Nathalie Sarraute by Ann Jefferson

Author:Ann Jefferson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 19. Dominique Aury, Jean Paulhan, and Marcel Arland in Paulhan’s office at Gallimard, 1953. © D.R. Coll. J. Paulhan / Paris.

She also suspected Dominique Aury of having played a part in the previous rejection of Portrait of an Unknown Man by offering to help get it accepted, but then blocking it behind the scenes. She entertained friends with an amusing account of an awkward encounter with Aury under the hairdryer at a salon de coiffure in rue Jacob, when she took Aury’s abrupt departure as proof of her animosity. How much basis there was for these speculations is impossible to say and, as Robbe-Grillet commented in response to Nathalie’s anecdote, she was apt to construct elaborate fabrications on the flimsiest pretext.13 But she clearly remained uneasy, and in a letter to Butor in 1964 she thanks him for his reassurance over some matter about which Dominique Aury was allegedly spreading alarming rumours.14 Their content is not revealed.

As Claude Mauriac had observed, reassurance was the thing of which there was never enough and which Nathalie never felt she could count on. There were high points, as when Gaston Gallimard reportedly said to her in 1958, “Rest assured that I will never let you go. Never. So, tell me your conditions and I’ll agree to them in advance.”15 But the effects of these reassurances didn’t last, and a letter of 26 May 1961 shows Gallimard trying to assuage Nathalie’s concerns after another unspecified problem: “As you must have sensed, I was very affected by our last conversation. You know how devoted I am to your work, and how important it is for me, and I don’t want there ever to be any misunderstandings or problems between us.”16

Claude Gallimard, Gaston’s son, was less adroit in his dealings with authors and found himself threatened with Nathalie’s defection when his failure to return a phone call convinced her that the Éditions Gallimard had no faith her work. The draft of a letter to him dated 15 June 1966 conveys her sense of precariousness, due in part to the mismatch between the brisk pace imposed by the practicalities of publishing and the slow agonies entailed by her writing:

I thought you had enough appreciation of my work and enough friendship towards me to respond within a decent period of time.

I now see that this is not the case,

Under these circumstances I do not feel comfortable either with you or with your collaborators and I do not wish to set foot in your offices again.

I need to feel that my publisher has confidence in my somewhat atypical books, supports them and promotes them at least as much as those that require less effort appeal to a general readership. . . .

I realise that you have reduced me to the sad role of the ousted author for whom one is not there available and to whom one does not even bother to reply.

It’s a role that I have no wish to relearn.

I did not and do not wish

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