The Man in a Hurry

by Paul Morand

  So might marriage not be a prison after all? A door still remains open. They go out to admire the moonlight and they return at breakfast time. Who would not jump at such a guarantee?

  At times, you embarrass your staunchest friends. The deftness with which you escaped the butchery of 1914–18 leaves an unpleasant taste. Your friend Valery Larbaud, ruled out of active service on account of his bad health, offered his services for several months emptying chamber pots and serving meals on trays in a Vichy hospital before taking refuge in Spain, in Alicante, to work on his book. The family he lodged with included some very lively young girls. They made him run a few risks, rather less serious ones than those experienced in the trenches by the men of his generation, but nevertheless… How we might have wished that Péguy, Alain-Fournier, Codet and so many others could also have escaped the slaughter! The sacrifice of your life—or even just a left arm, which your friend Giraudoux considered a lesser evil—would not have shortened the endless killing by a single day. Your death, on the other hand, would have deprived the age of a portraitist so brilliant that he might have been taken for its creator.

  To those who had the cheek to ask you what you thought of yourself, you replied apologetically:

  “People think me subtle, adaptable and intelligent; quite the reverse, I am blunt and foolish.”

  To what extent would you have liked the quite compelling portrait of Lewis in your first novel to be your own?

  “Lewis entered the room heavily and sat on the ground, laying two large, steaming boots by the fire and settling his dog, which gave off a foul smell, between his knees; excessive fastidiousness led him to appear as though he was shunned in elegant places because he quite enjoyed giving the impression that he was rough and ill-mannered.”

  However you may have behaved, dear Paul, no one would believe you. Or were you, rather, thinking of the way you treated women when in your Journal inutile you noted sharply:

  “I’m a shit.”

  Said none too soon! Did Hélène not give her blank cheque? It would have been very grudging of her to blame you for affairs that were foreseen in your agreement. The fact that she may have suffered as a result made her love you all the more. She was not made of marble. In your fictional works, which are sometimes transparent—the new generations, or whoever they were, not having inherited their parents’ skills—the preliminaries are brief. It’s depriving oneself of the best part.

  I open… Ouvert la nuit. No single favourite story, they’re all gems. ‘La nuit nordique’ has delighted me ever since I was a teenager. Aïno, a cool Scandinavian girl, yields to the traveller’s fine words on the shortest night of the year in Sweden:

  Aïno gripped her hands around my neck.

  “You’re an international swine,” she said.

  I took her in my arms. She remained there the rest of the night, for the sun, after a quick shower, was already bustling about.

  Since I complained to you that such a night was far too brief, you came back at me:

  “Ten minutes is a long time. Two would have been enough.”

  Women were never angry with you. They treasured your notes, which were often written in lead pencil, which was easier to rub out. In the inscription to a press officer, I recall: “To X… in memory of the Savoy, affectionately, P. Morand.” Not exactly a cheap hotel. The drawing rooms in which these beautiful ladies entertained you bear witness to your lightning passage through a life that had come to a halt following your departure (or your flight, if you prefer). Your photograph could be seen everywhere, on mantelpieces, on bedside tables, in a desk with drawers that contained expeditious love letters from you, and in particular the photo that I like very much: three-piece suit, an elbow resting casually on a dresser beneath a delicate portrait of a young girl by Marie Laurencin; sometimes you are in a bathing suit or dressed as a deep-sea diver on the Passable beach at Cap-Ferrat, or now and then wearing dungarees at the wheel of a racing Bugatti, the famous 57. One of your former priestesses owned a bronze bust of you and used to say: “According to the mood I’m in, I tap him on the cheek as I pass by or stroke his forehead.” Would you ever have written such a poignant story as ‘La Mort du cygne’ without your intimate relationship with Josette Day, the one-time ballet student at the Opéra before she became famous as a film star thanks to the close attention of Marcel Pagnol and her friendship with Cocteau? One of these ladies whom I shall not name said to me: “I am Hécate!” To be as precise as possible, she was not the only woman to make such a claim, and, perhaps, at the time that Lewis et Irène was published, there may have been a woman who claimed to have inspired the character of Elsie Magnac, the earlier version of Hécate. Elsewhere, in the same novel, people thought they recognized a famous fashion designer who protected herself admirably from the ogres of finance. This lady friend was not very pleased when, at a fancy dress ball given at her private mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, among the Pierrots, the cardinals and the Punches, you appeared in evening dress and a white tie, immaculate apart from one minor detail: a strip of shirt-tail was sticking out from your fly-buttons. Lewis himself could not have provided more of a shock. I take the liberty of reminding you of these scraps from the past and from your books, since novelists easily forget their waxen or flesh-and-blood characters after having imprisoned them for life in two hundred pages. The reader is a better keeper of memory than the author.

  Your short note of the 11th of November 1975 has occasioned a very long reply. I can sense you longing to go outside for some fresh air, but I should like to add a comment about the body of your work that reflects you like a revolving mirror.

  Hiver caraïbe, Bouddha vivant, Air indien, those portraits of cities, Londres, New York, Bucarest, reread today are perfect faded snapshots akin to Lartigue’s beautiful photographs.

  You make little of your travel writing. Wrongly so. The world deserved the very rare example you provide of a simultaneously loving and lucid eye. These tales are your roving memory, your silhouette standing out amid the chaos.

  Whenever a writer sees “other people” he ceases to inspect his own navel.

  I was saying that your note had occasioned a long response to which, for all your chronic impatience, I should like to add a word about your books. A tornado suddenly shattered this work that was so self-confident and we probably then assessed its vulnerability, which made it more precious still. An accident along the way humanized and sensitized it. Did it need this? Perhaps it was necessary for it to move forward openly and less hurriedly. Let us refer to Ernst Jünger’s diary, kept during the years 1991–6:

  Politics is the pox of literature, writes Paul Morand. An excellent maxim that he himself did not adhere to sufficiently, still less so his wife. I had put them on their guard. He was one of those writers on whom his youngest disciples relied, however much they may have compromised themselves politically or morally.

  In fact, you did not affect politics, politics affected you. You made fun of it thanks to a scepticism inherited from Philippe Berthelot, your sponsor as well as Jean Giraudoux’s at the Quai d’Orsay. A senior civil servant serves the state and the state decrees, well or badly, its political policies. At a particular moment in the history of France, our state was split in two as if with an axe. It had two half-heads. We hesitated between serving the one or the other. Millions of lives and their futures were caught in two nets. This time, luck was not on your side. From being First Minister in Berne, you found yourself virtually on the street. In Switzerland:

  … the knot on which saws are broken; invasions have shaped it like a joiner’s plane, obliged to deflect in the midst of the grain.

  In exile? Not really. Let us say rather: in purgatory. One gets out eventually. In the meantime, borders are closed or closely watched, you are struck off the ministerial list, your salary is suspended, in Romania the Soviets confiscate Hélène’s income, in France publishers show caution and your books have little success except in bibliophile circles, which is a far better sign of
posterity than you might think.

  Not destitute, but you could be seen pedalling on an old bicycle to do your shopping in the market. Hélène and you nibble away together. The winter is particularly harsh and you shiver in gloomy rooms. By great good fortune, the Lausanne municipal library in the canton of Vaud is a warm shelter. Deprived of geographical space, you spend the afternoons there consulting the histories of Europe and Asia, the greatest possible escape. A copy of Montociel, rajah aux Grandes Indes is inscribed to Josette Day: “… this account of a journey during a time when I no longer travelled, Paulm. 1944–6.” Montociel, unfortunately, was a failure as a novel. One does not look for the “new Morand” there. In another book, you write to the same person: “… this journey in time, her devoted Pmorand.” The two condensed signatures, which already look like text messages, recall L’Homme pressé [The Man in a Hurry]. The pill is not merely bitter, it is sad, as you had foreseen in 1931:

  There is something lovelier than Paris; it is nostalgia for Paris.

  In the full ripeness of his years (fifty-seven), a man whose books flew from one success to another was unwisely approaching the Tarpeian Rock. You responded courageously with the writer’s supreme weapon: some masterpieces, Le Bazar de la Charité, Milady, Parfaite de Saligny, Fouquet and one of the greatest and most dramatic novels of the twentieth century: Le Flagellant de Séville. Venices would be the testament and farewell to the friends of your youth, to the ghosts, to a miracle of serene beauty, the city that overcomes everything that is ponderous:

  In Venice, my insignificant being had its first lesson on the planet, as I emerged from classrooms in which nothing had been learnt.

  There were a few of us who, in our early years, were able to recognize a memorable elder colleague who was threatened by the baseness of current events. Of those young friends, practically none remain apart from Jean d’Ormesson and myself.

  For all that, the Journal inutile does not always spare us. There is something healthy about that and it reminds your friends of relativity. Fortunately we are no longer at an age when we wound each other with chilly words. Our warm caresses did not blind you and I can imagine, being restored to favour, the irritation with which you swept aside these caresses. Including my reply to your own 1975 letter whose ending you have probably forgotten:

  … Jean d’Ormesson is on his way to 200,000 and nothing is going to stop him. Kléber is at France v. England. Solzhenitsyn did not care for Nabokov. He has turned his back on Russian exiles living abroad. For him you can only resist in your own country (what a justification for Vichy, by the way!). When are you coming? I’m going to make some brief visits to Vevey but it’s hard to leave a distressed woman who is on a protest strike against life. Cabanis’ book on Saint-Simon is a success, mainly because people haven’t read any of it.

  P.S. I realize that from the start of this letter I’ve been using the informal tu. Would you mind if this slip of the pen became the rule? I admire your life together; a good team.

  Tibi, semper, Morand.

  * Morand is making a pun on the French words cavernes and casernes.

  † A small town some twenty kilometres south-east of Paris.

  ‡ Members of the Académie française—the Immortels—are only forty in total and are elected to numbered seats or fauteuils on the death of a predecessor.

  § This was written in 2008. In 2014 only Jean d’Ormesson survives. Maurice Druon and Claude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009 and Félicien Marceau in 2012.

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  Copyright

  Pushkin Press

  71–75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ

  Original text © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1941

  Afterword © Michel Déon, 2009

  English translation © Euan Cameron, 2015

  The Man in a Hurry was originally published

  as L�
��homme pressé in France in 1941

  Afterword by Michel Déon was first published in

  Lettres de château by Michel Déon, Gallimard, Paris, in 2009

  This translation first published by Pushkin Press in 2015

  This ebook edition first published in 2015

  This book is supported by the Institut français

  (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme

  ISBN 978 1 7822713 1 4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

  Frontispiece: Paul Morand © Harlingue Viollet

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