Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.
There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.
Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.
The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:
Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.
As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”
This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.
There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:
To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.
He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.
If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.
What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.
René Clair on the set of an early sound film.
When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:
How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!
Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”
What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.
If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.
Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.
The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.
Star Turn, by René Clair London: Chatto & Windus, 1936
Title page from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra (1938).
One of my Neglected Books guilty pleasures is the work of the prolific French novelist Maurice Dekobra. There was a time when Dekobra was among the best-known and most successful authors in the world. His books are said to have been translated into over seventy languages, and there was a time when no novelist came close to him as a precursor to Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann for American readers: our titan of titillation, if you will.
Dekobra’s books are like fresh garlicky potato chips: heavily seasoned and hard to resist, but not good to overconsume. From everything I’ve read, he was a man of monstrous ego. A man who, had the great Victor Hugo himself been around at the time, wouldn’t have hesitated to tell le maître des Les misérables to step aside as he paraded down the Champs-Élysées.
Dekobra’s egotism enabled him to blithely ignore his own ignorance. Reality and research were for the timid and unimaginative. The fact that he knew nothing about a subject never prevented him from making up his own facts. And if their foundations and construction seemed a bit jury-rigged and unstable, no matter: speed was what mattered most. As long as the reader kept turning the page, credibility took a back seat to pure forward narrative momentum.
Cover of Reader’s Library (UK) edition of Prince or Clown by Maurice Dekobra.
In his 1929 novel Prince ou Pitre, published in English as Prince or Clown, for example, he invents an entire Balkan country, Phrygia, its language and culture. The Phrygians, for example, consume massive amounts of yarka, their national drink. Yarka, Dekobra informs us “made from distilled tomatoes and geranium leaves.” Geranium leaves are, in fact, edible and have been used to season dishes, supposedly; but distilled tomatoes? (The answer turns out to be yes, according to drinks website SevenFiftyDaily (“The Arrival of Tomato-based Spirits: European distillers are betting on Americans’ fondness for the nightshade with a new crop of liquors”) — so get your yarka franchise going today!)
Then there is the Phrygian language, which is capable of expressing things hitherto unthought and unfelt:
“Afafna!” “Afafna?” “That means in Phrygian, ‘By the body of my mother, I am overcome with zodiacal emotion.'”
Dekobra presents us with other bits of Phrygian: Tchik zaga houm-houm crakoi (“I’m feeling better” — I think); Zurbe Barigoul! (um .. sorry, not a clue); Djouk! (you can probably figure this one out yourself). (I must omit Kayout Kagda, as that would be a spoiler.) He also offers us a remedy for accidental poisoning: “Give her a spoonful of milk every two hours, a cup of cod liver oil, boric acid and gum-arabic.” (OK, admittedly this is probably what the finest GP in Paris would have prescribed … in 1729.)
Not surprisingly, Dekobra also had a high opinion of his high opinions. American and English newspapers loved to offer their readers his grand pronouncements on everything from love and marriage to food. And especially, women. He was, after all, “The Man Who KNOWS Women.”
From the London Sunday Dispatch, 11 December 1938.
Dekobra would argue that his ideas were grounded in careful and objective observation. When he visited in New York in January 1930, for example, he told reporters that he had come to conduct a study of American women:
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930.
Nevermind that upon debarking the week before, he felt confident in announcing that what American women needed was a good shaking:
From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 11 January 1930.
By the time he’d ended his American tour, he was ready to set down his conclusiong about American women and American romance in algebraic precision:
From the Long Beach Sun, 30 August 1931.
Ten years later, as a refugee from occupied France, he predicted with striking inaccuracy the economic landscape of the postwar world:
From the Montreal Gazette, 2 April 1941
When Dekobra turned fifty, he thought it was time to offer the world a larger piece of his mind. His autobiography, published in English as Written with Lipstick, is part memoir, part stories polished to perfection at countless dinner parties and rounds of drinks with friends — always showing Dekobra to his best advantage — and part pontifications as solemn and authoritative as any declared from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome. These last are easy to spot in the book: they’re always in numbered lists. There are, for example, four key failings of English women:
They do not understand how to choose their dresses — above all, to choose colours — too much apple green and red geranium.
They marry without careful consideration — before they know whether the man is suitable.
They talk too much about their household affairs.
They are too fond of bridge.
At the end of his chapter on “The Adventuress” (“chief character in tens of thousands of novels in every language under the sun”), he provides us with his “Articles of Association for Adventuresses” — or, “Ten Commandments for Love’s Highwaywomen”:
Choose an original name — Thea, Belkis, or Mareva.
Confide to men under strict secrecy that you are the niece of a revolutionary executed in prison, or the natural daughter of a Balkan king [from Phrygia, for example].
Although you may have taken you M.A. at Oxford, speak English with a Russian accent, slightly flavoured with Bulgarian and just a suspicion of Hungarian.
Have a favourite flower — a red lily or a Brazilian cowslip — that you won the first time you were kissed on the lips by a Cossack general at the age of sixteen.
Introduce anecdotes into your conversation. Remark casually, for example: “‘In summer it is warmer than in winter,’ as the great Lao-Tze has said.”
Always live at a hotel. An adventuress has no use for a kitchenette.
Wear an antique ring on your little finger — one that used to contain deadly poison and was used by the Florentines in the days of Lucretia Borgia.
If you happen to be spending a few days at Margate [surely Dekobra didn’t write Margate in his French original], say to the man who is paying you attention, “My dear, I have just arrived from Stamboul.”
Procure a number of leading Continental hotel labels and stick them on your new luggage. An adventuress who does not travel is like a panther without teeth.
An adventuress does not eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. She takes snails on toast, six olives, half a pound of caviare, and an aspirin tablet in a glass of absinthe.
When he returned to France after the war, Maurice Dekobra continued to publish several novels a year into the 1960s, but hardly any of these were translated and published in English. To readers now accustomed to fug, Lolita, and Playboy, Dekobra’s brand of footsies-as-sex seemed as outdated as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Which is a bit of a shame, as Dekobra’s postwar novels were, according to Claude Duneton, precursors to Frédéric Dard’s fast, furieux, and funny San Antonio novels.
Cover of Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes by Philippe Collas (2002).
However, by the time Philippe Collas’ biography, Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes, was published in 2002, most of Dekobra’s work had falled out of print and, even for French readers, he was an unknown. Melville House reissued his single biggest bestseller, The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, as part of its Neversink Library in 2012, but that appears to be the only one of his books currently available in English.
Cover of the 1948 New Directions edition of The Skin of Dreams.
Jacques l’Aumône and Walter Mitty are twin sons of different mothers. Both men escape from what they consider dull lives by fantasizing themselves in extraordinary situations. Their two creators, however, took very different approaches to their subjects. Thurber mined Mitty’s situation for its comic power, the absurdity of the contrast between the milk toasty Mitty (whose wife literally feeds him milk toast) and the dangerous adventures he imagines himself in.
Queneau, on the other hand, attempted to integrate James Joyce, surrealists like Andre Breton and Boris Vian, and French and American pulp fiction into the world of his hero. When we first meet Jacques l’Aumône (l’aumône being French for alms or charity), he’s the teenaged son of a hosery manufacturer living in Rueil, a suburb of Paris that must be associated with shrunken lives and stifling boredom (the original French title was Loin de Rueil or Far from Rueil. Watching a western with one of his friends, Jacques — called Jackie by his parents — does more than become involved with the film. He transmogrifies into the film:
Jacques and Lucas held on to their seats with two hands as if they were on that mount they saw there before them, inverse and planimetrical. Thus they are shown the mane of the soliped and the breeches of the booted one, and then they are shown the pistols in the belt of the breeches-wearer, and after that they arc shown the powerfully circular thorax of the bearer of fire-arms, and finally they are shown the mug of the guy, a dashing buck, a burly fellow for whom men’s lives were of no more account than a louse’s, and Jackie is in nowise astonished to recognize in him Jacques l’Aumone.
A founding father of the Oulipo movement, Queneau once described himself as a rat who constructed mazes from which he planned to escape — which is an apt way of summarizing what he does for Jacques l’Aumône in The Skin of Dreams.
But anyone who’s read a bit of Queneau knows that what sets him apart from the surrealists and other Oulipians is his simple humanity. So, Jacques doesn’t just indulge in escapism. He also projects himself into other lives — walks a mile in other men’s shoes, as the saying goes. When he encounters the husband of his building’s concierge, for example, a man who’s down on his luck and somewhat out of his head with illness, the same transformation that put him in the saddle up on screen in the cinema takes place:
He then perceived with a fresh eye the whole course of his life, behind him: his happy childhood, his mad ambitions, his bitter disappointments, his career as a bureaucrat, his expulsion for negligence, his marriage to a bag, and finally, after many increasingly unbrilliant trades, that of janitor, an old canker putting an end to this sad life, ugh! alas! To complete the resemblance he shook his hands like old dead leaves that a gentle rainy November wind does not yet wish to tear from the tree that bears them. Jacques found pleasure in this situation, after all perhaps he himself would never attain a joy comparable to that which he bad in his role of a decayed Cerberus endlessly stuttering those words “Things riding high, my way, really riding high”, all the more so since the other, contemplating himself in this human mirror, smiled widely and began shaking even more violently, as if insisting on the profound meaning of his inconsistent babbling.
Joan Miró poster for the original French edition of Loin de Rueil.
Queneau was inspired by Joyce’s manipulation of words, both the simple collages like snotgreen sea and wavewhite wedded words in Ulysses to the splicings and graftings of Finegans Wake (schutschum and tragoady). Which makes him a challenge for any translator. H. J. Kaplan, a novelist himself (and later press secretary for the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese), fares well if perhaps a bit stiffly with Queneau’s wordplay. But even the most ham-fisted translator can’t interfere too badly when working with a writer so obviously enjoying his wordplay:
He was examining little bits of doryphoras through the microscope, for the problem was to increase the efficiency of the Baponot Doryphovore [a pesticide manufactured by Jacques’ employer], the insufficiency of which in the business of doryphorotrucidation was beginning to be known among all the farmers of the region.
An anastrepha doryphoros, by the way, is a fruit fly, but mouche des fruits is far too mundane for Queneau’s purposes.
Jacques’ talent for assimilating into the things he sees evolves to such a degree that eventually, it takes over Queneau’s book itself. Near the end, an American movie comes to Rueil’s local cinema. It stars James Charity (see above) and turns out to be both the actor’s autobiography and the synthesis of all of Jacques’ past fantasies:
He is seen to appear now as an explorer, now as an inventor, now as a boxer, now as a thief. He makes an excursion to the land of the Borgeiros, particularly wild Indians. At San Culebra del Porco he meets a young actress, Lulu L’Aumone. Both will go to Hollywood to get a look at what can be done there. And very quickly comes success, glory, triumph. James ends by marrying Lulu L’Aumone and while he kisses her on the mouth he signs (with his free hand) a royal contract for his polyglot talking picture The Skin of Dreams.
Queneau was a mathematician by training, and it’s likely that he studied differential geometry, which is one of the more mind-warping fields of math, since it deals with how spaces of X dimensions are mapped into spaces of Y dimensions — or, if you will, how one reality transforms into another. The Skin of Dreams is something of an experiment in differential geometry in fiction. And having studied differential geometry myself, I promise you: reading The Skin of Dreams is not only a realistic simulation of that particular form of mathematics, but a lot more fun.
The Skin of Dreams, by Raymond Queneau, translated by H. J. Kaplan New York: New Directions, 1948
The Zemganno Brothers is Edmond de Goncourt’s love letter to his dead brother and collaborator, Jules. Together, the two had written six novels, several plays, and even more works of history and criticism, in addition to keeping a journal that is considered the most candid (and savage) account of mid-19th century Parisian life and society. Jules died from the effects of syphillis at the age of 39. Edmond carried on as a writer but never considered his own work anything but second-best to what he’d accomplished with Jules.
In 1876, over six years after Jules’ death, Edmond confided to his journal, “I want to depict two acrobats, two brothers who love each other has my brother and I have loved each other.” His idea was that these brothers would not only work together as he did with Jules, but literally support each other: “Their spines are, so to speak, common property” and they would strive to develop their strengths and skills to the point that they could perform feats previously considered impossible.
Edmond visited the Cirque Olympique in Paris while writing the book, and was particularly taken by the act of the Hanlon-Lees, whose blend of tumbling, juggling, and knockabout clowning the French called entortillage. The Zemganno brothers achieve acrobatic feats to rival those of the Hanlon-Lees, but instead of juggling, they incorporate the playing of violins (which was probably easier to describe than it would have been to perform).
The Zemganno brothers mirror the de Goncourts: Gianni, the elder, is able and temperate; Nello, the younger, is more talented and hot-headed. But they commit to their partnership and a vision of becoming legendary performers when still young, and work their way up, from a humble circus traveling around France by wagon and cart, to an initial attempt to join a grand circus in Paris and then, when that fails, to London, where they spend years studying the English form of highly physical clowning and tumbling. Finally, having worked on a series of tricks in secret, they return and are quickly taken into the troupe of the Deux-Cirques, the premier indoor circus in Paris.
Their act is a combination of comedy, melodrama, and physical magic. At its climax, Gianni appears to humiliate Nello, who falls to the ground and lays there prostrate. Then, suddenly, he is transformed:
His muscles worked in a way beyond their normal powers and danger-point, his loins became hollows, his shoulder blades jutted fantastically, and his spine took on an unaccustomed curve, archied like the crop of a wading bird strayed from another planet. His muscles were one mass of quick, tiny ripples, like those seen beneath the flaccid skin of a snake. All that the audience could see now was a creature flying without wings, a crawling, unearthly, demon-haunting quality of movement associated with beasts of ill-omen and horrible fables. But at last the demon was driven out of the sprite’s bosom.
Despite their successful, however, outside the ring, they lead “a quiet, orderly, intimate, sober and chaste life.” Their focus, their passion is to push the limits of their bodies and continue to master ever-more-difficult stunts.
When an American trick rider, la Tompkins, joins the circus, however, the bond between Gianni and Nello strains. Not so much out of romance as the realization that la Tompkins’ act is of a level of polish and mastery that puts theirs to shame. And this drives Nello in particular to attempt riskier leaps. Anyone who’s seen a circus movie knows where this leads.
The Zemganno Brothers is that rarity, a 19th century novel that is neither novella nor three-volume behemoth. Under 200 pages in its excellent English translation by Lester Clark and Iris Allan, it’s as lean and swift as the Zemganno brothers themselves. While certainly not a masterpiece, it’s a memorable story and a moving tribute from one brother to another.
The Zemganno Brothers, by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Lester Clark and Iris Allan London: Alvin Redman, 1957
I don’t remember how many years ago I bought this book, but it sat on the shelf long enough to have escaped my notice until I took it down to kill a few minutes while waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. One of the downsides to reading and writing about books all the time is that one loses touch of that magical experience of opening a book and commencing to read without any prior knowledge to cloud one’s judgment.
If I ever knew much about I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, I’d forgotten it long ago. I suspect it was nothing more than the loveliness of the title that made me buy it in the first place. So I was naively putting myself in Madeleine Masson’s hands, knowing that I would be setting it down in a few minutes, perhaps not to pick it up again for a matter of years, if ever.
“It was a beautiful day in June 1940” opens the first chapter, “Paris — June 1940.” Of course, we know enough history to realize that a beautiful day in Paris in June 1940 is not going to end beautifully. Masson’s lover arrives to persuade her to leave for Switzerland with him. As a Jew, she understands the risks she faces. “They say that the Germans will be entering Paris at any moment,” her anti-Semitic landlady announces with undisguised delight. Masson chooses not to go to Switzerland but carries on packing up, prepared to join the flood of refugees leaving the city for … well, any place else.
We understand by the end of Chapter One that Masson’s title is a lie, which gives everything that follows a certain poignancy, rather like that one feels in watching the silly bourgeosie in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu. And Masson herself could easily have been one of the characters in Renoir’s film. Raised in South Africa by a French father and Austrian mother, she came to Paris in 1934 with her mother, who was hoping to establish her own salon and effectively separate from her dull diamond broker husband (if not from his money).
For Masson, however, Paris is a different kind of escape — from her mother, in fact. She quickly finds herself a job as secretary to a wealthy American dowager and a room of her own in a pension, and begins to assimilate into a peculiar cross-section of Parisian society. At the high end, she meets the idle rich and idle not-so-rich (the latter often of noble descent) through her enployer and mother. At the low end, she meets people like Madame Tricon, the patronne of her pension:
She told me that she was one of the first women in Paris to have eyelashes made from the hairs of her current lover’s legs. “Imagine, ma petite,” she said, batting two black centipedes at me, “Imagine to yourself the voluptuousness of giving him Japanese kisses with his own hairs.
At one of employer’s soirees, Masson meets Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière, who plies her with food and drink and by the end of the evening declares himself desperately in love. She takes quick stock of his character: “lazy, amoral, deeply religious, sentimental, and selfish.” Nonetheless, when he proposes, she accepts.
Then she discovers that she is the third player in a duet. The Baron is in thrall with the Marquise de Rastignac, a fifty-ish noblewoman his mother enlisted to introduce her son into the mysteries of sex. Some twenty years later, the two are still carrying on their affair, aided in part by the fact that the Marquise is footing much of the bill for the Baron’s playboy lifestyle. Masson’s account of the Baron and the Marquise is just one of the nuggets of la vie Parisienne pluperfect that are studded throughout this book:
The Marquise’s finest hour, L’heure bleue, was her hour of triumph. From 5 to 7 p.m. was visiting time for French lovers; and in love nests all over the country, and in Paris particularly, men were taking down their trousers and heading for the Louis XVI style bed where lay la petite amie in a frilly négligée. Tearing off this garment was part of the ploy. I could never visualise the Baron’s Laure frivolling naked on what the Baron called with some respect the battlefield. For this lady, who to me resembled a Roman matron, had amisleading air of impenetrable virtue. Her clothes appeard welded to her massive frame, and her large handbags and tiny feet were as much a legend in Paris as was her vanished beauty.
Not long after Masson and the Baron are married, the Marquise pays a visit and informs the new bride that “Renaud is my life and I don’t propose giving him up.” Masson’s job is to produce an heir and interfere as little as possible in the status quo ante matrimonium.
This is also the view of the Baron’s family, who don’t bother to hide the contempt they feel towards a pretender with three strikes against her: a Jewess, a foreigner, and a commoner. They refuse to even acknowledge her existence. The shock of her rejection on all fronts causes Masson, now pregnant with the Baron’s child, to miscarry. And this, ironically, then enables Masson to get the marriage annulled through some intricate maneuvers through the Byzantine processes of the French bureaucracy and the Catholic Church.
Madeleine Masson in 1942.
For proper Parisians, there is no difference between an annulée and a divorcée. Official recognition as a wanton woman, however, frees Masson to explore less-sanctioned aspects of Parisian society. She takes a series of lovers, some who fall for her, others whom she falls for, none of them remotely suitable. Early on, she is aided and abetted by Lucy de Polnay (sister of the author Peter de Polnay, whom Neglected Books fans may recall). Lucy instructs her in the fine art of judging a lover, dismissing one for having what she called “the postman’s knock method”: “three sharp rat-a-tats, put it in the letter box, and away.”
Masson also comes to know — intimately or briefly — many of the celebrities of Paris of the 1930s: Colette, Nathalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, Suzy Solidor, Marie Laurencin. So, if you’re not satisfied with savoring Masson’s delicious tales, you can also feast upon pages rich with vintage Parisian gossip, including their “curious sexual appetites and habits.” (Masson could never share Count Serge Cheremeteff’s “passion for the whip and the rod,” for example.)
And, as we know from the start, there is the tragic goodbye to all that, as Masson tries to find a way out of France with thousands of other refugees. The streets of cities like Tours and Bourdeaux “black with people, like flies on a wound.” Just what happens to her in the end, however, is unclear. In the book, she writes that she managed to book a passage to South Africa from Marseilles. Her Wikipedia page, on the other hand, suggests that she stayed and became involved with the Resistance. After the war, however, it’s clear that she married again (a Royal Navy captain), had a son, to whom the book is dedicated, settled in England, and became a biographer and playwright. She died in 2007 at the age of 95.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye is as insubstantial as an éclair — and every bit as irresistible.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978
Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the United States for almost ten years but also set over a dozen novels here. But what’s even more surprising is these novels have appeared in English so haphazardly.
Simenon achieved his tremendous output through tremendous discipline. Despite the fact that he moved from place to place almost constantly, he kept to a strict routine of sitting down to his typewriter each morning, and once there, he wrote at a furious rate. A typical novel might take him two to three weeks. There was at least one Maigret a year, plus two to four of the psychological thrillers he called romans durs, plus countless stories. And if these weren’t enough, he also wrote further works under a variety of pseudonyms throughout the first half of his career.
Simenon claimed that living in the United States was a goal he had set himself as a young man, and soon after the war in Europe ended, he applied for visas for himself, his wife Tigy, and their son Marc. They landed in New York City in October 1945. Knowing almost no English, Simenon quickly hired an American agent and put out a request for a bilingual secretary to help him with his correspondence. He met the first application, a French Canadian woman named Denyse Ouimet, for an interview at a restaurant named Brussels near Central Park. As Denyse later told Simenon biographer Pierre Assouline, “I met him at the Brussels at 1:45. I saw him again at the Drake at 4:45. At 7:00 we were making love.”
Now a party of four, the Simenons headed for Quebec, where at least they avoided the language problem. There, he wrote his first two American novels, both set in New York City.
• Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946); first published in English as Three Beds in Manhattan (1964), translated by Lawrence G. Blochman.
Simenon transposed his first meeting and the early days of his affair with Denyse into this story, with his role played by François Combe, a French actor, and hers by Kay Miller, the estranged wife of a Hungarian count. In her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, Joyce Carol Oates called it “the most existential of love stories,” and it represented something of turning point for Simenon in that it was his first novel in which sexual passion — which soon became one of his favorite narrative accelerants — was the driving motivation.
But it’s also about Simenon’s romance with Manhattan. The book is filled with scenes that show that even having spent just some weeks in the city, Simenon soaked in countless details. When not in bed with each other, François and Kay spend hours walking:
They were on the street again. No doubt about it, they felt most at home in the street. Their mood changed immediately. The magic, lighthearted comradeship they had found by accident returned the moment they were again caught up in the noise and confusion of traffic. People were lining up in front of the move theaters. Gaudily uniformed doormen guarded the padded portals of night clubs. They passed them all by. They zigzagged aimlessly through the sidewalk crowds until she turned to him with a smile he recognized instantly. It was the smile that had started everything.
Later, while waiting for Kay to return after a separation, François walks endlessly, the city now devoid of the energy they experienced together:
… the little dark men swarming like ants under the lights, the stores, the movie houses with their garlands of light, the hot-dog stands, the bakeries with their displays of nauseating pastries; the coin machines that played music for you or allowed you to play at rolling balls into little holes that rang bells and lit lights; everything a great city could invent to deceive man’s loneliness…
Simenon may have written Three Beds in Manhattan having scarcely set foot in America, but he managed to produce not only his best romantic novel but also one of his best American ones.
The was filmed in France as Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965, starring Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot.
• Maigret à New-York (1946); first published in English as Maigret in New York (1980)
If you’ve read any of Simenon’s Maigret novels, you can guess that the Inspector was far less impressed with New York City than were the lovers of Three Beds in Manhattan. The beer is poor, the streets too noisy, he can’t smoke his pipe in a movie theater, and no one seems to understand why he wants his “little lunch” in the morning. The practice of numbering streets he finds particularly frustrating: “I’ve never had a memory for figures and you people are really tiresome with your numbered streets. Why couldn’t you say Victor Hugo Street, or Pigalle Street, or President-What’s-His-Name Street….?”
The story starts at convoluted and gets messier. There is a missing young man, perhaps the heir to a fortune or perhaps an imposter, a jukebox millionaire who started as a vaudeville musician, elements of the mob (some English editions are called Maigret and New York’s Underground), retired carnival performers and FBI men who aren’t always as helpful as they could be. Despite this, the book remains among the most popular of the many Maigret novels.
• La jument perdue (1947); not yet translated into English.
Simenon wrote this novel (the title could be translated as The Lost Mare Ranch) within weeks of arriving in Tucson, Arizona in September 1947, and he drew upon places and people he discovered there. Jane Eblen Keller, who wrote an extended study of Simenon’s time in Arizona and the books he wrote there for the Journal of the Southwest in 2002, describes it as “one of the few sunny books Simenon wrote,” a tale involving a pair of aging cowboys and a couple of elderly sisters in a town resembling Tucson — although Keller does add that the plot “deals in treachery and sorrow, skullduggery and betrayal, crooked business dealings and corrupt politics.”
• Le Fond de la bouteille (1948); first published in English as The Bottom of the Bottle (1954), translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.
This was the first of the romans Américains I read and I enjoyed it even more when rereading it recently. Simenon wrote the book while renting a house called the Stud Barn in the Santa Cruz Valley near Tumacacori, Arizona, about a fifty miles south of Tucson and just across the border from Nogales, Mexico. There, the eastern bank of the Santa Cruz River was broad and productive, and the area was mostly populated by a few dozen wealthy ranchers. The Simenons — Georges, his wife Tigy, mistress Denyse and son Marc, now joined by their French cook Boule (coincidentally another of Georges’ mistresses — quickly fit into the little community.
The ranchers and their wives enjoyed a relaxed and highly social lifestyle, often gathering at one or another’s large houses for parties that could go on for days — earning the area the nickname of Santa Booze Valley. At times when the river flooded, the eastern bank became completely inaccessible and the ranchers’ parties could then run on for weeks.
This is the situation into which Donald Ashbridge, a convicted murderer and escapee from a prison in Illinois, arrives. He wants money and help from his older brother P.M., a lawyer who’s married a woman with one of the largest ranches in the valley. Donald needs to get across the river and into Mexico, where his wife and children are waiting. But P.M., having built up a reputation of integrity, needs to distance himself from Donald and his own less than respectable upbringing. Meanwhile, the storm rages, the river rises, and the booze spins the party at ever-faster speeds.
The Bottom of the Bottle introduced a theme that appears in most of Simenon’s romans Américains — that of the supposedly upstanding citizen who’s ultimately undone by some fatal flaw rooted in a secret past or association. As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, that secret can remain hidden and inert. But when some catalyst upsets the formula — a brother on the run or a young woman found murdered or being black-balled from the country club — that stability quickly devolves into chaos.
In his Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recalled one concept that struck him while living in America: “In any American town, ‘you have to belong.’ To the community.” He himself admitted that when he was living in Connecticut, he had the illusion that he really belonged. But he also realized, as do his protagonists such as P.M. Ashbridge and Eddie Rico, that the flipside of belonging was ostracism and the ostracized person had not place in the American of the 1950s.
The novel was filmed — partly on location in the Santa Cruz Valley — as The Bottom of the Bottle, starring Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Ruth Roman, in 1956.
• Maigret chez le coroner (1949); first published in English as Maigret at the Coroner’s (1980), translated by Frances Keene.
In Maigret at the Coroner’s, Maigret is less inspector and more witness. He’s essentially dumped in a Tucson coroner’s inquest by an FBI agent he’s visiting on his way across the U.S., and most of the book is devoted to his following the courtroom proceedings, all the while trying both to figure out the case and decipher the odd habits of Americans. The case itself seems straightfoward: a young woman goes out partying on a Saturday night with five airmen from a nearby base and is found dead the next morning. Is it murder, accident, or suicide? We’ll never know, because Simenon ushers Maigret along to his next stop before the inquest closes.
It’s Maigret/Simenon’s observations about American manners and customs that are far more interesting than the crime (if there was one). Such as how they managed to avoid the hangovers that plagued him every time he indulged in American whiskey rather than his beloved beer:
From his first days in New York he had been amazed to see men whom he had left the night before in a state of advanced drunkenness all fresh-faced and, as they said, rarin’ to go the next morning. Then someone had told him their secret. After that, he noted in all the drugstores, in cafés, in bars, the special blue bottle mounted on a wall bracket, its spout down, out of which the proper dose of effervescent powder could be measured. Dropped into a glass to which the barman added water, the compound fizzed and tingled. This was served you as promptly as a morning coffee or a Coca- Cola, and a few minutes after ingesting it the fumes of the alcohol had been dispersed.
Yet why not? Machines for getting drunk, machines for getting over being drunk. They were logical people, after all.
Logical, yes, but this would not be Simenon if he didn’t also hint at the worm at the core. The clean-cut, Power of Positive Thinking-minded American men got that clean-cut look by taking their shirts to the dry cleaners instead of wearing them again and again like any sensible Frenchman. This emphasis on appearances is, to Maigret, just a façade. “He suspected that, at bottom, they suffered the same anxieties as the rest of humanity but that they assumed this happy-go-lucky appearance out of embarrassment.”
The book closes as Maigret’s plane is about to land in Los Angeles, the next stop on his tour. “Whatever would he see now?” he wonders as the book closes.
• Un nouveau dans la ville (1950); not yet translated into English.
Un nouveau dans la ville or A stranger in town is alone among les romans Américains in being set in a seaside town in Maine. As Jane Eblen Keller summarizes the book, the stranger acts a catalyst, unleashing the town’s many dysfunctions. He sets Charlie, the owner of the only bar in town, to wondering about the one foreigner in town, a quiet man called Yougo (he’s thought to be from Yugoslavia), and Charlie’s doubts infect the rest of the town. At the same time, the stranger suggests to Yougo that his situation is at risk, that the town’s latent xenophobia is about to make him its target. Simenon sets up a conflict that ends … well, for that we’ll have to wait for an English translation.New York Daily News article on Simenon’s second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.
• La Mort de Belle (1952); first published in English as Belle (1954), translated by Louise Varèse.
Belle is the first of three novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse. At the time he wrote the books, Connecticut was within commuting distance of New York City by train but still full of small, quiet towns whose inhabitants could often point out generations of ancestors in the local cemetery. But in some ways, these books are more specific to a time than a place: specific, that is, to the time of blacklisting, McCarthyism, and whisper campaigns. And of course, these were all symptoms of that question Simenon saw Americans asking each other: “Do you belong?”
In the case of Spencer Ashby, the answer to that question is already a little unclear. A teacher at a local exclusive boarding school, he’s become a local artificially, by marrying the daughter of the school’s late headmaster. But when Belle, the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends, staying with the Ashbys temporarily, is found strangled in her bedroom, that artificial link becomes brittle. See, the problem is that Ashby was working in the basement, turning a piece of furniture on his lathe, at the time that Belle must have been murdered.
There’s no evidence of his being involved, no obvious motive. Yet it seems oddly suspicious to everyone. He’s questioned repeatedly by the police … and let go. Is it just a matter of time before they find the evidence? The doubt is enough to make the townspeople keep their distance: “The newspaper dealer was gaping at him as if he came from another planet; and two customers, who only came in for their papers and out again, cast a curious glance in his direction.”
And more than that — and this is really where Simenon excels in his dissections of his protagonists’ psyches — Ashby begins to doubt himself. “Why, not being guilty of anything, did he have a feeling of guilt?” The fragile props of his comfortable life begin to weaken, to give way. Whether Ashby has already committed some sin or only committed the sin of inaction, his self-doubt ultimately becomes a propelling force and drives him forever out of his comfortable inertia. Simenon plays out his drama quietly, subtly, simplying adding one straw after another until something catastrophic happens.
• Les Frères Rico (1952); first published in English as The Brothers Rico (1954), translated by Ernst Pawel.
The Brothers Rico demonstrates that Simenon had learned quite a bit about the workings of organized crime during his time in the U.S.. Eddie Rico is, to all appearances, a prosperous fruit and vegetable broker somewhere in central Florida. In reality, he’s a local boss, running the gambling and prostitution operations in his area while keeping the local sheriff on his payroll. It’s a nice, quiet affair, one that keeps him in good with the big bosses in New York without forcing him to get his hands dirty.
Eddie doesn’t really have the appetite for the rough side of the business: “He was never armed. The only gun he owned was in the drawer of his night table. As for fighting, he had too much of a horror of blows and of blood for that. He had fought but once in his his, when he was sixteen, and the blood running from his nose had made him sick.”
His brothers Gino and Tony, on the other hand, are suspected of being involved in a hit on a mob boss in Brooklyn. Which becomes a problem for Eddie when Gino shows up in Florida (note the parallel with The Bottom of the Bottle). He soon disappears again after realizing that Eddie is too afraid of his higher-ups to take a risk. Unfortunately, those higher-ups then enlist Eddie in tracking down his brothers.
Eddie knows that he’s playing the Judas goat. All he has to do is locate at least one of his brothers and then step out of the way and let the professionals do the rest: “It was routine. Long ago this kind of operation had been perfected like the rest, and by now they were performed according to an almost inalterable ritual. It was best to have executioners who, coming from elsewhere, were unknown in this area.” So, he does as he’s told, knowing he’ll be able to return to his quiet, comfortable life in Florida. Only without his soul: no one gets away with murder in a Simenon, even if by proxy.
The Brothers Rico was filmed in 1957, directed by Phil Karlson and starring Richard Conte as Eddie Rico.
• Feux rouges (1953); first published in English as The Hitchhiker (1957) and Red Lights (1967), translated by Norman Denny.
Red Lights is Simenon’s version of The Lost Weekend. Steve Hogan meets his wife for a couple of drinks before they hit the road one Friday evening, intending to pick up their kids from summer camp in New England. But it’s hot and rainy and the traffic is terrible and Steve just needs a drink or two more to get him through hours of sitting in traffic. And so he stops at a roadside bar.
The problem is, Steve is a blackout drunk. Or, as he puts it, “he goes into a tunnel”: “an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.” His wife refuses to go along and heads to take a Greyhound bus to the camp. Steve ignores her, walks into the bar, and the next morning, wakes up on the roadside in his car with a flat tire, his trunk rifled through, and a vague memory of having given a ride to an ex-con named Sid.
What’s worse, he has no idea where his wife is. And that’s where the nightmare really begins. Once again, Simenon looks behind the façade of the happy, normal American life:
For thirty-two years, nearly thirty-three, he had been an honest man; he had followed the tracks, as he had proclaimed last night with so much vehemence, being a good son, good student, employee, husband, father, and the owner of a house on Long Island; he had never broken any law, never been summoned before any court and every Sunday morning he had gone to church with his family. He was a happy man. He lacked nothing.
Then where did they come from, all those things he said when he’d had a drink too many and started by attacking Nancy before assailing society as a whole? They had to spring from somewhere. The same phenomenon occurred each time, and each time his rebellion followed exactly the same course.
For Simenon, a momentary lapse of judgment is never an isolated incident. There is always an underlying flaw, some fundamental character defect that just needs the right — or the wrong — set of circumstances to reveal its full capacity for destruction.
• Crime impuni (1954); first published in English as The Fugitive (1955), translated by Louise Varèse.
The Fugitive, which has also been published as Account Unsettled is only part romans Américains. The first half is set in Simenon’s native city of Liege in Belgium. Elie, a student rooming with Madame Lange and her daughter, becomes obsessed with revenge when a Romanian student named Michel Zograffi moves in and becomes the pampered pet of the household — and the daughter’s lover. Elie plots to murder the man and flees the city when he thinks he has. After years on the run, he makes his way to Bisbee, Arizona, where he runs the town’s best hotel as Mr. Craig. The plot hinges on the highly improbable coincidence that Michel (now Michael) Zograffi one day wanders in, bearing the scars of the murder attempt but now a wealthy investor come to bail out Bisbee.
The most plausible element of the story draws upon Simenon’s observations of the copper mining business in Bisbee, which then centered on the Copper Queen Mine. By the late 1940s, conventional tunnel mining was proving unproductive and open pit mining had not yet begun. Simenon postulated the collapse of the mine and the town:
It was as though the city were dying, the tip-trucks that at certain places ran along cables over the streets were now stationary near the pylons and the four tall oven chimneys at the far end of the valley no longer wore their crowns of greenish smoke.
It happened from one day to the next when the machines, which for twenty years had been boring into the red earth of the mountain, scooping out a gigantic crater, and uncovered a subterranean lake, the existence of which no one had suspected.
Bisbee was able to postpone its decline for a few decades by switching to open pit mining, but the city now relies more on tourism than industry to survive. As far as the book itself, however, I’d rate it the weakest of the lot, a story that might have fared better had Simenon left his characters on the other side of the Atlantic.
In The Watchmaker of Everton, Simenon’s favored theme of guilt through inaction is played out in the form of a good father and a bad son. Dave Galloway, the quiet watch repairman of the title, a single father, learns that his son Ben and his girlfriend have stolen a car, and killed its driver, and run off into the night. When Ben is eventually caught and arrested several states away, he shows no remorse and no interest in talking to his father. Which, of course, leads the police — and Galloway’s neighbors — to wonder: how could a father not know he was raising a monster? “Do you know your son well, Mr. Galloway?” the police ask. Was he perhaps not quite the dutiful father everyone thought he was? And if so, what else might he be guilty of?
Galloway asks himself the same questions. Was this due, in part, to the fact that his own father had died when he was young, that he’d hated the stepfather his mother married? Did his flaws drive off Ben’s mother when the boy was just a toddler? The Watchmaker of Everton is an almost agonizing example of Simenon’s gift for pulling on one well-chosen loose thread.
Bertrand Tavernier filmed the novel as L’Horloger de Saint-Paul starring Philippe Noiret in 1974.
• La Boule noire (1955); first published in English as The Rules of the Game (1988), translated by Howard Curtis.
Walter Higgins, manager of the local supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds his application to the local country club has been rejected — for the second time. Higgins understands the real message behind this decision: “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community.” He begins to question everything around him, begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back.
And, of course, this being Simenon, there are reasons why Higgins might be insecure about his place in the community. Or rather, one reason: he was born poor. He grew up in a tenement, often having to fend for himself while his mother went out drinking. His real fear is that the country club men can smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.
Unlike P.M. Ashbridge or Eddie Rico, Walter Higgins doesn’t fall apart through this crisis. His resolution is more French than American: he falls into cynicism:
He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game — like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.
But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game.
• La main (1968); first published in English as The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1970), translated by Moura Budberg. Also published as The Hand (2016), translated by Linda Coverdale.
Written over a decade after Simenon left the U.S., The Man on the Bench in the Barn takes the theme of guilt by inertia of Belle and refines it down to a cold existential minimalism. Two couples get stuck in a blizzard near one of their houses. One of the men gets separated from the other three and doesn’t make it to the house. After some wait, the other husband — Donald Dodd (another lawyer (viz. P. M. Ashbridge), another artificial local (viz. Spencer Ashby)) — is sent to look for him. Already exhausted, he quickly gives up. But rather than simply return and admit his failure, he enters the barn near his house, where he sits for an hour or so, smoking.
