Raymond Queneau in Saint-Épain, Indre-et-Loire (37)

 

Of course, Raymond Queneau was born in Le Havre, although his father Auguste was born in Saint-Épain in 1870. Auguste's family worked on the farm La Touche, and the Queneau family had previously worked at La Deniserie, being in the agricultural business dating back to the seventeenth century: this information is on a plaque outside the school named after Raymond Queneau. Raymond's uncle Louis (Auguste's elder brother) continued at La Touche while Auguste joined the army at eighteen to be moved to Le Havre as a colonial accountant in 1901, where he married Joséphine Mignot the same year and she gave birth to Raymond in 1903. Raymond sometimes went on holiday to Saint-Épain, Louis being his godfather as well as his uncle. Raymond spoke very little of his connections to the town, and claimed that all his father knew is that one his ancestors used to castrate sheep with his teeth. Nevertheless, the plaque prints a poem, 'Le Fromage de Sainte Maure' (a village nest to Saint-Épain), from Raymond's Courir le rues:

'LE FROMAGE DE SAINTE MAURE

En me rendant à Auteuil

je passais rue des Belles-Feuilles

lorsqu'il me fut donné de voir

vétues de robes améthystes

qui vantait le val de Loire

et ses produits nutritifs

sur des airs simples et naïfs

c'était une vraie chienlit

mais comme nous étions samedi

les gens d'une dent guillerette

croquaient tartines et rillettes

ah quel plaisir c'était de voir

les avisées et folles choristes

débiter aux gastronomistes

les bons produits du val de Loire

alors m'arrachant à regret

à ce spectacle croquignol

mon petit chemin coninuai

en sifflant un air espagnol'

Promenade Littéraire #13: Raymond Queneau, Rue Casimir-Périer, Le Havre, Seine-Maritime (76)

#13, Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), Rue Casimir-Périer. Queneau was born and grew up in Le Havre and his novel Un rude hiver (1939) is set in the town. Several scenes are set in a bookshop on this street, and the book also remembers his family haberdasher's on Rue Thiers.

Raymond Queneau: Un rude hiver | A Hard Winter (1939)

Like, for instance, 'Bouville' in Sartre's novel La Nausée (1938), Armand Salacrou's play Boulevard Durand (1960) and many other works, this is a book set in Le Havre. The period is World War I, and Raymond Queneau, born in Le Havre, spent the first seventeen years of his life there until the end of the war. The main character in Un rude hiver is Bernard Lehameau – a lieutenant now recovering from schrapnel wounds – who lost his mother, his wife and his first sister-in-law in a cinema fire in Le Havre on 21 February 1903: the date, it just so happens, is the date Queneau was born.

Lehameau is an ambivalent and contradictory character who enlivens the lives of two children – Annette (aged 14) and Polo (aged 5) – by taking them to the cinema and treating them in other ways, although problems set in when Annette falls in love with him. In fact he's already in love anyway – with the young English woman Helena Weeds from the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), who is temporarily based in Le Havre. But then, how can a person tell he's in love with someone if he hasn't had sex since his wife died thirteen years before?

And then there are his ideas, his (somewhat paradoxical loathing) of the working class, his wishing that Germany were a protectorate of France, etc. In the end he comes together with Annette and Polo's elder sister, the prostitute Madeleine.

There are many other characters in this odd novel, although many years before Zazie dans le métro there is a half-similar evident love of playing with language, not only obscure French words but deforming English as in the words 'un fleurte', 'poudigne' and 'visqui', or whole sentences such as 'Zey lâffe, bicose zey dou notte undèrrstande'.

Raymond Queneau: Les Enfants du limon (1938)

Les Enfants du limon – Children of Clay in the translated version – is Raymond Queneau's fifth novel, which is a fictionalisation of a book considered to be unpublishable: 'Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes', on which Queneau had spent four years. The subject of the unpublished book (and the central subject of the published book) is 'fous littéraires', a term which has unfortunately often been translated as 'literary madmen', 'literary lunatics', and equally inaccurate expressions when 'outsider writers' would cover it far more politely, and far better.

Before this post runs away with itself though, perhaps a little backtracking is in order. In Les Enfants du limon Queneau – through Chambernac, but more of him later – mentions former works on fous littéraires/outsider writers which he consulted while researching his unpublished book: Charles Nodier's De quelques livres excentriques (Paris, 1835); Delepierre's Histoire littéraire des fous (London, 1860); Philomneste junior (aka G. Brunet)'s Les Fous littéraires; and Iv. [sic]Tcherpakoff (aka Auguste Ladrigue)'s Les Fous littéraires (Moscow, 1883).

