Focussing upon Life

...She seduces both Hermine, a music teacher, and Gabriel, a lonely young man from the provinces...

...She is first seduced by Isabelle, a schoolmate, who, in one night showed her that, "a flower opened in every pore of [her] skin...

...My ugliness will set me apart until I die...

...The problem of existence becomes the problem of defining the self...

...After the War, nearing 40, she goes to a plastic surgeon to have her nose "redone.' When the mirror is handed to her following the operation, the glass shows her no real change...

...The very nature of the book makes it appeal to those who are more interested in communicating the experience of an idea than the idea itself...

...The child, finding only reproach in her mother's blue eyes, grasped at the impossible relationship between them and transformed herself into the creature reproached...

...She recounts only experiences that are vitally new...

...They define without structuring...

...The writing which describes these experiences is truly brilliant, because the author accepts her past bitterness with all the forlorn intensity of a child hugging herself in self pity...

...Love must be the breath that clouds the mirror, blinds her to herself, or sets her free from herself...

...6.95 Reviewed by CHARLES RUAS Department of Romance Languages New York University In spite of endorsements by Camus, Sartre, Cocteau and Genet listed on its cover, and a laudatory introduction by Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc's autobiography, La Batarde has not been able to reproduce here the mass success it enjoyed in France...

...and not wanted as a girl, she mutely transformed herself into an absence by enveloping herself between the folds of her grandmother's wide blue skirt...

...The mask is not attached to a being, because the mask is the ugliness by which nature has set her apart...

...There, lost in the old woman's total devotion she was shielded while exposed, a presence while absent...

...Love is release and forgetfulness in the joy of the five senses...

...Because she was sickly, she could not eat...

...She seems intent on conveying to the reader the same viewpoint by which she watches herself as she changes roles...

...It is a moment of perfect identity, this feeling of being watched in her abandonment...

...The inevitable suspicion follows that perhaps all her past gestures, words, feelings, the situations she created, and those in which she placed herself, might be postures assumed before a mirror...

...Yet in the course of the narrative she has been befriended, loved and married...

...The tally of the resulting sensations, feelings, appearances, gives us a vivid impression of a unique personality using her potentials, sounding the depth and variety of her personality...

...In her first Schiaparelli gown, she strolls through Paris, a masquerade of worldliness in the realm of the beautiful, listening with incredulous joy to one proposition after another...

...she suddenly found her own self by losing the enveloping being...

...When a voyeur asks to watch Hermine and herself make love, she takes Hermine into a mirrored room and performs for the observer reflected serially all around her...

...She presents her autobiography as a bildungsroman, and in it refers her readers to her novels, which she does not hesitate to say are purely autobiographical...

...For these problems are the natural premises of her life, the compost in which she develops, and it is solely the natural process of this development which interests her...

...And yet her desire to possess the whole person is a rapaciousness caused by an inability to focus either on herself or on the beloved...

...Her intense feeling for Maurice Sachs, a homosexual, slowly enables her to see her own blind, moth-like instinct for impossible situations: the need to love madly without the risk of a response...

...Looking into a mirror, she sees her long nose, narrow eyes and thin wide mouth...

...Approaching 30, in an effort to turn herself inside out, she suddenly craves elegance, accepting as real the ideal of beauty presented by fashion models of the period...

...The full acceptance of this painful insight brings her to a sense of reconciliation with herself, and causes her to turn to writing...

...Her physical being is defined by the situation and thus is recognized and accepted...

...A b??tarde has no birthright, except the fact of being born...

...It enables her to refuse roles proffered, and with this limiting of her possibilities, comes a turning inward and the capacity to write...

...Born illegitimate, she can make no such claims and therefore is solely concerned with the definition of her various illegitimate roles and relationships to others...

...She acquires a sharp sense of form, the esthetic appreciation which substitutes imagination for experience, and thus discovers art as a lens to focus upon her life...

...The poet, Jacques Pr?©vert, wittily remarks, "They should have changed the forehead...

...Ultimately, Violette Leduc begins to understand that, for her, there is no communication possible in love...

...Her insights are sparks thrown off by the striking of her senses and emotions...

...This creates an opposition to her feelings which are unrecognizable unless imparted to another...

...Only a person with rightful claims on others and society can conceive of the existential problems of alienation and revolt...

...This creates both a sense of development and self-revelation, and unifies a seemingly patternless sequence of events...

...In youth as a schoolgirl she crops her hair short, wears felt hats "without gender," blouses with tight collars, and neckties...

...She tries repeatedly to transform herself...

...Instead, it has won for itself only a fringe of readers, a mixture of beats, avant garde writers, painters and film makers, and the usual Francophiles...

...Isolation has been reduced by her to a problem of the physical shell...

...The experiences she records exemplify, without intellectualizing, many of the ideas of Sartre, Genet and Simone de Beauvoir...

...she demands of each the sacrifice of herself to the other, and of both that they pay for and delight in her need for distraction and clothes...

...She is la b??tarde...

...Her mother saw her as defiling the memory of the man she loved, by resembling him only in ill health and being expensive, and by being a mockery of him in her gender and physical ugliness...

...When her grandmother died, the child's grief was like that of a newborn or a lover...

...Rather than a central personality altered by experience, there is a display of roles: Violette Leduc as a sickly child, as a student, as the lover, the beloved, as a friend, a black marketeer, a writer...

...feeling herself ugly, she became awkward in all her motions and stumbled into injury and illness...

...Thus, by putting herself foremost, she erases the distinction between fiction and autobiography, perceptions of the imagination and of experience, the demands of esthetic ordering and selfdramatization...

...Who is Violette Leduc after all...

...Need becomes a process of development without possible satisfaction...

...and finding herself absorbed and changed, she clasps and clasps again until her surrender becomes possession of the other...

...Gabriel sees her love as annihilating...

...Thus, when Violette Leduc writes, "dear reader," she does not address herself to those conscious of the problems of revolt, alienation, or liberation as abstractions...

...She sees the strange reflection of a preconception within her own retina...

...the eyes, the cheeks, the mouth...

...Violette Leduc uses essentially novelistic techniques ranging from stream of consciousness written in a highly imagistic style that builds to a lyrical incoherence, to straight narrative tersely written, conversations recorded journalistically, and situations dramatized in a sequence of scenes...

...He says, "You want to destroy me...