Leslie Camhi
Hervé Guibert’s great-aunts serve as muses and collaborators in a newly translated “photo novel” of disquieting love and beauty.
Suzanne and Louise, by Hervé Guibert, translated by Christine Pichini, introduction by Moyra Davey, Magic Hour Press, 125 pages, $35
• • •
“Photography is also an act of love,” the protean, prolific French writer Hervé Guibert tells us in Ghost Image, a collection of personal essays on that visual medium, in which he also excelled. Love, however, appears to have been complicated for him. Born in 1955 in the middle-class suburb of St. Cloud, Guibert, at thirty-five, was a relatively minor fixture in the avant-garde cultural firmament of Paris. He’d been the photography critic for Le Monde, had won a César for his screenwriting collaboration with director Patrice Chéreau, had authored books in the as-yet-unclassified genre of autofiction, revealing himself as a literary iconoclast in the tradition of de Sade and Bataille, but queer. Then the publication of his 1990 autobiographical roman à clef, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, rendered him notorious.
The scandal—played out in debates on French television—centered not on Guibert’s naked chronicling of the fallout that had accompanied his 1988 diagnosis with AIDS: the existential panic, swirling scuttlebutt, physical indignities, absurdist medical bureaucracy, and unraveling of relationships, all vividly translated into English by Linda Coverdale three decades later. No, the red line that Guibert had crossed, in privacy-obsessed France, concerned his book’s tender portrayal of Muzil, a character clearly based on his close friend, the philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. In the book, Muzil succumbs to complications of the virus. When Foucault died in 1984, most obituaries made no mention of AIDS (only Libération hinted at rumors); the philosopher and his family had intended to keep his diagnosis a secret. Did Guibert’s commitment to literary truth—inspired, perhaps, by his very love for his friend—sanction this betrayal?
Dying, Guibert might have countered, was its own form of betrayal—the dead abandon the living to their own devices and torments. Illness and death were the bigger scandals for him: the illness that had sapped Foucault’s prodigious energy, rendering his towering intellect ineffectual, and the death that loomed for them both.
Death arrived precipitously for Guibert in the year following that book’s publication, two weeks after a failed suicide attempt—the writer at last meeting “in the flesh” the fatal muse that had long fascinated him. (In Ghost Image, penned when Guibert was in his twenties but already death-obsessed, he recounts taking a 400-lire photo-booth self-portrait in Florence and using it to order an Italian-style funerary medallion for himself.) Since then, his works have very slowly been making their way into the hands of English-language readers. Suzanne and Louise is the latest addition to that number—a “photo-novel” of exquisitely printed black-and-white images accompanied by text, first published in France in 1980 and now translated by Christine Pichini.
Spread from Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
It’s initially difficult to reconcile this haunting and profoundly disquieting early work, centering on the reclusive existence of a pair of elderly women, with Guibert’s later reputation as a bad-boy author of outré erotic obsessions. Yet it is of a piece with his nonconformist spirit, which sought, in each instance, to expand the boundaries of our understanding of love.
So, as a very young man, he found his first muses behind the shutters of the hôtel particulier in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement, where his two great-aunts had lived for more than forty years. In the title, Suzanne, “the one with money” and the house’s owner, gets top billing. But her younger sister, Louise, who “serves as her humble, tyrannical maid,” almost steals the show.
Louise. From Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
With his parents during his childhood, and then on his own in the late 1970s, Guibert would visit his great-aunts for lunch most Sundays. The women’s knotty relationship, their histories and routines, fascinated him. He proposed making a film about them, but they refused, so he started to write a play instead, and began photographing them, “without their involvement, without asking.”
As it turned out, the women were intrigued by these first pictures. They weren’t in the habit of looking in mirrors, and in photographs “the images they had of themselves stopped at age thirty . . . ‘Old age isn’t presentable,’ was the general idea.”
Spread from Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
Thus began a complex game “in which the artist, using subterfuge and epistolary seduction, bewitches his shrewd aunts into compliance,” writes Moyra Davey in her introduction to the current volume. His great-aunts collaborate with him as models in the creation of mises-en-scène that he photographs, pictures that will later form the backbone of this book.
Old age is itself a kind of scandal, its face largely hidden in our ageist, youth-obsessed culture, or else paraded as an exotic specimen. But for Guibert it is a realm of sumptuous, if chaste, sensuality and unforeseen menace.
Suzanne, Louise, and Hervé Guibert. From Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
He is careful not to pigeonhole his great-aunts and resists—until close to the book’s end—assigning a specific number to either woman’s age. Their advanced years, for their ringleted young grandnephew, are like a remote landscape full of surprises through which he is determined to feel his way, without guideposts or map.
Louise’s memories from her time as a Carmelite nun from 1937 to 1945, recorded by Guibert, bear witness to her strange, obdurate delight in mortifications of the flesh, marking this “saintly” woman as an unwitting bedfellow to de Sade and Sacher-Masoch.
Spread from Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
Louise hadn’t cut her hair since Suzanne—a decade older and, like her, raised in poverty, but having “married up” in life—had “ransomed” her sister from the convent at the end of the war and brought her to live in Paris. For Hervé, Louise unwinds and unravels the braids that she normally wears wrapped around her head, revealing a magnificent gray mane that hangs down to the small of her back.
Suzanne. From Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
Meanwhile, readers slowly learn that Suzanne’s childless marriage to her late husband, a successful pharmacist, had concealed its own secrets. Now the widow, sharp as a tack but physically infirm, depended upon her younger sister to administer rough care.
Spread from Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
Reading this description, cinephiles may be tempted to recall Albert and David Maysles’ documentary Grey Gardens (1975), or the cruelly campy horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which almost single-handedly resurrected the careers of its aging stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. What saves Suzanne and Louise from camp and charges of exploitation is the steady, serious gaze Guibert trains upon his aunts—a quality of profound attention to neglected lives that is its own form of love—and the extremes of hidden beauty that he finds there.
Louise and Suzanne. From Suzanne and Louise. Courtesy Magic Hour Press.
When these pictures were made, among the trio of collaborators, Guibert was the most likely survivor. In fact, both Suzanne and Hervé would perish in 1991, with Louise following several years later. Thomas Simmonet, in an afterword to this edition, notes that “on the site of their hôtel particulier, there now stands a modern apartment building.” Art, with all its fragility and complications, remains our surest rampart against death and forgetting.
Leslie Camhi is an essayist, memoirist, and literary translator (from French), writing for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and other publications. She is also a frequent contributor to art museum catalogs. Her first translation, of Violaine Huisman’s novel, The Book of Mother (Scribner), was a finalist for numerous awards and long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize.