I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem anymore scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.
Nevertheless, Leduc was assailed by doubts: “As for my work at the moment, I am discouraged,” she admits to de Beauvoir. “I find myself thinking it a pointless book full of schoolgirls’ follies I thought it was sexual narcissism, mere titivation.” De Beauvoir was convinced that Leduc would succeed in evoking “feminine sexuality as no woman has ever done: with truth, with poetry, and more besides.” Nevertheless, she was at a loss as to what to do with the audacity of Leduc’s language: “There are some excellent pages; she knows how to write in bursts, but as for publishing this, impossible. It’s a story of lesbian sexuality as crude as anything by Genet,” she told Nelson Algren.
As revealed by her handwritten notebooks with their variants, their pages struck out or glued together, Leduc was aiming for a miniaturist’s precision in her descriptions of the erotic scenes. In her role as primary reader, and in spite of their literary value, de Beauvoir advised her against keeping certain passages for she knew “exactly where one might go too far” with a publisher. She was not mistaken.
When, in 1954, de Beauvoir at last presented the manuscript of Ravages—already toned down in a meticulous “cleansing” process — to Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lemarchand, both members of Gallimard’s reading committee, they were disconcerted. Although he appreciated the novel’s qualities, Queneau judged the first section “impossible to publish openly,” while Lemarchand wrote: “It’s a book of which a fair third is enormously and specifically obscene — and which would call down the thunderbolts of the law. The book also includes a number of successful passages. The story about the schoolgirls could, in itself, constitute a rather beguiling tale — if the author would agree to draw a veil over some of her operational techniques. Published as it is, this book would become a scandal.”
At a meeting with Leduc, Lemarchand proved unyielding. Despite de Beauvoir’s support for the book, he declared that to publish the “story about the schoolgirls” it would be necessary to “take out the eroticism while keeping the emotions.” He also demanded that several passages from the novel’s second section be cut, notably the passage in the taxi about touching “the crumpled skin, fragile as an eyelid” of a penis. The description of the abortion (then illegal) with which the text ended would also be considerably censored. Lemarchand found it “too long, too technical;” Gallimard’s legal adviser thought it like a “vindication of abortion.”
“Hard day with Violette Leduc,” de Beauvoir tells Sartre in May 1954. “She got out of bed where she had thrown herself with a fever of thirty-nine degrees following the meeting with Lemarchand. The doctor told her that that’s what caused it. I made her have lunch in the Bois, take a walk to Bagatelle, and I did my best to console her. The taxi scene literally scandalizes people: Queneau, Lemarchand, Y Levy; I sense that they feel personally offended, being male.”
This meeting broke Leduc as both writer and woman, by forcing her to give up on Thérèse et Isabelle, the best of her book, its most sincere and most daring part. It was her favorite piece out of all her own writing. They had “cut her tongue out.” She experienced this censorship as a laceration, an amputation. Almost twenty years later, in La Chasse à l’amour (“The Hunt for Love”), a posthumous part of her autobiographical trilogy, Leduc movingly pleads her cause:
They rejected the beginning of Ravages. It was a murder. They did not want the sincerity of Thérèse and Isabelle. They were afraid of censure. Where is censure’s true home? What are her habits, her manias? I can’t work her out. I was building a school. . a dormitory. . a refectory. . a music room. . a courtyard. . Each brick, an emotion. Each rafter, an upheaval. My trowel digging up memories. My mortar to seal in the sensations. My building was solid. My building is collapsing. Censure has pushed my house over with the tip of one finger. I had a pain in my chest the day I learned of their rejection. I was wounded right in my heart. Society opposes it even before my book can be published. My work is broken up, scattered. My searching through the darkness of memory for the magical eye of a breast, for the face, the flower, the meat of a woman’s open sex. . My searching, a box empty of bandages. Continue to write after such a rejection? I cannot. Stumps keep poking out of my skin.
De Beauvoir tried to offer Ravages to other publishers. In vain. They demanded more cuts. Leduc resigned herself to Gallimard’s publication of her novel in a censored version in 1955. The book was praised by critics but had no commercial success. Then Jacques Guérin, a friend and patron of Leduc, brought out a private edition of Thérèse et Isabelle at his own expense, intended for a circle of fervent admirers of Leduc’s work.
The censoring of Ravages and its lack of success contributed to Leduc’s descent into paranoid delirium. She underwent electroshock therapy and took a long sleeping cure. But she lost neither her will to write nor her will to live.
At the beginning of the 1960s, on de Beauvoir’s advice, Leduc grafted part of “Thérèse et Isabelle” into the third chapter of La Bâtarde. She took out passages, tightened up some pages, toned down some of the metaphors, modified the direction of certain dialogues. Thérèse metamorphosed into Violette. The rest of “Thérèse et Isabelle” was then published thanks to La Bâtarde’s success.
In 1966, taking heart from her new notoriety and doubtless out of a wish for “revenge,” Leduc signed a contract with Jean-Jacques Pauvert. She had told Gaston Gallimard about this: “You will no doubt recall having rejected the first 500 pages of Ravages. This text later appeared in a limited edition. It was entitled Thérèse et Isabelle. Quite naturally, I am anxious to inform you that this same text is now scheduled to appear in a standard edition.”
The publisher’s call to order came straight away: “It was due to general agreement that we judged it preferable to postpone the publication of this text, which was at first destined to be part of Ravages. At the time, legal challenge was to be feared, which would have paralyzed this book’s distribution among the bookshops, and so I left you free to publish Thérèse et Isabelle separately, in a private and limited edition, on the understanding that I would retain priority for a broader publication once circumstances allowed. But it was never a question of my rejecting this text.”
Leduc bowed to the publisher’s injunction, although, one must admit that he demonstrated a certain amount of dishonesty that day. Thérèse et Isabelle was swiftly printed by Gallimard and appeared in the bookshops in July 1966.
During the 1950s, unlike Jean Genet, Leduc had not benefited from a “louche” reputation nor from any public support as a famous writer. She had to wait until 1964 for that, when de Beauvoir wrote her preface to La Bâtarde.