‘I would have liked to phone you sooner,’ she said at length, ‘because Luc had told me to. And also because I was sorry to think of you being alone in Paris. But …’
‘I should have phoned you too,’ I said.
‘Why?’
I was going to say ‘to apologize’ but the word didn’t seem strong enough. I started to tell the truth.
‘Because I wanted to. Because, yes, I was lonely. And then because I was sorry to think that you thought …’
I gestured vaguely.
‘You don’t look well,’ she said gently.
‘That’s right,’ I said irritatedly. ‘If I had been able to, I would have come to see you and you would have given me steak to eat, I would have lain down on your rug and you would have comforted me. Unfortunately you were the only person who would have known how to do that and the only person who couldn’t do it.’
I was shaking. My glass was shaking in my hand. Françoise’s gaze was becoming unbearable.
‘It … it wasn’t pleasant,’ I said, by way of excuse.
She took my glass from me, put it on the table and sat down again.
‘I was jealous,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I was jealous of you physically.’
I looked at her. It was the last thing I had expected.
‘It was stupid,’ she said. ‘I knew perfectly well that there was nothing serious between you and Luc.’
When she saw my reaction she immediately made a gesture of apology, which seemed to me commendable.
‘What I mean to say is that infidelity on the physical level isn’t really anything serious; but I’ve always thought that. And especially now, now that …’
She really seemed to be suffering. I was afraid of what she was going to say.
‘Now that I am not so young,’ she concluded, ‘and’ – she turned her head away – ‘not so desirable.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I said.
I protested. It hadn’t occurred to me that the story could have another dimension, unknown to me, a pitiable aspect, not even pitiable, just sad for its being ordinary. I had thought that the story belonged to me; but I knew nothing of their life together.
‘It wasn’t that,’ I said, and I got up.
I went up to her and stood there. She turned towards me and gave a slight smile.
‘My poor Dominique, what a mess!’
I sat down beside her and put my head in my hands. My ears were buzzing. I felt empty. I wanted to cry.
‘I really like you,’ she said. ‘I like you a lot. I don’t like to think that you’ve been unhappy. When I first saw you I thought that we could make you look happy in place of that rather defeated look you had. That hasn’t been a great success.’
‘Unhappy, yes, I have been rather unhappy,’ I said. ‘But then, Luc warned me.’
I would have liked to collapse against her, against her large, generous body, and tell her that I wished she could have been my mother and that I was indeed unhappy; I would have liked to weep a little. But I couldn’t even play that role.
‘He’ll be back in ten days,’ she said.
What was that jolt I felt again in my stubborn heart? This had to be: Françoise had to have Luc again, and what passed for her happiness. I had to sacrifice myself. That last thought made me smile. It was a final effort on my part to conceal from myself how unimportant I was. Since I had no hope, I had nothing to sacrifice. I had only to put an end, or let time put an end, to an illness. That bitter resignation carried with it a certain optimism.
‘Later on, when it’s over for me,’ I said, ‘I shall see you again, Françoise, and Luc too. All I have to do now is wait.’
At the door she kissed me gently. She said: ‘See you again soon.’
But once I had returned to my room I fell on my bed. What had I said to her? What half-baked nonsense? Luc was coming back, he would take me in his arms and kiss me. Even if he didn’t love me, he, Luc, would be there. The nightmare would be over.
Ten days later Luc came back. I knew that because on the day of his return I passed where he lived on the bus and saw his car. I went back to the residence and waited for his phone call. It did not come, not that day nor the next day when I stayed in bed to wait for it, pretending to have flu.
He was there but he wasn’t ringing me. After a month and a half of being away! Despair expressed itself in my shivering, in my wry, stifled laughter and my obsessive apathy. I had never suffered so much. I told myself that this was the last spasm, but that it was hard.
On the third day I got up and went to my class. Alain began taking walks with me again. I listened attentively to what he said, I laughed. A certain phrase obsessed me without my knowing why: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’32 It was always on my lips.
