Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, Dorchester, Dorset

Thomas Hardy designed Max Gate on the outskirts of Dorchester, and lived there with Emma his first wife and later Florence his second wife from 1885 until 1928, the year of his death. During this period he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1892), and his last novel, the highly controversial Jude the Obscure (1895), after which Hardy restricted himself to just writing poetry.

Hardy had a great interest in sundials.

The dining room, which contains some of the original furniture. Two of Hardy's guests were W. B. Yeats and T. E. Lawrence.

The drawing room opposite.

On the first floor, the flushing toilet.

Emma occupied two attic rooms following extensive alterations in 1894.

The master bedroom, first used by Hardy and Emma and later by Florence.

Hardy first used this room as a study. Here he wrote The Woodlanders and corrected proofs of The Mayor of Casterbridge. Towards the end of his life he used this room as a bedroom, and this is the room in which he died.

The bathroom.

 

A bust of T. E. Lawrence lurks in the drawing room on the ground floor.

Outside, the Druid Stone which was found three feet below ground.

Hardy was a huge lover of animals, and this pet cemetery reminds me of Edith Wharton's in Lenox, Massachusetts.

 

The shepherd's hut in the grounds.

 

At the top of High Street in Dorchester is a statue of Thomas Hardy sculpted by Eric Henri Kennington (1888– 1960), the same man who sculpted T. E. Lawrence's bust.

My other Thomas Hardy posts:

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Thomas Hardy in Stinsford, Dorset
Thomas Hardy's birthplace, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset
Thomas Hardy in South Street, Dorchester, Dorset

T. E. Lawrence at Clouds Hill, Dorset

The rear of Clouds Hill. Originally this was probably an early nineteenth century forester's cottage. T. E. Lawrence first rented it in 1923 when he was stationed at Bovington Camp with the Tank Corps, and he bought it two years later. In 1935 he left the RAF and lived here, although he died shortly after, at 46, several days after a motor cycle accident. The cottage was very primitive, with no kitchen, no electricity and no toilet.

The logo above the entrance door reads 'οὐ φροντὶς': 'Why Worry'.

I don't know the significance of the door knocker.

In Lawrence's reading room-cum-bedroom. His specially designed chair indicates his small (5ft 5 inches) height, and of note is his reading stand in the centre.

Lawrence's bathroom.

Upstairs in the Music Room is a bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington (1926).

The bunk room (also called the store room), where a number of Lawrence's guests stayed. The walls are lined with aluminium to keep cool and prevent condensation.

Lawrence had a ship's port hole fitted here.

Outside, the garage which housed Lawrence's Brough Superior motor cycle is now an exhibition room dedicated to the writer. In the year after his death, his brother A. W. Lawrence gave Clouds Hill to the National Trust.

My other T. E. Lawrence posts:

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T. E. Lawrence in Moreton, Dorset
T. E. Lawrence in Lincoln

Fanny Burney and George III in Weymouth, Dorset

As 'Keeper of the Queen's Robes', the author Fanny Burney visited Weymouth on George III's first visit in 1789, the year after his first (possible) attack of porphyria. A plaque at the side of this replica of his bathing machine records Burney's impressions of the royal visit here:

'His majesty is in delightful health, and much improved spirits. All agree he never looked better. The loyalty of this place is excessive; they have dressed out every street with labels of "God save the King"...[The sailors] never approach the house, nor see the king, or his shadow, without beginning to huzza, and going on to three cheers...Nor is this all. Think but of the surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music, concealed in a neighbouring machine, struck up "God save great George our King".'

Thomas Hardy's birthplace, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset

The birthplace of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester.

 

The woodshed, with the outhouse to the right.

The bread oven in the kitchen.

'THOMAS HARDY, O.M.
WAS BORN IN THE ADJACENT
COTTAGE 2nd. JUNE 1840.
AND IN IT WROTE
UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
AND
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED TO
HIS MEMORY BY A FEW OF
HIS AMERICAN ADMIRERS
1931.'

My other Thomas Hardy posts:

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Thomas Hardy in Stinsford, Dorset

Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, Dorchester, Dorset
Thomas Hardy in South Street, Dorchester, Dorset

William Barnes in Dorchester and Winterborne Came, Dorset

The statue occupying pride of place in the centre of Dorchester is not a representation of Thomas Hardy but William Barnes. This is by Edwin Roscoe Mullins, in 1888.

