Thérèse and Isabelle (16 page)

Leduc has become known as the author of books, fictional and autobiographical to varying degrees, (
Ravages, Thérèse and Isabelle, La Bâtarde
) which include scenes recounting sexual relations between women in vivid detail. Her books also include accounts of her unrequited love for a series of gay men (including Maurice Sachs, Jean Genet, and Jacques Guérin); her physical and emotional feelings for Simone de Beauvoir (never reciprocated across the several decades of their friendship—a word that perhaps cannot quite do justice to the odd and unbalanced relation they had); as well as her marriage and divorce, and her subsequent friendships and romantic relationships with a number of men. Illegitimacy
(Leduc's mother became pregnant with her by the son of a family for whom she was working) is at the heart of Leduc's personal and professional self-image. When she was in literary company, she often had difficulty fully accepting that she belonged where she was. In her writing, this self-doubt comes to be intimately tied to her sense of the unruliness of her own sexuality—an unruly sexuality that often provides the material about which she writes. Fascinated by sexual outsiders of many kinds, it does not seem that the categories that other people used to talk about her sexuality, or about sexuality in general, had much pertinence for her.

Consider the extraordinary letter she writes to de Beauvoir in late summer of 1950 about her feelings both for de Beauvoir and for a couple of women who run the hotel in which she is staying in the village of Montjean:

That you should not love in the way that I love you is well and good, since that way I will never grow tired of adoring you gravely. My love for you is a kind of fabulous virginity. And yet I have passed through, and am still in the midst of, a period of sexual frenzy. . . . I have been obsessed by, hounded by, that couple of women I wrote you about. I have been humiliated, revolted. They have found in this village, they have made real a union, whereas I have for 15 years been consumed by, and am still consumed by solitude. I have often felt as if I were in Charlus's skin as I spied on them, as I envied them, as I imagined them. They never even spend 15 minutes apart, and I often cry with rage and jealousy when I notice this fact. They are mistrustful, they are shut up inside their happiness. One night I told them, after all the people summering here had left, I told them in very nuanced terms that I loved you and about your beautiful friendship for me. It was a one-sided conversation. I gave, but got nothing in return. They are even more extraordinary than Genet's “Maids.” The difference in their ages—I have also already told you about
this, one is thirty, the other fifty-six—is something I find enchanting and consoling . . . How simple they are, I keep coming back to this, how unrefined, how sure of themselves. The younger one has the face of a brute. Their fatness is the weight of sensuality. When seated they open their legs wide, like soldiers, whereas so-called normal women keep them crossed or closed tight. They are a torment to me without even knowing it but they also intensify my love for you because you are a part of the disaster that I am. I often think about lesbians in their cabarets, who exist on another planet, who are nothing but sad puppets. (Leduc 2007, 174–75)

The letter is typical of Leduc in all her idiosyncrasy: verging here and there toward the preposterous without ever quite tipping over into it, excessive in its emotivity, self-consciously obsessive, and profoundly curious both about the way sexuality functions (which doesn't mean she can't make the odd homophobic remark), and about the lack of fit between her sexuality and
everyone else's (in this case, de Beauvoir's, the two women she describes, and lesbians who frequent queer bars and cabarets). She is attentive to a number of characteristics, axes of variations in sexualities we might say, that aren't always factored into typical discussions of sexuality: that sexualities have a class or regional component; that age difference is important in some sexualities; that girth can have a relation to gender and to sexuality; that sexualities such as her own and that of this couple of women are often best understood by way of representations from the world of literature (Genet's two maids), and that the representations chosen can sometimes rely on transgendered forms of identification (her link to Proust's character, Charlus).

Consider another more condensed example of Leduc's attentiveness to the multivariable experience of sexuality.
La Bâtarde
recounts several outings taken by the young Leduc and her mother to see different
shows while they were living under the same roof in Paris. (They once went, for instance, to see the cross-dressing aerialist, Barbette.) As they set out on one such outing, Violette takes her mother's arm:

“Don't put your arm through mine. You're such a farm boy [
paysan
]!” she said.

