by Jean Giono
Another comic matter, this one personal, stems from the discrepancy between my actual financial situation and the myth circulating on this subject. X. told me this again yesterday in Marseille, I’m considered very rich. It infuriates the “pure youth” that I have a checkbook. It’s true, I do have one. Right now I have a grand total of 32,000 francs in my Crédit Lyonnais account. Salomé is coming to ask me for 2,500 francs to buy casks for my wine. I owe Porporat 37,000 francs for work at Margotte. Mme. Ernst enters the hospital Monday and is counting on me to pay for her operation (6,000?). Salomé wants to borrow 50,000 from me to buy a little horse at the fair in Gap. I’m going to have to turn him down. But even so, I don’t have enough to pay Porporat and the taxes I still owe, 80,000. I owe 80 + 37 + 6 = 123,000 and I have 30,000. No response from Grasset about the 50,000 I asked for. I have never had money. What surprises them is that it doesn’t bother me. Well, not very much. What does bother me is not being able to lend Salomé 50,000. No. Everything about it bothers me. And what a waste of time thinking about it!
Everything is working out. At noon the 50,000 arrived from Grasset with a nice letter. What’s more, they only had to advance me 35,000. I had credit for 15,000 in my account. A nice simple letter sending me the money and saying a letter would follow from Grasset, which I haven’t received yet. Mother Ernst will be able to have her operation.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday in Marseille. Hôtel de Paris. They’re nice. The hotel clerk was sucking up a little, I don’t remember regarding what (filling out my guest card no doubt), “famous writer,” he said, “known throughout the world,” he added. He was an old man, you couldn’t be angry with him, that was annoying. The next minute, I was thanking him stupidly, awkwardly, like I would give a coin to a beggar. I wanted to tell him to get lost. Three days of divine joys. Life gives me loads of joys. And I am more and more capable of savoring them, of enjoying them fully. The quality of what I’m given is so magical that it’s as though I’m living in an enchanted city. Nothing exists beyond my joy. It’s the essential fabric. I move through the streets like an underwater diver. Restaurant, faces, it’s all tulle (like Cocéa’s forest). It’s all scenery, though not ugly because the rest is so beautiful, so golden, so fantastically real that it banishes the ordinary in life to extraordinarily remote distances. The impression that we leave our mark in the street. A beautiful mark, the mark of joy in sadness, maybe even purity (that must be seen), well, certainly unusual. They stand there opened mouth, sometimes literally. The completely appalling humanity of the city. Men and women with fish heads, pig heads (many of these), snake heads (without chins), parrot heads (the women), dog heads, cat heads, tomato heads, empty heads as well, many of them, the majority. Apollos among them as well, but you can tell immediately they have the hearts of hollow radishes just seeing what care they take that the crease in their trousers doesn’t get rumpled. And what spastic jerking all the bones in their skeletons have to endure so that their jackets remain impeccable as they walk. And their eyes! If they are a beautiful color (which happens, velvet black), they are no less cold. If not, they are the ugliest part of the whole city, the eyes of the Apollos, not diabolical, no, not even when they’re beautiful, that’s what makes them terrible, absolutely cut off from all good or evil gods, that’s the color of their eyes. There are also Venuses, and here it’s simply a matter of their asses, not even clean, that’s for sure. Night is falling. A horrible sensation. To be far away. Happily. No different from being in the hills with the red leaves right now and the wonderful yellow-gold of the medlar trees. When we were alone in the phantasmagoria of the solitary olive orchards. Always the same and it’s beautiful. Ugliness will not enter, cannot even seep in. Watertight. Completely.
November 7
First day of a brisk mistral in a long time. Great frenzy of light and cold. Sky sparkling from one edge to the other. The hills dazzlingly bright. Red leaves in droves. Rumbling, drums. Frantic gestures of trees that lash the flocks of leaves with their black whips.
