Roger Martin du Gard

Roger Martin du Gard (born March 23, 1881 in Neuilly near Paris; † August 23, 1958 in Bellême , Orne ) was a French writer. In 1937 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Life and work

Youth and literary beginnings

R. Martin du Gard came from both parents from Catholic-Conservative legal families. He grew up in the middle-class Parisian suburb of Neuilly and first attended a Catholic school, then the renowned Lycée Condorcet (where he had the later publisher Gaston Gallimard as a classmate). His school performance there was poor because instead of studying, he randomly read a lot of things that were not in the curriculum. His father therefore sent him to a private boarding school in Paris, where he received strict but effective encouragement from a capable teacher, so that he was finally able to switch to the Catholic-oriented Lycée Janson de Sailly and take the baccalaureate .

In the meantime he had decided to become a novelist , following the example above all of Leo Tolstoy , whose historical family novel War and Peace had deeply impressed him. He began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1898 , but broke it off and successfully applied for the École des Chartes in 1900 , the traditional Parisian college for archivists and librarians .

After completing his military service in between 1902/03, he completed his studies in 1906 with a diploma and doctorate. He then married (despite latent homosexual tendencies), went on a lengthy honeymoon to North Africa and in 1907 had a daughter. He did not have to pursue a job thanks to sufficient personal wealth. Rather, he wrote, alternately in Paris or his parents 'holiday villa, and above all in his in-laws' country house in Bellême, which later (1924) became the center of his life.

He made his first attempts at writing as a schoolboy. During his student days he had written several works that had remained unpublished: 1901 the novel La Chrysalide , 1903 the two novellas in dialogue form Jean Flers and La Méprise and then the dialogue novel Une vie de saint , which he gave up halfway in 1906.

His first published work was the formally more conventional autobiographical novel Devenir! , which is about a young notary's becoming an author. Published as a private print, it did not achieve sales success, but received some positive reviews. The author's first work accepted by a publisher was the story L'Une de nous in 1910 .

The time of success

In 1910, Martin du Gard returned to the form with which he had been experimenting for a long time and which seemed particularly appropriate to modernity: a montage of dialogues, letters, diary entries, minutes, etc. with short authorial narrated interim texts that connect them. In this manner he wrote the novel Jean Barois , which, against the historical background of the Dreyfus Affair and the hotly controversial separation of state and church (1905), depicts the protagonist's conflict between scientistic agnosticism and traditional piety, i.e. a conflict that engenders many bourgeois ones Plagued contemporaries and the author himself. Rejected by a first publisher (Grasset), the work appeared in 1913 thanks to a school friend Gallimard in the publishing house of the young magazine Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) , then had considerable success despite or because of its avant-garde form and brought its author close to the circle around André Gide and Jacques Copeau , the NRF editor-in-chief .

In 1912 Martin du Gard's preference for the form of dialogue resulted in a genuine play: the farce Le Testament du Père Leleu, set in a rural setting . The play was staged in 1914 by the director Copeau, who had become a friend, in the Parisian theater Le Vieux-Colombier , which had just been founded , was well received and was often performed well into the 1930s. (Another peasant farce, Le Gonfle , written between 1922 and 1924 , was not performed.)

Although Martin du Gard spent the war years 1914 to 1918 at a logistics unit in the stage, he was nevertheless shocked by the devastation and human misery in the front area. At least he was able to edit two pieces by Anton Chekhov for the French audience in between. In the first post-war year (1918/19) he was a soldier in the German Rhineland, which was occupied by France .

Back in Paris, he helped Copeau reopen the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. In 1920 - it was the epoch of the long " romans-fleuve " - he drafted the plan for a large-scale family novel entitled Les Thibault . The plot should extend from 1905 to the present writing (ultimately to around 1940), but ultimately only spanned the period up to 1918. The main roles in the formally more conventional work are played by the upper-class and authoritarian-conservative widower Oscar Th. And his two sons Antoine, who started working as a young doctor, and Jacques, who was initially a 14-year-old student. The generation and mentality conflict that underpins the plot contrasts above all with Oscar, the hyper-moral one, e.g. For example, the old-school patriarchs, who taboo on sexuality, and Jacques, who is considered homosexual by his father because of exuberant love letters to a friend and is put in a correctional home, but later, thanks to the always mediating Antoine, is released from it and develops into a pacifist left-wing intellectual. After two of the protagonists, father Oscar and son Jacques, had already died or perished beforehand, the plot closes with the tragic end of the dutiful philanthropist Antoine, who was the victim of a poison gas attack during the war and who, incurably suffering, takes his own life . The novel's eight volumes are: Le Cahier gris (1922), Le Pénitencier (1922), La Belle Saison (1923), La Consultation (1928), La Sorellina (1928), La Mort du père (1929), L ' Été 1914 (1936) and Épilogue (1939). The original volume 7, L'Appareillage , which was almost completed in 1930 , was destroyed by Martin du Gard when he and his wife had got into a crisis, also due to a serious car accident together with his wife (1931), and thought to stop work on the Thibaults .

