Ronald Firbank: Prancing Nigger, aka Sorrow in Sunlight (1924)

The original title of Roland Firbank's short 1924 novel, Prancing Nigger, has today been politically corrected to Sorrow in Sunlight. Partly written in Havana, this book – written by a person with much obvious affection for black people – contains a great deal of conversation, mostly that of the kind we would normally expect to find in fiction about the slave plantations. The narrative is equally colourful: there are not only references to exotic flora and fauna, but the language itself is strange and exotic:

'One evening, towards sundown, just as the city lifts its awnings, and the deserted streets start seething with delight, [Charlie] left his home to enjoy the grateful air. It had been a day of singular oppressiveness, and, not expecting much of the vesperal breezes, he had borrowed his mother's small Pompadour fan.'

This book is not set in the US but on an unnamed Caribbean island, where a family – Mrs Mouth and her husband (whom she calls 'Prancing Nigger') and their children Miami (or Mimi), Charlie and Edna. Mrs Mouth has decided that they are to move from the small village of Mediavilla to the city of Cuna-Cuna, where her children can be educated, where the family can 'enter Society': yes, it's a form of social improvement, where they will be wearing dresses, shirts and trousers instead of leaves and loincloths.

So they move to the bright lights but university isn't ready for the children, although (passing through an earthquake and a religious revival) two of them find an unplanned future: the younger Edna starts living in style with Madame Diaz's son (although probably not for long), whereas Charlie is 'fast going to pieces, having joined the Promenade of a notorious Bar with its bright particular galaxy of boys.'

Firbank's writing is delightfully odd, even when he occasionally seems to be slightly mis-translating from an unknown foreign language.

Christophe Tison: Il m'aimait (2004)

This should be a deeply shocking book, and indeed it is, as it's about homosexual abuse, pedophilia, although it's not condemnatory, not revelatory. That, perhaps, is one of the most disturbing things about this part autobiography. Or not: the past is a different country.

Separated, a mother is happy to leave a man with her child – the cute, (effeminate-looking?) kid on the cover, who could be, Tison muses, eleven, twelve, maybe older? Leaves him to be sexually abused frequently. Unsurprisingly, Tison grows up sexually mature beyond his years, and goes on to enjoy heterosexual relations.

But this isn't, say, Flavie Flament and David Hamilton: no, Christophe Tison isn't revealing the name of his sexual abuser: after all, when kids of his age were grooving on, for example, the likes of Claude François, he had been introduced to the worlds of Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, David Bowie.

A disturbing book indeed, particularly as it neither asks nor answers any questions.

Édouard Louis: Qui a tué mon père (2018)

After the devastating En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014) and Historie de la violence (2016), Édouard Louis continues his autobiographical (mixed with his sociological, and this time more polictical) writings. In his first novel his father is severely criticised, although in this third autobiographical novel his father is far more humanised, as opposed to his half-brother Vincent. The title of the new book is deliberately ambiguous: Qui a tué mon père ('Who Killed My Father') is without a question mark: this is not a question asked by the author, but a fact.

We learn that the narrator's father, following an accident, is now suffering with a serious heart complaint, can no longer drink or drive, gets breathless after only going a few steps, and this at the age of only fifty. Taking the sociological angle, Édouard Louis says his masculinist beliefs have condemned him to live in poverty: school being seen as 'effeminate', his father left as soon as he could to take up work in the factory his forefathers had worked in. Although violence (such as that doled out by his paternal grandfather) hasn't been passed on, and the father takes it out on other things.

Louis in one respect turns Sartre on his head: his father's life proves that he isn't what he's done, but what he's not done, because society has prevented him from doing it. But there are still many criticisms (due to societal pressures and problems, of course) of the things his father's said, such as 'Eddy' wanting the DVD Titanic as a present, which his father sees as a 'girls' film'; such as his father refusing to recognise 'Eddy' (a word not actually mentioned in this book) singing in a girls' voice at 'concert'; his father wishes he worked in a mortuary, where at least the dead can't piss him off.

And yet Louis's father, he discovers, had (at least once) dressed in female clothing, had attracted his wife by his dancing, but has shrugged any tramellings of 'femininity' away to become 'a man'. As a result, by moving straight to work from elementary schooling, he has chosen to live like a child for the rest of his life, succumbing to the slightest desires, drinking to excess, staying out all night if the fancy takes him. After her husband spends a huge amount of the housekeeping on a passing fair, his mother realises that she has not married a man but a child.

Towards the end of this novel Édouard Louis gets seriously political and starts making accusations: Jacques Chirac and his health minister Xavier Bertrand cut down on remimbursements for digestive problems, so they destroyed his father's intestines; Nicholas Sarkozy and his 'accomplice' Martin Hirsch replaced the RMI with the RSA, forcing people into work, and Louis' father with a bad back was harrassed into taking up work; under the government of Holland and Vals, helped by work minister Myriam El Khomri, the notorious 'loi travail' forced Louis' father into working more; and of course, under the new very right wing régime, Macron believes 'that the poor are too rich, that the rich aren't rich enough'.

It's fitting that Édouard Louis mentioned Ken Loach's film I, Daniel Blake a few weeks ago on La Grande Librairie, because the Thatcherite and Blairite privatisation horrors that long ago destroyed Britain are now happening in France, although I don't think very many people are like Édouard Louis, with sufficient knowledge to realise what is happening to them under Macron and Philippe. It is tragic, and this is Édouard Louis's best book by far.

