Picked-Up Pieces (43 page)

Albertine Sarrazin appears in her photograph as a curly-haired, big-eyed
street Arab with a wry tuck of intelligence in the corner of her mouth. The bleak jacket notes state that she was born in Algiers in 1937, and that she was an orphan. She ran away from her foster home at the age of fifteen, was placed in reform school, escaped to Paris, “drifted into a life of theft and prostitution,” and spent the next nine years either in jail or in hiding. In prison she wrote two novels,
La Cavale
and
L’Astragale
, whose publication in Paris in 1965 made her famous and secured her parole. For two years she “lived quietly with her husband Julien in the south of France,” and then died, after a kidney operation, a week before her thirtieth birthday. A female Genet she was not. These two novels, published simultaneously by Grove Press as
The Runaway
and
Astragal
, are not in Genet’s class, either as literary creation or as self-proclamation. Though she refers to her prison guards as “angels” and invokes “St. Duty” and “St. Java,” Mme. Sarrazin shows none of Genet’s myth-making power or the Satanic philosophy that conceives of prison as an inverted Heaven where seraphim swirl in violent rhythms controlled by the Deity-like onanist fantasizing in his cell. This order of originality is well beyond the very young woman who has, she tells us, “only my ball-point to pull me out of the shit and the despair.” Whereas Genet celebrates the brutal, homosexual microcosm of prison as his chosen universe, Mme. Sarrazin describes nothing but daily dreariness and dreams only of escape.

The Runaway
is a very long piece of scarcely disguised autobiography. Its English title inadequately translates the complex associations of
cavale
, a literary word for “mare,” from which has been derived the slang verb
cavaler
, meaning “to run, to decamp, to take a powder.” The translator, Mr. Markmann, confronted with a slangy and idiomatic text, has responded with sprinklings of faintly obsolete and off-key terms like “yack” (for “talk”) and “mitts” (for “hands”) and “nut” and “noodle” (for “head”) and with impossible medleys like “What vision froze the guy in his tracks?” and gauche metonymy like “I Colgate the pearly whites,” to signify tooth-brushing. In fairness, nothing deteriorates quicker in passage than slang, and there is little to suggest that the original French text is very finely nuanced. The first four hundred pages are really quite dull: the housekeeping details of prison cells, a lot of tape-recorder dialogue, a hope to escape and mount the
cavale
that never comes to anything, a succession of cellmates indistinguishable except that some smell worse than others. There are patches of vivid description:

The details of note-smuggling (in candy, via vagina, from mouth to mouth during kisses) are surprising, and there are some interesting psychological touches, as when Anick, the fastidious and reclusive heroine, takes it upon herself to delouse a senile fellow-inmate. But it all comes upon the reader haphazard, worse organized than even a sociologist would do it—the objectified diary of a precocious girl who detests jail yet is unable to stay out of it, whose self-perception is barely emerged from the chaos of self-pity, whose principal activities are stamp-cadging and daydreaming, whose days ebb by amid conversations like:

To be sure, this unstinted dreariness has a mimetic effect of sorts; we become as eager to escape the book as its narrator is to escape prison.

Anick begins her story well after the middle; she is a hardened jailbird when we meet her. The turning point of her life—her falling in love with a man called Zizi during an interval of freedom, and her concomitant conversion from lesbianism—is past, and it figures in the present tense of this novel as a constant pining for him and a futile scheming to rejoin him in the life of burglary they once led. He is in another part of the prison. On his initiative, they get married, winning the privilege of meeting once a week, with glass between them. They can kiss only in the police wagon taking them to and from the interrogations preparatory to their trial. Their final sentence is severe. Zizi is more cautious than Anick, and discourages her hopes of escape. The end of the book, if I understand it, shows her joining him in resignation—“another stroke
through the calendar is not so bad. Slowly the mercury is getting down to zero, and from zero you make a fresh start.” Her
cavale
, her “runaway mare,” has become transformed into the interior escape of imagination. The secret action of this book is the act of its own writing; what Mme. Sarrazin has described, with steadily growing conscious intent, is the process of what we on the outside would call her “rehabilitation.” In the last hundred pages, the writing grows cleaner, the imagery more complex, the plot more active. Her lawyer emerges from the shadows and becomes a character. And she herself gains access to the defiant child she once was: “I try to recapture the basic savor that I found in the hole [the isolation cell] during my adolescence.… I had my shoulder to the wheel of hardships, I made frightening bets against myself; I fasted, I burned myself, I pricked myself.… The hole was a vice, as much a vice as being tattooed or masturbating, a vice that I wanted to savor while I had the chance, and, if possible, to learn to like.” She tells her lawyer, “I’ve been asocial ever since I was born.” Earlier in the book she has tersely referred to her “mother,” in puzzling variance with the dust jacket’s claim that she is an orphan; now she cries out, “I’m a bastard, no one’s child.” Though at times she prays “Let my fury never abate. Let me always keep intact my wrong, my hurtful ways,” an essential perspective has been gained, and an essential peace. “Zi, my love, one day the cycle of days and nights will stop torturing us and turn kind to us again.… The hateful blanket in which I roll myself up will vanish like the cold, and I will gorge myself on sun.” The monotonous texture of the bulk of the book yields to heartfelt exclamations, glimpses of the past, a poetry of “this golden coma of prison where nothing makes a mark.” The process of rehabilitation merges with the process of learning how to write.

