Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  The quality of Réage’s prose made it clear that the last alternative was highly unlikely, if not impossible. “To this day,” the translator wrote, “no one knows who Pauline Réage is.”

  For his part, Paulhan offered no clues. “Who is Pauline Réage?” he wrote in his preface, describing the novel as “one of those books which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same as he was before he read it.” He proclaimed it a “brilliant feat” from beginning to end, one that read more like someone’s private letter than a diary. “But to whom is the letter addressed?” he asked, disingenuously. “Whom is the speech trying to convince? Whom can we ask? I don’t even know who you are.”

  Nothing about the novel was straightforward, as the New York Review of Books noted in 1966 about the Grove Press edition: “[O]ne is struck by an atmosphere of prestidigitation, of double and triple meanings that suggest an elaborate literary joke or riddle which extends even to the question of O’s authorship. Pauline Réage, except as author of the present book and of the preface to another, seems not otherwise to exist: None of her admirers claims to have met her, she has not been seen in Parisian literary circles, and it has been said that she is actually a committee of literary farceurs, sworn to guard their separate identities, like the pseudonymous authors of a revolutionary manifesto.”

  The NYRB had a mixed response to the novel but conceded that it was too coolly executed not to be taken seriously: “If it is not a joke then it is madness, though not without brilliance and not without pathos.” The reviewer seemed convinced that it was the work of Paulhan, noting (wrongly) that Paulhan’s preface was in a style “not unlike that of the novel itself.” But this reviewer added, more tenably, that “Pauline (Paulhan?) Réage, whoever she, he, or they may be, is surely perverse and may indeed be mad, but she or he is no fool and is as far as can be from vulgarity.”

  The Columbia University professor Albert Goldman, reviewing Story of O for the New York Times, was effusive in his praise, calling it “a rare instance of pornography sublimed to purest art” and describing its “evidently pseudonymous author” as “a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade.” Rather than issuing propaganda or a “call to arms,” Réage, with her simple, direct style, aims, he argued, “to clarify, to make real to the reader those dark and repulsive practices and emotions that his better self rejects as improbable or evil.” Yet the critic Eliot Fremont-Smith, also writing in the Times, described the book in more ambivalent terms as “revolting, haunting, somewhat erotic, rather more emetic, ludicrous, boring, unbelievable and quite unsettling.” He added that it was of “undeniable artistic interest.”

  In any case, Pauline Réage stayed silent, and Dominique Aury continued her respectable life as a cultural éminence grise. For years there were rumors, hints, and speculation connecting the two, and at some point the connection had become an open secret in literary circles—yet her privacy was respected.

  Paulhan’s daughter-in-law, Jacqueline, later claimed that she had learned the truth only at Paulhan’s funeral in 1968. “There was a very big bouquet of flowers with no name attached,” she told a journalist. “I was standing next to Dominique Aury, whom of course I knew well, and I remarked, ‘I suppose they must be from Pauline Réage.’ Dominique turned to me and said, ‘Mais, Jacqueline, Pauline Réage, c’est moi.’”

  Decades later, Aury offered a full and public confession. Her lover had been dead a long time. Her parents were dead. She felt she was reaching the end of her own life. There was nothing to lose, nothing at stake now.

  The August 1, 1994, issue of the New Yorker printed an excerpt from a forthcoming book by the British writer John de St. Jorre, The Good Ship Venus (Venus Bound in the United States), about the infamous novels published by the Olympia Press—including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Pauline Réage’s Story of O. When the author interviewed Aury for his book, he was treated to “a double surprise”: he learned definitively that she was Réage; and he learned that the name Dominique Aury “was itself a disguise.” Although she asked that he not publish her actual name, the now elderly lady was otherwise ready to confess at last.

  St. Jorre landed a fascinating interview with Aury, whom he described as a “calm, clearheaded woman who answered my questions easily and with dry humor.” She dismissed the scandal that had erupted over her novel all those years ago as “much ado about nothing.”

  In 1975, Aury had given a long, wide-ranging interview to Régine Deforges, an author whom Aury admired. She was interviewed as “Pauline Réage,” and she provided honest answers about her life and work, and her philosophical views on art, sex, war, feminism, and so on, without disclosing her true name or getting too specific in her personal anecdotes. She could open up while remaining anonymous. The interview was published in book-length form as Confessions of O, first by Pauvert in France, and then, four years later, by Viking Press in the United States. (No photo of Réage appeared in the book.) The jacket copy noted, “In these pages one senses clearly a presence, a person, where once there had been only a pseudonym. The face may still be shrouded in mystery, but now, at last, the voice is clear, authoritative, and of a rare intelligence.”

  Aury never intended to give another interview after that one, so the New Yorker’s profile was a coup for the reporter. It was the first time Aury admitted in public that she had written Story of O.

