There was a very big bouquet of flowers with no name attached,' she told me. 'I was standing next to Dominique Aury, whom of course I knew well, and I remarked, "I suppose they must be from Pauline Reage." Dominique turned to me and said, "Mais Jacqueline, Pauline Reage, c'est moi."'
By the 1960s, according to Regine Desforges, some 12 or 15 people knew the true identity of Pauline Reage. In the 1970s and 1980s the numbers crept up. Philippe d'Argila recalls accompanying his mother to an event at which she was greeted by President de Gaulle with the words: 'Ah, the writer of Story of O !' (He thinks de Gaulle said it to shock his wife.) But the secret remained confined to an elite group of insiders until de St Jorre asked for and was granted an interview.
Even then, d'Argila believes, she didn't really intend to confess. 'He's a good journalist. I'm not sure she followed too precisely what he said. I don't think she meant to tell at that time.' It may well be that his personality had something to do with it. De St Jorre is an engaging, serious man, who was respectful of Aury's literary achievement and clearly would have had no interest in writing about her in a sensationalist way. Desforges thinks she did intend to reveal it: 'She didn't like lying, and she was relieved.' In the subsequent television interview, Aury herself said she had waited until her parents were dead, and then for a little more time to pass: 'When you learn that it was written by a very old lady it loses some of its scandal.'
The news broke on 1 August, when the French were on holiday; it was not until people returned to Paris on the 15th that it became a scandal. Then there were articles in the tabloids, photographs and requests for interviews. This was a book that had never been out of print, had been bought by millions, and during the 1960s was the most widely read contemporary French novel outside France. (Not much has changed: the day I spoke to Philippe d'Argila, he'd just signed a new contract for Greek publication).
Dominique Aury's life had, however, already changed in the only way she really cared about, in 1968 when Jean Paulhan died. 'I lived with him for 11 or 14 years, I can't remember,' she told Pola Rapaport when they met to film the last footage of her, shortly before her death. 'The last part of my being alive, of my life being alive. After that, I didn't. I stopped. Everything.'
Waiting in his hospital room, night after night, fresh from work on the other side of Paris, she wrote A Girl in Love, the third-person account of the writing of Story of O, as he lay dying. It was published soon after, with the original last, rejected, chapter, as Return to the Chateau . Why she consented to publish this abandoned part after so long is a mystery, not least because she prefaced it with a disclaimer: 'The pages that follow are a sequel to Story of O. They deliberately suggest the degradation of that work, and cannot under any circumstances be integrated into it.'
Perhaps it was that she wanted A Girl in Love published and felt she needed to bulk it out. Perhaps she needed money, as Pauvert may have done.
'I think she published the sequel to please Pauvert, to thank him for all he had done,' says d'Argila.
She may have been past caring. After Paulhan died, according to Jacqueline, Dominique put together a book of recollections of him. 'After that, she kind of gave up her interest in the world. She pulled back from the world and lost her short-term memory.'
Dominique Aury was able to conceal her identity for so long because she looked so unlike an author of a raunchy book. 'She was very self-effacing,' remembers Jacqueline. 'She used to wear very pretty costumes, but not at all showy: very soft, muted colours which really matched her personality.'
Elizabeth Porquerol, who, despite her age, remains very acute, recalls 'a very well-bred and polite person, always smiling and affable. But everyone is double, or triple, or quadruple. Every character has its hidden sides. One doesn't reveal one's secrets to all and sundry.'
When she was a young woman, Regine Desforges says, Dominique Aury liked to walk in Les Halles dressed like a prostitute.
Fifty years on, Story of O remains a powerful text, no longer as shocking as it once was, and no longer causing incredulity that it was written by a woman, but still able to touch people viscerally. Pola Rapaport, who read it at 13 and then again as an adult, told me when we met in Paris: 'It catches people's imaginations. I'm not into S&M. I find the book fascinating and erotic and repellent all at the same time: it's unfiltered and unique.'
Peter Fryer, who wrote a book on the British Museum's collection of erotica, described it as a 'daydream transfigured by literary skill, notably by obsessive detail, Henry James's "solidity of specification"'. (Aury researched 18th-century costume and the book is studded with descriptions of interiors, dress, the appearance of things.)
But beyond its merits as a literary work, its merits or limits as pornography, there lies the paradox that this incendiary book was written by a woman who wore little make-up and no jewellery, who dressed with quiet elegance, who lived out a polite, bluestocking existence in a small flat with her parents and son. Beneath this unlikely exterior raged terrible passions. In the end, the most instructive aspect of the book is that it demonstrates the demoniac nature of sexuality in any or all of us. This quiet, learned woman understood the power of sex. She knew that desire can ignite compulsions to commit sudden, arbitrary violence and induce a yearning for voluptuous, annihilating death.
