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41: La Batarde
Nov. 9th, 2012 03:43 pm41. La Batarde, Violette Leduc
Wow. Although I'm pretty sure I read some Leduc at some point in college, I came to this remembering next to nothing about her, and was completely, solidly blown away. Her writing is absolutely amazing. This is her first volume of autobiographical nonfiction (not her first book -- her first novel, L'Asphyxie/In the Prison of Her Skin, was also autobiographical), and it follows her from her childhood, born out of wedlock, through her unhappy adolescence in a girls' boarding school, to her young adulthood working in publishing in Paris, and her war years as a somewhat hapless but successful black marketeer. But all of this is just background to the story of how and with whom Violette falls in love -- in boarding school with the luminous Isabelle, and then Hermine, a teacher, with whom she lives for many years, a ridiculously awful marriage to a strange man named Gabriel, and then later she falls in love with a gay Jewish writer, Maurice, who finally convinces her to write, while they are isolated in a Normandy village during the occupation. (Yes, somehow, I cannot avoid reading about WW2, yet again. My obsessions, let me show you them.) And much of her love life is shot through with memories of her grandmother, Fideline, who loved her in a tender way that her own mother never offered. The passages when Leduc writes about Isabelle are spellbinding, perhaps moreso because I felt she captured so perfectly that weird experience of sexual exploration, with a girl, when it's hidden and of a piece with the whole bubble of being at a school -- nearly precisely my experience in college (because for various reasons, at the gayest school in the country, I was quite closeted, and as inexperienced as Violette was at age 12 or 13, apparently). The beauty of her writing is how it has so many unexpected turns and images in it, like this, in one of her night trysts with Isabelle: A wave carried her away and she sank down into the bed, then rose up again, plunged her face toward me, and held me to her. There were roses falling from the girdle she put around me. I fastened the same girdle around her. Or this, from the book's closing passage: This August day, reader, is a rose window glowing with heat. I make you a gift of it, it is yours....I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. Does that capture it? No? Maybe? Anyway, amazing. The book faltered a bit, for me, in the long awful sections of her chasing Gabriel and Maurice around. She has a doggedly low opinion of herself, and although she was taken in by Simone de Beauvoir and other famous post-war writers in that circle, she never quite achieved fame as a writer. It's a shame, reading this book, because she is really something special.
I'm working on finishing the second autobiographical volume that follows this one, Mad in Pursuit, which is so far proving to be almost better. Though nothing will quite match her lyricism about her awful childhood and her early loves, I think. Sad but luminous, her writing has inspired me so much this past month. I wish I'd known her work better in college, she is a perfect match for my other favorite autobiographist, Dolores Prato. Anyway -- this book is highly, highly recommended.
Wow. Although I'm pretty sure I read some Leduc at some point in college, I came to this remembering next to nothing about her, and was completely, solidly blown away. Her writing is absolutely amazing. This is her first volume of autobiographical nonfiction (not her first book -- her first novel, L'Asphyxie/In the Prison of Her Skin, was also autobiographical), and it follows her from her childhood, born out of wedlock, through her unhappy adolescence in a girls' boarding school, to her young adulthood working in publishing in Paris, and her war years as a somewhat hapless but successful black marketeer. But all of this is just background to the story of how and with whom Violette falls in love -- in boarding school with the luminous Isabelle, and then Hermine, a teacher, with whom she lives for many years, a ridiculously awful marriage to a strange man named Gabriel, and then later she falls in love with a gay Jewish writer, Maurice, who finally convinces her to write, while they are isolated in a Normandy village during the occupation. (Yes, somehow, I cannot avoid reading about WW2, yet again. My obsessions, let me show you them.) And much of her love life is shot through with memories of her grandmother, Fideline, who loved her in a tender way that her own mother never offered. The passages when Leduc writes about Isabelle are spellbinding, perhaps moreso because I felt she captured so perfectly that weird experience of sexual exploration, with a girl, when it's hidden and of a piece with the whole bubble of being at a school -- nearly precisely my experience in college (because for various reasons, at the gayest school in the country, I was quite closeted, and as inexperienced as Violette was at age 12 or 13, apparently). The beauty of her writing is how it has so many unexpected turns and images in it, like this, in one of her night trysts with Isabelle: A wave carried her away and she sank down into the bed, then rose up again, plunged her face toward me, and held me to her. There were roses falling from the girdle she put around me. I fastened the same girdle around her. Or this, from the book's closing passage: This August day, reader, is a rose window glowing with heat. I make you a gift of it, it is yours....I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. Does that capture it? No? Maybe? Anyway, amazing. The book faltered a bit, for me, in the long awful sections of her chasing Gabriel and Maurice around. She has a doggedly low opinion of herself, and although she was taken in by Simone de Beauvoir and other famous post-war writers in that circle, she never quite achieved fame as a writer. It's a shame, reading this book, because she is really something special.
I'm working on finishing the second autobiographical volume that follows this one, Mad in Pursuit, which is so far proving to be almost better. Though nothing will quite match her lyricism about her awful childhood and her early loves, I think. Sad but luminous, her writing has inspired me so much this past month. I wish I'd known her work better in college, she is a perfect match for my other favorite autobiographist, Dolores Prato. Anyway -- this book is highly, highly recommended.
