Au Revoir, Tristesse

Lessons in Happiness from French Literature

Viv Groskop

• Publisher: ABRAMS Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781683357971
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Groskop skillfully juggles memoir, biography, philosophy, and literary criticism to create a delightful tour through some of French literature's greats." —Madeline Miller, New York Times –bestselling author Like many people the world over, Viv Groskop wishes she was a little more French. A writer, comedian, and journalist, Groskop studied the language obsessively starting at age 11, and spent every vacation in France, desperate to escape her Englishness and to have some French chic rub off on her. In Au Revoir, Tristesse, Groskop mixes literary history and memoir to explore how the classics of French literature can infuse our lives with joie de vivre and teach us how to say goodbye to sadness. From the frothy hedonism of Colette and the wit of Cyrano de Bergerac to the intoxicating universe of Marguerite Duras and the heady passions of Les Liaisons dangereuses, this is a love letter to great French writers. With chapters on Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, and of course Françoise Sagan, this is a delectable read for book lovers everywhere. "Ms. Groskop is a skilled raconteuse who brings people—and the page—to life. She writes with a self-deprecating appreciation of the Frenchman or -woman manqué(e) that lurks in us all. You don't have to be a savant to enjoy this book... Au Revoir, Tristesse will make a witty, seductive companion." — The Wall Street Journal "Groskop's combination of her own memories, what the novels meant to her at different stages in her life, her description of the authors, along with her description of the novels, will have readers eagerly turning the book's pages." — Forbes

1. Don’t judge yourself for being young and foolish: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

(Or: Interfering in your father’s love life can have dire consequences)

Françoise Sagan’s supremely indifferent expression as she plowed her car into someone’s briefcase without really even noticing was the moment that cemented my longing for France and Frenchness. And it motivated me to seek out Sagan’s work and Bonjour Tristesse, her 1954 bestseller, written when she was seventeen, published when she was eighteen, an international bestseller by the time she was nineteen. This book went on to sell five million copies worldwide and was translated into twenty-two languages. Beat that, J. K. Rowling! (Actually, the Harry Potter series has sold five hundred million copies and is available in over eighty languages. But that didn’t take two months to write when J. K. was seventeen.) The happiness lesson of this book? To be young is a wonderful thing. But you rarely realize that when you are young. I am avoiding writing, “Youth is wasted on the young.” My grandmother used to say this often and wistfully, and it always irritated me. It’s true. But it’s of no help to know this when you are young.

Sagan exemplifies the idea of youthful indifference. I came to think of my screen memory of Sagan’s daredevil driving as “Le Grand Bof,” the careless driver’s version of La Grande Bouffe, the 1973 film about a group of friends who planned to eat themselves to death. Françoise Sagan was, I decided, the queen of “bof ” in a country where you are liable to hear the word “bof ” several dozen times a day. You will not find “bof ” in a dictionary. For anyone who has not heard a French person say “bof,” it is basically an utterance that can mean anything from “I just don’t care” to “No one in the entire world cares” or “I care so little that I don’t even acknowledge the existence of the idea of caring.” It is the supreme proclamation of disregard. In a restaurant it can mean “We don’t have any fries left, and we don’t have to justify to you why that is.” (Bof.) In a relationship it can mean “I don’t care whether you live or die.” (Eh bof.) And in the case of Sagan, it can mean “Did I just nearly run that man over with my car? Oh, who cares.” (Triple bof.) Being able to say “bof ” sometimes—or even quite a lot of the time—is the key to a good life. I liked Sagan principally because she was 100 percent bof. There’s a lightbulb that goes on for lots of us at different times of our lives: the moment of inspiration that ties you to a place or an identity. For some people it comes through literature or a wonderful meal or a glass of wine or the feeling that a beautiful piece of music gives you. Or it comes through your admiration of a person who is ambivalent about road traffic accidents.

