by Jean Giono
At one point I wondered if they really were gendarmes. I wondered if they were going to draw their revolvers and start shooting. That lasted about ten seconds. Ten very chilly seconds. I continued to ramble on about French composition but the atmosphere had turned icy.
English radio announced this evening that Italy, through Marshall Badoglio, has declared war on Germany. Then followed an Italian voice that uttered, among other things, this astounding line: “Who could accuse us of having done an about-face?” (And they would like us to take all this seriously! No, it’s simply homicidal madness, a kind of general running amok. If after all this, one still truly believes in a hereditary enemy (a different one each week), still trusts in a state’s word and signature (Belgium, France, Italy, and those that follow), still sees the reason for fighting between peoples, that would justify the most profound contempt for the whole human race. And we aren’t at the end of these retractions.)
October 14
I’m more and more convinced that something new and amazing could be done in film with Sartre’s Nausea. By new, I mean a complete break with everything that already exists in film in terms of the poetic and fantastic. Especially the length of the film, surely not the present length (it would be meaningless at that length). Of course, it’s not a question either of money, connections, or producers. It’s only a question of art since the great preoccupation is the Art of Cinema. For example, when Roquentin goes to Café Mably that foggy day (p. 96) and then, after going to the library, he returns to the café to check on M. Fasquelle, despite his haste to return, unlike in the book, it must be represented without haste. Haste in film actors creates disorder. Or else use slow motion, make the actor run, and then slow down his actions until the moment he enters Café Mably and sees that the café is empty. (Nausea) The sequences are really extraordinarily beautiful. I wonder why nobody has thought of it. For example, immediately following Café Mably (p. 105, 106, 107) the giant carapace that stirs the mud with its long claws, then the pervert, red with cold in his long cloak, who watches the little girl, and then suddenly the library, the reading room, Roquentin’s hand at the table holding La Chartreuse de Parme, “refuge in the lucid Italy of Stendhal.”
Finally, despite my repugnance for it (no desire at all to play investigator) I wrote Lucien a short note simply to inform him about the gendarmes’s visit.
It’s funny, that line from last evening: “Who could accuse us of having done an about-face?” It’s funny and it’s very Italian, Stendhal’s Italian. The gentleman who puts on Louis xv heels to get his ass kicked. Fine, without words. With words, disgusting. And the poor bastards keep letting themselves be killed, because they aren’t getting themselves killed anymore, they’re letting themselves be killed.
October 17
Into my little office today, battered with rain and clouds, came G.M.R. to tell me about her marriage. It’s in two weeks. She’s nineteen years old, strong, with a little mustache, dark, well built, very healthy and so sensual that one sees her as though in an American film, assailed with a sensuality that will be her undoing. She’s marrying a cold, pale creature, a chemical engineer for Rhône Aspirin. She says she’s fed up with the preliminaries for the wedding. She’d like to be married to a Strauss waltz played on the organ and with a bouquet of sunflowers in her hands. “Why not?” she asks me. Of course, I nod. Her plans for their life are staggering. Unhappy chemist, how will he fulfill his vows to the gods of chemistry? I give her some fatherly advice and she leaves very determined to be the whale of adultery. I imagine (and it’s obvious) what monstrous dreams she has. This will take place in two weeks under the most bourgeois auspices imaginable.
October 20
This evening I returned from Margotte by bicycle. Returned by the Villeneuve road that I didn’t know. Too tired to write down everything I worked out along the way. Before Fragments, I have to write Deux cavaliers. Saw how I can reconstruct it with what exists. The plateau leaving Forcalquier toward Villeneuve is very beautiful, almost transforming. A wide open view of the Alps. To see it again someday in the great winter wind with clouds. Streams of light. A new view of the Saint-Maime side. The village of Dauphin like a king’s crown on playing cards. Also thought about Fragments, that its construction seems right to me and accommodates beautiful things.
