Writing Women

The picture must have given many a page-flipper pause. Spread across two pages of the Paris weekly Elle were the faces of 70 women. At first glance they might have been graduates of the Cordon Bleu cookery school, characters in a police line-eup, culture seekers at the Sorbonne, or simply guests at an unaccountably manless cocktail party. The truth was much more improbable. They were working novelists.

Once the role of women in French literature was limited to giving male writers something to write about. Madame de La Fayette (who in 1678 wrote the first French novel, La Princesse de Cleves), Madame de Stael, George Sand and a handful of other women did write, and very well, but they were exceptions. The greatest exception of all was Colette (1873-1954), one of the finest of all French stylists, whose women were always too good for men, but not good enough to do without them. In the path cleared by Colette, an army is now marching.

Women mothered almost one out of every three novels appearing in France last year, and delivered more than half the year's crop of early (first or second) novels.

Flesh & the Devil. Since the war more women than men have won the prestigious Prix Femina (awarded by an all-woman jury), and more than 60 novels by women were thought to have enough merit to become candidates for the major literary awards. In a class by themselves are the prizewinning historical studies--51-year-old Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian's Memoirs (TIME, Nov. 29) and 38-year-old Zoe Oldenbourg's The Cornerstone (TIME, Jan. 10). But, like Colette, few of the ladies write historicals or go to libraries for material. They supply their own, proving themselves much bolder practitioners of the entre-les-draps (between-the-sheets) school of literature than men.

Many of the books are written in the first person and carry with them the tang and immediacy of confessions. France's most successful novel last year was Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), which will be published in the U.S. this month. In one season its talented, 18-year-old author, Francoise Sagan, became a celebrity, and her book's haunting title became part of the French language. Author Sagan's lucid young heroine leads a freewheeling existence on the Riviera with her freewheeling father, until one of his mistresses tries to marry him. The girl's intrigues split the couple and lead to the older woman's suicide. The book ends where the beautiful young heroine's maturity begins: "Only, when I am in my bed, at dawn, with only the noise of cars in Paris, my memory sometimes betrays me: the summer returns and all its recollections. Anne, Anne! I repeat this name very low for a very long time in the dark. Then something rises within me that I greet by its name, my eyes closed: 'Bonjour Tristesse.'"

France's famed Roman Catholic novelist, Francois Mauriac, said the book was clearly written by the devil, and that did not harm its sales. He might have said the same of many other Frenchwomen's novels, notably 32-year-old Danielle Hunebelle's Philippine. The pretty young thing of 20 who tells the story manages to seduce a man of more than 50 after failing with his wife. "Had anyone objected," the heroine declares, that loving "leads to hell, I would have replied that one wins one's soul in losing it."

The latest novel by 47-year-old Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins, is now the sensation of Paris (an earlier De Beauvoir novel has just appeared in the U.S.--TIME, Feb. 7). In December Les Mandarins (roughly, The Intellectuals) won France's fattest literary prize, the Goncourt. Novelist Albert Camus and Author de Beauvoir's great and good friend, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, are thinly disguised principals. "These new Platos," one critic wrote, "talk slang like street cleaners, express themselves as sewer diggers no longer express themselves."

Love & Deepened Voices. Not all French women writers are as fiercely intellectual as Simone de Beauvoir or as sensationally sexy as the kiss-and-write girls. Louise de Vilmorin, 48, author of the brilliant little tragicomic gem, Madame De (TIME, Oct. 11), writes books that are always impeccably elegant, and 47-year-old Renee Massip's La Regente is a sensitive psychological study of an unhappy girl and a domineering mother. French women writers, as diverse in personality as in subject matter, range from glamorous Silvia Monfort, 30, whose Droit Chemin is about a professor who tries to command people as he commands ideas, to Danielle Roland, 38, the retiring wife of a physician, who wrote a moving fantasy (L'Huissier et le Sergent) of a Milquetoast dreaming about strength.

Whatever their faults, the novels have astonishing qualities. If many French women writers happily strip in public, that may be because, as 23-year-old Novelist Elisabeth Trevol puts it: "We are afraid to write a woman's book, so we try to deepen our voices. We discover how easy and amusing it is to talk of things 'taboo.' That shamelessness is a bit forced." But the majority of the women novelists, even the beginners, are sure-handed craftswomen. The best of them do not trade on their femininity, want to be judged as writers. Says Dominique Aubier, a perceptive lady critic and novelist: "The book arrives alone . . . but it's signed. The first name is enough. The effect is magic . . . The critics think more of the sex than of the text. But [literature] is not the privilege of one sex, and the liberty or joy of living not a right of birth. We are taking it."

Just how creative French women writers can be was demonstrated by the 70 novelists in the Elle picture. While turning out 256 novels, they also bore 82 babies.

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