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Text Acts by Francis Booth
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: AU DÉBUT DE SIÈCLE Arthur Schnitzler Reigen Dream Story Henri Barbusse Hell Pierre Louÿs The Young Girl’s Handbook Three Daughters of their Mother Pybrac Guillaume Apollinaire The Eleven Thousand Rods The Exploits of a Young Don Juan Raymond Radiguet The Devil in the Flesh Aleister Crowley The Nameless Novel Paul Leppin Daniel Jesus Severin’s Road to Darkness Blaugast CHAPTER 3: OBELISK PRESS Frank Harris My Life and Loves DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer The World of Sex Lawrence Durrell The Black Book CHAPTER 4: SEX AND SURREALISM Researches Into Sexuality Louis Aragon Irène’s C*** 1929 Robert Desnos On Eroticism Liberty or Love The Devil’s Popess Salvador Dalí Rêverie CHAPTER 5: LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR Pierre Klossowski: Sade My Neighbour Maurice Blanchot: Sade’s Reason Simone de Beauvoir: Must We Burn Sade? Gilles Deleuze: Coldness and Cruelty Roland Barthes: Sade, Fourier, Loyola Angela Carter: The Sadeian Woman Georges Bataille Story of the Eye The Solar Anus Madame Edwarda The Little One The Dead Man My Mother
CHAPTER 6: OLYMPIA PRESS 'Selena Warberg' (Diane Bataille) The Whip Angels ‘Jean de Berg’ (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) The Image 'Pauline Réage' (Anne Desclos) Story of O ‘Harriet Daimler’ (Iris Owens) Darling Innocence The Organisation The Woman Thing The Pleasure Thieves ‘Louise Walbrook’ (Edith Templeton) Gordon Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers The Thief's Journal Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg Candy CHAPTER 7: SEX AND THE NEW NOVEL Alain Robbe-Grillet A Sentimental Novel Marguerite Duras The Ravishing of Lol Stein The Lover The Malady of Death
CHAPTER 8: ’PATAPHYSIQUE/OULIPO ÉROTIQUE ‘Sally Mara’ (Raymond Queneau) We Always Treat Women Too Well ‘Vernon Sullivan’ (Boris Vian) I Spit On Your Graves Harry Mathews Singular Pleasures CHAPTER 9: MY SECRET GARDEN: FRENCH Colette The Pure and the Impure Violette Leduc Thérèse and Isabelle Gabrielle Wittkop The Necrophiliac CHAPTER 10: MY SECRET GARDEN: ENGLISH Anaïs Nin House of Incest Winter of Artifice Delta of Venus Little Birds White Stains Auletris Edith Wharton Beatrice Palmato CHAPTER 11: MY SECRET GARDEN: GERMAN Unika Zürn Dark Spring Elfriede Jelinek Lust The Piano Teacher
and appearance, what in general characterises and qualifies any works of art as surrealist is, first and foremost, their erotic implications. André Breton This is no place for a wide-ranging discussion on what is and is not surrealism which, as Breton says, covered a very broad range; it encompassed both literature and art, and broadened out even further as time went on. Even Breton himself admitted he did not entirely know what it meant. ‘We know, up to a certain point, what we understand, my friends and I, by surrealism,’ he wrote in 1922. However, he then went on to say: Anyone undertaking to unravel the secret of the elective fascination which the entirely dissimilar works of Duchamp and de Chirico have been able to exercise with unabated power upon surrealism since its origin is likely to lose himself in sterile conjectures if he fails to realise that their highest common factor is eroticism… over and above their extreme disparity of means
This word, which we did not invent and which we could easily have allowed to become part of the most general critical vocabulary, is employed by us in a precise sense. By it we have agreed to designate a certain psychic automatism which corresponds closely to the dream state, a state which it is still extremely difficult to define.
In the first Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924, Breton says that he and Philippe Soupault named their new movement in ‘homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had just died and who, on several occasions, seemed to us to have followed a discipline of this kind.’ He then seeks to define it ‘once and for all’.
SURREALISM, n. Psychic
automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’
RESEARCHES INTO SEXUALITY
Although surrealism as a whole is too big a subject to handle here, we can perhaps say something about surrealism’s fascination with all things erotic, especially in relation to the Researches into Sexuality (Recherches sur la Sexualité),
‘conducted’ by some of its early members. In fact, ‘conducted’ and ‘research’ are far too scientific to describe the sessions, which mainly consisted of a group of friends – in the earlier sessions entirely male friends – sitting around and talking about their sexual tastes and habits. However, they took it all very seriously, calling their meeting centre the Bureau of Surrealist Research and treated their magazine, La Révolution Surrealiste, like a serious scientific journal; the earlier sessions were published there. Only three of the sessions included women, and they were mostly the wives or girlfriends of the men involved. The first of the twelve sessions was held on January 27, 1928 and was published in issue eleven of the magazine on March 5, 1928. It begins with Breton’s question: ‘A man and a woman make love. To what extent is the man aware of the woman’s orgasm?’ The answer is, not much; these men are not particularly interested in women’s orgasms. The second session, a few days later, included Louis Aragon; he re-phrases Breton’s question, ‘a man and a woman make love. To
what extent and how often can they reach orgasm simultaneously?’ The answers vary from 85 percent of the time down to 2 percent. Several participants mention the need for ‘artificial methods’ if the woman is to attain orgasm; the phrase is never explained by anybody. Aragon insists that, although simultaneous orgasm is rare, and he himself does not know how to achieve it, it is the aim of sex, 0r at least, as he puts it, of love; there seems to be a lot of confusion between the two things in the sessions. Breton himself says that ‘no one here can say what it means to love a woman.’ Aragon replies, ‘I can. To love a woman is to see her as the unique preoccupation of one’s life, preoccupation above all others.’ This is quite poignant, given that Aragon’s own great love affair was soon to break up, as we will see later. Aragon continued: This simultaneity is precisely what seems to me to be the most desirable in love. It is something absolutely exceptional. Of course, it is completely impossible for me to induce it, I have neither the mental nor the physical capacity
to produce such a result. Perhaps that means that it is really a moral issue for me, I don’t know, but probably it is. What is certain is that I am completely incapable of delaying my own orgasm. Which makes it impossible to talk about percentages: maybe 1 percent.
An interesting facet of these sessions is that it turns out that these pioneers of the freedom of fantasy
Breton stops him: ‘I am absolutely opposed to continuing the discussion of this subject. If this promotion of homosexuality carries on, I will leave this meeting forthwith.’ But then Aragon interrupts to say that he does not object to homosexuality of itself, simply to the subject taking over the discussion. When Raymond Queneau asks Breton which sexual perversions he would not condemn, he replies, ‘all apart from the one we have been discussing for too long.’ Then he changes the subject to one which gets the discussion flowing freely. What sexual positions do you enjoy most? Baron? JACQUES BARON Sixty-nine, socalled ‘doggy-fashion’. MARCEL DUHAMEL so-called ‘doggy-fashion’, sixty-nine. LOUIS ARAGON I’m very limited. The various positions all attract me equally, as so many impossibilities. What I enjoy most is coming when I am performing cunnilingus. In the end I almost always make love in the simplest way. ANDRÉ BRETON
and the unrestrained imagination are seriously homophobic, or at least Breton is: in the first session he says, ‘I accuse homosexuals of confronting human tolerance with a mental and moral deficiency which tends to turn itself into a system and to paralyse every enterprise I respect.’ His only exception is for the Marquis de Sade, ‘for whom freedom of morals was a matter of life and death.’ In the next session, when one of the participants admits he has imagined going to bed with a man,
MAN RAY No preferences. What
MARCEL PÉRET As regards parts of
intrigues me most is fellation of the man by the woman, because that’s the thing that has happened to me most really. MARCEL NOLL Cunnilingus, or sex on sex, mouth on mouth, sixty-nine.
the body, the legs and breasts. Beyond that, seeing a woman masturbating. MAN RAY The breasts and armpits. ANDRÉ BRETON The eyes and breasts. Apart from that, everything in physical love which pertains to perversity.