Bonjour Tristesse is a novel about a teenager whose life takes a disastrous path when she leaves Paris for the summer. Being the living incarnation of that certain kind of dangerous joie de vivre became a charm and a curse for Sagan. Writing in the New Yorker in 1998, Sebastian Faulks, a British novelist, described Sagan as portraying “an idealized version of French living.” This was easily one of the reasons for the critical and commercial success of Bonjour Tristesse, whose tone played as well abroad as it did at home. This was a novel about a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl having sex on (or at least near) the beach in the South of France in the sunshine. Who doesn’t like the idea of that? And it wasn’t written by some dirty old man. It was written by an actual seventeen-year-old girl. Because of Sagan’s youth and her looks (and, let’s be honest, her gender)—plus the fact that the novel was fun and sexy—the writer-as-personality became the focus rather than the writing. It was soon a well-known trope that if you asked French people in a survey, “Who is Françoise Sagan?” they would reply that she was a film star. Through no fault or design of her own, she became a celebrity first and foremost. Sagan said, “In 1954 I was being asked to choose between two roles: the scandalous writer or the bourgeois schoolgirl. I was neither of those things. I would rather have been a scandalous young girl and a bourgeois writer.” She went on to say that at the time she decided to do the only thing she could think of: just do whatever she wanted. For her this meant taking it “too far,” embracing excess.

One area where she could be safely and harmlessly excessive was in the way that she used language, and she frequently teased journalists and interviewers by giving them the outrageous sound bites they craved and then later completely contradicting herself. This is a woman who gave good quote: “A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.” “Money may not buy happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.” Sometimes this was in jest or self-mockery. Sometimes it revealed perhaps more than she intended. When she was asked to write an obituary for her own life, she wrote: “Her death was a scandal only for herself.” Is there anything sadder than that?

It’s hard to read about Sagan’s life without imagining her as some sort of caricature. You have to wonder (as we will see later with Marguerite Duras and Colette, two other female writers who became twentieth century “brands”) where the private person ended and where the “writer-created-for-public-consumption” began. And whether these two selves ended up merging into something unrecognizable. Turning writers into “personalities” is a hallmark of every culture, but I remember being surprised to discover, when I first began to understand conversations in French about celebrities and authors, quite how gossipy the French were. I had been led to understand that the British were the absolute worst for this kind of thing, and so I was shocked to find that the French were just as gripped as everyone back home by tales of dissolute behavior, drugs, adultery, and dying from dropping your hair dryer in the bath. This was one of the first big tests of my French, where my pen pal explained to me who Claude François was: “Mais comment ça se peut? Tu ne connais pas Claude François? Il est mort dans sa baignoire.” “How can that be? You don’t know who Claude François is? He died in the bath.” This always stood out to me as a lesson in what people become famous for. Claude François was not introduced to me as an accomplished singer and national treasure; he was introduced to me as a man who had died in the bath. Truly the French are just as bad as the rest of us.

I can see, though, why anyone might confuse Sagan with a fictional character or a movie star. After all, she encouraged this, really. There is a thin line between Françoise, the carefree, fun-loving young woman who wrote a novel, and Cécile, the carefree, fun-loving antiheroine who, from the first page of Bonjour Tristesse, is obsessed with the distinction between happiness and sadness. “In the summer in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy.” Later on, sadness is seen as an emotion so distant and unlikely that it is “strange” and “new.” Cécile is the first-person narrator of the story. She is spending the summer with her father, Raymond, in the South of France, where they’ve rented a villa. Cécile and Raymond have an unusual relationship: Cécile’s mother died when she was young, and Raymond has pretty much left her to her own devices. She harbors very little resentment about this. This aspect is the only part of this novel that did not ring true for me. Although I guess Cécile is in denial about a lot of things, so she might as well be in denial about the fact that her father has behaved pretty irresponsibly toward her. In fact, maybe this is the whole point of the novel, this refusal to see who or what is really to blame for things.

