April 7, 1907

Violette Leduc (April 7, 1907 to May 28, 1972) ) is, I am beginning to think, an example of a particularly French genius. When I read a Marguerite Duras story in the New Yorker, and almost puked, because I saw myself, I put Duras in a lonely class of great writers. Now, I have read Violette Leduc and there is the same strange glint of objectivity.

Leduc was raised in a loveless setting of poverty. Her accomplishments are implausible. Edmund White is quoted, by Deborah Levy, assessing Leduc:

'Violette Leduc’s novels are works of genius and also a bit peculiar. It is not surprising that Jean Genet was one of Leduc’s early admirers, as were Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. According to Edmund White’s autobiography My Lives, Genet and Leduc even made an amateur film together, a re‑enactment of a baptism in which Genet, who was an orphan, played the child and Leduc the mother. Both writers were illegitimate, born at a time – Leduc in 1907 – when such things mattered.... What a shame the film has been lost.

'If, as White points out, both Proust and Genet “were dismantling all received ideas about the couple, manhood, love and sexual roles”, I would include Leduc in the rearranging of the social and sexual scaffolding of her time. I don’t think she set out to do this. It was just that her life wasn’t quite bourgeois or stable enough to do anything else. Leduc can make this reader laugh out loud at her grand themes: loneliness, humiliation, hunger, defeat, disappointment – all of which are great comic subjects in the right hands. Samuel Beckett could do this, too. It requires a sensibility that is totally unsentimental, a way of staring at life and making from it a kind of tough poetry created in part by not having led an existence that makes one believe that the so-called compassionate and tender have any pity.

'Leduc does not sanitise and flatten a perception and make it more literal than it is; she accepts its own language.'

This is not such a good example perhaps, from a dubious translation of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur (1965):

'She crossed the road, then spat without spittle, as a cat spits, at another furrier's window: inside, wound around a tree, was another fox fur glistening in a spotlight, as imposing as a dying lion in the tawny rays of a setting ...'

But this from the same book, about an old lady, is:

'She was breathing the oxygen meant for people who had spent their day working. To cry out that it was impossible to begin her life all over again would be useless.'