Roger Peyrefitte: Les Amours singulières (1949)

Strange loves indeed. In a few introductory paragraphs to Roger Peyrefitte's Les Amours singulières, the book reveals that the two stories here, 'La Maîtresse du piano'and 'Le Baron de Gloeden', show different loves: the first destructive, the second not.

'La Maîtresse du piano' involves the young Czech Mathias, who has come to Paris to paint but ends up as a photographer. He meets the young René at art classes, and he befriends him and introduces him to his mother the piano teacher, Mme Bertin. When asked, Mathias tells René he's a virgin, whereas René startles him by saying that his mother likes him to keep her widowed friends happy, that at present he's satisfying three of them, and even that his mother fancies Mathias. Mathias says he prefers younger fare. And then they visit a widowed cousin who's deaf, ugly, walks with a stick and René reveals he lost his virginity to. Then a young couple arrive and walk around naked, and Mathias later hears them having sex with Mme Bertin. Later, he even hears René having sex with his mother.

But the story isn't really about incest or gerontophilia, it's more about moral corruption, and Mme Bertin's jealousy and greed is extremely destructive. Mme Bertin has hoped that René will marry Hélène, who's from a weathy family, but Mathias falls in love with Hélène, the feeling is reciprocated, and it's time for Mme Bertin to wreak revenge. And she does so on a huge scale, causing two suicides, one premature death, and obvious misery for the survivors.

'Le Baron de Gloeden' is also about an artist who turns photographer: in 1926, the seventy-year-old German Gloeden speaks of his past over the previous fifty years. He mentions that he visited Capri – where the gay writer Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen was exiled and about whom Peyrefitte later (in 1959) published L'Exilé de Capri – but decided that Sicily was a far more beautiful place, so settled there. It's not long before he takes up photography as a way of earning money, and continues this occupation for many years. He's particularly interested in the naked young boys around Taormina, and of course takes many photographs of them. He writes about the many customers who have come to him, including generations of the same family, and he keeps a visitors' book for them to sign. The police come to visit him as they're dubious about his photographic activities, but they can't find any wrong-doing, and none is mentioned.

The note at the end of the story made me wonder if Gloeden had in fact been a real person, and he certainly was. Peyrefitte has based it on the biography of the photographer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931), who is noted for his (non-pornographic) studies of naked boys.

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden

Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges » | Lie with Me (2017)

The title refers to the narrator Philippe Besson's mother's criticism of him as a child, telling him to stop telling lies. But lies, of course, are Besson's profession: he's a novelist. On the other hand, this novel is the most autobiographical he's yet written. And through this novel, we come to learn that other books of his have skirted around this particular story, especially perhaps in Mon frère, where the character Thomas Andrieu is prominent. And «Arrète avec tes mensonges»* is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Andrieu (1966–2016): he really did exist.
Philippe Besson was born in Barbezieux (Charente), where he spent his childhood and adolescence, and where much of the narrative takes place; also, as Besson says, his family spent their holidays on Île de Ré, taking the ferry as this book is largely set in 1984, before the bridge was built in 1988.

But the main interest is between Thomas and Philippe, who meet for passionate sex on a number of occasions, although Thomas wants their activities to be kept strictly secret, as if he's somehow ashamed of being gay. Thomas lives on a farm with his parents (father French, mother of Spanish origin from Gallicia) and is still expected, as were children many years before, to follow his father's profession. Thomas knows that the academic Philippe will leave tiny Barbezieux (pop. then just over 5000) and that their friendship will end.

It is in fact Thomas who will call an end to the relationship by going to Spain, leaving Philippe with only memories of their affair as he leaves Barbezieux for Bordeaux and later Paris.

The second part takes place in Bordeaux in 2007, and here the narrative seems to swerve a little away from fact and into contrivance, although I may be wrong. The day after a book signing session in Bordeaux, Philippe is interviewed by a journalist in his hotel when he suddenly spots Thomas. Well, it's not Thomas but his son Lucas, the 'spitting image' of his father. Lucas is the product of a relationship with a Spanish girl and Thomas, and as she comes from a staunch Catholic family there's no question of abortion so they marry and live on the farm in Barbezieux. Lucas knows that Philippe is a famous writer, that he's been very friendly with Thomas, and reveals that Thomas has read Philippe's books and that there has to be absolute silence in the house when Philippe appears on TV. Lucas gives Philippe the family's phone number and takes Philippe's number to pass on to Thomas, although Philippe knows that neither will phone the other.

And then, in 2016, the bombshell: Lucas must see Philippe in Paris soon and hand something to him. The meeting takes place in Café Beaubourg, when Lucas tells Philippe that his father's hanged himself but not left a note saying why. He goes on to reveal that two days after Philippe met Lucas, Thomas announced that he was leaving the family definitively, giving his wife his land and his other possessions: they are to divorce. No one knows where he went. Searching around after Thomas's death, Lucas – who's carved a new life for himself in California but returns to France for his father's funeral – finds a number of letters to Thomas from another male lover, threatening to sever their relationship if Thomas doesn't live with him. But Thomas is incapable of revealing his real sexual identity, which is why he'd lived a heterosexual lie for so many years.

Before Philippe reads it, Lucas leaves the café giving Philippe an unsent letter Thomas wrote it to Philippe in 1984, in which he tells him that the time he's spent with Philippe is the happiest he's ever had, and that he knows that he'll never be as happy again.

*This book was translated into English in 2019, with the bizarre title Lie with Me, which didn't exactly receive a brilliant review in i: but then what do you expect, as this wasn't written by Philippe Besson, but a (seemingly pretty wobbly at that) translator?

