The Lost Estate (2 page)

The intensity of
Le Grand Meaulnes
as imagery and fable seems due in large part to the immediacy of such emotions for the author. Hardly more than a schoolboy himself when he wrote it, Henri-Alban Fournier drew on a set of adolescent erotic experiences – ‘crushes’ one could call them, fairly enough – that were still close enough to recall, just distant enough to become literature. Fournier was born in 1886 in the Sologne, and his father really was a schoolteacher, though, rather than staying in the village school as he got older, Fournier was sent away to Paris, where he studied at the elite Louis-Le-Grand. In
1903, he went away briefly to a preparatory school in Sceaux, where he met Jacques Rivière, who would later become the founder of the great periodical the
Nouvelle Revue Française,
as well as Fournier’s brother-in-law. They exchanged letters on literature for the rest of Fournier’s life, and Rivière seems to have encouraged him to become a novelist; in a sense, in his novel Fournier cast himself in the Rivière role, the wise watcher, while actually being a kind of Meaulnes himself.

On 1 June 1905 – Ascension Day – Fournier walked out of an exhibition at the Grand Palais on the Right Bank and, like Freddy in
My Fair Lady,
saw a girl who seemed to be the most beautiful and haunting he had ever seen. He followed her down along the Cours la Reine and across the Seine, until eventually she turned into a house on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He haunted the street and was eventually rewarded with another glimpse of her, and, after some time had gone by, actually got her into a conversation. Her name, it turned out, was Yvonne de Quievrecourt; she asked him, perhaps flirtatiously, to please never follow her again, as she was engaged. A year later, he went back to the Boulevard to look for her again, but couldn’t find her. ‘Even if she had been there,’ he wrote to Rivière, ‘she would not have been the same girl.’ (Eventually, he would meet her once again, just before the publication of his book, when she was already the mother of two children.)

The dry-eyed critic is duty-bound to doubt both the truth and the force of the famous anecdotal meeting of Fournier and the original Yvonne – but anyone who has seen a photograph of Yvonne as she was when Fournier saw her will not doubt it for a minute, any more than anyone who recalls seeing a beautiful small girl as a boy will doubt the truth of Dante’s feelings about Beatrice. The force of this revelation – of perfect beauty, the one true love, revealed in a glimpse and then lost, or never even held – stayed with him through the next few years, as he did two years of military service and then eventually became an aide to the French statesman Jean Casimir-Périer. When his book was published, it was an instant hit – coming second in that year’s Goncourt competition – though it was published, of course, on the brink of catastrophe.
Fournier fought with the French army in that terrible August and died on the front in September. He wasn’t yet twenty-eight years old.

But on the other hand, it does not require a faith in Freudian dogma – though, perhaps, it requires an understanding moulded by Freudian insight – to see that in the intricate and seductive fabric of romance as Fournier made it for himself there is some plain sheer fear of sex. We have a sense, reflecting on Fournier’s life and art, that what is being fabulized is in part an ambivalence about sexual intercourse; we want to sleep with the girl in a fairy-tale castle and still live there, remain children and get laid at once. The intensity of the romance of childhood and the attempt to marry it, literally, to an erotic-romantic dream glow bright for Fournier with the light of something not quite real, a flare not a fire. Fournier’s dream is at once erotically charged and sexually neutered (we can no more imagine the act of sex that produces the child in
Le Grand Meaulnes
than we can imagine Gatsby penetrating Daisy).

This makes the dream, of course, unreal, as dreams must be, and easy to condemn. The rose has her thorns, but eventually there must be little roses. But unreal though it may be, the fantasy remains essential to the novel of adolescence that Fournier invented. The novel of adolescence is very different from the novel of arrival: the novel of arrival taking as its subject the growth of the youth into a man; the novel of adolescence, the rejection of apparent maturity for youth. The great novels of arrival –
Lost Illusions
or
Phineas Finn
or, in another way,
David Copperfield
– are about the romance of growing up.
(Great Expectations
is perhaps, in this as in so many other ways, what professors call a key transitional work: Pip grows up by going back to the heartfelt intuitions and loyalties of his childhood. David grows up; Pip gets back.) Meaulnes’ final image in the narrator’s mind is of the same big schoolboy with a taste for adventure, not a man tempered by experience; it is the resilience of his romantic nature, not its instruction by experience, that makes him matter to François, and to us.

