Occupation Journal

by Jean Giono

  So, back to our Jacques Lucien, and those three or four, hearing the clattering of the typewriter before they entered, must have thought to themselves that this time they’d stumbled on staff headquarters! The producer of incendiary tracts, the issuer of watchwords, the maker of lists. What do I know? One can only imagine what they might have imagined, in this lost hamlet of Boyers hearing that typewriter. And no, it was a poem! But they don’t want to give up so easily. They’re from a country without absurdity. And they must have spent long hours grilling him, not believing in the poem or the paintings or the artist. What do you do? Where does your money come from? How could they believe Lucien to be a great poet and a great painter? There was the chaos and filth, and our Lucien perhaps unshaved, for who knows how long. Their idea of the man of letters living in Paris or Berlin. And nevertheless, gentlemen, it’s true, you are simply in the presence of a great and free artist and he is far removed from all the petty tricks that concern you and that seem to you huge, important things. He is another sort. Of course they laugh when he tells them simply what I just wrote, and they wonder to themselves if it could be true. He is simply an artist, gentlemen. But however much they laugh, ridicule, persist in their cruelty, sarcastically, ironically, they never stop wondering if they themselves aren’t the butt of the joke. The funniest part is that they’re not. At least not in the way they imagine.

  January 5

  I received an ambiguous letter from Rabi. They don’t love me. They love profit. But from now on it’s going to be very difficult for them to catch me in their trap. They’ve all been telling the most terrible lie for the longest time, a lie against the spirit. They’ve played all the dramatic roles: grandeur, pacifism, friendship, faith. But they themselves have remained just as their souls or lack of souls made them. Yes, the Contadour was something very important, but only for me. I had five hundred professors and I was the only student. They gave me a complete course on the absence of grandeur in men. What I learned I will never forget. Not Robert Berthoumieu, not Hélène, no one. The only man among them was Lucien Jacques. His failings still let grandeur shine through. For the others, I will never have words strong enough to condemn them as they deserve.

  January 6

  Eight days ago I wrote in Virgile: “With the war of 1914, the socialist Babels came crashing down.” Today I read the following sentence in The Brothers Karamozov: “For socialism is not only the labor question or that of the fourth estate, but first of all the question of atheism, of the modern embodiment of atheism, the question of the Tower of Babel built precisely without God, not to go from heaven to earth but to bring heaven down to earth.”

  January 7

  Only today have the pains abated and I can walk without limping and almost without suffering. But after a miserable night I’m too tired today to do good invented work, and I’ve written only a few lines. In the past few days, the lines for the first scene of a play have come to me, but I don’t know its location or time period. There’s just the hall of a castle, a captain, soldiers, chaos; they’ve just come from battle. The captain says to clear the hall of bodies and to post watch by the sea to report the approach of the boat. A door opens, a young woman enters. She must be thin and white. She asks who’s in charge. The captain answers: I am. She wants to see the bodies. She seems to do this with pleasure. This may seem surprising, but she’s watched her world be capsized and shipwrecked and she’s concluded that if that’s possible, then there’s no god and nothing is forbidden. She has just discovered the enormous sweetness of cruelty. From there, it will have to develop with no preconceived plan. Led by the characters and not at all by the idea. Create them, bring them to life, leave them to their own devices as superbly as possible, and be the historiographer.

  Hélène Laguerre wrote to me from Paris to ask for money. I won’t give it to her. I don’t have any. I need to sell two manuscripts to make some. But if I had any, I wouldn’t give it to her.

  January 8

  Princess B.: “You’re a stranger to the castle? – No. That’s my father, my mother, those are my brothers whom you have laid out as corpses in the hall that you want cleared. – And they are the ones you want to see? – Of course, what interest would I have in seeing other bodies? – I understand and I bow to you, Mademoiselle. I am not a brute. – No, of course not, I simply want to see the dead.”

