Roger Vailland in Meillonnas (Ain (01))

Roger Vailland (1907-65), who won the Goncourt with La Loi in 1957, lived in Meillonnas with his wife Elisabeth from 1954 to 1965. The notice outside his house calls him one of the important figures of surrealism, the Resistance, communism and literature. The house they lived in is now called 'Rue Roger Vailland'. His grave is in the local cemetery and is almost anonymous, inundated by vegetation.

Roger Vailland: 325.000 francs (1955)

325.000 francs is Roger Vailland's sixth novel, and in a sense is a very working-class one, although Vailland himself wasn't a member of the working class. In very few books is the nature of working-class labour described, although here it is repeated like a litany. What strikes me – hard – about this book is that it is written by someone who is very concerned about the conditions of work in Oyonnax (in the novel called Bionnas), with its important plastics industry and the many injuries to workers.

For the communist Roger Vailland, then, is this a novel of political commitment? Hardly. The capitalist Jules Morel, owner of the firm Plastoform and Cité Morel, isn't the evil capitalist of left-wing sterotypes. But then nor is Bernard Busard (ah, more bird imagery as in Les mauvais Coups) anything like a working-class hero: under the thumb of his artificially-looking 'girlfriend' Marie-Jeanne – with whom he hasn't yet even had sex after eighteen months, and for whom the sexy and far more natural Juliette Doucet would be a far better match – Bernard slaves away to shape a capitalistically-envisaged future for the two of them.

Bernard sees this future as working in a snack-bar off the N7, and fantasises about running a whole series of snack-bars from Paris to Nice, each given a number relating to the number of miles covered from Paris. But to acquire the first one he needs 700,000 francs, of which he had to provide 325,000 of them. This he has to do by working extra hours (in tandem with Le Bressan, who is working for his own interests: or so it initially appears).

Vailland was inspired by seeing someone with an artificial hand in Oyonnax, the hand which holds the cards of the Tarot card game which he plays all day. Bernard becomes that person, who because handicapped is unsuited to running the N7 snack-bar and so runs a café in the town with his wife Marie-Jeanne. Until he returns to the plastics factory, that is.

Many of the themes in Les mauvais Coups are here, notably jealousy, although in this book it is Bernard's almost insane jealousy of Marie-Jeanne that impotently conquers. An important work, I think, but one which must certainly be viewed in the context of Vailland's total of nine novels, of which I've so far only read three.

My other Roger Vailland posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Roger Vailland: La Loi
Roger Vailland: Les mauvais Coups

Roger Vailland: Les mauvais Coups (1948)

There are a number of autobiographical elements in Les mauvais Coups, Roger Vailland's second novel. Certainly there is something of himself in the protagonist Milan, of his first wife Andrée Blavette (or Boule) in Roberte, of his dear friend the poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte in Octave (who doesn't appear here but is mentioned), and of course there's much drinking and a whole chapter is devoted to reckless gambling.

Milan (French for the kite bird of prey) is actually married to Roberte (whom he dreams of as a violent bird), although he doesn't believe in marriage, believes in freedom, believes in having lovers as he pleases, they have no real significance (although one (Juliette) obviously was, which is why Roberte slapped her face). And what can be more, er, significant than suicide, as performed by Octave who had been having an affair with Roberte and kills himself over her, or Roberte's final drunken (or maybe not so drunken) act of driving into a swamp after (presumably) reading Milan's letter to the lovely and much younger Hélène? After fifteen years (Milan with Roberte) what is left of love, if that means a great deal after the dying of the burning passion? Is all that remains just, as the cover illustration indicates, Milan the hunter symbolically crushing the skull of a crow, as if it were Roberte's? No, he clearly shows that he knows there are various kinds of love.

Is love that first dying burn, like the burn of winning at the roulette or the chemin de fer table, the burn of shooting defenceless animals, or does it take a long time to grow, like Vailland's emotional maturity?

My other Roger Vailland posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Roger Vailland: La Loi
Roger Vailland: 325.000 francs

Roger Vailland: La Loi (1957)

This powerful 1957 novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt in the same year. Communist Roger Vailland was shattered to learn the truth behind Stalin's lies, and sought refuge with his wife Élizabeth for several months in the Pulgia area of southern Italy, more specifically in the town of Gargano, which becomes masked as Manacore in La Loi, and is where almost all of the action in this claustrophobic novel is set.

The title La Loi refers to the translation of La Legge, a (male-only) bar game played in small towns and villages in southern Italy where everyone knows each other and in which, after the casting of a die or the drawing of a tarot card, a 'boss' emerges to chose a second-in-charge to lay down the Law with over a bottle of wine. The boss can drink as many glasses from the bottle as he wishes, and give or refuse glasses to other players who ask. He has the power to criticise, indeed insult, or even praise any of the other players or anyone else he wishes. For the dispossessed, this is a chance for a moment of glory, a chance to become all-powerful in theory, to make 'The Law'. The Law is a microcosm, here, of the social situation in Manacore.

Manacore suffers from often oppressive heat, oppressive mosquitoes, and oppressive men who think it their right to rape young virgins if they are refused that pleasure. Manacore on first appearances seems to be a place that time has forgotten, although there are glimpses of the twentieth century: the scooters, the cars, and the TV sets, for instance. But socially let's say there's room for growth.

There are feudal echoes here, as in the seventy-two-year-old Don Cesare's long-held 'right' to take women, although this right can easily be concealed by him employing them as servants: he owns a fair amount of land as well as money, so he can make the Law.

Matteo Brigante also makes the Law, has a great deal of money, but is a racketeer, not of the same social status as Don Cesare. Brigante is married, but likes to seduce virgins, such as Mariette, who is sixteen to seventeen here, and cuts Matteo deeply on the cheek with his own greffoir, or grafting knife, when he tries to rape her. This is an example of the 'lesser' sex turning the tables, of Mariette standing up for herself rather than accepting her lot as others would do: an example of a woman making the Law.

Making the Law can be complicated, as in prostitution. A hirer of prostitutes makes the Law by using the woman, but then the woman makes the Law by using the 'john' and establishing the price and creating all the conditions: maybe she has the best of both worlds by making the Law and receiving it, the narrator suggests. But there are no brothels in Manacore, a place where it is said that everyone is everyone else's cop, where if anything clandestine is to be done it has to be done by great cunning and/or a great deal of money.

But positions in the hierarchy are by no means permanent, as proved by the huge upward leap by the rank outsider Mariette, who may well be Don Cesare's daughter, and who gains a great amount of property in his will. As opposed, that is, to her mother and sisters and his servant Tonio, who is forced to join the ranks of the unemployed. A complicated story, but a very interesting one.

My other Roger Vailland posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Roger Vailland: Les mauvais Coups
Roger Vailland: 325.000 francs