The Mystery of Henri Pick

by David Foenkinos

  Joséphine kept reading without difficulty. She didn’t recognize her father’s voice, but then she hadn’t imagined he was even capable of writing a book. Yet what she felt echoed a sensation that she had never been able to define. She had often had the feeling of not being able to tell what he was thinking. To her, he seemed unfathomable, and that quality had grown in his later years, after he retired. He would spend hours staring at the sea, as if halted within himself. In the evening, he would go out to drink beer with the regulars at the local café, but he never seemed to get drunk. And whenever he saw someone he knew in the street, Joséphine noticed that they never said much to each other—just a few indistinct words—and she felt sure that his evenings in the café were above all an attempt to stave off boredom. Now she thought that all his silences, the way he gradually erased himself from the world, had perhaps been a way of hiding his poetic soul.

  Joséphine said that the story reminded her of the Clint Eastwood film, The Bridges of Madison County.

  “Clint who? The bridges of what?” her mother demanded.

  “Never mind…”

  “So shall we go up to the attic?”

  “Okay.”

  “Get up, then.”

  “I just can’t get my head around this whole thing.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You never know anyone. Especially not a man,” said Joséphine, incapable of going more than two minutes without relating everything back to her own life.

  Finally she went to get the small stepladder necessary to reach the attic. She opened the trapdoor and climbed, bent double, into that dusty nook. Her gaze was immediately drawn to a small wooden rocking horse that she used to ride as a child. Then she saw a blackboard. She’d forgotten that her parents never threw anything away. She found her dolls, all of which had the strange particularity of not wearing clothes, only knickers. It was crazy to think that she was already obsessed with underwear at that age. A little further on, she glimpsed a pile of her father’s aprons. A whole career encapsulated in a few scraps of fabric. At last, she saw the cardboard boxes that her mother had mentioned. She opened the first one, and it took her only a few seconds to make a crucial discovery.

  PART FIVE

  1

  Delphine explained the project to Grasset’s sales representatives. These men and women would travel all over France, announcing to booksellers that a very unusual book was about to be published. For the young editor, this first public presentation was an important test. They had not yet read the novel; how would they react to the story of its discovery? She’d asked Olivier Nora, her boss, to give her more time than usual so she could go through all the details. From the beginning, the novel of the novel would be crucially important. Of course Olivier had agreed; he, too, was unusually excited by the project. Several times, he’d repeated disbelievingly: “You were on holiday at your parents’ place and you discovered a library of rejected books? It’s incredible…” Normally a very elegant man with an almost British self-control, he had jubilantly rubbed his hands together like a child who’d just won at marbles.

  The pleasure of presenting Pick’s novel made Delphine even more radiant. In her high heels, she towered over the meeting room, although not in an oppressive way. She spoke with gentle assurance. She seemed certain that she had discovered a major author in the person of this dead pizzeria owner. The sales reps all appeared enthusiastic about the idea of championing this publication. They immediately started talking about window displays, which was very rare for a first novel. “The whole company believes in this,” announced Olivier Nora. One of the reps mentioned that he remembered the library in Brittany; he’d read an article about it a long time ago. Sabine Richer, head of the Touraine region and a big fan of American literature, talked about the Richard Brautigan novel that had been at the origin of the idea. She adored that novel—an epic road trip to Mexico, in which the author cast an ironic glance over 1960s California. Jean-Paul Enthoven, a writer and editor, went into raptures about Sabine’s erudition, and she blushed.

  Delphine had never been to a presentation anything like this one. Usually, they were long, dull affairs, with everybody fastidiously taking notes about the upcoming releases. This time, something happened. They bombarded her with questions. One man, squeezed into a too-small suit, asked: “What about promoting the book? How will you do that?”

  “There’s his widow. An old Breton woman, eighty years old, good sense of humour. She knew nothing about her husband’s secret life, and I can tell you it’s pretty powerful when she talks about it.”

  “Did he write any other books?” the man asked.

  “We don’t think so. His wife and his daughter have searched the attic, and they didn’t find another manuscript.”

  “But they did make an important discovery,” said Olivier Nora. “Right, Delphine?”

  “Yes. They found a book by Pushkin: Yevgeny Onegin.”

  “Why’s that important?” another rep asked.

  “Because Pushkin is at the very heart of the novel. And in the book that his wife discovered, Pick had underlined certain sentences. I’ll have to get hold of that copy. He may have left some clues, or he may have wanted to communicate something by marking those passages.”

  “I have the feeling that there are more surprises to come,” concluded Olivier Nora, as if to highlight the book’s mysteriousness.

  “Yevgeny Onegin is a wonderful novel in verse,” interjected Jean-Paul Enthoven. “A few years ago, a Russian woman gave me a copy. A beautiful and very cultured woman. She tried to explain to me the beauty of Pushkin’s language. No translation can convey that.”

