by
Joel Gross
New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987 340
pages
The following book reviews appear courtesy of Nanette Morton.
| Sarah by
Joel Gross |
|
New York writer Joel Gross's novel Sarah takes an interesting psychological spin on Bernhardt's life. Depicting S.B. as an essentially tragic figure, Gross links the actress' desire for public recognition to the emotional neglect she suffered as a child. Here, Youle Bernhardt is depicted as a beautiful, self-absorbed woman whose focus on her lovers, their gifts, and her anxieties surrounding the inevitable wane of her youthful attraction leaves her daughter with an insatiable and never fulfilled desire for love and attention. Gross is good at convincingly depicting both this desire and the imagined effects of Sarah's inevitably more than dubious social status as the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan in a respectable, bourgeois, Catholic school. For the most part, Gross concentrates upon Bernhardt's early life -- his description of her early triumph in Le Passant takes place after two thirds of the book are over and done with. The poetic licence he takes is generally convincing and aesthetically pleasing: S.B.'s dawning awareness of the meaning of her mother's social condition is quite poignant. Unfortunately, Gross's attempts to provide an historical context are sometimes unwieldy and awkward: the fact that he does not trust the audience to know anything about the era leads to irrelevant paragraphs like this: "France, without Sarah’s help, persisted in its Second Empire revelries, while the world continued taking heroic steps into the modern age .... Steamships were crossing the Atlantic in nine or ten days, racing past sailing ships still carrying the bulk of the world's cargoes. Fortunes were being made by those who paid attention to the shifting fates of American cotton planters, owners of slaves who would surely one day be set free. And more than cotton was being wrested from the American earth. Eighteen fifty-nine was the year of the first oil well, drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania." Although Gross does often manage to smoothly integrate relevant historical information -- his description of Paris by gaslight the night S.B. goes to see her first play is quite well written-- there are some places where his historical research seeems to take over. In spite of this, his fictional depiction of loneliness and an emotional hunger, which no amount of adoration can really assuage, is quite convincing.
| Dear Sarah Bernhardt By
Francoise Sagan (translated from the French by Sabine
Destree) |
 |
The most obvious difficulty in selecting Sarah Bernhardt for the subject of a novel is the fact that her life, so cram-jammed with spectacular events, is almost impossible to fit into a neat and tidy plot. Francoise Sagan avoids this problem by presenting her novel as a series of letters exchanged between herself and Bernhardt. Noting that Sarah, "had a life that was as boisterous as it was secretive, which is saying a lot", Sagan asks Bernhardt to answer her questions and comment on her life from her present sanctuary, the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Although readers who are used to a novel with a conventional beginning, middle and end might find this a bit unusual at first, what follows is an interesting read. The book is an easy back and forth conversation between Bernhardt and Sagan. Sagan has Sarah remember, deny, and digress--just as one would do in an interview. Although Sarah Bernhardt has a fit of pique when Sagan reminds her that she was thirty, not twenty-five, when she first performed Phedre, the collaboration, for the most part, goes smoothly. If Joel Gross's Bernhardt is essentially a tragic figure, Sagan's is characterized by an "irrepressible gaiety": " I never knew anyone, or any situation, word or deed that could prevent those endless waves of laughter from pouring forth from me, and what made matters worse was it generally happened in the most unlikely and inopportune places." While relating the story of her life, S.B. explains her penchant for stretching the truth by saying, "I know that I'm wandering from the story of my life and getting bogged down in pointless digressions that probably wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny anyway. Besides, who knows whether I'm lying or telling the truth. . . I'm not even sure I know myself... I'm a woman of the theatre, remember? And even if I weren't, I'm someone for whom truth resides in the probable or the credible, and in certain instances in the genuine.
Sagan's Sarah also bemoans the image of present-day actresses, who are "displayed in your newspapers and magazines in various guises: cooking in their kitchens, changing their babies' diapers, explaining how they keep themselves, young, how they dress just like anyone else ... Do you think the world would have praised me to the skies if I had been just like everybody else? Really, what an absurd goal! Do you mean to say there isn't anyone among your contemporaries who would like to look like no one else on the face of the earth? No one who wants to set himself or herself apart from the common herd? Is there no one who wants to transcend the others, who wants to be adored by them ... [?]" Yes, one can absolutely imagine Sarah saying that.
| Madame Sarah by Cornelia Otis Skinner |
 1967 dust jacket |
 1988 paperback |
Madame Sarah. by Cornelia Otis Skinner. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1967.