  January 11

  I’m rereading La Mousson (The Rains Came) by Louis Bromfield. Unlike Gone with the Wind, which I recently subjected to the same test, this one is a great book. The Major’s appearance by Miss MacDaid’s hospital bed after the catastrophe, when the old nurse revives the dying woman by talking in her ear, is a very noble human moment. Everything is right. And here’s a book that includes sex, effortlessly. Noble and grand. Maybe too clever overall, maybe superficial, but that’s a question for future centuries. For the moment, I’m pleased that someone has written it.

  January 19

  This morning Castel, the cleaning woman’s husband, was buried. Yesterday Aunt Noémie (Élise’s cousin) was taken to the hospital and this morning the surgeon didn’t operate on her. He said that there’s cancer throughout her stomach, and she won’t live for more than a couple days. She was with us for Christmas and New Year’s Day, eating, laughing, singing. This afternoon, D. came from Céreste. I hadn’t seen him since his wife went mad. He told me how it happened. Sexual trauma. The story of how the Ch. family took advantage of her, how the mother, whose son is a lazy dolt, a virgin at twenty-three, stupid from masturbating, urged him to sleep with the poor woman so at least he would know how to make love. Everything about this story is both revolting and Homeric, or rather Aeschylesque. The mad woman going on and on about artificial insemination. The mother saying, “she’s good for the taking,” then making the son sleep in Mme. D.’s room (she’s lovely, young (22 or 23), blond, melancholic, very blue eyes, full lips, petite with plump breasts and bum), and Mme. D. saying to the boy, “Come sleep with me, get naked, I’ll show you how D. makes love.” It was D. who told me all this. She had simply told him the whole story when she came home. She had become horribly impure, he told me. When he first arrived and I asked what was new, he broke down in tears. As he told me the story, he was no longer crying.

  Élise is sick with the flu. Sylvie is sick with a cough. My mother is coughing as well. But I’m feeling better.

  January 20

  I’ve just finished Virgile. In the hospital, Noémie continues to laugh, make jokes, call desperately for food. She has no fever, she’s bright, cheerful, she sings to herself in bed. Strange sort of cancer, in my opinion. I don’t know what comes next, of course, but for the moment, it’s better than Molière. The morose little surgeon, sullen, full of dire prognoses, circling the bed where Aunt Noémie sits enthroned, a song on her lips. Of course her sons, daughters-in-law, and grandsons also gather around her bed, not daring to say a word and gazing at one another dumbfounded!

  The gendarmes are looking for Meyerowitz everywhere and this threatens everyone’s safety. M. supposedly said to Mme. Ernst, “After the war, it’s our turn to save Giono.” Save him from what?

  My sick ones are better.

  Lucien phoned to invite me to his housewarming. I turned him down. Wrote a very harsh letter to Hélène. I’m absolutely determined to reject everyone. I’m breaking free, they’ve taken things too far.

  Mme. Castel came earlier. Widow Castel. She’s so deaf that even when you shout into her ear, she can’t hear it. She has no money to pay for the coffin and the burial. I gave her 700 francs. She kept asking me questions and complaining and to make her understand what I was saying I wrote it down for her in big letters on a page in my notebook. Then she covered her bad eye and looked with her good eye. Afterward, she kissed me shyly on the neck, not daring to kiss my cheek. She left a little happier.

  I have a base nature. I say this because of the business with the two Lyonnais from Sainte-Roustagne. I do what must
be done, I resolve not to talk about it (if I were a good soul, this would come so naturally that I’d feel no desire to talk about it.) But I do want to talk about it. That’s pretty low. Couldn’t being completely genuine serve as a kind of self-defense against my legend? In any case and no matter what, I’m not genuine enough to do good and keep quiet. Or if I don’t talk about it, I’m so pleased with myself. Like here, for example, I can hardly keep my mouth shut, and isn’t all this talk about my sincerity just a (small) roundabout way of talking about it?

  What a farce this has become! We were just visiting Aunt Noémie in the hospital. Now she has peritonitis. The surgeon said, “She’s going to suffer terribly. She isn’t suffering, but you’ll see.” The nurse came with her syringe of morphine. Refusing the syringe, Noémie was bright, rosy, laughing with everyone, singing. She said, “I don’t like needles. I want to eat, I want bouillon.” Tired of resisting, they told themselves, “Well, she’ll see, we’ll give her bouillon and just see what will happen!” In fact, she drank it, smiling, fresh as a rose, then gently and peacefully fell asleep for a little nap. Vexed, the surgeon crept off, predicting in front of everyone the most rapid, ignominious death and the most atrocious agony.

