A certain life

When she was 20, about two years after publishing her best-selling novel, "Bonjour Tristesse," Francoise Sagan was interviewed by the literary journal The Paris Review. It's clear from the text that the interviewers had a hard time swallowing the brazen girl who had sold millions of books and become rich overnight. She was the antithesis to the respectable, intellectual literary milieu and took a stance that was totally out of bounds: She was contemptuous of the bourgeoisie. Asked why she had written the book, she replied: "Instead of leaving for Paris with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel." The interviewers asked sarcastically if she was making an effort to improve her style, to which she replied that she had worked on the book for three or four months and had written for only two or three hours a day. "It's a good way to make a living," she said provocatively. In response, the interviewers asked patronizingly if she distinguished between serious writing and writing for money. "Of course the success of the books has changed my life somewhat because I have a lot of money to spend if I wish, but as far as my position in life is concerned, it hasn't changed much. Now I have a car, but I've always eaten steaks." Within the pleasure principle "Bonjour Tristesse" ("Hello Sadness") has just been republished in Hebrew in a new translation by the poet Dori Manor. (It first appeared in 1955, translated by Aliza Shani.) According to Manor, the previous translation was fine, but the Hebrew language has changed utterly in the intervening 55 years. Advertisement "I read the earlier translation after I finished my translation. I didn't want to read it before, so I would not be influenced. This is not one of those cases where a translation is old and bad. It's just that half a century has passed and Hebrew has changed drastically since then, on top of which this is the vernacular of a girl who wrote it when she was 17. The language the heroine uses in the old translation is impossible today, with all due respect to the worthiness of the translation." Some three decades after the book's publication, Sagan, referring to the scandal it stirred, said it was inconceivable that a 17-year-old girl should have sexual relations with a boy of her age without being in love with him and not be punished for it. She explained further that people were incapable of accepting that this girl knew about her father's love affairs and discussed them with him, and as such was actually an accomplice to a crime involving subjects which until then were taboo between parents and children. The afterword to the new Hebrew edition, written by Shlomzion Kenan and Nurit Gertz (daughter and mother) notes the struggle that takes place in the novella between two polar attitudes, two worldviews. On the one hand, reality, the bourgeoisie, morality, work and social obligations; and on the other, the pleasure principle, bohemianism, revolt, youth and the gratification of desire. Francoise Sagan was born in 1935 to an affluent family in Cajarc, a town in the district of Lot in southwestern France. Her real name was Francoise Quoirez, and she chose the pen name Sagan because she liked the sound of it, and also in evocation of the Prince and Princess de Sagan, 19th-century Parisians on whom, it is thought, Marcel Proust based some of the characters in "In Search of Lost Time." After completing her high school studies she applied for the Sorbonne but failed. In an interview she explained that she decided to write "Bonjour Tristesse" because she felt bad for her parents and that she "had to do something" to please them. Published in 1954, the novella had a dizzying success. By 1958 it had sold 810,000 copies in France and more than a million in the United States and had been translated into 22 languages. In the wake of her first book, Sagan, who would go on to write nearly 50 books during her life, became not only famous but also rich, and developed a special penchant for fast cars and gambling, a fondness she did not try to hide. She was married twice: at age 23 to a literary editor, Guy Schoeller, who was 20 years her senior, and afterward to Robert Westhoff, an American sculptor. Neither marriage lasted long. Her only son, Denis, was born from the marriage to Westhoff. At the age of 28, Sagan was already twice divorced and a mother. In an interview he gave in 2008 to a French literary journal, Denis Westhoff, a photographer, said about his mother: "When I was born in 1962 she was at the height of her fame. She regularly hosted all manner of guests in our home - agents, friends. We did not have the same schedule. She went to sleep very late. She wrote at night and slept during the day. I never had breakfast with her. We had nannies who took me to school and prepared the meals. We spent vacations in a place that was bought one morning thanks to the money she made at night in the casino. I remember the afternoon hours in the summer, when I played while the keys of her typewriter rattled in the green room." In a 1993 interview, quoted by The New York Times in her obituary, Sagan said: "I had incredible luck because just when I grew up, the pill came along. When I was 18, I used to die with fear of being pregnant, but then it arrived, and love was free and without consequence for nearly 30 years. Then AIDS came. Those 30 years coincided with my adulthood, the age for having fun." Her love life was indeed tempestuous, and included affairs with women. She had a long relationship with Peggy Roche, the fashion editor of the French edition of Elle, and was part of an open threesome with Bernard Frank, a married journalist and writer, and with the editor of the French edition of Playboy, Annick Geille. Her son relates: "She lived high on the hog. There were receptions for 150 people. I ran into Orson Welles, Ava Gardner, Georges Pompidou there - they were all regulars. Waiters served champagne and caviar. My mother hated