In his latest work, Jérôme Garcin does not pass anything on to our collaborating writers, he charges them. Are friendship and criticism compatible? asks our columnist, after having felt a slight discomfort upon reading the book by the former critic of Mask and the Feather.
Jérôme Garcin has just published Words and deeds – Belles-Lettres under the Occupation. This author, who is a friend, has a passion for literature, he writes books which are remarkable and have always benefited from enthusiastic reviews. Its register is infinitely varied, from the intimate to History. Regarding him, I never doubted the sincerity of these praises, precisely because I approved and shared them. While in general, I have always judged French criticism (literature, cinema and or theater) to be conniving, clientelist, excessive and therefore false, oscillating between hyperbole and demolition and too rarely giving an impression of freedom and authenticity. Perhaps my vision is excessively pessimistic; or should I concede to being stopped, in the face of many analyses, favorable or not, by this intolerable limit that they do not match mine?
Unwelcome derision?
With the last and short work by Jérôme Garcin, which I read in one go as it mixed literature, the terrifying and, for some, heroic period of the Occupation, the fate of several detestable writers in their writings and their behavior, cursed, rejected, shot for Robert Brasillach, talented but misguided or admirable like Jean Prévost. I found myself confronted with excellence but also with a slight discomfort.
I do not have to discuss the choice of his hostilities and his predilections. For the latter, we know that Jean Prévost, to whom he devotes several chapters, is a model: as a writer, as a man of courage, resistant and heroic, as a personality capable of leading everything at the same time, a man of reflection and action.
When Jérôme Garcin looks at the writers he despises because they wrote horrors, they made a pact in one way or another with the occupier and they did not correspond to his ideal of “chivalry”, sometimes nobly sacrificial, it loses nothing of its quality of style, its art of portraits and its narrative fluidity.
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As for style, he reports what Paul Morand was criticized for in his correspondence with Jacques Chardonne: “making style in every sentence”. This could be, in a positive way, credited to Jérôme Garcin.
What disturbed me, and which contrasts with the deep understanding that Jérôme Garcin knows how to demonstrate even in the face of the worst, is the tone of derision, or condescending, or moralizing, which he often uses. As if it were impossible, in judging these few writers despicable, to better explain why they had been so, in what trap History had stuck them and how they had not known or been able to escape from it. A Robert Brasillach was admirable from his arrest, during his trial with expeditious justice and during his execution: this does not compensate for his unworthy writings but would have called, from my point of view, less inquisitive dogmatism.
You don't have to be resistant to write well
I add that Jérôme Garcin is completely right to celebrate resistance writers, combining with their talent the courage to confront Nazism and for some to lose their existence to it. But I sometimes had the impression, reading it, that you had to have resisted to write well, to be called a great writer. I wouldn't go so far as to place Céline above everyone else because he revolutionized the French language, but having dazzled with The Journey or Death on credit should not be neglected.
In this beautiful little book, I am touched indirectly by Jérôme Garin's self-portrait: literature is not everything for him, courage is essential, saying no rather than yes, when faced with the intolerable, is exemplary, life is not a long, quiet river but a struggle where you have to know how to stand.
I hope, with this post, that I have not betrayed the honesty of a criticism, nor the happiness of a friendship.