GEORGES SADOUL
No strong preference. Cunnilingus. LOUIS ARAGON
What excites you most? MARCEL DUHAMEL A
woman’s legs and thighs. And then the sex, the thighs [sic] and the buttocks. JACQUES PERVERT
Buttocks. The arse. LOUIS ARAGON The thought of the woman’s orgasm. MARCEL NOLL That’s the only thing that interests me too. MARCEL DUHAMEL Me too. RAYMOND QUENEAU
So again these surrealist renegades, the heirs of decadent, transgressive sensualists like Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans and the man who gave them their name – Apollinaire – these acolytes of de Sade, intrepid explorers in the dream worlds of Freud, are revealed as being not really interested in perversity at all; in the sexual realm their tastes are entirely prosaic and unimaginative, no more exotic than
those of the kind of bourgeois officeworker they so despise. In the seventh session, on May 6, 1928 there is more discussion about women’s orgasms: no woman has yet taken part in the discussions and a less well-informed group of men on this subject is hard to imagine. They are like Victorian explorers discussing a dark, distant, unmapped continent without ever having been there. An imbecile recently claimed that in sexual terms one could categorise women into three types: clitorals, vaginals and uterines. Let us accept this distinction. What percentage of women has Duhamel known each of the categories. MARCEL DUHAMEL I’ve never thought of making such a distinction. ANDRÉ BRETON Clitorals. It is well known that there are a very few (very, very few) pure clitorals. Five percent. The clitoral vaginaluterines (normal) represent sixty percent. The vaginals thirty ANDRÉ BRETON
percent, the uterines five percent. JEAN CAUPENNE I’m loath to make such a distinction. There are a lot more clitorals. MARCEL NOLL Yes. ANDRÉ BRETON Do you know where the clitoris is? JEAN CAUPENNE The very high percentage of women who do not have orgasms must derive from the fact that they have only normal sexual relations, in which the clitoris is
neglected. Thus the number of clitorals would be much higher since many women only come when the mouth is used on the clitoris. ANDRÉ BRETON I believe that it is very rare for women to have orgasms through the use of the lips and tongue on the clitoris. It’s a very uncertain method unless other techniques are also used. JEAN BALDENSPERGER This kind of view of stimulation of the clitoris as all-powerful tends to make all women into lesbians. All the aids to female masturbation which have been invented have been made for vaginals not clitorals. The eighth of the sessions – held in November 1930 after a long gap – ends the run of all-male discussions of the female orgasm. It was Aragon, in the second session, who had originally raised the issue of female participation. ‘I must declare that what disturbs me about the majority of answers given here is the notion which I believe I detect of the inequality of the man and the woman. For myself, nothing can be
said about physical love if one doesn’t start from the fact that men and women have equal rights to it.’ Breton objects that no one has claimed the contrary. Aragon replies, ‘let me explain: the validity of all that has been said so far seems to me to have been partially undermined by the inevitable predominance of the male point of view.’ Breton asks the question, ‘which explicit sexual image do you prefer?’
The women’s answers are very different to the men’s and Breton genuinely seems not to understand the women’s point of view. The breasts. YVES TANGUY The buttocks. JEANNETTE TANGUY The eyes. ALBERT VALENTIN the arse. NUSCH [Paul Éluard’s girlfriend, later his wife] The eyes. PIERRE UNIK The eyes. André Breton applauds the answers of Tanguy and Valentin and objects strongly to those of Nusch and Unik. The eyes are not sexual. PAUL ÉLUARD The sex. ANDRÉ THIRION A slightly moist cunt. In addition, a very lowcut dress. JEANNETTE TANGUY The eyes. Question: Do you like to see the sex? In other words, how do you look at it? ALBERT VALENTIN I have the very strongest desire to see it. ANDRÉ BRETON This tells us nothing. The question is badly formulated. PAUL ÉLUARD Do you enjoy looking at the sex? In what way? Yours as well as your ANDRÉ BRETON
partners? And in what circumstances? ANDRÉ BRETON, ANDRÉ THIRION, PAUL ÉLUARD Very interesting. ALBERT VALENTIN if it’s a woman I love or to whom I’m attached, I like to see her sex, in the most vulnerable positions. JEANNETTE TANGUY It’s not crucial. NUSCH If it moves, I like to see it. I like to see my own after coitus. YVES TANGUY In one particular position: the woman on all fours. PIERRE UNIK My own, never. YVES TANGUY Damn it, I’d forgotten mine. (Laughter.) I like best to see it when I’m alone, with an erection. JEANNETTE TANGUY We are all great masturbators. Is this a reference to Salvador Dalí’s 1929 painting of that name? Possibly. But it is hardly surprising that a woman should say that, in the company of men who know and care so little about women’s orgasms.
LOUIS ARAGON
Along with André Breton, Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was one of the founders of surrealism: at the end of 1919 the two of them decided that they and their like-minded friends should meet in the Certà bar in the Passage de l’Opéra in Paris. These two, with Philippe Soupault, cofounded their house journal Littératures the same year.
In the nineteen twenties Aragon published poetry and two prose works: Paris Peasant, 1926 – a surrealist homage to Paris – and Treatise on Style, 1928, which despite its title is an extended rant against the establishment in all its guises. In 1927, along with fellowsurrealists Breton, Paul Éluard, Jacques Péret and Pierre Unik, Aragon joined the French Communist Party which, as we saw earlier, was partially founded by Henri Barbusse. But Aragon’s friendship with Breton foundered after he and Georges Sadoul attended the Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov in the Soviet Union in 1930 and signed a declaration condemning Trotskyism and all forms of idealism and Freudianism – key components of the surrealist mind-set. Around 1924/25 Aragon became the lover, some said the slave, of the heiress, art patron and publisher – and later, promiscuous alcoholic – Nancy Cunard. Aragon had been formerly been known in Paris as le canard sauvage, the wild duck, but that was later changed to le cunard sauvage. (They might have called
him le cunard enchaîné, after the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné.) He travelled with her, and kept up with her hectic social life – like her near-contemporary the heiress Peggy Guggenheim, her money and her catholic taste in both men and art made her extremely popular with starving artists. But by the summer of 1928 Cunard’s drinking and promiscuity led to a breakup. Aragon seems to have been devastated but to have accepted that he was not meant to live with her.
Perhaps Aragon was incapable of satisfying Cunard sexually. In one of the sessions of the Researches into Sexuality he says, ‘I’ve never had anything but semi-erections.’ Andre Breton asks him if he regrets it. Aragon replies, ‘as much as any other physical failure, and no more. I don’t regret it any more than being unable to lift pianos.’ He also seems to have been more interested in a woman’s personality than in her physical attributes: in another session he says, ‘the woman who would tempt me would not tempt me by her eyes, hair, breasts, height, bottom or legs, but rather by her expression, which is absolutely indescribable.’ But then Aragon also seems to like experienced women: ‘I have a horror of virgins. I have only had relations with real women who know what love is and make no bones about it.’ He seems to believe, as a surrealist should, in the transgressiveness of the sexual: he says in Paris Peasant, ‘in all love there resides an outlaw principle, and irrepressible sense of delinquency, contempt for prohibitions and taste for havoc.’ And in 1930 he wrote a welcoming preface to Apollinaire’s The Eleven
Thousand Rods which, as we saw earlier, had a very proto-surrealist use of language, a glorious sense of fantasy and the absurd. It seems that, although Aragon was not meant to live with Nancy Cunard he was meant to live with the Russian-born writer Elsa Triolet, whom he met at Sadoul’s flat; he stayed with until her death in 1970. But Triolet did not like Breton and he did not like the way Aragon’s politics had gone since he met her:
towards an uncritical acceptance of Soviet communism. Nevertheless, during the Occupation in the Second World War, Aragon became, with Éluard, one of the most popular Resistance poets, publishing several volumes of poetry during the war. In the post-war period he published several novels including the sixvolume The Communists from 1949 to 1951. Aragon kept on writing and publishing until 1980, not long before his death.
IRENE
This delicately-titled novella (Le Con d’Irène; note that le con is a masculine noun in French, as are le vagin, le clitoris and l’orgasme though la pine, slang for cock, is feminine) was first published pseudonymously in an edition of 150 in 1928, the year of Aragon’s breakup with Nancy Cunard and the first of the sessions of researches
into sexuality. It was also the year another pseudonymous underground classic of French erotica was published, by the same Parisian publisher – René Bonnel – and illustrated with highly explicit drawings by the same artist – André Masson. The other book was Story of the Eye, now known to be by George Bataille, of whom much more later. It was also the year of the first publication of The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which also started underground but then, as we have seen, emerged into the light with spectacular effect. Story of the Eye is now relatively well-known but Aragon’s book always was, and still is, deep underground, though Albert Camus called it, ‘the finest of all works touching on eroticism’. French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, notable for publishing the work of the Marquis de Sade in the early 1950s and the first publisher of Story of O (more of which later) in 1954, said of Irène, ‘it is one of the four or five finest poetic texts ever produced by surrealism’, and that ‘there are few books for which I have so much desired, with the full force
of desire, to be the publisher; most of the others have ended up in my catalogue, but this one never will be.’ No doubt the title has helped it to stay obscure, and it has always been hard to obtain, even in French, though it has sometimes been published, less provocatively, as just Irène, or Irene in English. (A much later edition of 1952 included an illustration by the very disturbing artist Hans Bellmer, husband of Unica Zürn, to whom we will be returning later.) Until his death in 1982, the year in which the ban on Le Con d’Irène in France was lifted, Aragon continued to deny being the author – his involvement in the Communist movement would have been severely compromised – so the work’s origin is rather mysterious. However it is believed that it originated in a commission from the wealthy couturier Jacques Doucet. For a fee of Fr.1000 a month, Aragon committed to send him regular manuscripts, including pages from what was to be a major work, The Defence of Infinity. But on one of Aragon’s regular trips abroad with Nancy Cunard, in a fit of despair he burned the 1,500 page manuscript.
Cunard managed to save some pages; some of them were found in her papers when she died, charred and stuck together with tape. By 1928, Aragon had been abandoned by both Cunard and Doucet and may have decided to publish Irène because he needed the money. He entrusted the manuscript to the writer and journalist Pascal Pia, who in 1922 had published the erotic novel Les Princesses de Cythere: Chronique Libertine de l'Histoire –
never apparently translated into English – who took it to Bonnel. Despite the book’s title, Irène’s cunt is not in fact the central character of the story, though it does feature quite heavily. In fact it is quite hard to say just who is the central character, though Aragon himself seems to be one of the multiple narrators: he says: ‘arranging everything into a story is a bourgeois mania’, so it is inevitable that there is no single, simple storyline. The first narrator seems to be an old and paralysed man whose helpless howl of an unpunctuated interior monologue follows Joyce’s Ulysses (though that was not translated into French until 1929) and prefigures Beckett’s The Unnameable. However, as with all true surrealist works, Irène’s great ancestor is Lautréamont’s Maldoror. In part the monologue goes (in an
excellent English translation by Alexis Lykiard): Swords are being stabbed through my eyelids they’re digging fingers into my throat they’re rubbing my skin with the gravel of reveille. Don’t tell how my finger nails plunged into the compost of dreams my flesh sticks to the darkness night is in my mouth my blood doesn’t want to flow. I’m asleep for God’s sake I’m asleep. Brutes I’m going to scream and screaming brutes sons of sows buggered by prayer stools abortions of dirty underpants latrine sludge ladders in whores’ stockings menial toads purulent mucosa vermin let go of me rhododendron-blight armpithairs candles louse-clippings ratgrease shavings shavings black dejecta let go of me I’ll kill you I’ll
crush you I’ll rip off your balls I’ll chew your nose I’ll I’ll trample you. Dead dead so they’re going to wake me up they wake me. Another thread of the story is narrated by a man who is trying to get over the end of a love affair (as perhaps at this time Aragon was). ‘Everything came back to one image
that possessed me and of which I meant to rid myself once and for all. I have nothing to reproach this woman for, really, except that she did not love me.’ He tries to find other women in rural eastern France to replace her. ‘Some hope, eh. The French provinces. The ugliness of Frenchwomen. The stupidity of their bodies, their hair.’ But even though the women seem hideous to him, he ‘can’t bear prolonged continence,’ even though, ‘often I don’t get a good erection’; as we know this was one of Aragon’s problems. Ah, amorous inspiration wasn’t wafting aloft from the pavement with that stingy cooking stink which characterises our heroic Lorraine. In vain did I stare at myself in the mirror, full-face three-quarter, profile. Run my hand over my balls. Squeeze my prick till tears came. That’s how I am, might as well make the best of a bad job. I remained there with that congested, dreadfully absurd appendage. I looked at myself with shame. And a certain rage. I stuck wet handkerchiefs inside my trousers. Meal times regularly found me in an
impossible posture, and it required a series of gymnastics before I could go downstairs to eat without offending against the rudiments of family modesty. A dream brought a little respite to this continuous hyperexcitation: six women austerely dressed above the waist had surrounded me while I was busy tying the ropes that held the scaffolding of a house under construction to a ring to which a
horse had also been tethered. They had formed a circle around me, bending over, arms about waists, the left hand of each fingering her neighbour’s clitoris while her tongue delved into the arse of the one on her right, who was squirming to work it in. In my dream it was quite natural, and round they went. And the girls were brushing up against me with their swollen vulvas. As for me, clad in skimpy linen underpants, I felt myself achieving mythological volume. Dreams, and their Freudian interpretation are of course central to surrealism, but this dream needs very little exegesis. He visits a brothel but there are only three women working, all completely unattractive. ‘The fattest of the three was mincing about with a stole, she looked like a fidgety great turd.’ The second had, ‘a jewel that didn’t close right’, and the least-worst had, ‘the small features of the cat which had fornicated with a rat, on a long slovenly body’. This one ‘didn’t leave me cold. Besides, I’d been as stiff as a poker since two o’clock… Her mound was prettily shaded by hairs
which had retained their own colour. The somewhat long labia drooped… On the bed she suddenly resembled a pile of macaroni.’ But even this very un-erotic sight cannot diminish his erection. ‘No sooner had her tongue reached the prick she was strenuously holding than the sperm spurted into her eyes. I’d hardly felt what was happening there. Well, it was no better than a dream.’ The woman then shows him, through a keyhole, a scene in which, ‘a fat girl with sagging breasts, spare tyres round her torso, thick goitrous neck, big eyes and a small mouth like a sabre cut’, whom they call the nymphomaniac, is having sex with three soldiers, ‘lacking both foreheads and lustre [who] were steadily wanking with vacant looks on their faces as they waited their turn.’ Eventually, all three manage to get inside her at
once, ‘probably due to the excellent pyrotechnical training given at the garrison’. The woman the narrator has been with asks if that gets him hot. ‘Not at all, as a matter of fact. I pulled up my trousers. What bloody sadness there is in all erotic achievements!’ The narrator, presumably expressing Aragon’s thoughts, then enters into a digression on writing and the erotic which is very relevant to all the works I have been considering in Text Acts. What I am thinking naturally expresses itself. Everyone’s language differs each from each. I for example do not think without writing, which is to say that writing is my method of thinking. The rest of the time, not writing, I have only a reflection of thought, a sort of grimace of myself, like a memory of what it