  Although she had led a quiet, comfortable life in the years following the publication of O, she did not entirely relinquish Pauline Réage. In 1969, she’d published a sequel of sorts, Retour à Roissy, which included the first novel’s original (unpublished) final chapter, and a third-person account (titled “Une Fille Amoureuse,” or “A Girl in Love”) about the genesis of O, signed by Réage. She’d worked on it as Paulhan lay dying in a hospital room in a Paris suburb. Aury slept in his room each night for four months, until his death at eighty-three in October 1968. Later, she recalled Paulhan’s extraordinary passion for life. “Existence filled him with wonder,” she said. “Both the admirable and the horrible aspects of existence, equally so. The atrocious fascinated him. The enchanting enchanted him.” One friend of Aury said that after Paulhan died, “She pulled back from the world and lost her short-term memory.”

  It’s clear from St. Jorre’s profile in the New Yorker that this “small, neat, handsome woman with gray hair and gray-blue eyes” never recovered from the loss of Paulhan and led a fairly solitary life afterward. “Their relationship underscored the centrality of love to life,” St. Jorre wrote, “the creative and destructive forces that passion can unleash, and the ease with which a human heart can be broken.” He concluded the piece by observing that Aury had no regrets “as her days and nights gather speed, taking her toward what she calls ‘a great silence.’” She died in 1998, at the age of ninety.

  Aside from its major revelation, the article delved into a subplot of the saga: the pseudonymous translator of the English edition of Story of O. There was no evidence of deception, aside from the translator’s suspiciously florid name, “Sabine d’Estrée.” Yet no one seemed to know the mysterious woman. The Grove edition included no biographical note on her, and she mentioned in her “Translator’s Note” that she’d never met Réage but had been “in indirect communication (via the French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert) and received the author’s comments.” Aury, in her interview with St. Jorre, told him that she had no memory of any contact with d’Estrée, nor any idea who she (or he) might be. St. Jorre had a theory, however: the New York editor, translator, and publisher Richard Seaver.

  In the early 1950s, Seaver had lived in Paris as a Fulbright scholar studying at the Sorbonne. He cofounded a literary journal that published early pieces by Jean Genet and Eugène Ionesco in English. He was an early champion of the then-unknown Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, and had been instrumental in arranging a book deal for Beckett with Barney Rosset (who hired Seaver).
Eventually, Seaver worked his way up to editor in chief at Grove, where he was celebrated for advocating challenging and censored books. He stayed at Grove for twelve years before moving to Viking and then to Holt, Rinehart; along with his French wife, Jeannette, he founded Arcade Publishing in 1988. Jeannette’s middle name is Sabine.

  St. Jorre’s attempt to extract information from Seaver himself went nowhere. Seaver insisted that he’d been sworn to secrecy about d’Estrée’s identity but told St. Jorre that he would seek permission from d’Estrée—whom he called a “very shy, secretive person”—and get back to him. He never did.

  So the journalist did his own research, carefully going through the Grove Press correspondence archive at Syracuse University Library’s Special Collections Department. He found it curious that there were variant spellings of “d’Estrée,” and that one letter purporting to be from d’Estrée herself requested that all payments be addressed to an attorney in Manhattan, Seymour Litvinoff. After St. Jorre tracked down the lawyer, Litvinoff said that had represented both Seaver and d’Estrée, but “I cannot say who Sabine is. I don’t know who she is.”

  St. Jorre also discovered that d’Estrée had continued to translate French erotica—at least four other books—in collaboration with Seaver, who kept “hiring” her even after changing publishing jobs. She did translation work for no one else. Seaver was long believed to be d’Estrée, but he kept quiet about it. The mystery was solved in January 2009, when he died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-two. His wife finally confessed. “He wanted people to guess,” Jeannette told a reporter. “But yes, he did it.”

  Seaver’s stint as d’Estrée has been largely forgotten, but the novel still resonates around the world, affecting readers in ways that are deeply personal. “Ever since I remember,” an anonymous American woman admitted on an online message board, “I have always used some form of power exchange fantasy in masturbation. I had no words for it, no framework, and O was the first book to provide that.”

  Story of O also influenced writers of erotica for decades after its release, though it set a standard that few, if any, could meet. The person who could perhaps claim the closest literary kinship with Réage is the contemporary author and art critic Catherine Millet, whose “autobiography,” Sexual Life of Catherine M., was published in 2002. Edmund White went so far as to call it “the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman.” The book detailed the author’s early experiences with masturbation and her abiding fondness for orgies (in which she began to dabble at the age of eighteen), sex in public places, and so on. She said that of her countless lovers, mostly men, she would be able to recognize at best only fifty faces or names. The book was cast as a memoir, but J. G. Ballard wondered if it was “the most original novel of the year.”

  Although Millet’s sexual proclivities hardly mirrored those of Réage—Millet did admit to enjoying having her nipples pinched, along with more aggressive forms of sex—their profiles were strikingly alike. Both women published confessional, shockingly graphic books in midlife. Millet is French, and by day she, too, is a bourgeois intellectual who appears respectable enough. Her book, like O, was well written and even literary. As Jenny Diski noted in the London Review of Books, Millet “anatomises her sexual experiences and responses as a Cubist might the visual field.” That Millet’s project was both intellectual and sexual (and possibly even spiritual) calls Réage to mind yet again. “[Millet] takes her radical philosophy from Bataille, and admires Pauline Réage’s über-underling O for her perpetual readiness for sex, her propensity for being sodomised and her reclusiveness,” Diski wrote. Millet, like Réage, feels no guilt about her sexual life, and similarly writes about sex “as plainly as if she were a housewife describing her domestic round.”

  Had Réage not published Story of O, perhaps Millet could not have published Sexual Life, at least not under her own name. Aury had endured stigma and shame and had emerged a success. That legacy gave Millet license to tell her story. And it explains why Jane Juska, for example, could celebrate, in A Round Heeled Woman, the pleasures of promiscuous geriatric sex via the NYRB classified ads. It also freed a young woman, Melissa Panarello (known as “Melissa P.”), to publish an erotic autobiographical novel in 2004. Called One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, it chronicled, in diary form, group sex, S&M, and other experiences. This book was an immediate best seller in the author’s native Italy, and was hailed as “a Story of O for our times.”

  O’s enduring significance was evident on the fiftieth anniversary of its debut, when the French government proudly announced that Histoire d’O would be included on a list of “national triumphs” to be celebrated that year.

  Two years later, in 2006, Réage’s works were part of an auction at Christie’s in Paris, featuring the “Bibliothèque Erotique” of Gérard Nordmann, a businessman in Geneva who had assembled a library of almost two thousand erotic manuscripts and rare books. An edition of O from its limited first run of six hundred copies was cited as “First edition of the most important erotic novel of the postwar period.” Another lot by Réage was described as “[the] complete holograph working manuscript in pencil and ballpoint of what is arguably the finest erotic novel (1954) of the post-war period and its sequel (1969), which describe unconditional love as total sexual submission carried to its ultimate consequence.” The manuscripts of Histoire d’O and Retour à Roissy sold for $127,000.

  In assessing the life and work of Dominique Aury, it is striking how brave she was to risk everything for the man she loved. The pseudonym could have been exposed early on, destroying her reputation and wrecking friendships. “If you care enough about something, you have to pay the price,” Aury once said. Hers was a life without compromise, highly moral, and one lived without regret.

  After Aury’s death in a suburb south of Paris, a longtime friend declared it unremarkable that the author had hoarded a nom de plume for so long. “Everyone is double, or triple, or quadruple,” she said. “Every character has its hidden sides. One doesn’t reveal one’s secrets to all.”

  Acknowledgments

  Above all, I cannot thank enough the amazing Tina Bennett. Without her, there would be no book, or it would exist only in my head. I’m endlessly grateful for her wisdom, kindness, patience, and enthusiasm, and for always laughing at my jokes. I feel very lucky.

  Thanks to Gillian Blake for acquiring this book, then nudging and nurturing it along.

  To all at HarperCollins—the wonderful Rakesh Satyal, Katie Salisbury, David Koral, Heather Drucker, and Leah Wasielewski—thank you for everything.

  Also at Janklow & Nesbit, I’m grateful to Stephanie Koven and to Svetlana Katz (a real-life superhero). Dorothy Irwin provided expertise at crucial moments. And I did nothing to earn such generosity from Amy Grace Loyd, but there it was, anyway. The phenomenal Nicholas Latimer is busy enough with his many responsibilities at Knopf, yet he gave freely of his time, his brilliant advice, and more. Whenever I tell people that I know Gretchen Koss, they usually respond by saying, “She’s the best.” It’s true, and having her help has been a great gift.

  Love and gratitude also to Alice Quinn and Laurie Kerr; Michelle Williams; Devon Hodges, Eric Swanson, Tristan Swanson, and Cecily Swanson; the Rosabals; my dear friends at 37 Montgomery Place; and above all, Sarah (and her parents, Rosalind and Colin) and Oscar and Freddy Fitzharding.

  Time Line

  George Sand born

  1804

  Charlotte Brontë born

  1816

  Emily Brontë born

  1818

  George Eliot born

  1819

  Anne Brontë born

  1820

  Lewis Carroll born

 
1832

  Mark Twain born

  1835

  1848

  Emily Brontë dies

  1849

  Anne Brontë dies

  1855

  Charlotte Brontë dies

  O. Henry born

  1862

  1876

  George Sand dies

  1880

  George Eliot dies

  Isak Dinesen born

  1885

  Fernando Pessoa born

  1888

  1898

  Lewis Carroll dies

  Georges Simenon born