News For Women Woman Novelist Likes To Drive Fast Cars

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28266, 2 May 1957, Page 2

News For Women Woman Novelist Likes To Drive Fast Cars

[By

LES ARMOUR]

Francoise Sagan shrugs. It is her first and automatic reaction to anything. Then she speaks slowly:

“I couldn’t write about war or fishing or farming, could I?” She grew up ip Paris in a luxurious apartment block near the Madeleine. Her father—grey and square and solid looking—is a prosperous manufacturer of metal crucibles.

Francoise, one might think, could write about metal crucibles. Or about upright, bourgeois citizens. She does not, however. She writes about people who have, in her own words, “no fixed morals.”

Presumably, it is fair to ask how, at 20, coming from an environment in which morals are very fixed indeed, she can write about them. One might, in fact, be inclined to think that she would know rather more about

war or farming or fishing. She has fished and her father does maintain a house in the country where she has spent six months out of every year m her life. She must, at least, have seen farmers farm. Unusual Views Still, her own view is that “every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.” And, she says, “a girl of 15 is a woman.” These are unusual views even in Paris, and, although Shakespeare seems to have held them, too (Juliet was only 13), one might expect some arguments in support of them. To Francoise, however, they are self-evident truths and arguments are not to the point. She knows—or she thinks she knows. And several tens of thousands of readers in Europe and America are prepared to take her word for it. Her first novel, “Bonjour Tristesse,” made enough money to last her several lifetimes. She gets £lOOO a throw for articles in American magazines. Hollywood will pay her 3 per cent, of the take oh a film based on “Bonjour.” Of course, ' she has already grown tired of “Eonjour.” She will no longer discuss it. And she does not think it will emerge very well from Hollywood. “All

the characters will be married and they will all have babies I suppose.” (One is left to infer that having babies is the ultimate low.) Distrusts the English In any case, she distrusts both the Americans and the English. “They cannot understand that you can be a good person and not have fixed morals. They think the wicked always have to be punished and the good always have to be made happy. But this is not true.” The excellent philosophers of Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard, who have always taken it more or less for granted that to be “good” meant, in fact, that one had some sort of “fixed morals,” can take themselves as having been dismissed. They have been overruled by a higher court. It is not discreet to ask a girl of 20 whether or not she herself has ‘‘fixed morals,” but nobody has, strangely enough, discovered any particular lack of them in Miss Sagan. Her one “vice” is—or was until last week—fast motor-cars. She likes to drive them down country roads in the dead of night.

Sometimes she drives barefoot because “it increases the thrill.”

Recently one of her drives ended in a crash which left her unconscious for several days, and it is taking all the skill of modern medicine to keep her alive. [A cable message says that she has left hospital where she was treated for severe injuries suffered in the motor accident a fortnight ago.] It is unlikely that modern science will be able to do anything for her black convertible. Perhaps the crash will radically alter her outlook. But, up to the moment of it, she was still concerned with love. In the car was found the manuscript for another novel. It is called “Les Paupieres Mortes” —“The Dead Eyelids”— and in it business is as usual. Interest in Jive

Apart from motor-cars her principal interest is in jive. When she was in New York she went every night to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. She described it as “the most fantastic place I have ever seen. Six thousand coloured men with beautiful bright shirts dancing. We danced from 11 till 6. I didn’t know I could dance so much, but in New York there is something tonic in the air.” At home in St. Germain des Pres she dances only til] 4. So the Americans do have something even if they are confused about morals. Her late nights interfere a little with her days. She sleeps late and spends the early afternoon seeing friends. That leaves her the late afternoon in which to write before the round begins again.

And what does her father think of this distinctly unbourgeois regimen? He is not saying much. But perhaps he is noticing that there is something of the bourgeois about her still. For, apart from an expensive fur coat and her car, Francoise lives fairly frugally. Most of that fabulous fortune is being salted away. And a productive typewriter can be as sound a proposition as a factory making metal crucibles.