My other Philippe Besson posts:
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Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer

Bernard-Marie Koltès: Une part de ma vie : entretiens (1983-1989) (1999)

Une part de ma vie is a fascinating, if often intangible, insight into the playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès's work, being a collection of interviews taken from just before the publication of his first work (his only novel La Fuite à cheval, in 1983) until the date of his death from AIDS in 1989.

Koltès often appears to side-step questions, denying what might appear to be obvious, such as the alienation, the lack of hope, the deracination. Nothing to do with his homosexuality, though, as he says he can't use that as a prop. Well, no, as all these interpretations of his work deal with universals.

At one point in an early interview he makes an interesting point about his interest in the theatre in particular: he likes the constraints, how you can't describe a character directly as in a novel, never speak about the situation, because you have to make it exist. It's what's behind the words being said that is of importance: you can't, for instance, have a character say 'Je suis triste' ('I'm sad'), he has to say something like 'Je vais faire un tour' ('I'm going for a walk'). Yes, but the way it is said is surely vital?

Koltès says that he goes to the cinema a great deal, but to the theatre very little, as, for example, he doesn't like the people who go to the theatre, and I can understand that very well. His literary influences are 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'Latin American', and mentions Melville, London, Conrad and Vargas Llosa, although he dodges the inevitable probe that these are writers of exile, elsewhere, travel, by saying that they have an extraordinary sense of metaphor. A similar avoidance of being pinned down to particular themes in his work comes when he doesn't deny that his work deals with deracination, but simply states that no story doesn't take this into account.

But travel is very important to him, and he finds it impossible to write in Paris, his ideas always come when travelling, and he wrote Combat de nègre et de chiens in a small Guatemalan village. The way people speak languages which are not their native tongues is also important to him.

Later, he says that he's never written anything that's intended to be serious, which surely must be an odd kind of joke, itself not to be taken seriously?

Translation though (one of my own pet hates) is certainly to be taken seriously, and he says that he'd like to see his plays performed in London, but suspects that translation is a problem. Certainly he came to see Germany (a nation among his greatest readership) as mis-translating his work in the broadest sense: he saw the theatrical interpretation of one of his plays as appalling.

Interestingly, when asked about his depiction of marginals, Koltès replies that the whole world consists of marginals. In Quai Ouest he took New York and Barbès (in Paris) as his models, places where eighty per cent of the population were (and probably still are) immigrants: ordinary people are marginals – the real crazies, the real weirdos – are the bourgeoisie in the provinces.

Clearly, Koltès was a truly original talent cut down in his prime.

My other Bernard-Marie Koltès posts:
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Bernard-Marie Koltès: Quai ouest
Bernard-Marie Koltès: Sallinger
Bernard-Marie Koltès: La Fuite à cheval très loin dans la ville
Bernard-Marie Koltès: La Nuit juste avant les forêts
Bernard-Marie Koltès: Dans la solitude des champs de coton | In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

Bernard-Marie Koltès: Dans la solitude des champs de coton | In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (2010)

Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948–89) died of AIDS three years after the publication of this play, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (trans. as In the Solitude of Cotton Fields), which is a mere sixty short pages long. Maybe 'play' is a misnomer, as it's really a dialogue between the Dealer and the Customer. But no transaction takes place as the whole thing is a tense verbal ballet, skirting around a never specifically mentioned subject, although drugs are briefly mentioned, and sex a number of times. There's also an atmosphere of threat, of danger, of a kind of known but at the same time uncharted territory, of braving an unspoken challenge. I can't say more now as this is the only work I've yet read by Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose existence I only discovered last year on finding his grave in the Cimetière de Montmartre:

My other Bernard-Marie Koltès posts:

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Bernard-Marie Koltès: Une part de ma vie
Bernard-Marie Koltès: La Fuite à cheval
Bernard-Marie Koltès: Sallinger
Bernard-Marie Koltès: Quai ouest
Bernard-Marie Koltès: La Nuit juste avant les forêts

Michel Tremblay: Des nouvelles d'Édouard (1984)

Des nouvelles d'Édouard is the fourth volume of Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal by the gay Québéquois writer Michel Tremblay, and for me it was a surprisingly fascinating, often hilarious, read. I say surprising because the initial pages about the ageing Édouard, a shoe saleman-cum-drag queen and the world of the drag queens weren't too interesting for me, until Édouard meets his death by a knife blade in a Montréal street. That's when both he and the book come alive.

Because we go back to 1947, when Édouard came into a little inheritance and went to Paris for the first and only time, when he wrote a diary about his journey and his findings, but intended it to be read after his death, a diary from the dead to be read by his sister-in-law the 'Grosse Femme'.

This is a tale of lies, masquerades, outsiders (whoever they are: aren't we all in some way outsiders?), and culture conflict. A common language links Québec and France, or maybe divides it: after all, French Canadian talk is different, often difficult to understand, laced with English therefore bastardised, but then so are all forms of speech, and who's to say which is better than another?

On the voyage across he meets Antoinette Beauregard – the name of course is an indication of the pedigree, or at least the pretension towards the pedigree – but in any case don't we all pretend to be someone we aren't, as for instance Édouard was pretending to be the Duchesse de Langeais when a drag queen? Why shouldn't Édouard lie and pretend to have read all of the books by (the incidentally gay and sort of mid-way between American and French) Julien Green, the author she's reading? Or pretending to read? And then along comes the Princess Clavet-Daudun, by which time Édouard's had just a gram of bullshit too many, and confesses – in broad French Canadian dialect, really laying it on thick – that he's really just a shoe seller and she may well not be a member of the aristocracy, etc. But she doesn't realise that he's speaking the truth, she just sees him as a brilliant actor. It's a bit like an Eliza Dolittle 'Luvaduck me beads!' moment, but Édouard really doesn't give a shit.

