by John Updike
The second novel also, femininely, embodies a process—the process of healing. Astragal (“anklebone”) begins with the drop from the prison wall whereby Anne, a less slangy Anick, escapes and shatters her ankle, and ends with her walking back toward prison, “hardly limping at all.” In the months between, she has met Julien (the name of Albertine Sarrazin’s actual husband), has been sheltered by him in a series of hideouts, has supported herself by prostitution while he is in jail, and has broken her emotional ties with Rolande, her last female lover. These months of freedom and rescue and healing are, then, the pivotal idyll remembered in Runaway. The writing is in every sense happier, and Patsy Southgate’s translation, comparatively uncluttered by lingo, keeps pace with the brief scenes, the nice ease of prose:
An arm went around my shoulders, another slid under my knees, I was lifted up, carried away; the man’s face of a moment ago was very close, above mine, moving across the sky and the tree branches. He carried me firmly and gently, I was out of the mud and I was moving, in his arms, between the sky and the earth.
With her new virtuosity, Mme. Sarrazin has no trouble in making the injured foot both a symbolic presence—“I had a new heart in my leg, still irregular, responding inordinately to the other”—and a convincingly painful “stew of shattered bones and flesh.” Though not a sensual writer compared to Violette Leduc or to Colette, she can strike off a fresh phrase quick with the life of the moment. When she and Julien are together, “the ground is under our feet like an island”; of her outgrown lesbianism she simply says, “Rolande was the night light, the daylight is here, I turn it off.” And she can detect, in the classic manner of French analysis of the sentiments, small motions within herself, such as the “cruel ill will” with which she invites Jean, an unloved protector, to zip up her dress as she goes to meet Julien, so Jean will “sniff at my new skin” and “realize that I was … happy; and that he didn’t, that he never could, have anything to do with it.” True, the depths within herself are still out of reach; her recourse to streetwalking seems screened in the telling, her alcoholism can be deduced from the text but is unacknowledged by it, the will toward self-destruction is never disentangled from her wild will toward freedom, and a certain innocent egotism flattens the other characters, including and especially her hero, Julien.
These two books, for all their developing skill, exist less as literature than as life, as the record of a life that against crippling odds fought through to expression and, in its last two years, success—“she lived quietly with her husband Julien in the south of France.” While the novels of Genet insist that the male criminal dwells in a world apart, with a morality and rationale of its own, Albertine Sarrazin’s world is not readily distinguishable from that of respectable women: a world of momentary but keenly felt pleasures—a cigarette, a sunbath, a bowl of fruit on a linen tablecloth—in which the chief enemy is boredom rather than (as with men) defeat, in which a prevalent stoicism is qualified by fits of panic, in which a monogamous passion is qualified by phases, almost absent-minded, of wantonness, in which powerful impulses, with a reckless lightness amazing to a male, override conventions. The laws Albertine Sarrazin broke were not, one feels, real to her; only the policemen and warders were real. At the end of Astragal, arrest arrives with lyric suddenness, in a courteous flurry:
I grab my bag, I open the door, I put the key outside; on the landing a man is standing, not very big, looking cheerful and gratified:
“Hello, Anne,” he says to me. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time, did you know that? Come on, let’s get going, I’ll follow you. And don’t try to run away, O.K.?”
I smile, Julien will see us go by, he’ll understand that I’ll be a little late and that it’s not my fault.
Now she is gone, her redeemed life cut short, and again it is not her fault.
Saganland and the Back of Beyond
SCARS ON THE SOUL, by Françoise Sagan, translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin. 141 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1974.
THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND, by Simone Schwarz-Bart, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. 246 pp. Atheneum, 1974.
In the Herald Tribune of April 14, 1955, under the headline “ ‘BONJOUR TRISTESSE’ PRODIGY ARRIVES FOR 10 DAYS IN CITY,” nineteen-year-old Françoise Sagan, after informing the interviewer that she wrote her sensationally successful novel in one lazy month, confided some thoughts on existentialism and then added, deferentially, “But I am no philosopher. Sometimes I think philosophical thoughts when I have nothing better to do.” Well, a generation later, Mlle. Sagan evidently has nothing better to do, for her new (and eighth) novel, Scars on the Soul, is full of philosophizing and devoid of almost everything else. A fiction of sorts unfolds between pages of musing and self-display: two gorgeously languid characters from her play, Castle in Sweden, the van Milhem siblings Sebastian and Eleanor, are revived ten years later and allowed to drift through a plot whose subsidiary characters keep dropping away (one commits suicide, others are abandoned or forgotten by the author) like petals from a vase of tired roses. The plot is in fact a subplot; the real plot, and the more exciting one, traces the chic, bored, speed-crazy ex-prodigy’s attempts, through Normandy vacations and automobile accidents and spells of acedia, to push this little book through to its ending. End it does, with Françoise Sagan, as a character, in the arms of her paper hero, and this bit of origami may be, in her mind, her ticket of admission to the ranks of the New Novelists. Amid her pensées are some sentences devoted to these now avuncular experimenters:
This is what I have against the New Novelists. They play with blank cartridges, defused grenades, leaving their readers to create for themselves characters left undelineated between neutral words, while they, the authors, openly wash their hands of them. God knows, ellipsis is tempting … but it’s really a little too facile, possibly even unhealthy, to make people puzzle over obscurities when there’s nothing to show that they’ve caused the author himself any real headache.
