Francis Carco: The Career of a Literary Bohemian 9780231882590

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FRANCIS CARCO

FRANCIS CARCO The Career of a Literary Bohemian By SEYMOUR S. WEINER

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NEW YORK 1952

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

COPYRIGHT 1 9 5 2 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK

Published in Great Britain, Canada, and India by Geoffrey CumberlegtOxford University Press Londonf Toronto, and Bombay MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA

TO MY

FATHER

Foreword

r RANCIS CARCO is an example of the curious fact that a writer may be recognized by the public and critics of his own country and yet be comparatively unknown here. His works have earned for him in France popular success, financial rewards, the Grand Prix du Roman of the French Academy, membership in the Goncourt Academy, the rank of Commander in the Legion of Honor—and little recognition in the United States. Of more than fifty volumes, only L'Homme traqué, Perversité and Le Couteau, De Montmartre au quartier latin, and Le Roman de François Villon have been translated into English. Carco has reached eminence as the chronicler of the mores and the psychology of the milieu, the shady world of suspect activities, fraudulent practices, prostitution, and criminality— the gamut from the gamin to the murderer, from the naïve child of the streets misled by her own sentimentality to the insensitive professional without hope or charity. Although Carco wrote works treating of other backgrounds and characters, his undisputed province is that of the voyou. But if Carco's subject matter has won him a certain initial suffrage, it has been his technical skill, esthetic truthfulness, and literary value that have elicited more lasting encomiums. Another aspect of his significance for our and future times is his role in twentieth-century bohemianism. His multiple

viii

FOREWORD

activities—poet, novelist, biographer, art critic, playwright, scenarist and actor, night-club and radio reciter of poetry— are diverse facets of the same temperament. They are also an opportune response to a literary and social tradition. The legends that have accrued to his name are significant as signs of an epoch as well as illustrative of Carco's colorful personality. And he has been instrumental in the picturesque comprehension of the poètes maudits, of Villon and Verlaine, of painters like Utrillo and Modigliani, stigmatized by their addictions and rejected by society. The note of fantasy, with an echo of bitterness or cynicism, which sounds through the poems of La Bohème et mon cœur; his memoirs about his friends and about the art rising on the eve of World War I; the depiction of new attempts, after that holocaust, at flight via adventures, stimulants, and the cult of sensation—these are data of interest to those concerned with the reflection of a certain contemporary disquiet and search for new values in the arts and in society. In the pursuit of this investigation of Carco's career, I have received aid and encouragement and information from various people. They are too numerous to be all mentioned here, and in some cases their special assistance is indicated merely in the notes. Carco himself, in addition to corresponding with me, welcomed me as a guest at "La Planque" and put himself and his home completely at my disposal. Not only did he permit me to interrogate him endlessly (at no time did he try to persuade me to his convictions), he also granted me the unrestricted consultation of his study and his library. (Access to so much, with too little time to do justice to the possibilities, almost discouraged me from attempting the present book.) M. Edouard Gazanion, Carco's old friend, with remarkable altruism allowed me to consult his extensive collection of letters, documents, and notes, elucidated obscure points, and suggested further researches. I am obliged for hospitality,

FOREWORD

ix

documentation, reminiscences, and efforts in my behalf to M. Mario Meunier, former secretary to Rodin and erstwhile contributor to Le Feu; M. François Bernouard, publisher, editor, bohemian; M. Henri Martineau, editor of Le Divan; M. Philippe Chabaneix, poet and advocate of the fantaisistes; M. Paulo, Père Frédé's son and present director of the Lapin Agile; M. Bernard Combes de Patris, the chief commentator on Rouergue arts and letters ; Dr. Edouard Carcopino, Carco's brother; M. Emile Galtier, former teacher at the lycée of Rodez; Mme Pierre La ville, widow of Carco's collaborator on topical verses ; M. Louis Collomb, principal of the collège of Villefranche-de-Rouergue; M. Auguste Benazet, félibre poet; Captain Breil, Carco's comrade at school; Mme Jayr and Marquis Jean de Pomairols, Charles de Pomairols's children and the present owners of his estates; M. Salingardes, son of Le Narrateurs publisher and himself the publisher of its continuation; M. Emile Freslon, proviseur of the lycée of Agen; M. Marcel Vertès, the artist; M. Henri Torres, occasionally Carco's lawyer in legal actions. I am very grateful to the late M. Alexandre Albenque, proviseur of the lycée of Rodez; with extraordinary love both of scholarship and of his native Rouergue, whose ancient history he has written, M. Albenque enthusiastically undertook researches as my proxy, facilitated introductions, and conducted me on a memorable tour. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor Jean-Albert Bédé, of Columbia University, for his guidance, sympathetic patience, scholarship, and especially his ability to inspire. For their help and advice I owe much to Professor Wilbur M. Frohock, who pointed out so many inadequacies of style and weaknesses of development, and to Professor Jean Hytier, familiar with the period and the personalities discussed here, and author of a study of "The Last Bohemia." I am obliged, too, to Professor Norman L. Torrey and Professor

X

FOREWORD

Justin O'Brien for textual criticism and the benefit of their knowledge. Mr. J. Christopher Herold has been very helpful in editing the manuscript for publication. A l l opinions and conclusions, however, unless otherwise stated, are my own responsibility. The libarians of the following institutions have been tireless in their efforts and most generous with their facilities: University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Library of Congress, Columbia University, New York Public Library, French Institute Library, Frick Art Reference Library, Museum of Modern Art, Princeton University, Yale University (whose collection of Carco's works is the finest in this country), Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection Jacques Doucet, Société Aveyronnaise des Arts, des Lettres et des Sciences. And I am grateful to Mr. Dominick Coppola and Mr. Otto Hafner, of Stechert-Hafner Inc., Mr. Wittenborn and Mr. Schultz, of Wittenborn and Co., and Miss Iskian and Dr. Lucien Goldschmidt, of Pierre Berès Inc., for their cooperation and personal concern in procuring for me or allowing me to consult expensive or out-of-print titles. I also wish to thank the copyright owners who gave me permission to quote and to reproduce various excerpts and illustrations. For her cooperation, her perseverance, and her patience, I must recognize that my greatest debt is to my wife. S. S. W . New York September, 1951

Contents

I II

CHILDHOOD:

NEW CALEDONIA

ADOLESCENCE:

3

CHÂTILLON-SUR-SEINE

17

III

YOUTH:

ROUERGUE AND T H E SOUTH

33

IV

DEBUT:

PARIS

58

V VI VU VIN IX

MORATORIUM:

WORLD WAR I

RESUMPTION:

PARIS AND ABROAD C O N T I N U I T Y IN CHANGE

PROLONGATIONS: PERSPECTIVES:

AFFINITIES AND TENDENCIES

CONFIGURATIONS:

PERSONAL AND I N T E R P R E T I V E

85 103 130 156 178

NOTES

195

BIBLIOGRAPHY

241

INDEX

263

Illustrations

Three Sketches by Carco of Himself: 1924, 1919, 1949 Title page Carco at the Age of Four, in New Caledonia (Photograph by L. Devambez) 32 The Carcopino Residence, Probably Rue de la République, at Noumea 32 Carco, c. 1906, Probably at Rodez 33 Carco with Pierre Laville, c. 1907, at Rodez 33 Auguste Benazet with a Self-Portrait by Gal, at Villefranche-de-Rouergue (Photograph Taken in 1948) 33 Etching by Chas Laborde for Rien quune femme (Edit. de la Roseraie, 1925) 48 Engraving by André Dignimont for Nuits de Paris (Au Sans Pareil, 1927) 48 Frontispiece Copperplate Engraving by Jean-Gabriel Daragnès for La Bohème et mon cœur (Emile-Paul frères, 1929) 48 The Lapin Agile; Etching by Eugène Véder for Promenades pittoresques à Montmartre (Edit. Léo Delteil, 1922) 49 Père Frédé at the Bar of the Lapin Agile; Etching by Eugène Véder for Promenades pittoresques à Montmartre (Edit. Léo Delteil, 1922) 49 Sketch by Jeoffroy in La Phalange, April 15, 1908 50 "The Phantoms of the Mercure [de France]," by Roger Wild in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, February 19, 1948 79

xiv

ILLUSTRATIONS

Etching by André Dignimont for Les Innocents (Emile Hazan, 1930) Carco when a Student Pilot at the Aviation School at Pau, in 1917 Carco with the Manuscript of Petits Airs, at the Infirmary of Les Clayes, in 1917 "Homage to Toulet," Painting by Tristan Klingsor (Collection of Henri Martineau; Photograph by Marc Vaux) "Some of the Last Bohemians," Photograph from The Last Bohemia (New York: Henry Holt, 1928) Title-Page Drawing by Chas Laborde for L'Ami des filles (1921) Heliogravure by Jean Oberlé for Panarne (Henri Jonquières, 1927) Lithograph by Luc-Albert Moreau for Tableau de Vamour vénal (Edit, de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1924) Color Lithograph by Marcel Vertès for Rue Pigalle (Bernard Grasset, 1927) Black and White Engraving by André Dignimont for Nuits de Paris (Au Sans Pareil, 1927) Movie-Still(?) of Carco with two gigolettes in the Attire of the 'Twenties (from Oui Police-Detective, June 13, 1949) Carco Posed with a Spanish Dancer . . . at Barbizon Carco Posed with Père Frédé at the Lapin Agile (Photograph by Michel Brodsky) "M. Francis Carco, or the . . . New Spanish Rendezvous," by Carlo Rim in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, April 20, 1929 Carco with Germaine, his First Wife, Pierre Mac Orlan, Pierre Benoit, and Jean Marèze (his Youngest Brother), at Saint-Céré, in 1931

96 96 96

97 97 99 112 112 112 112

113 113 113

123

144

ILLUSTRATIONS Carco with Eliane Négrin, his Future Wife, in Egypt, c. 1933 (Photograph by Studio Béla, Cairo) Carco and his Poodle, 0 . K., at "La Planque," L'lsleAdam, in 1946 (Photograph by Jean Marie Marcel) Carco and his Wife in the Garden of "La Planque" in 1948 Carco at an Art Exhibit (Photograph from Erasme, May-June 1946) Carco Leaving Montmartre for his Home on the lie Saint-Louis (Photograph by Zalewski, in Images du Monde, December 22, 1949) Caricature by Avil in Comoedia, December 23, 1924 Portrait Frontispiece by Max Jacob for Au coin des rues (Crès, 1922) Portrait Sketch, c. 1925, by André Dignimont in Complémentaires (Emile Hazan, 1929) Portrait by Maurice Asselin Used as Frontispiece for L'Equipe (Crès, 1924) Portrait Etching by Demetrius Galanis as Frontispiece for La Bohème et mon cœur (Edit, de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922) Portrait, c. 1925, by André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Frontispiece for the Catalogue of Carco's Collection of Paintings Sold in 1935 Portrait Copperplate Engraving by Pierre Gandon for Supplément aux Dialogues des courtisanes de Lucien (Edit, du Trianon, 1928) Portrait Frontispiece by André Derain for La Bohème et mon cœur (A la Cité des Livres, 1927) Pencil Sketch, c. 1949, by Cabrol "M. Francis Carco's Readers," by Carlo Rim in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, May 11, 1929

xv 144 145 145 145

145 146 160 160 160

160

161

161 161 161 188

xvi

ILLUSTRATIONS

ENDPAPERS. The caricatures of Carco shown on the endpapers are (from, left to right, across the double page) by the following artists Front Pierre Payen (in François Ribadeau-Dumas, Carrefour de visages, Nouvelle Société d'Edition, 1929); Vonik (in Radio 48, October 29, 1948) ; Sire (in La République du Centre [Orleans], May 11, 1948) ; J . B. (in Radio-Inter, April 19, 1950) Roger Wild (in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, March 24, 1949) ; "Faux Peynet" (in Opera, December 28, 1949) Bib (in Nice-Matin, September 12, 1949); Georges Lepape (in Le Crapouillot, new series, No. 8, 1950); Bil (in Parallèle 50, May 13, 1948) ; Anonymous (in Mon Programme, December 18, 1948) Back Bernard Bécan (in Les Humoristes, Ollendorff, 1921) ; Louis Touchagues (in Le Journal Littéraire, October 11, 1924) ; Halicka ( in Panam, Stock, 1922 ) ; Carlo Rim ( in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, May 19, 1928) Serge (in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, September 17, 1927) ; Serge Czerefkow (in Serge Czerefkow and René Lalou, Les Ecrivains chez eux, Michel Kornfeld, 1925) Gile (in Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, March 20, 1927) ; A.B. (in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, September 16, 1933) ; Jean Oberlé (in Le Crapouillot, August 1, 1924) ; Anonymous (in Correo da Manha [Rio de Janeiro], July, 1924)

FRANCIS CARCO

CHAPTER

I

Childhood:

NEW

CALEDONIA

stumbled across Bougainville's moss-covered tombstone in Montmartre cemetery, 1 he must have felt with the quick thrill of intuition that the straight line of his destiny had led him from the shadow of the Mont d'Or in New Caledonia to that of the Sacré-Cœur. Yet he was able to say, after his first literary success and again in his memoirs, that his birth in far-off Noumea was fortuitous and that its importance should not be exaggerated. 2 This is surprising in one who is admittedly "superstitieux comme une fille" 3 and who, in commenting on Verlaine, did not hesitate to quote an old book of horoscopes. 4 Marc Saunier was perhaps responding to this aspect of Carco's personality, as well as to his own interest in the occult, when he characterized Carco's work as marked by the influence of ancient Lemuria. 5 However far from Noumea to Montmartre, however far from a little boy in a striped sailor suit 8 to an imaginative, sophisticated artist, that little boy—as Carco has said—was the purest part of himself, and les extrêmes se touchent. Had Bougainville actually discovered New Caledonia in 1768 when his frigate Boudeuse passed near by, France might have taken possession of the island with less difficulty than was the case. But to the adventurous Captain Cook belongs the fame of its discovery and naming, in 1774, after his native Scotland. He had anchored his ships Resolution and W H E N FRANCIS CARCO

4

CHILDHOOD

Adventure in what was to be called Balade Bay and, without exploring the interior, remained a week establishing friendly contacts with the natives. In 1793 the French navigator D'Entrecasteaux entered the coral barriers at the same place as Cook had, and was favorably impressed. France was seeking a base for its navy and merchant marine in the South Pacific. Although the Marists had established a mission ten years earlier, France did not take formal possession until 1853. At first a dependency, New Caledonia became a separate colony in 1860. From the first, the possibility of establishing a penal colony distant from the homeland was a consideration in France's interest in the island. Lieutenant Biseuil "maintained that ever since D'Entrecasteaux visited the island, France had her eye on it for the deportation of convicts—to make it a 'Sydney of the South Seas.' " 7 In the Moniteur Officiel of February 14, 1854, the statement was made that "la prise de possession a eu pour but d'assurer à la France, dans le Pacifique, la position que réclament les intérêts de la marine militaire et commerciale, et les vues du gouvernement sur le régime pénitentiaire." 8 In conformity with these views, after a decree of 1863 had proclaimed the climate of New Guinea too unhealthy, the first shipment of two hundred and fifty prisoners arrived at New Caledonia in May, 1864. By the end of 1884 they numbered more than eleven thousand. The prisoners were divided into three categories—the déportés, the relégués, and the transportés. Among the déportés, or political prisoners, one of the better-known was Abu-Mezrig-Mokrani, who had led twenty thousand Arabs in the Kabyle uprising of 1871 against the French. When the New Caledonian aborigines revolted in 1878, he was asked by the French government to lead his own followers as well as the French troops against the natives. The déportés also included four thousand Communards of 1871, the best-known

NEW CALEDONIA

5

of whom were Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel. Rochefort escaped, traveled, wrote his memoirs, went back into journalism as editor of L'Intransigeant, and died in 1913. Louise Michel, freed by the general amnesty of 1880, continued her ardent socialist career, wrote a book on the Kanakas,9 and died in Marseilles in 1905. The Communards were camped off Noumea, on the Isle of Pines and on the Ducos Peninsula.10 After the general amnesty almost all left New Caledonia, although a few elected to stay on in Noumea as free men. The relégués were habitual criminals judged to be of "perversité incurable." By the decision of the Chamber of Deputies, December 1, 1881: tout individu condamné trois fois pour vol, escroquerie, abus de confiance, vagabondage ou rupture de ban pourra, en cas de quatrième récidive, être, par le jugement correctionel qui le frappera, condamné, pour une période de temps qui n'excédera pas vingt années et ne sera pas inférieure à cinq, à la déportation dans une colonie à ce spécialement affectée. 11

The relégués themselves fell into two classes. Individual relegation did not require imprisonment but carried the penalty of enforced residence in the colony. Such a sentence did not preclude the opportunity of obtaining a concession of land after good conduct had been established. Collective relegation was for more serious offenses and incurred more stringent penalties; yet it held the opportunity of advancement to the first category. Although relegation was a supplementary punishment which theoretically went into effect at the expiration of the main sentence and was intended to be a severe measure, in practice it was found that many convicts sought by deliberate criminality to become relégués. As relégués they had greater freedom of movement than prisoners in Metropolitan France and had also the solace of human contacts. The transportés, or serious offenders, were, like the relégués, condemned to hard labor, but if the sentence did not exceed

6

CHILDHOOD

eight years, the transporté, after remaining in the colony as a libéré a length of time equal to his prison sentence, would be eligible for complete freedom. During this "doubling" of the sentence the transporté could obtain a land grant and establish a homestead. If the sentence was more than eight years, after this time had passed he was compelled, except by special grace, to spend the rest of his life in New Caledonia.12 From 1887 to 1889 only those condemned to less than seven years were sent to New Caledonia. The rest went to New Guinea (obviously the government had decided that from a societal point of view the climate was no longer insalubrious). From 1889 to 1897 there was a redistribution of these forced immigrants between the two sites, with the less desirable ones being sent to New Guinea ; and after 1897 no more at all were sent to New Caledonia. The prison population of all categories between 1885 and 1900 varied from five to seven thousand, diminishing ordinarily each year. In 1931 New Caledonia ceased by official decree to be a penal colony.13 Although the Transportation (the penal administration) had the use of 110,000 hectares, a great deal of land was still available on a homesteading basis to free colonists.14 The government was prepared to make loans and to help with supplies and advice and even labor. The last was made available through the hiring out at minimum rates of eligible prisoners or of those who had served their sentences but could not own land of their own.15 The déportés furnished the backbone of the labor supply in the pioneer days of New Caledonia. At first they were used by the government to carry on improvements in Noumea itself in road building and similar developmental work : L a main-d'œuvre pénale a construit tous les établissements appartenant à l'administration pénitentiaire: hôpitaux, magasins, prisons, logements de fonctionnaires, cases de condamnés; elle a contribué à la construction des hôtels des chefs d'administration . . . 1 8

NEW

CALEDONIA

7

However, few roads were built, transportation was inadequate, and much of it had to be by boat along the coast. The colonists did not prosper, and according to the census of 1 8 8 7 there were only 5 , 6 6 1 free colonists. Life was difficult for them. They suffered under the usual handicaps of rudimentary installations, and the lush country, with its dense thickets and rich flora (niaouli, mango, eucalyptus, and papaya trees abounded), was swept from December through March by storms. Overnight, dry river beds became swirling torrents. A steady, monotonous rain slowed the tempo of living to an exasperating inactivity. During January and February hurricanes raged through the island, wrecking human and natural constructions. Under such conditions it seems that insufficient inducements were offered to attract any large number of worthwhile colonists. The presence of prison camps at various points on the island and the type of criminal sent to New Caledonia detracted from its appeal to potential colonists. Forty thousand convicts made the trip from France to the South Pacific; at that time there were regularly more convicts than free men. Then, too, from the time of the earliest Marist missions there had been a lack of understanding of and sympathy for the natives. Marists, anxious to make converts to the Christian concepts of morality and discouraged by the younger natives' casual attitude, had the shortsightedness to convert and baptize moribunds. The number of deaths which followed the adoption of a new religion impressed the local inhabitants unfavorably, even though they revered the dead. The expropriation of their lands, even with some form of compensation, embittered the natives against the intruders. There were various uprisings and reprisals which culminated in the bloody riot of 1878, when the French were almost wiped out. The cannibalistic practices of the native New Caledonian also undoubtedly dissuaded many who might have braved the other hazards of removal to an undeveloped country.

8

CHILDHOOD

The life of New Caledonia centered principally in Noumea (originally named Port de France by Tardy de Montravel, the discoverer of its site). Noumea was an extremely simple city built primarily to cater to the requirements of the local government and its functionaries. Opposite the Isle of Pines and Nou Island, where the penitentiary for the transportés was situated, it faced on one side the bay, and on the other side the Mont d'Or, a high mass of nickel-bearing rock. Noumea was a jerry-built town of a functional nature—administration buildings, a hospital, a school, a church (the cathedral was to be built later), and a type of simple barrack for homes. (It has been suggested that some of the buildings had been shipped from New Guinea to serve the same purpose in Noumea.) The city was largely convict-built. The usual type of architecture for homes was a one-story wooden building with a tin roof, rattan walls, and a veranda. During the hurricane season the streets, which had been laid out in straight lines and were shaded by very leafy trees, overflowed; buildings were knocked down ; roofs were torn off. One of these simple houses for government officials was occupied by the recently arrived Inspector of the Domains of the State, Jean-Dominique Carcopino-Tusoli, a Corsican, and his Niçoise bride, Marie-Antoinette-Désirée-Sophie-Honorine Roux. Although no mention is made of him before 1887 in the Annuaire de la Nouvelle Calédonie et dépendances, on the third of July of the preceding year ( 1 8 8 6 ) , he registered the birth of his first-born, François-Marie-Alexandre, the future writer. Perhaps they were not yet fully settled, for no address is given on the birth certificate, 17 and there is no baptismal record. 18 In 1888 their residence was the Vallée du Génie, where the second son, Edouard-Lucien, was born. 19 Some time in 1889 the family went to Nice during Jean-Dominique's leave of absence. A daughter 2 0 was born there in 1890, the same year that they returned to Noumea. By 1894, when their

NEW

CALEDONIA

9

third son, Charles-Marie, 21 was born (later, in France, they were to have a fourth son, J e a n ) , they were living on the Rue de la République, the street best remembered by their oldest child. The most imposing feature of the banal house was the veranda, whose drab lines were softened by a spacious garden with tropical foliage: Avec sa véranda et son toit, sans étage, notre maison à Nouméa ressemblait—en plus vaste—à une cage à lapins. J'en possède une photographie. Un papayer et un manguier abritaient du soleil les chambres du devant. 22

Jean-Dominique was an industrious, ambitious, very methodical person. It was only by chance he had been offered a position in New Caledonia rather than a post elsewhere. Even in the Pacific, or perhaps all the more so because he was in the Pacific, he was determined to live the careful and logical life of a sensible man in a secure position offering a comfortable future. His duties, which required him to visit various prison camps and to frequent criminals, disposed him the more strongly to conduct his home according to conservative bourgeois principles. Strong-tempered, autocratic, the dominant influence in the home, he had a powerful nature. The disciplined rhythm of the domestic routine had its insidious counterpart in the spectacle of prisoners tramping in ordered file through the streets to and from labor assignments. The fetish made of conformity at home clashed with the wildgrowing natural surroundings. Strict obedience, exacted by paternal authority, contrasted sharply with the stories of violence and revolt related by the servants. Especially bewildering for the child were his father's abrupt shifts in humor, veering from dispassion to vehemence. Francis had the intimate feeling that his father was fundamentally violent, but as ruthless with himself as with others. In this atmosphere the boy was unable to establish a harmonious equilibrium. He found that he was a rebel in spirit and mentality, that he could

10

CHILDHOOD

not seem to do the right thing in the right way at the right time, that there was a serious deficiency and distortion in his values. Pecadilloes were punished with severe beatings and strong censure. Most of the time a mutually antipathetical attitude prevailed. But where another child might have submitted, at least on the surface, young Francis did not knuckle under. 23 The father would fly into a terrible rage at the lack of conformity and the insubordination in his son and would beat him to the point of their mutual exhaustion. There were times when he came close to infanticide, so hotly was he spurred on by the mute resistance of his own flesh and blood. Years later he was to avow to Francis that he had never known another child to have been beaten as much as his own son. 24 But just as Fortunato submitted to the decision of Mateo Falcone, so Francis, like the true Corsican he considered himself to be, never revolted physically against the punishment ordered for him. It became a point of honor with him to take these beatings without a murmur. Pride in moral resistance was augmented by a growing pleasure in the giving and receiving of suffering. In the obscure depths of his sensual nature a perverse taste for hurt made him enjoy the dejection and loneliness of being an outcast. He found that there was pleasure in the intense feeling of anguish at being rejected, at his fall from his father's good graces—an aspect of the algolagnia which was later to be exteriorized in his art. He sought refuge for his unhappiness and a palliative to his hate in the escape offered by his more sympathetic surroundings. Lying in the grass, he would sob out his pain alone. In spite of resentment and anger, he felt murkily that there was a very close temperamental affinity between him and his father, and that the father was offering him as a sacrifice to exorcise the latent devil in himself. To his oldest child he was indeed a bewildering personality. Though Carco's mother does not seem to have been much of a buffer between him and his father, Carco thought of her as

NEW CALEDONIA

11

kind and sweet. 25 She gently attempted to persuade him to behave, she tried to excuse his escapades, she consoled him. But she meekly obeyed the dictates of the head of the family and was hardly a forceful enough person to counterbalance the dominance of her spouse. Nonetheless, she was a gentling influence, and occasionally won greater lenience for her firstborn. Many years later, upon her death, 26 Carco would feel superstitiously that with her a protective barrier between himself and his own earthly destruction had been removed. Her existence was proof of his existence. It would seem to him completely logical to assert that she had been the focal point of " f a m i l y , " and that his father, in that sense, was of little importance (an assertion refuted by their relative influence apparent in Carco's literary production). 2 7 Even in as correct a household as that of the Inspector of the Domains of the State, the children inevitably overheard shop talk. One anecdote in particular, because of its very absoluteness and injustice, became a nightmare for the impressionable eavesdropper. The prisoners were severely restricted in the number of luxuries to which they had access. Their greatest consolation was liquor. A concession had been established f o r the use of the guards, and, as might be suspected, convicts with sufficient funds contrived to gain access to its facilities. One poor fellow, eaten by resentment of the guard who acted as intermediary between the liquor canteen and the illegal sale at extortionate prices to prisoners, killed a surveillant (who had done him no h a r m ) , the vicarious victim of his hate. Condemned to death for this murder, he was given the usual opportunity to say a last few words. After confessing his crime and recognizing his guilt, he attempted to explain the real motivation responsible for the death of a chance substitute. Even at that final point in his life he was unable to make himself clear, for the roll of the drums silenced him, and he was hastened to the guillotine. 28

12

CHILDHOOD

Along with stories concerning convicts, Francis heard other tales of violence, for in the Carcopino household were the Kanaka servants, Arona and Tayo, the white maid, Maria, and a libéré gardener, all of whom had their stories to tell, their songs to sing. Arona was a native,29 possibly of the MelanoPolynesian type, whose chief had sold him into bondage, as was a custom of the time.30 Tayo was the cook. Maria had come out to the colony to be with her husband, deported there to nine years of hard labor and therefore condemned to remain in New Caledonia. The gardener was a former convict, now a "garçon de famille." 3 1 Arona, 32 friendly, good-natured, always laughing, was the children's attendant and companion. (Carco always refers to him as "mon nègre." 33 ) He played with his charges in the garden and took them to school. Usually he had to carry Francis, in order not to drag him through the dust, to the dull classroom.34 Francis hated the tedium, confinement, and discipline of school and was a rebellious, bad student. Ironically, the very street leading to this school now bears the name "Avenue des Frères Carcopino." 35 It was certainly not within Arona's duties to take his young charge to witness the native festivals. But he did take him. At the slightest excuse the Kanakas organized a pilou-pilou, a feast of celebration. The pilou-pilou ordinarily lasted for five days of merriment and dancing and copious repasts. But often the excitement of the festivities led to fierce internecine warfare and sometimes even to cannibalism. 36 The sensuousness and aggressiveness represented by the dances were not only a bizarre scene to the onlooker, they represented potential danger. Francis was well aware of this danger. He had seen the still dust of the Rue de la République raised by the natives about to riot. Once he had had to take refuge for three days in a grocery shop while a fight was raging. Guillaume Apollinaire, who relates the incident,37 points out that young Carco

NEW

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CALEDONIA

left untouched the basket of provisions he was carrying and which, by the way, was intended for his own lunch. To such an extent did he manifest his stubbornness not to deviate from some idiosyncratic standard he had set for himself. (If, indeed, this detail is not a sample of Apollinaire's penchant for hoaxing.) He also knew of riots from Maria, and never tired of hearing in detail her stories of the bloody massacre of 1878, when the natives made their last abortive attempt (almost a successful one) to wipe out the foreign intruders: they destroyed two hundred stations, massacred two hundred whites, and gorged on their flesh. The account of the human feast especially fascinated the boy (Arona commented on the picture with enthusiastic appreciation). 38 Fascinating, too, were Maria's versions of the wreck of the Alcyon,z9 especially poignant when "the hurricane tore at the trees in the garden and shook the low fronds of the banana palms" 40 in accompaniment to her story. Tayo, the Kanaka cook, was less impressive and was remembered chiefly for his little song: Moussie, cochon! Madam', cochon! Tout l'mond', cochon! You-You! 11 which Arona might accompany on the galoubet, or Caledonian flute. This instrument was a pipe with a hole at each end. Sound was created by blowing into one hole and achieving a variation of two notes by finger action over the other hole. 42 The gardener was friendly; he had a smile and little kindnesses for the children. On Sundays he went to the Place des Cocotiers, the hub of Noumea's social life. All who were free to do so-—civilians, functionaries, felons—would gather to exchange social amenities within their caste. Undoubtedly the Carcopino family mingled there with friends and perhaps

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CHILDHOOD

relatives 43 while listening to the music of the prison band. Griffiths, in his An Unknown Prison Land, recalls with horror that the conductor of "la musique de la Transportation" was the infamous Pitazy. 44 Pitazy had found another man occupying his place in his wife's bed. Offended by the circumstance, he killed the interloper, cut out his heart, gave it to his wife as that of a sheep, and then shared the delicacy with her. This gourmandise led him to the slim rations of New Caledonia. The remarkable thing about the intercourse—tenuous though it was—between the convicts and the children was the mute affection expressed by a smile or a wink, which these men, bereft of home and family, displayed as much as they dared towards the youngsters. The libérés, often abject physically and financially, were warmed by the spontaneous reaction of children uninhibited by society's judgment of their criminality. There was no absolute barrier between these punished of society and these innocents of society. The children felt the natural affection of these men and responded to it. In spite of the vague knowledge, beyond their naïve comprehension, that these men were outcasts, they felt their similarity to and worthiness among the other humans of their experience. Instinctively young Francis felt the uncritical hungering affection of these men, and felt, too, that regardless of their position in society, as human beings they were akin to the most proper in his sphere. Complex as his later attitude towards the criminal element would be, this early experience made him appreciate the possible concomitance of the human and the monstrous (ni ange ni bête, yet something of each) in all of us. And there was implanted early a responsive feeling of innate sympathy for those generally deemed repellent. His own conduct, so censured by his family, may have made him feel a personal affinity for these lawbreakers. At times these men must have seemed more tender and kind than his own father.

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15

Nevertheless, Carco was a bourgeois, and whatever he might do in the future in reaction to and in defiance of that background, he would know that he was different from these men to whom he felt akin and that his origins were a limitation he could not deny. The strongest factor governing future attitudes, though, was to be opposition to his father, 45 and his art might, in a sense, be considered as expression of independence— independence in being literature, independence in having subject matter and content hardly sympathetic to a respectable bourgeois. In such an environment the early years passed, except for the trip back to France in 1 8 8 9 - 1 8 9 0 . 4 6 Finally, in the winter of 1897, at a time when New Caledonia was losing its importance as a penal colony, the family left the island. They were never to return. The uprooting, start of a nomadic existence, may not have been felt very keenly by an adolescent voyager entranced by the adventure; yet it was the beginning of a lack of stability which would exert its influence on a character predisposed to acute reactions and in essence very mobile. Carco has stressed (and his commentators after him) the importance and poignancy of this uprooting. 47 At the time he was probably quickly distracted from the loss of familiar surroundings by the novelty of new ones. The boat trip 48 was an exciting experience—vivid to him in all its incidents. The other passengers, like the stock figure of the Englishman, acted and thought on this temporary maritime home as they would have in more fixed surroundings. Insouciant of the past because of the charm of the present, curious about but ignorant of the future, the youngsters on board were the only ones alive to the inherent qualities of their vacation. There was the continuous thrill of new sights, new faces, new experiences. One time it would be the exploration of the boat, another time the spectacle of the slaughter on the bow of bellowing, frightened cattle, or the burial at sea of one of the mechanics,

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CHILDHOOD

or the sight of an unfortunate stoker's black skin turning pink as it peeled from a scalding bum. 49 The voyage did not interfere with one of Francis's greatest pleasures—a small menagerie of which, as in Noumea, he had the responsibility. It was housed in an unused cabin. The animals' dependence on him, their responsiveness to his care, gratified his sense of virtue and satisfied his need to lavish affection. And the sheer delight in their movements appealed to his sensual nature. The bustle of the voyage affected family decorum and created momentarily a greater intimacy and friendliness between father and son. At Sydney they had gone together to visit the extensive Botanical Gardens; his father had made him a present of a Bengali bird; on board ship the youngster was not held in check or reprimanded to the extent to which he was accustomed. The father was more expansive, more affectionate, more as his son would have had him be. But with the return to mundane routine, this rapport did not last. Francis extended the resulting sense of loss of what was, in effect, a brief interlude of forty-four days to include the country left behind. Basically, it was not New Caledonia he regretted, but the intimacy with his father. The arrival at Marseilles was the close of one phase of Francis's formation and the inauguration of another.