The beginning of the New Middle Ages, as announced in the first pages of Chute de Constantinople. Robberies (the armed robbery of the tobacco shop in Simiane can hardly pass for a patriotic act of war), large companies occupying the high hills and even T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The priest in La Fontaine de Vaucluse was killed. The newspaper report could have been for the ecclesiastical murders of the tenth to thirteenth centuries: “Two shots were fired that wounded the unfortunate priest. Retreating, Father Ameilh took refuge in a side chapel, then at the foot of the high alter. His assailants pursued him mercilessly and shot many more times to finish him off.” This article from 1943 ends with a paragraph on the desecrated church that will be closed and off-limits until it can be reconsecrated. The incidents created by gangs of robbers and murderers will necessitate strongholds, communities withdrawing into themselves, and probably a kind of knighthood, and maybe the white gatherings that I spoke of in Chute. Round Table. In Marseille, Z. told me that during his stay in Nyons a Gaullist rally was announced right out in the open. Roads, streets, and alleys guarded by the gendarmes. The curiosity of people who came to watch, pretending they hadn’t; counter-demonstrations by the Youth camps who marched past singing La Marseillaise. Atmosphere of unrest and insecurity. All that, if the Communists looked at it with their eyes open, goes beyond the revolutionary stage. It’s already post-revolution (post aborted revolution), with outbreaks of fighting or attempts of fighting amidst widespread insecurity. There are no mystical ferment. For the moment at least. The Middles Ages without faith, without lords, without fortified castles, without chivalry, without Christianity (or whatever might replace it – because Communism will not replace it because it is so crudely material, because it hasn’t realized that the spirit is also matter, and what matter!). In any case, this is going to continue, to grow and expand, to increasingly turn away from all that might have been noble about it at the start; it’s going to devolve into murder pure and simple, hotfooted armed robberies of isolated farms, busses, cars, forming gangs like Cartouche and Mandrin. Good material for novelists.
I’m gradually realizing that the place where I live (my office) is wonderful. Not in the way that Lucien might find wonderful maybe, not Côte d’Azur or Saint-Paul or the Contadour. Nothing sensational. But right, and radiant with light. I was reading on my divan and I looked at my south window out of which, in full sun scoured clean by the mistral, swayed the shining cypress and I had to come note down my contentment. It’s true that it’s a Greek day outside. One of those icy, brilliant Sundays on which, when I was young, I would go on magnificent personal odysseys in the olive orchards, which have since become my Armida’s gardens.
Having no inner resources, that’s the curse of men who live in cities (Marseille), where those who have them lose them or leave. Territories without beauty.
Today, the ceaseless rush of violent wind around my high room. The sound of wind battering my north wall. Outside it’s pure diamond. Unbearable brilliance of an earth without form or color. All that exists open to the heart is a naked gray sky that captures all the light. The earth is nearly black.
In Marseille, I saw a movie in color. La Ville dorée. A mediocre film except for the choice of faces (almost as right as in American movies). Color, although used discretely and magnificently for the first time, remains irrelevant to life. But precisely in this irrelevance, what possibilities for poetry! In the falseness that is color, what potential for latent poetic powers. I was speaking recently of La Nausée. What I mean about the poetry of color can be expressed more clearly in relation to this film project. It’s not in a film’s exterior – flesh of horses, ponds, flowers, skies, clouds, skin tones of faces, the beautiful green eyes of the heroine – that color must function, but in the poetry. Sartre’s La Nausée in color. That’s where we could really see what color can do. I think that as soon as films in color become the rule, the black and white film will disappear as the silent film has
. Only here we are headed toward extraordinary vulgarities. Colors are going to be slapped on wildly, none of the plays you can discover with a new keyboard scale. If I were allowed – please heaven – to be able to freely – I say freely – film Le Chant du monde, and if it were to be in color, I would love to try to use those new tones not to make the grass green – although it would be green – but to make a crimson or ochre or grayish pink enter suddenly into the drama as Lady Macbeth enters or the witches or Ariel! Of course it would all be in color, but suddenly a dramatic color would enter – maybe a lowly gray – and the gray would play – that’s the essential thing, would have to play – the same role as an action, word, or music. Ville dorée, a trite story, and nevertheless the red dress and crown of wheat and the festive golds in the costume of the servant girl who is getting engaged to the master; when the servant girl follows behind her dark master like a caged bear, at the moment when first the girl appears, and then disappears, and the whole party leaves for the pond to stop her from drowning herself. A moment of very high drama. Very brief but very high.