 

 

 

'WILLIAM BARNES

1801 – 1886

 

ZOO NOW I HOPE HIS KINDLY FEACE

IS COME TO VIND A BETTER PLEACE

BUT STILL WI' VO'K A-LEFT BEHIND

HE'LL ALWAYS BE A-KEPT IN MIND.'

I have a very Foucauldian way of looking at institutions: the medical profession exists to give you illnesses, schools exist to prevent you from learning, the police exist to encourage crime, etc. So it makes perfect sense that tourist information centres exist to give you hopelessly misleading information: yesterday, at Dorchester Tourist Information Centre, this proved exactly the case. Now I knew that William Barnes is buried in St Peter's churchyard in Winterborne Came, and although Winterborne Came – a mere two miles from the centre of Dorchester – is a derelict village and the church redundant, both my AA map and Googlemaps show the ex-village but not the ex-church. So I wanted the exact whereabouts, because the Poets' Graves website notes that it's difficult to find. The girl at Dorchester TIC claimed the grave is easy to find, being on the A352 just outside Dorchester, only she called it Whitcombe church. I knew she was wrong and insisted that it was Winterborne Came church that I was looking for. She'd never heard of Winterborne Came, and continued to insist that Barnes' grave is in Whitcombe churchyard. I showed her the Poets' Graves site: 'Winterborne Came'. 'So they're wrong?', I ask. It clearly says it's hard to find too, and she starts backing down slightly and mentions the relativity of difficulty and names, and maybe in the past the church was, well who knows? Certainly the girl at the Dorchester TIC doesn't, although she continues to repeat that we want Whitcombe church. That's it then, and we walk away in the false knowledge that William Barnes's bones are at the side of the A352: I mean, she must know what she's talking about, mustn't she? Er...

 

But then I happen to wander into a secondhand bookstore in South Street and find proof positive that the girl at the Dorchester TIC was talking out of her arse: Douglas Ashdown's An Introduction to William Barnes: The Dorset Poet: 1801–1886 (Tiverton: Dorset Books, 1996). On page 12, there's a map showing Whitcombe church to the right of the A352, but there's a Came church down a road to the left of it. Furthermore, page 43 says that Barnes was buried 'on 11 October in the churchyard of his Winterborne Came church'. No arguments there then. For the benefit of anyone wishing to go there, I have to add that it is indeed extremely difficult to find: heading north on the A352 towards Dorchester, take the final unnamed road on the left about half a mile south of Max Gate, continue for about half a mile until you reach a triangle, park on it and walk a few hundred yards down the road on the left, then turn down a path on the right after a tiny path that says 'To the Church'. (In retrospect, I should have stuck a middle finger up in the direction of Dorchester TIC: they'd wasted a lot of my time.)

'IN MEMORY OF

WILLIAM BARNES

DIED OCT. 7th 1886

AGED 86 YEARS

FOR 24 YEARS RECTOR

OF THIS PARISH

 

THIS MEMORIAL

WAS RAISED TO HIS MEMORY BY HIS

CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN'

 

St Peter's, Winterborne Came.

 

A view from the pulpit.

 

A view of the chancel.

Church of St Peter: Winterborne Came, Dorset (London: The Churches Conservation Trust, 2009).

My other William Barnes post:
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Douglas Ashdown: An Introduction to William Barnes

Cecil Day Lewis in Stinsford, Dorset

'CECIL
DAY LEWIS

1904–1972

Poet Laureate
 

Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say.
Ask my song.'

Cecil Day Lewis was a great admirer of Thomas Hardy and his wish to be buried as close as possible to him was granted.

Thomas Hardy in Stinsford, Dorset

'HERE  LIES THE HEART OF

THOMAS HARDY OM

SON OF THOMAS AND JEMIMA HARDY

HE WAS BORN AT UPPER BOCKHAMPTON 2 JUNE 1840

AND DIED AT MAX GATE DORCHESTER 11 JANUARY 1928

HIS ASHES REST IN POETS CORNER WESTMINSTSER ABBEY'

 

Thomas Hardy's father and grandfather played viol and violin in the choir at Stinsford church for many years in the early part of the nineteenth century. Hardy himself knew this place well, and he shares this land with his parents, his wives Emma and Florence, and other members of the Hardy family. In his novel Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) he disguises the name of he village as 'Mellstock'.