  “And did he speak Russian, this Pick?” asked another rep.

  “Not to my knowledge, but he adored Russia. He even named a pizza after Stalin,” added Delphine.

  “Is that how you want us to sell the novel to booksellers?” the man asked, chuckling, and the whole room roared with laughter.

  The meeting went on like that for a while longer, with everybody talking about Pick’s novel so much that there was little time left for the other books that would come out at the same time. This is often how the fate of a book is decided; some are given a head start. The publisher’s enthusiasm is the deciding factor; every parent has a favourite child. The Last Hours of a Love Affair would be Grasset’s lead title for the spring, and everybody at the company was hopeful that its success would last until the summer and beyond. Olivier Nora didn’t want to wait until September so he could publish it in the famous French rentrée littéraire, which would have given the novel a better chance of competing for the big literary prizes. That period of the year was too competitive and overcrowded, and it was likely that nobody would see it as a true story, but rather as an attempt by a famous author to trick the critics and literary judges by hiding behind the facade of a dead pizzeria owner. It was, said Nora, simply an incredible story, unearthing a novel in this way. And it was important to believe, sometimes, in incredible stories.

  2

  Hervé Maroutou waited for a brief silence to bring up what he considered to be an important point. For years, he had been roaming the east of France three days a week, and he had established friendly relations with many booksellers. He knew each one’s tastes, and that enabled him to personalize his catalogue presentations. A sales representative is an essential link in the bookselling chain, the human link to reality—and often that reality is one of suffering. Year after year, as bookshops closed, his rounds grew shorter; he was literally running out of road.

  Maroutou was in awe of these foot soldiers of literature, who formed a bulwark against the coming world: a world that was not necessarily better or worse, but in which the book was no longer considered an essential aspect of culture. Hervé often met his competitors, and had become particularly friendly with Bernard Jean, his counterpart at Hachette. They would stay in the same hotels, eat the same all-inclusive “special representatives’ menu” offered by certain Ibis establishments. Over
dessert one evening, Hervé mentioned Pick’s novel. Bernard Jean replied: “Isn’t that a bit weird, publishing a rejected author?” This reaction, made at the exact moment when one of the men was eating a tarte normande and the other a chocolate mousse, had been anticipated by Maroutou during the meeting at Grasset. He was always one step ahead.

  At the time, he’d asked Delphine: “Isn’t it a risk, publishing a book by explaining that you found it in a library devoted to rejected manuscripts?”

  “Of course not,” the editor replied. “There’s a long and venerable history of masterpieces rejected by publishers. I’ll draw up a list, and that can be our response.”

  “That’s very true,” someone sighed.

  “Besides, there’s nothing to prove that Pick ever sent his manuscript to a publisher. In fact, I’m pretty sure that he took it straight to the library of rejects.”

  This last sentence changed the whole equation. Perhaps it was not a book that had been rejected, but one never intended for publication. It would be almost impossible to verify either way: publishers don’t keep records of the books they’ve rejected. Delphine made preparations to respond confidently and vigorously to all such questions. She did not want anybody to doubt this book. She spoke about the beauty of not seeking publication, of living a life beyond the margins of worldly recognition. “He was a genius who loved obscurity, that’s what we should say,” she added. In an age where everybody wants to be famous for everything and nothing, here was a man who spent months of his life perfecting a work destined to be dust.

  3

  After that meeting, Delphine decide to prepare a few documents supporting the idea that rejection is no measure of a work’s quality. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust is surely one of the most celebrated rejected books. There have been so many articles analysing the manuscript’s failure with publishers that you could stitch them together into a book longer than the original novel. In 1912, Proust was known principally for his love of high society. Is that why he wasn’t taken seriously? Mysterious recluses are always more appealing. The qualities of the silent and the sickly are more vaunted. But is it impossible to be at once brilliant and frivolous? A brief glance at the first volume of In Search of Lost Time was surely enough for anyone to recognize its literary quality. Gallimard’s reading committee at the time was composed of famous writers, including André Gide. Perhaps he merely leafed through the book rather than reading it and, armed with his prejudices, found some sentences that he considered clumsy1 and others that were tortuously long. Not taken seriously, roundly rejected, Proust was forced to pay for the book’s publication himself. Gide would later admit that the rejection of that novel remained “the reading committee’s greatest error”. Gallimard responded by finally publishing Proust. In 1919, the second book in the series, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, won the Prix Goncourt, and for the past century this author, initially turned down by every major publisher in France, has been considered one of the greatest writers of all time.