“All the time I had been in the barn, on the red bench, I had chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette after another, dropping the butts on the ground and stamping them out with my foot. I had smoked at least ten.” That’s it. That’s the sum of his crime. Except that when the storm abates and the authorities are notified, Dodd goes back to the barn and see that the cigarette butts are gone. Which can only mean one thing: his wife knows.
And that is all Simenon needs to let the unraveling begin. For Dodd has built around him the same façade that Maigret had detected in Arizona: “It made him think of too tidy a garment, too well washed and pressed.” In Dodd’s case — and he is only first-person narrator I’ve encountered in a Simenon — “The truth is that I wanted to have everything run smoothly and orderly around me.”
David Hare adapted The Man on the Bench in the Barn for the stage as The Red Barn in 2016.
The sum of Simenon’s Romans Américains, one could argue, is enough to earn him a place among the best American novelists of his generation. He could certainly claim to be — to steal something A. J. Liebling once said of himself — faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. And we have to look back to Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to find such bitter criticism of American mores and concepts of sin. It’s a shame that it’s a body of work still so incompletely represented in English.
Note: Simenon’s English language publishers have long been fond of bundling his books together. As a result, there are a number of compilations worth looking for if you’re interested in reading any of these novels:
Violent Ends, comprising Belle and The Brothers Rico. Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
Tidal Wave, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Doubleday, 1954.
Danger Ahead, comprising Red Lights and The Watchmaker of Everton. Hamish Hamilton, 1955.
An American Omnibus, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, The Hitchhiker, and The Watchmaker of Everton. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
Jean Cocteau once called Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues (Things Seen), the posthumously published collection of notes the poet and novelist collected throughout his lifetime in Paris, “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet it’s never been fully translated into English.
When the book was first published in 1887, the English magazine Booklore informed its readers that it “contains some excellent reading”:
The poet’s observation was of the keenest and most comprehensive nature, and many details which to some might have seemed trivial, were to him indications of possible important events which might or might not lie beyond. Victor Hugo was ever on the look-out for “straws” wherewith to gauge the wind, and long habit in this practice had invested his organ of sight with microscopical powers.
George Routledge and Sons rushed out a two-volume uncredited translation of Choses Vues the same year, including the full contents of the French first edition.
Two volume 1887 Routledge edition of Things Seen.
The first story published in both editions was that of the decline and death of the diplomat Talleyrand, the architect of Napoleon’s undoing at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. By the time of his death, however, Talleyrand had become something of a forgotten oddity in Paris. Hugo reported on Talleyrand’s ignominious embalming:
This man, who possibly might have been a match for Machiavelli had he lived a century or two eailier, had the misfortune to die on the 17th of May, 1838. The doctors came and embalmed the body, and in order to do so Egyptian fashion, they drew the entrails from the side and the brains from the skull. This done, they nailed the mummy down in a coffin lined with white satin, and went away, leaving on the table the brains — those brains which had thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and kept the world within bound. When the doctors left, a footman entered and saw what they had forgotten. He suddenly remembered that there was a drain in the street outside; so off he went and threw the brains into it.
The centerpiece of Choses Vues is Hugo’s account of the revolution of 1848 as he witnessed it in the streets of Paris. This accounts for over half the length of the first edition and has often been cited as the most accurate first-hand report.
Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin.
It was, however, just a fraction of the full set of notes that Hugo left behind. It was not until nearly 100 years after the first edition of Choses Vues that a complete version, edited by the critic and novelist Hubert Juin, was published. Juin’s edition filled four volumes and represented over 1,000 pages — three times the length of the 1887 edition.
As Graham Robb admitted in his 1997 biography of Hugo, “This vast collection of personal and historical anecdotes is usually pillaged, as it is in this biography, for its illustrative gems.” But, Robb argued, it deserved to be considered as a composition in its own right — indeed, that it may represent his best work: “a fragmented view of what his work might have become without the all-consuming desire to be a financial success and the owner of a coherent philosophy.”
Another Hugo biographer, Andre Maurois, agreed. Hugo had two distinct styles, he wrote: “one of which Sainte-Beuve said he could never shed ‘his gaudiness, his pomposo‘; and the other, of Choses vues “remained that of the perfect reporter.” An early critic, Ernest William Henley, felt that Hugo the reporter was a relevation for those familiar with his pomposo:
When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours?
Robb suggests that Hugo’s obsession with fitting his creations into preconceived designs undermined the truth inherent in his less artful reportage. “Without the need to make all the data point in the same direction, Hugo could have gone on collecting information ad infinitum, spontaneously generating whole libraries of text like one of those super-efficient organisms he found so engrossing.”
And gather he could. Reading Choses vues in the 1950s, the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton expressed his awe at Hugo’s ability to take in details: “Hugo has the capacity to record like a tape machine, a memory like that of the Polynesians or of Scotland Yard!” Aldous Huxley considered Hugo “that consumate journalist.”
Victor Hugo in 1848.
As far as I can determine, no one has tried to update or expand Routledge’s anonymous 1887 English translation. Which is a shame, for it’s clear that there are many things still to be revealed to English readers. Joanna Richardson, another Hugo biographer, notes that the full edition includes, for example, nine separate “erotic entries” for September 1871. The Routledge edition also skips almost everything Hugo wrote about the Franco-Prussian War.
Illustration of Leon Gambetta’s escape by balloon, Paris, 7 October 1870.
This account of the departure by balloon of the escape of Léon Gambetta during the siege of Paris in 1870, for example, which was quoted in Richard Holmes’ Falling Upwards:
There were whispers running through the crowd: “Gambetta’s going to leave! Gambetta’s going to leave!” And there, in a thick overcoat, under an otter-fur cap, near the yellow balloon in a huddle ofmen, I caught sight of Gambetta. He was sitting on the pavement and pulling on fur-lined boots.
He had a leather bag slung across his shoulders. He took it off, clambered into the balloon basket, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag into the rigging above Gambetta’s head. It was 10.30, a fine day, a slight southerly wind, a gentle autumn sun. Suddenly the yellow balloon took off carrying three men, one of them Gambetta. Then the white balloon, also carrying three men, one of them waving a large tricolour flag. Under Gambetta’s balloon was a small tricolour pennant. There were cries of “Vive la Republique!”
Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine.
The Routledge edition does, however, include this early example of dark tourism, from a visit to the home of Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner to both King Louis XVI and the first French republic (for which he guillotined his former employer):
One day an English family, consisting of a father, mother, and three lovely blonde daughters arrived. Their aim was to see the guillotine….
The blade was pulled up and released several times at the request of the young girls. One of them, the youngest and the prettiest was not satisfied, however. She asked the bourreau to give her a detailed description of the procedure known as la toilette des condamnes. She still wasn’t satisfied. Finally she turned to the bourreau [executioner].
“Monsieur Sanson?” she said timidly.
“Mademoiselle?” said the bourreau.
“What do you do when a man is on the scaffold? How do you tie him down?”
The bourreau explained this dreadful procedure, and said to her: “We call it enfourner. [Literally, to put in the oven.]
“Well, Monsieur Sanson,” said the young girl, “I want you to put me in the oven.”
The bourreau winced. He protested. The young girl insisted. “I want to be able to say that I was tied down on that thing,” she said.
Sanson looked at her parents. They replied: “If that is what she wants, do it.”
He had to give in. The bourreau made the young miss sit down, he bound her legs together with rope, he tied her arms behind her back, he laid her on the bascule and buckled the leather strap around her body. He wanted to stop there.
“No, no, you haven’t finished,” she protested.
Sanson leveled the bascule, put the young girl’s head in the lunette, and closed its two halves together. Only then was she content.
Later, in telling the story, Sanson said, “I was waiting for the moment when she would say ‘You still haven’t finished. Let the blade fall.'”
Helen Bevington, who read an expanded French edition of Choses vues in the late 1960s, wrote admiringly of the book in her own journal, Along Came the Witch:
An appealing kind of writing in France, in a sense notation, is (or was?) choses vues. It is, of course, the title of a book by Victor Hugo, from which the name may come: things seen, noted because there they are to look at. In America we haven’t much taste for such writing. In prose we require plots and conflicts. In poetry we have little talent for gazing at the view.
Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession. The Choses Vues contains many a moment of mortality, pictured with gusto — the funeral of Napoleon, the death of the Duke of Orleans, the funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the death of Madame Adelaide, the passing of Balzac. At the final curtain Hugo was unfailing, an absorbed witness and notetaker.
Perhaps someone will take on the job of translating the full Hubert Juin edition of Choses vues and give English readers a chance to experience this classic of journalism. Until then, you can make do with the two Routledge volumes, which are available on the Internet Archive: Volume One; Volume Two.
Choses vues, by Victor Hugo Available from Gallimard in a two-volume edition based the 1980 Hubert Juin edition
An illustration from a French edition of the works of Paul de Kock.
“A__ has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a moral writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds, are covered, as with the unclean plagues of Egypt,” the actress Fanny Kemble wrote her friend Harriet Martineau in 1842. “They are very clever, very funny, very dirty, abominably immoral, and I do not think I can read any more of them; for though I confess to having laughed till my sides ached over some parts of what I read, I was, upon reflection and upon the whole, disgusted and displeased.”
Kemble seems to have shared the opinion of many literate people of her time when it came to the man who was, for much of the 19th Century, France’s most popular novelist. Many were those who enjoyed his books. Fewer were those who would praise it. “The French writer whose works are best known in England is Monsieur Paul de Kock,” wrote William Thackeray in 1841. But, he cautioned, “Talk to a French educated gentleman about this author, and he shrugs his shoulders, and says it is pitoyable.” “Paul de Kock? he is very witty,” a woman once said to Jane Carlyle. “Yes, but also very indecent; and my uncle would not relish indecencies read aloud to him by his daughters.” Ralph Waldo Emerson admitted to having read one of de Kock’s stories, but hastened to add, “Its fun is so low that I will never lend it.”
Who was this controversial figure, whose books were considered as addictive and illicit as heroin? Well, he was a man whose entire life was consumed in his work. Starting with his first novel, L’Enfant de ma femme, published in 1811 when he was just 18, he proceeded to write, according to one biographer “de façon industrielle ensuite un roman en un mois chaque année” [in an industrial fashion followed one novel a month each year). Born in Paris, he claimed to have rarely left the city and spent most of his days at his desk in his house on the Boulevard St. Martin. The one luxury he allowed himself as the years passed was to purchase a house protected by high walls from the noise of the streets and curiosity of passers-by.
Paul de Kock’s study, looking out on the Boulevard St. Martin. Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby & Co. edition of The Memoirs of Paul de Kock.
At first, however, the streets of Paris served as one of his primary inspirations. His book of essays, Scenes of Parisian Life, closes with a piece titled “Paris from My Window,” in which he records the life he observes on the boulevard in front of his house. Around two P.M., he notices an elderly couple promenading along. It is M. Mollet and his wife:
M. Mollet is a short, full-bodied, red-faced, knock-kneed man who constantly wears an entire suit of flannel and above that two shirts, thin drawers, thick woollen trousers, two waistcoats, a coat, a frock coat and an overcoat. You can understand that this enormous mass moves only with difficulty. When M. Mollet wants to get his handkerchief out of his pocket, he begins by sighing, then he stops, lets go of his wife’s arm, gives her his cane to hold, and tries to make use of his hands; but he is never quite certain in which of his pockets he has put his handkerchief, and the examination is often so long that Madame Mollet ends by lending her handkerchief to her husband, who takes it with a grateful look and murmurs, “Thank you, dearest!”
By 1830, he had surpassed the likes of Balzac in terms of popularity. His books typically sold 2-3,000 copies, while Balzac, Georges Sand, and Eugene Sue were pleased to sell more than 1,000 of theirs. “There never was an author more popular in the real meaning of the word,” Théophile Gautier later wrote. “He was read by everybody, by the statesman as well as by the commercial traveller and the schoolboy, by the great ladies in society and by the grisettes.” De Kock’s knowledge of the everyday life of Parisians earned the admiration not just of his readers but of some of his colleagues. He “had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers,” argued Gautier. “He shared their ideas, their opinions, their prejudices, their feelings.” In fact, when the works of Charles Dickens first began to be published in France, his French publisher invoked the name of Paul de Kock in advertisements to gain the confidence of readers.
A caricature of Paul de Kock from 1842.
In her book Mastering the Marketplace: Book Subtitle: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France, Anne O’Neil-Henry, one of the few academics in recent decades to take an interest in de Kock, calls him “the July Monarchy’s bourgeois writer par excellence,” but acknowledges that “by the 1830s his name carried a specific connotation: ‘Paul de Kock’ signified ‘bad’ literature, a sort of … marker of poor taste.” O’Neil-Henry argues that this is missing the point. “While critics around 1830 began to use his name synonymously with lowbrow literature, many of their reviews evinced an appreciation of some elements of his work and recognition of his successful command of the taste of modern readers.” “Simply put,” she writes, “’Paul de Kock’ did not always signify ‘Paul de Kock.”
In 1835, the English publisher Marston and Company advertised a collection of de Kock’s works that would be “carefully weeded from the indelicacy and impiety from which scarcely any French work is entirely exempt.” At the same time, however, they boasted that “A more thorough insight into French manners and customs may be acquired from one of de Kock’s novels than from fifty volumes of travels.”
His reputation throughout Europe was, in the mid-19th Century, that of an exceptional novelist. The young Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote his father in 1844, “Paul de Kock is unquestionably the most amusing and the most natural of the novelists. The interest of his works never flags for a moment, and even his pathetic scenes are perfectly true and unaffected.” Leo Tolstoy was a fan.“Don’t tell me any of that nonsense that Paul de Kock is immoral,” he was quoted as saying, “He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, free and rough, but he is never immoral.” When the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière visited Pope Leo XIII in the early 1880s, the Pope asked, “And how is the good Paolo de Koko?” In his book Sex Lives of the Popes, Nigel Cawthorne writes that Pope Gregory XVI shared his appreciation for the novelist. Benjamin Disraeli so admired de Kock that he worked an endorsement into his novel Henrietta Temple:
“Have you ever read Paul de Kock’s books?” “Never,” said Ferdinand. “What a fortunate man to be arrested ! Now you can read Paul de Kock! By Jove, you are the most lucky fellow I know!”
Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby edition of Adhémar.
De Kock could be counted on to provide entertainment value for money. To judge his merits, I tried That Rascal Gustave, one of the two dozen de Kock novels that were packaged in a mammoth edition published by Mathieson in London in the 1880s and available on the Internet Archive (link).
The book opens with young Gustave de Moranval being caught in a Paris love-nest with an 18-year-old girl from his home village by his uncle. The uncle dismisses the girl with a pay-off and dispatches Gustave to the home of M. de Berly in the Loire Valley with the aim of getting him married off to de Berly’s niece. The niece loves another, however, and Gustave’s roving eye gets him into some awkward situations. There are several incidents involving jumping from windows and having to put on women’s clothes.
In the scene that probably earned the book its scandalous reputation, Gustave finds himself hiding under the bed on the night that the niece and her new husband return to chez de Berly.
They fastened the door, and prepared to retire, so there were no means of escape for him, and he would be only too lucky if he were not discovered, as he could not even be taken for a thief since Aurelia knew him, and thus Julia [Gustave’s amoureux du moment] must be compromised; he made up his mind, therefore, to stay under the bed, happy if no one should turn him out of his hiding place. He lay on his back, hoping that Providence would not allow either monsieur or madame to look under the bed, as timorous souls so frequently do, waiting in perfect silence, without daring to move, and hardly to breathe, trusting that love or chance would enable him to escape.
As the couple prepares for bed, the bride is taken aback at her husband’s insistence on wearing a flannel vest and cotton night-cap, and reminds him of the Bible’s instructions: “When we are married, we must mutually meet each other’s desires, and even forestall them, and it allows us to enjoy the pleasures of marriage by begetting children in our own likeness.” What he then hears “opened his eyes as to the real character of the ‘prude’ he had first met at the residence of M. de Berly. Gustave finally manages to escape in the next chapter, entitled, “Julia Loses Her Beauty and Gustave Loses His Trousers.”
M. Berly falls down and finds himself on top of Gustave, an illustration by George B. Luks from the Quinby edition of That Rascal Gustave.
The next three years take Gustave on a grand tour of the salons and bedrooms of Spain, Italy, and England. He finds England’s tastes particularly mystifying:
Nobody can care for England who does not find his chief pleasure in horse-riding, cock-fighting, betting, punch, and plum-pudding, and it strikes a Frenchman as very strange to see all the ladies leave the room soon after the dessert is put on the table, whilst the gentlemen remain for such mirth as may be inspired by drinking burnt brandy.
In the end, he finds his way back to his home village, where the young woman he’d been caught with in Paris and born his child and won her way into the uncle’s affection – proving that “that virtue, gentleness, talent, and beauty can well replace birth and wealth.” And they all live happily ever after.
“It was Gustave especially which got me talked about,” de Kock later wrote in his memoirs:
Not in terms of praise by everybody. Oh, no. Many persons found the book rather too coarse, but I for my part declare, and I do so without a blush, that neither at that time nor later, did I feel the slightest remorse for my crime. To speak frankly, come, can you expect a novel called Gustave ou le Mauvais Sujet to have anything in common with Telemaque — unless it be where the son of Ulysses goes to chat, on the sly, in the caves, with the beautiful nymph Eucharis?…. At any rate many ladies were very gracious to me after reading Gustave. Ladies, evidently, who liked bad boys. There used to be ladies of that kind in those days.
To produce at the rate he did, de Kock understandably relied on certain formulas. French critic Jacques Migozzi has described it as, “Playing allegro presto with mistakes, surprises with a narrative or playful function, coincidences, misunderstandings or mystifications, and spicing up his story with burlesque episodes and bantering.” De Kock’s penchant for comedy made him the favorite of many readers. “When the vapours have smothered the sun, and when it rains, as it does always, instead of inhaling charcoal! or leaping from the Pont Neuf,” wrote John Sanderson in his 1838 book, The American in Paris, “I go into a cabinet de lecture, and read Paul de Kock. No author living can carry one so laughingly through a wet day.”
Illustration from an Italian edition of Soeur Anne.
There’s a good share of slapstick in That Rascal Gustave, enough to make one wonder why his novels haven’t been mined for more movie scripts. Here, for example, is how Gustave’s village love escapes from one awkward situation:
Susan, on hearing this, put both her legs out of the window, and this time she reached the ground, but she stumbled against Thomas, who knocked up against Mother Lucas, who fell over the greengrocer, who fell over the grocer, and so on. Pushing each other along, they got as far as the chateau, and then they did not push each other any more, and it was just as well, as they might otherwise have fallen into the moat which surrounds it.
At the same time, he could also be counted on to end on a moral note, reinforcing good bourgeois values.
By the time of his death in 1871, de Kock’s reputation had already begun to wane. Part of the problem, according to Gautier, was that he had unwittingly become a historical novelist:
His works contain the description of manners in a civilisation differing as greatly from our own as does that the traces of which are found in Pompeii; his novels, which people read formerly for amusement’s sake, will henceforth be consulted by erudites desirous of recreating life in that old Paris which I knew in my youth and of which the vestiges will soon have vanished…. Some of his novels have the same effect upon me as Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans; I seem to read in them the story of the last of the Parisians, invaded and submerged by American civilisation.
Ironically, it was just about the same time that de Kock’s novels gained traction, if not esteem, among readers outside France. Advertisements of his books began to be found in the pages of magazines from Manchester to Minnetonka, often tweaking his titles to play up their suggestiveness. Thus, Pantalon became Madame Pantaloons; Gustave, ou le mauvais sujet [the bad fellow] became That Rascal Gustave; Le démon de L’Alcove became The Vampire. Others needed no help, though: Cards, Women and Wine; The Courtesan; The Cuckold; Bride of the First Night; Wife, Husband, and Lover.
Article from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1871.
Not everyone thought this was a good thing. A bookseller in Liverpool was brought up on charges of trafficking in impure literature for carrying such titles as That Rascal Gustave. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was scandalized to find that a Cincinnati bookstore carried more copies of de Kock’s novels than of his sermons. One English traveler, reporting from Lima, Peru in 1881, lamented that “There was not a single decent edition of Don Quixote to be found in all the shops of the city,” but that there was “a brisk sale for indecent photographs and cheap editions of Paul de Kock novels.” A New England sea captain held the books responsible for the moral decay of many a young sailor: “Cheap novels, which record the imaginary exploits of highwaymen and pirates, constitute the chief entertainment” and “contribute their corrupting influences to poison the minds of hundreds of young and inexperienced sailors, and thus pave their way to those ‘houses of death,’ from which ‘none that go ever return again; neither take they hold of the paths of life.’”
A complete set of the 42-volume edition of the works of Paul de Kock published by Frederick J. Quinby Co., Boston.
Yet at almost the same time, several publishers outdid themselves in releasing ornate editions of de Kock’s works. Mathieson & Co. in London, George Barrie & Sons in Philadelphia, and the Jefferson Press and Frederick J. Quinby Company in Boston all published sets of twenty or more volumes. Quinby’s was the most elaborate, with red or teal blue leather bindings, Art nouveau flowers ornamentations, and illustrations by John Sloan, William Glackens, and others. In fact, it was a bit too elaborate, as Quinby only managed to publish 42 of a planned total of 50 volumes before going out of business in 1908.
Ad for a free copy of Gustave with a subscription to Pearson’s Magazine.
By the turn of the 20th Century, however, de Kock’s name had become synonymous for lowbrow in most English-speaking countries. He pops up several times in 1904 Dublin as depicted in Joyce’s Ulysses. “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock.” Molly Bloom recalls that her first lover “offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.” Yet he’d also become tame enough for Pearson’s Magazine to advertise an edition of That Rascal Gustave as a freebie with new subscriptions and the Boston Globe to serialize one of his novels, The Maid of Belleville, on the front page of its Sunday magazine in 1917.
Today, if we set aside over-priced print on demand reprints of his ancient editions, the works of Paul de Kock haven’t seen a new English edition (or translation) in at least a century. Even among bibliophiles, his work is now so devalued that a complete set of the Quinby edition in excellent condition was sold recently at auction for little more than $10 a volume. While he’s no candidate for elevation to the same shelf as Balzac or Flaubert, somewhere in his pile of hundreds of titles, there must be a few that merit rediscovery as, say, a 19th Century French counterpart to P.G. Wodehouse or some other prolific comic master. Anyone up for a deep-dive?
Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train (1977). Two years later, Christopher Isherwood sees her walk into a Berlin nightclub on the arm of Tania Kurella, a German woman who met the Anglo-Irish writer James Stern that evening and later married him.
In 1948, Malcolm Lowry gets drunk at a party at the house outside Paris she shared with her then-lover Joan Black. Her name pops up in accounts of Julia Child, Richard Olney, James Beard, and other culinarily-minded Americans who clustered around Child’s villa, La Pitchoune, outside Cannes. Even in Quicksand (2005), a memoir written by Sybille Bedford, with whom she lived for twenty years, Eda rates less than three pages.
She only emerges from the margins in two places: in her three brief and largely autobiographical novels — Childsplay (1961), A Matter of Choosing (1963), and Extenuating Circumstances (1971); and in Selina Hasting’s just-published biography of her long-time lover and companion, Sybille Bedford: A Life (2020). Through Eda’s first two novels we can follow her story up to her early twenties; Hastings fills in many of the gaps thereafter.
Eda grew up in material, if not psychological, comfort. She was born in 1907 in Durango, Mexico, where her father, Harvey Hurd Lord, a former Olympic athlete, managed a copper mine. In late 1910, her father and mother were forced to flee from Mexico on horseback, taking Eda with them, when miners and peasants turned on the Americans who owned much of the land Durango in one of the early incidents in the Mexican Revolution.
Cover of UK edition of Childsplay
Though Harvey Lord came from a wealthy family, he had an unfortunate knack for investing in unproductive mines. As a result, in her childhood Eda became accustomed to moving from place to place — a pattern revealed in the chapter names in Childsplay: Joplin, Missouri; Neosho; Webb City; Okmulgee, Oklahoma; Embreeville, Tennessee. The one constant was her grandmother’s home in Evanston, Illinois, where she spent most summers. Her mother died of cancer when she was three; her father remarried but Eda was never really accepted by her stepmother, and when Harvey Lord died in 1920, Eda became a ward of her grandmother Eda Hurd Lord.
Eda Hurd Lord was something of a force of nature. Daughter of the abolitionist lawyer and Chicago pioneer Harvey Hurd, she became a real estate developer, building up Evanston, Illinois as one of Chicago’s first suburbs. She was a patron of the arts, purchasing works by Winslow Homer and others and contributing money and paintings to museums. She was not, however, interested in matters of the heart. When Eda’s father died and her future was uncertain, her grandmother put the choice to thirteen-year-old Eda in business-like terms:
She said I had a lot to think about. She wanted me to make a decision, but I must do it slowly and carefully. I should not answer at once; tomorrow would be soon enough. She said she did not want to influence me one way or the other; I should make up my own mind. Did I want to stay on with her and remain a member of my own family? Or did I want to go to Oklahoma and live with my stepmother?
Her grandmother warned Eda, however, that “if I did decide in favor of my stepmother, she could no longer have anything to do with me. She could not.” “My grandmother might be cold,” Eda later wrote, “but at least you knew where you stood with her.”
As the title of Eda’s second novel A Matter of Choosing suggests, her grandmother continued to treat her as an autonomous being rather than a child in her care. Eda Hurd Lord moved from Illinois to California, first Glendale and then La Jolla, for its environment. She gave her granddaughter the choice of attending a public or private school. Eda chose private, entering the Bishop’s School in 1922.
Eda Lord, from the Bishop’s School yearbook, 1924.
Still busy with investments, her grandmother was often away and Eda became accustomed to the company of adults. One, a financier, took her along on trips down to Tijuana. Here she became acquainted with what she called “the idiot world of Prohibition drinking:
… the crazy behavior, the stumbling walk, women in evening dress out cold and carried off on stretchers. No one lifted an eyebrow; the Hamiltons did not even look up. I was learning not to be surprised at anything.
Unfortunately, Eda’s own drinking habits came to be modelled on what she witnessed in Tijuana.
With her talents and precocious sophistication, Eda became the “It” girl of the Bishop’s School. When Mary Frances Kennedy (later M. F. K. Fisher) entered the school in 1924, a year behind, Eda was the vice president of the Junior class, a member of the Debate and Thespian clubs, editor of the literary annual, and a player on the basketball, hockey, and baseball teams. “She could always do anything, anything at school better than we could,” Fisher later wrote; “she was more exciting and brilliant than any student had ever been.” Not surprisingly, Fisher developed an intense schoolgirl crush, an “awkward, bewildered, confused” love for Eda.
Eda then went to Stanford — her grandmother’s decision this time — where she quickly earned a reputation for flouting the rules. On a whim she and a fellow student paid $5 for a ride in an airplane, which resulted in a counseling from the women’s dean. This was just the start. Before the end of her first year, she was put on “social probation” (prohibited from speaking to other students on campus). As a sophomore, she began making outings with male students. One evening, after visiting a speakeasy in San Francisco, the car she was riding in was involved in an accident. Though everyone covered it up, word eventually reached the school administration and she was expelled. “They tell me that you break the laws of our country, as well, that you have taken to drink,” her grandmother confronted Eda upon her return. “Do you enjoy muddling your words?”
Intent on gaining independence from her grandmother, Eda got a job in the advertisement office of a department store in Los Angeles and took an apartment. A middle-aged bootlegger took a fancy to her and soon she was making the rounds with him almost every night. He was proud to be seen with a fresh-faced college girl on his arm. After a few months of this, however, she was ready to move on: “With Pat, I had seen it all; I was familiar with every used car park, gas station, restaurant, street corner. Los Angeles was an uninspired, sprawling, provincial conglomeration.”
She decided to try her luck in New York City. Her grandmother took the news in her usual matter-of-fact fashion: “Experience cannot be passed on to others,” she said. “Each human being has to find out for himself.” Eda was able to find work in New York but soon grew restless again. She met Karl Robinson, a young executive with an American oil company operating in China and the two were wed in early 1930. Soon after the couple arrived in China, however, Eda realized that married life was not for her. She journeyed north to Vladivostok and made her way to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway.
Eda eventually made it to France, where she met her old classmate Mary Frances Kennedy, now married to Alfred Fisher. She ingratiated herself into the budding gourmet with a ten-pound tin of caviar she’d bought in Moscow. Mary Frances in turn introduced Eda to Lawrence Clark Powell, who was renting a room from them while studying at the University of Dijon. Eda and Powell had a brief affair, little more than a few days together. Powell was infatuated, Eda less so. As he recalls in The Blue Train, she said there was little “an old drunkard like me” could offer:
Besides, you’re my last man. I intend to live with women after this. Anyway, I’ll be dead of lung cancer before I’m forty. Look at my fingers. You’d think I was Chinese. What could I give you? A child? No. The good father took care of that. He told me it was an appendectomy when he destroyed my ability to bear a child. My best gift to you would be my body in alcohol.
In his retrospective account, Powell made Eda older and a redhead to enhance her allure and mystery.
From France, she headed to Berlin, where she began working as a writer. The city’s pre-Nazi Cabaret decadence suited her perfectly. She may have had an affair that led to her having an abortion (Powell suggests this came earlier), but she began sleeping with women and frequenting nightclubs. It was in one of these that Sybille Bedford first met her. Sybille was in the company of Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, Eda with her lover Tania. Eda later said that Bedford seemed “occupied and preoccupied.” Sybille, on the other hand, claimed that she “mostly sat prim and shocked — reading a review.” The two women went on their separate ways.
They met again briefly at a cocktail party in Paris in early 1939. The web of attractions at this affair was complicated to say the least. Sybille met Allanah Harper, a wealthy and worldly Englishwoman who would become her partner through the war years and later her supporter in many practical matters. Eda was with Joan Black, also a wealthy Englishwoman, with whom she would be involved through the same period. Sybille was interested in Joan and Eda. Though the two couples parted, lines between these four women would cross in numerous ways in the years after the war.
Sybille and Allanah sailed to America shortly after the Germans invaded in May 1940. Eda and Joan Black were trapped in France. Their different fates did much to determine the direction of Sybille’s and Eda’s careers. Eda and Joan made their way to the south of France, then under control of the Vichy government. They struggled with all the challenges of life under occupation — food shortages, fuel shortages, suspicion and harassment — but at least Eda’s status as a neutral foreigner offered some protection until Hitler declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.
The contrast between the account of living under occupation Eda tells in her last novel, Extenuating Circumstances, and the evidence of history is intriguing. In the book, Eda foregoes the first-person narrator of Childsplay and A Matter of Choosing for an impersonal third person. Her lead character, Letty, the widow of a British Army veteran, survives through a combination of ingenuity and good luck. A wealthy American couple leave her with the keys to their villa, which provides Letty with relative comfort and privacy — privacy enough to act as a safe house for escaping Allied airmen on occasion. The story as a whole carries a bit of a Swiss Family Robinson air as Letty and her friends overcome difficulty after difficulty by improvising solutions and outwitting the Vichy police and Gestapo. In the end, after Liberation, one character observes to Letty, “You have come a long way.” “I have,” she replies, “And you won’t catch me looking back.”
Compare this with Hasting’s description:
To those who knew Eda in the post-war period, she appeared a timid, fragile creature, shy and retiring, clearly reluctant to attract attention or to express any opinion that might be considered remotely contentious. In her younger days, however, Eda had presented a very different image, a dark-haired beauty, sociable, intelligent and high-spirited, attractive to both men and men, eager for adventure and determined to make a successful career as a writer.
Elsewhere, she writes that Sybille found Eda “pale and thin, very anxious and shy, clearly traumatised by her wartime experiences.”
What separated Eda from the fictional Letty was the reality of her experiences during the war. She and Joan were ill-prepared to deal with deprivation. Their life in Paris had been one of sleeping late, partying long, and drinking heavily. “We were too hazy with drink to notice a kerb,” Eda later wrote. Though they made their way to the Riviera, they didn’t end up in the comfort of a luxurious villa. Instead, they found a humble country house prone to the worst of the Riviera’s wet grey months: “dampness everywhere, between one’s ribs, dripping from one’s fingers, mud all over the floor. It corrodes one’s very soul.”
And instead of the Famous Five-style adventures of Extenuating Circumstances, Joan and Eda found themselves, in March 1943, interned along with hundreds of English and American women, in Cavaillon, one of the towns “approved” for them to live. As Eda wrote in an unpublished account that Selina Hastings most generously shared with me,
Cavaillon is the mouth of the funnel of the Rhône Valley and, in consequence, is the suction vent of mistrals blowing throughout the south. Wind shakes the ugly raw-blown houses and for weeks on end, wind flings dust everywhere: into eyes, mouths, nerves.
A few days later, however, they were rounded up and loaded onto a train. No one explained what was happening or where they were going.
Women at a Vichy French internment camp.
They ended up being offloaded into a camp on the outskirts of Paris where English and American women from throughout Vichy France, nearly two thousand in all, were being held for transfer to a German Internierunslager. In some ways, Eda felt more at peace there than at any time in the south:
In this prison life I was startled to discover a curious sense of leisured ease. There was no possibility of outdoor exercise: we were not allowed out; not necessity of wangling for food: we were given so much and no more, but, even so, more than we could buy outside. I walked from the dining room back to my bed and lay down with a book, savouring the peace and luxury of it. There was nothing I could do about anything.
… Outside, I could have been shot for no reason. Here I was known, named, numbered, and certainly under someone’s care and responsibility.
After a few weeks of this, however, the internees were told that they were being shipped back to Vichy with instructions to return to their places of enforced residence. Ironically, this news was nearly as bad as being handed over to the Germans. “It was as though a steel band had snapped,” Eda wrote. “The team spirit had been broken. People began grumbling.”
The women were transported back to the south of France to live, effectively, under house arrest. “We were a present from Vichy to the Germans, but they didn’t want us,” as Eda later put it in the words of a minor character in Extenuating Circumstances. The remaining months until the Allied landings in August 1944 were dreary, anxious, and hunger-filled. Eda later said that Joan took to reading cheap English mysteries for their descriptions of food and drink. “Literary bacon and eggs,” however, “are not very sustaining.”
Following Liberation, Eda and Joan made their way back to La Cerisaie, the farmhouse near Giverny that Joan owned. There, the women reconnected with friends from before the war and Joan began drinking great quantities of cheap red wine. For Eda, on the other hand, the one positive outcome of the wartime lockdown was recognizing that she was an alcoholic:
It was then that I had to decide that I must give up all alcohol and completely. Because that was the only real trouble: my liver had long before given up in despair and the alcohol went immediately into my blood stream, poisoning me, puffing me up, giving my mind strange illusions. I did this in as unobtrusive a way as I could, so that even now most people don’t know whether I drink or not.
Eda kept herself sober, as Sybille later put it, “with unrelenting effort — and the crutches of cigarettes and caffeine.” Eda would come to be known among acquaintances for her habit of arriving at parties with a thermos of coffee in hand. It seems as if Sybille saw Eda’s alcoholism as a purely a weakness rather than acknowledging her general success in maintaining sobriety.
Eda continued to write but published little. Malcolm Lowry praised a story she wrote titled “The Pig,” based on her experiences during the Occupation. “As a story perhaps it has, in one way, a kind of intolerance or lack of centre, even when it is being most subtle,” he wrote a friend, but admitted that “perhaps this imbalance is the clue to the author’s talent, or one clue.” He even suggested that Eda might pull together a collection of stories about “the gruesomes & comedies of the occupation.”
It was not until August 1956, after several more encounters, that Sybille and Eda became lovers. The relationship started with crash. Driving south from Paris, they were involved in an automobile accident that left Sybille with a broken hip. They recuperated at La Bastide, a villa in the hills above Cannes that Allanah Harper — a former lover of both women — was restoring with her husband. In many ways, La Bastide became the closest thing to home that Eda was to experience in her adult life.
For much of their time together over the next twenty years, Eda and Sybille lived on the move, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. As Sybille wrote in Quicksand,
… [W]e were living in years’ or half-years’ snatches in rented houses or flats in Dorset, in London, in Portugal, in Essex, then London again, then Italy: the Browning Villa at Asolo, an intolerable mistake with a sudden recourse to where we should have started: the South of France. And there we found the only both loved and permanent home I ever had: a conversioned annex built on Allanah Harper’s property.
This period, however, represented Bedford’s most productive time as a writer, as she published two novels, several collections of reportage, and a two-volume biography of Aldous Huxley. And Eda, who’d never written more than magazines and short stories, finally got down to work on a longer piece. She may have intended to write something about the Occupation: in one of Sybille’s letters, she writes that Eda is working on a piece about Marseilles and that “it is like a door burst open, then freedom and imagination and originality of the writing, filled with joy.”
Cover of US edition of Childsplay
What Eda published in the end, though, was Childsplay, which was essentially her autobiography up to the time of her father’s death in 1920 (though she places the event in 1917). Childsplay was published to good reviews in both the U.S. and England. The New York Times’ reviewer singled out Lord’s spare, elegant prose style. “She writes with great clarity and is able to make each separate scene count for exactly what she intended.”
Monica Furlong, writing in the Guardian gave the book its most enthusiastic review: “Masterpiece, tour de force, work of art — all the silly rave words of reviewers fail one utterly, yet the fact remains that here is a writer who uses language as if it had just been invented, who remembers precisely what it was like to learn to read, to get stuck on a roof and not be able to get down, to mistake a puppet for a real monkey. Miss Lord has no self-pity, no sentimentality, no vulgarity. Her greedy appetite for life takes a well-judged bite at America in the early years of this century….” Furlong later named it as one of the books she’d most enjoyed during the year, saying the book’s “vivid, singing prose” had “haunted me for months.”
Cover of US edition of A Matter of Choosing
Eda followed two years later with A Matter of Choosing, which carried her story forward to her arrival in New York City in her early twenties. Like Childsplay, it was written in a frank, unsentimental first-person voice that was as tough on herself as on those around her. The book displayed a remarkable level of constraint — not reticence, mind, but a maturity that recognizes the danger in making sweeping statements. As one reviewer put it, Lord’s prose was “cool and spare and always beautifully exact both in what it says and what it implies.” Only Anne Kelley though, writing in Chicago Tribune saw through Lord’s reserve to the vulnerable orphan she really was: “The sense of loneliness in the midst of so many people is overwhelming.”
M. F. K. Fisher, who saw Eda in the late 1950s after a break of many years, recognized that time had taken its toll on her. “I know that you are everything I recognized in you so long ago,” she wrote Eda in 1959, “tempered and refined and of course wearied by those processes.” Martha Gellhorn, who was a close friend, cautioned Sybille that “Eda will never decide anything because she cannot, and her motives are not what you think (gratitude, duty, affection) but plain terror.”
It was Sybille, not Eda, who took the lead in things. When Eda returned to the U.S. for the first time in over thirty years in early 1964, it was because Sybille had agreed to report on the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, for LIFE magazine. While Sybille attended court, Eda went on to California to stay with M. F. K. Fisher, where, as Sybille wrote after they met again in New York City, Eda had “put on some weight, thank God.”
Once back in France, however, Eda found it hard to get back to work on her long-delayed novel about the Occupation. Living with Sybille when she was working on a deadline was “like living with a caged tiger.” Eda had to take on most of the domestic duties. “I’ve been nurse, housekeeper, errand boy,” she complained, along with having to do most of the work in the large garden that Sybille wanted but could not care for. But Eda was also suffering from depression. Sybille wrote a friend that Eda refused to discuss what was going on: “That wretchedness was neither admitted, nor discussed; it was concealed.”
By the summer of 1968, however, Eda was dealing better with depression, thanks in part to effective medication. She returned to her third novel “without great faith but with tenacity and courage,” as Sybille put it. Deep into her research for the Aldous Huxley biography, Sybille traveled to the U.S. with Eda again. The two women spent some time with her aunt Margaret Burnham, the last of Eda’s father’s siblings. Sybille the experience stifling: “the days are spent in maddening slow rounds of trivia.” Aunt Margaret disapproved of Eda’s smoking and made a point to say so frequently. Yet she also insisted that her niece take part her busy social life, which left Eda “shrivelled with boredom” and with no energy to work on her book. The only relief was a visit to M. F. K. Fisher in Napa Valley, although Eda’s frailty worried her old friend: “I feel as if she is nourished on cobwebs,” she wrote afterward.
Cover of U.S. edition of Extenuating Circumstances
Eda finally finished Extenuating Circumstances in October 1970. Sybille’s long-time editor Robert Gottleib was happy to accept the book for Knopf. By now the story had only a loose connection with Eda’s own experiences during the Occupation. Instead of a grim account of survival and deprivation, it had become, as one reviewer put it, “a wry comedy” in which the heroine — seen through the distance of an impersonal narrator — was transformed from “starveling to spiv entrepreneur.” It was as if the only way Eda could put that time down on paper was to step out of the story completely.
Eda grew more and more reluctant to leave the annex of La Bastide that had become their home. She continued to struggle with depression, took no interest in eating — which would have been difficult for Sybille, who always relished good food and wine, of which there was plenty to be had with friends like Julia Child and Richard Olney nearby. Eda was likely dealing with a serious case of agoraphobia. As one can imagine, it was difficult to be around someone with such dark moods — hard to show love, harder to feel it. Reading the account of Sybille and Eda’s relationship in Hastings’ biography, you realize that while we may not have progressed much in the priority we give the treatment of mental illness, we are at least better at recognizing it. Neither woman was well prepared to deal with Eda’s depression.
And Eda’s smoking began to take its toll. She finally gave it up, but the damage had already been done. She was diagnosed with throat cancer. Worse, after suffering a hemorrhage, Eda was told that she needed to undergo a hysterectomy. Already weakened, she had no reserve to draw on for recovery and she died soon after. M. F. K. Fisher later raged at the decision about the operation: “It was cruel to make Eda submit to an obviously useless surgical interference so late in the game. After that biopsy, why not just keep her warm and as comfortable as possible? DAMN.” In the last days, Sybille wondered just what connected her with the woman she’d lived with for two decades: “The difficulty with Eda is that she is so hard to know. I feel that I do not really know her (which makes everything even sadder).”
Sybille survived Eda by almost thirty years. In contrast to Eda’s grim decline, she enjoyed her greatest recognition, earning an OBE in 1981, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989 with her novel Jigsaw, wining a Golden PEN award in 1993. After dedicating several of her books from the 1960s to Eda, Sybille finally addressed their relationship, if only briefly, in her 2005 memoir Quicksands. Now, fifteen years after her death, most of Sybille’s books are in print and likely to gain more readers as a result of Hastings’ outstanding biography. Eda Lord, on the other hand, is likely to remain where she is: on the margin of other lives.
My sincere thanks to Selina Hastings for her help with this piece. Her biography, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, is available from Penguin/Random House (U.S. and U.K.)
If Maurice Sachs deserves to be remembered today, it’s almost entirely for his effusive memoir, Witches’ Sabbath, reissued last year by Spurl Editions. As I wrote at the time of its republication, Witches’ Sabbath is not only a classic autobiography but an essential reference for anyone interested in French art and literature between the world wars: “Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few.”
Sachs’ first book, The Decade of Illusion, published in the U.S. almost two decades before it appeared (posthumously) in France. Sachs wrote the book during his stay of roughly two years, probably to cash in on his brief celebrity as a traveling lecturer. He’d come to New York City in 1931 at the invitation of his friend Lucien Demotte, who hired Sachs to run a Manhattan art gallery filled with French art. Unfortunately, the art market had dried up as a result of the stock market crash and the two men soon parted ways.
Notice for a talk by Maurice Sachs on Proust on New York radio station WRNY.
Ever the opportunist, Sachs reinvented himself as an expert on French culture and soon began appearing as a lecturer at lady’s clubs and art societies and on radio. Despite being homosexual, he married a socialite and aspiring writer named Gwladys Matthews. Within months, Sachs had deserted Gwladys for a handsome young man, while the couple were together, Sachs wrote, and Gwladys translated, this breakneck run through the cast of players in French culture and society of the 1920s.
As one reviewer put it, Decade is a “kaleidoscopic parade, staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France (mostly Paris), which includes in its dramatis personae practically every well known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, book seller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” And as such, it’s probably still of some interest to scholars of the period. Sachs’ Who’s Who is a good starting point: in the space of barely 250 pages, he manages to squeeze in enough names to fill 11 double-spaced pages in the index, for a rough total of 700 people.
But this is cultural history People magazine style. It’s full of gossipy tidbits and asides: the young pianist Arthur Rubinstein, “So strong, so powerful, he was like a bull on hind legs: when he took a woman’s hand, one imagined the rape of Europa.” Henri Matisse, the movie fan: “He goes each evening, no matter what the film. What appears on the screen does not interest him; he closes his eyes and listens to the murmurs of the neighboring crowd.” André Derain “loves auto racing” and collects landscape paintings by Corot. Maurice Utrillo was a drunk.
As anyone who’s watched an hour of any American newschannel knows, the chief qualification of any successful commentator is a ready supply of opinions, well-informed or not. Maurice Sachs would have been a superstar in this world, for he tosses off judgments as other writers use punctuation. “In all American universities,” he intones, “one worries first about the moral reasons of written works — which certainly would be the last consideration of a young Frenchman.” Good taste makes for bad paintings: “Nothing is more deplorable than a delicious arrangement.” French cinema lags far behind that of America because French film-makers lack “the American mind, less lively, more deliberate and analytical, like the German” — a statement I can’t imagine any film historian agreeing with.
Though several reviewers praised Sachs’ “amazingly superficial chit-chat style,” the fact is that he managed to write a book-length work by filling large gaps between his chit-chat with windy pontifications. But perhaps this was not entirely inappropriate for someone who at one point took vows and began to train as a priest (a gig he soon lost after a wealthy woman complained about the Sachs’ interest in her teenage son).
In some ways, more interesting that the book itself is what came along with the copy I purchased. As the bookplate shows, it came from the library of the heiress and art enthusiast Adeline Lobdell Pynchon. Sachs first met her soon after his arrival in New York City, when she was still married to Henry Atwater. By the time the book was published, she’d moved back to her hometown of Chicago and married Harold Pynchon, a wealthy businessman.
Included in the book was a letter Sachs wrote her in November 1931 — shortly before her marriage to Pynchon — asking whether “there would be any possibility” for him to deliver lectures in Chicago similar to those he was in the process of giving in New York. He needed the work: “The Art season has started rather badly and since you ask me, I confess that I have not so much hopes for sales this year.” “But nevertheless, who knows?” he concluded optimistically.
Letter from Maurice Sachs to Adeline Atwater, November 17, 1931.
His call for help was heeded … eventually. In March 1933, the Chicago Tribune reported on a “delightful lecture” that Sachs gave to the Arts Club on “The Decade of Illusion.” Sachs was hosted, according to the article, by “Mrs. Harold Pynchon” and accompanied by Henry Wibbels, “a young painter from California who is with him here at the Ambassador East.”
It was Wibbels for whom Sachs had left his wife, and the two men sailed for France a few weeks after their stop in Chicago. They remained together for nearly four years — some of the worst in Sachs’s life, when he fell prey to alcohol and drugs. In the end, they parted. As Sachs later wrote, “Life played tricks on us because we were trying to play one on it. We had to separate before we were entirely annihilated, Henry by dependence, I by drunkenness and lying.” Adeline Lobdell Atwater Pynchon, on the other hand, remained a fixture of Chicago society and an active patron of the arts until her death in 1975.
The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, by Maurice Sachs New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933
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’sZeno’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.”
Jean Dutourd, 1956
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.”
Five A. M., by Jean Dutourd New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956
Maurice Sachs was a charmer. Jean Cocteau once warned their mutual friend, the poet Max Jacob, “Don’t trust Maurice. He’s a charmer. He would try to charm God Himself!” In writing his memoirs with utterly self-effacing candor, he managed to make his charm live on after him. Sachs wrote in the tradition of Rousseau, Stendhal, and André Gide, convinced that the greatest sin of all was hypocrisy. In the pages of his posthumously-published memoir, Witches’ Sabbath — being reissued this week from Spurl Editions — and its sequel The Hunt, Sachs admits to breaking most of the Commandments.
Though he rarely managed to complete the novels he started and few of his plays made it to the stage, Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. Though a homosexual, he wasn’t averse to going to bed with a woman if it served a purpose. He also wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. He seduced several German officers while living in occupied Paris and numerous members of the LVF (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, a Nazi-friendly French military group) and Gestapo after moving to Hamburg in 1943. “My life has been nothing but one long complicity with the guilty,” he wrote. “I have always been on the side of the pariahs.”
Sachs’ grandmother had scandalized French society by leaving her husband to marry Jacques Bizet, the talented but erratic and spendthrift son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Sachs idolized Jacques, but by the time they became close, Bizet was already bent on self-destruction. Maurice remembers Bizet playing around with a revolver one day. He “fired one bullet out the window to show me it was really loaded, and put the barrel in my mouth, right up against my palate. Then he put my forefinger on the trigger and said: ‘When you’ve had enough of life, that’s the way to kill yourself. It’s clean, and you don’t feel a thing.’” Not long after that, Bizet used the gun in exactly that way to take his life. Maurice was just sixteen.
Sachs’ grandfather was a wealthy diamond merchant, but Sachs’ parents managed to squander his legacy. When he was seventeen, Maurice had to arrange for his mother’s quick escape to England after she wrote her creditors a large check guaranteed to bounce. He disliked his family so much he fantasized in his memoir about the family he wished for: “My father comes in all muddy from foxhunting, my mother gets up from the piano where she has been singing a simple ballad.” He claimed the only things he inherited from his parents were his father’s laziness and his mother’s “lack of balance.”
His parents rid themselves of the responsibility to raise Maurice by sending him off to a boarding school. By his account, French boarding schools were just as much hotbeds of sadomasochism and homosexual as English ones. Maurice skirted the approaches of masters and upperclassmen but fell in love with a fellow student and appears to have accepted his sexual preference with remarkably little angst.
After leaving school, he set himself up in Paris with what he’d saved from his grandfather’s estate and dove headfirst into the city’s social and cultural life. “How good it felt to be twenty, in those days. This was the reign of gaiety and license,” he recalled. He met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and fell under the spell of his piety. Sponsored by Maritain and his wife, Sachs converted to Catholicism in 1925 and soon after entered a seminary to become a priest.
It was to be a short stay. Sachs put on his soutaine in January 1926; by the end of September, he had been ejected from the order. While enjoying a short vacation on the Riviera, he made the acquaintance of the American writer Glenway Westcott, who in turn introduced him to a handsome (and wealthy) teenager named Tom Pinkerton. Sachs fell madly in love with Pinkerton. Though Sachs maintained the relationship remained platonic, Pinkerton’s mother complained to the Bishop of Nice.
Sachs acknowledged that “I mistook an ephemeral enthusiasm for an eternal vocation.” He also confessed that he felt “a mixed delight” in the trappings of the church “that was not entirely pious.” He loved his soutaine, for example: “The black was becoming, and made me look slender.” He is also reported to have had his lined with pink silk crêpe du Chine.
He went from one institution to another. Leaving the seminary made him eligible for military service, and he was soon stationed with the French army of occupation along the Rhine in Germany. While his first job was monitoring latrines, he was soon put in charge of the officer’s library after a colonel found him reading Montesquieu at his post. About the only thing he took away from his time in the army was his lifelong friendship with the poet Max Jacob.
Back in Paris again, he indulged himself in the two vices he’d become acquainted with in the military: sex and drink. Though he claimed not to have known of their existence, he began frequenting Paris’s male brothels, including the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, notorious as the scene of Marcel Proust’s more extreme sexual experiences. He also became a profligate drinker: “it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to sit down to a meal without having drunk about ten cocktails.”
Sachs rarely held back his passions. If Cocteau learned to be wary of Maurice’s charms, Sachs gave into his enchantment with the poet and artist completely: it was, he wrote, “total, immediate, and delicious.” “When we left this magician,” Sachs recalled, “I knew beyond all doubt that I was going to live only for him.” Cocteau’s response to Sachs was friendly but cautious.
He did, however, recommend the young man to Coco Chanel, who hired him to assemble a private library. Then “on the point of no longer counting her fortune,” Chanel gave him a monthly budget of 60,000 Francs and carte blanche in his commission. “I had no problem making a good living out of this sum,” Sachs wrote in something of an understatement. It’s unlikely that much of Chanel’s investment made it to her shelves. He took full advantage of her largesse:
I had an apartment, paintings, a car, a secretary, two servants, a masseur, expensive love affairs; I spent my nights in cabarets, my afternoons at the tailor’s, I bought books and bibelots, and this was perhaps the moment of my life when I enjoyed the highest degree of physical comfort. What young man would not have been intoxicated by so many absurd grandeurs which he believed to be the result of his personal genius?
By the time he’d exhausted Chanel’s good humor, however, he’d managed to convince other investors of his genius as well. Lucien Demotte hired Sachs to help assemble collections of French paintings that were shown in Paris and London. The pair then headed, artworks in hand, to New York, where Demotte owned a gallery on East 57th Street. Unfortunately, they landed in New York with perhaps a million dollars’ worth of merchandise which had little prospect of being sold. Sachs was able to hang onto Demotte’s coattails for a while, standing in as a groomsman when Demotte married the daughter of the Franco-American tycoon Felix Wildenstein in early 1931, but he soon had to fend for himself.
Louis Marcoussis, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs and Moise Kisling at the Claridge Galleries, London, June 1929
He came up with a solution with the help of Harold Peat, director of a lecture tour agency. Impressed with Sachs’ good looks and suave manners, he agreed to take Sachs on as a lecturer. The only problem was: on what?
“What will you talk about?” “About art.” “There can’t be more than three hundred people who are interested in that. We need three thousand. Why not talk about politics?” “Because I don’t know anything about politics.” “Just read the morning papers, and that evening tell what you read in your own words.”
Two weeks later, Peat was selling his new client as “Maurice Sachs: Famous French Economist,” whose talks promised to “Train a Spotlight on the Secrets of Europe.” Sachs also found support for his new career in an admiring member of his early lectures. Gwladys Matthews, whose father was pastor of the largest Presbyterian congregation in Seattle, was an aspiring writer who wanted to get free of her family.
Sachs claimed he told her of his preference for men but said he was interested in gaining a wife for the sake of a future political career. He charmed Reverend Matthews with the sincerity of his passion: “I love your daughter,” he told Matthews. “If you do not give your consent to our marriage, I shall marry her all the same.” Regardless of who was fooling whom, Maurice and Gwladys were married in Seattle in June 1932, her father officiating.
In Witches’ Sabbath, Sachs referred to Seattle as “Morpheus,” which gives a clue to the prospects for the marriage. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks then returned to the West Coast, taking an apartment in San Francisco. It was there, in April 1934, that Gwladys filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Brilliant Romance to End” read the Associated Press headline for the news. In fact, what would prove Maurice’s longest romantic involvement had begun – according to the divorce papers – in February 1933 he ran off with a young Californian he refers to in the book as Henry. As usual, Sachs was honest about his dishonesty: “I had married her like a madman; I left her like a coward,” he wrote.
Gwladys, by the way, later moved to Hollywood, worked as a screenwriter and married the pioneering photographer Ned Scott in 1936. Before his desertion, she also did Sachs the favor of translating his memoir, The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, which Knopf published just weeks after Maurice took off with Henry.
The book, now long out of print, received good reviews. “A charming and delightfully kaleidoscopic parade,” wrote C. Norris Millington in The American Magazine of Art. “staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France.” Millington credited Sachs for his “dramatis personae”: “practically every well-known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, bookseller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” Others thought he took his personal Who’s Who too far, noting that his index listed 770 names, or roughly three names for every page.
Maurice and Henry took the advance for Decade of Illusion and bought berths on a cattle boat returning to Le Havre. Sachs returned to a family devasted by the Depression. “Nous n’avons rien” he wrote: “We have nothing left.” Sachs’ mother had suffered a heart attack; his Uncle Richard had committed suicide. Though Sachs’ most tolerant, if skeptical, supporter, André Gide, helped him get a job editing a new series for La Nouvelle Revue Française, the money wasn’t enough to support the two lovers and Maurice had to fill in as a desk clerk at the cheap hotel where they stayed. Sachs’ description of the hotel (which he calls the Hotel Saint-Joachim but was actually l’hôtel Saint-Yves) and its residents are some of the best passages in Witches Sabbath.
A man who stays in a hotel, far from his habitual milieu, inwardly liberated, rarely constrains himself. The employee sees him naked. In two years of the hotel business, I learned a great deal about human behavior. I have seen maniacs, debauchees, paragons of virtue, monsters of anger, the timorous, the greedy, and the generous; I have observed vanity and folly, dreadful aberrations, charming virtues, conduct full of inner distinction, and incredible abasement I have watched, and a horrible spectacle it was, thousands of individuals eat, whom it was my duty to watch as they did so (spaghetti dinners were always the worst). The toilet that doesn’t work, the bath that overflows, the bed in which, in spite of everything, a lady believes she has found a mischievous flea, oblige a curious participation in the intimacy of people whom you know too much about and whom you don’t know. The intimacy that no sympathy motivates is as painful as a promiscuity of the flesh.
Even with this income, Sachs wrote, “There was almost no day when I knew exactly how we were going to eat that evening.” He admits to hanging around the bookstalls across the river from the Louvre for the purpose of stealing books. Cocteau later wrote that during this time, Sachs would stuff his pockets with toilet paper, rustling it so others thought his pockets were full of 1,000-Franc notes. “It gives me confidence,” Sachs told Cocteau.
Sachs’ way of coping with poverty disgusted some of his acquaintances. Marcel Jouhandeau, who later collaborated with the Nazis, claimed that it was his encounters with Sachs that led him to write a notorious article, “How I Became an Anti-Semite,” for the journal of the far-right party, Action Française.
