Chocolates for Breakfast Read online

  The passages that had been cut from the Rinehart edition in 1956 were vivid, direct, and often sensual. But the new material that Moore added to the French edition in 1957 is much more cerebral: discourses on politics and philosophy, delivered by Courtney, Miss Rosen, Anthony Neville, and Charles Cunningham. Moore may not have even had the original typescript pages with her in the Paris hotel room where, over the course of several weeks, she and de Laurot created the Julliard nouvelle édition.

  For example, the conversation between Courtney and Miss Rosen now includes the following:

  “Just jargon!” the girl exclaimed angrily. “Even you, you spout the same jargon I hear all around me. You hide life between the pages of your psychology manual . . . We say ‘relationship’ when we mean ‘love,’ or ‘communication’ instead of ‘meeting of minds.’ It couldn’t be that I love you because I see the truth in you. Of course not! It’s a fixation due to transference of my mother-image—a fixation with lesbian overtones . . . We repeat phrases as we hear them, and we silence our hearts to better hear the anthem of our civilization.”

  “It’s true, Courtney. All my life, I’ve listened to that anthem. I sought my liberation in study, travel and reflection . . . this jargon poisons our souls . . . it taints our food . . . It is a sterilizing mist sprayed upon the forests of America.”

  Soon after, Miss Rosen provides the lesson in existentialist philosophy that will serve as a kind of refrain further on in the book:

  “I’m going to tell you something, Courtney, that you may not understand right away. You’ll remember it in a few years, and maybe then you’ll understand it. You will discover that truth and love are inseparable. One cannot know one without the other. Love flourishes not in innocence, but in purity. One cannot create love without destroying the Myth.”

  “You know this kind of love, then?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “I didn’t find it, I created it.

  I didn’t discover myself, I created myself. I did not ‘meet’ my destiny, I forged it for myself. You must understand that, in order to understand what I represent, and why my Love is linked to Truth.”

  And here is Janet, stretching naked on her bed:

  Courtney looked over at her roommate and admired her tanned and athletic body. Suddenly, this secret pleasure shocked her. She had always prided herself on repressing the latent sensuality that whispered between the walls of Scaisbrooke and troubled the protective silence of Puritanism.

  Afterward comes Courtney’s initiation of Janet—to revolutionary consciousness:

  “Look,” said Courtney, stretching her hand toward the New England countryside that unfolded before them. Janet leaned out . . . she saw the neatly trimmed walkways of Scaisbrooke and the asphalt driveway that disappeared into the foliage. Here and there, a Colonial house, freshly repainted, stood out from the shadows . . . “You can see the lush, well-tended countryside of an Empire, with its Metropolis over there, beyond the hills—The Empire State, as they say.” She turned abruptly to her friend. “Is it my fault, Jan, that I see there a land where only fraud and wretchedness can thrive?”

  There are times when this 1950s French Courtney sounds almost hip, like a teenager who’s just discovered Beat poetry. In Hollywood, when Barry asks her if she likes it there, Courtney replies:

  “I don’t like this town. It’s under the command of the Guardians of Myth. Here, by their order, the Myth is conceived, the idols are carved and the canticles are written.”

  Barry’s eyes widened. She shrugged her shoulders and continued.

  “I see you don’t understand me. I’m not surprised. You just understand everyday things.” She added in a theatrical tone: “The Hollywood sun doesn’t make anything grow, doesn’t change any season to show the passage of time. It tans the bodies of lotus eaters who never grow old, because they were never young. There’s no winter or spring, no past and no future. The people are prisoners of this timeless irreality.”

  “Pete,” says Barry, “another Martini. You want another glass?”

  “Yes, a Daiquiri.”

  “And a Daiquiri for the young lady.”

  Anthony Neville and Charles Cunningham both win Courtney’s approval by their renunciation of American values. As a European, Anthony has an easier time of it, complaining of American women and their puritanical ideas about sex.

  “Puritanism is not a refusal to make love, it is a way of making love. It is cocktails that dull awareness, darkness that hides young bodies, the closed eyes . . . and silence that denies pleasure.”

  But even Charles Cunningham, the straight-arrow law student who put himself through school, chimes in with his own social criticism, sounding in French like a student revolutionary straight from the Left Bank of Paris. When Courtney repeats what Anthony has told her, that childhood is not an age but a world, Charles contradicts her:

  “It is not a world but a state of mind. Retaining that state of mind is what protects the adults around us from destroying their childhood and accepting responsibility for their society. It is our national state of mind. That is why our youth does not know what Revolution is.”

