Salonica World Lit: It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp

It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp

Sure, the erotic can be alluring. Very alluring. But let's face it, when you do anything as a profession, it can lose it's appeal. Being a prostitute demands that one masters the sensual, becomes the erotic professional. And endures subjugation and humiliation.

Unless, of course, you're Garry Marshall and manage to romanticize the hooker lifestyle. You know, that you could meet someone like Richard Gere, that you could choose when and whom you sleep with, that you could be the princess and marry the knight on a white horse, that you cold marry a billionaire john. That could happen. But more than likely it's those women who come from downtrodden backgrounds and feel that this is the only profession in which they can survive and perhaps even feel some sense of control. Is this is what leads us to Marthe by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Scandalous in it's time(the puritanical Parisian year of 1876), Huysmans actually turned to Belgium to get it published. But if you are looking for a realistic and naturalistic portrayal of lower class Paris, this is your book. Even though this was published in 1876, not much has changed in the world's oldest profession. It hasn't really benefited from technology as other professions have, to put it mildly.

Our young Marthe came from a pitiable childhood that leads her into a pretty pitiable existence that seems to only have moments of reprieve due to her good looks. Marthe manages to land a job in a 'revue' in a Parisian music hall. Marthe was discovered in wine shop by Ginginet, the host of the bawdy review in the Bobino theatre. Huysmans gift for detail and incisive description makes us laugh and cringe simultaneously:

The Bobino's clientele was students and artists, a boisterous and cynical race if there ever was one. They didn't come to this miserable shed lined with hideous purple wallpaper to swoon in front of leaden melodramas or madcap comedies; they came to shout, to laugh, to interrupt the performance--in short, to have a good time. The curtain had scarcely risen before the braying began; but Ginginet was not a man to be worried by a little thing like that, his long dramatic career had accustomed him to hisses and cat catcalls. He waved graciously to those who were interrupting him, chatted with them, sprinkled his lines with jokes aimed at the troublemakers, and soon had the whole audience applauding him. The show, on the other hand, went pretty badly, and was barely limping along by the second scene. The audience started to get restless again. What it appreciated above all was the entrance of an enormous actress whose nose seemed to be marinading in a lake of fat. The tirade of verse that spouted from the bunghole of this human wine-barrel was punctuated by a great battery of drumming from the stalls and the poor woman was so bewildered she didn't know whether to stay or make a run for it. Then Marthe appeared: the din ceased.

Things go well for Marthe for a short time. Then bad luck hits and Marthe is forced to the streets again. Eventually she fall in love with a poet, Leo. They are passionate and in love, but he knows nothing of her sordid past. Marthe lives in fear that he will find out and leaves Leo before he finds out about her past. She returns to her lifestyle with resignation and begins working in a brothel:

This is a new fascination for Marthe, this was the attraction of the abyss over which one was leaning, that of a life lived at white-heat, with its somersaults and its pirouettes, the glasses empties while lying on one's back, the arguments between one girl and another over a ribbon or over a man, and the reconciliations conducted between dashes up and down stairs; she remembered with a singular pleasure those feverish passions that her to writhe so deliriously, like the vertiginous frenzy that makes dervishes howl and leap into the air, maddened by the spinning of their wheels.

Throughout the story of Marthe, we feel for her. Frequently screaming in our heads, 'Oh, no!', when we sense impending danger. We want to save her. Not only do we want to save her, but so do Leo and Ginginet. We see their faults and scream, 'No, not him!'. Of course she can't hear us and we know that her choices are only going to lead to more unhappiness. Marthe never lies to herself about who she is and that's why we like her. Perhaps this honesty is what continues to make Marthe erotic as Ginginet tell Leo when Leo is desperately trying to find her.

'Monsieur, if you wish to have news of Marthe, you wold probably do well to address yourself to the Prefecture of Police--second bureau, first division, Department of Public Morals--and they will give it to you. As for myself, If I mourn the loss of the actress, my former pupil, I'm full of admiration for the woman, my former mistress. She has at least one advantage over others, she's given up deceiving men. Marthe will lie novmore, now that she no longer has to stimulate the moans and groans of true love. What the bourgeois would call wallowing in the mire or descending the ladder of depravity to the lowest rung, I myself call an expiation, a return to honesty!'

Marthe is not void of morals, just lacking in choices. This is a seedy ride through the back streets of Parisian debauchery and a good, gritty ride it is.