John was in town to promote his touching memoir about his search for his "lost" mother, DARLING BABY MINE, and I was anxious to meet him and talk about the book and his life as a globe-trotting journalist. I loved the book and the review can be found at
and in Paris at the Abbey Bookshop
Over a leisurely lunch at Le Mesturet we identified similarities in our childhoods and common friends and colleagues in the world of journalism. Here are a few highlights from that conversation.
Biafra. I covered the Nigerian-Biafran civil war from both sides for the London Observer during my fifteen-year career as a foreign correspondent. I later wrote a history of the conflict, which is still in print. (See below.) During visits to Biafra, usually on clandestine arms planes piloted by American mercenary pilots, I met Frederick Forsyth, a fellow British journalist, who was working for the BBC.
During the war, he was fired for being too biased towards the Biafran side. He became an adviser to Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, and wrote a short book, while the war was still going on. Entitled The Biafra Story, the Observer asked me to review it. I found it well-written but Forsyth's bias towards Biafra was obvious and often at odds with the facts. I ended the review by saying that I thought Mr. Forsyth's talents lay not in the field of non-fiction, but in fiction. My editor pointed out that it was a rather snide remark to make about a fellow journalist so I deleted it.
After the war ended with Biafra's defeat, Forsyth disappeared. The next time I heard of him was when his second book appeared. It wasThe Day of the Jackal, which became a huge best-seller, a great movie with Edward Fox as the Jackal, and put its author on the road to fame and fortune. Perhaps I should have left that "snide remark" in my review of his first book after all.
The 1973 Arab-Egyptian War
I covered this war for the Observer as the newspaper's Middle East correspondent then left to go to New York. In 1977, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader, suddenly decided to go to Jerusalem to break the post-war deadlock in which Israel still occupied Sinai. The Observer sent me from New York to cover this event, which shocked the Egyptians and the whole the Arab world.
When I arrived in Cairo, I went to see an old friend, a diplomat who worked in the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and asked him why Sadat had made this astonishing decision. It clashed with the orthodox policy that an Arab leader would only visit Israel after a peace deal had been concluded.
The official, like most Egyptians, was mystified and shocked. However, he said, there was a joke that explained it perfectly. Egyptians are famous for their political jokes that they say date back to the pharaohs because they have always been ruled by dictators.
Sadat's wife, Jihan, was notoriously avaricious and loved shopping. She was also overbearing and gave her husband a hard time. So, according to my friend, she kept complaining to her husband that she wanted to go to Bloomingdales in New York.
He told it was impossible because, after his surprise attack on Israel in October 1973 during Ramadan and on the holy day of Yom Kippur, the Americans would never let him or his wife into their country.
"Well, do something, Anwar," she told him.
He was tired of her nagging and desperate to find a way to please her. Then, one night, a light bulb went off in his head. He shook his wife awake.
"Jihan," he exclaimed triumphantly. "I've got it! I'll go to Jerusalem and talk to the Jews in their parliament. The Americans will love me and you can go to Bloomingdales!"
Maurice Girodias, founder and head of the Olympia Press in Paris.
The Olympia Press, which put out a large number of pornographic books, as well as ground-breaking avant-garde novels, functioned in Paris from the late 1940s into the 1960s. Among the more famous books, Girodias published were J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and Dominique Aury's Story of O.
Girodias never gave his authors a contract and often finished up in court battling them. His most epic struggle was with Donleavy, a combative Irish-American, and that ended badly with the writer taking over the press. But, according to one of Girodias's long-time assistants, he loved litigation. "A day out of court for Maurice," she said, "was a day wasted."
Dominique Aury and Story of O.
While I was researching my book on the Olympia Press in Paris (The Good Ship Venus in the UK and Venus Bound in the United States), I unraveled a forty-year old literary mystery by discovering the true author of the erotic, sado-masochistic classic novel, Story of O.
She was Dominique Aury, a highly regarded lady of letters who worked for Gallimard, the publisher. She agreed to meet me at Gallimard and we sat in a small windowless room and talked. She was 86 years old, simply but elegantly dressed with no make-up. Her only jewellery was a gold ring in the form on an Egyptian scarab, which her lover had given her. He was Jean Paulhan, a famous writer, essayist and critic and a member of the Academie Francaise. At a critical point in their relationship, she felt he was slipping away from her and it made her desperate.
"What could I do?" she said. "I wasn't young, I wasn't pretty so I had to appeal to his mind, and I started writing him a serious of love letters in a fictional form. He loved them and told me to keep writing. Later, he said they would make a good book and he arranged to have it published under the title of Story of O. He also wrote a preface under his own name in which he said, the book was the most passionate love letter that a man had ever received.
"I didn't want it published but when he insisted I agreed on the condition that it would appear under a pen name, Pauline Reage, and I have hidden my true identity ever since."
I met her several times both in Paris and in her house in the country. She also allowed me to take her photograph outside the Gallimard offices. She died in 1998, at the age of 91.
Her story appears as a chapter in my Olympia Press book but I also wrote a profile of her forThe New Yorker in 1994. It was the lead story on the cover and it was entitled: The Unmasking of O.