  Another emblematic example is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The author, exhausted by the constant rejection of his novel, committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-one. With prophetic irony, the epigraph of his novel was a quote from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” How is it possible that such a powerfully original and funny novel could not have found a publisher? After the author’s death, his mother spent years devoting herself to getting the manuscript published. Her determination was rewarded, and when the book came out in 1980 it was a huge international success. It has become a classic of American literature. The story of the author, driven to suicide by the world’s incomprehension of his brilliance, surely contributed to his posthumous fame. Many masterpieces are accompanied by a novel of the novel.

  So Delphine noted down these examples, in case some critics mentioned the possibility that Pick’s novel had been rejected. She also did some more research on Richard Brautigan. She had often heard authors refer to him—Philippe Jaenada,2 for example—but she hadn’t yet read any of his books. Sometimes you create an image in your head of an author just because of one title. Thanks to Dreaming of Babylon—translated into French as “A Private Detective in Babylon”—Delphine associated Brautigan with a hippie version of Philip Marlowe: a mix of Bogart and Kerouac. But reading Brautigan, she discovered his fragility, his humour, his irony, his subtle melancholy. She decided he was more like another American author that she’d just discovered, Steve Tesich, and his novel Karoo. To return to our theme of rejected books, Brautigan too had a hard time with rejections from publishers. Before becoming one of the most iconic authors of his generation, mobbed by groups of hippies, he had spent several years living close to the poverty line. Unable to pay his bus fare, he would sometimes walk three hours to an appointment; having hardly anything to eat, he didn’t refuse when a friend offered him a sandwich. All those hard years had been punctuated by the regular thud of rejection slips landing from publishers. Nobody believed in him. Manuscripts that later became so successful were given no more than a quick, scornful glance. His idea for the library of rejected books was undoubtedly born during this period when his words were ignored. He knew all too well what it was to be a misunderstood artist.3

  4

  As the publication date drew nearer, despite the enthusiastic responses of booksellers and critics, Delphine became increasingly stressed. It was the first time she had felt this kind of anxiety about a book. She was always invested in her projects, but Pick’s book had driven her into a completely new state of feverishness; the feeling of being on the edge of something major.

  Every evening, she called Madeleine to check how she was. She thought it important to be there for her authors, and even more so for the writer’s widow. Perhaps she had a premonition of what was going to happen? She had to prepare this elderly woman for the limelight. Delphine was worried that Madeleine’s life would be turned upside down; she had not expected that. Sometimes she felt uneasy at having convinced Madeleine to publish her husband’s book. This was not the editor’s usual role; this whole story could be perceived as a sort of hijacking of fate, and perhaps as a lack of respect for an author’s wishes.

  Frédéric, meanwhile, was struggling to write his novel. In these periods of literary difficulties, he had trouble with words in general: he never knew what to say to reassure Delphine. This lack of inspiration infected both of them, leaving their relationship like a blank page. The adventure, which had begun in Crozon with feelings of excitement and even joy, had become an oppressive, nerve-wracking exercise. They made love less often, and argued more. Frédéric felt bad, staying in the apartment all day long, going round in circles, waiting for his girlfriend to return as if she were the only proof of the existence of other humans. For a while now, he’d felt a need for attention, like a misbehaving child. So, one day, he announced coldly:

  “I meant to say, I saw my ex again.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I bumped into her in the street. We went for coffee together.”

  Delphine didn’t know what to say to this. Not that she was jealous, but Frédéric’s vindictive tone had taken her by surprise. The brutal way he stated the facts suggested that the information was important. What had happened? In reality, the answer was: nothing. When he caught up with his ex on the street and suggested going out for a coffee, she said she couldn’t. He had considered this a second humiliation. Which was ridiculous: she had been perfectly pleasant to him. Frédéric distorted reality, interpreting two harmless facts as marks of contempt. Agathe might have a meeting, and it wasn’t her fault if her ex-boyfriend’s novel had been published to so little fanfare that she’d never heard of it. Frédéric refused to see things this way; he was, perhaps, a little bit paranoid.

  “Okay. So was it nice?” Delphine asked.

  “Yes. We talked for two hours. The time just flew by!”

&
nbsp; “Why are you saying it like that?”

  “I’m just letting you know, that’s all.”

  “Okay, but I’m really stressed at the moment. And for a good reason, as you know. So you could be a bit gentler with me.”

  “Calm down, nothing happened. I just had coffee with her, we didn’t sleep together.”

  “All right. Well, I’m going to bed.”

  “Already?”

  “Yes, I’m exhausted.”

  “See? I knew it.”

  “Knew what?”

  “You don’t love me any more, Delphine. You don’t love me any more.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You won’t even argue with me.”

  “Is that what you think love is?”

  “Yes. I just made all that stuff up to check—”

  “What? You made it up?”