"Madame:" An Evening With Catherine Robbe-Grillet

Left, Beverly Charpentier; with pen, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Wednesday, October 7; pho­to­graph by Michael George.

By the way, when we vis­ited Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young act­ress, had dressed her­self à la gam­ine in my hon­or, pre­tend­ing to be Lolita, and she con­tin­ued the per­form­ance the next day, when we met again at a publisher’s lunch­eon in a res­taur­ant. After pour­ing wine for every­one but her, the waiter asked, “Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle?” It was very funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so sol­emn in pho­to­graphs, roared with laughter.

—Vladimir Nabokov; in an inter­view with Alfred Appel, Jr., con­duc­ted August 1970, col­lec­ted in Strong Opinions, 1973, McGraw-Hill

Brian Boyd’s bio­graphy of Nabokov places this meet­ing in 1959. By this time, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, née Rastakian, has already pub­lished her first nov­el, The Image, pub­lished by Editions du Minuet under the pen name Jean De Berg in 1956, when she is 26. She mar­ried Robbe-Grillet in 1957. The Image is a detailed account of a sado-masochistic rela­tion­ship; it was made into a film, shot on loc­a­tion in Paris, by Radley Metzger in 1975. Robbe-Grillet appeared in two of her husband’s films, both among his best, 1963’s L’Immortelle and 1966’s Trans-Europe Express. In the years since her husband’s death (he passed away in 2008) she has gained a second repu­ta­tion; for a very rare speak­ing appear­ance in New York, held by the  French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) on Tuesday even­ing, she was referred to more than once as “France’s most fam­ous dom­in­atrix.” The even­ing, which was pre­faced by an edited ver­sion of La cere­monie, Lina Mannheimer’s doc­u­ment­ary about Madame Robbe-Grillet, which also fea­tures extens­ive inter­views with Robbe-Grillet’s com­pan­ion and, …well,… it’s hard to put a name to it, and “slave” will not do…in any event, a good deal of the post-film dis­cus­sion focused on how Beverly Charpentier, who spoke quite a bit her­self while serving as Madame’s trans­lat­or, could, as an extremely accom­plished het­ero­sexu­al woman with two grown chil­dren, have giv­en her whole life over to the care and obed­i­ence of Catherine.

The pan­el was mod­er­ated by Toni Bentley, the one-time bal­let dan­cer whose writ­ings have come to chron­icle her own explor­a­tions of sado-masochism. Wearing a near-crimson dress, Bentley, who authored the recent Vanity Fair art­icle which intro­duced Madame Robbe-Grillet and her life work/style to an American audi­ence, asked a series of ques­tions, told the audi­ence that she expec­ted their own ques­tions to be “bold,” and related a tale of her own par­ti­cip­a­tion in a bond­age ritu­al with Robbe-Grillet and Charpentier.

So, you know, it was not an entirely lit­er­ary even­ing. (It’s part of the French Alliance’s “Art of Sex And Seduction” series.) I myself am not ter­ribly inter­ested in S&M as a prac­tice (des­pite my hav­ing penned, pseud­onym­ously, an account of an even­ing at The Vault for a Guccione pub­lic­a­tion back in the ‘80s; like they say, once a philo­soph­er, twice a…never mind…), but like all closed or semi-closed social sys­tems, it is cer­tainly inter­est­ing, and Madame Robbe-Grillet, a woman of fierce and for­mid­able intel­li­gence, brings her per­cep­tu­al acu­ity to bear on the phe­nomen­on in a dis­pas­sion­ate way when neces­sary. Looking very prop­er in her black dress suit and white head­band, Madame, now 85 years of age, reflec­ted on the fact that, from what stat­ist­ics she could glean, 90 per­cent of all the indi­vidu­als with an interest in sad­o­mas­ochism are males, and that the dis­pro­por­tion cre­ates, among oth­er things, a cer­tain kind of com­pli­city among women who par­ti­cip­ate in the life­style. Also dis­cussed were the dif­fer­ences between pro­fes­sion­al dom­in­atrices and those who prac­tice dis­cip­line as a life­style; Madame Robbe-Grillet, who does the lat­ter, does not dis­dain sex workers—indeed, she has heart­felt praise for them—but does not take money her­self; it redefines the nature of the whole exchange, she says, and of course she is cor­rect. As for Charpentier, answer­ing why a woman as accom­plished as her­self should be in the pos­i­tion she’s chosen, wondered aloud why it would be con­sidered so unusu­al, and cited the motto of the American col­lege fra­tern­ity Phi Kappa Psi, “joy in ser­vice.” A not dis­sim­il­ar concept anim­ates some prac­tices with­in twelve step pro­grams, but I wasn’t gonna bring that up necessarily.

There was much laughter in the talk. “Obviously, if you’ve read or seen 50 Shades of Gray, you know that a pre­dilec­tion for sad­o­mas­ochism is the res­ult of some­thing ter­rible that happened to you as a child,” Madame Robbe-Grillet said, lux­uri­at­ing in mild, rancor-free irony. “It’s reas­sur­ing for people to tie it in to some child­hood trauma, but I can’t say that there’s any that I myself remem­ber.” She went on to say that sexu­al­ity was still a place of mys­tery, and while “çe me derange pas” that psy­cho­ana­lysts, both ama­teur and pro­fes­sion­al, have tried to fig­ure out “why” she spent dec­ades as a sub­missive before turn­ing dom­in­ant, or any of the oth­er fea­tures of her erot­ic life, she her­self had/has “no need to find out where my desires come from.” I was delighted when, at the ques­tion of how long she inten­ded to keep up her prac­tice of rituals now that she’s in her ninth dec­ade of life, Madame cited the example of Portuguese film­maker Manoel De Oliviera, who con­tin­ued mak­ing films even past the age of 100.

It is a tricky busi­ness, sado-masochism, and par­tic­u­larly in these times. At one point, Madame made men­tion of the fact that a genu­ine sad­ist derives no pleas­ure from inflict­ing pain on a per­son who enjoys receiv­ing pain, as that goes against the whole eth­os of sad­ism; the implic­a­tions of this state­ment were left to hang as Madame con­tin­ued by speak­ing of ideas of con­sent. Consent, I infer, is one of the rationales that inform the ritu­al­ist­ic prac­tices in Robbe-Grillet’s mode of liv­ing. But these prac­tices are not all she lives for. Again without irrit­a­tion, she noted, “I know I’m billed as France’s most fam­ous dom­in­atrix, and I am, but I’m also a nice little old lady who’s inter­ested in the theatre, music, and lit­er­at­ure, and who makes jam!”

There was not much time for audi­ence ques­tions. The house, Florence Gould Hall, was packed, and the male-to-female ratio was some­thing like 60:40, and of course I thought more than once of old Woody Allen jokes about the per­son­al ads in the New York Review Of Books. The ques­tions were not ter­ribly “bold,” and I didn’t get to ask either of mine, the first of which was to soli­cit her own recol­lec­tion of the meet­ing with Nabokov so very long ago (in the year of my own birth, as it hap­pens), the second would have been about the extent to which she’d been involved in the mak­ing of the film ver­sion of The Image, and her impres­sion of the pic­ture. There was a book-signing after­wards, though, and I got to be third on line.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s final pub­lished fic­tion, A Sentimental Novel, is so replete with elab­or­ate erot­ic fantas­ies of such atro­cit­ies as child murder and such that it’s easy to ignore its ingeni­ous struc­ture, a vari­ant of that of Raymond Roussel’s long poem “La Vue”—a struc­ture that in some way inocu­lates the work from genu­ine mor­al con­dem­na­tion, or should, or, oh, I don’t know. Although Robbe-Grillet doesn’t get into it in his won­der­ful mem­oir, pub­lished in English trans­la­tion in 1988 as Ghosts In The Mirror, his mar­riage to Catherine was, among oth­er things, a long-held S&M rela­tion­ship. (His depic­tion of the mar­riage in the book is in fact, espe­cially for this author, down­right romantic. The book con­tains an account of how the couple sur­vived the first crash of an Air France Boeing 707 in 1961, and how his main regret from that event was that in his incin­er­ated lug­gage was a brace­let he had brought for Catherine in com­mem­or­a­tion of their meet­ing exactly ten years before, while he was stuck on his nov­el Les Gommes and took a trip to Istanbul on impulse—the couple met on the Orient Express!) The cov­er of the paper­back edi­tion of Madame’s mem­oir of her hus­band, Alain, is a pic­ture of the two locked in an impossibly tender embrace that has an emo­tion­al echo of Annie Leibovitz’s famed 1980 Lennon/Ono shot. The book is a series of alpha­bet­ic­ally arranged vignettes/observations, some sev­er­al pages, oth­ers only a para­graph or two. I cer­tainly hope an English trans­la­tion is in the off­ing; here is my own prob­ably very not-good and cer­tainly com­pletely unau­thor­ized trans­la­tion of the entry called “Fax.”

FAX

My man has a happy rela­tion­ship with tools, but with technology…?

Apart from the fax, he nev­er puts aside his obstin­ate refus­al of tech­nic­al innov­a­tions (digit­al photo, com­puter, mobile phone). Only the fax finds grace with Alain; he has it in con­stant use after I buy him a simple mod­el. He will not even hear of a cred­it card, even after being tricked up in a Canadian hotel, or it becomes a require­ment for access­ing an inter­na­tion­al phone line. He will nev­er change; he’d rather suf­fer than bend.

Fortunately, without being infatu­ated with them, I have no issue with elec­tron­ics, domest­ic or oth­er­wise, and everything works out.

Tools, that’s him; elec­tron­ics, me.

 It was Alain that I chose for Madame to sign. Charpentier was by her side to trans­late, and I men­tioned right off that I was an admirer of hers and a long­time admirer of her husband’s. Madame said some­thing to Charpentier, and Charpentier said to me “You are a good per­son;” by way of amp­li­fy­ing this, Madame—who des­pite her tiny frame gives the impres­sion of being a for­mid­ably strong per­son, and is unfail­ingly alert, with viva­cious eyes—continued, “Tous les ama­teurs de Robbe-Grillet sont bonnes.”