Many, perhaps most, fans of Luis Buñuel have no idea that his consummately stylish and enigmatic Belle de Jour (1967)—the portrait of a society woman slumming in a brothel—was adapted from a controversial novel by Joseph Kessel, a Russian Jew born in Argentina who wrote in French, that was first published in 1928. Kessel has himself suffered the fate (near-oblivion outside France) of the book that he called the “dearest” of his creations, and the one “in which I think I’ve best caught the accent of life.” But he was among the most widely read French authors of his time, a famously prolific and charismatic storyteller, biographer, travel-writer, reporter, editor, aviator, Resistance fighter, member of the Academie Francaise, and—more to the point, perhaps—a reckless and virile hedonist. “I knew the risk I ran,” Kessel writes in his preface to Belle de Jour—the risk of outrage at the novel’s blasphemous (and, if one is honest, enduringly titillating) premise: that Séverine, a frigid beauty otherwise blissfully married to a handsome surgeon would court debasement in search of ecstasy by freelancing as a whore.
There is not an obscene word or a graphic sex scene in Kessel’s novel, but its subject almost guaranteed that there would be no American edition for decades, and the first English translation of Belle de Jour wasn’t published until 1962. If it scandalized Jazz Age Parisians, what hope did it have of seeing the light in a country that would not only close its borders to Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but that would—in 1930—stop Voltaire’s Candide at customs, en route to the Harvard library? Buñuel and his screenwriter, Jean Claude Carriere, had the advantage of a liberal, even revolutionary, climate and they attribute fantasies to Séverine that Kessel (who treats her with a gallantry that Bunuel found sentimental) leaves to the imagination. “Séverine’s daydreams are Buñuel’s contribution to the plot-line,” Michael Wood writes in his monograph on Belle de Jour. “Indeed, Bunuel said that the idea of the two levels of reality, where in Kessel there was only one, was what provoked him to film the story in the first place … This was a way of distancing himself from his real debt, perhaps, since the novel already contains a good deal of what he turned out to need. It is shrewd and intelligent throughout, warmly sympathetic to its troubled heroine, only a touch too dedicated, in the end, to the idea of sexuality as a horrible fate.”
If the sadomasochism of Buñuel’s faintly parodic dream sequences is explicit, their meaning isn’t. (And what the devil does Séverine’s brutish Chinese client have in that ominously humming box? According to Wood, the question drove Bunuel crazy—it was all people asked him, he said—and his standard answer was: “How should I know?”) Fifty years earlier, however, Kessel felt obliged both to explain himself and to defend Séverine’s “sick heart.” He did so to counter the charges of “pointless licentiousness, even of pornography” that greeted Belle de Jour when it was serialized in Gringoire.1 Unlike the old Buñuel, who revels with a certain cool, ironic glee in the perversity of bourgeois society, not to say of human nature, the young Kessel (they were born two years apart, the former in 1900, the latter in 1898) was a romantic. His goal, he writes, was to dramatize a common, if tragic, marital predicament: the divorce between “a body and soul,” and between “a true, tender, and immense love, and the implacable demands of the senses.” In that respect, his friend Colette took a page, and perhaps more than one, from Belle de Jour when she wrote The Pure and The Impure (first published as Ces Plaisirs … in 1931).2 “But what is the heart, madame,” asks Charlotte, an orgiast with ladylike manners, when Colette meets her in an opium den. “It’s worth less than people think. It’s quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it’s not very particular. But the body … Ha! That’s something else again.”
In reframing the novel as a high-minded case study, Kessel underplays Séverine’s courage—and perhaps his own. Colette, I suspect, read Belle de Jour more perspicaciously than Kessel read himself, because his real originality (and the novel’s enduring interest) is not vested in Séverine’s noble love for her perfect husband; not in the “aberrant” nature (Kessel’s adjective) of the sex that she volunteers for with the brothel’s roughest trade; not in her infatuation with the seductively thuggish and volatile Marcel; nor the inevitable collision of her double lives. It’s a function of Kessel’s willingness to challenge certain fundamental pieties, taboos, and hypocrisies about erotic life—and in particular, the erotic life of women.
Though Kessel was a rebel and bohemian, he was, like many heretics, a product of the religion he was trying to overthrow, and what he calls a divorce between “body and soul” is, in fact, a split that exists in most civilized people—between a social and a sexual self. Literature, to a large degree, is a chronicle of the lengths that tormented men and women go to in their effort to escape, punish, rationalize, or resolve that conflict. (And it’s worth noting that in his private life, Kessel was more successful than most. He managed to content a harem of mistresses who all, apparently, coexisted in relative peace and adored him.)
Séverine and Pierre may have an idyllic marriage—a union, in other words, with a high index of compatibility—but sex thrives on the thrill of otherness. The social self seeks a consort, the sexual self an accomplice—and how often do they coincide in the same partner? French fiction has always been obsessed with that conundrum, and readers of the late 1920s were fairly blasé about dangerous liaisons and dramas of adultery, even when the heroine’s other “man” was a woman. So what nerve did Kessel shock, and Buñuel after him, in Belle de Jour, and why is it still raw?
To discover the answer, read the book, though before you do, a word of caution. Art and pornography may both draw the curtains on a stirring, troubling, and forbidden scene, but in a work of art, there’s no voyeurism with impunity.
—JUDITH THURMAN
1 Gringoire, which published the Belle de Jour serial in 1927, was a journal of culture and politics with a mass circulation, some six hundred and fifty-thousand readers. It was funded by a rich Corsican, Horace de Carbuccia, and Kessel, one of its co-founders and the literary editor, recruited a distinguished roster of contributors. By the mid-thirties, however, Carbuccia had become an apologist for Hitler, and Kessel departed. (He later fled France to serve as de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp in London). Gringoire’s readers apparently made no objection to the obscenity of rabidly antisemitic caricatures and pro-Nazi propaganda, but obscenity, of course, is subject to “community standards.” Nouvelle Revue Francais, an irreproachable French company, publlished Belle de Jour in book form a year later.
2 Kessel bought it for serialization in Gringoire, though after three installments, Carbuccia abruptly suspended publication, without notifying Colette. He simply cut off the text in mid-sentence with the word “Fin.”