Until, that is, he has to have one in the (unmentioned by the same name) chiottes à la Turque in France, has no toilet paper and is forced to use his underpants. See what I mean about culture shock? That is before more dirt greets him in Paris, before he discovers the minuterie and has to scrabble in the dark, before he discovers there's a rez-de-chaussée before he reaches the first floor, and oh the smells, the lack of en suite accommodation, the crap food.

The Deux Magots café near the Café Flore isn't specifically mentioned, but that's where Édouard ends up late at night with a street map spread out before him, pretty pissed, very pissed off, but a certain Simone (who's with a certain Jean-Paul) is very obliging and tells him which métro to take home. But home is Montréal, not Paris, so after a ten-day journey and a mere thirty-six hours in Paris he's off home. And so a final lie is discovered posthumously: Édouard didn't spend all that time in Paris that he said he did.

A book to read before you die.

Olivier Delorme: Le Château du silence (2003)

Olivier Delorme's autobiographical novel Le Château du silence didn't initially seem promising to me because of the foreign politics but, far more annoying, the mention of the Nobel prize-winning 'Slovenian Balzac' Srečko Pradčik, including a two-paragraph speech from him during the prize giving ceremony, which is included at the beginning of a chapter: I had severe doubts, and sure enough Pradčik is just an invention.

The narrator is French, married to Elvire, and works as a special correspondent for a magazine. When in Beirut waiting to be given instructions reporting events in the first Gulf war, he gets tired of nothing happening and decides to take a brief holiday in Cypress, which is when the trouble starts: personal, existential, emotional, and deeply psychologically disturbing.

It starts with a cock crowing, then he learns of Polykarpos, a young Greek Cypriot who is one of the 1619 missing people taken away during the Turkish invasion of northen Cypress in 1974. He resolves to find out what has happened to Polykarpos, and it becomes obsessional, Elvire believing he's found another woman.

In fact it's not a woman he's found but men: he's discovered that he's gay, that Polykarpos was gay, and as his marriage seems to crumble around him and he counts off the hundreds of male encounters he's heading for a strong identity crisis, a double personality, only one of them is dead. What started out as appearing unpromising actually makes fascinating reading.

There's a great deal packed in here: sexual identity, politics, mythology, gnosticism, a hilarious pub crawl, etc. I could have done without the various poem sections which punctuate the book and comment on the events, but that's just a minor grouse.

Édouard Louis: Histoire de la violence (2016)

I had wondered how Édouard Louis was going to follow up his highly successful En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule – apparently to be translated as The End of Eddy, which misses out the surname the author had to grow up being called. As it happens, another autobiographical work was to come soon after, although under very unfortunate circumstances.

Histoire de la violence – if translated as 'History of Violence' – sounds very grandiose, and the reader might expect that he or she is in for heavy theorising on the changing nature of violence in society, but that would give entirely the wrong idea: 'Story of Violence' would be much more accurate. And this story happened to Édouard Louis.

To the author's credit, the novel is not sequential, and is in fact told by two narrators: Louis himself in regular, educated French, and on a number of occasions by a representation of Louis's sister Clara's speech to her husband, in colloquial, slangy French. Throughout, there is a number of references to Louis's working-class childhood in Hallencourt, although the name of that small town in Picardy is never actually mentioned.

En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule is dedicated to Didier Eribon and Histoire de la violence to Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, the two sociologists Louis spends Christmas Eve with near the Place de la République. He walks towards home clutching his Christmas presents, books that he intends to look at before he goes to bed, and he stresses that he wasn't drunk, although he decides that it's wise not to return by bicycle. On the way home he's greeted by the stranger Reda, a Kabyle whom he discovers is doing odd jobs on the side, and he decides to invite him in. It's a few hours later that the problems start.

They have sex and it's just as Reda is preparing to leave that Édouard realises that he can't find his phone, which like many people he uses as a nervous tic. He does, though, discover his iPad, which he fishes out of Reda's pocket and in a roundabout way asks him to return his phone, even offers to pay fifty euros for it: stealing isn't seen as a huge crime for someone who's grown up in an environment where lack of money can be a major issue.

Unfortunately, Reda (rather oddly) reads Édouard's words as a kind of affront not only to himself but also to his mother, and reacts angrily by calling him a 'filthy queer': the insult of course isn't at all odd because Reda is merely divorcing himself from the truth, in denial of what he has done. But his words aren't the problem: his actions are.

Reda threatens Édouard with a gun, tries to strangle him with a scarf, and brutally rapes him. This takes the reader back to the first page, with Édouard trying to hide all trace of Reda by washing him out of his system (mainly at the launderette), and yet forgetting to destroy Reda's crushed cigarette packet or wash the glass he's used to drink vodka: slim DNA evidence they will bring.

But then, Édouard is far from happy with the police, annoyed by their evident racism, automatically (and incorrectly) calling Reda an Arab, and associating 'Arabs' with criminal activities. Édouard Louis's left-wing credentials are clear in this book, which ties in with what Didier Eribon wrote in Retour à Reims about the working-class being faithful to the politics of their roots in spite of upward mobility. Evidently, there are few things to laugh about in this second novel, although the reader must wince not only at the gratuitous violence but on learning of Édouard Louis's initially very misguided attempts to join academe by wearing, er, a suit and butterfly tie.

