Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio (1990)

This is, in effect, an autobiography / biography of Frédéric Dard/San-Antonio, who wrote perhaps 288  books, mostly as San-Antonio but also under many other pseudonyms. Jean Durieux tries his best to track down this great figure of French literature, interviewing him in Switzerland and Cannes, for instance, and at times it's initially difficult to figure out who's speaking, such is the resemblance between the slang of the two people. Anyway, in San-Antonio's books it's sometimes difficult to know whether San-Antonio or Frédéric Dard is speaking.

Most of this is culled from tape recordings of what Dard said to Durieux, and much of it is rambling slang. At times it's difficult to believe, as Durieux points out to him, and the bragging seems to be never-ending. But it's clear that we have a man from relatively humble beginnings, born in Bourgoin-Jussieu, who spent a part of his childhood in Saint-Chef (both in Isère), moving to Lyon where the writer Marcel Granger (born in Lons-le-Saunier) sets him on as a young writer for his paper Le Mois â Lyon.

It takes a few years before Dard's books take off, but Armand de Caro encourages his writing San-Antonio books, and he goes to Paris and has a family with Odette and sells many thousands of books and of course becomes rich. There's a great deal of name-dropping, and such people as Édith Piaf and Johnny Hallyday (spelt as Halliday) are just thrown out as a matter of course.

Then there's the failed suicide when Dard is torn between his wife and family with Odette and his new love Françoise de Caro, his publisher's wife. Eventually, he marries Françoise and they end up living in Switzerland with Fabrice (his wife's son by her first husband), Abdel (an African child they adopt), and their own child Joséphine.

And it's the kidnapping of Joséphine and its effects on Dard and his family that occupies more than 100 of the 346 pages in this book, which goes into the precise details of how it was accomplished, the extraordinary lengths the kidnapper went to, and details of his former thefts. 

Gradually, a picture emerges of Dard's life, although it's not necessarily in complete chronological order – the reader has to do a little work – but Jean Durieux has obviously made the most of a very difficult (human) subject.

(Of all the people mentioned here, one unnamed guy runs a kind of utopian restaurant in Courcheval, with a sock to put any contributions for the food consumed hanging on the door. Dard doesn't mention his name, nor the restaurant's name, but says he used to write. A little Googling proved him to be Jean Bouvet, head of 'La Soucoupe' restaurant, and author, among other books, of Billebaude dans les Alpes.)

My Frédéric Dard posts:
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Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio
Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio
San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve
San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes

San-Antonio: Des dragées sans baptême