The Novel as Arc Lamp: The uncompromising innovations of Hélène Bessette

Abstract

The Novel as Arc LampThe uncompromising innovations of Hélène Bessette Kate Briggs (bio) The first time i read the name Hélène Bessette was in a letter from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, dated May 26, 1957. This was, I think, five years ago. I was reading Murdoch's correspondence (Living on Paper, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, 2015), getting a sense, from the changing tenor of the letters that Murdoch wrote to Queneau, of their long and admiring but also complicated relationship, learning that Murdoch had undertaken to translate his novel Pierrot mon ami into English, a project she'd eventually abandon. "(Yes, translation is exciting [End Page 48] Click for larger view View full resolution Hélène Bessette at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris, where she received the Prix Cazes for her book Lili pleure on March 18, 1954. Photo © AGIP / Bridgeman Images Page 102: Courtesy Krystel Ann Art gallery and the artist. [End Page 49] work indeed.) But it's not easy." Reading and underlining, getting moved and feeling energized by Murdoch's letter-writing style, in particular, her modes of address: "Dear heart," "Dear bird," her signing off-style: "I kiss your hands," her powerful articulation of the ways she lived—at a physical distance from, but in other forms of proximity to—the people she loved: To Philippa Foot: "You are a most frequent figure in my mental world." To David Hicks: "I love you, and I'm conscious of you all the time." I can locate and pull these sentences and sentence-parts easily out from my copy now because I marked them up as I read. In soft gray pencil, sometimes in thin green pen. I didn't do this when I was younger. For years I never underlined sentences, wrote in the margins, or in any way marked up the books I read. This was because from somewhere I had absorbed the idea that if you take books seriously, if you care about the things-in-themselves and respect other people's writing, it is a bad thing to do. Now, in my loopy, spiky hand, I write all over or in the margins of almost everything I read. I draw shaky, loose lines. I press in dots and make stars, feeling exactly the opposite, strongly—that it is a good thing to do. It is a way of actively responding to the books that I've bought expressly for the purpose of bringing them home into my work spaces and home spaces, my other spheres of activity. It's an obvious thing, but I often marvel, looking at my own shelves or at other people's, at how relatively own-able artworks in book form can be. Therefore, how private and how undetermined—how open—the terms of a person's engagement with them. I can pick a block of pages up and put it down again, enter into it, any time. I can lend it my imagination, decide not to; leave it, feel involved with it, bored or diverted by it. I can fall asleep with it. I buy other people's books, new and secondhand, because I want to live with [End Page 50] them. Like this. In inter-animation. And to do so over time, for a long time. I now see marking up my books as an important way of recording these interactions. I do it in soft erasable pencil. Or with whatever is to hand: permanent thin green pen. It was more recently, two years ago now, paging through Murdoch's correspondence again, noting the green star I'd drawn in the margin next to it—a star or what looks more like a firework—that I acted on what must have been my first impulse: to look up this unfamiliar name. Hélène Bessette—who was she? The sole mention of Bessette in Murdoch's letters is a thank-you note: the letter dated May 26, 1957, thanking Queneau for posting her a package of Bessette's novels out of the blue. A package likely to have contained maternA (1954), the only work of experimental fiction...