A contribution to the 1956 Club.
This ought to be one of the rediscovered classics of this pandemic. Like Fernand Gérard Doucin, the narrator of Jean Dutourd’s novel Five A. M., many of us have found ourselves wide awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at the ceiling, our mind wandering along the edge of an abyss of despair:
Catastrophe: not the least little bit of sleep between my eyelids! My mind is as clear as at noonday. The room has grown considerably lighter, too. I can hear the muted ticking of the alarm clock hidden in the closet. Panic! I am filled with panic.
Like Doucin, we find our thoughts “revolving in [our] lucid brain like those acrobats known as riders of death, spinning on their motorcycles round and round the inside of a huge drum.” And like Doucin, we drag ourselves into the waking world “haunted by the thought of not having had enough sleep.”
In 1956 (or 1955, when Five A. M. first appeared in French as Doucin, the global spectre was not disease but the atomic bomb. Comparing his trivial accomplishments with those of Homer and Shakespeare, Doucin reflects, “Besides, the atom bomb may destroy everything in fifty years’ (or fifty minutes’) time. In which case, farewell Homer, good-by Shakespeare, good night Balzac, adieu Doucin (Fernand and Gerard).” Born a few years after Doucin was having these thoughts, I can still remember how, as a child, upon awakening to the flash of lightning outside my bedroom window as a kid, my first thought was that a nuclear war had begun.
But in Doucin’s case, it is less global destruction than the minutiae of his own life that fill his thoughts. A thirty-year-old bank clerk, bachelor and largely lapsed Catholic, he worries about money, his weight, about his smoking, about his baldness. While the last of these could be seen as mere vanity, Dutourd recognizes something I’ve been saying ever since I went bald myself — namely, that being bald requires one to stare death in the face each morning.
Perhaps as a symptom of his profession, Doucin is a calculator. “How many people in the world care about me, alive or dead? How long will they talk about me after my death?” he wonders. Not many of them will be women. As a lover, Doucin is more hunter than collector. Even as he feels his attraction to a new mistress, his thoughts race ahead to the moment when he will grow bored and have to break with her.
Smoking is easier to quantify. “How many cigarettes have I smoked in sixteen years?” he wonders. “Possibly 150,000.” Of these, nothing remains — except, of course, the collective damage they’ve done — are still doing — to his body. Unlike the narrator in Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, however, his last cigarette is nowhere in sight: “I can’t stop,” he despairs. “As night closes in, as the lights come on, my frantic need to smoke grows more intense.”
As a realistic description of insomnia, Five A. M. is a success. But it fails, in the end, as a piece of literature. Doucin is too much of an empty shell — or rather, the emotion at the core of his being is one unlikely to compel much sympathy from the reader: boredom. “I am convinced that I know the world inside out. Everything bores me. I know everything in advance. Love, war, the passions, money, all disgust me like a sauce gone bad.”
Even though the word love appears three times more often in the text than boredom and its variations, the spirit that fills the pages of Five A. M. is paralysis. “A man who loves boredom,” Doucin reflects, prefers it “to diversions, pleasures, happiness, everything.” He will refuse to go to a cafe, refuse to call his friends, refuse to move: “He will stay at home for weeks on end, sprawling on a sofa, all alone with boredom.” As Time magazine’s critic responded callously, “Author Dutourd writes as dry ice feels, but his chilling message is only half true. A man’s lifetime is invariably more than the sum of what he thinks and feels in the small, black hour of the hoo-ha’s.”
Perhaps Five A. M. was only a therapeutic exercise. “I used to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning filled with morbid thoughts,” he later claimed, “and said to myself that the best way to fix that was to write a book. I wrote it with the utmost pleasure, in just a couple of months, and have slept soundly since.” Even so, French critics thought well enough of Doucin to nominate Dutourd for the Prix Goncourt (he lost to the now-forgotten novelist Roger Ikor’s novel Les eaux mêlées, later published in English as The Sons of Avrom).
At the time he wrote Five A. M., Dutourd was undergoing an ideological sea change. Having been an active member of the Resistance — narrowly escaping execution after being captured by the Gestapo in 1944 — by the mid-1950s, he had forcefully declared himself as a Gaullist, writing an enthusiastic review of de Gaulle’s memoirs and writing The Taxis of the Marne, which was partly a memoir of his wartime experiences and mostly a brooding reflection on the state of France as he saw it.
It’s not a pretty read in light of today’s world. “In 1935, with her institutions, her cabinet ministers, her soldiers, her severe court of justice, her sparkling navy, her strict prefects, her Pacific empire, her cruel colonists, and her State patriotism, France was a lion,” he declares. To protest against this state, even at the smallest scale, he argued, “was noble and courageous.” “But the France of 1956 is a weak and divided country,” he continued. “The anticonformists are donkeys kicking a dying lion.” His preference to the campaigns of the left, was patriotism. And “By patriotism,” he wrote, “I mean active, intolerant, cruel and effective patriotism.” Orville Prescott, The New York Times’ usually conservative book editor found The Taxis of the Marne “crammed with fine, mouth-filling denunciation, drenched with eloquent cries of lamentation and despair.” And the equally conservative Paul Johnson noted ironically, “Dutourd remarks, correctly, that too many Frenchmen regard their memories as rights; but his whole book is a convincing demonstration that he himself shares the fallacy.”
Dutourd’s shift continued over the course of the next decade until, by the late 1960s, he showed himself sympathetic to royalism in his novel Pluche, or the Love of Art (1967). Eventually, he grew so identified with the establishment in France that he became a target of radical leftists. In the early hours of Bastille Day in 1978, Dutourd’s apartment on Avenue Kleber in Paris was wrecked by a bomb planted by a so-called “Franco-Arab refusal section” that wanted “to destroy the lair of the provocateur Jean Dutourd, a man of the pen at the service of the Jewish press.”
Dutourd was by then writing a column for the evening newspaper France Soir in which he often mocked the pretensions of the left. His cynicism, particularly of leftists still taking favorable positions toward the Soviet Union, would prove prescient. As he wrote just a few days before the bombing, “In a few years’ time, the proletarians and intellectuals will perceive that the fatherland of socialism is nothing other than a military empire.”