Sachs was saved by the actor Pierre Fresnay, best known among English-speaking audiences for his role as the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Fresnay encouraged him to write for the stage. Though most of Sachs’ attempts never reached completion, let alone the stage, his translation of the Terence Rattigan play, French Without Tears was a success. Fresnay enlisted Sachs to work as stage manager when he organized a run of plays performed on alternating nights in London’s West End in 1938. Sachs returned to Paris exhausted. It is here that Witches’ Sabbath ends. “I am leaving. I don’t know where I am going, where I shall go. To the East, if I have any luck.”
The Hunt ( La chasse à courre), Sachs’ last and incomplete memoir, picks up a two years later in May 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg was approaching Paris. Sachs had managed to attach himself to the staff of the government radio network and fled with it to the Third Republic’s final capital in Bordeaux. There, he first encountered the deceit, greed, and hypocrisy that would characterize much of French life under the Occupation. After a few weeks of sharing an over-priced bed in an overcrowded hotel, he returned to Paris.
There, he found the black market was already booming. “What was I going to do if not the black market?” he asked. Once again, Sachs relied on his charm and connections to work his way in. He became a specialist in moving jewelry and precious goods, often working on consignment. He lied and was lied to on a daily basis. “I was up to my neck in the very finest garbage,” he wrote.
And exceptional garbage it was. While rationing and deprivation was the rule for ordinary Parisians, with the right connections and enough money, the life of luxury rolled on: “the Chataigné … turned out a delectable lobster au beurre blanc, Philippe served the foie gras at the height of rationing, chocolate mousse, and meat without coupons, the Vieux Pont-Neuf, where they had cakes made with real cream, Gaffner served beefsteaks, Lola Tosch offered leg of lamb, et cetera….” It took a furious amount of wheeling and dealing to keep up this lifestyle, however, and Sachs’ accounts of his many transactions are both dizzying and mind-numbing.
After a point, however, the reader loses interest in knowing how much he took from the Duchesse d’Y or sold to the Comte de T.. Sachs came to feel the same way. “The fatigue, the boredom, yes, above all the boredom of these incessant transactions, the unreality, the roguery, the disgust I felt for myself and for others suddenly seized me by the throat,” he wrote. He teamed up with the ex-wife of one of his friends and retreated to the quiet of a village in Normandy.
In The Hunt, he refers to the woman as Pomme. In reality, she was Violette Le Duc, who later became famous for her memoir, La Bâtarde. Though they spent months together – continuing to keep up a steady black-marketing operation, only now in produce, meats and cheeses – it would be hard to tell from comparing their respective accounts. In The Hunt, Pomme is a pleasant companion with an absurd crush on him. In La Bâtarde, he is the brilliant, handsome, and talented Maurice Sachs – Le Duc refers to him by his full name at least 50% of the time. Sachs ultimately found her suffocating. Le Duc credits him with inspiring her to write:
Maurice said to me next day: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”
That afternoon, Le Duc began to write what would become her first book, L’Asphyxie. If you are interested in a third version of this story, you can watch director Martin Provost’s 2013 film, Violette.
Maurice and Pomme were accompanied to Normandy with Karl-Heinz, a German Jewish orphan that Sachs took a notion to adopt. The Rothschild family had taken in a group of Jewish orphans ejected from Germany a few months before the outbreak of war in hopes of finding homes with good French families. One doubts two black marketeers hiding out in the country were quite what they had in mind. And Sachs’ treatment of Karl-Heinz demonstrated the dangers of boutique parenting.
Sachs was attracted by the twelve-year-old’s good looks, but as soon as the boy opened his mouth, he left his foster father with a longing to flee. Karl-Heinz was not interested in books or art or music. His ambition was to be a waiter. Sachs was glad to learn of an American Quaker organization that was arranging for orphans to be sent to families in the U.S. and soon Karl-Heinz was standing at the nearest train station, ticket in hand. “My burning love for Karl-Heinz had already been extinguished in the tepid waters,” Sachs confessed, happy to be rid of the boy’s “appealing mediocrity.”
Sachs returned to Paris and the 24×7 life of deal-making, but his luck in coming out on the profitable end of these increasingly complicated three-, four- and five-way transactions was on the wane. By the beginning of autumn 1942, he was looking for another way out.
In October 1942, Sachs finally headed East. To Hamburg. His rationale is unclear from The Hunt and none of the several biographies written since the 1960s have come up with a definitive answer, but the most likely reasons relate to lust and greed. Sachs was infatuated with the strong, self-confident blond Aryans he encountered in smart uniforms in Paris and saw a chance to carouse with more of them in the Fatherland. He also thought the Nazis would pay well for information supplied by a willing Frenchman operating inside the forced labor organization supplying thousands of workers for German factories.
Sachs managed to slip out of occupied France in November 1942, sleeping with his guide along the way. The final section of The Hunt is drawn from letters he sent back to Paris. At first, he found the experience of going to work with hundreds of other French workers tedious: several pages of The Hunt are devoted to cataloguing the character flaws and bad habits of Bretons, Gascons, and others. And “Need I add that they had never heard the word ‘conversation’ in their lives?” He was proud, however, of what he referred to as his “little Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
Sachs was in Hamburg when some of the cities’ most devastating bombing raids took place. “The city is really nothing more than a heap of charred rubble in which I still have a room without water, without electricity, almost without anything,” he wrote after one raid. Still he felt more at home than he had in occupied France. “No doubt about it, I adore this country: the only one where I find it easy to be happy, where I’m instinctively happy, as it were.” And there was no shortage of sexual partners: “There’s love for all through the town,” he reported almost giddily.
In June 1943, he wrote with excitement – and suspicious ambiguity – of getting a new job. “I am well paid, newly clothed, and well thought of,” he crowed. The job undoubtedly involved collaboration with the Gestapo, but it also provided him with opportunities to seduce young Frenchmen of the LVF and the occasional willing Nazi. He may not have known that at the age of 36, he was already being referred to as Maurice la tante — Maurice the aunt.
The Nazis were less susceptible to Sachs’ charm, however. In November 1943, he was arrested for his homosexual activities and sent to the Fuhlsbüttel prison. What happened to Sachs after this was for some years a mystery. When La chasse à courre was first published in Paris in 1947, it ended with a postscript added by the publisher stating Sachs’ whereabouts were unknown. Later, it was reported he had been lynched by inmates. Finally, a German reporter was able to confirm that in April 1945, Sachs and the other prisoners in Fuhlsbüttel were evacuated to avoid the approaching British Army and forced to march to another facility in Kiel. Walking through the snow without food, water, or proper clothing, many of the inmates died along the way. When Sachs and another prisoner failed to join the formation on the morning of April 14, 1945, they were shot in the head by a Belgian SS guard.
Le Sabbat (subtitled souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse — Memoirs of a Stormy Youth) caused “a considerable furor in literary and salon circles,” as Janet Flanner reported in a 1946 “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. One French reviewer described it as “The chronicle of a vicious drunk and pervert, whose struggles to refashion his life and regenerate his soul are blocked by a voluptuous pleasure in guilt and loathsomeness.” Even untranslated, the assessment of another reads like a seminarian’s list of venal and deadly sins: “Mal élevé, vicieux, orgueilleux, vaniteux, adonné aux pires excès, aux perversions les plus scandaleuses, homosexuel, renégat, mufle, il représente le point extrême de la jeunesse débauchée et cynique.” An American academic reviewer put it more bluntly: “Young Jew writes je as easily as Jean-Jacques.”
The book was first translated into English by Robin King in 1953 as Days of Wrath: Confessions of a Turbulent Youth. It’s a rendition best left forgotten. The TLS reviewer called the translation “slapdash” and “disfigured by an exasperating carelessness in the proof-reading.” And despite his claim that the book was of greater literary than documentary value, King also chose to bowdlerize the text. As Benedict Nicolson put it in his New Statesman review, “There can be no excuse” for King’s editorial decisions: “… reproducing parts of chapters, omitting a phrase here, a paragraph there, in so arbitrary a fashion that one is continuously driven back to the French text to discover what the author intended.”
Spurl Editions has wisely chosen to reissue the 1964 Richard Howard translation, titled Witches’ Sabbath, instead. At the time of its original publication, Anthony Powell called it “a near-classic of its kind.” Powell had an elegant way of describing Sachs’ elusive manner of dealing with facts. “Although one suspects there is little here that is not, within its context, true, the skill of the narrative makes truth almost beside the point.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano was so inspired by Sachs’ handling of the truth that he brought Sachs back to life as an aging and unrepentant collaborator in the first novel of his “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Etoile (1968).
A year after Witches’ Sabbath, its sequel The Hunt, Richard Howard’s translation of La chasse à courre was also published by Stein and Day in the U.S. and Calder & Boyars in the U.K.. Although a much shorter and obviously incomplete book, Sachs’ charm was still on display. “There’s a racy, flaunted untrustworthiness about Sachs which keeps you on your guard just as surely as it keeps you reading,” David Williams wrote in The Daily Telegraph. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had the opposite of Robin King’s assessment, saying the book had far more documentary interest than literary merit.
Spurl Editions has done readers a great favor with its reissue of Witches’ Sabbath. At a time when people are looking for a good book to hunker down and enjoy, this is an excellent way to spend a few days while you’re barricaded behind your walls of toilet paper. You can order the book now from Spurl or from Amazon as of April 3.
CAUTION! Any person or persons who attempt to recognize their own sordid idiosyncracies in any character in this book are warned that anything they say will be used in evidence against them.
This disclaimer may be the best thing in this book. On the other hand, my knowledge of the who’s who (or who slept with who) of the glitterati of the 1920s (and 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s) may be too inadequate to have recognized — let alone understood — most of the inside jokes that are probably peppered throughout.
Daisy Fellowes was a portmanteau of connections. In her day, she may have been the best-connected person on the planet. If there are six degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon, there were probably no more than four between Daisy Fellowes and my grandfather. Just read the string of labels that opens her Wikipedia biography: “prominent French socialite, acclaimed beauty, minor novelist and poet, Paris Editor of American Harper’s Bazaar, fashion icon, and an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune.” Every one of those subordinate clauses by itself is more that most of us can claim. She packed six of them into her life. But then she did have plenty of hooks to hang them from, carrying around a name that would have taken up a sheet of paper by itself: Marguerite Severine Philippine de Broglie Ducasez Fellowes, Duchess de Gluecksbierg. Daisy Fellowes on her yacht c.1930
She was the kind of character who provides an irresistible rabbit-hole for even a well-intentioned writer. Thus, Ladislas Farago, when ostensibly writing about her daughter Jacqueline in his history of World War Two espionage, The Game of Foxes, veers off course for a quick swing around the isle of Daisy:
The Prince was killed in 1918, the year Jacqueline was born. His young widow, a ravishing and poignant figure in the deep mourning that was fashionable at that time, then married the Hon. Reginald Fellowes, a tall, dark, dashing British banker, younger son of the second Lord de Ramsey. From then on, she commuted between her palace in Neuilly-sur-Seine, her spacious Villa Zoriade on the Riviera, and Donnington Hall in Berkshire, once the residence of Beau Brummel, now decorated with Daisy’s magnificent collection of eighteenth-century furniture. She lived so sumptuously that even the walls of her boathouse on the Cote d’Azur were lined with drawings by Giovanni Tiepolo, the great painter of Venetian baroque whose frescoes adorn the Doge’s Palace. With apartments also in Belgravia and Tangier, she was always on the move, allegedly to dodge taxes on the vast Singer fortune.
Daisy Fellowes de Broglie Ducasez, acclaimed as the world’s best-dressed woman, was the outstanding hostess of her age, more devastatingly smart and witty than beautiful. She entertained prodigiously at her many homes and aboard her 250-foot yacht, the Sister Anne. Her circle of friends included not only such blue-blooded fixtures of high society as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Lady Castlerosse, Lady Diana Cooper, Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, and the Aga Khan, but also Somerset Maugham, the great ballet master Serge Lifar, Coco Chanel, Cecil Beaton, Yvonne Printemps, and Sacha Guitry.
Her name pops up in letters, memoirs, and biographies of everyone from Gertrude Stein and Colette to Erté and Chanel to the Duchess of Windsor and Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman (to name another portmanteau of the famous and rich). And there is always some juicy tidbit about her to be shared:
Daring Dos, Marie Trasko:
• “According to her hairdresser, she had her hair done as much as ten times in one day.”
The Power of Style, Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins:
• “Seeing a group of girls playing in a park, she asked the nurse watching them, ‘Whose lovely little children are those?’ To which the nurse replied, ‘Yours, Madame.’
Too brief a treat: the letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke:
• “Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time — the Doctors say no more).”
October Blood, Francine du Plessix Gray (novel):
• “Daisy Fellowes, who always wore identical bracelets of diamones and rubies on each wrist (she ordered two of each because she loathed asymmetry).”
Second Son: An Autobiography, David Herbert:
• [Daisy on her daughters]: “The eldest, Emmeline, is like my first husband only a great deal more masculine; the second, Isabelle, is like me without guts; [and] the third, Jacqueline, was the result of a horrible man called Lischmann ….”
I confess that I bought Cats in the Isle of Man for its title alone, hoping for something quirky and unjustly forgotten. Instead, I found the book quippy and probably not worth what a used copy will cost you. It starts as the story of Claudia and John, twin children of an American Singer-like heiress and a handsome but feckless Polish prince. John is dropped off early in the journey, however, only to reappear briefly in the midst of World War One and then be killed in combat. Instead, the story becomes focused on Claudia and her consistently poor taste in men.
Claudia see her father and handsome and resolute, “a terribly just and severe judge.” Instead, he is feckless, a man who “dreaded being alone and would do anything to keep his friends about him, from the time he awoke in the morning to his last minute of consciousness.” Her first crush is on the debonair Felix, who quickly proves to be just another impoverished nobleman in search of an American fortune. She marries Count Robert for his “knack, which came from long practice, of asking questions about the futile things that women are interested in, and appearing to appreciate their answers, while all the time his gentle mind was wandering in other spheres.”
The Count takes her off to his castle in the countryside and makes her a near-prisoner in its bleak rooms, unchanged in their decor for the last eleven generations. Later on, with Robert conveniently dead and the fog of war putting her world in a comforting soft focus, Claudia meets and falls in love again with Felix. They pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. But once a shit, always a shit, Claudia learns in the end, and Daisy Fellowes draws the final curtain on her story.
Cover design from the Lincoln Mac Veagh edition of Cats in the Isle of Man (1929)
I got the strong impression Cats in the Isle of Man that Daisy Fellowes would have been terrific fun as a conversationalist. There are some amusing asides and observations tossed off in the course of the book. Count Robert worries that Claudia, “being half American, could not be entirely civilised.” The most sought-after prostitute in Paris is sought after by men not for her beauty or sexual prowess but simply because she “had a trick of looking at him with her brown eyes all the time he was speaking, and she never interrupted.” Sadly, these are bits of tinsel hung off an otherwise unremarkable frame. Claudia is a cipher and her story not worth telling. But the book did allow her to add “minor novelist” to her CV, so I guess it served its primary purpose.
File this “Justly Neglected” and run: You got a hair-dresser to get to!
Cats in the Ilse of Man, by Daisy Fellowes New York: The Dial Press/Lincoln Mac Veagh, 1929
I decided to abuse the #1930club, this round of the semi-annual reading club organized by Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’, as an excuse to read something by Maurice Dekobra.
Dekobra was hugely successful — successful not just in his native France but among readers all over the world. He came up with his pen-name after seeing a snake-charmer’s act and he was something of a snake-charmer himself. His material was exotic, risky (or risqué and often both), quick-paced, and rarely more than an evening or two’s read. In a way, he made the same kind of appeal to wannabe sophisticates as Esquire later in the 1930s and Playboy in 1960s. You can see how Dekobra himself played this charade in his preface to the English edition of Venus on Wheels:
A philosopher once said, “The world is a great book, and one has merely read the first page when one has only lived in one’s native town.” I would add when one has only loved women of one nation.
“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” asked a popular Tin Pan Alley song from World War One. For some ex-doughboys, I suspect the answer was, “Keep feeding them Maurice Dekobra.”
Many of Dekobra’s books take place in the mysterious East — India or China; the rest in Paris or on the Riviera. All of them involve sex. Or rather, broad, obvious, and leering hints at sex. Everyone keeps their clothes on. But Dekobra does not deny the existence of lust, infidelity, and prostitution — hell, he hammers away at the fact with Stakhanovite zeal. He knew the material would appeal to American readers in particular: “Americans are enchanted here in Paris to find no detectives in the hall, asking haughtily, ‘Is the lady with you your wife?'” he once told an interviewer.
The most admired figure in the book, Monsieur Maline, the grand old man, is respected not for his age and wisdom but for the 88 conquests he has detailed in his little green notebook: “To deceive one’s wife, well anybody can do that. To deceive her so that she has not the slightest suspicion, that is better. But to deceive her fifty-three times without her knowing, that is indeed high art. The work of a virtuoso … the Paganini of the Quai de Passy.” Dekobra has read just enough Freud to believe that sublimation is worse than its cure: “A little five to seven o’clock every now and then has its good points,” one his characters offers in the way of homeopathic advice.
Dekobra’s prostitutes do not have hearts of gold. They would, however, like to have pockets of gold. He spends a fair amount of space in Venus on Wheels defending the professionalism of his pros. What they do, one explains, takes skill:
“It is not enough to be just pretty. It is necessary to know your job.”
“How? Explain yourself, Pauloche. I am interested.”
“You’ve got to have the flair, the tact. You must know what men like. For example, if you are accosted by a sentimental man, puffed up with illusions, first drop a discreet tear, a mother in hospital, a consumptive little sister. Play the ‘Clair de lune’ of Werther until the fellow forks out for a nicely enamelled bedroom suite or pays your rent a month in advance. If, on the other hand, he is a degenerate who is looking for sensations, trot out the drugs. A pinch of cerebos sniffed gently up the nose, or a little Vittel syringed into the thigh. Then the fellow between a couple of pipes of opium (a little Virginia tobacco mixed with apricot jam) will write you a cheque and give you a pearl necklace, gurgling that life is a dream. That’s the way to succeed in business!”
Review of “Venus on Wheels” from Arts and Decoration magazineTo crank out books at Dekobra’s rate usually involves frequent recourse to some formula or other. In the case of Venus on Wheels, the formula is the three-act play — more specifically, the three-act structure of a farce by another French bard of infidelity, Georges Feydeau. Act One is set in the wee hours in a Paris bar run by Père Cassis, “an optimist with ogee-shaped [Viz. ogee on Wikipedia, for those like me who need to look it up.–Ed.] shoulders,” who “carries upon his epigastrum, in the shape of various trinkets, evidences of his peccadilloes which we does not expiate because the myrmidons of the Law have enrolled his as an informer.” I haven’t found the text of the French original, La Vénus à roulettes, to tell if the over-the-top lexicography is the fault of Dekobra or his English translator, Metcalfe Wood. There are a fair number of these “aren’t we clever?” wordplays in the book, such as when one of the prostitutes claims one of her competitors “dagged me with a pin.” That one I think we can safely dag on Metcalfe Wood.
A fair cross-section of the demi-monde, including some demimondaines, are wrapping up their nights when in walk two proper society ladies. We soon learn that one of them, Madame Lorande, has decided to carry out a social experiment. She wants to adopt another sort of lady and see if she can turn her into the legal type of working girl. To house her, feed her, re-clothe her, and train her in all the basic secretarial skills. Dutch readers would have been saved the trouble of reading most of the book from its translated title, Als Venus wordt een typiste (trans.: If Venus became a typist). Père Cassis quips, “Here, Madame, folks don’t generally come to lift women up — but rather to pick them up.” Still, one of the girls in the bar, Palouche (not, Dekobra tells us, one “who dispenses sensual pleasure like a Chicago pork-packing machine”), finds the idea interesting. Coming off a rough and unprofitable night, she agrees to the deal. End of Act One.
