Elizabeth Porquerol, who, despite her age, remains very acute, recalls 'a very well-bred and polite person, always smiling and affable. But everyone is double, or triple, or quadruple. Every character has its hidden sides. One doesn't reveal one's secrets to all and sundry.'
When she was a young woman, Regine Desforges says, Dominique Aury liked to walk in Les Halles dressed like a prostitute.
Fifty years on, Story of O remains a powerful text, no longer as shocking as it once was, and no longer causing incredulity that it was written by a woman, but still able to touch people viscerally. Pola Rapaport, who read it at 13 and then again as an adult, told me when we met in Paris: 'It catches people's imaginations. I'm not into S&M. I find the book fascinating and erotic and repellent all at the same time: it's unfiltered and unique.'
Peter Fryer, who wrote a book on the British Museum's collection of erotica, described it as a 'daydream transfigured by literary skill, notably by obsessive detail, Henry James's "solidity of specification"'. (Aury researched 18th-century costume and the book is studded with descriptions of interiors, dress, the appearance of things.)
But beyond its merits as a literary work, its merits or limits as pornography, there lies the paradox that this incendiary book was written by a woman who wore little make-up and no jewellery, who dressed with quiet elegance, who lived out a polite, bluestocking existence in a small flat with her parents and son. Beneath this unlikely exterior raged terrible passions. In the end, the most instructive aspect of the book is that it demonstrates the demoniac nature of sexuality in any or all of us. This quiet, learned woman understood the power of sex. She knew that desire can ignite compulsions to commit sudden, arbitrary violence and induce a yearning for voluptuous, annihilating death.
SOURCE: the guardian
by Geraldine Bedell