Chick Grit

"My case is not unique," begins Violette Leduc, in her deliciously louche and starkly lascivious life story, La Batarde (Dalkey Archive $15.95), and immediately I sense a lie.

La BatardeThere's no truth in such blatant self-effacement. This has to be a set-up. By the time that self-effacement is compounded ("My birth is not a matter of rejoicing") and compounded again ("He is your wound, and I am the picture of him"), I'm convinced - Violette Leduc lied, lied so that she may better be able to tell us her bitter truth.

It may as well have been her last lie.

According to legend (and introduction), "Violette Leduc was the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant who was seduced by the consumptive son of her employer." Accordingly, she was a bastard. And as Violette has so kindly been told: "Bastards have a curse on them."

So says a friend, and so believes Violette. So too believes Violette's dear mother. "Each morning she made me a terrible gift: the gift of suspicion and mistrust." Nice. What's more, V (for brevity's sake we'll first initialize) is made to feel a whole lot less - more of a burden and less in the eyes of others. And herself. Mother and daughter, fugitives from a tragic idyll, may as well be mother and albatross. Hurtful stuff.

Shame begins to be something of a comfort ("I was ashamed and I wanted to go there again"), love an utter disaffection. It was either that or nothing. Mostly nothing. Left alone, V brings dull things to life. Staircases are "solemn," trees "despair," grass is "sad." Until, eventually, she makes of them disciples: "Shoe, I will teach you to feel fervor."

But of course a keen kid can never be content with mere things. Shipped off to girls school ("It's miserable, and I don't want to go away from here"), V falls for first love, Isabelle. This would be different. Bubble and bubble ("I felt sad and forced myself to feel sad so that I would be interesting to her"), toil and trouble ("I hate her, I want to hate her. It would be a relief if I could hate her even more"), the rage of angels. In between rages is erotica, the pitter-patter of middle-night explorations, nubile interludes of hush and hunger, as if Duras were writing Lolita for the same sex set.

Or for horny old(er) men. Which brings to fore Gabriel, ("so full of anguish, so unlucky so indispensable"). With his threadbare stare and his last 2 francs ("I feel the same shame for him we feel for martyrs"), goodish, golly G wishes to be everything to her; it is her command that he is so. "Archangel I hope you hate me" runs the familiar refrain. And hate her he does, with the devotion of the persecuted.

The starry-eyed misfits though have (and need) more than each other for distraction. V has Hermine, Isabel's common-sense successor. G has his catalog of phobias. They both have Paris. Low crimes and high drama: Cocteau and his cronies making round after round, nights lit with Nijinsky and Diagheliff (sic), days drummed by Beach and Joyce, Collete's pantry, Max Jacobs across a crowded café, this close to Artaud.

G couldn't care less. The scene, even from a distance, bores him, V's infidelity of little consequence. She could stand the lack of ambition; his la-di-da approach to love drives her up the wall between them. Its prototypical dysfunction written poetic, played pathetic, lived vividly. Hermine the dream girl is suburbanly indifferent, complicitly unaware. G is just a noble wreck. Torn between two semi-consummated lovers, V opts neither, there's the refuge of observation: "The present is never a legend" becomes a consolation; "A bridge is a conquest" becomes a dare; "Covetousness: a turquoise blue agony" becomes a symptom for what will forever ail her. And what would make her renown.

If even none of the La Batarde were true (and much of it seems too good and too bad to be so), the writing alone would ensure that Violette Leduc must be considered some rare dame. If Simone de Beavoir's almost hagiographic foreword, and Deborah Levy's equally laudatory introduction to this volume are even a hazy indication, this dame cut quite a figure, and struck quite a few bright minds. From her sporty - and risqué - early look (razor-cut hair, short above the temple, necktie, a pair of men's shorts), to the pan-Almadovarian heroine chic (all nose and mottled fur), she dashed through Parisian streets, stumbling, bumbling, and brilliantly succumbing to her own shiny neurosis.

But what made Leduc more than some mere madwoman was her remarkable facility for and with words, words enough to alert the likes of Genet, Camus, and Sartre, and of course, provoke the so-very Simone into candid accoladation. Even now, nearly forty years after the initial publication, and some six or seven decades after the facts (and fictions), Leduc's words charm and alarm, with brash tenacity, in the most delightfully peculiar manner (I've ten pages of scribbled quotes to prove it).

I'd hesitate to say that without Leduc there'd be no chick lit; I'd even hesitate to throw her into such a by-now clichÈ clamor. Yes, there's an obsession with things, but it's more in the begging for than in the buying of; and, yes, there's a compulsiveness with loves, but that's more for the unobtainability of such sordidness (a lengthy platonic affair of sorts with gay scribbler Maurice Sachs wondrously denudes that stance). I would though recommend that each and every wannabe kitten-with-a-whip take a gander, for this is the grit from which chicks are made. And all you cats out there - whatever your persuasion - do dig in, you'll be both surprised and unhinged. The pleasure and the pain, though, that's all hers. Wicked.

Thank you, Violette.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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