O

by Steven Carroll

  On the screen the figures of the moment come and go, one succeeded by another, mere prime ministers and presidents and the odd murderer. Mere news. Intrigue and scandal. She pays them scant attention. Why shouldn’t she? She knows all about scandal and doesn’t need the news to tell her. She once lived in the eye of a storm. The storm passed. And who now would look at a white-haired little old woman and even associate the word scandal with her? A flicker of a smile passes over her face. Old age does that: takes the sting out of a scandal.

  She prods the dinner, leaning back in her chair. Who was she, that woman who shocked her world and created, conjured up, a storm? You wouldn’t believe a book, and such a little book, could do that. Surely after a world war, millions dead, death camps, whole cities reduced to rubble and ash, the dust still settling, the earth still trembling, the world was beyond being shocked. But her little book, which was written almost half a century ago in another age that has now passed and for a lover who is now dead, did exactly that. Her fantasy or her little bit of porn (depending on who is speaking) – her strange progeny, which, looking back on it all, she can’t believe she ever wrote – consumed the city and the whole country. Divided it. A public orgy of hate and insult on one side; fascination and intrigue on the other. The fact of it still amazes her. And the woman who wrote it, who was she? Anne Desclos, Dominique Aury, Pauline Réage? All her, all now slipping in and out of each other. And could she ever tell them apart? And the book, where did that come from? Born in those frenzied nights when she wrote through until first light, her hand holding the pencil moving over the page like the hand of a stranger in a strange dream.

  And who was Pauline Réage if not a fragment of her that called out to live somehow – who existed and never existed, the medium through which she wrote. Some part of her that had to live and then had to die, but who, nonetheless, endures now through the book.

  She sits at her table considering the meal. She lifts her fork, dips it into the dinner and nibbles on a piece of potato, vaguely registering the taste. The past sits at her table with her. A whole life, and everyone and everything that constituted that life: the child she was, the girl, the young woman, and the woman who was suddenly not so young any more and who wrote her little book as a way of keeping her lover. A private letter thrown into the eye of a public storm.

  She rises from the table, leaving the meal half eaten. Faint laughter becomes audible. The news of the latest scandal has given way to a comedy. She shuffles across the floor and smiles, absent-mindedly, at the antics on the screen, then turns the television down and settles on the sofa beside the cat.

  Who is Pauline Réage? A man? A woman? A famous author’s pseudonym? Just anybody? That woman sitting beside you at a café? That lady of a certain age stepping into a taxi carrying bags of exclusive shopping, or the young woman laughing in a bar with her friends, tristesse in her laughing eyes? Everywhere, and nowhere. Like those revolutionary heroes who hide in plain sight and who leave only a flower behind when they depart the scene. That was her, a kind of Pimpernel, both the maker – the subject of the scandal – and an observer of it. She picks a book up from the table beside her. Shakespeare. The cat stretches out. All things pass, the storm subsided, the scandal became yesterday’s news.

  Who would have thought a book could do that? And such a slight one. Something she always thought of as a fairy tale. One with a dark side, like the best of fairy tales.

  Her eyes slowly close, not so much sleeping as resting. Almost serene. An unexpected state of grace. She is untouchable now. As she dozes, the streets she once haunted spring up around her, the boulevards, the café called Hope and the cheap hotel where she and her lover met, two or three times a week, in the blue hours between six and eight, when they became forest creatures, the hotel with its drab curtains and threadbare carpet their sacred wood

  Love is such a shop-soiled word. She doesn’t even know what love means any more. All she knows is that they gave themselves to each other in the only way they could. Sometimes this giving fell short. Sometimes it was too much. What mattered was that the source of this giving never dried up. It was from this deep well that she drew the gift of her story, their story, and, as it turned out, a story with a life of its own.

  Notes on a novel

  If there was a scandal when Story of O was released in Australia in the 1970s – as there had been when it was first published in France – I wasn’t aware of it, not the way I was aware of the scandal that accompanied the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint.

  First published in France in 1954 under the pseudonym Pauline Réage, Story of O was both hailed and reviled. (And there was a popular view at the time that, because the novel pandered to male fantasy, it had to have been written by a man.)

  English editions didn’t follow until the 1960s. I later became conscious of it as a book that divided people – those who saw it as cheap pornography that glorified the objectification of women and pandered to male fantasy, and those who saw it as an elegantly, even clinically written examination of the complex nature of desire and, if anything, graphically mirrored the masculine order of things and male objectification of women.

  According to French novelist and essayist Regine de Forges, women embraced the book and men hated it. One interpretation of this might be that Story of O so graphically lays bare the masculine order of things that, for men, it is not so much an erotic reading experience as a deeply confronting one.

