In 1953, hélène bessette, a schoolteacher in her mid-thirties, published a novel, Lili pleure. The writer described her style—lineated, rhythmed, and occasionally rhyming—as “a sort of bonded prose-poetry, never done before nor since.” A short epic novel about a mother and a daughter, crushed hopes, and irrepressible lives in a time of war, Lili pleure is, as Bessette wrote, “a strange, lively, anxious mix—no, not depressing, far too clear and virile to be depressing.”
The novel’s early readers were quick to recognize that Bessette, born in a Paris suburb in 1918, was doing something important. “At last, something new!” Raymond Queneau, her editor at the prestigious literary imprint Gallimard and a longtime supporter, announced on the cover of the book. “The literature that is alive, for me, right now, is Hélène Bessette, no one else in France,” Marguerite Duras wrote in L’Express. In 1954, Lili pleure was awarded the Prix Cazes, and this summer, my translation, Lili Is Crying, was published, the first time the novel has appeared in English.
I first wrote about Bessette for the winter 2021 issue of The Yale Review, where I also shared an early extract of Lili Is Crying. Until then, the only published English translation of Bessette’s work was the first three pages of her 1954 novel, maternA, made by the poet, translator, and publisher Keith Waldrop. Here is a small section:
The A is important.
Because childhood is the A of life.
That’s why it’s written: maternA.
That’s why the heroines are called:
BrittA
GrittA
DjeminA
IolA
PierA
MonA
LisA
The A is dominant.
The book converses in A.
maternA is the only work of experimental fiction I know of that is set in an école maternelle, or preschool. (Bessette once worked in one.) The very first letter of the alphabet, the start, for Bessette, of her novel and of institutional life: the A indeed dominates, specifically the short French ah! that is the ending note of all those names (MonA! LisA!—the school’s two cleaners), as well as many common words and phrases (déjà, c’est ça, là-bas). The ah! that is the marker of the future tense: elle arrivera. In English, meanwhile, the same low, unrounded vowel shares a soundscape with ay, a vowel that makes your mouth move, as in say, play, and the letter A.
Incidentally, Bessette’s conversation in A was published fifteen years before Georges Perec’s strict lipogram in E, La disparition (1969), a novel conversant with the four other vowels, since the letter E doesn’t appear even once. Perec’s book was translated into English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1995. Waldrop published his translation of the opening sequence of maternA in 1990, for a journal of writing called Avec. When Bessette died in 2000, all her books were out of print; now, a project to republish her complete works is well underway. I’m following Lili Is Crying with a translation of her third book, Twenty Minutes of Silence, which will be out in the spring. How, why, and under what material circumstances a writer, translator, or publisher feels compelled to respond to the call of a past work—all of this is often wholly incidental. While there can be deep interest as well as contingency and opportunity at play, there is rarely a clear logic to it.
In his notes for a lecture course, later published as a book titled How to Live Together, Roland Barthes asked: Who are my contemporaries? Who do I live—think, read, and write—with? Sharing a historical moment, sitting and working together around what Barthes envisioned as “the table of time,” is not nothing. But nor can it account for everything. Barthes’s lectures were delivered in 1976 and 1977; his notes were published in French in 2002 and not translated into English until 2013. The odd timings of translations, like those of republications, group books and practices together in a newly shared “now” and produce a different kind of contemporaneity—the kind that Barthes was more interested in. They invite us to consider (without looking at the calendar) which here is the “newer” and which the “older.” And then to ponder whether this is ever the most interesting question to ask.
One of my aims in translating Bessette today is to introduce readers to her work, to initiate a project of translation that I hope will be continued by others. (She wrote thirteen novels in total.) Another is to learn from her. Bessette, the cofounder, in 1956, of the Gang of the Poetic Novel, was consciously drawing on what she saw as the poem’s capacity for expressing broken, nonlinear, and explicitly nonprogressive experiences of time. Why? Because poetry “is the language of suffering.” This was directly linked—and here the calendar’s authority must reassert itself—to her writing in the immediate aftermath of two world wars, writing that shared historical time with a third conflict: the Algerian War of Independence, which was fought from 1954 to 1962. The reason I know this is because in 1969 and 1970, Bessette wrote two issues of a short-lived review titled Le résumé, in which she described her circumstances, her influences, her motivations, and her positions on education, writing, and publishing—an effort she termed “an act of intelligence.” What follows are my translations of extracts from both issues of Le résumé, the full texts of which have recently been republished in France, along with part of a radio interview Bessette gave in 1967. They provide crucial further context for Bessette’s practice, but to translate is always to ask wider questions: How might reading a writer so actively engaged in defining le roman poétique in her own particular terms help us, now, to define it in our own? Imagining an exchange of ideas; a timely group conversation made possible by the untimeliness of a translation. For what do literary critics mean when they write of the “poetic novel” or the “poet’s novel”? I wonder: A novel by someone who happens to write poetry—or something else? What do writers mean, or intend, when they move words as a poet might in the longer narrative form? Why do this, and why now?