In Act Two, set in the respectable home of Madame Maline (Madame Lorande’s mother), characters wander in and out of the room where Palouche sits practicing typing. By the end of the act, at least three assignations involving at least four different married people have been arranged. And in Act Three, set in the flat shared by Palouche and her friend Lily, there’s as much coming and going as in Grand Central Station, but in the end I’m not sure anybody actually hootchied or cooed. There was, however, so much eyebrow-arching going on that Maurice Dekobra’s poor forehead must have been exhausted by the time he finished the book.
I’m sure that every other book written about for #1930club is far more substantive, far worthier, far less telling of its reader’s character flaws than Venus on Wheels. I betcha I had the most fun, though.
In the last summer of my mother’s life, I was sitting with her on the little lawn of her cottage in Sussex, when she said suddenly, “I feel it is wrong to repine as life goes on, for I can always say to myself, ‘I, too, have lives in Arcadia.”
She must have seen that I was wondering to what part of her life she referred, for she could look back to many delightful and remarkable experiences.
She put her hand on mine. “I mean the five years with your father, and the further nine summers I spent with his mother, at La Celle St. Cloud.”
So opens the first volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, in which she recalls the uniquely gracious and intimate world that her grandmother created in her modest country home in a village less than ten miles from the center of Paris. It all began in 1867, when two friends, both pioneering English women’s’ rights advocates, Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, reunited in Paris. Bodichon was recovering from a fever contracted while living in Algiers with her husband, Dr. Eugène Bodichon, a prominent physician. Concerned at her friend’s condition, Parkes sought a place in the country where they could relax and get away from the stagnant summer air in Paris.
She came across a flyer advertising a chalet for rent in La Celle St. Cloud offered by a Madame Belloc. Madame Belloc was Louise Swanton Belloc, daughter of James Swanton, an Irish officer who had served in the armies of both King Louis XVI and Napoleon, and widow of the recently deceased painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc. She was also the leading advocate of English literature in France. She produced a steady stream of translations of Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Walter Scott, and others, and her network of acquaintances included many of the most famous writers of both countries. The chalet was on the grounds of a small tract where she lived with her son Louis and a frequent visitor, Adelaide De Montgolfier, daughter of the famous balloonist Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.
Louis Belloc had been a busy and successful official in the Paris city government, but at some time in his late twenties, he collapsed from overwork or perhaps a stroke and was now living as an invalid with his mother. At the time that Bessie Parkes came to stay with the Bellocs, this model of Victorian rectitude, independence, and industry probably had no intention of remaining more than a few weeks.
But some kind of profound intimacy was sparked between Bessie and Madame Belloc, and soon after, between Bessie and Louis. When the two Englishwomen returned to Paris, Bessie had promised to come back to La Celle St. Cloud in the autumn. And she confided to Barbara, “I want you to know of a certain decision I have made! I have made up my mind to marry Louis Belloc.” Louis had not, in fact, asked her. “Such an idea, I feel sure, has never crossed his mind…. But he will do so when I stay with them this autumn.”
Barbara and Bessie’s family argued strongly against the marriage. They found it hard to conceive how a woman with such drive, responsible to dozens of initiatives to improve the lives of women and the working poor in England, could suddenly tie herself down to a sick man living on a tiny French estate. But an entry from her diary, written just two months after her wedding, offers a clue to the emptiness that the love of the Bellocs filled in Bessie:
How utterly my life has changed! In the old days it was always astonishing to me that with so many elements which should have made for real happiness–intelligence, great interest in literature, sufficient money, and the highest principles–my mother’s house was so lacking, at any rate where I was concerned, in real happiness….
How strange that Barbara should think I ever feel lonely! There have been times in my life when I have felt painfully alone, but never since the fortunate day when she and I settled into the chalet last spring. I remember feeling that evening as if I had stepped into a new dimension, and in that dimension I have, thank God, dwelt ever since, with increasing joy and peace.
Within a year of marrying Louis, Bessie gave birth to a daughter–Marie–and two years later, to a son, Hilaire. The couple had little time to celebrate Hilaire’s birth, because the Franco-Prussian War had begun a week before, and less than two months later, the family had to flee to England ahead of the imminent siege of Paris. Mademoiselle Montgolfier, however, remained, and her letters, along with those of Louis’ sisters, all of whom stayed throughout the long and difficult siege, demonstrate the kind of strength and dedication in the face of hardships that seems to have been given in exceptional degree to some people in that era.
When the Bellocs returned to La Celle St. Cloud after the armistice, they found that Prussian troops had looted the estate, leaving much of it damaged and uninhabitable. But Madame Belloc and Bessie plunged into the business of restoration, and within a few months were able to live there again. Their relief was short-lived, however. One day in August 1872, Louis collapsed, and he died just a few hours later. As Bessie wrote to Barbara afterward, “I had an angel of goodness by my side for five years. From the time he uttered his marriage vows, giving his whole self to me as he did then, I never had cause to regard him other than with the exceeding reverence which ended in exceeding love, which made me hold so lightly all the real difficulties of a life to which I was never blind.”
Marie and Hilaire Belloc would become two of the most prolific English writers of their generation. When she began to write her memoirs, Marie had seen, for the third time in her life, German troops invading her first home. Even though I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia was written in the time of the Blitzkrieg and the Blitz, it is very much a book of the century before. This is not to imply that it is stiff or outdated in any way. Instead, it is marked throughout by a sincerity of emotion that we have grown too jaded to trust and, hence, that seems antique. But as Elizabeth Bowen wrote when it first came out, “It is a book in a thousand, for it conveys the character of a group of people, at once civilized and original, and the atmosphere of an unusual place.”
Marie Belloc-Lowndes wrote three more volumes of memoirs: Where Love and Friendship Dwelt (1943); The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946); A Passing World (1948). I am nearing the end of Love and Friendship and can report that it maintains the same warm and intelligent spirit as I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Despite wartime printing limitations, Macmillans in the U. K. managed to put out a handsome set of volumes that are as pleasant to hold and read as anything I’ve come across. I started reading the series with the U. S. edition published by Dodd, Mead, but I liked the Macmillan editions so much I bought another copy just to keep.
I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes London: Macmillan, 1941
I ordered a copy of Maxence van der Meersch’s 700-page novel, Invasion, after reading Tom Leonard’s review of the book on Amazon, but having recently devoted a considerable amount of time to another very long–but very great–novel (Fortunata and Jacinta), I intended to stow it away in the nightstand for later.
I sat down to read a few pages to get a sense of the book. An hour later, I was on page 50 and committed to finish it.
Invasion (originally titled Invasion 14 in French) would not, at first glance, seem the sort of book that can pull you in and make you want to stay. Set in Roubaix, a French industrial town just a few miles from the border with Belgium, Invasion is the record of over four years’ occupation by the German army as experienced by dozens of the local inhabitants. Even on a good day, Roubaix is a pretty grim place: a town of mills and mines, full of streets of grey shuttered houses, much of the year under a grey a dreary sky. Trapped behind German lines, the people of the town had no choice but to remain, but today’s reader is free to leave their story gathering dust on the shelf.
However, Van der Meersch’s style (in translation, at least) is simple and immediately accessible, like Tolstoy’s, and like the great master, he has a viewpoint that seems able to get inside the head and heart of any character. In the course of the novel, Van der Meersch follows dozens of the town’s residents, from wealthy mill owners to shopkeepers and farmers to petty criminals and little children. As with a Russian novel, there are times when one gets lost in the flurry of names (I kept confusing the Fontcroix with the Laubigiers).
Yet despite the bleakness of the novel’s setting and subject and the constant shifting from character to character, Van der Meersch maintains a remarkable level of narrative tension. Put any group of people in an extreme situation and their responses will vary widely. This has been a basic formula of story-tellers for millenia. But in this case, the strain seems to increase relentlessly. No one–not even the Germans–expects the occupation to wear on for months and then years. The faint, muffled sound of shelling–the front is never more than twenty miles away–goes on and on, and the sense of hopelessness grinds away at even the strongest.
The Laubigiers, an ordinary working class family, for example, offer shelter to three French soldiers separated from their unit in the first retreat. It’s a simple gesture of charity in response to a request from the local priest. Civilian clothes and forged papers are arranged to aid their escape. But then the time wears on:
For the first few weeks an atmosphere of mutual toleration prevailed, but then a certain amount of friction began to develop. The men were bound to the Laubigiers by no real ties, and became irritable under pressure of forced seclusion. Their minds turned to their own people, and the necessity of learning new trades in order to keep themselves occupied and to earn enough to pay for their keep, of becoming cobblers, harness-makers, and chair-menders, began to get on their nerves. Quarrels started. Disputes arose over the sharing of coal and food. The carelessness and messiness of her three lodgers did violence to Félicie’s naturally tidy nature.
“Seen in its stark reality,” van der Meersch concludes, “the situation was one in which a group of people remained bound together by necessity, while all the time they grew daily to hate one another more and more violently.”
One reason I was interested in Invasion is that I wanted to explore the effects of a prolonged occupation on a people. Twice in the course of thirty years, the people of Belgium, where I live now, and parts of France, lived for years under the rule of an occupying power. This is an experience unknown in American history, and I have a theory that this is one reason why people in this part of Europe view good and evil as lying along a spectrum of infinitely subtle gradations and no clear-cut distinctions.
In the first months of the occupation, a few in the town display true heroism. A priest and a local schoolteacher manage to produce a newsheet telling about local incidents of German brutality and calling for resistance. A mill owner rallies his workers to refuse to make cloth for German uniforms. But they are all soon rounded up and shot, imprisoned or sent off to forced labor. Even the rich find their possessions confiscated and their savings eaten away by black market prices.
Some collaborate quickly and with little sense of guilt. Others give in only when their means or willpower have been exhausted. Some develop genuine friendships, as the Laubigiers do for a German cook billeted with them, that inevitably come with complications that verge or veer into collaboration.
By the time the severe winter of 1917-18 comes around, the hardships have worn away almost all sense of hope and dignity. The extent to which the experience leads inevitably to self-destruction is symbolized by peoples’ pillaging of their own homes:
Gradually, and rather fearfully, folk began to remove the banisters from staircases, trap-doors from lofts, everything that was of no immediate, or only of secondary, use. Boards were taken from the backs of cupboards, shelves for keeping food fresh in the cellars, doors and woodwork from lavatories, the seats themselves, the roofs. A futher step involved the shutters of windows, rabbit hutches, tool-sheds, coal boxes. After a further week or two the doors of the rooms had to go, attic floors, gutters, and drain pips. Finally, life came to be lived in the strangest apologies for houses, bare walls open to the air, with a mattress of the ground and a fire in one corner.
The occupation does end, however. Two hours after the last German leaves, the English arrive, and the retribution begins almost as soon as the celebrations. “Realizing that life in France would be impossible for them,” women who have taken German lovers “made up their minds to see whether they could not start afresh in Germany.” When they catch up with retreating troops, though, they are sent back to be branded and beaten.
The men, on the other hand, soon reach “a sort of tacit agreement to cease fire…. It was very much better to form a mutual admiration society than to rake up uncomfortable truths and start hitting blindly at the expense of all and sundry.” “Those who stumbled on the truth,” writes van der Meersch, “took fright and avoided it like poison.”
A native of Roubaix, van der Meersch was just seven years old when the German occupation began, but his novel is informed by a rich network of friends, relatives and neighbors and years of hearing their recollections. Trained as a lawyer, his advice was often sought out even though he never actually practiced. The historian Richard Cobb, who met van der Meersch when he was evacuated to Roubaix as an internee during the German occupation of 1940-44, described the novelist as “the magician who had pulled the front off so many corons [villages], to introduce me, de plein pied, into the kitchen and the smell of coffee and boiling potatoes.”
In an essay in his book, Paris and Elsewhere–reissued as a New York Review Classic–Cobb calls van der Meersch “a regionalist who had written almost exclusively about Roubaix and who had brought honour to the town by winning the Prix Goncourt. He was, in fact, a clumsy stylist, a Christian-Socialist Zola, who wrote off an accumulated stock of fiches [files].” Invasion does, at times, give the sense of being an accumulation of fiches–primarily because no single character dominates the narrative.
Van der Meersch wrote around a dozen novels, all of them set in and around Roubaix, in the space of about as many years. He was 27 when Invasion was published, and two years later he won the Prix Goncourt for L’Empreinte du dieu, translated into English as Hath Not the Potter. By the time Cobb met him, “He was tubercular and had fallen under the influence of a medical eccentric who preached under-nourishment as a cure for tuberculosis; his most recent novel [Corps et âmes, translated as Bodies and Souls] was an attack on orthodox medicine.” He died of the disease in 1951 at the age of 43. Although several of his novels are still in print in France, as well as Spain and Germany (not Invasion, understandably), his work has largely been forgotten by English readers.
Invasion, by Maxence van der Meersch, translated by Gerard Hopkins New York: Viking Press, 1937
One could almost believe that Balzac wrote The Bachelors (Les Célibataires) in 1834, and not Henri de Montherlant in 1934. There are so many echoes of Balzac in Montherlant’s novels: the squalor of pretentious people falling deeper and deeper into debt; the meanness of relatives turning their backs on the spectacle of poverty; the unquenchable thirst for delusions to shelter one from the bitterness of reality. But it took a 20th century sensibility to take two miserable, useless characters such as the Baron Elie de Coëtquidan and Léon, comte de Coantré, his nephew–a couple of faded aristocrats living on the fumes of long-ago squandered fortunes–and grind them down to squalid, humiliating deaths.
That hardly makes this sound like a book you’d want to crawl in bed with, I admit, and it might seem crazy to suggest that The Bachelors could hold its own beside some of the best novels of the 19th century. It’s so rich in its characterizations, so full of wonderful details and mannerisms.
But imagine Dickens without the tiniest hint of sentimentality. Imagine David Copperfield dying cold, sick and hungry along the road to Dover instead of making it to the warmth of his aunt’s house, and you get a sense of how ruthless Montherlant can be toward his characters. “The tragic thing about anxious people is that they always have cause for anxiety,” he observes at one point, which illustrates the kind of cold, scientific objectivity with which he relates these sad, tragic stories.
What really distinguishes The Bachelors in my mind is that Montherlant manages to be pitiless without becoming cruel, to be grim but not bitter. This is not a satire. Montherlant doesn’t try to skew the story to make a point about the inadequacy of an older generation. This is just an unblinking look at failure. Which also makes it absolutely riveting. The experience of reading The Bachelors is a bit like the old saying about watching a car wreck: “It hurts to look, but you just can’t turn away.”
The Bachelors was originally translated into English by Thomas McGeevy and published as Lament for the Death of an Upper Class by John Miles in 1935. Terence Kilmartin, who translated several other works by Montherlant, released a second English translation, using a literal translation of the French title, in 1960. I picked up McGeevy’s translation and started it, thinking I’d found a long-forgotten work by Montherlant, until I realized it was actually The Bachelors. I thought McGeevy’s version was pretty good, but Kilmartin’s is far easier to locate, having been reissued several times, by Penguin and Quartet.
The Bachelors, by Henri de Montherlant, translated by Terence Kilmartin London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960
Rabbi David Wolpe writes to recommend a favorite title that’s now long out of print and largely forgotten: Jean Dutourd’s 1963 novel, Les Horreurs de l’amour, released in English in 1967 as The Horrors of Love. This description of the book and its plot comes from Time magazine’s original review:
The Horrors of Love is an often ridiculous, sometimes funny tale of a middle-aged member of the French Chamber of Deputies who becomes tragically involved with his young mistress. At first glance, the story seems to be as obviously and simply French as a pair of lovers sneaking off to a bedsitter in the Square St.-Lambert. Yet it is not only the Gallic spirit that intrigues Dutourd, but the human spirit as well.
The rambling story unfolds in a dialogue between Dutourd and a friend. As they stroll in Paris, they discuss the unhappy case of Edouard Roberti, the 52-year-old Deputy who has been sent to prison for killing his mistress’ brother. It is apparent that Roberti, a respectable, loving father and husband, was all too ordinary—not so much evil as weak, not so much stupid as pitifully vain. By way of examining how it was that such a commonplace, decent man could become trapped in a senseless and sordid mess, Dutourd’s dialogue ranges through all sorts of philosophical detours. Courage and cowardice, honor and honesty, art, letters, manners, politics and morals become way stations as the two friends chat and argue.
This is not the first mention of The Horrors of Love in these pages. In the Los Angeles Times’ 1999 feature, Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium, John Lukacs called it a “stunning exception” to the overall decline of the novel. Lukacs wrote,
One oddity about it is that it is written in the second-person singular; it is a long dialogue between two super-intelligent Frenchmen (both sides of Dutourd’s own character) walking through Paris, ambling in and out restaurants, reconstructing the pride and fall of a Parisian politician who gradually falls in love with his younger mistress and ends up in jail. It is a delicious and profound work of art, from beginning to end. Andre Maurois likened it to Proust; but in some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and more imaginative. The language itself is superb.
And in nosing around the Net, I found a third strong thumbs-up from the fine novelist, Diane Johnson, in an issue of Archipelago from a few years back:
My first choice would be Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love, which is translated into English and was published in the sixties. It is an incredible tour de force — a dialogue running to more than 600 pages, between two men who are walking through Paris, talking about the fate of a politician friend of theirs who was brought down by an erotic entanglement. Urbane, wise, humane, funny, even suspenseful — this is a worthy successor, as someone said, to Proust. Dutourd is the greatest living French novelist, and the only witty one since Proust; and before that? Voltaire? Laclos?
Praise such as this makes me want to hang my head in shame for not having read it yet, even after skipping past used copies in bookstore stacks perhaps a hundred times over the year (I think it was a Literary Guild selection, so there are plenty of cheap used copies out there in the U.S.).
Dutuord, who’s managed to put out nearly a book a year since 1946, is still living and, I assume, writing. His 1950 satirical fantasy, A Dog’s Head, was reissued by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Fiction series in 1998 and is still in print. His other novel of that year, Au bon beurre, scenes de la vie sous lâ Occupation, translated as The Best Butter has been called the best French novel to come out of World War Two.
Reader Chris Leggette recommends Roger Martin du Gard’s family saga, Les Thibault, a series of seven novels published in the U.S. in two volumes: The Thibaults and Summer 1914, and then in a two-volume set, The World of the Thibaults. Clifton Fadiman included it in his compilation, Reading I’ve Liked, but as you can see from his New Yorker review below, the work held second candle in his eyes to Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will. Contemporary reviewers such as Mary McCarthy and Malcolm Cowley also had mixed feelings about The World of the Thibaults — ironically, feelings not dissimilar to those expressed by other reviewers by the time Romains reached the end of his own saga.
A few years ago, Timothy Crouse, best known for his comic account of the press coverage of Nixon’s second presidential campaign, The Boys on the Bus, helped translate and revive Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, a massive novel Martin deu Gard left unfinished at his death. Its release in 2000 led John Weightman to write in The New York Review of Books,
· Andre Gide, letter to Roger Martin du Gard, 17 March 1936
I do not want … the weekly mail to leave tomorrow without telling you of the immense joy, the profound satisfaction I felt after the first reading [of Summer 1914, the seventh volume of Les Thibault]. It was a difficult contest; you have won….