CHAPTER

11

Adolescence:

CHATILLON-SUR-SEINE

wintry day a ship of the Messageries Maritimes sailed into Marseilles. It was the first glimpse of "sunny France" for the shivering young colonial. 1 Dazed by the bustle of the busy port, bewildered by the conflicting smells of the world's odors emanating from the warehouses, he was still in the process of adjusting mind and body as he met his relatives. Apparently unaccustomed to elderly people, he was startled by an abrupt introduction to his grandfather, a tall old man wearing glasses, a derby, an affectionate smile, and carrying a cane. "Mama," shrilled the boy, "when will Grandpa be thrown into the water?" The Kanaka legends, Careo affirms, had taught him that thus were the aged treated by the Caledonian indigenes. 2 A sortie through the crowded old streets of the Vieux Port, dinner in a restaurant, a ride in a railroad along the coast between the sea and the slopes—and they were home (their temporary home) in Nice, in an old house behind the lycée, with windows facing on the garden, rococo ceilings painted vivid hues, and red floors.3 But there lingered about him the ways and the attitudes of the tropics. He was used to animals, and so one had been given him—a monkey—as a pet to replace the pets he had had in Noumea and on board ship. The monkey dashed about the house or gazed fixedly at its young master for hours on end. And the young master dashed about U N A COLD,

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the house prying into everything, or gazed, lost in contemplation to the point of abstraction, at the flowers in the garden. Les persiennes ouvraient sur le grand jardin clair Et, quand on se penchait pour se griser à l'air Humide et pénétré de fraîcheurs matinales, Un vertige inconnu montait à nos fronts pâles Et nos cœurs se gonflaient comme un ruisseau grossi, Car c'était tout un vol de parfums adoucis Dans l'éblouissement heureux de la lumière.*

The house was large and rooms were rented out, mainly to foreigners. It gave Francis a queer sensation, just as if he were living in a hotel, to shift back and forth when the rooms were taken by strangers or became temporarily his own. Sometimes, when a room was examined as though he were not in it, he felt that he had lost corporeality. One room in particular made him thrill. It was situated at the back of the house, and its three windows faced the garden. Someone had once committed suicide in it. The room had a sinister aura. The child would cross its threshold with palpitating heart. He imagined he could see the bloody stain on the red-painted floor and hear the echo, ricocheting from the high blue ceiling, of the fatal shot. This gloomy thought darkened the cheerful sunlight heavy with thick odors rising from the bright flowers in the garden below. To sit there as he attempted to adapt some sanguinary story squeezed his heart and tightened his n e r v e s — f o r he was already composing, especially for the theatre, and was then working on an adaptation of Mérimée's Colomba.6 His imagination was never still; everything was a new experience to him, and his senses were constantly shocked by the ebullience around him. Italians and Corsicans, his f a m i l y were never phlegmatic either in action or in expression. 6 From his spice warehouse one uncle brought into the house the smells of the four corners of the world. Two others had served in the colonial troops in Dahomey and Tonkin, where their lives had

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been active, adventurous, even danger-filled. Nor were they calm in speech and gesture. Their turbulence made periods of tranquillity even more desirable. There were times when the boy wanted to be left alone, when there was a deep though indefinable joy in the mood of vacuity. L i f e with his grandparents was exciting and interesting. Francis recognized instinctively the coddling affection of his grandmother. He liked h e r ; she spoiled him, she laughed at him, she enjoyed having him there. Being pampered was a delicious feeling. He had in her an ally and a comfort. She intrigued him, not only f o r the magic of her housekeeper's k e y s , but also for the charm of her person. Grandmama was coquettish. She talked with enjoyment of old beaux, she p r i m p e d , she placed a great deal of emphasis on sentiment. T o her delighted grandchild she offered all the charm of a w a r m l y illogical heart. Because he liked her, and perhaps because of a deep-seated, if unavowed, respect for bourgeois principles, F r a n c i s had scruples about helping himself to extra sums of money, but he had no qualms about sharing such funds when obtained by others. One of his cousins was very adroit. Embracing his grandmother, he would slip the keys from beneath her pillow, p i l f e r from her coffer, and return the keys in the s a m e way. With this loot Carco was able to explore more of the attractions of this resort town. He enjoyed the bustle of its sun-warmed streets and, happy in the affection of his relatives, he felt that he " b e l o n g e d . " Numerous dedications to his cousins in early prose efforts testified to this enthusiasm. 7 B u t friendliness for and from relatives could not compensate f o r the lack of intimacy between him and his father; once a g a i n on solid ground, his father had resumed his conservat i v e values which inevitably meant disapproval of his erring son's ways. A s the prodigal who did not return to the f o l d commented later on this mutual dissension, " m y father and I n e v e r had anything to say to one another." 8

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Matters did not remain in a passive state, for the autocratic head of the family ignored sociable stories, accepted no excuses, encouraged no confidences from what he considered to be a sorry example of offspring. Carco hated him for this, and, limited in possibilities of retaliation, he was to vent his spleen by means of his pen. It is difficult to know whether an hallucinatory literary idea concretized itself by the use of autobiographical details as a framework or whether the motive of revenge determined the selection of such details thinly disguised as fiction. If the latter is true, then his purpose was to wound his father by a gruesome story whose meaning would be inescapable. This story, entitled "L'Oncle," 9 tells starkly, in the first person, that Jean-Paul-René Cauchoise, an interne in the collège, was living at the school because he was too turbulent at home and disturbed his uncle, confined to a wheel chair and idiotic. The knotty fingers of the old man twined and intertwined until they became locked in their interlacings and had to be separated for him. His mouth would fall open and his lower jaw remain hanging for long periods of time. He would stare fixedly, and his look was frightening in its rigidity. Although the boy feels that he must have been born " a t home," in his grandmother's house, the school principal informs him that he was born on July 3, 1880, in Noumea, New Caledonia. This disturbs him, but after intense rumination, he is able to evoke the tropical foliage, the simple structure of his birthplace, and the servant, Arona. He is unable to communicate these impressions to his grandmother, for she is busy with his dying uncle. Brusquely called one night to the bedside, he sees a "profound and pure serenity" on his uncle's normally constricted face. Later, he learns that the "lamentable and terrible idiot who no longer knew either his mother or his son" was his father. 1 0 Though he was in Nice far into the summer—at a time when his comrades left the hot, still city for cooler climes—

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the boy did not spend all his time there. Near by were two properties belonging to relatives—one to an aunt, the other to the uncle who owned the spice warehouse. On these estates he would play with his sister and his cousin, Riri Verando, during vacation time. He became acquainted with the men of the region and with the very land. His profound feeling for the earth's call found expression later when he wrote about a visit to Corsica: Je dirai une tache de soleil, verte et dansante dans la forêt, l'odeur des pierres brûlées, de l'herbe roussie, la fraîcheur des bassins lavés au creux des roches et le ciel insensible sur la mer. Je veux que ce soit un hymne immense fait d'un seul élan, issu de la race, de la maison qui craque de vieillesse et de pauvreté: les jardins fleuris et extravagants, la chasse, la liberté vivante et la jeunesse sauvage dans le maquis où ma famille a sou ventes fois rôdé dans la peur du gendarme! Tu 9ais que j'aime la terre. En Corse, j'aurai le maximum. Né dans une île j e trouverai l'instinct pour célébrer une île presque vierge. 11

On shooting expeditions and excursions into the fields the tense wait for the game exacted a conscious effort on his part to blend into the country and to discover the esoteric signs whereby nature became an ally to the hunt. Although he did not care for the shoot, lying in wait in the fields with the sweet odor of the wet grass, looking at the clouds pushing by overhead, hearing the swish and rustle of the wind—these dilated his eyes and heart. The kill seemed to him somewhat sad and pitiful. The greatest thrill, the keenest relish for Francis was the seeking of birds' nests with their small, warm fledglings. The feel of the trembling heart beneath the soft down excited him as he would carry his find home, there to try to raise the young birds. His younger brother used bluntly to ask him why he bothered since the birds "always croaked." 12 Francis could not have answered why. Ever since his early response to them in far-off Noumea he had loved the sight, and sound, and feel, of the warm, furry creatures. However, it was legitimate to spend the day in the fields

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ADOLESCENCE

and woods only during the holidays. The rest of the year there was the hated routine of school. Carcopino senior had accepted a post as Conservateur des Hypothèques 13 in the small town of Châtillon-sur-Seine. To its collège, which had seen the diligent studies of Désiré Nisard and Marshal Marmont, young Francis was committed as an externe. If he frequented the fields and the rivers, if he watched the advent and departure of the seasons, it was usually while playing hookey—and while fearing the stern punishment to be meted out in the evening. Around this little town near the source of the Seine nature was varied, and the year was divided into its traditional periods of cold, thaw, fertility and harvest. From the bright sun of the warm south Francis would return at the long vacation's end, when the ground started to congeal and the wood to crackle with the snap of the chill in the air. The leaves were turning russet and gold, and vines and fields were stiffening themselves for the period of endurance ahead. The brown-gray of the old buildings settled more firmly into the rock of the slopes, and the haze in the air thickened. Drizzle fogged the streets, shortened perspective, and coated everything with slick coolness. Then the bite of winter followed with heavy snows which enveloped in thick flakes the hard congealed ground. Sound became muffled to a soft sigh or cracked out like the snap of a dead branch. The melting of the snows and the gusty spring rains unlocked river and earth as refreshing water spilled its wetness over river-bed and field. Renascent bush and woods dripped with the dampness of their greening vitality. As the rhythm of exuberance became more even, the days became long and still and dusty. Brooks murmured within the confines of their beds. Copse and meadow and slope shimmered in the waves of summer heat. To this age-old ritual of life Francis had access only by subterfuge. He was a schoolboy; there were his studies, which he did poorly, and there was his father, who viewed with ill grace his son's delinquen-

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23

cies. Unhappy at school, unhappy at home, he turned for solace and refuge to what, in turn, was an important contributing factor to his wretchedness, to the very passion which detracted from his assiduity at school—to the fields and to the woods. In doing this at Chatillon, he was only continuing a course begun in Noumea and which he would follow all through his youth. The college held no spell for a child avid to savor life outdoors and to commingle with nature. He liked the principal, a kindly, absent-minded man who, it seems, lacked the strict disciplinarian approach to education, wherein he differed from his staff. The strongest impression the faculty of the school made on Francis's young, critical mind was not through the appeal of erudition, but rather through the shortcomings of their personalities and their risible behavior. There was, on his part, the fundamental assumption that the world of grownups is restrictive, inimical, ununderstanding. To this prejudice was added an active dislike of his professors— failures whose deficiencies only augmented his natural penchant for finding interests outside the school. The especial objects of his dislike were the pedantic science teacher and the hateful supervisor who displayed pretensions to gallantry and to literary wit. Somewhat less distant was his teacher of the classics, for the latter did not bother with the texts, but spent his time drinking rum and declaiming on the beauties of hunting. The world of the stalking and the spying of game was far more glamorous, more attractive to teacher and pupil than the drab exploits of foreign warriors. How much more alive to follow the unfolding of strategy requiring keen attention and intuitive awareness of all the little signs which lead to victory in the hunt! What drama in this conflict between man and natural obstacles, between human cunning and animal instinct! These stories were real, for he himself had lived them. And it hardly needed imagination, rather only simple

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recall, to visualize, with emotion and empathy, the terrain and the antagonists. After such a session he would escape into the surrounding country with renewed zest and a feeling of selffulfillment. He was encouraged to such expeditions by the strange and exciting personality of an older classmate. Carco's love for fields and for birds found a complex variation in the attraction his classmate held for him. He informs us that the fellow "was a monster." Raudot, 14 a reticent redhead, was indeed strange and mysterious enough to make a striking impression on the one person at school he had chosen as the object of partial confidences. Older than the other boys (he was more than fourteen), Raudot was already helping his father in the butcher shop. His duties included the slaughtering of sheep. School meant very little to the big, strong body and dull mind of the butcher's son. He sat stolidly in class, unmoved by the recriminations and punishments of the detested supervisor. He was equally indifferent to his simple classmates and their activities. While others were busy with lessons or with surreptitious readings, his thick fingers were busy in his desk or shirt fondling the warm bodies of birds he had trapped in the woods. While the other boys played tricks on each other or made up games of soccer, he went his solitary way to the latrines, whence he returned with brighter eyes and more febrile caressing of his shirt-front. Inside it reposed the birds he had been excitedly smothering. And while his fellow students were passionately arguing over the rules of their play and discussing outings for their holiday afternoons (there was no school on Thursday afternoons), Raudot's thoughts were following the winsome body of Adrienne, the gravedigger's daughter. 15 With such particular interests, he had little in common with his school acquaintances. For some reason he made an exception of the young nature enthusiast. It would be improper to speak of mutual sympathy or affinity, for Carco

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TILLON-SUR-SE1NE

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was apparently like the average boy at school and had no experience of the thrill in strangling a warm, palpitating life into insensibility. His knowledge of love, too, was ingenuous. Rather, it was Raudot's friendship which acquainted him with some of the possibilities of both spheres of emotion. As he has said, "since he experienced these feelings, there was no questioning their existence." Raudot's pleasure and excitement in stifling the birds made Carco realize the ambiguity of his own sentiments when he had been thrilled by the fearful flutter of a small captive secured within the vise of his fingers. It intrigued him that Raudot deviated from his usual boorishness to let him know about the birds and to invite him to go on a special expedition into the woods on a free afternoon. He accepted the outing with trepidation. Once there, he saw Raudot's traps and his handling of the victims. Nauseated by the brutality, Francis elected to remain at a certain spot rather than continue on the rounds. He awaited the sadist's return, when Raudot would have sated his lust and would guide his squeamish companion from this unfamiliar part of the forest. But even as the arrangement was being made, Carco felt a certain malaise. Was it because Raudot was so eager, was it the evasiveness of his eyes and the muffled quality of his speech? But the sun was warm, the spot tranquil, and so the day passed pleasantly. Yet, withal, an uneasiness, an uncomfortable sensation of a near-by presence which, as the day waned and the shadows lengthened and the busy calls of birds dwindled to an occasional note, grew into panicky foreboding and deepened to an ominous sense of fearful danger. When he failed to receive an answering hail to a crescendo of raucous cries as fear tightened his throat, Carco dashed blindly away from the clearing into the surrounding green-black tangle. Exhausted by terror, he was astonished to find, as the waning notes of the church bells were announcing the end of day, that he had never been far distant from town, and that he was within the

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ADOLESCENCE

comfortable limits of familiar territory. Later an evasive Raudot did not resolve Francis's doubts, engendered by oppressive fear, as to the butcher boy's possibly murderous intentions. 16 After this incident, Carco thought it more prudent to be less intimate with Raudot. As nests were deserted with the onset of autumn, Raudot found his life emptier. He became more sullen, less amenable to the routine of school. He was expelled. For a while he was happy, promoted to the responsibility of slaughtering the cattle. He had more time to spend with Adrienne, whose laundry was near his shop. As the weeks passed, however, not only were there fewer birds, but Adrienne, too, was failing him. She did not confine herself to one ardent admirer: she had found other swains. Threats, pleas, moments of rage were unable to affect her conduct or inhibit her careless freedom. Carco learned clandestinely of these developments (Raudot was not considered fit company after his dismissal from school). He was thrilled to act as intermediary between them, carrying Raudot's threatening note demanding an appointment. The peaceful outcome of the interview (it was held after dark when the messenger had to be at home) was in a way a disappointment to Francis—he had expected to learn that Adrienne had been butchered like one of the sheep. 17 As for love, Raudot's pitiful case stimulated a curiosity which, natural to adolescence and its ignorance, became more and more intrigued by the physical force of this undefinable yearning. His information and comprehension of this mystery were nebulous. At Chatillon he was upset to learn from a classmate that parents were also lovers. He had never seen his own parents express overtly their mutual affection, and although he was accustomed to the ostentatious display of emotion by his Italian relatives, 18 somehow he had never associated within his own family the physical with the sentimental except in an abstract way. The sight of his father

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27

sleeping nude affected him profoundly. And when his father returned from a trip to Paris with renewed gaiety and rejuvenated by the absence of his conservative beard, his son was uncomfortable at the change. He was critical of his mother's naïveté in not suspecting an extramarital explanation of this startling transformation. Such keen observation is somewhat surprising; one wonders if a more sophisticated knowledge based on mature observation has not amalgamated with an early memory, has not been colored by general resentment. His own experiences were puerile. Next door to the Carcopino home in the Bourg-Amont district of Châtillon-sur-Seine, with its garden contiguous to his own but separated by a high wall, was the spacious residence of a well-to-do businessman. In its garden the svelte figure of the elder of two daughters attracted the inquisitive eye of the somewhat younger son of the Conservateur des Hypothèques. Not having been formally introduced—a sine qua non of small-town society—they could only communicate mutely across the wall. Young Carco would clamber to its top, where, precariously perched, he followed the mannered strolls of his charming neighbor. Their silent communication progressed to carefully casual encounters, with each one surreptitiously aware of the attention of the other. In order to further this absorbing attendance on his blonde neighbor, the sight of whose light dress made his heart hammer, Francis managed on some pretext to be exempted from the afternoon study hall. As soon as he was without the confines of the old school, he would hasten to his observation post. A day of rain, previously a delight, no longer held its appeal of the sound of water pattering against the window panes, dripping from the leaves of the trees to the sodden earth. Francis knew that he was in love with Germaine, but he could not understand what love was. He had no analogy in his experience to explain the irresistible attraction his perch on the wall held for him. None of the definitions or examples

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of love he had received explained to him what he felt. According to Raudot's case, love was a physical intimacy and its recollection. According to the remarks of a classmate, "Titine," who based his assured opinion on the doleful despair of his deserted mother and on some surprised scenes between his parents before their separation, love was a soulful effusiveness which involved caresses. But Titine did not offer detailed evidence, or Francis was too embarrassed to ask for particulars, and, moreover, Titine's prestige was not high. He violated the imperative caste rules by confiding the secrets of the boys' world to his mother and by being able and willing to converse at ease with grownups, and he was too overt in his affection for his mother—he would openly embrace her and hold her hand. He was also too demonstrative in his liking for his classmate, especially after Carco took his defense in a scuffle with Raudot. Titine did not realize that the altercation was not in his behalf but, instead, an affirmation of attitude in a struggle for mastery with Titine's enemy. By badgering Titine, Raudot was warring on the former's f r i e n d ; by defending Titine, Carco was asserting that he neither feared nor wished to stand well with Raudot. Carco, in reality, preferred the brusque masculinity of Raudot to the effeminate softness of Titine. On a visit to the latter's palatial home he stole a handf u l of toy soldiers as symbolic testimony to his preference. What he learned from Titine about love was interesting but not helpful. It bothered him, after being informed of love's physical aspects, that he loved Germaine without ever having been closer to her than the top of the wall—except on Sundays, when he could stare at her in church. Yet he had the intuition that Germaine reciprocated his emotion. When she exasperated her mother by returning tardily to the house, when she had to be sent for to go indoors, she was knowingly conniving with him. But one day this idyll ended. They had just exchanged their first words: " I have hurt myself," 19 he had said, show-

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ing her his knees scratched from too hasty an ascent of the wall. He was forcing his courage to follow up this opening gambit when her mother surged from behind a tree. Without deigning to notice the presence of her neighbor on top of the wall (they had never met socially), she took Germaine off to the house. That night Carco's father told him that it might be a good idea, that indeed, it would be an excellent idea, for him to spend his afternoons in the study hall. Young Francis was not yet ready to satisfy his curiosity about love. The time was approaching for Carco's first Communion. Part of his day was given to study in catechism and to getting religious instruction from the likable priest, whose examples etched themselves in his mind; the catechumen could visualize in the most minute detail the perilous experiences these stories related. Highly emotional, he would choke up with sympathy and even weep as he shared the distress and terror of their characters. The priest recognized the disquieting intimations of such extreme sensitivity, yet he was indulgent to the sincerity of such wholehearted reaction. The rituals of church ceremonies made their powerful appeal both for the atmosphere they created and for their spiritual connotations. Carco enjoyed participating, and he was eager to share in the activities of those who were about to receive Communion. It was in this preparation that he became aware through the catechism that he was a sinner on a spiritual level. He already knew from his father's admonishments that his social acts were sometimes corrupt. But whereas he fully recognized the power and authority and even justness of his father's punishments, he could not reconcile the priest's spiritual role with the latter's human and social condition. In this sense the confessional, for him, could not rise above its human presentation. 20 Arbitrary confessing to a randomly chosen number of sinful activities was a way of protesting against the fallibility of a human intermediary; this rationalization motivated irresponsible

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answers which violated in its essence the significance of the confessional. At the same time he took pleasure in a moving sense of guilt and learned to seek out the possibilities of guilt under the deceitful appearance of innocent action. Thus he increased his recognition of adulterated motivation and deed, yet could not accept confessional absolution. Though not devotional, he was to retain a feeling of respect for the general principles of the Church. His belief in God would remain fast on a direct basis. Carco has urged 2 1 (with conviction, even if illogically) that surely his health, his continued being, his escape of the pits which were to swallow up his friends—drugs, disease, accidents, cessation of literary creation—were under the protection of a sympathetic and forgiving Supreme Being in whose good graces his life rested secure? Carco enjoyed the quiet of the reflective, aged tranquillity of Chatillon's churches, dating from medieval times. He found in their hushed dimness relaxation for his turbulent spirit, in their coolness an abatement to his heated emotions. The historic stones impressed him with their rough harmony, and his aesthetic sense responded to their proportions; his knowledge of their construction vivified them with recollections of life at the time of their origins. A blend of the artistic and the literary gave substance to an abstractly religious sentiment, with the result that the importance of these structures of piety shifted for him from their inherent purpose to their general value as representations of art. The same commingling of sensitivities, with the added exhilaration of the excursions, made trips under the guidance of the priest to historic and religious spots intensely memorable. The standard, droned recital of the caretakers recreated to his inner eye and ear the halcyon existence of these places and transported him back to other times. The world of the spirit was one for him, unhampered by considerations of historic

CHA TILLON-SU R-SEINE

31

periods. This quality was not peculiar in an imaginative youngster. Almost any child lives his life on various planes which are not stratified but intermingled. As the child molds to the more discriminating man, these planes become separated, and if they continue to exist at all, they exist within sharply defined limits. Carco was to have the gift of retaining this fusing introversion, and he was not to be inhibited by the rational sense from communing with people or periods outside his actual experience. This might be called fantasy or the poetic sense. At the time it was daydreaming. If Carco was a very bad student at school, if he seemed to spend too much time in reveries, it was these qualities which helped him most in his extracurricular readings. The texts commented on in class lost vitality because they were obligatory and were analyzed according to a preestablished system. What he read haphazardly for himself retained all the vividness of direct appeal and partial comprehension. He often had the equivalent of free periods when his rum-drinking teacher left him alone in class. On such occasions he would leave the room for the library, the Bibliothèque Marmont. As Carco was to write later: C'est là que mon éducation s'est effectuée, sans programme ni principes d'aucune sorte. Je passais des mémoires de Saint-Simon au théâtre complet de Scribe, de Mérimée à Lamartine, de Balzac, de Gautier à Hugo, et des vieilles chroniques du pays à L'Education sentimentale et au triste et voluptueux roman de Madame Bovary.22

Of these readings Emma's adventures made the most vivid appeal because her life had run its tempestuous course in a provincial setting and had been agitated by turbulent yearning for a more spectacular stage. She was an introduction to the mysterious drama of love. 23 But it was not Emma and her problems which a sympathetic actor-playwright tried to represent with his schoolfellows in dramatic essays. Their plays were more like charades in which, with the hard, practical

32

ADOLESCENCE

sense of a realistically critical eye, they lampooned their teachers. 24 No poetry softened the sarcasm of their farces. There was not even any indulgence for the weaknesses of softies like Titine. In a boys' world Carco was outwardly a regular fellow. Nor is there any mention in his memoirs of the acting of drames passionnels like his adaptation of Colomba. In the inconstancy of adolescence with its quick shiftings of mood and constitution, the ordinary mannerisms were outwardly uppermost. With a little more maturity he would reveal and affirm insistently a more particular, personal, individual behavior.

THE CARCOPINO RESIDENCE, PROBABLY RUE DE LA REPUBLIQUE, AT NOUMEA

LEFT:

CARCO, C. 1906,

PROBABLY

AT

RODEZ;

RIGHT:

WITH

PIERRE

LAVILLE,

c . 1907, AT RODEZ

CHAPTER Ul Youth: ROUERGUE AND THE SOUTH

summer vacation came, Carco returned to the family residence in Nice. At the end of the summer of 1901 he did not go back to Burgundy, for his father had obtained a transfer to Villefranche-de-Rouergue. 1 This historic city of about 7,000 people is situated in a valley, in the mountainous Aveyron. Its old churches, which date back to the fourteenth century, rise in solemn solidity above the swift flowing waters of the Aveyron river. The cobblestone streets, whose calm is rarely disturbed by the hurried feet of ambitious people, slope down to the Promenade Giraudet along the right bank of the river. The old houses, bunched together behind the vestiges of massive walls which had seen the holocaust of the Reformation's bloody wars, are surrounded by superb views of hill and valley. In the blustery, late fall it is not unusual for tiles to be wrenched from the old roofs and to hurtle down into the narrow streets. The principal thoroughfare, the Rue de la République, slithers between the crowding, tall, severe dwellings, to become suddenly imposing beneath the arcades and buttresses of the Eglise Notre-Dame. Opposite it is the main square, on which faces the city's chief businesses; the ground floors of the residences are, for the most part, used as shops. Not far from the Pont des Consuls which crosses the Aveyron where the road sweeps down in a grandiose arc from the encircling hill, W H E N THE

34

YOUTH

is the location of the Administration des Hypothèques. At the beginning of the century 52 Rue de la République was a spacious barbershop, 2 and halfway between it and the church, at number 31, was the tall, narrow residence of the Conservateur des Hypothèques, the important Jean-Dominique Carcopino Tusoli. In October Francis enrolled in the college as a day pupil of seconde classique. But it was impossible for him to conform, to behave conventionally. Within the academic year he had to be disciplined—the same year that he won a first (and his only) prize for a dissertation in French; toward the end of the school year 1 9 0 2 - 3 he was expelled and then reinstated on sufferance. 3 Not only were his grades very poor, he engaged in lampooning his teachers and upsetting the usually quiet routine; outside the school he had already acquired a reputation as an eccentric attracted to and fomenting improper conduct. He was soon notorious. His family, held in high respect by its equals and inferiors alike, was pitied by the very people who spread the tales of the son's scandalous conduct. But the family's influence, a certain ultimate discretion on the part of the delinquent son, and perhaps good luck too, tempered disciplinary measures. Before being censured by the collège, Carco had had the opportunity to engage in the school's dramatic program. On the 25th of January, 1902, he had played a part in the third act of Les Plaideurs, as well as the lead in scenes from Le Gendre de M. Poirier. The local paper, Le Narrateur, commented that "on a loué surtout la diction nette et juste de M. Carcopino." * Appearances in the limelight were not limited to the school. Carco frequented the dancehalls and an ill-famed cabaret (it was suspected of catering to more appetites than just a desire for musical diversion and a few drinks) located near the bridge which crossed the Aveyron. Though his conduct hor-

ROUERGUE

AND

THE

SOUTH

35

rifled the respectable community, it made him the more attractive to his comrades. In the evening, when weather permitted, it was fashionable to take a stroll along the river bank down the Promenade Giraudet. Carco would sit on the parapet and amuse his friends with sharp verbal sketches of the passers-by, or mimic their voices and gestures. Then, suddenly tiring of sarcasm, he would drop lightly into his skiff moored below, and drift off down the river; his exit was like the withdrawal of a magnet holding together attracted particles: the group drifted apart, each one returning regretfully to customary routine. 5 When not satirizing the staid townfolk, Francis might discourse at length on authors whose names were hardly known to his comrades. He was an assiduous, quick, and retentive reader. 6 In the musty secretive gloom of the lending library, run by a lame shrew 7 with one suppurating, inflamed eye (the other was blind), he would ferret out some book that intrigued him by its provocative title. The shop's shelves and stacks of books disgorged to his prying fingers Verlaine, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Jammes, Villon. What he culled from these "sensationalists" excited him violently; here was the vibrant stuff of life communicated in pain, in languor, in sarcasm, in insinuating melody. Here was precedent (but oh! how different from the stifling pedantry of classroom assignments), novelty, and the unexpected. This was the expression of what Francis felt stirring forcefully—-yet still blindly— within himself. Regardless of their actual dates, these poets were his contemporaries—moderns. At this time he was also stirred by the sweet, nostalgic rhythms of Albert Samain. His tenderness, his pervading melancholy, his resigned sorrow—this softness beckoned appealingly to the softness in Carco. Samain's vague world of mystery invited repose and Lethe on the lullaby-like drift of an obscure but safe and protective passivity. This mystery

36

YOUTH

was different from the energetic, aggressive search into the unknown of the dynamic volitionists such as Baudelaire; each had his attraction for the complex adolescent seeking peripheral points whereby to delineate his own personality. One thing he knew already: that he would be a writer— more precisely, a poet. His family reacted fiercely against this aspiration of its troublesome oldest son. The life of the artist was deemed unworthy on at least two counts: it was suspected of immorality, and it would most probably not support its devotee. Francis was forbidden to read his suspect favorites, but he read them clandestinely. Francis was forbidden to write, but he did write. Yet, unsure of himself and of his ability, he sought the advice of an aristocratic, recognized poet of the region, Charles de Pomairols. Pomairols responded with an invitation s to visit him at his estate near Villefranche-de-Rouergue, at Pesquies. 9 Needless to say, the proud adolescent got on his bicycle and rode off to the interview. Charles de Pomairols was a fervent admirer of the romantic tradition in poetry. He considered himself to be a disciple of Lamartine 10 and tried to fashion his own poems accordingly. 11 President of a society for the award of a prize for virtue, and president of the Spiritualist Society,12 he had set ideas on the technique and the content of poetry. What he had to offer Francis were observations on the mechanics of the art. He unfailingly insisted during the lessons that there was no proper eleven-syllable verse 13 and that assonance was not more than an inadequate substitute for rime riche. His pupil did not agree. Grateful though he was for the instruction, 14 and though he profited by it, he recognized that their artistic sympathies were dissimilar. 1 ^ He could not find emotional satisfaction in Pomairols's examples. But the poet, conscious that his own horizons had been darkened by the death of his beloved daughter, 18 had no wish to impose his perspective on the young repre-

ROUERCUE AND THE SOUTH

37

sentative of a new generation. Indeed, he suggested to Careo that the latter read more vivacious poets, such as Anna de Noailles 17 and Banville. Carco's first (known) published poem appeared in Le Narrateur and was dedicated to his mentor. 18 It was signed "Franco Crac." The Carcopinos' dislike of notoriety was probably responsible for the use of this pseudonym, transparent though it was. Le Narrateur featured poetry contributions in column one of page one; the local population could not have failed to take note of Carco's official debut. Undoubtedly it was as flattering to the young author to be published as proof of worth as it was disconcerting to his fellow townsmen that the school's bad boy should have the gift of artistic expression—especially if one thinks of the common judgment that poetry is indivisible from morality. A month later he published another poem, this time signed simply with his initials and dedicated to a teacher of the college.10 The epigraph from Samain's Au jardin de I'injante sets the tone and indicates clearly the dominant influence. Though Careo was later to dislike Samain's work almost to the point of antipathy, 20 though in his memoirs his recital of a companion's mockery of Samain would show his own tacit assent to this judgment, Careo was at this time strongly influenced by the symbolist poet. 21 But as the softness of adolescence hardened under the effect of more mature activities and the company of energetic friends, Careo turned outward to the physical world around him. In this orientation he was guided by the forceful personality of a certain Gall. 22 One day while boating (being free of school left him wonderful hours of leisure, restricted by the fixed duty of being home in time for the parental dinner hour), he made the acquaintance of a local eccentric. Gall was a stonecutter who spent most of his time poaching, drinking, loafing, and reciting poetry. On the slightest provocation, and even unwelcome, he

YOUTH

38

would declaim from memory from the famous anthology of Van Bever and Léautaud. 2 3 On the occasion of their first meeting, Gall had been hidden by a bend in the stream over whose bank he had hurled the opening verses of Rimbaud's Bateau ivre. It was he who initiated Carco into the cult of symbolist poets such as Rimbaud, Laforgue, Corbière, Mallarmé. Since he would not lend his precious anthology, Carco had to learn its contents (those poems that interested him) by heart. He haunted Gall because of his book, because of his memories, because of his life. Gall had known Verlaine toward the lamentable end of Verlaine's life and would relate anecdotes which, sordid by the usual standards, had all the charm of fairy tales, along with the appeal of the improper. At that time Gall himself had been close to being a vagrant although he had had some occasional jobs as an artists' model. At Villefranche his mode of life was not an encouragement to conformity, 2 4 and undoubtedly this was an inducement to Carco to spend much time in his company. After allowing the river's swift-flowing current or their tireless feet to carry them f a r out into the country, they would end up at some rustic cabaret where they would drink with the peasants and flirt with the girls. 25 Carco was at this time collecting a stock of folk and gypsy songs as well as amorous experiences. These experiences would find expression in anecdotic form somewhat later in sharp sketches of Instincts and Au coin des rues. His poetry v/as still close to the somnolence of a countryside swept by cool winds from flowered slopes. For the moment Carco was writing what he termed "washings": little nature poems in which there was a combination of a rural setting and the familiar chores of simple people. 2 6 Dans l'enclos régulier où sèche la lessive, La rivière entraîne le ciel à la dérive, Et le vent est chargé d'une odeur de lilas.

ROVERGVE

AND THE

39

SOUTH

La terre exhale une senteur de terreau gras, Dont s'imprègnent les gros tissus et les draps rudes, Que la servante épaisse aux lentes attitudes, Recueillera, ce soir, dans des paniers d'osier. Songe au geste rustique, égal et familier De cette femme, détachant, comme des grappes De fruits clairs, la blancheur impeccable des nappes, Simulant tout un vol de colombes, soudain Se déployant—halo vivant—par ce jardin Et claquant le silence inconnu d'un bruit d'ailes. 27 Still, at about the s a m e time that he could write naturistic

28

poetry of this sort, he could be tenderhearted, close to the vague sadness of adolescence, weary of long, somnolent days with little relief from monotonous routine—adolescence, with its pervasive sentiment of confinement, wanting to live and not knowing how to define either its goal or its impulses. Sunday was particularly mournful, as people dressed in their

finery

Après avoir bien clos aux maisons les persiennes S'en sont allés, le long des chemins poussiéreux, Mettre un peu de dimanche à leurs âmes chrétiennes. 29 Dusk, when shadows lengthened and all became quiet, when he saw the hope of escaping from the house darken with eventide, was especially poignant: Le crépuscule a dénoué d'un geste lent Sa traîne de brouillards et de brumes légères Et c'est, dans le silence et la paix coutumière, Le soir qui te sourit confusément. . . . Mais les nuages sont si bas entre les branches! Il fait si triste à regarder dans le jardin Que tu te sens le cœur écrasé de chagrin. Il pleut sur l'enchevêtrement des branches. Des violets cernent les horizons étroits. Il pleut sur ce jardin désert et sur les toits. 30 He was still obliged to f a c e his disapproving family at the day's end and to remain at home in the evening to p r e p a r e

40

YOUTH

for his baccalaureate examinations. Frequently he managed to sneak out of the house and to hang around the carnivals and the cabarets. At one of the carnivals he met Sarah, a snake charmer. She was easily charmed by the Conservateur's son. At the time he was delighted by the exotic quality of their relationship, and his pleasure was enhanced by his repulsion for her snakes. It was not so much the woman he courted as the tingling mélange of the gruesome and the sensual: Sarah, voluptueuse et rousse, charme les serpents: dans sa tunique de satin vert constellé de verroterie, elle appelle lascivement les étreintes larges et molles, intenses et lentes et persuasives. Le tambourin nasille sur d'étranges rythmes, de plus étranges motifs selon les paresseux enveloppements des boas engourdis et des tendres pythons.

Sarah danse, souple dans la spirale mouvante des monstres; elle s'échauffe peu à peu, petite prostituée nerveuse, petite prostituée du délire. . . . Elle entrelace la complexité des rythmes et la danse l'enivre et les bêtes la violent d'une possession totale: une étreinte lui lie la taille et l'enserre d'une volupté morbide. Elle danse les cuisses baguées d'écaillés, la gorge serrée d'une tendresse sans nom, crispée, souillée, pâmée, radieuse. Et, d'un geste grave, elle élève la tête en triangle des monstres à fleur de bouche, les yeux démesurément élargis, pétrifiés de peur, de terreur consentante. 31

His enjoyment was augmented, too, by the necessity of keeping his liaison clandestine and by the knowledge that his actions—actions which took place very close to his father's regular café—would have horrified the latter had he known of them. But while Francis enjoyed enormously the thought of how unusual it was to have a bohemian for a mistress, he was made uncomfortable by the informality of her poor attire: she often was barefoot, she owned only a few wretched rags. The influence of his background colored his final appreciation of Sarah: he could not escape judging such garb improper, perhaps even indecent. 32 He was still an onlooker, not a participant

ROUERGUE

AND THE

SOUTH

41

compelled to a bohemian way of life by reasons and requirements of reality. Carco's existence was deliciously complicated by the contrasts and inconsistencies of his activities. He would set off from home with a volume of avant-garde poetry to read while lying in the fields or while drifting according to the moods of the streams. Once a week he would have a lesson from "le poète de la pureté" 33 and would show him his most recent efforts. On other days he might spend his time drinking and joking with the coarse, strong peasants. When he returned to supper he was drunk with the crystal-clear air and exhilarated by the numerous rounds he had shared. Ahead lay an evening with Sarah or with companions in the town's cafés. The local representative of the Félibrige movement, who had achieved a certain reputation, was the Rouergat poet, Auguste Benazet. More attentive to material considerations than Carco's beloved poètes maudits, Benazet was also the town's barber. Gall and he would argue excitedly the relative merits of two such different symbolists as Rimbaud and Samain. Benazet opted for the author of Au jardin de l'infante, whereas Gall preferred the brio and violence of the traditionsmashers. Carco subscribed to Benazet's volume of poetry, Prèp del clouquiè,34 This subscription 35 is in itself proof of Carco's early recognition of the poet's dependence on material factors as well as acknowledgement of a dedication which paid tribute to his prowess as a boulevardier.36 His favorite readings, in addition to the various poètes maudits with whom he had recently become acquainted, were the works of Henry Bataille and Francis Jammes. The former struck a responsive chord in his adolescent admirer through the evocative quality of the marchen-like figures in La Chambre blanche.37 Bataille had been able to retain the Symbolists' capacity to surround a scene with an aura of mystery and with

42

YOUTH

the nostalgia of loss (but loss of an innocence which had never known the corruption of intimate acquaintance). Bataille was able to crystallize poetically for Carco his own intuitive sentiment that the joys of life are evanescent (was this the effect of being uprooted before he could establish firm associations?). Bataille clarified for him still-ambiguous yearnings, moods not hitherto understood. And Bataille was the poet of the disintegration that comes from provincial apathy. Jammes, on the other hand, taught him the wonder of direct, simple statement which in its seeming simplicity would convey all the richness of a full and overflowing perception. 38 Jammes emphasized the apparently trivial detail. He revealed the rich, human meaning of a simple gesture and identified himself with the earth and animals. Deeply religious, his work also contained a sensuous love of nature in a pantheistic sense, a voluptuous feeling for its physical manifestations. In tribute to these masters and truly indicative of the ascendancy for him of spiritual values (at this time), Carco was working on a voluminous manuscript of poems. The title is a résumé of the contents. It was called simply De la chambre au jardin. They were never to be published. 39 Though his poetry of this period was naturistic in tone, and though Carco was carefully studying the potentialities of poetic form, his personality was still developing. The urges of adolescence made Carco particularly observant of amorous phenomena. The arrival of the train from Toulouse was a big event in a town limited to a monotonous pattern of few amusements. Very conscious of feminine charms, Carco's inquisitive eye did not fail to note the arrival of certain unfamiliar silhouettes. Nor did it take him long to ascertain that these feminine additions to the population were transients whose stay relied on the hospitality of the law court's clerk. 40 The imported guests usually left within a day or two. What also struck the boy's wondering observation was

ROVERGVE AND THE SOUTH

43

that a certain lawyer, who had a predilection for Baudelaire when not otherwise occupied, sometimes took part in the welcoming. Carco soon realized that when this happened, the two men were sharing expenses to bring from Toulouse more interesting fare than the provincial town ordinarily provided. It was a revelation to the future author of L'Amour vénal that two men could share the same woman. The immediate reaction, however, was immense jealously of the adventurous, experienced court clerk. Carco envied him his assurance, his air of satisfied lechery, his masterful manner. He envied him especially his women. It seemed to him that they must possess mysterious abilities and unknown secrets of ecstasy. Fundamentally he attributed to them what he has termed the baroque 41 in Baudelaire's poems—a certain luxure, a sensuous decadence suggesting opulent sensations. Carco has claimed that his personal experiences with venal lovemaking of a voluptuous nature were limited to (regretfully passive) attendance at the toilette of a local belle. She would invite him to her room and let him look on in rapt hunger while she prepared to go to an amorous rendezvous. Carco permits himself the metaphor of saying that the fire in the room "burned with all my senses" 42 while she perversely allowed her slip to slide along her body to nestle in a little swirl of silk at her feet, and would then slowly strip off her stockings. The sinuous contortions of her arms as she arranged her hair before dressing fascinated him. When she was ready to leave, she would dismiss him with a pert tap on his flushed cheek. By then it was time for him to go home where he was obliged to remain for the night. All the heartache and febrile longing of these envies and these desires found their expression later in the fictional43 reminiscences of Rien qu'une femme.** This major work, which was written in the full heat of almost total recall, analyzes the emotional and physical history of a

44

YOUTH

boy who possesses, and then falls in love with, one of the servants in the hotel owned by his mother. Claude's affair with Mariette becomes known, and she is sent away. Her moral indulgence, abetted by her attractiveness, persuades her to seek an easy living in prostitution. She is kept by the local court clerk. At first Claude is outraged; his pure desire is offended, his love is sullied by her looseness. In the attempt to alter her actions, Claude beats her. After a while, he finds that these beatings increase his ardor and that sharing her with a hated rival, and others, attaches him to her the more obsessively. The viler her behavior, the more passionately his body and his mind cling to her. When matters are at this point, Claude again meets his father, who had abandoned Claude's mother (except for periodic and unexplained visits) in his son's infancy. His father, an experienced bon vivant, soon sizes up the situation. He is especially appreciative of the lump sum Mariette has obtained from her steady provider, the court clerk. At his suggestion the three of them leave the small town, for more opportune surroundings. At Toulouse he purchases (with Mariette's money) a bar and installs her as its proprietress with himself behind the bar. By that act she has attained the ultimate in pretension by becoming a settled bourgeoise. The sole course left Claude is to follow elsewhere the only future open to the imperious needs of a body attuned to intense experience and directed by a mind formed to the pimp's conception of the values of love. At the end of the school semester Francis joined the other boys in the trip to Toulouse for the baccalauréat examinations. Needless to say, his expectations were fulfilled; he failed to pass. But his father was determined that he would get his diploma, and for this purpose he was enrolled as an interne (for the summer courses) in the lycée at Toulouse. In a way this was a new experience for him, for all of the students were scholastic failures. There was less class distinction than during

ROUERGUE

AND THE

SOUTH

45

the usual academic year. But the private war between himself and formal education continued. His teachers were interested only in cramming him with the modicum of facts necessary to pass his examinations for a diploma in classical studies with oral competency in a modem language. 45 They themselves had their own studies and interests to pursue and wished to cut to a minimum extracurricular duties such as the supervision of their charges after school hours and at night. One Sunday Carco accompanied some older comrades to one of the town's bordellos. His dignity was deeply wounded when he was ignominiously put out the door with the remark that he was too young to join the others. Drinks in various bars did not soothe his hurt and did strengthen his determination not to waste his day in the dull streets that shimmered under the hot sun. He suddenly remembered an address— that of a woman 46 maintained by a judge, father of one of his acquaintances. With bold resolve he went there. The maid let him in. When the mistress of the house appeared, believing that she had already met him, she wanted to take his hat. "Don't bother," 47 he said and flung it into a corner of the divan. This initial lack of sophistication ceded to a quick intuition of more suitable behavior. He found that bv the exercise of pleasing repartee and self-assurance, his day was not wasted. This experience, which he renewed frequently, gave him confidence in himself, taught him that women are accessible by other means than money (of which he had little), supplied him with a more physical attitude. 48 He found, too, that he was able to learn Spanish much more easily from his amiable companion than from his teachers. At this time he first began to appreciate the Spanish proverb that "women are worth what they are paid." On the basis of his experience he adapted it to "what they are paid by others." 49 In spite of his interest in accumulating sexual experiences,

46

YOUTH

there were periods when he lacked the energy to seek any conquests. At such times he felt completely exhausted, incapable of the slightest exertion. These fits of weakness were not, apparently, the direct result of sexual excesses, though they followed them. The characteristic was a physical inability to engage in any activity, coupled with intellectual and spiritual vacuity. It was as though he "blacked out." Then he would pretend illness and remain in bed until renewed interest and energy were consciously felt. Although he was ashamed of these depressions and attempted to surmount them, they were beyond his control. First felt at Toulouse, they were to occur periodically throughout later years. On some of his free afternoons he found an ingenious way to augment his allowance (his father was in no mood to coddle his poor scholar of a son). By reciting aloud, in the original Greek, stanzas from the Iliad, Carco was able to collect a crowd of idlers intrigued by the novelty of such entertainment. Having lyrically led them to a part of the public gardens where a friend had by prearrangement established his pitch, Carco abandoned the come-on to his fortune-telling associate while he passed the hat. He would close the show with a demonstration of the latest dance step. He found this activity quite profitable since it brought in about twenty-five francs for a few hours' diversion. 50 He was also singing in cafes under the sobriquet, Jean d'Aiguieres. This did not help him, however, to pass the bachot. He did pass the examination on his third attempt. 51 But there still remained before him the year of philosophy required for a first-class diploma. After he had passed the first part of the baccalaureate examination (in October, 1905), Carco's family sent him to Nice. He was to live at his grandmother's house and to study at the lycee.

ROUERGUE AND THE SOUTH

47

Francis's family had undoubtedly forbidden him to engage in literary activities until he had satisfied their minimal academic requirements; but he was still, as ever, intensely interested in things literary and in people connected with the literary world. While still a student, he was familiarizing himself with the practical aspects of publication and establishing his contacts. Among the subjects of his scrutiny was Jean Lorrain. Lorrain had come to Nice to attempt a last repairment of his faculties. Notorious for his excesses, considered the showman of vice and the bizarre, he seemed to incarnate the malignant fascination of dissipation. His stay at Nice was the last flicker of his incandescent reputation, a flagrant disavowal of his lofty pretension to moral effect: " I do not corrupt, I give freed o m ! " 82 He was, for Carco, another link in the chain of predecessors: Villon, Maynard, Choderlos de Laclos, Baudelaire, Alexis, Montfort. Each had treated some aspect of vice, especially—except Laclos—from the viewpoint of its venality. Lorrain's "L'Homme des berges" 6 3 was eminent in this gallery of portraits. Carco was also fascinated by the art of Gustave-Adolphe Mossa, curator of the museum at Nice. 84 The brooding melancholy, the dark foreboding, and the wide sweep of his canvases in the romantic tradition, appealed to Carco's morbidity. Overeager to enter the literary arena, confident that there would be a market for the endeavors of fresh, new writers, Carco founded, together with Jean Clary 8 8 and Joel Dumas, 6 6 La Revue Jeune.BT For want of sufficient funds (and, undoubtedly, a sufficient audience), it died an early death. 88 However, Carco did not restrict himself to editing his own magazine, he contributed to other regional publications, as well as to several in Belgium. 8 9 At this time, his media were poems and critical articles on fellow members of the same coteries with

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YOUTH

which he had affiliated himself—a modest mutual-admiration circle, based on artistic affinities, with a tinge of premeditated commercialism. 60 With the demise of his periodical, and with the eventual success at Aix-en-Provence for his diploma, Carco returned to his family at Rodez (about thirty-five miles north of Villefranche-de-Rouergue), where his father's administrative fortunes had transferred his duties. The family had moved into a narrow, three-story house, 3 Boulevard Laromiguiere. The boulevards had been laid out on the former ramparts of the old city which dates back to the days of the Gauls. Rodez is a solid, severe-looking town built to withstand the rigors of extreme seasons. Its architecture bears the lasting imprints of durability: its occupation by the Romans and its importance in medieval times had modeled it along the lines of the fortified city. Because of its situation on a high plateau, one can see far out over the mountainous country. But inside the town itself, the houses are set close together; the streets are narrow; the general appearance is forbidding. Near the place where the administrative and educational life centers is the Fualdes dwelling, which still casts its mysterious shadow over the Avenue des Hebdomadiers. The Fualdes affair 81 has left an aftermath of gloom and horrified curiosity over its scene. In the imagination of succeeding generations the locale of the event has remained impregnated with its bloody mystery. Whenever Carco went by the scene of the old crime, his flesh would creep at the images his susceptible mind evoked, but delighting in the sensation, he provoked this delicious horror by making occasions to pass by. He would wonder at the ruthless determination of the criminals and the fierceness with which they had executed their intentions. In Noumea he had seen the tender aspect of the convicts' nature while surprising only those details of their personalities which moved him to pity.

LEFT: ETCHING BY CHAS LABORDE FOR Rien

qu'une

femme

(EDIT. DE LA ROSERAIE,

1 9 2 5 ) ; RIGHT: ENGRAVING BY ANDRÉ DIGNIMONT FOR Nuits PAREIL,

de Paris

(AU SANS

1927)

FRONTISPIECE COPPERPLATE ENGRAVING BY JEAN-GABRIEL

DARAGNÈS FOR La Bohème mon cœur

1929)

et

(EMILE-PAUL FRÈRES,

THE LAPIN AGILE;

ETCHING BY EUGÈNE VÉDER FOR

toresques à Montmartre

(EDIT. LÉO DELTEIL,

PÈRE FRÉDÉ AT THE BAR OF T H E LAPIN AGILE; VÉDER FOR

1922)

Promenades

pit-

1922)

Promenades pittoresques à Montmartre

ETCHING BY EUGENE (EDIT. LÉO DELTEIL,

ROUERGUE AND THE SOUTH

49

A fascinated frequenter of the criminal courts, 62 he had heard a judge pronounce the death sentence and had seen the unmitigated obstinacy of the tough conforming to his conception of ethics. When reflecting on the Fualdès gang, Carco marveled at the mentality necessary for such sustained brutality. 83 This same fascination was to interest him in the case of the infamous Cartouche 64 and to influence his later frequenting of criminal types. Carco was enrolled in a special class at the lycée of Rodez to prepare for the examinations for an administrative post. He abandoned this discipline after two days. 65 But his father had not weakened in his determination to secure for his eccentric oldest son a sound and proper employment. His influence may have secured for Francis the position of pion 66 in the lycée at Agen. His academic record could hardly recommend him for this post, but somehow he got it. His duties at Agen involved keeping order in the study hall, supervision of the dormitories at night to be sure that there were no disturbances, and directing the weekly walks. Interested in things nonacademic to the detriment of his own record, Carco was quite unsuited for the scholastic aspects of his job. And his personal life did not exactly qualify him to pass judgment, according to usual standards, on the proclivities of his younger charges. Professionally, he was a complete failure. In study hall he assigned marks on the basis of quiet rather than application or learning. On the promenades he chose the direction by the chance itinerary of any one of the town's more attractive girls who might happen to pass by the troop. He could not assure the peace of the dormitory at night, for he was not there. He found the privacy of some boudoir much more comfortable than a cot separated only by a curtain from the students' deviltries. In addition to these delinquencies, his ways were quite out of conformity with the decorum expected of even a subordinate in the school. The summer was

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50

hot, and so Careo did his reading wearing only a hat and with his feet in a bucket of cool water. When he received the town's intelligentsia, come to pay homage to a poet already in print, 67 they would find him seated on the cold marble mantel wearing a hat and no clothes. 88 Undoubtedly there was a studied flouting of the proprieties in this affirmation of eccentricity. Nor did the director of the lycée think it dignified for his employee to sing for money in the courtyards of the old city like an itinerant troubadour. Because of lofty ideals, or perhaps moved by professional ethics, the director had no sympathy for this disreputable way of supplementing the monthly stipend of forty-five francs.®9 Besides, his pion through his assiduity in the cafés and the red-light district soon made himself notorious to the more discreet population.

SKETCH BY JEOFFROY

IN La Phalange, APRIL 1 5 , 1 9 0 8

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51

Carco, however, was not spending all his time making fan of conventions. At the school he had found two kindred personalities, Robert de La Vaissière 70 and Tristan Derème. 71 La Vaissière was already addicted to ether and to the poètes maudits ; a pessimist whose sensitivities had been outraged by the coarseness of life's frictions, he was even then taking refuge in hallucinatory dreams induced by art and drugs. He was experiencing and refining his testament, LabyrinthesJ2 73 Though the only record of his iconoclasm is in these pages, reminiscent of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, his influence must have instigated some of the mannerisms flaunted at that time by his companion. 74 Derème was just out of short pants when Carco met him, 75 but he had already demonstrated a playful, sardonic conception of the value of life even before their meeting. He and Carco, without altering each other's individual perspective, complemented one another in viewing humorously life's sordid realities. In La Vaissière Carco found the reflection of bitterness, in Derème, of flippancy—suddenly set aside to permit a glimpse of fundamental pain at loss of illusion. From a technical point of view La Vaissière was a slow, meticulous craftsman who labored incessantly at each articulation of his structure, losing himself in never-ending detail. Derème, on the other hand, was a quick, perceptive artisan with an amazing facility for verse-turning, and his expression excelled in surface brilliancies. Carco lacked Derème's immediacy; and he was too impatient for public suffrage to lose himself in a maze of elaborate toil as La Vaissière was doing. But the Agenese triumvirate agreed on sensation as the keystone of their poetics, irony as their buffer and weapon, incisiveness as the stamp of personality. Their relative anonymity found solace in the lofty affirmation that they were writing for themselves and for a chosen few. 76 By the natural attraction of sympathy rather than the formal requirements for entrance

52

YOUTH

into some restricted clique, others were to gravitate, each with his own uncircumscribed individuality, to this attitude toward art and life. By the end of three months, the director of the lycée found Carco's actions too extreme to be borne and his attitude almost insolently cavalier. He severed officially the tenuous connection, 77 and Carco was free to follow his fantasy elsewhere. The prodigal returned to Rodez to face his family's disapproval. Their opinion did not, however, interfere markedly with his activities. He had received from Pomairols a letter of introduction to the local poet and playwright, Roger Frêne. 78 Carco himself was then writing plays and was, in the diversity of his artistic activities, eager also to act. There is no record of his dramatic writings of this period, but he did appear 78 in La Cathédrale, a two-act play in verse by his friends, Roger Frêne and Henri Bourjade. The performance took place at the Théâtre de la Nature on August 11, 1907. 80 But Carco had known them at least a year and a half earlier. He had been in Rodez in March of the previous year and had, at about that time, published in his magazine, La Revue Jeune, an article on Bourjade. 8 1 He had known of Frène's poetry from the latter's collaboration on the Revue Provinciale of Toulouse. Carco thought so highly of Frêne that he would dedicate his first volume, Instincts, to "the magnificent poet of the Sèves originaires." 82 But if Carco was accepted and admired by one vigorous aesthetic group, he was persona non grata with another. Though a fervent admirer of Francis Jammes, to whom he had sent his own early imitative elegies, 83 he was not invited to attend a gathering held for the "rustic poet." Carco's social reputation may have been an important consideration in the decision of Léon Moulin, 84 its organizer, in excluding him. Even had Moulin, teacher at the lycée, wanted to accept Carco the writer, his religious temperament 8 5 could not have condoned Carco's growing ill-repute.

ROUERGVE AND THE SOUTH

53

Carco made, too, the acquaintance of the painter, etcher, writer, and editor, Eugène Viala, 86 who filled for him the place of Gall. In addition, Viala was himself an intense artist. Born at Salles-Curan, near Rodez, he was fervently in love with his native surroundings. Indeed, he seemed to wither away when distant from his beloved fields and forests. He celebrated them in the bite of acid on copper 87 and the swift rush of poetic prose. Stories were told that, like a bear rubbing contentedly against a tree's coarse bark, Viala would run his hands lovingly along their trunks and grovel in the clayey ground. 88 He would live like a woodsman who had the gift of expressing his love for the earth on canvas. Under his guidance Carco came to feel the qualities of his natural surroundings, learned to appreciate himself as a part of earth and air and water. But more fantastic, more literary, more perverse than the painter, he expressed himself in an affected, sophisticated manner. With leaves twined around his brow and a garland of flowers about his waist, he danced, otherwise naked, across the rocky slopes and punted down the swift streams. 89 There was sheer animal exhilaration in this close contact with the bountiful earth, and ecstasy in the perception of life testified to by the ripple of muscles, the surge of breath swelling in the chest, the feel on the body of the caress of the breeze. Whereas good health is commonly recognized by an absence of feeling ill—that is, a negative state—he relished his vitality, used it as an expression of an artistic and deliberate attitude. J'aime les siestes au bord du fleuve. Mon passé connut la jouissance d'un somme ivre de paresse et de grave orgueil poétique. L'ombre des saules, fouillis menu, défend mal du soleil. Sur le dos, je mesure le ciel creux sans nuage. L'eau n'est qu'une croûte d'azur: elle luit, elle est dure, elle est épaisse et difficile. Je me couche sur le ventre et je mâche une queue sucrée d'herbe sauvage. . . . Mon ventre chaud contre la terre absorbe la vie. Je me roule et je tombe, la face dans l'herbe fraîche. Une pointe chatouille mes narines heureuses. J'ai les mains blanches, grasses, je me sens libre comme une femme sans

54

YOUTH

corset et je touche mes seins fermes et doux, mes joues, mes cheveux lourds. . . . 9 0

There was much of posing in these earthy gestures, but these moods were not always dominant. Like the swift shiftings of the changeable winds, there were fits of depression and of nostalgic reverie. For no apparent exterior cause, the apperception that man is limited to the confines of his own physical being, that communication is impossible, would well up and drown his joy. Or, at other times, the stillness of the streets, the distant tinkle of bells, the haze of heat over the drooping flowers, whispered insidiously that the world is a dim mirage whose faint contours exist with mysterious analogies in the dream world of the mind. In the grip of these moments a spontaneous melancholy dissolved years and experiences to leave only the tender heart of a small boy yearning innocently for . . . he knew not what. Perverse and sentimental, sophisticated and guileless, an animal with a soul, Carco was feeling the growing pains of the aesthete who must cope with two worlds. In this provincial community the personal legend, which was later to become a selling point and an excitation to acquaintance, provoked disapproval—was, in fact, a handicap. Nevertheless, Carco followed his penchant, stimulated by its symbolic significance as revolt against detested bourgeois values, and a nascent, shrewd understanding of its value to set him apart and define him as a personality. With increased independence he was asserting his opposition to his family and emphasizing his difference from the average son of an average family. He was determined, cost what it would, not to comply with his father's efforts to mold him to a safe standard and a respectable future. As he would write ten years later to Pierre Laville, the intimate friend 9 1 of this time at Rodez, and with whom he had written verse satires of police regulations, " T u ne vas pas faire l'andouille, j'espère, et achever ce que ton

ROUERGUE AND THE SOUTH

55

père a entrepris. Il ne faut jamais suivre l'exemple de ses parents—même s'ils sont sérieux." 92 Defiantly, Careo flaunted his unconventionalism in the cafés and streets, and added fuel to the fire that was the legend.93 Carco's wanderlust carried him back and forth across the southern part of France in visits to poets who, like himself, were still comparatively unknown.94 His practical sense, his appreciation of publicity—that is, both publication and recognition by established literary groups—urged him to unite these disparate voices into a choir whose combined resonance would be more noted. At the beginning of 1908, once again undertaking the financial, literary, practical problems of such an organ, he established Pan, together with Jean Clary and Joël Dumas, at Montpellier; Careo himself was then living at Lyons. The program was very simple—to accept, without an a priori set of standards, fresh writing by new authors. Carco's name disappeared from the masthead with the fourth number, when he begain his military service (Pan continued its Bacchic tune until 1913). At the beginning of 1909, while still in service, he collaborated with the same men to start at Grenoble Les Petites Feuilles, which were scattered after the first and only number.95 Military discipline had no proviso for either aesthetics or incongruous behavior. There was no objection to spending a leave at the Théâtre Antique of Orange,96 but military police did censure Carco's appearance in uniform as part of the entertainment in an ill-reputed dance hall.97 The result was that although he had begun his compulsory military training as mail clerk to a group of bakers and had even been promoted to corporal,98 he corrected the galleys of Les Petites Feuilles in the military prison at Briançon.99 Careo hated his period of military service. He got along well with the men—they found him a ready companion, a convivial drinker, and ever eager for a good time (he knew

56

YOUTH

some of the most interesting women in town 1 0 0 ); they gaped at his quotations 101 from his own or others' poetry 102 —but he himself felt his individuality constricted by group routine and compulsion. The presence of his poetess cousin, Paule Lysaine, 103 wife of Major Hebrard, and his gay acquaintances softened the onerousness of subservience to military dictates, yet he knew that he was but a number in a column of numbers. His incarceration among the army recalcitrants, at Briangon, which nestled in desolate wastes of snow, lengthened his period of military service. A type of literature, appropriate to his situation, probably fortified him. Had not Villon and Dostoyevsky and Wilde suffered the same plight? Carco alleviated the enforced delay before regaining his civilian freedom by lighthearted joking with occasional visitors. 104 The experience was all the more bitter because he felt it to be the last hurdle which had to be cleared before he could throw off the shackles of obedience, or at least, conformity to outer regulations. But this period of military service was extremely valuable to him—not only did it intensify his avidity to live, that is to say, to do what was significant to him, but it also introduced him more thoroughly to more extensive samplings of society's variegated types. What previously may have been seen but was then interpreted in terms of the picturesque and for the sake of a striking detail, now was seen as the adumbration, the typical though particular, revealing excrescence of a world or a type which exists in reality, however bizarre or exceptional it may seem. These experiences, vital for the artist, were furnished him incidentally with his livret militaire by compelling him to associate intimately with the hodgepodge of humanity dredged into the army, and by his observations while seeking escape from the obligations of that same livret militaire. In order to have some private life, Carco sought in town a room of his own, where he could have around him books and pictures 105 and, especially, some privacy. In going from

ROUERGUE AND THE SOUTH

57

house to house, seeking for that refuge, he had sudden glimpses —almost illuminations—into the lives of the people interested in renting. It suddenly occurred to him that from such glimpses, from the interpretation of a few characteristic yet individual details, he had an insight into the unknown of the lives thus momentarily revealed. The picturesque, the sordid, the evocative, the magnetic incident—these materials of the artist stung deeply into the memory, the consciousness, the intelligence of the artist. Carco was on the threshold of becoming a novelist. J'ai pourtant quelque chose dans les pattes, juste ou faux, qu'importe! et des tas de sensations violentes, du roman, du théâtre . . . tout! une vie abondante qui va toujours. . . . Parfois je reste stupide pendant quinze jours. C'est une période de jours morts, incohérents. 108

When he came out of Briançon, he engaged in a frenzied enjoyment of freedom; and then he journeyed across France to Bayeux, in Calvados, where his father had been appointed. Carco was determined, more than ever, to lead his own life— that is to say, a literary life with social pleasures in conformity with his temperament. His family finally consented to his going to the literary Mecca and Babylon combined—Paris— on the condition that he obtain some employment which would assure him a regular minimal income. Carco arranged through Louis Pergaud 107 to take a job in the Compagnie des Eaux, and also promised that he would prepare himself ( once again ! ) to take the examination for a post as a government functionary. And so he was ready to risk the gamble of the small-town boy trying to make good in the big city.

CHAPTER

Debut:

IV PARIS

B E F O R E the first World War, Montmartre comprised three overlapping circles which were not always distinct. Around the Place Blanche and the Place Pigalle were various night clubs and dance halls which drew their trade from the patronage of the average citizen as well as from tourists. These night clubs, though situated in Montmartre, were like the average night club elsewhere in the city or, perhaps, in any other cosmopolitan area. They had one characteristic associated with their location 1 —they were frequented by prostitutes and loose women, for it was there that customers were to be found. Further up the hilly streets of Montmartre were dance halls such as the Moulin de la Galette and the Moulin Rouge, famous since Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec had everlastingly fixed their image and their significance. Here enthusiasts from highly varied backgrounds mingled indiscriminately—bourgeois clerks, manual laborers, shady characters, conventional wives and sweethearts, prostitutes, suspect characters, poets and artists, the currency and the riffraff of one of the world's capitals. On the upper hill the Butte Montmartre was a charming, quiet, drowsy little village with its gardens and its farms and its neglected plots. During the day, its twisting, ascending dead-end streets echoed only to the clatter of children's and marketers' sabots, or the scrape of a painter's easel being

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59

shifted to another somnolent spot, there to fix on canvas the blossoming of a tree or the effect of sunlight on long, peeling white walls. Housewives and janitors took the sun on their doorsteps, workers with a respite and the unemployed lazed indolently at the tables under the arbors of the cabarets. In the evening, flickering candles lighted the cloths of restaurants where people would linger over a simple meal in the open air. In the winter, cold fogged the windows of the cabarets in whose low-ceilinged common rooms pipe smoke hung heavy. At dusk a narrow band of light filtering around the cracks of doors and windows was the only indication that there was any animation within the walls. At night, however, with the withdrawal of the workers and the sightseers, the clientele of these cabarets suddenly changed. There remained seated at the tables or huddled at the bar those who had no compulsory obligations for the morning. It was the time for the poet and the painter, for the criminal and the unemployed, to hold converse. Then these two worlds, both unconventional, came together, and it was not always obvious who was to be the artist of the morrow and who would furnish cause for sensational headlines in the newspapers. This Montmartre was a sort of combination of Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen. Francis Careo came to this Montmartre one snowy day as the New Year began in 1910. When Careo arrived in Paris, his personal fortunes and hopes were set back by recent deaths of men whom he admired and who might have been able to bolster his insecure foothold on the literary ladder. Jean Moréas was no longer there to play the noble Grecian to his admirers at the Café Vachette.2 Charles-Louis Philippe had just succumbed 3 to the social disease which was the penalty for the experience behind Bubu de Montparnasse. Careo was in correspondence with the contributors to the various periodicals with which he himself was associated, as well as with critics such as Charles-Henry

60

DEBUT

Hirsch. But none was in a position to secure him immediate entrée to a remunerated or advantageous position. Edouard Cazanion was comfortably installed at 67 rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre but was not engaged in the politics and economic agitations of the literary world. He was, however, the familiar of many of the new generation of writers. It was at his home that Carco soon met (with the welcoming cheer of substantial food) Max Jacob, André Warnod, Charles Vildrac, Brunelleschi, Alexandre Mercereau, and others. 4 And Gazanion took him to the place which would become the symbol, a sort of crystallization of all that Montmartre was to mean to Carco—to the Lapin Agile. The Lapin Agile stands at the junction of Rue St. Vincent and Rue des Saules. It had originally been called Ma Compagne and later, during the symbolist period, Le Cabaret des Assassins. It had received its latest name from its signboard, 6 which showed a plump rabbit hopping out of a frying pan. This rabbit had been painted by André Gill, whence the syncopation from "Le Lapin à Gill" to "Le Lapin Agile." The Lapin Agile had a large common room with two tables, one of which was very long and massive. There was another squarish but smaller room. Outside was a garden. Across the street was the cemetery of Saint-Vincent, where three hundred Communards, executed by firing squads, lay buried in a common grave. Frédé, who ran the Lapin Agile with the help of Berthe," had leased the cabaret from Aristide Bruant, the famous singer of street songs in the popular vein. Bruant had purchased the cabaret to make sure that this landmark of Montmartre would not disappear before the progressive encroachment of the city. The Lapin Agile became Carco's favorite hangout. He liked its tranquillity, he liked especially Frédé's generosity with drinks on the house, and he liked above all the credit which Frédé extended to impoverished poets and artists. And,

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too, Berthe ingenuously extended to her clients a motherly affection and solicitude to which these sophisticates were not accustomed in their usual debonair and casual mode of existence. At the Lapin Agile, Carco became well acquainted with the regular habitues of the house and was himself soon taken into the inner circle. This franchise was only extended to genuine artists, that is, those who could prove their appreciation of and ability to create art. It was also necessary to have a personality sympathetic to the idiosyncrasies of the clique. Carco had no difficulty in moving up, the very first evening that he was there, from the small table to a place at the privileged table. He sang several songs from the repertory of the Bataillon d'Afrique (i. e., the corps of military service created from those convicted of various crimes), as well as some of his own composition. At this table were to be regularly found Pierre Mac Orlan, who was at that time attempting to become an artist; Wasley, sculptor of a large figure of Christ which served as the cabaret's coat rack ; Roland Dorgelès, specialist in practical jokes; Max Jacob, mystic, water colorisi, necromancer, poet; Edouard Gazanion, poet of disappointment and deception in life's trials; Girieud, painter and poet; André Warnod, sketcher, painter, raconteur. Often present, too, was one of the most successful counterfeiters of the day. Sometimes the Lapin Agile would be invaded by a stealthy band of pale, nervous youths Avho had a sudden urge to get off the streets. Their presence made everyone else uncomfortable. The artists once again became cognizant of the reality around them as they were dragged from the heights of aesthetic discussion; other drinkers furtively felt pockets in which weapons or valuables not easily accounted for might be concealed. Frédé, though he usually had in hand his guitar or a pitcher of cider or a bottle of wine, kept a gun within easy reach. It was during a gun battle between such a gang of strangers and the police that Frédé's older son, Victor, was shot to death

DEBUT

62 7

behind the counter by an unknown bandit. But on the whole, disturbances were few, for the disparate clientele of the Lapin Agile scrupulously practiced mutual tolerance, and indeed, it was not always clear where the demarkation between artist and bandit should be made. For instance, Mac Orlan was once commissioned, without his suspecting the true purpose, to sketch the layout of certain churches in Brittany. Later he discovered that his plans would have been used in robbing them. Manolo introduced into this circle a painter who had found that his fingers were more adept at stealing clock mechanisms in hotel rooms than at wielding the paint brush. Chance played an important role in determining whether one was to leave a record in the annals of literary or art history or in the criminal files of the police. Carco did not confine his activities and his interests to the Lapin Agile. His curiosity led him to investigate all the ins and outs of Montmartre, to try to get to know intimately all the suspicious little bars and hotels and cabarets. Every street, every house had for him a memory, an insight into the life and the mentality of the quarter. His moneyless condition made him keen to seek out any place which could give him credit for lodging or food or drink. He quickly got to know the Palmier on the Place Blanche, the restaurants of Adèle and of Gabrielle, those of the Rue Cavalotti, the hotels of Bouscarat and of Spielmann. At this time, from sheer necessity, the motto of the Lapin Agile's owner, Frédé, was Carco's dearest tenet: "The first duty of a worthy man is to have a good stomach." The job with the Compagnie des Eaux was neither interesting nor remunerative enough to hold him. He was attempting to place orders with various bookstores for Héliogabale by Sicard, but that, too, was not a livelihood. As for Instincts, which was supposed, once again, to be published in Paris, as well as a volume of poems, Le Travail des prisons, publishers wanted them to be

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63

underwritten rather than pay for them. For a while, Carco •worked for François Bernouard as a typesetter, and set by hand his own volume of poems. This edition never was published. After shifting from an uncomfortable, cramped, poor apartment to even worse accommodations, Carco moved into Gazanion's spare room as a guest, and they became the Paris representatives of Le Feu. In attempting to find a wedge which would open up the literary cliques, Carco thought of starting a publication somewhat similar to a publishers' handbook, which would list and describe and advertise the merits of various periodicals and their publications. This project aborted. Even a short term on the payroll of a member of the Chambre des Députés proved an unsatisfactory expedient, too far removed from words as literature. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in reconciling his two imperious needs and desires—an adequate livelihood and success as an author—was the attraction that the climate of Paris, especially Montmartre, had for him. C'est que Paris, la nuit, avec ses restaurants illuminés, ses brasseries, ses mornes établissements, ses rues louches, ses innombrables tentations, est d'un bien grand attrait. Jusque dans ces hôtels ignobles, aux murs tout décrépi [t] s, ces bouges humides, ces bastringues, ces buvettes écartées, son charme est tout-puissant, et agit, même passé l'âge d'une innocente canaillerie, sur qui voudrait s'y dérober. Que de fois, frissonnant à l'aube dans des vêtements fripés et relevant le bord d'un trop mince pardessus, ai-je déploré mon manque de volonté! J'étais mort de fatigue, aux trois-quarts ivre et, me retrouvant avec peine dans des quartiers fort excentriques, j'éprouvais cependant une sombre félicité. Elle me venait de ma propre faiblesse et de ma lâcheté et j'admirais, dans une demi-lucidité, le ciel clair, les maisons lépreuses, les devantures brunes des bistros. . . ,8

Carco found that the occasions for fun, the temptation to pass his evenings in various bars, whether in the company of friends or of characters whose occupations were illegal or suspect, interfered strongly with any sustained critical efforts.

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DEBUT

Such vadrouilles exhausted his energy and drew him more and more firmly into the orbit of those who talk about literature but do not create; they drew him into the way of life of those who sit around cabarets, waiting for some miraculous good fortune that would eliminate all material concerns. Those days when he had the few sous necessary for food and drink and tobacco, the few times that he had a windfall, were occasions for grandiose dreams midst the chatter of conversation and the smoke of the symbolic pipe and the fumes of stimulating spirits. The succeeding hangovers placed him once again in the dull world of reality—insignificant success, no financial stability, a bleak future. Carco had the premonition that time was running short, that if he did not soon withdraw from this irresponsible existence, troubled by the necessity of finding financial expedients, he would sink into the oblivion of unachieved intentions. He enjoyed what he was doing, or what he was not doing, but was nagged by his conscience. He knew that he had to break away in order to fulfill himself. Undoubtedly, for him, as for most of these artists who were still in their youth and confident of their strength, although this was a time of trial and of misery and of economic worries, hope of success counterbalanced tragic examples of physical defeat. Léon Deubel had drowned himself; there were the precedents of Hégésippe Moreau and of Gilbert, and of Aloysius Bertrand, who had died at the hospital because of malnutrition—and incomprehension, too; Gaston Coûté, author of the Chanson d'un gas qua mal tourné, and Modigliani had not yet paid the penalty for their excesses. The others did not think that they might be marked for the same fate, though such an existence augmented the risks of defeat from material causes. In contrast to the innumerable places where the artists did nothing but theorize and build plans for the brave new world they would create once they would be recognized, there was

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a center of real activity at the Bateau Lavoir on the Rue Ravignan. In this decrepit old building, with entrances on various levels because of the steep hill, in almost bare, drafty, primitive, barrack-like rooms, a Picasso, a Max Jacob could bar their doors and work with intense concentration. There, regardless of the amazing boutades which they occasionally declaimed in cafés, these artists worked to shape the future rather than wait first for success. In the abandoned quarries at the top of the street, Paco Durio turned out brilliant ceramics from his kiln and lived surrounded by a superb collection of Gauguin paintings. Guillaume Apollinaire, who seemed to spend all his time in cafés for the purpose of eating as many meals each day as possible (his capacity was infinite; he thought nothing of having a copious dinner three times in a row), was actually engaging in multiple literary productions including pamphlets, articles, scholarly books, pornography, and articles for financial journals, and in ghostwriting. Utrillo and Modigliani were painting in paroxysms of effort, while Careo was frittering himself away in dissipations. Perseverance could counterbalance the unequal struggle. Careo himself appreciated, though he was not applying, this precept. What he lacked was perspective, that is, removal from immediate temptation. At this moment, the necessary bit of good fortune (in the retrospective light of subsequent events) was supplied, ironically, by the arrival at Paris of his father. Early one morning, bleary-eyed, stumbling through the mess of a disorderly room, Careo opened his door to his father's forbidding presence; within the room, the son, hardly yet recovered from a brawl which had ended at the police station; on the threshold, the severely correct and dignified, trustworthy representative of the state and of orderly routine. His father's decision was made at once. His son had no regular employment, was leading a disreputable life, and was not even fulfilling his all-consuming

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ambition to achieve literary success. That same day, in February 1911, they left for the family's home at Villefranche-surSaône. From there Carco wrote immediately to his intimate friend, Edouard Gazanion: " 0 la fuite! Le vieux désir revient: illustrer ma carcasse de tatouages, l'imprégner d'alcool, l'affamer de barbares convoitises. Et ce n'est pas de la littérature." 9 In the most important respect, however, his idleness had not been sterile. He consciously realized that he was coming into direct contact with the materials he would use later. He did not lose his lucidity or discernment or critical judgment. He carefully stored away in his memory and took notes on the characters he so willingly frequented and on the occurrences which seemed to him colorful or significant. At the same time that he drank for the sake of drinking, that he had casual affairs for the sake of passing pleasure, that he luxuriated in a conduct which repudiated all the sacrosanct standards of his background, he knew that he had not abandoned these standards. The concluding lines of "Hymne" in Instincts are explicit: "Vous êtes cette fille qu'on viole, et je vous vois tourner dans mes prunelles brouillées,-—car vous jouissez où je me vautre." 10 Instincts had been published under the imprint of Le Feu just before Carco left Paris. Instincts comprised some of the short prose sketches, or incidents and sentiments experienced in the provinces and in Paris. Short, concentrated, incisive, these sketches presented a detailed etching of a moment's vision. Their tone was cynical, but with a sweep of fervor, and an intensity of feeling which clearly exposed the passionate reaction of their creator to the incidents depicted. The sketches of a scene in the country had a softness and a lyricism representative of a surrender to the majesty and the force of nature. The Parisian tableaux were much harsher, as though lit by spotlights, focusing full attention on a word or a gesture and

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highlighting the subject exposed in all its nudity. There was not just instinct in these sketches, there was the percipience of intelligence seeking out the revealing detail. It was, however, instinct which had the predominant role, for it was that which chose the subject and which ordained its significance. Here was life as it is, certain aspects of it, but here was equally the temperament of the artist revealed in their choice. But this same temperament was the very point of controversy between Carco and his family. It is puzzling that, having reached an age when often one does not pay such heed to parental opinions, he remained obedient to the dictates of that family. In Carco's case, the Corsican background may have been a strong influence; the fact is that he did submit to his father's orders. And by leaving Paris, Carco gave himself the chance for physical rest and nostalgic recall, the chance to settle down to writing. An end in itself, it could also be an escape from his family. Enfin, travaille! Il n'y a que cela de bon. Je suis enfin chipé par la littérature et j'empile un sur un les manuscrits quotidiens. . . . Je cherche et je crois qu'avant deux ou trois ans j'aurai quelque chose de convenable à montrer. . . . Je me souviens d'Agen où je pouvais passer des journées entières au bordel et travailler. 11 J'apprends le mécanisme des phrases et de la composition. Quelles merveilles! Ah! la littérature est un chic métier: je l'ai dans la peau ce métier-là! Travaille!12 Tu sais quel calme puissant donne le travail . . . et quelle jouissance de créateur on trouve devant une page écrite. Je souligne parce que nous ne sommes pas des petits nègres et que nous comprenons combien d'amour demande une phrase. 13

Later that year, in May, when his father was transferred to Angers, Carco was still one of the household. But at the end of the year he went to live in Nice. Here was the solution to his predicament. He was, on the one hand, away from his father and from the constant friction characteristic of their relation-

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ship. He was, on the other hand, away from the distractions and amusements and temptations of Paris, which he missed very much. He had enjoyed a long rest; he was ready to start once again to prepare his weapons for an assault on the literary stronghold. Carco began to write ]ésus-la-Caille. Jésus-la-Caille did not progress smoothly. He worked at it sometimes regularly, sometimes erratically. He had not yet disciplined himself to a steady rhythm of work, 14 and, too, his rate of production was affected by his moods and other interests and duties: Il faut revenir à la vie régulière ou tout est foutu. . . . J'ai beaucoup de tendresse et je ne sais comment m'en défaire sans aller trop loin. 15 J'ai Paris dans le sang comme un poison. Mais que faire pour l'argent? Je vais chercher un petit bureau. Je gagnerai cent cinquante francs par mois. Je serai un pauvre bougre, terne et timide et j'écrirai, le soir après dîner pour remplir mes soirées, des romans qui ne seront pas vaches. Ou bien un beau matin je partirai sans dire à revoir à personne et on me verra bien mort à la fin.10

Carco felt that Nice was shallow, that the sunny Mediterranean with its glossy stillness was a shell over emptiness— beneath its surface, no agitation, no upheaval, no profundities. And he felt that, except for a few individuals, the city itself was like that sea. 17 Carco had made the acquaintance of Frank Harris. Greatly attracted to this stormy personality, whose life and books were the center of scandal, Carco greatly admired Harris's individuality, his capacity for passionate feeling, and his independence of thought and action. Carco at one time hoped to become Harris's secretary and to go with him to the Orient. Carco also thought of escaping from the boredom of Nice by expatriating himself to England or Belgium. Perhaps he believed that in England he might establish connections through John Middleton Murry, whom he had met shortly before leaving Paris. The plan to go to Belgium involved a woman with whom he

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was very much in love. His hopes were frustrated, and he remained in Nice. One important result, after the first direct smart of disappointment in love had been conquered, was the adoption of a protective armor of cynicism. This cynicism was not the negation of life's values but rather a viewing of them with a more disabused (yet not jaundiced) eye, the rescaling of experiences to a juster proportion. Life was good; an inordinate appreciation of personal experience was to be tempered by the recognition of its lesser interest for others. The contrast between these two sets of values might be called irony. But this irony did not rule out sympathy. He wanted to live life fully but not to be the dupe of his own desires. After this sentimental disappointment, Carco felt renewed force and an intense determination to find his salvation in art. As a result of the increased sensitivity and effort to solace the hurt stemming from his love affair, he felt himself capable of a more incisive, a profounder style, backed by an appreciation of psychological values he had heretofore lacked. These values were revealed in his volume of verse, La Bohème et mon cœur. The title of this first published collection of his poetry (his earlier verses were not to be reprinted until fifteen years later) indicated the nature, scope, and temperament of their author. With a variety of verse forms ranging from the classic alexandrine to the five-syllable line, but with most of the poems utilizing the balanced octosyllable, employing standard rhyme, counter-assonance, and even hardly any rhyme at all, Carco offers a series of frank apperceptions of his own life. This is personal lyric poetry, with the emphasis on mood evoked by physical details. They range from the imaginative "L'aube a fripé ses roses blêmes!" 18 to "Ventre alourdi, cul sur ta chaise"; 19 from the cynicism of "Parade" 20 to the tenderness and idealism with a capital I exemplified in "Car, ô ma vision troublante, n'es-tu pas / Un mirage incessant trop difficile à

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suivre?" 21 The subject matter Is quite varied, with a number of poems treating of church bells and Sundays in the provinces, or of various love affairs with precise physical details, or of autobiographical events such as his incarceration in the military prison of Briangon ("Cellule 2 1 4 " ) . " The rhythms are reminiscent especially of Verlaine, 23 and other influences are readily apparent. For instance, "Complainte" ~4 reminds us of Bertrand's Gaspard de la nu.it; the aforementioned "Cellule 2 1 4 " is perhaps mindful of Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol"; Laforgue is present in the tone of mockery and sarcasm. By the combination of mood and physical setting, by an emphasis on atmosphere, they employ a modification of symbolist values by a romantic personality. This romanticism is modern, however, in its refusal to expatiate at length (indeed, most of the poems are quite short) on suffering and spiritual torment, and in its positive acceptance of the joys of life. But these poems are not only derivative literary offspring of extensive readings in poetry. We have autobiography and insistence on the experiences and feelings of the author, but there also are restraint and reticence. Rather than emphasis, we have implication; rather than sorrow, we have a mixture of tears with laughter. Carco has not forgotten Villon's " J e lis en pleurs," which is for him a great secret of art and of life. If Carco may be said to have at this time a "philosophy," it is the belief in the supreme value of art; the conviction that art is only for one's self; and that the key to being right in art is in a sense of moderation. It is because of these beliefs that Carco could criticize quite stringently the poetic efforts of most of the women writers of the day. 2 0 He knew that in accusing them of too effusive selfconfession and of overworking the establishment of mood by too much insistence on it, he ran the risk of forming a bloc of powerful enemies and was laying himself open to a charge of tenuous reasoning. But Carco welcomed the controversy which might be aroused by his article on the role of women in poetry.

