Pierre Louÿs, The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments, Trans by Geoffrey Longnecker, Wakefield Press, 2010.
read it at Google Books
A bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louys (1870-1925) was a friend of, and influence on, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarme among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louys' true legacy was to be discovered: nearly 900 pounds of erotic manuscripts were found in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many subsequently lost. Since then, it has become clear that Louys is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners was the first of his erotic manuscripts to see publication, and it also remains his most outrageous-an erotic classic in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice-ostensibly offered "for use in educational establishments"-couched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Louys turns late-nineteenth-century manners roundly on their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether offering rules for etiquette in church, school or home, or outlining a girl's duties toward family, neighbor or God, Louys manages to mock every institution and leave no taboo unsullied. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners has only grown more scandalous and subversive since its first appearance in 1926.
The first of Pierre Louÿs’s erotic works to see publication after his death, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is also his most outrageous, and one of the few erotic classics in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice and a parodic format, Louÿs turns late nineteenth-century manners roundly upon their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether he is offering rules for etiquette in church, school, or home, or outlining a girl’s duties toward family, neighbor, or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution, leaving no hypocrisy unexposed. The book has only grown more scandalous and subversive than when it first appeared in 1926.
Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) was a best-selling author in his time, and a friend of and influence on such luminaries as André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Stephane Mallarmé. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, and his 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet has been adapted for the screen in such noteworthy films as Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman and Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. But it was only after his death that his true legacy was to be uncovered: nearly nine hundred pounds of erotic manuscripts were discovered in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many lost. The body of work that has since been gathered—manuscripts continue to be discovered—leaves little doubt: Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was.
“Louÿs entered eroticism the way others enter politics or religion”— Jean-Paul Goujon
“One of the great and glorious erotomaniacs of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth”— André Pieyre de Mandiargues
“This is just the book to give your niece—if she’s a quiet, neat, straight-laced girl.”—A. D. Jameson
These are the first two books published by the new Wakefield Press, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and seemingly run by Marc Lowenthal, translator of Nerval, Picabia, and Queneau. These two books are small both in size and in page count (the Louÿs is 76 pages, the Balzac 110), but they’re beautifully produced and worthy of attention.
Louÿs’s posthumously published Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is an unabashedly pornographic parody of etiquette manuals, an aphoristic list of instructions for how one should behave “In Class,” “At Confession,” “At the Seaside,” and “With the President of the Republic,” as well as “Duties Toward Your Father,” “Duties Toward Your Mother,” etc. Like most etiquette manuals, it’s largely aspirational: Louÿs’s schoolgirls are sexual dynamos, and the overall effect is rather like the 120 Days of Sodom‘s ever more complex permutations for permutation’s sake, but this is funnier than mathematical. An echo might be found in Louis Aragon’s Dadaist parody of François Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus, though that would seem to have been published earlier than the Handbook: an argument could be made for Louÿs being Dadaist before the fact.
A few of the maxims in the Handbook, in translation by John Harman, appeared in Atlas’s edition of Remy de Gourmont’s The Book of Masks; that translation seemed distractingly British to me. A previous edition was published by Grove Press’s Zebra series translated by Richard Seaver (as Sabine D’Estrée); a shoddy print-on-demand edition that claims to be a reprint of an Olympia Press edition is still in print, with no translator given. Wakefield’s edition perhaps more respectable than the work deserves: Longnecker’s introduction is brief, but contextualizes the work.
The introduction to the Handbook quotes a letter from Louÿs to his brother, declaring that he wanted “to burn everything before dying, with the satisfaction of knowing that the work will remain virgin, that one will have been the only one to know it as well as create it . . . that it will not have been prostituted” (p. vii). This desire for a zero-sum life resonates with the ideas of Balzac in his Treatise for Elegant Living, an incomplete manual of dandyism meant to be part of his Comédie humaine alongside his Physiology of Marriage in his Études analytiques. Balzac’s work begins by dividing men into three parts: the man who works, the man who thinks, and finally the man who does nothing. Three different kinds of life are lived by these men: the busy life, the artist’s life, and the elegant life. The elegant life is what concerns Balzac here: the artist, he explains, is a special case, elegant by definition. But the artist who produces is not fully elegant: the truly elegant man should create and accomplish nothing.
This is an odd book: Laurence Sterne is invoked more than once, and this is almost a book about writing a book about elegant living. Partially this is because the book is unfinished. After a meeting with Beau Brummell, the author (and his friends, it seems) decide what the book will consist of going forward:
And so the subject matter to be dealt with in the second part was adopted unanimously by this illustrious parliament of fashionophiles, under the title: GENERAL PRINCIPLES of elegant living.
The third part, concerning THINGS PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE PERSON, would be divided into several chapters:
The first will comprise clothing in all its parts. An initial paragraph will be devoted to men’s clothing, a second to women’s clothing; a third will offer an essay on perfumes, baths, and hairdressing.
Another chapter will provide a complete theory on walking and deportment. (p. 39)
Of course this never really happens. A few of the general principles are elaborated; Jeffries’s notes point out that the “complete theory on walking and deportment” became the essay Theory of Walking, but we’re left to wonder what this book might have been. Of course, leaving the book unwritten is the proper course of action for the dandy; and one wonders if Balzac turned away from dandyism to write; certainly, the images that we have of Balzac, a hard-working artist if ever there was one, don’t suggest the dandy. Potential, maybe, is what matters.
The book proceeds by generating aphorisms, 53 in total: perhaps this list of aphorisms was to be the real treatise. Generating these is something of a struggle: arguments are ploughed through, and at the end aphorisms emerge:
XIII. One must have studied at least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant life.
XVI. A banker who reaches the age of forty without having gone into voluntary liquidation, or who has more than thirty-six inches in girth, is the damned soul of elegant living: he will see paradise without ever entering it.
The elegant are not the rich; rather, being elegant is a far more complicated proposition, tied up in the character of Beau Brummell, living in Boulogne, in exile from his creditors. Brummell is a new sort of man:
It would be difficult to express the feeling that took hold of us when we saw this prince of fashion: it was one of both respect and joy. How not purse one’s lips enigmatically when seeing the man who had invented the philosophy of furniture and vests, and who was going to pass on to us axioms on pants, grace, and harnesses? (p. 31)
The dandy of 1830 is an odd figure, not the Wildean figure of the dandy that’s been received since. A lengthy introduction (as well as well-researched notes) by translator Napoleon Jeffries help to explain what Balzac was approaching; there’s still something essentially strange here, which is reassuring.
These are, it needs to be stressed, beautiful little books, some of the nicest I’ve seen recently in the mass-market literary world. French flaps on paperbacks have become de rigueur for any small press with artistic pretensions; but Wakefield excels in being well-designed inside and out. Garamond Premier is used for most of the type, with decorative swashes where called for; hung punctuation suggests that there’s a designer (nameless, in the best tradition) who’s done serious thinking about how an elegant book should appear. They’re also cheap for how well they’re done. Wakefield’s forthcoming catalogue (Perec translated by Lowenthal in September, with Péret, Fourier, and Paul Scheerbart to follow) looks fantastic. It’s difficult to imagine many others – with the exceptions, maybe, of Atlas or Exact Change – doing such an attentive job with the material. - withhiddennoise.net/
Pierre Louÿs, Pybrac, Trans. by Geoffrey Longnecker, Wakefield Press, 2014
Quite possibly the filthiest book of poems ever written, Pybrac was first published posthumously in 1927 (in an edition of 105 copies), but Pierre Louÿs had worked on it in secret throughout his life. Its 313 mockingly moralistic quatrains represent just a fraction of the more than 2,000 that were purportedly scattered in manuscript form in auctions after his death; yet like all things erotic, what remains nonetheless conveys a sense of unending absurdity and hypnotic obsession. In turns amusing and offensive, Pybrac offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade may have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse.
In turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs’ Pybrac is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, Pybrac was, with The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners, one of the first of Louÿs’ secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase “I do not like to see…,” Pybrac is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own evergrowing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he “disliked” witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest, and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains collected here conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near hypnotic obsession.
Pierre Louÿs, The She Devils, Creation Books, 2000.
Described by Susan Sontag as one of the few works of the erotic imagination to deserve true literary status, The She Devils (Trois Filles de leur Mère) remains Pierre Louÿs' most intense, claustrophobic work. A study of sexual obsession and monomania, it is unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity.
This new edition also contains Louÿs' lewd novella Toinon, now widely available in English for the first time, in which the author gleefully describes various sexual misdemeanours in a girls' boarding school.
Of all the women I have met, and fucked, since I became single, since I lost my love, Rachel had perhaps the best heart. Yet I treated her terribly. I say I lost my love, but that isn’t true. I still had it. I treated Rachel terribly because it was now all mine, and no longer shared. But that isn’t the real point of interest, not this time. Rachel was training to be a doctor and when we fucked she would explain the process, would break it down for me, medically. She spoke about her ‘vulva’ and my ‘glans,’ and I would cringe. She would happily swallow my come and then seek to enlighten me as to why it didn’t taste bad or, to be specific, like anything much at all. [A rare occurrence, apparently, that means the lack of something in my system; a situation that might indicate I have cancer]. Her sex talk was so clinical that it was profoundly unsexy; and it made me realise that the acts in which we engage are not everything, that the purely physical isn’t the whole of it, and that language and narrative are important too.
“Despite the fact that my sexual exercises are ordinarily as reserved and conservative as my language, my moral scruples do not go so far as to prevent me from fucking a mother on top of her daughter and then deflowering the same daughter on top of her mother.”
The She Devils was written in 1910 by Pierre Louys, who was, according to wikipedia, made a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d’honneur for his contributions to French literature. However, the book wasn’t published until the 1950s and then, unsurprisingly, only under a pseudonym. I have read a lot of sexually explicit, or so-called erotic, novels recently but I have never before had an experience such as I had with this. It is, to put my cards on the table, the only book that has got close to arousing me. This had something to do with the content of course – although I would like to point out that not everything in it excited me, some of it even disturbed me – but was more about the presentation of that content. What I have found is that, generally speaking, this kind of writing is approached in a Rachel-like manner, which is to say that it is too anatomical; or, and this is equally off-putting, there is sometimes an attempt at imbuing the acts with poetry or beauty. I have, in fact, always felt when reading erotica previously that none of the participants – neither the characters nor the authors – were actually enjoying themselves.
Pierre Louys, however, wrote in a blunt, and enthusiastic, fashion such that when Teresa says she will empty the narrator’s balls ‘with a twist of my asshole’ you believe it. Blessedly, there are no ridiculous extended metaphors, there is no obfuscation, suggestiveness or innuendo; everything is up front [or down below or round the back]; and it was really refreshing and, yes, occasionally, genuinely, hot. Yet before you all rush out to buy The She Devils I do feel as though I ought to say more about the content, to be specific about what you will encounter, for it really is not, I would imagine, for everyone. There is, to begin with, a lot of anal; more anal in fact than vaginal intercourse. There is oral performed on men and women; there is lesbianism and group sex; there is come swallowing and come swapping; there is coming on tits and there is coming on faces; there is ass to mouth and rimming; there is fingering; there is…well, honestly, pretty much everything that you could think of, including, erm, bestiality and, um, shit eating. No, really.
For me, it was fascinating to discover that a lot of the things that we think make us kinky, or broad-minded, now were, it seems, being performed by people over a hundred years ago [at least]. There is sometimes a temptation to believe that dirty sex is somehow a modern invention, that prior to our generation everyone was fucking missionary style while still wearing most of their clothes. Indeed, if someone had an interest in the most eyebrow-raising elements of The She Devils – the scat and the scenes in which come is shit from one woman’s arsehole into another’s mouth, etc – we would possibly attribute it to a jaded population raised on the accessibility of internet pornography. In fact, I have heard the claim, which is often framed as a joke, many times, that internet porn has raised the stakes, made conventional sex boring, and introduced a number of extreme acts into the public consciousness that were invented purely for the visual medium; and yet this book suggests that this is not the case.
I have thus far given no real indication as to what The She Devils is about. I mean, it is primarily about fucking, of course, and I think you’ve got that, but there is, despite its plotlessness, a little more going on than that. The set up is of a young man, aged twenty, who narrates the action, and who lives next door to a family consisting of a mother and her three daughters. The young man is horny, and the family are prostitutes. He has each member of the family in turn, and occasionally has more than one of them at the same time. Two of the daughters are underage – being eleven and fourteen – but I don’t want to labour too much over the pedophiliac aspects of the story, or the incest for that matter. I do, however, think it is worth considering some of the characters individually. The narrator is particularly interesting because he is the only one with reservations. When one of the girls wants him to call her a whore, for example, he will not, not even to excite and please her. Likewise, when one of the girls wants to indulge in a rape fantasy he declines, for resistance ‘freezes’ him. Moreover, he frequently gives voice to his disgust in relation to some of the things the girls want or are prepared to do and criticises their mother for intentionally raising them to be experimental nymphomaniacs.
The narrator is therefore the novel’s moral heart. He passes judgement. The title itself is a moral judgement: the women are devils. It is difficult to know whether Louys was aware of his chauvinism in regard to this, whether it was, in fact, intentional or not. What I mean by this is that the women – who all absolutely enjoy sex, the filthier the better, and who, in fact, make all the demands and lay down all the rules – are being criticised, literally demonised, while the man who fucks them, well, isn’t, or certainly is not to the same extent. The narrator reviles the girls’ mother, rightly considering her behaviour towards her daughters, and yet this doesn’t stop him, and as such he is complicit in their abuse. It’s possible that Louys was making a point about weakness or hypocrisy, about how the sexual urge is so strong that moral objections can be compromised or dismissed, at least during the act, but I’m not so sure. It seems more likely that it is simply an example of the old double standard where sex is concerned.
However, I do feel as though the novel deals sensitively and intelligently with the subject of prostitution. As suggested previously, the daughters were trained from a very young age by their mother to be whores. They are indoctrinated in the same way the little girl is in Robbe-Grillet’s A Sentimental Novel, and, as with that novel, Louys writes about the harmful effects of what we are exposed and introduced to in childhood. So, yes, the girls enjoy sex, they enjoy beating themselves off too, but that does not mean that they haven’t been abused. Moreover, I found particularly moving a couple of the things that Charlotte – the eldest, and most sensitive, daughter – says about her trade. When discussing bestiality she states that a dog is less disgusting than a magistrate, and I think the intention was not to take a cheap shot at a certain profession, but to say something about men and the way they treat women, particularly whores. The animal, unlike the clients, doesn’t have any ill intention, it is not trying to hurt or exert power or dominance or control. Sex itself is not the problem, sex is not bad, it is the attitude that we sometimes bring to it that is. This is made even clearer when she says: ‘you think that things like that disgust us? No. It’s the men not the acts.’ - https://booksyo.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/the-she-devils-by-pierre-louys/
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