—kate briggs
From issue one of Le résumé:
the poetic novel It’s not by docilely submitting to the teachings of universities (where we’re taught to adore the Past, which is adorable to be sure) that a person acquires the independence of mind capable of producing new works that do more than merely replicate the Past. Indeed, in the last century, the best writers, whether in France or elsewhere, have been autodidacts.
The Poetic Novel, as a new force, has slowly risen in the shadows—since the start of the twentieth century, in the wake of Valéry-Proust-Radiguet-Proust-Radiguet, Radiguet-Proust-Valéry-Valéry-Radiguet-Proust…et cetera […] names that the literary press is always harping on about. […] Alain-Fournier, who was just as remarkable, introduced Poetry into the fabric of the Novel. Also of note, the luminous simplicity of Charles-Louis Philippe […] Raymond Queneau, whom Claude-Edmonde Magny cites by name in virtually every chapter of her book on the Modern Novel, without ever devoting a chapter to him. The kind of Novel where the Theater is never far away, presenting itself as a freshly cut slice of life, whose force stems from its lack of commentary, not unlike the kind of poetic renewal that J. M. Synge effected in the art of theater. Speaking of Playboy Synge defined it like this: “Wrote directly as a piece of life without thinking or caring to think whether it was a comedy a tragedy or extravaganza.”
communication Racine had a readership of two hundred. Today, thousands of children recite Racine until they’re sick of it.
(Eternal glory to Louis XIV for supporting his writers…)
[…] In the field of Literature, an authentic author will never gain the following of a great crowd of readers, will not always gain the following of the intellectual crowd, and will only ever be followed by those “intelligent people” who, sadly, never form a crowd. Which raises the question of how to live and how to produce one’s works under such difficult conditions.
The Manifesto
It is normal that the Poetic Novel should progress from poetic themes to taking
inspiration from Poetry, to the broader form of the poetic narrative and then on to a
Poetry that is more precise, and bolder.
Literature is fifty years behind Painting, Architecture, and Music. The other Arts
don’t hesitate to use new materials. Why does Literature not loosen itself from literary
tradition.
The intellectual wave has stilled what is essentially in movement: Art and its
movements.
Art is destined to be transformed.
Wasn’t Ronsard’s pretty use of language perfect? Why change it? And yet the
Classics came along. The harmonious perfection of the Classics was enough, was it
not? Yet along came the Romantics. The luxuriant richness of the Romantics, so
bountifully present in Chateaubriand, it was beyond compare, no? And yet then we
had the realists, the naturalists.…That so-called “poetic” form should enter the
writing of a book is the next logical step in literary evolution.
In a noisy anxious world, it is the sentence that makes itself heard. A sentence that has no choice but to be haunting and painful.
There exists a kind of poetry born of all the isms of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century, a poetry available to any sensitive and capable and thinking person, available to any student feeling great strength of emotion. It is a poetry that has been depreciated, devalued, and deemed common by the academic world—a poetry which distorts the perfect ideal of Poetry. This so-called “common” poetry can therefore quite naturally become the material that the writer, making the most of the situation, uses to give new life to her writing. Poetic form that can be expressed through the disarticulation of the sentence, a scission. A sort of literary impressionism, tachism. Phoneticism. A movement is underway: as in Painting, it involves passing from the Figurative to the Abstract.
A single page of a Poetic Novel is not worth much. But the novel runs to over two or three hundred pages. Writing “like Prévert,” yes, but at length, introducing situations and characters. […]
Naturally, such a novel is not wedded to artificial chronological order. Instead, it presents as a jeu d’esprit to which the reader must adapt. This game can be that of the associations of ideas, deductions, conversations, the double novel, et cetera.