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Such a discussion would create publicity and draw him and his friends to the attention of a wider, still somewhat remote public. It would create interest in the works of the " g r o u p " with which he was associated. It was at this time that the poètes fantaisistes started to be so called. Though not a school in any dogmatic sense, the label could cover common aspects of their works and be a useful means of identification. The fantaisistes were dissatisfied with what they considered the worn-out themes and techniques of poetry of the twentieth century's first decade. Poetry had become, they believed, either too rarefied or too grandiloquent. The corrective would be a more sober, a more lighthearted, a more disabused appreciation of the facts of life. Each poet should pursue his own interests but retain, too, a recognition of the relative importance to others of his personal experiences. The times were changing. Values were uncertain. It was not reasonable to assume that one's own allegiances formed part of a generally accepted dogmatism. Honesty would be, then, the confrontation of experience without the blinders of indoctrinated attitude and the acceptance of the relative unimportance of personal despairs and triumphs to an indifferent society. Such an attitude, coupled with a certain amused skepticism and tolerance—a sort of detached humor—implied that poetry should be pitched to a minor key. Yet, though on the one hand there was the feeling of being adrift, there was, too, the sense of tradition, of roots in and associations with a long and rich past, as well as the spirit of investigation of their own time. Thus, the fantaisistes might be termed limited optimists. It was an affinity of attitude, and not formulae of technique and of content, not subservience in the ranks of a marshaled, disciplined battalion which united the members of the so-called school. There was a diversity of temperaments and of heritages. For instance, Derème owed much to Schopenhauer; Vérane is in the tradition of the Bacchic poets; Jean-

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Marc Bernard considered himself a classicist interested in continuing in his elegies the pure French tradition of the Renaissance. Pellerin refused to make a display of himself like Musset and even mocked the poet. Writers such as Salmon and Apollinaire were more interested in the pyrotechnics which might be displayed in light badinage and in essaying new tones than in identifying themselves more than momentarily with the above-mentioned poets, essentially limited in range. It is significant that Toulet, though he was somewhat older than the others, was chosen as head of the group because of the finish, the humor, the versatility of his quatrains. Yet Toulet could not get his Contrerimes published during his lifetime (the same is true of the bulk of Pellerin's poetry). 2 6 If Carco is spoken of as the theoretician of his group, he at no time had the belief, as Derème did to some extent, that the école fantaisiste represented more than a useful title which signified especially a loose cooperative association of friends practicing, in individual works, a similar conception of their art. Carco took stock of himself. He felt that he was strong, that he had knowledge of the practical difficulties besetting the man with a position still to win, but he felt, too, that he had the equipment and the intelligence to be a success. 27 He estimated that he had achieved sufficient contacts and notoriety to enter the literary lists in Paris. His reputation had, to some extent, preceded him. There had been a certain amount of notice accorded his books and contributions to periodicals and his discussion of the role of women poets. He knew that he had a good friend in CharlesHenry Hirsch, about whom he had written a brochure, 28 and that his general acceptance as one of the prominent figures among the poètes fantaisistes would gain him a more stable position in the literary world. He returned to Paris in mid-

1913. The early part of the twentieth century saw a continuation

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and a deepening of the uncertainty and bewilderment which had become acute after the Franco-Prussian War. The younger generation was dissatisfied with both traditional values and the hitherto accepted practices of the symbolist-naturalist period. Writers such as Bourget and Barrés had shifted from an emphasis on psychology and on emotivity to the defense of traditionalism. Cousin's eclectic philosophy was deposed by the ingenious thought and style of Bergson. Poetry was drifting into super-distilled symbolism which had reached the impasse of dexterously contrived melody unsupported by genuine feeling. The impact of German philosophy as well as the infiltration of Russian ideas first disseminated by Voguë 29 enlarged the conception of what literature should be without at the same time offering persuasive artistic examples of how to apply the new ideals. Around 1910 this state of irresolution in French thought and art reached a crucial point of discussion. As early as 1895 Jules Huret 30 had started the investigation of the literary scene. In 1905 Louis Le Cardonnel and Charles Vellay,31 as well as Georges Casella and Ernest Gaubert,32 had proclaimed the advent of a new and satisfying literature whose content was attuned to the interests and needs of the day. In 1910 Agathon 33 attacked the very root of the problem by investigating the divers philosophies at the basis of the old and new literatures. Their conclusion was the need for a renovation of values and of techniques, but they were unable to be precise as to who would be the new chefs de file.3* The most important periodical of the day was the wellestablished Revue des Deux Mondes, which jealously guarded the accumulated capital of the past. The Mercure de France, which had started to flaunt its mauve banner in 1889, had the position of chief adversary to the Revue's entrenched complacency. L'Action Française had adherents, but its fanaticism and its snobbishness limited its followers to the select few blue-

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bloods. André Gide's Nouvelle Revue Française had just started (in 1 9 0 9 ) , and had not yet won the undoubted leadership of militant youth. There were, too, innumerable little periodicals and ephemera ; guerrillas attacking and sniping in an unorganized campaign of independence. Naturism, neoclassicism, école romane, paroxism, these were some of the banners under which the untrained recruits had entered the fray. Careo was an independent fighter who allied himself with mutually incompatible organizations such as the Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres and Les Guêpes on the one hand 3 5 and the Ile Sonnante 3(i and Le Feu 3 7 on the other, as well as with foreign cohorts such as Poesia in Italy 3 8 and Rythm 3 9 in England. Though he thought Maurras's ideology a salutary contribution to the destruction of uncritical complacency and satisfaction with the worn-out tenets of the past, Careo could not adopt Maurras's chauvinism. Though Careo was interested in the ultramodern affirmations of Marinetti and the cubists, he was too sensible to the ingrained preferences of the pure French tradition to succumb to their iconoclastic blandishments. Careo wanted the new, the vital, the personal, but within a nondogmatic scheme. He believed that there was too much empty echo in resounding catch phrases with too little definable substance. He was too partial to individual idiosyncracies to accept uncritical adherence to the discipline of any confining group. Since he was moved most by the influence of an individual's personality and an individual's art, he preferred to seek his allies in whatever group they might be. Cognizant of the necessity for well-supported attack, he knew that he would be unable to pierce through the opposition of intrenched success without the support of others, but he was f e a r f u l of losing his chance at advancement by being absorbed within a cadre where others might gain the credit and where he would be hampered by the uniform of the outfit in which he had enrolled.

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He had his eye on his ultimate personal success, and for that future advantage he was willing to eschew immediate victory. There was also in this reasoning an element of intellectual integrity as well as practical acumen. Carco did not believe that the times called for flamboyant proclamations or dogmatic explanations. He judged that the day had arrived when the writer and the public expected to follow the progress of individual skirmishes rather than mass battles. He believed that the spiritual and intellectual climate indicated that the proper tone was one of confident irony which did not in any way preclude energetic affirmation of joy in living. Success could only be achieved by being true to one's individual vision; satisfaction of the public only by the emphatic handling of a limited subject. The twentieth century was not the time for major generalizations or sweeping affirmations, but rather for the concrete investigation in a factual way of a specific subject. Let the conclusions be what they might, the artist should attempt to convey the sentiment of the authentic, of the experienced, of the new. No rehashing of what has been said and said again previously, but instead, the deft offering of what one, oneself, had lived through with just a trace of irony as to the importance of the experience. He believed the public wanted works which would be keen and stirring but that it would be suspicious of, if not indifferent to, excessive effusion. The public had learned that the importance of anything was relative and the only thing which was really important was what one oneself cared about. Here at the very beginning of his literary career Carco was setting a limit which would deny him, even though he might have the qualifications, access to the rank of an important thinker or of one concerned with general values. While waiting to achieve recognition, Carco worked as a literary hack for Willy. 40 Willy was one of the best-known boulevardiers and journalists. His signature had graced the covers of many books, none of which he had written. Like

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Alexandre Dumas père, he ran a literary factory. He would get an idea for a novel and turn the idea over to someone who he knew could develop it at some length. He would then have that version retouched by one or more other collaborators until the final product seemed salable. It would be published under his signature alone. The best-known of his amanuenses was Colette, then his wife. He advised her how to retouch her early efforts but did not advise her that she could write without him. Willy employed Carco, Tristan Derème, Paul-Jean Toulet, and perhaps others 41 in 1912 and again in 1914, on L'lmplaquable Siska (notice a typical Willyism) and Les Amis de Siska; Carco worked on at least two more novels for Willy. These works were potboilers relying heavily on puns, innumerable adventures, and somewhat scandalous situations. Their only merit was that they earned money for Willy and helped his collaborators through periods of pecuniary difficulty. But his collaborators were not grateful for this employment, nor did they consider their work to be literature. This subservience to economic necessity was a way to lengthen the period of residence in the capital with perhaps the hope that Willy might lead to more independent opportunities. Willy was the familiar and connoisseur of the various compromises and arrangements necessary to achieve success. He was also well acquainted with the circus, dance hall, and vaudeville world. He knew how to go behind the façade to the central mechanisms which activated the various milieux. Doubtless, Carco benefited by his education in Willy's atelier and his meeting there acrobats, dancers, and theatre folk. But Carco himself had instinctively been drawn to these colorful groups; he had penetrated them and had been accepted by them on his own account. Willy was perhaps most useful in revealing those aspects which Jean Lorrain had so copiously treated in Le Tréteau (indeed, this book had been one of Carco's favorites for its viciously frank revelations of human pettiness and

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selfishness). 4 2 Careo was certainly not na'ive in estimating the complexities and the qualities of the field in which he intended to become preeminent. He knew that the quality of his writing was something which would be determined by its inherent values, and that literature as an art had merits separate from its commercial possibilities. But he appreciated, too, both because of observation and because of his origins, that sucess could be determined by financial returns for one's abilities. Money would give him that independence he had so vehemently fought for. He wanted to write well, he wanted to be a craftsman satisfied with the artistry of his product; he determined, too, to be a financial success. Through Pierre Mortier, its editor, Careo had articles published in Comoedia, and Roland Dorgelés was instrumental in getting him a position as art critic on Clemenceau's newspaper UHomme Libre. This position, which paid fifty francs a month, did not last long, for Careo refused to read Clemenceau's daily editorial on political matters. Careo found Clemenceau's prose unbearably dull and without any connection with literature. He had no interest in the political situation of the d a y ; probably he thought that art had, at best, only to compromise with the sordid aspects of human organizations. 4 3 From L'Homme Libre he went to Gil Blas. Careo was of course still contributing to poorly-paying periodicals. Yet, in spite of a small income, he now took an apartment at 1 3 Quai aux Fleurs, and dressed quite nattily. Confident of imminent success, he lived extravagantly and did not hesitate to run up considerable debts. This optimism was not misplaced. Shortly after his return to Paris, Careo attended the marriage of Paul Fort's daughter to the futuristic painter, Gino Severini. 4 1 This was to prove the decisive moment of his literary life. During the festivities which followed the ceremony, Careo was asked to sing. He got up and gave his interpretation

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of some risqué Marseilles songs and also some gypsy melodies. He was a great success. A lady asked to be introduced to him. It was Rachilde, wife of Vallette, the director of the Mercure de France. After talking with Carco for a while, Rachilde asked why he did not submit something to the Mercure. He replied that for some time the Mercure had been holding the manuscript of Jésus-la-Caille.45 That night Rachilde read it and talked about his work to Vallette. Vallette may have already known of Carco from the latter's article on Alfred Poussin, published in the Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres}6 Vallette, himself a thwarted author, 47 had been a great admirer of the late nineteenth-century bohemian poet and had prefaced a réédition of his Versiculets.iS Carco had quoted from that preface in his own article, in which he told of having been introduced to Poussin's work by a poet at Saint-Rambert d'Albon (that is to say, by Jean-Marc Bernard) ; but in his article Carco did not hesitate to say that he considered Vallette's judgment of Poussin's merit somewhat exaggerated. Whatever Vallette may have thought of Carco's article, he read Jésus-la-Caille, with the result that within a week Carco had a contract from the Mercure de France. Eclectic, though partial to the post-symbolist movement, the Mercure de France's mauve cover, stamped with a symbolic caduceus, was a guarantee of new and fresh and diversified literature. In addition to its review, the Mercure de France also published books under the winged staff. The subject matter of Jésus-la-Caille was in itself sure to appeal to the general reading public. A story about pimps and prostitutes and their little-known mentality and customs generally could not fail to arouse popular interest. Although Carco had several recent predecessors in the use of this theme, he received greater recognition than they. Eugène Montfort's La Turque,*9 a sober, touching recital of the formation and death of a prostitute, an essentially kind, good, and simple girl forced

"THE PHANTOMS OF THE Mercure IN Les

Nouvelles

Littéraires,

[de

France],"

BY ROGER WILD

FEBRUARY 1 9 , 1 9 4 8 .

From left to right, among others: Jean Lorrain, Colette, Willy, Rachilde, Henri de Régnier, Careo, Paul Fort, Paul-Jean Toulet

by economic necessity and an unhappy love affair into that trade, had apparently achieved moderate popular favor. Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu de Montparnasse had created more of a stir 50 with its sad tale of a poor young man's attempt and failure to rehabilitate the ingenuous prostitute whom he loved. But Montfort's novel gave few descriptions (except for some memorable scenes of Grenoble and vignettes of the exercise of the profession at Paris) of the physical setting; Philippe has well-developed descriptions of the Sébastopol neighborhood where Berthe seeks her customers, and of Bubu's background—Bubu is, however, a relatively secondary character, for Philippe's novel is really the loving portrayal of Pierre's

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spiritual, ideological, physical, and sentimental problems. Montfort terminated his case history with the quiet suicide of his heroine; Philippe prefaced the peroration of his passionate social plea 51 by emphasizing the unbridgeable abyss between the milieu and those on whom it preys in Berthe's final statement: "They want you to pay me," 52 a propos of a night she has spent with Pierre just before returning to street-walking at Bubu's threatening insistence. In the case of both these novels the point of view is really from outside the world 53 which they portray. Sophie (La Turque) is a recruit, one might say a naturalized citizen who had to obtain first and second papers before achieving unqualified status; Pierre, the true hero of Philippe's autobiographical confession in fiction,54 is of the lower bourgeoisie. On the contrary, all of Carco's personages are of the milieu. In addition, as the title itself indicates, Jesus-la-Caille is a homosexual,55 a type not previously treated at such length in novels dealing with this stratum of society. Very ingeniously, Carco does not either consider La Caille's sentiments as intrinsically abnormal or differentiate their quality from that of the ordinary heterosexual. He has, also, chosen as the locale of his novel the lower slopes of Montmartre, that is, the neighborhood of the Place Blanche and the Place Pigalle, which might be considered the true habitat of the type. And Carco's story is much more complex than those of his predecessors. There are subsidiary plots and numerous characters which enrich the narrative and reveal varied facets of their natures —Jesus-la-Caille, who loves Bambou (temporarily in prison), is loved by Fernande, a prostitute who belongs to Le Corse; Le Corse is sent to jail through the machinations of Pepe-laVache, who also loves Fernande; both La Caille and Fernande are admired by the small fry of Montmartre venality, whereas Le Corse (who hates homosexuals) has all the prestige of a master pimp and gangster, and Pepe-la-Vache the hidden

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s t r e n g t h — a n d w e a k n e s s — o f the stool pigeon. Thus, against a background of realistic yet lyrical on-the-spot descriptions of the bars and streets and hotels where the action takes place, the r e a d e r is introduced to the social complexities a s well as the psychological and sentimental motivations of a city within a city. Still greater authenticity and c h a r m is achieved by the dialogue, which is in the strange slang of the protagonists. F r o m the opening r e m a r k of Jésus-la-Caille ( a f t e r his perfunctory " B o n j o u r " ) ,

" B a m b o u est f a i t , " we listen to the

elliptical expression of a special c l a s s : On l'a donné, pour sûr ! . . . Dans la chambre, le pante nous lâche un sigue. Mais il crânait, les poches pleines de pèze. . . . Tu penses si je guignais. . . . Mon Bambou, lui, paraissait ne rien voir. Bon, l'pante se déshabille, et nous. . . . Mais il n'était pas au truc. J e sentais qu'il regardait du côté de la glace; alors, moi aussi, nature! et qu'est-ce que je vois? Bambou, parole, qui fauchait le pèze. Ça n'a fait qu'un cri: Un agent! . . . Moi, je me suis barrée sous le lit, et Ménard a boni: 'La Mina, mets les vivement et retiens ta menteuse!' . . . Méfie-toi, la Caille, les mecs font le jeu des bourres. . . . J e sais ce que je sais. Les plus maries sont souvent de la Grande Taule. La ferme, Mina ! Non, mais? Si j'veux. Combien que vous êtes à vous passer l'ouvrage? Ces messieurs travaillent dans la police et les patrons de province. Et tu trouves encore des gonzesses au béguin, des p'tites gueules? 5 8 Or this conversation about the spectacle of F e r n a n d e dancing with Jésus-la-Caille at the Moulin-Rouge: Le barman salua ses clients. La Caille fait des siennes, remarqua-t-il soudain sur un ton calme. Titine eut une moue : Ma chère, avec une femme. . . . C'est Fernande! II est bon, l'môme. T'as pas vu? Ce fut une minute de surprise. On commentait l'événement.

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Alors, il remise? dit Olga, qu'un rire cruel affinait. T'es louf ! A doit raquer, Fernande, ou elle fait le truc en combine. Mais le Corse? Tu n'vois donc pas qu'elle n'en veut plus, du mac ? C'est franc. . . . Faut-il l'écrire dans la Lanterne? . . . Non, mais la môme en tient: la belle amour. . . . Zieute-moi. . .

Indeed, the deft handling of slang 58 immediately created for Carco an eminence which classified him as an authority 59 as well as fixed his popular image—expedient, yet restrictive. (Thirty-five years later, upon the creation—as a sort of farce —of an Académie Française d'Argot, he was to be elected its president.) 00 Another reason for Jésus-la-Caille s appeal to the public is the author's ostensible objectivity. Carco's characters are seen from within their own world. 61 The author does not intrude directly. He does not make reflections on the morals or acts of his people, but he does attempt to show the rudimentary development of their thinking by a bareness of dialogue. This simplicity does not handicap the reader's appreciation of the complexity and extent of the characters' feelings. But perhaps the greatest attraction lies in the pace, which not only develops the ups and downs of a love story (Fernande is as fully portrayed as La Caille), but also quickens excitement about the suspected, inevitable, bloody conclusion. Carco gave particular attention to descriptions which, like attractive vistas during a promenade, hold one's attention. During his temporary residence in Montmartre, he had stored up in his memory, and noted down, the locales of his story. To these personal observations he could add details culled from correspondence with friends. And, of course, he had perfected descriptive ability in the prose poems of Instincts as well as in short stories and sketches contributed to various periodicals. 62 Especially did he respond to Paris in the rain. The opening paragraph of Jésus-la-Caille : "Il pleuvait. L'eau, mollement, fouettait les vitres du petit bar," forecasts a péri-

PARIS

83

odic return of rain or haze to the city renowned for its translucent humidity: L e b o u l e v a r d de Clichy a m a s s a i t , sur un ciel bas d'octobre dont les n u a g e s crevaient, ses r a n g é e s d ' a r b r e s . Des flaques d'eau brillaient confusément et, sur l'étroit trottoir du milieu, se hâtaient des p a s s a n t s tardifs. Contre les devantures fermées, battait un triste flot d ' o m b r e s éveillées et méfiantes. Deux agents surveillaient les filles qui tournaient. . . . P a r f o i s , à la lueur d'un bec d e gaz, elles sortaient de l'ombre avec de si t r a g i q u e s v i s a g e s qu'on eût dit des mortes soulevées par le vent. Et, très loin, au fond de ce l a r g e boulevard, le place Blanche étageait ses lumières. 6 3 L e vent soufflait p a r intervalles et balayait, en grinçant d a n s le haut des toitures, un ciel b a s dont il déchirait les brouillards. Tantôt blancs, tantôt g r i s ou bien roux à cause des lumières qui luttaient avec eux, les b r o u i l l a r d s tournoyaient entre les m a i s o n s c o m m e une écume p r o f o n d e , et l'odeur dont ils imprégnaient l'atmosphère avait un goût f a d e et p o u r r i d ' e s p a c e . 0 4

Each of the three parts, of equal length, into which Jésusla-Caille is divided, starts with a description of the weather; at least sixteen of the sixty-seven brief chapters open on the same note (Part I : Chapters 1, 15, 2 1 ; Part II: Chapters 1, 11, 19, 21, 2 3 ; Part I I I : Chapters 1, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 1 7 ) . Appropriately, Part II—devoted to Fernande's loves— is sunlit. From these descriptions alone the reader knows how the characters are feeling: they respond like sensitive plants to light and dark, warmth and cold. Besides numerous quick sketches of street, hotel, and bar scenes, each section has a fuller panorama: Part I, the Foire de Montmartre; Part II, the view of Paris from Montmartre; Part III, the crowded-together dwellings of Belleville. Realistic in an impressionistic sense, the depictions are bathed in the emotions of the protagonists, are truly paysages d'états d'âme. Such lyrical response to rain, the intimate association of mood (almost always one of sadness or hurt) and dripping skies—

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these characteristics stamp Carco as "le poète de la pluie," whether in prose or poem form. In the traditional manner he had first attracted attention as a poet, which procedure could, on the whole, only grant him a succès d'estime; but a successful first novel was a guarantee of publishers' subsequent attention. Without their favor, a writer could have no audience; through them (and their promotion of publicity) he might have the advantages of advertising and salesmanship. The Mercure de France had first printed Jésus-la-Caille in its periodical at the beginning of 1914, and then issued it as a book by mid-year. By then Carco, well stocked with a variety of manuscripts and eager to demonstrate his versatility, knew that publishers were chiefly interested in repetitions of the sort of thing which had caught the public's fancy. 03 Because of this situation Carco was to be unable for some time to vary his manner in the field of the novel, although he did manage to contract for a volume on the contemporary state of poetry and was ready to publish art criticism. With the outbreak of war, these projects had to be postponed. Literary pursuits were relegated to the position of an insignificant, impractical, impossible pastime. And, in obliterating even literary creation, it ended one era and ushered in another.

CHAPTER

V

Moratorium:

WORLD WAR I

that the first World War did not have a profound effect on Carco the writer, but it undoubtedly left a lasting imprint on his affections and caused him grievous loss in his friendships. As far as his literary fortunes are concerned, it appears in retrospect that, on the whole, the war was not much more than a moratorium for his career. Had the war not taken place he would not have written some of the works he did, nor, obviously, have used data of a wartime nature; but surely some of his later works would have appeared earlier, and perhaps he would have substituted novels of a fundamentally similar nature. The war did not reflect itself in a change in Carco's interests or "mentality," as was the case with his friends, Pierre Mac Orlan and Roland Dorgelès and André Salmon. Perhaps it even made his task easier in so far as his desire to portray the end of a way of life, whether artistic or societal, is concerned. Some of the tales of Au coin des rues, the existence already in a fairly developed state of the manuscript of Scènes de la vie de Montmartre, the preface to Veillées du "Lapin Agile" attest to this (not to mention a bulky postwar production). Because of the war we do have some of his short stories depicting experiences of the Montmartre character under military conditions and his novel, Les Innocents. The increased poignancy of the theme of friendship is attributable in part to the death of some of his friends and of his brother, Charles Carcopino-Tusoli. I T WOULD SEEM

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When Carco was mobilized he was sent with his outfit to Gray, a small town in the environs of Besançon. There, in the mud and the cold and the rain, Carco sulked, performed perfunctorily his functions as postman to a bakery unit, drank excessively—and wrote when he could. Apparently he felt from the first that the war was a futile error which would only destroy without constructing. As for himself, his duties seemed to contribute little to military advantage; he felt that he was experiencing once again the pointlessness, the frustration, and the sense of confinement and imposition of the days of his military service. Emotionally, it was a period of trial because he felt his own role to be insignificant, even ridiculous. Intellectually, the war was to him another moment of traditional stupidity, barren of the promise of greater happiness for mankind. Occasional furloughs, when he would return to Paris or visit his parents in the South, made the unfair discrepancies between military routine and the frenetic life of the arrière still more bitter. During such furloughs Carco was able to visit clandestine places of entertainment and narcotic dens where profiteers, slackers, and the privileged wallowed in the lust of forgetfulness and sensation. Upon his return to his sector the only outlets for his physical energies were manual activities or besotting himself. Mental and spiritual ambitions were channeled into the passionate observation of what was happening to the recruits from the cities' tough districts, and into correspondence with friends with whom he could be himself. Most important—from a literary point of view—was the exchange of letters with John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, his wife. 1 Carco had known Murry since 1911 2 and had met Katherine Mansfield when she had come later with Murry to Paris. It was Carco who found them a hotel and who guided them about the city. He was struck by her intense

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interest in learning, her overwhelming desire to penetrate through the surface appearance of phenomena to their profoundest significance, her acuteness, and perhaps especially her elusive, undefinable qualities of temperament. . . . Carco's admiration was first stimulated and then apparently transmuted itself into an ambiguous commingling of friendship and of love. And so, though Carco continued for some time to address both of them in the person of Murry, gradually his letters were meant for her alone. This correspondence continued during the war, and when, toward the end of 1914, her relations with Murry were extremely disturbed, Miss Mansfield turned to Carco for advice and consolation. He urged her to come over to France, hoping that he might be able to see her again, and he offered her the use of his apartment, 13 Quai aux Fleurs, unoccupied since his assignment at Gray. Discouraged, perturbed, and unhappy, Katherine Mansfield decided to cross the Channel, and, away from Murry, to try to put order into her feelings and her mind. After a short stay in Paris, although her passport and credentials did not entitle her to go into the military zones, she determined to visit Carco at Gray. The trip was acutely painful, as the train passed slowly through station after station where the wounded lay on their stretchers, waiting for hospital cars. On board the train the soldiers returning to the front were recuperating from the excesses of their furloughs, while those who were able were prolonging their pleasures up to the last moment. At the station of Gray, Miss Mansfield was able to get through the examination of papers by the kind complicity of a major; Carco, feverishly impatient, bundled her into a carriage and, concealed from view (he was violating military regulations), they were borne to her farm-house hotel. 3 During her short stay—three days—Carco was subject most of the time to his military duties. They could be together only for lunch and in the evening; she had to remain concealed or

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be the cynosure of a startled soldiery. But whatever it was she expected to find in Gray—and in Carco 4 —she did not find it, for she returned to Paris, and a little later to England. Carco was to see her, by then quite consumed by illness, only once again before her death 5 —an encounter which was to put still another strain on the equivocal relationship of Carco and Katherine Mansfield and J. Middleton Murry. This sentimental experience furnished some of the ingredients, psychological, descriptive, and factual, of Les Innocents, published the year after Katherine Mansfield's sojourn in France. Not only did Carco use her, to some extent, as the sitter for his portrait of a perverse, dangerously curious English writer (Winnie) eager to plumb the depths of the ultimate capabilities of a voyou (Milord), but he also took descriptions for his book from Katherine Mansfield's letters to him. This Carco did in no sense with the intent of plagiarism. Rather, he both appreciated the acuity and fineness of her observations and recognized their affinities of temperament and of estimation in matters of significant details. 8 It does not seem amiss to see a distinct correlation between the weakening effect on the novel of a certain vagueness in character delineation and the fact that Katherine Mansfield always remained somewhat mysterious and undefinable to Carco. As in Carco's previous novel, the story concerns the world of the voyou and his companions, this time telling of the difficulties, practical, idealistic, and sentimental, of a young apache in achieving mature stature among his peers. He is frustrated in this ambition under the distorting, arresting, irresistible pressure of wartime conditions which wipe out clear-cut principles by removing from the position of mentors those influential by dint of experience and knowledge of traditions. The symbolic title stresses the thesis that, prevented from evolving according to the traditions of their class and according to their standard of morality, and frustrated in their

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habitual growth by external ruthlessness, these naïve neophytes must succumb in their defenselessness before a world they no longer understand—they are the children of a war generation, of a lost generation. 7 Another, more hidden, meaning of the title might be that so simple a character as Milord is inadequate to cope with the exacerbating, insidious probings of so sophisticated a person as Winnie. Milord's final brute action, when he shoots his mistress (who has just strangled Winnie), is in keeping with his nature, but it is also the admission of his failure to master and direct the course of his life. The plot of Les Innocents is essentially the story of seventeenyear-old Milord. A Parisian voyou whose completion of apprenticeship in criminality has been interrupted by the war, he falls in love, at Besançon, with a young prostitute, Savonnette. Though happy in her love, he forsakes her in order to fulfill his ambition to win a preeminent reputation within his society as well as to seek work in conformity with his standards. At Paris he witnesses the moral disintegration of his peers and their dispersal into despicable conventional employment. He makes the acquaintance of Winnie, an English journalist seeking information on the mentality of the milieu. Milord's resoluteness and faithfulness to his ideal weakens under the debilitating influences of his longing for Savonnette, the humiliating probings of Winnie (whose purpose escapes him, but whose questions force him constantly to admit his conceptual defeats), and the inopportuneness of the times for daring, remunerative exploits. Despairing of realizing his ambition, Milord volunteers for military service. A wound commits him, still gnawed by the feeling of failure, to the military hospital at Besançon. Winnie, whom he hopes to use financially, joins him there. She, ever curious to probe further into the possibilities of his character, urges Milord to return to Savonnette. These two do meet and are ecstatically happy. But Winnie

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insists on meeting Savonnette. At the second rendezvous of the two women, and at the moment that Milord is waiting for them in the next room, Savonnette strangles Winnie. Milord and his love go to their own hotel, where Milord shoots first Savonnette and then himself. Three secondary characters complement the three principal ones. Milord is the disciple of L'Edredon who, always present in spirit but never in person, is for his acolyte the epitome of all the virtues. Before Milord could form himself in his master's image, L'Edredon had been called by the mobilization, and the neophyte had to go on without benefit of guidance. When Milord learns of L'Edredon's death on the battlefield, that news removes his last bit of faith in his own ability. Beatrice, a painter-journalist, is the more finished and ruthless alter ego of Winnie. Beatrice believes that nothing must inhibit the accomplishment of a purpose, that one must persevere regardless of the price. For instance, she had strangled a lover in order to satisfy her curiosity as to whether she was capable of doing so and as to how she would feel. Her ideal is to strip away any human weaknesses so that there may remain only the perfection of unique self-fulfillment. Beatrice acts as Winnie's counselor and, in one scene, as prophetess, when she tells Milord of the difficulties and rewards of absolute devotion to an ideal. Savonnette has a grotesque and alcoholic younger brother, N'a-qu'un-oeil. It is his ambition to become another Milord and to act as the latter's proxy during his absence. He is a sounding board for Savonnette's emotional and mental perturbations, as he is for Milord's guilty conscience. There are few minor characters, each serving a specific purpose. Nenesse represents the voyou who finds it easier to take a petty, ill-paid job than to persevere in the hazards of illegality. La Rosse's only function is to allow N'a-qu'un-oeil

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to acquire some stature in the milieu. In rejecting Bunneman, a Germanophile Swiss who desires her while dreaming of his fiancee, Savonnette can show her patriotism. When Milord informs on Mes Fesses, his erstwhile comrade who robs mailboxes for two " B e l g i a n " employers (understand: German agents), he is motivated by patriotism as well as by disgust with the miserable stratagems to which nonentities such as Mes Fesses have been reduced. Les Innocents is constructed with well-balanced proportions. It is divided into three parts which may stand for thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and each of the three parts has almost the same number of scenes (or chapters) and pages. In Part I the first chapter introduces Milord, Savonnette, and N'a-qu'un-oeil at Besançon. Milord, consumed with ambition to establish himself socially and financially, leaves Savonnette for the capital (Chapter 2 ) . Chapters 3 through 7 relate his difficulties in Paris and his meeting with Winnie. Contrapuntally, Chapters 8 through 11 concern Savonnette and her failure to resist returning to prostitution. 8 The closing scene of this first section terminates on her rejection of Bunneman's lucrative proposition. Part II, except for one pivotal scene (Chapter 1 7 ) , which shows Savonnette's moral state and N'a-qu'un-œil's aggrandizement as a voyou, concerns Winnie and Milord. Abetted by Beatrice, Winnie probes Milord's mentality in order to discover the characteristics of the apache-. Chapter 16 enunciates metaphorically, with Beatrice a s the porte-parole, Milord's spiritual problem—as well as his insufficiency: . . . Il faut, jamais, n'avoir peur . . . être fort, c'est détester tout, jusqu'au bout . . . l'argent n'est point la force, c'est le sang qui est en vous empoisonné et le cœur. Il convient d'arracher tous les sentiments. . . . [Les garçons] n'arrivent pas tous au but parce qu'ils ont commencé trop jeunes. Alors il vient une heure qui est comme un

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MORATORIUM

immense désert entre le passé et demain. Il y a beaucoup, qui sont perdus dans le désert. Ils sont très malheureux, ils souffrent une abominable peine. . . . Il convient toujours d'aller sans arrêter, dans le chaud soleil du sang . . . 9

From Savonnette's dream (in Chapter 1 7 ) to the end of Part II, we follow Milord's discouragement up to his resolution to join the army. Parallel with Savonnette's action in Chapter 1 1 , Chapter 2 3 sees Milord behave with social respectability as he informs on spies in the service of the national enemy (who, according to the standards of the milieu, is not his f o e ) . Part III takes place at Besançon. It unfolds like a play in five acts. Milord, convalescing from war wounds, is alone and without hope; Winnie joins him and urges him to yield to his love f o r Savonnette; he finds temporary euphoria with her; Winnie intervenes, driven by perverse curiosity, to unbalance this precarious harmony; Savonnette retaliates by strangling Winnie to death, and Milord destroys both Savonnette and himself in an agony of despairing self-reproach. 1 0 A s in Jésus-la-Caille, there is a chronological and topographical guide to the characters' movements, but the series of descriptions (bars in Besançon and in Paris, black-market operations, street scenes, military combat) is here less obtrusive than in the previous novel. Weather is significant; it is, however, used more deliberately as a symbol rather than in separate blocks—in J ésus-la-Caille, Carco at times described f o r the sheer sake of evocation—serving perhaps an anagogic rather than analogic purpose: Le soir venait. Derrière de fines rangées de peupliers, une étoile brillait dans le ciel calme. Cette étoile, le Milord la regardait et il s'étonnait de son immobile éclat. Il songeait vaguement, les yeux fixés sur elle, au destin qu'il avait choisi et de baroques histoires de crimes, des bribes de romances éveillaient dans son cœur une sorte de candeur d'apache. 'Qui qu'n'a pas son étoile et son p'tit vent du n o r d ? ' raillait-il.

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93

Cependant il croyait à la sienne et il était frappé de sa froide et nette lumière. . . -11

And when the thought suddenly comes to him that L'Edredon may have had some ill fortune : L'étoile cependant avait disparu du ciel où, par une soudaine coquetterie, le Milord la cherchait. 12 Mais ils ressentaient, l'un et l'autre, une sensation de plénitude si nouvelle et si surprenante que le silence, qui accompagne le soir, avait pour eux mille voix, mille frissons, mille extases et cette musicale ferveur dont deux êtres, qui s'aiment, sentent partout vibrer l'accord profond. 1 3

Although Carco's characters speak slang (Winnie, Beatrice, and Reggie, an English petty thief, speak Anglicized French) for realistic effect, the tone occasionally reminds one somewhat of Charles-Henry Hirsch's Le Tigre et Coquelicot. Hirsch aspired to treat the pègre in the manner of Buffon; 14 outside his subject, he commented on his protagonists with persiflage or summary observations. Sometimes we surprise Carco being flippant at the expense of his characters—self-mockery, or mockery of them? Qui pénétrera jamais les secrets d'un garçon revenu—quoique jeune— des préjugés bourgeois? 1 8 Le Milord, on le sait, détestait la nature, et ce n'est certes pas. . . . 1B Il est des natures d'une ingénue perversité. 17

Yet these are, on the whole, slight slips—Carco retains his objectivity and creates sympathy, as well as interest, for his lost youths. Judged by itself, this curious story has an ambiguity which makes it somewhat unsatisfactory as a work of art. Might this not be attributable to the possibility that it is a rapid, hastily written fiction cloaking the indirect confession of actual relationships? Regardless of how exact or authentic the bases for its contents, 18 they have not been incorporated into the

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fiction with full effectiveness. Although it is one of Carco's favorite efforts, there is a certain lack of integration. On the one hand, Les Innocents is an on-the-spot 1 9 report of a contemporary phenomenon, the relating of social history as it occurs. Here are precise and evocative descriptions of Besançon and Paris and scenes of soldierdom. The climax is as intense and even more dramatic than that in Jésus-la-Caille; and Milord is another character of the same world, explored from a different angle. But there is a fluidity and mystery about Winnie which seems to weaken both the characterization and the structure of the novel. Perhaps this is because Winnie is seen through Milord's eyes, and there is much about her which he cannot comprehend. Milord is more distinct and true to character (Carco had used himself as the model for the object of Winnie's experiments in psychological analysis and influence). A further complication is that Winnie is often accompanied by, and stronely attached to, a woman whose role is not adequately clear. 20 Carco had sketched John Middleton Murry as he had first known him. 21 He had employed his understanding of Katherine Mansfield soon after what must have been his most profound reaction to her. In turn, she felt her grasp of Carco's character to be sufficient for a complex portrayal of his personality. In 1918 (therefore posterior to Les Innocents and any influence it may have exerted on her judgments) she published her recently written Je ne parle pas français.22 This is the story of her first meeting with Carco, in 1913, when her first words to him were those of the title. It is an apparently faithful account of his efforts to make her and Murry comfortable, to be of service to them. It reveals his ambiguous position in her affections as well as the complex regard he had for her. But details of this sort are secondary in an interpretation of the personality, temperament, and mentality of Carco. The main interest lies in the fact that this

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autobiographical musing (the entire story is the rumination in the first person by Raoul Duquette—that is, Carco—while seated in a bar) conveys the overwhelming literary ambitions, keen unscrupulousness, and readiness to profit by any serviceable means, of a selfish careerist. His assets include physical charm, psychological astuteness, dexterity in Machiavellian compromise, and an aura of calculated vice. But there is also his sincere belief in his true ability, in his genuine though sublimated delicacy, and in his not completely stifled yearnings for the life of "the true in heart and in deed." It was Les innocents, and especially the depiction of Milord, which first gained for Carco the lasting literary and personal esteem of Paul Bourget. Champion of Baudelaire and Stendhal, proponent of modernity—in these respects Bourget was a dynamic leader for the younger generation. But as the professor of concepts such as monarchy, religion, and conservatism, as the animator in his novels of a cast of aristocrats, as a dogmatist he lost the attention of a wearied reading élite. Carco, too, at the beginning of his career, was uninterested in Bourget, indifferent to the lessons of the explicator of "planches d'anatomie morale." 2 3 Yet as a member of the Académie Française, Bourget had the prestige and the importance of which the deferential editors of established magazines were mindful. Later his spontaneous, unsolicited interest 24 in the author of Les Innocents would clear for Carco the way to the attention of the remunerative periodicals; he would even persuade his confrères of the Académie Française to award the Grand Prix du Roman to L'Homme traqué. Carco never ceased to be grateful for Bourget's altruistic aid, and he later came to appreciate his artistic accomplishments as well as his integrity. In 1916, however, Carco was more immediately concerned with his own personal, moral, and military predicaments. After completing the final draft of Les Innocents, he had a

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period of depression in which he felt himself to be completely useless militarily. It may also be surmised that a repercussion of this sentiment would take the form of cynicism bordering on insolence which would not ingratiate him with his fellow soldiers or his superiors. Carco could avoid this situation by assignment to another service. He asked for a transfer to the newly formed air branch of the army. In March, 1916, he became a student pilot at the Maurice Farman school at Avord. From there he was sent for more advanced training to Etampes. 2 5 While at Etampes, he received the horrible news that his brother, Charles, had been killed in action. Charles Carcopino had always been an exemplary student and had from the first shown an amazing precocity in mathematics. He had graduated at the head of his class both at the Ecole Polytechnique and at the Ecole Normale; a brilliant future seemed to be promised him. Whereas Francis had been a disciplinary problem through his scholastic career, Charles had always been a model of good behavior. To this day his memory is cherished in the schools where he studied. 20 The loss of this favorite son was a very severe blow to the family and to his brother. Carco's hurt was instinctive. Regardless of the difference in their lives, regardless of the fact that they thought and acted worlds apart, Carco would never lose his spontaneous affection for this brother. Another grievous loss was that of Jean-Marc Bernard, blown to bits by an enemy shell. Jean-Marc had been as close to Carco, and in some respects closer, than the latter's brother. He had shared some of the interests and certainly many of the most intimate incidents in Carco's youth. Many of their joys, their hurts, and their hopes had been experienced together. On the social plane they had both revolved within the orbit of the same magnetic attraction—Carco, by his fascination with commercial vice, Bernard by his tormented love for a brothel mistress. Irresistible passion, elegiacal, pastoral love

L E F T : ETCHING BY ANDRÉ DIGNIMONT FOR

Les Innocents

(EMILE HAZAN,

1930) ;

RIGHT: CARCO WHEN A STUDENT PILOT AT THE AVIATION SCHOOL AT PAU, IN 1 9 1 7

CARCO W I T H

THE

MANUSCRIPT

OF

Airs,

AT T H E

Petits

INFIR-

MARY OF LES C LA YES, IN

1917

"HOMAGE

TO T O U L E T , "

P A I N T I N G BY T R I S T A N K L I N G S O R

O F H E N R I M A R T I N EAU ; P H O T O G R A P H From

left

to

right:

LAVAUD, TRISTAN

TRISTAN

KLINCSOR,

DERÈME, EMILE

BY M A R C PIERRE

DOYER, CARCO, HENRI MARTINEAU, PHILIPPE

WARNOD

EUGÈNE

DUSSANE,

MARSAN,

JEAN-LOUIS

CHABANEIX

MARCHAND

SUZANNE VALADON "SOME

LIÈVRE,

HENRIOT, MADAME

(COLLECTION

VAUX)

OF

Bohemia

THE

(NEW

LAST

BOHEMIANS,"

YORK: H E N R Y H O L T ,

CARCO

BRAQUE

PHOTOGRAPH

1928)

DERAIN

FROM

The Last

GUY VAU-

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of nature, flippant fantasy—these tunes piped by Bernard were variations of airs sung with more insouciance or sophistication by Carco. Though they differed on the point of political interests (Jean-Marc had been a fervent traditionalist who had believed that a return to "things French" was the only salvation for France, whereas Carco did not concern himself with politics), they were both imbued with aggressive admiration for the national literary heritage and with a certain cynicism towards the contemporary scene. In this respect, Bernard was more militant, dogmatic, conventional than his apolitical intimate friend. The war took, too, the life of André du Fresnois, 27 critic and stimulator, and Alain-Fournier, 28 poet of childhood's purest dreams. And to these could be added the long line of artists, friends, compatriots in life's struggles, who would remain for Carco like figures in a dance of death. When, after the end of hostilities, Carco prefaced the Veillées du "Lapin Agile" and contributed to Histoires montmartroises, he remarked sadly that some of his comrades-in-arms had left the ranks of the revelers prematurely. But there were still the living; however lonely, they had to start anew where they had left off in August, 1914. For Carco this meant solidifying the reputation he had acquired with Jésus-la-Caille and with his articles on Montmartre. In 1918 he published a sequel, Les Malheurs de Fernande, in order to round out the earlier presentation. 29 During the completion of his flight training and while convalescing from a knee injury, he had leisure for this retouching as well as for working out a wartime novel, 30 which he was not to list later among his works (he believed it to have no particular literary merit). In 1918 he also published, in collaboration with Pierre Mac Orlan, Les Mystères de la morgue, roman gai, a frothy novel full of witticisms, more or less veiled topical allusions, and puns.

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At this time he entered into an agreement with Pierre Mac Orlan and André Salmon. The three proposed to treat the same theme as a pendant to Jeanne Landres's Bob et Bobette, enfants perdus. Each would take a different period in their characters' experiences and interpret it as he imagined it would have been. Carco was to see them on the eve of the war; Mac Orlan during the war; and Salmon towards the end of the war. 31 Mac Orlan, himself a decorated veteran of frontline combat experience whose brother had served in an African battalion, situated his hero in that tough outfit. Salmon, who had been in the capital during the long wait for peace, showed his hero adapting instinctively, successfully, to the new values and chances for profiteering of the arrière. Carco put him into a situation similar to that in Les Innocents. It is once again the story, against a Montmartre and Montparnasse background, of the youthful, impotent efforts of a neophyte to establish a position in the hierarchy of his society. But, himself a weakling and without the benefit of benevolent guidance, Bob will fail in his ambition and degrade Bobette's dream of a music hall career to one of streetwalker. This novel is constructed much like Jésus-la-Caille in that there is a series of background scenes alternating with the progress of the plot's events. The touch is light, with emphasis on the descriptive; the psychology of the characters is indicated indirectly. As in its model, Bob et Bobette s'amusent has a similar complement of actors: a stool pigeon, an experienced counselor, a more astute friend, and a nemesis represented by the police. Thus far Carco had chosen adolescents as the prototypes of his novels. They had been aided by or opposed to older men who imposed their way by superior force and by obedience to class traditions. With L'Equipe, which also takes place before the war, Carco essayed the portrayal of a hero who had achieved the stature of gang leader.

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In L'Equipe we have the story of Marcel Bouve. Sold out to the police by Bobèche, who becomes the gang leader, Bouve seeks his revenge. In a knife fight along the river he stabs Bobèche to death. This retribution of treachery satisfies Bouve's sense of honor. But suddenly his serenity is troubled by the disquieting presence of Bobèche's mother, who wishes to know where the body of her son may be found. The old lady does not protest against the justice meted out to her child, she only wants to know the location of his body. Her imploring shadow, weak, timid, reproachful, fills "Le Capitaine" 32 (Bouve) with uneasiness. Her presence upsets carefully laid plans for burglary; it destroys his energy. By confessing to her, Bouve regains his confidence and is once again fit to

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act with all the decision and authority of a true leader. Bouve's companion is Marie Bonheur. It is noteworthy that Marie is not a prostitute and that Bouve would be humiliated to be supported by her, and just as in Jésus-la-Caille the coarse Monsieur Dominique cannot stand homosexuals, so Bouve cannot bear pimps. He is the lion of the underworld jungle. He has respect only for the ferocious, the powerful, those who prey on society with murder and with burglary. He has little respect for the jackals, the souteneurs who rely on the earnings of the female. This work, though it, too, should be classified among Carco's novels of atmosphere, already indicates a greater emphasis on the mentality of an individual against the influence and the symbolism of a background. In this novel we have a developed treatment of the effect of anxiety, of almost hallucinatory proportions, on the thought processes and the sentiments of an individual. The discomfort, the superstitions, the tenuous fear which the presence of Bobèche's mother arouses in him—this complex becomes itself one of the protagonists. It sneaks through his mind and through the pages of the book like a presence which cannot be defined, but which looms vaguely within the range of the mental vision. This product of the mind will become the adversary and the conqueror of Lampieur in L'Homme traqué. It is this projection of the hidden depths of the human conscience (but not at all in the sense of remorse) 3 3 that will be the unnamed personage of Carco's later novels. Like Les Innocents, L'Equipe is mainly composed of short chapters and is divided into three parts. It differs from the earlier work in that many chapters, aside from descriptive matter, present only one scene of action or of mood. In Les Innocents, chapters were built up on the principle of complementing contrasts or developments, one highlighting the other. Part II of L'Equipe is one relatively long chapter devoted to Bouve's surprising of Bobèche and the knife fight

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between the two. With little introductory information it could stand by itself as a short story. In its context, Part II is the acme of Le Capitaine's new virility—a point from which he can only go downward. Both Milord and Bouve are, so to speak, travesties of the Horatio Alger success formula. Milord is the lad who did not make good, while the successful Bouve learns that the reward of virtue is human inability to retain one's riches. Milord wanted to become a Bouve. Bouve learned that he could not come up to the ideal, traditional and personal, by which he lived. Both are profoundly conservative in their aspiration to emulate heroes of the past. Both are shocked by the immorality of the present, and both are defeated by forces beyond individual control. Milord, in desperation, sacrifices his life to his ideal. Bouve morally abdicates his place in the milieu s roster of captains. The two novels are similar in situating precisely the time span and the locales. But in L'Equipe the topographical descriptions are more extensive and elaborate. Weather continues to play an important participating role. The characters of L'Equipe respond to or reject the perspective of a scene, fragrances in the air, lights and shadows. But whereas in Les Innocents the weather and the thoughts or feelings interacted sometimes in the same sentence, in L'Equipe, though psychologically dependent, they are syntactically separate. The same distinction applies to the presentation of the ideals of the milieu. In Les Innocents we must infer obliquely. In L'Equipe Bouve declares formally, didactically, what his principles are. Once again Carco uses a dream scene for multiple purposes. Savonnette dreams of Milord and his accomplishments. With ironical contrast the following scene takes up the dream to show how far short Milord is of realizing Savonnette's wishful sublimations. Bouve dreams of an encounter with Bobeche's mother, and through his dream learns fear and terror of moral

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weakness. When the encounter actually does take place he carries out the oneiric premonition, except that he does not murder the mother. This sort of parallelism between the promptings of the subconcious and the actions of conventional reality would, twenty years later, be repeated more elaborately by Carco. Yet, these works are essentially romans de mœurs, intended to present the little-known customs and ways of a particular class. General characteristics, buttressed by precise details that evoke the picturesqueness of the locale, take precedence over individual motivation. A similar intent ordained the structure of Scènes de la vie de Montmartre. In a modernization of its archetype, Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème, Carco wished to represent twentieth-century Montmartre life (of the period before the first World War)—economic difficulties, discussions of art, casual love affairs, the tenor of careless days and dreams of future glory. Picasso, Max Jacob, Roland Dorgelès, Pierre Mac Orlan, le père Frédé are the prototypes for composite representative figures who frame and set the tone for the sweet love affair of Irène and Coquelet, who is the sentimentalized portrait of Carco himself. Coquelet loses Irène to the pander, Boule-de-Gomme, and he himself descends from the "Butte Sacrée" into the arena of paying journalism. Written with hindsight and under literary influence (especially Philippe's Bubu de Montparnasse), Scènes de la vie de Montmartre is a recognition of reality rather than a prophecy. It is the wake for the end of an attitude toward, and a way of, life.

CHAPTER VI Resumption:

PARIS AND ABROAD

W H E N CARCO was discharged from the army, he was in the difficult position of having to mend his economic and literary fences. On December 30, 1919, he married Germaine Augustine Jarrel in a civil ceremony performed at the mayoralty of Paris's first arrondissement. He was impatient for success and for living on a comfortable scale, his appetites sharpened by four years of constraint added to that bleak period of apprenticeship, of unfruitful efforts, of experience in the rough and tumble game of establishing himself. He had now to hasten to make up for his long patience. His greatest asset was the reputation he had acquired as guide to Montmartre's bohemian life, its society, and its art. Carco had earned a fair amount of money from the sale of novels and short stories and perhaps from advances against future publications—enough to take a château at Cormeillesen-Vexin. (Later, in 1923, he purchased the Château Vert, on the edge of the Oise river.) There he met Pierre Sylvestre, playwright and financial journalist. When Sylvestre, with Maurice Magre, founded La Rose Rouge, Carco published L'Equipe in it and became art critic of the magazine, alternating in this capacity with Blaise Cendrars. Carco was prepared for journalistic art criticism by his prewar experience, the articles published in Switzerland during hostilities, his frequenting of artists, and especially his deep love of the

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painter's gift of expression. Indeed, he himself, had he had the choice, would have preferred the palette and the burin to the pen. Cendrars's articles were devoted to the examination of the fundamental principles, possibilities, dangers, and limitations of cubism. 1 Carco shared his views but with less generosity for an art form which Carco considered un-French, that is to say, foreign to the French genius as well as historically an importation by way of naturalized French artists. 2 And, also, Carco had scant sympathy for the works themselves created by this new school, except where they seemed to him effective in spite of theory. The word cubism had been used for the first time in 1908, when an unidentified member of the jury of the exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants used it to characterize a painting by Georges Braque. 3 Picked up by Guillaume Apollinaire, and perhaps Henri Matisse, it became the descriptive term for a movement which may well have started in 1903. It was then that Apollinaire met Picasso at the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre. One was to be accredited executant, the other theoretician of the new art, though neither was to be confined by it. They had had the opportunity to see examples of native negro art, masks and totems from the South Pacific, carvings and paintings from Africa. 4 Vlaminck was one of the first to collect such examples of native art; Mac Orlan's brother, a soldier stationed in Africa, had brought to the Lapin Agile the portrait of a white man, the buttons of whose uniform were arranged in a halo around his head rather than down the front of his tunic. From this they derived the theory of displacement for connotative effect. And the paintings of the douanier Rousseau, launched—perhaps as a hoax—by Apollinaire, stressed the artistic value of a "primitive" approach to a subject. To these examples, stimulating a new generation of artists

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determined to find independent values for itself, should be added the reaction (that is, postimpressionism, as a general term) to the art of the impressionists. The inheritors of this group had pursued their investigation of the personal emotional reaction to a phenomenon of nature and the effect of light refraction on that phenomenon, to the extent where their canvases, like the poems of the neosymbolists, dissipated their effect through exaggerated emphasis on technique. In the first decade of the century the Fauves attempted to establish independent aesthetic values. They attempted to eliminate the influences of culture and of traditional techniques. Vlaminck and Derain (the school of Chatou) were pursuing the investigation of the use of masses of color right from the tube; Matisse was experimenting with the effect of the arabesque. While some did their work in the open air with their subject actually in view, and others struggled to recreate in their ateliers, they and the nonpainting sympathizers would hold innumerable, endless conversations about theory in studios, restaurants, cafés, and during long promenades. Undoubtedly discussion, groping, and theorizing of this sort is common to any period whenever its artists and writers, not yet established, congregate. The cénacles of the nineteenth century had seen similar interchange of ideas among their poets and painters, creators and critics. The final word will always rest with posterity on the basis of the thing created. But, loo, searching, uncertain human nature will always seek the proof and support of sympathy. Careo was already aware of the plight of the artist and the new movements in art before his arrival at Paris. By the time he finally reached the capital, the tenets of some of the new doctrines had been advanced, been subscribed to by fervent adherents, and proven effective against the established order. But on the whole it was a period of flux. Many of the whirlpools of argument swept around the Lapin Agile, which, beacon-like, invited the explorers to its hospi-

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table harbor.8 There, and at the Bateau Lavoir, and across the river in the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse, Carco attended many such debates. Indeed, they furnished much of the material for Scènes de la vie de Montmartre. Carco himself was unable to paint, but many of his writer friends also handled the brush, and some, like Pierre Mac Orlan and Max Jacob, for example, had not yet fixed on any one medium. Carco was intimate with the artists. He knew the details of their private lives, their idiosyncracies, their purposes. He had the opportunity to see their inspiration and the accomplishment of creation. Not only could he be abetted in the understanding of their work by his own situation in the same physical, intellectual, and spiritual atmosphere as they, but he was also acquainted with the critics-to-be of the new art while they were still molding and formulating the expression of the appreciations which would persuade the public of the morrow. Like these heralds of the most modern forms of expression, Carco was endowed with interest, sensitivity, love of art. Like them, too, he was in revolt against the sacrosanctness of conventionalisms which, either because they were not personal discoveries or because they were obsolescent according to the values of his own world, were deemed equivalent to aesthetic falsehoods. But unlike the enthusiasts who saw in cubism the epitome of the art of painting (and of other media), Carco could not sympathize with this form of modernism.6 The keynote of all his work is feeling, that is, the intimate identification of himself with the object of his consideration. Allied with this and of considerable, though (in my opinion) not of equal importance, in his feeling for form and restraint and tradition. In 1909 he had ridiculed futurism 7—though he had contributed to Marinetti's periodical, Poesia,8 and was a good friend of Gino Severini—because futurism broke with tradition, pursued the excessive, and worshipped mechanization.

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Technique, or theory, as far as he was concerned, could not be substituted for the most important criterion of all— to what extent and by what means does the artist manage to convey his personality to the spectator and interest him in it? What is particular to the creator, what affinity does the artist establish, what new awareness of himself does the beholder gain by its recognition? Carco seeks to know, through the experience of the artist, what the artist is, what he himself is. He is against intellectuality in art. In the instance in point, he is anticubist. But Carco did share, even though for nondogmatic reasons, 9 the appreciation of Braque's form of cubism and of Picasso's "classical" and "blue" periods. Braque and Picasso were interested in the pictorial potentialities of musical instruments, pipes, the life and color, the unreal prosaicness of circus folk. 10 Carco treated these same themes, and used them as symbols, in La Bohème et mon cœur, in Instincts, Chansons aigresdouces, Panam, etc. He, too, has a gallery of guitarists, harlequins, pierrots. 11 And, in "Réflexions sur le cirque," he even went so far as to say that he would willingly exchange a Toulouse-Lautrec for a Picasso on clowns, for the latter had captured within his frame the movement and the depth, the high laughter and hidden tragedy, the surface appearance and secret significance of this contemporary variation of an eternal comment on human nature. 12 Carco's preferences went instinctively to a number of artists in whose works he found the qualities which moved him most, which same qualities have given a particular color to his own creations. Literary description of their productions could serve to characterize the subjects and their interpretations by Carco. The two artists most significant for the author of La Légende et la vie d'Utrillo were the subject of that book and Amadeo Modigliani. Carco was one of the first to appreciate Maurice

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Utrillo; he admired his power of evocation, the impression of poignant experience which emanated from a representation of the scenes of gripping memories. It was the haunting understanding of the frightful power of the bar and the street on a submissive constitution, as well as the wholehearted, childlike response to churches, depicted in light-saturated paintings —the proclamation of Utrillo's despairs and rejoicings— which intrigued and seduced the spectators. There was nothing risible in Utrillo's naive use of calipers to determine the arrangement of the scene or in his application of plaster to the canvas as a concretization of his ideas (for a purpose quite different from that of the collage).13 And if his drawing was somewhat weak, this fact did not prevent him from being superior to that technical deficiency. The amazing thing about Utrillo's genius was that it had achieved expression almost in spite of himself. His mother, Suzanne Valadon, herself an artist, had urged him to paint as a diversion from his alcoholism. Utrillo painted because he was forced to or because it was the only way he could get money to palliate temporarily his insatiable thirst. Locked in a room, he would use postcards as models, even long after both topography and fashions had changed; but what transpired was his interior vision. And it was to this that Carco responded as well as to the bizarre legend of still another artist cursed by a vice which raises him above the ordinary into the ranks of the blessed. Modigliani's life and work had a similar attraction for Carco. Modigliani had been Utrillo's companion in violent drunkenness. Like Utrillo, Modigliani had had a protecting, self-sacrificing friend. Zborowski, an art dealer who believed fanatically in Modigliani's genius, had to contend not only with public and commercial indifference but also with the painter's debauchery. Yet Modigliani, myopic, educated genius, conscious of his aesdietic intents and successes, who according to Carco had

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affixed the most intense expression ever recorded on a woman's face, 14 could not barter his portraits for the price of his art materials and a few meals. If he dissipated his heart and his life in dissoluteness, it was not because of perverseness or fatal attraction 15 but rather as the only escape from economic misery. There was, in Modigliani, an artistic fervor which could not be stopped by anything except death. Careo had always been fascinated by the variety of vice which Paris offered the connoisseur and the amateur. He explored the ins and outs of the city; he frequented all the little bars and brothels and secret dens which curiosity and chance— and initiates—presented to his scrutiny. From the traditional bordello to the infamous shacks where deformed or perverted or diseased prostitutes sold their services; from the opium dens to the homosexual dance halls of the Rue de la Gaité; from the pick-up spots along the Grands Boulevards to the risky slums bordering the Seine and the former ramparts of the city, he familiarized himself with the people, the mentality, and the activities of the underworld, the criminal world, the vice of the capital. His promenades assuaged his curiosity, aroused his disgust—and attracted him irresistibly to more and greater spectacles of human degradation. As he sank deeper into this morass of perversion and evil, he found within himself greater delights and greater affinities with this corruption that exists partly because of the ills of society, partly because of the ills of human nature: whatever depravity he beheld or heard about increased his obsession with vice. To be sure, one must not confuse the contents and the subjects of his works, his descriptions of aberrations, with his own social activities (some of which, though not usual, he has spiritedly admitted); yet there is no doubt that his confession of being attracted to and enjoying depravation, is genuine. As an artist, he has been able to live, exhaust, even create such sensations vicariously. (Had he been inarticulate, would he

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h a v e been c o m p e l l e d by the tendencies of u n u s u a l l y extensive sensitivity and penchants to enroll in the legions of the d a m n e d ? A n u n a n s w e r a b l e question.) B e c a u s e of such inclinations, C a r c o would e x a m i n e both poetico-realistically a n d a l s o theoretically the gestures and the l o c a l e s , the concepts and the potential influences, of the p l a c e s which serve a s d i s p l a y r o o m s of h u m a n w e a k n e s s e s . F r o m the time of h i s début with Instincts, C a r c o h a d lovi n e l v described a g a i n and a g a i n . in p o e t r y a n d p r o s e p o e m , in short storv and novel, in anecdote and m e m o i r , the movements and the decors of the creatures a n d a r e n a s of c o m m e r c i a l p l e a s u r e . La Bohème et mon cœur, Au coin des rues, Panam, Avec les filles, Nuits de Paris, were so m a n y hymns to the godd e s s of luxure. H i g h priest of sensation's orgiastic rites, C a r c o chanted the g r a c e s , the fascinations, the multiple a m b i g u o u s blandishments of protean p a s s i o n . Y e t , h i m s e l f enthralled, he retained the lucidity of critical intelligence—the p r e y , but not the d u p e , of his instinctive inclinations. H e did not e n g a g e his conservative sense of und e b a s e d v a l u e s — a sense which, a n a l y z i n g the dazzling glitter, e x p o s e d the u n d e r l y i n g falsity, c o m m e r c i a l deceit, businessl i k e h y p o c r i s y in the exploitation of h u m a n sentimentality, curiosity, search f o r narcosis. B u t it is not e a s y to perceive the reality concealed behind the m a s k of ostensible fact. P e r s p i c a c i t y is h a m p e r e d b v the blinders of foreignness and of p r e j u d i c e . V i s u a l a i d s could be f o u n d , however, in the illustrations of other seekers, in the illuminating discoveries of predecessors, in the revealing conf e s s i o n s of sniritual siblings. C a r c o h a d a l w a y s a p p r e c i a t e d the aesthetic and c o m m e r c i a l possibilities of the illustrated edition. A s e a r l v a s 1 9 1 3 . he h a d borrowed d r a w i n g s by art c o l l a b o r a t o r s of Rvthm to illustrate Chansons aigres-douces,16 M a n y of his subsequent works a p p e a r e d in de-luxe illustrated editions with the a c t u a l partici-

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pation of Carco in the determination of technical problems. For the first edition of L'Ami des filles ou . . . Chas-Laborde commenté par Francis Carco, he underwrote the costs himself; for an edition of L'Amour vénal, both Carco and the illustrator, Vertès, shared the risks of the enterprise. Dignimont undertook a glossary in etchings of his friend's complete works, which project was halted by the Depression. Each one of these artists, and others (Asselin, Moreau, Daragnès, Barraud, Oberlé), would lend his talents to the elucidation and interpretation of several of the logomachie canvases depicting the very subjects of their own attention. Indeed, the catalogue 17 of the auction, in 1925, of part of Carco's art collection is a roster of names and an affidavit testifying to his tastes and his sympathies. Like himself, they had been attracted to the rites and the myths of the brothel, the night club, and the street, whether brutally frank or sophisticatedly camouflaged. In the pursuit of their quarry, some would be lost in the pitfalls awaiting hunter and hunted alike. Artists such as Laborde and Pascin would never escape from this pursuit. Laborde, secretly desirous of working in other media, was bound by his comprehension of the social and human market places (Carco rates him as highly, if not above, George Grosz), to remain known as their publicist. Pascin, who died before their similarity of interests could expedite his collaboration 18 with Carco, had made the brothel the hub of his life—its revelations of human nature the matter of his studies, its world the cosmos of his art. And yet the passionate love of this kind of life, in itself inexhaustible, would drain him of all desire except that of suicide. 19 Not so sacrificial were the investigations of Asselin, Vertès, and Dignimont. They had documented themselves by personal investigation of the gestures and mentality of the milieu. Asselin, with cool objectivity; Vertès, with emphasis on the senti-

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mentality and optimism which blooms ever fresh, no matter how often sullied; Dignimont, in spite of his bourgeois repugnances, with a salute to the feline graces and good manners of these " l a d i e s and gentlemen." In these illustrators, Carco had found responsive and stimulating commentators on the bohemian aspect of his life. D e r a i n and Vlaminck were the exponents in oils of the scenes and the moods which Carco had cultivated in his earliest poems. Never stifled, this lyrical rapture with a cleaner, purer pastoral Nature than could be found in the confines of a neon-lighted P a r i s , was akin to the f e r v o r and force of their appetite f o r l i f e . T h e y felt direct communication with the pagan, vital energies of tree and earth and natural arrangement. 2 0 Carco had been attracted in the works of a Utrillo or a Modigliani to the air of misery and of brutality, to the pervading mood of morbidity; he satisfied his equally powerful, though more subterranean, love of joy in living in the contemplation of the Fauvists' lusty, wholesome appetite f o r nonartificial pleasure. Both temperaments mingled in him, both found affinities in these graphic confessions. Carco does not experience the painting as painting, but rather as poetry. The first World W a r had melted away much of the veneer of traditional, unquestioned values to lay bare the underlying, shoddy stuff. The Dadaist response to human stupidity and complacency had been to declare that everything must be destroyed and afterwards there might possibly be reconstruction. (But the Dadaists were completely occupied with leveling and iconoclasm; the building would perhaps be done by the inheritors of chaos.) A f t e r f o u r years of shock the public wanted an access to escape f r o m the depressing realities in which it was mired. Such escape could be offered by fantasy, b y change with its allure of the new (and therefore not yet proven fundamentally f a l s e ) , and by the cultivation of one's individual capacity to feel.

L E F T : HELIOGRAVURE BY JEAN OBERLÉ FOR Panarne RICHT:

LITHOGRAPH

BY

LUC-ALBERT

MOREAU

(EDIT. DE LA NOUVELLE REVUE FRANÇAISE,

FOR

(HENRI JONQUIÈRES, 1 9 2 7 ) ; Tableau

de

F amour

vénal

1924)

L E F T : COLOR LITHOGRAPH BY MARCEL VERTES FOR Rue Pigalle

(BERNARD CRASSET,

1 9 2 7 ) ; RIGHT: BLACK AND WHITE ENGRAVING BY ANDRÉ DIGNIMONT FOR Nuits Paris

(AU SANS PAREIL, 1 9 2 7 )

de

LEFT: MOVIE-STILL(?)

OF CARCO WITH TWO gigolettes

'TWENTIES (FROM Oui

Police-Détective,

WITH A SPANISH DANCER . . .

IN THE ATTIRE OF T H E

J U N E 1 3 , 1 9 4 9 ) ; RIGHT: CARCO POSED

AT BARBIZON

CARCO POSED W I T H

PERE

FREDE AT THE LAPIN AGILE (PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHEL BRODSKY)

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The surrealists would propose the cultivation of the subconscious and the exploitation of sensation. Whatever might be the niceties of distinction between antipathetical groups and the metaphysical bases of their dogmas, they subscribed to principles which had already been proposed by André Gide, Delphic barometer of the contemporary spiritual climate— fervor, disponibilité, sincerity toward oneself. One current of this sweeping mood was a spirit of internationalism redolent with the hope of a frontierless communion among different nations. The propagation of this ideal would be an undertaking exacting and permitting the exercise of idealism, the spirit of adventure, the devoting of body and heart. Pierre Mac Orlan called it le fantastique social, the modern equivalent of the exploits of freebooters, pirates, gentlemen of fortune. 21 Paul Morand would depict this cosmopolitan spirit through the eyes of his globe-trotting, vivacious sensation hunters; Cendrars and Cocteau, in vivid excursions into exotic America. But in France itself there were examples of this new internationalism and of the cult of sensation. Even before the war had ended, the geography of Europe, as depicted by maps, was being changed. Paris became host to Balkan refugees, White Russians, people without a country. Those without money became waiters, taxicab drivers, dope peddlers, or vagrants with no place to wander. Those who had managed to carry away valuables had at least the means to purchase surcease and temporary oblivion from the poignancy of their acedia : being expatriates without a home. Servant and master, they joined the throng of refugees from reality who sought escape in physical pleasure, in dreams or stultification through stimulants, in the wresting from each moment of a substitute for happiness. But they yearned for the stability of citizenship —that is, the sense of belonging and of being secure in a world with a future.

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These frenetic seekers of feverish, evanescent pleasure furnished Carco with the subject matter of Verotchka Vetrangere. This unsuccessful attempt to enlarge the horizon of his observation was his response to the intellectual challenge of the modern social problem and, perhaps, was also a refutation of the typing concomitant with the fame of his series on the milieu. No doubt he was strongly influenced, too, as the subtitle, Le Gout du malheur, so plainly indicates, by his conception of the masochistic Russian soul. 22 Confraternity, nobility by blood, multifaceted love, drugs, social idealism, love of one's soil, the yearning to establish roots, these are threads which he inexpertly wove into a pattern in order to portray an undercurrent of contemporary history. Carco had seen in night clubs and narcotic dens, in drawing rooms and sophisticated society, Russians cast out by the Revolution. His readings of Russian authors had impressed him with their morbidity, self-flagellation, and voluptuous love (he thought) of martyrdom for an ideal. Carco's failure in the depiction of this world lay in his not having sufficiently integrated such a diversity of ingredients. Motives do not become clear; the conclusions he reaches are not satisfactorily established by the incidents he presents as clues in the search for the real compulsions of his protagonists. Perhaps he was uncomfortable in the role of actor, for he has made himself one of the characters involved and exerting an influence in the complex emotional relationships he depicts. Later this became one of his preferred techniques. His fast-paced play, Mon Homme,23 was more successful. Its exciting world of the apaches, full of danger and of brutal action, fascinated a public avid for sensations. Comfortably installed in their seats, they could feel all the strong emotions of risk-charged incidents without danger to their skins. Carco was never to be particularly proud of this melodramatic theatrical offering, but it did bring him a great deal of money.

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Though Carco, in the printed version, gave most of the credit for this money-maker to his collaborator, André Picard, the public and the critics saw in this adaptation to the theatre of the milieu primarily the knowledge and skill of Carco. One success called for another. This time, with the expert help of Jacques Richepin, Les Chercheurs dor was offered for the public's titillation. It was even more melodramatic than its predecessor, and catered to dreams of exotic places and quick riches in having part of its action take place in the Yukon. In spite of the opportunity it offered for vicarious traveling, though the leading roles were played by Cora Laparcerie and Harry Baur, this play was less of a financial success. With Jacques Richepin as co-author and Charles Boyer in the lead, Panam, based on Les Innocents, was successful. Apparently Le Gentleman, in collaboration with Alfred Savair, was not produced. 24 Though Carco had himself needed collaborators in order to work out his theatrical efforts, Paul Bourget called on him to help make a play of Un Drame dans le monde; in succeeding years, Carco would often be invited to exercise his skill in doctoring a sick theatrical offering or to adapt importations to the French stage. 25 Yet it is one of his deep regrets that he has never been able to establish a reputation in the theatre. Eventually weary of defeat, he renounced the stage with the excuse that he was more interested in the development of psychological problems and the growth of character than in the depiction of action based on predetermined personality. His own plays have only achieved the stature of examples of the interest, on the stage as in other art forms, in fast action and strong emotion as an aftermath of the war. The training, however, which he had received in the exigencies of tight-knit construction for the theatre, was to stand him in good stead in writing L'Homme traqué. Coming at a time when critics were already beginning to comment that

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Carco was a man of limited resources, it won almost unanimous admiration for the mastery of treatment and the precision of saying the almost unsayable. What excited critical acclaim was the fact that Carco had taken two people—neither of whom was articulate—and had, by the reproduction of their illformed, hardly expressed comments, managed to analyze the successive psychological states of what was occurring within them. Told with tremendous sobriety, it contains nothing extraneous or superfluous to the central action. The situation is quite simple. Lampieur, who works in a basement bakery, has murdered an old woman for her money. Léontine, a prostitute, had come (at the time of the crime) to the sidewalk grating of the bakery in order to get some bread, and had noticed his brief absence. Lampieur suspects that Léontine has surprised his secret; Léontine fears that Lampieur knows of her discovery. This mutual fear draws them together, rivets them indissolubly, one to the other. Each tries to disarm and pacify the other's torments by hints and half-denials. Lampieur, originally tranquil, becomes more and more erratic in his behavior. Under the pressure of this fear, which, akin to remorse (but remorse itself plays no role whatsoever in this psychological dissection), causes him to haunt the scene of his crime, he makes himself the obvious suspect. The conclusion of the drama, when Lampieur is seized by the police, is simply a way to terminate the story. Even the crime itself is but very briefly touched upon. All interest is concentrated on the analysis of the evolution of the protagonists' helpless reactions before the face of self-inflicted terrors. Dostoyevsky's name was mentioned immediately in connection with L'Homme traqué.26 It was thought that Carco had borrowed the brooding atmosphere, the concentration on dark colors and on night time, as well as the conception of the characters' reciprocal relationship from the author of Crime and Punishment. This critical observation is only partially correct.

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Carco's novel develops on a single theme and on a single plane. There is no theorizing ; there is no motivation outside the very temperaments of Lampieur and Léontine. There are no philosophical overtones. Careo starts with the murder as a fait accompli and gives only the most rudimentary indication of why it occurred. It is a single incident told clearly, almost curtly, and it develops with a simplicity foreign to Dostoyevsky's work. Careo had, indeed, read Dostoyevsky as well as Gogol, Kuprin, and other Russian authors. 27 He had steeped himself in their works even before his arrival at Paris. A knowledge of Russian literature was part of the literary baggage of the modern writer, and that literature was satisfying to his aesthetic and temperamental affinities. No doubt the younger generation was, in general, influenced by the Russian novel and would adapt some of its aspects for home consumption. As for L'Homme traqué, specifically, Careo had ascertained technical details by the personal observation of a Montmartre baker's activities. He obtained a more artistically desirable atmosphere by transferring the setting from the Rue Tholozé in Montmartre to the neighborhood of the Halles; the psychological penetration he found in the introspective exploitation of the depths of his own heart. The most that we can attribute is influence and reminiscence, but not imitation or adaptation. When the Académie Française awarded the Grand Prix du Roman to L'Homme tragué, presented under the patronage of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres, 28 it was honoring the French tradition of the typical psychological novel executed with economy of composition and clarity of structure. In making this award, the Académie Française was departing from its usual standard of considering morality as a judgment value to reward solely artistic merits. Among the repercussions was the bruiting about that Careo might eventually become a member of that august body. 29

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The same atmosphere of unrelieved despair characterized a somewhat more elaborate novel, Perversité, a study of the effect of cruelty on a weak, passive, undeveloped character. First presented in the calm tepidity of a long-practiced, mechanical routine, Emile's existence is disorganized by the introduction into his home of Bébert, a pimp, who has become the master of Emile's prostitute sister. Up to this moment Emile had never questioned the significance to himself of his sister's profession. It was enough for him that his day was exclusively filled with his tasks in an office, repose in the kitchen at home, and long hours of dreamless, emotionless sleep. But Bébert is like a dust devil; irked by the silent, depressing presence of Emile, Bébert takes pleasure in frightening, hurting, and degrading him. Inside and outside his home, Emile can find no refuge from his tormentor. As he becomes progressively more cowardly, he is pushed inevitably by the flickering insistence of a rudimentary sense of human dignity to the purchase of a gun with which to shoot Bébert. When the crucial moment arrives, because chance offers inoffensive Irma, rather than the object of his hatred, as his target, it is his sister whom he shoots. As logical as a mathematical conclusion, it is ironical that this murder will remove from Emile's control the possibility of ever resolving the quandary in which he is floundering. The irony (and the implicit moral) is that such a gesture escapes from the control of its perpetrator. Chance, the hazard of the particular moment of action, decides who is to be the victim. Regardless of who the ostensible victim may be, the doer succumbs to the compulsions of his nature and is his own victim. As in L'Homme traqué, fate cannot be swerved from its implacable exigencies. One cannot escape from the pressures outside and within oneself; one cannot direct the energy released under pressure to a specific, self-chosen object. Man is

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the puppet of destiny; he cannot change the master plot which has marked him for sacrifice. The conception of man as "vraiment peu de chose" determines the pantomime of Rue Pigalle. The most symbolic of Carco's works, it returns to the manner of precise yet impressionistic descriptions which were the trappings of Jesus-laCaille. Taking into account, however, the changes after the war, Carco shifts his scene to the frenetic night-club world of postwar Paris and introduces the insidious influence of cocaine. To the cast of living characters he adds three mannequins— Pierrot, Columbine, Arlequin. It is they who play the chief roles and represent the fantastique social and who, by their pernicious influence on the drugged vision of the human puppets, lead them implacably toward destruction. Valentine, a young streetwalker, witnesses the installation of the three life-sized mannequins in the windows of the Chateau Caucasien, a Montmartre night club. Immediately she experiences a superstitious foreboding of misfortune which, she feels, will come from the dolls. Business is bad. Leon, her man, is shortly arrested for peddling cocaine. Wandering about, Valentine encounters Tonton, an addict, who persuades her to try the drug. Affected by this first dose of cocaine, she submits to him. As time goes on she uses more and more of the imperious drug. She begins to have hallucinations of the mannequins' spying on her, and she shifts volatilely from mood to mood— exalted, despairing, contemplative, cruel. Her only hope of refuge from the mannequins' malevolence is in Leon's return. Tonton, at first a sort of proxy for Leon, soon seems allied with the dolls. Even an encounter with Jojo, who is ready to sacrifice everything for her, cannot free Valentine from her terror of the puppets. The weak-willed son of a respectable bourgeois family, Jojo turns thief, then addict, and finally commits suicide—another victim of the Rue Pigalle's mortal fascination.

