LOUIS GUILLOUX (1899–1980) was born in Brittany, where he would spend most of his life. His father was a shoemaker and a socialist. At the local high school, he was taught by the controversial philosopher Georges Palante, who would serve as inspiration for the character of Cripure in Blood Dark. Guilloux worked briefly as a journalist in Paris, but soon began writing short stories for newspapers and magazines, and then published his debut novel, La Maison du peuple, in 1927. During World War II, his house was a meeting place for the French Resistance; on one occasion it was searched by the Vichy police and Guilloux was taken in for questioning. Following the war, he was an interpreter at American military tribunals in Brittany, and the incidents of racial injustice that he witnessed in the American army would form the basis of his 1976 book OK, Joe. In addition to his many novels—including Le Pain des rêves (1942) and Jeu de patience (1949)—Guilloux also translated the work of Claude McKay, John Steinbeck, and several of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories.
LAURA MARRIS’s recent translations include Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House and, with Rosmarie Waldrop, Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan and Other Poems. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.
ALICE KAPLAN is the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. She is the author of Looking for “The Stranger”: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, The Collaborator, Dreaming in French, and French Lessons: A Memoir. Kaplan’s book The Interpreter explores Guilloux’s experience as an interpreter for the U.S. Army courts-martial in Brittany in the summer of 1944. She is also the translator of Guilloux’s novella OK, Joe, which inspired her research for The Interpreter.
BLOOD DARK
LOUIS GUILLOUX
Translated from the French by
LAURA MARRIS
Introduction by
ALICE KAPLAN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
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Copyright © 1935 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
Translation and note on the translation copyright © 2017 by Laura Marris
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Alice Kaplan
All rights reserved.
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.
This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
Cover image: Leon Golub, Blue Sphinx, 1988; © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Guilloux, Louis, 1899–1980, author. | Marris, Laura, 1987– translator.
Title: Blood dark / by Louis Guilloux ; translated by Laura Marris.
Other titles: Sang noir. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008649 (print) | LCCN 2017026714 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371467 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371450 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. | France—History—1914–1940—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / War & Military. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ2613.U495 (ebook) | LCC PQ2613.U495 S313 2017 (print) | DDC 843/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008649
ISBN 978-1-68137-146-7
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
A Note on the Translation
BLOOD DARK
Notes
INTRODUCTION
THERE are no trenches, no German submarines, no gas attacks in Blood Dark, yet Louis Guilloux’s epic novel ranks among the most powerful French depictions of the First World War. By 1935, when it was published, suffering on the front line had already produced a series of classics: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire and Maurice Genevoix’s ’Neath Verdun (1916); Blaise Cendrars’s I’ve Killed (1918); Roland Dorgelès’s Wooden Crosses (1919). Guilloux’s contribution was different. As an adolescent in provincial Brittany, he had seen war reach behind the front and penetrate civilian populations and institutions; in Blood Dark he set out to create a war literature of the home front, a toxic zone where rumors do battle with the truth and witch hunts are carried out in the name of patriotism.
Blood Dark takes place on a single day in 1917, in a town recognizable as Guilloux’s native Saint-Brieuc, population twenty-four thousand, perched on the north coast of Brittany. The war has reached a low point after the debacle at the Chemin des Dames, and the American doughboys are still nowhere in sight. Patriotism has grown hollow; for some young people, revolutionary Russia is becoming a source of hope. Into a classical frame—unity of time and of place—Guilloux sets a riotous cast of some twenty main characters whose destinies combine and reverberate in a series of short episodes. He finds a way, through this form, to explore the effects of the war on an entire community and to delve deeply into the consciousness of one flawed individual who is both a spiritual guide and a living symptom of the society in disarray.
This guiding light or rather guiding shadow of the novel is an unhinged teacher of high-school philosophy named Charles Merlin, nicknamed “Cripure” by his students—a play on Kant’s CRItique of PURE Reason. He is in charge of teaching ethics to the draft-aged boys, young men condemned to spin the wheel of fortune on the front. Guilloux’s portrait of Cripure was inspired by a teacher and mentor of his own, the eccentric philosopher Georges Palante (1862– 1925), though Guilloux once said that Cripure was “derived from Palante”—a starting point for his fiction, rather than a model. Like Palante, Cripure is a renegade from the Sorbonne, a man of broken friendships and a failed marriage, sharing his bed with an uneducated housekeeper, the affectionate, saintly Maïa, who dispenses level-headed wisdom inflected with Gallo, the local dialect of eastern Brittany. And like Palante, Cripure is disabled in the cruelest way, with huge, deformed feet that make it difficult for him to walk. At one point, the town boot-maker shows off Cripure’s shoes to a visiting circus director, who wants to hire him: “But when the circus manager had learned that the owner of those astonishing boots was a professor, and of philosophy! He’d simply shrugged and changed the subject.”
