This is by Francoise Sagan (1935-2004), and it was published in March 1954. Ie, when she was 18... Yeah, I know... And she wrote it in a matter of weeks...

Hello Sadness... It's unusual, Jon Beasley-Murray tells us, to leave a title untranslated. And yet, not only the English but the German, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Swedish, and Greek translations do exactly that.

Another book whose title has generally gone untranslated was Nada by Carmen Laforet. I didn't see the point in that case. "Nothing" seemed a perfectly adequate translation. In this case, though, I'd really hesitate to opt for "Hello Sadness". In English it sounds really naff. In French it somehow doesn't...

Which is perhaps because it comes from a 1932 poem called Barely Disfigured, by French surrealist Paul Eluard:

Adieu tristesse
Bonjour tristesse
Tu es inscrite dans les lignes du plafond
Tu es inscrite dans les yeux que j’aime...

Here's Heather Lloyd's translation:

Farewell to sadness
Sadness hello
You are written in the lines on the ceiling
You are written in the eyes that I love...


The French version is available on Internet Archive

Anyway, I read Bonjour Tristesse at the suggestion of Henry Eliot. I'm no longer part of that book group, but it seemed like such a good summer read. Helena Frith Powell also recommended it on Five Books, in the category "Best Books on Glamour". For her, the book "gives you a very strong sense of French glamour, French style". Totally...

I'd read it before, but we're going back a while... I note, in that indispensable farewell catalogue I drew up when I parted with tons of books, that the English translation I originally owned was dated 1980. Likewise, two more Sagan works: A Certain Smile and Aimez-Vous Brahms? (another title left untranslated, presumably to exploit that French cachet). A decade later, I read The Painted Lady, but in French that time.

I recall no negative reaction to any of them, but nothing really stuck. This time round, however, I read the original, and really LOVED Bonjour Tristesse...

***

We initially meet three people on holiday in the south of France in the 1950s. They're staying in a villa by the sea.

Our narrator is Cecile, who's 17. She has just failed her exams, but is not too bothered about that. Her father, Raymond, is 40, and he has been a widower for 15 years. He's an easy-going playboy whose current mistress is Elsa, our third character. She has charm and beauty, and gets on fine with Cecile, but she doesn't have too much in the way of wit or intelligence.

At the beach, Cecile meets Cyril, a 20-something guy who offers to teach her to sail, and becomes her first lover.

Everyone is happy; all are relishing their relaxed, sun-baked seaside stay. And definitely, one of the strengths of the novel is its superb depiction of the languorous mood of a hot Mediterranean summer.


Toulon, 2024. Another bit of the southern coast

Into this tranquillity comes Anne. A friend of Cecile's late mother, she has been invited by Raymond. And, in her quiet, elegant, intelligent way, she totally upends the indolent, sun-kissed beach holiday.

Cecile knows Anne. Having lost her mother at a very early age, the teenager spent many years at a boarding-school. When she emerged from that experience a couple of years ago, all pigtails and ugly dress, Raymond entrusts Anne with the task of seeing that she's fit to be seen in Paris. But Anne has not been part of their lives.

Cecile is an utterly superficial young woman, totally lacking in self-reflection and ambition, and completely dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. She's completely at home in her father's fast and frivolous set, and certainly, nothing she has seen has given her any taste for fidelity. What she's familiar with is quick love affairs, passionate and ephemeral. You date, you kiss, you grow weary, you move on...

Cecile knows that once Anne arrives, there'll be a shape to things, a definition. The older woman will impose norms of good taste and delicacy, and this is a prospect that Cecile finds both exciting and tiring. At bottom, she knows Anne is right, and she wants to be like Anne. She admires her irony, her ease and authority; she's also aware of Anne's capacity for cruelly dismissive criticism... When the newcomer takes up residence, Cecile continues to be fascinated by her intellectualism, her pithy mode of expression, her subtlety. She admires the way she dresses, and carries herself. Anne is someone she can aspire to be.

But she also finds her annoying. And as readers, we also find Anne annoying... She's condescending and insensitive. We (or at least I) definitely start to side with the feckless Cecile... For example, the teenager has little appetite in the morning, but Anne tells her: "You need to put on three kilos to be presentable. Your cheeks are hollow, and your ribs show. Go and eat some toast."