Queneau restricts himself to nineteenth century fous littéraires/outsider writers: before that period misunderstandings could get in the way of definitions, and of course when he began writing the twentieth century wasn't even through its first third. But within the chosen century there are also limitations as to who should or shouldn't be placed in the category of fou littéraire/outsider writer, although the boundaries may change because this is after all a working copy (now within a novel, that is):

– by definition the person should be unknown (which of course automatically invalidates everyone if a list is published: i.e. there's a built-in paradox)

– the fou littéraire/outsider writer must have published something and so be to some extent in contact with the world outside his brain

– the published works must be saying something very strange indeed.

The question of how to establish the line between madness and plain eccentricity is also important here, but then more crucially so is the line between madness and sanity, and the reader can certainly be forgiven if he or she feels they are losing grip on reality, as indeed must have Queneau, who sifted through all these mathematical 'geniuses', messiahs without followers, idiots savants, prophets of apocalyptic doom and heavenly bliss, etc, for such a long time.

This then is a book within a book, the unpublished book within a loose story about the Limon-Chambernacs, a business family married to the impoverished aristocracy, where almost everyone is a little mad.

But it's Henri de Chambernac who is the main character, the retired schoolmaster who's now writing the book, and using the mysterious Purpulan as his secretary-cum-slave. Or is Purpulan just a facet of Chambernac's imagination, as Chambernac's passing on his book to the fictional Raymond Queneau – who makes a brief appearance at the end – is a facet of the narrator's imagination?

What are true are the names of the fous littéraires/outsider writers featured here, along with the sometimes detailed quotations from their works. But obviously what couldn't be mentioned is that the Belgian writer and bibliographer André Blavier (1922–2001) – who was near despair until he read and later met Queneau – actually succeeded in writing and publishing a huge book such as Queneau had intended to publish: Les Fous littéraires, which was published by Henri Veyrier in 1982 and revised and extended in Editions des Cendres in 2000. It is one of the oddest – and one of the most fascinating – reads anyone could ever wish for, as of course is Les Enfants du limon.

Links to my other Queneau post, my post on Blavier's book, and Queneau's grave:

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Raymond Queneau: Exercices de style
André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires
Queneau's grave, Juvisy-sur-Orge

Raymond Queneau in Juvisy-sur-Orge, Essonne

'RAYMOND QUENEAU

1903 – 1976'

Queneau lies with his parents in the small cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, Essonne. Famous above all for his crazy novel Zazie dans le métro, which Louis Malle turned into an equally crazy film. He is also noted for being the co-founder of the experimental literary group Oulipo, a group particularly interested in constraints – Georges Perec's e-less La Disparition (A Void in English) being an obvious example.

Queneau's novel Les Enfants du Limon (1938) – translated as Children of Clay – was the best he could make of his work on 'fous littéraires' (roughly 'outsider writers'), but one which came like a thunderbolt to André Blavier and probably saved him from killing himself. Blavier's reference book Les Fous littéraires – a huge work of information on writers of largely self-published works so crazy that almost no publisher would touch them – is the generally acknowledged authority on this area of literature. It's unfortunate that not many people are aware of this superb labour of love.

There is now a Médiathèque Raymond-Queneau in Juvisy-sur-Orge.

Charles Nodier: Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #9

'CHARLES NODIER

MEMBRE

DE

L'ACADÉMIE

FRANÇAISE

ET DE

LA LÉGION D'HONNEUR

BIBLIOTHÉCAIRE

DE L'ARSENAL'

 

The Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal is part of the BNF. Charles Nodier (1780–1844) was a highly prolific writer of the period, but for me he is particularly interesting for his 1835 book Bibliographie des fous : De quelques livres excentriques: a seminal work from which Raymond Queneau, for instance, learned a great deal. More importantly, it is a precursor to the huge, essential work on outsider literature by André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires (1982; repr. with additions 2001).

Link to my earlier post on Père-Lachaise:

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Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise / Père Lachaise Cemetery

André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires (1982; repr. 2000) #1

It was while reading an article on Raymond Queneau that I discovered André Blavier (1922–2001), whose huge book Les Fous littéraires^* was first published in 1982; this contained 924 pages, but additions in the 2000 edition increase it to 1147 pages. The title isn't at all easy to translate: literally it means 'Literary Madmen', but that entraps us in a gender specificity that's to some extent built into Latin-derived languages, although opting for the more politically correct 'Literary Mad People' is just ugly. And then there's the problem with the word 'mad': clearly, it frequently has pejorative connotations, but Blavier didn't intend any, so I think that – on an analogy with the expression 'outsider artists' – the term 'outsider writers' is the best to use here.

Blavier was a Belgian librarian of working-class origin from Verviers, whose life was overturned – indeed saved, as he was on the verge of suicide – by reading Queneau, who in the 1930s had unsuccessfully attempted to write a book about outsider writers, adding to Nodier's list of 'génies méconnus' ('little known geniuses'). He failed to publish, though, but salvaged his researches by incorporating some of his subjects into a novel read by Blavier: Les Enfants du limon (1938) (Children of Clay). Blavier later got to know Queneau and in 1961 became Oulipo's foreign correspondent.

