Le Mur tombé du ciel #4: Julien Gracq

Julien Gracq went to boarding school in Nantes, and was the brightest student at his lycée (when he was Louis Poirier). In 1985 he looked back at Nantes in La Forme d'une ville, the title of which is taken from Balzac.

Lucien d'Azay: À la recherche de Sunsiaré : Une vie (2005)

In some respects Lucien d'Azay's À la recherche de Sunsiaré resembles Didier Blonde's books: recovering people from oblivion by detective work. Certainly Blonde's Leïlah Mahi 1932 (2015) is called to mind: a strikingly attractive young woman about whom very little is known. This applied to Sunsiaré de Larcône, who died in a car crash in 1962, which took the famous and highly noted 'Hussard' Roger Nimier with her. She had just published her first novel, La Messagère, which she saw as just a 'trigger' for what she was due to bring to the literary world. Obviously her ambitions were killed along with her, but just who was she? In a detective story which resembles a biography but also (unlike Blonde's investigations) contains autobiographical elements, D'Azay tries to find the answers.

Sunsiaré was born in Rambertvillers (Vosges) modestly, as Suzy Durupt, to a car mechanic father and a mother who was a hairdresser, although her mother remarried the pied-noir Diego Larcone (without circumflex), a soldier in 1947. Suzy was brought up by her paternal grandparents, who had a restaurant in Rambertvillers. Suzy left school at the age of 14. 

D'Azay's account is fascinating, containing as it does many first-hand accounts of who Sunsiaré was, her change of name (to go with her change of image ), plus many letters to add to our knowledge of her. Sunsiaré was what we might describe as an intellectual groupie, but she was a force to be reckoned with. She had many conversations and correspondences with literary figures, such as Julien Gracq (whose Château d'Argol and La Rivage des Syrtes influenced her a great deal), and other friends of hers included Guy Dupré and Raymond Abellio. This book is not much light to 400 pages, and is surely without question the definitive work on this obscure and entrancing individual.

Sunsiaré, Columbarium, Père-Lachaise, Paris 20e.

Philippe Le Guillou: Le Déjeuner des bords de Loire (2002)

Philippe Le Guillou's Le Déjeuner des bords de Loire begins 'Longtemps je l'ai rêvé lointain...' and we know from the Proustian allusion that this book is about epiphany.

From 1992 Le Guillou visited Julien Gracq at his last home, in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, on a number of occasions. He had loved Gracq's writing since he read a sentence from Un beau ténébreux (1945) that moved him considerably during his troubled adolescence: 'Un pâle soleil, un soleil irréel s'est levé sur les crêtes des vagues.' He then discovered that the strength of literature opens up a kind of bottomless pit, a thirst for knowledge that can never be quenched, but the pursuit of which can be ineffably beautiful.

Gracq had moved back from Paris to his family home in Saint-Florent because of his elderly sister there, and over a the years a friendship essentially based on the love of literature developed between him and Le Guillou. The book details one occasion in February 1998 when Le Guillou journeyed by train from Rennes to Varades – within easy walking distance of Saint-Florent but involving crossing two bridges and moving from the département Loire-Atlantique to Maine-et-Loire via L’île Batailleuse – maybe something like the rural equivalent of walking due south from Châtelet to St Michel.

Le Guillou speaks of meeting Gracq, who sat beneath his portrait by Bellmer, of going to the nearby La Gabelle restaurant and discussing many things: the Loire area and its geography; such (later generation) writers as as Renaud Matignon, Jean-René Huguenin, Michel Tournier, and Jean-Erdern Hallier as a liar and a plagiarist; Le Guillou's work; the absence of literary movements since surrealism (Gracq believing the nouveau roman was just about style and not feeling); etc.

Gracq was well known for being gloriously prickly: he refused to accept the Goncourt for Le Rivage des Syrtes in 1951, refused to have his books published in poche, and so on. But there are some lovely comical bits in this, such as the anger of Mitterand – an admirer of Gracq – because the illustrator of one of Gracq's books (Un balcon en forêt, Le Guillou thinks) had dedicated it to Mitterand, but that Gracq had refused to give his signature to it; and on returning on one of his rare visits to his apartment in rue de Grenelle, Paris, Gracq is amused to find an invitation to a reception in honour of the 'Queen of England' at the Élysée Palace: Gracq comments that he was too late for it, but wouldn't have gone anyway.

Gracq, at the age of 84, was still driving and took Le Guillou back to the station. A delightful read, although I was a little surprised (well, disappointed to be honest) to learn that Gracq had a television.