I owed my discovery of his books, such as Le Voyage des morts [Voyage of the Dead], to Jacques Brenner. Reading them led me into unknown territory completely different from the world I knew. They aroused in me a fascination mixed with fear. If I use my own personal example, it is because I challenge you to embark upon Augiéras work, and especially A Journey to Mount Athos, without immediately feeling that fascination and that fright, when confronted with universes where only a rare elect ever venture. My relationship with Francois Augiéras was therefore limited to a correspondence that began in 1968 and ended in 1971. In his letters, the author of Le Vieillard et l’enfant [The Old Man and the Child], that same Vieillard et l’enfant which he had published under the pseudonym of Abdallah Chaamba, spoke of the difficulties of living, writing and above all getting published.
Two publishers, who shall remain nameless, had just turned down A Journey to Mount Athos. This double rejection had affected Augiéras. He was convinced that he was a cursed writer, which alas was only too true ....! Despairing of getting anywhere, he entrusted me with a typed copy of Mount Athos. As soon as I read it, and loved it passionately, I passed it on to Etienne Lalou, who was then publishing director of Flammarion. Forty-eight hours were all Lalou needed to recognise that this book was a masterpiece of the unexpected. But is it not true that all of Augiéras’ work is unexpected, unique in its genre, set apart in our century?
Augiéras himself felt he was different, and very conscious of his singularity. On 20th March 1970, he wrote to me, “Sometimes it seems to me that I am a distant star [... ] That is to say, if you like, a Quasar: those stars that are difficult to locate anywhere, with their highly enigmatic signals, and about which all theories are possible”. He constantly kept his distance from human beings and, the minute he was able, set off into wide open spaces. Such behaviour, such a need for escape, is perhaps explained in a paragraph of Forster’s A Passage to India: “The old, very old malaise that gnaws at the heart of every civilization: snobbery, the desire for wealth and for honoured accessories; it is to escape that, rather than the temptations of the flesh that saints withdraw into the Himalayas”. Augiéras was not a saint. He simply loved to withdraw into his internal Himalayas. He also loved to surround himself with mystery, and the biographical note that accompanied A Journey to Mount Athos on its publication taught me more about its author than months of correspondence:
François Augiéras was born in 1925, in Rochester (United States). His father was a French pianist and his mother a Polish émigreé. He returned to France after the death of his father and spent his adolescence in Périgord. Abandoning his studies at the age of fifteen, he quite quickly turned to a sort of wandering.
The discreet and accurate summary, “a sort of wandering”, is admirable. Augiéras’ life and books are a series of various wanderings in France, North Africa and Greece. Each of his pages is in itself a voyage, and often an initiatory one. In it you are hungry, you are thirsty, you make love to forget hunger and thirst, then, with superb ease, you move from the pleasures of the body to the ecstasies of the spirit.
In A Journey to Mount Athos, François Augiéras reveals himself as a pilgrim who is able to attract the company of young cherubs, and old hermits whose beards are as long as their experience. He comes, he goes, he picks the fruits that appear as if by some miracle along his way, and savours them with a sensual pleasure that does not prevent him from being lucid. He reached his Promised Land, he finally found his country: Athos. “On Athos, through lack of food, through want, you were only too liable to stray into delicious errors and, because of solitude, to find everything within yourself”
It is I who have emphasized that phrase, find everything within yourself, in which we can recognise echoes of the most ancient wisdom. Thus François Augiéras, who in his lifetime was sometimes taken for a madman, was a wise man. Like a wise man he died, detached from everything, at the Hospice de Domme, in 1971.
One could put this epitaph on his tombstone. It was written by Jean Cocteau for himself, and can be found at the end of his Requiem:
Halt pilgrim my voyage
Took me from danger to danger
It is right that people should dream of me
After staring at me.
And now it is time to restore François Augiéras’ face to him, like a star, or an underground beacon ...
JEAN CHALON
14th September 1987
A
TNT
ebook
Black & white images in this ebook are taken from
the original paperback version.
Some of the original lower quality black & white images have been replaced
with colour images depicting similar aspects of Mount Athos.
2019
A Journey to Mount Athos Page 20
