Thérèse and Isabelle

AFTERWORD

The list of early admirers of Violette Leduc is literarily impressive: de Beauvoir, Cocteau, Sartre, Genet, Camus, and Jouhandeau. In a letter Simone de Beauvoir wrote to her American lover, Nelson Algren, on June 28, 1947, de Beauvoir recounts having dinner with Violette Leduc, whom she describes as “the most interesting woman I know” (Beauvoir 1998, 37). High praise indeed, from someone like de Beauvoir. She is perhaps fascinated that someone from such an underprivileged background, someone with the odd and difficult personality that was Leduc’s, could produce such astonishing writing, breaking new ground in the description of women’s lives and of female sexuality in particular.

Jean Cocteau wrote in a letter to an acquaintance in October, 1948: “Violette Leduc is a wonder and everything that comes out of her should find its way into the hands of anyone who knows how to read with their heart. L’Affamée needs no defense but times are hard. We have to help it along however we can” (Leduc 2007, 78n).

Yet for Leduc, being recognized by this elite subset didn’t constitute a fully satisfying form of success — in part because she was poor and desperate to earn money from her writing, in part because she hungered for wider recognition.

Her first book, L’Asphyxie, translated as In the Prison of Her Skin, appeared in 1946, but it was only with the publication of La Bâtarde in 1964 when she was fifty-seven years old, that she found a larger reading public (at least in France), and with it a measure of financial stability. Until this success, she endured, as best she could, what was for her the extremely painful task of finding contentment in the admiration of a small number of readers.

To say that her early books sold poorly would be an understatement. There is a passage in her posthumously published volume, La Chasse à l’amour (“The Hunt for Love”), in which Leduc recounts the moment when she received a letter from her publisher, Gallimard, informing her that the remaining unsold copies of L’Asphyxie were about to be pulped:

A letter from my publisher. Could it be good news? “My publisher.” Who are you kidding. He’s Proust’s publisher. There’s a clear difference between a cathedral of hawthorns and a louse coated with excrement. Let’s open the envelope. My God!. . They are going to pulp the remaining copies of L’Asphyxie. My book is dying. It never even really had a life. No one read it. Today is a day of mourning. I have lost a child. . The editor has run out of storage space. Did it really take up so much room in his cellars, my scrawny little kid? (Leduc 1994, 142–43)

A bit later on in the same passage from La Chasse à l’amour, Leduc realizes that Gallimard is actually offering her the chance to buy the remaining copies of L’Asphyxie at a reduced rate, and she imagines what she might do if she were able to afford to purchase all the copies Gallimard was about to destroy:

I read the letter again. I hadn’t understood it fully. I have the chance to buy all the unsold copies before they are disposed of. There are 1,727 copies left. What will I do with them? Religious tracts. I’ll ring doorbells and hand them out. They’ll turn their dogs on me. Who believes in generosity any more? I’ll sneak them into the bins of the booksellers that line the banks of the Seine before they even notice I’ve done it. I will go to the bookstore La Hune and, fraudulently, I will place a single copy on their shelves for the letter L. I will sing “Death, where is your sting?” as I leave La Hune. (143–44)

Leduc imagines buying her own books from her publisher and then sneaking them into places where, if someone should buy them, the profits (at least the financial ones) would not be hers. If she calls this a form of fraud it is hardly because she is swindling anyone financially, but rather because she apparently feels her books would not have legitimately earned the right to be on the bookstore shelves where she herself would have placed them.

Gallimard would once again return L’Asphyxie to print after Leduc’s 1964 success with La Bâtarde. It remains in print today. Leduc would also receive a similar letter from Gallimard regarding the fate of the 1,473 remaining copies of her second book, L’Affamée. At the bottom of the letter she wrote, in response, “Pulp them! Pulp them!” Her biographer, Carlos Jansiti, displays and reads from this letter in the recent documentary about Leduc, Violette Leduc: La Chasse à l’amour.

Leduc has become known as the author of books, fictional and autobiographical to varying degrees, (Ravages, Thérèse and Isabelle, La Bâtarde) which include scenes recounting sexual relations between women in vivid detail. Her books also include accounts of her unrequited love for a series of gay men (including Maurice Sachs, Jean Genet, and Jacques Guérin); her physical and emotional feelings for Simone de Beauvoir (never reciprocated across the several decades of their friendship — a word that perhaps cannot quite do justice to the odd and unbalanced relation they had); as well as her marriage and divorce, and her subsequent friendships and romantic relationships with a number of men. Illegitimacy (Leduc’s mother became pregnant with her by the son of a family for whom she was working) is at the heart of Leduc’s personal and professional self-image. When she was in literary company, she often had difficulty fully accepting that she belonged where she was. In her writing, this self-doubt comes to be intimately tied to her sense of the unruliness of her own sexuality — an unruly sexuality that often provides the material about which she writes. Fascinated by sexual outsiders of many kinds, it does not seem that the categories that other people used to talk about her sexuality, or about sexuality in general, had much pertinence for her.

Consider the extraordinary letter she writes to de Beauvoir in late summer of 1950 about her feelings both for de Beauvoir and for a couple of women who run the hotel in which she is staying in the village of Montjean:

That you should not love in the way that I love you is well and good, since that way I will never grow tired of adoring you gravely. My love for you is a kind of fabulous virginity. And yet I have passed through, and am still in the midst of, a period of sexual frenzy. . I have been obsessed by, hounded by, that couple of women I wrote you about. I have been humiliated, revolted. They have found in this village, they have made real a union, whereas I have for 15 years been consumed by, and am still consumed by solitude. I have often felt as if I were in Charlus’s skin as I spied on them, as I envied them, as I imagined them. They never even spend 15 minutes apart, and I often cry with rage and jealousy when I notice this fact. They are mistrustful, they are shut up inside their happiness. One night I told them, after all the people summering here had left, I told them in very nuanced terms that I loved you and about your beautiful friendship for me. It was a one-sided conversation. I gave, but got nothing in return. They are even more extraordinary than Genet’s “Maids.” The difference in their ages — I have also already told you about this, one is thirty, the other fifty-six — is something I find enchanting and consoling. . How simple they are, I keep coming back to this, how unrefined, how sure of themselves. The younger one has the face of a brute. Their fatness is the weight of sensuality. When seated they open their legs wide, like soldiers, whereas so-called normal women keep them crossed or closed tight. They are a torment to me without even knowing it but they also intensify my love for you because you are a part of the disaster that I am. I often think about lesbians in their cabarets, who exist on another planet, who are nothing but sad puppets. (Leduc 2007, 174–75)

The letter is typical of Leduc in all her idiosyncrasy: verging here and there toward the preposterous without ever quite tipping over into it, excessive in its emotivity, self-consciously obsessive, and profoundly curious both about the way sexuality functions (which doesn’t mean she can’t make the odd homophobic remark), and about the lack of fit between her sexuality and everyone else’s (in this case, de Beauvoir’s, the two women she describes, and lesbians who frequent queer bars and cabarets). She is attentive to a number of characteristics, axes of variations in sexualities we might say, that aren’t always factored into typical discussions of sexuality: that sexualities have a class or regional component; that age difference is important in some sexualities; that girth can have a relation to gender and to sexuality; that sexualities such as her own and that of this couple of women are often best understood by way of representations from the world of literature (Genet’s two maids), and that the representations chosen can sometimes rely on transgendered forms of identification (her link to Proust’s character, Charlus).

Consider another more condensed example of Leduc’s attentiveness to the multivariable experience of sexuality. La Bâtarde recounts several outings taken by the young Leduc and her mother to see different shows while they were living under the same roof in Paris. (They once went, for instance, to see the cross-dressing aerialist, Barbette.) As they set out on one such outing, Violette takes her mother’s arm:

“Don’t put your arm through mine. You’re such a farm boy [paysan]!” she said.

Farm boy. The use of the masculine really got to me. (2003, 127)

In one very compact utterance, Leduc’s mother registers her impression of her daughter’s sexuality, subtly linking together gender, object choice, and that odd mixture of regional identity, class, and race that is contained in the French concept of peasant, paysan. Leduc’s representations of her mother’s reactions to the sexually dissident forms of behavior she exhibits while growing up provide interesting evidence of a point of view (her mother’s) that is neither exactly approving nor exactly disapproving, but is certainly matter of fact about such expressions of dissidence. When Leduc is expelled from her girls school because of her sexual relations with one of the teaching staff, she is sent by train to Paris, where her mother is now living. Her mother meets her at the station:

I saw my mother in the first row: a brush stroke of elegance. A young girl and a young woman. Her grace, our pact, my pardon. I kissed her and she replied: ‘Do you like my dress?’ We talked about her clothes in the taxi. My mother’s metamorphosis into a Parisienne eclipsed the headmistress and sent the school spinning into limbo. Not the slightest innuendo. Giving me Paris, she gave me her tact. (111)

There is a complicity between mother and daughter, a shared choice not to take up the subject of Leduc’s behavior or its consequences. We might see behind this complicity a shared set of reference points regarding sexual culture. The sexual culture of the countryside, villages, and towns they came from was, while not the same as what they see around them in Paris, already a rich, diverse, and conflicted one, which means that they were both in full possession of a practical understanding of sexual diversity and dissidence that allowed them to communicate with and understand each other on all sorts of implicit levels.

This practical understanding of sexual diversity that Leduc shares with her mother is, of course, present in her letter to de Beauvoir as well. Her practical understanding tells her that her love for de Beauvoir, the relationship between the two women she encounters that summer, and the sexuality of Parisian lesbians are all related and yet different. We could say, borrowing the term mobilized so influentially by Kimberlé Crenshaw, that Leduc and her mother have a practical understanding of sexuality that is fundamentally intersectional. José Esteban Muñoz glossed Crenshaw’s term in the following way: “Intersectionality insists on critical hermeneutics that register the copresence of sexuality, race, class, gender, and other identity differentials as particular components that exist simultaneously with one another” (Muñoz 1999, 99). We might well imagine that Leduc’s experience of her own sexual idiosyncrasy, and her practical ways of understanding distinctions between different sexualities she perceives around her somehow involve an experience of intersectionality, and that among the identity differentials that count for her are differentials between country life, small town life, and city life, and also, the topic to which I now turn, differentials between people involved in literary or intellectual pursuits (herself, de Beauvoir) and those who are not.

However seriously Leduc may be taken by writers like Sartre, Jouhandeau, Cocteau, Genet, and de Beauvoir, something about her being a woman means that both the social world and the gatekeepers of the literary field treat her differently than they treat, say, Genet. Leduc registers this aspect of her situation in many ways, including the portrayal, in La Chasse à l’amour, of the mental and physical distress she experiences following Gallimard’s refusal in 1954 to publish those sections of her novel Ravages having to do with the sexual relations of Thérèse and Isabelle at boarding school (the text reprinted in this volume), the representation of an abortion and its aftermath, and several other passages. If these passages were so important to her, it is because she understood them to be a key part of her attempt to break new ground in literature, just as Genet was doing. One can also trace in her correspondence with de Beauvoir from a few years before this episode, her sense that de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had a similar kind of importance for the evolution of culture. She expresses her support for de Beauvoir as she confronted the violently misogynist reactions to her book, and she told her of her pride at being cited by de Beauvoir in the volume. “I thank you with all my heart for citing me on several occasions,” she writes in 1949. “What touched me was the actual moment during which you were writing my name in a serious book” (Leduc 2007, 130).

Leduc’s sense that she, Genet, de Beauvoir, and Sartre were breaking important new ground in the ways they struggled to represent sexualities that previously had no place in serious writing finds further expression in a letter from the following year. Early in 1950, Leduc makes a comparison between the audacity of Genet in his novels and the audacity of de Beauvoir in The Second Sex: “Genet’s authority appears as strong as ever when you reread him. How salubrious are all the sexual audacities to be found in contemporary literature! I could feel the world-wide barrier of resistances begin to give way as I read volume 2 of The Second Sex, as I reread Genet” (Leduc 2007, 142). Clearly she meant for her own writing in these years to contribute to this same project. This helps explain why the frustrations of seeing her work censored, along with the frustration of the poor sales of her books, was almost too much for her to bear.

A scene in the recent French biopic devoted to Leduc develops this commonality, by showing de Beauvoir defending Leduc against her censors at Gallimard, accusing them of being unable to bear the idea of a woman speaking openly about sex between women, and insisting on the urgency for abortions — at the time illegal in France — to be a topic that could be written about in both literary and philosophical contexts (Violette 2014).

For Leduc, being involved with literature was part of her experience of sexuality. Early in La Bâtarde, she describes for her readers how, around the age of sixteen, she related to a provincial bookstore:

I also walked in the Place d’Armes on Saturday nights. The lighted storefronts crackled before my eyes. I was attracted, intrigued, spellbound by the yellow covers of the books published by the Mercure de France, by the white covers of the Gallimard books. I selected a title, but I didn’t really believe I was intelligent enough to go into the largest bookstore in town. I had some pocket money with me (money that my mother slipped me without my stepfather’s knowing), I went in. There were teachers, priests, and older students glancing through the uncut volumes. I had so often watched the old lady who served in the shop as she packed up pious objects, as she reached into the window for the things that people pointed out to her. . She took out Jules Romains’ Mort de quelqu’un and looked at me askance. I was too young to be reading modern literature. I read Mort de quelqu’un and smoked a cigarette as I did so in order to savor my complicity with a modern author all the more. . The Saturday after that I stole a book which I didn’t read; but I paid cash for André Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth) and a sculpture of a dead bird. Later, under my bedclothes, when I went back to boarding school, I returned to the barns, to the fruits of André Gide by the glow of a flashlight. As I held my shoe in the shoe shop and spread polish on it, I muttered: “Shoe, I will teach you to feel fervor.” There was no other confidant worthy of my long book-filled nights, my literary ecstasies. (2003, 51–52)

Perhaps we could say that she experiences herself more as a member of a counterpublic than as a member of a public for the literature she explores. She is unable to relate to it in mainstream ways. She is too poor, too uncultivated, too young, too enthusiastic a reader to approach literature appropriately. Her reading is intermingled with other sensual experiences (cigarettes and the smell of shoe polish among them) in a way that enhances her sense of its illicitness. She, like many other alienated young people, often people exploring nonnormative sexual experiences, develops an affiliation with Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, a kind of countercultural classic of the early to mid twentieth century, with its call to a certain kind of sexual dissidence, to an experience of fervent sensuality.

Once she becomes a published writer, Leduc’s relationship to bookstores takes on a different, more anxious cast. Here is a scene described in Mad in Pursuit that took place shortly after the publication of L’Asphyxie in 1946, a book that received only meager and unkind critical notices despite an excerpt having been published in Sartre’s celebrated journal, Les Temps Modernes, and despite having appeared in a collection edited by Albert Camus:

One afternoon I was preparing an assortment of vegetables to make my soup, a wild hope seized me, the knife fell onto my one sad leek. I threw on my clothes. The journey to rue de Bac station was interminable. I arrived in front of the Gallimard bookstore on the Boulevard Raspail, in front of its eclectic windows, completely out of breath. But it must be in them. It wasn’t. The large-format books, the rare editions of Valéry, of Gide, of Apollinaire, disdainful and withdrawn, rejected me utterly. The bastions of modern literature cannot be overthrown just to make way for your little pile of turds. Oh God, how I begged outside those windows. . If I had only been sure of what I was writing, I should have been saved. . Baudelaire and Rimbaud, were they sure of themselves? But I wasn’t Baudelaire, I wasn’t Rimbaud. Ten new books published every day. How can you expect them to display such a flood? An hour, even if it were just for an hour, each of us in turn. . Where has it gone since I dedicated all those copies? Where has it gone to earth? Have the bookstores received it? I should die of shame if I had to ask them. Writing must be a sin, or why should I prefer to conceal it? My guilt was coming back. Window displays and bookstores whispered to me in the night: “You’ll never amount to anything, you’ll never amount to anything at all,” just as my mother had once dinned those words into me in the past. I shall hand in my cards. Hand in your cards to whom? To the bookstores, to their windows, to the publisher. (1999, 72)

Perhaps foolishly, Leduc grants the window of the bookstore run by the publishing house Gallimard a particular kind of sacredness. Given how many famous authors Gallimard published, it was probably unreasonable to expect to find her own first book on display. And yet how is a new, idiosyncratic author of Leduc’s ilk ever to find readers? Idiosyncratic books by idiosyncratic authors often circulate by word of mouth, developing small communities of highly partisan readers. Leduc already knew that this was the case for her first book, as she reveals a bit earlier in the same passage from Mad in Pursuit:

My cheeks still wet with tears, I ran into the antique dealer Hagnauer, who was only too delighted to give me the news that Cocteau had read my book and was telling everyone else to read it. Encouraged, I walked round for hours and hours. I had developed a method: that of the bird’s nester. I slowed down when I was twenty yards away from the bookstore, then I stole up on it very gently so as to surprise my book in the window and receive a shock from it. But all the nests were empty. Except once. Where? The dispiriting window of the Polish bookstore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. How old and worn it looked in the very back row! If I buy it from them, then they’ll take it out of the window; if I buy it from them, it will become a dusty rectangle after I leave. I looked at it for a long time. (71–72)

Cocteau helped her book find readers in informal ways; its formal place in bookstores remained highly tenuous. Leduc knew that at the time Jean Genet’s books circulated in a similar way: Genet’s Miracle of the Rose was recommended to her by Simone de Beauvoir, but was not a text that was easy to find. It only existed in a hand-printed, 475-copy edition published by a small publishing house called Arbelète. De Beauvoir promised Leduc she would leave her copy of the novel for Leduc with the cashier at the Café des Deux Magots:

The lady at the desk of the Deux-Magots handed me the copy of Miracle de la Rose Simone de Beauvoir had left there for me. It’s heavy, I commented. Yes, it’s heavy, the lady at the desk replied. . That evening Miracle de la Rose weighs down my bed. The book is inside a chest, between two covers that fit together. I have brought a deluxe edition home with me: it’s a first. . The size and weight are almost those of a Bible at the foot of a pulpit. They require a lectern, special arrangements. I lean my elbow on the pillow, we tilt, the book and I together, towards the wall, and we begin to give ourselves to one another. I am falling into my reading of Miracle de la Rose as one falls in love. (74)

Genet’s book comes to Leduc through unofficial channels, we might say, and her reading of it resembles her youthful reading of Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, involving a combination of secrecy, sensuality, and sacredness. There is a lesson to be learned about the combination of these two phenomena, unofficial modes of circulation and a certain kind of fervent reading: they link both Genet and Leduc to what we might call a sexual counterpublic, a very specific kind of readership with a correspondingly particular kind of authorship and a particular experience of reading. Perhaps prominent display windows of imposing bookstores are not the most hospitable homes for books seeking that kind of readership, or offering that kind of experience.

Leduc’s early work, with all the difficulties of its style, its subject matter, and its way of perceiving and thinking about the world, comes to be admired by much the same set of people who admired Genet’s early work. The book-collecting industrialist Jacques Guérin would even arrange for the publication of a private, luxury collector’s edition of L’Affamée, similar to the private editions of Genet’s early novels. It was, in fact, in the form of this private edition that Leduc’s book would find itself where she had dreamed it would be. As her biographer Carlo Jansiti notes, the private edition “comes off the presses in September 1948. Paul Morihien, rue de Beaujolais, dedicates a window to it” (Jansiti 1999, 210); Morihien was also the publisher of the private edition of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. The more affordable Gallimard edition of L’Affamée, published a few months later, sold poorly.

Unlike Genet, Leduc was slow to find a wider readership. De Beauvoir’s understanding of why Leduc’s Ravages was censored more rigorously than anything by Genet ever was is simple and convincing: the men who chose what to publish, the men who reviewed what was published, the men who demanded that this or that passage be censored were made uncomfortable by the idea and by the example of a woman finding a vibrant new language in which to explore instances of female same-sex sexuality (the topic of Thérèse and Isabelle), or to recount the experience of a botched abortion, or to describe bemusedly what it is like to handle a penis during a taxi ride. Yet, there is perhaps more to be understood about the difficulty Leduc has had finding readers, the slowness with which they have found their way to her writing. Perhaps there is a kind of complexity to the reading experience she offers that has been difficult to take in, perhaps there is a complexity to her exploration of the way sexual experience is constructed, and to the way sexual and literary experiences intermingle that have been difficult to access. What to do? Find more of her books and make special arrangements to read them: polish your shoes, hide under the sheets with her books, display her books wherever likely readers might find them. Speak to others fervently about your obsession, about the unsettling complexity of the sexual and literary experiences that Violette Leduc offers.

MICHAEL LUCEY

WORKS CITED

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1998. A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren. New York: The New Press.

Jansiti, Carlo. 1999. Violette Leduc. Paris: Grasset.

Leduc, Violette. 1994. La Chasse à l’amour. Paris: Gallimard-Imaginaire. [Original edition 1972].

——. 1999. Mad in Pursuit, trans. Derek Coltman. New York: Riverhead Books. [Original edition 1970].

——. 2003. La Bâtarde, trans. Derek Coltman. [Normal, IL]: Dalkey Archive Press. [Original edition 1964].

——. 2007. Correspondance 1945–1972, ed. Carlos Jansiti. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Violette. 2014. Directed by Martin Provost. Diaphana. DVD.

Violette Leduc: La Chasse à l’amour. 2013. Directed by Esther Hoffenberg. Les films du poisson. DVD.