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Valentine surreptitiously saves m o n e y for Léon. T o prevent Tonton from spending it for cocaine, she hides it in the mattress. But when Léon is released from jail and accompanies Valentine to her room, the m o n e y is not there. ( Probably it had been cut up by Tonton, who has taken to signaling the dolls with torn bits of paper. ) In a sudden rage Léon, thinking Valentine is mocking him, strangles h e r — i n view of the dolls. Later, in alcoholic excitation, he believes he sees the wax images beckoning to him. H e follows t h e m — i n t o the police station. From the moment of their installation, the mannequins seem to portend evil : La poupée toute raide, que [M. Paul, gérant du Château Caucasien] tenait à bras-le-corps, avait l'air de lui résister. 11 la poussait, la tassait gauchement dans l'angle de la première fenêtre, sur un haut tabouret. Et la poupée tantôt glissait, tantôt se redressait. C'était un long Pierrot au visage blême. Ses maigres jambes articulées, ses bras, son buste avaient parfois des contorsions bizarres et plus M. Paul s'appliquait à la tâche, plus elle paraissait vaine aux gens qui regardaient. —Mon p'tit, c'est du travail, estima Valentine. A la seconde fenêtre, une Colombine se débattait et, lorsque la troisième poupée, qui était un fenèbre et cocasse Arlequin, parut, chacun pensa qu'on n'en viendrait pas aisément à bout. Or ce dernier s'assit presque aussitôt et, comme s'il eût été préparé à son rôle, se figea de guingois dans une attitude goguenarde qui fit un gros effet. 30 Tonton is a Pierrot lost in the maze of irreality, and Léon w i l l traditionally exercise "sa batte et son mauvais destin" ; 3 1 Valentine, like Columbine, w i l l weep, for tears—or w o r s e — are her fate, presaged by intimations that, with Léon gone, . . . elle rêvait un rêve stupide auquel le décor de la rue, avec ses maisons grises, ses bars et la présence devant leurs portes d'individus qui parlaient à voix basse, ajoutaient du mystère. Valentine n'y comprenait rien. A peine reconnaissait-elle des lieux si familiers. Ils lui étaient hostiles. A mesure qu'elle les situait machinalement dans son esprit, elle avait le sentiment de devenir de plus en plus le jouet d'une illusion perfide et pleine d'incohérence. 32

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The tempo of Rue Pigalle is set to the staccato blinking of the street's flashing neon signs. The characters become progressively jerky, lacking in self-control, as cocaine dominates them. And as they become invaded by the drug, they spend more and more time in a hallucinatory state, generally intense and cruel in evocation. Already, in Perversité, Emile had sought refuge in dreams from terror. But a phlegmatic, torpid person, whose habits were humble and banal, his dreams were slow, hazy, benevolent. 33 In the case of Emile this sort of daydreaming is the dissolution of personality, whereas in Rue Pigalle the dreams are more nightmarish—under the influence of cocaine — a n d serve not only to characterize the drug's influence but also to propel the characters towards violence. At the time when Rue Pigalle was published, it was seen as a prolongation of an earlier subject, the exploitation of the role of narcotics in a milieu dispensing jazz and excitement, and as still another affirmation by Careo of the irresistible attraction for him of the venal. It is indeed all this. But how instructive to be able to see today, by reference to the latest stone (Morsure) in the arch of his creation, that each block fits into a harmonious structure. Jojo, rejuvenated, appears again in another postwar period, is again the plaything of powerful compulsions emanating from the same street. In Rue Pigalle, Jojo had to sacrifice his life to sensuality, but today, twenty years later, in Morsure, Jojo's namesake, also a bourgeois, is granted a respite—for what secret design of amused destiny? This interest in the fantastique social may have been the underlying motive for a trip to Spain which Careo took in the spring of 1 9 2 8 . From March to May he visited Madrid, Toledo, Cádiz, Seville, Granada, Cordova, Barcelona, and intermediate points. In preparation for the trip Careo read or reread Gautier, Mérimée, Barrés, Talon, guide books, and art monographs. 3 4 His knowledge of Spanish was fairly adequate. He

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had letters of introduction to landed proprietors, businessmen, and artists. And, of course, he could rely on his flair for meeting people who might initiate him into the life of Spain. But he wanted to discover for himself the characteristics revelatory of the essential Spanish temperament and ways. Shortly after this trip Carco published a selection from his notebooks and diaries. Though covering a multitude of notations, Printemps d'Espagne emphasizes especially Holy Week at Seville. The observations recorded in the other chapters expand and reinforce those devoted to Easter. Carco finds in the Spanish celebration of the Passion a frenzied mixture of religious fervor and violent sensuality. Whereas every spot for viewing the parade on Good Friday is taken, everyone is also planning to attend Easter Sunday's bullfight. An unexpected downpour causes the celebrants and participants to take refuge in cafés, bars, and doorways. In the mingling of nobles and riffraff who fraternize, heedless of class distinctions, Carco sees a salient characteristic of the Spanish people. A similar absence of propriety (according to French—and Anglo-American —standards) is the presence in even the most sordid brothels of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Churches are filled with the pious; masterpieces of Spanish art receive the homage of the admiring multitude—and the cafés and prostitutes can hardly satisfy the numbers of impatient clients. Carco's discussions of Spanish art and of the barrio chino (Barcelona's red-light district) turn around these two poles, the religious and the sexual, whose axis is the desire for suffering : J'essayais de trouver dans les processions de la Semaine Sainte un argument qui me servît, quand tout à coup: "C'est la même chose [cette ivresse du sang], me dis-je, le même et cruel appétit de la souffrance. Après la religion chrétienne, celle du taureau, la plus antique. Toutes deux se joignent à Pâques, le jour précisément que, Christ montant au ciel, la bête est mise à mort." Je n'en pouvais douter. Les ardentes paroles d'amour qui m'avaient

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secrètement choqué à Antequerra étaient celles que, dans les églises, vendredi, la foule prodiguait à son Dieu. 35

The concluding scene in Printemps d'Espagne is that of the barrio chino. It is indeed a striking climax, but perhaps a somewhat unfortunate choice as the note on which to terminate these impressions of Spain. The Spanish were understandably in-

"M.

FRANCIS CARCO, OR T H E

RENDEZVOUS,"

BY

C A R L O RIM IN APRIL 2 0 ,

. . . NEW

SPANISH

Les Nouvelles

Littéraires,

1929

dignant at Carco's portrayal of their country. They felt that in a large measure, when leaving their country, he could declare little baggage which he had not brought with him. Y e t undoubtedly Carco was sincere, was not attempting to make capital of his reputation for proficiency in describing bartered entertainment. He wrote feelingly about Spanish art and did not eschew criticizing traditional appreciations of its art and architecture and countryside ; in this declaration of independence and integrity, he was differing from values determined to a large extent by French tourists. Suite espagnole,38 which

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muses over his deep-felt appreciation of the art of Goya and Velazquez, terminates, too, on a wild scene at Huelva. This dual preoccupation with painting and with commercial sexuality, however true or biased a picture it may produce of Spain itself, 37 is certainly a faithful profile of Carco's temperament. In 1932-1933 Carco visited Egypt and the Mediterranean seaports. Whereas his book on Spain has been regularly listed as a reportage, Palace-Egypte was first called a novel, and only later put in the same category as the previous work on a foreign country. Actually it is more novel than travel relation, and not successful as either. The plot is an adaptation of the triangle: one man (Carco) in love with two women (Naila and Yasmine) both of whom do, and do not, love him. Though he at first desires Naila, it is Yasmine who will touch him more profoundly and incarnate for him what is most indigenous to Egypt. Naila, a Syrian, is perhaps a symbol of the modern emancipated Egyptian woman who will conduct her own life energetically, independently, aggressively. Yasmine, a Jewess, represents a continuum of seemingly eternal tradition; the "harem type," she is passive, subservient, yearning for love. Carco cannot win Naila, for she is self-sufficient; nor will he assume the burden of supporting Yasmine in her weakness. The very title Palace-Egypte indicates that the action takes place in the sumptuous luxury hotels which are the modern counterpart of Egypt's enduring temples. In contrast to Printemps d'Espagne there is little description of the red-light district or of the poor. This is a novel about the rich and their appurtenances of salons, night clubs, automobiles, luxuries. But each locale is surrounded by the desert sands, the relics, and the ways of the past. The Egyptian, though claiming to long for emancipation, feels safe in, as well as bound by, the chains of tradition. Carco, the foreign intruder, feels the force of this timelessness, he seems to capitulate before it—but he discerns the restless shifting towards change. Symbolically,

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Naila is fond of a modern, sentimental French love song; Yasmine dreams, like Baudelaire, of being where she is not. Beneath Egypt's apparent immobility is an undercurrent of revolt, of stifled desires for new horizons. The fellah may remain conservative, high society will assume more and more deeply the veneer of the present. This, then, is the implication of Palace-Egypte, which as a novel seems thin and obscure, as a description incomplete and ineffective in evoking a picture of Egypt. 38 The latter part of Palace-Egypte utilizes data about the drug traffic in that country for informational purposes as well as for the sake of the plot. Carco pursued his interest in the organization, the working, and the personnel of narcotics smuggling along the Mediterranean. Gathering his information in the Levant and in the Mediterranean seaports, he traced the traffic in drugs from Greece to Turkey, to Syria, to Africa, to Marseilles. Carco recapitulated his findings in La Dernière Chance (which he calls a novel, but which is really a reportage). Drug-running is simply another commercial enterprise. Its risks are chanced because of profits, not at all because of adherence to a mystique. The charm has gone, the corruption remains. As a travelogue, La Dernière Chance is movingly satisfying. Though Carco does not describe the renowned monuments of various places which he visited (Athens and Piraeus, Smyrna, Istanbul, Beyrouth, Naples, Tunis), he does convey distinctly the animation, the color, the character of the streets of each of these cities. It is only at Istanbul, and when he takes a half-holiday to go to Therapia, that literary reminiscences, in this instance well integrated in the text, serve as comparisons whereby to measure the degree of revolution in Turkish customs. Even each city's red-light district, so monotonously similar to that in any other place, is distinguished from the others with individualizing, effective succinctness.

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The sites are primarily only the background for the investigation of the drug traffic and its concomitant, the men engaged in it. We experience the thrill of an adventure or detective story in following Carco's pursuit of clues leading, from country to country, to the traces of elusive smugglers, who had formerly engaged in white slavery. But with the concerted action instituted by the League of Nations against international prostitution, and the stringent local controls dictated by revised governmental domestic policies, the exporters in that business had had to seek their livelihood in the contraband of narcotics. Though also illegal, trafficking in drugs could still return a profit which the Depression had diminished in the exploitation of women. But as the police apprehended some traffickers and closed in on others, the risks became greater and reliable associates fewer. What future was there for these somewhat anachronistic protagonists of an outlawed, outmoded way of life? They were trapped. Fiftyish, denied the right to enter most of the countries which in turn had expelled them, unfit for any but illegal or hardly tolerated trades, they were living precariously on shrinking incomes. Also diminishing were their chances of escaping the police dragnets converging on them at Tangiers and Tunis. The few who did slip through the meshes into a European country had to contend not only with competitors and the law, but also with traitors. Even as customs and the face of the countryside change, so had the ways of the milieu. Representatives of an old-fashioned mentality, adherents to a code which had become vitiated, they—and their ideal —were doomed to disappear outright or to undergo disfiguring mutation. What were the principles, now obsolescent, for which Carco felt such nostalgia and to whose exponents he had been so magnetically attracted? There had been a strict moral code every bit as valid and rigid as that of the society which con-

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sidered its exponents immoral. In this world there was a law of faithfulness, but fidelity was determined on the basis of whether the man paid or was paid for his part in the couples' intimacies. The marriage ceremony was dispensed with, but its purpose, in a somewhat modified form, persisted. Chastity was not considered in the same way as in conventional society, for commerce prohibited it, but sexual intercourse for business purposes was considered no more immoral than working for a department store or a bank or a government bureau, and there was a fee for services rendered. There could be no adultery in this sense, for it would be adulterous, then (to make a comparison), to work for any employer; adultery consisted in a free giving of oneself to a third party in the same social system, or in funds being diverted from their legitimate recipient to the profit of a third party. If such occurred, the law of "to love, honor, and obey" had been violated; the violation had to be punished. In this society, force and courage and cunning were analogous to the value attached to such characteristics in the world on which the voyou and the prostitute preyed. A major difference was the fact that kindness on the part of a man was considered to be a weakness and was as punishable as the quality of irresponsibility in conventional society. These people were simple-minded, instinctive, clannish, and they obeyed their code and esteemed their traditions just as well as the average member of the standard social system who respected the inviolable virtues of his own nation. There was a code of honor which was binding on all; submission by the woman, recognition of the rights of the man, and the obligation on the part of the man to defend his woman, to assert his own value, and to live up to his obligation to punish any insults to his dignity. These punishments were chastisement for lesser misdemeanors such as a lack of respect towards the man, or liquidation for betrayals of the code of ethics, such as informing the police or being disloyal to one's comrades.

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But the World War had disrupted this pattern. After the war there was a great deal of money to be made quickly, but in new ways. There was an influx into Paris of potential criminals and outlaws who owed no allegiance to the established criminal order. With the evolution of society in general, there was change in this small segment of it. What had before been virtues for the milieu now seemed too impractical and costly. There was less individual combat to settle a dispute and more conniving with the police or gangster allies to settle a difference with an enemy. One could say that according to prewar standards, decadence had set in and moral values were on the decline. This lesson is apparent in studies such as Les Hommes en cage, L'Amour vénal, and Traduit de l'argot. Even the very language and demeanor of the underworld had undergone a change: D'ailleurs, où c'est qu' t'en vois qu'a l'genre voyou? Ça s'porte plus. A part les mécanos d'ia porte Maillot et les p'tits poisses des boul'vards extérieurs, les autres sont à la page . . . Parler argot, y a rien d'meilleur pour s'faire poirer et les hommes l'ont compris. Passe la main, qu'ils diraient, t'as du retard. Ou bien, ils t'rigoleraient au nez. C'est plus des mômes. . . . Entre nous, argot ou javanais, j'laisse ça aux gnières pas affranchis et j'jacte français. . . S'il arrive par hasard dans un bar qu'un miteux aye l'air de dévider le jar, méfiance. . . Seulement, dans le temps, ceuss qui s' disaient marioles l'étaient bien moins qu'ils l'proclamaient. On les repérait tout d' suite. Tandis que maintenant. . . L' plus marie, vois-tu, c'est encore çui qu'a l'air d'une bille."'

This underworld was now concerned with being inconspicuous. It tried to speak correctly, it dressed unobtrusively, and with the change in women's costumes, no longer was it readily apparent who was a professional and who a proper and accepted and respectable member of law-abiding society. With the change in social values, there was more competition from those who considered that they had the right to the use of

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their bodies as they saw fit, without consideration of financial remuneration. It might be said that amateurs are the ruin of an art and a trade. In these studies Carco's moral principles became more evident. Even though in Jesus-la-Caille he frequently used the term "vice" and by adjectives often unwittingly betrayed what were his own standards, he was trying to write objectively, without the slightest repugnance. In subsequent novels he adopted an air of candor and of sympathy, without being at all maudlin. In these retrospective studies of the milieu he affirmed more clearly his own segregation from the world which was his province in literature.

CHAPTER

VII

Prolongations:

CONTINUITY

IN

CHANGE

A s CARCO sought out the wellsprings of this obscure world, he revealed himself more and more overtly. In reportages and novels (of this period) on the milieu, he is himself one of the characters, the one who is attracted to, but does not understand fully, the significance of what he beholds. The story becomes properly that of his own enlightenment. There are innumerable realistic touches which can be verified. He is Francis, he is a writer who works in his apartment, Quai aux Fleurs, or Quai de Douai. He is approximately his own age (in La Lumière noire he makes himself somewhat younger), and his affairs are probably personal experiences. But he is also the artist observing himself as one of his characters, and he is able to picture himself with his illusions and his disappointments. In a way, we have in a single work the story and the notes for the story. Carco tells us the points which puzzle him and how he must await a significant incident to resolve certain perplexities. We see him seeking out his material and how he handles it. We see his failures and his triumphs. This technique simplifies his works to the stature of memoranda, and relies heavily on the minutes of conversation. The use of slang makes textual comprehension quite difficult. There is much that is obscure or misleading, but by the end of the text we should be able to understand the true significance of the spectacle. The use of the same names and the same char-

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IN

CHANGE

131

acters in various works shows his preoccupation with digging more profoundly into the lives of his personages and with attempting a fuller explanation. Strangely, the more comprehensive his works become the farther removed Carco is from the mentality which he portrays and the more explicative he becomes. He translates the vocabulary of his characters, and he repeats frequently how different he is from them. What binds him to them is curiosity and also a malignant fascination with vice rather than with the individuals themselves. What for them is instinctive or a matter of practical importance, is sometimes for him a commentary or an illustration of a literary text which has seized his imagination. Through them he understands more fully certain passages of Villon or Baudelaire or Verlaine. For Carco the life of the criminal is poetry in flesh and blood. And so, believing that the chivalrous qualities of the milieu had disappeared, Carco formally declared his resignation as the trumpeter of the milieus intrinsic virtues at the end of Paname: —J'ai plutôt [dit Bob] que l'milieu me dégoûte. Vous [Carco] aussi, hein, pas vrai? J'ai lu ça hier, dans les journaux. Paraît qu'vous laissez tout tomber . . . vous changez de genre . . . —Comme tu dis. —Ben, vous avez raison. C'est fini, le milieu. Avant la guerre, y avait encore des hommes et il en reste. Mais voilà, les plus forts sont obligés maintenant de mettre les pouces . . . Q'est-ce que vous voulez . . . C'est comme ça . . . C'est la vie! 1

This did not mean that he would write no more about his predilection, for in the early thirties he published short stories (La "Belle Amour," Contes du "milieu," La Route du bagne), in which the characters and the settings were his familiar domain. But these stories were the literary expression of attitudes or experiences from his richly remembered past. If he was still presenting diverse aspects of the milieu's mentality,

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it was now with an undercurrent of sophistication and lack of parti-pris. Cases of extraordinary heroism, such as that of a priest who assumed his brother's crime and went to the penitentiary in his place, win his warm admiration, but it is for the individual rather than for the group. Undoubtedly Carco could relate innumerable tales of a similar sort. Perhaps he will yet. But there is no reason to suspect the sincerity and frankness of his statements to the effect that there was a shift in his interests. Convinced as he was that the truly laudable virtues, such as honor, moral strength, devotion, and unflinching courage, had become no more than the expedients of a way of life instead of its formative ideals, 2 Carco also believed that in some cases there was nothing that could be done for its practitioners. As he has said of some criminals, "Ils sont nés monstres." 3 Before these, society has no method of self-protection other than restraint. But what has society done to and for those who are not in this category? Carco sought the answer by examining the penal institutions for men and for women. No doubt, there was a practical business reason recommending this journalistic activity, for who was better qualified than Carco (or Albert Londres or Geo London) to describe the caged and the cages? The penchant which had ordained his fréquentation of the hunted impelled his curiosity to satisfy itself about the part of responsibility of the judges, that is to say, the society which meted out incarceration as punishment and corrective to transgressors of its customs and laws. By doing a series of newspaper articles which would become books, Carco was engaging in popular sociological investigation. As Carco studied further the society of the milieu and its contacts with conventional society, he examined the punitive institutions of the latter. He attended trials and then visited various penal institutions. Carco does not deny the necessity for society to safeguard itself by retaliatory measures. He

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does believe, however, that existing measures do not solve the problem. Often the investigations do not bring to light the true motives for criminal action. Prisons punish but do not ameliorate. By the time the condemned has completed his prison sentence, he is so rooted in criminality that there is little justifiable hope that he will become an accepted member of society. The prison itself surrounds him with other criminals, some of whom are more corrupt than he. Prison compels him to adopt as permanent values which at the time of his wrongdoing were only tentative; and when finally he is released from prison, economic necessity seconded by social opprobrium forces him to earn his living by becoming either a pimp or a criminal, if not both. An outcast, he knows that his only future is in preying on society. What corrections does Carco suggest? First of all, sentences which are more in conformity with the crimes; second, prisons with proper physical facilities and sufficient nourishment; third, religious instruction (if there must be religious instruction) properly adapted to the mentality of those for whom it is intended; and last, a realizable future within the framework of society. This program, for which Carco does not offer any specific practical agenda, would have its basis in a juster appreciation of a psychology of the milieu. The present program is simply retaliatory and defensive rather than corrective. Repeatedly, Carco has insisted on the incapacity of the helpless individual to escape from the clutches of his environment. But what about the efficacy of individual intervention? Could an outside force be strong enough to break the bond between the magnet and its slavish dependent? Using the technique employed in Verotchka Uetrangere ou le Gout du malheur and in his reportages, he placed himself in La Rue as one of the main characters; can Carco persuade Louise that a respectable way of life is possible if she can resist her sub-

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servience to her pander, Maurice? (This simple plot is reinforced by the bizarre figure of Evariste Cabrol, a frustrated writer, who passes as her father; it is he who originally perverted Louise, picked up in the street.) The experiment is a failure; Carco is not influential enough to overcome the preponderant weight of her past. Indeed, his efforts expose her, dirough a series of incidents, more overtly to the obligations and consequences of prostitution and, similarly, on a spiritual level, to the disheartening realization of her degradation. Had Carco not intervened, she might have continued to be buoyed up by a vague hope of social and moral rehabilitation: Mais malgré tout j'gardais l'espoir de m'en tirer, un jour, de m'en sortir. . . . Cette idée que j e pouvais peut-être, à force, me relever, j'I'ai toujours eue. Alors vous êtes venu et au lieu de m'encourager, vous m'avez fait honte de c'que j'étais. C'est ç a : honte! Ah! vous m'ia copierez celle-là, hein? paroles et musique, parce que pour l'résultat, vous voyez voir, il est joli. Mais y a pas d'honte, quand on est forcée, comme moi, comme je l'étais, d'aller en rendez-vous. Y a qu'on peut pas faire autrement et qu'ça n'compte pas puisqu'on y est obligée. 4

Perhaps Carco might have been more successful had he been more deeply concerned with the victim than with his own ambivalent feelings towards her: Mais en même temps, j e me sentais uni à elle par mille fibres secrètes et douloureuses. J e souffrais. J e m'analysais. J e me faisais mal à plaisir et finalement il me parut que, loin de n'être rien pour moi, Louise était tout car j e vivais en elle comme dans ma création. Hélas! ce n'était que trop vrai. J'existais, je me confondais en elle. J'en dépendais si étroitement qu'elle, partie, je n'aurais plus eu de raison d'écrire. Ses caprices, ses crises d'humeur, de désespoir, sa résignation, sa tristesse, trouvaient en moi leur prolongement, leur écho. . . . 5 Plus j e la sentais abattue, plus j'avais le désir d'en apprendre davantage et j e rentrais alors chez moi, tête basse, comme après une débauche ignoble, dégradante. C'était ce désir de savoir qui me poussait vers Louise et non point la promesse que je m'étais faite de la ramener à une autre existence. Qu'il fût trop tard, comme elle me l'avait dit, ne

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m'étonnait nullement, mais je me demandais parfois s'il ne valait paa mieux qu'il fût précisément trop tard tant je trouvais d'excuses, de satisfactions dans cet état de torpeur trouble et de curiosité. Au fond peu m'importait que Louise se ressaisît. L'essentiel n'était-il pas qu'elle se montrât réellement comme elle était et continuât à ne me rien cacher? 9

Carco was interested not only in Louise, symbol of a type within a class, but even more in the neighborhood in which she lived. Ever since he had read Zola's L'Assommoir, Carco had been intrigued by the mournful, bleak, reverberating quartier of the workshops of the Chemins de Fer du Nord. The first part of La Rue informs us of his meeting his characters and of his intention to use them in a book. It is also the relation of his fascination with the atmosphere of their locale and his desire to evoke it in a novel. The décor is more important than the personages—they must harmonize with the scenery and are defined by it. Repeated attempts at description, and the implication in the title, reveal the correlation Carco establishes between his characters and their immediate environment. From this point of view, even though affected by the evocative power of Carco's visualizations, one may wonder in what way the district described here differs in effect from others (such as Montmartre in Jésus-la-Caille, the Halles in L'Homme traqué, Belleville in L'Equipe) on the kinds of characters Carco presents. The scene is distinct from the backgrounds in the other novels, yet the cast might well appear against the other settings. A page which is typical, in its mixture of description, mood, and reverie, of much of Carco, is in fact about the Place Blanche. Louise has become a streetwalker, and so must frequent the amusement area. Surely here, in Montmartre, she is more truly Carco's creature and has more intimate significance for him than against the whistle-streaked, smoky perspective of rail and wire:

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L e vent s'était levé. Il secouait, entrechoquait les branches avec des plaintes, des sifflements et pendant près d'une heure, passant et repassant devant des bars, des cafés, des brasseries d'où s'échappaient des airs de jazz, de phonographes, j'errai en quête de je ne savais quoi. Il me semblait que Louise était morte et qu'elle m'avait fixé sous ces arbres rendezvous. Soudain, la pluie cessa, mais le vent agitait toujours les platanes, en détachait des ombres étranges, incohérentes qui m'entouraient comme des fantômes ou d'un seul coup s'évanouissaient. Cette idée que la jeune femme n'appartenait plus au monde des vivants s'associait à toutes les formes malsaines de la nuit dont la ronde équivoque et vaine me tourmentait et je dus brusquement, pour me soustraire à l'obsession, entrer dans un débit où je me fis servir à boire avant de gagner le suivant. Et ainsi de suite, de débit en débit, de bar en bar, je cherchai Louise et ne la trouvai pas. 7

Tireless, however, in the examination of his own duplicity and the problem of redemption, Carco confessed anew in La Lumière noire to his powerlessness to divert the fulfillment of a predetermined course. He cannot find release for Serge and Marise and Simone from their torments and bitter ecstasies. Damned by their vices and frustrations—homosexuality, incest, drugs (especially opium, which gives the book its title) — t h e y are lost souls, not because of their unsocial penchants, but because the will to ascend from the pit of their private hells is paralyzed. The time span of La Lumière noire is quite long, which is unusual in Carco's works; it is of the period of, and the French counterpart of, the Russian Vérotchka l'étrangère ou le Goût du malheur. The off-stage presence of Georges is, however, a conception which is to be found in the other novels published around 1 9 3 4 ( J e a n Fournier in L'Ombre, Georges in Ténèbres. The citations from J e a n Lorrain's " L ' H o m m e des b e r g e s , " so influential in their malignancy, will be opposed fifteen years later by a different, moral quotation from the same author, affirming the possibility of salvation. Considered perhaps the most clinical and depressing of Carco's works,

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La Lumière noire dissipates even the inertia and protective illusion of artificial dreams. Carco's creative writings ( in contrast to his journalistic type of investigation) reinforce the impression that he was turning away from the subject matter of most of his previous novels. In 1933, he published L'Ombre, which is peopled with petits bourgeois. A sort of detective story, L'Ombre traces in detail the investigation by the police of a murder. We attend the series of questionings and witness a demonstration of the planning and execution of police routine, strategy, and utilization of petty animosities. The whole life and mentality of the poor working people living in the building where the crime has occurred is laid bare as though the protecting walls had disappeared, exposing not only the doings but also the thoughts and feelings of the inhabitants. All this serves as a background to the attempt by Denise, sister of the suspected murderer, not to do anything which would further implicate her brother. She must allay the suspicions of the police, the neighbors, and somewhat later, the real murderer. Her brother's appearance is no more than a brief shadow at the beginning and at the very end of the novel. The ever-present shadow is Denise's unadmitted fear that her brother is indeed the culprit who might, by a careless gesture or word from her, fall prey to the ever-hovering police. The real murderer, Firmin Blache, a huge, hulking dairyowner, at first completely unsuspected, by progressively more violent and unreasonable acts attracts attention to himself and must finally confess. Blache is impelled to help Jean, on the one hand, by a feeling of remorse at being responsible for the latter's predicament. Blache is also helping Denise's brother because Jean's inaccessibility is Blache's protection. (As long as the police are seeking for Jean, they will not suspect the real murderer. ) Yet Blache's fatal weakness is in being haunted by his inability (and it is this which especially compels him)

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to dissociate the image of his murdered mistress from the presence of the suspect. This novel is reminiscent of L'Homme traqué in its tightknit composition. It is, however, richer, perhaps more artful, in a greater complexity of cast, opposing forces, and planes of activity. The ending is clearly superior in its appositeness, 8 its sustaining of mood to the last dwindling suspension points. It is perhaps less of a tour de force because the characters are by class and condition more articulate, the scenes here have more airiness and light than the night-shadowed, noisy, redstreaked vista of the Halles. Within their settings, both locales are insinuatingly placed as a backdrop for the profound disturbances of their protagonists. Carco's intent to rid himself of the categorical label, the "Froissard des escarpes," 9 became still clearer with the publication of Ténèbres. Whereas UOmbre was regularly adjudged to be a detective story, and its characters were of the whitecollar class, Ténèbres moved up a big notch in the social and financial hierarchies by dealing with affluent, educated individuals. There are no gangsters nor descriptions of bars nor use of slang, so characteristic of Carco's fiction. The locale has shifted to the world of apartments where servants cater to comfort, where there is concern for elegance, and discussion of monetary matters. Money (other than incidentally or as the object of illicit gain) had, for the first time, played a role in L'Ombre, where economic circumstances infringed on and oriented the doings of the characters; in Ténèbres, income and jobs, expenses and financial responsibilities are part of the background and preoccupation, on a more evident and impressive scale, of its personages. The compulsions which motivate the actors in this drama are in keeping with their class. Adultery, remorse, expiation, with their bourgeois connotations, had not previously appeared as factors in Carco's investigations of motivating forces. It is

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also notable that the characters are middle-aged, whereas his protagonists had regularly been youths or mature individuals whose age signified experience and knowledge. Here, Maurice Marrières has shot and killed the artist-lover of his wife, Hélène. On his release from prison, five years after his condemnation, he returns to her; they both intend to try to forget the past and to face the future together. The story is properly that of their struggle, especially Maurice's, to cope with the problems, personal and mutual, which necessarily have resulted from his crime. But the real interest is in Maurice's excruciating, floundering efforts to determine for himself the hidden causes of an apparently hasty gesture and also to what extent he would be able to free himself from it. The five-year term in prison has settled nothing except his legal debt to society. There still remain his obligations to his conscience and, secondarily, his responsibilities towards his wife. It is soon evident that their relationship is empty and lacks the stuff to resist the inevitable strains of differences in character, misinterpretations and deceits of thought and speech, and the ever-present, insinuating shadow of the slain interloper. Both Maurice and Hélène are stripped of their mutual hopes and illusions in a series of situations which, by introducing their friends and relatives, fill in their respective backgrounds, prove their incompatability, and set the stage for the apparent solution—a separation. Up to now the story has been fairly banal, lacking in poignant interest. But Maurice has been impelled to plumb his psyche by a bizarre grotesque, Marius (or Antonin) Mallepate, whose influence began with the fortuitous fact that, as the victim's next-door neighbor, he had thumped on the wall during the dispute and had been a very favorable witness for the defense at the time of the trial. It is he who convinces Maurice that he has neither expiated nor resolved the problem of his crime by a jail sentence. It is he who stirs into activity Maurice's malignant self-interrogation,

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and it is he who, by relating a similar experience of his own— when he had lacked the courage (why had he lacked the courage? his conscience cried out) to kill—adumbrates the double, contradictory supposition of inevitable fatality and of individual will. Mallepate's role, which may originally have been intended to be more picturesque than central to the core of the story, 10 becomes the predominant obsessive theme in the last part of the book. Indeed, we do not see Maurice again at all until the very last page when he commits suicide. Instead, we glimpse his perplexities and sufferings through Mallepate's drinksodden effusive soliloquies and hallucinations when he identifies himself as Maurice's spiritual "double." While his mind veers from pondering the ultimate significance of the world as reality to fulsome affection for Maurice, the wind that batters the shaky studio and causes the lamp to cast huge distorted shadows over the hodge-podge of art objects wails an eerie accompaniment to the murderer-suicide's stealthy presence in the rain-spattered alley. The hobgoblins and devils on a windagitated canvas in his studio symbolize the tortures of the unseen sinner about to die. Indeed, this last section is the only one in which Carco brings to bear the full force of description as part of the atmosphere enveloping the various movements of a soul. Up to this point, when vision and symbol and habitual reality fuse into evocative fantasmagoria, he has refrained from any description other than the minimum necessary to set the tone of the interiors of bourgeois homes. Unusual in Carco, nature and the weather have hardly been mentioned until the tremendous swell of the finale.11 Whereas Ténèbres had emphasized a hallucinatory condition and the spiritual effect of weather only in its last section, these two factors are the main forces of Brumes. In 1935 Carco took a trip to the Low Countries and visited especially Antwerp and Amsterdam. An old book, Le Putanisme d'Am-

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sterdam, had excited his imagination and supplied him with a picture of its bygone harlotry, entertainments, and customs. Perhaps he had wished to see paintings of the Flemish and Spanish schools; or he may have wished to refresh his memory, to document himself on the spot, even to write in an analogous setting, Brumes. Ténèbres, as its title indicates, emphasized the shadows hidden within the conscience. Brumes is pervaded by the thick, clinging mists which cloud and change the course of rudimentary or abnormal passions as well as by the fog rolling off the sea along the waterfront. For the setting of Brumes is that of the red-light district, catering particularly to sailors, in an unnamed harbor city. The time is that of an immobilizing freeze; snow and ice and bitter cold penetrate, envelop, muffle everything. Their static effect is intensified by medical regulations and arresting fear, as a result of the symptoms of pestilence, which paralyze movement. In this frozen world whose habitual actions have ceased because of the weather and the horror of plague, there is little movement through the snowbound streets. All the action is interior, and most of it is within dreams. The only dynamics which cannot be congealed by this environment are the uncontrollable human surges of aspiration and of passion. The plot itself is double. One-armed, sterile Feempje, owner of a bar, maltreats his pregnant mistress, Flossie, until she hangs herself in the unheated, unventilated cubicle where he has forced her to live; the police compel him to sign a confession by brutalizing him. And Lionel Poop (the name can be spelled forwards or backwards, as he remarks) attempts to persuade Geisha, a simple prostitute, to commit suicide, thus imitating two predecessors in Poop's sentimental life. Fear of the police and their brutal methods induce Poop to go away before this is accomplished. But the stories, as such, have little importance; the fascination which Carco creates is

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secured by several leitmotifs which stand out all the more vividly against the stark bleakness of the background. Feempje, Geisha, Poop, have recurrent dreams about boats, but strangely, there do exist actual counterparts of these oneiromantic images; and these dissimilar individuals, each obeying different compulsions, visualize the same objects. Another theme is that of a promenade in a carriage along the seashore which Poop had taken forty years before (and since forgot about) with Koetge, who was then his mistress and has since become a dope peddler. This promenade which has always retained for her the pristine freshness of purest ecstasy, becomes the envy, approaching obsession, of various sordid characters who have no similar recollection to sustain them in their human condition. As the ice and snow melt, as the threat of plague lessens, as spring renews the blatant, buoyant commercialism of the neighborhood, some die because of the plague, some succumb to the rottenness within them—but all feel, before their death, the latent presence of an unrealized ideal. Just as in Ténèbres Mallepate was an asymmetrical double of Marrières, so Poop was attempting to dispossess Geisha of her own individuality and to project into the adyta of her heart his own bizarre thoughts and aspirations. If this could be accomplished, then one would indeed be both a split personality (with, in this case, the other half assuming mortal risks) and a dual personality living narcissistically with and in the projection of oneself. The same problem of "doubling" would insatiably absorb Carco's literary efforts again and again. In L'Homme de minuit, he attempts once more to circumscribe the affinities and influences of two corporeal entities which form but a single soul. For his puppets he uses an acrobatic team, Jim and Jimmy. Their routine achieves high comedy through the strenuous, serious efforts of two contrasting types to be of

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mutual help: the more each strains to adjust to the intents of his partner-adversary, the more he impedes the other and counteracts the other's endeavors. Professional success demands perfect secret harmonization and the equilibrium of exact reciprocity. Neither one, though each was previously a solo artist, can realize his full potentialities, can achieve subtle balance without the complementary weight of the other. Physically, mentally, temperamentally, they are contrasts which, like opposing poles in a magnetic field, generate and define a dynamic current. Jimmy is short, ugly, brutal, uncouth, sordid; Jim is tall and slender, handsome, conciliating, softhearted, ethereal. Endowed with greater sensitivity and sensibility than his partner, he is dominated by Jimmy. The latter is the unidentified man who, at midnight, has strangled for gain a dissolute, elderly beggar, Mme. Paul, in the cellar of the vaudeville house, and has given part of his loot to his uncomprehending associate. By this act Jim becomes his tacit accomplice, for he soon learns, and conceals from the police, that his partner is the murderer. But this event has a profound effect on them both. Though it does not change on the surface the habitual tone of their relationship, they are both committed, like two men carrying a load of nitroglycerin, to adjusting to and compensating for each other's stability. As time goes by, it is Jim who must bear on his frail constitution the greater part of the load, for Jimmy reacts with stupid directness to every disturbing hazard. Aside from the expected routine police investigation, these hazards include a blackmailing journalist, a confused, spiteful, undetermined witness, and, especially, the perplexing, psychically unbalancing presence of Mme. Paul's forlorn husband, Jules Auguste Fredin. It is the latter who, ingenuously, by his timeworn plaints of his cuckoldry, acts as a springboard for the series of events leading to the couple's downfall. But Fredin is unaware of his influence, and he is too ridiculous to arouse our sympathy.

