Poems Read online
Alain-Fournier
Poems
TRANSLATED BY
Anthony Howell
Anita Marsh
Anthony Costello
To the memory of Anita Marsh
What will survive of us is love
PHILIP LARKIN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acumen: On the Path which Loses Itself, The Early Mists of September, The Remains of Warmth, The Shower
Agenda: Road-Song
Orbis: Round-Dance
The French Literary Review: From Summer to Summer
The French texts are based on those in Miracles, Gallimard, 1924, the Livre de Poche edition of Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1986 and the Livre de Poche edition edited by Jacques Dupont, 2011
The frontispiece is from a pencil portrait of Alain-Fournier by Lavoro, based on a 1913 photograph
The cover painting, Woman at the Garden, 1873, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was chosen by Anthony Costello
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION by Anthony Costello
The Poems in English
On the Nacelle
I Think of Those
The Griefs of Summer
Adolescents
The Shower
Tale of the Sun and the Road
On the Great Grey Road
Round Dance
From Summer to Summer
Road Song
The Remains of Warmth
The Early Mists of September
And Now that It’s the Rain
On the Path which Loses Itself
The Poems in French
Sur la nacelle…
Je pense à celles…
Tristesses d’ été
Adolescents
L’ondée …
Conte du soleil et de la route
Sur ce Grand Chemin gris…
Ronde
À travers les étés…
Chant de route
Sous ce tiède restant …
Premières brumes de septembre …
Et maintenant que c’est la pluie …
Dans le chemin qui s’enfonce …
SOME NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION by Anthony Costello
NOT SIMPLY THE MEANING by Anthony Howell
About the Authors
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
À tout seigneur tout honneur
ALAIN-FOURNIER, born Henri-Alban Fournier in La Chapelle-d’Angillon, central France, died on 22 September 1914, one month after the outbreak of the First World War. He died, aged twenty-seven, while fighting in Vaux-Les-Palamaix, near Verdun, on the French-Belgian border. It was only in 1991 that his remains were identified and subsequently interred in the cemetery at Saint-Remyla-Calonne. Obituary writers referred to him as a ‘French author and soldier’. Although as a teenager he attended a naval college in Brest for over a year, undertook his military training in 1908–1909 and died fighting for his country, he is best known as the author of Le Grand Meaulnes.
Le Grand Meaulnes is regarded as a classic of French literature; a rite de passage for young adults on a par with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. The eponymous hero of Le Grand Meaulnes is an adventurous everyman (or everyboy) of the male imagination, inhabiting that hinterland between the real and unreal, which gives the novel something of the romance that can be found in Novalis and Keats and classic German fairy tales. This strange novel propelled along by the dream-like notions of children, its mythic country settings, its grand châteaux or lost domains, its secrets and its loves and losses, seems of a bygone age. It is a novel where the pursuit and love of a beautiful, mysterious woman (or girl) is a plot in itself, and the raison d’être for Meaulnes. Meaulnes’ love-interest is Yvonne de Galais, and it is widely acknowledged that the character of Galais represents Yvonne Marie Elise Toussaint de Quiévrecourt, a woman whom Fournier was in love with and (it is fair to say) obsessed with for most of his brief adult life.
We know from Fournier’s correspondence with his brother-in-law, Jacques Rivière (a publisher and editor of Marcel Proust in La Nouvelle Revue Française), which was published in 1926, and his letters to his family (published in 1930) that Fournier, walking out of the Grand Palais in Paris one day in 1905, became transfixed by a woman he had seen, following her along the Cours La Reine, then on a bateau mouche to her home at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, returning several times in the ensuing weeks and eventually speaking to her. Despite being told that she was betrothed to another man, Fournier returned at the same date a year later to see her, but to no avail. It was during the next few years while he was completing his military service that Fournier wrote the essays and short stories and poems published long after his death, in 1924, under the title Miracles.
