A Frenchman born in Spain, Michel del Castillo, who died on Tuesday December 17 at the age of 91, never left in his books, written vividly, the field of ruins of a youth lived between the monstrosity of two wars and of two parents.
“Contrary to what so many people imagine, writing offers no consolation. The more I dig into words, the more my unhappiness deepens”said this Dostoyevsky enthusiast, to whom he devoted an essay, “My Idiot Brother” (1995).
Author of some 45 books, mostly novels including his latest “The Expulsion” published in 2018, it received the booksellers and Deux Magots prize in 1973 for “The Night Wind”the Renaudot in 1981 for “The Night of the Decree”RTL-Read for “The Crime of the Fathers” (1993), Femina-essay for “Colette, a certain France” (1999) and Méditerranée for its “Spain lovers dictionary” (2005).
Michel Janicot del Castillo, his real name, was born on August 2, 1933 in Madrid to a Spanish mother and a French father. Abandoning his wife and child, the latter returned to France on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.
Close to the Republicans, his mother, Candida, spent a year in prison then took refuge with her son in the late 1930s in France. Her former husband, from whom she constantly demands money, denounces her to the authorities as “undesirable foreigner” and had her interned, with Michel, in a refugee camp in Mende (Lozère), with harsh living conditions.
Candida herself delivers the little boy to the German police in exchange for her own freedom. He was sent to work farms in Germany in 1942, until the end of World War II.
“Elephantic memory”
The wandering seems endless. He found himself for four years in a reform center in Barcelona from where he escaped in 1949: it was “a penal colony. I was rankedson of red‘, we were beaten, we were starved”.
The teenager found respite in a Jesuit school in Andalusia where, thanks to a monk, he discovered literature.
In the 1950s, he saw his father again – who seemed arrogant, racist, frankly odious – then his mother: “the child that I had been loved him, the adult that I had become did not love him”. He who thought he was an only child discovered that she had six children, from different fathers. “She abandoned us all at around the same age, 8 or 9 years old”dira-t-il.
“They were two monsters, he mediocre, she great. They didn’t like.
A generous uncle and his wife take Michel in Paris. Life begins. He studied literature and psychology and began to write. His first novel, “Tanguy” (1957), largely autobiographical – written in French, like the rest of his work – is a success.
“I have an elephantine memory. Very early on, I must have felt in danger of death and my emotional memory worked to save me”he told L’Express magazine. Of course, he never stopped digging into this traumatic past, but he did so as a writer and artist, without primarily wanting to create an autobiographical work.
“From a French father” (1998) begins as a tragic thriller: “I have a meeting with my assassin. He’s my father”. And in « Meters » (2010), inspired by his mother, he writes: “everything in this existence woven of lies and perjury inspired terror”.
In addition to fiction and a little theater, Michel del Castillo, for whom a school in Mende is named, is the author of essays such as “Algeria, ecstasy and blood” (2002) or “The time of Franco” (2008).
Member of the honorary committee of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, he spent a large part of his life in Provence, near Nîmes.