ADDENDUM: Of course, none of Édouard Louis's mishaps that he describes in his relationship with 'Reda' are at all funny, although initial legal complications are distinctly farcical. Read here (in French): Eddy Bellegueule alias Edouard Louis, Riadh.B alias Reda et le féroce juge Bourla

My other post on Édouard Louis:

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Édouard Louis: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule | The End of Eddy

Didier Eribon: Retour à Reims | Returning to Reims (2009)

This could be described as Didier Eribon's coming out novel, only not as a homosexual (which he'd already done) but as something he felt harder to reveal: his coming from a working-class background, which for many can be seen as a source of shame. In this book, following his father's death, Eribon returns to visit his home town of Reims, where he grew up in an HLM, although his parents moved to the outskirts of Reims, to Muizon, some years previously. As well as describing Eribon's personal memories of Reims from his birth in the late fifties, it also charts the change within, even what can be described as the death of, the working class.

Eribon, then, grew up with a kind of double curse on him: his sexuality and his class. There are, unsurprisingly of course, many similar elements in Édouard Louis's En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (to be translated as The End of Eddy): the lack of understanding of (indeed contempt for) difference, the lack of and little concern for education, the non-intellectual activities, etc.

 

He hated his father, and vividly remembered him coming home a few days after Friday payday when Eribon was four or five, and his father still drunk from his binge and standing in the kitchen throwing bottles of milk, oil and wine at the wall opposite: as good a reason as any not to attend the funeral. His mother, though, he realises slaved in a factory for him to give him the education she was so ashamed of lacking.

 

The book is determinedly left-wing, school to some extent seen as a plot to prevent the working class from joining the dominant class, to perpetuate the status quo: the war is against the working class, with school as the battleground.

 

And yet the modern working class is at war with itself: from the solidarity of Eribon's youth, the class struggle of the dominant against the dominated and the importance of communism as an ideological tool, the working class is now divided and instead of seeing immigrants as their friends sees them as their enemies and increasingly votes for the extreme right-wing Front National. There is little awareness of the paradoxes. Didier Eribon paints a bleak picture.

Paris 2015: Jean-Baptiste Niel, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #19

'L'ÉCRIVAIN

Jean-Baptiste

NIEL

1962 – 1995'

 

Jean-Baptiste Niel wrote a thesis on Marie Noël, French teacher and later bookseller. His first novel was Vous qui passez dans l'ombre (1989) (trans. as Painted Shadows) about a transexual prostitute. Ludion d'alcool (1990) came next, followed by Ceci est mon sang (1992), a work Niel said is not so much about AIDS as it is a hymn, a requiem. La Maison Niel (1995) is an autobiography and was published posthumously. He also wrote Rachel, Cathelin (1994) on the painter Bernard Cathelin (1914–2004).

 

Jean-Baptiste Niel died of AIDS. The fullest obituary I've come across is in the Independent by the gay poet James Kirkup (1918–2009), who translated his first novel: Obituary in English.

Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon (2005)

Philippe Besson, it seems, can always be relied upon to produce a very good outsider novel, and Un instant d'abandon is no exception. This is told from the point of view of Thomas, an Englishman of about thirty who has lived most of life in Falmouth, Cornwall. He paints a very gloomy picture of the town, although the description of the Chain Locker pub (and there really is one in Falmouth) made me realise Besson has never set foot in a pub in England. An English pub where you order a coffee, sit down, are served, and pay afterwards? And which also serves grenadine? I can't for a second imagine such French café style service in a pub in Falmouth.

Anyway, to cut to the quick. Thomas has been something of a weedy person physically, injured his leg as a child and suffered forever after from torment by his male school counterparts but earned great respect from Marianne, whom he married and had a child by, or rather didn't as he's infertile, although Marianne didn't know that, so her infidelity is ostensibly only known by her. But it makes for a problematic marriage made even more problematic when Thomas kills the son who isn't his biological son.

In fact he doesn't really kill him as such, he's just a little negligent taking him out to sea when warned against it, and the child just dies accidentally, although Thomas (rather harshly, I thought) gets five years for a kind of homicide after he's, well, just released a dead body (never found) to the sea. But then he didn't defend himself in court.

And after prison Thomas returns to the completely empty home his wife has left – perhaps to go with her lover: who knows or cares – to the only place he's really known, but to almost universal ostracism, to hurtful oblique comments in the Chain Locker. Almost universal, but there are two understanding souls: both are outsiders of sorts.

First there's Rajiv, the Pakistani from whose shop Thomas buys a large number of things from, and who invites Thomas into his private 'sanctuary' for cup after cup of tea, sessions during which Rajiv listens almost like – I couldn't help thinking – a psychiatrist.

And then there's Betty, an attractive girl of twenty-one who's viewed Thomas for a long time on the sly, recently watched him coming and going from the Chain Locker, identifies a fellow outsider and will have no truck with the mindless ostracism. With great pain, she listens to Thomas in the Chain Locker (and surely prison is suggested in that phrase?), hears of the initial madness he underwent inside, of the violence and egoism of survival. It's difficult for her to listen to Thomas, but she does so because she loves him, as she confesses.

How does Thomas react to this? Well, Betty has also said that she has a young child, so surely he has a ready-made family, a working partner and an end to all the outsiderdom?

Alas, Thomas can't accept the invitation to love and possible happiness and has been waiting for the return of Luke, the guy he met in prison, and who comes to join him in Falmouth. Throughout, the novel had been leaning away from the world of heterosexuality: 'Le désir des femmes, je l'ai égaré, si je l'ai jamis eu': ('Desire for women, I lost it, if I ever had it'); 'Non, la connaissance d'une autre ne m'a vraiment manqué': ('No, I never really missed the knowledge of another woman'). Besson is a world away from the explicit gay sex of some novels, but (rather differently) more tilted to the coded homosexual languages of decades ago. Just a shame he's never been to an English pub though, as he'd have been far better equipped to describe one in the novel.

My other posts on Philippe Besson:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »

Paris 2015: Guillaume Dustan, Cimetière du Montparnasse #20

'WILLIAM BARANÈS

DIT

GUILLAUME DUSTAN

1965 – 2005

MAGISTRAT . ÉCRIVAIN . ÉDITEUR'

 

' J'AI TOUJOURS ÉTÉ POUR TOUT ÊTRE

                                                                        G . D. '

 

Although trained as a lawyer, Guillaume Dustan (born William Baranès) is far better known as a writer, particularly of autofiction, Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper being his main influences. He created 'Le Rayon gay' (later called 'Le Rayon') imprint of the Éditions Balland (late nineties–2003), the first literary French LGBT collection: in its lifetime about fifty books were published, and Dustan won the Flore prize for Nicolas Pages in 1999. Dustan's published works under this imprint also include two other books: Génie divin (2001) and LXiR ou Dédramatison La Vi Cotidièn (2002). In 2001 he famously appeared in a TV programme in a silver wig compered by Thierry Ardisson, in which he spoke about barebacking.

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.

Dominique Fernandez: La Gloire du paria (1987)

Dominique Fernandez's La Gloire du paria (lit. 'The Glory of the Pariah') is set in 1986, at about the time when AIDS was creating havoc in the developed world but also when very little was known about it. Wildly distorted media scares called it a 'plague' and perhaps inevitably represented the gay community as largely responsible for the phenomenon.

Bernard Morin (45) is a novelist from a staunch middle-class background: his father is a teacher of French in a lycée, and his mother is a well-read worker in a bookshop in the quartier Latin. For three years he has lived with in Paris with Marc Lavergne (25), a law student from a more modest background with a father who works in an office and a friendly Sicilian mother.

Marc has grown up in an era of tolerance whose his parents have – although certainly not as readily as he thinks – accepted the fact that he is gay. Bernard, though, has grown up in an age when homosexuality was taboo, something to hide, but essentially something illegal.

It is the difference between the two main characters' background experience of homosexuality which creates the tension and the interest in the novel, which begins at the time of the death of Jean Genet. Genet's death is symbolic, being the end of the days when homosexuality was associated with the outsider, the outcast, the criminal, the worship of the underworld.

It is just such a backcloth from which Bernard comes, and which he misses with considerable nostalgia. His partner Marc never knew the days of the thrill of illegality, never experienced the multiple revolutions of Paris (and beyond) in 1968, never enjoyed the casual sex of the period. Because of this, Marc accepts that Bernard regularly feels the  need to go out at night, to experience vicariously – on the street, in the metro, etc – the closeness with other men that he once enjoyed much more directly: this is a monogamous relationship.

And then Bernard (against the advice of his friend Xavier Laronde) decides to write a play about AIDS, but before it's completed he is diagnosed as having the disease, and can't complete it. Suddenly all his friends – with the exception of Laronde (and apart of course from Marc) – find petty excuses not to visit Bernard on his deathbed.

Bernard's mother has previously visited Marc when her son was well, and reveals that she has known all the time that he is gay, that she pointed him towards Proust and works by Gide, although very near the beginning of the novel the reader knows that Bernard has written off imaginary attempts to question his parents (for instance) about the nature of Balzac's character Vautrin. It is almost as if he wanted his parents to disown him for his sexual persuasion. And sure enough the near-blind mother doesn't want to see her son again, although not because of any disgust but because she realises that Bernard is actually happy being a pariah.

When Bernard is diagnosed as having AIDS and close to death, Marc wonders – not with retrospective jealousy, as he's not that kind of person – if his partner had in fact been unfaithful during his night-time journeys. Then  Nicole, the former wife of Robert – the 'friend' of Bernard's who deliberately avoids sitting in the front rows at theatres to miss any (imagined AIDS-related) spittle hitting him, and who for the same reason has his wife sit between him and Bernard at Les Deux Magots – tells Marc she's discovered the truth.

Some years earlier Robert had badly injured Bernard's thigh in an accidental shooting incident, and Bernard as a result had to have two blood transfusions: one of which was contaminated with the AIDS virus. All of Bernard's friends have been deserting him, but this of course 'proves' that he was 'innocent', doesn't it? Marc, Nicole insists, must reveal this evidence to Bernard, as the friends who've deserted him will realise he's not a screw-around gay, won't they?

Well, perhaps, but that is the worst possible scenario, as Marc – unlike Nicole – knows Bernard and how he has always prided himself on his pariah status, knows how the re-demonising of homosexuality has brought a kind of fresh blood into his veins. Marc has also discovered about friendship, about the nature of hypocrisy, and prefers to give his dying lover the lethal injection, and knows that there's just enough poison in the syringe to take them off together at exactly the right time.

La Gloire du paria is an original novel about the nature of friendship and love, and the ugliness of the hypocrisy that so often rears its head when things get difficult.

Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie (2003)

There are superficial similarities between Philippe Besson's Un garcon d'Italie and Linda Lê's Lame de fond (2012), mainly that the novels have three narrators, one coming from the grave.

In Un garcon d'Italie, though, each narrator has no more than three pages in which to tell his or her part of the story, almost always the 29-year-old Luca first, then his girlfriend Anne of the same age, followed by the twenty-three-year-old (but younger-looking) Leo.