One morning when a full fortnight had gone by, I woke to hear music in the courtyard, emanating generously from a neighbour’s radio. It was a fine andante by Mozart evoking, as it always did, daybreak, death and a certain smile. I lay still in bed, listening to it for some time. I felt rather happy.33
The landlady called me. There was someone on the phone for me. Without rushing I slipped on a dressing gown and went downstairs. I thought it must be Luc and that it was no longer so very important. Something was ebbing away from me.
‘Are you well?’
I was listening to his voice. It was his voice. Where was I finding this sweetness and calm, as if something living and essential was now flowing from me? He was asking me if I would go for a drink with him the following day. I was replying: ‘Yes, I will, yes.’
I went back up to my room feeling very alert. The music had finished and I was sorry that I had missed the end of it. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I saw myself smile. I did nothing to prevent it, I couldn’t anyway. I knew I was alone again. I wanted to say that word over to myself. Alone. Alone. So what? I was a woman who had loved a man. It was a simple enough story. There was no reason to make a big deal of it.
Translator’s Note
Bonjour tristesse, a first novel by Françoise Quoirez, only eighteen years old and using the pen name Françoise Sagan, was published in Paris in March 1954 and immediately caught the attention of the French reading public, before going on to win the Prix des Critiques in May of that year. As early as 25 March the long-established London publishers John Murray were approached by a literary agent suggesting that they bring out an English edition. John Murray, who rarely published translations, were initially dubious but by the end of April had embraced the idea, no doubt influenced by the enthusiastic reception of the novel and its young author in France. By that time the American publishers E. P. Dutton and Company had also decided to publish it in English and John Murray, having now identified ‘an extremely suitable translator’, suggested to Dutton that they cooperate over the venture. The translator in question was the London-based Irene Ash, who had read and summarized the novel for John Murray, and by early December her finished translation had been accepted by the publisher. It has ever since reigned as the recognized translation in English of a novel celebrated for having spoken to a generation that was coming of age in the post-war period.
The English edition was widely and, on the whole, favourably reviewed (though John Davenport, writing in the Observer of 15 May 1955, opined that it was a ‘curiously vulgar little work […] put together with meretricious skill’ and predicted that ‘it will cause a flutter in the dovecots’). Where reviewers mentioned Ash’s skill as a translator, it was generally with warm approbation, in spite or because of an awareness that the translation represented an abbreviated version of the original: Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail of 20 May 1955 commented that, while the translation was ‘unusually good […] I observe on many pages the traces of a mysterious blue pencil. A number of sentences have been removed as too frank or too suggestive for the innocent English public.’ In the view of John Raymond, writing the following day in the New Statesman and Nation, Ash ‘has not been afraid to pare and clip
the text to suit the English reader’, though the one example he gives refers to an innocuous enough phrase at the end of a paragraph in Part One, Chapter Two (translating as ‘with arms that felt heavy and a dry mouth’) the omission of which he sees as a stylistic improvement.
When, in the Spectator of 17 August 1956, Quennell reviews the English version of Sagan’s second novel, Un certain sourire, he states: ‘[H]er London publishers […] found it expedient to remove one or two passages from the translated version of Bonjour Tristesse.’ If John Murray’s did implement changes on the limited scale he indicates (and their archives reveal only their extreme satisfaction with Ash’s work), the comment in Quennell’s earlier review that the traces of a mysterious blue pencil were visible on ‘many’ pages suggests that the blue pencil was largely wielded by Ash herself on the French original, from which well over one hundred lines were cut. Some of the omissions involve quite short phrases, but others are substantial. The latter fall into two categories: firstly, sections of the text which might be deemed overtly sexual, and secondly, portions of detailed analysis.
