ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

To make one more last contribution to #WITMonth, today I read a short novella called The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc, first published in 1965 and translated from the French by Derek Coltman.

(I had been a bit ambitious in thinking that I had time to finish A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson (translated by Nichola Smalley). Life has conspired to get in the way of reading time this past week…)

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is one of Penguin’s European Writers series:  it’s a series of seven (so far) and I bought the lot when I first heard about them. (Except for Death in Spring by Mercé Rodoreda, (translated by Martha Tennent because I  had already read and reviewed the Open Letter Books edition at the beginning of this #WITMonth).  The titles are all bite-sized short stories and novellas, representing authors from France, Spain, Germany , Sweden, Romania, Greece and Italy.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is only 80 pages long and can be read in an afternoon, though its impact will last much longer than that. It affected me in the same way that reading Knut Hamsun’s Hunger did (see my review).  Hamsun’s protagonist is a distressed young man at the end of his physical and psychological tether.  His circumstances are different to Leduc’s old lady’s but like her, he is starving in an impersonal city, and like her, he suffers hallucinations which blur with reality.

Leduc’s nameless old lady is sixty (which doesn’t seem so very old to me), but she is alone and friendless. Her sole companion is an insect in the skirting board of her room.

She was a sack of stones holding itself up of its own volition, this woman who had never had anything, who had never asked for anything.  If the edge of the wind had caressed her neck at that moment, had caressed her neck just below the ear, then her heart would have stopped.  She would have given her life and her death for another’s breath that close. (p.38)

She uses her few francs for a ticket for the train — not to take a journey, but to be in company with other people, even though they ignore her.

She has developed rituals and routines to get through her long lonely days, and she plans carefully to eke out her pitiful store of money.  This is how the story begins:

Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six… the the roar.  The table shook, the coffee beans fell into her lap.

The overhead Métro was an invader she had never grown used to, though it shook her like that every five minutes during off-hours, every two minutes during rush hours.  (p.1)

That astonishing image is just one of many arresting images.  As Deborah Levy says in the introduction, Leduc is incapable of coming up with a boring sentence, and it’s true.  At Les Palmiers, which the old lady must avoid because she has no money…

There were some young girls going into the café and she lowered her eyes — the pavement was as old as she was.

February was a sullen captive in the afternoon mist, and the grey streets were melting indistinguishably into the grey street corners. (p.1)

She lashes out and eats two cubes of sugar and some coffee soaked bread, but immediately her rashness in eating without thinking of economy overwhelms her:

She ate: her teeth melted with delight as they sank into the coffee-soaked bread; her stomach was a pit of pleasure — and the passing train was as frivolous as smoke.  But the pencil was already beckoning before the last mouthful; figures will not wait, they are executioners intent on torturing their victim.  (p.40)

Now she has to get some money, some food in order to go on… she craves an orange but there isn’t one in the dustbin, only an old fox fur.  It’s tatty and it stinks, and all the time she wears it she fears that the dustmen will be after her to get it back. But it’s her little rascal, and she loves it.

She took the little fox back to her room and examined it beneath her attic window.  To find something, no matter how ignorant or how learned one may be, is to dip ones’ finger into cerulean blue.  And what she found now was warmth, relaxation, and a caressing softness.  The fox had offered itself to the first comer, and she had been stronger than the others.  They had all been asleep and she had come upon him.  She kissed him, and she went on kissing him, from the tip of his muzzle to the tip of his brush.  But her lips were as cold as marble: in her mind these kisses were also an act of religious meditation.  She looked him up and down, then burst into her first fit of uncontrollable laughter: the amusement he filled her with was no less sincere than the love she felt for him. (p.50)

Though she knows he is just a little dead animal that someone had thrown out into the gutter, she plans to take him out on little jaunts around Paris, while also dreaming of selling him and buying him back when she has made her fortune. Not so different to Knut Hamsun’s protagonist’s dreams of selling a manuscript which will banish his hunger forever.

It really is harrowing to read about these protagonists living in such straitened circumstances, knowing that it’s real life for so many in our mean and selfish world.

Mentored by Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc (1907-1972) was admired by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet.  She published fiction and two memoirs.

• L’Asphyxie, 1946 (In the Prison of Her Skin, trans. Derek Coltman, 1970).
• L’affamée, 1948.
• Ravages, 1955.
• La vieille fille et le mort, 1958.
• Trésors à prendre, suivi de Les Boutons dorés, 1960.
• La Bâtarde, (memoir), 1964 (La Bâtarde, trans. Derek Coltman, 1965).
• La Femme au petit renard, 1965 (The Lady and the Little Fox Fur,trans. Derek Coltman, 1965).
• Thérèse et Isabelle, 1966 (Thérèse and Isabelle, trans. Sophie Lewis, The Feminist Press, 2015. )
• La Folie en tête, (memoir) 1970 (Mad in Pursuit, trans. Derek Coltman, 1971)
• Le Taxi, 1971 (The Taxi. Helen Weaver (translation). Hart-Davis MacGibbon.
• 1973. ISBN 9780246105851. OCLC 561312438.)
• La Chasse à l’amour, 1973.

Can anyone recommend which of these titles by Violette Leduc I should try next?

Author: Violette Leduc
Title: The Lady and the Little Fox Fur (La femme au petit renard)
Translated from the French by Derek Coltman
Introduction by Deborah Levy
Publisher: Penguin European Writers, Penguin Random House, 2018, first published 1965
ISBN: 9780241357453, pbk., 80 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings.