Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc – review

I was tempted, at first, to start this review with some clunking irony along the lines of “Like most men, I have no prurient interest whatsoever in contemplating a highly sexual love-affair between two pupils at an all-girls’ boarding-school, so the subject matter of this novella held little appeal ...” But having read Thérèse and Isabelle and been deeply moved by it, I don’t think it appropriate to make jokes; and the impulse to have done so might in itself be a side-effect of the pornification of culture, or at least of myself.

Then again, it was horror and fear on the part of the publishers which kept this work, first written as the opening section of Leduc’s novel Ravages (1955), unpublished in its original form until 2000 – and in French, at that. Leduc, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir (who also had a crush on her), had spent three years writing Thérèse and Isabelle – and it shows, in a good way. So when Gallimard said, in effect, “no way” in 1954 (“impossible to publish openly,” said Raymond Queneau, of all people), Leduc nearly had a breakdown. The publishers had, in De Beauvoir’s words, “cut her tongue out,” and although the work was reshaped and inserted, piecemeal, into subsequent books (and circulated in a private edition among friends), it hasn’t appeared in English before this edition.

It’s a brave thing to do, and if there’s one good side-effect of prurience, it’s that in the pursuit of something rude, good art can be discovered. (I remember being steered to Les Biches as a teenager by someone who had heard it was full of dirty stuff; I ended up discovering the genius of Chabrol early.) And Thérèse and Isabelle is, unquestionably, great.

And its interest in the sexual side of things is crucial. Such affairs as the book describes happen; they are part of what makes people the way they are; and so they have to be written about. In this country, we have a particularly immature attitude to this kind of thing: just look at the smirking adolescence betrayed by the inaugurators and keepers of the flame of the Bad Sex Awards, a prize whose point has always been unclear to me – is it for good writing about bad sex, bad writing about bad sex, or bad writing about good sex? (The main point of the prize, it seems, is that some things simply should not be written about.)

So here we have extraordinary writing about sex; and, more importantly, about love, and the way it makes us feel. “Now is a night of obstacles. Her smell belongs to me. I have lost her smell. Give me back her smell.” Who has not felt like that, as the odour of the beloved evaporates from the sheets? “’I wish you would look at me when I’m looking at you,’ she said behind me.” Who has not felt a similar kind of possessiveness? “It’s too stupid. A moment ago we understood each other.” Who hasn’t sometimes been astonished at the vertiginous nature of love, the way it is an unstable equilibrium, a magical but precarious balancing act? And: “My eyebrows brushed her eyebrows. ‘It’s incredible the way I’m seeing you,’ she says.” I don’t think I have ever read physical intimacy better described, or evoked. (One thing that comes across pretty quickly is that this is a damned fine translation, that can’t have been easy to pull off; and dispels any misgivings that the translated quote in the press release, from Libération, inspires: “Violette’s prose, hirsute and grasping as always, throws itself into faces more spiritedly than today’s provocateurs ...” Eh?)

So we are, in fact, a long way from pornography, although perhaps not too far from what pornography (written pornography, that is) tries to do: which is to make us believe in plausible minds behind the genitals, so that there is some agency behind the act. Anaïs Nin, obliged to write porn to make ends meet, had a natural instinct to make it more “artistic”; here, the art is the point. And it’s funny how the people who do this kind of thing best are the French.

The original article can be found here.