is. Others rely on diverse procedures. Thus I greatly envy the eroticists, whose eroticism is their expression. Magnificent language. It is not really mine. Notwithstanding what I think of the limitations of erotic experience, of the unavoidable, the inevitable repetition of an elementary theme perfectly reducible to any other indifferent
action, I have the deepest respect for those to whom such limitation seems freedom itself. They are the true masters of the physical world, the perfect executioners of a sort of metaphysics of extinction in which, for me as spectator, every form of morality is summarised. Let anyone who has not dreamed of the idea of death in the midst of fornication interrupt me here. Everything that to those unfortunate individuals like myself is irremediably impoverished in the possible complications of sensual pleasure has for others, I realise, the prodigious metaphorical value which I attribute to words alone. That words impose on me, I mean. I probably do not appreciate this particular and immense poetry. I understand that. Hence the terrible finiteness of my sensations, and worse, of my life. Eroticism, that word has often led me into a field of bitter reflections. Finally, nearly halfway through the book, we are introduced to Irène’s cunt, in what is undoubtedly the longest, most poetic and most
sincere hymn to the female sexual organ ever written by man or woman and a world away from Henry Miller or DH Lawrence. It continues for several pages and I can only quote parts of this enraptured encomium, this paean of praise, this heartfelt homage to the vagina, which for once does seem to justify the cliché, a labour of love, as does the translation. Young bourgeois industrious workman and you, high-ranking civil servant of this Republic, I am granting you a glance at Irène’s cunt. O delicate cunt of Irène! So small and so large! It is here that you are at ease, man finally worthy of your name, it is here that you are back on the scale of your desires. Don’t be afraid of moving your face close to this place – and already your tongue, the chatterer, is restless – this place of delight and darkness, this patio of ardour, and its pearly limits – the fine image of pessimism. Oh cleft, moist and soft cleft, dear dizzying abyss. It is in this human wake that vessels finally lost, the engines
now unserviceable, returning to the infancy of voyages, hoist the sail of despair to a jury-mast. Between the curly hairs how beautiful the flesh is: beneath this embroidery well divided by the amorous axe, the skin amorously appears, pure, firming, milky. And the folds of the labia majora, joined at first, gape. Charming lips, your mouth is like that of a face leaning over to a sleeper, not transverse and parallel to all the
mouths in the world, but fine and long and forming a cross with the speaking lips that test it in their silence, game for a lengthy punctilious kiss, adorable lips which gave kisses a new and terrible direction, a meaning forever perverted. How I love to see a cunt get bouncing again. How it strains towards our eyes, how it bulges, lowering and swollen, with its hair from which it emerges, like the three nude goddesses above the trees of Mount Ida, the incomparable lustre of the belly and the two thighs. Touch, go on and touch: you could not put your hands to better use. Touch that voluptuous smile, trace the ravishing gap with your finger. There: let your two motionless palms, your lovesmitten mitts on that prominent curve, join up towards the hardest, best point which raises the holy ogive to its peak, o my church. Don’t budge, stay, and now with two caressing thumbs take advantage of this tired child’s goodwill, press, with your caressing thumbs gently, more
gently, part the beautiful lips with your two caressing thumbs, your two thumbs and now, all hail to thee, pink palace, pale casket, alcove a little disordered by the grave joy of love, vulva appearing for a moment in its fullness. Under the designer-label satin of dawn, the colour of summer when one closes one’s eyes.
There is a nice postscript to the story of Irène. In 1993 the collection of the leading French bookseller Jacques Matarasso was auctioned. Among the works was the very copy of Le Con d’Irène that had belonged to Pascal Pia; it had proofs corrected by Aragon himself in his own hand. It sold for Fr.220,000 (about €33,000 today) and the buyer later turned out to be the National Library of France, whose Hell section of banned books Apollinaire had worked in and the very institution which had tried to suppress the book on its 1968 reissue.
1929
If Irène’s Cunt has always been an underground work, the very short volume 1929 is buried even deeper, even in its French version; it has never, to my knowledge, been published in English and was not available in French even in France until quite recently. It was originally published privately with no
indication as to editor, place or date in an edition of 215. According to the catalogue of the Hell section of the National Library of France it was published originally as a pamphlet in Brussels, probably by the Belgian review Variétés, which dedicated an issue to surrealism, leaving the choice of texts to Breton and his friends. Clearly they should have known better. All copies were apparently seized at the French border, possibly because of the photographs rather than the text; it is not recorded what happened to them, though probably the border guards did what most border guards do with confiscated pornography. The work consists of a number of almost childishly filthy poems by Benjamin Péret and Aragon, illustrated by some highly explicit, hard-core photographs by Man Ray. It is of almost no literary value but one of the poems by Aragon is worth quoting – just – for its surreal juxtapositions and the effect of its repetition (my translation).
The cock and the cunt [La pine et le con] in a bed The cock and the cunt in the street The cock and the cunt in a tramway The cock and the cunt on the Grand Boulevards The cock and the cunt in the countryside The cock and the cunt in the forest The cock and the cunt in another bed The cock and the cunt separated by the crowd
The cock and the cunt reunited by the crowd The cock and the cunt very rich in a taxi The cock and the cunt along the river The cock and the cunt in a confessional at Saint Augustine Church The cock and the cunt under the eyes of a boarding school of girls The cock and the cunt struggling with demons The cock and the cunt no matter where but together
Aragon and Breton by Man Ray
ROBERT DESNOS
No one else ever rushed so headlong onto every path of the marvellous… Everyone who witnessed Desnos’ daily plunges into what was truly the unknown was swept up into a kind of giddiness; we all hung on what he might say, what he might feverishly scribble on a scrap of paper. André Breton
This quote comes from an interview of the nineteen fifties, but Breton was a very early admirer of Desnos (1900-1945), even before he had published any major works: in the first Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924 Breton says, ‘in the course of the numerous experiments he has been a party to, has fully justified the hope I placed in surrealism and leads me to believe that a great deal more will still come of it. Desnos speaks surrealist at will.’ Desnos had first impressed Breton by his contributions to the formal experiments on writing under hypnosis that were held under his guidance, beginning on the evening of September 25, 1922 in Breton’s Paris flat. Breton and Philippe Soupault had already written notebooks full of automatic phrases in spring and summer of 1919, which they published as a surrealist novel, The Magnetic Fields. Desnos had also already practised automatic writing and soon became the most prolific contributor. The sessions were inspired by Marcel Duchamp, who had invented an alter ego called Rrose Sélavy (a pun on Éros, c’est la vie; arrosez la vie – Eros is life; arouse life) who
coined the word surrealism; one feels Apollinaire would have been very good at this game. Many refer to Rrose Sélavy herself and some to Duchamp, for instance: ‘Rrose Sélavy connaît bien le marchand du sel’ – Rrose Sélavy knows the salt seller well (there is an English pun available here: salt seller and salt cellar). Aragon also appears: ‘Aragon recueille in extremis l’âme d’Aramis sur un lit d’estragon’ – Aragon collects in extremis the soul of Aramis on a bed of tarragon; (this works even better in its English translation). L’âme is a produced a series of poetic puns. In the session of October 7, 1922 Francis Picabia (a close friend of the great English-language wordwrangler Gertrude Stein) asked Desnos to contribute; he grabbed the bull by the horns and produced 138 of them, all of which were published in the journal Littératures, issue 7, December 1922. (Picabia produced a drawing called Lits et Ratures – Beds and Erasures – for the journal in similar, punning vein). Some of Desnos’ oneliners are dazzling and most of them are worthy of Apollinaire, who
homonym for larme, which means tear, and Aramis was of course one of the Three Musketeers, presumably a reference to the three founders of surrealism. Estragon would much later be the name of one of the characters in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Breton claimed that Desnos could only produce these while in a kind of trance, as could Duchamp himself; Desnos claimed that they came to him while Rrose was speaking to him through Duchamp – whom he had never met – but only when Duchamp had his eyes open. Breton
said, ‘I can still see Robert Desnos as he was in the days which those of us who have known them call the period of sleeping-fits. Then he would sleep, but he would also write, he would also speak… What in Duchamp seemed most inimitable in a few mysterious plays on words recurs in Desnos absolutely pure and suddenly takes on extraordinary resonance.’ But the sessions, and Desnos himself, quickly got out of hand: at one point he tried to attack Paul Éluard with a knife – and they were stopped in 1923. It is probably just as well, as they had become something of an obsession, and not a healthy one, with the participants. Aragon himself wrote: There were some seven or eight of us who now lived only for those moments of oblivion when, with the lights turned out, they spoke without consciousness, like men drowning in the open air. Every day they wanted to sleep more. They became intoxicated on their words when they were repeated back to them. They went into trances everywhere. All that was necessary now was to follow the opening ritual. In a cafe,
amid all the voices, the bright lights and the bustle, Robert Desnos need only close his eyes, and he talks, and among the beers, the saucers, the whole ocean collapses with its prophetic racket, its vapours decorated with long oriflammes. However little he is encouraged by those who interrogate him, prophecy, the tone of magic, of revelation, of the French Revolution, the tone of the fanatic and the apostle, immediately follow. Under other conditions, Desnos, were he to maintain this delirium, would become the leader of a religion, the founder of a city, the tribune of a people in revolt. In the mid-1920s. while all this craziness was going on, Desnos had a much more prosaic, parallel ‘real’ life. He did various jobs to make a living, including working as an accountant for a medical publisher, an advertising salesman for an industrial yearbook and a cashier for the paper Paris-Soir. In 1924 he wrote the scenario for a film by Man Ray, l’Étoile de mer and then in 1925 he began working as a journalist for
Paris-Soir and for the daily papers Le Soir and Paris-Matinal. In 1924, Desnos had met and fallen in love with the muchadmired Belgian singer Yvonne George, though the attention she got from other men made their affair very difficult for him, and she was probably not attracted to men in any case. Desnos wrote her several intense poems, some of which were collected in To the Woman of Mystery in 1926 and others in
Shadows of 1927. In 1930 Yvonne George died following years of alcohol and drug abuse, during which Desnos wrote a series of long poems in classical French metre, ending with The Night of Loveless Nights, published the year of her death. Desnos then met Lucie Badoud, also known as Youki, who was at that time the third wife of the Japanese painter Tsuguhara Foujita – he had painted, among others, Kiki of Montparnasse and Nina Hamnett, who as we saw was one of Raymond Radiguet’s lovers, and provided erotic illustrations for Pierre Louÿs’ King Pausole – but she left him and married Desnos. The poems Desnos wrote for her are far less angst-ridden than the poems he wrote for Yvonne George. By the end of the 1920s the core group of surrealists was already starting to fall apart and in 1929 Breton issued a second Manifesto of Surrealism which criticised many of his former friends. Several of them, including Desnos and Georges Bataille, of whom we will be seeing a lot more later, signed a pamphlet called Le Cadavre, issued on January 15, 1930 attacking Breton,
who was pictured on the front with a crown of thorns. In 1932, Desnos began a career in radio, writing advertising slogans and jingles as well as hosting a show about the famous French literary anti-hero Fantômas – he also wrote a song cycle about him, set to music by Kurt Weill. Desnos proved very popular on the radio and listeners sent him their dreams for him to interpret on air. For the next few years Desnos wrote a hundred poems for children as well as lyrics for songs, commercials and the
movies; he also reviewed jazz (like Boris Vian, whom we will meet later) and cinema, becoming part of a completely different artistic Paris where he was friends with a completely different kind of artist: among them Hemingway, Picasso, Artaud, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein. During the war, Desnos, like Aragon and Artaud, was a member of the Resistance but unlike them he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and deported, moving between several concentration camps before finally ending up in Terezín (Theresienstadt), where he died of typhoid fever in 1945, shortly after liberation.
ON EROTICISM It is an habitual hypocrisy for those who write on eroticism to declaim against it first in the name of morality. This last word then loses all meaning in their speech and becomes synonymous with prudishness… All philosophy is incomplete, whose morality does not contain an ‘EROTIC’… What man preoccupied with the infinite, in time and space, has not built this ‘erotic’ in the secret of his soul, what man concerned with poetry, worried about the mysteries incidental or distant, does not like to withdraw into this spiritual retreat where love is
both pure and licentious in the absolute. This is Desnos from the introduction to his De l’érotisme consideré dans ses manifestations écrites et du point de vue de l’esprit moderne (On Eroticism Considered in its Written Manifestations and from the Point of View of the Modern Spirit) – an obscure work written to order in 1923 for the couturier and art patron Jacques Doucet, who also, as we saw, patronised Aragon – which has never, to my knowledge, been translated into English. I have already quoted Desnos’ definitions of words related to eroticism in the Introduction and his views on Apollinaire so I will not say much more about this book except to say
that it is a very brief survey of erotic literature in French and, in addition to its positive views on Apollinaire it is also very positive about the Marquis de Sade, long before the renaissance of interest in him among French philosophers in the 1950s. In fact, the work of the Marquis de Sade is the first philosophical and pictorial manifestation of the modern spirit. All our current aspirations were essentially formulated by Sade when, first, he gave the integral sexual life as a basis for sensible and intelligent life… From an erotic point of view, Sade’s work is intellectually superior. Whatever the reasons that provoked it, erotomania or the material impossibility (prison) of an active life, it is a creation of an absolutely new universe.
While all his predecessors in erotic literature had seen ‘the thing’ with a mocking smile, an exasperating skepticism or a repulsive grossness, Sade considers love and its actions from the point of view of the infinite; no smile in his work, but sometimes a tragic sneer that makes one think of the tragic laughs of the accursed romantics; the greatest faith in crime or virtue animates the Rodin, the Justine, the Juliet. The word libertine comes from his pen in its own sense of freedom of mind. . . He knows no restriction in the description of lust. There is no depravity of which he has not left an exact observation and that without a single line being vulgar or displaced.
