In Anne Rice's "Exit to Eden", the heroine recalls that her first glimpse of the world of S/M is finding a copy of Pauline Reage's "Story of O." when she was a high school girl frustrated and trapped by the ordinary world around her. That was something that caught my eye.
Ms. Rice's heroine talks about finding "Story of O." in a discreet paperback with a white cover. I had to laugh at that, since that's exactly the edition I first read. I remember being fourteen or fifteen and finding an extract from "Story of O." (the notorious first chapter, it was) in an anthology called "The Evergreen Review Reader". You almost certainly won't remember the Evergreen Review. The original journal began its run in 1957 and ceased publication sometime in the early 1980s. It was "re-launched" seven or eight years ago, but I've never seen the new version and expect it's nothing at all like the original.
The original Review mixed experimental and Beat fiction with leftist politics, but its claim to fame was publishing "dangerous" literature-- e.g., Wm. S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Terry Southern, or Pierre Klossowski's Roberte ce soir. At fourteen or fifteen I was a literary kid, and I was looking for something that was hip and edgy and that might take me out of the world where I grew up.
So I read the extract in Evergreen Review and was...shattered. This was something far past anything I'd thought about at that age. A few months later I saw the full version in paperback at a bookstore near the local university. Just as Ms. Rice's heroine remarked, it was in a plain white cover. All very discreet, mind you. Grove Press (which also published Evergreen Review) did the paperback. I think it was later reprinted by Ballantine, still in that white cover. I bought a copy, and it's something that's been on my shelves ever since. The current softbound edition is in a larger format and has a black cover-- there's one there on my shelves, of course.
"Story of O." introduced me to the idea of S/M, yes. But it introduced me to something else as well. For me, "Story of O." was as much about class as it was about sex. Forever after, sex would be linked in my mind with social class. "Story of O." was originally in French, of course, and anything set in Paris was something that played to all my adolescent fantasies of escape and life overseas. And the action in the novel takes place in hidden chateaux and exclusive clubs and the world of high fashion (O. is a fashion photographer). That became the world that I associated with sex. The physical part of sex was never as important (or maybe even not as necessary) as the setting. Set and setting became deeply important for me, and sex became something that happened only in settings that were literary and upscale.
Andrew Holleran always wrote that s/m is the intellectuals' kink, and I have to agree with that. S/M requires expensive accoutrements and expensive fashion. It requires a partner who is deeply aware of ritual and symbolism. People have said it before-- I'm pretty certain that I've said it before --that you could set "Story of O." in a middle-class suburb in Terre Haute or Atlanta, but then it would just be about abuse. Setting it in a chateau in a forest outside Paris makes it literary and full of baroque symbolism. I wanted that world, of course. I wanted desperately to escape to someplace, anyplace that wasn't the place where I was living at fourteen or fifteen. S/M done properly is sex that requires lots and lots of literary, religious, and artistic references-- sex with footnotes and an annotated bibliography. And that's what I wanted even then.
Ah-- the religious references? The author of "Story of O."-- Anne Desclos, writing as Pauline Reage and masked as Dominique Aury --told interviewers late in her life that to understand "O." you needed to read "Letters of a Portuguese Nun". I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, and I'll recommend the documentary "Writer of O." both for its insights into how and why the novel was written and for some very lovely dramatizations of scenes from the book. The c. 1973 French film version of "O." wasn't bad, but the fashions and soundtrack are dreadful Seventies things that haven't held up at all.
I quite empathized with Anne Rice's heroine. "Story of O." sends the teen heroine of "Exit to Eden" off into a life (and career) in a world of moneyed and stylish S/M. I'll never be able to buy the services of a lovely, educated submissive on a private island, but I have told people that the novel made me think of sex as a set of baroque rituals-- that it could never, never be just about bodies.
In that opening chapter of "O.", O.'s lover cuts off her bra and underwear in the back of a limousine and tells her that she'll never wear either again. That became something I've asked the various young ladies of my acquaintance to do-- it's a signature move for me. So that's one thing I took from the novel, just as "O." made me go read Mark Girouard's "Life in the French Country House". Sex requires the proper architecture-- always.
No girl. they say, was ever ruined by a book, and more's the pity. When I was in graduate school, I worked in a small, independent bookstore, and I made sure that we carried "Story of O." and recommended the novel to many a shy and bookish girl from the nearby Catholic academy. I hope that least a few of them found an older lover who'd help them experiment with silk blindfolds and candle wax and riding crops. I hope at least one or two went on the world of hidden chateaux and baroque dreams.