(Biography) This is a vivacious, old-fashioned, straightforward biography, which tells all of the salient points of S.B.'s life with wit, affection and a kind of sympathetic scepticism. The latter is entirely necessary, for Skinner notes that false rumours, along with S.B.'s well-known penchant for verbal embroidery and her grand-daughter/biographer's "starry-eyed ... chronic admiration" make biographical accuracy difficult. In her introduction, C. 0. S. states that she "has tried to sort out from a mass of conflicting research what seems most likely to ring true". This does not, however, make Skinner an unsympathetic biographer: in narrating Bernhardt's unhappy separation from the Belgian aristocrat who fathered her only child, Skinner recounts the incident in two ways. In the first, Sarah is convinced by her lover’s uncle to give up her lover for the good of the aristocratic family. In the second version, told in a biography written by Basil Woon, S.B. is brutally rebuffed by her lover once he finds out she is pregnant. Of the first version, Skinner writes: "It might perhaps be uncharitable to point out that when Madame Sarah related these events to Louis Verneuil and subsequently to her granddaughter, when she had already performed La Dame aux Camélias well over a thousand times." Since it is impossible to know what actually happens, Skinner sticks with the first version, writing, "There is no question that Sarah Bernhardt's adventure with the father of her son was the great love affair of her life, which remained sacred and nostalgically painful in her memory as her 'abiding wound.'. If she romanticized it over the years, who can blame her? What woman doesn't romanticize her better amorous recollections?"
Another interesting sign of her loyalty to her subject is Skinner's rejection of Marie Colombier's Les Memoires de Sarah Barnum as a source of information. Skinner writes that the book is the invention of "a filthy and malicious mind". This does not mean, however, that Skinner omits Sarah's faults; rather, she writes as if exposing the foibles of a well-liked friend. An actress herself, Skinner shows particular admiration for what she calls Bernhardt's showmanship -- her ability to pick plays perfectly suited to her own talents and the expectations of her audiences. Although a the language sounds "dated" in one or two places the book, though thirty years old, is a very readable one.
| The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah
Bernhardt by Arthur Gold and
Robert Fizdale |
 |
No common-place biographers these: Gold and Fizdale used their extensive connections to draw upon sources to which many other biographers would not have access: in their acknowledgements, the authors thank the descendants of Henri, Prince de Ligne (the father of Bernhardt's only son), the grand-nephew of Jacques Damala (Damala, very briefly, became Sarah's husband), relatives of Pierre Loti (a member of Bernhardt's "Court"), a descendant of Charles Haas (one of Sarah's early lovers and Proust's model for Swann), and Sarah's own great-granddaughter and great-great-grandson. As a result, the two were able to draw on private family photographs and personal letters unavailable to other biographers. There can be no greater evidence that Sarah's mother, Youle (Julie) Bernhardt favoured Sarah's younger sister Jeanne than a family photograph, reprinted here, in which Jeanne and Youle stand so close as to exclude an unhappy looking Sarah, who seems to have been pushed into the background.
Gold and Fizdale have also quoted extensively from the love letters Sarah sent to Charles Haas, Jean Mounet-Sully, Gustave Dore and Jean Richepin. The authors' comment, that Sarah had complicated attitudes about lovemaking, is an understatement when one reads these exchanges, in which Sarah blows hot and cold, rebukes, apologizes, changes her mind, and, in general, acts like her maddening self. This reader would have liked a little more interpretation here: biographer Ruth Brandon's intuitive discussion of why women often do what they do would not be amiss.
While Cornelia Otis Skinner refused to admit that Marie Columbier's depiction of "Sarah Barnum" could have some basis of fact, Gold and Fizdale suggest that, however exaggerated, malicious and Anti-Semitic its intent, Sarah Barnum was the work of one who had been Sarah's intimate (though obviously not wisely chosen) friend from a very early age. Gold and Fizdale's account of Sarah's life therefore, is considerably more unvarnished than Skinner's, although it is still sympathetic. The authors report that, given the evidence of Columbier's book, Sarah's own personal letters, and the milieu into which she was born, Sarah did rely on various lovers for financial support when her acting career initially fizzled. Indeed, although Skinner felt the need to assert that Sarah "never took [a lover] on for mercenary purposes", the fact that Bernhardt had no means of support and virtually none of the skills needed for the limited number of jobs a woman could hold in the nineteenth century suggests that the actress, at least for a time, may have had no choice.