The action of the novel revolves around a few signal events: a schoolboys’ plot to unbolt the front wheel of Cripure’s bicycle; a Legion of Honor ceremony at the local school, now partly transformed into a military hospital; rioting soldiers at the train station who don’t want to return to the front; Cripure’s aborted duel with his colleague Nabucet; and the adventures of an even larger cast of characters that includes draftees, antiwar students, amorous spinsters, hypocritical school officials, and pedophiles; slick politicians and young men on the make; a revolutionary leaving for Russia, an amputee, and a couple learning of their son’s execution for mutiny at the front.
Guilloux’s fiction touches on issues that are still matters of great contention among French historians of the Great War: To what extent was there a consensus about the fighting? What was
the nature of the mutinies that broke out as the war dragged on? Did they occur at random or were they part of a deep current of antiwar sentiment? Soldiers in transit demonstrating at train stations, individual deserters, fomenters of revolt on the front were all in some sense “mutineers,” and their numbers add up to a few thousand or to tens of thousands—depending on your definition of “mutiny.” What is clear is that antiwar sentiment, moral exhaustion, and episodes of disobedience flourished in the summer of 1917, the summer of Blood Dark.
The best-known scene in the novel is certainly the riot at the Saint-Brieuc train station. Guilloux has a genius for portraying chaos and for letting us see the drama of the individuals inside a crowd. He doesn’t spare his readers a close-up of one of the men disfigured by trench warfare—a gueule cassée, or “broken face.” For his novel to begin in a carnival of cruelty and end in tenderness is one of its great achievements. Cripure, impossible to categorize by any of our literary labels—hero, victim, genius, idiot, madman, muse—is another.
•
Albert Camus considered Blood Dark one of the few French novels to rival the great Russian epics. “I know of no one today who can make characters come alive the way you do,” he wrote to Guilloux in 1946. Guilloux, Camus said later, was uniquely attuned to the sorrow of others, but he was never a novelist of despair.
Camus was only one of many French writers at the forefront of literary life in the 1930s and ’40s who considered Blood Dark a masterpiece. Louis Aragon said that Cripure was the Don Quixote of bourgeois ruin; André Gide said that the novel had made him lose his footing. On the left, Guilloux’s contemporaries understood Blood Dark as an important political response to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s nihilistic Journey to the End of the Night, published three years earlier. “The truth of this life is death,” Céline wrote in Journey, and Guilloux responded: “It’s not that we die, it’s that we die cheated.” The publisher used that line on a paper band around the book cover. For French intellectuals in the 1930s, there was a crucial difference between Céline and Guilloux: Both writers denounced the patriotic lies that lead men to their deaths, but for Céline the violence of man to man was inevitable, biological. Guilloux, by contrast, held out hope for fraternity and for collective struggle. In his world, and in his fiction, there were always causes worth fighting for, always zones of tenderness.
When Blood Dark missed winning France’s biggest literary prize, the Goncourt (just as Journey to the End of the Night had missed it in 1932), Guilloux’s fellow writers, among them Gide, Dorgelès, and Aragon, as well as Paul Nizan and André Malraux, protested by organizing a public meeting to laud his vision and underline his blazing critique of war and human hypocrisy.
Literary historians of existentialism have argued that Blood Dark launched the notion of the absurd well in advance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, and Camus’s The Stranger. Yet Guilloux is often dismissed as a regionalist. In fact he was a transnational writer at a time when many of his contemporaries were taken up with ingrown literary rivalries. Just before beginning to work in earnest on Blood Dark, he translated Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, rendering black American English in vibrant Caribbean slang—a Creole of his own making, adapted for French readers. Guilloux’s notebooks make clear that more than a realist, he was a voice writer, testing dialogues and send-ups of bourgeois language, recording conversations, and compiling lists of idioms and ridiculous expressions. The black English in Home to Harlem surely inspired Maïa’s Gallo-speak. Guilloux read well beyond the French canon, translating Steinbeck and McKay, on the one hand, and drawing inspiration from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other.
Blood Dark is still considered a masterpiece in France, but in English the book remains little known. Part of the problem is its first translation. Samuel Putnam’s version, titled Bitter Victory, appeared in simultaneous American and British editions shortly after the original French publication. A former expatriate, a columnist for The Daily Worker, and a translator of Rabelais and Cervantes, Putnam saw in Guilloux’s novel a condemnation of “the bourgeois culture that had made the war.” Was it he or his editors who chose Bitter Victory, a misleading title for a book set a good year before the war’s end, when no victory was in sight? Putnam translated in the “mid-Atlantic style” then in vogue, neither American nor English, supposedly pleasing to readers in both countries but actually quite lost at sea. As a result of this linguistic compromise, Guilloux’s most remarkable quality as a writer, his sense of each character’s unique voice, is muffled.