 

My other Thomas Hardy posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, Dorchester, Dorset
Thomas Hardy's birthplace, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset
Thomas Hardy in South Street, Dorchester, Dorset

T. E. Lawrence in Moreton, Dorset

'TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF

T.E. LAWRENCE

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE

OXFORD

BORN 10 AUGUST 1888

DIED 19 MAY 1935'

The mother of T.E Lawrence, more familiarly known as Lawrence of Arabia, wanted to emphasise his academic achievements as opposed to his military ones.

Lawrence's funeral service took place at St Nicolas Church, Moreton, and two of the many people present included Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. The grave above is in a cemetery extension some yards beyond the church.

My other T. E. lawrence posts:

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T. E. Lawrence at Clouds Hill, Dorset
T. E. Lawrence in Lincoln

William Thompson in Weymouth, Dorset

 

'WILLIAM THOMPSON
1822–1879
NATURALIST AND
PIONEER OF UNDERWATER
PHOTOGRAPHY
LIVED HERE'

It was here in the town of Weymouth, at 11 Frederick Place, that William Thompson also worked as a solicitor, although this certainly wasn't of great interest to him: amazingly, in 1856 – when photography was still in its very early years – he produced the first ever underwater photograph. This, as is perhaps to be expected, was a little fuzzy, although it is clear that Thompson had photographed rocks and seaweed.

Jean Anglade: La Maîtresse au piquet (1996)

Jean Anglade turned one hundred this March, and has written a great number of novels. Born in the Auvergne, an area which his novels document, he nevertheless refuses to call himself a regional writer.

La Maîtresse au piquet was published when Anglade was over eighty, and concerns the life of Frédérique (or Frédo for short) who comes from working-class origins and was partly brought up by her widowed aunt in Paris and goes on to become a primary school teacher in the Zones d'éducation prioritaire in the 18ème. Life is stressful teaching children from the HLMs, and difficulties not only come from the pupils but from their parents and the head teacher. After a long love affair with travel agent Claude, she is unceremoniously dumped by her girlfriend and is devastated. To the amazement of her friends and associates, she decides to become a supply teacher in the Auvergne, moving to the hamlet of Antaillat near the small town of Issoire: it would be difficult to find anywhere so unlike Paris.

Initially Frédo sees her new job – small classes of willing students, no discipline problems – as a paradise compared to Paris. And although she comes to realise it's not quite as simple as that, this original impression isn't too far from the truth as she sees it. The Chtitny family are travellers and leave two children at the school she's temping at: they may have fleas that Frédo has to cope with, but Jean-Paul is a kind of noble savage with a great knowledge of the animal kingdom, as she begins to realise when she sees a brown lizard licking spittle from his finger.

Despite the book cover, most of the book is concerned with Frédo's extracurricular activities, such as getting to understand the Kleisters from a distance: they are understandably ostracised in Antaillat because the couple sing Nazi songs and the husband wears a belt with swastikas around it. The other residents of Antaillat don't take her curiosity seriously, and welcome the newcomer. And Frédo soon settles in with the pet rabbit Bunny, her goldfish Krasucki and Krasuckienne, not forgetting her car Choupette.

Things change when Frédo's car gets damaged and Vincent does the repairs. She thinks he looks like Gérard Depardieu in Les Valseuses: Beurk !, as her pupils might have said to things that make them want to vomit. Vincent, in a love story I find a little difficult to believe, becomes Frédo's smicard as she calls him in the book – a man on the minimum wage who drives a clapped-out deuche, has no culture as such to boast about, no ambition, and who can only spell very badly. Frédo starts teaching him, well aware of the fruitlessness of the task. She seems to hover between accepting him for his faults and just ditching him, especially as he doesn't care about driving over the alcohol limit, and on one occasion she makes him a meal and he turns up very late pissed out of his skull after celebrating with friends.

