Thérèse and Isabelle (15 page)

Ravages
was to be her first true novel, a project of protracted gestation that turned out to be riddled with problems, as Leduc's correspondence shows. While suffering from loneliness and from her infatuations with inaccessible people, Leduc revised and reconstructed her former passions on paper. “I have noted the gulf that stretches between the life I am leading and the eroticism of the book I'm writing,” she confided to de Beauvoir.

In its original version,
Ravages
was intended to retrace the three love stories of its heroine Thérèse. These were inspired by, if not calqued on, the three liaisons that had marked Leduc's youth: a carnal coupling with a fellow schoolgirl; the time she spent living with a schoolmistress; and her encounter with a man whom she was to marry long afterward. This brief marriage ended with a suicide attempt by the author and an abortion that took her to death's door. Leduc was to devote three years to writing “Thérèse et Isabelle,” the first part of her book. The challenge was considerable:

I 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's experience with precision. I hope this will not seem anymore scandalous than Madame Bloom's thoughts
at the end of Joyce's
Ulysses
. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.

Nevertheless, Leduc was assailed by doubts: “As for my work at the moment, I am discouraged,” she admits to de Beauvoir. “I find myself thinking it a pointless book full of schoolgirls' follies I thought it was sexual narcissism, mere titivation.” De Beauvoir was convinced that Leduc would succeed in evoking “feminine sexuality as no woman has ever done: with truth, with poetry, and more besides.” Nevertheless, she was at a loss as to what to do with the audacity of Leduc's language: “There are some excellent pages; she knows how to write in bursts, but as for publishing this, impossible. It's a story of lesbian sexuality as crude as anything by Genet,” she told Nelson Algren.

As revealed by her handwritten notebooks with their variants, their pages struck
out or glued together, Leduc was aiming for a miniaturist's precision in her descriptions of the erotic scenes. In her role as primary reader, and in spite of their literary value, de Beauvoir advised her against keeping certain passages for she knew “exactly where one might go too far” with a publisher. She was not mistaken.

When, in 1954, de Beauvoir at last presented the manuscript of
Ravages
—already toned down in a meticulous “cleansing” process—to Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lemarchand, both members of Gallimard's reading committee, they were disconcerted. Although he appreciated the novel's qualities, Queneau judged the first section “impossible to publish openly,” while Lemarchand wrote: “It's a book of which a fair third is enormously and specifically obscene—and which would call down the thunderbolts of the law. The book also includes a number of successful passages. The story about the schoolgirls could, in
itself, constitute a rather beguiling tale—if the author would agree to draw a veil over some of her operational techniques. Published as it is, this book would become a scandal.”

At a meeting with Leduc, Lemarchand proved unyielding. Despite de Beauvoir's support for the book, he declared that to publish the “story about the schoolgirls” it would be necessary to “take out the eroticism while keeping the emotions.” He also demanded that several passages from the novel's second section be cut, notably the passage in the taxi about touching “the crumpled skin, fragile as an eyelid” of a penis. The description of the abortion (then illegal) with which the text ended would also be considerably censored. Lemarchand found it “too long, too technical;” Gallimard's legal adviser thought it like a “vindication of abortion.”

“Hard day with Violette Leduc,” de Beauvoir tells Sartre in May 1954. “She got
out of bed where she had thrown herself with a fever of thirty-nine degrees following the meeting with Lemarchand. The doctor told her that that's what caused it. I made her have lunch in the Bois, take a walk to Bagatelle, and I did my best to console her. The taxi scene literally scandalizes people: Queneau, Lemarchand, Y Levy; I sense that they feel personally offended, being male.”

This meeting broke Leduc as both writer and woman, by forcing her to give up on
Thérèse et Isabelle
, the best of her book, its most sincere and most daring part. It was her favorite piece out of all her own writing. They had “cut her tongue out.” She experienced this censorship as a laceration, an amputation. Almost twenty years later, in
La Chasse à l'amour
(“The Hunt for Love”), a posthumous part of her autobiographical trilogy, Leduc movingly pleads her cause:

They rejected the beginning of
Ravages
. It was a murder. They did not want the sincerity of Thérèse and Isabelle. They
were afraid of censure. Where is censure's true home? What are her habits, her manias? I can't work her out. I was building a school . . . a dormitory . . . a refectory . . . a music room . . . a courtyard . . . Each brick, an emotion. Each rafter, an upheaval. My trowel digging up memories. My mortar to seal in the sensations. My building was solid. My building is collapsing. Censure has pushed my house over with the tip of one finger. I had a pain in my chest the day I learned of their rejection. I was wounded right in my heart. Society opposes it even before my book can be published. My work is broken up, scattered. My searching through the darkness of memory for the magical eye of a breast, for the face, the flower, the meat of a woman's open sex . . . My searching, a box empty of bandages. Continue to write after such a rejection? I cannot. Stumps keep poking out of my skin.

De Beauvoir tried to offer
Ravages
to other publishers. In vain. They demanded more cuts. Leduc resigned herself to Gallimard's publication of her novel in a censored
version in 1955. The book was praised by critics but had no commercial success. Then Jacques Guérin, a friend and patron of Leduc, brought out a private edition of
Thérèse et Isabelle
at his own expense, intended for a circle of fervent admirers of Leduc's work.

The censoring of
Ravages
and its lack of success contributed to Leduc's descent into paranoid delirium. She underwent electroshock therapy and took a long sleeping cure. But she lost neither her will to write nor her will to live.

At the beginning of the 1960s, on de Beauvoir's advice, Leduc grafted part of “Thérèse et Isabelle” into the third chapter of
La Bâtarde
. She took out passages, tightened up some pages, toned down some of the metaphors, modified the direction of certain dialogues. Thérèse metamorphosed into Violette. The rest of “Thérèse et Isabelle” was then published thanks to
La Bâtarde
's success.

In 1966, taking heart from her new notoriety and doubtless out of a wish for “revenge,” Leduc signed a contract with Jean-Jacques Pauvert. She had told Gaston Gallimard about this: “You will no doubt recall having rejected the first 500 pages of
Ravages
. This text later appeared in a limited edition. It was entitled
Thérèse et Isabelle
. Quite naturally, I am anxious to inform you that this same text is now scheduled to appear in a standard edition.”

The publisher's call to order came straight away: “It was due to general agreement that we judged it preferable to postpone the publication of this text, which was at first destined to be part of
Ravages
. At the time, legal challenge was to be feared, which would have paralyzed this book's distribution among the bookshops, and so I left you free to publish
Thérèse et Isabelle
separately, in a private and limited edition, on the understanding that I would retain priority for a broader publication once
circumstances allowed. But it was never a question of my rejecting this text.”

Leduc bowed to the publisher's injunction, although, one must admit that he demonstrated a certain amount of dishonesty that day.
Thérèse et Isabelle
was swiftly printed by Gallimard and appeared in the bookshops in July 1966.

During the 1950s, unlike Jean Genet, Leduc had not benefited from a “louche” reputation nor from any public support as a famous writer. She had to wait until 1964 for that, when de Beauvoir wrote her preface to
La Bâtarde
.

It is the privilege of great artists to be ahead of their times. It is the lot of “accursed” ones to expect posthumous recognition. This is all the more true for women. Virginia Woolf foresaw Leduc's position, asserting that if a woman were to write accurately and precisely about her feelings, she would find no man—that is, no one at all—to publish her.

Now we have
Thérèse et Isabelle
as a whole work of art, with its original coherence and trajectory at last complete.

CARLO JANSITI

AFTERWORD

The list of early admirers of Violette Leduc is literarily impressive: de Beauvoir, Cocteau, Sartre, Genet, Camus, and Jouhandeau. In a letter Simone de Beauvoir wrote to her American lover, Nelson Algren, on June 28, 1947, de Beauvoir recounts having dinner with Violette Leduc, whom she describes as “the most interesting woman I know” (Beauvoir 1998, 37). High praise indeed, from someone like de Beauvoir. She is perhaps fascinated that someone from such an underprivileged background, someone with the odd and difficult personality that was Leduc's, could produce such astonishing writing, breaking new ground in the
description of women's lives and of female sexuality in particular.

Jean Cocteau wrote in a letter to an acquaintance in October, 1948: “Violette Leduc is a wonder and everything that comes out of her should find its way into the hands of anyone who knows how to read with their heart.
L'Affamée
needs no defense but times are hard. We have to help it along however we can” (Leduc 2007, 78n).

Yet for Leduc, being recognized by this elite subset didn't constitute a fully satisfying form of success—in part because she was poor and desperate to earn money from her writing, in part because she hungered for wider recognition.

Her first book,
L'Asphyxie
, translated as
In the Prison of Her Skin
, appeared in 1946, but it was only with the publication of
La Bâtarde
in 1964 when she was fifty-seven years old, that she found a larger reading public (at least in France), and with it a measure of financial stability. Until this success,
she endured, as best she could, what was for her the extremely painful task of finding contentment in the admiration of a small number of readers.

To say that her early books sold poorly would be an understatement. There is a passage in her posthumously published volume,
La Chasse à l'amour
(“The Hunt for Love”), in which Leduc recounts the moment when she received a letter from her publisher, Gallimard, informing her that the remaining unsold copies of
L'Asphyxie
were about to be pulped:

A letter from my publisher. Could it be good news? “My publisher.” Who are you kidding. He's Proust's publisher. There's a clear difference between a cathedral of hawthorns and a louse coated with excrement. Let's open the envelope. My God! . . . They are going to pulp the remaining copies of
L'Asphyxie
. My book is dying. It never even really had a life. No one read it. Today is a day of mourning. I have lost a child . . .
The editor has run out of storage space. Did it really take up so much room in his cellars, my scrawny little kid? (Leduc 1994, 142–43)

A bit later on in the same passage from
La Chasse à l'amour
, Leduc realizes that Gallimard is actually offering her the chance to buy the remaining copies of
L'Asphyxie
at a reduced rate, and she imagines what she might do if she were able to afford to purchase all the copies Gallimard was about to destroy:

I read the letter again. I hadn't understood it fully. I have the chance to buy all the unsold copies before they are disposed of. There are 1,727 copies left. What will I do with them? Religious tracts. I'll ring doorbells and hand them out. They'll turn their dogs on me. Who believes in generosity any more? I'll sneak them into the bins of the booksellers that line the banks of the Seine before they even notice I've done it. I will go to the bookstore La Hune and,
fraudulently, I will place a single copy on their shelves for the letter L. I will sing “Death, where is your sting?” as I leave La Hune. (143–44)

Leduc imagines buying her own books from her publisher and then sneaking them into places where, if someone should buy them, the profits (at least the financial ones) would not be hers. If she calls this a form of fraud it is hardly because she is swindling anyone financially, but rather because she apparently feels her books would not have legitimately earned the right to be on the bookstore shelves where she herself would have placed them.

Gallimard would once again return
L'Asphyxie
to print after Leduc's 1964 success with
La Bâtarde
. It remains in print today. Leduc would also receive a similar letter from Gallimard regarding the fate of the 1,473 remaining copies of her second book,
L'Affamée.
At the bottom of the letter she wrote, in response, “Pulp them! Pulp
them!” Her biographer, Carlos Jansiti, displays and reads from this letter in the recent documentary about Leduc,
Violette Leduc: La Chasse à l'amour
.