TamTam Books News Monday, September 27, 2004: Françoise Sagan passed away a couple of days ago. TamTam Books website seems to be the meeting ground where we say goodbye to these interesting individuals. Guardain UK wrote the obit - and I was surprised that they mention Boris Vian in the article. Here's the piece: Françoise Sagan Iconic writer of 1950s French intellectual chic whose life mirrored the indulgent world of her characters Anne Corbett Monday September 27, 2004 The Guardian With the death of the French writer Françoise Sagan, at the age of 69, one of the last links with the famous French intellectual scene of St Germain-des-Près has disappeared. She was part of that 1950s' firmament which included the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the singer Juliette Greco, jazzman Boris Vian - and a young politician called François Mitterrand. They would all meet up in the jazz cellars of Paris's Left Bank. Sagan's place among them derived from her sensational leap to fame in 1954, with the publication of her first novel Bonjour Tristesse, written when she was 18. One half of France was shocked by the story of 17-year-old Cécile, a bright lyceenne from a "good" family - as one said at the time - studying in a bored way for her baccalauréat, and dreaming that a Mediterranean holiday with her father will bring sexual initiation and fun. Faced with attempts by her father's mistress to take her and her father in hand, she plots to get rid of the mistress. This, after all, was Catholic France in the days before the pill; sex was supposed to be within marriage, and young girls did not speak their mind. The other half of France, however, was seduced by the audacity and hedonism of it all, by the heroine's survival kit of ennui in the face of tragedy, and by Sagan's ability to project herself so completely in her writing. What a charming little monster, said the ageing François Mauriac, a great chronicler of the bourgeoisie, who saw in Sagan a future great writer. Meanwhile, General de Gaulle was perplexed by the book, and struck by the author's air of social respectability. Bonjour Tristesse quickly became a bestseller, with more than 500,000 copies being bought in France in its first year. Sagan went on to write more than 30 other novels. These included Un Certain Sourire (1956), Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), Chateau en Suède (1959) and Le Chien Couchant (1980). In 1984, she produced Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir, a portrait of writers and others with whom her path had crossed. Her books sold more than 30m in France, and millions more worldwide. She also wrote for the theatre and the cinema. She worked, for example, with Claude Chabrol on the screenplay for Landru (1963). For much of her life, there was controversy as to whether Sagan's writing was "literature" or "sub-literature". The décor of casinos, fast cars, racehorses, marriages and divorces, penniless aristocrats and idle rich, young girls and older men, which fill so many of her novels, led one critic in 1959 to call Sagan "a luxury hotel existentialist". This was to be contrasted with "real" existentialists - like Sartre - struggling with ideas of man as a self-creating being, making the choices or existential "leaps" which defined their lives. Sagan responded coolly by claiming that the rich were all she knew. "It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand," she once said. "Think about it. Whisky, Ferraris and gambling; aren't they rather more amusing than knitting, housekeeping and one's savings." "Anyway," she added, and this was typically ironic, "I would have been the last person to have written convincingly about that." It came out convincingly when she added, "All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me." Along with her modesty, and her capacity to be gracefully ironic, Sagan was a good friend. Sartre became a friend in the last years of his life, and she wrote a wonderful portrait of him. But she was, first and foremost, a serious writer. As she said much later, "I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write Bonjour Tristesse in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted. It was not bad. It was an honest job. But I know how to read. I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place." Time has been kind to Sagan as a writer, and her qualities have been recognised. Today, Bonjour Tristesse figures in collections of the world's classic literature (for example, in the Penguin Essentials series). Contemporary critics see a quality and a unity of her work which could touch the heights of tragedy, and is never without irony. I think of La Chamade (1965) - la chamade is the roll of drums from a besieged city which signals submission. In this novel, the tragedy of not making a choice is no less tragic for involving a lead character whose futile gesture of survival is to raise cash from a jeweller in the Place Vendôme by trading in her real pearls for false ones. Sagan could be said to be re-interpreting Scott Fitzgerald in the light of existentialism. For the media, the apparent similarity of her life - fast cars, lovers, gambling, drink and drugs - and her novels meant that there was always a view that Sagan herself was of more interest than her books - a view she