November 8
A.F. who came to see me this morning told me a funny little story that made me roar with laughter. It was in the Marseille station. The train for Saint-Raphaël packed to the gills by the porters, the steps crowded with passengers holding on. On the platform a dazed German soldier under a tremendous load of bags; he had no idea where to board, where to find a spot. He looked around, he was the last one on the platform, they were only waiting for him to blow the whistle for departure. Then one of the crew went up to him and said to him in patois, “Alors, ounclé, parten ou parten pas?” (“So, Uncle, are we leaving or aren’t we?”) It’s difficult to explain this Marseille humor that makes me laugh. First of all, there’s that word ounclé, uncle, which is both condescending and slightly protective (like a young nephew to an uncle) and that casual way of considering the act of departure (very Marseille, hardly German, hardly soldier, not at all German soldier). It seemed like he was saying, “So, what’s the decision?” Now what decision did that poor fellow have to make, buried under his luggage, his orders, and maybe even his doctrine. Hence, the laughter of the people on the train, and my own, slaves alike.
Sylvie: “I made five mistakes in my dictation.” Since I give her some coins whenever she makes only one or two mistakes, I said, “So, no coins. “I know,” she said. “And why five mistakes?” “There was a hard word.” “What was it?” “Intérieur.” (I’m very surprised.) “Yes,” she said, “I put in an h,” and she added, “I wanted to use two l’s.” (I think that, in fact, seeing my surprise that she’d added an h, she was really saying, “Oh that’s nothing, I almost put in two l’s,” as if to say, “Imagine what could have happened!”)
Charles: Slow, insensitive, narrow-minded, formerly an architect, he’s forty years old, now my gardener, handyman. German, undoubtedly a Communist, at least a sympathizer. Gardener, but he cuts wood, goes to the farms for supplies, takes care of the rabbits and chickens. Pleasant enough tasks. Lives in the house, sleeps in the back of the library. Willing to help, loyal, good-natured, very devoted to me, to me and by extension to the whole house. I took him in stark naked, so to speak, dressed in rags. Now wears new clothes of mine recut to his size. Sleeps, slept with Mme. Ernst. Reads, takes notes, lives with us as an equal. Eats at my table, of course. And 600 francs a month, plus whatever he asks for anytime he asks for it.
A wasted day today. I read the detective novels that J. brought me at eleven o’clock. Decided to begin the text on Virgil tomorrow. The third act of Voyage seems short to me. The advantage of a quick resolution, but I must review the typed text as I correct it to make sure everything is clear enough. The possibility of fleshing out the scene with Donna Fulvia and the colonel, or finding a better exit for the colonel which, right now, is weak. That might come with writing the text on Virgil.
The legend. Radio National reported that Marcel Pagnol, sentenced in Aix at the film trial (that’s true), paid me four million! (needless to say I wish it were true – the possibility then of donating the money to the town for a maternity ward at the hospital.) He didn’t pay me anything and moreover, according to the figures of the experts, he owes me 1,500,000 francs, which he won’t pay me. Dragging everything out as expected. As Marcel Pagnol must.
November 9
On this business of color, the best way to say it is that color must be made to play the same role (in film) that it plays in a painting. The painter hasn’t put in the true color, or more accurately, he has invented (always the quarrel between true and false). What is annoying and irritating in color films is that the color is true. It must not be true. Just like Van Gogh paints the wheat field with a wide stroke of chrome yellow and doesn’t care about capturing the glistening of the stalks other than through the white of the canvas (why? because in contemplating the actual wheat field his gaze was absorbed in the wonderful yellow of the ripe ears and the dazzling gray of the stalks seemed to him white in comparison.) Likewise, not to establish the truth, but the sensual truth of relationships. And for dramatic effect, maybe make the lips green and the eyes red. But that’s another story.