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The creation of Fredin is obviously a less successful attempt by Carco to introduce into his fiction another character who, like Mallepate and Poop, dominates the situation and acts as a psychic sounding board creating an atmosphere of the unexpected, the bizarre, the irrational. Although his long soliloquy does create a certain malaise, he never completely determines the movement of the story's emotional trajectory. Much more effective is the contrasting blend of the realistically described locale, the Rue de la Gaité in Montparnasse, and the portrayals of Jim, always presented as acting in a dreamy, narcotized state. This unreal condition exists both in the aura Jim elicits in his role in the acrobats' act and in his tortuous gropings while off stage. The contrast is all the more effective in that the scenes themselves—their performance, the theatre, the neighborhood, the murder, the secondary characters, etc.—are described with precise naturalism. It becomes more and more apparent that Jim's grasp on reality is increasingly tenuous and destined to failure before the imposing concrete task of concealment. We sense, too, that Jimmy is also the longprepared victim of an inexorable fate which will crush his simple brutality before its exigencies. Once again Carco has examined dispassionately, while arousing excitement in the poetry of their movements, the agitations of sure victims. Carco had been interested in the music hall since the time when he used to frequent the Cirque Medrano with Colette, Picasso, René Bizet, Pierre Mac Orlan, and André Salmon. At the beginning of 1936 he was offered an interesting contract to sing at the Noctambules, a café whose entertainment was largely by chansonniers. Whereas the latter achieved their success by satirical parodies on the political and sensational events of the day, Carco's performance was the rendering of some of his own songs, popular street airs, and tough refrains like the marching song of the Bataillon d'Afrique. This em-

CARCO W I T H GERMAINE, HIS FIRST WIFE, PIERRE MAC ORLAN, PIERRE BENOIT, AND J E A N MARÈZE ( H I S YOUNGEST B R O T H E R ) , AT SAINT-CÉRÉ, IN 1 9 3 1

CARCO W I T H E LIANE NÉGRIN, HIS FUTURE W I F E , IN EGYPT, C. 1 9 3 3 BY STUDIO BÉLA, CAIRO)

(PHOTOGRAPH

ABOVE: "LA

CARCO AND HIS POODLE, O. K . , AT

P L A N Q U E , " L'ISLE-ADAM, IN

(PHOTOGRAPH

BY J E A N

MARIE

1946 MARCEL) ;

R I G H T : CARCO AND HIS W I F E IN T H E GARDEN OF

"LA

PLANQUE"

IN

1948

L E F T : CARCO AT AN ART E X H I B I T (PHOTOGRAPH FROM RIGHT:

CARCO LEAVING MONTMARTRE

(PHOTOGRAPH

BY ZALEWSKI,

IN

Erasme,

FOR HIS H O M E

Images du Monde,

MAY-JUNE

ON T H E I L E DECEMBER

1946);

SAINT-LOUIS

22, 1949)

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ployment enabled Carco to secure at first hand technical knowledge for his as yet unannounced novel.13 Perhaps he will some day utilize his first-hand knowledge of the cinematic world for his fiction. Not only have films been made of Prisons de femmes, L'Homme traqué, and L'Ombre, but Carco has also worked on the scenarios of Paname and Paris-Béguin. He has also acted in some of his adaptations for the cinema. In 1932 Carco was promoted to the rank of officer in the Legion of Honor. (Seventeen years later he became a Commander.) He celebrated by becoming gloriously drunk. The discreet and tolerant police found him wandering around Montmartre, attired only in his shorts, brandishing a revolver, and threatening to shoot a restaurateur against whom he had a momentary alcoholic enmity. Such activities are somewhat disconcerting when thought of in conjunction with the rumors that Paul Bourget had been proposing to sponser Carco as a candidate to the Académie Française. Perhaps Carco himself had envisaged this possibility, and there is no doubt that he had always had a vivid feeling of admiration and indebtedness to the illustrious academician. Indeed, Bourget's name was mentioned by reviewers in their estimates of Carco's latest works. But with Bourget's death, in 1935, there seemed little likelihood that that conservative academy would proclaim officially its appreciative recognition of both Carco's life and fiction. There still remained a possibility of election to the rival academy founded by the Goncourts in opposition to the—as they believed— moribund "forty immortals." In 1937, when Gaston Chérau died, Carco's chances of election to replace him were abetted by the fact that the members included his friends Dorgelès and Ponchon as well as others sympathetic to him, such as Rosny and Descaves. In Carco's favor, too, was the fact that

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his works were contemporary, vigorous, fresh. Nor was his appreciation of La Fille Elisa a handicap, for he had praised its realism, its psychological penetration, its justness. But, on the other hand, twenty years earlier Carco had denigrated the value of the Goncourt Academy awards; and there was also the sentiment that, as a successful, matured writer, he did not need the nomination, which should go to a younger, less well-known, less established author. But Carco did secure the nomination 14 and took his place among this very influential, publicized group. Afterwards, Carco was to sit on many juries to decide awards for both prose and poetry. 15 Yet there could be no doubt that, though he was well-known

CARICATURE BY AVIL IN DECEMBER 2 3 ,

Comoedia, 1924

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to the public, he was still adding to the overt, personal delineation of his temperament, convictions, and experiences. So rich and varied was the information he revealed that readers of his memoirs should either have revised the notion of a Carco uniquely the exponent of the pègre or should have hesitated to categorize so complex a person. De Montmartre au quartier latin had already (in 1927) confessed Carco's helplessness before the attraction for him of degradation, especially his own: Renouant avec des filles perdues des relations dont j'eusse peut-être rougi, je me débattais dans l'ivresse, le dégoût et un affreux tourment. Plus j'allais et plus ce tourment augmentant, je me sentais la proie de mes tristes habitudes. Toutefois ce n'était pas que ces filles que j'aimais, mais d'abord les rues noires, les hôtels, les débits, le froid, la pluie fine sur les toits, les bars, le hasard des rencontres et, dans les chambres, un air de navrant abandon qui me serrait le cœur. Ce décor si tragique par les nuits d'hiver, si sombre, si pathétique m'envoûtait et me procurait à la fin de telles sensations que, parfaitement insensible à d'autres attraits que les siens, je m'enivrais comme d'un vin âpre de ma propre infortune. 16

Maman Petitdoigt (1920) had disclosed some of the factors contributing to such intense delectation in self-inflicted pain. Mémoires d'une autre vie (1934) and A voix basse (1938) continued those revelations, and discussed early influences while expatiating on his soulful response to nature. Montmartre à vingt ans ( 1938), Envoûtement de Paris ( 1938), and Bohème d'artiste (1940) repeated, supplemented, and set in new perspectives the data and confessions of the previous memoirs. Roughly chronological, Carco's memoirs interknit factual relation, literary discussion of technique and intent, selfanalysis, and poetic evocations. A blend of fact and fancy, his memoirs are perhaps the richest of his writings, and surely, in his works, outstandingly affecting. In this multiple effort to

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a r r a c h e r à ses p r o p r e s refoulements, toute espèce de réflexions, de sentiments, d'images, dont la présence au f o n d de chacun de nous constitue une seconde v i e — 17

Carco seeks less the precise, objective fact than the illuminating or seminal. Attentive as he is to exactitude of detail, he is, as ever, seeking the evocation of verisimilitude—if need be at the sacrifice or deformation of ostensible truth. The exact truth of particular statements may be questioned, yet the total effect is credible; should we judge the ana of his memoirs from the standard of artistic fiction, then indeed he has fabricated, in the variety of leitmotifs, some of the most subtle and intricate textures of his art. The publication, in 1939, of the " c o m p l e t e " edition of Carco's poems should likewise have altered the popular, caricaturish image of Carco the publicist of Montmartre's denizens and of the milieu s fauna. Here was a concomitant confession, in verse, of his formative aspirations, of his bohemianism—instinctive, literary, and idealistic—and of bis attitudinal toughness protecting too sensitive a heart. Shifting from inherent melancholia to ecstasy at the beauty of nature; reveling in the joys of the senses, only to learn that sensations may be mocked by sentiments; pretending cynicism only to find L ' h e u r e amère des poètes Q u i se sentent, tristement Portés sur l'aile inquiète Du désordre et du tourment, 1 *

Carco would discover that he could not escape from himself or from his past. Delighting in the sweet hurt that " T o u t est gâché, tout est perdu . . . chagrins intimes," he was haunted by phantoms—which he himself sought out—for in their comp a n y he would never be alone. Obsessed by the Doppelgänger of the shades of his friends and the shades of his fictions, he would confess to " L ' O m b r e " 19 and " A l ' A m i t i é " : 2 0

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Ton ombre est couleur de la pluie, De mes regrets, du temps qui passe. Elle disparaît et s'efface Mais envahit tout, à la nuit. 21

At the outbreak of World War II, Carco was living at L'Isle-Adam, about twenty-five miles from Paris. (He had been divorced from his first wife, and married Eliane Négrin in 1935.) There, in the country of Gérard de Nerval, he could feel closer to the presence of the poet whose evocation would serve as a sort of recurring theme in Mortefontaine.22 There he could recall in tranquillity his early adventures and the Paris he had known before World War I. Too, after a short trip he could be in the capital to deal with business matters or to see old friends. With the German sweep across France, the armistice found Carco within the occupied zone. The outer form of life soon resumed a certain order and stability, since the conquerors were very anxious to have things appear as cordial and as normal as before the war. But Carco ceased all active literary output and did not publish anything in the various organs controlled by the servants of the New Order. As a member of the Goncourt Academy, he resisted the incorporation into that body of people like Pierre Champion and Sacha Guitry. He felt that Champion, as mayor of Nogentsur-Marne and member of several political bodies, did not satisfy the stipulations of Edmond de Goncourt, although he, Carco, had felt close to and dedicated a volume to Champion. Sacha Guitry was persona non grata to Carco because his art, although brilliant on the surface, was in no way the sort of thing that the Goncourt brothers would, he felt, have wanted to have rewarded, and moreover Guitry was suspected of being a collaborator. 23 Carco himself did not apparently take any active part in the organized or individual resistance to the invader. He was in sympathy with men like Jean Dorsenne, who wrote and dis-

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seminated polemical literature against the Germans, and who lost their lives in the service of their patriotism and their beliefs. He knew that some of his friends would be harassed and perhaps put in concentration camps. Yet the presence of the conquerors had obliterated that atmosphere, that mentality, which made Paris and things French so dear to Carco. Refusing all of the attractive offers which the Germans made him, Carco joined the flow of refugees heading away from the occupied zone. He went to the south of France by way of Rodez and settled in a hotel in Nice. There, without the funds which were blocked in Paris, in order to earn a living he became once again a café entertainer. He sang nightly in various cabarets his own and other songs and popular tunes. But after the Germans found that they had lost the French fleet, they took over the entire country. There no longer was a " f r e e " and an occupied zone; all was German. Carco wished to escape from this surveillance, this environment whose air suddenly seemed to him unbreathable. He went to Switzerland. In order to leave France he had to use the services of a former pimp who had influential government connections and who was able to get for him and his wife the indispensable passports. Carco settled in Geneva. He was an expatriate. Carco did not like the Swiss. He found them too prudent, too shrewd, too cold. They had taste and comfort, but they lacked spontaneous, disinterested affection for things aesthetic. He felt that the Swiss bought paintings and illustrated books and rare editions only, or rather especially, as an investment. The emphasis for them was on the return for the risk taken in purchasing an objet d'art. While in Switzerland, waiting for the day that he could return to France, whose shore was visible on the other side of the lake, he contracted for several de luxe editions and began once again to write. Carco first completed Surprenant procès d'un bourreau, which he had begun before his flight from Paris. 24

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This work goes back to another time, to the fourteenth century, when France was shaken by marauding bands of English freebooters. Ostensibly based on documents found in archives, it relates the story of a hangman who is, in reality, a woman. This is discovered at the examination of a spy who is also a procuress. The locale is really Villefranche-de-Rouergue, although Carco assigns the name of Vorle 25 to the town. This work, although it was conceived before the war, has an atmosphere of hate and violence and blood and immediacy which blends the past and the present in a fervor of terror and of sanguinary lust. Though the affabulation is completely convincing in its judicious use of specific historical references (some invented, some identifiable), the terror which finds its echo in the reader is a repercussion of this last war. As the war continued, Carco gave himself up more directly to his fascination with death. His next work was again a return to the past, this time a learned and poetic musing about the dance of death, and how its portrayal on the walls of cemeteries exhibited the spiritual state of the people. But if Carco's primary concern is with what such a spectacle might have meant to Villon, he seems at the same time to be looking for the modern counterpart of the same problem—the ever-present fear of death. As soon as it was possible to travel freely, Carco returned to Paris. He was welcomed there by his friends and by colleagues of both the Right and the Left; by those who had made a name for themselves or enhanced their name by an active part in the Resistance; by those who had uttered no protest and taken no action whatsoever; by those who had made the dangerous mistake of subscribing to the innovations imposed by Vichy and Berlin. Carco did not cast any stones, nor did he alter his judgments on the basis of the war years. It is indicative, however, of the way in which his own actions, or the lack of them, 28 were judged, that the National Committee of Writers elected

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him to its board of directors. Through the shifting attitudes towards the problem of guilt and punishment, Carco has been reelected to the committee. Yet he does not belong to any political party and has not sought to surround himself with friendships which might be useful in critical times. He has been friendly to the Left and also to the enemies of the Left. The explanation for his silence during the war would seem to be that Carco himself felt that, regardless of his own sentiments, he was not a political writer. Apparently he did not engage in political polemics; he remained the artist. 27 For other writers Carco has represented the apolitical, the man who could not be held to account for not risking his person with the same intrepidity as some others. In 1945 the French were still hotly hurling accusations against the fainthearted and honoring the fighters of the Resistance. Various works had been or were being published to portray the difficulties and dangers and acts of the period of occupation. Carco, too, attempted to picture in Les "Belles Manières" the countercurrents, temptations, and responses of the public to the conqueror. With a strange choice of cast he scrutinizes particularly the reactions of a compromising Italo-French hotelkeeper, a well-to-do assimilated Jewish youth, a semiretired gangster, and a patriotic colored prostitute. The Germans are all stock, brutal martinets. Carco's thesis is that their behavior (the " B e l l e s Manières"), however proper and correct, could never be accepted unreservedly —they were intruders into a family for whom they would always have the status of strangers. The two strands which Carco weaves through this background are the gangster's accomplishment of a theft, and the Jew's course towards the assassination of a hated enemy. The first tale is a patch on the thematic tapestry; the other lacks general value as a picture of the spiritual purposes of the Resistance. Simon acts out of a petty personal hatred in a

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cowardly way—that is, he is neither willing to sacrifice himself for an ideal, nor is he thinking of escaping retaliation in order to be able to act again. Les "Belles Manières" is more effective than Vérotchka Vétrangère because of the wealth of precise notation but not superior in its presentation of ideological forces. He achieved much greater poignancy by the relation, in Ombres vivantes, of the deaths during the war years of dear friends. Max Jacob, because of Jewish ancestry, though he had become a Catholic, had died of ill treatment at the concentration camp at Drancy. Jean Dorsenne, active in the Resistance, had died in Germany. Carco's youngest brother, a journalist, song writer, and novelist who used the pen name Jean Marèze, had committed suicide over an unhappy love affair. He added their memory to the memory of those whom he had lost during the first World War—Jean Pellerin, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alain-Fournier. . . . To these comrades he associated the shades of his favorite poets: from Villon to the present their throng haunted him, to each he had given part of himself. Outwardly a powerful, sociable extrovert, Carco was in reality surrounded with intimate ghosts: "Et les morts sont bien morts quand même ils reviendraient." 28 His next novelistic effort brought him back to the world of Iiis creation, more real to him than historical reality. Ever since his early prose, Carco had been unable to rid himself of the haunting idea of the Doppelgänger. Sometimes it had manifested itself as an unseen presence. Unlike Peter Schlemihl's shadow, it could not be forsaken. Instead, the shadows of those he had loved or even glimpsed as representations of his own sublimated desires had come to follow everywhere in his train. Sometimes it was the grimacing caricature of what lurked in the locked storerooms of the subconscious, and sometimes the double was the counterpart of himself. Carco has become increasingly and more directly self-revelatory in

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his fiction, whether in novels, poetry, or memoirs. His latest novel, Morsure, is perhaps the most concrete presentation of this constant concern with a projection of one's self. For this attempt to penetrate the secret penchant of a person, Carco utilized once again the familiar voyou type. But this time the character (Jojo) is the dark mirror of an ingenuous boy (Georges) from a well-to-do, conventional family, who is irresistably fascinated by the underworld. Dans son amour malsain des filles, il entrait une peur mal définie de s'exposer à de mauvaises rencontres, la nuit, par des ruelles sordides où le vent, s'engouffrant dans les cages vitrées des réverbères, faisait s'entrechoquer des ombres sur les murs. Cette peur, cette angoisse lui étaient, le lendemain, délicieuses à savourer dans l'évocation des rues peu fréquentées. . . . Tout ce qui rampe, hésite, louvoie, ou cherche à se rendre invisible, dans la pénombre complice du porche d'une maison meublée ou d'une entrée d'hôtel, l'attirait, l'envoûtait. 29

By an amazing coincidence (to which an author has a right as the point of departure for a series of events, but which the reader may find it difficult to accept easily), Georges, who is subject to spells of amnesia and of hallucination, meets Jojo, his almost exact physical twin. Jojo uses Georges as an alibi: while Jojo is burglarizing a suburban villa, he has La Rouquine (his mistress) entertain Georges in a Montmartre night club, thus ostentatiously establishing his whereabouts. Jojo dominates Georges by force of personality and the allure of this type of existence. But Georges, still influenced by bourgeois scruples, is dangerous; Jojo intends to have him killed once he has served his usefulness. Georges is taken on the death ride by Jojo's mistress; but during the drive Georges's memory is restored by the familiar scenery. La Rouquine, sentimental because of the intimacy she has had with Georges, allows him to return to the haven of his home, family, social condition. This happy ending—unusual, if not exceptional in Carco's work—is an additional justification of the epigraph from Jean

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Lorrain, "Je ne corromps pas; je délivre." But surely the moral is implicit in the text itself, and the end of the story could just as logically see Georges pulled down, like his namesake in Rue Pigalle, into the whirlpools of the vicious environment from which he temporarily escapes. The plot, then, is in itself quite slight except for the genuine suspense, sustained to the end, as to Georges's immediate fate. The lasting magnetism consists in the contrast between a precise form and an elusive illusionary content. Whereas the dialogue is realistic in its up-to-date argot, and the functioning of Jojo's gang is detailed, the settings are lyrically described. The shifts of Georges's mind between superficial reality, amnesia, and hullucination induce our own bewilderment as to what is real. Carco is a sure guide; we follow him confidently, aware that without him we should be unable to extricate ourselves from this confusion of values. Morsure is Carco's latest published work. 30 The time has come, he feels, when the novel has lost its particular savor and value. He feels that it is poetry which has the greatest chance of enduring, and that it is poetry which contains the most inclusive and the most essential of a man. Concerned now more than ever, after an adventurous life and after a successful career, with what will subsist after him, he wants to offer it in its most polished form, that is to say, in poetry. But then, in his novels, in his essays, in his memoirs, he has always tried to convey the vision of the poet, and this has given them their particular cachet, their unique value for others. Carco will continue to write in various media (he is at present engaged on a novel, a volume of verse, 31 and his memoirs), but whatever the form, it will be his ability to say confidentially what are man's half-moods, ambiguous sentiments, and secret longings which will catch our ears and move our hearts.

CHAPTER

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IT IS of course impossible to know exactly what readings any individual has done, and especially to determineprecisely which books or authors incisively influenced him. In Carco's case, these influences can be fairly adequately determined by his own admissions as well as by the testimony of certain studies or references. It is quickly apparent that his interests, that is to say, those books for which he has felt an elective affinity, fit into a certain pattern. Carco as a youth supplemented—or rather, replaced—the standard education of the French schools by wide readings of his own choice; he was most influenced by authors not emphasized by the school administration. When he was about fifteen years old, he first became acquainted with Villon, who was to haunt him all his life. The figure and the personality, as well as the works, of the first literary mauvais garqon intrigued him passionately. The crux of his interest in Villon was the problem of how Villon became a poet in spite of his environment, and also how that environment was responsible for his poetizing. Carco has always been bemused by the attraction for Villon of vice and crime, which, according to Carco, lent to Villon's verse its most poignant accents: Villon the man, who engaged in activities inimical to society, produced Villon the poet, so dear to society. But the man and the

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poet cannot be dissociated into separate entities—the artist is not superimposed on the member of society, but rather grows out of, is sustained by the socially-conscious individual. The distress of the social delinquent becomes the very material of the artist. Carco believes that the key, if one be needed, of Villon's modernism, lies in his sincerity, in the human-ness of his autobiographical and spiritual confession. The complexity, the diversity and range of sentiment, their lyrical simplicity of expression, these bridge the gap between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries to make of Villon a completely modern man. Indeed, some critics have reproached Carco with minimizing the differences in environment and in atmosphere between the two epochs, and with assimilating Villon to the status (but not the stature) of the toughs Carco saw in Montmartre. 1 This criticism does not seem to be well founded. Carco's keen interest in defining Villon had led him to read Marcel Schwob, 2 Pierre Champion, 3 and the chronicles of the day, and to attempt to reconstruct the physical and psychological influences which may have impinged on Villon's temperament. Without in any way minimizing the less noble facts of Villon's sordid existence, Carco suggests that Villon has more than paid for them by the beauty which he created from that sordid life. Carco has repeatedly returned to the examination from divers angles of the figure of Villon. In 1912 he considered Villon as the pioneer of a tradition which would include Laforgue and Corbière and Rimbaud. 4 Fifteen years later he attempted a full-length fictional portrait of his hero's personality. Recently, he has examined the dance of death as it was represented on the walls of the Cimetière des Innocents, and at Basel, and elsewhere, to determine the psychological effect of one phase of medieval life on Villon. 5 Villon was intensely preoccupied with the fear of death; he lived with that fear f r o m childhood to the last known record of his life. Yet this spiritual burden did not curtail lawless activi-

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ties at the risk of his mortal safety. 6 There was still another current in Villon, that of violence. Surprenant procès d'un bourreau stems from Carco's interest in the spiritual climate in which Villon matured. He does not claim to have solved the conundrum of how Villon was able to create beauty from the stuff of an abject, dissolute, vicious way of life which differed only in his poetic production from that of other malefactors. But on the psychological level he does place the problem squarely on the question of how and why fleurs du mal should have been Villon's gift to all time. Le Roman de François Villon was criticized for its biased estimate of the forces which motivated Villon as well as for its somewhat thin factual background. (On the other hand, some believed Carco had chosen very deftly the indications which evoke the contemporaneous setting. 7 ) The other major criticism, that Carco has made a twentieth-century man of Villon, strikes more deeply at the heart of the problem. Has Carco seen Villon or has he seen himself in Villon? Undoubtedly he would answer that he has done both and has attempted to do justice to both. Each reader must decide for himself whether there are temperamental heights which remain essentially unchanged, with due allowance for the effect of a changing environment on men born into different periods. Carco would probably say that what Villon was is not the important thing ; what he is to us today is what counts. He believies it to be miraculous that in spite of conditions as they were in the Middle Ages, and in spite of the tremendous obstacles in the way, Villon became a poet—and even more, he became a poet who can be, and who is, completely modern. Carco also believes the work of the pedant to be of little value; what is ours is what we get individually from an author. The facts matter less than the climate of affinities which can be established. (It must, however, be borne in mind that Carco himself, concerned as he is with creating a certain climate for atmosphere,

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makes every attempt to have his décor achieve verisimilitude. It will not be surprising if some of his work remains of interest for the exactness of the settings, aside from their emotive or psychological value.) If Carco did not care for the routine study of the classics— which he knows—he did read for his own pleasure the poets of the Pléiade and the libertines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the time that he was taking lessons in prosody from Charles de Pomairols, he was already familiar with Du Bellay, Maynard, Guillaume Colletet, Théophile de Yiau, and those who were to be represented in the anthologies published by Lemerre and at Leipzig. 8 The closest friends of Carco's formative period were familiar with these authors who had attracted the attention of poets since the revival of interest in the poetae minores. Jean-Marc Bernard was to do an edition of Villon for Larousse; 9 Léon Verane was to edit the works of Saint-Amant for Gamier; 1 0 Jean Pellerin knew the more obscure works of the Pléiade; Paul-Jean Toulet knew and sponsored the ephemera of his beloved eighteenth century. Through his friends 11 Carco must have been introduced to many authors not generally known. The common denominator for most of these poets was humor. Sometimes it was sarcasm, sometimes the tone approached bitterness. Whichever it was, sincerity stamped the artfulness with the mark of authenticity. The point of the barbs was directed as much against one's self as against others. Better to jest, said the satiriques, than to weep—and if weep one must, then let the tears well from the heart. Eschewing grandiose terms, one is more likely to be truthful. Nature cares little for humanity; humanity should not be the dupe of its own assumptions of importance. A valuable catechism on duplicity was Choderlos de Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses. Carco's preface to a de luxe edition of this work 12 recapitulates the ideas expressed by Baudelaire

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in his essay, 13 De l'Education des femmes par Choderlos de Laclos. Laclos had unerringly disengaged and brought into the limelight the pettiness, the animality, the evil, of man's conduct. The subtitle of Les Liaisons dangereuses might well be: "A Demonstration of Egotism in Action." This work was particularly instructive for Carco in its portrayal of the innate state of combat which exists between the sexes and of the role that woman may play in the formation of man's personality. Carco may well have associated this surgical dissection of human psychology to the lesson he drew from Maynard's verse, "Entrez en plein jour au bordel." By this Carco understood that the company of women most familiar with the naked display of human conduct would be the most instructive and salutary of lessons. Through them one could form for oneself an opinion of life "which counts." The nineteenth century was perhaps the richest in exemplars for Carco. With romanticism, the emphasis had shifted from the general laws of psychology to the actions of individuals. The humanitarian current had found its subject matter in the study of the lower strata of society and in society's outcasts. The investigations of these two categories could be summarized as a study of the problem of suffering. In the case of the poor, the financially wretched, the exploited, they became the subject matter of the novel from Hugo through Maupassant and of poets like Jean Richepin in his Chansons des gueux and of Jehan-Rictus in his Soliloques du pauvre. These are studies of the victim abused, brutalized, dehumanized by a society indifferent to efforts. There developed a parallel current of the artist misunderstood by his environment and in rebellion against it. Gilbert and Hégésippe Moreau had died of starvation because a smug society was indifferent to the plight of the artist who had no means of livelihood other than the expression of his mind and heart. Corbière and Laforgue had succumbed to misery and illness; Rimbaud had fled to Abyssinia to escape

L E F T : PORTRAIT F R O N T I S P I E C E BY MAX JACOB FOR Au RIGHT:

PORTRAIT S K E T C H ,

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L E F T : PORTRAIT BY MAURICE ASSELIN USED AS FRONTISPIECE FOR L'Equipe

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L E F T : PORTRAIT, C. 1 9 2 5 , BY ANDRÉ DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC, FRONTISPIECE FOR THE CATALOGUE OF CARCO's COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS SOLD IN 1 9 3 5 ; PORTRAIT

COPPERPLATE

ENGRAVING

BY

PIERRE

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FOR

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RIGHT: aux

Dialogues des courtisanes de Lucien (EDIT, DU TRIANON, 1928)

L E F T : PORTRAIT FRONTISPIECE BY ANDRÉ (A LA CITÉ DES LIVRES,

1927);

DERAIN FOR La Bohème et mon cœur

RIGHT: PENCIL SKETCH, C. 1 9 4 9 ,

BY

CABROL

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the emptiness into which his iconoclasm was leading him. These figures represented on a mortal, physical plane the romantic concept of genius doomed to suffering because of the incomprehension of an insensitive society. Vigny had trumpeted his stoic determination to do without the plaudits and the recognition of his contemporaries. Musset had claimed that suffering itself was the mark of the superior soul, and that it was an end in itself, that the suffering of genius was its own recompense as well as its stigma. The greatest symbol and example in the nineteenth century was Baudelaire. The most lucid psychologist of his time, he was able to set down an ars poetica of individuality and of pain. Les Fleurs du mal, L'Art romantique, Les Curiosités esthétiques, were so many books of the new bible teaching the artists of the future to have faith in their genius and to not pay homage to the false gods of society. Their road to salvation would be the exploitation of the pain within their hearts, the exacerbation of their sensitivity, the unflinching rejection of the insult to their intelligence by their uncouth, complacently ignorant environment. Verlaine lacked the intellectual and theorizing ability of Baudelaire, nor did he have as complete and as determined a conception of the artistic craft. But Verlaine, an instinctive artist, had written some of the most subtly moving, insinuating poetry of all time. His life was, like Villon's and like Baudelaire's, an instance of disorder and of submission to irresistible instincts. He was another representative of the perturbing principle that genius is dependent on subservience to an extraordinarily domineering temperament which will not brook the barriers fixed by conventional conduct. Had Verlaine not become the slave of his passion for Rimbaud, he would most probably not have written his best work. It is notable that for Carco the Verlaine of Parallèlement is greater and more interesting than the one who expressed himself in Sagesse. Carco

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does not deny the genuineness of Verlaine's religious conversion, but he does not think it to be as significant, pervading, or characteristic as the sentiments which attracted him to the voyant. Certainly, Verlaine's religion did not keep him safe from the attraction of the green-tinted absinthe he so gluttonously absorbed, or the amorous attentions of convivial streetwalkers. Carco does not say that Verlaine 14 or any of hi9 predecessors were great because of their vices, but he implies that they had to be true to their vices in order to be great. 15 But it was not Villon, the libertins, and the poetes maudits alone who counseled and informed Carco on the joys and despairs of being "different." A group of French writers at the turn of the century, when Carco was just awakening to the demands of his physical maturation, had examined the psychology and the environment of vice. Maupassant could give him a dispassionate, objective picture of the mode of existence of women who earned their livelihood through the commerce of their bodies. Jean Lorrain discussed the same society but with much greater insistence on its perversion. Maupassant had given its geography, Lorrain gave its climate. The difference might be measured in terms of the temperaments of the two men. Whereas Maupassant was a highly sexed man, who sought out physical pleasures like a man with an unusually hearty appetite who might eat much more copiously than the average person, Lorrain was a gourmet who sought highly spiced dishes to please a palate for which ordinary fare had palled. Maupassant cultivated sensation, Lorrain, nuances of sentiment. Both men paid the price of their reason, condemned by the breakdown of the physiological structure under the effects of venereal disease incidental to their personal researches. Yet both had given a picture of that school in which Carco believed one would be best educated to form an appreciation of life. Of a similar sort are works like Le Putanisme d1 Amsterdam and Kuprin's Yama (the latter work is in the Maupas-

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sant tradition, the former a Dutch counterpart of Lorrain's approach), and Eekhoud's Libertins d'Anvers,19 If such personal details seem to confuse literature with private life, let us bear in mind that Carco himself has always asserted his interest in the personal experiences which influence the artist; he would not divorce that duality. Jean de Tinan, too, was indisputably a favorite tutor. 17 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this brilliant young writer (contributor to the Mercure de France) had been the chronicler of Parisian night life as well as of the undercurrents of the world of entertainment. Tinan, an extraordinary, precocious youth, found that by the time he was old enough to be judged a responsible citizen of society, his heart was already too old for a world which had lost its freshness. Instead of being thrilled by his first participation in adult society, he found to his dismay that cynicism and perverseness vitiated any spontaneous or pleasurable reaction. With bitter lucidity he looked within himself and around himself. All he could see was a shoddiness which belied its ostensible glamor. Sentiments were soon worn thin, pettiness lurked under supposedly ingenuous motives, generosity was sullied by the corruption of success. On a more cultured, literary, polished level, with a more debonair and clearly articulated style, Tinan was exposing the festering corruption which Lorrain had bared in the bordellos and in the social life of the Riviera. With pious integrity Carco would, a quarter of a century later, edit a publication of Tinan's chronicles, 18 which, except for the changes in the fashions of costume, and a less elegant manner of expression, could characterize the theatrical, circus, demi-monde, and vaudevillian world of the following decades. Carco would also be affected by the experiences of his most intimate friends. Jean-Marc Bernard knew well the bordellos catering to soldiers. Robert de la Vaissiere was indefatigable

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in discovering secretive, innocuous-appearing houses which specialized in satisfying unusual desires and, at one time, planned to do a work on the sexual life in the Parisian bathhouses. 19 Jean Pellerin frequented the capital's opium dens and had documented himself on the supplying of more or less virginal young womanhood. And no one except Carco—if even he be able—could enumerate the casual (but artistically fruitful) acquaintanceships, the indirectly received confessions and commentaries, the mass of information available to a specialist like himself. All such data, however, must be considered secondary to the artistic significance of the insights he acquired by personal reactions. In this connection might be mentioned a peculiarity in his choice of subjects for publication. Not only does he restrict himself to a certain category of material, but he also determines its value, on the basis of its evocative stimulation of himself. Those novelists of previous generations who have discussed some aspect of Paris—Zola in Thérèse Raquin and L'Assommoir; the Goncourt brothers, especially Edmond de Goncourt's La Fille Elisa;20 and Balzac—have had his suffrage. Among his contemporaries, in addition to the poètes fantaisistes, Carco has criticized favorably Binet-Valmer 21 and Charles-Henry Hirsch, 22 Pierre Benoit 2 3 and Pierre Mac Orlan 24 and Joseph Peyré. 25 He has written prefaces or introductory reviews for Louise Hervieu, 26 Pierre Varillon, 27 Théodore de Banville, 28 Noël Riïet,29 François Piazza, 3 " Jean Dorsenne, 31 Eugène Montfort. 32 He has also introduced to the public books by Jacques Chabannes 33 and Colette 34 as well as works on Montmartre and on the milieu and on slang by Paul Yaki, 35 Max Aghion, 36 Edouard Ramond, 37 Gaston Montho, 38 Jean Lacassagne, 39 and Pierre Devaux. 40 Many of these names are unfamiliar. Undoubtedly, some of these authors have their place in contemporary letters and

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may live still for posterity. What is remarkable is the absence of many names considered more important today. The explanation is probably that Carco has responded to the dictates of friendship in preference to dispassionate literary opinion. He is undoubtedly familiar with some part of the bulk of the yearly output, and has indubitably read, aside from the requirements of the various committees for literary prizes of which he has been a member, many of the books acclaimed by the regular critics. Numerous references in his memoirs attest to familiarity and close attention to the writings of his fellow authors. Yet because his value judgments are so fused with the ties of friendship and sympathy, Carco's encomia cannot be accepted completely. It is questionable whether the poètes fantaisistes group will eventually attain the stature its proponents hope for it (but Carco himself is much more modest and temperate in the game of general classification than some others). His art criticism is frequently illuminating and always interesting. And although in a good deal of art criticism he speaks in terms of pure painting and good techniques of composition (his was the original classification into periods of Utrillo's paintings 41 ), he tends to emphasize the effect of the personality of the artist. He is the sensitive and informed amateur who responds to a work of art on the basis of emotional apperceptions as the primary quality. His literary judgments, which often seek the person in preference to the artist, are too personal, too one-sided, to be considered first-rate criticism. While an author has every right to limit his own creations according to his abilities and his interest, he must have a more dispassionate opinion in essaying the evaluation of the work of others. Carco, however, does not always give unqualified support and admiration to those about whom he writes. He will sometimes say that the man is worth more than his work, or that his

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inspiration has run thin for part of his literary efforts. He usually states that he is examining the work or the author from a certain angle; the reader must bear this in mind in order not to surmise that the critic has lost perspective. On this basis, one may well believe that Careo is aware of the limitations of his criticism and of its small chances of enduring. When we know how important it is to Careo to please the public and to make a commercial success ( in spite of perfectly sincere and valid statements by him to the contrary), we understand how such a consideration would influence his choice of epithets. Carco's interest would seem to be to get a work and its author's name to the attention of the public. For it is the public which is the final arbiter. Yet he knows that popular success is no proof of true merit and believes that final values will lie in the hands of the happy few. One may say that he strikes an uneasy, temporary balance between immediate, practical considerations and the loyalties of artistic credo. Though Careo claims that he does not pass judgment on what he portrays, he does condemn or condone, if only indirectly. For whatever he describes he has seen one or many models and has faithfully attempted to be as accurate as possible. His first principle is to see squarely the truth of what is, but the second principle is to interpret correctly what he sees without prejudice. In this way he differs remarkably from the exploitations of naturalism, "ces triviales et grossières sensations dont la fin du naturalisme m'a toujours empli de dégoût." 42 The observation must be realistic, but the interpretation must be without a priori theories. The third concern is to create a mode of presentation which will reflect without deforming it the world which he describes. It is here that a sense of judgment and effect is most important; to select only those details which in themselves are true and which will give the impression of being true; to create an atmosphere which helps to visualize and to understand the

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action; to say only enough so that intuition will supply what has been only implied. 4 3 The method of procedure is then relatively simple. The vocabulary used must be faithful to the people who will employ it, wherefore the use of slang by those who normally speak it. The atmosphere is as important if not more important than any character. Their problems, their spiritual difficulties, their anguish, are portrayed against a background of rain and glistening streets, the lights and shadows of street lamps and flickering display signs. In a sense, the atmosphere creates the characters and describes them, and at the same time it is itself an actor in the drama. This atmosphere is almost always fluid, in half-tones, and has the subtle effect of creating malaise, of awakening in the reader the expectancy of some horrible event. It draws him into the orbit in which the personages evolve, and it makes him a party to the action and the mood. The creation of atmosphere as an inducement to and as a symbol of a mood is restricted to short scenes placed at the moment when the characters would logically be most aware of that atmosphere. The point of view is that of the character who feels and expresses for himself; when the author is, in his own name, one of the characters, he speaks only for himself. 44 But in actual practice Carco frequently indicates his own estimation of what he wishes to present with objectivity. This is mainly apparent in the choice of derogatory adjectives, or the frequent use of a particular word. In Jésus-la-Caille, Carco uses "vice" very frequently. In Images cachées, often the words "disgusting" or " f r i g h t f u l " or "vicious" entwine themselves around their nouns. Yet Carco claims not to be a moralist. He refuses to be called a moralist, for he aspires only to show what is. He feels that society is responsible rather than individuals, but that as long as society exists, certain types will

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exist; society can do nothing for them, nor can it change them. The implication seems to be that society should recognize its own faults and should not punish when it cannot help. It can, however, act more intelligently by recognizing, without hypocrisy, what the true situation is. Carco subscribes to the picture painted by Kuprin in Yama. It is man who is responsible for prostitution and vice and crime rather than those who earn their living in these occupations. Carco is a pessimist, though, in his belief that nothing will change, that nothing ever changes. 45 All that the individual can do is to try to fulfill himself by being whatever his nature intended him to be. Carco does not believe in progress or in the benefits of civilization. Indeed, his own work reveals a bit of rancor about mechanized progress, for he feels that the world of yesterday is being obliterated before it can permeate and enchant us with its charm. This is quite conceivable; he has always felt nostalgia for the past and for the experiences of a youth which seemed to have time for many activities and much deep feeling. 40 But if Carco feels that the world of yesterday, with its slower pace, was a more f r u i t f u l world, he has lost perspective by forgetting that his whole youth was an intense effort to become part of the present. After reading Baudelaire without quite knowing what modernism meant, Carco was a modernist. Though he found affinities in predecessors such as Villon and Laforgue, he also felt that many of those before his time were impediments from whom he had to break away. He wanted to find his own world in the present. When he first came to Paris to try for success, he made every effort to bypass those who were already situated. He could not accept the tranquillity and the judgments of his elders when they did not conform to his own personal values. He was always seeking what was new, strange and startling, and yet, too, comprehensible. On this basis, perhaps he should have adhered to the tenets of cubism. But because he esteemed the instructive above the analytical,

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the emotional above the mathematical, the "proven reasonable" above the abstractly logical, Carco remained somewhat conservative—he could not plunge unreservedly into newness for its own sake. Because he felt that there was a living, vibrant, valid tradition to which he could subscribe, he was proud to receive from Maurice Barrés the salutation, "jungamus dextras." 47 Carco has been called a modern romantic. There is no doubt that he had cultivated la petite fleur bleue of sentiment, and he is definitely in the romantic tradition. He has been classified among the exoticists and among the writers of a literature of escape. He is a romantic in his interest in the bizarre, the strange, the unusual. With romanticism there developed a sympathy for the rehabilitating value of suffering; for the man who suffers is superior to his environment, because it is the environment which has not properly appreciated his qualities. Carco has always cultivated his penchant for suffering and has proclaimed society's wrong in condemning those who do not conform to the norm. Romanticism has been defined as an attitude of sentiment, if not sentimentality. It is sentiment which is the keystone of Carco the man and of Carco the artist. Romanticism has always been concerned with the individual, and so has Carco. Romanticism has always had a soft spot for outcasts; Carco has specialized in their appreciation. Romanticism, if it has been optimistic in its ideal of human progress, has had an air of melancholy, le mal du siècle, and the leitmotif of pessimism. Carco is fundamentally a mélancolique. But where Carco differs from the romantics to whom he has acknowledged his indebtedness is in his love of tradition and of conciseness and the implication in his work of universality. Nor does Carco subscribe to effusive lyricism. He believes that one is entitled to that for which one has paid the price, and that nothing is worth great effort except honesty towards

