by Jean Giono
October 28
Les Chouans (Balzac). There’s something like a present-day atmosphere. The past and future face-to-face, the rubble, the ambushes, the dangers of the road, a taste for intrigue, a lack of nobility, the seductiveness of revolutionary youth (suddenly I realize that’s what Communism is lacking: youth. A young Communist is no longer young, neither in physical appearance or soul. They’ve replaced enthusiasm with calculation and intellect. Communist revolutionaries are all old in mind and body, and moreover, the staunchest of them are old professors, old teachers, old students). Impossible for Balzac to speak of them as he speaks of Merle and Gérard in the Gars’s castle (Pléiade, p. 904): “he seemed to have one of those truly Republican spirits which, in the days of which we write, crowded the French armies, and gave them, by means of these nobly humble devotions…” So here, in a word, lies another explanation: present-day devotions are humble but not noble. The Republican ideal requires nobility. The Communist ideal requires nothing but success. Hence its quick renunciation of nobility. The Republic is very beautiful once again under the Empire.
Earlier on that same page: “…those lines which gave, in those days, an expression of great candor and nobleness to young heads.” I’m thinking of Communist revolutionaries. They have the cold, wrinkled heads of mathematicians, bitter, wasted. The revolution of M. Brauman, of Jean Perrin.
One could argue that this hardly matters, but where is there beauty to be found in the Communist revolution and a Communist state?
And we know very well that it matters! And Aragon, and Malraux, and my dear old Guéhenno? (Reread in Lenin the whole Iskra period and see what connections there are.)
The Adventures of David Balfour by Stevenson. The extraordinary pursuit from chapter 20 to chapter 31. Extremely sensitive musical composition. The reality of night, cold, water, and dread. But it’s better and more sensitive in Les Chouans when Marie de Verneuil, Francine, and Galope-Chopine go to the Gars’s ball (Pléiade, p. 971–977), there’s true composition, not just in length but in sensitive depths. With the description of Fougères (p. 928–932) an immense resonant landscape is established that reverberates for a long time. (The Fougères attack, p. 915–955, is as astonishing as Waterloo in La Chartreuse.) Stendhal might have given richness to Marie’s passion, but he would have neglected the orchestra. The basses, violins, and violas have to play their parts, but the horns must ring out as well. And if somewhere, at the precise moment, a drum beats, maybe that will make the dull symphony burst forth in the blaze of some emotion from the gut or “pit of the stomach.” Then, what iridescence (rainbow)! Skipping stones in water. Nothing of all that holds true for Stevenson. With the art of Balzac and Stendhal, we have an essentially French art. Stevenson addresses the epidermis. Dickens as well, with naive attempts to go deeper in a crude way. The two French writers are rogues.
Les Chouans (Pléiade, p. 975). A sentence sounding very much like the Cervantes of Don Quixote: “Hardly had they gone a few miles through those woods than they heard in the distance the vague murmur of voices and the sound of a bell…” – The scene is set with a single stroke and the mystery unfolds. We are going to “eat the flute and drink the cymbal.” But Balzac continues: “…a bell whose silvery tones did not have the monotony that the movements of cattle imprint upon them.” And it’s bad Balzac. “Imprint” especially is unbearable, vulgar, false, and wrong. Stendhal wouldn’t have used “imprint.” But then Stendhal wouldn’t have had that Cervantian sentence.
Often the sentence that has just swelled, expanded and sparkled in the light, bursts and resolves into a tiny drop of soapy water. We are not only vexed (this might be nothing, but it might be something), but also troubled as what we were looking at disappears. Hence, some uncertainty at times, increased by the many mistakes in word choice. It’s like if you water down alcohol. It loses its potency.
Sylvie arrived home from school very overexcited: she saw leaflets falling! This is the first time, she points out as an excuse. No one heard the least sound of engines. Imagine the surprise of a bombing from that height.
Les Chouans. Description of the waltz danced by Marie de Verneuil and the Gars (Pléiade, p. 1001), example of description of a thing totally unknown by the author and very foreign to his nature. Wrong words (roula) and all lackluster. Some emotion remains because it’s Balzac and because it’s moving to know that Balzac never waltzed with a woman in love and passionately loved. No divination. It’s here that Stendhal (even having never waltzed) might have worked wonders. He might have made of it a description of Fougères.
Just before the description of the waltz, moreover, and undoubtedly at the moment when Balzac, well underway, sensed that he was about to describe something unknown, there’s this ghastly image, ugly and above all false: “kept the secret of her thoughts as the sea swallows those of the criminal who casts a weighted body into its depths.” We get lost in the comparison between Marie’s beautiful head and the sea, between “thoughts” (pensées) and “weighted” (pesant) body. “Those of,” which replaces “secret,” is so questionable that we don’t know right away what it’s replacing and we have to reread the whole thing, emphasizing “those of,” to understand the construction. Here is the fear of the writer who, in a moment, is about to fall into the unknown and is already stumbling. He is in the process of trying to save beauty and he writes rubbish. We would need to know why, at that moment, Balzac thought of comparing Marie’s thoughts to the “product of a crime.” Because once he wrote the word “sea,” he could have, and normally he would have, thought of fish, and then there’s only one mistake: face and sea (especially a face described so: “unfathomable gentleness of her eyes,” “the demure smile on her lips” etc., is not comparable to the sea). Furthermore, there is no crime to hide here; he says so himself, she has nothing to conceal but her flattery and vanity. So, why the devil this “weighted body”? It’s Balzac who interests me here. Cave of bats.