  Just as I predicted. I received Meyerowitz’s letter, the one I’ve been expecting since he left. Letter full of sugarcoated threats and saccharine insults. And all this time I’ve been trying to salvage what he has jeopardized. (Did I ask him to make an opera out of Le Bout de la route? He wouldn’t drop it until I finally said, “Okay, do it.” But he took that “do it” to mean I was going to do it.)

  January 22

  Yesterday there was aerial combat over Manosque. The town was strewn with machine gun cartridges. A German plane was brought down and fell six kilometers this side of Pierrevert. There were six German fighter planes against a squadron of 100 to 150 English bombers. I was on my bicycle and had just passed Bois d’Asson when the noise made me look up and I saw the enormous squadron. At first they looked exactly like wild geese.

  Received an urgent letter from Hélène whom I can’t seem to escape. But how I despise that whole band, now.

  A visit last evening from Mlle. Laugier on the subject of Martel from Banon. Perhaps I will be able to do something. Her visit to P. in Marseille yielded some results.

  January 23

  We talk about famous friends. There’s Montaigne – Boethius, Castor and Pollux, Achilles and Patroclus. And now let’s add Laurel and Hardy, Rivoire and Carret.

  January 27

  It turns out Aunt Noémie has an intestinal occlusion. It’s the surgeon who claims this and immediately he performs a colostomy. And now there she is with this business! This woman who never suffered, remained fresh as a daisy, laughing and chatting the whole time. First she had so-called cancer, big as anything (his two arms couldn’t stretch wide enough to show how big it was), then she had peritonitis (she didn’t stop laughing and making jokes), but now, whether she wanted it or not, she has had a colostomy. She reeks unbearably. And amid this stench, she keeps laughing and chatting and, touching her index finger to her thumb with what she considers infinite delicacy, she says, “Now I know what I had; I had an intestinal eclosion.”

  But it’s no longer a laughing matter. This morning Mme. Julien, her husband’s daughter, arrived. She was informed by the bursar that the surgeon no longer wanted to keep Aunt at the hospital. He claims that the surgery is complete. That’s a joke. What I think: he doesn’t want her there anymore because everyday he has to live with his remorse. And also because now she has a terrible infection. I say to Mme. Julien that Aunt Noémie, with all her wealth, could pay for a private hospital room. She can do that. She only has to spend her money. None of her children can take her in and care for her. Why should she scrimp for them? Mme. Julien agrees with me. But the real mystery is this sick woman’s good humor and serenity. There was something funny going on there, no doubt about it, but the fact remains that now there she is with her colostomy.

  Fighting in Banon between inhabitants and the Gestapo, and among inhabitants themselves who – just as I had predicted – are paying each other back for all the old neighborhood quarrels over property lines, malicious gossip. They couldn’t care less about the county. There’s talk of machine gun exchanges, but I don’t believe it. They say that Mile de Dauban was shot, tortured, and killed, Mile du Calavon says. I can hardly believe it. But a few days ago, a truck full of resisters with machine guns killed two Gestapo agents in a car on the road to Céreste, near the Lesbros farm, it seems. I heard that Gestapo agents are here as well. The same person told me he had to flee for fear of their machine guns. In any case, the air is not breathable and they evacuated Marseille. We’re in for bad times.

  I received the proofs for La Terre du voleur for which I’m writing a preface. This novel has captivated me from the start. It’s beautiful and that doesn’t muddle its intelligence about the human condition as our poor French writers do and will do more and more, tagging after Malraux who leaves them dumbstruck as a hen that’s found a knife. I read this in a Swiss review of Malraux’s latest novel: “Many readers are afraid of the abstractions that punctuate one of the chapters in this novel. It’s a matter of a long discussion on the ‘permanence and metamorphoses of man.’ Such pages are difficult, no doubt about it,” (says the critic Charles Guyot in Formes et couleurs, no. 4 – 1943) “but to reproach the author for them or even to assert that they are excessive and weigh down Malraux’s beautiful book is to misunderstand the meaning of this work.” Which means, first of all, that Charles Guyot likes showing off, and secondly, that Malraux who is super intelligent has gotten himself all tangled up in his intelligence like a silkworm in its cocoon. Oh, they are really digging France’s grave. First they do a colostomy on her – so that she truly reeks and no one will miss her.

  January 28

  Our Communist revolutionaries are also aesthetes, although they’ll join the fight if necessary (Malraux in Spain); fighting is part of their aesthetic. They have intelligence but not conviction. Malraux is erotic, and Aragon? Surely something, considering Gide’s fear of him. If they ever gain power, I think it’ll be like watching the Marquis de Sade in action. Sadism and heroism share the same root. Both are superficial distractions. But if you told that to a brave comrade (my cousin André, for example), he’d go wide-eyed as a cat pissing in hot coals. If he understood, that is. And by definition, comrades never understand.

  February 10

  My mother came up to have her nails cut. I could hear the tapping of her cane in Barbara’s room. I opened the door and said, “Come in, my dear.” She came in and sat down by my fire. For her it’s a holiday. The whole time we’re cutting nails, she and I, we’re acting out a little drama. I pretend to be a brute who’s hurting her and she squeals as if I were cutting off her fingers. Now she’s resting. She asks me, “What is a submachine gun?” “At your age!” I say, “Why do you need to know what a submachine gun is?” “Well,” she says, “I hear everyone talking about them. Is it like a rifle?” Then she understands that I’m writing and falls silent.

  Wind squalls. Sky heavy with charcoal clouds. Red glow to the south. There was snow this morning. The aftermath of the storm I was caught in at Rozans the other morning.

  Letter from Montherlant regarding Hélène Laguerre’s son. He’s doing what he can, but it isn’t much. Like me. On the other hand, I can’t help finding them ridiculous, the ones who now want to bend the rules of the game in question. Of course I know it could be a matter of life and death of this young man, but while he was playing he didn’t care about the deaths of others. It’s only now that it’s his own death that he wants the rules changed. Every one of those patriots is dishonest, especially those who began as pacifists.

  Montclin has been released. And I’m trying my best to get Martel of Banon released as well. He was arrested by the Gestapo. But if he did anything, it was out of foolishness or a fit of generosity a
nd good-heartedness. Moreover, those in Banon who were really in charge, and aware, the doctor and one other (this is from hearsay), have been released and are refusing to do anything for their retained comrades. A fine display of cowardice. It’s easy to imagine all these braggarts shitting their pants at the first sign of trouble.

  I’m writing the preface for La Terre du voleur.

  Aunt Noémie remains alive, without pain, laughing amid her stench.

  War and revolution never kill the right people.

  Read with great pleasure the delicious second volume of Théâtre by Maurice Boissard. Especially the beautiful Chronique that so aptly and justly attacks the bombast of Perrin, Langevin, and highbrow democrats. What a lovely demagogic weapon science is. Yes, truly, it’s indisputable, the dust in your eyes is gold. It’s good to see someone contradict the “scholars,” even if it’s over political inanities – you’d think he was contradicting Euclid or Newton. Nothing left but to fall into line.

  February 12

  I am small-minded. I never see clearly and completely all the aspects of issues presented to me. I finished the preface for La Terre du voleur in which I wanted to address (given limited time and space) the issue of human solitude. I forgot to mention the solution offered by God. I talked about this for ten minutes with M. Bellion, the sub-prefect; he sees clearly, he goes straight to the point and what he says is right. And once again, I see that my style is overly ornate and unclear. I’m trying, but I’m trying too hard. At best, I barely succeed. Sometimes it seems to me that I’ll pull it off. Or at the very least, make some progress. And then I look at what I did and see that it’s even worse than before. If I approach Deux cavaliers in this way, I’m going to write a beautiful book badly.