Introduction
"The Flesh Is Weak" was the first novel of an American writer who took up residence in Paris, France and whose work has been favorably compared with that of Henry Miller, dean of the "avant garde" sex novelists. "Flesh" made a tremendous impact upon the general public and also upon the Paris Prefecture de Moralite which promptly banned it. It was soon also banned in London as being "inimical to the interests of the public morality." Underground sales and reputation of this work mushroomed however, and the existing copies were rapidly bought up by collectors of modern literary erotica.
Many collectors consider "Flesh" to be a much better written, and more daring in subject matter than Henry Miller's magnum opus "Tropic of Cancer" or even "Sexus." Be that as it may, "Flesh" is a story that portrays the moral and sexual decadence of certain favored sections of the European aristocracy and middle class with a stark, unashamed reality. It is one of the frankest and most outspoken works ever to be written on subjects which are even not gone into too deeply in psychiatrists' books on abnormal psychology.
Perhaps a statement by Sigmund Freud, the greatest of all psychoanalysts, can give us a master key to the sexually obsessed and neurotic characters as they run rampant through a hair-raising series of escapades. In analyzing the dream of a patient he said, "I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man and knew that women give us our first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman's breast. As the young man, who was my patient and a great admirer of feminine beauty, was talking of the good-looking wet-nurse who had suckled him when he was a baby: 'I'm sorry,' he remarked, 'that I didn't make a better use of my opportunity.'"
This statement illustrated perfectly the factor of 'deferred action' in the mechanism of the psychoneuroses."
The reader may well ask himself as he ponders the sexual excesses and sadistic perversions encountered in this story how well Freud's principle of "deferred psychoneurotic mechanisms" applies to the erotic behavior of the presumed adult characters. How much of the sex play is inspired by infantile vengeance and emotional deprivation seeking its long-deferred outlet in the grown male or female?
Some of the answers are in this engrossing story, printed in its complete and unexpurgated version by Europa Novels. "The Flesh Is Weak" is recommended only for the student of abnormal psychology or psychiatry, and the mature adult reader.
Allan Saunders, M.A.
New York City,
January 1968
PART ONE