The second novel also, femininely, embodies a process—the process of healing.
Astragal
(“anklebone”) begins with the drop from the prison wall whereby Anne, a less slangy Anick, escapes and shatters her ankle, and ends with her walking back toward prison, “hardly limping at all.” In the months between, she has met Julien (the name of Albertine Sarrazin’s actual husband), has been sheltered by him in a series of hideouts, has supported herself by prostitution while he is in jail, and has broken her emotional ties with Rolande, her last female lover. These months of freedom and rescue and healing are, then, the pivotal idyll remembered in
Runaway
. The writing is in every sense happier, and Patsy Southgate’s
translation, comparatively uncluttered by lingo, keeps pace with the brief scenes, the nice ease of prose:

With her new virtuosity, Mme. Sarrazin has no trouble in making the injured foot both a symbolic presence—“I had a new heart in my leg, still irregular, responding inordinately to the other”—and a convincingly painful “stew of shattered bones and flesh.” Though not a sensual writer compared to Violette Leduc or to Colette, she can strike off a fresh phrase quick with the life of the moment. When she and Julien are together, “the ground is under our feet like an island”; of her outgrown lesbianism she simply says, “Rolande was the night light, the daylight is here, I turn it off.” And she can detect, in the classic manner of French analysis of the sentiments, small motions within herself, such as the “cruel ill will” with which she invites Jean, an unloved protector, to zip up her dress as she goes to meet Julien, so Jean will “sniff at my new skin” and “realize that I was … happy; and that he didn’t, that he never could, have anything to do with it.” True, the depths within herself are still out of reach; her recourse to streetwalking seems screened in the telling, her alcoholism can be deduced from the text but is unacknowledged by it, the will toward self-destruction is never disentangled from her wild will toward freedom, and a certain innocent egotism flattens the other characters, including and especially her hero, Julien.

These two books, for all their developing skill, exist less as literature than as life, as the record of a life that against crippling odds fought through to expression and, in its last two years, success—“she lived quietly with her husband Julien in the south of France.” While the novels of Genet insist that the male criminal dwells in a world apart, with a morality and rationale of its own, Albertine Sarrazin’s world is not readily distinguishable from that of respectable women: a world of momentary but keenly felt pleasures—a cigarette, a sunbath, a bowl of fruit on a linen tablecloth—in which the chief enemy is boredom rather than (as with men) defeat, in which a prevalent stoicism is qualified by fits of
panic, in which a monogamous passion is qualified by phases, almost absent-minded, of wantonness, in which powerful impulses, with a reckless lightness amazing to a male, override conventions. The laws Albertine Sarrazin broke were not, one feels, real to her; only the policemen and warders were real. At the end of
Astragal
, arrest arrives with lyric suddenness, in a courteous flurry:

Now she is gone, her redeemed life cut short, and again it is not her fault.

S
CARS ON THE
S
OUL
, by Françoise Sagan, translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin. 141 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1974.

T
HE
B
RIDGE OF
B
EYOND
, by Simone Schwarz-Bart, translated from the French by Barbara Bray. 246 pp. Atheneum, 1974.

In the
Herald Tribune
of April 14, 1955, under the headline “ ‘
BONJOUR TRISTESSE
’
PRODIGY ARRIVES FOR
10
DAYS IN CITY
,” nineteen-year-old Françoise Sagan, after informing the interviewer that she wrote her sensationally successful novel in one lazy month, confided some thoughts on existentialism and then added, deferentially, “But I am no philosopher. Sometimes I think philosophical thoughts when I have nothing better to do.” Well, a generation later, Mlle. Sagan evidently has nothing better to do, for her new (and eighth) novel,
Scars on the Soul
, is full of philosophizing and devoid of almost everything else. A fiction of sorts unfolds between pages of musing and self-display: two gorgeously languid characters from her play,
Castle in Sweden
, the van Milhem siblings
Sebastian and Eleanor, are revived ten years later and allowed to drift through a plot whose subsidiary characters keep dropping away (one commits suicide, others are abandoned or forgotten by the author) like petals from a vase of tired roses. The plot is in fact a subplot; the real plot, and the more exciting one, traces the chic, bored, speed-crazy ex-prodigy’s attempts, through Normandy vacations and automobile accidents and spells of acedia, to push this little book through to its ending. End it does, with Françoise Sagan, as a character, in the arms of her paper hero, and this bit of origami may be, in her mind, her ticket of admission to the ranks of the New Novelists. Amid her
pensées
are some sentences devoted to these now avuncular experimenters:

Whereas readers of
Scars on the Soul
will put down the book convinced, if of nothing else, that it gave the author a headache to write it.

One must be fair. There is a dainty wit, a parody of decadence, in the delineation of the ethereally incestuous and cheerfully parasitical van Milhems. Not all of the author’s
aperçus
are banal; she knows her world of night clubs and vacation villas and remorselessly self-conscious love. The book reads easily; it is
company
. The author’s cry of personal crisis, which leads to a novel that haltingly invents itself under our eyes, feels sincere; she is honest even in her lameness and limpness of thought, and her self-exposure, as “someone tapping away at her typewriter because she’s afraid of herself and the typewriter and the mornings and the evenings and everything else,” has its fascination, as do, on this side of the Atlantic, the lurching franknesses of Mailer and Vonnegut. However, there is about
Scars on the Soul
an arrogant flimsiness that invites a quarrel, just as the generous margins and blank interchapter pages invite contentious jotting. “Oh, tush!” and “Ho-hum,” I discover myself to have written, respectively, beside these pieces of Mlle. Sagan’s wisdom: