by Joshua Cohen
“X” IS FOR XXX
X’s anonymity has stood in for the miscellaneously prurient, a shorthand for the scatological or otherwise forbidden. It stands for 10 in Roman numerals and has also served as both a symbol of negation (“no”) and the traditional signature of illiterates. The origins of its myriad applications are obscure. Two Olympians incorporated this anonymizing, lurid letter into their pseudonyms. XXX was the pseudonym of Diane, or alternately Diana, Bataille, wife of Georges, also known as Princess Diane Kotchoubey de Beauharnais, and the author of The Whip Angels. Greta X was John Millington-Ward, who wrote exclusively about le vice anglais—flagellation. As Greta, this dignified, older Englishman—Olympia’s most commercially successful d.b. writer throughout the 1950s—wrote There’s a Whip in My Valise and Whipsdom. He also wrote under the names Angela Pearson (Scream, My Darling, Scream; The Whipping Club; The Whipping Post; Whips Incorporated), and Ruth Less or Lesse (Lash). Under his own name, Millington-Ward was a theorist of education and the author of such valuable textbooks as New Intermediate English Grammar and Proficiency in the Use of English: 10 Lessons of Guidance and Practice.
“Y” IS FOR YOUNG ADAM
Young Adam is a book by Francis Lengel, aka Alexander Trocchi, who wrote both d.b.s and more-serious literature for Olympia under the gynonym Carmencita de las Lunas and the alias Oscar Mole. He used the name Lengel for pornography; de las Lunas was used to write Thongs; and Oscar Mole was appended to Trocchi’s translations, which included an Englishing of Apollinaire’s Les Onze Mille Verges. The indefatigable Trocchi was also Terry Southern’s first collaborator on the latter’s update of Candide, but Trocchi recused himself to meet d.b. deadlines, leaving Southern to work with Mason Hoffenberg on the subversive sex farce Candy. Subsequently, Trocchi turned literary agent, introducing Southern and Hoffenberg to Girodias, who published their coauthored novel to enduring success. Trocchi was a one-man, rush-hour Grub Street and was even prodigious, or profligate, against his will: When his update of Fanny Hill, entitled Helen and Desire (1954), was banned in France, Olympia reprinted it under the title Desire and Helen (1956). Helen and Desire was the first Lengel book, but Young Adam—also from 1954, about a bargeworker plying Glasgow to Edinburgh who discovers the corpse of a woman he knew, and is sexually stirred—was his most successful. In the late ’50s, Trocchi left Paris, moved to the United States, and, life imitating art, worked on a garbage barge on the Hudson River. He returned to England a decade later, continued writing (in 1960 publishing his masterpiece, Cain’s Book, also concerning a libidinous bargeworker), but summated his posterity by injecting heroin on a live TV talk show. He died in 1984, having spent his last years operating a used-books stall in London. A Young Adam film appeared in 2003 starring Ewan McGregor. It was rated NC-17; Sony Pictures, the movie’s American distributors, wanted to cut McGregor’s full-frontal-nudity scene for Stateside release, but the actor protested and the scene was retained.
“Z” IS FOR ZAY, THEODORE
Theodore Zay, ostensible Hungarian nobleman, wrote only one book for Obelisk, never reprinted. That novel, Love Counts Ten, subtitled A Sensational Story / of the Night Haunts of a Great City, concerns young gigolo Ernest von Sternheim, who services both sexes in Weimar Berlin. Sternheim falls in love and seeks retirement at age twenty-seven, but the stock market crashes and our tender whore loses his fortune. After his lover dies of consumption, Sternheim blinds himself in a suicide attempt as inept as his author’s prose style (I am relying on summaries, however; Love is among the most difficult of Obelisk titles to obtain). At novel’s end, our hero, broke and unable to satisfy his clientele, is left preternaturally old, selling matches on a Paris street corner. Theodore Zay is certainly a pseudonym, given the location of Obelisk’s offices just across the Seine from the Left Bank’s Quai d’Orsay (and the Musée d’Orsay, where Manet’s Olympia hangs). In bleak January 1939, the price of paper was already so prohibitive in France that Love was printed in Belgium. The true identity of “Theo d’Orsay” remains unknown.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, James; Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank, 1946–1960
de St. Jorre, John; Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers
Ford, Hugh; Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920–1939
Girodias, Maurice; The Frog Prince
Girodias, Maurice; The Olympia Reader
Kahane, Jack; Memoirs of a Booklegger
Kearney, Patrick (ed. Angus Carroll); The Paris Olympia Press
Pearson, Neil; A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press
* Alternatively, and perhaps more convincingly, Obelisk’s name and colophon are said to have been inspired by the ancient Egyptian Obelisk of Luxor. Dating from the reign of Ramses II, hieroglyphed from bottom to top, that monumental column had guarded the entrance to the Luxor Temple and was a gift of goodwill from Egypt to Louis-Philippe I, the last King of France. It was erected, in 1836, in Paris’s Place de la Concorde, just a handful of blocks from the Vendôme column and the future site of the press’s offices.
FROM THE DIARIES
SOUNDS OF ODESSA
Clip-clop, clip-clop: Horse hooves on the cobbles? Or the mating call of stilettos?
SIGHTS OF ODESSA
Potemkin Villages are fake villages; the Potemkin Stairs are real steep.
ODESSA FASHION
Odessa fashion is extremely resourceful: A sailor’s stripes are the same as a convict’s.
ODESSA AT WORK
A man demands money just for owning a monkey.
ODESSA GEOGRAPHY
Wherever an ashtray is, is the center of the table.
LONDON STUMBLE
(Lateness accrues debt to be repaid in compliments.) But he stumbled into the pub saying, “It’s dark out and you look great.”
POND MEMORIES
ON GEORGES PEREC
Once upon a time there was a pond, which was filled with small worms who fed on even smaller worms. To survive, the littlest of the worms had to hide in the slimy shallows and secrete themselves amid the weeds. But whatever the littlest worms lacked in practical resources, they made up for in imagination. Because as the littlest worms waited in the shallows—as the littlest worms lived—expecting at any moment to be devoured, they found themselves inventing legends, lore: a tradition. They called the pond they were in the Great Pond and named its four paradisiacal rivers: the one that brought gold and silver (the slime), the one that brought flowers (the weeds), the one that brought pearls (the frog-spawn), the one that brought coral (the fungi). Birds had once nested at the pond’s banks until their nests had been scavenged and their eggs had been crushed and so bits of the crushed eggshells floated atop the water and gazing up from below the littlest worms called the bits “the stars.” The littlest worms called a pumpkin—rotting at the shoreline, barely visible through the murk—“the sun.” The littlest worms honored one another with titles like “Trout” and “Pike,” “Whale” and “Leviathan,” and even managed to assemble a code of little-worm-law, with hundreds of little-worm-commentaries, thousands of little-worm-rules and little-worm-regulations….
And then, one day, a herd of swine came crashing through the pond—their brute hooves breaking through the water’s surface, which is the heaven of the worms—destroying everything….
“In the Pond” is a short tale by Isaac Leib Peretz, who was the Whale, the Leviathan, of Yiddish literature: among the largest and most slippery and so most inassimilable authors in the Yiddish canon.
He was also Georges Perec’s great-great-uncle.
Perec, who had no Yiddish and so was familiar with his ancestor’s work only in French translation, was nonetheless proud of his lineage, and mentioned it often: in conversation, in intervie
ws, in books.
In his best book: W, or The Memory of Childhood, from 1975.
In Chapter Eight of that book, Perec speculates that his forebears fled the Inquisition and took their name, Peiresc, from their refuge in Provençe. The Periescs, in Perec’s account, then dispersed throughout the papal states, and from there to Mitteleuropa and vicinities east: Russian Poland, Romania, Bulgaria. Perec’s parents were of the generation that made the return journey west: His father, Icek Judko Perec, informally André, and his mother, Cyrla Szulewicz, informally Cécile, separately left Warsaw for Paris just after WWI. Perec himself was born in Paris in spring 1936. In spring 1940, Perec’s father, a volunteer soldier in the Twelfth Foreign Regiment of the French army, was wounded by German fire and died. In winter 1943, Perec’s mother was interned at Drancy and then deported to the country of her birth—to Auschwitz.
All of which might explain the son’s penchant for genealogy.
The orphaned son’s mania for forms (evolved), structures (imposed), branches, clades, lines of descent.
In 1942, two years after his father’s death, a year before her own, Perec’s mother brought the future author to the Gare de Lyon, bought him a copy of Charlie (the tame kiddie predecessor of Charlie Hebdo), and sent him off to Villard-de-Lans, under the protection of relatives and the International Red Cross.
The tiniest worms who weren’t trampled died of fright and the tiniest worms who didn’t die of fright succumbed to broken hearts.
The rest committed suicide.
Only one—the tiniest of the tiniest worms—survived, and when he declared to the bigger worms (who’d been fast asleep at the bottom of the pond) that the heaven above them now was a new heaven—when he declared to the bigger worms (who’d been fast asleep at the bottom of the pond) that the old heaven had been decimated by a pogrom of stampeding beasts, and so that the worm-heaven was not eternal—that only this universal-heaven presently above them might be eternal—then the bigger worms understood: this survivor-worm had lost his mind….
They treated him with the utmost compassion and conveyed him to a subaqueous insane asylum….
