Collected Works of Pierre Louys including Aphrodite Complete and Unexpurgated

by Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louys was acclaimed not alone for his exquisite prose, but for his genius in portraying the virtues and sins that all mankind is heir to.

His fame as one of the foremost historians of pre-Christian moralities is especially clear in the unforgettable masterpiece, APHRODITE - the story of pagan romance, of slave-girl and mistress, Hellenic abandonment and Grecian virtues.

Included to in this Avon collection, are the 147 prose SONGS OF BILITIS - plus fifteen short stories, each complete and unabridged, and hitherto not readily available.

-back cover description-

Genres: Erotica, Literature

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". He was made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his contributions to French literature.

Born in Belgium, in 1870, but moved to France where he would spend the rest of his life. He was a friend of authors André Gide and Oscar Wilde, and of composer Claude Debussy.

Reviews

[N.]

This was given to me in college by a friend who bought it unread as a vehicle for a gift card. He was, to say the least, dismayed to realize that he had given me a collection of 19th century erotica.

Honestly, I count this among the best gifts given to me.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

"It is terrifying. It is the face of Medusa."
—Aphrodite, p.19

When Robert E. Howard (yes, that Howard, creator of "Conan the Barbarian") presented a copy of Pierre Louÿs' then-new Collected Works to the rather prudish Texas schoolteacher Novalyne Price, she was scandalized. According to the biopic The Whole Wide World (based on Price Ellis' memoir One Who Walked Alone), she thought it was "horrendous."

That sounded like a recommendation to me, and when my local library system actually turned out to have a copy (acquired back in 1971), I had to at least try to read it... especially since The Whole Wide World was such a marvel of restrained intensity, somewhat like The Remains of the Day.

Pierre Louÿs' tales were intense, too... but not at all restrained. These Collected Works are, perhaps, too much an artifact of their time, and of the bygone times that Louÿs depicted. While the frank sexuality, numerous suggestive woodcuts by illustrator Harry G. Spanner, and lesbian relationships that scandalized Price once upon a time are no longer a matter of controversy, these stories are still severely problematic in other ways, ways that were invisible to Louÿs and to his English translator, Mitchell S. Buck—in attitudes of casual racism and sexism, for example, that the 20th Century had not yet outgrown, and that remain all too common here in the enlightened 21st.

*

The first book, Aphrodite, is set in the first century B.C.E.—in the great city of Alexandria, second only to Rome at the time, with the lighthouse of Pharos presiding over all of Hellenic Egypt. The story concerns a prominent courtesan called Chrysis, and the love she conceives for a prince of the realm.

So far, so good—but much of what goes on in Louÿs' version of Alexandria would be pretty horrendous from any perspective. Of the priestesses of the Baptes, for example, Louÿs writes,

Once a month, at the full moon, they gathered in the close of the temple, maddened by aphrodisiac beverages and girdled by canonical phalli. The eldest of the thirty-six had to take a mortal dose of the terrible erotogenous philtre. The certainty of her speedy death made her attempt without fear all the dangerous excesses before which the living recoil. Her body, everywhere foaming, became the centre and the model of the whirling orgy; in the midst of long yells, cries, tears and dances, the other naked women clasped her, bathed their hair in her sweat, chafed themselves against her burning skin and excited new ardors in the uninterrupted spasm of this furious agony. Three years these women lived thus and, at the end of the thirty-sixth month, such was the intoxication of their end.
—pp.51-52

And there's more...

Consider offhand slurs like these:

The eldest had seemed pretty to him, but the youngest was without charm; and, as ugliness made him suffer, he avoided thinking of her.
—p.27

A woman one has not yet possessed has something virginal; but what good result, what surprise awaits a second meeting? It would be almost marriage.
—p.55

"There are but two ways of being unhappy: to desire what one has not or to possess what one desires. Love commences by the first and finishes by the second, in the most lamentable state—that is to say: as soon as it succeeds. May the gods save us from loving!"
—Naucrates, p.89

At least one of the Alexandrian courtesans at the party where Naucrates is speaking, by the way, is not yet 11 years old...

And then there's the cruelty displayed toward the slave Aphrodisia later in that same party—not just from Queen Bacchis, who had Aphrodisia hanged on a cross as punishment and centerpiece for a crime she had not committed, but also by the philosopher Phrasilas, who stood there explaining Aphrodisia's fate to her even as she was expiring.

What happens to Chrysis when she gets what she wanted is not quite as horrendous as Aphrodisia's being simultaneously crucified and bored to death, but it's pretty close...

*

The second book is named Woman and Puppet, and it's very much the same sort of tale, albeit shifted forward in time and moved from Egypt to Spain. The Woman is the beauteous Conchita "Concha" Perez de Garcia of Seville, and the Puppet is the man who becomes enamored of Concha despite—or perhaps because—of her unattainable beauty.

The lines that seemed most memorable to me are, again, those that illustrate the moral gulf between Louÿs' time and our own, a distance perhaps greater than that between Louÿs and the times he was portraying:

"Believe me, what ruins these girls is the advice of women more than the eyes of men. I do not trust the best of them. Many a one with her rosary in her hand has the devil in her skirts."
—Concha's mother, p.187

and

After what had happened there were only three things for me to do; leave her, force her or kill her.
I decided on the fourth one, which was to endure her.
—Mateo, p.204

*

In contrast, The Songs of Bilitis, a cycle of 163 brief prose-poems comprising the life story of Bilitis, a fictional contemporary of the poet Sappho, and Bilitis' lover and eventual wife Mnasidika, comes across as sweet and tender, surprisingly so, especially after the poison, spite and jealousy of the first two works and the disasters with which they conclude.

Here is but one brief example:

LIV
The Past Which Survives

I will leave the bed as she has left it, unmade and rumpled, the covers tangled, so that the form of her body may remain impressed beside mine.
Until tomorrow, I will not go to the bath, I will not wear any garments, I will not comb my hair, for fear lest I efface her caresses.
This morning, I will not eat, nor this evening; and upon my lips I will place neither rouge nor powder, in order that her kiss may remain.
I will leave the shutters closed and I will not open the door, for fear lest the remembrance which she has left might fly out upon the wind.
—pp.261-262

*

The Adventures of King Pausole was by a wide margin the funniest of Louÿs' tales. It's the story of a Mediterranean monarch who has decreed exactly two laws:

I. Do no wrong to thy neighbor.
II. Observing this, do as thou pleasest.
—p.321

This radical freedom, imposed by royal decree, leads to an amusing and fascinating mass of contradictions and contrasts—and cognitive dissonances—which, if nothing else, differ from the hypocrisies afflicting the rest of Europe at the time.

Here's Louÿs' dryly humorous take on Taxis, the Chief Eunuch of Pausole's harem:

Heaven had spared him the concupiscences of the flesh and in an excess of compassion had spared them equally to all women that came in contact with him. {...} He was neither the victim nor the cause of sin.
—p.329

And this observation, which is at least as true today as it was in King Pausole's time:

I have been told that the laws of our country permit a novelist to portray all the crimes of his characters, but not the least detail of their indulgences. Wholesale murder is a far lesser crime in the eyes of the legislator than pleasure.
—p.347

"I have five minutes," he said to himself. "Just time to make a sonnet."
—the page Giglio (also known as Giguelillot), p.418

But even The Adventures of King Pausole, light-hearted as it is, cannot altogether avoid the horrendous. That same sonnet-composing page carries in his commodious pockets a comprehensive set of equipment for the seduction of the women he encounters.

The first contained:
A corkscrew.
Six corset laces.
Smelling salts.
Knock-out drops.
Three varieties of powder: white, flesh and brunette (in small boxes, pocket sizes).
Pins: white, black and round-headed.
{et cetera...}
—p.443

Wait, back up... knock-out drops?!? Sheesh. And that's not even asking what Giglio, or Louÿs, or translator Buck, thought the color of "flesh" was, or how it differed from "brunette."

Sheesh.

*

Speaking of cognitive dissonances, contrast the following from the Introduction of Twilight of the Nymphs:

We need more dreams and more dreamers.

with the very next sentence:

The soft voices of the nymphs would benefit and calm us infinitely more than the loud, shameless voices of the young females found between the covers of so many of our present-day books.
—translator Mitchell S. Buck, p.515

These are darker tales, cast as stories told among a group of nymphs. One of them, "The House upon the Nile, or The Semblance of Virtue," is perhaps the nadir of these Collected Works—the story of Bion the traveller being nothing more than a "farmer's daughter" joke without even a punchline.

*

After those, the Sanguines seem more trifling, a collection of short scenes and set pieces neither as poetic nor as poisonous—nor as memorable—as their predecessors.

*

Psyche, the final, fragmentary tale, does contain (on pp.672-673), an impassioned denouncement of public harassment in multiple forms that wouldn't be out of place in a modern #MeToo thread—but it's immediately followed by Louÿs' explanation of Psyche's distress: she just doesn't understand herself. Forsooth.

She no longer feared sinning as much as perhaps sinning awkwardly.
—p.723

*

...which one compares sometimes to those temples, two thousand years old, of which we have but the august fragments.
—Translator Claude Farrère, p.742

I wrestled long and hard with this review. The Collected Works of Pierre Louÿs contains many beautiful passages, tender erotic scenes, some presciently enlightened attitudes, and numerous iconoclastic sentiments both eloquently and forcefully expressed. But... in the end, their beauty is overshadowed by the effects of changing times—not so much by the bygone conventions against which Pierre Louÿs rebelled, as by their other assumptions—aspects to which Louÿs himself was, almost certainly, completely oblivious.

I cannot recommend that you read this book... but if you do, at least try to read it in context—and I hope you're able to do a better job of that than I did.

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection represents the imagined Greek world of the erudite immoralist Louys.

Aphrodite is the sensual, slightly risqué tale by today’s standards of a young courtesan Chrysis and her lover sculptor Demetrios; she is also the focus of lesbian love, written in 1896. She asks him to steal three precious items thinking to capture him by his actions but it backfires. The novel was printed privately and in translation too was hard to acquire in its day – Dorothy Parker did a review in 1920. It is well written and imbued with the cultural times - the now modern view of lesbian marriage (and then adoption) is expressed in lovely way, and although the story has several clear references to child courtesans it cannot be said to be too adult.

The songs of Bilitis are short 147 poems with Ovid-like themes. Again well written and individually rather clever. They did get a bit samey towards the end for me.

The collection concludes with a pair of collections of short stories ‘The Sanguines’ and ‘the Twlight of the Nymphs’. These are similarly Greek based but some are reflections/stories from the contemporary protagonist.

Overall I don't think this captivated as much as I anticipated - 3 stars.

[Unicorn Carnival · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divertido y picante: todo un derroche de ingenio.