1967
L ‘Histoire d’O
(Draft of a Review for Ladies Home Journal)
How much time, and how much trouble should a woman take in preparing herself for an evening with her fiance? We have already dealt with this problem several times in our column, but we are prompted to address it again after the publication of this little book, probably the work of a famous international visagiste who has coyly chosen to hide behind the pseudonym of Pauline Reage.
One reason the book can be recommended is the attention it devotes to details of toilette often neglected by how-to books and women’s magazines, even though such details are of supreme importance. Our readers therefore can find helpful hints about fixing iron rings around ankles and wrists, accessories usually ignored since they require a great deal of care to ensure they are fastened securely. It’s a great mistake to rely on the guarantee of some masked blacksmith; for excellent devices can be found at any beauty . salon, or else by telephoning SADE, the Society for Assistants in Deflowering and Emasculating, who will send a masseur to your home within minutes. You must make certain that the iron causes those unsightly red weals, the drops of blood and the chafed wrists and ankles that your Special Man is so crazy about. The ring should be secured just as our grannies used to buckle their chastity belts, not too loose and not too tight. Only a gentle little nip to create that allure of tense haughtiness along with the moist, frightened-gazelle look, and Mister Right is yours!
Even greater care (allow at least an hour before your date arrives) is a must when it comes to attaching a golden padlock to your labia majora. Madame Reage’s book shows clearly how this operation can be performed in a few, easy steps. Unfortunately, she doesn’t list retailers that carry the item in question, but if you rummage carefully through Mom’s trunks up in the attic, you may make some amusing discoveries. A woman who knows how to love is bound to be clever in recycling odds and ends, putting them to new and thrilling uses.
And now a final reminder (the book is full of fantastic advice on this subject): Be imaginative and decorate your body with all sorts of long bloody gashes, using your little boudoir whip with the studded thongs. The best whips come from Barcelona, though lately the rival Hong Kong whips have been the rage (but beware of the imitations from East Germany). When you’re making these marks, however, don’t overdo it. The book explains clearly how your man can add more love marks, especially if he counts melancholy English gentlemen among his best friends. We’re assuming he works for some multinational and is highly connected. Otherwise, Mme. Reage’s advice is best forgotten, because her book is aimed, after all, at the upmarket reader. If you’re not in that class (face facts!) you might try another firstrate booklet, Official List of Infirmities and M utilations Acceptable for Exemption from Military Service. It’s available to our readers from its publisher, the Ministry of Defense.
1968
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Finally a breath of fresh air. Your reviewer’s overwhelming sensation is a chaste and modest emotion as he begins speaking of this book, which has just arrived on his desk like a comet at Bethlehem in the murky firmament of obsessive contemporary erotica. In a galaxy of J ustines tortured by the latest Marquises d’O and of Emanuelles carrying out the most refined experiments in coitus interruptus, and of multiple couples who copulate and recopulate in geometric swappings, in an era of magazines for women only (but read obviously by men only) and sadomasochistic comic books, an era when a film can create a scandal only if a heterosexual woman, fully dressed, is happily married to her husband who works at the First National Bank (giving the well-to-do an uneasy hint of the irreparable decadence of their behavior), and as human sexuality becomes the object of excessively scrupulous examination in the pages of Our Sunday Visitor and sexual congress for the purpose of reproduction now arouses psychoses far beyond the worst descriptions of Krafft-Ebing-here, at last, is a clean, straightforward love story, absolutely unsophisticated, the sort of read our grandmothers used to enjoy.
The plot is simple: a noblewoman, brought up (and revolted) by the consumer values of our technological era, falls in love with a gamekeeper. Obviously the gamekeeper comes from a different background, an earthly paradise totally uncontaminated, with no notion of the pollution of the atmosphere (though he is not unaware of sexual pollution) or ecological mutation.
Their love is pure, a series of marvelous experiences, free of the slightest hint of perversion, an encounter between the sexes strictly according to the laws of nature, as in those old
fashioned love stories now read only by the fanatics of nostalgia, determined to rediscover in the jumble of secondhand stalls those tales that the culture industry no longer dares reprint because of its ambivalent, cowardly conformism to anticonformity.
Here, then, is a book the younger generation should read. It would help them form a cleaner, more modest view of life, entertain genuine feelings, not adulterated, and develop a taste for simple, honest things, like the smell of new-mown hay or baking bread.
A book, too, for frustrated, restless wives, for happy brides, and for wandering husbands seeking a basic redefinition of family life. A book for dissatisfied couples in search of truth. A book whose limpid, sober pages, free of all fetishistic gratification, point the way to a healthier relationship, rejuvenating it, supplying its vexed boredom with the fundamental values that any normal person wishes to see restored.
The narrative style is occasionally marred by decadent mannerisms, and we would advise the author to follow less blindly the debatable sophisms of Marshall McLuhan in conducting his analysis of contemporary society. Here and there some residual traces of class consciousness emerge, for example, the author’s embarrassment in describing the relations between his leading characters. He would do well to work for more realism in his handling of the erotic scenes, which to our contemporary taste seem tied still to the apron strings of Victorian pruderie. He should tackle a theme of this sort more freely, boldly calling acts, situations, and parts of the body by their real names.
All the same, this is a book of great power, of great idealistic breadth, open, innocent, delicately romantic. Reviewers will unhesitatingly recommend it as required reading in the schools, as an antidote to the excesses of contemporary eroticism now as sailing our tender and vulnerable young people. This book is a timely reminder that uncorrupted values such as Life, Nature, and Sex still exist and can be perceived in their virginal and virile reality.
1971
The Discovery of America
DAN : Good evening, folks. Here it’s 7 P.M. on the 11th of October 1492, and we’re linked directly with the flagship of the Columbus expedition, which by 7 A.M. tomorrow should put Europe’s first thalatanaut on a new land, a new planet, if I may be allowed the metaphor, that Terra Incognita so many astronomers, geographers, cartographers, and travelers have
dreamed of. Some claim that this land is the Indies, reached from the West rather than from the East; others say it’s actually a whole new continent, enormous and unexplored. As of now, in a joint effort, all our TV networks will be transmitting around the clock, twenty-five hours. We’re linked with the telecamera installed on the flagship, the Santa Maria, and with our relay station in the Canary Islands, as well as with Sforza TV in Milan, and the Universities of Salamanca and of Wittenberg.
Our guest here in the studio is Professor Leonardo da Vinci, the famous scientist and futurologist, who will provide a running commentary, explaining the technical details of this extraordinary venture. But first a word from Jim. Jim?
JIM : Well, Dan, as you know, unfortunately we won’t be able to see the actual landing. Our camera’s attached to the figurehead of the caravel, but the antenna, in the crow’s nest of the mainmast, can’t be activated until after the lookout has sighted landfall and the sails are furled. Where are the three caravels now, in their epoch-making voyage? I tell you, we’re all holding our breath while we follow this adventure, the most daring exploit of all time. It’s the beginning of a new age, which some columnists have already suggested calling The Modern Era. Man is emerging from the Middle Ages and is making a major breakthrough in his intellectual evolution. Obviously, the crew at Cape Canary feel the same way we do . . . But I’d like to hear from Alastair Cook, who has just arrived