October 29
An ambiguous letter from Hamonic on the 50,000 francs that I asked for. He’s not sending it. Grasset will have to write to me, it seems. I’m going ahead and writing to him first. Since 1929, I’ve never asked for a single penny in advance. My credit has always been good with my publisher. To an extreme, and that’s rare, I think. And this time, it’s not even an actual advance, simply an advance on the 160,000 francs that they’ll owe me in two months, after the deluxe edition of Pan and Que ma joie demeure comes out. Instead of making things simple, they deliberate. It seems like I’m asking them for charity or a huge favor. A letter to Grasset, not angry but firm. Because what good does it do to get angry.
Les Chouans – Toward the end, there is no more debate, nothing more to see, we are swept along, no wrong word choices, no “imprint,” nothing. There’s only the Gars, Marie, the Chouans climbing the precipice, the Bleus’ silent march in the fog. Death that thunders, about to explode into lightning. Only Corentin, whose dishonor I don’t entirely see. At that point, one excuses all baseness. We know they’re going to die. A magnificent book that never lags, to be read all in one sitting. Many wonderful passages, descriptions of the country and battles. The death of Galope-Chopine, the ball, the mass in the forest. Marie and Francine walking to the ball. Description of Fougères. Lacks the sparkling diamond heart that Stendhal would have given the love between Marie and the Gars. That’s the weak part. Or at least we know that it’s been done better. As for the rest of it, no one has ever done it better.
Strange, too, how Garganoff is behaving. We’ve signed a contract for my plays. Fine. Moreover, according to the contract he gets the plays for free and he gets half the royalties, under the pretext that he’ll be in charge of them. Fine. He’s had La Femme du boulanger for over a year and he hasn’t staged it. I’m doing that. I found him, for free, a large theater in Paris, a smart director (Cocéa) who’ll cover all the costs, he’ll get half the royalties, for nothing, and still he writes me an insolent letter becau
se I signed what? A little paper from the Société des Auteurs by which I agree to give the play to Cocéa and Cocéa agrees to take it from me, period, that’s it. He calls this a contract and he claims that the only reason he’s not suing me is because he’s a good soul. What wrong have I done him? On the contrary: rereading the contract carefully, I get nothing out of doing plays. On that point (and as a kindness) I’m doing one more (Le Voyage) and I’m giving it to Cocéa as well. He doesn’t have to do a thing and he gets half the royalties without having paid a single penny to buy the play, or to produce it, or to advertise it, nothing. I’m not complaining about the contract, I signed it. I’m complaining about his insolence. And this is my friend! Actually I’m not complaining. I’m writing it down. It’s a joke.
October 31
I just this moment finished the third act of Voyage. But Aline has a sore throat, Sylvie is coughing, and I just applied a poultice, and Élise just went to lie down saying, “I’m not sick but I’ll feel better lying down.” And she is sick.
November 2
Aline has a wicked sore throat that hasn’t responded to three days of painting it. We’re out of cotton, we’re out of iodine; finally, today, it seems better. Élise has been in bed for three days and isn’t completely over some vague digestive trouble. Sylvie feels better and is doing her homework. Began to reread the Aeneid to compare against the 200 best pages of the Corrêa edition. I don’t find in the translation published by Belles Lettres the vivid emotion of the Hinstin translation published by Lemerre that I read in the orchards on Sundays in spring in my youth. But the secret must lie in the orchard, Sunday, spring, and youth (to be verified, even so).
It’s raining a Chinese rain. Dark figures of women are slowly climbing the small hill under my window, sheltered by big umbrellas. The whole country streaked with white lines. The firs hunched over in their great coats. It’s beginning to get cold in my house. Cleaned my stove with Charles and installed a new heater in the big chimney that doesn’t draw well. The stove with its flues draws, but too much, and roars, which I hate. Scared stiff of fire. Why? Atavism? That fire my father often talked about, in which his father lost all he had and the wages of the workers at the Zola building site near Aix. My father told me that was the first time he saw the moon. He was nine years old, but brought up the hard way, he was in bed every evening by six o’clock. That night he was snatched in his nightshirt from the blazing house and on his mother’s knees, from the meadow, he saw the moon. That was more striking to him than the fire in which two men burned to death. Even so, he must have been afraid and must have passed that on to me. I have never witnessed any fires. Out of fear, I’m insured and double insured. I have a physical terror of a roaring stove. Reinstalled in the mantel of the large fireplace, my stove roars terribly. I made use of fire in Colline. I described it with delight, I remember, one winter morning when my room was so cold that my fingers froze. Élise begged me to make a fire. I wouldn’t have done that for all the money in the world. I would have sooner stopped writing. That was in the big black house on Grand Rue. In my father’s old workshop where we’d added a kitchen after he died, and where we were all living, Élise, my mother, Uncle, and me. Aline had just been born.
