Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1875 [sic] –1970 (1990)

Pierre Citron's Giono 1875 [sic] -1970 gets off to a bad start because the title page (as opposed to the correct cover title) makes his date of birth twenty years before it in fact was: he was of course born in 1895. That weird proofreading oversight – all the weirder because Seuil is a major publishing house – notwithstanding, this is still a huge contribution to knowledge of Jean Giono, a masterly work, on a great author, written by someone who not only had access to Giono's papers, but who knew him over a large period of time. I hesitate to call this the definitive work on Giono only because I believe Citron's later unpublished 'Les Ordres étranges. Sur les amours de Giono' should adjust the gaping hole in this biography – when the opening of it is allowed in, I think, 2040! But more of that below.

This biography is a work by an academic, a considerable 670-page book with copious textual apparatus. It's also a critical biography, including Giono's many works: his novels, plays, non-fiction, newspaper articles, film work, etc. And Citron often gives his opinion of the value of these works in Giono's oeuvre as a whole. I found Citron's brief mention of Giono's earlier substantivising of adjectives fascinating: 'le sensible des cuisses', 'le gluant du courant', 'le profond de sa pipe', etc –  this is part of his description of how Giono's writing develops between the years before and after World War II.

Citron's book isn't a eulogy of the man, either: it includes his faults, although that is at the same time a way of fleshing the man out, humanising him more. And of course in so doing it adds humour to the text: it's interesting to learn, for instance, of Giono's clumsiness, of how he tried to learn to drive earlier in his life when he was working in a bank in Manosque but failed to get the hang of a work colleague's Citroën. So it may appear odd that Giono, in his correspondence home during World War I, should mention apparent physical feats: Citron realises that Giono is merely trying to put his worried family's mind at rest, knowing from his experiences of playing darts and boules with him that Giono really was incorrigibly clumsy, that he had great problems with objects. He even mentions the time that Giono, in his Le Paraïs home, called out an electrician to mend his broken radio: he'd just forgotten to plug it in.

In Giono's work untruths have an importance, and as a story-teller – in other words a kind of professional liar – he often had a cavalier attitude to the truth: he couldn't, for instance, understand why Readers' Digest didn't like the work he had, as asked, sent them ('L'Homme qui plantait des arbres') but invented (which wasn't asked for) the man who planted trees: why bother to commission a story-teller if he wasn't allowed to tell stories? Pure and simply, Giono was often economical with the truth, treated it not so much perhaps with contempt but with indifference: any numbers he mentioned might well be exaggerated, certainly they changed frequently during different tellings.

This, in a roundabout way, brings us to how Pierre Citron, in writing this book, entered into a 'moral contract' with Giono's daughter Sylvie not to make any mention of Giono's extra-marital affairs, and this contract was also included in the Pléiadisation of his work. This means that there is only a fleeting mention of Simone Téry, only a few mentions of Hélène Laguerre (as a pacifist friend), but no mention at all of the woman who influenced a number of aspects of Giono's work (including the bizarre second half of the biography on Herman Melville – Pour Saluer Melville (1974)), a woman who appears in Giono's work under different guises, with whom Giono had a passionate love affair, and to whom he wrote well over a thousand letters between 1939 and the year of his death in 1970 : Blanche Meyer, who first came to Manosque with her solicitor husband, and first came to Giono's attention when she wanted a copy of Joyce's Ulysses from a local bookseller.