herself refuted with elegance in Les Bleus Dans L'me (Bruises In The Soul, 1972). But her last years continued, for many, to match the notion that real life provided the more interesting plot. Sagan, who by all reports was extraordinarily generous in her heyday, died in Dickensian poverty, after years in miserable health and totally dependent on the charity of her friends. She owed large sums to the tax authorities. Her grand Normandy property had been seized, her race horses had long been sold, the sports cars with which she had been identified since her youth had gone. There was a conviction for possession of cocaine in the 1990s. Then, in 2002, a French court found her guilty of defrauding the tax authorities, and linked her to the financial-political scandal involving the petrol giant Elf during Mitterrand's time as president. She was given a one-year suspended prison sentence. When, shortly after the court case, Sagan appeared on French television, older audiences were shocked to discover just how frail and ravaged she was, how much she needed whisky to get herself through an interview as she dismissed, in a delicious irony, modern sexually exhibitionist French writers as not being "literature". The young thought her irrelevant. But as one of those who first read Bonjour Tristesse at the end of the 1950s, seeing her on television was to be taken back to a provincial England, which, at the time, was quite as stifling as its French equivalent, and to remember her with gratitude. Sagan and James Dean both burst into our lives - the fresh air which was to herald the 1960s. Sagan won that competition. She was so sophisticatedly Parisian and Mediterranean. Not only did she offer an alternative view of France to the pimply French boys on English language courses combing through our south-coast beach in search of les petites anglaises, but, thanks to her, we took our first steps in French philosophy, becoming mini-existentialists with more than a touch of ennui. Sagan was born Françoise Quoirez, at Cajarc, in the Lot. She was educated at convent schools and at the Sorbonne, where she studied literature for a year before leaving, having failed her exams. It was then that she wrote Bonjour Tristesse, in seven weeks during the summer holidays. When she told her father her novel was to be published, he forbade her to use the family name. Characteristically, she took the name Sagan from a character in Proust. Twice married and divorced, she is survived by her son Denis, from her marriage to the American sculptor Robert Westhoff. · Françoise Sagan (Françoise Quoirez), writer, born June 21 1935; died September 24 2004 Tosh // 8:15 AM ______________________ Comments: Post a Comment
Françoise Sagan passed away a couple of days ago. TamTam Books website seems to be the meeting ground where we say goodbye to these interesting individuals. Guardain UK wrote the obit - and I was surprised that they mention Boris Vian in the article. Here's the piece: Françoise Sagan Iconic writer of 1950s French intellectual chic whose life mirrored the indulgent world of her characters Anne Corbett Monday September 27, 2004 The Guardian With the death of the French writer Françoise Sagan, at the age of 69, one of the last links with the famous French intellectual scene of St Germain-des-Près has disappeared. She was part of that 1950s' firmament which included the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the singer Juliette Greco, jazzman Boris Vian - and a young politician called François Mitterrand. They would all meet up in the jazz cellars of Paris's Left Bank. Sagan's place among them derived from her sensational leap to fame in 1954, with the publication of her first novel Bonjour Tristesse, written when she was 18. One half of France was shocked by the story of 17-year-old Cécile, a bright lyceenne from a "good" family - as one said at the time - studying in a bored way for her baccalauréat, and dreaming that a Mediterranean holiday with her father will bring sexual initiation and fun. Faced with attempts by her father's mistress to take her and her father in hand, she plots to get rid of the mistress. This, after all, was Catholic France in the days before the pill; sex was supposed to be within marriage, and young girls did not speak their mind. The other half of France, however, was seduced by the audacity and hedonism of it all, by the heroine's survival kit of ennui in the face of tragedy, and by Sagan's ability to project herself so completely in her writing. What a charming little monster, said the ageing François Mauriac, a great chronicler of the bourgeoisie, who saw in Sagan a future great writer. Meanwhile, General de Gaulle was perplexed by the book, and struck by the author's air of social respectability. Bonjour Tristesse quickly became a bestseller, with more than 500,000 copies being bought in France in its first year. Sagan went on to write more than 30 other novels. These included Un Certain Sourire (1956), Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), Chateau en Suède (1959) and Le Chien Couchant (1980). In 1984, she produced Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir, a portrait of writers and others with whom her path had crossed. Her books sold more than 30m in France, and millions more worldwide. She also wrote for the theatre and the cinema. She worked, for example, with Claude Chabrol on the screenplay for Landru (1963). For much of her life, there was controversy as to whether Sagan's writing was "literature" or "sub-literature". The décor of casinos, fast cars, racehorses, marriages and divorces, penniless aristocrats and idle rich, young girls and older men, which fill so many of her novels, led one critic in 1959 to call Sagan "a luxury hotel existentialist". This was to be contrasted with "real" existentialists - like Sartre - struggling with ideas of man as a self-creating being, making the choices or existential "leaps" which defined their lives. Sagan responded coolly by claiming that the rich were all she knew. "It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand," she once said. "Think about it. Whisky, Ferraris and gambling; aren't they rather more amusing than knitting, housekeeping and one's savings." "Anyway," she added, and this was typically ironic, "I would have been the last person to have written convincingly about that." It came out convincingly when she added, "All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me." Along with her modesty, and her capacity to be gracefully ironic, Sagan was a good friend. Sartre became a friend in the last years of his life, and she wrote a wonderful portrait of him. But she was, first and foremost, a serious writer. As she said much later, "I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write Bonjour Tristesse in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted. It was not bad. It was an honest job. But I know how to read. I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place." Time has been kind to Sagan as a writer, and her qualities have been recognised. Today, Bonjour Tristesse figures in collections of the world's classic literature (for example, in the Penguin Essentials series). Contemporary critics see a quality and a unity of her work which could touch the heights of tragedy, and is never without irony. I think of La Chamade (1965) - la chamade is the roll of drums from a besieged city which signals submission. In this novel, the tragedy of not making a choice is no less tragic for involving a lead character whose futile gesture of survival is to raise cash from a jeweller in the Place Vendôme by trading in her real pearls for false ones. Sagan could be said to be re-interpreting Scott Fitzgerald in the light of existentialism. For the media, the apparent similarity of her life - fast cars, lovers, gambling, drink and drugs - and her novels meant that there was always a view that Sagan herself was of more interest than her books - a view she herself refuted with elegance in Les Bleus Dans L'me (Bruises In The Soul, 1972). But her last years continued, for many, to match the notion that real life provided the more interesting plot. Sagan, who by all reports was extraordinarily generous in her heyday, died in Dickensian poverty, after years in miserable health and totally dependent on the charity of her friends. She owed large sums to the tax authorities. Her grand Normandy property had been seized, her race horses had long been sold, the sports cars with which she had been identified since her youth had gone. There was a conviction for possession of cocaine in the 1990s. Then, in 2002, a French court found her guilty of defrauding the tax authorities, and linked her to the financial-political scandal involving the petrol giant Elf during Mitterrand's time as president. She was given a one-year suspended prison sentence. When, shortly after the court case, Sagan appeared on French television, older audiences were shocked to discover just how frail and ravaged she was, how much she needed whisky to get herself through an interview as she dismissed, in a delicious irony, modern sexually exhibitionist French writers as not being "literature". The young thought her irrelevant. But as one of those who first read Bonjour Tristesse at the end of the 1950s, seeing her on television was to be taken back to a provincial England, which, at the time, was quite as stifling as its French equivalent, and to remember her with gratitude. Sagan and James Dean both burst into our lives - the fresh air which was to herald the 1960s. Sagan won that competition. She was so sophisticatedly Parisian and Mediterranean. Not only did she offer an alternative view of France to the pimply French boys on English language courses combing through our south-coast beach in search of les petites anglaises, but, thanks to her, we took our first steps in French philosophy, becoming mini-existentialists with more than a touch of ennui. Sagan was born Françoise Quoirez, at Cajarc, in the Lot. She was educated at convent schools and at the Sorbonne, where she studied literature for a year before leaving, having failed her exams. It was then that she wrote Bonjour Tristesse, in seven weeks during the summer holidays. When she told her father her novel was to be published, he forbade her to use the family name. Characteristically, she took the name Sagan from a character in Proust. Twice married and divorced, she is survived by her son Denis, from her marriage to the American sculptor Robert Westhoff. · Françoise Sagan (Françoise Quoirez), writer, born June 21 1935; died September 24 2004 Tosh // 8:15 AM
