BY MARY HAWTHORNE
In, 1941, during the German occupation of Paris, the French illustrator Jean Bruller found himself in search of a publisher for his recently completed novella “Le Silence de la Mer” (later adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville as his first feature film). Encouraged by his friend the writer Pierre de Lescure, Bruller had joined the Resistance, and together the two men hit upon the idea, in the absence of an alternative, of setting up an underground press, which they called Éditions de Minuit. The next year, the book, which centers on a cultured, idealistic Nazi soldier quartered in the home of an elderly Frenchman and his niece, who choose silence as a form of passive resistance in the face of the soldier’s queries and soliloquies, appeared under a pseudonym: Vercors, after the Vercors Massif, in central France, a Resistance stronghold.
With the help of the writer and editor Jean Paulhan, the press went on to publish some twenty-five volumes clandestinely, among them works by Paul Éluard, François Mauriac, and Louis Aragon, which were passed from hand to hand, often in the middle of the night on a Paris bridge. After the Liberation, the editors decided to continue along their chosen path of resistance, publishing only the work of unconventional writers, whom they would not solicit but, rather, trusted would come to them. And so they did: Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Pinget, Marguerite Duras, and, many years and authors later, Jean Echenoz. As with Beckett, everyone else had refused the young writer, so, as a last resort, he dared to approach Jérôme Lindon, Minuit’s legendary editor, who snatched up his novel at once.
I learned the general outlines of this history in the basement Fnac store at the Italie Deux mall, in Paris, by reading the bande desinée that prefaces the Bac Pro study guide for Echenoz’s best-selling novel “14,” published by the New Press as “1914.” (The book has entered the French canon: now teen-agers are forced to read it.) Meticulously researched and grounded closely in fact, the book is a retelling of the Great War, the first “industrial,” and obscenely “experimental,” war, from a singular perspective. It’s too idiosyncratic to be shelved under historical fiction. Rather, it’s an implicitly philosophical novel, though it may not seem so at first, because Echenoz simply states facts, at a certain remove, as if by way of a recording device. But, of course, which facts? And how to arrange them? In this regard, Echenoz’s unemotional prose and rigorous assembly concerning a ghastly subject bring to mind the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff’s brilliant “Testimony,” just republished by Black Sparrow, which borrows from harrowing criminal-court transcripts to create a bleak history of the United States between 1885 and 1915.
“1914” centers on five young men, all but one of them friends, who within a matter of weeks find themselves confronting the horrors of trench warfare. By the end of the book, all but two have been killed. The book is a cadenced, inexorable funeral march, whose music comprises the hideous sounds that war produces, including the sad, absurd sounds made by military bands marching alongside the soldiers, urging them on, as a column of gendarmerie take up the rear, poised to shoot anyone who might be tempted to desert—and who are “hated almost as much if not more than the fellows across the way.” The soldiers are prisoners of war, the gendarmerie their keepers. Sorry, pal: no exit.
The role of the gendarmerie during the war was news to me, as it was to Echenoz when he began his research, and it’s one kind of fact that he elaborates. He also brings to the fore more esoteric details that similarly hit their mark, such as the weight of an amputated arm (in this case, eight pounds), or the contents of a soldier’s pack (soldier’s prayer book: check; pressed-iron mug: check) and what that pack weighed (seventy-seven-plus pounds)—when dry. It was a completely different matter when it rained, which it did, a lot. Another kind of fact, almost equally sordid, in its way, emerges toward the end of the novel. “We all know the rest,” the disembodied voice of a disturbing narrator who comes and goes—a hallmark of Echenoz’s fiction—says. He goes on:
The first two months of the spring offensives in the fourth year of the war consumed vast numbers of soldiers. The army’s reliance on mass tactics required the permanent replenishment of large battalions, an ever-higher level of recruitment, and ever-younger recruits, which supposed a considerable renewal of uniforms and matériel—including shoes. . . . The pace and urgency of such orders, combined with the unscrupulousness of manufacturers, led to the production of questionable service shoes. A certain stinginess crept in regarding leather of so-so quality; insufficiently tanned sheepskin was often selected, less expensive but mediocre in terms of thickness and durability, and in other words, pretty close to cardboard. Laces were now square cut, easier to manufacture but more fragile than round ones, and they lacked finished ends. Thread was skimped on in the same way and eyelets were no longer made of copper but of iron—which rusts—of the cheapest kind available. It was the same with the rivets, pegs, nails. Bluntly put, they were slashing the cost of materials without any care for the solidity and water resistance of the product.
