'My father-in-law was quite the ladies' man.'
By the early 1950s, Aury was worried that his attention might be shifting. Well aware of his liking for erotic literature (he had written a preface to de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom), she said she thought she could do something similar. Paulhan was dismissive: erotica wasn't a thing women were capable of. In the footage, licensed by Rapaport to show in her documentary, she explained: 'I wrote it alone, for him, to interest him, to please him, to occupy him. I wasn't young, nor particularly pretty. I needed something which might interest a man like him.' (Pressed as to why she wrote in pencil, she replied mischievously: 'So as not to stain the sheets.')
Aury gave the notebooks to Paulhan, who thought the writing was too good not to be published and urged her to turn it into something longer, a proper novel. Aury admitted that after the initial explosive burst of energy, the writing slowed, and you can tell. The erotic charge seems less intense. O has a job and answers the telephone and moves around Paris, which is all a bit awkward and pointless when you are supposed to be in thrall to an identity-crushing sexual cult. There are high points: the sex with women is obviously strongly felt (Aury was actively bisexual at times in her life) and she introduces the dark character of Sir Stephen, an Englishman to whom O is handed over. Sir Stephen, she told Regine Desforges, 'links to a desire for one's father. He is a father figure'.
Aury succeeds in giving her book a novelistic shape. But as Colette complained when asked to comment on Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness : 'Obscenity is such a narrow domain. One immediately begins to suffocate there, to feel bored.' If events become ever more extreme (which they must), at some point you are going to lose all but the most committedly sadomasochist readers. It's tough to maintain the tempo of pornography, and Dominique Aury's final, rather pedestrian chapter was left out of the published novel. In its place were two alternative, perfunctory endings