October 21
Returning to Deux cavaliers. Poetic composition falling outside the usual rules of composition. The Jasons’ story, then Ariane’s conversations about the town (which are written but without any of the women’s conversations clearly focused on the savagery and brutality of that town), then Marceau’s dream. To give clarity to the composition, and fierceness. To leave only the essential, to center the whole story around its strength. But above all, a great variety of points of view in the composition. A single description of the country (very important) when Marceau dies. The end must be a powerful explosion that self-destructs. Ariane remained standing. She didn’t act like an old woman. She straightened up, took a deep breath, and waved her arms like an athlete. She speaks (and immediately a description of the town begins).
In the fights, not to trust comparisons, take out the marriage of the cadet and the woman. Unnecessary tenderness. Clean it up.
Course of events. Arrival of “American civilization” in a France divided and without desire for grandeur. Abundance, redundant speeches, Capuan delights, all right here. A few weeks of personal vendettas; everything is settled. All the hundred-year-old quarrels between neighbors, all the small-time Capulets and Montaigus, Saint Bartholomew’s Day for the envious and the ruined. Bouvard and Pécuchet of the machine gun. A mix of Ubu roi, radical-socialist agricultural shows, and the slaughterhouse. Then it’ll go to the polls where the Communist party will take over legally.
“The powers (sublime with regard to elections) of the ventriloquist…”
H. de Balzac (Le Député d’Arcis)
We are headed toward the victory and reign of the ventriloquist. “The price of cotton depended upon the triumph or defeat of Emperor Napoleon, about whom his adversaries, the English generals, said in Spain: “The city is taken, let the idiots advance.” (H. de Balzac, Le Député d’Arcis) With France taken, we can let the idiots advance. The spirit would remain. Germany after 1815. But the Cossacks were only bogeymen. Alexander was beautiful as the day. Stalin doesn’t bother with beauty salons.
While I was writing, the dull rumbling of a big bomb in the distance, then anti-aircraft defense overhead. I opened the window. At that moment Charles knocked on my door. “You hear the bombing?” “I opened the window,” I say. We try to guess the direction. Maybe Avignon. But the wind is from the south so my guess would be Marseille instead. We’ll find out tomorrow. Charles says, “The war’s getting closer.”
October 22
This morning, the newspaper had nothing about bombing in neighboring areas. And we can still hear muffled blasts in the distance. No doubt these are defense exercises. But last evening, last night, all that dark rumbling was truly epic. The wind has been from the south for several days. Rarely have I seen clouds as beautiful as the ones now rising. A moment ago, the east was masked by an enormous black band and the light came from the west in three long straw-colored streaks that reversed all the shadows. Then as the wind shifted everything went back to normal.
October 23
At eight o’clock this morning Mme. Seguin came to let me know that Meyerowitz has been arrested and is headed for the Mées concentration camp. Doing what I can to help him. At noon C. came to see me with the same news and to try to coordinate efforts. He’ll go to the bishop’s office (M. has a strong letter of support from the nuncio), I’ll go to the police, and Ch., who was alerted in Marseille by telegram, will see the prefecture.
Feeling a great need to be done with Voyage. Finished scene IV today; I’m on the last scene. I can’t wait to be less strapped for money. For organized solitude. But Voyage is made up of small drops and
I need a project that draws more generously from what I really am, that can be a very powerful siphon. In this regard, taking up Cavaliers again will help me. To acquire a style again, which is also a life style. I remember a time when I spent many hours at a stretch at my desk. Now I go there to jot down two or three good lines between hours spent on the divan. I don’t feel like I’m working but like I’m trying to. To regain that healthy abundance of work as with Batailles dans la Montagne or Que me Joie, and to make a work of art without thinking about anything else.
October 24
A.F. showed me an article in Jeunes Forces de France on Les Vrais Richesses reproaching me for my bank account and my checkbook. What a joke. First of all it’s hard to relate a checkbook to a book, but more to the point, there would have to be a real checkbook. The French consider themselves rich if they have 50,000 francs. I don’t have that kind of money. I don’t have 50,000 francs, free and at my disposal. I work precisely to make a living. I have nine people to feed, my two farms are tiny and they cost rather than make me money. I’m not complaining about that. I have to solicit my publishers three or four times a year and right now I have exactly 20,000 francs in my Crédit Lyonnais account (that’s easy to verify) and I owe 60,000 to the tax collector and 32,000 to the builder who fixed up the apartments at Margotte, and I’ve asked Hamonic at Grasset for an advance of 50,000 francs. So the legend is established. But all this leaves me perfectly indifferent and I’m quietly explaining it to myself just to take stock.
