Françoise Sagan, the Great Interrogator of Morality

It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can become fate. The fiction lays a fetter on the life. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in “The Great Gatsby.” Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters; the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. It is as though they have crushed our illusions about human destiny. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it.

The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death, in 2004, were full of the sense of this failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, which was published when she was just nineteen. In that book, “Bonjour Tristesse,” she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of postwar Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and amorality of her life that interested the obituary writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine, Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. “Bonjour Tristesse” concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving forms part of the legend of her life, sustained severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny was palpable.

The hedonism and amorality of “Bonjour Tristesse” is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense, Sagan is far more of a classicist than others of her existentialist brethren, such as Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioral norms, but in “Bonjour Tristesse” those norms are as much psychic as they are societal. Cécile, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Cécile’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it intrinsic? If not, does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Sagan’s brief and disturbing novel.

Cécile and her father, Raymond, have decided to rent a summer villa on the Côte d’Azur for two months. Raymond is bringing his girlfriend, Elsa, along for the holiday, though Cécile is anxious that the reader should not disapprove: “I must explain this situation at once, or it might give a false impression. My father was forty, and had been a widower for fifteen years.” Notice that it is Raymond who has been bereaved, not Cécile herself: she tells us only that she had been at boarding school until two years earlier. She recalls her father’s embarrassment at her ugly dress and plaited hair when he came to collect her from the station. It is as though they had not seen each other for years; as though Cécile, between the ages of two and fifteen, was an orphan. “And then in the car his sudden triumphant joy because he saw I had his eyes, his mouth, and I was going to be for him the dearest, most marvellous of toys.”

At the villa, the trio are contentedly idle. They swim and sunbathe; they are untroubled by a sense of duty or compunction. Raymond does beach exercises to diminish his belly. The beautiful, vapid, red-haired Elsa badly burns her skin. Cécile, who has recently failed her exams, lies on the beach, running sand through her fingers: “I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer.” One day, a young man capsizes his sailing boat in their cove. This is Cyril, an ardent, good-looking university student, who offers to teach Cécile how to sail. He is the ideal prospect for a summer romance.

Chance, impulse, happenstance: this is how life unfolds in the world of Raymond and Cécile. They do not concern themselves with order and structure, the resistance to certain desires and the aspiration toward certain goals. Even Elsa merely submits to the sun’s power to burn her. Is this the correct way to live? The question does not arise; there is no one to ask it. Until, that is, Raymond announces one evening that he has invited a woman named Anne Larsen to stay. The first thing we learn about Anne is that she was a friend of Cécile’s dead mother. With the mother, the whole lost world of order, nurture, and morality is invoked. Anne is the emissary of that world: “I knew that once she was there it would be impossible for any of us to relax completely,” Cécile says. “Anne gave a shape to things and a meaning to words that my father and I preferred to ignore. She set a standard of good taste and fastidiousness which one could not help noticing in her sudden withdrawals, the look on her face, and her hurt silences.” Anne is beautiful, sophisticated, successful; and, unlike Cécile, Raymond, and Elsa, she is an adult, with an adult’s power of censure and moral judgment.

Cyril, too, is an adult—he is shocked by Raymond and Elsa’s ménage, and apologizes to Cécile for kissing her. “You have no protection against me. . . . I might be the most awful cad for all you know,” he says, in a most un-cad-like way. When Anne arrives, it is clear that she means to take Raymond and Cécile in hand. It is clear, too, that she is in love with Raymond, and that Raymond has reached for her in a bid to escape the childlike emotional world that he inhabits. Elsa is dispatched; the mature, glacial Anne is installed. Soon she and Raymond announce their plans to marry; immediately, Anne begins to impose her will on Cécile. She orders her to eat more, to study in her room instead of going to the beach, to cease outright her relations with Cyril. Is this love or hatred? Is it nurture or control? Is it what Cécile has missed out on by not having a mother, or what her motherlessness has exposed her to?

