ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  “O” IS FOR HISTOIRE D’O

  Histoire d’O, or Story of O, is the story of a woman named after the most open, accessible vowel in the alphabet. O, a fashion photographer, is taken to a château in Roissy, a Paris suburb, by her lover, René. There, she is sexually—and, shockingly to feminism, willingly—enslaved: She is whipped, raped, and kept manacled in dungeons while being repeatedly sodomized by a succession of ebonite dildos. She is branded on her buttocks; her labia are pierced with a ring connected to chains by which she is led around, crawling. Story of O was published simultaneously in French and English in 1954, under the pornonym Pauline Réage, with a preface signed by Jean Paulhan, a respected critic for the Nouvelle Revue Française, editor at Gallimard, and member of the Académie française. Thanks to Paulhan’s imprimatur, the book was a succès de scandale and bestseller, the author’s identity an avidly sought secret. The French press doubted that Réage was a woman and proposed as author André Malraux, Raymond Queneau, Jean Paulhan himself, and even the American writer George Plimpton. Forty years after publication, though, Réage was publicly outed by Olympia scholar John de St. Jorre (writing in The New Yorker) as Dominique Aury, a Gallimard employee, and a prominent English-French translator. Aury, who was privately suspected for decades of being O’s author, maintained that her novel had been a love letter to Paulhan, who had guarded her identity after he captured her heart. As Paulhan was years older than Aury and already married to an invalid who’d outlive him (Paulhan died in 1968), Aury’s O had been intended as a complete gift of herself to the man she could not possess. However, Dominique Aury was also a pseudonym, used for the author’s translation work, and ultimately de St. Jorre chose to protect the true identity of the novel’s creatrix. The real writer of O is named only in the definitive bibliography of the Olympia Press, written by book smuggler and erotician Patrick Kearney and edited by Angus Carroll. There we are told that Réage/Aury is, or was, Anne Cécile Desclos (1907–98). But Desclos’s is not the only pseudonymous conundrum involved with O’s publication: The translator of the book’s 1965 American edition was Sabine d’Estrée, believed to be Richard Seaver, translator of Samuel Beckett’s French work and husband to a woman whose middle name was Sabine. The first English version of O was execrable, with Olympia’s translator translating the name “Madeleine” as “cake.” Because brother Eric was busy, Girodias had entrusted the work to Baird Bryant, dilettante novelist. Bryant would abandon literature for cinematography; he was one of the cameramen who, at the 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, caught on tape the murder of gunman Meredith Hunter by Hell’s Angel Alan Passaro, which can be seen in the documentary film Gimme Shelter.

  “P” IS FOR PORNOGRAPHY

  My breasts, if it is not too bold a figure to call so two hard, firm, rising hillocks, that just began to shew themselves, or signify anything to the touch, employ’d and amus’d her hands a-while, till, slipping down lower, over a smooth track, she could just feel the soft silky down that had but a few months before put forth and garnish’d the mount-pleasant of those parts, and promised to spread a grateful shelter over the seat of the most exquisite sensation, and which had been, till that instant, the seat of the most insensible innocence. Her fingers play’d and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss, which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament. / But, not contented with these outer posts, she now attempts the main spot, and began to twitch, to insinuate, and at length to force an introduction of a finger into the quick itself, in such a manner, that had she not proceeded by insensible gradations that inflamed me beyond the power of modesty to oppose its resistance to their progress, I should have jump’d out of bed and cried for help against such strange assaults. / Instead of which, her lascivious touches had lighted up a new fire that wanton’d through all my veins, but fix’d with violence in that center appointed them by nature, where the first strange hands were now busied in feeling, squeezing, compressing the lips, then opening them again, with a finger between, till an “Oh!” express’d her hurting me, where the narrowness of the unbroken passage refused it entrance to any depth.

  From Fanny Hill, or: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, first pornographic novel in English, by John Cleland, published in installments beginning in 1748, republished by Olympia in 1954, defined as protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution by the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 1966, which effectively ended literary censorship in America.

  “Q” IS FOR QUENEAU, RAYMOND

  Raymond Queneau (1903–76) was a French poet, novelist, literary theorist, Gallimard executive, and the co-founder of the Oulipo movement (an acronym for ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature), dedicated to experimenting with writing under formal and stylistic constraints. Translation: His work is difficult to translate. Queneau’s most artistically successful book is 1947’s Exercises de style, in which the same story is told multiple times and in multiple ways, such as in retrograde and in rhyming slang. Queneau’s most commercially successful book, however, was 1959’s Zazie dans le Métro, whose English edition was published simultaneously by Olympia under the same French title in a translation by Eric Kahane and Akbar del Piobo, a pseudonym for American artist Norman Rubington. A film version by Louis Malle was made in 1960. Zazie, which concerns the adventures of the eponymous young girl placed in the care of a transvestite uncle to allow her mother time alone with a lover, explores the possibilities of punning in colloquial French. Its opening word is “Doukipudonktan,” a phoneticized portmanteau of the correct “D’où qu’il pue donc tant?” (“How come he stinks so bad?”) The now-standard English translation, by Barbara Wright, reads “Howcanaystinksotho,” while “Holifart, watastink” was Olympia’s original.

  “R” IS FOR RIJEKA

  Kahane was shelled and gassed at Ypres in 1916, his health forever ruined. After his hospital discharge, marriage, and honeymoon recuperation, Kahane resumed his duties, serving as a transport officer with the Fourth Army in Dunkirk and Italy. Stationed in the port of Fiume—today known as Rijeka, Croatia—Kahane’s job was to ensure that the Italian railways ran on time to facilitate the return of Allied troops to Britain. Austro-Hungarian Fiume’s population had been majority Italian, until the novecento, when the Habsburgs began encouraging Croatian emigration. The city had been administered by the Hungarian half of the empire from Budapest, but following the armistice it was under British control and Italy (especially the Italian Right) had begun claiming it, if only unofficially. Meanwhile, the city’s port moored ships from the fleets of Britain, France, Austria, and Italy. When the Treaty of Versailles failed to award the Dalmatian territories to Italy, Italian nationalists felt insulted and sought to restore their dignity through the figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio, warrior-poet. A crazy blackshirted fascist—he popularized both the politics and the fashion—D’Annunzio had emerged from the war a hero, not only as an artist but also as a cavalry officer and fighter pilot. When it emerged that Fiume itself would not be awarded to Italy, D’Annunzio, with the support of Mussolini, who’d just founded the Fascist Party, marched on the city in September 1919. There he claimed Fiume for Italy against the will of the Italian government. The government condemned D’Annunzio; Mussolini’s Fascists denounced the government; and D’Annunzio, calling himself Il Duce before Mussolini, ensconced himself in Fiume, which he declared an independent state called the Regency of Carnaro, where he instituted the laws of ancient Rome, including capital punishment. When the Treaty of Rapallo between Italy and Yugoslavia called for Fiume to be incorporated into Croatia in 1920 (under its Croatian name of Rijeka), D’Annunzio responded by declaring war on the country of his birth. But with the Italian fleet blockading the harbor and shelling his villa, the poet-provocateur retreated. By this time, Kahane was already in France, where he was asked to approach the Yugoslav delegation at the Paris Conference on behalf of Italy, covertly offering to purchase Fiume/Rijeka from Yug
oslavia; further, the Italians offered to surrender Spalato and build a new port for that city. Kahane’s remuneration would have been the concession for the port’s construction, but the scheme came to nothing. Fiume/Rijeka was Kahane’s first encounter with the fascism that his sons would experience more directly.

  “S” IS FOR DE SADE, MARQUIS

  La Grande Séverine, Girodias’s nightspot, was located down the street from the fifteenth-century Saint-Séverin church. While excavating the building’s cellars for an expansion, workers unearthed skeletons from the church’s medieval burial grounds. Converting this (said to be cursed) basement into an underground theater, Girodias turned impresario, staging theatrical works for the public and friends. These included a revue entitled Les Playgirls as well as a stage adaptation of Norman Rubington’s Fuzz Against Junk in a French translation by Eric Kahane. Girodias’s brother was also responsible for a 1959 adaptation of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir (The Bedroom Philosophers), the dialogical original of which Olympia published in English in 1953. Olympia also released editions of the ithyphallic marquis’s Justine (first published under the Obelisk imprint), Juliette, and The 120 Days of Sodom. While La Philosophie dans le boudoir’s opening night was a success, the Paris vice squad—increasingly intolerant in de Gaulle’s France—arrived two nights later and closed the play down. Characteristically, Girodias defied the ban and even mounted the stage the next night to read, as an opening act, the text of the decree that shuttered his show. The police did nothing, however, perhaps because that night the audience included de Gaulle’s former minister of education; the writer Romain Gary and his wife, actress Jean Seberg; the filmmaker Roger Vadim; and actress Catherine Deneuve. The following night, though, the vice squad returned and the theater never reopened. La Grande Séverine soon exhausted its resources and credit, closing forever. Olympia Paris would not survive the club by much, and by 1965 Girodias had moved his operations to America.