Also present is her father’s mistress, Elsa, who is only about ten years older than Cécile. The two seem fond of each other but not overly close. Elsa comes across as someone Cécile finds vaguely amusing and a bit stupid. Suddenly—and unexpectedly—Anne arrives. Anne is an old family friend who knew Cécile’s mother. She attempts to treat Cécile in a maternal, reproachful way, and Cécile is not keen on this. It’s soon clear, though, that Anne has designs on Raymond and is not going to let Elsa get in the way. Anne is very self-possessed and is—crucially—a fashion designer, so she knows how to dress in order to win a man away from a younger rival. This is how I read it, anyway. I imagine Anne as very pouty and hair-flicky in an Anne-Bancroft-as-Mrs.-Robinson kind of way. Elsa didn’t stand a chance.

Raymond and Anne announce their engagement, and Elsa storms off. Cécile is appalled, especially when Anne starts lecturing her about the relationship she has with Cyril, her summer boyfriend (who she’s having sex with, thereby preventing any studying, although to be fair, sex or no sex, it’s pretty unlikely Cécile would do any studying anyway). Cécile grows so annoyed by Anne’s interventions, and the prospect of how much worse they’ll get when they return to Paris as a “family,” that she hatches a plan. Cécile finds Elsa and persuades her to seduce Raymond again. She makes sure Anne sees them meeting up. Anne is horrified and drives off. Later—massive spoiler alert—Raymond and Cécile find out over the last few paragraphs of the book that she has been killed in a car crash.

What’s really interesting is that for some novelists, the conclusion would actually be the start of a novel—the aftermath of an incident that has had an unforeseen outcome. This is the breathtaking chutzpah of this novel, that perhaps only a very young (and arrogant?) person could have written: it carries you along in a haze of cigarette smoke, early-evening glasses of wine, and the aroma of sunscreen on warm skin and then drops you from the top of a cliff and leaves you for dead. Sagan does to the reader exactly what fate (or Cécile?) does to Anne.

Is it a betrayal? Or is it what we were hoping for all along? After all, isn’t Cécile’s insouciant approach to life insufferable? Why does she get to be so happy when she really isn’t that nice of a person? Ultimately the conclusion is ambivalent. You could argue that Cécile has got her comeuppance for not caring about anything: she will surely spend the rest of her life haunted by her actions and by this event. Or you could argue that it won’t affect Cécile at all (I do think she will at least smoke a bit more heavily) and that the only person who has suffered is Anne, the most likable—and most caring and innocent—character in the book. Or you could argue that no one is wrong and no one is right. Cécile could have been more caring and less calculating and Anne would still have ended up driving off a cliff. The question you are left asking is “How do we live with the suffering we may have caused?”

The lesson about youth is key even if it’s an ambivalent one. Perhaps Cécile is protected by her youthful idiocy: she can pretend that it’s OK because she never liked Anne that much anyway. Or perhaps the ending represents the shattering of her youth. It’s in the moments running up to Anne’s death that we see the idyllic nature of Cécile’s existence: she can do what she likes, be whoever she likes, and to hell with the consequences. She doesn’t even realize how good she had it until it’s too late. This is a common theme in French quotes about happiness. There’s a famous line by Jacques Prévert, a poet who was a contemporary of Paul Éluard (the one whose words inspired the title of Bonjour Tristesse): “I recognize happiness by the sound that it makes upon departure.” Or as someone else once said without having to be a giant of French poetry, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

In literary terms, this novel asks another question—and it’s one that, I think, influenced the reception of Bonjour Tristesse and the furor around it: “Is it OK for a novelist to be ambivalent about a terrible incident?” Sagan leaves it for us to judge whether Anne’s death is a random accident, a suicide, or something close to manslaughter. Or perhaps it’s an unfortunate combination of all three? Sure, Cécile does not explicitly cause her death, but you could argue that she created all the conditions that led up to it. It doesn’t seem as if the ending is really about happiness in life, in fact quite the opposite. But it does ask a profound question: “Who is responsible for our happiness?” Cécile attempts to control too much of her own happiness and will leave nothing to chance. She attempts to engineer the fate of her father and of Anne. And she fails disastrously, surely creating a situation that will have consequences for the rest of her life. She’s going to end up feeling worse about Anne’s death than she ever would have felt if Anne had become her stepmother? Somehow Sagan creates an atmosphere where judgment is suspended. We forgive Cécile for her attempts at massaging fate. She was young. What else was she supposed to do?

