07 November 2013
Rights, rats and revolution: Albert Camus turns 100
7 November 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of birth of French writer, philosopher, playwright and activist Albert Camus (1913-1960). It is impossible to speculate how his career in any of these fields might have developed had he not died prematurely in a car accident on 4 January 1960 when a Facel Vega driven by his publisher and friend Michel Gallimard crashed near Sens, killing them both.
Camus (left) and Michel Gallimard
Born in Algiers into a poor family, Camus was brought up by his mother after the death of his father in the Battle of the Marne (1914), and during his years as a student was forced to limit his studies and his activities as a goalkeeper for the university football team Racing Universitaire d'Alger when he developed tuberculosis. Throughout his life his ties to his native Algeria remained strong, and he wrote evocatively of the heat and brilliance of the climate, never more tellingly than in his most famous novel L’étranger (The Outsider; 1942) of which the British Library possesses a first edition (W17/9256 DSC), where the relentless glare of the sun is a direct factor in the narrator Meursault’s attack on an Arab which ultimately sends him to the guillotine.
In another novel, La Peste (The Plague; 1947: first edition at 012551.m.30. and W26/4658 DSC), Camus once again sets the action in North Africa as the backdrop for the ethical choices and changes which confront the inhabitants of a small town when a mysterious rat-borne plague suddenly erupts. The rats have been interpreted by critics as symbols on a variety of levels, including carriers of moral and political corruption as well as an allusion to the compromises for which France was blamed during the German occupation.
Camus’s own political beliefs brought him into numerous conflicts, from his membership of the French resistance cell ‘Combat’ and editorship of its paper to the outspoken criticism of Communism which led to his expulsion from the party in 1937 and his breach with his fellow-Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in 1951. His vigorous advocacy of human rights encompassed pronouncements on the bombing of Hiroshima, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and the Algerian war in 1954, and opposition to totalitarianism and the death penalty, which he joined forces with Arthur Koestler to criticize.
In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times’. This is nowhere more evident than in his dramas, which place the moral dilemmas of human existence and the workings of the absurd in a variety of contexts which, from ancient Rome in Caligula (1938) to pre-revolutionary Russia (Les Justes, 1949), frame timeless questions about human guilt and responsibility and make them accessible to all. It is surely no coincidence that Camus and Sartre’s first meeting in 1943 was at a rehearsal of the latter’s play Les Mouches (The Flies), where Orestes and his fellow-citizens grapple with a symbolic plague no less virulent than that in Camus’s work.
By locating the action of these plays in distant times and places, Camus enables his audiences to enter into it without the limited identification with specific contemporary issues which would have resulted from a modern setting, and stimulates discussion of questions which remain of vital importance a century after the author’s birth. And yet, despite their enduring dramatic power and the serious quality of their content, we may recall Camus’s response when asked by his friend Charles Poncet whether he preferred the theatre to football: he is said to have replied, ‘Football, without hesitation’.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech & Slovak Studies
07 October 2013
Alain-Fournier and Proust film adaptations. Part I
There have been two film adaptations of Alain-Fournier’s novel Le grand Meaulnes, by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco in 1967 and by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe in 2006, and several adaptations of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu or parts of it. There have also been some other fascinating attempts to bring these two novels to the screen which failed despite the tireless efforts of two remarkable women – Isabelle Rivière and Nicole Stéphane.
Isabelle Rivière (1889-1971), Alain-Fournier’s sister and dedicatee of Le grand Meaulnes, owned the film rights to the novel. In 1933 she met André Barsacq (1909-1973), a young Ukrainian-born stage designer with some experience in film as assistant director to Jean Grémillon. Barsacq later became the director of the Théâtre de l'Atelier and for some forty years he was a major theatre director in Paris, staging the work of, among others, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Anouilh, Marcel Aymé, Paul Claudel, and Félicien Marceau, and adapting the works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Turgenev for the French stage.
Isabelle Rivière
Barsacq and Rivière drafted a screenplay and in the 1940s there were location searches and screen tests, but plans foundered several times due to prohibitive financial costs. Rivière turned down proposals from other film makers, notably from Julien Duvivier, who first expressed an interest in 1937 and again in 1954. By the latter date Duvivier’s commercially successful Don Camillo films would have probably helped to raise money for the film of Le grand Meaulnes but Rivière’s faith in Barsacq remained unshakeable and the correspondence between the two continued for some 32 years until 1965, when she finally realised that Barsacq’s theatrical commitments would always be his first priority, and offered the film rights to Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, a young director who had already successfully adapted Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (1961). Albicocco’s film is rightly dedicated to Rivière and she was pleased with the result, as it is very faithful to the novel. Had she lived to see Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe’s 2006 adaptation she would have certainly disapproved of it, as it takes liberties with the text, notably by having Meaulnes, like Alain-Fournier, killed in the First World War.
Nicole Stéphane (left) was an actress best known for her remarkable performance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s film of the Jean Cocteau novel Les Enfants terribles in 1950. Her acting career having been cut short by a car accident, she became a film producer, and her credits include To Die in Madrid (1962), Frédéric Rossif’s documentary about the Spanish Civil War. In 1962 she acquired the film rights to A la recherche du temps perdu. Her epic attempts to turn Proust’s novel into a film lasted nearly as long as those of Isabelle Rivière, and she finally had to content herself with Volker Schlöndorff’s 1984 film Un Amour de Swann (Swann in Love) an adaptation of a more or less self-contained part of the novel. All her attempts to interest French film directors - René Clément, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette – had previously failed.
More frustrating were the failed projects of Luchino Visconti and then of Joseph Losey between 1969 and 1977, both of which had to be abandoned at a late stage. It is a small consolation that both these aborted projects left behind them two remarkable screenplays by Suso Cecchi d’Amico (for Visconti) and Harold Pinter (for Losey) to which I would like to return in a later blog.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian Studies
References:
Martine Beugnet / Marion Schmid. Proust at the Movies (Aldershot, 2004). YC.2006. a.5329.
André Barsacq: Cinquante ans de théâtre. (Paris, 1978). X:900/20339.
Michel Autrand. ‘André Barsacq et le Grand Meaulnes au cinéma’ in Bulletin des Amis de Jacques Rivière et d’Alain-Fournier, no118 (2007), p.93-106 and no.120 (2008), p. 81-110. P.901/1770
Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi d'Amico. A la recherche du temps perdu [scénario d'après l'œuvre de Marcel Proust]. ([Paris], 1984). YA.1987.a.8894
Harold Pinter. A la recherche du temps perdu: the Proust screenplay with the collaboration of Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray. (London, 1978). YC.1991.a.2249
20 September 2013
Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes
Like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who is chiefly known for Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), his only novel, Alain-Fournier’s reputation rests almost exclusively on Le Grand Meaulnes, his elegiac, and partly autobiographical, novel of adolescence, adventure and lost love set in a rural setting (the region of Sologne) evoked with great sensitivity. It first appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française, from July to November 1913 and was published in book form by Émile-Paul at the end of 1913.[BL shelfmark: 12548.ppp.20]. A few months later, on 22 September 1914, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle on the Meuse, aged 27.
Alain-Fournier in 1904. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Le Grand Meaulnes is one of the classics of French literature. Most French people first come across it at school, and in England it was for years a favourite A-level text. Its popularity with Anglo-American readers can be gauged by the number of different translations of the title – Big Meaulnes, The Great Meaulnes, The Magnificent Meaulnes, The Wanderer, The Lost Estate, and The Lost Domain – and its influence on writers like Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald (especially The Great Gatsby), and John Fowles. Julian Barnes, who, surprisingly, first read it only in his late 30s, has recently written about the novel’s enduring appeal.
Since 1975 the Association des Amis de Jacques Rivière et d’Alain-Fournier, founded by Alain Rivière, the son of Jacques Rivière (Alain-Fournier’s closest friend) and Isabelle Fournier (his sister and the dedicatee of the novel), has been promoting the work of these two writers, through the publication of a six-monthly Bulletin (P.901/1770). The Association’s website is a mine of information: as well as an index of the Bulletin it also lists all illustrated editions of Le Grand Meaulnes (reproducing examples of the illustrations), and all cover illustrations of the novel.
Highlights include John Minton’s illustrations for the 1947 English translation of the work. The cover of the 1966 Penguin Modern Classics translation with Alfred Sisley’s painting Les Petits Prés au printemps (The Small Meadows in Spring) will bring back fond memories to many a reader of the book.
Despite the popularity of Le Grand Meaulnes and its status as a classic, Alain-Fournier, has so far not entered the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, the ultimate sign of literary recognition in France.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek Studies
23 August 2013
Fond memories of a tin snail
I wonder how many of you have seen a Citroën 2CV on the roads recently? Not many I bet. Yet not so long ago almost every other car on the streets of France was a ‘Deux Chevaux’. Watch an old black and white French film and they are as much a feature of Paris as the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe. Certainly in the 1980s when I first crossed the Channel they were still abundant, tootling around the streets of metropolitan France or haring down narrow rural lanes.
Plans for the the 2CV, or Deux Chevaux Vapeur, were conceived in the 1930s but production only began in 1948. The tin snail, as it was sometimes affectionately called, was manufactured until 1990. For the final two years it was made in Portugal but for most of its life production was at the famous Levallois-Perret plant in Paris.
A pre-war Citroën 2CV prototype.
I bought mine new in 1982, drove it for six years and took it to France several times. The French were fascinated, not just by its right-hand drive, but also its deep red colour, unusual in France where 2CVs were mainly light grey, beige or white.
With its 602cc engine you were unlikely to be caught speeding in a 2CV, but it could reach 70mph going downhill with a following gale. And it was pointless installing a radio because of the noise inside and out.
Nevertheless, I had more fun driving that car than any other I’ve owned.
My Citroën 2CV in Falaise, France in 1987, beneath the statue of William the Conqueror
The only other car of the same era with a comparable iconic standing was the Volkswagen Beetle, but that was never as endearingly quirky as the Deux Chevaux. Nor was it as versatile. I remember once buying a very long ladder; inserting it through the 2CV’s boot to protrude from the rolled-back canvas top, I was able to take it home without incurring a hefty delivery charge. Moreover, the back seat was easily removable and could be used conveniently for picnicking.
2CVs were often the butt of English jokes. Jasper Carrott once said that if a 2CV hit a rabbit on the road, the car would be a write-off. He also said that only the French could make a car like that and then sell it to the British. Once when I gave my brother a lift in mine, he asked me if it had an engine or did I have to pedal.
My British Library colleagues knew of my passion for the Deux Chevaux. I had many toy models around my computer and pictures on the wall. A French colleague would bring me back 2CV biscuit tins and postcards from trips to France. One tin had a charming picture of two Breton ladies in a 2CV with their traditional tall hats peeping out from the rolled-back roof.
I now drive a Volkswagen Golf. This was described as treachery by an official at last year’s International Citroën Rally in Harrogate but when faced with a 200-mile drive down the motorway, even I can't recommend a 2CV over a Golf. Still, if you’re a nostalgic Francophile like me and just need a runabout, you can buy one rebuilt as new these days for between £10,000 and £14,000, or buy a wreck and rebuild it yourself using Lindsay Porter’s manual How to restore Citroën 2CV (Dorchester, 2004) [BL shelfmark YK.2005.b.1616]
And how does one sum up the legendary Deux Chevaux? It was perfectly expressed on a sticker I once saw in the back window of one: ‘Ce n’est pas une voiture, c’est un art de vivre’ (This isn’t a car, it’s a way of life).
References: Reynolds, John, The Citroën 2CV (Sparkford, 2005.) YC.2005.b.2323
Allain, François, Citroën 2CV (Boulogne-Billancourt, c2002.) LB.31.b.26133
Trevor Willimott, former West European Languages cataloguer
09 August 2013
Some 2013 anniversaries
This year’s musical anniversaries, especially the bicentenaries of Verdi and Wagner and the centenary of Britten, have so far somewhat overshadowed the centenaries of some momentous events in literature, the visual arts, and music, all happening in Paris in 1913, an annus mirabilis for French and European culture, and the culmination of the activity that made the city the epicentre of artistic creation in the first years of the century.
Earlier this year, the BBC marked the centenary of some of these events with a series of five 15-minute talks. The programmes looked at Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, and Apollinaire’s Alcools, all published in 1913, Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913, and, curiously, Cubism (even though the movement dates back to 1907).
Two other events during the same extraordinary year, not covered in the series, were the creation of Debussy’s ballet Jeux and the publication of Blaise Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien.
Jeux, painting by Dorothy Mullock (1888-1973). Image from Wikimedia Commons
Jeux (‘Games’), Debussy’s last orchestral score, had the misfortune to be premiered by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on 15 May 1913, just a fortnight before the same company’s first performance of The Rite of Spring. Both ballets were conducted by Pierre Monteux who, a year earlier, had conducted the first performance of Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé. (How many conductors can claim as much?)
Debussy’s ballet (or ‘poème dansé’), was burdened with a scenario and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky which was much ridiculed by, among others, Erik Satie; the plot involved a man, two women, and a game of tennis. Obviously Nijinsky’s knowledge of tennis was nebulous, as the ball used on stage was nearly the size of a football, and the dancers’ movements resembled those of golfers rather than tennis players.
