To give myself courage, I clung to this argument: if I wanted to assuage my fury once and for all, and reclaim this chapter of my life, writing was without doubt the best way to do it. Over the years a few people have suggested the idea. Others, meanwhile, in my own interest, have tried to dissuade me.
It was the man I love who finally persuaded me that writing meant becoming once more the subject of my own story. A story that had been denied me for too long.
To tell the truth, I am surprised that someone else, some other young girl from that time, hasn’t already written her own book in an attempt to correct the interminable succession of marvelous sexual initiations that G. describes in his books. I’d have loved someone else to do it instead of me. Someone more gifted, cleverer, more impartial too. It would certainly have unburdened me of a great weight. The silence apparently corroborates what G. has always claimed, offering proof that no teenage girl has ever had reason to complain of having been in a relationship with him.
I don’t think that’s really the case. I believe that it is extremely difficult to extricate oneself from someone’s hold, even ten, twenty, thirty years later. It is hard to shake the feeling of self-doubt, the sense of being complicit in a love that one felt oneself, in the attraction that we once aroused in him; this is what has held us back, even more than the few fans G. still has in the Parisian literary world.
By setting his sights on young, lonely, vulnerable girls, whose parents either couldn’t cope or were actively negligent, G. knew that they would never threaten his reputation. And silence means consent.
But on the other hand, to my knowledge, not a single one of his countless mistresses has ever chosen to write a book recounting the wonderful relationship she had with G.
Does that tell us something?
What has changed today—something that men like he and his defenders complain about constantly, excoriating the general atmosphere of puritanism—is that following the sexual revolution, it is now, at last, the turn of the victims to speak out.
NOT LONG AGO, I WAS CONTEMPLATING A VISIT TO THE renowned Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives. There, in a magnificently renovated former abbey just outside of Caen, visitors may make an appointment to consult, among other treasures, the original manuscripts of Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras. Before going, I searched the internet for a list of the authors whose archives are preserved there, and, to my astonishment, there was the name of G.M. A few months previously he had donated to this noble institution all his manuscripts, including the correspondence from his love affairs. At last, his posterity is guaranteed. His works are now a part of literary history.
For the time being, I have decided not to visit the Institute. I picture myself sitting down in the grand reading room in solemn silence to decipher the spidery handwriting of one of my favorite authors, all the while wondering if the person sitting next to me is consulting the letters I wrote when I was fourteen. I imagine myself applying for permission to access these letters. I’d have to invent some untruth, a thesis on transgression in the fiction of the second half of the twentieth century, a dissertation on the collected works of G.M. Would my request have to be submitted to him first? Would his authorization be required? What an irony, to be obliged to employ such a ruse for the right to read my own letters.
In the meantime, and although the thought of book burning has always filled me with horror, I wouldn’t be opposed to a great carnival of confetti made from my signed books and all the letters from G. I found recently at the bottom of a box left at my mother’s apartment for all these years. I’ll spread them out around me, and with a big pair of scissors I’ll snip them carefully into tiny bits of paper that I’ll throw in the air on a windy day in some secret corner of the Luxembourg Gardens.
At least posterity won’t have them then.
Postscript
Warning to the reader
Between the lines, and sometimes in the most direct and crude way, some of G.M.’s books constitute an explicit apology for child sexual abuse. Literature considers itself to be above moral judgment, but it is our responsibility as publishers to keep in mind that a sexual relationship between an adult and a minor is a culpable act, punishable by law.
See, it can’t be that hard if even I can write those words.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Claire Le Ho-Devianne, the first “objective” reader of this book, for her comments and encouragement.
My thanks also to Olivier Nora, who agreed without hesitation to publish it, for his faith and loyalty.
And finally, thanks to Juliette Joste for her sensitive editing and her unwavering support.
A Note from the Translator
When I first read Le Consentement, some time before the opportunity to translate it came my way, I shivered at the portrayal of the claustrophobic world of St. Germain des Prés that Vanessa Springora conjures with such deft precision. It’s a tiny area of Paris, but the power it exerts as the nexus of generations of literary dreams and fantasies remains strong in the minds of Parisians and visitors alike. Springora was born into this quasi-aristocratic world and knows it intimately. Her ability to evoke its intricate social codes and superficial glamour, the painfully gendered hierarchies of social, literary, and political entitlement, infuses the book with nervy, mercurial intensity.