being alone and in all the apartments we had there was one room for her friend, the writer Bernard Frank." Asked about the type of people who impressed his mother, Westhoff said she was taken by people who were faster and more intelligent than she was. "She invited Sartre to the Closerie des Lilas [a bohemian cafe in Paris]," he said in the 2008 interview, adding: "Francois Mitterrand also impressed her greatly. There was a high degree of respect between them - he ate with us regularly." Explaining her approach to love in a 1980 interview, Sagan likened it to an illness, "an intoxication": "Sometimes I've been intoxicated for three or four years, but never more. I think that people can be happy together for longer than I used to believe, but I still don't think it can be forever." Besides gambling and fast cars, she liked alcohol and drugs. After being involved in a serious car accident in 1957, when her Aston Martin flipped over, she developed an addiction to painkillers. During various periods of her life she was addicted to prescription drugs, amphetamines and morphine. She was twice tried and convicted, in 1990 and in 1995, for being in possession of cocaine. She told the judge that she had the right to destroy herself, as long as no one else was harmed. "If I feel like swallowing a glass of caustic soda, that's my own problem," she said. Sagan's last years were not good. Her son related that she no longer had a place of her own, that her health deteriorated and that she had problems writing and financial difficulties, too. In 2002 she was convicted on a charge of tax fraud, in a scandal dating back to the 1990s which involved her good friend Francois Mitterrand, who was the president of France at the time. Her assets were impounded by the state in lieu of her debts. When her son was asked what his mother had left him as an inheritance, he replied: "A million euros in debts and not a single manuscript." First celebrity writer Gabi Levin, an expert in French literature and a regular contributor to Haaretz's books supplement (in Hebrew), met Sagan as a youngster of 17. "She was then living opposite the Luxembourg Gardens and was sitting in a cafe there," Levin recalls. "I went up to her and said I was a great admirer of her work. I was terribly young and had read all her books. She invited me to sit down and was very nice, but I did not understand a word she said, because her speech was slurred. Simone de Beauvoir also once said what bothers her about Sagan is that she cannot understand a word she says, which is a pity, because she looks very intriguing." According to Levin, the scandal that the publication of "Bonjour Tristesse" triggered in France was due to the conservative and religious atmosphere prevailing there at the time. Sagan's novella, she says, was part of what she calls "the postwar spirit of rebelliousness," when "all kinds of bebop clubs started to spring up on Boulevard St. Germain. Her book was so scandalous and unexpected that it simply generated astonishment," Levin says. "She talked about free sex, this whole Machiavellian thing she does in order to remove the lover from her father's life [in the novella] and the whole relationship with him - and this from a bourgeois girl in the 17th Arrondissement who suddenly publishes something like this." To this day, Levin says, Sagan is very widely read in France and is still considered scandalous. "The French very much admire lightness and elegance, and those were her trademarks. On the one hand she was deep - she greatly admired and understood Proust - but on the other hand she lived a life that was half promiscuous and scandalous and half creative. That combination still works on the French." Sagan was the "first celebrity writer," Levin says. When the book was published she was interviewed extensively and made many public appearances. "It was unbelievable," Levin notes, "because she was very ugly, sort of mousy, unclear in her speech and also very shy. At first this whole thing very much attracted the journalists, and afterward, when she made millions, she could also allow herself to live a scandalous life. She bought sports cars and sped barefoot across the length and breadth of France. She was the first to go with her friends to St. Tropez, where they took a house on the beach every year and lived it up: orgies, drugs and unlimited alcohol. And all of it on her account." The fact that she died penniless, Levin says, is due to her addictions to gambling and drugs. "She was a wild gambler and lost huge sums of money in casinos, and she was also a drug addict and an alcoholic. That was the only way she knew how to live - she was very generous to all the parasites around her. At the end of her life she lived in the home of a very rich girlfriend." According to Levin: "The literary milieu never took her seriously as a writer because of her stormy life. She was a very good writer, but people did not trust her because of her social context. They would say: 'Francoise Sagan has published another little book.' The magic of her prose still casts an extraordinary spell, but she was never accepted. She was continually rejected because she captivated the press. And because her name appeared in social columns, she was not respected and was looked down on by the literary world. But the fact is that a person of the stature of Simone de Beauvoir found her interesting. Sagan was also a very close friend of Sartre. The fact is that intellectual heavyweights like them saw her as an interesting person." In 2004 the French minister of culture, appalled by her poverty and poor health, tried to find a solution. A meeting was arranged for them, but she died on September 24, 2004 from complications of a heart ailment. The French media said her life was like a storm, that she was generous, inspirational, fast, modern, inimitable and unclassifiable. The "Bardot of literature," they called her. The headline in Le Parisien was "Adieu Sagan, bonjour tristesse."