Whereas readers of Scars on the Soul will put down the book convinced, if of nothing else, that it gave the author a headache to write it.
One must be fair. There is a dainty wit, a parody of decadence, in the delineation of the ethereally incestuous and cheerfully parasitical van Milhems. Not all of the author’s aperçus are banal; she knows her world of night clubs and vacation villas and remorselessly self-conscious love. The book reads easily; it is company. The author’s cry of personal crisis, which leads to a novel that haltingly invents itself under our eyes, feels sincere; she is honest even in her lameness and limpness of thought, and her self-exposure, as “someone tapping away at her typewriter because she’s afraid of herself and the typewriter and the mornings and the evenings and everything else,” has its fascination, as do, on this side of the Atlantic, the lurching franknesses of Mailer and Vonnegut. However, there is about Scars on the Soul an arrogant flimsiness that invites a quarrel, just as the generous margins and blank interchapter pages invite contentious jotting. “Oh, tush!” and “Ho-hum,” I discover myself to have written, respectively, beside these pieces of Mlle. Sagan’s wisdom:
For nothing will alter my conviction that only by pursuing the extremes in one’s nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little—oh, I admit only a very little—of what life is about. At any rate, my life.
And the women who want equality with men, and the good arguments and the good faith of some and the grotesque obtuseness of others, human just the same and subject to the same god, the only god, whom they try to deny: Time. But who reads Proust?
Françoise Sagan reads Proust, is the answer. But her Proustian meditations have an unstately way of dwindling to nothing, to a flirtatious self-mockery.
Since, fundamentally, the only idol, the only God I acknowledge is Time, it follows that I cannot experience real pleasure or pain except in relation to Time. I knew that this poplar would outlast me, that this hay, on the contrary, would wither and die
before me; I knew I was expected at home and also that I could just as easily spend another hour beneath this tree. I knew that any haste on my part would be as stupid as any delay. And for the rest of my life, I knew everything. Including the fact that such knowledge meant nothing. Nothing but a privileged moment. The only authentic moments, in my view. When I say “authentic,” I mean “instructive,” which is just as silly.
Proust interweaves his speculations and confessions with the exhaustively evoked details of a world he powerfully loves; Mlle. Sagan has for fabric only the shreds and scraps of a world she has come to despise. She confesses on the first page “the distaste I now feel for a way of life that until now … has always attracted me.” Later, she rises to the defense of her “Saganland” of the privileged and idle and frivolous; “The majority of critics are appalling hypocrites.… What could be more enjoyable than to know that a whiskey on the rocks awaits you at a villa on the other side of this golf course, among people as lively as yourself, and as free from material worries?” But the defense rings hollow. The details are tired. The furniture and chitchat, the spongers and spongees of Scars on the Soul are dismissed in the same breath that evokes them; only the aloof weather and landscape of Normandy arouse the writer’s respect, that reverence without which description is so much word-trundling. We have indeed come a long, heavy way from Bonjour Tristesse, with its sparkling sea and secluding woods, its animal quickness, its academically efficient plot, its heroes and heroines given the perfection of Racine personae by the young author’s innocent belief in glamour. The van Milhems, those blond leeches, seem by this retrospect degenerate forms of the incestuous affection between Cecile and her father in Bonjour Tristesse. Incest, self-love’s first venture outward, feels deliberately burlesqued; Mlle. Sagan—at this juncture in her career, at least—has ceased to love herself, and with love has lost the impetus to create a fictional world.
An abundance of love nearly overburdens The Bridge of Beyond, the first novel by Simone Schwarz-Bart. The novelist, a native of Guadeloupe, married to the French author of The Last of the Just, describes her intention in an autobiographical note: “For me, the essence of Guadeloupe will always be the most oppressed and proudest Negroes of the island, ‘unbroken and unbreakable.’ I early dreamed of speaking about them someday so that justice might be done for them.” She has written The Bridge of Beyond (whose title in French is the very different Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle) “in memory of an old peasant woman of my village who was my friend.” Telumee tells her story, beginning with her genealogy; she is the daughter of the black woman Victory, who was the daughter of Queen Without a Name, who was the daughter of Minerva, who was “a fortunate woman freed by the abolition of slavery from a master notorious for cruelty and caprice.” These matrilineal generations overlap those of Mme. Schwarz-Bart’s husband’s recent short novel, A Woman Named Solitude, which brings slavery to Guadeloupe in the person of Bayangumay, a girl abducted from an African village of pre-Adamic pleasantness. Schwarz-Bart is a European Jew writing about slavery; his wife is a native Guadeloupean writing about Guadeloupe. Though the two books have a companionable closeness of tone—a kind of tranced lyricism, as if, in her phrase, “dreamed in broad daylight”—her novel is the less surreal and the more substantial, the more convincing as a testament of life. The imagery of rivers flows through it, and its radiant shimmer and feeling of unforced movement are drawn from the center of the stream. “We were steeped in day, the light came in waves through the shifting leaves, and we looked at one another astonished to be there, all three, right in the stream of life.” The book takes for its theme nothing less than living: Queen Without a Name “went on doing what God had created her for—living,” though she can also ask, “To see so much misery, be spat at so often, become helpless and die—is life on earth really right for man?” Her granddaughter, Telumee, who acquires the title of Miracle, searches for “the thread of [her] life” and pronounces the verdict on her life and on life simultaneously:
We have no more marks to guide us than the bird in the air or the fish in the water, and in the midst of this uncertainly we live, and some laugh and others sing. I thought I would sleep with one man only and he abused me; I thought Amboise immortal; I believed in a little girl who left me; and yet, without quite knowing why, I don’t regard any of all that as a waste of time.
