Honor Moore
1.
I avoided it. Never even saw a copy of it all those years. But it lay there, beneath my young woman feminism. A curiosity. A taboo.
Written by a woman, I heard. To entertain her husband.
A friend of mine met her in Paris. Pauline Réage. She was small, a literary woman who wore glasses. She came into the room, her face obscured by a hat.
The marvelous name was a nom de plume.
2.
In a dark apartment near St. Germain, a woman hands a sheaf of pages to a man wearing a suit.
3.
I had returned to the city after years in the country and for a few months lived in a loft at the border of Little Italy and SoHo. I was writing and it was winter, and as snow fell outside I described it. Meticulously. How it fell on the roof of the church across the street. How it dulled a red door that led from the roof to god knows where. How something that had looked yellow in sunlight in falling snow had no color whatsoever.
I was having a love affair after years of involuntary abstinence. I was still “a woman” I had discovered.
I thought of myself as in the process of having a sexual awakening.
I thought of myself as “a girl at fifty.”
4.
The first time I was alone with him, we stood at a small distance from each other and I trembled. When I saw him again I scarcely recognized him. It was not how he looked that had caused me to tremble.
Because circumstances proscribed the dimensions of the affair, restraint became its method. For instance, he never came to see me in that loft at the borders of SoHo and Little Italy.
Or lie with me in that bed. It was built of dark wood and highly polished, the bedclothes were white, and its surface stood high, at an unusual height from the floor.
5.
One night after seeing the film based on Proust’s Time Regained, I returned alone to the loft. I had in mind to choose a book, and there it was. Story of O. I pulled it from the shelf: on the white cover, a characterization by Eliot Fremont-Smith of the New York Times: “A total, authentic literary experience.”
The critic’s name brought back the room where I began to write in 1972. The American edition had appeared in 1965, the year I lost my virginity.
In the country I had lived alone and taken care of an old house. Which made me strong, as did writing a long book. By the time I moved back to the city, I was weary of my strength and its requirements.
6.
“ . . . they notice, at one corner of the park, at an intersection where there are never any taxis, a car which, because of its meter, resembles a taxi.
Get in, he says.
She gets in. . . .”
7.
Even now, without the book in hand, I can see the cool interior of that automobile, the green of trees through the window as the driver makes his way out of the city. Also, I have the sensation of the leather upholstery, how it sticks to the nakedness of her buttocks.
And can recall the feel of the man sitting next to her.
8.
Now a man wearing a mask is entering the woman’s cell in the château at Roissy. With chains, he secures her wrists to the wall above her bed. And fits her neck with a wide leather collar.
The mechanisms are mercilessly described. “They had clasps, which functioned automatically like a padlock when it closes, and they could be opened only by means of a small key.”
The click of her mules as she walks the tiled corridors, her pale flesh reflecting the fire in the hearth of the library where she is presented, the men with their drinks circling her, making their crude remarks. And then she is whipped.
9.
I feel myself abruptly frantic, a woman enraged at being kept from her pleasure. I toss the book aside.
Hot blur of white bedclothes, black night out the window, the burning, my own fists pounding the mattress beside me, the rising torso, a fury of moaning no one can hear, so thick are the walls of the old loft building, and afterward the fumbling for it, the book written by a woman in Paris when I was a child, its yellowed pages beneath the reading lamp.
Again and again.
10.
Which shocked me.
11.
She wears the taffeta gown caught up at the waist: in the back to reveal her buttocks, in the front to expose her “belly.”
She is not the only woman in the château, and she is not permitted to speak to the others, nor they to her. Like the others, she is directed to keep her eyes lowered, and if she meets the gaze of any of the men who “use” her, she is beaten.
The word “mule” and the idea of that kind of unsecured shoe enter my erotic imagination.
Riding crop. The whip with several knotted lashes. The one fashioned of bamboo and leather.
It is the year 2000, and there is no talk of torture in the news.
12.
If I were a feminist critic, I would note the narrator’s presence at the opening of the novel, as in: “Then, when her blindfold was removed, she found herself standing alone in a dark room, where they left her for half an hour or an hour, or two hours, I can’t be sure . . .”
I would put forth Story of O as a novel with a marriage plot, in which the heroine chooses self-actualization over domesticity.
Or the narrative of a saint’s life that culminates in martyrdom.
13.
When I have watched pornographic films, I have been aroused but also disgusted, but no matter how “disgusting” the events that befall O, her story does not disgust me.
As she bent, I bent. As she prepared, I prepared. As she was beaten, I was beaten. As she was fucked, I was fucked. As she was denied, I made her accommodation.
14.
“ . . . O tried to figure out why there was so much sweetness mingled with the terror in her, or why her terror seemed itself so sweet. . . .”
15.
Such is the understanding of sexuality—as something beyond good and evil, beyond love, beyond sanity; as a resource for ordeal and for breaking through the limits of consciousness—that informs the French literary canon that I have been discussing.
Story of O, with its project for completely transcending personality, entirely presumes this dark and complex vision of sexuality so far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by American Freudianism and liberal culture. The woman who is given no other name than O progresses simultaneously toward her own extinction as a human being and her fulfillment as a sexual being.
—SUSAN SONTAG, 1967
16.
One Christmas I dined in the restaurant in Paris, where, in a private dining room, Sir Stephen had shared O with two other men.
17.
It must have been dawn when I finished the book, but I do not remember the light or whether it was still snowing.
“Down on your knees,” says my lover on the telephone.
Trembling, I picture myself there.
And then we laugh.