Sagan records clearly the new regime’s effect on Cécile: “It was this I held against Anne: she kept me from liking myself. I . . . had been forced by her into self-criticism and a guilty conscience.” In one sense, then, morality is a form of self-hatred; it is a wound one assuages by wounding others in precisely the same way. But Anne has done something else—she has stolen Cécile’s father, her one source of unconditional love. Raymond is now estranged from his daughter; he has disarmed and abandoned her. Cécile the divided girl is forced into immorality: she wishes to get rid of Anne and regain Raymond. Her actual powerlessness gives rise to fantasies of power, and these thoughts cause her to oscillate between hatred and terrible guilt. Here, then, is an indictment of morality, at least as it is lived by Anne. Anne has fomented violence in Cécile’s pacific nature. By controlling her, and by interfering with her source of love, she has given her the capacity to do wrong.

This is a masterly portrait that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic consequences of different forms of upbringing. One day, Anne locks Cécile in her room, after an argument about schoolwork. At first, Cécile panics, and flings herself at the door like a wild animal. “This was my first contact with cruelty.” Then her heart is hardened, her duplicity sealed: “I lay stretched out, on my bed, and began to plan my revenge.” The form this revenge takes occupies the final section of the book, and is almost theatrical in its psychological grandeur. Cécile chooses as her tools her father’s childishness, Anne’s intransigence, Elsa’s vanity, and Cyril’s responsible nature, and with them she forges a plot in which each of the four is utterly at her mercy. As a dramatist, she experiences, for the first time, complete power over others. Her plot is tragic and bitter, but it plays uninterrupted to its end. Neither right nor wrong winds up the victor of this battle. It is insight, the writer’s greatest gift, that wins.

Sagan’s second novel, “A Certain Smile,” is in many ways a sequel to “Bonjour Tristesse.” Several of the familiar themes are there: the search for and betrayal of the lost mother; the double nature of father/lover and lover/brother; the defense of boredom or nothingness as a moral position more truthful than conventionality. Dominique, a law student at the Sorbonne, meets Luc, the married uncle of her boyfriend, Bertrand. Luc and his kindly wife, Françoise, take Dominique under their wing, for she is uncared-for and alone, the daughter of provincial parents rendered more remote by their unassuageable grief over the death, some years earlier, of “a son,” as Dominique puts it. Like Cécile, Dominique struggles to maintain the dignity of her own reality, to assert its truth, however abnormal other people might claim to find it.

Luc quickly begins to make advances toward Dominique, even as Françoise envelopes her in mother-love. Dominique profits from their attention but can find no moral path through it, for the two forms of affection—sexual and parental—are confused. Luc proposes that Dominique come away with him and have a brief affair, at the end of which he will return to Françoise. Once again, the father figure is identified with an aberrant morality that results in the girl’s betrayal of the mother figure. More important, he denies her emotional reality: according to Luc, his affair with Dominique can proceed only on the basis that she does not love him.

The nature of love is the novel’s central preoccupation. The uncanny maturity that made Sagan’s name as a novelist is most strongly in evidence in her astute portrayal of love as a psychical event that has its roots in family life and the early formation of personality. To the modern reader, Luc’s conduct toward Dominique has strong undercurrents of abuse: her violent emotional trauma in the aftermath of the affair, and the novel’s exquisitely ambivalent ending, go far beyond poignancy or even frankness. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!” Dominique finds herself repeating, without knowing why. Sagan’s sense of emotional tragedy is indeed that of the great dramatists.

“Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters,” Sagan said in an interview, shortly before the publication of “A Certain Smile.” In “Bonjour Tristesse,” this tenet is illustrated almost sculpturally, when Cécile describes the three adults standing on the stairs the night Raymond transfers his affections from Elsa to Anne: “I remember the scene perfectly. First of all, in front of me, Anne’s golden neck and perfect shoulders, a little lower down my father’s fascinated face and extended hand, and, off in the background, Elsa’s silhouette.” These two novels, so spare and rigorous, so artistically correct, so thorough in their psychological realism, are the highest expression of the triangular purity of their author’s strange and beautiful esthétique.

This essay was drawn from “Coventry: Essays,” which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in September.