  And at the end of the book, Anthony has given Courtney much more than enchantment; he has allowed her to fulfill the prophecy Miss Rosen gave her at the beginning:

  “You have given me something much more precious, something you’ll never know. A long time before I met you, someone told me that I’d learn some day what I’m telling you now. I would have never understood it if you had not given me my childhood. She told me that love does not exist in innocence, but in growth . . .”

  “You have found this love?”

  “No, I cannot find it. I must create it. I shall create it as I shape my destiny, and try to expose the Myth that destroyed Janet.”

  Armed with this new knowledge, Courtney sets forth to save the world, as Anthony retreats to his island and the summer comes to a close.

  The Preface to the Nouvelle Édition

  Quelle est la raison d’être d’une préface? Apologie? Explication? Commentaire? Indice de faiblesse ou de mauvaise foi— si elle est écrite par l’auteur—, éloge de complaisance parfois, si elle est due à quelqu’un d’autre. Je n’ai jamais compris l’utilité des préfaces, j’ai peu de goût pour en écrire une. Une note pourtant s’impose ici.

  La première édition française de mon livre a été traduite de la version américaine que je n’ai jamais considérée comme complète. Je me trouvais à cette époque-là aux Etats-Unis et il ne me semblait pas possible d’y faire paraître mon livre dans sa version intégrale. L’occasion de publier cette dernière me fut offerte lorsque j’ai rencontré à Paris mon éditeur français.

  Voici donc l’édition non expurgée. Est-ce à dire que la version américaine avait subi des altérations arbitraires? Certes non. Il s’agissait plutôt d’une contrainte que je m’étais à moi-même imposée et que je voudrais pouvoir nommer : une censure par anticipation. Cette même contrainte existe dans l’esprit de beaucoup d’écrivains américains qui sont conscients de préférences du public à propos duquel ils écrivent et qui connaissent bien aussi l’idée que se font de notre public ceux qui le servent.

  Il est difficile chez nous de servir à chacun ses quatre vérités, surtout lorsqu’il s’agit de ce conflit essentiel qui existe entre les principes de notre mode de vie et les exigences de la condition humaine. Ce conflit est latent dans tous les cœurs de notre pays, et il tourmente beaucoup d’entre nous. Nous nous détournons de cette vérité terrifiante avec ce que j’appellerai une sorte de mauvaise foi commune. C’est ce qui m’a poussé à m’exprimer avec certaines réticences au cours de mon travail initial. Mais après y avoir réfléchi, j’ai senti qu’il me fallait tenter de parvenir jusqu’aux causes de cette crise morale dont souffre tant la jeunesse que je décris ici.

  What is the purpose of a preface? Apology? Explanation? Commentary? Indication of weakness or of bad faith—if it is writ
ten by the author—or obligatory praise, perhaps, if the work of another. I never understood the purpose of prefaces, and I have little desire to write one. A note, nonetheless, is called for here.

  The first French edition of my book was translated from the American version, which I never considered to be complete. I was in the United States at the time and it didn’t seem possible to me to bring out my book in its integral version. The possibility of publishing the latter was offered to me when I met my French editor in Paris.

  Here then is the unexpurgated version. Is that to say that the American version was subject to arbitrary alterations? Certainly not. It was rather a constraint that I imposed upon myself and that I would like to be able to name: a censorship by anticipation. This same constraint exists in the mind of many American writers who are conscious of the preferences of the audience about whom they are writing, and who also understand quite well how that audience is viewed by those that serve it.

  It is difficult for us to offer each reader the unvarnished truth, especially when it concerns the essential conflict that exists between the principles of our way of life and the demands of the human condition. This conflict lies latent in all the hearts in our country and torments many of us. We turn away from this terrifying truth with what I would term a kind of collective bad faith. This is what led me to express myself with some reticence in the course of my initial work. But after having reflected on it, I felt obliged to try to arrive at the causes of this moral crisis that so afflicts the youth whom I describe in this book.

  P. M.

  Or as one contemporary critic wrote, after comparing the original with the new version: “Julliard, give us back the untutored freshness of the original work!”

  The indictments of American capitalist society that Pamela Moore added to the French edition in 1956 turned out to be very good for business. Chocolates for Breakfast did well in France, remaining in print well into the 1970s. Moore’s popularity in France also extended to her later books, which were better received abroad than in the United States. The French nouvelle édition also used as the basis for other translations, including the Italian edition published by Mondadori, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and remained in print as late as 2005.