Added to that foundational material are the supporting materials: freedom with regard to typographical presentation, the introduction of color, but without turning the book into a “luxury object.” Use of the white page, the cover, slogans formulas figures. All moves that the Poets have already made. But set to work in the Novel. […]
Traditional prose […] even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say, remains a very commercial product, which is very useful when thirty thousand readers and intellectuals are clamoring for books.
“Poetic” language is necessarily the language of difficult times. It is the language of suffering and the everyday normal expression in Times of war. In a noisy anxious world, it is the sentence that makes itself heard. A sentence that has no choice but to be haunting and painful. The cousin of Jazz. That grabs at the attention. It might be cruel. Evidence that it’s in the right place.
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Already in 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote with deeply female foresight […]: “The boundary between modern Poetry and the modern Novel must become less rigid.” That sentence could be placed in the Manifesto. The Novel of the future that she’s glimpsing certainly won’t be a Poem in prose but more like a work of art, a harmonious construction. The Novel must gain in Beauty, the modern Novel must invent its novelistic Poetry, a Poetry of situation emotion architecture. […]
Some features of the Poetic Novel that a reader will find in my novels:
Novel without landscape
Novel in the first
And the last person
Novel reduced to its simplest expression
A single character
The others diminished.
A novel without air without song with more or less anonymous characters.
Question of lighting. The novel’s color.
Novel without hope without dream terribly opaque.
Who knows if there will be a novel.
A harsh time. A timeless time.
The book is no less than the story the description the translation of a possible
remedy.
For a great suffering.
How to heal from.
So here it is soul doctor I shall write a book.
Strange drama.
The hero is missing.
We no longer ask that our adventures have heroes. A character is more than
enough.
But indeed: even perfunctory [sommaire] even reduced he no longer manages to
make his fragile presence felt.
Less than perfunctory: absent. Refusing to live.
To participate. To face.
To speak.
Novel of emptiness.
The novelist lacks material.
Hence the almost constant monologue.
Breathtaking tale. In a dying voice. Shortness of breath.
Chopped-up words. Sentences intercut. (So the words will have to be cut in two.)
After the sentences.
In the awkward language of early childhood.
I’ll speak with short breath of a life weakened diminished.
Faltering voice. Literature in pieces.
A life cut short. Sentences cut short.
Over so quickly, this speech.
The fiction belongs to the reader.
You’re plunging us directly into the midst of your tale. We can’t follow your story’s
thread.
Rupture. Disequilibrium. Between the action proposed and the actors involved.
Until the denouement, the moment that brutally reestablishes the (broken)
interrupted order. The known order of things. The novel: an instant of disorder in
the general order.
That instant of the unknown in the known.
An unhabitual manifestation and its consequences intervening in the real.
Perturbations. Long-ing phenomena.
And what were you saying?
No one is saying anything anymore.
They are listening.
To catch at the little the brief language the snatched voices.
They’re mad. They’re savages.
We don’t know a single thing about them.
Simili-madness. Air de folie.
A crisis.
The novel as the narrative of a crisis
and
The novel as arc lamp.
From a radio interview with Jean Paget, recorded on September 21, 1967, and broadcast on France Culture between 10:15 p.m. and 11:14 p.m. on September 30, 1967.
jean paget The books you publish are not for the “general public”—they are difficult novels. What meaning is there for you in producing difficult novels not intended for a general readership?
hélène bessette In terms of style and the presentation of characters, my book Lili Is Crying already marked a development and an achievement in terms of literary research. I’d previously written a novel that I’d self-published in a little magazine in the South Pacific. That novel was written in a very pretty French—I can say that without modesty—and was perhaps not unlike what was being written at the time of Maupassant and Flaubert. It earned me compliments. But I abandoned that way of writing because at that time I experienced a rupture in my private life and in my inner life; there was a kind of development or a blossoming expansion of intelligence happening in my mind that allowed me, drawing on my life experience, to arrive at a form that, from my first book published in France, seemed to me close, so to speak, to perfection.
Translations from Les résumés by Hélène Bessette courtesy Le Nouvel Attila.
Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) was the author of thirteen short novels, including Lili Is Crying and Twenty Minutes of Silence, both translated from French by Kate Briggs.
