Hell Damnation, Cruelty, Lies...

Inspired by the suicide of writer Frédéric Mistral’s nephew over a failed love affair, Alphonse Daudet published a short story called “L’Arlésienne” (in English, “The Girl from Arles”) in 1869. The titular girl never appears in the text. 

This story haunts Lili Is Crying, the 1953 novel by Hélène Bessette, now out in Kate Briggs’ translation. Lili, whom Bessette repeatedly calls a “young-girl-from-Arles,” is not absent but inactive in her own life, living almost entirely according to her mother’s wishes. The mistral winds — which, by way of reference to Mistral, seem to carry the whiff of l’amour fou — blow through the novel’s first pages as they shadow the ageless, prophet-like shepherd who issues the following warning: “Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, severances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death.”

Bessette was born in 1918, the daughter of a perfumer and a taxi driver. She married a pastor and moved with him to the Pacific Islands, where he intended to evangelize but succeeded best in profligate infidelity. When she left him, she briefly moved to Australia, where she worked in a cosmetics factory. She then returned to France and began to write in the small hotel room she lived in with one of her young sons. Lili Is Crying, her first novel, was commissioned by Raymond Queneau (founder of the OuLiPo group) at the intellectual publishing house Gallimard; it won prizes, two of her later novels were shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, and she gained acclaim from not only Queneau but also Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir.

Lili Is Crying revolves around the poisonously codependent relationship between Lili and her mother and its impact on Lili’s abortive love affairs. Over and over, she returns to her mother’s house; her mother even rejoices when Lili’s husband is sent to a concentration camp during World War II. The novel is set against the backdrop of a ruined tower, barely sketched in, and reads almost like a play. A significant portion is told in dialogue that seems to slip, unmarked, between lines spoken aloud and internal monologue. It’s a fitting form for a story about roles and scripts — “what counts as natural,” as Briggs writes in her translator’s note, “between mother and daughter, between female friends, between husband and wife, between hosts and guests, between nation states and their citizens.”

Bessette called her books “poetic novels” — avowedly novels, but compressed to their minimal required elements of characterization, plot, and setting. Like poetry, her prose pays particular attention to the pressure and position of words on the page; she uses line breaks, creative spacing, enjambment, and the emotive rather than grammatical possibilities of punctuation. Her work calls to mind, obliquely (which, one assumes, is how they would both prefer it), that of Clarice Lispector with its interest in not so much metafiction but the cancellation of the fictional, stripping the novel of generic trappings like plot and setting. In perhaps another gesture towards Daudet, her novel Rose de Garance opens with the line “L’heroïne est absente” — the heroine is absent — and in the last section of Lili Is Crying, Bessette’s intermittently present narrative voice informs the reader:

“The novel is taking its leave

gently”

Bessette was doing something avowedly and determinedly new, but she distanced herself from the writers of the nouveau roman — the contemporaneous literary movement in pursuit of the avant garde “new novel” — instead starting what she called the Poetic Novel Gang — a gang in which she and her son were the only members. This was as much a political stance as it was an aesthetic one; she criticized “the so-called left-wing” writers who seemed “to have a magisterial contempt for workers.” Her work was a relentless attack on necrotic bourgeois values and the bourgeois novel. Indeed, Duras once called Bessette’s work “living literature.”     

Despite her early acclaim, Bessette’s work was a commercial failure and her later life was marked by minor scandal: an acquaintance noticed a resemblance between herself and a character in one of Bessette’s books (ever testing the bounds of the fictional, Bessette had declined to change her name) and the resulting defamation lawsuit led her to resign from her teaching position. After itinerant years working odd jobs (a tutoring gig in Switzerland, a job as a governess in England, stints as a cleaning lady and a waitress) and with her books all out of print, she lost her grip on reality. She told her children that she thought it would take fifty years after her death for her work to be appreciated, but perhaps it won’t take quite so long. Her books have recently returned to print in French, and the forthcoming publication of Lili Is Crying marks the first time one of her books has been translated into English. Her writing, at least, feels as alive today as ever. —Meghan Racklin