When a Boy Isn’t a Boy: Soft Skull’s Controversial New “Memoir”
Posted by Thomas Riggs in authors books translation on March 9, 2010
Perhaps you didn’t notice, but next month Soft Skull Press is releasing The Bad Life, the English translation of Frédéric Mitterrand’s “memoir” La mauvaise vie (2005). Over the last few months the author has become controversial, and in response Soft Skull published a defense of the book on its blog.
We’d just like to say that what is most surprising to us regarding the situation is that Mr. Mitterrand’s story has for quite some time been public knowledge to the French people, and in the most high-profile fashion. The Bad Life was published four years ago and became a bestseller in France. The controversial passages have been known to us all along and, among other things, it was the frankness and thoughtfulness with which Mr. Mitterrand discussed his life that drew us to the project. Whether you agree with Mr. Mitterrand’s story or habits, he approaches them with a compelling and thought-provoking honesty and we continue to stand behind this elegant and brave book in the same way we have since undertaking to publish it here. As a publisher, Soft Skull has always embraced controversial conversations.
So, then, who is Frédéric Mitterrand, and what did he do to cause such a scandal?
Monsieur Mitterrand is the nephew of the former French president François Mitterrand. In June 2009, after many years as a documentary maker, writer, and television presenter, he became the French minister of culture and communication under the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, supposedly at the urging of Sarkozy’s wife, the singer and former model Carla Bruni. France is famous for looking the other way when politicians and other personalities transgress moral norms in their personal lives. Hardly anyone in France seemed to care when Mitterrand’s book appeared in French in 2005, even though what he says about paying for prostitutes in Thailand is hardly accepted behavior in France.
Tous ces rituels de foire aux éphèbes, de marché aux esclaves m’excitent énormément. La lumière est moche, la musique tape sur les nerfs, les shows sont sinistres et on pourrait juger qu’un tel spectacle, abominable d’un point de vue moral, est aussi d’une vulgarité repoussante. Mais il me plaît au-delà du raisonnable. La profusion de garçons très attrayants, et immédiatement disponibles, me met dans un état de désir que je n’ai plus besoin de refréner ou d’occulter. L’argent et le sexe, je suis au cœur de mon système ; celui qui fonctionne enfin car je sais qu’on ne me refusera pas.
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All the rituals of the market for young men, the slave market, excite me enormously. The light is awful, the music gets on your nerves, the shows are dreary, and such a spectacle, abominable from a moral standpoint, could also be judged as a hideous vulgarity. But it pleases me beyond reason. The profusion of boys, very attractive and immediately available, puts me in a state of desire I no longer need to restrain or hide. Money and sex, I am at the heart of my system, that which functions in the end because I know that no one will refuse me.
In France the book was critically acclaimed and sold well, but something changed in 2009. Mitterrand, now a politician, threw himself into an international controversy: the arrest in Switzerland of director Roman Polanski, a French citizen, who had fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl. Mitterrand called the arrest “frightening.” Unfortunately for Mitterrand, what he seemed to be admitting in his book—sex with underage boys—was immediately identified with Polanski’s crime, sex with an underage girl. Both French Socialists (the party of his uncle) and the ultra-right-wing Front National attacked him for pedophilia and “sex tourism.” It was left to President Sarkozy’s party, the right-wing UMP, to defend its minister of culture. The party’s spokesman, Xavier Bertrand, expressed his support in a typical French way. “On n’est pas obligé d’utiliser la vie privée des gens à des fins politiciennes” (“One is not obliged to use someone’s private life for political ends”).
Hardly surprising, the issue ended up being more complicated than it first seemed. Most importantly, the book is, as its French publisher (Éditions Robert Laffont) states, a roman d’inspiration autobiographique (“novel of autobiographical inspiration”). In other words, it’s a mixture of memory and imagination. The controversial material is found on only a few pages. The book covers a much longer period of his life and concerns something more general, as Mitterrand hints at here when referring to himself in the third person.
Autrefois on aurait dit qu’il s’agissait de la divulgation de sa part d’ombre ; aujourd’hui on parlerait de “coming out.” Il ne se reconnaît pas dans ce genre de définition. La mauvaise vie qu’il décrit est la seule qu’il a connue.
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In the past one would have said it was a matter of revealing his dark side; today one would speak of “coming out.” He doesn’t recognize himself in this type of definition. The bad life he describes is the only life he knew.
Mitterrand eventually went on French television to discuss the controversy. He denied having sex with underage boys, saying gay men often call other men “boys.” He echoed misgivings expressed in the book, saying payment for sex was “an offence against the idea of dignity, human dignity.” And ultimately, as when the book first appeared in 2005, many (though not all) French people admired his honesty in discussing the issue. To this day he remains the minister of culture and communication.
Of course, I don’t know whether Mitterrand is telling the truth. But I give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a smart man (if you understand French, see the video below), and it doesn’t seem bright to mention in a “memoir” that you committed what would be a serious crime in your own country. France, of course, prosecutes people who have sex with minors.
But what about the book itself, its quality and literary merit? As we have learned so many times before, art is not a reflection of the moral rectitude of the creator. Art, in this case an arrangement of words, stands on its own. On the back of the French edition, a blurb describes the work as “délicat, pudique jusque dans l’impudeur” (“delicate, discreet to the point of indiscretion”). In reading the book, I was absorbed by the author’s elegant style, his search for understanding, of himself and of things around him, whether real or imagined. I found it to be an impressive and moving confession of an unsettling and at times disturbing life.
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