Nom de Plume (33 page)

Paulhan was awestruck. When he excitedly asked if he could find a publisher for her work, she agreed on the condition that her authorship remain hidden, known only to a select few. She gave herself the pen name “Pauline Réage”: “Pauline” after Pauline (Bonaparte) Borghese, elder sister of Napoleon, who was famous for her sensual, decadent pursuits; as well as Pauline Roland, the late-nineteenth-century French women's rights activist. Despite the apparent blur between “Pauline” and “Paulhan,” Aury said later that her appellation had nothing to do with him. (Some insisted, wrongly, that she chose the name because it sounded like the French for “Reacting to Paulhan.”) As for “Réage,” she'd supposedly stumbled upon it in a real estate registry.

People assumed that aspects of
Story of O
were highly autobiographical, yet Aury wasn't so sure. Some twenty years after the book came out, she admitted that her own joys and sorrows had informed it, but she had no idea just how much, and did not care to analyze anything. “
Story of O
is a fairy tale for another world,” she said, “a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book.”

She characterized “Pauline Réage” in vague terms as well—someone who “is not me entirely and yet in some obscure way is: when I move from one me to the other the fragments scatter, then come back together again in a pattern that I'm sure is ever-changing. I find it harder and harder to tell them apart anymore, or at least not with sufficient clarity.” Like many pseudonymous authors, Aury saw identity as unstable and felt perfectly at ease inhabiting a self that refused to remain a fixed star.

She knew that finding a publisher for her novel (whether or not she took a pen name) would not be easy. It was Paulhan who demanded that the book reach the public, and he fought for it. In this instance, however, his prestige within the literary world carried no clout. Gallimard promptly refused the work, not wanting to deal with the inevitable (and expensive) hassle of a court case. “We can't publish books like this,” Gaston Gallimard told her. This was especially disappointing because Aury had worked for him. A few years before her death, Aury said that she had never forgiven Gallimard's rejection of her novel, since he'd already published Jean Genet, whose work was “much nastier.”

Paulhan persuaded Jean-Jacques Pauvert—an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old publisher who'd issued Sade's complete works, and who was already a veteran of obscenity trials—to accept
Story of O.
“It's marvelous, it'll spark a revolution,” Pauvert said to Paulhan after reading it overnight. “So when do we sign the contract?”

In 1954, Pauvert published a gorgeously designed first edition of two thousand copies. It had a laudatory preface by Paulhan, “Happiness in Slavery,” in which he argued that women in their truest nature crave domination; that O is empowered by confessing her desire; and that, in truth, slaves love their masters, would suffer in their absence, and have no wish to achieve independence. Indeed, as one reviewer noted, the more O is brutalized, the more “perfectly feminine” she becomes. This is one of the elements that makes the novel more disturbing than arousing.

Paulhan conceded that there was “no dearth of abominations in
Story of O.
But it sometimes seems to me that it is an idea, or a complex of ideas, an opinion rather than a young woman we see being subjected to these tortures.”

The book was a sensation, but hardly a blockbuster. Although it was a topic of titillating gossip among the cognoscenti, a year after publication, the initial printing had not sold out. Aury was not hopeful about the book's prospects; she believed it was doomed to be relegated to the “reserved” section of libraries, if it was ordered at all.

Its status as a best seller was achieved slowly, as the mystique around it continued to build and as other international editions were issued. Initially, because many French booksellers assumed that the novel had been banned, they tended to conceal it under the counter—thus ensuring that sales would be poor. “Everyone talked about it in private,” the author recalled, “but the press acted as though the book had never been published.”

Whatever attention
Histoire d'O
did receive focused on the author's identity, not on the text itself as something worthy of consideration and analysis. Susan Sontag was the first major writer to recognize the novel's merit and to defend it as a significant literary work.

In her 1969 essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag insisted that
Story of O
could be correctly defined as “authentic” literature. She compared the ratio of first-rate pornography to trashy books within the genre to “another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.” She also maintained that like science fiction, pornography was aimed at “disorientation, at psychic dislocation.”

