An Extraordinary Writer, An Ordinary Person

Violette Leduc's La Bâtarde

I split the writers I love into two broad categories: conscious and crafted, and not so conscious and more natural/realist. The former is the type of writing that makes me marvel at its cleverness, over the wordplay and originality. You can sense the amount of work and thought those authors put into their craft, but it also feels a bit devoid of emotion sometimes. The authors in this category would be James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and more.

The other type I love, not so well-remembered or respected, though equally deserving, make “the not obvious obvious”. They’re writing feels as if it came to them naturally, and there’s an emotional gut-punch quality to it though it’s straight-forward. It’s writing that calls attention to something that’s lingered at the edge of my subconscious rather than clever tricks, and helping me to understand something I’ve experienced or observed but remained just out of sight or mind, forgotten too quickly, and their observations are sometimes discomforting. Those are the authors that fewer people read, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Natalie Barney, Constance Debré, and Violette Leduc, and Arundhati Roy. Unsurprisingly, the writers in the latter category are non-conformist: they don’t give a sh!t what their reader thinks (though they secretly probably sort of do). These are the authors I reach for this week as I find them more comforting, because I overthought myself into a depressive spiral and then had to climb back out.

In particular, I discovered Violette Leduc. If you’re a fan of ordinary-person-perspective of John Williams’ Stoner, Constance Debré’s analysis and rumination on class¹, Annie Ernaux’ awareness of the limitation of being working class, or generally of French modernist autofiction, then Leduc is for you. I’d read Thérèse et Isabelle, and that I read Violette’s full 600+ page autofiction-memoir-picaresque-stream-of-consciousness-modernist La Bâtarde (1964) a week later should say something about Leduc’s readability and relatability. The former is scarcely a whisper when compared to the full color shout of the latter.

There’s no one that wrote like Leduc. Her use of language may be as measured as some of the greats. Make no mistake, she should be one of the greats. It reads as very natural stream of thought out of her diary. Her voice is at once calm yet there’s enormous anxiety moving under it, her life ordinary yet extraordinary, her passions extreme, and her personality and vivaciousness almost leap off the pages. A wealthy woman who takes Leduc under her wing tells Leduc that her lack of physical beauty does not matter because she’s got the sort of liveliness that draws people more strongly than mere good looks. That may explain why Simone de Beauvoir mentored Leduc and wrote the stunning, hyper-class-conscious introduction to Le Bâtarde, Albert Camus published her first book, Maurice Sachs pushed her to write, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet became admiring fans of her writing, and why La Bâtarde was a bestseller that almost won the Prix Goncourt (France’s most respected literary prize).

Leduc hadn’t set out to be a writer, as she was too busy living and too scared of failure to write. She barely brings up her secret dream, and she’s afraid her sentences are too heavy for her to succeed as a writer. She’s also not the class of person who normally becomes a writer. Leduc was born to lady’s maid who had become pregnant when her employer’s son asks her to repay a kindness through sex. These aren’t best circumstance to be born under in 1907. The situation is exacerbated by Leduc’s mother’s shame, controlling nature, and her protectiveness. Her mother’s unkindness is offset by her grandmother’s love, though her grandmother is equally protective and dies when Leduc is only nine years old. Add to this the abject poverty, and the hunger that many working class Europeans experienced during WWI, and Leduc’s came out of a childhood that left her scarred. As an adult, Leduc funnels her latent ambition to write into a job at a publishing house. Through this job, she meets writer Maurice Sachs, who befriends her almost on sight, and encourages Leduc to write because he’s tired of hearing her about her terrible childhood.

La Bâtarde covers that childhood, her adolescence, three love affairs, her highly irregularly, not-entirely-standard academic and later work history, and it ends a bit after WWII. Though she never obviously or directly speaks to it, the reader might surmise that some of the irregularity of Leduc’s life was caused by the unhappiness impoverishment of her childhood. The long specter of poverty casts its shadow throughout the book, especially in Leduc’s emotional insecurities and her obsessions with possessions, luxury goods, and her frequent, lengthy descriptions of food. She declares that her “case is not unique” in the opening lines of La Bâtarde. In some ways, it is not. As readers, we’re so adapted to reading folks who came from the higher classes and from stable two-parent families that we might begin to believe the experiences of that class are normal, but data and statistics would show that Leduc’s class and familial struggles are much more the norm. Rather than casting herself as a victim, she manages to make the struggles read in ways that entertaining, as she shifts into odd jobs in publishing to smuggling farm-fresh butter and meat to wealthy Parisians during WWII. Her torrid love affairs are torturous, and her errors in love painfully obvious even as she indulges in them.

There are two woman-loving-woman affairs in this book, but Leduc’s book isn’t about the experience of queerness. She writes about her romances in the same way she does of her marriage to a man, focusing more on the person than her perspectives on her identity or how society perceives her. She calls faint attention to her gender presentation, telling the reader that the more masculine she appears, the more her desire for luxury and material goods. At times, she fetishizes the male homosexuality of her friend Maurice Sachs in a way that may read uncomfortably for many modern readers, and it almost reads as if she wants to be a homosexual man occasionally². She also writes about Jewish people in ways that aren’t blatantly anti-Semitic but would be questionable to many modern readers, and of people of color ways that are equally questionable (including of South Asians). Even so, these questionable passages aren’t (IMO) as questionable or discomforting as modern writers like Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney.

1. Although Leduc doesn’t ruminate as Debré does; rather Leduc lives the class, and it’s especially reflected in her interactions with those in the higher classes.

2. She writes about this a few times, including asking her husband to make love to her as a man would to another man.