Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“LE DIABLE AU CORPS” by Raymond Radiguet (written 1920-21; first published 1923) (as “THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH” there have been at least three English-language translations)

            In a recent posting called Flamed-Out Youth, I wrote about creative people who died very young and who were subsequently glamourised. Of all these illustrious youthful dead, I said that the one who probably held most promise was  Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923), dead at 20, best known for his short novel Le Diable au Corps. Having published this post, I decided to re-read Le Diable au Corps after many years, to see if it still held up in my estimation. Radiguet wrote the novel in 1920-21, when he was 17-going-on-18. It was not published until 1923, the year of his death, heralded by much publicity, arousing exactly the sort of scandal that the publishers wanted, and becoming instantly a bestseller. Like Le Grand Meaulnes, it has remained a novel that literate French teenagers read as a matter of course, although its tone is quite different from the romanticism of Alain-Fournier.

            There was, of course, another matter that drove me to re-read the book. If you look up my post on Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, you will see that I noted the particular proclivity of the French to write short novels that do not so much celebrate love as analyse it clinically. As examples I gave Madame de Lafayette’s 17^th century masterpiece La Princesse de Cleves, Adolphe itself, l’Abbe Prevost’s Manon Lescaut, and [a little more ambiguously] Honore de Balzac’s story of misplaced love Eugenie Grandet. To these short novels, I suppose I could have added Chodleros de Laclos’s (very long) manual of seduction Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and even Flaubert’s Madame Bovary which is, after all, a novel about a woman who is deluded by romantic reading into believing that a cad is her true love. But the one I said was the most cynical of all was Raymond Radiguet’s Le Diable au Corps, so I am here, after re-reading the novel, considering both whether it is a work of adolescent genius and whether it is truly cynical.

            Le Diable au Corps is the story of a teenage boy who has an adulterous affair with a young married woman called Marthe. The story is told in the first person by the teenage boy, who is never given a name. The novel opens thus:

“Je vais encourir bien des reproches. Mais qu’y puis-je? Est-ce ma faute si j’eus douze ans quelques mois avant la declaration de la guerre? Sans doute, les troubles qui me vinrent de cette periode extraordinaire furent d’une sorte qu’on n’eprouve jamais a cet age; mais comme il n’existe rien d’assez fort pour nous viellir malgre les apparences, c’est en enfant que je devais me conduire dans une aventure ou deja un homme eut eprouve de l’embarras. Je ne suis pas le seul. Et mes camarades garderont de cette epoque un souvenir qui n’est pas celui de leaus aines. Que ceux deja qui m’en veuelent se representent ce que fut la guerre pour tant de tres jeunes garcons: quatre ans de grandes vacances.” (pp.7-89) [As the novel is not divided into chapters I give all page numbers accordig to my Livre de Poche edition.]

In English: “I am going to invite many reproaches. But what can I do about it? Is it my fault that I turned 12 just a few months before the war broke out? No doubt the troubles that afflicted me in that extraordinary time were the type that nobody ever experiences at that age; but regardless of appearances, nothing in the world can make us older than we are, so it was as a child that I had to find my way through an experience which even a grown man would have found trying. I’m not the only one. From that time, my friends will retain memories that are not like those of their elders. People who don’t like what I’m saying might just consider for a moment what the war really meant to so many young boys: four years of holidays.” [Apologies for my translation].

Immediately we are given a context. The story takes place during the First World War, in which the narrator is too young to fight and is therefore free to follow his whims, while having a flippant attitude to the war itself. It opens with the narrator’s very early adolescence, but skips quickly to the main story which takes place in 1917 and 1918, when the narrator is 15 and 16. Marthe herself is young. She is 19 when the narrator first meets her and when he (aged 15) first seduces her. Her husband Jacques is a soldier involved in the war and away at the front throughout most of her liaison. (One reason the novel caused so much scandal in early-1920s France was its apparently disimssive and unpatriotic attitude towards the recent world war.)

The arc of the story has the precocious narrator constantly manipulating the young woman, attempting to bind her to himself and making her complicit in his plots. For example, before the seduction itself, he ostentatiously “helps” her to choose furniture for a bedroom she will share with her husband, but deliberately steers her towards buying furniture that her husband will hate. To us readers, he boasts frequently of his intellectual maturity, telling us (p.12) that in four hours he can do the school-work that takes his classmates two days - and hence he has time to go adventuring in Paris and on the banks of the Marne. In manipulating Marthe, he mainly seeks sexual gratification. References to his family suggest that his father is a complaisant (and complacent) man who (at least until very late in the novel) doesn’t really mind his young son having an affair, so long as he is discreet about it. There is also the disapprobation of Marthe’s spying neighbours to be dealt with. But the crisis is when Marthe becomes pregnant. Is the father her husband or her young lover? I do not hesitate to tell you how it all ends, as it is implicit throughout much of the novel. Marthe dies. Her husband – still unware of her infidelity – raises the baby not imagining that it might not be his own. And the narrator gets to tell us the story we have just been reading.