Farm boy. The use of the masculine really got to me. (2003, 127)

In one very compact utterance, Leduc's mother registers her impression of her daughter's sexuality, subtly linking together gender, object choice, and that odd mixture of regional identity, class, and race that is contained in the French concept of peasant,
paysan
. Leduc's representations of her mother's reactions to the sexually dissident forms of behavior she exhibits while growing up provide interesting evidence of a point of view (her mother's) that is neither exactly approving nor exactly disapproving,
but is certainly matter of fact about such expressions of dissidence. When Leduc is expelled from her girls school because of her sexual relations with one of the teaching staff, she is sent by train to Paris, where her mother is now living. Her mother meets her at the station:

I saw my mother in the first row: a brush stroke of elegance. A young girl and a young woman. Her grace, our pact, my pardon. I kissed her and she replied: ‘Do you like my dress?' We talked about her clothes in the taxi. My mother's metamorphosis into a Parisienne eclipsed the headmistress and sent the school spinning into limbo. Not the slightest innuendo. Giving me Paris, she gave me her tact. (111)

There is a complicity between mother and daughter, a shared choice not to take up the subject of Leduc's behavior or its consequences. We might see behind this complicity a shared set of reference points
regarding sexual culture. The sexual culture of the countryside, villages, and towns they came from was, while not the same as what they see around them in Paris, already a rich, diverse, and conflicted one, which means that they were both in full possession of a practical understanding of sexual diversity and dissidence that allowed them to communicate with and understand each other on all sorts of implicit levels.

This practical understanding of sexual diversity that Leduc shares with her mother is, of course, present in her letter to de Beauvoir as well. Her practical understanding tells her that her love for de Beauvoir, the relationship between the two women she encounters that summer, and the sexuality of Parisian lesbians are all related and yet different. We could say, borrowing the term mobilized so influentially by Kimberlé Crenshaw, that Leduc and her mother have a practical understanding of sexuality that is fundamentally
intersectional.
José Esteban
Muñoz glossed Crenshaw's term in the following way: “Intersectionality insists on critical hermeneutics that register the copresence of sexuality, race, class, gender, and other identity differentials as particular components that exist simultaneously with one another” (Muñoz 1999, 99). We might well imagine that Leduc's experience of her own sexual idiosyncrasy, and her practical ways of understanding distinctions between different sexualities she perceives around her somehow involve an experience of intersectionality, and that among the identity differentials that count for her are differentials between country life, small town life, and city life, and also, the topic to which I now turn, differentials between people involved in literary or intellectual pursuits (herself, de Beauvoir) and those who are not.

However seriously Leduc may be taken by writers like Sartre, Jouhandeau, Cocteau,
Genet, and de Beauvoir, something about her being a woman means that both the social world and the gatekeepers of the literary field treat her differently than they treat, say, Genet. Leduc registers this aspect of her situation in many ways, including the portrayal, in
La Chasse à l'amour,
of the mental and physical distress she experiences following Gallimard's refusal in 1954 to publish those sections of her novel
Ravages
having to do with the sexual relations of Thérèse and Isabelle at boarding school (the text reprinted in this volume), the representation of an abortion and its aftermath, and several other passages. If these passages were so important to her, it is because she understood them to be a key part of her attempt to break new ground in literature, just as Genet was doing. One can also trace in her correspondence with de Beauvoir from a few years before this episode, her sense that de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex
had a similar kind of importance
for the evolution of culture. She expresses her support for de Beauvoir as she confronted the violently misogynist reactions to her book, and she told her of her pride at being cited by de Beauvoir in the volume. “I thank you with all my heart for citing me on several occasions,” she writes in 1949. “What touched me was the actual moment during which you were writing my name in a serious book” (Leduc 2007, 130).

Leduc's sense that she, Genet, de Beauvoir, and Sartre were breaking important new ground in the ways they struggled to represent sexualities that previously had no place in serious writing finds further expression in a letter from the following year. Early in 1950, Leduc makes a comparison between the audacity of Genet in his novels and the audacity of de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex:
“Genet's authority appears as strong as ever when you reread him. How salubrious are all the sexual audacities to be found in contemporary literature! I could
feel the world-wide barrier of resistances begin to give way as I read volume 2 of
The Second Sex,
as I reread Genet” (Leduc 2007, 142). Clearly she meant for her own writing in these years to contribute to this same project. This helps explain why the frustrations of seeing her work censored, along with the frustration of the poor sales of her books, was almost too much for her to bear.

A scene in the recent French biopic devoted to Leduc develops this commonality, by showing de Beauvoir defending Leduc against her censors at Gallimard, accusing them of being unable to bear the idea of a woman speaking openly about sex between women, and insisting on the urgency for abortions—at the time illegal in France—to be a topic that could be written about in both literary and philosophical contexts (
Violette
2014).

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: