Nom de Plume (34 page)

Once, at a dinner party, she was amused to hear a friend confidently announce that people who wrote books such as
Histoire d'O
were very sick. Another time, in the presence of her mother, a family friend abruptly turned to Aury and said he believed that she'd written
Histoire d'O.
She panicked, but said nothing. There was an awkward silence. Then her mother said, “She never mentioned it to us.” After their guest left, Aury's mother offered her more tea and never spoke of it again. “My freedom lay in silence, as my mother's lay in hers,” Aury later recalled. “Hers was the refusal to know; mine, the refusal to say.”

Although her father had an extensive erotica collection and had spoken frankly to her early on about sex, Aury's mother was another matter. “She didn't like men,” Aury said. “She didn't like women, either. She hated flesh.”

Some of the vitriol directed against Aury's book was quite shocking. People described it as trash. (How many had actually read the book?) The author was accused of being antifeminist and of dishonoring all women. Never mind that no man who had written pornography was ever blamed for debasing his gender. Aury received plenty of nasty letters addressed to her alter ego: one writer called her a “damned bitch” who catered to the lowest common denominator for money. Another cursed the womb that bore her. Perhaps one of the most perplexing letters was from a man who told her that although the fantasy S&M world she wrote about did exist, it was only between men and boys. He claimed that it was much easier to dominate young boys than women.

As for Aury's son, Philippe, who was in his twenties when
O
appeared, he told a journalist after his mother's death that he'd had no clue what she had been up to. “I didn't know she was the author,” he said. “She never told me, really. I only found out in 1974, when there was talk of making a film and people came round to discuss it.” The film, made in 1975, is universally acknowledged to be dreadful. However, he added, “It is a very good book.”

Jean-Jacques Pauvert once told an amusing anecdote about being on holiday with his wife in 1957 or 1958 and overhearing a conversation at a restaurant. A group of people were seated at a table behind them—“well dressed, in their late forties or fifties, probably notables of the town, quite cultivated people, talking about books.” Suddenly, Pauvert recalled:

One of the men said, “You must understand that since Paulette wrote
Histoire d'O
she has had a very difficult time—isn't that right, Paulette?” His wife, a good-looking woman, about forty-five years old, wearing a fine pearl necklace, replied, “Yes, you know, it's been terrible for me. If I had only known what it would turn into, what with my husband's position. . . . It's absolutely terrible.” This seemed to be going on all over France. There were literally hundreds of people claiming to be the author of
O.

Each of the three introductory notes in the novel expresses bafflement as to the author's real identity. The translator Sabine d'Estrée—and more on
that
pseudonym later—pointed out that Pauline Réage was “a name completely unknown in French literary circles, where everyone knows everyone.” Aside from corresponding with the author about the translation, d'Estrée admitted, “I have never met Pauline Réage.” The shock of the book itself paled in comparison with the public's curiosity about the name of the person who wrote it. “Until her identity was bared,” d'Estrée wrote, “people found it difficult to assume a reasonable stance vis-à-vis the work; if Pauline Réage was the pseudonym of some eminent writer, they would feel compelled to react one way; if she were a complete unknown, another; and if indeed she were a literary hack merely seeking notoriety, then still another.”

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.”