The events of the book are numerous; the author follows three heroines through their lives’ adventures—their children, their lovers, their shacks, their occupations on the edge of survival. It is a frontier world, this post-slavery village of Fond-Zombi, where harsh disappointments suddenly wipe out years of tranquil harvesting; the human—or, more particularly, the female—capacity to survive sorrow and reconstitute the work of cultivation is a theme illustrated several times over, always movingly. The “miracle” attached to Telumee’s name and present in the French title may be that of the human spirit, with its immortal resilience, its quicksilver moods admirable even when malevolent, its—as the book puts it—panache. Another theme is the special shape and tactics forced upon the black spirit in a land ruled by white proprietors. Telumee is advised, “Be a fine little Negress, a real drum with two sides. Let life bang and thump, but keep the underside always intact.” The word “Negro” recurs insistently, not as a demoted term of racist distinction but as a metaphor for all men who are oppressed and scant of hope. To be Negro is to be human in a heightened degree: “however beautiful other sounds may be, only Negroes are musicians.” Telumee comes to understand “what a Negro is: wind and sail at the same time, at once drummer and dancer, a first-class sham, trying to collect by the basketful the sweetness that falls scattered from above, and inventing sweetness when it doesn’t fall on him.” We are all, this novel makes us feel, “Negroes at the back of beyond,” “flat on our bellies,” our main defense “the Negro’s ingenuity in forging happiness in spite of everything.” “What happiness!” comes as the book’s concluding phrase, and if words of wisdom are spoken by too many sibylline Negresses, and a Caribbean brand of black populism pushes some passages into sentimentality, the book’s gift of life is so generous, and its imagery so scintillant in the sunlight of love, that we believe every word.
In Praise of the Blind, Black God
A HAPPY DEATH, by Albert Camus, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 192 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
Albert Camus’ first novel, A Happy Death, which he did not allow to be published during his lifetime, has now been issued in a handsome, annotated edition. Read in conjunction with the other writings of the young Camus—the notebooks begun in 1935, the two small collections of essays The Wrong Side and the Right Side (1937) and Nuptials (1938), the play Caligula (composed in 1938 but not performed until 1945), and his second novel, the classic The Stranger (completed in 1940 and published in 1942)—his first attempt at extended fiction offers an instructive lesson in the strategies of the imagination. Though shot through with brilliant rays, A Happy Death is a chunky, labored work, cumbersome for all its brevity, so cluttered with false starts and halting intentions that it occludes its own themes. In Camus’ published Notebooks, it first appears as some chapter titles listed in January of 1936, when he was twenty-two; the last relevant notation occurs in March of 1939, when work on The Stranger was well advanced. An entry in June of 1938—“Rewrite novel”—implies a finished draft of A Happy Death by that time, but a month earlier, in a sketch of a funeral in an old people’s home, The Stranger had begun to germinate, and some months later the uncanny, chilling first sentences of the masterpiece were written out intact. During the interval when passages for both novels compete in the Notebooks, those relating to A Happy Death suffer by comparison, seeming febrile and flaccid amid the sharp glimpses of the novel eventually published. Wisely, Camus let the first novel be consumed by the second, reusing a number of descriptions, recasting the main theme (a happy death), and transforming the hero’s name by the addition of a u—Mersault, the man of sea and sun, da
rkening to Meursault, with its shadow of meurtre, of murder. Technically, the third-person method of A Happy Death, frequently an awkward vehicle for alter egos (see, see the sensitive young man light his cigarette; now let’s eavesdrop on his thoughts), becomes the hypnotic, unabashed first-person voice of The Stranger. Substantively, Camus has located, outside of autobiography, the Archimedean point wherefrom he can acquire leverage upon his world. Often in art less is more, and one must depart to arrive. In the first novel, the author fumbles, trying to pick himself up by too many handles, and growing more handles in the process; in the second, he takes a short but decisive side-step, becomes less himself, and with this achieved narrowness penetrates to the heart of his raison d’écrire.
