"To have an inner life, to think, to juggle and leap, to become a tightrope walker in the world of ideas. To attack, to riposte, to refute, what a contest, what acclaim. To understand. The most generous word of all. Memory. To retain, a geyser of felicity. Intelligence. The agonizing poverty of my mind. Words and ideas flitting in and out like butterflies. My brain a dandelion seed blown in the wind." - Violette Leduc
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. . Earlier this week we uploaded a copy of Le Taxi by Violette Leduc that is for sale in our bookshop. The story deals with the topic of incest between a brother and sister as they drive around Paris in the back of a taxi having sex and talking about their time together growing up in the city. While the subject of the book was and remains taboo, Leduc was never one to shy away from the extremes of life in her writing. She was innovative in her sexual boldness, her ability to delicately express the tenderness that can be felt between two people and in her belief of her talent and her writing capabilities.
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Violette Leduc holds a place in literary history that is as formidable and notable as many of her contemporaries that include Jean Genet (who said of her: “She is crazy, ugly, cheap, and poor, but she has a lot of talent.” ) Simone de Beauvoir (her formal mentor and lifelong friend who she stalked at Cafe Fleur and tried repeatedly to have a love affair with) Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau and Jean Paul Sartre. Despite living and working at the same time as these writers her name holds much less cultural sway, despite her utterly breathtaking body of work. Most famous for her memoirs La Bâtarde, whereby she details being the illegitimate child of a poor house maid and rich man who refused to acknowledge her existence, she wrote many other works that were often semi autobiographical with a devastating and intense focus on lesbian intimacy and sex, polygamy, love and identity.
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Homosexuality, abortion, illegitimacy, she confronted all these taboo topics in 1950s France without fear or hypocrisy. A quick glance into any of her books reveals a writer exceptionally gifted in rendering the depth and passion of sex, most of which came from personal experience and was written at a time long before such vocal sexual liberation was accepted or understood. Leduc is famous for her ability to perfectly evoke the complications of lust and desire in a framework that is heartbreaking and often overwhelming. She understood love and lust as the basis for all human connection, in all their constructive and destructive power.
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She is a feminist, made so by experience, seeing first hand the rich, male dominated literary world that she was excluded from. Leduc made her money trading on the black market in Paris while she wrote, smuggling meat to rich Parisians. In Leduc we see a feminist authenticity that Simone De Beauvoir only theorizes. De Beauvoir described her on her first sighting as a “tall, elegant, blonde woman with a face both brutally ugly and radiantly alive.” She is “a provincial woman, a smuggler, a lesbian who lived wildly and loved madly was not part of the French cultural narrative;” yet her works stand alone in their richness, their truth and their universality all of which are heightened by her wild and rebellious fervor bound somehow into the most delicate of work. Her sexuality was just one facet of her life that rejected social expectations. She details her first childhood lesbian affair in Thérèse and Isabelle, notable for its censoring by the French government who called it “enormously and specifically obscene” that was not lifted until 2000. She faced similar censorship issues with Le Taxi for its explicit depictions of incest between a brother and sister. She was kicked out of the Collège de Douai for having an affair with her female teacher, who was also fired and whom she continued to live with for many years. Her work was admired in literary circles however she failed to receive public acclaim until the end of her life, passing her short life in poverty and varying states of depression and psychosis that led her in and out of hospital. She died aged 57 in France as a famous author but the quality and sincerity of her work deserves to be raised in our social conscience.
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Of her legacy she said: “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 any more scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.
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L’Asphyxie, 1946 · L’affamée, 1948 · Ravages, 1955 · La vieille fille et le mort, 1958 · (Trésors à prendre, suivi de Les Boutons dorés, 1960) · La Bâtarde, 1964 · La Femme au petit renard, 1965 · Thérèse et Isabelle, 1966/2000 · La Folie en tête, 1970 · Le Taxi, 1971 · La Chasse à l’amour, 1973