On the subject of M. Wullens’s article, I’ve decided that it would be cowardly to offer any explanation. I can say that I’ve thought about it for a long time now and in the end I don’t have anything to say.
October 26
Spent the last two days getting Meyerowitz out of the Mées camp, foreign workers camp no. 702. Monday I went to Mées. It was raining so hard that M. phoned to tell me to put it off until Tuesday. But I had already left and Élise took the call. It was pouring at the Peyruis station where I got off and through the rain I saw M. arriving who said, “The captain has sent a car for you.” It’s three kilometers from Peyruis to Mées. We climbed into a farm truck also carrying two gendarmes from Nice accompanying a Jew. We drove with all three of them through the downpour. We arrived sopping wet. The camp, the office, the captain. Like Hurluret, but what humanity! Over the course of the day, he told me that he had to save France, that he was a radical socialist, that, above all, he was a patriot, that he had been a tie salesman, that he was a mathematician, that he had saved Italian officers, that he had survived 1940, that he had stashed 250,000 francs for his company in his flannel binder, that he had seen a flag burned, that everything was going to work out for M. His wife appeared at noon, drank wine with us. Must be the company’s backbone. Makes care packages for the prisoners of war, enlivens the place, plays mother for the group, but I’m editing our conversations, and she sent a few guys she didn’t like to the factory, and she has such light blue eyes, and a smile on her pretty, tired, old-looking face. Hurluret kissed the hollow of her elbow and arm in the café. I did the honors. Beside me, M., scared and obsequious, played the fool nevertheless. Finally at four o’clock I bought M.: twelve hundred francs a year in payments of a hundred francs a month, and the camp released him to me as a farm worker at Margotte, so in Forcalquier. M. is going to live in Forcalquier. And I returned through the same rain, a packed train, an hour late, and only green beans to eat when I got home, so-called green: hard, stringy, inedible. In a silent rage. A terrible effort the entire day to be nice. Left by bike for Forcalquier yesterday to sort out M.’s situation. Returned in the evening dead tired. Received four letters.
At the Peyruis station that evening, M., who had repeated incessantly all day, “I’m running the greatest risks,” did not stop repeating, “I’ve run the greatest risks.” I hope that in Forcalquier he’ll find a piano and a place to live and can work peacefully, but the captain said to him, “be retiring as a violet.”
I can’t tell if M. really considers us friends, or even likes me. And my lack of confidence no doubt makes me treat him very unjustly. It’s not out of spite but for fear of being duped. I’m hard to understand until one learns that I’m very shy and all my kindnesses don’t come naturally and cost me dearly. I only feel comfortable alone or with very, very simple people: Barbara, my cleaning woman, Charles. I’m not even at ease with Salomé, as simple as he is, but that’s because I do him too many favors. I gave him a team of work horses, a harvester, a trotter, a cow, had the sheds rebuilt, gave him an electric pump, a shredder (with which he earns 2,000 francs a week by his own admission), I gave him a radio worth 6,000 francs, and I’m sure I’m forgetting to include in this list a good third of what I’ve given him. This prevents me from being at ease with him. I was never comfortable with Lucien Jacques. I liked him and that feeling troubled me considerably.
My shyness, which I’m constantly suppressing, robs me of all naturalness and simplicity. And being so patient, so stubborn, so pigheaded about following through with my plans, so faithful to my family ties, I have neither patience nor fidelity for “the ordinary” and I withdraw as soon as I’m hurt. And that’s immediately. And that’s why I’m unsociable. I have a horrible disgust for being duped. I can’t excuse it.