In Peretz’s tale—given in my own loose English above—a pondful of diminutive squirmers try to temporarily reshape and so transcend their imperilment through fiction: through the invention of stories.
To put it bluntly, worms writhing in muck countering that muck by creating a law and a culture = Jews in the backwater shtetls of Russian Poland immersing themselves in Torah, Talmud, kabbalah, anecdotes, and jokes.
In Perec’s W, or The Memory of Childhood, an adult man who is, or who says he is, Perec records and so relives his childhood, a time during which he was trying to temporarily reshape and so transcend his imperilment through fiction: through the invention of stories. Foremost of which is the story of the island of W, or the reconstructed story of the island of W, a grotesque childhood fantasy that Perec first put to paper (with fist-around-the-crayon illustrations), or claims that he first put to paper (with fist-around-the-crayon illustrations), around the bar-mitzvah age of thirteen, and that, he further claims, he’d never been able to escape, he’d never been able to completely forget, in all the intervening decades.
W—whose “shores offer no natural landing stage, but only shallows with treacherous, barely submerged reefs, or straight, steep, unfaulted basalt cliffs”—is located “far away, at the other end of the earth.” Its government is a criminal or at least inhumane regime based entirely on a perversion of Classically Grecian physical culture. That is, based entirely on culling the winners from the losers: survival of the fittest.
To put it bluntly (as Perec himself does): W with its squalid barracks, training facilities, and tracks, where male athletes are starved, stripped to the skin, and forced to compete against one another in relentless contests of running, jumping, and mortal combat = the Nazi death camps.
Peretz, in his short Yiddish tale, is making a metaphor. Perec, in his much longer French tale, is admitting to a metaphor. The Yiddish writer trusts his readers to understand the correspondences and, despite the grim nature of the correspondences, to take pleasure from that understanding. The French writer offers no such solace. To him, symbolism has been degraded, and so feels degrading. Symbols are for fascists.
Perec’s technique, then, is to put everything out in the open—everything, including technique. This isn’t precious avant-gardism, but principle: To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric, only if you can’t admit that it’s merely prose. Only if you can’t admit that your metaphors, that all metaphors, are insufficiencies and, as such, failures.
* * *
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RELIGIOUS JEWS IN DANGER and seeking a reprieve will pray by reciting the verses of Psalms that begin with the letters of their names. Psalm 119 is often used for this purpose, as it’s composed of twenty-two sets of eight verses, all the verses in each set beginning with the same Hebrew letter, with the sets arranged alphabetically—alephbetically. Alternatively, Uncle Peretz and Nephew Perec might’ve opted to read out Psalm 144, which contains their surname: Eyn peretz is the verse in Hebrew, which means, essentially, “Let there be no break.” The majority of Jewish liturgy not taken directly from Torah comprises devotions arranged by permutations of letters and interpolations of sums: For centuries, rabbis have written acrostic prayers that spell out their own names, and any visit to any synagogue on any day of the week at any of the three daily services will tell you that the number of times a text is repeated is just as crucial, theologically crucial, as what that text might mean.
Perec was the heir to this mystical—kabbalistic—practice, which he secularized and refined through his association with the Oulipo (an acronym for ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “the workshop for potential literature”), a French writing group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, whose ranks included Italo Calvino. The Oulipo turned research into the art itself, as members sought to identify sets of constraints by which novels and stories might be produced—calculations and formulas by which the clichés of freewriting might be avoided in favor of making something “new,” of making something “original.”
Oulipian constraints included, but were not limited to: use of anagram, use of palindrome, word-count limits, vowel-count limits, word replacements (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = “massacre,” then that last fragment should read “in which every occurrence of a massacre is replaced by another massacre”), vowel replacements (in which the word “noun” might be turned to “noon,” the hour, or “naan,” the flatbread, or “neon,” the gas). Then there’s the snowball, which is a text in which the words get progressively one letter longer, or the melting snowball, which is a text in which the words get progressively one letter shorter, and, of course, the lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing letters”), in which a text is written without the use of one or more letters. Literature’s most famous lipogram is La disparition (A Void), an antidetective novel published by Perec in 1969, whose three hundred or so pages omit the letter “e.” The book’s hero, Anton Vowl, must search for his vowel, just like the book’s author must search for his family, his past—given the plethora of “e”s in “Georges Perec,” the quest is, ultimately, for the self.
A futile quest for the self’s completion.
W, or The Memory of Childhood focuses on a different letter: that dissonant consonant “W,” which as Perec’s English-language translator David Bellos has pointed out, should be pronounced, as it should be interpreted, in the French style: double-vé.
Throughout the book, this letter will stand for une double-vie, and Victory, and Vichy, and Rue Vilin, and Various other things.