I just reread some passages from the Hinstin translation. It’s not quite as well translated as the André Bellessort that I’m working through. It’s just as I thought, a matter of youth and enthusiasm. A little while ago, Henri (Fluchère) came to see me, very good, fine, calm, peaceful, a good friend, faithful and just. I’m the bad character here, thin-skinned, arrogant, proud, and lacking the most basic generosity. Fluchère talked to me about the work he’s doing on Shakespeare and Elizabethan theater. Very coherent, accurate views on the relationship between Machiavelli and Seneca. It’s true that in each play there’s a Machiavelli and that, after brandishing increasingly bloody hearts on the points of daggers, the only recourse left is Seneca’s stoicism (which I don’t possess). For my part, it’s been more than six months since I read The Prince, joyfully and fruitfully.
The small clandestine journal Les Lettres françaises that I receive provides some information on the book A. Malraux has been working on for the last three years. One certainly can’t judge from the excerpts in this summary, which aren’t given much space. But if the article’s accurate, Malraux would be no more than a kind of Maurice d’Esparbès for the lower class.
All this sucking up to the Russians, is it sincere? Doesn’t he overdo it a bit? It all seems compelled by money, or the desire for an eminent position afterwards, or having succumbed to some propaganda. There’s too much of it. I get the impression that those who are offended by the poetics of Pilniak (and who are remarkably intelligent) will also be offended by this poetics of intelligence. Odds are that a strong victorious Communist party would kick out M. André Malraux. Lesson: too much fawning blurs our vision, whether from the simple perspective of art or even the opposite perspective of service to a party. What I’m going to copy below is insufferable, indefensible, badly conceived, and badly constructed.
“The troops had received orders to advance toward the second enemy lines” (I’m copying from Les Lettres but what I’m highlighting is from Malraux). Doctor Hoffmann is growing impatient. Strange men in shirtsleeves come out of the trench, but “the wave of assault did not head toward the Russians, it came back.” It’s impossible to summarize this part of the work here. Nevertheless it constitutes the essential lesson. It is the eruption of indignation, the explosion of revolt, the impassable limit of the inhuman. To the humiliation of action, to the humiliation of thought, to the humiliation of courage, is supposedly added the humiliation of human brotherhood in the face of death, the humiliation of a kind of vague love of life, as if in the presence of helpless suffering, anger and shame did not suddenly arise.” (Parenthesis: all of that except the italicized lines are the journal speaking). “The spirit of evil here was even stronger than death, so strong that it was necessary to find a Russian who hadn’t been killed, any Russian at all, to drape him over his shoulders and save him.” (Another parenthesis – this is from Malraux.) This is what I call sucking up because why a Russian!? In the passage that line comes from, it’s supposedly a matter of decent German soldiers who attacked with gas and who are saving the gassed Russians. But, and this isn’t logical, but these lines make me think of the time in my childhood when it was the poor Chinese children who had to be saved. The Germans didn’t attack with gas, as far as I know, and if tomorrow it was the Russians who attacked with gas, would M. Malraux applaud them, repeating his own words: “The wave of assault did not head toward the Germans, it came back” and “…it was necessary to find a German who hadn’t been killed, any German at all, to drape him over his shoulders and save him.” I know very well what M. Malraux will say: No, my Russians are the future, your Germans are the past, nothing at all, pigs, Nazis, there’s no possible comparison, Russians are saved, yes, indignation, humiliation, anger, shame, in short, everything the journal says, but that’s because Russians are attacked (who barely three years ago were in accord with the Germans about carving up Poland together). The humiliation of human brotherhood in the face of death, as they say above, does it apply in both cases or only, as at the circus, in my favor? I don’t find anything great in these little expressions of popular propaganda. Bad Epinal imagery. Malraux, do you think the Russians, any more than the Germans, are truly capable of revolt in honor of the love of life, as you say, in the presence of helpless suffering, as you say? Do you think, Malraux, that anger and shame will rise up somewhere, anywhere, look, that it’ll rise up in you yourself, for example, in the face of all the helpless suffering that, as victor, you’ll inflict with as much cruelty and injustice as the Germans are doing now? Les Lettres françaises journal (which must be Communist) says that this passage constitutes the essential lesson, but I maintain that if the Germans or the Russians attacked with gas tomorrow, there would be no revolt, no shame, no anger, no humiliation of
a vague love of life. Everything would happen as usual, that’s how it is, horrible, and no one would be outraged. I don’t think the Germans are a chosen race, but more importantly I don’t think the Russians are. Neither one nor the other. God isn’t French, but neither is he a foreigner.
And the paragraph continues: “And Vincent Berger (that’s the hero) who, swept up in this chaos, also dragged a dead Russian onto his back and is attempting pathetically to save a corpse, watched wide-eyed, relieved, as the onslaught of pity came crashing toward the ambulances.”
It used to be a daily coin donated to the church to save Chinese children, now it seems to be all our blood donated to the church of M. Malraux and Co. to save the “good Russians.” There’s something deadly comic in this, that’s all.
