I for one have always denied that there could be such a thing as a modest artist; since meeting Martin du Gard my certainty has begun to waver. But this monster of modesty also has other reasons, apart from the peculiarity of his character, for seeking to live in withdrawal from the world: the legitimate concern every artist worthy of the name has to protect the time needed for his work.
This reason becomes imperative the moment the author identifies his work with the construction of his own life. Time then ceases to be merely the place where the work is done, but becomes the work itself, immediately threatened by any diversion.
Such a vocation rejects provocation and its calculated stratagems, instead accepting in everything concerned with literary creation the law of true craftsmanship. When Martin du Gard began his career as a writer, men were entering literature (the history of the Nouvelle revue française group is clear proof of this) rather as one enters the religious life.
Today, people enter it or pretend to do so—as if in mockery; it is merely a pathetic derision which can, with a few writers, have its effectiveness. With Martin du Gard, however, there was never any doubt about the seriousness of literature.
The first of his published novels, Devenir!, is a clear indication of this, being the story of a literary vocation that fails through lack of character. He makes the person in whom he depicts himself say: “Everyone has a little genius; what people don’t have anymore these days, because it’s something you have to acquire, is a conscience.”
The same character likes neither too polished an art, which he describes as “castrated,” nor “geniuses who are essentially adolescent.” I hope readers will forgive the author for the truth and topicality of his second remark. But the “big guy,” as Martin du Gard calls him in the novel, continues squarely in the same vein. “In Paris, all writers seem to have talent; actually, they have never had time to acquire any: all they have is a kind of cleverness which they borrow from one another, a communal treasure in which individual values are frittered away.”
It is already obvious that if art is a religion, it will not be an attractive one. On this point Martin du Gard quickly cut himself off from the theoreticians of art for art’s sake. Symbolism, which caused so much exquisite damage among the writers of his generation, never had any effect on him, except in certain stylistic indulgences2 which he later outgrew, like adolescent acne. He was only twenty-seven when he wrote Devenir!, and the writer who is quoted with enthusiasm in this first work is already Tolstoi.
From here on, Martin du Gard was to remain faithful all his life to an ascetic vocation, an artistic Jansenism that would make him shun ostentation and effect, in order to sacrifice everything to uninterrupted labor on a work he wanted to make endure. “What is difficult,” says this precocious and perspicacious thinker, “is not to have been someone but to stay that way.” Genius runs the risk, in fact, of being no more than a fleeting accident. Only character and work can transform it into fame and a livelihood.
Hard work, and the organization and humility that go with it, are thus at the very core of free creation and consequently indispensable in a craft where work, but work humbly pursued, is also the rule of life. It is no exaggeration to say that Martin du Gard’s very aesthetic principles made it inevitable that his work, in which individual problems have the starring roles, take on historical dimensions.
The man who finds his reasons for living and his delights in free work can, in the end, bear any humiliation except the humiliation justly inflicted on his work, just as he can accept every privilege except those that separate him from his liberty, the work to which he is chained. Works like Roger Martin du Gard’s sometimes unknowingly restore artistic toil to its rightful place in the city, and can no longer be divorced then from its victories or defeats.
But even before any other discovery, the result is this work, solid as stone, whose main body is Les Thibault and whose buttresses are Devenir!, Jean Barois, Vieille France, Confidence africaine, and the plays.
We can discuss this work, we can try to see its limitations. But we cannot deny that it exists, and does so superbly, with an unbelievable honesty. Commentaries can add to it or detract from it, but the fact remains that we have here one of those works, exceptional in France, around which one can turn, as one walks around a building. The same generation that gave us so many aestheticians, so many subtle, delicate writers, also brought a work rich in people and in passions, constructed according to the plans of a well tried technique.
This nave of men, built solely with the rigor of an art practiced a whole lifetime, testifies that in a time of poets, essayists, and novelists concerned with the soul, a master craftsman, a Pierre de Craon without a religion but not without faith, was born in our land.
Nevertheless, a law exists in art which says that every creator should be buried beneath the weight of his most obvious virtues. The proverbial honesty of his art has sometimes hidden the true Martin du Gard in a time which, for various reasons, put genius and improvisation above everything else, as if genius could do without a work schedule and improvisation without arduous leisure. The critics thought they had done enough by paying homage to virtue, forgetting that in art virtue is only a means placed at the service of risk.
There is certainly no lack of audacity in the work that concerns us. It stems nearly always from the obstinate pursuit of psychological truth. It thus serves to emphasize the ambiguity of human beings, without which this truth is meaningless. We are already surprised, reading Devenir!, by the cruel modernity of the ending; André, who has just buried his wife in great grief, notices the young servant girl standing at the window. We know that he has desired her, and realize that she will help him digest his sorrow.
Martin du Gard deals frankly with sexuality and with the shadowy zone of darkness it casts over every life. Frankly, but not crudely. He has never given way to the temptation of suggestive licentiousness that makes so many contemporary novels as boring as guides to social etiquette. He has not obligingly described monotonous excesses. He has chosen rather to show the importance of sexual life through its inopportunity.
Like a true artist, he has not painted directly what it consists of, but indirectly, what it forces people to become. It is sensuality, throughout her life, for example, that makes Mme de Fontanin vulnerable in the presence of her unfaithful husband. We know this, and yet it is never said, except as Mme de Fontanin watches over her husband on his deathbed.
What is also noticeable in Les Thibault is a curious intermingling of the themes of desire and death. (Once more, it is the night before the burial of Mother Frubling that Jacques is initiated by Lisbeth.) Certainly we must see this intermingling as one of the obsessions that are an artist’s privilege and at the same time as a means of underlining the unusual nature of the sexual life.
But desire is not only mingled with the things of death, it also contaminates morality and makes it ambiguous. The righteous man, the man who observes the outward show of Christianity, the father in Les Thibault, writes in his diary: “Do not confuse with the love of our neighbor the emotion we feel at the approach, at the touch, of certain young people, even children.” Then he crosses out only the final words, and this omission reconciles him with both modesty and sincerity.
Just as Jérôme de Fontanin savors the delight of the repentant libertine when he saves Rinette from the prostitution into which he had cast her. “I am good, I am better than they think,” he repeats tenderly to himself.
But he cannot resist sleeping with her one last time, adding the pleasures of the flesh to those of virtue. One sentence is all Martin du Gard needs to summarize the mechanical inspiration of the pose: “His fingers were automatically unfastening her skirt, as his lips rested on her forehead in a paternal kiss.”
The whole work has this flavor of truth. The admirable Vieille France not only offers us Martin du Gard’s most sinister character, the postman Joigneau, a sort of Astaroth on bicycle, but it also abounds in pitiless revelations about the provincial heart, and the last page gives an astonishing conclusion. Similarly, in African Secret, the very simplicity of an incestuous brother’s tone will make his unfortunate adventure seem natural. In 1931, with Un taciturne, Martin du Gard dared to put on the stage, without the slightest vulgarity of tone, the drama of a respectable industrialist who discovers he has homosexual leanings.
At last, in Les Thibault, the brilliant touches multiply. One could quote the scene in which Gise secretly allows the child that the man she loves has had with another woman to suck her virgin breast; or the meal Antoine and Jacques have, after the father’s death, that almost in spite of themselves takes on a slight air of celebration. But there are two such touches I rank