And she's like a dog with a rabbit over Cecile's exam failure. She insists she study, says she "absolutely must" retake her exam in October. "Why?" asks flaky Dad: "I've never had any qualifications, and I live a life of luxury." Anne reminds him that's because he started out with money... "My daughter will always find men to provide for her," he replies, grandly. Elsa laughs...

Fabulous scene...

Primarily, Cecile is uncomfortable because Anne makes her question and assess herself -- and she doesn't like what she finds.


Francoise Sagan

Slowly but surely, Raymond is falling for this woman, and Elsa is being pushed out... And when they decide to marry, Cecile can't believe it -- her father, so stubbornly opposed to the chains of marriage...

She knows Anne's intellect and refinement will put paid to the rackety lives she and her father have led. And yet she still admires the qualities Anne offers. Anne makes all those tumultuous dinners, crazy guests, and Elsa-type women seem tawdry...

This representation of teenage confusion, giving us a palpable sense of being tugged in two directions, is really well done throughout. "I used to watch them," Cecile says, "coming down the stairs together, leaning against one another, laughing together, shadows under their eyes, and I swear I would have liked that to continue all through life." But the fact remains that Anne is bossy. She bangs on about the need for Cecile to study, even locking her in her room at one point. She finds Cecile and Cyril together at one point, and warns him off. To be polite, Cecile appears embarrassed, and notes: "I saw her put on her beautiful mask of contempt, that expression of weariness and disapproval which made her remarkably beautiful, and frightened me a little."

And eventually, pulled backwards and forwards, hither and yon, Cecile ends up thinking that Anne is noxious and dangerous, and really needs to be got out of the way...

She needs, she decides, to recover her father, and their old life together. Anne is just not one of them, Cecile reflects: She's cold, while they're warm; she's authoritarian, while they're laissez-faire; she's indifferent to people, whereas they're fascinated by them; she's reserved, whereas they're lively. "It's only the two of us who are really alive, and she will slip between us with her tranquility; she will warm herself, and gradually take away our beautiful, carefree warmth; she will steal everything from us, like a beautiful snake."

Then, fatefully, Elsa comes to see Cecile: "She brought with her an atmosphere of kept women, of bars, of easygoing evenings that reminded me of happy days." And Cecile concocts her plan... Elsa and Cyril will fake a relationship, to make Raymond jealous.

Again, as the plot spools out, Cecile is realistically ambivalent: Boldness, remorse, boldness, remorse... And her feelings towards both Anne and Raymond are cleverly contoured.


A film version of Bonjour Tristesse, directed by Otto Preminger, was released in 1958. It starred Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr, and David Niven


Seberg, Sagan, and Preminger on the set

Meanwhile, the relentless conversations with Anne continue. The older woman interrogates her: "What do you consider important? Being left alone? Being independent?" Cecile fears these exchanges. "I don't think of anything," she says, dismissively, "I hardly think at all, you know." To which Anne replies:

-- "You annoy me a bit, you and your father. 'You never think of anything; you're not good at anything; you don't know...' Do you like being like that?"
-- "I don't like being like that. I don't like myself; I don't try to like myself. There are times when you force me to make my life complicated, and I almost resent you for that."

Raymond is irritated by his renewed desire for Elsa (the result of Cecile's handiwork). And Cecile admits she didn't really think of him when she was formulating her plan to oust Anne. She thought he would console himself in the way he always did. And anyway, she reassures herself, a rupture would cost him less than a settled life; he's a man who is dragged down by habit and routine. Father and daughter are alike, she thinks. The same race. Sometimes she thinks that's a beautiful thoroughbred race of nomads, and sometimes she thinks it's a poor and desiccated race of pleasure-seekers...

But Elsa calls out to him viscerally, because she's young, and Cyril is young, and he so wants to feel young too...


Cannes, 1959

Writing now, looking back, Cecile wants to pass quickly over this period, because she doesn't want to fall again into memories that overwhelm her. Just thinking about Anne's laugh, Anne's kindness, makes her feel as though something has struck her, made her breathless. She feels so close to what people call a guilty conscience that she's forced to distract herself with a cigarette, a record, a telephone call.

