Françoise Sagan, the writer who was never old-fashioned
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“SHE HAD HER INAUGURATION in 1954 with a tiny novel, “Good Morning, Sadness”, that scandalized the entire planet. Her loss, after a life and work pleasant and frivolous, scandalized no one but herself.” This was the obituary Françoise Sagan had concocted in 1988, and if in September 2004, shortly before her death, she had been asked to revise it, chances are she would not have changed a word.
She died at sixty-nine on the mat, accused of tax evasion and stigmatised as having been bribed by the oil company Elf to mediate on her behalf with François Mitterrand. Her last books sold, but were not read with much fervour. Her inner loneliness, the driving force behind all her writing, may have been unbearable to her, now stripped of her worldly glamour. Half a century, however, after her “scandalous” appearance, and on such days twenty years ago, Sagan crossed over to the other side in a wave of understanding and love as great as her sensitivity and intelligence, as absolute as her passions.
For the author of “Do you like Brahms?”and of “Deceptive Mirror”, “A Certain Smile” and “Submission”, as in life, so in novels, cigarettes were meant to be smoked, alcohol to be drunk, drugs – hard and soft – to be consumed, money to be spent, and sports cars to spill out onto the highways like wildfire. The daughter of a factory owner, settled from the age of ten on the right bank of Paris, brought up with warmth, though educated in strict Catholic schools, Sagan, without parting with her “bourgeois” literary context, experienced and celebrated her desire for freedom, almost defiantly disregarding the price.
In a way, Sagan was never old-fashioned. And in another, she was the epitome of the modern writer: more important than her books, more famous than her characters – the fickle, immature men and the generally giving women, members of love triangles who are indifferent to the mundane daily lives of the rest of us.
A challenge to the bourgeoisie was her maiden novel, Good Morning, Sadness, which she wrote in the bistros within six months and published under a pseudonym caught by Proust and with a line by Eliar for a title, before she was well into her nineteen years. “I didn’t understand anything then, and even today I can’t attribute the scandal to anything but two silly reasons”, he will confess in 1984 in his autobiographical – and untranslated in Greek – “With my best memories”:
“No one would tolerate that a girl of seventeen, eighteen could make love to a boy her own age without being in love and without being punished for it,”she wrote of her heroine.“Not melting in love and not getting pregnant at the end of the summer was unforgivable. Just as it was unforgivable that the same girl knew of her father’s loves, that they discussed as allies with each other taboo subjects still about the relationships between children and parents.”
The publicity generated by “Good Morning, Sadness” in ’54 – within months its sales soared to 200,000 copies – surpassed even that for Hemingway‘s Nobel Prize. Ever since then, the name of Sagan – that charming “monster”, as François Moriac was quick to describe her – has remained in the collective subconscious alongside that of Bardot, associated with the famous liberation of manners, carelessness and freshness that had invaded post-war and so conservative French society with a vengeance.
What if later premarital love seemed obligatory in the eyes of all? From the onslaught of AIDS and onwards, the 1950s resurfaced wrapped in a veil of poetry and nostalgia. In a way, Sagan was never old-fashioned. And in another, she was the epitome of the modern writer: more important than her books, more famous than her heroes – the fickle, immature men and the generally giving women, members of love triangles who are indifferent to the mundane daily lives of the rest of us.
She herself belonged to no literary generation. Although she coincided with the flowering of nouveau romance, she shared none of the ambitions of its exponents. “I don’t give a damn, she said. Literature was not sacred to Sagan, nor did she ever treat it as a passport to immortality: “I don’t know if I have a place in the history of literature, but I certainly have a place in the history of publishing”. In fact, she worked harder than she admitted; not all her books were “footnoted”, as she self-deprecated, and she treated writing as a “priceless” gift, a pleasure unlike any other.
Or almost none. For, at another point in “With My Best Memories”, he speaks of a source of pleasure and pride that has nothing whatsoever to do with words and inspiration. Sagan is referring to an evening at a casino in Doville. Not the one from which she earned exactly what the only house she ever bought (the one in Normandy, which was later confiscated) cost her, but the one from which she came out of it in debt with only 300 francs! Neither the most triumphant premieres of her plays nor the most rave reviews of her novels offered her the fullness of that evening, she confesses. “The play,”she writes,“requires not only madness or a horrible, incomprehensible vice in the subconscious, it requires composure and will and courage. When you’ve been losing incessantly all afternoon, all week, when you feel like the gods have abandoned you, and suddenly the wheel of fortune turns back in your direction, it takes a tremendous effort to impose yourself and regain your faith, to grab opportunity by the hair and take advantage of it.”
Sagan’s relationship with money was proverbial. “My father taught me right,” she would confess in ’94 to Nouvelle Observateur, recalling the day when her publisher, René Gilliard, advised her to entrust the management of the 500 million francs due to her from Good Morning, Sorrow to her dad. But he reacted as follows: “You’re an adult, aren’t you? Spend it immediately, it’s too dangerous to keep it!” She was right. Do you realize what would have happened to me if I had to save or invest? I would be a horrible bourgeois.”
That’s the only thing no one blamed her for! What respectable bourgeois would have swept the streets of San Tropez, her bare feet alternating with the pedals of a decapodable Ferrari? Who would treat speed “not as a challenge, nor as proof of anything, but as a plunge into happiness”? Who would declare “I refuse to admit or deny that I do cocaine, I have a right to do what I want, it’s in the Constitution”
A life hidden behind a huge blonde fringe, ready and neurotic, generous not only to the heroes she invented but also to the creators who marked her, like Sartre, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Carson McCullers, Billie Holiday, Françoise Sagan had it coming: “I have always been free. As free as a woman can be, free to love a fool, free to live as I wish.”
*Françoise Sagan’s books are published by Zacharopoulos
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