The vast majority of Giono's letters went to Yale University in Connecticut, and from these Patricia A. Le Page wrote her university thesis 'Space of Passion: The Love Letters of Jean Giono to Blanche Meyer' in 2004. The truth was at last out. Annick Stevenson's book Jean Giono et Blanche Meyer reached a larger public in 2007. In 2013 Pierre Citron's widow Suzanne wrote an article in Histoires Littéraires revealing the existence of the 232-page typescript 'Les Ordres étranges. Sur les amours de Jean Giono', which her husband had deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale. The half-title refers to an expression which appears in Giono's novel Le Chant du monde: 'Dessous campait cette partie de sa chair d'où jaillissaient les ordres étranges', which is obviously a reference to an erection. The following year (2014) the novelist and singer Taos Amrouche's Cahiers Intimes were published posthumously; this is a 476-page collection of her writings in her diaries, and it was quite evident that she was very much in love with Giono, although their liaison was brief. She mentions one sentence that a number of writers have repeated: 'Il m’a prise par trois fois et pour la première fois, il a osé me retourner et entrer par-derrière' ('He took me on three occasions, on the first of which he dared to turn me round and enter me from behind'): oddly, the title of the short chapter in Citron's typescript (revealed by Suzanne) is called 'Taos ou la tentation refusée' – an instance of Giono lying again?

My Jean Giono posts:
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Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Pierre Citron and others in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (04)

In Guide des tombes d’hommes célèbres Bertrand Beyern describes Montjustin in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence as being in a ‘dream setting’ in ‘a tiny village at the end of the world’. I know what he means. The road is tarmacked but mainly slender, and 2.5 kilometres seem much longer. We drove up a road which seemed to be going up a mountain, until I turned back, thinking we must have missed it in a few houses we’d passed. On the way back a work van managed just to get by, although not before I’d asked the driver of the whereabouts of the cemetery. He looked at me as if I were a little crazy, but I told him I was certain that it was in Montjustin, so all he could do was shrug his shoulders. Further down I saw a woman mowing the grass and asked her about the cemetery, which she told me was back where I’d come from, in the village. There’s a village up there? Yes, there is (population 57 in 2015), so we turned back and found it, but didn’t know where to go in a place with just a few houses, no shops, no bar, no obvious administrative buildings, but a post box. I parked in a vacant area off the road, looked for life, and found a guy who told me to walk up the village street after parking in the proper (I’d say about seven-space) car park, ignore the left turn after 50 metres, then I’d find a school after 300 metres, and the cemetery was ‘down’ from that. I found the school but couldn’t figure out what to do after that, but fortunately I saw another woman who shook us by the hand in great welcome, after which I asked her for directions to the cemetery. She was delightful, and showed us the original medieval cemetery, which is about the size of an average bathroom and I could only see one grave. She also showed us a group of cypress trees which appeared to be a great distance away, and pointed out that this is where the cemetery is. However, she kindly led us back in front of the school, where there was a dirt track marked as leading to the cemetery (but which you can only see on the way back!) and said that led directly to the cemetery. My partner Penny was worried about the distance, so I told the woman Penny couldn’t understand our conversation and wanted to know how far away it was, and the answer was only five minutes. I’d say four minutes, but at least we’d made it to the ‘end of the world’ in relatively quick time. I noticed that the cemetery gates (spelt right, Morrissey!) were held together by a piece of waxed rope, and figured that they should always be kept so. On our return I met the guy who’d given us the original directions, who asked us if we’d found the place, and to his second question, I assured him that we’d closed the gates.

Ah yes, the cemetery in Montjustin: there are in fact two cemeteries there, one of which includes the grave of the world-famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). Pierre Citron (1919–2010), an expert on Jean Giono whose doctoral thesis was titled La poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire, is also buried here.

Unfortunately, it was only after my visit today that I learned of the second adjoining cemetery: how we both missed it is beyond me. In it are the graves of the poets Jean Mogin (1921–86) and his wife Lucienne Desnoues (1921–2004), as well as the friend of Jean Giono, the poet, painter and engraver Lucien Jacques (1891–1961) and the painter Serge Fiorio. A return journey was essential.

One of the cemeteries in Montjustin.

Cartier-Bresson's wife, the Belgian photographer Martine Franck (1938–2012).

'Vagins vigilants'. Vigilant vaginas. On the window of a house in Montjustin.

My Montjustin posts:
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Henri Cartier-Bresson, Pierre Citron and others in Montjustin
Serge Fiorio in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Lucien Jacques in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Jean Mogin in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Lucienne Desnoues in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Suzanne Citron in Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence