The Accident on the A35

by Graeme Macrae Burnet

  So the premise and central characters of the novel were clearly rooted in reality, but what of the narrative? Certainly, the somewhat gaudy subplot involving the murder of Veronique Marchal is pure fiction. No such murder occurred in Strasbourg at the time, and the description of the crime owes a great deal to the opening of Claude Chabrol’s 1971 film Juste avant le nuit, in which a middle-aged businessman strangles his mistress in circumstances much like those in the book. Chabrol had directed the screen version of La Disparition d’Adèle Bedeau, and there can be little doubt that Brunet, who was in any case something of a cinephile, would have seen his earlier work.

  Far greater uncertainty surrounds the adventures of Raymond Barthelme in Mulhouse, however. Much to the glee of the board of Gaspard-Moreau, a handful of journalists made it their business to uncover the ‘true story’ behind The Accident on the A35. It helped that there was (and still is) a bar on Rue de la Sinne named Le Convivial, and although it bears only a passing resemblance to the establishment in the book, for a while it became the unofficial base camp of these literary detectives. None of the regulars or staff in the bar remembered an event like the one that forms the climax of the novel; nor did they remember a young man like Raymond Barthelme visiting the premises. But why should they? If the incidents had actually taken place, they would have done so over forty years before. One regular, by then in his seventies, did vaguely recall a bartender named Dédé, but he was never traced.

  The journalists’ activities centred on Rue Saint-Fiacre. The street is a few minutes’ walk from Rue de la Sinne, but while it is broadly as described in the novel, it boasts neither a philatelist’s shop nor a corner café. Had Rue Saint-Fiacre been the location of actual events in Raymond Brunet’s life, these differences may simply have been due to the vagaries of memory. Or they may have been inventions to allow the author to introduce certain elements of his story; in particular, the theft of the knife, which closely mirrors an incident in Sartre’s The Age of Reason, in which the character of Boris buys a knife from a similar shop before stealing a thesaurus. On the other hand, and given that Brunet invented a name for the street where his own home was located in Saint-Louis, any actual events may have taken place in another street entirely. It’s possible that the choice of Rue Saint-Fiacre was simply a nod towards Brunet’s literary hero, Georges Simenon, one of whose earliest novels was entitled L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre.

  Neither this, nor the fact that Irene Comte—had she existed—would have been well into her eighties, prevented the journalists from knocking on the doors of every apartment in the street. An ageing spinster, Isabelle Cabot, living in an apartment at 10 Rue Saint-Fiacre (diagonally opposite No.13), denied ever having met Bertrand or Raymond Brunet. She did, however, have a daughter—coincidentally or not—called Delphine, who was tracked down to her home in Lyons. Delphine Cabot inadvertently fuelled the speculation by refusing to talk to any journalists. Some claimed that Isabelle Cabot was only remaining loyal to a promise she had made to Bertrand Brunet to keep their relationship secret. And had the events of the novel taken place as described, it would be quite understandable for Delphine not to wish to have them publicly raked over. It was more commonly held, however, that the attention focussed on the two women was nothing more than the unseemly harassment of individuals entirely unconnected to what were most likely fictional events.

  Whether Isabelle and Delphine Cabot were the prototypes for Irene and Delph will never be known (Isabelle has since died). It does, however, seem valid to ask why, if the events portrayed in the novel had no basis in truth, Brunet would have been so anxious for it not to be published in his mother’s lifetime. And, if we allow ourselves to speculate further, had some sexual relations occurred between Brunet and a half-sister, the trauma of this might account for the difficulties he experienced with the opposite sex later in life. During his spell in Paris publicising the film of La Disparition d’Adèle Bedeau, Emmanuelle Durie, the actress who played the role of the title character, developed something of a fondness for the author. During the few weeks Brunet spent in Paris, the two discreetly dined together and accompanied one another to the city’s art galleries. In an interview conducted many years after Brunet’s death, Durie described him as a softly spoken, intelligent man with a self-deprecating sense of humour. He liked nothing more than to sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg speculating about the lives of those who walked past. She had, she admitted, been quite smitten with him. But, she said, ‘He seemed to have a kind of horror of any sexual contact.’ At the time she had concluded that he was a ‘suppressed homosexual’.

  However, while such speculation might make for fine entertainment, it is, at the end of the day, no more than tittle-tattle. What matters is not whether The Accident on the A35 is ‘true’, but whether it is any good. The real measure of ‘truth’ in any novel is not whether the characters, places and events portrayed exist beyond the pages of the book, but, rather, whether they seem authentic to us as readers. When we open the pages of a novel, we enter into a pact with it. We want to immerse ourselves in its milieu. We want to engage with the characters, to find their actions psychologically plausible. We invest a little bit of ourselves in the narrative and, while never quite forgetting that it is fiction, experience the disappointments, humiliations and petty successes of the characters as if they were our own. A novel is, in Sartre’s phrase, ‘neither true nor false’; but it must feel real.

  Certainly, it must have felt real to Raymond Brunet. As both a novelist and an individual, he was entirely trapped in his home town. Natives of Saint-Louis, disgruntled by his earlier portrayal of their municipality, found little to placate them in The Accident on the A35. Similarly, the characters have stepped from the same playbook, and whether directly autobiographical or not, they undoubtedly reflect the preoccupations of an individual who appears to have grown increasingly neurotic as his life went on. His brush with celebrity, and the all too brief time he spent in the cosmopolitan environment of Paris, can only have thrown the monotonous nature of his life in Saint-Louis into relief. The fact that Brunet was, in effect, waiting for his mother to die so that he might continue to publish his work, must have been an insufferable torment. In the end, he chose to bring about his own death rather than wait for hers.

  While Gaspard-Moreau’s astute marketing ensured that the book outsold La Disparition d’Adèle Bedeau, critical reception was mixed. One reviewer, while snootily noting the ‘unseemly circus’ surrounding the publication of the novel, observed that it was perfectly obvious why Brunet had killed himself rather than see the book published. It was the work, she averred, of a writer who ‘had only one idea, and not even a good one at that’. On the other hand, Jean Martineau, writing in Lire, was relieved to find a novel that ‘eschews the gimmickry of so much contemporary fiction and relies instead on the time-honoured virtues of character and story’. It was, he said, ‘hopelessly and agreeably old-fashioned’.

  It is, of course, for readers of this, the first English language edition, to decide for themselves who is right. A translator is first and foremost a reader, and it is my hope that others will share my pleasure in returning to the non-descript streets of Saint-Louis.

  GMB, April 2017

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to express my gratitude to the Society of Authors’ Foundation for providing me with a grant to carry out research for this book.

  Many thanks to Michael Heyward and Jane Pearson of Text Publishing, and to my great friend and trusted reader, Victoria Evans, for their invaluable and perceptive notes on earlier drafts of this book. Also to my editor at Saraband, Craig Hillsley, for his meticulousness and myriad insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks as well to Julie Sibony for patiently answering my questions about French stuff. Any errors are, of course, entirely mine.

  To Sara Hunt: your patience, expertise and humour are extraordinary. It’s a privilege to be published by you.

  And, finally, as always, to Jen, who more than ever encourages,
supports and indulges me. I couldn’t do it without you.