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oneself. Carco would not ascribe unrestrained exclamations of sentiment to romanticism. He believes that to have been the vice of the late symbolists and that it was they who drowned the comprehensible in a sea of tears and of obscurities. Carco feels that the symbolists lost sight of what is human in the empty azure of effusive generalities. There is always in his work and in his intent the reference to the specific, the factual; the mood emanates from the fact, but the fact itself is not excised. His characters are individuals, but what is particular in them is also universal. 48 The composition is tight-knit, started right in the midst of a movement which is soon to reach its climax. The rhythm is swift. As soon as the inevitable has occurred, Carco is no longer interested in his story and ends it abruptly. There are few or no subsidiary plots, no attempt at brushing a larger canvas than the pochade. It is after this first draft that he retouches, fills in, deletes, and heightens the plot and motivation. But some of the works are hardly retouched at all. They retain a certain superficiality, a sort of awkwardness in expression and a looseness in composition. Several works on the pègre such as Images cachées and Traduit de Vargot are simply the minutes of his documentation on his investigations. They lack the polish and the firmness of his more concentrated works. The point of departure is always some concrete instance, a situation or a gesture which he has surprised. These minutiae work on his subconscious until finally they coalesce around the conception of a character or characters. 49 In order to give his personages a setting suitable to their way of life and their dispositions, Carco takes notes, consults photographs, and makes sketches of the locale in which they will act. When he has conceived the plot of his story, he sets himself to write. He writes with great rapidity, 5 0 attempting especially to se-

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cure first the quality of his protagonists. He communicates to paper in long self-interrogations what they are essentially like, with particular attention to the little characteristics which express themselves without forewarning. During the course of his recital, a secondary actor may suddenly become more and more important until he dominates the action and leads it where he will. The orientation of the book may thus be radically changed under the influence of its inhabitants. The author is the prisoner of his creations. Perhaps Pirandello would say that the author is the creation of his characters. As in real life (for the whole intent is to create believable individuals), they come into and leave the story without preliminary introductions. Any information about their backgrounds is offered incidentally through the portrayal of their environment and the sketchy thoughts or anecdotes which they share with the reader. They live almost exclusively in the present and are concerned especially with immediate problems. They think sometimes that they control their destinies and that they can plan for the future on the basis of their immediate situations. But fate is not to be denied. There is some factor which they have not properly judged or which is insidiously at work and which will be the director of the dance in which they are puppets. It is not the author who pulls the strings, but rather their fate. The general coloration of the works is sad, depressing, pessimistic. There are splashes of violence, the strong emotion of quick and brutal action. Carco's predilection is not, however, with his characters' actions, but with their impulses. One reason for his fascination with this world of criminals and parasites and profiteers on mankind's baser instincts is its elemental character. These people follow their instincts, though they themselves do not well comprehend what motivates them, nor can they express articulately why they act as they do. The science of their author is to make comprehensible what is obscure to them. He

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examines them with passionate interest, but he does not claim to be omniscient. There is much that remains obscure, unexplained. 5 1 In the case of the novels, this is exhibited in two ways. On the one hand, the characters lose themselves, lose their confidence in what they are, under the influx of a sudden invasion of moods and half-thoughts which they do not control. On the other hand, the precise and clearly defined contours of the story sometimes become vague and wavering: there are incidental situations which are not explained, whose position in the fabric of the story does not help to define the pattern. For instance, in the novel, L'Homme traqué, there is never any adequate explanation of why Lampieur has committed the crime, nor is there any explanation as to why he chose his particular victim. The end of the book is also arbitrary. It is simply a way of cutting off a recital the interest of which has been exhausted with the demonstration of what has occurred in the inner consciousnesses of Lampieur and of Léontine. One of the major characteristics of Carco's works is the quality of reverie. This state of dreaming pervades many of his books. It frequently destroys the time element, or rather warps it, so that the reader is not quite sure on what plane the action is taking place, at what time it occurs, and just what is real and what is imaginative. Even in a novel which must attempt to establish a certain world of reality, this contemplative, introspective quality may suddenly envelop the situation in a haze of thoughts and longings and psychic states which dissolve the action in their nebulousness. The cause of this is probably the intense effort of introspection which is at the basis of, and is concealed behind, the original comprehension of the work. This introspection operates on various planes. It may be simply literary recall or association, it may be the coupling of the past with the present, or it may be submission to the flow of thoughts which sweep the author into the irra-

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tional world of possibilities, that is, where he is no longer sure of what is factual and what is potential.52 In Carco's memoirs, the reader is first struck by the constant shifts in time and the constant juxtaposition by the author of personal experience and literary or emotional reminiscence. The reader may at first assume that he is in the presence of artistic arrangement, that the author is utilizing the product of education, both his own and that of the reader, to share actual experiences against a background of literary identification. Such a judgment is not quite fair. There is deliberate arrangement, the role of the artist is conscious, deliberate, perspicacious. But Carco himself has admitted, and it is evident from his works, that one does not easily distinguish verifiable reality from the offerings of a sensitive imagination; yet, when examined with biographical data in mind, it is ascertainable that, almost always, his work has a point of departure in reality. Any subsequent deformation is due to the temperament of the author without the aid of the artist. Carco dreams his works, they possess him more than he possesses them. Many of Carco's early prose sketches and some of the poems, too, deal with hallucinatory states. The later novels are prolongations of this same impulsion. Though Carco sets his stories against an objective background, and though he makes use of characters who have their prototypes in the world which they represent, and though he uses le document humain, that is to say, the confidences which he has received, he finds the development and the explanation of his characters' acts within himself. Carco's work is a series of communications with himself, the release to the public of part of his life-long introspection. But in his case, he has managed to achieve an amalgam of the naive and the fictional and the frankest confidences. There is a very great part of sincerity in his work. What is the fundamental purpose of this ever-deepening introspection? It is motivated by a natural tendency. But be-

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hind this penchant is his fierce determination not to be a dupe. Because Carco is fundamentally disabused, because he believes that one is essentially alone, this introspection has enhanced his literary morbidity. Carco's work is pessimistic; it does not offer any hope for a better world; his stories do not have a happy ending; they are more concerned with what is evanescent than what will be surely there tomorrow. His orientation is toward the past. Carco applies the same principles in his examination of the works of others. Time disappears for him. As he walks through the lower Latin Quarter, he can still see Villon walking around as he must have done in the fifteenth century. Every street, every house, every painting, is impregnated for him with the shades of the men who had seen them or created them. This sort of vision makes of Nostalgie de Paris at the same time an objective and a fictional, one might almost say, erroneous, work. When Carco crosses the Pont des Arts, he can visualize towers which were destroyed long ago; he can see a Place Maubert which no longer exists; he can see in an elderly, decrepit woman the spry young girl who was the toast of Paris. Because of this preference, Carco will accept explanations of phenomena which are not so convincing to more objective analysts. His inclination is to color in order to poetize. This viewpoint may result in distortion. For Carco there was no doubt that Tristan Dereme, whose life had been generally conservative, even bourgeois, must have suffered sentimental and financial agonies at the end of his existence. In presenting such an interpretation of the verifiable facts, Carco is the first to be seduced by his own nature. One can sympathize with such a temperament, one can profit by his poetic feeling of what is behind the surface, but certainly the surface itself is not accurately delimited by the way in which he informs us of the story. We are then in the presence of a dual rhythm: on the one

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hand, he attempts to strip away all that is conventional, all that is usually accepted tacitly without question; and on the other hand, by the deliberate cultivation of his own ego, by the attempt to exhaust the possibilities of his sensitivities, he goes into a region which cannot be exactly accessible to any other man. This vision of life is very personal, and yet, because it moves us so, must have a basis of common reality, that is to say, other more conventional men suspect within themselves the same depths and the hidden belief in the same truths. In addition to the horizons of natural inclinations, he has stimulated his view and pushed further the horizons through the use of artificial excitants such as ether, opium, and alcohol. If Rimbaud wanted to become a voyant through the ordered derangement of his senses in order to perceive new worlds, Carco wished to plunge deeper into the same world to discover new mysteries in it. Some of his works are hallucinatory in the sense that the action takes place as though under the effect of narcotics. In Rue Pigalle the two main characters are almost constantly under the influence of cocaine. As a result of the distortion, both visual and mental, created by the drug, large wax mannequins become actors, too, in the story. The tempo of Vérotchka F étrangère is speeded up by the characters' frequent use of morphine. As for alcohol, the ingurgitation of innumerable drinks paces most of his short stories and novels. All of La Dernière Chance is an investigation of the traffic in opium. Of these various stimulants, opium has been perhaps the drug best known to Carco, if only by examples. Robert de la Vaissière was already a regular smoker at Agen; Jean Pellerin had started to smoke while still at Grenoble. Carco has pushed the consideration of drugs to the point of almost daring to assert that they have helped to create certain literary works and are a sign of their times, that is to say, that each period in literary history is characterized by the more exclusive use

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of a particular stimulant. Doubtless, scientists will disagree with this notion. It is not, however, an apology for his own behavior that Carco is presenting with this theory, but rather, he believes, a more exact and true explanation of one of the factors in the contemporary temperament and literary production. For Carco the work of art has always been a sort of exorcism, as well as a way to live a multiple existence. It has been for him a way of self-analysis, a sort of long duologue whereby he could gradually delve deeper into the shadowy corners of his own personality. On ne s'analyse pas en vain lorsqu'on écrit. Tout s'éclaire dans ces moments-là. Tout remonte du fonds obscur de la conscience et prend vie. Des sentiments, trop longtemps refoulés, se font jour. Des passions se réveillent. Un monde, qu'on ignorait peut-être, émerge comme d'un mystérieux abîme et, sans que l'on en soit tout d'abord prévenu, une froide lucidité vous oblige à vous juger vous-même et détermine vos nouveaux actes. 53

But it has also been the opportunity to communicate himself more freely than one can generally do otherwise than by ait. No matter how frank, how honest, and how complete the display of himself, he has always sought for certain proportion and ordinance which have given to his works a form frequently called "classical." There is at the core of Carco a certain hardness, a certain courage, an integrity, which has not permitted him to succumb to the temptation of his own nature or of the outside world. Though he has engaged in various excesses and has sought sensations without the handicap of conventional morality, none has been able to hold him or to master him. The reading of his works sometimes leaves one with the feeling that Carco might easily, were it not for fortuitous chance, have become any one of many things—pervert, pimp, drug addict, spineless incompetent—yet this would be misleading. Carco never gave himself completely to anydiing except his

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ruling passion—art. He knew that he had a certain leeway and that time was on his side. He knew that, as a prerequisite to being an artist, he had first to satisfy his own curiosity and to fulfill his desires in order to be himself. If he had to find his characters in himself, he had also to find in the world outside their prototypes, some of whom might well be antitheses of his own nature. His characters are what he is not, as well as what he is.

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of Carco's work is that of life itself, from Instincts to Danse des morts and Surprenant procès d'un bourreau. The first works glorify the body and the senses, are sensuous. But very early the minor theme of regret for lost youth and sensation—"Où donc es-tu ailleurs que dans mes poèmes?" 1 —throbs mutedly through his work. The answer is still another demand on the body to feel. The early novels are stories of energy in action. With added years and a settling down, the emphasis shifts to the psychological and the reflective. Essays and/or observations such as L'Amour vénal (especially in its first form, "Chansons de Paris" 2 ) show this. And widi the latest work, the themes of death and violence are a curious blend of a physical set of values in decline and the more overt awareness that the body must die. No distinctly religious message is forecast, but there are religious undertones—the mention of the abbey of Bonnecombe 3 in the memoirs, the background of Danse des morts, the setting of Surprenant procès d'un bourreau-, Carco, the modem sophisticate, does not accept, yet he is moved. The influence of today's events is not to be minimized for giving impetus to this progression. His previous work, his bohemianism, his cachet in literature would also act as a brake to slow down this trend from T H E CURVE

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the picturesque towards the spiritual, the documentary towards the personal. Thus we continue to have the underlying pessimism of his work and the feeling that the individual must somehow hew out his own little niche within his stratum. Though fearing death, Carco has always been attracted to it. As with Villon, this fear of death is one of the leitmotifs of his work. Ever since his earliest years when he could hardly make sense of overheard remarks (for they were beyond his referential experience), Carco has had examples of man's revulsion to death. Even then he must have been impressed by the tremendous impact that instances of death had on those who were forfeiting life as well as on those who witnessed or heard of its loss. His reaction to stories of death must have been conditioned by the horror-laden tone in which they were told. And, too, must he not have remarked (as evidenced by his recollection of the death speech of a criminal in distant Noumea) that because man fears crossing the threshold of his living world into the black outer world, he attempts desperately to leave part of himself behind within the visible familiar scene of his physical life. And although Carco was impressed by the Kanakan offhandedness about death, he also had examples of despair at the parting of close friends. Even so early he was made aware that uprooting, separation, displacement—these are forms of death. The immediate, the inference might be, has no projection beyond the moment of its existence. Death is, indeed, a destroyer of this only world. As a child, he used to love those periods of depression and of illness when he had to remain in bed. In the hot, close atmosphere of the sick room, with a hushed stillness around him, he would feel himself drained of all animation. He would feel himself dissolving into nothingness, losing the consciousness of being. There was a voluptuous feeling in covertly following the progress of this process of dissolution.4 Later the death of friends had the consolation that they had

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ended the struggle with life. Those works in which poets have cried out their pain at loss are the most cherished by him. Carco has always felt that nothing is so dear that it cannot be renounced, and indeed, the wrench of parting is an additional thrill. The notation by Toulet, "Today was almost happy," 5 is one most cherished by Carco. The lines by Villon, in his "Belle leçon aux enfans perduz," Beaulx enfans, vous perdez la plus Belle rose de vo chappeau,

come tirelessly to mind. When he is unable to wrench someone from the path of damnation, there is a secret relish in his failure to alter the inevitable course of events. In La Rue Carco tells us that he is basically more concerned with the tenacious clinging to a course of action which will lead to heartbreak and to death than in really saving the condemned. The problem of man's reaction in the face of the inevitable still deeply concerns Carco. In his earliest work the portrayal of death was presented in such a way that the lighting was on a hinterland of death, free momentarily, but rapidly spinning into death's realm. That is, the illumination was on the action leading to death. With such an intent we would get, and do get, very realistic, active tableaux of the act which precedes physical trespass. In the latest work on this subject, La Danse des morts, the illumination is from behind the shoulder of the onlooker onto the path ahead. The emphasis is on the domain of death itself. And so we have not so much the physical movement as the psychological and temperamental reactions to the belief in death. In a work like La Danse des morts, the author attempts to show a preoccupation with death in French society of the fifteenth century and the effect it must have had on Villon. As for Carco himself, he has always stated very baldly that the thought of death terrifies him. At no time has he offered the religious consolation of a hereafter.

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Yet, in compensation for this morbid view of things, Carco has made almost a fetish of friendship; he has devoted some of his most moving works to the evocation of friends. Indeed, he feels that the only triumph over death, the only prolongation of life offered to man is through the memory that he leaves behind him. This ties in with his emphasis on interest in the personality of the artist and the attempt to assert an individual personality. The dead are always with us from this point of view. This affinity with the beyond and the departed is not restricted to friends. It extends to those anonymous predecessors who have lived in the same rooms, seen the same sights, and perhaps experienced the same emotions as he. He has more and more intensely sought what is human in a place or in a work. He tells us that hotel rooms have played a great role in his life. As he has said, when he enters a hotel room, which is his only for the moment, and drops his small change on the false marble mantlepiece, the ringing of the coins underlines the fact that he is alone and that he will pass from that room just as the sound of the coins dissolves in the air. That is real, but at the same time he knows that many, many other men have made the same gesture in the same place and perhaps have had the same sentiment.8 That community of act and of feeling is a bond with the past and is one of the few truths which cannot be destroyed. For this same reason Carco has always been very fond of brothels. In a bedroom where one pays for what one receives, there is no hypocrisy, there is no deceit (he says) about what one is getting, and yet, to his imagination, there still remains in the atmosphere of this venal room the passage of other men with their aspirations and their defeats. This has given him comfort in that he feels himself akin to them. It has also brought him despair in the sentiment of the loss of everyone and everything. The subtitle "le Gout du malheur" could well serve as the generic title for all his works. His absorption in misfortune is emphasized by his rapture with a favorite saying of Paul

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Bourget, "il faut que la plaie saigne." Just as to counteract a shocking hurt, one presses heavily on it or attempts to anesthetize one pain by another, so Carco seeks to joy in hurting himself. He cannot allow things to be as they are. He cannot stand a placid routine. There must be excitement, there must be grief, there must be exposure to suffering. If, on the one hand, this conception is an artistic technique for ascertaining the limits of human endurance, it is also a natural proclivity on his part. Carco would maintain that, in the first place, one is entitled to be whatever one is, and, secondly, that it is not to recognize life for what it is to be either complacent or optimistic or positivistic. He knows that life cannot be dammed up behind a barricade of desires. The sense of destitution, while it is natural to his temperament, he has carefully nurtured. Because of the pain of loss he has attempted to cultivate a sense of non-possessiveness. This attitude does not imply cynicism and indifference. It is a defense mechanism on the part of one who is too sensitive, too confiding, too loving, and who has been hurt by the inherent evanescence of the moment. Although from the earliest time of recollections a pessimist in the sense that he recognized man's inability to fix the fleeting, he is an optimist in that he believes in the glory of possession —what one has assimilated is unalterable, ineradicable. And so there is a duality of comprehension of life ; on the one hand the ability to relinquish, on the other hand the ability to recall. If the latter ability is limited to the experience of the individual, still it has made bearable the individual's life, which, too, will eventually fall into the huge abyss of nothingness which is death. If Carco has professed the motto, "Il ne faut pas être dupe," by which he means that one must not deceive oneself, he has no confidence that intelligence is the instrument whereby to safeguard oneself from that pitfall. His work is a long paean to instinct. Carco believes individual salvation is to be found

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in obeying one's instincts. The title of an article, "Intelligents? Pas si betes!" 7 is very significant. Carco has always been suspicious of intelligence; he believes it to be limited and deceiving. Instinct, on the contrary, is that which is spontaneous and natural—in conformity with our most intimate being. By obeying instinct, one is oneself. Carco's characters have problems because their instinct cannot tell them how to cope with situations for which they have no experience, no sense of values. This inability to know by an inner compulsion what to do upsets their equilibrium and forces them into expedients which lead to their destruction. In the case of Bouve, the hero of L'Equipe, he manages to escape the danger by shutting out the disturbing factors and by returning to his habitual modes of action. As for Milord, in Les Innocents, his tragedy is that the war has frustrated his normal course so that, in the end, he has to assert himself by what, at first, seems to be a completely unmotivated act. But that act (the slaying of Savonnette, who has just strangled Winnie) is as logical and as motivated as the determination of Stendhal's Julien to go to his death. This conception is in line with the contribution of Bergsonism which showed at the beginning of the century the limits of intelligence and of the conscious will and revealed the complexity of the subconscious life, which would find its proper expression only through intuition or instinct. But Bergsonism did not fully satisfy the inquiring, logical French mind, nor could it negate the importance accorded to the will. Among the contributions of Russian literature had been the evocation of the mysteries and the complexities of the subconscious and also the foreboding sense of man's struggle with an implacable destiny. Carco enhanced his natural tendency to see things darkly by steeping himself in writers whose views were morbid, whether a Dostoyevsky and a Gorki, or a Laforgue and a Jean Lorrain. Carco could be classified as a pessimistic writer. For Carco,

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one cannot escape one's destiny, one is foredoomed. Man has a limited control over his l i f e ; he cannot change it as he will. A l l conspires against him, externally and within himself; he is a double victim of what might be termed the "historical force" (society, environment, tradition) and the weaknesses and shortcomings of his own character. There is not much grandeur in people, and they are still further cheapened by pettiness. On the surface it would be possible to confuse this pettiness with conformity to instinct. The distinguishing sign is that pettiness is coupled with fear, whereas instinct involves the whole pattern of the personality. In the case of Carco's characters, instinct often reflects itself in an act of courage, for they are by nature violent, extreme, and belligerent. A woman, while aggressive herself, is subservient to her man and proud of his aggressiveness. And though the characters are cunning and use all sorts of subterfuges to gain their ends— since their instinct, based on the world to which they were born, suspects the police—the use of the police's services constitutes an act of betrayal. Sometimes the police intervenes as the tool of fate. This does not signify the intrinsic superiority of the forces of order nor the triumph of the individual who has brought about their intrusion. Because of the peculiar code and the framework of the criminal society, the police represents fate; but this function of a social agency does not involve any moral judgment (as when a conventional member of society believes that police action represents the just chastisement of an immoral act). We know that f o r Carco reason is not a reliable thread through the maze of life, for reason sacrifices the individual to some arbitrary misconception of what l i f e means. But, on the other hand, we know that for him instinct cannot withstand the inexorable force of society. Fatality is the destruction of the individual devoid of weapons strong enough to repel this stronger enemy. The drama lies in the conflict with this fore-

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gone conclusion. In this comprehension of fatality we have a Greek, or classical, understanding of fate and of tragedy. The difference can almost be measured in terms of social emphases. Carco selects "ignoble" characters as his protagonists, yet their conflict is no less meaningful for them than the struggle of the well-born. For modern man, Carco's characters, who are not on so lofty a level as required of the heroes of classical drama, may even bear the identification of a closer kinship. 8 In Carco's early work fate is indicated by the ironic presentation of the innate inability of one person to be understood intimately by another. But this feeling is accompanied by the irrational sentiment that Carco has been able to penetrate to the core of the situation. This is done through the sacrifice of comforting illusions. An early example is the sketch, "Printemps." 8 We are introduced to Carco himself and to a hotblooded, easily accosted female. The two climb a hill. The air is heavy with a perfume of vegetation fermenting under the direct rays of the southern sun. There on the brilliantly lit hilltops, Carco feels himself drawn into the heat of the sunlight and made one with all nature spread out to the distant horizon. This identification with the earth and the air sharpens his desire for his companion at the same time that it associates her with the fertile land. Overflowing with the intensity of his emotion, he turns towards her to increase even further his ecstasy by sharing in what he feels must be her similar emotion. He finds her absorbed in making her sensitive gums bleed with the sharp prick of a stalk of grass. In self-protection, to cover up too sensitive a heart, the shield of irony is employed. The same motif runs through many of the poems of La Bohème et mon cœur. It would be wrong to assume that apparent insouciance and bravado are the results of ignorance; rather it is the sprightly tune of a man who decides that the way to his death is cheerier when skipped along with a tune on his lips than when dragged out by a solemn and measured tread. He

186

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never was to lose sight of this same recognition of underlying values, which in his lastest works revealed itself more directly. The direct sight of the death grimace in La Danse des morts is simply a more overt demonstration of the concern which motivated the jingling song and dance of Pierrot and Harlequin. As the years have gone by, anxiety has sharpened the artist's pencil to write more directly about man's inescapable fate. The curve to be followed is the progression from instinct to violence to fatality to compensations to the inevitable. Carco tells us that instinct, or intuition, is the only reliable guideline for living. Intelligence, or reason, will not direct life. Instinct, when trapped by life, resists violently, but it fails to alter the implacable outcome—man is doomed to his fate; there is no escape. But there are certain possibilities for enriching life. First, one must not work from false standards. Second, one must be worthy of, and capable of, accepting and exacting life's potentialities. One must have paid a price to know what values are. One of these values for Carco is friendship, and it is friendship on the basis of the sharing of experience and a fundamental similarity of character. This is not confined to the living, and so another value is self-identification with a tradition. Since men of a certain temperament are fundamentally alike in any age—regardless of social, historical, and material changes—one becomes a link in a chain of being which exists throughout the history of a people. One identifies oneself with those other personalities, whether they be painters of one's own generation or writers of previous generations. It is by creating for oneself a personality and by recognizing the individual personality of others that one makes a tangible mark which may leave an impression. But since man in his body does perish, he must put himself in a state of grace for his end. By a state of grace, Carco means a reconciliation between the individual overwhelmed by the tidal wave of his times and the possible fulfillment of his individuality. By accepting fully

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the imperious dictates of his nature, the individual, who is of his time, has the possibility of riding its crest. He will have recognized his limitations, linked himself with what has remained vital, and by his strong attitude remained true to his own position in the eddies of anonymity. He and his work will have durability. If it were necessary to compose a schema of contemporary French literature, what would be Carco's position? He would not be considered a writer of the first rank. Carco has specialized to too great an extent in a society which is thought to be atypical, unusual, and, for some, unworthy of major consideration. Unlike the practitioners of the roman-fleuve, he does not try to give a panorama of a whole period, nor major and minor social values. He does not propose overt philosophical debates ; he is not the professor of a modus vivendi. Carco does not present the problem of man's human condition against a background of political, economic, or social forces. Unlike a Gide or a Mauriac, he does not consider the religious significance of sin. Nor can Carco claim to be the exemplar, like Proust or the surrealists, of distinctive psychological and aesthetic principles of such magnitude that they become the cynosure—for a while—of man's quest for determinations in art. When Carco made his formal début with Jésus-la-Caille (after having won at least a succès d'estime with La Bohème et mon cœur), he fixed critical and public attention on that sort of work. Generally speaking, one may well say that, except for some critics (such as Henri Martineau 10 and André Rousseaux, 11 especially), he has suffered from, and been bound by, that early appreciation which emphasized the subject matter itself, though recognizing a personal, poetic treatment of it. Later, after World War I, when interest shifted to the experimental, Carco was largely by-passed as a producer of standardized literature having no immediate appeal for a new

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"M.

FRANCIS CARCO'S

BY CARLO RIM

READERS,"

Les Nouvelles MAY 11, 1929 IN

Littéraires,

literary generation. Certainly he is not included among those exercising an influence on contemporary letters—but he is regularly seen as the continuator of a Villon, Hugo, Eugène Sue, Marcel Schwob tradition and accorded honorable mention in the roster of twentieth-century writers. Carco has indisputably established his preeminence as the herald of the milieu: he is the authentic inheritor of that mantle. Whoever, in the future, will write about the pègre, will have to stand comparison with Carco, as he has with his noteworthy predecessors. Individual works by Pierre Mac Orlan or Joseph Kessel recall in their subject matter Carco's province, but their fortes lie elsewhere. Mac Orlan has pursued adventure in exotic voyages; Kessel has responded to the call of modern ideologies. In general, the tone of their comparable works approaches more that of Carco's reportages than his novels and essays on the theme of the milieu. Roland Dorgelès's memoirs of Montmartre, like Mac Orlan's, com-

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plement Carco's series of volumes on the bohemian bivouac. Dorgelès and Mac Orlan left Montmartre with bitterness for the miseries and illusions they bore there before their departure for the first World War. And their work reflects much more directly than does Carco's that brutal intervention in men's lives. As for André Billy's reminiscences, they remain more aloof, more intellectual than those of the Lapin Agile's progeny; André Salmon belongs as much—if not more—to the ateliers of Montparnasse as to the air of the Butte. If we heed the temperamental undercurrent from which works seem to bob to the surface, we must think of Colette. As Carco might be called a paysan perverti, so she has been entitled a paysanne pervertie.12 In both of them is the same consciousness that life is physical and that it is sensation. Though Carco has not sung, to the same extent as Colette, rapture with the earth, nor (except in his memoirs) kinship with animals, he is, like her, motivated by instinct. Like Colette, Carco recognizes the implacable turning of the senses and their inadequacy to achieve complete fulfillment in their greatest possibility of expression—in love. As Colette's characters seek and fail to find the ideal in the symbol, so Carco's are incapable of realizing an impossible aspiration. Indeed, Colette quotes approvingly, in commenting on her statement that love of love can be so lofty that it cannot be achieved by lovers, Carco's boutade that love is so wonderful it should not be diminished by being entrusted to lovers. 13 And yet there lurks in Carco's work a presence feared but sought, to which Colette would refuse admittance, that of death. 14 And Carco's work has a mélange of dream-state and reality which is not characteristic of Colette. The emotional and factual climate (though so different in the social environment and the spiritual goals) of Carco's later works are remindful of Julien Green. Green's novels evolve more in an atmosphere of nightmare and of repression.

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More like pathological studies, they are impregnated—though for different reasons—with a morbidity, an irreality, a dreamstate which, while creating a greater sense of horror and impending insanity, suggest somewhat the miasma of mind and sentiment and environment enveloping Carco's unfortunates. However, Green creates an impression of fate exercising its bane on preordained, inscrutable principles, whereas Carco's victims succumb to a weakness within themselves as their vitality diminishes before its development. Green releases the impersonal furies, Carco traces the vagaries of human perverseness. In Anglo-American literature there does not seem to be anyone who in subject matter, tone, and response is a counterpart to Carco. Gerald Kirsh, in Night and the City, emphasizes the romanesque and the grotesque with the vision of the artist haunted by Titanism and a Hugoesque fervor to create beauty from ugliness. Kirsh insists on strong-colored descriptions which make caricatures of bizarre, deformed characters 15 — surely they are closer to a cour des miracles than those acceptable even in a world which must cater to clandestine or unusual lusts. Nelson Algren, in The Man with the Golden Arm, has achieved an extremely rich and moving protrayal of Chicago's Skid Row. His presentation, in scope and depth and variety, is perhaps more thorough and as dialectally accurate as anything in Carco. The use of song refrains as an indication of mood is also reminiscent of a device utilized by the latter; Carco does not have any device like the assonantal word jingles that Algren, copying from reality so cleverly, uses to reveal the emotional and aspirational situation of his characters. Carco himself has praised Bessie Cotter,™ by Wallace Smith. This book, a flat, naturalistic recital of events in the life of a San Francisco prostitute, bears no resemblance to Carco's art. Though Carco does often examine this special world and has

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written romans de mœurs, he fits more into the French tradition of the psychological novel. Carco's position in the history of French poetry is more difficult to establish—and yet Carco hopes that posterity will judge him by his poetry. Academically, Carco is situated in the lineage of Villon, Laforgue, and Verlaine, and cited as representative of the fantaisistes. The filiation is accurate, but the heterogeneous grouping which the loose label of fantaisiste has assembled is yet to be refined into divergent types—of which Jean Pellerin, Philippe Chabaneix, and Vincent Muselli would represent three different aspects. In his latest verse 17 Carco has undoubtedly been consciously responding to the influence of the Apollinaire of Alcools and the Nerval of Aurélia. Sensitive to the lyricism of "Le Pont Mirabeau" and "La Chanson du mal-aimé," Carco has not followed Apollinaire's "cubistic" examples, nor the syntactic ellipses and extended verse form which would be echoed in Cendrars and Cocteau. Carco has also eschewed Nerval's occult, esoteric symbolism for the mystery of his phantasmagoric blend of reality and imagination. Loosely traditional in form and in structure, simple in vocabulary and in statement, Carco's verse expresses primarily disillusionment dissimulated by irony, or the melancholy of the evanescence of happiness. The dominant mood is lyrical; comprehension is to be intuitive. Through a declaration, slight in itself but cunning in melodic resonance, he instigates a response whose repercussions are pervasive though indefinable. The effectiveness of such poetry of a fairly facile nature will depend on how readily one is moved by sentiment rather than intellect. Like Verlaine's—but on a lesser scale—Carco's poems have something of the popular song's plaintive, sentimental appeal. Carco seeks not intellectual appreciation but rather the complicity of the heart. The qualities of his poetry are also the qualities of his prose.

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Carco's work is truly unified. The temperament, the experiences, the vision which he has expressed in verse are those of his novels and essays and memoirs. His literary and art criticism, which he has mainly restricted to the anecdotic, reveals the same interests and—allowing for the difference of genre—the same authorship.18 In all forms we have the conception of the poet. Whatever the subject, whatever the technical ordonnance, the interpretation is personal, poetic. No doubt a sorting and grading will be—and should be—made: all is not uniformly successful, part has been hastily or improperly expedited, whether for commercial convenience or because of momentary indifference to artistic ideals. Nevertheless, all of Carco's writings are pervaded by his individual, lyrical adaptation of whatever may be his subject—which so often Carco's poetic expression persuades us to visualize or revivify. Carco is not among the giants, but within the scope which he has set himself he is an artist of high importance. His finesse, his ability to follow without didacticism the serpentine convolutions of the heart's and the mind's complexities is extensive. His mastery is especially noteworthy in the blending of mood and setting. No one else, perhaps, has been so successful in describing the emotional repercussions, the effects on human sensitivities, of rain. The shimmer of streets glistening under rainfall, the prismatic irridescence of street lights under a sudden sprinkle, the refractions of light from wet cobblestones, the haze from fog or rain on a river, these scenes are Carco's province. Noteworthy, too, is his deftness in associating a mood with a panorama.19 Both are conveyed with a simplicity and a directness of language which secure a maximum of effect with what is almost a banality of expression. Particularly appealing to the contemporary reader is the force of instinct, which is the keystone of his work. The trepidations of uncertainty, the painful labor of his protagonists to understand

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themselves and to adjust to the difficulties of their insecure environments, these are sympathetic to the reader of today who is faced with analogous situations in his own life. The sense of insecurity and of uncertainty, the fear of the unknown tomorrow with its threat of violence and of death, and especially the haunting sense of inadequacy before the unknown, make allies of Carco and his audience. The hallucinatory quality of some of Carco's works, that is to say, an irrational feeling that all is occurring under incomprehensible circumstances, the fearful thought that one is perhaps something else, or other than what one thinks oneself to be, this finds its sympathetic echo in modern man uncertain whether or not he has free will and independence of action. There is the attraction of both Carco's subject matter and of the personality of the man himself. The conventional person is intrigued by the unconventional, and for a while, he may escape through his reading into another world than his own banal routine. Carco's work offers the exotic, the bold and the daring—the equivalent, in a way, of an adventure story. 20 The conventional reader is attracted by the frankness and the bohemianism of Carco's life. In reading him, especially his memoirs, one has still another opportunity to escape from oneself. Here, there is also interest in the portrayal of personalities; through Carco, we know something of the private existences of other writers and artists. And though Carco's work is neither scatological nor obscene, 21 there is for the average person the fascination of vice and of passion, as well as the obverse, which is a certain sentimentality. We are touched by his cynical idealism. The modern man clings desperately to the hope that sincerity will perhaps triumph over the depressing realities trumpeted daily in his newspaper. Even though grim reality vanquishes Carco's characters in his novels, we are sympathetic to the struggle and pleased by his own success as evident in his memoirs.

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In the last analysis Carco will be classified as the author of Jésus-la-Caille and of La Bohème et mon cœur. The latter title sums up the contents of approximately fifty volumes and symbolizes the links between him and his audience. Carco stands as the memorialist of the struggle, in the first half of the twentieth century, of the individual to be himself and yet conform to a changing society. And, in depicting—perhaps better than any of his contemporaries—a particular and ostensibly exotic world, he makes us mindful of the basic similarity of men to one another. He makes us aware of sentiments, aspirations, and moods we may have forgotten or thought stifled in ourselves.

Notes

I:

CHILDHOOD

1. Cf. De Montmartre au quartier latin (Albin Michel, 1927), p. 57; also Georges Delaw, "Les Coudes sur la table," Vers et Prose, VIII, No. 31 (Oct.-Nov.-Dec. 1912), 45. 2. "Peu m'importe vraiment d'être né à Nouméa plutôt qu'ailleurs. Il faut naître quelque part" (Maman Petitdoigt [5th éd., Crès, 1922], p. 14). A first version of Maman Petitdoigt appeared as "Le Souvenir" in the Revue de Paris, Vol. XXVII, Part 5, No. 18 (15 Sept. 1920), 320-38. 3. Maman Petitdoigt, p. 89. 4. Cf. Verlaine (Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939), p. 164. Another edition, entitled Verlaine, poète maudit, was published by Albin Michel in 1948. 5. Francis Carco raconté par lui-même (Chiberre, 1921), p. 5. Saunier was the director of the series "Ceux dont on parle," in which appeared these reminiscences by Carco. Lemuria was the name assigned by Dr. Encausse (Papus, adept of the occult sciences ) to a continent which supposedly existed in the Pacific. Cf. The Encyclopedia of Occult Sciences (New York: McBride, 1939), introduction by Poinsot. 6. See the photograph opposite p. 32. 7. W. G. Burchett, Pacific Treasure Island: New Caledonia (2d ed., Melbourne: Cheshire, 1942), p. 27. Burchett gives his source as Biseuil, Notices historiques et anecdotiques sur la Nouvelle Calédonie,

1774^1878.

8. Quoted in Alberti, Etude sur la colonisation à la NouvelleCalédonie: colonisation pénale, colonisation libre (E. Larose, 1909), p. 8. 9. Légendes et chants et gestes canaques (1885). I have not been able to consult a copy of this work.

NOTES

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TO I:

CHILDHOOD

10. Confinement to the Isle of Pines was to replace execution; Ducos was the equivalent of a penitentiary. Today the Isle of Pines is a tourist spot. 11. Alberti, op. cit., p. 34. To these offenses should be added sexual perversion and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Cf. article "Relégation," by Le Sueur, in La Grande Encyclopédie, XXVIII, 333-34. 12. Cf. article "Transportation," by Le Sueur, in La Grande Encyclopédie, XXXI, 309-10, for a succinct résumé of the various classes of

transportés.

13. Océanie Française, XXVII (1931), 49, 85. 14. Burchett, op. cit., p. 51. 15. Burchett, op. cit., p. 82; Alberti, op. cit., p. 211. 16. Alberti, op. cit., p. 105. It has been contended that some buildings were transported to New Caledonia from New Guinea. 17. I am obliged to M. Paul Dorbritz, of the Noumean mayoralty, for his gracious aid. He procured for me copies of Carco's birth certificate, as well as his brothers'. The text of the former's is : "L'an mil huit cent quatre vingt six, le trois juillet à dix heures du matin, par devant Nous, Joseph Bouillaud, adjoint, remplissant par délégation du Maire les fonctions d'officer de l'état-civil de la Commune de Nouméa, Nouvelle-Calédonie, a comparu Jean Dominique Carcopino Tusoli, Chef de Service du domaine de l'Etat, âgé de trente et un ans, domicilié à Nouméa, lequel nous a présenté un enfant du sexe masculin qu'il nous a déclaré être né aujourd'hui trois juillet à quatre heures du matin, de lui déclarant, et de Marie Antoinette Désirée Sophie Honorine Roux, sans profession, son épouse, âgée de vingt deux ans, domiciliée à Nouméa, et auquel il a été donné les prénoms de François Marie Alexandre. Les présentations et déclarations ont été faites en présence de Jules Massoni, Chef du Service topographique, âgé de quarante cinq ans et Georges Marin Vénard, receveur de l'enregistrement, âgé de trente deux ans, tous les deux domiciliés à Noumea, lesquels ainsi que le déclarant, ont signé avec Nous, le présent acte, après lecture faite. . . ." 18. This information was kindly supplied me by the R. P. Henri Boileau, curé of the Cathedral of Noumea, who copied for me the extant baptismal records of the Carcopino children. 19. Edouard-Lucien, born October 22. He is now a physician at Nice.

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CHILDHOOD

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20. Carco refers to his sister in his memoirs, "Nouméa-Marseille," Annales Politiques et Littéraires, XCVI, No. 2381 (1 May 1931), 428, and in A voix basse (Albin Michel, 1938), p. 17. 21. Charles-Marie, born September 8. He was killed in the first World War. 22. See photograph opposite p. 32. 23. "Les coups ne m'ont jamais rien fait" (Maman Petitdoigt, p. 79). 24. Bohème