The drama, which is very much a detective story, begins to unfold when Luca is found dead in the River Arno in Florence, where the whole story is set. He briefly describes the events after his death up to being buried and adding a few comments on this permanent location, and says that no one will know what has happened to him – although he neglects to say that his readers will find out in the end.

The autopsy reveals that sleeping tablets were in his system, which might suggest suicide or murder rather than accident: this is for the efficient if slightly unpleasant Inspector Tonello to discover, if he can.

Although the relationship between Anna and Luca has existed for a few years and although the couple are obviously in love, Luca has never wanted to live with Anna and has remained a little aloof, only seeing his girlfriend three or four days a week.

Anna begins to discover something of the truth when she lets herself into Luca's place and discovers the existence of Leo Bertina, whom the police know as a rent boy with a criminal record working around the train station restrooms and whose existence is known to Luca's uptight middle-class parents who reveal almost nothing to her about the affair.

The truth is a little less sordid than it appears because Luca has lied by omission to Anna and has been having a non-paying, loving sexual relationship with Leo, and been the only person ever invited to Leo's hotel room. But Luca had had sex with Leo on the same night that he died, he fell to his death just an hour after he left Leo, and Tonello asks himself if he was stuffed with tablets in an act of murder for which the motive isn't clear.

The third section of the book is short and just told by Anna and Leo, when they meet at his place of work at the station. Here two opposite worlds stumble towards mutual understanding, both obviously intelligent people with a strong understanding of psychology, but Leo to some extent hampered by his inability to translate his eloquent thoughts into eloquent words.

I doubt that any reader suspected an unreliable narrator, and indeed there isn't one. Both Anna and Leo return to their respective haunts to cope as they can with their loss of the same – but very differently perceived – person, and it's left for Luca to give the last voice, to reveal the truth.

He'd had a lot of wine that night with Leo, but he didn't think it would help him sleep, so he buys sleeping tablets from a chemist, doesn't realise he should have taken one instead of four, so feels wonderfully light-headed and starts playing on the bridge parapet, doesn't know it's slippery, and falls. So, verdict never recorded: accidental death.

At only 220 pages in largish print, this is a quick read, but a very fruitful one: once again, Philippe Besson shows he's a powerful writer.

My other posts on Philippe Besson:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »

Christophe Donner: Quand je suis devenu fou (1997)

Christophe Donner was born Christophe Quiniou in 1956 and has written a large number of books, about half of them (for children) written as Chris Donner, and one as Hélène Laurens. He narrowly missed winning the Renaudot in 2007 with Un roi sans lendemain, when Daniel Pennac's Chagrin d'école came as if from nowhere to take the prize. This is his only novel I've read, and I'm unsure what to make of it so I'll suspend my judgement until I've read a few more of his books, which should give me a fuller picture of his worldview.

I would certainly classify Quand je suis devenu fou (lit. 'When I Went Mad') as gay literature, and apparently the expression 'coming out' has been used in relation to Donner and this novel, although Donner most strongly denies the tag: he has never called himself homosexual, would deny it under torture(!), and views with horror the idea of anyone being reduced to their sexual practices. So that is categorically clear.

Quand je suis devenu fou is more about obsession than madness, the obsession of the narrator for the male prostitute Nick in Amsterdam. At one point the narrator says 'Quiconque exerce ce métier stupide mérite tout ce qui lui arrive' ('Whoever practises this stupid profession deserves everything that happens to them'.) Interestingly this expression is also the title of Donner's last novel, which concerns acting, and I learn that this is a quotation from Orson Welles, although for some reason – maybe because it's a misquotation? – I can't find the exact sentence Welles used in English. But prostitution is certainly (and no doubt correctly) depicted as a branch of the acting profession in this novel, which reminds me of a particularly brilliantly acted scene by Jane Fonda in Pakula's Klute.

But I digress. The French-speaking narrator, a number of whose biographical details are a lot like Christopher Donner's, is desperate to 'rescue' Nick – who is of Italian origin but speaks English and holds a UK passport – from the 'Boys [sic] Club'. Nick himself says the narrator doesn't know him, and anyway how is the narrator going to, er, pull off such a coup when his beloved isn't exactly wild about him and the whole crazy thing seems doomed to failure before it starts?

But pull it off he does – at the beginning at least: they both make it to San Francisco, but they don't get on, they start leading separate lives, they row, and the narrator pays for him to return to London or wherever. And the narrator sells up in the USA and – sick of Anglo-Saxon culture – heads off for Mexico.

On the way down to Guadalajara the narrator mentions that he plays Brel, although there is no mention – as on the way to Amsterdam from Paris – of a muzzy tape of an interview with Hervé Guilbert (1955–91), a writer much loved by both the narrator and Donner himself.  At his luxury hotel the narrator meets Saúl, who's wearing a tee-shirt of Dalí's Christ, and the narrator quotes Dalí to Saúl: 'The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.' Saul responds: '¿ Pero quién es, Dalí ?' We know already that the narrator doesn't like his men to be intellectuals, that just complicates a relationship, so, yeah, obviously he's falling in love again...

François-Paul Alibert: Le Fils de Loth (2002)

François-Paul Alibert (1873–1953) was a poet and a journalist who was born and buried in Carcassonne.

His erotic gay novel Le Supplice d'une queue (lit. 'The Torture of a Dick') was published and sold under the counter in 1930–31 in a print run of only ninety copies by René Bonnel in the same volume as Hugo Marsan's Le Jeu de l'amour et de la nécessité (lit. 'The Game of Love and Necessity', and an obvious pun on Marivaux's play Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard).

Alibert's second (gay) novel – Une Couronne de Pines (lit. 'A Crown of Cocks') – with a print run again of about one hundred – was confiscated by the police.

