ALAIN-FOURNIER (LITERATURE)

Born: Henri Alban Fournier in La Chapelle d’Angillon, France, 3 October 1886. Education: Educated at the Lycee Voltaire, Paris, 1898-1901, lycee in Brest 1901-03; lycee in Bourges, 1902-03, baccalaureat, 1903; Lycee Lakanal, Paris. Military Service: Served in the French cavalry and infantry 1907-09, 1911, 1913-14; second lieutenant. Career: Secretary and translator for wallpaper factory, London, 1905; journalist, Paris Journal, 1910-12, L’Intransigeant, Paris, 1912-14. Tutor of French to T.S. Eliot; secretary to Claude Casimir Perier, 1912. Died: (killed in action) 22 September 1914.

Publications

Fiction

Le GrandMeaulnes. 1913; as The Wanderer, translated by Frangoise Delisle, 1928; as The Lost Domain, translated by Frank Davison, 1959; also translated by Sandra Morris, 1966; as The Wanderer; or, the End of Youth, translated by Lowell Bair, 1971; as Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of the Lost Content, translated by Katherine Vivian, 1979.

Miracles (stories). 1924.

Colombe Blanchet (unfinished), edited by Gabriella Manca. 1990.

Other

Jacques Riviere et Alain-Fournier: Correspondance 1905-1914. 4 vols., 1926-28; revised edition, edited by Isabelle Riviere, 2 vols., 1948; also edited by Alain Riviere and P. de Gaulmun, 1991.

Lettres au Petit B. . . . 1930; revised and enlarged edition, 1986.

Lettres d ‘Alain-Fournier a sa famille 1905-1914. 1930; enlarged editions 1940, 1949, 1986.


Alain-Fournier-Madame Simone, Correspondance 1912-1914, edited by Claude Sicard, 1992.

Charles Peguy et Alain-Fournier: Correspondance 1910-1914, edited by Yves Rey-Herme. 1973; revised edition, 1990. Miracles: Poemes et proses. 1986.

La Peinture, le coeur et l’esprit: Correspondance inedite (1907-1924), with Andre Lhote and Jacques Riviere, edited by Alain Riviere, Jean-Georges Morgenthaler, and Frangoise Garcia. 1986.

Towards the Lost Domain: Letters from London 1905, edited and translated by W.J. Strachan. 1986.

Chroniques et critiques, edited by Andre Guyon. 1991.

”Le Corps de la Femme" et Quelques Lettres d’Alain-Fournier et Jacques Riviere by Pascale McGarry, 1998.

Critical Studies:

Images d’Alain-Fournier, 1938, and Vie et passion d’Alain-Fournier, 1963, both by Isabelle Riviere; The Quest of Alain-Fournier, 1953, revised edition as The Land Without a Name: Alain-Fournier and His World, 1975, and Le Grand Meaulnes, 1986, both by Robert Gibson; Portrait of a Symbolist Hero: An Existential Study Based on the Work of Alain-Fournier by Robert Champigny, 1954; Alain-Fournier et le Grand Meaulnes by Jean-Marie Delettrez, 1954; A Critical Commentary on Alain-Fournier’s ”Le Grand Meaulnes” by Marian G. Jones, 1968; Alain-Fournier: Sa vie et ”Le Grand Meaulnes” by Jean Loize, 1968; Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life 1886-1914 by David Arkell, 1986; Le Grand Meaulnes: Images et documents edited by Daniel Leuwers, 1986; Alain-Fournier by Stephen Gurney, 1987; Alain-Fournier: Les Chemins d’Une Vie: Guide Biographique Illustre by Alain Riviere, 1994; L’enigme Alain-Fournier 1914-1991 by Alain Denizot and Jean Louis, 2000.

Although Alain-Fournier’s fame seems likely to rest on Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer), his only completed novel, he does not deserve to be seen simply as a one-book author. In his tragically foreshortened life, he produced a number of poems and short stories as well as an impressive array of letters and newspaper articles. All this material has now been published and occupies several hundred closely printed pages.

