{"id":128385,"date":"2018-08-09T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-08-09T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128385"},"modified":"2018-08-09T16:08:49","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T20:08:49","slug":"feminize-your-canon-violette-leduc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/09\/feminize-your-canon-violette-leduc\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Violette Leduc"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Violette Leduc.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the summer of 1956, Violette Leduc, the autofiction pioneer and proteg\u00e9e of Simone de Beauvoir, began inpatient psychiatric treatment. She was forty-nine and suicidal. Her first two novels, L\u2019asphyxie<\/em> (translated as In the Prison of Her Skin<\/em>) and L\u2019affam\u00e9e<\/em> (The starving woman), both published in the late forties, were read and admired by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. \u201cShe is an extraordinary woman,\u201d Genet would tell people. \u201cShe is crazy, ugly, cheap, and poor, but she has a lot of talent.\u201d Albert Camus, who had accepted L\u2019asphyxie <\/em>for his series at \u00c9ditions Gallimard, likewise considered Leduc a brilliant writer. But critics were underwhelmed, and the public all but ignored her work. \u201cI don\u2019t think of myself as not understood,\u201d she writes. \u201cI think of myself as nonexistent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1954, her third book, Ravages<\/em>,\u00a0which had taken six years to complete, was deemed too shocking to be published in its entirety. The male reading committee for Gallimard characterized the opening section, an autobiographical portrayal of the passionate romance between schoolgirls named Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Isabelle, as \u201cenormously and specifically obscene\u201d and liable to \u201ccall down the thunderbolts of the law.\u201d Summarily excised, the section wouldn\u2019t be published for another forty-five years. Yet Leduc\u2019s dreamy, metaphor-burnished rendering of adolescent desire, which conveys as much emotional as physical sensation, is erotic but neither graphic nor coarse. \u201cI was reciting my body upon hers,\u201d Th\u00e9r\u00e8se narrates, \u201cbathing my belly in the lilies of her belly, finding my way inside a cloud. She skimmed my hips, she shot strange arrows.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to imagine such lines corrupting twentieth-century sensibilities any more than, say, Joseph Kessel\u2019s Belle de Jour<\/em> (published by Gallimard in 1928) or Genet\u2019s gay classic Lady of the Flowers<\/em> (published by Gallimard in 1951, albeit with some of the more pornographic scenes cut). As the novelist and Leduc champion Deborah Levy has said, the publisher\u2019s prudishness seemed to rest on the fact that Leduc\u2019s narrative is driven by the female libido\u2014almost unique in literature then and hardly more commonplace today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was also a time of conflicting and shifting attitudes around literary license. In 1955, the French authorities brought obscenity charges against the publisher and anonymous author of Story of O<\/em>, a paean to BDSM and winner of a major literary prize. Meanwhile, the succ\u00e8s de scandale of Fran\u00e7oise Sagan\u2019s Bonjour<\/em> Tristesse<\/em> led, in some quarters, to a call for more literary censorship. In London, a shopkeeper was sent to prison for stocking copies of Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em> around the same time as the French film adaptation\u2019s arrival in theaters. (The film was promptly banned in New York for \u201cpromoting adultery.\u201d) Regardless, Leduc was devastated by the \u201cmutilation\u201d of Ravages<\/em>, which felt to her like \u201ca murder.\u201d In de Beauvoir\u2019s words, they had \u201ccut her tongue out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book did, at least, receive a few enthusiastic reviews on publication. Anne C\u00e9cile Desclos, the journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Dominique Aury (and who was the secret author of Story of O<\/em>), tells readers of the influential Nouvelle revue fran\u00e7aise<\/em> to \u201cjump into the fire\u201d of Ravages<\/em>, with its \u201cfierce resolution to say everything, tone of uncompromised truth, cruel and clear language.