  Like Russian dolls, there are readings within readings within readings. Men in Story of O have complete power and the character known only as ‘O’ submits to them. She is their slave. But there are others, Regine de Forge among them, who say that the dynamic operating between O and the men in the chateau – basically a brothel, to which she consents to go to please her lover – is far more complex than that. The men are actually – without knowing – in the service of O, whose quest is the dissolution of self and spiritual transcendence, the story using erotic fantasy to document a spiritual journey where submission, humiliation and ultimate transcendence are akin to the ordeals of the saints which are marked by self-abnegation and surrender.

  Dominique Aury (born Anne Desclos) always maintained that the inspiration for Story of O was 17th-century French theologian and poet Francois Fenelon. But what struck me when I finally got around to reading the book sometime in the 1990s was something else entirely different – the constant repetition of a significant number of key words: ‘surrender’, ‘submission’, ‘humiliation’, ‘defeat’, ‘liberation’, numerous references to a superior power, ‘masters’, ‘shame’ and the odd ‘invasion’. Just as much the language of war as sado-masochistic erotics. At some point, another interpretation entirely of Story of O began to take hold of me – that for all its erotic content the novel, in large part, was an unconscious metaphor for the most shameful episode in modern French history: the Nazi Occupation of France in the Second World War.

  If Story of O had been written in the 1970s or later it wouldn’t have mattered. But the fact is Dominique Aury conceived Story of O around 1950 and wrote it as a love letter to her lover, publisher Jean Paulhan, soon after, in the rain-shadow of the Occupation, when words such as ‘surrender’, ‘submission’, ‘defeat’ and ‘liberation’ had a meaning redolent of an all too recent, shameful past. Everybody was on edge, nerves were jangled, the experience still raw, and to a large extent the populace wanted to put the Occupation behind them. Forget it. Repress it.

  But the moods and preoccupations of a country, especially at certain pivotal moments, have a way surfacing through art. Whether consciously, unconsciously, or a combination of both, art can sometimes mirror the very thing that a country wants to forget. And it increasingly occurred to me that, as unlikely a candidate as it may seem, Story of O was just such a work: one of those cases in which the individual psyche is like the whole society writ large.

  When the novel was first published in France in 1954 (after having been rejected as porn by Gallimard – for
whom Dominique Aury worked), it caused a scandal the likes of which are rare in publishing. A scandalous text, vilified and praised in equal measure, it won the prestigious Prix des Deux Magots, edging out Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. The French Book Committee – the censors – condemned it as an ‘assault on public morality’ and the French equivalent of the vice squad moved in. Pauline Réage was a wanted author. It struck me as well that the outrage may have been triggered not just by the explicit sex in the novel but by the symbolism, the way it distilled the abjection the whole country had felt during the Occupation.

  A pervasive Underground image of France during the Occupation – especially in literature – was of France as a whore who surrendered all too easily. Marshal Petain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy France, was often depicted as the pimp who handed his country over to the Germans. Was it possible the narrative of Story of O mirrored the story of the country, but presented in erotic fairy tale form, cleansed of history, reduced to its essentials?

  I sat on the idea for ten or fifteen years while I completed other novels, one day dismissing it as a fanciful idea that didn’t have the legs to be a novel, the next thinking that I might be on to something. During this time I was continually looking out for evidence that this interpretation had already been made. Yet most readings of the novel focused on the dynamics of the relationship between O and her masters or the story’s religious and spiritual symbolism. Nobody mentioned the war.

  It gradually dawned on me that, as far as I could tell – for better or for worse – the interpretation was mine alone. I still wasn’t sure this was a book I wanted to write. During this time my partner, fellow writer Fiona Capp, would occasionally prompt me, asking if I was going to write this book because she was sure that the idea held.

  Eventually I started to get anxious that somebody else, especially on those days when the interpretation looked so blindingly obvious, would stumble across the same idea. It happens. The first thing I ever wrote in the early 1980s was a play about T.S. Eliot, his first marriage and the writing of ‘The Waste Land’, thinking that nobody else would be interested. Just when it was accepted by a Melbourne theatre company I heard that a play called Tom and Viv (about T.S. Eliot, his first marriage and, in part, the writing of ‘The Waste Land’) had opened in London and was scheduled for production at a Melbourne theatre company. Production plans for my play were shelved.

  With this in mind, I started planning the novel. Right from the start I thought of it as a kind of critique of Story of O, an attempt to define the silence in the text, the thing that it either didn’t know about or didn’t want to know about, but a fictional not a critical analysis – one novel interrogating another novel.

  This also led into the whole area of authorial intention and the degree to which a writer is fully cognisant of what’s going on in their work. I think writers must be able to articulate what they think their book is about. Working out key themes and preoccupations is a crucial part of the preparation process. But most writers know that they are not in full control of all the meanings embedded in their books, given the unconscious forces at work in the creative process. And when a novel is published and enters the public arena it inevitably takes on a life of its own. This, I imagine, is what happened with Story of O. I make no judgement about the literary merit or otherwise of Aury’s novel; this didn’t concern me.

  The novel took me to Paris, where – with the help of my friends poet and novelist Xavier Houssin and his wife, publicist Amelie d’Or – I interviewed literary figures who either knew Dominique Aury or wrote about her. Xavier, who lives in Normandy, not far from Avranches, where Dominique Aury grew up with grandmother, found her old house, which really does look out to Mont St Michel.

  I’ve taken many liberties with the facts as we know them. Pauline Réage never existed. I’ve made her a character in the story. Dominique Aury was in the Resistance (distributing anti-German literature – which was enough to get you shot) and may well have been recruited by her lover Jean Paulhan. She was certainly distributing leaflets that he had printed, only she didn’t know he was printing them. But she never undertook anything so dangerous as the events in my novel. I’ve always wanted to write a thriller, and this section of the novel allowed me to indulge that part of me. Nor did Dominique Aury ever teach.

  Some things you couldn’t invent. The Gallimard reading committee meeting, for example. It actually happened. This committee rejected Story of O, but – except for Jean Paulhan and Dominique Aury, who was the first woman to sit on the committee – nobody in the room that day knew that the author of Story of O was, in fact, Aury.

  The challenge the whole way through was never to lose sight of the key, informing idea. The story, much of it complete invention, was always intended as an illumination of that idea, otherwise I would have been left with simply biographical fiction. (I don’t see my T.S. Eliot novels as biographical fiction, rather as speculative explorations of the emotional wellsprings of his poetry.)

  Likewise I see O as a piece of speculative fiction, that unconscious metaphor of O’s story being a key part of Story of O that she, the author, was completely unaware of.

  But, in the end, it’s all a riddle. Just as Dominique Aury, Anne Desclos and Pauline Réage – a formidable woman who intimidated nearly everybody around her, who re-read the complete Proust every year for five years and translated the greats of her day – remains a riddle, a kind of Pimpernel who baked her favourite biscuits (Visitantes) for the Gallimard reading committee meetings, and smiled enigmatically upon the scandal her one and only novel created.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the following people and organisations.

  In France, my friends Xavier Houssin and Amelie d’Or, who arranged interviews with the following (Amelie acting as interpreter):

  Renowned novelist and critic Philippe Sollers, who knew Dominique Aury, and whom I spoke to in his tiny office at Gallimard; writer and publisher Angie David, whose prize-winning and very substantial biography of Dominique Aury I read with the aid of a French/English dictionary; writer and journalist Josyane Savigneau, who also knew Dominique Aury and whom I interviewed in the café called Hope; writer Florent Georgesco, editor of Angie David’s biography of Aury.

  I would also like to thank the Cité Internationale de Paris for providing me with a residency when I was completing the first draft of the novel.

  Xavier Houssin, novelist and poet, who lives in Normandy not far from Avranches, discovered, among other things, Dominique Aury’s house in Avranches where she grew up with her grandmother, and which really does look out towards the Mont St Michel.

  I’d also like to acknowledge the following: Pola Rapaport’s documentary Writer of O and John de St Jorre’s New Yorker article ‘The Unmasking of O’. Both were very helpful.

  In England, my agent Sonia Land and all the gang at Sheil Land.

  In Australia, novelist Catherine de Saint Phalle, who read an early draft of the novel with a particular view to looking at all things French, especially the use of vous and tu.

  At Harper Collins, publisher Catherine Milne, editor Amanda O’Connell and Belinda Yuille.

  My partner, fellow writer, Fiona Capp, who read and edited the novel four times through its numerous drafts, and who also wrote the final paragraph of the novel.

  Finally, to our finest co-creation, our son Leo, just for being Leo.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEVEN CARROLL was born in Melbourne. His first novel, Remember Me, Jimmy James, was published in 1992. This was followed by Momoko (1994); The Love Song of Lucy McBride (1998); The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and France’s Prix Femina literary award for the Best Foreign Novel in 2005; The Gift of Speed (2004), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005; The Time We Have Taken (2007), which won both the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South-East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Miles Franklin Awa
rd 2008; The Lost Life (2009), which was shortlisted for both the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award and the ALS Gold Medal 2010; Spirit of Progress (2011), which was longlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award; and A World of Other People (2013), which was shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Award 2014 and was co-winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2014. He was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2015. Forever Young (2015) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2016; and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2016; and A New England Affair (2017) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2018. The Year of the Beast, the sixth novel in the Glenroy series, was published in 2019.

  Steven Carroll lives in Melbourne with his partner and son.

  Praise for A World of Other People

  ‘A World of Other People is a powerfully imagined, elegiac homage to love, heroism and poetry . . . an intimate private drama, set against the immense and tragic backdrop of European civilization tearing itself apart’

  Prime Minister’s Literary Awards judges, 2014

  ‘A fine, absorbing novel — darker than The Lost Life but equally eloquent and assured. Carroll’s re-creation of a distant and now long-lost world is vivid and tactful’

  Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald

  Praise for The Time We Have Taken

  ‘Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration . . . a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives’