André Baillon's Histoire d'une Marie is a largely autobiographical novel in that the main character is Marie Guillot (changing the name from Baillon's wife Marie Vandenberghe), André Baillon is here represented as Henry Brulot and Baillon's second woman (Germaine Lievens) as Germaine Lévine.
The first part of the book sees Marie with her brutish father and good mother who is nevtheless too busy to care for her daughter's education. When Marie gets pregnant by her boyfriend Victor she leaves for Brussels, but unfortunately her child dies and Hector marries someone else. Marie goes to live London with the pimp Vladimir, who hands her over to d'Artagnan, although Marie escapes to Belgium.
In Brussels Marie joins a brothel until François rescues her to live with him, although he dies and Marie is left with little money. She becomes a laundress and puts a small ad in a paper with a view to meeting a man for Sunday walks. As soon as Henry replies she discounts other applicants and soon goes to live with him in Forest near Brussels, where (like Baillon) he lives near a cemetery.
Henry, though, lives very frugally, with pretensions of becoming an author, but can't put words together in the right way. They move to a rural setting in Campine, where Henry also fails at being a farmer. And Marie is later arrested for once more prostituting herself. It's only when he leaves Marie for the pianist Germaine that he writes a book, which is a success.
To his muse Germaine Lievens, André Baillon dedicates Histoire d'une Marie.
The life of André Baillon (1875-1932) was cut short by his fifth (and obviously successful) suicide attempt. An orphan at the age of six (his father having died when he was only four months old), his life was fraught by his own frustrations, his guilt, and his inability to resolve his love life: at one time he was living with two of his women (Marie and Germaine) on different floors.
Psychologist Pie Tshibanda's critical biography was a rare find: this book is completely unavailable via the internet, there's not even a copy held at BNF, and his own publisher's site doesn't recognise it! Oddly though, I've found a link to Tshibanda advertising the book (in 2009) here. This is its tenth anniversary.
As Tshibanda says, as a 'man of colour' (he comes from the Congo), he wanted to write a book about another 'man of colour' (Baillon was red-haired as well as full of complexes), and wanted to show that he wasn't mad as is normally perceived by critics. This is a very well researched book which details Baillon's books in the light of the people and the events in his life, his living with a prostitute, his stays in psychiatric hospitals, etc. Baillon comes through all this as not exactly normal (there is of course no normal, and we are all neurotic in some way) but as someone who is writing about the problems of his life out of therapy, necessity, or mere (partly changed) autobiography. Fascinating stuff.
'1875 – 1932
AU ROMANCIER
ANDRÉ BAILLON
SES AMIS.'
An impressive tribute to the brilliant Belgian-born novelist André Baillon, who after a number of aborted attempts killed himself in 1932. Adolphe Wansart (1873–1954) also made a bust of Baillon.
My other post on André Baillon, which includes my impressions on his novel Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg, gives much more information on the man:
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André Baillon: Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg
André Baillon's troubled life began in Belgium in 1875, his father dying exactly a year after his birth. His mother died when he was six, and he entered a religious school the following year. He was interned in the psychiatric hospital of Salpêtrière in Paris on a few occasions, and after several attempts succeeded in killing himself in 1932. He is buried in Marly-le-Roi (78), and has left a number of imaginative works, one of the most noted being Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg (lit. 'The Luxembourg Earwig' (1928)). Baillon's poet lover Marie du Vivier wrote a biography about him (La Vie tragique d'André Baillon (1946)) and a critical work (Introduction à l'œuvre d'André Baillon (1950)), and although she describes Le Perce-oreille as 'uneven and badly constructed', several literary scholars would disagree with her.
Le Perce-oreille is in three parts and from the beginning we learn that the narrator Marcel is twenty-five ('or fifty') and writing about his life from a psychiatric hospital. Part I describes Marcel's childhood until he is fifteen: the slow dispossession of the family's property until they are living in a kind of boarding house on Île Saint-Louis in the 4th arrondissement; Marcel's religious education, but particularly the occasion when his tormentor Dupéché squashes an earwig in the jardins du Luxembourg; and the brief move to Provence with his 'uncle' and 'aunt' Varia, from whom he discovers the torments of unfulfilled sexual desire.
Part II is the shortest and concerns Marcel's relationship with his friend Charles, Charles's relationship (such as it is) with Jeanne, and Charles's death and funeral.
Part III is concerned with Marcel's relationship with Dupéché and Jeanne; with Dupéché and Louise's wedding ceremony and Marcel's weird behaviour there; and sandwiched between is Marcel's sexual initiation by the much older prostitute Nelly.
These are the mere bones of a story which is not so much a mad narrative as an obsession to write away madness, although the obsession usually takes over and becomes a succession of repetitive thoughts about how things appear to others, how others perceive, twisting ideas, twisting 'reality', whatever that means here. As Nelly tells him: 'Be careful, you live in your head too much'.
Dupéché perhaps has too obvious a surname, and one too easily identifiable with sin (péché), even the devil himself. But his words Marcel often imagines, and it is simple (maybe too simple) to identify him as a personification of Marcel's self-hatred, self-torment, self-torture.
Things of little or no importance take on a big, even enormous, importance. The earwig perhaps represents a number of different things: self-harm (oeil percé), Marcel's madness, Marcel himself, Dupéché, things loved and hated, perhaps above all the aleatory, but not all of these at the same time: the earwig can change at anytime, transmogrify within the text.
I'm sure there's a great deal more to this book, which is frightening, exhilarating, most of all stimulating, although that would require a second reading: some books deserve a second reading, some don't but this most certainly does. This is clearly a forgotten classic, and I'm very pleased that the small Belgian publisher Espace Nord has re-issued it.
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