Sagan may by no stretch of the imagination be called a sexually explicit writer, but in the Britain of the 1950s outlooks were prim. Indeed, as is well known, in 1960 Penguin were prosecuted (unsuccessfully) under the Obscene Publications Act over their intention to publish in Britain, unexpurgated, the novel by D. H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s novel is much more sexually focused than Bonjour Tristesse, but each was subject, albeit to a different degree, to the lingering strait-laced paternalism of the time and place which has for ever been encapsulated in the question of the prosecution counsel to the jury at the Chatterley trial: ‘Is it a book that you would […] wish your wife or your servants to read?’ Thus, six years earlier, it had been thought proper to omit from the English translation Sagan’s quite lyrical yet distinctly unanatomical references to love-making, notably in Chapters Four and Six of Part Two, as well as to excise or tone down other sexual allusions: for example Cécile, the seventeen-year-old heroine, is daringly frank (too frank for Ash, no doubt) in her condemnation of the life-choices of Cyril’s complacent widowed mother (Part One, Chapter Four). She also crosses swords lewdly with the dreadful Madame Webb, and although in that instance her play on the word maquereau, meaning both ‘mackerel’ and ‘pimp’, cannot be rendered directly into English, Ash’s translation does not seek to reflect its double-entendre in any way; Cécile merely tells the reader: ‘[I] did not know what to answer without being too offensive.’
The longest single omission is in Part Two, Chapter Six where, after a predictably cut-down version of Cécile and Cyril’s love-making in a little boat, nineteen lines are left out, an entire discussion in which Cécile deconstructs the expression ‘to make love’. While Ash may have deemed the topic unsuitable, it is also possible that she had little patience (or felt her readers would have) with the analysis as such. In fact she quite readily pares down analytic sections and in doing so short-changes us on one of Cécile’s principal traits, her intelligent, sometimes tormented reflectiveness, evident from the opening paragraph and liable to be pushed to extremes of convoluted self-interrogation. Thus she omits, for example, several lines at the end of Part One, Chapter Two in which Cécile discusses her attachment to some words of Oscar Wilde’s, and she condenses Cécile’s long discussion, strategically placed at the beginning of Part Two, of her newly discovered inner duality.
Aside from her treatment of the more erotic sections and her seeming impatience with Gallic navel-gazing, Ash frequently cuts out what she deems to be redundant phraseology, taking upon herself the role of editor of Sagan’s prose rather than the faithful translator of it. All the same, when the question arose of finding a translator for Un certain sourire, John Murray unhesitatingly selected her again, though Dutton in the United States preferred this time to make separate arrangements. Dutton’s decision was perhaps not surprising, in view of the fact that, although the American publisher had part-paid for and published Ash’s translation of Bonjour tristesse as agreed, it had been issued to the American market with most of the important omissions made good and with numerous alterations to the English. So although John Murray offered Ash’s translation of Un certain sourire to Dutton, who pronounced it ‘excellent’, they chose as their translator Anne Green. Green’s pacey translation is somewhat less coy than Ash’s. Arguably, however, in spite of its topic (the affair between the young student Dominique and her boyfriend’s much older, married uncle Luc), Un certain sourire contains less in its detail that was liable to create a flutter in the dovecots, and what risked doing so was mostly dealt with in Ash’s usual no-nonsense way: thus she has Luc in bed with Dominique place his hand on her side and not, as in the French, her hip, and she sees fit to apply a little further censoring of what immediately follows.
It may be thought fortunate that what appears to have been an early working title for Sagan’s second novel, Solitude aux hanches étroites (‘loneliness with narrow hips’), was dropped in favour of Un certain sourire, this being a phrase used by Dominique near the end of the novel. As a title for the English translation, Ash initially suggested A Way of Smiling, and there were other proposals. In March 1956 Sagan herself reportedly preferred the title in English to be A Certain Smile, so it was perhaps journalistic spin that led Nancy Spain to announce to readers of the Daily Mail of 31 March: ‘A bottle of bubbly if you can name Miss Sagan’s naughty book,’ and to go on: ‘Her English publishers have not yet decided upon a title. Can you think of one better than A Certain Smile?’ It seems nobody could.