Since the first volumes of the novel hit the current taste and sold well, the author was able to purchase Le Tertre in Bellême from his father-in-law in 1924 , where he withdrew more and more from the unpopular Parisian literary business.

During the Thibaults' hiatus , Martin du Gard was not completely inactive. In 1930 he wrote the story Confidence africaine, which revolved around the incest motif . In 1931 he wrote the "modern drama" Un Taciturne , the protagonist of which commits suicide when he became aware of his homosexuality. Although the play was performed, it did not go down well with the audience and was the author's last attempt as a playwright. The satirical novel La Vieille France , on the other hand, was well received in 1932 and shows a village postman on the stops of his day tour.

In 1933, Martin du Gard went back to his great work, but according to a new, greatly abbreviated concept. 1936 came out in three parts of the band L'Éte 1914 . It impressed as a clairvoyant analysis of the situation before the outbreak of war and was a great success. It was undoubtedly this success and the pacifist tendency of the book at a time of renewed danger of war in Europe that made Martin du Gard appear worthy of the Nobel Prize in 1937.

The war and post-war years

The outbreak of war surprised him on a long trip to the Caribbean. He finally managed to return home via the USA. At the beginning of the German " Blitzkrieg " in 1940, he fled Bellême and settled in Nice (which was annexed by Italy a little later and occupied by German troops in 1943).

In Nice he began a new novel, which in turn would lead to the present day: Les Mémoires du lieutenant-colonel Maumort . However, he did not get beyond the youth of the fictional, again latently homosexual protagonist, well before 1900. The fragment and the drafts were only printed posthumously.

In the post-war period, things remained silent about Martin du Gard. Already during the war he had failed to get involved politically and later he was reluctant to do so. So he was completely sidelined by the then highly politicized Parisian literary scene, especially since he lived far away from it in Bellême, as before. Since his previous topics had outlived themselves due to the deep historical turning point after 1940, he only dealt with smaller projects, e.g. B. a novel from the American, the script for a film based on the opening volumes of the Thibaults or a book about his friend André Gide, who died in 1951.

At least he saw the publication of a complete edition of his works with a highly appreciative foreword by Albert Camus in the renowned Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series (1955). Nevertheless, in the following decades it was increasingly forgotten.

In 2003, a television series filmed after the Thibaults caused a small Martin-du-Gard renaissance in France.

Works (selection)

Letters

• Bernard Duchatelet (Ed.): Correspondance générale Gallimard, Paris 1980/2000 (10 vols.)

Novels

• Little world. A novel from the French provinces ("Vieille France"). Propylaea Publishing House, Berlin 1935.
• The Thibaults , edition in 7 volumes: 1st volume: The gray booklet. The reformatory ; 2nd vol .: Summer days. The consultation hour ; 3rd volume: Sorellina. The death of the father ; 4th to 6th vol .: summer 1914 ; 7th volume: Epilog . Volk und Welt publishing house, 1958
• The Thibaults. The story of a family ("Les Thibault"). dtv edition in 801 pages, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-423-13155-1 .
• The confession ("Confidence africaine"). Manholt, Bremen 1992, ISBN 3-924903-91-3 .
• Jean Barois. Novel . Zsolnay, Zurich 1932.

Work edition

• Œuvres complètes . Gallimard, Paris 1983.

1. 1983, ISBN 2-07-010343-9 .
2. 1983, ISBN 2-07-010344-7 .

literature

• Center international de recherche sur Roger Martin du Gard: L'écrivain et son journal . Gallimard, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-07-074373-X .
• Harald Emeis: L'áme prisonnière. Analyzes de l'ouvre de Roger Martin du Gard . Edition de la Revue du Tarn, Albi 1983.
• Harald Emeis: L'œuvre de Roger Martin du Gard. Sources et significations (FORA; vol. 7). Verlag die Blaue Eule, Essen 2003, ISBN 3-89924-042-1 (2 volumes).
• Petra Gekeler: The critical distance of the intellectual. Roger Martin du Gard in the context of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) (Saarbrücker Works on Romance Studies; Vol. 11). Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2001, ISBN 3-631-38494-7 .
• Gerd Neumes: Religiosity, agnosticism, objectivity. Studies on the work and aesthetics of Roger Martin du Gard (Trier studies on literature; Vol. 4). Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1981, ISBN 3-8204-6137-X .
• Gisela Riesenberger:  Martin du Gard, Roger. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 18, Bautz, Herzberg 2001, ISBN 3-88309-086-7 , Sp. 863-877.
• Hanno Werry: physicality and sexuality. Studies on the novel by Roger Martin du Gards . Gretscher, Grossrosseln 1990 (also dissertation, Saarbrücken University 1989)
• Helga Militz: The method of critical realism in the work of Roger Martin du Gard. Diss. Phil. University of Jena 1967 (machine script duplicated)

Web links

Commons : Roger Martin du Gard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Roger Martin du Gard in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Roger Martin du Gard  in the German Digital Library
• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the award ceremony in 1937 to Roger Martin du Gard (English)
• in: names, titles and dates of French literature by Gert Pinkernell
• Critique of the work Die Thibaults

notes

1. ↑ Maiden name: Farmer