The challenge for the translator is to navigate the multiple registers of the prose, to match the nimble, suggestive descriptions of social occasions and interpersonal dramas, so brilliantly summoned in French, sometimes in barely more than a single word or phrase. Most important of all, the translator must summon with the same nuance the double vision that characterizes the narrative: the child’s view of the world as it segues into that of the adult looking back. Springora’s taut fury as she recounts her experiences of her abuse and subsequent breakdown is modified by her benevolent pity for her younger self, a “broken toy” who has had to struggle so hard to learn to trust and love again.
Consent is a memoir of abuse, but it is also a penetrating exploration of both language and literature—specifically French—as a vector of power. Springora’s abuser, “G.M.,” a self-styled “great writer,” is horrified at the thought of anyone abusing his beloved French, while unashamedly indulging in the grotesque sexual and emotional abuse of children. He lays romantic store in the notion that his elegant way with prose will save him, not from himself, or the wrath of God, but from the grimly bourgeois straitjacket of conventional morality, and, more prosaically, from jail. Springora wonders, as many others have, why such behavior is tolerated “when it is perpetrated by a representative of the artistic elite—a photographer, writer, filmmaker, or painter. It seems that an artist is of a separate caste, a being with superior virtues granted the ultimate authorization, in return for which he is required only to create an original and subversive piece of work. A sort of aristocrat in possession of exceptional privileges before whom we, in a state of blind stupefaction, suspend all judgment.”
Even at the age of fourteen, Springora instinctively understands that her abuser is using language to steal her soul. One day he determines to write her assignment for school, an experience she describes as a “dispossession.” Throughout their relationship he takes endless notes in his Moleskine notebooks, and uses them later to turn her, barely disguised, into a character in several novels that are published to some acclaim by the most esteemed Parisian publishing houses. “I was just a character, living on borrowed time, like every other girl who’d come before me. It wouldn’t be long before he erased me completely from the pages of his wretched diary. For his readers, it was merely a story, words.” The money he earns from his writing finances his trips to the Philippines where he further indulges his pedophilia, tales of which then fill his published diaries. He carries a letter from President Mitterrand around with him wherever he goes, like a talisman, convinced that the president’s mellifluous praise will keep him from arrest.
It is only after several y
ears that Springora returns, with some reluctance, to the world of publishing and literature she has turned her back on for so long. Having been tormented for years by the annual publication of a novel or collection of letters that feature her or her correspondence with G.M., having been “trapped in a deceptive likeness, a reductive version of [myself], a grotesque, contorted snapshot,” she finds herself restored, mended, able to live and love in a way that for so long she believed she would never be able to. She realizes, triumphantly, that the same language that had once exerted its insidious power over her was now to be the instrument of her salvation, enabling her not only to name and shame G.M. himself, but to extend her criticism to all those both in publishing and in the Parisian intellectual world in general who protected and supported him for so many years. If she has learned one thing from her abuser it is what every writer and translator knows: that there is no such thing as “merely a story,” or “merely words.” She finally understands that the only way to become the subject of her own story is to write it down: “Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?”
Natasha Lehrer
Paris, August 2020
Here ends Vanessa Springora’s Consent.
The first edition of this book was printed and bound at at LSC Communications in Harrisonburg, Virginia, February 2021.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this novel was set in Dante, a typeface first developed by German-Italian printer and type designer Giovanni Mardersteig (1892–1977), founder of private press Officina Bodoni. Officina Bodoni quickly gained a reputation for their high-quality printing, and Mardesteig approached typefaces with the same perfectionism. Dante was released for mechanical composition in 1957. The digital version, which you see on this page, was redrawn by Monotype’s Ron Carpenter and released in 1993. Based in part on Luca Pacioli’s renaissance face, Dante is an exquisite, balanced serif font, making it perfect for print.
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About the Author
VANESSA SPRINGORA (b.1972) is a writer, editor, and film director. Born and raised in France, she graduated from the Sorbonne with a drgree in literature. Springora is currently director of the French publishing house Julliard. In 2020, Consent won the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Prize for Autobiography and the ELLE Grand Prix des Lectrices in Nonfiction.
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Copyright
CONSENT. Copyright © 2020 by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle. English language translation copyright © 2021 by Natasha Lehrer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover art: Rozenn Le Gall
Cover design: Stephen Brayda
Cover photograph © Francis G. Mayer/Getty Images (Madonna of the Meadow)
Originally published as Le Consentement in France in 2020 by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle.
FIRST HARPERCOLLINS EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2021.
Digital Edition JANUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-304791-4
Version 01052021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-304788-4
ISBN 978-0-06-306038-8 (Intl)
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