into life. Ainsi Soit-Elle was also an international best seller and Groult, at the age of fifty-five, became a leading light of the Women’s Liberation movement.
The publication of her novel Salt on my Skin some ten years later, all about the sensual pleasure and sexual delights of an adulterous couple, seemed more in keeping with the strand of écriture féminine than with second-wave feminism, and it shocked many. Even in an age when porn is part of the social landscape, when women often earn more than men, and sophisticated young female executives can take up with Balinese fishermen and live, or claim to, happily ever after (who wants city life and good conversation when sensuous sex, sun, and sand are only an air-flight away?) Groult’s Salt on my Skin still makes one feel as if one is stepping into unknown and possibly dangerous waters, where unwelcome immanent truths may lurk.
Nothing escapes Groult’s keen eye. Her observations are acute. On the insistent individualism of the French: “their unconcern, their lack of civic spirit and their skill at turning professional rivalries into an art form.” On the blonde hair and blue eyes of the American beauty: “With her blonde hair and blue eyes, she had that milk-fed, corn-fed, steak-fed air. Vitaminised and psychoanalysed to the core, she saw comfort and health as her right, and unhappiness as an illness.” And with equal insight she examines the ambivalent feeling a woman has about the texture of the male scrotum, and the way the male penis feels, “not hard like wood, not even like a cork, say, but hard and soft at the same time, like nothing else in the world but another penis in a similar state of arousal.”
Of course the novel is imperfect, as a long book written with such passion and integrity is almost bound to be. Sometimes (as Groult attempts to break free from the conventional reticences that have plagued écriture féminine from the beginning) the many detailed descriptions and the determined naming of the parts involved in the sexual act can seem excessive and slightly embarrassing. Some might criticise the way Groult changes rather indiscriminately from first to third person singular—sometimes we’re seeing the world through George’s eyes, sometimes without warning through the writer’s—but to my mind this serves to make the reader’s involvement with the story closer and more intimate. George becomes both the observer and the observed.
Unusual and unlikely coincidences bring the lovers together—how does a Breton fisherman just happen to be trawling for tuna in Dakar and just happen to run into George? The reasons given can become rather forced. Indeed, considering both lovers are French why does the US seems to be where much of the novel takes place?
But all becomes clear when one realises that Gauvain, the uneducated Breton fisherman of the novel, was in real life Kurt, a poorly educated American pilot. Quicker by far to get around the world by plane than by Breton fishing trawler!
Blandine De Caunes, Benoîte’s daughter by her second marriage, reports that she and her sisters, Lison and Constance, knew of their mother’s affair and became very fond of Kurt. When later, after splitting with her second husband, Georges de Caunes, Benoîte was in an ‘open’ marriage with writer Paul Guimard—who, like Gauvain loved the sea: the surging ocean looms large throughout the novel—Kurt was a frequent visitor to their home in Ireland. Paul kept out of the way when Kurt visited, but as de Beauvoir found in her marriage to Sartre, when theirs was the very one which made such relationships fashionable, ‘open’ marriages are never easy. Love and jealousy, however much dismissed theoretically, keep intruding.
Salt on my Skin is built around not just the known diaries that Benoîte Groult began in 1945 when she was twenty-five, but also on secret erotic diaries she’d written as an adolescent back in the thirties. By the late forties the men were back from the war, and women, being back in the home, were dependent again on male goodwill for their livelihood, so sexual reticence was more than ever advisable. Many, no doubt, were the secret diaries written at that time. Once a woman was married, Groult pointed out elsewhere, the need for secrecy was even greater: “When the ‘oppressor’ is your lover and the father of your children and often the principal purveyor of the funds, freedom becomes a complex and risky undertaking. So much so that many women prefer security, even under supervision, to the hazards of freedom.” It was a good thirty years before women could earn, and no longer requiring male approval, could write the truth of female experience.
The affair in Salt on My Skin is moved forward a couple of decades and set between the fifties and the eighties. What Groult has presumably sourced from the secret diaries in which she recorded its early days is material which seems to me barely fictional—written in the first person by a talented young writer with such great tenderness it’s hard to imagine a more stirring or romantic evocation of a girl’s sexual awakening: a female Bildungsroman.
Blandine, asked in an interview what her mother, good feminist to the end, would say by way of advice to young women writers, suggests: “Don’t get married, it’s not worth divorcing. Stay free and write what you want, in words that are yours.” Though, as Blandine, herself a writer and editor, adds: “Many women would find that advice difficult to follow, even today.”
I find myself recommending the book to friends in emotional trouble, saying what I said in the seventies of Marilyn French’s The Woman’s Room: “Read now, at once! This book changes lives.” But Salt on my Skin is a far more positive and less angry novel, as befits the current times.
FAY WELDON / 13th June 2018
-
First of All…
-
First of all, what am I going to call him so his wife never knows? A Breton name, anyway, for that’s what he had. But I’d like him to have the name of a bard, one of those absurdly brave Irish heroes who lost most of their battles but never their souls.
Or a Viking name perhaps? No, the Vikings were fair-haired. Celtic rather since he so belonged to that race of sturdy dark men with light eyes and a touch of red in their beards, that people of no precise place, whose history is disputed, whose very existence is more a matter of poetry than fact.
I want it harsh and rugged to go with that solid build of his, the dark brown hair which curled low on his forehead and down his powerful neck, those vivid blue eyes which flashed like two rays of sea light beneath his bushy eyebrows, his high cheekbones and the copper-coloured beard he grew when he was at sea.
I try one name then another, turning him round before the mirror of my mind… This one doesn’t convey his angry, obdurate look when crossed, that one doesn’t match that weighty walk of his.
‘Kevin’? Well, maybe, if I could be sure it would be pronounced in the English way and not ‘Quevain’. ‘Yves’? No, that sounds like an Icelandic fisherman, and I’ve come across too many ‘Jean-Yves’ on holiday in Brittany, all of them skinny and freckled. ‘Loïc’? Possibly. But I’d like something more unique, a name for a cormorant.
How about ‘Tugdual’? ‘Gawain’ – one of the knights of the Round Table? Or ‘Brian Boru’, the Charlemagne of Ireland? But in French you pronounce it so that it means ‘brilliant Boru’, and the light English r, that back and forward movement of the tongue mid-palate, becomes a graceless French gargle.
And yet, to suit him truly the name must have a chivalric ring. And who more chivalrous than Gawain, son of Lot, King of Norway, and of Arthur’s sister, Anne; Gawain who died in single combat with the traitor Mordred? The Arthurian stories tell us he was prudent, wise, courteous, magnanimous, of matchless prowess and unfailing loyalty to his liege lord. Not a poet, it’s true, but a man eager for adventures and heroic deeds, who fulfilled his duty whatever the cost. This is the Gawain of the Breton cycle, and this is how he is, the man in my story.
In real life I thought his name silly, and, from the moment we knew each other,
