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.Aury never intended the novel to be made public, but Paulhan insisted on it.For her, the manuscript was simply a long letter that had to be written.She hoped this gift would ensure the permanence of their relationship.“You’re always looking for ways to make it go on,” she said.“The story of Scheherazade, more or less.”The content of the novel was graphic, but the author’s prose was highly controlled, disciplined, and spare.Her “voice” was at odds with the erotic material, making it hard to dismiss as pornography.For Paulhan, the book was “the most ardent love letter that any man has ever received.” He did not abandon her.The author said later that Story of O, written when she was forty-seven, was based on her own fantasies.She was influenced, too, by her lover’s admiration for the Marquis de Sade.Later she described her feverish writing process as “writing the way you speak in the dark to the person you love when you’ve held back the words of love for too long and they flow at last.without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting, discarding.the way one breathes, the way one dreams.”Paulhan was awestruck.When he excitedly asked if he could find a publisher for her work, she agreed on the condition that her authorship remain hidden, known only to a select few.She gave herself the pen name “Pauline Réage”: “Pauline” after Pauline (Bonaparte) Borghese, elder sister of Napoleon, who was famous for her sensual, decadent pursuits; as well as Pauline Roland, the late-nineteenth-century French women’s rights activist.Despite the apparent blur between “Pauline” and “Paulhan,” Aury said later that her appellation had nothing to do with him.(Some insisted, wrongly, that she chose the name because it sounded like the French for “Reacting to Paulhan.”) As for “Réage,” she’d supposedly stumbled upon it in a real estate registry.People assumed that aspects of Story of O were highly autobiographical, yet Aury wasn’t so sure.Some twenty years after the book came out, she admitted that her own joys and sorrows had informed it, but she had no idea just how much, and did not care to analyze anything.“Story of O is a fairy tale for another world,” she said, “a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book.”She characterized “Pauline Réage” in vague terms as well—someone who “is not me entirely and yet in some obscure way is: when I move from one me to the other the fragments scatter, then come back together again in a pattern that I’m sure is ever-changing.I find it harder and harder to tell them apart anymore, or at least not with sufficient clarity.” Like many pseudonymous authors, Aury saw identity as unstable and felt perfectly at ease inhabiting a self that refused to remain a fixed star.She knew that finding a publisher for her novel (whether or not she took a pen name) would not be easy.It was Paulhan who demanded that the book reach the public, and he fought for it.In this instance, however, his prestige within the literary world carried no clout.Gallimard promptly refused the work, not wanting to deal with the inevitable (and expensive) hassle of a court case.“We can’t publish books like this,” Gaston Gallimard told her.This was especially disappointing because Aury had worked for him.A few years before her death, Aury said that she had never forgiven Gallimard’s rejection of her novel, since he’d already published Jean Genet, whose work was “much nastier.”Paulhan persuaded Jean-Jacques Pauvert—an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old publisher who’d issued Sade’s complete works, and who was already a veteran of obscenity trials—to accept Story of O.“It’s marvelous, it’ll spark a revolution,” Pauvert said to Paulhan after reading it overnight.“So when do we sign the contract?”In 1954, Pauvert published a gorgeously designed first edition of two thousand copies [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]