A scene in the recent French biopic devoted to Leduc develops this commonality, by showing de Beauvoir defending Leduc against her censors at Gallimard, accusing them of being unable to bear the idea of a woman speaking openly about sex between women, and insisting on the urgency for abortions — at the time illegal in France — to be a topic that could be written about in both literary and philosophical contexts (Violette 2014).
For Leduc, being involved with literature was part of her experience of sexuality. Early in La Bâtarde, she describes for her readers how, around the age of sixteen, she related to a provincial bookstore:
I also walked in the Place d’Armes on Saturday nights. The lighted storefronts crackled before my eyes. I was attracted, intrigued, spellbound by the yellow covers of the books published by the Mercure de France, by the white covers of the Gallimard books. I selected a title, but I didn’t really believe I was intelligent enough to go into the largest bookstore in town. I had some pocket money with me (money that my mother slipped me without my stepfather’s knowing), I went in. There were teachers, priests, and older students glancing through the uncut volumes. I had so often watched the old lady who served in the shop as she packed up pious objects, as she reached into the window for the things that people pointed out to her. . She took out Jules Romains’ Mort de quelqu’un and looked at me askance. I was too young to be reading modern literature. I read Mort de quelqu’un and smoked a cigarette as I did so in order to savor my complicity with a modern author all the more. . The Saturday after that I stole a book which I didn’t read; but I paid cash for André Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth) and a sculpture of a dead bird. Later, under my bedclothes, when I went back to boarding school, I returned to the barns, to the fruits of André Gide by the glow of a flashlight. As I held my shoe in the shoe shop and spread polish on it, I muttered: “Shoe, I will teach you to feel fervor.” There was no other confidant worthy of my long book-filled nights, my literary ecstasies. (2003, 51–52)
Perhaps we could say that she experiences herself more as a member of a counterpublic than as a member of a public for the literature she explores. She is unable to relate to it in mainstream ways. She is too poor, too uncultivated, too young, too enthusiastic a reader to approach literature appropriately. Her reading is intermingled with other sensual experiences (cigarettes and the smell of shoe polish among them) in a way that enhances her sense of its illicitness. She, like many other alienated young people, often people exploring nonnormative sexual experiences, develops an affiliation with Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, a kind of countercultural classic of the early to mid twentieth century, with its call to a certain kind of sexual dissidence, to an experience of fervent sensuality.
Once she becomes a published writer, Leduc’s relationship to bookstores takes on a different, more anxious cast. Here is a scene described in Mad in Pursuit that took place shortly after the publication of L’Asphyxie in 1946, a book that received only meager and unkind critical notices despite an excerpt having been published in Sartre’s celebrated journal, Les Temps Modernes, and despite having appeared in a collection edited by Albert Camus:
One afternoon I was preparing an assortment of vegetables to make my soup, a wild hope seized me, the knife fell onto my one sad leek. I threw on my clothes. The journey to rue de Bac station was interminable. I arrived in front of the Gallimard bookstore on the Boulevard Raspail, in front of its eclectic windows, completely out of breath. But it must be in them. It wasn’t. The large-format books, the rare editions of Valéry, of Gide, of Apollinaire, disdainful and withdrawn, rejected me utterly. The bastions of modern literature cannot be overthrown just to make way for your little pile of turds. Oh God, how I begged outside those windows. . If I had only been sure of what I was writing, I should have been saved. . Baudelaire and Rimbaud, were they sure of themselves? But I wasn’t Baudelaire, I wasn’t Rimbaud. Ten new books published every day. How can you expect them to display such a flood? An hour, even if it were just for an hour, each of us in turn. . Where has it gone since I dedicated all those copies? Where has it gone to earth? Have the bookstores received it? I should die of shame if I had to ask them. Writing must be a sin, or why should I prefer to conceal it? My guilt was coming back. Window displays and bookstores whispered to me in the night: “You’ll never amount to anything, you’ll never amount to anything at all,” just as my mother had once dinned those words into me in the past. I shall hand in my cards. Hand in your cards to whom? To the bookstores, to their windows, to the publisher. (1999, 72)
Perhaps foolishly, Leduc grants the window of the bookstore run by the publishing house Gallimard a particular kind of sacredness. Given how many famous authors Gallimard published, it was probably unreasonable to expect to find her own first book on display. And yet how is a new, idiosyncratic author of Leduc’s ilk ever to find readers? Idiosyncratic books by idiosyncratic authors often circulate by word of mouth, developing small communities of highly partisan readers. Leduc already knew that this was the case for her first book, as she reveals a bit earlier in the same passage from Mad in Pursuit:
My cheeks still wet with tears, I ran into the antique dealer Hagnauer, who was only too delighted to give me the news that Cocteau had read my book and was telling everyone else to read it. Encouraged, I walked round for hours and hours. I had developed a method: that of the bird’s nester. I slowed down when I was twenty yards away from the bookstore, then I stole up on it very gently so as to surprise my book in the window and receive a shock from it. But all the nests were empty. Except once. Where? The dispiriting window of the Polish bookstore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. How old and worn it looked in the very back row! If I buy it from them, then they’ll take it out of the window; if I buy it from them, it will become a dusty rectangle after I leave. I looked at it for a long time. (71–72)
Cocteau helped her book find readers in informal ways; its formal place in bookstores remained highly tenuous. Leduc knew that at the time Jean Genet’s books circulated in a similar way: Genet’s Miracle of the Rose was recommended to her by Simone de Beauvoir, but was not a text that was easy to find. It only existed in a hand-printed, 475-copy edition published by a small publishing house called Arbelète. De Beauvoir promised Leduc she would leave her copy of the novel for Leduc with the cashier at the Café des Deux Magots:
The lady at the desk of the Deux-Magots handed me the copy of Miracle de la Rose Simone de Beauvoir had left there for me. It’s heavy, I commented. Yes, it’s heavy, the lady at the desk replied. . That evening Miracle de la Rose weighs down my bed. The book is inside a chest, between two covers that fit together. I have brought a deluxe edition home with me: it’s a first. . The size and weight are almost those of a Bible at the foot of a pulpit. They require a lectern, special arrangements. I lean my elbow on the pillow, we tilt, the book and I together, towards the wall, and we begin to give ourselves to one another. I am falling into my reading of Miracle de la Rose as one falls in love. (74)