I’m still thinking about “Violette,” the fine French film I watched the other day, following the recommendation of my friend here, Fung-Lin. It’s about the life of Violette Leduc, a French writer, with all its loneliness, homoeroticism, braveness, and this uncommon, unusual female courage in postwar Paris. Yes, It also recounts a passionate but little known mentor-student relationship of authors (with Simone de Beauvoir), often depicted as a denied love affair, with its frustrations displaced into art… above all, it’s a fascinating interplay between women intellectuals… Violette Leduc’s autobiographical La bâtarde, never made a splash in the US, and was out of print for decades. The book, however, has a foreword—equally little known—by Simone de Beauvoir, which I’m enclosing here (only parts of it…) Again, by Simone de Beauvoir: When, in early 1945, I began to read Violette Leduc’s manuscript—“Ma mere ne m’a jamais donne la main”—I was immediately struck by it: here was a temperament, a style. Camus accepted L’Asphyxie without hesitation and published it in his Espoir series. Genet, Jouhandeau, and Sartre hailed the arrival of a new writer. In the books that followed, her talent was confirmed. Exacting critics gave it the highest praise. But the public did not respond. Despite a considerablesuccès d’estime, Violette Leduc remained obscure. It is said that the unknown writer no longer exists; anyone can get his books published. That is exactly the trouble: mediocrity flourishes; the good seed is choked by the tares. Success depends, most of the time, on a stroke of luck. And yet even bad luck has its causes. Violette Leduc does not try to please; she doesn’t please; in fact, she alarms people. The titles of her books—L’Asphyxie, L’Affamée, Ravages—are the reverse of cheerful. Leafing through them, you glimpse a world full of sound and fury, where love often bears the name of hate, where a passion for life burst forth in cries of despair; a world laid waste by loneliness, which, seen from afar, looks arid. It is not in fact. “I am a desert talking to myself,” Violette Leduc wrote to me once. I have encountered beauties beyond reckoning in deserts. And whoever speaks to us from the depths of his loneliness speaks to us of ourselves. Even the most worldly or the most active man alive has his dense thickets where no one ventures, not even himself, but which are there: the darkness of childhood, the failures, the self-denials, the sudden distress at a cloud on the sky. To catch sight suddenly of a landscape or a human being as they exist when we are absent: it is an impossible dream which we have all cherished. If we read Labâtarde it becomes real, or nearly so. A woman is descending into the most secret part of herself and telling us about all she finds there with an unflinching sincerity, as though there were no one listening…”
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 03:31:45 +0000
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