\u201d But sales, again, were negligible, and Leduc fell into a deep and paranoiac depression. Blighted by migraines and insomnia, she believed that journalists on the radio were ridiculing her literary failures and her ugliness. Her biographer Carlo Jansiti reveals that she even sought an \u201cinvestigation\u201d into the media\u2019s targeting of her, imploring de Beauvoir to help arrange it. Alarmed, de Beauvoir instead persuaded her to check into a clinic in Versailles (and paid the bills). Leduc remained there for six months, undergoing a \u201csleep cure\u201d and electroconvulsive therapy. Afterward, she said, \u201cI had to learn to walk again, to work my eyelids, and I wasn\u2019t cured. I had to do it all myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, Leduc published another two books, and both met with the same fate as the rest of her work. Her mental health remained fragile; she was lonely, poor, and losing faith in writing as a path to redemption. De Beauvoir, stalwart in her commitment to Leduc\u2019s genius, urged her to \u201cgo back to her birth\u201d and write her life story. The result was La b\u00e2tarde<\/em>,\u00a0the first volume of Leduc\u2019s autobiography (billed as such, but no more or less an artistic reworking of her life than her previous books), published in 1964 with a glowing preface by de Beauvoir. \u201cA woman is descending into the most secret part of herself,\u201d de Beauvoir writes, \u201cand telling us about all she finds there with an unflinching sincerity, as though there were no one listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

At long last, the French reading public started listening, and the book was a sensational hit. In just a few months, a hundred seventy thousand copies were sold, many of those readers no doubt enticed by conservative critics\u2019 accusations of \u201cunparalleled obscenities and pornography\u201d and \u201cscandalous immorality.\u201d Nominated for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Femina, La b\u00e2tarde<\/em> was immediately translated into several languages, with American publishers competing for the rights. The English edition, translated by Derek Coltman, garnered Leduc comparisons to Rimbaud and \u201cGenet at his best\u201d in the U.S. and to Rousseau in the UK. But for the fifty-seven-year-old author, financially comfortable for the first time in her life, success had come too late. \u201cI\u2019ve lived through too many hopeless moments,\u201d she said, \u201cand needed the recognition twenty years ago.\u201d Nevertheless, before her death from breast cancer at age sixty-five, she published two further volumes of her autobiography, La folie en t\u00eate<\/em> (translated, also by Coltman, as Mad in Pursuit<\/em>) and La chasse \u00e0 l\u2019amour<\/em> (Hunting for love), as well as more stories and novellas.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy case is not unique: I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in this world,\u201d begins La b\u00e2tarde<\/em>. \u201cI haven\u2019t worked, I haven\u2019t studied. I have wept, I have cried out in protest. These tears have taken up a great deal of my time.\u201d With prose by turns visceral and immediate, poetic and philosophical, Leduc tells of her illegitimate birth as the daughter of a seduced domestic servant; her rapturous sexual awakening in the arms of another girl; her first serious relationship, with one of her schoolmistresses; her job at a publisher in Paris; her doomed marriage and abortion in her early thirties; and\u2014the book\u2019s climax\u2014how she found her salvation and, sometimes, her undoing: turning her life into literature.<\/p>\n

Enmeshed in a dysfunctional wartime friendship and black-market smuggling operation with the writer Maurice Sachs (one in a series of gay men she masochistically fixated on), she would bore him \u201cto distraction\u201d with endless lamentations on her unhappy childhood. One day, exasperated, he ordered her \u201cto go and sit under an apple tree\u201d and \u201cwrite down all the things you tell me.\u201d She began L\u2019asphyxie<\/em>, realizing to her joy that through writing, she could resurrect her grandmother, her sole source of affection as a young child and the only person she\u2019d ever loved without pain and complication. \u201cThe birds suddenly stopped singing and then I sucked my pen: the pleasure of foreseeing that my grandmother was about to be reborn, that I was going to bring her into the world.\u201d Like her foremost literary descendant, Annie Ernaux, whose best-selling books alchemize the quotidian and the personal into high art, Leduc discovered that aestheticizing her emotions, crafting her memories with language, mitigated the injustice of fate and the tyranny of longing.<\/p>\n

In Paris after the war, Leduc contrived an introduction to de Beauvoir, whose first impressions of Leduc were of a \u201ctall, elegant, blonde woman with a face both brutally ugly and radiantly alive.\u201d De Beauvoir, who was just beginning to make her mark as a writer and thinker, arranged for the publication of L\u2019asphyxie <\/em>and for excerpts to appear in Les temps modernes<\/em>, the journal she was launching with Sartre. Leduc, instantly besotted with her wonderful new mentor, turned her infatuation into a novel, L\u2019affam\u00e9e<\/em>. (\u201cI will give her my life. She doesn\u2019t care \u2026 I will kill her. I will kiss both her hands \u2026\u2009\u201d) De Beauvoir was unfazed, describing L\u2019affam\u00e9e <\/em>to her American lover Nelson Algren as \u201ca diary in which she tells everything about her love for me. It is a wonderful book.