None of the 12 poems he completed was published in his lifetime. The first was written in August 1904 and the last in August 1906. They are nearly all in free verse form and bear the clear imprint of the great enthusiasms of his later teens: Francis Jammes, Jules Laforgue and Pelleas et Melisande. Their principal interest is that they already include some of the dominant motifs of his later writing; a pair of sweethearts in a peaceful country setting, the cooing of doves, the notes of a distant piano, an elusive girl who is loved in vain. The most accomplished of these poems, ”A travers les etes. . . ,” written in August 1905, was the first attempt to transpose into polished form his impressions of the brief encounter two months previously with Yvonne de Quievrecourt; it was eventually to become the centrepiece of the fancy dress party at the lost domain in The Wanderer.

The first of his writings ever to appear in print was ”Le Corps de la Femme,” completed in September 1907, just before the author began his two years of compulsory Army service, and published in La Grande Revue two months later. It is a series of vignettes expressing his youthful ideal of womanhood, composed as a deliberate counter to Pierre Lous, who sang the praises of the female nude and wrote captions for pornographic ”art-studies,” Alain-Fournier argued that French women would remain loyal to their gender and to the traditions of their country only if they kept clothed and remained remote. His next contribution to this subject, ”La Femme empoisonnee,” completed 18 months later, reveals the effect of army service on his youthful ideals: the woman of the title, once the pure girl who sets schoolboy hearts a-flutter, is now the garrison whore riddled with the pox.

From 1909 onwards, the consequences of lost innocence became Alain-Fournier’s abiding concern. While he continued to yearn for the inaccessible aristocratic Yvonne, he embarked on a series of short-lived love-affairs with lower-class women, the legacy of which was invariably self-disgust. Loss of purity, he came to believe, squandered his hopes of happiness and directly threatened the childlike sense of wonderment that he felt was crucial to his art. Variations on this theme are to be found in the short stories in Miracles and in the earliest attempts he made to write a novel where his version of the Land of Lost Contentment is simply called le pays sans nom (the land without a name): in The Wanderer, finally completed in 1913 after all manner of false starts, this becomes the ”Lost Domain” which Meaulnes is convinced he has no right to re-enter because he is no longer innocent. The theme was also to have been of central importance to Alain-Fournier’s second novel, Colombe Blanchet, only a few fragments of which were ever written. Set like all his fiction against a rural background, its characters were to have been young schoolteachers rather than schoolboys in their teens. The projected epigraph was a quotation from the Imitation of Christ: ”I seek a pure heart and there I will take my rest.”

While Alain-Fournier’s poetry and fiction remain deeply rooted in his rural past, his prolific correspondence and numerous newspaper articles have a spectacularly wider range. The first of his published letters, written to his parents in 1898, lists his examination successes at the end of his first term at his Paris lycee; the last, sent to his beloved sister in September 1914, is from the battlefield of the Marne. Between these two dates, he wrote scores of letters, many positively voluminous, to his closest relatives, to school-friends, and eventually, as he began to make his way in the literary world, to such fellow-writers as Gide, Jacques Copeau, Jammes, and T.S. Eliot, who was, for a brief while in 1910-11, his private pupil. By some way the most important correspondence is that with Jacques Riviere, his closest friend and eventually his brother-in-law. Circumstances separated them for four years and they exchanged long letters in which they described and analyzed for each other their evolving thoughts and feelings and their impressions of the world around them. Alain-Fournier builds up a detailed picture of the London scene in 1905 and records vivid impressions of his army service which played so significant a part in both his sentimental education and his literary apprenticeship. Especially revealing is the record of their latest discoveries in the worlds of literature, music, and painting, where they respond with infectious enthusiasm yet analyze and evaluate with admirable perceptiveness.

Their appetite remained insatiable to the end. While Riviere went on to become secretary then editor-in-chief of La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, Alain-Fournier became a literary critic and gossip-columnist for a variety of newspapers and journals. By its very nature, much of this work was ephemeral, but it remains impressive for its wealth of judicious comment and the sheer breadth of its range. Taken together with his many letters, it constitutes an invaluable chronicle of that inordinately rich decade in the cultural life of Paris which preceded World War I.

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