For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine, Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and amorality of her life that interested the obituary writers. In that book, “ Bonjour Tristesse,” she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of postwar Europe on the cusp of the sixties. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, which was published when she was just nineteen. She had become, we were told, a tragic figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death, in 2004, were full of the sense of this failure. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it.
It is as though they have crushed our illusions about human destiny. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in “ The Great Gatsby.” Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can become fate.
Photograph by Bert Hardy / Picture Post / Getty Françoise Sagan sitting by the Seine, in Paris, 1955.
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