  Edited or Censored Passages in the American Manuscript

  But to return to the original manuscript, which Pamela had submitted to Rinehart in early 1956, the cutting of dozens of manuscript pages from the American published version may have been the decision of Moore herself; her agent, Monica McCall; or her editor at Rinehart, Sandy Richardson. Many of these passages underscore the sensual connection between Courtney and Miss Rosen. For example:

  Miss Rosen flinched. She got up and put her hand on Courtney’s shoulder. Courtney felt the touch through her whole body, and the sensation was an agreeable one. Often at night she thought about Miss Rosen touching her, and being with her all the time, not just for a few hours in the evening. She would like to have that warm feeling more of the time instead of the loneliness. (Original manuscript, p. 17)

  Unlike the lofty, sometimes stilted language of the French nouvelle édition, the passages cut from the conversation between Janet and Courtney about Miss Rosen sound much like the conversation of two teenagers discussing a taboo subject:

  “I don’t dig this thing you two have,” [Janet] went on. “You know, I was up in Alberts and Clarke’s room before lunch, and they were talking about you and Miss Rosen. I’d watch out if I were you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Watch out’?”

  “What I mean is, she seems queer as hell to me. Now don’t flip, I mean it. I know she’s engaged and all that, but she’s not sleeping with the guy or anything, and funny things happen to people in boarding school. She’s got this fixation on you, and she wants to make you a little Miss Rosen, and she loves the fact that you worship her.”

  “So what? You think of everything in terms of sex. I have a crush on her, everyone knows that, and like any teacher she loves to work with an intelligent student and feel that she’s developing a person.” (p. 4)

  And the deleted portion of the teachers’ conversation on the same topic sounds plausibly the way teachers might talk about it:

  The staff members began to get concerned about Courtney, and one afternoon in the staff parlor, where they could smoke, they talked about her . . .

  Miss Rosen was not there . . .

  . . . “Well, if we may speak frankly,” said Mrs. Reese, “the relationship that Farrell had with Miss Rosen was— well, unnatural. Not that Miss Rosen had anything to do with that,” she added hastily. (p. 34)

  Here is Courtney watching Barry, her first lover, as he sleeps:

  She constructed his body beneath the blanket, lean and pale with an almost girlish grace. Then she felt almost embarrassed, with the sensual self-consciousness that she had known at Scaisbrooke when Miss Rosen leaned over her. (p. 55)

  From her death in 1964 until the late 1990s, Pamela Moore was mentioned only in passing—and often in lists of lesbian fiction. In a 1965 article entitled “Feminine Equivalents of Greek Love in Modern Fiction,” Marion Zimmer Bradley, who later wrote the bestselling The Mists of Avalon, compared Chocolates for Breakfast favorably with several novels about the obsessive love of a young girl for an older woman. Courtney, she wrote, “is taken up by a friendly, kindly teacher; but just as Courtney is coming out of her shell, the teacher realizes the nature of this attachment and rebuffs her . . . [T]his rejection of her overwhelming need for love touches off the sexual promiscuity and dissipation which characterize Courtney’s later adolescent years.” In Contingent Loves: Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality (2000), Melanie Hawthorne surveyed French novels that feature an erotic bond between schoolgirls and older female teachers, and she cited Chocolates for Breakfast among the English language counterparts to this genre.

  It would seem that these and other characterizations of Chocolates for Breakfast as lesbian fiction were based on little more than the schoolgirl crush depicted in the book’s first chapter. But the relationship becomes more complex in light of the passages deleted from the manuscript. One can view these cuts as censorship, or self-censorship, or perhaps the editing process of paring a book down to a more suggestive, essential form. If the work is done artfully, the missing material might be sensed though not seen. It’s as if a face were cropped from a photograph in such a way that certain viewers still perceive it to be there—a ghost image of a desire deferred, of original love and loss.

  K. K.

  About the Author

  PAMELA MOORE was an American writer educated at Rosemary Hall and Barnard College. Her first book, Chocolates for Breakfast, was published when she was eighteen and became an international bestseller. Moore went on to write four more novels, but none of these enjoyed the success of her first. She died in 1964 at the age of twenty-six, while at work on her final, unpublished novel, Kathy on the Rocks.

  www.chocolatesforbreakfast.info

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  Also by Pamela Moore

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  Pigeons of St. Mark’s Place

  The Exile of Suzy-Q

  The Horsy Set

  Kathy on the Rocks

  Copyright

  An incarnation of the first chapter originally appeared in New York Tyrant Magazine.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  CHOCOLATES FOR BREAKFAST. Copyright © 1956 by Pamela Moore. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  First published in hardcover in 1956 by Rinehart and Company.

  EPub Edition July 2013 ISBN: 9780062246929

  Title page art by Carter Kegelman.

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