Part of what makes this new translation so riveting is the attention that Laura Marris has given to the novel’s distinct voices and places. As a poet, and the translator of the contemporary Breton poet Paol Keineg, Marris has immersed herself in local Saint-Brieuc culture and has studied Guilloux’s papers, attending to the voices and sense of place he captured. From its new haunting title on, she has brought Blood Dark to life for the American reader. In this centenary of the darkest year of the Great War, what truer novel to read? In one respect, Guilloux’s story could not be more contemporary: as violence and terror seep into every aspect of his characters’ lives, they try to hold the chaos of the world at bay.
—ALICE KAPLAN
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
EVEN BEFORE I began to translate Le Sang noir, I thought of Louis Guilloux as a master listener—someone with an ear for dialogue, but also for the voice of thoughts. With linguistic ability and empathy, Guilloux was capable of capturing each character’s private language of symbols and associations.
As is so often the case, what makes a book great is also what raises questions for a translator. I have done my best to preserve the contrasts between characters—Maïa’s matter-of-fact speech and Cripure’s introspective madness, Simone’s teenage wisdom and her father’s complacency, Kaminsky’s sick wonder and Madame de Villaplane’s desperation. Since so much of this novel takes place in the minds of its characters, my challenge was to render the wild mania of Guilloux’s close third-person perspective in English syntax. The beauty of certain passages creates a romantic lyricism that becomes absurd in context and generates a cyclical pattern of rising emotion undercut by reality. In the sentences themselves, the characters try to climb out of their lives and fall back against the (sometimes self-created) limitations of their situations. The more their society enforces self-consciousness and militant patriotism, the louder these thought voices become.
Because the specific place and time are so important to Guilloux’s feelings of disgusted claustrophobia—in a society Cripure calls a “menagerie,” while a horrific war is going on outside—the language of the translation can’t lose too much of its sense of place by sounding like it belongs in any particular English-speaking culture. The previous translation by Samuel Putnam, published in 1936, uses quite a few British English expressions (“old boy” and “old chap” or “By Jove!”) that now seem odd in a French setting.
This realization left me with a difficult task—creating a voice for Maïa without removing her character from its local context. In the original, she sometimes uses phrasing from Gallo, a dialect primarily from Brittany and neighboring parts of France. Unlike Breton, it is Latinate, so French speakers can understand it. Though there are very few Gallo speakers today, the dialect is older than French and mixes medieval words with more modern usage. Guilloux studied Gallo with respect, but he also knew that the average French reader would interpret this nonstandard speech as provincialism and lack of education. Perhaps this disjunction is why the author made Maïa’s character—sharp-witted, sensible, and sane—a bastion of reason in contrast to literary, tortured Cripure. Class takes place in language, but Guilloux does not privilege one voice over another. I’ve chosen to use small grammatical changes and colloquialisms to demonstrate Maïa’s background, rather than relying on any particular British or American dialect. In a few places this strategy required me to tweak a spoken idiom (“keep the pig and eat the bacon,” for
example) when a literal translation would have been too distracting and an English equivalent too culturally marked.
These conditions also posed a problem in translating the book’s title. Le Sang noir literally means black or dark blood, an English phrase with a history of race and racism that is not intended in the French original. At first, I thought “le sang noir” might be an idiom related to “se faire du sang noir” or “se faire du sang de l’encre,” both meaning something like “to get upset,” and derived from the medieval idea of bile, one of the humors that determined angst in human character. But when I visited Saint-Brieuc and asked about the title, scholars of Guilloux’s work told me that “le sang noir” was an unidiomatic phrase and that “sang noir” was the blood of dead and wounded soldiers. Bitter Victory, the title of Putnam’s translation, was probably good marketing in 1936, but it now seems tacked on to the book, since in 1917 the characters have experienced neither the victory nor the full brunt of its bitterness. And the phrase le sang noir appears nowhere in the body of the novel.
Searching through Guilloux’s papers in the archives of the Saint-Brieuc library uncovered a slew of earlier titles Guilloux (or his publisher Gallimard) had rejected—and a literary mystery. He had considered L’indesirable (the unwanted) as a working title. Then L’education révolutionaire (a revolutionary education)—to which Louis Chevasson at Gallimard had replied, “I don’t think A Revolutionary Education is a good title, but it would be a great cartoon.” Other choices were Cripure, Les chevaliers de la lune (knights of the moon), La mort dans l’ âme (death in the soul), La clé des songes (the key to dreams), Le cloporte-roi (the clopper king), La vie perdue (life lost), Ame morte (dead soul), Le secret de polichinelle (Punchinello’s secret), and Les feuilles sèches (dry leaves). But the genesis of Le Sang noir is nowhere to be found in Guilloux’s correspondence, except in a very last-minute note stating the date of the novel’s completion. This gap left me to assume that the title had come from a conversation with someone, most likely his friend Pascal Pia, a well-known editor and man of letters who had connections to Gallimard. But it didn’t get me closer to an English version.
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