In the 13th arrondissement of Paris, there is a rue Alphonse-Boudard, which ensures him at least a small legacy in the neighborhood of his childhood. A truculent and endearing novelist, finer than he seems beneath his loud-mouthed goofball ways, Boudard had his hour of glory (Prix Renaudot in 1977, Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française in 1995). But who still reads it? In 1981 he wrote this in The morning : “I am more interested in my criminal record, alas, than in my penetrating subtleties which pass well above the face of the barge who pays, and even more so that of the critics who, for their part, only read sideways, overwhelmed as they are by the books which reach them every day by cart.” No offense to Boudard, he is wrong: in the jumble of current editorial overproduction, something new stands out, and it is his posthumous book, which crushes the living with its intelligence and its verve. Damn the year 2000 brings together around fifty texts published between 1959 and 1999 in the most varied newspapers (we go from World has Playboy and Crapouillot has Telerama). They allow us to retrace the journey of an atypical lunatic in our recent literary history.
Born in 1925 to an unknown father and a prostitute mother, young Boudard first grew up in the countryside before being entrusted to his grandmother, who raised him in a working-class, if not miserable, 13th century. . He hangs out in the streets, is passionate about Nickel-plated feet, the Tour de France (like Antoine Blondin) and Môme Piaf, of which he never misses a concert. He goes to see her at the Fagon, the small music hall on the Place d’Italie which has now disappeared, then at Bobino or at L’Européen, charmed by “this irreplaceable voice coming from the depths of the Parisian street”. Still a teenager, he joined the Resistance: he fired shots in a maquis in Sologne, participated in the Liberation of Paris, received the war cross from the hands of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny. What followed was not as glorious: less well born than Jean Dutourd, also resistant and whom he resembled in many respects, Boudard became a brigand. From 1948, and for around ten years, the gentleman burglar often stayed in various prisons, in Liancourt and especially in Fresnes, “three stars… establishment recommended by the Touring Justice Club”.
Alongside former collaborators who are going to be shot and fellow prisoners who would like to attack his virtue, Boudard is struck by the grace of literature: “Like many writers, I met Emile Zola at the gnouf. It’s there that I read almost everything, that I learned, educated, cultivated, refined, affirmed, renovated… renaudot… my ENA… the gap, my Polytechnique and my human sciences.” He reads with bulimia Céline (from which he steals the slang and the ellipsis), Stendhal, Giono and therefore Zola and his “banter of the suburbs”: “I realize that he is the dab, Zola, that without him Céline would not have existed. Céline is the enfant terrible, the temperamental child of naturalism, let’s not forget that.”
When he is not imprisoned for various misdeeds, this serious tuberculosis patient from Boudard is treated in sanatoriums. In 1958, he returned to Fresnes, where it clicked: he would be a writer. If he likes to lampoon popular novelists like Guy from Cars, he wouldn’t mind succeeding in this direction: “I already saw myself, in my bottom-of-the-bottom dreams, suckling the Havana, sipping Chivas, ladling caviar… crocodile pumps, a hundred and fifty suits… mink carpet, sable rug… obsequious minions at every step… the heavy Rolls… platinum bumpers… ” He made his debut in 1962 at Plon with The Metamorphosis of the woodlice. There follows a series of autobiographically inspired novels such as The Hospital, ultimately closer to Blondin than to Céline. Boudard joined “a cheerful, thirsty and yet highly cultured team” where we found Eric Losfeld, André Hardellet, René Fallet, Georges Brassens… He also set foot in the world of cinema and frequented Lino Ventura and Jean Gabin. At the latter’s burial in 1976, the coffin took a long time to arrive. Albert Simonin, the author of Don’t touch the grisbi!laughs in Boudard’s ear: “He thinks he’s still on the set… he’s kept waiting…”
“I thought it was a joke from Laurent Ruquier”
Success came the following year for Boudard: with The Little Happiness Fighters, where he recounts his youth and his commitment to the Resistance, he won the Renaudot prize. All his friends are there to congratulate him: Simonin, Fallet and Blondin, but also Guy Béart, Simone Signoret and the painter Gen Paul. With Boudard, a certain bohemianism gains its letters of nobility. However, he does nothing to improve his image. The proof with this incredible article, published in Him in 1971, where the former FFI campaigned for the rehabilitation of Lucien Rebatet.
Despite his provocations, Boudard flirted with institutionalization in the mid-1990s, when he received the Grand Prix du roman from the Académie française for Dying of childhood. The text he devotes to this ceremony, “OK Conti”, reflects the image of the author: “When Maurice Druon’s secretary called me on the phone to tell me the news, I believed in a joke from Laurent Ruquier.” Wearing a Jean d’Ormesson-style knitted tie, he goes for drinks with his supporters (Dutourd, Félicien Marceau, Henri Troyat, etc.) – that’s counting without his press officer who is trying to put in place “a surveillance plan picrate.” And Boudard concluded thus: “In a few years, if I have not fallen into disarray, it is not the Academy that I am aiming for, but the Nobel Prize for the underworld. I deserve it since I brought in the ‘slang under the Dome.’
In Damn the year 2000 there is also a portrait of Fernandel, one of his idols: “I met him a few times at the end of his career; he would enter anywhere… an office, a café, a train station, a train compartment train and it triggered a swell of laughter. It’s not Balladur who can say the same.” We will have understood: Boudard loved puns, jokes and popular culture, he was the absolute antithesis of Eric Reinhardt. We regularly pinch ourselves when reading it: how could such a free and funny author enjoy such recognition? We come to be convinced that the world of letters was less snobbish and less puritanical half a century ago.
But it would be a caricature of Boudard to limit him to his Falstaff de Paname side. Gifted with a sensitive soul and a sharp mind, he is very moving when he speaks of the death of his mother, infinitely poetic when he evokes Gen Paul in his studio in Montmartre, insightful when he defends Marcel Aymé against “the Robbe -Grillet and other Philippe Sollers for whom life never passes… will never pass, simply because the vanity of literary circles prevents them from taking to the streets one fine morning, as the author of the Wall passto meet the little people, the people of no rank, with their worries about money, their daydreams about sex, their drunken chatter.” An improbable cross between Villon, Rabelais and Stendhal, such a man was not made to resist long into the 21st century. Two weeks took their toll on his health: he died on January 14, 2000.
Damn the year 2000, by Alphonse Boudard. Le Dilettante, 250 p., €19.
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