At twenty years or little more from his death, Paul Morand has made a strong comeback onto the French literary stage. Journal inutile (Gallimard, 390 francs) is the title of his memoirs, in the wake of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro (“J’annonce un ecrit periodique...Je le nomme Journal inutile!”), two volumes consisting of over 1600 pages, a time span that goes from June 1968 to April 1976.
Another three months and then the heart attack while he was working out in the Automobile Club gym: he was 85. The book is a best seller. Le Monde and Le Figaro dedicated their cultural inserts to it, the monthly Lire a dossier. There is not one weekly that has not associated it with an enquiry or a debate. General opinion is, “What a great writer, what terrible ideas!”. For France and the French, Morand is a case that every so often reopens. The favourite of Proust, symbol of literary modernity, champion of elegance, of the art of living and of number of published books, he tied his name to the crazy years between the two wars: he represented frenzy and exoticism, travel and adventure.
A professional diplomat, in 1940 he made the mistake of preferring Pètain to De Gaulle. Five years later, he found himself defeated and exiled, banished and forgotten. France and the French closed the case. In the fifties, they opened it again. His style still appealed and had. meanwhile, how shall I say, become sturdier and stronger. The reporter of society events, the curious and tireless traveller had disappeared to leave room for the historian and memorialist, the survivor of a lost world now made his antimodernity a novelty element. While still alive, he was made a member of the Accadémie.
A short time after his death, the Pleiade welcomed him among the classic: France and the French thought that this time, the case had been finally put to rest. They were wrong. Secretly, in his usual way, Morand was working for a reader of the future, a reader who would never know him: “My contemporaries don’t interest me, but I do think a lot about those who will come after, I love them”. So his is not Gide type diary, a paper monument to himself: “My laziness, my weakness will dominate forever, I feel it, whatever I do to correct myself.
And yet the result is striking. The charm and embarrassment of the Journal inutile consist in its impropriety: human, social, ideological and political. In the tales, in the novels, in the historical prose, it was connected together and channelled in the description of a character, in the analysis of a sentiment, in the reconstruction of a fact or of an age. Here it is in its wild state, and the provocation is equivalent to the conciseness with which it is conveyed, to the multiplication of the levels on which it is enacted. “In my youth, women were a question of skin, today they are only flesh”. “Look at that cat, it has made friends with a bird? I don’t like things that go against nature”. “How boring romantic novels are: one wastes time over a waste of time”. “Other peoples’ despair often touches my heart...but always bores me...”
The antifeminism of someone who has always been loved by women combines with the anti-Semitism and refusal of homosexuality of someone, from Proust onwards, who knew Jews and homosexuals well and for many of them was a friend and advisor. “For pederasts, as for Jews, when you’ve known one, you’ve known them all”. Now that Communism has gone by the way, the cold war is just a memory and the Berlin Wall a souvenir, it is hard to understand how, at the end of the Sixties, fear or attraction for the Left in the West was the subject of the day and how, for those that had seen the Second World War in terms of a clash between civilisations, the game had not yet ended. For France, the role of De Gaulle was yet another addition to the scene, a charismatic figure of the right who, to win the day, had had to deny and combat the right of Pétain and Vichy, to team up with the communists in Moscow and Paris, only to find them later as opponents.
Twenty years after these events, the reader finds in Morand’s diary these same contenders still scowling at each other and the “collaborationist” Morand sarcastically describing the end of France and the ambitious “world-power” dreams of the hated De Gaulle, detesting the excessive power of America but enjoying that country’s plight in Vietnam, remarking on the weight of Russia and the blindness of “democratic” intellectuals when it comes to criticising that country. With the calendar fixed at 1945, Morand’s political ideas are all in the remote past. He is a revenant, a ghost, an exile in a country and a world no longer his, which he cannot understand, which he does not want to understand. Re-read today, it appears as archaeology, but until the other day, it was throbbing with life. The best of the diary is elsewhere, just as the life of its author was elsewhere. “I have for a long time meditated on the attraction exerted on me by Cohn-Bendit and the contesters of 1968. What I have in common with them is laziness. Amusing oneself! Every revolt starts by getting drunk and with physical satisfaction”.
His life appears to him like a race against time: “The time I have been able to waste during my existence, in bed, with women, in garages, with cars! At least two or three decades”. “How much time lost trying to gain time”. “A real writer has to dream his life; I made the big mistake of living mine”. The diary of an eighty-year-old who had for a long time turned physical exercise into a religion, this is also the touching realisation of the faults and disasters of age, the knees that give way, the teeth that fall out, the wrinkles that multiply. “Old age, this death that moves, is no less sinister than the stiffness of dead bodies”. “Old people, children without a future”. “Cemeteries are airport baggage deposits where travellers leave their bodies before taking flight”. The diary of a writer, it is the incredible list of things read, considerations, quotes, comparisons, opinions, advice, definitions.
In ten lines, he sums up Proust like no one had ever done before “It is as if he were saying: ‘I was born into a superior class, I belong to a privileged environment, I have been abandoned by everyone, I have been unable to earn a living. I am the summary of everything excellent there is in two races. And, at the same time, I am on the lowest rung of misfortune and human misery. Jew and pederast: twice exile for the real world. A double life then - among the privileged and among the damned. I embrace all conditions’”.
In two lines he defines Voltaire: “A miracle. At the same time the most amusing narrator and the most boring playwright”. The diary of a seducer, it is a long and tender act of love for the woman of a lifetime, Princess Hélene Soutzo, his wife for more than half a century, over ten years older than him, after whose death he dwindled away like the flame of a candle. Hélene was his anchor; well born, very intelligent, haughty, crudely and cruelly cultured, in her lies all the mocking spirit of a mundane and intellectual world heading for extinction. “We have not repudiated either Petain or Laval, we have not asked for De Gaulle’s pardon, something it would have been easy to do, we can die with our heads held high”.
“In my days, homosexuality was a vice, today it is a profession”. “The poor! Let them die without complaining! They have never had anything, why cry about what they leave behind?” When illness affects her more and more, blindness, immobility, she remarks: “The worst illness would be not to die”. “I do not like sick people who get well”. “I’d like to be switched off like an alarm clock”. All that remains for him to do is to grieve: “Sobbing I ask her forgiveness, scolding her only for having loved a shitty person like me. When you are unfaithful for a lifetime, the day comes when you are disarmed and ashamed in front of the other who has loyally played a game with a cheater”. In taking stock of his life, Morand seeks no excuses: “Compared to other lives, what I have done may seem insignificant or mediocre, but it is immense, colossal, if you consider the mediocrity of my person, my stupidity, my laziness, my vulgarity, my groping along blindly”.
The “vagabond” has reached the end of his journey. (traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)