Interestingly, although Sagan has always been described as someone who writes brilliantly about the folly of youth (and Bonjour Tristesse is one of the best coming-of-age novels ever written), her portraits of people in early middle age are also spot-on. The characters Sagan writes about represent the quintessential Frenchness d’un certain âge (of a certain age—i.e., middle-aged) and I observed this for myself when I first spent time in France in the late 1980s. People in their forties and fifties seemed younger than people of that age in the UK. They worried more about what they looked like. Women blow-dried their hair. Everyone smoked. I once saw an extremely chic Frenchwoman, an aunt of my friend, completely lose her mind because her pack of Gitanes went missing off the mantelpiece for about thirty minutes. I learned this lesson: if you’re French, even when you become quite old, you are still allowed to behave like a spoiled brat from time to time. Petulance keeps you young.

Described as “a vulgar, sad little book” in a review in the Spectator magazine in 1955, Bonjour Tristesse was written when Sagan was still at school; in fact, she said she wrote it when she was supposed to be studying. She called it “a simple story about a girl making love with a boy, surrounded by certain complications.” She said later that she had told all her friends that she was writing a novel—when she wasn’t—and that “by lying about it, I ended up writing.” She sent a manuscript to two publishing houses. Éditions Julliard responded by sending a telegram, as her telephone was broken: “Call Julliard urgently.” She went into the office, they made her an offer, she drank a large glass of cognac. She had to assure the publisher that “there was no kind of sinister story like that in my own life” (i.e., that she wasn’t libeling any adulterers in her family) and that the novel was not autobiographical. Although, as she said later, “Is there any other kind of novel?” Her mother’s response upon learning that her daughter was now officially a writer: “It would be better if you could come down for dinner on time and brush your hair occasionally.” Her father just laughed.

In Le Figaro, François Mauriac, thought of by many as France’s greatest living writer at the time, called her “a charming little monster.” She soon came to resent her infamy and the idea of “le phénomène Sagan, le mythe Sagan” (the Sagan phenomenon, the Sagan myth): “Everyone wants to be thought of as a normal person, to be spoken to normally and not be repeatedly asked whether you like noodles or some other banal nonsense.” Sagan said she found the interest in her difficult and that “the photographers were appalling.” She particularly resented being expected to recycle amusing anecdotes in interviews. As a result, she kept her mouth shut and acquired a reputation for being sad, which she wasn’t at all.

To be fair to the public and press of the time, it must have been difficult to know what to make of Françoise Sagan. The novel itself is unusual and subversive, even sixty-five years after it was written. It is a portrait of a strangely amoral, self-interested universe but one that is hard to judge and seems peculiarly seductive, perhaps because we can all remember what it is like to be a self-obsessed teenager who thinks that they know it all. It is a spectacularly beautiful novel and survives multiple rereadings (not least because it is a very quick read). When we become adults, we realize how silly we were at that age, but I think we also slightly regret not being able to hang on to the determination and blind self-belief of that age. The true attraction of Sagan’s narrator, seventeen-year-old Cécile, is that she is a hedonist: she does what she wants, to please herself. She knows it, and she’s OK with it: “My love of pleasure and happiness constitutes the only consistent aspect of my character.” This is why I take the title of the novel as ironic, playful, or even a bit sick. “Bonjour tristesse” is a pose for Cécile. In truth, nothing gets in her way. It’s not even clear if Anne’s death will puncture her love of pleasure and happiness.

I love how plain-talking Françoise Sagan is as a novelist. When she speaks through Cécile, she is a real bitch. Cécile, for example, considers her father to be a bit of an idiot because he disdains ugliness. The consequence of this is that he ends up hanging out with stupid people a lot. Because, Sagan suggests, beauty and intelligence do not go hand in hand. I often wonder if we are supposed to infer something about the low intelligence—and therefore high beauty—of her father’s companion Elsa when we find out that she has come to the South of France at the height of summer without any sunscreen and therefore is red and peeling within days. Cécile on Elsa: “She had, to her credit, done the best she could with her dried-out hair and sunburnt skin but the result was not brilliant. Fortunately she did not seem to realize this.”