From Blavier's huge collection of eccentric people has emerged what can perhaps be described as a canon of outsider writers, of whom I mention just two here:

Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837–1919), who wrote, among a number of books, La Natation ou l’art de nager appris seul en moins d’une heure (1870) ('Swimming or the Art of Swimming Self-Taught in Under an Hour'). He developed the theory that humans evolved from frogs.

Paulin Gagne (1808–76) wrote L'Unitéide, ou la Femme-Messie ('Woman Messiah') (1857), which is a poem of 726 pages said to contain some of the most fantastic names and strangest words ever written. In L'Histoire des Miracles he tells of the time he sub-let his salon to spritualists who were followers of Allan Kardec. Bearing a crucifix, he went into one of their sessions:

'[...] je suis allé seul dans la salle où se faisaient les évocations infernales ; ô miracle étonnant et épouvantable ! à l'instant, un mouvement de rotation irrésistible s'est emparé de moi ; je tournais comme une toupie autour de la table satanique, que je couvris de crachats et de bave, et d'où s'échappaient les esprits démoniaques par la présence du crucifix que je tenais toujours à la main : Satan et Dieu se disputaient mon corps et mon âme !!'

(My translation: 'Alone, I went into the room, from which hellish apparitions were coming; oh, astounding and dreadful miracle: suddenly, an irresistible rotary movement took hold of me; I spun like a top around the satanic table, which I covered with spit and dribble, and from which demonic spirits were escaping because of the presence of the crucifix I was holding: Satan and God were arguing over my body and soul!!').

After this bizarre event, Gagne was taken to a maison de santé to recover for several days.

Paulin Gagne, artist unknown.

^*The expression originates from a book by Charles Nodier (1780–1844): Bibliographe de fous: de quelques livres excentriques (Paris: Techener, 1835).

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
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André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

Boris Vian: L'Écume des jours (1947)

The first paragraph of L'Écume des jours (variously translated in English, and two publications have rendered it Mood Indigo¹ and the rather ugly Foam of the Daze) begins with a man's blackheads shrinking back into his skin out of the shame of seeing themselves in the mirror, and the reader knows almost immediately that this will be no ordinary read. Sure enough, we soon learn of a cook feeding the mice, and beheading an eel that's been popping out of the tap to feast on his pineapple-flavored toothpaste, and many conventional situations are turned on their head. I'm not too certain why I'd avoided reading this book so far (probably put off by reading his J'irai cracher sur vos tombes first, I imagine), but I'm very happy I finally got round to it: this is a very funny book which also has a number of very serious things to say.

The main character is Colin, who has enough money to live on to avoid having to work, unlike his friend the engineer Chick, who has far less money than the workers he's in charge of, so Colin often invites him over for a meal cooked by his chef Nicolas, who derives his culinary inspiration from the 19th century master Jules Gouffé.

Colin soon meets Chloé, the love of his life, and quickly marries her in a wildly extravagant wedding. Meanwhile, Chick has found Alise, but the couple don't have much money for long: although Colin very generously gives his friend a quarter of his 100,000 doublezon wealth, Chick is obsessed with the philosopher Jean Sol Partre (obviously a very thinly veiled satirized version of Vian's friend Jean-Paul Sartre), and must own everything he writes, including very expensive limited editions.

Colin too will soon have money problems as a water lily is discovered growing in Chloé's lung, and the best cure is to send her to a mountain retreat and keep her surrounded all the time by flowers. Almost as soon as she gets better, the other lung begins the same complaint, and Colin will have to consider the unthinkable: working for a living.

The end is catastrophic for all four main characters. Chick has spent all his money on Partre's books and souvenirs, but Partre is working on a multiple-volume encyclopedia of nausea: Alise kills Partre as he refuses to cease publication, she dies while burning bookshops, and the police kill Chick during an argument over him not paying his taxes. Chloé dies, a heartbroken Colin decides to drown himself, and even the pet mouse, in sympathy with his dead friends, resorts to suicide by sticking his head in the jaws of the cat.

This is an anarchic book, and the author of it is of course a kind of anarchist as he takes shots at almost every institution. Another book that once did that, and which led to the author abandoning novels altogether, was Thomas Hardy with Jude the Obscure (1895). In Jude, though, work is all important, whereas for Vian it is the opposite.

Vian once said that it's not possible to see a man working without cursing the person who made him do it, because that man could be swimming, lying on the grass, reading, or making love to his wife. Ignoring the fact that the mention of the word 'wife' ² of which Vian seems to approve alludes to another (sometimes poisonous) institution – and one for which Hardy was severely punished for taking such a strong, er, poke at – this shows us where Vian's sympathies clearly lie: in the love of freedom.