  “T” IS FOR TRILOGY

  Alexander Trocchi, Scottish writer and pornographer, co-founded Merlin with his American wife, Jane Lougee, in 1952 as a journal for “innovation in creative writing.” Their partners included Austryn Wainhouse, Richard Seaver, and British poet Christopher Logue. It was Seaver who discovered Samuel Beckett in French, helped translate him into English, and brought the Irish writer to the attention of Merlin, which published an excerpt from Molloy. Girodias, who’d befriended the Merlinois, as he called them, and who supported the journal by employing its editors in the writing of d.b.s, was introduced to Beckett (1906–89), and in 1953 published Watt, the future Nobel laureate’s first book in English, as part of a series called Collection Merlin. Another of the Merlinois, South African Patrick Bowles, translated Molloy into English in collaboration with its author, who translated Malone Dies and The Unnamable on his own. Despite the fact that Beckett considered the three titles individual entities, Girodias published them as a trilogy in 1959, fixing for posterity the format and order in which we read them today.

  “U” IS FOR UNEXPURGATED

  “Sleeveless errand” is superannuated slang for a fool’s errand, or fruitless endeavor. “Sleeveless” derives from “sleave,” or “sleive,” meaning raveled thread or the raw edge of silk, implying uselessness. An Old English verb, to “sleeve” meant to divide or separate. To sleeve silk meant to prepare it for weaving by passing it through the “slay” of a loom, sometimes called a “sled.” The “sleeve” itself was the tangled, coarse end left over from the process. Sleeveless Errand is a novel by Norah C. James, written in 1928 and scheduled for publication by the British Scholartis Press in 1929. But in February of that year, on the eve of publication, London police raided every bookstore that had ordered copies and confiscated their stock. What followed was a sleeveless prosecution. The Crown found the book lascivious, while supporters praised its (illusory) literary merit. Offending passages included such verbiage as “bloody hell,” “balls,” “homos,” “whores,” “for Christ’s sake,” “like hell,” and “bitch.” Kahane read about the fracas in a newspaper across the Channel and managed to obtain a confiscated copy (most of the print run had been pulped). He didn’t enjoy it as literature as much as entertain it as business opportunity. Believing that the book had been attacked because a prominent politician was maligned in its pages—though neither he nor James ever mentioned any names—Kahane conceived the idea for a prurient but entirely legal Parisian press, which profited from exploiting the definitional differences between British and French pruderies and libels. In March 1929, Kahane purchased English-language, French-publication rights to Sleeveless Errand, taking out advertisements in the London press announcing that “in the event of other books of literary merit being banned in England,” he was “prepared to publish them in Paris within a month.” Sleeveless Errand was Obelisk’s first title. James said that had she known that portions of her book would have offended, she would have removed them. Kahane, contrarily, relished the economics of transgression and emblazoned on a blue-green wrapper across his edition’s cover the catchphrase: THE COMPLETE /AND UNEXPURGATED TEXT.

  “V” IS FOR VALERIE SOLANAS

  In 1967, while establishing Olympia U.S.A., Girodias lived in New York at the Chelsea Hotel. His neighbor was a writer named Valerie Solanas. A friendship began, and Girodias came to appreciate Solanas’s antimale play Up Your Ass, as well as a manifesto entitled, and for, S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men. Girodias commissioned Solanas to write a novel, offering her an advance of $2,000, and Solanas—a friend and collaborator of Andy Warhol’s—introduced Girodias to the pop artist at a screening of the rough cut of his film I, a Man. Solanas could not finish her novel, however, and offered Girodias her manifesto instead. In June 1968, Girodias abruptly evacuated New York for Montréal. The day after he left, Solanas entered Warhol’s studio and shot the artist three times, damaging organs. That evening, with Warhol undergoing surgery, Solanas surrendered to police in Times Square. Warhol’s shooting was front-page news until Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles two days later. Capitalizing on the Warhol shooting as best he could, Girodias immediately published S.C.U.M., treating it as an exhibit in Solanas’s public trial by quoting in a press release her statement to the police that her motives for shooting Warhol were “very involved but best understood if you read my manifesto.” There was a rumor, possibly spread by Girodias himself, that the deranged Solanas, dissatisfied with what had been Girodias’s delay in publishing her manuscript, had actually been after him, that she had stopped by Olympia U.S.A.’s Gramercy Park offices first, but, finding Girodias gone, instead walked, gun in hand, to Warhol’s Factory at Union Square. Girodias was said to have known she was coming and thought it best to depart for Canada.

  “W” IS FOR WYNDHAM LEWIS

  Marjorie Firminger, born in London in 1899, began her artistic career as an actress, playing gadfly girl Penelope Foxglove in Kenneth Barnes’s play The Letter of the Law. Despite good notices, this was Firminger’s last stage success. When she met the author, painter, and raconteur Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), Firminger was eking out a living writing about fashion for women’s magazines. Lewis occasionally stopped by Firminger’s Chelsea apartment and encouraged her to gossip, relying on the younger writer for insight into Lewis’s friends, who’d become Firminger’s too: Sidney Schiff, novelist, and Richard Wyndham, painter, among others. At this time, Firminger was writing a novel herself, a fact she kept from the intimidating, domineering Lewis. That novel, Jam To-day, was a messy satire, and a masochistic act of social suicide. The title is borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which the Queen tells Alice: “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Though the Queen’s quote might derive from a Latin pun (iam in Latin means “soon,” or “presently”), Carroll’s phrase has come to signify unfulfilled promise or delayed gratification. Firminger herself greedily gobbles her preserves from the very first p
age: Sir Michael Bruce, author, is lampooned as Lord Jerry Poon; the book’s lesbian heroine, Bracken Dilitor, was based on Heather Pilkington (whom Firminger had introduced to Lewis upon Lewis’s request to meet a lesbian); and Pilkington’s real-life lover, Wyn Henderson, friend to shipping heiress Nancy Cunard and collaborator with Cunard on the Hours Press in Paris, appears as Mrs. Wikk, “over six feet and colossally fat.” Word of the book traveled, and even before publication Firminger’s friends began to desert her. Firminger, though, remained convinced of her right to transmute life into art—a conviction influenced by Lewis’s practice. Jam To-day was accepted for publication by Herbert Clarke, of the Paris-based Vendôme Press; it appeared in print in 1931 and was promptly seized by British customs as obscene. Only a week later, Clarke died of a stroke and Vendôme’s list was bought by Kahane, who rebranded Firminger’s novel with the Obelisk phallus and offered to publish her future books, but none was forthcoming. After Thirty, That Cad Jane, and Love at Last were left unfinished. A married Lewis, returned from an extended trip to Berlin, where he would fall under Nazi influence, distanced himself even further from Firminger, who remained obsessed with him, refusing to abandon her pretense toward their relationship. In 1932, Lewis published Snooty Baronet, a novel that follows its writer-hero, the one-legged, Scottish minor noble Sir Michael Kell-Imrie, as he makes his way through a world of mediocrities, unworthies, incompetents, and poseurs. One of them is his infrequent lover, hack writer Valerie Ritter, whose works were “quite unprintable, except in de luxe editions privately printed in Paris or Milan.” A “giggling fantoche” with halitosis, Val’s face “has a swarthy massaged flush. (If you look too close, it is full of pits; under the make-up is a field of gaping pores—her nose is worst in this respect: some day it will disintegrate for all practical purposes).” Like Firminger, Val self-destructed, having alienated “all those bright nebulous monomaniacal patrons, of Gossip-column-class—on to the hem of whose garment she had clung like grim death—but who had shaken her off, of one accord, and by common consent, about a year since, when she had pooped in their faces.” The author of Jam To-day married, divorced, and worked in a department store selling hats. Firminger’s legacy was Lewis’s slight; Lewis would withhold their correspondence from his own collection of letters. She died in 1976, humiliated still.