Because what happened that summer is that Anne saw Raymond with Elsa...

Immediately, she packs her stuff, gets in her car. Cecile runs after her. Says she'll explain everything. Says she and her father need her. Anne was crying, her face a picture of pain, and the truth comes home to Cecile: "Then I suddenly understood that I'd mounted my attack on a sensitive living being, and not on some abstract entity. She must have been a little girl once, a bit secretive, then an adolescent, then a woman. She was 40, she was alone, she loved a man, and had expected to find happiness with him for 10 years, maybe 20 years. As for me... That face, that face was my doing. I was petrified. I trembled from head to foot as I leant against the car door."

Anne replies: "You don't need anyone. Neither of you does." And off she goes.

She's killed when her car runs off the road. An accident? Suicide? Cecile reflects that it was generous of her to let them think it might have been an accident... But then again, would anyone commit suicide for people like her father and her -- "people who needed no-one, either living or dead"? Between themselves, they talk only of an accident.

Things go no further with Cyril. Cecile starts to date a friend's cousin. Her father finds an ambitious young woman. Life goes on again as before, as it was expected to go on. Cecile and Raymond laugh together, talk about their conquests. They're going to rent a villa again this summer, near Juan-les-Pins this time.

But sometimes, at dawn in Paris, Cecile's memory betrays her. "Summer comes back to me, with all its recollections. Anne, Anne!"



The novel began with a reflective paragraph: "I hesitate to give this unfamiliar feeling, whose soft tedium haunts me, the beautiful, solemn name of sadness. It is such a comprehensive feeling, and so selfish, that I am almost ashamed of it, whereas sadness always seemed honorable to me before. I didn't use to know the feeling of sadness. What I was familiar with feeling was boredom, regret, or -- more rarely -- remorse. Today, something folds around me like silk, soft and unnerving, separating me from others."

And now we understand why. Something irrevocable happened, that she believes she caused. She was a child; the adults around her had the capacity to make their own decisions. But still...

Brilliantly simple and profound. And also gripping... I really did want to find out what happened (as I'd completely forgotten...)

***

Beasley-Murray writes: "Bonjour Tristesse appears to offer a critique of superficiality, of the capricious and careless way in which Cecile and Raymond deal with other people, motivated by idle whim and the desire to postpone meaningfulness at almost all cost. But this reading destroys much of the book’s charm, which comes from its focus on immediate sensation, its depiction of characters who live for now, with little thought for the future... The novel is not unserious, but it takes surfaces seriously, like an Impressionist painting, fascinated by the ways in which light glances off objects and makes an impact in the moment." This inbuilt contradiction is the clue to its charm.

He continues: "Bonjour Tristesse can be read as being about growing up, assuming responsibility, and accepting a tragic view of the world. Yet the poem from which its title is taken... is about the power of love... This is a much more affirmative and less disillusioned take on things. And the text that Cecile is supposed to be studying [for her philosophy exam] is by Henri Bergson, whose philosophy revolves around the concept of an 'elan vital' or 'life force,' as in the line quoted in the novel (taken from Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion): 'It is always in a contact with the generative force of life that one is able to extract the power to love humanity'. Indeed, for all Cécile’s inability to sit down and study his philosophy, Sagan’s novel ends up being a thoroughly Bergsonian text: it resists the imposition of meaning and emotion, to affirm instead vitality and affect."



Bonjour Tristesse was an immediate success -- and sparked an immediate scandal. What? A young woman who has sex, and enjoys it, and doesn't end up pregnant, and has no immediate thoughts of getting married??! Decades later, Sagan said that the scandal for her was that it is possible, through unconscious but selfish actions, to lead a woman to kill herself...

Sagan's life certainly offered plenty of grist for the scandal-mongers' mill. She enjoyed gambling, spending, partying, drug-using, and driving fast cars: "She became the symbol of the free young woman who lives for the moment and without bounds, who radiates elegance and modernity." But a bad road accident in 1957 almost killed her.

Sagan, says Henry Eliot, wrote her own obituary for the Dictionary of Authors: "Appeared in 1954 with a slender novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which created a scandal worldwide. Her death, after a life and a body of work that were equally pleasant and botched, was a scandal only for herself."

Too interesting to not want to find out more...