Jeux was eclipsed by the sensation caused by The Rite of Spring which, ironically, echoed the scandal that greeted, exactly a year earlier, the creation of another short ballet by Debussy, also choreographed and performed by Nijinsky, based on the earlier symphonic poem ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, in the final scene of which the faun appears to masturbate. Jeux was subsequently dismissed as an example of Debussy’s declining powers in his last years, and it is only recently that it has been hailed as a masterpiece with echoes of Wagner’s Parsifal and looking forward to the music of Messiaen and Boulez.
La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France [Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France], a poem by Blaise Cendrars with pochoir illustrations in watercolour and gouache by Sonia Delaunay was published in October 1913. An edition of 150 copies of this ‘first simultaneous book’ was planned; as each was printed on a sheet unfolding to a length of 2 metres, if all the copies were placed end to end they would reach 300 metres, the height of the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of modernity celebrated in the poem and in other paintings by Robert and Sonia Delaunay. In the event, only 60 copies were produced initially and the outbreak of war the following year prevented further printing of what has been called ‘one of the most beautiful books ever created’.
The book was one of the highlights of the 2007-2008 British Library exhibition ‘Breaking the Rules: the Printed Face of the Avant-Garde 1900-1937’. A podcast about it and a zoomable image of it can be found on the British Library website, and there is a modern facsimile available at YK.2011.a.17509.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek Studies
References:
L’Après-midi d’un Faune. Vaslav Nijinsky 1912: Thirty-Three Photographs by Baron Adolf de Meyer. (London, 1983). L.45/3369
Robin Holloway Debussy and Wagner (London, 1979). X.439/8747
Robert Orledge, Debussy and the theatre (Cambridge, 1982). X.950/19866 and 82/32509
Blaise Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris, 1913)
15 July 2013
Propaganda from the skies
For the last two years, I have been working on a PhD about propaganda history at the University of Sheffield in collaboration with the British Library. The Library's current exhibition ‘Propaganda: Power and Persuasion’ has spectacularly advertised the importance of the subject and its impact on our modern society. My own research topic of ‘Allied propaganda in occupied France and Belgium during the First World War’, was triggered in this same institution by the discovery of a typescript and a collection of newspapers given to the British Museum Library in 1919 by Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943).
Edward Heron-Allen was an intellectual with interests in Persian literature, science and music but was also one of the propagandists working for what was probably the most mysterious communication unit of the British army during the First World War – MI7b. Our knowledge of this organisation is limited by the 1919 destruction of their archives. Yet surviving sources reveal varied activities such as attempts to demoralise the enemy, propaganda behind the lines, communication with the press or translation of pamphlets.
The newspapers contained in the British Library, made by the British between 1917 and 1918 and named Le Courrier de l’Air, were written in French in order to be dropped by planes (later by balloon) over the invaded territories of Belgium and France. The typescript attached to this collection describes the creative process behind the conception of this form of propaganda.
Two years after having accessed these documents, my research has allowed me to contextualise them. At the end of 1915, the French decided to drop a newspaper over their invaded departments in order to fight the powerful German propaganda being produced in French. The distribution by plane was partially done by the British over the sector of Lille. The Belgians imitated their neighbours in 1916 and published newspapers both in French and Flemish in an attempt to fight the campaign of division led by the Germans in the country. Le Courrier de l’Air was created by MI7b at the beginning of 1917.
The masthead of Le Courrier de l'Air (C.40.l.21.)
While there is not enough space to develop here all the findings of my transnational study, it seems useful to answer one of the most intriguing questions surrounding the topic – why did the British bother writing a newspaper specially aimed at the occupied civilians of foreign allied nations? The answer lies in the German propaganda. The content of the occupier’s French-language newspaper, the Gazette des Ardennes, (MF175) was strongly Anglophobic in order to arouse anger at the Franco-British alliance. Daily attacks against the British raised concerns inside the War Office which, when the French refused to offer assistance, decided to create the Courrier de l’Air.
The impact of British propaganda in French will be researched during the last year of my PhD. In the meantime, the last words will be offered by a Frenchman who experienced the occupation and reflected on the efficiency of German propaganda against the British: ‘Each piece of literature produced in the last centuries against England is reproduced in the Gazette des Ardennes. Not an issue without a mention of Joan of Arc or Napoleon. It is in vain – each occupied individual realises that he owes the existence of his country to England. And after all… the Hun hates her [England], and that’s reason enough for us to love her’. (P. Stephani, Sedan sous domination allemande 1914-1918, (Paris, 1919; 9083.bb.39. pp. 26-27.)
Bernard Wilkin, Sheffield University/British Library Collaborative PhD student
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