Throughout the novel, institutions represent enslavement and/or tyranny: the brutalization of work, the enslavement of everyone to money, the thuggery of the police, the callousness and avarice (and a mild suggestion of pedophilia) of the clergy, the violence of the government, etc.

To return to Vian's satire of Sartre through Partre, though, the novel makes a number of obvious references to the philosopher's works, particularly to La Nausée, and the allusion to Sartre's famous lecture on L'Existentialisme est un humanisme at the Club Maintenant in 1945 – in which Partre arrives on an elephant in an armored howdah and begins by exhibiting a pile of stuffed vomit – is hilarious. There are also references, for instance, to a 'duchesse de Bovouard' (Simone de Beauvoir) and 'Don Evany Marqué (an anagram Raymond Queneau, surprisingly, didn't find himself), but the main point is clear: celebrity cults are tyrannous too, and we have seen the destructive results of one on Chick and Alise.

Very funny, very frightening, surprisingly modern: a wonderful book.

¹ This relates to the jazz theme running thoroughout the novel, in which the character Chloé's name is taken from the jazz song 'Chloe (Song of the Swamp)' (to which the water lilies obviously allude), and Vian also claims that he wrote the Foreword in New Orleans and the book itself in Memphis and Davenport – although in reality he never went to any of these places.

² He in fact said 'femme', which can also mean 'woman', so do we give him the benefit of the doubt?

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Boris Vian: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes / I Shall Spit on Your Graves

Louis Wolfson and Schizophrenic Languages

Louis Wolfson's second book, the highly alliterative Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne à minuit, mardi à mercredi, au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan, which concerns his mother's death from ovarian cancer, has just been re-published in France after its first publication in 1984, and was re-edited by the author in 2010 with a very slightly different title.

Wolfson was born in New York in 1931 and has written two books, both in French, which is not his maternal language: a schizophrenic, after horrific youthful spells in psychiatric hospitals which included EST (ECT in British English), he came to detest English to such an extent that his existential survival depended on avoiding the language at all costs. Teaching himself Hebrew, German and Russian, but particularly French, he tried all possible means to shut out English words, notably those of his domineering mother, and for years strove to create an internal language that automatically bypassed received English words to create alternative foreign forms. 'Where', to give a straightforward example, is changed to the German 'woher', but other transformations involve highly elaborate linguistic convolutions via similar meanings and phonemes held in common, etc, sometimes through a series of different languages.

French publisher Gallimard published his first book, Le Schizo et les langues ('The Schizophhrenic and Languages') in 1970, with a Foreword by Gilles Deleuze. Raymond Queneau found it exceptional, and J.-B. Pontalis and Paul Auster have also shown great interest in Wolfson's work.

Ma mère, musicienne represents a kind of posthumous reconciliation of Wolfson with his mother, closely detailing his dying mother's state of health in her final year. There are some conflicting reports about the dates of events in Wolfson's life, although it seems certain that he later went to live in Montréal, and then Puerto Rico, where he won a lottery that made him a millionaire when he was in his seventies, although several years later he lost his money and unsuccessfully tried to file a suit against those responsible for his investment advice.

Inevitably, Rimbaud's expression 'Je est un autre' ('I is another') from 'Le Bateau ivre' has been referenced, and Le Nouvel Obs suggests that Wolfson's book makes Camus's L'Étranger (which of course also starts after a mother's death and for me is more accurately translated as 'The Stranger' or 'The Foreigner') look, well, of a far more superficial order.

My other post on Louis Wolfson:
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Louis Wolfson: Ma mère, musicienne

Raymond Queneau: Exercices de style (1947)

Queneau's Exercices de style first takes place on a former 'S' line bus in Paris, where there's a man of about 26 with a long neck wearing a soft hat with a long ribbon. Each time someone passes, the man next to him bumps into him, and the young man complains to the second about this. As soon as there's a spare seat, he takes it. Later, the narrator sees the same young man in an animated conversation with a friend, who advises him to do up the top button of his overcoat.

And that's the full story. But the narrator tells the same one over and over again, 99 times in total. Only, there's a variation each time: the story is told in litotes, metaphorically, backwards, using surprises, negations, anagrams, onomatopeas, alexandrines, apocopation, aphesis, apostrophe, casually, clumsily, negatively, telegraphically, as a sonnet, as an ode, lipogram, etc.

This is all very clever, but like some other Oupipean experiments the novelty tends to wear off very quickly, and I don't really think this bears sustained reading. Near the end, there's a page of interjections which are just given out at random, and the overriding feeling I'd got long before that was just to give up reading as the point had been made so often before — it tries too hard, and becomes a victim of its own cleverness.

Links to my other Besson post, and Queneau's grave:

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Raymond Queneau: Les Enfants du limon
Queneau's grave, Juvisy-sur-Orge