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Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) |
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French novelist, dramatist and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Martin du Gard was originally trained as an archivist and expert in old handwriting. His literary fame rests on his eight-part novel The World of the Thibaults, which continued the tradition of Stendhal and Tolstoy in its wide historical scope. Martin du Gard often juxtaposed two brothers, one seeking evolution, the other revolution, and studied through their conflict social, philosophical and religious problems. "One can love the people and not be able to stand their ongoing company. One can love the populace and not like to live with the individuals who compose it. Their ways of being and of thinking, their ways of being happy or unhappy, their desires, their welfare, their joys, their emotions, their sensitivity, their reactions are not my own; and I am a foreigner among them. My climate is not theirs. Whenever circumstances have forced me into contact with them, I have suffered from it." (from Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, 1941) Roger Martin du Gard was born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. His father was a prosperous lawyer and his mother came from a family of stockbrokers. At the age of seventeen Martin du Gard read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which inspired him later in the Thibault saga. He entered the École des Chartres in Paris and received his diploma as a paleographer-archivist in 1905. Next year he married Hèléne Foucault, and settled in Paris. Their marriage failed; the only child, Christiane, became the battleground for the parents. She eventually married Martin du Gard's closest friend, who was a quarter of a century older than she. Devenir!, (1907), which Martin du Gard's published at his own expense, was a story about a man who fails as an author. Earlier Martin du Gard had abandoned his first novel, Une vie de saint, which gives the work self-confessional background. His breakthrough came with the novel Jean Barois, (1912), fictional portrait of the Dreyfuss scandal, written partially under the influence of Marcel Hébert, a modernist priest. Using then largely experimental technique of juxtaposing dialogue and historical documentation, Martin du Gard described the mental struggle of reason and Roman Catholic faith in the person of his young hero, Jean Barois, a polemical journalist. From his youthful rebellion against religious beliefs Barois moves toward religion in his old age, and dies his spirit broken. Against his development Martin du Gard sets Luce, who maintains his liberated stance to the end. The book was published on the recommendation of André Gide, who became his close friend, but whose attitude to the Catholic religion and Church was more uncritical. Martin du Gard also shared some of his sexual interest. In the dark and dramatic play Un taciturne (1931) he dealt with homosexual themes. The play was showed at the Louis Jouvet Theatre. While working on Le Lieutenant-colonel de Maumort, Martin du Gard compiled a dossier in which he argued that homosexuality is a natural condition. However, although the atmosphere of Paris was relatively tolerant, he instructed Gide not to confess his sexual orientation. Gide was subject in his essays Notes sur André Gide (1951), based on his journals. Martin du Gard's correspondence with André Gide was published in 1968. Martin du Gard's peasant farce, Le Testament du père Leleu (1914) was performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. During World War I Martin du Gard served in the French Army in a motor transport division on the western front. After the war he worked briefly at a theater. Tired of the literary life of Paris, Martin du Gard withdrew to Le Tertre, a Norman country estate at Bellême. There he wrote his masterpiece, Les Thibault, published between 1922 and 1940. Noteworthy, before the Nobel Prize, his work failed to generate any significant debate. Martin du Gard himself declined to discuss his own political or philosophical views and did not offer concrete solutions on how peace and justice he advocated could be established in the world. The ceremony at which he received the Nobel prize, embarrassed him. The novels follow two bourgeois
families, one Catholic and the other Protestant, and depict the
degeneration of society prior WW I. The principal characters are
Jacques Thibaut, a socialist revolutionary, and his brother Antoine, a
Cartesian doctor who seeks change through evolution. Jacques and
Antoine are opposing personalities – when one is restless the other is
calm – and the first two volumes of the series focus on their conflict.
Both fail to see the signs of the approaching war; their blindness is
the universal blindness of mankind. Jacques distributes pacifist
pamphlets by air, his plane crashes and he is accidentally shot as a
spy. The birth and growth of his son, Jean-Paul, symbolizes the
contonuation of his fight. Antoine is caught by a gas attack. His
health rapidly deteriorates
but he keeps a diary recording his thoughts. "I am condemned to die
without having much understanding of myself or the world," he says. "Martin du Gard was not by his own account a very cheerful man; he even thought in his bluer moments that as a maker of fiction -- and despite his success, which included the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature -- he had come to the novel a generation too late. Fine writing wasn't his thing, objectivity was: he thought that a novelist should give us the material world -- the places, people, things that fill it to overflowing -- as plainly and substantively as he knew how, with all the ample transparency of a novel like War and Peace." (John Sturrock in The New York Times, January 23, 2000) An automobile accident in 1931, in which Martin du Gard and his wife were injured, made the author reexamine his plans for the rest of Les Thibault. He adopted a documentary technique and changed the story from a primarily psychological study to a historical account of the events that led to the outbreak of World War I. After the German invasion in 1940, Martin du Gard fled to Nice where he spent the war years. Writing of the difficulties living in France he said, that "not only are we going to starve, but we will freeze as well." Disillusioned after the war, Martin du Gard said to his friend Jacques Schiffrin, "Europe is finished. There are only ruins." Martin du Gard's last large novel was Le Lieutenant-colonel de Maumort, on which he worked for 17 years. He changed the plan of the book several times, and eventually it was left unfinished. The narrator of the story is a professional soldier, Bertrand de Maumort, whose life, loves, and disappointments the author follows through decades from his childhood to the years of World War II. André Schiffrin described in his book of memoir, A Political Education (2007) the author in his old age as "warm and friendly and very approachable, known for his welcoming smile and total lack of hauteur." Martin du Gard died in Bellême on August 23, 1958, at the age of seventy-seven. His Correspondance générale (1980-) reveals a passionate, independent artist, who set such high standards for himself that he destroyed several completed manuscripts. Martin du Gard was associated with the men of La Nouvelle Revue Française, but introverted and socially restrained, he did not accept the membership of the Académie Français. Jean Cocteau once said of his works, that an "author's work so truly reveals his solitude, that one wonders what strange urge of contact compels him to publish it." For further reading: Roger Martindu Gard and the World of the Thibaults by H.C. Rice (1941); Roger Martin du Gard by R. Gibson (1962); Roger Martin du Gard et la religion by R. Robidoux (1964); Roger Martin du Gard: The Novelist and History by D. Shalk (1967); Roger Martin du Gard by C. Savage (1968); The Decline of the New by I. Howe (1970); La Genèse des "Thibault" de Roger Martin du Gard by R. Garguilo (1974); The Quest for Total Peace by B.R. Jouejati (1977); Roger Martin du Gard Centennial by M. O'Nan (1981); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 3, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999) Selected works:
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