\u201d Leduc\u2019s love was, all too typically, unrequited. The pattern went back to her anguished relationship with her embittered, guilt-tripping mother. The heartbreaking first line of L\u2019asphyxie<\/em> is: \u201cMy mother never held my hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although de Beauvoir did not return Leduc\u2019s intense feelings, she was intellectually inspired by their affiliation. She cites Leduc frequently in The Second Sex<\/em> and drew on her life and work for the book\u2019s analysis of lesbianism\u2014a chapter that Leduc, according to a friend, found unsuccessful. Leduc also derided the lesbian literature that came before her own, with its heroines always, in her opinion, \u201cunhappy\u201d and \u201cinsipid.\u201d Rosamond Lehmann\u2019s Dusty Answer<\/em>,\u00a0though, had delighted her when she read it at age twenty-one. \u201cTwo young girls fell in love,\u201d she marveled, \u201cand a woman had dared to write about it.\u201d Of her own work, describing the painstaking creation of the lesbian scenes cut from Ravages<\/em>, she writes: \u201cI am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal but only to describe the woman\u2019s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem any more scandalous than Madame Bloom\u2019s thoughts at the end of Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leduc eventually got her wish, but the victory was partial. After the success of La b\u00e2tarde<\/em>, she announced that Jean Jacques-Pauvert\u2014the trailblazing editor of Story of O<\/em> and authors such as Georges Bataille, Salvador Dal\u00ed, and Albertine Sarrazin\u2014wished to publish the suppressed segment, which had previously been printed only for private circulation by a wealthy patron. Only then did Gallimard, which retained the rights, finally release Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Isabelle<\/em> as a separate, though still truncated, volume. It was a commercial success, and the film adaptation, directed by the soft-core auteur Radley Metzger, appeared in 1968. But it wasn\u2019t until 2000 that Gallimard published the full unbowdlerized version. In 2012, an English translation by Sophie Lewis came out from Salammbo Press in the UK, followed by a U.S. edition from the Feminist Press in 2015. English-language review coverage, though sparse, was uniformly positive. In the Guardian<\/em>, Nicholas Lezard declares, \u201cTh\u00e9r\u00e8se and Isabelle<\/em> is, unquestionably, great \u2026 I don\u2019t think I have ever read physical intimacy better described, or evoked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leduc is often referred to as a writer\u2019s writer, which carries connotations of highbrow experimentation. Yet her oeuvre, far from being tricksy or inaccessible, contains some of the rawest and most authentic conjurations of human subjectivity\u2014self-loathing, vanity, lust, greed, joy, despair\u2014that readers will ever encounter. Leduc\u2019s fellow writers, however, will derive particular pleasure (the kind accompanied by wincing recognition) from her brutally frank meditations on the writing life. In La folie en t\u00eate<\/em>,\u00a0she reflects:<\/p>\n

And my writing?
\nIt saps me. What does it inspire in me? Laziness, hollow hours, excuses for lazying my life away. I am literature\u2019s parasite. I must write. Then I change my mind. I spend my time at the cinema, in empty churches, in grimy little parks. I run away from my exercise book. It is my refuge. Yet I search for places where I can take refuge from it. I neglect it without abandoning it entirely. I am sickened by it all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leduc has been hailed as France\u2019s greatest unknown writer. An excellent 2013 film about her life, Violette<\/em>,\u00a0starring Emmanuelle Devos and directed by Martin Provost, raised her profile in a moderate way. But in the popular imagination, she is eclipsed by the Left-Bank literary eminences who were her friends and fans. An outsider in life thanks to her no-filter personality, her status as a \u201cbastard,\u201d and her forthright bisexuality, Leduc had the gift of the true artist: an inability to compromise. Of course, that gift is also a curse. Had she been less committed to telling the stark, unpalatable truth about being female when no one else would, she might have won membership to the temple of French literature. But self-censorship was never an option. Her stated mission was: \u201cTo write the impossible word on the rainbow\u2019s arc. Then everything would have been said.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable, <\/em>Longreads, <\/em>Newsweek, <\/em>The Daily Beast, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The Awl, <\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0Read her previous Feminize Your Canon columns, about Olivia Manning<\/a> and\u00a0Dorothy West<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.     In the summer of 1956, Violette Leduc, the autofiction pioneer and proteg\u00e9e of Simone de Beauvoir, began inpatient psychiatric treatment. She was forty-nine and suicidal. Her first two novels, L\u2019asphyxie (translated as In the Prison of Her Skin) and L\u2019affam\u00e9e (The 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