LIBERTY OR LOVE
It was in 1924, the year of his affair with Yvonne George that Desnos wrote the novel Liberty or Love (La Liberté ou l’amour), though it was not published until 1927. It is dedicated to the revolution, love and ‘she who is their incarnation’, which everyone assumed was directed at George. It begins with a long poem which is attributed to Arthur Rimbaud, though it is not in fact by him. The first chapter has the epigraph ‘Robert Desnos. Born in Paris, 4 July 1900. Died in Paris, 13 December 1924, the day on which he
wrote these lines.’ So the author is presenting it as if it were a final work, though in fact he lived for more than twenty years after he wrote it. The title is almost a homonym for the cry in the streets of Paris in 1789 at the beginning of the Revolution: la liberté ou la mort – liberty or death – and the whole novel is informed by the automatic writing of the Rrose Sélavy one-liners. In its satirical treatment of both the church and sex, and indeed in the merging of the two, the novel upset the establishment and it had to be withdrawn after publication until the Tribunal Correctionnel de la Seine had censored large parts of it and thought it fit to be set upon the public; the cuts have been restored in the currently-available French and English editions. (We have already seen that border officials seized Aragon’s 1929. It would be easy to think, from the career of Obelisk Press and others that there was never any literary censorship in France in the twentieth century; not so. But then, Kahane, Miller, Durrell and Joyce were foreigners writing in – for French intellectuals and the
authorities – an already bastardised and inferior language, English; the French authorities did not care much about books written in English. But Desnos was sullying the purity of both the French language and the Catholic religion.) One of the characters most designed to upset the religious authorities is Bébé Cadum, who is blasphemously associated with the figure of Christ. In fact Bébé Cadum is not a character at all, he is an advertising hoarding – Cadum was a brand of soap and their poster showed the enormous face of a grinning, curly haired baby – Desnos is satirising both the power of advertising and the church. ‘The wind buffeted the city. The hoardings of Bébé Cadum beckoned the emissaries of the storm to them and under the watchful eyes the entire city writhed in convulsions.’ Later, Desnos makes the connection explicit. Although a prisoner, Bébé Cadum will not relinquish his smile and allows himself to be thrown, despite his strength, into a dungeon. Bébé Cadum, or rather Christ, since we must call him by
his true name in our own era, was thirty-three years old. The beard would have given his face a rather sinister appearance if it were not for the childlike grin which hovered on his lips. Needless to say, Bébé Cadum did not actually have a beard in the posters. The two actual characters in the book – in so far as they are characters – move across the world and through history, criss-crossing each other’s paths. The man is
named Corsair Sanglot – a corsair is a pirate or buccaneer; sanglot in French means sob, sanglant is bloody and sangle is a strap; the name is also not too far from sans culottes – without pants: referring to the poor people who drove the French Revolution and shouted la liberté ou la mort. The woman is Louise Lame – l’âme means soul, lame means blade and larme means tear, so both names have double associations with wounds and with tears. The book’s narrator is like the eye of a camera that follows them
but sometimes seems to merge with Corsair Sanglot. In the beginning, the narrator is following Louise through Paris. She is taking off her clothes as she goes, including the skin of a leopard, who had ‘just enough energy before dying to deposit the supreme homage of his fur on the steps at the feet of the fatal, adorable girl.’ The narrator picks up her clothes as she drops them. ‘I picked up a pair of exquisite cambric cami-knickers. They fitted perfectly in my hand. I unfolded them and plunged my head into them with delight. They were impregnated with Louise Lame’s most intimate odours.’ She meets Corsair Sanglot at the Tuileries. ‘It is of little consequence to know what the preliminaries were to the conversation which took place between our hero and heroine. None but the strongest and most ferocious of the beasts of love could have held out against their fangs and claws.’ They go to a hotel room, ‘a poetic setting, in which a pitcher of water assumed the significance of a reef along some wild, romantic coastline; a dangling lightbulb was more sinister than three first trees in the middle of an emerald green field on
a Sunday afternoon; and the mirror brought to life menacing, autonomous individuals.’ They make love. Louise Lame and Corsair Sanglot, who respected few things for their moral value, respectfully considered these remains of an adventure which could have been their own. Then, after staring each other out, they undressed. When they were naked, Corsair Sanglot stretched out across the bed, so that his feet still touched the floor, and Louise Lame knelt before him. Magisterial kiss of enemy mouths. Reproduction is proper to the species, but love is proper to the individual. I prostrate myself before you, low kisses of the flesh. I too plunged my head into the shadowy recess of thighs. Louise Lame clasped her handsome lover tightly. Her eyes sought out the effect this conjunction of her time on his flesh had on his face. It is a mysterious sight, and perhaps the most beautiful. When Corsair Sanglot’s breath turned
into a pant, Louise Lame became more resplendent than the male. Later, after some travelling in time and space, Corsair Sanglot comes across a burning house where a woman is about to die on the fourth floor; he saves her and the next morning wakes up in the infirmary. The rescued woman was pouring him some lemonade. He felt an almost sensual satisfaction at her presence near him, and also in
the passage of her hands across his body, until the moment when the door of the English boardingschool opened. It was time to get up, thirty young girls and ten others a little older were hurrying about. The bath-sponge sent streams across their healthy shoulders and delicate skin. He paused to contemplate their almost boyish buttocks. Their sexes were still almost hairless but their breasts were charming
delights, still underformed by… ‘Tell me that you love me!’ gasped Louise Lame, lost. ‘You bitch!’ mocked the hero. ‘Love you? Ah! Ha! you crazy old pile of shit, blessed name of filth upon filth!’ Then, getting up: ‘What poem could move you more than that?’… Magnificent love, why must my language become so emphatic when I wish to evoke you? Corsair Sanglot had seized her round the waist and thrown her across the bed. He struck her. The sonorous rump had been soundly thrashed with the flat of his hand and the muscles would be blue the next day. He was almost choking her. Her thighs had been brutally forced apart. This was not true. The element of the story which most upset the censors was the Sperm Drinkers’ Club – a strange thing to find in a novel written by a straight man and dedicated to a gay woman; neither of them would presumably be interested in joining such a club. In one scene, Corsair Sanglot pays a visit.
A tall footman in gold-trimmed livery opened the door and showed him into a vast reception room. He took a seat in a leather armchair not far from a small bridge table. The flunkies of the Sperm Drinkers’ Club danced attendance upon him. Having selected a choice vintage, a Senegalese sperm from the year of the wreck of The Medusa,
Corsair Sanglot lit a cigarette. The Sperm Drinkers’ Club is an immense organisation. It employs women the whole world over to masturbate the most handsome men. A special squad is dedicated to finding the female elixir. Patrons prize equally a certain mixture to be found in the appropriate receptacle after wondrous onslaughts have occurred. Each harvest is preserved in a tiny phial of crystal, glass or silver which is then carefully labelled and dispatched to Paris. The club’s agents are incredibly dedicated. Some have even died in the course of their perilous enterprises, and each of them pursues their goal with passion. Better still is he who will come up with the most inspired idea. One gathers the sperm of a condemned man who has been guillotined in France or hanged in England, the manner of death determining the taste of the respective emissions, be it waterlily or walnut. Another assassinates young girls and fills his phials with the seminal fluid which their lovers cannot help
but release while in the grip of the tragic shock which the imparting of the terrible news causes them. Yet another, posted in an English boarding-school, garners the evidence of a young girl’s excitement when, having been overtaken by puberty without her teachers noticing, she is obliged, in reparation for a venial sin, to receive, skirt up and drawers down, a spanking and a caning in the presence of her female classmates and perhaps even a schoolboy, there by chance, the god of amatory pleasures. The boarding school and the thrashings return later, but as in all Desnos’ erotic passages, his pleasure – his writerly jouissance – comes
more from the act of writing than from the acts he is writing about: while you remain motionless in a landscape of the lesson of things, the storm of all eternity rises up behind your slate roof to break forth, with the brilliance of lightning, at the precise instant when the headmistress’s tawse marks the buttocks of a sixteen-yearold girl boarder with a red furrow and painfully illuminates, like a bolt of lightning, the mysterious arcana of my erotic imagination. Have I not written only in order to evoke your resemblance, lightning, whiplash! As in this passage, and rather like Aragon in Irène’s Cunt, Desnos several times calls attention to the act of writing, especially writing in
the surrealist vein of free association, correspondence and wordplay – the principle of all his writing: ‘a streak of lightning is about to appear in the sky which I have evoked, despite its blackness, on the white paper.’ Earlier, he had talked about my beloved whom I have never stopped thinking about even as my pen, animated in part by itself and in part by all the rest, flies into the lambent paper sky. My pen is a wing and every word, born by it and by its shadow on the paper, rushes towards either catastrophe or apotheosis. I have just spoken of the magical phenomenon of writing considered as an organic and optical manifestation of the marvellous. With respect to the chemistry, the alchemy of this handwriting, whose beauty is appreciated by nobody, and, I insist, from a solely calligraphical point of view (my apologies for any element of repetition which might or might not have crept in here), I advise the seasoned observers of atomic
structure to enumerate the ocular drops of water through which these words have passed before returning in a malleable form to confront my memory and count the drops of blood or the fragments of drops of blood consumed by this writing.