One appreciative English reviewer of Sagan’s second novel refers to its being ‘diamond-bright in style in Irene Ash’s translation’. It might equally be said of both her translations that Ash’s language has a cut-glass quality about it, reflecting an upper-middle-class milieu familiar to earlier cohorts of English readers, a world of secluded beaches, bathing things, afternoon tea and country houses, and a style of expression to match, existing in conjunction with the torrid heat of the Mediterranean, the mustiness prevailing elsewhere in the French provinces and the atmospheric student cafés of the Quartier Latin. Some of Ash’s vocabulary, now dated, risks being a distraction to today’s reader: characters cavil at things and chaff one another; Cyril fears he may be a cad; Elsa’s eye-black runs; Dominique lodges in a ‘pension’ and blows her money on a pair of slacks; the seductive Luc wears a waistcoat (in the French it is in fact a jacket); and everyone at some point or other is referred to as being gay. Yet despite all this, the three translations – Ash’s two and Green’s one – are to be admired for having served over many years as polished, readable and intelligent versions. The new translations offered here present both novels in entirely unabridged form for English-speaking readers and it is hoped they will encourage and help at least some to sample the original French for themselves; they have been undertaken with a view also to giving a fresh new dress, after almost sixty years, to the young Sagan’s remarkably stylish and perceptive treatment of themes that are still highly contemporary.
I wish to thank Mrs Virginia Murray, archivist at John Murray, Albemarle Street, London, for having generously put at my disposal documentation relating to the English editions of Bonjour tristesse and Un certain sourire.
Heather Lloyd
Glasgow, 2013
Notes
BONJOUR TRISTESSE
1. Paul Éluard, La Vie immédiate: Françoise Sagan found the title for her novel in the second line of the poem she quotes here (‘À peine défigurée’), from the collection La Vie immédiate (1932) by the surrealist poet Paul Éluard (1895–1952). (This is my translation.)
2. Fréjus: A town on the French Riviera to the west of Cannes and close to Saint-Raphaël.
3. Oscar Wilde’s: ‘Sin … life’: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), an Anglo-Irish writer, wit, aesthete and Francophile who courted scandal with his writings and lifestyle. Cécile quotes here (in French) from Chapter Two of his novel The Pictur
e of Dorian Gray (1891).
4. Bergson: Henri Bergson (1859–1941), a leading French philosopher of the earlier part of the twentieth century. His wide-ranging work addresses issues relating to consciousness, free-will, intellect, instinct and what he saw as the intuitive, creative impulse within humans. Philosophy has long been part of the school syllabus in France, and Bergson’s thought has traditionally featured in it.
5. Your ideas may be fashionable: The ‘fashionable’ ideas for which Anne castigates Cécile are not hard to identify. The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) had been set out in his philosophical works of the 1940s and by the 1950s was widely known of and influential in France, having found expression also in his novels, plays and other writings. According to Sartre, human beings are free to create their own destiny and should shoulder the heavy responsibility for doing so, rather than take refuge in some pattern of existence supposedly preordained for them. In 1949 a close associate of Sartre’s, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), published Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex). This work, of pioneering importance for modern feminism, highlighted the conventions hampering the liberty of women to flourish as autonomous individuals.
6. bebop: A style of jazz popularized in the New York of the 1940s, more musically developed than swing jazz.
7. the islands: Off the coast to the west of Saint-Raphaël and Saint-Tropez lie the Îles d’Hyères. To the east, facing Cannes and closer in, lie the two smaller Îles de Lérins. Either group of islands could provide an attractive, secluded destination for anyone staying on the Côte d’Azur who had a small boat.
8. However disparate … humanity: Cécile is reading the second chapter of Bergson’s treatise Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). He argues that a distinguishing mark of our humanity is our potential ability (referred to here as ‘the creative principle in the human species’) to transcend conventional loyalties dictated by tribe and clan and to reach out to those who are not like us. While the quotation conveys the dryness of the revision that Cécile is having to buckle down to on holiday, its substance may appear relevant to the situation in which she and Anne find themselves with regard to each other.