Thérèse and Isabelle

by Violette Leduc

  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 p
ublisher 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.

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Deborah Levy, Zoe Crisp, Sophie and Jean-Dominique Langlais, Clémence Sebag, Cécile Menon, and Hilary Kaplan; your contribution to this translation was essential.

  SOPHIE LEWIS, 2011

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Championed by Simone de Beauvoir and admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Albert Camus, VIOLETTE LEDUC has been referred to as “France’s greatest unknown writer.” She is best remembered for her autobiography La Bâtarde (1964).

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM FEMINIST PRESS

  King Kong Theory

  Virginie Despentes

  eISBN: 9781558616875 | ISBN: 9781558616578

  With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can’t or won’t obey the rules.

  “King Kong Theory brings to mind Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Muscio’s CUNT, and Plath’s The Bell Jar—feminist eloquence without restraint. You will love it.”

  STRANGER ON LESBOS

  Valerie Taylor

  Afterword by Marcia Gallo

  eISBN: 9781558618008 | ISBN: 9781558617995

  Sexy, beautiful, frustrated . . . a neglected housewife finds the delights and degradations of forbidden love. Frances, a 1950s housewife, becomes bored with her suburban life and enrolls in a class at the local community college. When she meets Bake, a butch lesbian, her life completely changes. In thrall to a world of martini lunches, late nights at queer bars, and a sexual passion she never knew was possible, Frances must choose between the safety of being a wife and mother, or the dangers of life on the edge of society. In this age of Mad Men fever, the reissue of Stranger on Lesbos comes at a perfect moment, invoking an era we can’t help but romanticize yet despise.

  WOMEN’S BARRACKS

  Tereska Torres

  Afterword by Judith Mayne

  Interview with the author by Joan Schenkar

  eISBN: 9781558617148 | ISBN: 9781558614949

  The grim setting of an urban military barracks—with its freezing dorms, rationed food, and unbecoming regulation underwear—became the setting for one of the steamiest novels of its time and the first-ever lesbian pulp. Written from the point of view of one of the younger and more innocent girl soldiers, Women’s Barracks reflects Tereska Torres’s experiences in the Free French forces assembled under General Charles de Gaulle. Condemned in 1952 for its “artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy” by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, this novel became an underground phenomenon, selling four million copies in the US and many more abroad.

  “As a lesbian historian, as a citizen of a war-torn world, simply as a reader, I found this 1950 novel, considered obscene in its own time, moving, arousing, and deeply interesting.”

  —Joan Nestle, author of A Restricted Country

  ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

  The Feminist Press is a nonprofit educational organization founded to amplify feminist voices. FP publishes classic and new writing from around the world, creates cutting-edge programs, and elevates silenced and marginalized voices in order to support personal transformation and social justice for all people.

  See our complete list of books at feministpress.org