Life
She did not hesitate to go straight to the source to find out what she wanted to know, going so far as to spend one month in a house of prostitution before writing Un mois chez les filles (A Month With the Girls) and, later, to disguise herself as a young monk for a month for Un mois chez les hommes (A Month With the Men.) She wrote, incidentally, that she had to elude the advances of a monk from Mount Athos.
Unexpectedly, Choisy underwent a religious conversion. She then tried to withdraw her work from publication and buy up any copies in circulation. Her reasoning was that her writing did not satisfy the criterion of three restraints, associated with Socrates: truth, usefulness, and kindness. She instead devoted herself to psychoanalysis, which she considered to be capable of a lasting contribution to the happiness of mankind. This was when she founded the "Psyché" movement, in which a young man named Jacques Lacan would begin his career. After her conversion, she still felt the urge to write. She produced the history of her conversion, On the way to God You Meet the Devil First, and the very moving Tales For My Little Girl (and For the Others). In the latter, the topic of death takes on a particular importance, even though a discreet humor remains present. In a final nod to her suridealistic youth, the hero of one of the stories is a nitrogen atom. He wonders about his own existence, experiences unhappy relationships, and ends up in a bombing.
Read more about this topic: Maryse Choisy
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“A real life, a life that leaves a deposit in the shape of something alive.... It’s difficult to say what makes a life a real life.... You could also say it depends on a person being identical with himself.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Age. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)