His third novel – Le Fils de Loth (lit. 'Lot's Son') – was called 'the most audacious' of Alibert's works by Joë Bousquet (1897–1950), who is perhaps Carcassonne's most famous poet. The above scan is the first edition, meaning that it took about seventy years to be published. That was by Musardine, and it has an Introduction by Emmanuel Pierrat and a Preface by Didier Eribon. The cover illustration is from Ils, dessins érotiques de Jean Cocteau (Annie Guédras, Le Pré aux clercs, 1998).

Le Fils de Loth takes as its subject not simply male homosexual love, but also gay incestuous love. At the beginning of the book Alibert uses a quotation from André Gide's Nouvelles Nourritures, in which he speaks of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt and Lot then sleeping with his daughters. Didier Eribon says that this could almost be seen as Alibert cocking an advance snook at the 'psychoanalytical vulgate' of judging homosexuality as a reversal of the Oedipus story: the male child dreaming of sleeping with his father and seeing his mother as a rival.

On first appearances it seems odd that this boundary-breaking book should come not from the literary centre of Paris but from the small town of Carcassonne, tucked away in the south-west of France. But then, there was a long correspondence between Gide and Alibert which lasted from 1907 to 1950: Didier suggests that Alibert was tempted to go beyond boundaries both because that is just what Gide had done with L'Immoraliste, and because of Alibert's taste for Helleno-Latin culture.

Le Fils de Loth begins with the young lovers Roland and André enjoying each other by the sea and Roland asking who initiated André into the art of love. André says that it was his father, and so begins a long explanation with only occasional interruptions.

Every attempt is made to make André's incestuous relationship very natural, wished for, chosen, non-exploitative. From the time that the seven-year-old boy shares a bed with his father when the mother is away and he enjoys his father's rugged masculinity and he is excited by his father's morning glory he knows that there is a power he must discover, although his father Édouard feel something is not right and they sleep alone afterwards, even though nothing of an overt sexual nature has actually happened.

André has never had any interest in girls but is particularly sexually excited by his father. When years later father and son sleep in separate beds Édouard – when he believes André is sleeping – has a tremendous wank (I don't think the word 'masturbate' is ever used), and André knows that he is having this effect on his father. But neither can express their feelings for each other.

It remains for Édouard's friend Michel to play Cupid and bring the fifteen-year-old André sexually together with his father, and the lovers have a number of days of unbridled passion, with full descriptions of many of their activities.

In the end André dies of meningitis, the nameless mother dies, Édouard is living with Michel, and the reader wonders what to make of all this. It wouldn't have been possible to publish this book in the 1930s, and although now pretty much anything of a sexual nature goes in terms of the written word the fact remains that even though André is a more than willing partner and even instigates a number of things sexually, this is still parental abuse of a child.

As Eribon states, and I translate: 'This book will again ask the eternal question: is everything possible in literature? How far can you go?' He also says that Alibert took it upon himself to push the boundaries back, and I think that's the best way to view the book: as a curiosity, a literary experiment.

Philippe Besson: En l'absence des hommes | In the Absence of Men (2001)

Most of the men are absent in this summer of 1916 because they're fighting in World War I, although a few men are brought together in Paris: the aristocratic Vincent de l'Étoile and the great writer Marcel Proust; and Vincent again with the housekeeper's son Arthur Valès, a soldier who has a week's leave.

Vincent, a sixteen-year-old far wiser than his years, is soon seeing the forty-five-year-old Proust every afternoon either at his home or in an expensive café: the two men are of the same class, are very intelligent, and almost instinctively recognise that they are of homosexual persuasion. But although the relationship becomes loving and confidential, it remains Platonic.

When Vincent gets together with the twenty-one-year-old Arthur though, the two enjoy seven nights of sexual bliss. Vincent's father knows nothing of this, although he knows that his son is friendly with Arthur and tries to discourage the mixed-class relationship. Later, Housekeeper Blanche will initially tacitly show that she is aware of the real nature of the relationship.

More than half of the book is the first part, which ends with Arthur leaving for an unknown future in an increasingly bloody war. The second half – almost a quarter of the book – is purely epistolary, with Arthur and Vincent expressing their deep love for each other, and Vincent slowly revealing his love affair to an understanding and avuncular Proust. The final letter is just a few lines: Vincent sending the news to Proust of Arthur's death.

The final part of the book is brief, with Vincent giving some consolation to Blanche by telling her of his deep love for her son, who Blanche informs him has loved Vincent since he first saw him. She also tells Vincent why she could never reveal who Arthur's father was. At the end of the 19th century circumstances drove Blanche to prostitution, although her shame led her to only have sex once with one client before she fled from the brothel.

The client was an aristocratic man whose father had given him money to go to the brothel because of his reluctance towards the opposite sex, and both Blanche and man found the experience uncomfortable. It doesn't exactly require great guesswork to figure out the identity of the father of Arthur.

The strength of the book is in its psychological insights, its understatement, the subtle characterisation. This is Philippe Besson's first novel, and I found it much more successful than the other two novels of his I've read: Son frère and La Trahison de Thomas Spencer. One small point though – on page 66 Vincent mentions the word 'surréaliste': this is supposed to have been written in 1916, but surely the word wasn't used until later?

My other posts on Philippe Besson:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Philippe Besson: La Trahison de Thomas Spencer
Philippe Besson: Son frère
Philippe Besson: Un instant d'abandon
Philippe Besson: Un garçon d'Italie
Philippe Besson: « Arrète avec tes mensonges »