PENGUIN CLASSICS
OLIVIA
DOROTHY STRACHEY (1865–1960), also known as Dorothy Bussy, was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and was the sister of the writer Lytton Strachey. She also became a great friend of André Gide and translated his works into English. In 1903, she married the painter Simon Bussy, and they had one daughter. Olivia, which she published under a pseudonym in 1949 and which is largely based on her own experiences at boarding school in France, is her only novel. Her obituary in The Times (London) described her as a “charming, witty, amusing, and amused person.”
ANDRÉ ACIMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and Enigma Variations, among many other works. He is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also the founder and director of the Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center.
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First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press, Ltd. 1949
First published in the United States of America by William Sloane Associates 1949
This edition with an introduction by André Aciman published in Penguin Books 2020
Copyright © 1949 by The Hogarth Press, Ltd.
Introduction copyright © 2020 by André Aciman
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Strachey, Dorothy, author. | Aciman, André, author of introduction.
Title: Olivia / Dorothy Strachey ; introduction by André Aciman.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019029896 (print) | LCCN 2019029897 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134404 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506249 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6003.U64 O4 2020 (print) | LCC PR6003.U64 (ebook) | DDC 823/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029896
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029897
Cover illustration: Leslie Herman
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
To the beloved memory of V. W.
L’on n’aime bien qu’une seule fois: c’est la première.
Les amours qui suivent sont moins involontaires.
LA BRUYÈRE
Contents
Introduction by ANDRÉ ACIMAN
OLIVIA
Introduction
In the postscript to her letter to André Gide dated December 5, 1933, Dorothy Strachey wrote: “P.S. A deadly secret. I have written a book!”
André Gide, the future Nobel laureate and her lifelong intimate friend whom she’d been translating from French to English with tireless and selfless devotion, was probably used to people coming up to him to confide they had written something that they wished to share with him. Her book, she went on, was “[a] very short one but I’m dying to show it to you. No one else in the world knows nor probably ever will. I didn’t mean to say this when I started this letter. Indeed, I had forgotten all about it. But when I have finished typing it I shall send it to you. For whether you will or no you have to bear a part in all I think and feel and do. Oh! these postscripts. How dangerous.”*
Her casual, self-effacing tone is more than a touch overdone, but not surprising. Dorothy was nervous enough to conceal that what she was really asking Gide was for him to set aside some time to consider the merits of her short book.
Gide responded by saying he was completely “submerged” with work and with “innumerable cares” and obligations, and was concerned about the publication of her recent translation of his novel—but not a word about hers.
On December 30, she wrote: “I am sending you my M.S. by this post. I am absolutely disgusted with it—poor, meagre, inadequate thing. I think at the last minute I wouldn’t have sent it, if it wouldn’t have seemed making too much of a fuss. . . . At any rate it isn’t long and won’t take you half an hour to read.”
His reply, dated January 25, was tepid, at the very best.
“Yes, it was with a very keen emotion that I read Olivia’s story, in the evening, by the fireside, alone in the large bedroom I have made my study. Three evenings I delved into those pathetic reminiscences. How few are the ashes that even today cover so much flame! . . . Must I return the pages to you? I’d like to bring them to you, but don’t yet know where to direct my uncertainty. I am in the great need of solitude. Everything ceaselessly distracts me . . .”
André Gide had returned to talking and thinking about the one thing he liked to talk and think about most: himself.
Dorothy was tactful enough to realize that, even if he’d leafed through her novel, Gide was not terribly impressed but might have been reluctant to say so. The matter was dropped with not one more word spoken. They stayed friends, and she continued to translate him and to worship him both as a writer and as a man, even though she knew he found men far more desirable than women.
Her manuscript stayed in a drawer and their silence on the subject lasted fifteen years, until 1949, when Dorothy suddenly decided to see it published in England.
The novel was an instant success, both in England and across the Atlantic in America, where it was published the same year. In 1951, it was released as a French film.
* * *
* * *
When it was first published in 1949, Olivia by Dorothy Strachey was called Olivia by Olivia. The first time I spotted the novel, in an English bookshop in Rome, I was immediately taken by its cryptic title-pseudonym combination and, to this day, continue to refer to it as such. Over the years since its publication, the author’s true identity has stopped being the poorly guarded secret it once was. On the Penguin Modern Classics edition that I finally purchased in Paris in the summer of 1971, Dorothy Strachey’s name appears not on the front cover but on the back, in relatively small print. In some cases, and particularly in her noted career as the English translator of André Gide, her given name is no longer Dorothy Strachey but Dorothy Bussy, because of her marriage to the French painter Simon Bussy—which adds a further enigmatic twist. By contrast, on the jacket of the 1949 French edition of Olivia, translated by her friend and eminent Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard, Dorothy’s name does not appear at all. Instead, the cover proclaims it “Olivia by Olivia, translated from the English by Roger Martin du Gard and the author.” This, as ambiguities go, is a stunning understatement. In a letter to Richard Heyd dated March 22, 1949, Martin du Gard admits not knowing “a word of English” and working off a shapeless word-for-word draft given him by the author.