If so, that aim is far more interesting than what most generic “mainstream” novels set out to do. No one could describe
O
as predictable or sentimental. Its vision was dark and unrelenting; everything about it was extreme. Sontag also compared sexual obsession (as expressed by Réage) with religious obsession: two sides of the same coin. “Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds,” she wrote. In her disciplined effort toward transcendence, O is not unlike a zealot giving herself to God. O's devotion to the task at hand takes the form of what might be described as spiritual fervor. She loses herself entirely—and, after all, the loss of self is a goal of prayer.

If O is willing to sustain her devotion all the way through to her own destruction, so be it. She wants to be “possessed, utterly possessed, to the point of death,” to the point that her body and mind are no longer her responsibility. “What does a Christian seek but to lose himself in God,” Aury, a devout atheist, once said. “To be killed by someone you love strikes me as the epitome of ecstasy.”

Sontag's essay was notable for refusing to conflate all porn as bad or to dismiss it all as “dirty books.” It was a thoughtful, rational piece on the aesthetic virtues of pornography at its best. In arguing that some so-called pornographic books were legitimate works of art, she acknowledged that staking such a claim was a daunting task: “Pornography is a malady to be diagnosed and an occasion for judgment. It's something to be for or against . . . quite a bit like being for or against legalized abortion or federal aid to parochial schools.”

Her case for the literary value of
Story of O
was compelling and highly specific: “Though the novel is clearly obscene by the usual standards,” she wrote, “and more effective than many in arousing a reader sexually, sexual arousal doesn't appear to be the sole function of the situations portrayed. The narrative does have a definite beginning, middle, and end. The elegance of the writing hardly gives the impression that its author considered language a bothersome necessity. Further, the characters do possess emotions of a very intense kind, although obsessional and indeed wholly asocial ones; characters do have motives, though they are not psychiatrically or socially ‘normal' motives.” All Réage did was bring into the open the kinds of impulses many people harbor in their bedrooms, alone, late at night. And, from Sontag's perspective,
Story of O
was not really pornography but “meta-pornography, a brilliant parody.”

Who would suspect that Dominique Aury was Pauline Réage? In midlife, Aury was a respected figure: an influential editor, a writer, and a jury member for various literary prizes. She'd earned the Légion d'Honneur; she had translated into French works by authors such as T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf; and she had been the only woman to serve on Gallimard's esteemed reading committee. Her demure appearance gave no hint of owl masks or dog collars. She was polite, refined, elegant, shy. She could not be described as beautiful. A friend remembered Aury as “very self-effacing,” and as having worn “soft, muted colors which really matched her personality.” She dressed quite plainly and wore almost no makeup. At least on the surface, nothing about her was subversive. (She said that dressing in a kind of basic uniform made life simpler.) If anything, Aury seemed conservative, even severe—and to look at her, you might assume that her sexual fantasies would be as stimulating as staring at a dusty library shelf.

The glaring incongruity between her work and her personal life was not lost on Aury. That was why the pen name was so crucial. She insisted that “it would have been wrong to mix what was for so long a time secret with something that was always banal and devoid of interest.” Aury never felt a need to justify the distinction to anyone; it was what she wanted, and it was nobody's business. She was not “living a lie,” because Dominique Aury was not “Pauline Réage,” who had produced the scandalous work. “For a long time I've lived two parallel lives,” Aury explained. “I have meticulously kept those two lives quite separate, so separate in fact that the invisible wall between them seems to me normal and natural.”

Upon the publication of
Story of O
, guessing games were rampant about the author's identity. Contenders included Raymond Queneau, André Malraux, and the most unlikely of all, George Plimpton, founding editor of the
Paris Review.
“It wasn't me,” Plimpton told a reporter in the early 1990s, “but it's a rumor I prefer not to scotch.” Paulhan, too, was a possibility, suspected at the very least of knowing the enigmatic author's identity. As Sontag noted, the theory that Paulhan was the author seemed credible partly because of his introductory essay for the novel. It called to mind the mask of Georges Bataille, who, having written his
Madame Edwarda
under the pseudonym “Pierre Angelique,” also contributed its preface under his own name.