Dear friend, I believe that this book is destined to create a stir, to have a considerable success. Everything is said in it that needed to be said, with a perfect honesty in its presentation–so that even the most stubborn reader’s deepest convictions will be shaken…. Yes, I believe that this book has a considerable power of persuasion aside from its literary merits. But it is as a man of letters that I want to speak to you, and I can find nothing to say but praise. Some chapters are tours de force of skill and precision. You have written nothing better.
· Mary McCarthy, The New Republic, 26 April 1939
The machinery of the plot works with extreme awkwardness. It is, an a sense, a novel about time, yet the author’s only notion of conveying time’s passage is, after each gap of several years, to have two characters tell each other the events of the interim….
But The World of the Thibaults is not simply the study of a French family. Martin du Gard has taken Tolstoy for a model and, with this family for a center, has attempted to show a society as a whole. Thus the work contains, besides the usual elements of a novel, generous trial samples of modern science, modern literature, modern art, practical politics, religion, war, socialism and pacifism. The difficulty is, however, that these topics have not really been woven into the novel, but merely added to it. The result is not so much a novel of history as a historical grab-bag.
For all its encyclopedic qualities, The World of the Thibaults is not an important book. It is, however, a genuine literary curiosty. Industry and seriousness have been called in to substitute for talent, and the result is a work whose learned obtuseness is, so far as I know, unequaled in fiction.
· Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic, 10 March 1941
With glazed eyes and swollen lids, I have just finished The World of the Thibaults in the complete English translation — both volumes and all the 1,900 pages. It isn’t fair to blame Roger Martin du Gard, a kindly man and a conscientious writer, for the dull headache that comes from reading too much. Yet I wonder whether this business of writing oversize novels hasn’t been carried much too far, since Marcel Proust first set the fashion. Is there any human subject that can’t be treated in a hundred or at most two hundred tliousand words, instead of spinning the story out to nearly a million? Is there any reason for believing that a novel published in eleven books — as this one was in France — is eleven times or even twice as good as a novel in one reasonably large volume with a beginning, a middle and an end, and not too many extraneous incidents?
Isn’t it possible that giantism in fiction is quite as unhealthy a symptom as giantism in business or architecture or armies? The least one can say is that the author who writes an inordinately long novel is like the orator who delivers an inordinately long speech; he is disregarding the capacity for attention of his audience. Either the book must be leisurely sampled over a period of .weeks, in which case the reader is likely to have forgotten the beginning before reaching the end; or else it must be read as a reviewer’s chore, hour after hour and day after day, in which case it leaves one with aching eyes and perhaps a blurred picture of the author’s intentions. And the author, too, is running a risk. Any man who sets out to write a 2,000-page novel is betting against fate and human experience that he can remain unchanged until the book is finished….
Summer 1914 is the work for which Martin du Gard will be remembered and for which he deserved to receive the Nobel Prize. In the easy-running translation by Stuart Gilbert, it can be enjoyed almost as much as in the author’s pedestrian French. Yet it would have been better, I think, if it had been written quite independently, without regard to the family affairs of the Thibaults and the Fontanins. Standing alone, without seven other books as an introduction and without an epilogue, it would be even more impressive. It could then be read for itself, and with clearer eyes.
· Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker, 1941
In 1939 there was published in this country The World of the Thibaults a book containing rather less than half of his Thibault series. Now, bearing the title, Summer 1914, the remainder is available in another book. The entire series, under the general heading, “The World of the Thibaults,” thus appears in two thick volumes, equivalent to eleven in the original French. Those who have not read “The Thibaults” may find “Summer 1914” somewhat puzzling. It is advisable to tackle the whole job or not tackle it at all. That means a total of 1,879 pages, but they are 1,879 pages that offer you a solid, almost tangible experience. They are pages for grown-ups….
In “The Thibaults” the emphasis was all on individuals and their relation to society; in Summer 1914 society itself almost ursurps the canvas. For me, there is a certain loss of power and originality….
But when du Gard concentrates he approaches magnificence: in his study of the Fontanin family, in his agonizingly perceptive account of the love between Anne and Antoine, in his heartbreaking record of the slow decay of the mind and body of Antoine. As a whole, The World of the Thibaults is unquestionably an impressive work. That world is now dead, its final hours having lasted from 1918 to 1939…. Someone had to write its epitaph, and for that epitaph to be clear it was necessary to go back to the roots of the Thibault world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was du Gard’s task, to which he has now devoted two decades of his life. The task, one presenting almost insuperable difficulties, has been presented with honor…. You may not read him with absorption; you will read him with respect.
· Time magazine, 24 February 1941
In 1937 when Martin du Gard’s award was announced, the question arose why — if the Nobel committee wanted to pick a long, social French novel — it did not crown Jules Romains’ longer, as yet unfinished Men of Good Will. The question is still valid. Both works cover the same period, both are fraught with the desire of idealists to stop the war, both are written with objectivity approaching self-effacement. The general impression left by Men of Good Will is rich, vascular, forthright; of Les Thibault nervous, sinewy, tangled. Men of Good Will chronicles a whole society, Les Thibault a family and its immediate connections. Romains cut into French life at scores of levels, pulled out hundreds of characters. They are alive, but they are polished as flawlessly as marble. Some are almost too pat to his purpose.
Martin du Gard’s people have the puzzling surfaces of real people whom he has studied closely but not entirely understood. At times their motivations stretch thin to the vanishing point, and their behavior seems perverse and arbitrary. But in some ways they are even more alive than Romains’ people. Doubtless Romains’ book is a greater work of art; but Les Thibault may be the better novel.
· Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays
Perhaps, in Martin du Gard’s eyes, the only guilty person is the one who refuses life or condemns people. The key words, the final secrets, are not in man’s possession. But man nevertheless keeps the power to judge and to absolve. Here lies the profound secret of art, which always makes it useless as propaganda or hatred…. Like any authentic creator, Martin du Gard forgives all his characters. The true artist, although his life may consist mostly of struggles, has no enemy.
When in 1937 Roger Martin du Gard was awarded the Nobel Prize for Summer 1914, the seventh part of The Thibaults, it seemed a fitting reward to mark not only the completion of a mammoth and magnificent achievement but also a life or remarkably disinterested devotion to literature…. He has never attempted or wished to be an exceptional writer in the sense of shunning the duller, more ordinary side of life. Rather the reverse. his aim, it has always seemed, has been to reflect life itself, with its tedium, its limitations and its complexity, not raised on the pedestal of a particular point of view but life in the round, in the rough, as it appears to, and affects, ordinary people such as, for example, the Thibaults.
· Masterplots, Revised Second Edition
The eight-part novel cycle The World of the Thibaults was inspired by the author’s desire to emulate for his own time the accomplishment of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In fact, the work’s style and pessimism is closer to Roger Martin du Gard’s countryman Gustave Flaubert than to the Russian author. Although the historical background of the action in the novel is of interest, it is the powerful depiction of human relationships that constitutes the book’s chief merit.
In many respects, the most influential character in the vast novel is old Monsieur Thibault, the patriarch of the Thibault family. A complete hypocrite, he announces to the world that his conscience is clear, yet he is concerned only with his own convenience and peace. Cloaking his craving for power and authority under a guise of fervent religiosity and philanthropy, he actually has no sense of either religion or generosity. He possesses no love for his sons, demanding only that they be completely docile. Any contradiction or sign of individuality throws him into a rage. For all of his big gestures, he is a petty man. Everyone automatically hides feelings from him, for one never can tell what his reaction might be. He forces his family into hypocrisy. By avoiding all introspection, Monsieur Thibault unknowingly condemns himself to a life of petty pride and cruelty, a life so alone that he must find his only consolation in public honors and the “knowledge†that he is a “good man.†As he grows older, however, the fact of approaching death terrifies him increasingly, and he desperately seeks some kind of immortality, as if he subconsciously realizes how futile his busy life actually has been.
The volumes of the series are crowded with fascinating, well-drawn secondary characters. These include Monsieur Chasle, the middle-aged secretary of Monsieur Thibault, who is suddenly revealed to have his own life, his own preoccupations, fears, and miseries. The reader becomes aware of many other lives lurking in the background, and beyond them still others. In the volume entitled The Springtime of Life, the adult Daniel and Jacques experience the bohemian life of Paris, encountering characters such as Mother JuJu, the retired prostitute, and many colorful girls of the streets, as well as the rich Jew Ludwigson, who sells Daniel’s pictures. Earlier, in a powerful scene at young Jenny’s sickbed, the Rasputin-like pastor Gregory chants and prays and condemns with equal fury and somehow saves the girl’s life….
The graphic realism of the sickbed and death scenes, and, in the seventh volume, Summer 1914, the dramatic buildup of the war, as the European nations are swept relentlessly to destruction, are impressive achievements. Even more impressive, however, is the fact that as the focus of the novel expands, the author never loses sight of the individuals who make up the world. For this vast, panoramic survey of society and the meaning of life, as well as for his earlier novel of the Dreyfus affair and atheism, Jean Barois (1913), Martin du Gard was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1937.
One of the longest novels ever written, Men of Good Will seemed to some, at least, to be one of the greatest creative works of the twentieth century. Clifton Fadiman was perhaps its most enthusiastic critic in the U.S., but he stopped reviewing the series well before its last volume, so we have no record of how well Romains’ art sustained his enthusiasm until the end.
Of the 14 English volumes of the work, only Verdun has held its head up against the changing tides of criticism and readership, coming back into print within the last ten years as one of the titles in the Prion Lost Treasures series. For the rest, the consensus today is that Romains (in the words of one bibliographer) “went too many rounds with Tolstoy and Marcel Proust.” Still, Romains’ efforts deserve more than entry stub he’s currently earned on Wikipedia.
For my own part, I have to admit that I’ve cracked The Sixth of October and Verdun a few times without getting past the third chapter. Details there are galore. Whether there is a narrative energy to pull a reader through them is another matter. But it would be unjustly neglectful on my own part to put this website together and fail to give Men of Good Will a spot that gathers together more words about this magnum opus than currently appear anywhere else on the Internet.
He had been brought up, like every intellectual young man of his time, on Proust, and now he had been reading the four volumes of M. Jules Romains’ endless novel. The fourth volume in its cheap French paper was lying beside his bed now. That was exactly what his life seemed to him at the moment. Bits and pieces. He had never supposed that he could write, but now it occurred to him that he could write a very good novel indeed about himself in this present manner. Very easy. No wonder so many of his friends were writing novels! Not of course that he could be as clever as M. Romains, but he need not worry about arrangement or form.
It is true that I haven’t read every one of its 4,256 pages, having sometimes been overcome with yawns in the middle of Jerphanion’s arch and soulful letters to his fellow student Jallez. On the other hand, I have read every word of Vols. I, II, III, IV (in French and English), VIII, and the greater part of Vols. V, VI, and VII. The eight volumes stand before me as I write — 612 cubic inches of reading matter, fully indexed, with more than half again as much to follow. Yet I can’t convince myself that this is a work that belongs somewhere between the “Comedie Humaine” and “Remembrance of Things Past.” I can’t convince myself that it ranks much above ordinary novels in any quality except sheer size.
Of course its size in itself is a real achievement, and one for which I didn’t give Romains proper credit when I wrote about the novel some years ago. I doubt that there are a dozen novelists in the world today who could plan such a gargantuan work, then patiently carry out the plan, at the rate of approximately five hundred pages a year. I doubt that there are half a dozen novelists who could give such a complete picture of their nation; Men of Good Will is almost an encyclopedia of modern French life, from aristocrats, financiers, commanding generals and Cabinet ministers down to slum rats, murderers and pimps.
• Jack Ferry, from The Ubyssey, the student newspaper of the University of British Columbia, 1942
To most of you the name of Clifton Fadiman signifies the program “Information Please”. He is much more to me. Fadiman is responsible for introducing me to one of the great experiences of my life, and certainly the greatest experience I have had in literature. For that I love him. Because to me a thing may be good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, but still desirable if it is a memorable experience. You see, he introduced me to Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will.
It all started last year with one of those Christmas books, which in this case was Fadiman’s Reading I’ve Liked. Halfway through it I came to the statement: “Jules Romains is the greatest of collective novelists, and to my mind one of the greatest of living novelists. His Men of Good Will is the most gigantic unified effort in the whole world’s literature.” This was a challenge. But it took this to cinch it for me: “Romain endeavors in Men of Good Will to portray not characters, but ‘life in the twentieth century, our own life as modern men.’ Obviously he must choose a terrain: it is France from 1908 to, one may presume, the present, or very close to it. He is writing, he says, one single novel, and its plot has been drafted in advance.”
Once I returned to Varsity after Christmas I lost no time in starting upon volume one. In this book alone I met about sixty characters, most of whom appeared throughout the series. On and on I went. I paused for the Easter exams; and then while I sought volume four, missing at UBC, at the Public Library. Through most of the summer 1 read volume after volume. Each day, clutching my book, I passed the guard at that west coast aircraft factory. I think he thought I was smuggling blueprints. Each volume encompasses two books of the original French version. I read through The Sitxth of October, Passion’s Pilgrims, The Proud and the Meek, The Depths and the Heights, and so on. I followed two young college students through the problems of early manhood. I saw the birth of socialism in France. I saw the automobile-oil combines emerge. I learned a system for writing poetry. I met a man who could stop his heart action. I learned how it felt when a child was born — from the point of view of the baby. I saw a young man search for a faith. I stepped into the inner sanctums of Freemasons and Roman Catholics. I watched four crooks float a bond issue that ruined a million simple Frenchmen. I saw the Great War come, and learned why Verdum (like Stalingrad) could hold — one of the most magnificent passages ever written. I challenge anyone to deny it. And now — I’ve finished the ten volumes completed to date. Over 8,000 pages. There is no question about it “being worth it” In those pages so it seemed, I learned as much as I had during all of the past eighteen years.
Yes, parts of it were dull — just like parts of a summer sunset are dull. Here’s a suggestion: If you want to read about the most important things that have happened since 1900 without discussing dates, and treaties, and agreements, and economic trends, and social trends as such, and still digest all these things — then give this great work a try.
Romains’ poetic gift is at the bottom of all that is successful in his immense production, but it is obscured and may be unnoticed under the mass of his writing. In the novel his truly amazing effort in Men of Good Will, a series of twenty-seven volumes, relegates to the second rank, as far as quantity in one novel goes, even Balzac himself, who does not connect his pieces so well, or Zola, whose artificiality in construction is too obvious nowadays.
Yet is Jules Romains’ series the really great this is the description of the battle of Verdun in two volumes which are truly an epic presentation of war. The description of the superhuman silence that descended on the front before the world grashed in the great German attack will have a permanent place in literature; it is an achievement of imagination rendered possible by the absence of the writer from the field of battle, which permits the deployment into genius of his capacity for being there in spirit.
Two or three volumes on Quinette raise the detective novel to a height which perhaps that kind of writing does not deserve, and enrich it by the annexation of Gide’s “gratuitous crime.” The description of the mentality and intrigues of professional literary men rivals Lost Illusions of Balzac (not the best Balzac, it is true). Every type of reader will find something in this extraordinary series.
Jules Romains’ colossal super-novel, Men of Good Will, has at last ground to a wordy stop, after 14 volumes (the original French runs to 27), some 7,500 pages, and about 1,000 characters.
The most grandiose literary project of a generation, introduced to the U.S. public more than a dozen years ago, Men of Good Will has been admired from a safe distance by many, praised to the skies by a few, actually read in its entirety by still fewer. It stands as a monument to the almost incredible industry and endurance of Novelist Romains and his readers. A vast, inchoate panorama, as broad as all Europe and 25 years long, its net effect is more nearly that of a giant notebook than of a novel.
Many of the individual chapters are subtly, brilliantly managed; here & there (as in Volume VIII, entitled Verdun) they blend into a more or less related whole. But ordinarily Author Romains moves his characters about by whim or wind, endows his chance encounters, political musings, philosophic sermons, fancy seductions with no more apparent interrelation than that of news stories in the daily press.
Author Romains once explained that the grand strategy of Men of Good Will was to “reflect a whole generation.” That it does, as faithfully, as arbitrarily and almost as indiscriminately as a mirror set up in a public square.
Men of Good Will is an extraordinary work, an extraordinary novel. It is not flawless — how could it have been? Pierre Daix said that after its twelfth volume, after the pinnacle of Verdun, it seems more or less to have taken a turn for the worse. Perhaps this is true — but not all that true. If the last volumes gave people at the time an impression of decline, I believe it was in part because these volumes were published a year apart, as if they were separate novels; thus, everyone expected what is generally expected of the latest novel by an author, something different from his preceding novel, be it a deepening or a revelation. But in this novel of twenty-seven volumes, since each book was the equivalent of a chapter, it was not intended to bring something different….
I decided to reread Men of Good Will, to reread this immense novel at one stretch from one end to the other — without being sure I would not stop on the way, especially toward the end, because I remembered my disappointment, during the war and afterward, in reading the last volumes.
This time I was not disappointed…. To be sure, the same shortcomings are there. While Romains is perhaps without equal in depicting male friendship, he is much less at ease in depicting love. The dialogue is dry and even a little awkward, both too sugary and too intellectual….
What had formerly seemed to me to be a rather haphazard structure now appeared a very rigorous design, and one executed by a master. And what a language, what rich expression and vocabulary! The style is perhaps not beautiful, not “elegant.” But it is better than beautiful. It is rich and full, with a precision and an apprpropriateness that have rarely been equaled and never surpassed.
Below is the complete list of English volumes of Men of Good Will. Alfred A. Knopf published the series in 14 volumes, each, with the exception of the final one, incorporating two books as originally published in French. The volume titles link to listings of used copies available for purchase through Amazon.com.
Dekobra was hugely successful — successful not just in his native France but among readers all over the world. He came up with his pen-name after seeing a snake-charmer’s act and he was something of a snake-charmer himself. His material was exotic, risky (or risqué and often both), quick-paced, and rarely more than an evening or two’s read. In a way, he made the same kind of appeal to wannabe sophisticates as Esquire later in the 1930s and Playboy in 1960s. You can see how Dekobra himself played this charade in his preface to the English edition of 
, after reading 
–reissued as a New York Review Classic–Cobb calls van der Meersch “a regionalist who had written almost exclusively about Roubaix and who had brought honour to the town by winning the 
. By the time Cobb met him, “He was tubercular and had fallen under the influence of a medical eccentric who preached under-nourishment as a cure for tuberculosis; his most recent novel [Corps et âmes, translated as 
Praise such as this makes me want to hang my head in shame for not having read it yet, even after skipping past used copies in bookstore stacks perhaps a hundred times over the year (I think it was a Literary Guild selection, so there are plenty of cheap used copies out there in the U.S.).
Reader Chris Leggette recommends Roger Martin du Gard’s family saga, 
For my own part, I have to admit that I’ve cracked 
It is true that I haven’t read every one of its 4,256 pages, having sometimes been overcome with yawns in the middle of Jerphanion’s arch and soulful letters to his fellow student Jallez. On the other hand, I have read every word of Vols. I, II, III, IV (in French and English), VIII, and the greater part of Vols. V, VI, and VII. The eight volumes stand before me as I write — 612 cubic inches of reading matter, fully indexed, with more than half again as much to follow. Yet I can’t convince myself that this is a work that belongs somewhere between the “Comedie Humaine” and “Remembrance of Things Past.” I can’t convince myself that it ranks much above ordinary novels in any quality except sheer size.
Once I returned to Varsity after Christmas I lost no time in starting upon volume one. In this book alone I met about sixty characters, most of whom appeared throughout the series. On and on I went. I paused for the Easter exams; and then while I sought volume four, missing at