Meyerowitz arrived late in the day. New troubles once again. Police, searches, fears, escapes, panic. What to do? Oh I was so, so thirsty, and what could I do but listen to endless moaning about the dangers he was in. Because I don’t believe that there are new dangers. Nevertheless, for the ones that actually exist, I examine the issues seriously and try to find solutions. Seeing in all this the heroic side of salvation at any cost, I naturally propose heroic (and moreover, valuable) solutions to which M. raises amusing objections: Yes, but what about my piano? (a noble concern for work but a little bit Laurel and Hardy). I answer that there’s some danger he’ll have to give up on the piano. “But I don’t think that’s an immediate danger,” he says. So I advise waiting. To which he replies, “Yes, but if they catch me tonight?” So now I don’t know how to disentangle myself from all this. Is it serious? Unjustified panic? Collective fear? I don’t know anymore. In the end I have to telephone B. to find out if M. could go to the A.’s at V. The comic side of each drama.
Mme. E’s operation must be today.
And once more I didn’t work today but read one of those infantile detective novels.
Reread the typed text of scene III of the third act Donna F. Julio. Satisfied enough with the tennis game. It returns us quite nicely to the first act. But I still think that the end of scene IV Donna F. Col. John is wrong. Fleshing it out a little and maybe (here must lie the secret) with another page or two – but very beautiful – in the last scene, and the third act would be perfect. Maybe that will come when I’m writing the text on Virgil. The distance, the shift to a different project, will cast fresh light on some inspiration, I think (I hope).
November 10
About half past noon sirens announced an alert. About one o’clock we could hear planes passing to the west. The alert ended at two. At three o’clock two German planes flew over us at very low altitude (50 or 60 meters). They came from the northeast and crossed in the direction of south-southwest. They didn’t gain altitude as they approached the hills on the horizon and I kept them in sight as long as possible and I imagine that, if they followed the course of the Durance, they went around the rock of Saint-Eucher and are continuing their descent into the valley.
November 11
Last night another alert. The sirens went off at 2:30. I went to reassure my mother who was sleeping somewhere else and hadn’t heard. What’s more, what I took to be the beginning of the alert was the end. I hadn’t heard the first warning (about one o’clock, I believe). This morning at nine o’clock, a great many planes passing over very high up.
The legend. This time it’s Le Petit Marseillais reporting that I was paid four million! They seized the opportunity to draw a parallel with Verlaine who, they emphasized, died in poverty.
Began the text on Virgil. I�
��m rereading Stendhal’s Correspondance from the beginning, when he was seventeen and was writing to his sister Pauline.
At 11:45 AM another alert. I was in town. Everyone ran. The police blew their whistles and made people go home, stopped cars, emptied cafés. I walked around trying to find Aline who should have been returning from school then. When I got to the Boulevard de la Plaine, it was already deserted and almost directly in front of the police station. I was not allowed to go on. Here I am and it’s the finest weather in the world, bright and warm, full sun, calm, golden leaves, blue sky. No more noise, everyone lying low. Noon bells in a splendor of earthly Paradise.
The end of the alert sounded about three o’clock. At two, we could hear very far to the west the rumble of artillery fire or bombs. The train from Marseille that’s supposed to arrive at 10 AM got in at 1 PM. The weather is fantastically beautiful.
Hung a Javanese cloth as a curtain in my south window because the morning sun is burning my paper and blinding me. Stained-glass window with a storm of flowers, leaves, purple and blue birds. I must go to the antique dealer and try to find a nice cloth to cover the west window on sunny afternoons when the same thing happens at the stroke of three.
Stendhal. Correspondance. Immediately surprised by the tone he uses to talk about his father to his sister Pauline. It’s my papa, the papa. “Do you know if my papa had my books sent?” Nothing suggests the tone of Henry Brulard. The letter he writes from Goito near Mantova on February 24, 1801 (Letter 16 to his sister. The Divan, p. 41) is a marvel of romantic accuracy. Already present are almost all the minor characters and scenery of La Chartreuse. Lessons can be drawn here for appreciating his magnificent honesty. Here you can also see his brilliant interpretation. A minimum of lying, or more precisely the maximum, since it becomes unrecognizable in the reality he creates and nevertheless it operates on the senses like Van Gogh’s big lie.