I went down to find something to eat (for lunch there was stuffed eggplant which I don’t like); Mme. Ernst was in the dooryard with Charles who was chopping wood. “Bad news,” she said, “I have to have an operation. Something wrong with my stomach, it’s going to be expensive.” I asked how much. Five thousand francs. I told her to come see me Saturday. I would really love to get an answer from Grasset about the advance of 50,000 francs that I asked for. They just published new editions of Naissance and Que ma joie. They should be able to, it seems to me.
At four o’clock a visit from Pierre Sauvageot. Came to talk to me about the natural cultivation of wheat. Wheat sown grain by grain, spaced, mounded and hoed. Experiments with an extraordinary range of Egyptian wheats. He spoke at length, improvising a magnificent apocalypse for races fed on products grown with chemical fertilizers. It was all very beautiful. I’m going to venture reproducing it. This interests me with regard to Grands Chemins. I told him that. He gave me some documents. I’m noting it here so there’s a record somewhere that he provided me with these documents, in case I use them in some dramatic fashion, that I personally know nothing about the matter, and that all credit should go to him, not me. But there’s no question that if I can make this apocalypse occur in Les Grands Chemins I will broaden the scope of the novel significantly.
Which is not to forget that the goal of the work on Fragments and Les Grands Chemins is to offer an embryonic Renaissance poetics. The elements of the Renaissance. Balzac. Le Député d’Arcis, I’m thinking of Stendhal’s Lucien Leuwen. It’s like that; although neither one is finished. I can imagine an end to Député that could become very Stendhalian by following the line pursued so far. Les Chouans, another Stendhalian book, but with Stendhal, the love scenes between Marie de Verneuil and the Gars in the coach and the inn would have been an immense, sharp-edged, dazzling diamond. Balzac’s a bit soft. And nevertheless the whole book has the sheen and sometimes the iridescence of Chartreuse de Parme. All of that very much beyond the Dickens that I’m in the process of reading this evening (Nicholas Nickleby) where the story doesn’t escape “Punch”: caricature, sentimentality. It’s very engaging, despite some long passages that seem to drag on, but it remains a sketch, witty, exceptionally well constructed, but constructed. The two French works have more to them, they’re richer, not in abundance but in grandeur and depths. Density. They can’t be exhausted so quickly. It seems as though they’d sustain you through long months in prison.
Aline is excited about the Egyptian wheat.
October 27
MADAME BARE: That man over there (Thios, that is Théophile), you can’t imagine how dirty he is. His hands are like feet! MADAME BARE: (reci
pe for making goat cheese): You let your milk sit all night. The next day you strain out the flies.
A little gem from Montagne de Lure.
Give me victory over those I love and over those I hate.
Astounding! My intervention to save Meyerowitz has stirred up the whole Jewish hive in Manosque. Of course M. is Jewish, absolutely, although he hides it, although he’s Catholic (is that why?), Jewish mouth, nose, heart, and soul, but apparently all the Jews collaborated in the anonymous denunciation that sent him to Mées. They worked with the police chief who belongs to the Francist Movement. That is to say, they denounced M. to the chief. One can get lost in the complexities here, clever, underhanded, an element of spitefulness. So, great fool that I am, I go to Mées and I get M. out of there without even wondering whether or not he’s Jewish, knowing only that he’s in trouble, and all that seems to have backfired on me. I can’t believe my bad luck. Each time I turn immediately and instinctively toward something that seems to me simply human, it looks like I’m doing something stupid. Mean spiritedly, M. (on his way from Mées) told me little annoying things about Mme. Ernst this morning. It made me so sick that he saw it in my face. “Maybe I was wrong to tell you this,” he said. I assured him that I never withhold my help, no matter what I think of the one I’m helping (M. for example about whom I have no illusions), but everything he said seems true and Mme. Ernst suddenly seems unjust to me. Because for over three years, I’ve continually given her more than I promised her: money (out of my own pocket), practical help with those in power (she remains here because I welcomed her with outstretched arms, no papers, no identity card, nothing), spiritual help (having her translate Triompe de la vie into German – listening carefully to her personal plans, encouraging her – welcoming her regularly to my home).