Not exactly the foundations for the perfect relationship, you might think. But then Frédo is diagnosed with breast cancer and has a single mastectomy and Vincent stands by her, even when it's possible that the cancer might be spreading. Frédo and Vincent are too old to have children, but then suddenly the magic Vincent pulls a rabbit out of the hat and reveals that he has a child by a former girlfriend who's being looked after by the grandparents, and that there's a chance they'll be able to adopt him. As it turns out, the only condition the grandparents make is that Frédo and Vincent are married, a condition that the happy couple are only too plesed to fulfil. So, here's a readymade family that Frédo obviously hopes will last as long as it can – she has a great deal of love to catch up with.

This is an interesting novel but at 370 pages is too long and some fat could certainly be cut from it. One thing that really annoyed me was Frédo's correcting of Vincent's speech because he doesn't use the imperfect subjunctive. What? She may have been a little angry, but there's absolutely no excuse for this pedantry, or are we supposed to laugh at it and criticise her? Also, narrator Frédo (or should that be Jean Anglade?) needs to check out use of English: 'To keep the pie and to eat it'? Well, 'To have your cake and eat it', yes.

Faïza Guène: Kiffe kiffe demain | Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (2004)

Faïza Guène was nineteen when this book was published. It concerns a fifteen-year-old girl – not representative of herself – of Moroccan parents living in a government-owned high-rise block (or HLM) in Livry-Gargan on the outskirts of Paris. It's written in the vernacular of youth, heavily laden with slang words and expressions, often in verlan, or backslang. And it's often very funny, with inventive observations of people.

Doria's father has left the family to return to Morocco to find a new wife, a more fertile one who can produce the son he yearns for. He leaves behind his first wife Yasmina, who has very basic French and is forced to work in a hotel under poor working conditions and very little money. Doria is depressed and withdrawn and gets free sessions with the elderly psychologist Mme Burlaud, who smells of flea powder. Doria, the narrator, originally intended to call the book 'Kif-kif demain', indicating that one of her boring days just follows another.

The person she most relates to is Hamoudi, a twenty-eight-year old she sees as too young to be a father figure. He has been in prison for an offence he says Doria is too young to hear about, and being unemployed he spends his days selling drugs, smoking dope and, er, quoting Rimbaud. Doria becomes jealous when he finds a girlfriend, although towards the end she accepts things when he settles down with a steady job and is planning to marry Lila, the woman whose child Doria used to look after.

Doria isn't doing too well at school and the local bright spark Nabil occasionally helps her with her work, although she's initially shocked – in fact disgusted – when he clumsily steals a kiss on leaving her on one occasion. She doesn't know what she'll do on leaving school, but can't see herself working in a fastfood restaurant: 'What size drink? Small medium or large? To drink in or take out? For or against abortion?'

Occasionally the pseudo-worldly-wise banter gives way to a more poetic bleakness: 'Outside, it was as grey as the tower block concrete and the raindrops were very fine, as if God was spitting down on us.' (My translations.)

However, the ending is much more optimistic: Yasmina has been given literacy lessons and now works in a local government canteen, Hamoudi is very happy with his new family, Mme Burlaud says Doria no longer needs her services, and Doria herself can now even envisage a possible future in which Nabil might play a part. That's why she changes the title to Kiffe kiffe demain – 'kiffer' is a slang word meaning 'to like' someone or something.

Guy Hocquenghem: L'amour en relief | Love in Relief (1982)

Guy Hocquenghem's L'Amour en relief (translated as Love in Relief) is a long, very strange mixture of essay on blindness, social criticism, metaphor for homosexuality, thriller, picaresque adventure and science fiction novel. With the exception of a coda narrated by the fictitious Dr Philippe Marcœur, there are two alternating narrative voices: the more prominent comes from the blind Amar, a young man originally from Tunisia; and the other is of a psychologically disturbed woman who was for a time known as Andréa: identity is subject to flux in this book.

Amar goes blind following a motor-cycle accident in his native Tunisia, although he is adopted by the wealthy and elderly Mrs. Halloween, who briefly takes him to France where his half-sisters live, and then to the USA. Amar has previously had sex with Andréa in Tunisia, although Mrs. Halloween just performs fellatio on him after putting her false teeth in a glass, and introduces him to other probably elderly women who pay him for sex. But Mrs Halloween dies, leaving all her money to her cat Zita, who also appears to die at the same time.

I mention this book as partly an essay in blindness because it views blindness not from the usual standpoint of the sighted, but of that of the blind, who – particularly from Amar's point of view – see far more than them. It's a truism that the blind rely on their other senses and as a result make far more use of them than people who can 'see', and although Amar is particularly gifted in this respect L'Amour en relief makes a very strong case for blindness in relation to the acuteness of the other senses.

Amar goes to the Valentine McPherson institution for a year before 'escaping' from it, and there he meets others who in the opinion of the Fathers who run it are blind: some suffer from spatial disorders, being unable to locate objects; others are incapable of looking from one object to another and simply fix their vision on one thing; others have no visual memory; and others have no sense of dimension. Huong has alexia, meaning he is unable to read or write in black: as a result he uses Braille, although Amar scorns this as one of the traps the sighted have devised for the blind: in many ways this is a highly subversive novel. When I read the back cover and saw that Claire Gallois in Le Figaro suggested that the novel perhaps isn't suitable for libraries in young girls' convents I thought it must be because of its (probably strong homosexual) content, but the sex in it is – in these days at least – very tame indeed.

Institutions of course tend not to be subversive, and Amar discovers that the in-mates are being dosed with bromide to kill their sex drive. As a person who has come to learn a great deal from the tactility of the sex act, this practice is evidently anathema to Amar, who does however manage to form a sexual relationship with one of the boys in the institution.

Amar succeeds in finding a lucrative job in West Hollywood: as a gigolo to both men and women – he has no particular gender preference. Guided by the cat Zita – who has now reappeared – with the aid of dark glasses he always speedily gets a lift to his favourite pick-up spot by hitching.

Meanwhile Andréa tracks Amar down by secretly following him around the world, although she takes some time to get together with him sexually again, and claims (to the reader) to be pregnant by him. From what Philippe says about her in his coda the reader may have just cause to doubt her word.

But then, why should the reader take Philippe's as written in stone? He thinks Amar is a dangerous trafficker of heroin on a big scale, and certainly he's imprisoned for 247 years for smuggling the drug, but then there's the possibility of getting out in twenty years after the authorities turn him into a kind of semi-computer who/which can pick up radio signals from the Russians. That's not even mentioning the odd case of Larry, the neurophysician who has prosopagnosia, meaning he can't remember people's faces – but that's (yet) another of the stories in this very strange, but mostly fascinating, novel.

Antoine Volodine: Bardo or not Bardo (2004)

Antoine Volodine – who had a Russian grandmother and has translated some Russian books – is often mentioned in the same context as Fernando Pessoa because of his heteronyms: Elli Kronauer, Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassmann. In 1987 his Rituel du mépris – published the previous year – won the Grand Prix de la science-fiction française, although Volodine has been eager to dissociate himself from any literary genre. He calls his writing 'post-exotique', and far from associating with Pessoa, whose voices are distinct stylistically and in terms of genre, Volodine's voices – while different from each other – say the same thing but at different moments.

This is my first Volodine book, so I can't possibly hope to understand what this very prolific writer is trying to do. But I appreciate first of all the playfulness of the title Bardo or not bardo, the French title of his book which obviously alludes to Shakespeare's internationally known line from his character Hamlet's soliloquy 'To be or not to be', and of course a second allusion is to the 'Bard' himself.

Bardo or not bardo is in seven sections, none of which is so much sequentially as thematically linked: 'Bardo' refers to the em>Bardo Thödol, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, according to which the newly dead spend forty-nine days in a kind of limbo. That is seven weeks, to which the seven sections of the books relate, after which they will enter the womb of a person or an animal and become reincarnated, or (ideally) they will have lost their individuality, their ego, and attained nirvana.

The trouble – or the fun, and Volodine's book is nothing if not funny – is that in the writer's political wasteland the communists, anarchists, bankers, murders and other criminals refuse to play the game and choose to adopt another incarnation, thus rebelling against the lamas' wishes for extreme self-negation.

Reincarnation as a human is not so easy to attain, and Glouchenko – in denial of his death – is compelled when the time comes to re-enter life as a monkey: not anything like as bad as becoming a spider like Dadokian. Oddly, there is something of the Beckettian in this world where ex-long-term convicts and ex-mental patients meet – dead, in the Bardo – before coming to life again as something horrific, although the burlesque easily wins over any existential anguish. And something else that's odd: Volodine sounds like a drug. But he hasn't exactly got me hooked yet.

Jean-Pierre Martinet: L'Ombre des forêts (1987)

In the Afterword to L'Ombre des forêts (lit. 'The Shadow of the Forests'), Alfred Eibel states 'Un roman digne de ce nom devrait créer une sorte de choc nerveux sinon à quoi bon la litterature, autant téléphoner à un copain pour prendre de ses nouvelles, comme disait Georges Perros' ('A novel worthy of that name should create a kind of nervous shock or else what value does literature have: you may just as well phone up a friend and ask him for the latest news, as Georges Perros used to say'). I can understand this: there's the kind of literature that holds your attention, keeps you reading and transfixed to the text but from which at the same time you learn nothing, you've just whiled away some hours or even days, but from which you've escaped with your pre-set ideas intact, your precious mental state unaffected, and all is as it was: but the truth is that you haven't been reading a book so much as mentally masturbating. Jean-Pierre Martinet is a perfect cure for that, although he'll change you. For ever.

If you're easily disturbed then don't read Jean-Pierre Martinet, if you have fixed ideas about what literature should be then don't read Jean-Pierre Martinet, but if you like literary challenges then Jean-Pierre Martinet's the guy for you. L'Ombre des forêts, at 242 pages, is only half the size of his masterpiece Jérôme (1978), although the earlier La Somnolence (1975) – at about the same number of pages as L'Ombre des forêts and which I have yet to read – may well be just the book for Martinet virgins to begin their exploration of this very odd, and often terrifying, writer.

Jean-Pierre Martinet died before he was fifty of a drink-related illness, and drink plays a large part in the lives of the five characters in this book. All of the characters are – this is Martinet after all – to some extent mad and/or obsessive, withdrawn from society at the same time as they are (to a minor degree) also a part of it. The descriptions are usually dreamlike, causing the reader to doubt the reliability of the narrator.

Firstly there's Monsieur, who is not given – and doesn't give himself – another name. He lives in a house in the imaginary small town of Rowena on the Franco-German frontier and has enough money to live on without actually being rich. He has retreated from the social world to such an extent that he has thrown his address book down the gutter, left his answering machine on wasteland, and since moving in about a year ago experiences vicarious enjoyment reading the fast-diminishing mail of the people who used to live in the house but died in a car crash. His principal relationship is with 'Globe sale', his lamp which is always lit and never dusted, left to collect insects attracted to it.

Secondly there's Céleste, Monsieur's housekeeper who doesn't have much to do apart from bring Monsieur his provisions, whisky and beer perhaps being the priority. She also changes the bed linen in the spare rooms, even though there are never any guests. She falls to sleep watching television and drinking pastis neat, on one occasion dropping the bottle and then licking up the spilt liquid along with the dust and fluff.

Thirdly, Rose Poussiére, who is no doubt named after the influential experimental novel of the same name by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, and who used to be called Edwina Steiner. She lives in an unsavoury hotel called Saratoga and is perhaps the maddest of all the characters. She only goes out when there's no possibility of rain as she is frightened of disintegrating in it. She is most probably deluded about several things, although it's not possible to judge clearly.

A fourth character is the duc de Reschwig, who is a tramp who used to be the film director Jean Bolaine, who wanted to make a film on Friedrich Hölderlin, although he intended his work to last for seventy-three years – the length of Hölderlin's own life: his frustration over the failure, and the subsequent failure of his marriage, led to him gouging out his eyes. He now spends his time looking in dustbins for pairs of women's tights, which he washes and adds to his collection. He is last seen living after a tussle with Monsieur, during which the latter finishes the tramp's last swigs of rum.

Finally, there's Oeil-de-Lynx, as Monsieur calls Jacques Torny, the dozy and forgetful barman at the Saratoga, who has a glass eye but not as he says from his days as a sailor because he never was a sailor. Rose Poussiére is in love with him after meeting him in the bar once, and towards the end of the book she leaves the hotel to meet him although she's not sure where she should go.

On entering the woods Rose Poussiére discovers that a tramp has been found dead in the river after three days. Also after three days, Monsieur wakes up in his house to find that in his drunkenness he's dismissed Céleste, although he remembers drinking in the presence of Oeil-de-Lynx at the Saratoga on leaving Reschwig in the woods, and catching sight of Rose Poussière from her hotel window before drinking there: he really has to see her, although the reader isn't too sure why he feels this need. He pays Oeil-de-Lynx handsomely to see Rose, although when he enters her room she kills herself by jumping from the hotel window and he follows her.

Jean-Pierre Martinet is an important literary talent. More than twenty years after he drank himself to death he is beginning to be recognised. But he nevertheless remains an obscure literary figure in the country of his birth, and needless to say he hasn't been translated into English.

My other Jean-Pierre Martinet posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La Somnolence
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Jérôme
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Nuits bleues, calmes bières
Jean-Pierre Martinet: La grande vie | The High Life
Jean-Pierre Martinet: Ceux qui n'en mènent pas large
Capharnaüm 2: Jean-Pierre Martinet sans illusions...

Jacques Chessex: L'Ogre | The Tyrant (1973)

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz is seen as one of the founders of French Swiss literature, so it's perhaps unsurprising that his surname is mentioned in passing in French Swiss writer Jacques Chessex's L'Ogre (translated as The Tyrant). Like Ramuz's Jean-Luc Persécuté (1908), L'Ogre is a tale of jealousy, madness and suicide.

 

There are some autobiographical similarities between L'Ogre and Chessex's life, although it was Chessex's father who killed himself when his son was twenty-two, whereas Jacques died in 1909 of a heart attack while defending his positive position on Polanski during a talk: in L'Ogre, it's the protagonist Jean Calmet who kills himself as a result of his father Paul's (mainly) psychological abuse of his son.

 

Dr Paul Calmet is a respected general practitioner who is a tyrant at home, and four of his children soon leave, with the exception of the youngest – in French the benjamin – who is named Jean-Benjamin, to Jean's disgust. Jean becomes a teacher of Latin literature in a lycée in Lausanne, but who even after the death of his father – the eponymous Ogre, of course – is incapable of forgetting the dreadful psychological legacy he's saddled with: in fact it grows much worse and he begins hallucinating, finding it difficult to comprehend that Paul Calmet is in fact dead.

 

Jean – who is thirty-nine years old – goes to the local Café de l'Evêché every day, and many of his students go there too. It is there that he meets the nineteen-year-old Thérèse Dubois, whom he calls 'la Fille au Chat', and with whom he has a sexual relationship. Although it's not a full sexual relationship because Jean suffers from a kind of impotence because he sees his father watching him and mocking him and so is incapable of performing. He has never had a regular sexual relationship with anyone before, having mainly resorted to masturbation and prostitutes, such as the fifty-five-year-old Pernette Colomb. And his sexual problems most probably stem from when he was a timid nineteen-year-old virgin with a seventeen-year-old girlfriend Liliane, whose virginity was given up to his father, and on one occasion Jean even surprises them at it.

 

And on another occasion at the Café de l'Evêché Jean suddenly breaks down in full view of many lycée students and la Fille au Chat and collapses on the table, causing some damage to glasses as well as a cut to his chin. This doesn't bother la Fille au Chat, who comforts him in her bed, but head teacher Grappe has received complaints about the behaviour of his otherwise model teacher and subjects him to a gruelling interview. But it's not in Jean's nature to reveal any of his problems to anyone, and anyway Grappe – who could almost, the head believes, be Jean's father – thinks that Jean's father was a wonderful man. How do you overturn local legends? Well, you don't because it's too difficult, especially if you're not given to talking about your problems.

 

Conclusion? Suicide is of course extreme, but  some choose it.

 

La Fille au Chat understandably sees herself as a free spirit because she's still in her teens, and it's also understandable that she should want to enjoy a more conventional sexual relationship with Marc, who's virtually her own age. But then, Jean is Marc's teacher and has to see his 'rival' every day. It's not easy, particularly if you can't get it up and can't explain why. So a frustrated and jealous Jean has a few days off school, although he doesn't know that these are his last days.

 

In fact he doesn't know he's going to die until the moment comes when he wakes up and he slits his wrists at home. And it takes twenty-five minutes for him to die from loss of blood, and the final pages quite graphically describe the death and I can understand that some readers chose to look away, not read anymore. I can also understand why this book – a very powerful scream of the outsider – won the prix Goncourt in 1973.