Although Fournier had a love affair with Jeanne Bruneau (the model for Valentine in Le Grand Meaulnes) while working as a literary critic in Paris in 1910, and had an affair with an actress, Simone Casimir-Perrier, near the end of his short life, it is Yvonne de Quiévrecourt who is the inspiration for the mysterious ‘woman’ who pervades most of the poems in Miracles, written (1908–1909) at least five years before Fournier gained acclaim by publishing Le Grand Meaulnes, which narrowly missed receiving the Prix Goncourt, in 1913.
The poems are a rich resource for our understanding of Fournier as a man, from his country childhood in La Chapelle d’Angillon in the Cher département of central France, through the military years and the literary years. Fournier was a critic for the Paris-Journal where he met Gide and Paul Claudel and was, for a time, a French tutor to a young T.S. Eliot.
The poems offer a tantalising glimpse into the Alain-Fournier world view. The poet, switching between first, second and third person narration and varying points of view, is always at a point of reflection, reminiscence, moving fluidly (often in adjacent lines) between the past and present and back again.
Fournier was influenced by the Symbolists but the narrative dream-like element to his poetry gives it a substance richer than symbolism. He was also interested in vers libre and the work of Jules Laforgue. The poems in Miracles possess the transfixing magic of pictures. In Alan Pryce-Jones’s lucidly brilliant introduction to the Frank Davison translation of Le Grand Meaulnes in 1957, he writes admiringly about the tonality of Fournier’s book as containing something of ‘the palette of Matisse’ and the ‘harmonic structure of Debussy’. Pryce-Jones describes the novel as ‘high-lit as in sleep’, and it is true that the novel and the poems exist in an ambience of particularly striking light and detail. There is too much narrative in Miracles for Fournier to be called an imagist poet, but it is the pictures he paints in his poems that remain fixed in the mind.
* * *
In an ideal world Alain-Fournier’s poetry would be read in French while listening to the harmonics of Claude Debussy (both Debussy and Fournier admired Maeterlinck’s play about the doomed love of Pelléas and Mélisande). The poems might accompany the impressionist paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. A waking-dream-like atmosphere would follow, sense impressions tinged with an awareness of unrequited love, loss, nostalgia, and an almost Proustian search for ‘lost time’.
The factual details of the eighteen-year-old Fournier’s meeting with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt have been covered in David Arkell’s A Brief Life and Robert Gibson’s The End of Youth, but I would prefer to let him narrate the events of this day.
I say to her as I pass very close in a tone of voice I shall never recapture, so close that she hears, so quickly as she moves past, and completely spontaneously, “Vous êtes belle.”1
And after following her to her house on the boulevard Pari
s Saint-Germain …
I slowly turn around where I wait for the window – it is now that I shall know, it is the moment, the window does not open… and then, all of a sudden, she is coming out opposite me … I whisper to myself ‘Fate’ …
And following her on successive Sundays,
Where is she going to alight … I think I can see her hand … she is getting into the tram and alighting from it to go shopping for her young ladies dresses and negligées … her brown train with a small tear … her black shoes so open and feminine …
And so on, until he is rebuffed politely.2 Yvonne is betrothed to another and soon to be leaving Paris. But Fournier continues to love her throughout his life, often despairingly, often with thoughts bordering on the suicidal, writing her un-posted letters, even acquiring detective agency reports about her whereabouts in the next eight years, and declaring his feelings for her again in 1913 after a meeting is set up by Yvonne’s sister (after Fournier had become well known with the publication of Le Grand Meaulnes). Yvonne de Quiévrecourt is the subject of most of Fournier’s poems, with the exception of ‘The Early Mists of September’, ‘The Remains of Warmth’ and ‘Road-Song’, written while he was on military service in 1908–1909.3
Fournier is the adolescent in love, but the evocations of love in his poems are not as juvenile as have been claimed. Fournier’s poems didn’t gain acceptance in his lifetime. André Gide rejected Fournier’s poems sent to L’Hermitage, saying ‘this is not the moment for prose poems’,4 and Jacques Rivière felt they were ‘unironic and sentimental’.