Since the authors did their homework and then some, this book is a rich and gossipy one, full of primary sources, anecdotes and historical context. It is also beautifully and profusely illustrated, a necessity for any book about the theatre.
| Being Divine: A Biography of Sarah
Bernhardt By Ruth Brandon |
 |
This is one of the most thoughtful and intuitive of the English language biographies of Bernhardt. Ruth Brandon is not dazzled by Sarah's larger than life eccentricities: rather, she seeks to explain them by digging deep into the actress's psyche. Speculating that Sarah may have been sexually abused as a child, Brandon writes that Sarah dealt with "a childhood ... so devoid of love and security and any opportunity to develop self-esteem" by pretending that these things happened to someone else. In other words, Brandon suggests that, living, "to an unusual extent. . .in and through her roles", Sarah may have had multiple personality disorder. To support her claim, Brandon draws on the autobiography of Canadian writer Sylvia Fraser, who, like Sarah, had uncontrollable temper tantrums as a child. Repeatedly sexually molested, Fraser grew up to develop "alters" -- including a hysterically compulsive, self-destructive personality that she nicknames "Appearances". It is also notable that Bernhardt's personal life was characterized by both sexual promiscuity and anorexia (her lack of appetite was well known and often commented upon) -- two very common reactions to sexual abuse. Whether or not you believe Brandon's "diagnosis" -- and one could make just as good a case for the much more common bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression) -- this biography makes interesting reading. Even readers who dislike the modem-day tendency to make psychoanalytic "diagnoses" of famous people will find many of Brandon's insights illuminating. "For such a person [as Bernhardt] Brandon writes, "it is obvious that the stage may be a form of natural therapy. All sorts of different situations may be acted out, great numbers of different personalities assumed, simply in the course of the working life .... And to act out one's death on stage may relieve the compulsion to try it out for real". And indeed, Sarah herself records at least one attempt at suicide in her own autobiography. In this book, the well-known Bernhardt coffin and repeated death scenes are psychological necessities rather than quaint nineteenth century publicity, By acting out her desires and fears, Bernhardt became the greatest actress of her age: "She did have very definite techniques, and she thought about them long and hard. But, on stage as in any other aspect of artistic creation, one can only do what one's self allows one to do; and the requirement of Sarah's self was that she be enabled to play out to the limit all the roles which Sarah Bernhardt might otherwise have found it impossible to confront. What Bernhardt's audiences saw was not just Sarah Bernhardt playing Phedre and speaking Racine's sublime poetry (though they saw that aws well). But they also saw the very incarnation of Phedre herself, and the effect was something extraordinary." Able to work out her anxieties on the stage, Bernhardt was able to give great performances and, in the process, cure herself.
| My Double Life: The Memoirs of
Sarah Bernhardt (Translated
by Victoria Tietze Larson) |
 |
This is the first translation of Sarah Bernhardt's autobiography since 1907. In many ways this modern translation, done by Victoria Larson, is an improvement: the language is modern, clear and crisp and more successfully conveys the headlong rush of S.B.'s narrative. The earlier translation made some silent omissions and slowed the pace of the narrative by amalgamating some chapters. Sometimes clumsily worded, it also chose censorship over accuracy in more than one case of misplaced modesty: during a stay in flooded, snake-infested New Orleans Sarah writes that her hairdresser, who slept in his trunk of wigs, was awakened by a strange movement under his mattress, which proved to be "two snakes ... whether fighting or making love he could not say". The 1907 translator silently substituted "actively moving about" for Sarah's Gallic frankness. The 1999 translation, unimpeded by such modesty is supplemented by an index and copious notes, which provide historical background and identify people named in the memoir, some of whom, it is suspected, are now chiefly remembered for their association with Sarah.
In spite of all this, the new translation is ultimately disappointing. The fault lies, not with the translator but with what she, in her introduction, refers to as "the current realities of academic publishing" which have forced her to abridge the original two volume text. Part of chapters 3 and 4, all of chapters 5, 7, 14, 23, 24, part of chapter 30 and all of chapters 31 and 35 are omitted. These omissions, inadequately made up for by brief summaries, seriously hobble the text's carefully constructed spontaneity. This memoir, after all, is an extension of Sarah's performances: it is an apparent headlong rush of emotion carefully orchestrated in order to present the image she wished to convey. The contrast between the feminine fragility she ascribes to herself and her apparent hardiness--she did, after all, survive childbirth, amputation, and several exhausting tours before the advent of antibiotics, vaccination, water filtration and commercial air travel -- is striking.
Although this present translation does not supersede that of 1907 it is still a compelling read. Sarah was frank about her faults--her (often destructive) impulsiveness, her famous temper, her vanity. Her disarming openness, however conceals as much as it reveals. Why, for example, did her respectable Aunt Faure stop communicating with Sarah (of whom she had disapproved since the days when Sarah, a reckless hoyden, had misbehaved during visits) and her mother? (I suspect that Youle's life as a courtesan and Sarah's own promiscuity caused the break but it would be nice to know.) Similarly, Sarah glosses over the existence of her lovers and makes only passing reference to the son she adored, who suddenly appears, innocent of conception, as a child of five or six during the Franco-Prussian War. Indeed, readers looking for an accurate account of Sarah's life should turn to one of the many recent biographies about her. Sarah was never one to let accuracy get in the way of a good story and, although some of her tales have a suspiciously Munchausen flavour, they are as fascinating as the woman herself.
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