So: shoe manufacturers—profiteers of the Great War. (A pair of soldier’s boots features on the Bac Pro cover.)
Echenoz has published fifteen novels since his first, “Le Méridien du Greenwich,” in 1979, his earlier ones hewing toward experimentalpolars, or detective novels, and other stock genres; his most recent, including “Ravel,” “Running,” “1914,” as well as his first collection of short pieces, “The Queen’s Caprice” (which has just been published by the New Press), hew toward the historical and biographical. (Endnotes provided by the collection’s gifted translator, Linda Coverdale, offer informative points of reference, and the pieces themselves, all of which were written on request, offer a window into Echenoz’s unique way of looking at the world.) Still, Echenoz is scarcely known in the U.S., and not all that widely read in France, for that matter, despite having won many prizes, including the Prix Goncourt in 1999 for his droll picaresque novel “I’m Off.”
One almost embarrassingly beautiful late afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I visited Echenoz, in his apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement, in Paris. Tallish and blondish and pink, he greeted me at the door by smiling shyly and looking down, gesturing me through a narrow foyer toward a carpetless, loft-like room with a kitchen at one end and a marble fireplace at the other. I sat down in an elegant upholstered chair opposite a similarly elegant sofa. He sat down on the sofa, across the wide river of a bare glass coffee table. A giant arching chrome floor lamp with a big, black shade hovered overhead. Echenoz was dressed in suède slip-ons, jeans, and a gray-blue cotton T-shirt with long sleeves, pushed up to reveal an old wristwatch. He crossed his arms and legs, and waited for me to say something.
I asked about his story “Three Sandwiches at Le Bourget,” one of the most oddly affecting stories in the newly translated collection, about a man who goes looking for a sandwich in Le Bourget. He told me that he was asked to write about the Bourget stop on the R.E.R., the railway network serving Paris and its suburbs, for a collection that served as a kind of tribute to the late editor François Maspero, who years before had written a book about the stations of the R.E.R. “Late one morning one day, I just decided to go there, and when I arrived I was very hungry and wanted a sandwich. So it turned out all right, as a kind of reportage absurd. . . . But I had no idea what a sad town Bourget was. I walked all around, but once was not enough, so I went three times.
“It was very cold,” he added with a laugh. “But I do this often, not in the suburbs but in Paris. I walk around and take notes, to conserve a kind of décor. Décor is the motor of fiction.”
I mentioned his piece “Twenty Women in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Clockwise,” which describes the postures, the clothing, the jewelry, and the coiffures of the statues of French queens over the ages, and offers a spontaneous interpretation of the expressions on their faces, and he told me that years ago he wanted “to write about all the statuary in the garden. And then, well, it’s complicated . . .” He laughed again.
“You were born in Orange—did you spend your childhood there?” I asked, speculating that the ancient city was somehow associated with his curiosity about the past. (One of the pieces in the book recounts Herodotus’ visit to Babylon.)
“No. I think I lived there for about fifteen days,” he said. “My family wasn’t particularly concentrated in one place. My father was born in Paris, my mother in Marseilles. My parents ended up in Orange because it was a zone that the occupying forces had left. My grandfather was a doctor in Paris before moving to Orange.”
“And you lived in Rodez?”
“Yes, because my father was a hospital psychiatrist. He was assigned to Rodez, then to Digne-les-Bains, then to Aix-en-Provence. Always in the South of France. So I passed the greatest part of my childhood in psychiatric hospitals, because I was the son of the doctor. But I have very good memories of that time, not at all traumatic memories. It was normal life, except with people who were suffering, more or less, who were ill. But it was not at all like being in the trenches. It was just a hospital, for the mad.”
“Did you always want to be a writer?”
“It’s very banal, but yes. I think because I read a lot as a child, because my parents read a lot. I was surrounded by books. But, between writing and becoming a writer, that took a while. I was already thirty when my first book was published.”
“Did you have a mentor?”
“Comment?”
“A mentor: someone who—”
“Ah, non, non. Personne. Oh là. Mon Dieu. Quelle horreur.”
No comments:
Post a Comment