It would seem that Dorothy could not make up her mind about whether she wished her identity revealed, or by which name she was going to be known. In this she joins a long legacy of women writers who chose anonymity but were not entirely committed to it either. The most notable example is that of the seventeenth-century French novelist Madame de La Fayette, the author of The Princess of Clèves. In La Fayette’s case, no matter the number of times friends, readers, and critics begged her to admit to having written what is, to this day, arguably the most perfect novel ever written in French, she refused, albeit half-heartedly. It is not precisely clear why Dorothy was reluctant to pronounce herself the author of Olivia, though it is usually attributed to the no
vel’s muted lesbian content. But the Bloomsbury Group, to which Dorothy’s siblings belonged and whose members she knew very well, was by no means a stranger to homosexuality. If anything, most members of London’s Bloomsbury set were at the very least polyamorous, and certainly bold and subversive enough to flout conventional, closeted Victorian mores. Their tact and upper-class upbringing prevented them from flaunting their sexuality or being in-your-face boors in public; what they did in private, however, always retained the stamp of unruffled, patrician dissent.
Dorothy was not entirely cagey about her identity, though. She dropped far too many hints along the way for her name to have remained a true mystery. She named the novel Olivia after her sister who had died as a three-month-old baby and whose body was buried at sea on her mother’s journey back from India. Not a difficult provenance to trace. More to the point, she dedicated her novel to V. W., who was clearly Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury’s leading female voice. And just in case there were any doubts regarding her name or her association with the Bloomsbury Group, not only was her novel published by the Hogarth Press, owned and run by Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, but Dorothy was the elder sister of both Lytton Strachey, Bloomsbury’s uninhibited patriarchal figure and author of Eminent Victorians, and of James Strachey, who became the official translator of the twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud—both, incidentally, known to have had long homosexual affairs. A third-rate sleuth would have outed her in seconds. The Strachey family may have been established and entrenched snobs, but they were also open-minded and, in many ways, unusually modern. Why the novel’s lesbian content might have induced her to seek anonymity remains an unsolved mystery.
Bloomsbury, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf had made their home, was the neighborhood where permanent as well as occasional friends congregated. E. M. Forster, Rupert Brooke, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell: all were highly educated, devoted to the arts and to high culture, and held emancipated views on a host of political, aesthetic, and sexual matters. They loved England, but they also cast an eager and loving eye on the world outside of it. Many of the members held a veneration for French literature, and the Stracheys in particular were devoted to France. Not only did Sir Richard Strachey, Dorothy’s father, hand over the family’s small villa in Roquebrune to his daughter when she married Simon Bussy, but her brother Lytton himself had learned French and, at the age of thirty-two, published a survey of French literature titled Landmarks in French Literature. Dorothy’s mother was a lover of France, which explains her friendship with Marie Souvestre, a frequent visitor to the Strachey home who ran a private school for girls called Les Ruches, near Fontainebleau. Girls from several countries were enrolled there, among them Dorothy herself and Eleanor Roosevelt.
It was as a pupil in this school that Dorothy acquired her love of French literature, and it was this school that inspired the fictional school of Les Avons in Olivia. Here the sixteen-year-old Olivia will have a crush on her teacher Mlle Julie, who was most likely inspired by Marie Souvestre.
* * *
* * *
Like Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier or Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Olivia turns out to be one of those very rare French novels that happens to have been written in English. The French have an easy name for this particular kind of novel—roman d’analyse—while the English don’t really have one, other than the clumsy term psychological novel. However, as was the case with Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (which Wharton started as a French exercise), the first draft of Olivia was—so it is alleged—originally written in French. It retains that unmistakable classical, thoughtful, and wise-to-the-world vein that is almost courtly in its depiction of how desire, arousal, and love can swell between individuals who are unwilling to speak their love or unable to abandon themselves to what each knows the other craves. Neither Olivia nor Mlle Julie misreads the other’s impulses, and their signals, though frequently couched and oblique, are seldom lost on the other. The classical model here is all about silence and retention, and in this Olivia’s plot is as merciless as La Fayette’s novel or Jean Racine’s plays. Everything is withheld and yet all is unavoidably transparent. In the words of François La Rochefoucauld, the French moralist and friend of La Fayette whom Dorothy does not cite but whose trenchant spirit hovers over Olivia, “There is no disguising love where it exists, and no feigning it where it does not.”
Olivia opens with an epigraph by another French moraliste of the seventeenth century: La Bruyère. “L’on n’aime bien qu’une seule fois: c’est la première. Les amours qui suivent sont moins involontaires.” (“We love fully only once: the first time. The loves that follow are less involuntary.”) Nothing could sound more disabused or more disenchanted. First loves are always perilous and incandescent; the lover never knows how to wade the shoals of desire, fear, and worship, and the attendant buffets of self-loathing. But then it was not a teenager who wrote the novel; it was someone much older. As her letter to André Gide suggests, Olivia was probably written around 1933 or so, when Dorothy Strachey was in her late sixties; it was published in 1949, when she was already into her eighties. Yet it reads as though written by the adolescent she once was: frail, timid, and hopelessly enamored. As a roman d’analyse, what Olivia offers is not plot but a tapestry of tortured, introspective moments. This may explain why the plot does not hold much sway in the novel. When intractable feelings are the plot, and when doubt, shame, fear, desire, and hope are at the source of a kind of emotional paralysis rather than of action, what readers respond to is the invitation to recognize in themselves what they’ve always felt but never quite had the time to consider or the courage to confront.
The tale here is quite short and simple, but what distinguishes it is its brazen candor, its clarity when depicting the complex mainsprings of conflicted feelings, and, above all, its ruthless analytical bent—ruthless because it is unremittingly clear-eyed, even when confused; ruthless because it is unencumbered by illusions of what one should and shouldn’t feel; and ruthless because it is couched in so much tact and simple, unadorned, unembellished grace that one forgets that, below the polished surface of day-to-day, well-behaved human dealings conveyed in the most limpid and elegant prose, our blood is shot through with savage, burning, sleepless wants.
Wants is the word, and Olivia, the teenager, is at once arrested and driven by wants she already fears may never be gratified. One may call it love, but when all is said and done it is unrepining, shameless physical love—the most powerful, most damaging, and least forgettable kind. Lying in bed, Olivia hears Mlle Julie’s footsteps at night and cannot wait for her to walk into her bedroom—did she imagine the footsteps, or were they real? And did they hesitate right outside her door before someone turned the door handle? Did the handle turn or was it just this comingling of fear and unfettered desire tussling in her breast—that “curious repugnance [and] terror of getting too near” (43)? Finally, she stands to look at herself in the looking glass by the washstand. But it is a small, chaste schoolgirl’s mirror that reflects only her face and shoulders. She wants to observe her entire body, so she strips naked and stands on a chair to see her midsection, and in the process experiences “that excruciating thrill [she] had never felt before” (62).
Olivia’s attraction to Mlle Julie is complicated. In a moment of effusion she will kiss Mlle Julie’s hand; she will even tell her—woman to woman—that she loves her; but Olivia’s love is also yoked to her love of poetry, to the beauty of Racine and French theater, to the discovery of liberty, to her sorrow over Swift’s madness and Keats’s death, and to what she admits is something she had been blind to all her young life: physical beauty. Everything Mlle Julie touches is refulgent, and when the two visit Paris together, “the boulevards [themselves] were ablaze” (30). The girl is besotted, but she still can’t put
her finger on what drives her to Mlle Julie:
My indefinite desire was like some pervading, unlocalized ache of my whole being. If I could only know . . . where it lies. . . . In my heart? In my brain? In my body? But no, all I felt was that I desired something. Sometimes I thought it was to be loved in return. But that seemed to me so entirely impossible. . . . I could not imagine how she could love me. Like me, be fond of me, as a child, as a pupil, yes, of course. But that had nothing to do with what I felt. And so I made myself another dream. It was a man I loved as I loved her, and then he would take me in his arms . . . and kiss me . . . I should feel his lips on my cheeks, on my eyelids, on my———No, no, no, that way lay madness. (56–57)
The novel is a restless journey of self-tormented doubts and self-indictments. Olivia’s are not brainy, pro-and-con ruminations. They are obsessive, because love itself is obsessive—always. Would it be love otherwise? And perhaps therein lies the genius of Olivia. It is the story of how, unbeknownst to us at a young age, or at any age, a blaze suddenly erupts in us, stirring things we couldn’t possibly name, and may never be able to name, but that we know come from us and from us only, bearing something like the promise of a plenitude we’ve known in childhood but left behind and didn’t know we’d lost and couldn’t be more grateful to think we’ve found again. Love is always about us, not about others, but only because others become more us than we are ourselves, because love drives us to think this way, because it hasn’t just usurped our will—it is our will. It is honest, it is true, and it is irreducibly carnal, which is why we trust it and can’t resist. It scares us because we know we desire but don’t know why we desire, and part of its beguiling lure is to make us think we’ll know better once we’ve yielded. It scares us because we know we could trip and fall, yet we want to trip and fall. All we feel is the longing to touch and the shame of wanting to. We fight it, but don’t want to. We lose when we win the fight.
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