For a while, Paulhan was under intense scrutiny, and his longtime, already volatile friendship with the writer François Mauriac was threatened by the novel's publication. Mauriac, a devoted if somewhat conflicted Catholic, acknowledged that he hadn't read
O
, but nonetheless publicly attacked the book. He was convinced that Paulhan had written it, and Paulhan responded by lashing out, accusing Mauriac of being the real author.

Some readers believed that Paulhan had heavily edited the kinky text. He denied doing so, and Aury, too, insisted later that he hadn't altered so much as a comma. She said the extent of his editing consisted of omitting a single adjective: “
sacrificiel.
” Pauvert, who'd known Aury for more than a decade (and knew of her nom de plume), had no doubt that the novel was Aury's alone. “I recognized her style immediately when I first saw the manuscript,” he said. “She is a great writer and absolutely uncopyable. Paulhan said that he could not write like that—that his own style was quite different, very dry, ironic, and he could not change it.”

A hastily released English translation came within weeks, issued by Maurice Girodas of the Olympia Press. This edition “horrified” Aury; she found it “vulgar” and said that “it cheapens the character of the book.” (She did approve, however, of the translation published by Barney Rosset's Grove Press in 1965.) Fan mail and hate mail poured in. Such a fuss was made that Pauvert and Girodas were interrogated by French police after the novel won the Deux Magots prize. Both men refused to reveal the whereabouts of Pauline Réage, and despite an investigation, no legal action came of it.

As a prime suspect in the making of this scandalous text, Paulhan paid a price. When he was nominated for membership in the elite Académie Française—which consists of forty members known as “immortals”—the opponents of his candidacy are said to have placed a copy of
Histoire d'O
on every Academy member's chair in protest. (He was elected anyway.) He was also forced to provide a deposition to the vice squad in 1955 as it held hearings to determine whether legal action should be taken against the book. Of course he lied in his testimony. He declared that “Mme. Pauline Réage (a pseudonym) paid me a visit in my office . . . and submitted to me a thick manuscript.” There was some truth in Paulhan's deposition—his feelings about the manuscript and why he had championed it. He revealed that he was struck by the book's literary quality “and, if I may say, in the context of an absolutely scabrous subject, by its restraint and modesty.” He said nothing about being in love with the author, but he was completely honest in recalling his first response to it. “I had in my hands a work that was very important in both its content and its style,” he said, “a work that derived much more from the mystical than from the erotic and that might well be for our own time what
Letters to a Portuguese Nun
or
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
were for theirs.”

He concluded his statement by reiterating that Réage did not wish to reveal her true identity, and that he intended to protect her desire for privacy. “Nonetheless,” he added, “since I do see her fairly regularly, I shall inform her of the statement I have just made, and in case she should change her mind I shall ask that she get in touch with you.”

Aury had her own dealings with the police: They showed up at her house one day to interrogate her about the book, and she feigned ignorance. Inexplicably, they chose not to pursue the matter—a courtesy for which she was grateful. But she did feel terribly guilty that the vice squad had focused so intently on her lover and her publisher.

Still, she suffered her share of awkward encounters, snubs, insults, scorn, and ignorant and rude remarks. Because of her anonymity, people felt free to express their opinions about the book. If anyone asked her directly whether she was Réage, she'd simply reply, “That is a question to which I never respond.” (It was a clever response, neither an admission nor a denial.) She was startled to read a characterization of her book as “violently and willfully immoral”; such commentary served to confirm that the pseudonym had been the best way to go. Aury was not naïve, and understood that the novel was quite racy, but she didn't think it was offensive. To her, one's sense of morality was assaulted daily by reading the newspaper. “Concentration camps offend decency,” she said, “as does the atomic bomb, and torture; in fact, life itself offends public morals every minute of the day, in my opinion, and not specifically through the various and sundry methods of making love.”