In our age of clichés, it is often beneficial to be a colorful character to go down in history. How is it, then, that Jean Prévost (1901-1944) has not become a national myth? His life is a novel. Pillar of the NRF, but also host of the magazine The Silver Ship under the direction of Adrienne Monnier, he published an unknown named Saint-Exupéry. Gifted with a sensitive soul, he signs with Creation at Stendhal a reference essay on the subject. This great spirit is also sporty: he plays rugby and has a punching bag in his office. You have to believe he uses it. Sylvia Beach, who likes to organize boxing fights in her bookstore on rue de l’Odéon, one day offers him this challenge: to face Ernest Hemingway.
The American, this soft face, is no match: he breaks a thumb against Prévost’s fist. The latter later went underground, fought the Germans (while preparing a book on Baudelaire at night in his tent) and fell in the Vercors in 1944 under machine gun fire. He died at age 43 (younger than Fitzgerald). It was to him that Jérôme Garcin dedicated his very first book, For Jean Prévostin 1994. Thirty years later, Garcin released Words and actionsa fascinating essay on the shadows (Céline, Chardonne or Morand) and the rare lights (Jean Paulhan or Jacques Lusseyran) of the Occupation. The most acidic (twisting) pages are devoted to this spineless socialite of Cocteau (“an eel”) and to the publisher Bernard Grasset, “this corrupting and corrupt megalomaniac”, author of pro-Nazi texts who published Hitler and declared: “The duty of every Frenchman is to remain deaf to the voices coming from London.” From the introduction, Prévost establishes himself as the most worthy figure: “We know the Richter scale. From now on, I cannot read anything about this era in chiaroscuro without referring to Prévost’s scale. She gives me the right measure of words and actions.”
Born in 1956, therefore significantly younger than his friend Modiano, Garcin continued his night rounds in the heart of the 1940s. Answering our questions in the sunny garden of the Gallimard editions, he tells us where this taste comes from: “I I have always been a fanatical reader of the diaries, correspondence, stories and memoirs of writers of that period. And I was a contemporary of the Mitterrand years, which were those of the good chic collaborator. marked, and it’s because of her that I ended up writing For Jean Prévost. Let me explain. In 1978, Darquier de Pellepoix gave a resounding interview to L’Express, where I worked before you, in which he declared that, at Auschwitz, ‘only the lice were gassed’. Faurisson then begins to make noise. Then in 1981 Mitterrand arrived with all his admirations (Chardonne firstly, but also Rebatet) and all his friends (Papon, Bousquet and the others). Publishers republish collaborationist authors. In 1987, two books to the glory of Brasillach were released simultaneously in big houses, one of which was written by Anne Brassié, a journalist at Minutewhich is a panegyric of Brasillach, seen as a martyr of the purge. Mitterrandism was terrible for that. Tongues were loosened. The worst trash were credited with additional talent, which is true of Céline, this absolute genius, but is not true for many others. Conversely, if you had made the right choice, you were considered a bad writer – you couldn’t say anything good about Saint-Exupéry, for example. This pushed me to want to bring Prévost out of oblivion.”
“Between perfection and abjection”
Fine author (what had been recalled My fragilewhich is coming out in Folio these days), Garcin will have spent a good part of his time reading the unfrequentable. A mystery remains: how can one be born with a gift for style and a twisted, even obtuse, mind? Our interlocutor still doesn’t have the answer: “Apart from Céline, the most extreme case is Morand. He has this crackling French style, which I really like, especially in Miladywhich I place at the top. No man spoke better of horses. Unfortunately his correspondence is terrible. In a letter to Chardonne addressed after the war, he is able to say of a writer who was deported: ‘He was in Buchenwald, but he did not learn concentration there.’ His letters make me vomit: they are overflowing with sick anti-Semitism, but also with racism and insane homophobia, with a vulgarity of feelings a thousand miles from the ultra-brilliant writer that he was. I don’t understand, I’m missing something… After the Liberation, Chardonne made amends. Morand, for his part, never gave up his worst ideas. And yet, in his most atrocious letters, he can suddenly describe a landscape, a light, and then touch perfection… So he was: between perfection and abjection.”
We remember that, despite fierce enmity towards the former ambassador of the Vichy regime, General de Gaulle had allowed Morand to enter the French Academy in 1968. He had been less lenient towards Brasillach, the editor-in-chief of I am everywhere, shot in 1945 at Fort Montrouge. In Words and actionsGarcin quotes these words from De Gaulle, collected by Alain Peyrefitte well after the fact, in 1963: “An intellectual is not less, but more responsible than others. He is an instigator. He is a leader, in the sense stronger. François Mauriac wrote to me that a thinking head must not fall. And why is this privilege more responsible than a piaf head? He had talent. What he did is all the more serious.” Garcin’s comment: “In my opinion, Brasillach should not be executed. The grandiose gesture would have been to pardon him. But in I’m everywhere he had practiced denunciation in an ignominious manner. De Gaulle’s argument is legitimate: an intellectual does not have to be exempt from all condemnation.”
“The more we unburden ourselves, the better we are”
To conclude, let us return to a second Quai Conti, where Charles Maurras was triumphantly elected in 1938. At the end of his book, Garcin remarks, by taking up the work of Gisèle Sapiro, that at the French Academy collaboration prevailed over the resistance – he thus unearths Henry Bordeaux, a forgotten Vichy academician who wanted to dismantle the Eiffel Tower so that his metal could be donated to the German war effort… In literary circles, it is said that Garcin aspires to the green coat. We ask him the question, he smiles: “I’m cited for a lot of things that I don’t want at all… The more we shed our weight, the better off we are. I know something about it today after leaving the jury of the Renaudot prize and the presentation of Mask and the Feather. The Academy corresponds neither to my way of life nor to my ideas – it has never been a den of progressives! I stopped everything, it’s not to get back into service. I’m very happy with just my notepad in The New Obs.”
Engaged in the intellectual resistance, close to Paulhan and Jacques Decour, the writer Jean Guéhenno said of men of letters that they do not form “one of the greatest human species”. Garcin pays him a beautiful tribute in Words and actions. We understand that he now prefers to take care of his horses in Normandy than to mingle with the thieves of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Words and actions. Belles lettres under the Occupationby Jérôme Garcin. Gallimard, 164 p., €18.50.
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