A Publisher's Paradise: Expatirate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

6. Suburban Souls and the Literary Family, Paris Circa 1900

B III PORNOGRAPHY 6.1. Title page for Suburban Souls: The Erotic Psychology of a Man and a Maid (Paris: Printed for distribution amongst private subscribers only [Carrington], 1901). Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. ~ SoullS ++++ THE FIRST OF THREE VOLUMES PARIS PRINTED FOR DISTRIBUTION AMONGST PRIVATE SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, 1901 187 chapter 6 / Suburban Souls and the Literary Family, Paris circa 1900 The changing cultural politics and publishing networks that gave shape to the pornographer’s paradise in Paris are encoded in fascinating ways in certain Paris editions.Works that presented themselves as confessions, memoirs, or diaries reflected on the expatriated book at different moments in its history.Jerome McGann’s sense that the meaning of texts is related to changing material and social contexts suggests a method of reading the unfolding history of Paris editions in terms of their shifting textual, bibliographical , and publishing conditions.1 The hard-to-classify book titled Suburban Souls: The Erotic Psychology of a Man and a Maid (1901) is a good place to start because it is an odd mix of self-reflexive literary praxis, publishing history, and pornography that is interwoven with a semifictionalized account of Charles Carrington’s clandestine trade in Paris editions circa 1900 (fig. 6.1).2 Privately published in Paris by Carrington, this three-volume book is the diary of a mysterious English expatriate who calls himself Jacky S., works at the Paris stock exchange, and freelances as chapter 6 188 an editor for a pornographer. Set in Paris between 1897 and 1899 and anticipating “the year 1900,” Suburban Souls is made up of diary entries, letters, lengthy citations, dramatic scripts, and appendices which together focus on Jacky’s erotic obsession with a young French woman named Lily Arvel and the “strange little secrets” of her “peculiar and patriarchal family” from the Paris suburbs.3 While breathing in “an atmosphere of incest” that arouses his “passions to the utmost extent,” Jacky turns into a “sensual Sherlock Holmes” and futilely attempts to uncover the quasi-incestuous relationship between Lily and her stepfather, Eric Arvel. All the while he also acts out the role of Papa in his intimate correspondence with Lily, whom he calls his “little daughter.”4 Soon everything becomes linked through an incestuous chain of deduction. Jacky’s dog, his mistress, his lover, and her villa all have the same name—Lily/ Lilian. In the same vein Eric Arvel’s continuous inbreeding of dogs serves as proof of “his passion for his mistress’s daughter.”5 The modern realities of train timetables, telegraphic communication, and suburban commuting set the pace for this strange mystery of quasi-incest, connecting social modernity, integrated technology, and psychosexual pathology. This description makes the book sound like a pornographic version of a Dan Brown novel hurling its hero through the city to unlock its secrets. Unfortunately Suburban Souls is far less exciting. By the third turgid volume of entries, letters , and telegrams, the incest plot has lost all of its propulsion. But if we keep in mind Vladimir Nabokov’s injunction never to read for plot, we might notice the extraordinary number of books that are named, quoted, and exchanged as Jacky’s incest fantasy-mystery plays out. Over seventy-five different books are cited over the course of the three volumes, all of a very different nature, many of them Paris editions, some of them cross-referenced. It is not too much of a leap to reason that Jacky’s preoccupation with incest is of a decidedly literary character. As Lisa Sigel has shown, incest became the subject of increased debate in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century.While legal, medical, and cultural opinion about incest remained unconsolidated , publishers exploited this interest and contributed to the rise of “incest pornography.” For the author of Suburban Souls, who wrote before these debates culminated in Sigmund Freud’s theories of incest as the basis of psychosexual development and before the passing of the Punishment of Incest Act in Britain in 1908, incest is imaginary rather than real.6 The “old bibliophile” (aka Carrington) Suburban Souls and the Literary Family 189 who compiled the bibliography of Forbidden Books (1902) recognized as much in his entry on the book: “It is not incest in the true sense of the word. The incest is merely fanciful. Eric Arvel, splendidly sketched as a selfish, gluttonous sensualist, keeps her mother, not...