Overblown
Joanna Richardson
The Painted Lady Francoise Sagan Translated by Lee Fahnestock (W. H. Allen £8.95) In 1954, at the unbelievable age of 19, Franioise Sagan published Bonjour Tristesse. Not surprisingly, she earned in- ternational acclaim. The year which brought the death of Colette had brought the advent of a young French novelist who was very much in the same tradition. Bon- Jour Tristesse would in fact have been a splendid first novel for Colette. It was the story of an adolescent girl, her love for her feckless father, her relationship with his mistresses; and it was astonishing for its precocity, its shrewd, ironic perceptiveness, its poignancy, and its undoubted style. It was followed by other novels, among them Un Certain Sourire, Aimez-vous Brahms, Les Merveilleux Nuages, and by collections of short stories; and, time and again, in the growing body of fiction, the reader recalls Colette. `Le Gigolo,' in the collection Des Yeux de Sole, records very briefly how a rich woman dismisses a young lover who has grown unacceptably fond of her. It is like a bitter, modern version of Cheri. Fran- coise Sagan, like her predecessor, is fascinated by the endless permutations, the Innumerable vicissitudes of love: by its boredom and its cruelty, its passion and calculation, its perversion and its powers of inspiration. She remains as fascinated as she was nearly 30 years ago, when she Published her first book; but her own tur- bulent life has deepened her awareness, and it has perhaps made her more cynical. In The Painted Lady she writes on a new and much larger scale, and she has chosen a subject of much complexity. Every year, towards the end of the summer, the SS Nar- cissus sets sail from Cannes on a luxurious Mediterranean cruise. The passengers (who pay 8,000 francs for de luxe accommoda- tion, 62,000 francs for first-class cabins), abandon themselves to ten days of epicurean living, and to the company of one or two international musicians. They also abandon themselves, it is plain, to ship- board romance, and its complications are infinite. La Doriacci, the opera-singer, had Years ago ensnared the virtuoso concert pianist, Hans-Helmut Kreuse; he is now a fellow-passenger on the Narcissus, but he shows affection only for his vicious dog, which rejoices in the name of Fuchsia. As for La Doriacci, she has come to have a penchant for young men, and she soon cap- tivates the handsome, fair-haired gigolo, Andreas Fayard (with whom the purser is hopelessly in love). Olga Lamouroux, the budding film-star, sets out to charm Eric Lethuillier, the editor of a left-wing intellec- tual weekly. Eric's wife, Clarisse, the Painted Lady, tries to hide her vulnerability under her excessive make-up. Driven to drink by her wretched marriage, she finds eventual solace with Julien Peyrat, a swindler who is posing as an art-dealer. Sometimes the transient romances end in tragedy: Andreas Fayard drowns himself when La Doriacci discards him: 'His solitude, in the past and still to come — the uselessness of his life, his lack of direction, or resistance, or realism, his desperate and puerile need to be loved, all of that seemed suddenly too difficult, too much of a burden'. But there is happiness as well as tragedy. Julien is redeemed by the love of the Painted Lady.
`You know,' he said, 'when you realised that I was a low-down thief, a cheat and a forger, that
might have disgusted you, mightn't it?' `Don't use that language,' said Clarisse, smiling, as though he had wrongfully insulted himself. 'They're not important, those things you did. And anyway,' she concluded, with a lit- tle laugh he found cynical, 'now you won't need all that.'
For the rich, unhappy woman and the repentant forger, romance already seems to be permanent.
In this massive novel, of some 450 pages, Francoise Sagan charts the course of these inter-related love-affairs; she does so with cynicism, compassion and understanding, with a rather cruel humour, and at moments with a touch of slapstick comedy. The result is an ungainly comedy of man- ners, and, to my mind, an uneven entertain- ment. With the exception of Andreas and the Painted Lady, none of the characters commands the reader's sympathy or their concern. They are spiteful, materialistic, constantly self-seeking (is the ship not call- ed the Narcissus?); and they are not merely unpleasant, they tend to be caricatures. Besides, the account of their various in- fatuations is far too complex and far too long. Mlle Sagan is happier when she is working on a smaller scale. She is at her best in a novel of average length, in a novella or a vignette, where much remains unsaid and much is left to the imagination. Bonjour Tristesse is a novel of quite another order; the short stories expand like those Japanese paper flowers, opening out of shells in a glass of water: delicate, mysterious and poetic. The Painted Lady is a brash and cumbersome novel; it is like a large-scale poster done by an accomplished watercolourist. There is, one has to confess, a good deal of vulgarity about it.
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