THE DEVIL’S POPESS
This short book does not really belong in this section for three reasons: it is by no means great literature; it is not especially erotic, and it is probably not by Robert
Desnos. But it is great fun so I intend to consider it anyway. La Papesse du Diable was published in 1931 by an erotica specialist and was attributed to the pseudonymous Jehan Silvius and Pierre de Ruysnes. The English edition recently published by Atlas Press is prefaced by a detailed but inconclusive discussion on its actual authorship, concluding that Desnos was probably not involved, even though the royalties from it went after his death to Youki. Nevertheless, there are passages that read like Desnos’ trance-state writings. The leg of the pendulum-angel of time marks the days of sorrow and joy; but is it precise enough to mark even my love? For long and long I have dreamed of the bisexual shadows projected on the wall, but I have lacked the vigour to declare this simple truth to the Princess, mute on her ceremonial chariot. The parasol, like a huge polar bird, barely reaches to my shoulders, and, on that multicoloured ribbon, the road, I fear the passage of the great crystal idols. It is not worth one’s slipping in with the serpents
through the opening of a dream; there is not, on the other hand, that hope you have of contemplating still the naked soul of things. It is set in the near future, where Paris and the West have been overrun by the armies of the East. Of course, not long after 1931 armies from much closer to the East of France would be massing on its borders, but no one had yet predicted that. At that time, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels and the films of them had made people fully aware of the evil cunning of the exotic Oriental, but not of the evil cunning of the Nazis. The preface claims that the authors are writing this prediction of the end of the world under dictation from a higher power, in passages which sound like they might come from a surrealist version of Aleister Crowley; the Devil’s Popess is almost as monstrous as Leila in Crowley’s The Nameless Novel. We are writing this book by the light of the Three Moons, rejoiced by the vision of future cataclysms.
The End of the World is drawing near, and woe unto those who would deny this in the name of a so-called Reason, the miserable palliative of their mental impotence… Until now you have known nothing; Black Masses have been the reward of only the few who have been initiated. To those who are beginning to understand, we shall announce
that the Devil’s Popess will spring from their spiritual strength. There will be at once Her creators and Her slaves. The key to the Temple of Lust is, in effect, within their reach; with it, Evil triumphs of a Good. Unusually, we have a lesbian sub-plot – centred around the heroine, a Cleopatra-like demi-goddess, the Archimagess, Mistress of Asia, Queen of the World, Daughter of Heaven, She, the Equal of the Gods, who arrives in the West as the conqueress. ‘She’ has no name, only these titles. She also has a young Russian secretary called Nadia who worships her with a ‘zeal which, surpassing the limits of ordinary human love, bordered upon adoration.’ Nadia finds ‘perfect delight in the caress of the sandals, veils and underclothes which had directly touched her beloved’s body.’
One day, She discovers Nadia ‘kissing and kissing again the places where, all night, the body of her mistress had rested,’ and tells her that, instead of being a secretary, she must become a love-slave. Now one night, after the fiftieth pipe of opium, the Archimagess raised herself up and, sitting on the divan, let her legs hang down, brushing with her feet the lips of the sleeping Nadia. Awakened, Nadia rose and not before the Mistress, who was given up to the kisses of her loveslave. She, the Equal of the Gods, sitting upright and cupping the globe is of her breasts in her hands, suddenly lay back, her body extended, opening her legs like a secret gate on to the abruptly unveiled sex-idol.
Then, surrendering herself to Nadia’s desire, she quietly murmured this appeal: ‘Caress me…’ ............................ .................. And thus Nadia came to know the flesh of the Beloved, She, the Equal of the Gods. One of the clues that the authorship of this work is the list of books on the shelves of the Queen of the World’s ancient Chinese bookcase, which ‘contained few books; but they were well chosen, and all of
them splendidly bound.’ The Archimagess did not ‘encumber herself with works of pointless science,’ since she herself commands ‘all wisdom and knowledge’. Apart from the sacred books, all that was to be found on the shelves were works concerned with dreams, drawn principally from the French, English and German literatures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Lord Byron, Paul, Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Heine, Gérard de Nerval, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. Villiers de l’Isle Adam. J-K Huysmans, Renée Vivien, Pierre Louÿs, Maurice Magre were her best side-table reading, to which she added a few poets of the nineteen hundreds, and two or three Russian writers, precursors and prophets. Apart from the omission of Sade, this is a pretty good list of the ancestor-gods of surrealism. The other clue to the literary interests of the author(s) comes in the new names of the streets of Paris which
are dropped not so subtly into the text. In 1940, five years after the revolution, streets of Paris are renamed; among the names are Boulevard Guillaume Apollinaire, Place Maldoror and Place JeanCocteau. If only that were the worst that had happened to Paris in 1940. In this virulently anti-Catholic work – it is not surprising that most French authors would deny having written it – the arch-enemy is the Pope, who is captured through Nadia’s cunning. He is sentenced to be crucified; the sentence is carried out in a scene worthy of Sade himself. Whoever the authors were, they were clearly well-acquainted with the Marquis, as of course Desnos was.
Out of a refinement of cruelty, the Queen of the World had specified that the Pope be crucified completely naked, so that his abdomen, thrust forward by a small beam slipped between the cross and the small of his back, exposed the pontiff’s sex, which stood out from tufts of grey hair. And, by way of amusement, the executioners who kept vigil at the foot of the cross kept prodding at it with the points of their lances. The Queen of the World could not take her eyes off the powerful virility of the dying pontiff. Lowering her binoculars slightly, she kept the focus on the crucified man’s lower abdomen, studying his phallus, now covered with fine purple scratches from which the blood was escaping in minute droplets… Nadia was sitting at her Mistress’s feet. She too was contemplating the Pope’s torments. And she was proud, for this was her own work… Thrills coursed through Nadia’s whole being as she followed the various stages of the bloody spectacle. Suddenly,
laying aside her binoculars and approaching the throne, she quietly parted the fine layers of gold-embroidered silk which alone covered the naked body of the Beloved. And the Queen of the World, whose ardent desire responded to her slave-girl’s desire, lay back on the cushions, offering her flesh to Nadia’s lips. The site of the torture filled the two women with a singular ardour and, under the young Russian girl’s caresses, the Archimagess groaned with
amorous pleasure… And so She, The Equal of the Gods, firmly pressing Nadia’s head between her thighs, crushed the lips of the little slave-girl against her torrid and humid sex; and the final voluptuous spasm coincided with the vision of death. In the overturning of the old order, She has taken many captives: ‘abbesses; wives and daughters of ministers, potentates and scholars, those vainglorious trustees of the Traditional Reason of the Old
World; courtesan companions of the one-time holders of worldly power.’ She first has them dressed in the ‘coarse-woven clothing of thieves and prostitutes,’ and then stripped naked. All were, ‘beautiful; all seemed young and well bred, and their bodies shone with a thousand intimate graces. They remained motionless, resigned.’ She tells all the men present that ‘this vile horde belongs to you. Be masterful!’ Another Sadeian scene ensues. ‘Nadia, despite your youth I cannot spare you the spectacle. Hitherto you have looked upon scenes that were sometimes sadistic, often cruel, if always majestic. Now is the time of the Sacred Orgy. This baseness is the moment of the whim of My Equals, the Gods: gaze with your dove’s eyes on the vultures scrambling at their
feast. Glory to the Black Archangel!’ Howling, the men fell upon the captives, and total confusion ensued: of tawny chests and pale breasts, of hairy thighs and tender buttocks. The women cried out in terror; the men panted with lust. Now all that could be seen was gnarled sexes thrusting at random, according to the most incredible flights of fancy, into the victim’s pearly flesh. Few of the women tried to resist; their brutal tormentors, in any case, soon subdued them. Then the blood flowed. After the spasm, the Asians stabbed those women whose martyred bodies had received their embrace. A giant Manchu, foaming at the mouth, severed with his long,
curved dagger the heads of three women from among the fallen corpses and began juggling with them, chanting litanies to the Evil Gods. A stale, slaughter-house odour pervaded the entire banquetinghall. The Sovereign then had the Tartars play a wild saraband, and raised up her dress, baring her dazzling thighs, which she offered to Nadia’s elaborate kisses. Unfortunately for them, the new Pope attacks back and appoints a Grand Inquisitor, who tortures Nadia, but, ‘the impression of the Sovereign’s passionate bites was revived in her fragile limbs and her senses, so distracted by the torture,
could no longer distinguish pain wrung pleasure. The rosy nipples of her breasts stood out, stretching towards a chimerical delight; and the orgasm of female ardours moistened the coral of her sex and her neat and downy pubis.’ The new Pope captures the Queen, strips her of her ‘penitent’s rags,’ and feasts her eyes on the sight of her naked body. Her olive skin displayed the infinite charms of Oriental graces. She was at once human and divine. Human in the warmth of her lissom contours, in the pure and regular line of her breasts, in her delicately jointed limbs, in her voluptuous buttocks; divine in the conquering magic one felt was concealed in her subtle fibres, in her eyelids, bluish portals of Shiva’s paradise. Gently, very gently, the Brother of the Lotus stretched out at the Beloved’s side and the Mistress of the Earth, virgin of all contact with despised men, received with delight, in her inmost being, the masculine caress of her superb lover.
course newly converted to heterosexuality. She asks him why he has not fled along with everyone else.
Like all lesbians in male-written pornography, the lucky girl finally gets what she has not known she has been missing. She is not that submissive however, and stabs in the back the military governor of Paris who tries to take her throne. Unfortunately for all of them, ‘an era of cataclysms was commencing,’ and the novel becomes even more like the Book of Revelations as it describes the end of the world, which finishes with a bang – in both senses – not a whimper. Unknown to him, a black soldier is addressing the Queen, who is in disguise and of
‘You might as well snuff it here as anywhere else!’ A lustful aura emanated from these crude words, and from the soldier’s bearing; it affected the Queen and aroused her sensual desires. She pressed her face close to the soldier’s, crying: ‘Take me!’ The brute hesitated. ‘Hurry! Don’t you see the walls are falling in?’ The man grew excited. A grin relaxed his features. He seized the offered body. With his clumsy, benumbed fingers he lifted the Queen’s skirts; but, more accustomed to tumbling native girls, his hands became entangled in the superb creature’s intimate and sultry lingerie – an unexpected obstacle to his male impetuosity. Finally he ripped away the flimsy silks, threw her on her back, crushed her with his weight.
With much huffing and puffing, with a debauched vigour, his priapic member ploughed the turgescent and secret folds of her feminine delights. She responded to his ardour, churning her rump and gasping in pleasure.
She tautened with a supreme sob. The meteorites rained down. A single meteor smashed the black and the Equal of the Gods. Trumpeting the end of the world, the laughter of the Black Archangel rang out in a call for the resurrection.
SALVADOR DALÍ
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is of course far better known as an artist than a writer and, although he is usually talked about as a surrealist, he was never really part of the movement, partly because he was Spanish but mainly because, unlike the French surrealists, he was very attuned to the art market and set out to exploit it brilliantly in America for his own personal financial gain. Dalí was not much of a ‘joiner,’ not much interested in systems and manifestoes. Still, in 1929 when his movement looked like it was falling apart, Breton summoned the extravagant, glamorous and virtuosic painter to Paris from his home in Cadaquès, Spain, hoping he could help revitalise it. In Paris Dalí mixed with Picasso, Magritte and Joan Miró, who had introduced him to Breton, and in 1929/30 he collaborated on two surrealist films with Luis Buñuel: Un Chien Andalou and L'âge d'or. But by 1934 Dalí was already in trouble with Breton for exhibiting in
a Paris exhibition that the surrealists had decided to stay away from and in the same year he made his first trip to the United States, where he had two solo exhibitions in addition to one being held in England. By 1939, Dalí was big in America. He had another solo exhibition, designed the Dream of Venus pavilion for the World’s Fair of New York and produced the libretto, costumes and sets for the Ballet Russe’s Bacchanale at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the first of nine ballet sets he designed. In the same year Breton wrote the article ‘Latest Tendencies in Surrealist Painting’, which was effectively Dalí's notice to quit the surrealist group. Dalí and his wife Gala returned to Europe in 1939 but by 1940, with the Nazis in France they moved to America and stayed there until 1948; among many other commercial activities of which Breton would not approve, Dalí designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound.
RÊVERIE
Dalí is probably best known for his 1929 painting The Great Masturbator and 1931’s The Persistence of Memory – the one with the melting clocks. The same year he wrote a short erotic story called Rêverie about his masturbatory fantasies concerning a eleven-year-old girl called Dulita, which was first published in the magazine Le Surréalisme au service
de la révolution. Yes, this is probably where Vladimir Nabokov got the idea and the name for his much more famous nymphet, Lolita. In fact, according to Delia Ungureanu in her book From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature, Nabokov’s earlier novella, The Enchanter of 1939, a kind of precursor to Lolita, shows remarkable similarities to Rêverie, whereas Lolita itself, published in 1955, seems to have been informed by The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí of 1942. In this scurrilous autobiography, Dalí develops the story of Dulita, now renamed Dullita, though he removes the explicit sexual fantasy. In all these stories there is a man trying to have sexual relations with a girl by using her widowed mother as a way in. But the difference is that Nabokov’s Humbert actually lives out his paedophile fantasy, whereas Dalí’s dreamer has no intention of doing so: for him the fantasy, and the detailed planning of it, is all. He is, after all, the great masturbator. The narrator of Rêverie, who is writing a book on surrealist painting, makes it quite clear that the fantasy he is describing – in
great detail, even though it is a fantasy it must have verisimilitude, it must have the possibility of becoming actual – is purely for masturbatory purposes. The fantasy starts with a ‘very dark stable, where, lying amidst the excrement and the rotting straw, I sodomise the woman I love, as I’m very much aroused by the stench of the place.’ I want to realise the dream act of sodomy in the stable that I have just identified with the one in the dream. But this time, the woman I love is replaced by a young girl of eleven, named Dulita, whom I met five years ago… I had to invent several stories which would create the conditions of dream, this similarity being indispensable to the development of my reverie. Here is the one I adopt. Dulita’s mother, a rather beautiful woman, about forty, a widow and always dressed in black, falls madly in love with me and excepts, out of masochism, my fantasy of sodomising her daughter, even consenting to help me with all her strength, all her devotion.
In the fantasy, the narrator sends Dulita’s mother, Mathilde, to meet Gallo, ‘an old prostitute I met way back when, who is extraordinarily perverse and experienced.’ For five days, the two older women plus Dulita have to treat him with great respect, ‘a great scholar whom the slightest troublesome gesture might seriously disturb.’
On the fifth day, Dulita will be taken to the cypress fountain two hours before sunset. There she will have a snack of bread and chocolate, and la Gallo, with help from Mathilde, will initiate Dulita, in the most brutal and coarse manner. As visual aids she will use a profusion of pornographic postcards, from which I will have earlier made a precise choice of overwhelming pathos. The narrator considers it a ‘completely inescapable necessity’ that he watches the initiation through the dining room window, ‘which, in reality, is impractical, because of various conflicts that are perfectly physical in nature.’ Fortunately for him, ‘a new fantasy, which appears particularly exciting to me, comes, bringing a solution to this first conflict.’ The solution is a fire which has burned the leaves of the cypress trees. ‘The idea that Dulita has to get dirty seems to me from that moment on essential, and is elaborated upon the perfection in the following fantasy.’ But in the end
of course the fantasy is doomed to failure. I run to the cypress fountain, sit down on the wet stone bench and with all my strength erect my penis with my two hands, then head for the stable where Dulita and the two women are lying naked, in the midst of the excrement and the rotten straw. I take off my burnoose and throw myself on Dulita, but Mathilde and Gallo have suddenly disappeared and Dulita has turned into the woman I love, concluding the reverie with the same images of the memory of the dream.