In Le Diable au Corps there is much of the giddy and contradictory nature of adolescent love. Within a page, the narrator can switch from saying “j’y vis la preuve que mon amour etait mort, et qu’une belle amitie le remplacerait” (“from this I saw proof that my love had died, and that a beautiful friendship would replace it”) to saying “Je commencais a respecter Marthe, parce que je commencais a l’aimer.” (“I was beginning to respect Marthe , because I was beginning to love her.”) (pp.56-57). Manipulative and opportunistic as he may be, there are signs that he does not really know where he stands emotionally. He can detach himself from his feelings and tell us that, really, there was nothing exceptional about the affair: “Mes transes me faisaient prendre notre amour pour un amour exceptionnel… tous les amants, meme les plus mediocres, s’imaginent qu’ils innovent.” (p.78) “My [sexual] transports of delight made me think that our love was something exceptional … all lovers, even the most mediocre, imagine they’re doing things nobody else has done.”

But at least one of the things that spurs him to pursue the affair is sheer male competitiveness. It is a challenge and a triumph to cuckold a grown man, especially if you are a young teenager new to the game. Equally, for the narrator, it is very annoying on the occasions when Jacques comes home on leave and Marthe apparently sleeps with him. The narrator says “je tremblais que Marthe appartint a son mari plus qu’elle ne voulait le pretendre.” (p.75) “I shook to think that Marthe belonged more to her husband than she wanted to admit.” He tries to make her his, and his only, in various perverse ways, again spurred by this competitiveness, saying “Ma soi-disant idee fixe de la posseder comme ne l’avait pu posseder Jacques, d’embrasser un coin de sa peau apres lui avoir fait jurer que jamais d’autres levres que les miennes ne s’y etaient mises, n’etait que du libertinage.”  (p.112) “My obsession was to own her in a way that Jacques had never been able to, to kiss some part of her skin after I’d made her swear that no lips but mine had ever kissed her there. It was nothing but absolute debauchery.” Competitiveness also requires some sort of public display. What is the point of winning a game of strategy if nobody notices? There is one really bizarre scene in which the narrator rejoices that the people downstairs can clearly hear him and Marthe making love noisily.

Frequently in the novel, the narrator throws out asides telling us that love and happiness are just selfishness and deception anyway: “Le bonheur est egoiste” (p.36) “Happiness is selfish”. “Pourtant l’amour, qui est l’egoisme a deux, sacrifice tout a soi, et vit de mensonges.” (p.81) “However love, which is mutual selfishness, sacrifices everything to itself and lives on lies.” And surely there is genuine selfishness – genuine disregard for the woman he has seduced – when the narrator remarks, as Marthe’s belly begins to swell: “Je voulais profiter de Marthe avant que l’abimat sa maternite.” (p.144) “I wanted to profit from [i.e. make sexual use of] Marthe before her pregnancy ruined her body.”

The narrator has a very contradictory attitude towards the baby. When Marthe first reveals she is pregnant, his immediate reaction is to urge her to sleep with her husband when he is on leave, to disguise their dalliance. Later he gets annoyed at the possibility that Jacques might actually be the child’s father (the old competitiveness kicking in). But on the very last page of the novel – which is the one and only time  the narrator actually sees Marthe’s husband – he rejoices to himself that Marthe apparently died calling his (the narrator’s) name, and that Jacques seems a good enough fellow to bring up “his” son.

I finished my re-reading of this novel with the sense that the adolescent narrator doesn’t really know what love is, but is also intelligent enough to understand this. He remarks of Marthe and himself: “Nous etions des enfants debout sur une chaise, fiers de depasser d’une tete les grandes personnes. Les circonstances nous hissaient, mais nous restions incapable”  (p.165) “We were children standing on a chair and proud to be a head taller than the grown-ups. Circumstances had lifted us up, but we were not up to them.”

So the narrator is cynical, manipulative, opportunistic, egotistical and cares little for the ultimate welfare of the woman he claims to love. But then we step back from his moral defects and remember that this is, after all, the voice of an adolescent male (both the narrator and the author), and Le Diable au Corps cannot be read as the story of a mature love. It is love as conceived by a precocious kid who takes seduction and sex to be signs of manliness and the main point of love. In that respect, it is a masterpiece of honesty – after all, this is exactly the way many (probably most) teenage boys think about love. And quite a few of them still haven’t grown out of this idea even when they are of mature years. I have known middle-aged men who are still really teenage boys - find ‘em, fuck ‘em, boast about it etc. And yet in Le Diable au Corps this sort of cynicism has another side to it. It is also the protective shell of the adolescent who wants to play tough but is in fact emotionally vulnerable. For after the narrator is intoxicated by the strategies of seduction and by sexual intercourse, he sometimes lets slip words of real affection for, and attachment to, Marthe… and then out come the words condemning love as mere selfishness and deception. We dare not show ourselves to be weak, dare we?

The 17-going-on-18-year-old author shows his skill in dissecting this mindset frankly, and as a piece of prose, Le Diable au Corps is extraordinary. It is written as confidently as if the author were already well settled into a literary career.

Considering what I know of his life, my verdict on Raymond Radiguet is very like my view of Arthur Rimbaud (see the postings ArthurRimbaud Twice Over and my review of Charles Nicholl’s Somebody Else). Both had an adult intelligence and literary skill coupled with an adolescent mentality [or sensibility]. The teenager Radiguet was taken in and “mentored” by the 30-plus-year-old Jean Cocteau (in other words became his homosexual lover). Radiguet completed Le Diable au Corps partly because Cocteau locked him up and ordered him to finish it. But Cocteau was outraged that Radiguet preferred to seduce women, and Radiguet said he didn’t want to turn into “Madame Cocteau”. Although Radiguet at first denied that Le Diable au Corps was autobiographical, later research has revealed that it really was.  He had had an affair with a young married woman, beginning when he was 14 (!). Clearly women were the chief object of his desire. Just as homosexuals claim Rimbaud as one of their own, so do they claim Radiguet – but I read it differently. In my view Rimbaud was an adolescent who tired of being pawed by men and abruptly left the world of Paul Verlaine once adolescence was over. With Radiguet one can only speculate, of course, because he died of tuberculosis when was 20. But I would suggest that, like the adolescent Rimbaud, he was a kid uncertain of his sexuality and that he wanted to move out of the Cocteau circle.

By the way, quite unrelated to the above, I found in Le Diable au Corps one very perceptive remark. At a certain point in the story, the narrator says that Marthe defies convention in having an affair with him, and yet at the same time is worried about what the neighbours will say. The narrator makes this neat comparison “Elle etait comme ces poetes qui savent que la vraie poesie est chose ‘maudite’, mais qui, malgre leur certitude, souffrent parfois de ne pas obtenir les suffrages qu-ils meprisent.”  (p.104) “She was like one of those poets who know that real poetry is an ‘accursed’ thing, but who, in spite of believing this, still sometimes suffer from not getting praise from those people they despise.” I will think of this whenever I survey experimental and/or bohemian poets shunning “convention” but leaping at awards, grants and applause like trained seals.

Cinematic Footnote: Le Diable au Corps has been filmed a number of times. There was a semi-pornographic Italian version in 1986, which apparently had little to do with the novel; and an Australian version in 1987 (retitled as Beyond Innocence) which attempted to set the story in Australia during the Second World War. Both flopped at the box-office and the critical consensus seems to be that both were rubbish.

The canonical, and still most-admired, film adaptation of the novel remains the first. This was Claude Autant-Lara’s version of Le Diable au Corps made in 1947 – just after the Second World War and therefore getting some of the same flak as the novel at first did for being so unpatriotic and flippant about the nation’s suffering. It starred Gerard Philipe as “Francois” (the nameless narrator of the novel) and Micheline Presle as Marthe. Both actors were 25 at the time but Philipe could [almost] pass for a mature teenager. Because it was about an adulterous affair it was regarded as “candid” and ground-breaking at the time. I caught up with this film about twenty years ago. It is good to look at and more-or-less follows the narrative arc of the novel. But, lacking the often ironic and cruel first-person voice of the narrator, it becomes more of a glossy and sentimental love-story than the novel ever is. Here’s a hard fact – the image I remember most from my viewing of the film is when “Francois” tries to confront Marthe’s husband, the sturdy and confident sergeant Jacques, but chickens out and ends up merely asking him for a light for his cigarette. There is, of course, no such scene in the novel.