But these views are open to dispute. Most of these poems were written when Fournier was aged eighteen and nineteen; some were composed while he was staying in London in the summer of 1905. His letters at that time, some running to twenty-two pages, are evidence of a mature prose style and contain intelligent and intellectual subject matter. He was reading widely in English – Dickens, Poe, Shakespeare – reading Dostoevsky and attending Wagner’s Ring Cycle. He was going to the theatre, visiting The Tate and The National Gallery and making detailed reports on the paintings he saw there (he liked Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Braque, and was profoundly affected by Millais’ Ophelia). He was teaching French, perfecting his excellent English and translating Virgil.
In the letters written and sent from London in 1905 Fournier countered Rivière’s comments by arguing that sentimentality only occurs if poems with sentiment as their modus operandi are not successful. Fournier was not only being self-consciously sentimental; he believed, finally, in the pastoral over the symbolic, the past over the contemporary. As for Gide’s criticism, the prose in Fournier’s poems is rather an internalised ‘speech-song’ – such as Debussy had his singers adopt for his operatic version of Pelléas and Mélisande, and hence they eschew rhetoric and are about the truth of adolescent feeling.
In the way that J.D. Salinger was able to maintain the ‘voice’ of thirteen-year-old Holden Caulfield throughout The Catcher in the Rye, so Fournier gives his narrator a younger teenage persona, albeit a perceptive and intelligent one. Fournier was always looking back, and I think he was already setting his recent experiences with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt in the poetic past, the narrator given a naïve outlook, an innocence and an unworldliness that Fournier’s real life disavows. The poems are powerful and effective given this distancing, and free-floating in some ideal place and time. Despite the powerful outpouring of spontaneous feelings and the symbolism attached to certain objects in the poems (the château, the parasol, the path, the garden, etc) they are not Romantic in the German or English sense of the word. The poems owe something to the dreamy sense of fantasy attached to French Symbolism, but perhaps ultimately they are shaped more by impressionism and the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty than by the standard preoccupations of nineteenth-century European poetry.
John Taylor feels that when reading Fournier ‘we move on to consciously filtered experiencing of the experiencing, from perceiving to apperceiving.’5 He senses that Fournier’s work reveals ‘an ontological separation from the presence of the world’, while Robert Gibson thinks that Fournier’s work is in the tradition of Rousseau’s Emile, Chateaubriand’s René and Gide’s Les Fauxmonnayeurs – that is, preoccupied with ‘The Cult of Adolescence’.6
In this sense the poems prefigure the work of Yves Bonnefoy’s L’Arrière-pays, and serve as a companion to Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes, which had as working titles Le Nom Pays and The End of Youth. John Fowles thought Fournier pinned down an acute perception of the young, which is an awareness of loss as a function of passing time.’7
* * *
Looking at the photographs of Fournier in A Brief Life – sitting in a high-backed chair at eighteen months in 1988, in school uniform (and with close-cropped hair) at the Lycée Voltaire in 1900, in thinker pose at La Chapelle in 1905, or with fellow officers at Mirande in 1913, it is hard not to be emotionally overwhelmed by knowing that this talented man would be dead a year later, in the first month of the First World War. A year earlier he had been acclaimed as a highly original novelist. Two years previously he had begun building his reputation as a budding writer and critic, seeing his short stories, monographs and reviews published by La Nouvelle Revue Française. With the help of Jacques Rivière (who had been his childhood friend as well as now being his brother-in-law) he was moving in literary and artistic circles – Gide, Claudel, Jammes, Péguy, André Lhote – and he was in love with Simone, a famous actress of her day (and later in life a writer and memoirist); he was a man about the city of Paris. He was also a personal assistant to the politician Casimir-Perrier, and his rise from what was considered peasant stock in the region of Bourges in the Cher département of central France was still in progress.
Fournier had always fantasised about a life at sea, attending a naval college in Brest for a year when he was fourteen. He completed his military service in 1909. It is easy to suppose that this talented, intellectual, sensitive and creative man might have been unsuited to front-line fighting. Fournier, however, rose to the position of Lieutenant in the 288th Infantry Regiment. He led a group of men into action near Verdun, none of whom returned. Mystery surrounding his death (missing presumed dead) and the difficulty of locating his remains added to the myth of the man who wrote Le Grand Meaulnes. The exact whereabouts of the battle Fournier’s troops were engaged in has been described in a variety of books: Verdun, Vaux-lès-Palameix, Epargue, Argonne, First Battle of the Marne, Tranchée de Calonnne, Saint-Remy-la-Calonne and Meuse Heights.
Fournier was as elusive in death as the manor house or château or lost domain was difficult to find once more for Meaulnes. The title of Le Grand Meaulnes is notoriously difficult to translate: The Magnificent Meaulnes, The Big Meaulnes, The Lost Estate, The Lost Domain, The Wanderer, Le Nom Pays, The End of Youth … It is as if the place names of Fournier’s last battle and the names for the novel, and the mysterious and adventure-like chapters of the book (‘The Flight’, ‘The Strange Fête’, ‘The Meeting’, ‘The Outing’, ‘The Secret’) are co-morbidities in one massive fatalistic adventure. Ultimately the dreamy countryside of Clara d’Ellebeuse8 is overrun by the machinery of war, with the hostilities commencing in 1914. In a similar way, the art-for-art’s-sake palette of Debussy gives way to the more spiky Ravel of the ‘Piano trio in A minor’. War poetry is to shake the lyrical foundations of the literary scene in Europe for the ensuing years. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land will be conceived, and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – indicative of a new aesthetic – while Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round will be painted in 1918.
If the poems in Miracles are to be appreciated fully, and you have found an old recording of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, then you may be transported to Fournier’s ‘land of dreams’, to his childhood homes of La Chapelle d’Angillon and Epineuil-Le-Fleuriel, and to the beauty of the Sologne countryside. It is a world that doesn’t exist any more, and hasn’t for the last hundred years. As Marcel Pr
oust wrote in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu: ‘The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost’.
ANTHONY COSTELLO
1. Towards the Lost Domain: Letters from London, ed. W. J. Strachan (London 1905), Carcanet, 1986.
2. Yvonne de Quiévrecourt tells him ‘what’s the good’ … ‘I leave tomorrow… I don’t belong to Paris’ … ‘we are young’ … ‘we have been foolish’ … ‘you have behaved very respectfully, I do not bear you any ill will at all’ … ‘I forgive you’ – Towards the Lost Domain, op. cit.
3. Alain-Fournier was on ‘night manoeuvres’ in 1909, walking through the landscape of Cagnes that Renoir was soon to preserve in his landscape paintings. Renoir and Fournier came from similar social backgrounds, both had love affairs with seamstresses, Renoir fathering a child (to be named Jeanne) to Lise Tréhot, while Fournier had a brief love affair with Jeanne Bruneau in Paris.
4. David Arkell, A Brief Life, Carcanet, 1986, p. 96.
5. John Taylor, ‘A Little Tour through the Land of Alain-Fournier’, The Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XXXIX, no. 3, 2000.
6. Robert Gibson, The End of Youth: the life and work of Alain-Fournier, Impress Books, 2007.
7. John Fowles, ‘Afterword’, The Wanderer, Signet, 1971.
8. A novel by the French pastoral poet Francis Jammes, whom Fournier admired.
Je ne suis peut-être pas tout à fait un être réel.
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
(quoted by Jacques Rivière as applied by Fournier to himself)
ON THE NACELLE
On the nacelle,