There’s something almost close to the psychopathic portrait of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho in Bonjour Tristesse. Cécile says that she only cares about happiness, but she also seems to observe psychological states as if from a distance, almost as if they’re a pantomime for her. On Anne and Raymond: “They were both smiling and looking happy. I was impressed by that. Happiness has always seemed to me to be a validation, to represent a successful outcome.” Sometimes she seems to be parroting the thoughts and feelings of others: “She was gradually going to make of us the husband and daughter of Anne Larsen, which meant that we would become civilized, well-mannered, happy people. For she would make us happy.”

So it’s clear that to some extent this is an amoral book. It’s hard, though, to read it as immoral or shocking. One of the most recent translations of Bonjour Tristesse (Penguin Modern Classics, I am looking at you) gleefully informs us that “explicit sexual scenes” were removed from the first English language edition when it came out. But now the “uncensored text” can appear “in full.” Exciting! Except guess what, it isn’t. I can’t even begin to guess what the censored bits were. Yes, it’s clear that this seventeen-year-old girl has sex with her boyfriend, the unfortunately named Cyril. But there is no explicit description of sex and really nothing here is any racier than Flaubert describing Madame Bovary’s carriage rocking back and forth as it bounces across the paving stones of Rouen.

A side note on Cyril, who despite his name is a superb character in the novel. But why does he have to be called Cyril? Cyril is clearly not a weird name to French people, for some reason. I don’t know how it is in American English, but it is not a hot name in British English. It’s reminiscent of the line in When Harry Met Sally when Harry talks about Sheldon: “A Sheldon can do your income taxes. If you need a root canal, Sheldon’s your man. But humpin’ and pumpin’ is not Sheldon’s strong suit.” I feel that Cyril shares the same problem as Sheldon. But clearly Françoise Sagan disagrees, and I have to guess that she knows way more about sexy French men than I do.

If this novel feels autobiographical and intimately observed, it’s hard not to look at Sagan’s family and wonder if it is about them. Clearly, the plot and the circumstances are invented. But the tension and the discomfort are not. I’m afraid to say that there is plenty to suggest that Françoise Sagan’s family were unbearable. I suspect she was too. She was born Fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Happiness is . . . pretending to be French
• 1. Don’t judge yourself for being young and foolish: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan: (Or: Interfering in your father’s love life can have dire consequences)
• 2. When memories visit you, soak them up: À La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust: (Or: Find excuses to eat your favorite cake)
• 3. Sometimes you’ve just got to make the most of what you’ve got: Gigi by Colette: (Or: Don’t let someone publish your work under the name Willy)
• 4. No one can be truly happy while others suffer: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: (Or: There are times when you need to write in your underpants)
• 5. Self-deceit is the surest path to misery: Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos: (Or: Do not use your naked lover as a writing desk)
• 6. Do not judge your own happiness—just let it be: L’Amant by Marguerite Duras: (Or: Avoid excessive alcohol consumption)
• 7. True happiness may involve quite a lot of hypocrisy: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: (Or: Beware people who dump you by leaving a note in a basket of apricots)
• 8. Our greatest weaknesses conceal our greatest strengths: Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand: (Or: Be proud of your huge nose)
• 9. It’s all very well to be ambitious as long as you are willing to pay the price: Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant: (Or: The bigger the moustache, the greater the fall)
• 10. Social climbing rarely pays off, but you’ll probably want to do it anyway: Le Rouge et Le Noir by Stendhal: (Or: Don’t flirt with the woman who pays you to teach her children Latin)
• 11. If you’re going to behave badly, then do it in style: La Cousine Bette by Honoré de Balzac: (Or: Use your disappointing looks to fuel a campaign of revenge against your more attractive cousin)
• 12. Freedom matters more than anything: L’Étranger by Albert Camus: (Or: Don’t take a gun to the beach)
• Conclusion: Happiness is not feeling that you have to pretend to be French
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Other Writers
• Recommended Reading