Born: Parc Saint-Maur, Paris, France, 18 June 1903. Education: Educated at Lycee Charlemagne, Paris. Career: Regular contributor to numerous newspapers and journals including Le Canard enchaine, Sic, L’Heure, L’Eveil, Litterature, and Le Coq, Paris, 1918-20; editorial secretary, LeRire, Paris, c. 1918. Met Max Jacob, q.v., who became an influential force on his writing. Closely associated with Jean Cocteau, q.v., with whom he had an affair. Died: Of typhus, 12 December 1923.
Publications
Collections
Textes inedits, edited by Henri Massis. 1927.
Oeuvres completes. 1952.
Oeuvres completes, edited by Simone Lamblin. 2 vols., 1959.
Oeuvres completes, edited by Chloe Radiguet and Julien Cendres. 1993.
Fiction
Le Diable au corps. 1923; as The Devil in the Flesh, translated by Kay Boyle, 1932; also translated by Alan M. Sheridan Smith, 1968; Robert Baldick, 1971.
Le Bal du comte d’Orgel. 1924; as Ball at Count d’Orgel’s, translated by Malcolm Cowley, 1929; as Count d’Orgel Opens the Ball, translated by Violet Schiff, 1952; as Count d’Orgel translated by Alan Sheridan Smith, 1969.
Denise (story), illustrated by Juan Gris. 1926.
Verse
Les Joues en feu I. 1920; revised and enlarged edition, 1925; as Cheeks on Fire: Collected Poems, translated by Alan Stone, 1976.
Devoirs de vacances. 1921.
Vers libres. 1925; with Jeux innocents, 1988.
Jeux innocents. 1926; with Vers libres, 1988.
Plays
Les Pelicans (produced 1921). 1921; as The Pelicans, edited and translated by Michael Benedikt and George Wellworth, in Modern French Plays, 1964.
Paul et Virginie (opera libretto), with Jean Cocteau. 1967.
Critical Studies:
Raymond Radiguet: Etude biographique by Keith Goesch, 1955; Radiguet, 1969, and Raymond Radiguet: la nostalgie, 1991, both by Clement Borgal; Raymond Radiguet by David Noakes, 1969; Un Maitre de 17 ans, Raymond Radiguet by Gabriel Boillat, 1973; Raymond Radiguet issue of Cahiers Jean Cocteau, 4, edited by Pierre Chanel, 1973; Los Annees folles de Raymond Radiguet (includes bibliography) by Nadia Odouard, 1974; Raymond Radiguet: A Biographical Study with Selections from His Work by Margaret Crosland, 1976; Radiguet, Cocteau, ”Les Joues en feu" by Jean-Louis Major, 1977; Radiguet by James P. McNab, 1984; L’Imaginaire dans les romans de Raymond Radiguet by Calogero Giardina, 1991; Cocteau et Radiguet; Etude comparee de leur crdation romanesque parallele by Damien Frangois, 1992.
Raymond Radiguet enjoyed a literary career that in many ways imitated that of the poet Arthur Rimbaud: brief, precocious, and meteoric. However, unlike Rimbaud, who simply renounced writing around the age of 21, Radiguet certainly intended to pursue his literary career, and indeed one of the most fascinating questions in the history of 20th-century French literature is the way in which his oeuvres would have developed had typhoid not killed him at the age of 20. His reputation rests on two novels, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh) and Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (Count d’Orgel Opens the Ball), and a collection of poetry, Les Joues en feu (Cheeks on Fire). His most distinctive achievement is in the use of delicate, psychological analysis and classical restraint of style to surprise and, frequently, to shock. His writing displays adolescent intensity and disillusion in equal proportions, and holds up the mirror to a society shaken to the core by the events of World War I and unable to accommodate itself to the post-war era.
Radiguet spent his childhood in Saint-Maur-sur-Marne, on the outskirts of Paris. His father, an impoverished cartoonist whose work was published weekly in L’Intransigeant, tried to supplement his son’s education by teaching him Greek and Latin. Although not wholly successful in this, his influence induced Radiguet to read widely in the French classics, reading that was soon supplemented by contemporary works, notably those of Cocteau, Jacob, and Apollinaire.
His formal education was somewhat perfunctory, the war creating a climate which facilitated regular truancy, At the age of 15, Radiguet more or less left home to live in Paris.He gained quickly an entree into the avant-garde of Parisian cultural life. Cocteau became his patron and lover, introducing him to Jacob and Breton, and to Picasso and other Cubist painters. His circle of friends extended to musicians, notably the Group of Six and Erik Satie, with whom, in 1920, he produced the comic opera Paul et Virginie.
In the same year, he published the collection of poems Cheeks on Fire, characterized by striking comparisons and clever rhymes, yet focusing on the everyday, even to the extent of deliberate banality (”Strive to be banal,” was on injunction contained in his article, ”Advice to Great Poets”). There is an apparent paradox in this attempt to write like everyone else in an era that prioritized the cult of the individual, but Radiguet’s originality lies in the classical precision of both his style and his analysis of feelings. These qualities were honed still further when he published his only play Les Pelicans (The Pelicans).
During the summer of 1921, he started writing his most notable work, The Devil in the Flesh, while on holiday on the Atlantic coast of France with Cocteau. The English rendering of the title is unsatisfactory, for it simply conveys lust rather than an impatience to grow up in order to relish the joys of adulthood. Inevitably, much of the novel is autobiographical, the story of an adolescent who grabs the opportunities for freedom that wartime offers. The narrator, a boy of 15, consciously falls in love with an older woman, Marthe, whose husband Jacques is away fighting at the front. The affair is recounted with astonishing lucidity, from the first tentative efforts at seduction, through his initiation by Marthe in a relationship in which sensuality, cruelty, and tenderness all play their part. The small town in which the couple live is scandalized, but their passion feeds on the flouting of convention and the risk of discovery by Jacques. Eventually, Marthe dies in childbirth, but the narrator’s sorrow is perversely diminished by the discovery that Marthe has named her son after him. When the book was published in 1923 it enjoyed immediate success.
Count d’Orgel Opens the Ball was written the following year and Radiguet was still working on the proofs when he died. Narrated this time in the third person (this created certain problems for Radiguet, as at times authorial intervention into the narrative becomes obtrusive), the novel is closely modelled on the 17th-century psychological novel, Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cleves (The Princess of Cleves). Mme. d’Orgel falls in love with Frangois de Seryeuse, and although they eventually discover that their love is reciprocal, the pair never meet. Mme. d’Orgel confesses her love to her husband who, insisting that outward appearances must be maintained at all costs, invites Frangois to his ball. Conscious echoes of the medieval Romance novel and rigorous analysis of emotions serve to create a highly literary work in which, to quote Radiguet, ”only the psychology is romantic.”
Three days before he died, on 12 December 1923, Radiguet told Cocteau: ”Listen to something dreadful. In three days I shall be shot by the soldiers of God.” Cocteau supervised the final proofs of Count d’Orgel Opens the Ball, published the following year, though he did not attend his friend’s funeral service, arranged by Coco Chanel.
Radiguet’s output may have been slight, but his renewal of the psychological novel, his concision, his humour, and above all his lucidity have exerted a continuing fascination upon later generations of readers.