A line of robust critical counter-reading of
Le Grand Meaulnes
insists, first, that Fournier’s epiphany in Paris was
constructed, as most such literary epiphanies so often are, retrospectively, in light of the book he later wrote and had in mind to write. (Real though she was, Beatrice doubtless shone brighter to Dante once he started writing his poem and needed her image more.) More important, the movement of the book can be understood, without too much strain, as really counter-romantic; Meaulnes, after all, impregnates his fairy, leaves her to die in childbirth and is left not with the persistence of his adolescent fantasies but with the physical consequence of his animal and adult nature: his daughter, not his dream. (The vengeful fantasy of seeing a woman who has, in real life, rejected you die while bearing your child is one that Hemingway indulged in, too, a few years later, in
A Farewell to Arms,
an adolescent novel pretending to be a war book.) It is possible to draw a cold, sardonic moral from
Le Grand Meaulnes
just as, once again; it is possible to draw an anti-idealist and anti-romantic moral from
The Great Gatsby.
Gatsby, after all, is not an avatar of the American dreamer, but a victim of the American dream – a decent man brought down by the false pursuit of an unworthy object and a sordid and debased and meretricious set of values; all those shirts are not a worthy object of a grown man’s desire.

Yet to say this is to deny the manifest spell both novels cast. It is left to ordinary books, of which there are many, to teach realistic lessons and point out morals; good books cast spells and cast out demons. If
Le Grand Meaulnes
offers a kind of day-dream, it has lasted for a very long day. Part of the power of the novel is that Fournier was among the first to see that this form of erotic attachment – which in one way is not erotic attachment at all, but merely adolescent fantasy – can be as powerful as any other. Fournier’s fantasy persists into our own day as a pattern in books as stirring (and unlike) as
A Separate Peace
and
The Secret History.
Alain-Fournier was the first to give form to one of the most powerful of twentieth-century myths, which continues to illuminate life.

A flare more than a fire… with one of those dreadful symmetries that are too much for fiction, this novel of a lost, enchanted world was published just as the lights were about to
go out all over Europe, and real flares would take their place. Yet perhaps it was the tragedy that awaited poor Meaulnes, and poor Fournier (as it awaited Wells and the boys in the Peter Pan house, for that matter), that helped give this day-dream its resonance. Poor Meaulnes? Poor Fournier? Lucky Meaulnes, lucky Fournier, perhaps, for all that they foresaw, and for all that they were not forced to see. There are worse things in the world to be prisoners of than childhood.

Adam Gopnik

NOTES

1.
Havelock Ellis, Introduction to
The Wanderer
(New York: New Directions, 1928).

2.
Frank Davison, Translator’s Introduction,
Le Grand Meaulnes
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

A Note on the Translation

Translabtors of Alain-Fournier’s novel have come across several difficulties, starting with the title. ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ is both the title of the book and the name given to its central character, the schoolboy whose fellows are impressed by his presence and his height:
grand
can mean ‘tall’ as well as ‘great’. Some, like the translator of the previous version in Penguin Classics, decided to skirt round the problem by keeping the French title, with an alternative, ‘The Lost Domain’, as a subtitle. Another translator tried ‘The Wanderer’ and, as a subtitle, ‘The End of Youth’. There are, in fact, more titles of this book in English than there are translations of it.

My own solution is to take a phrase from the novel, ‘le domaine perdu’, to translate it literally as ‘the lost estate’ and to use that as the title, taking advantage of the fact that in English the word ‘estate’ can be used to mean both a property in the country and a period of life (‘man’s estate’, ‘youth’s estate’): this is a book about the passing of adolescence – and nostalgia for it – in which the central character comes across an isolated country house and estate, has a strange adventure and is later unable to find his way back there. But I do not imagine that everyone will approve of my choice of title. This is a work that has passionate admirers who will defend it against any meddling.

The novelist John Fowles was one such admirer. In his Afterword to Lowell Blair’s translation he described Alain-Fournier’s novel as a ‘poignant and unique masterpiece of alchemized memory’.
¹
He also remarked that, in his opinion, the book was ‘very nearly untranslatable’: ‘Just as certain great French wines like Montrachet and Sancerre… have defeated all attempts by foreign vineyards to imitate them, so do Fournier’s style, tonality, and charm refuse transposition into another language.’ He was not, he said, suggesting that Lowell Blair had made a bad job of it, ‘but simply underlining the insoluble problems that face the brave man who tried the task’.
²

Fowles is not the only person to suggest that Alain-Fournier’s book is, in many respects, untranslatable. Frank Davison, the translator of the previous Penguin Classics version, has two lengthy footnotes early in the book explaining his difficulties with two crucial problems of translation: the first is the title of the book; the second is the designation of the isolated house and grounds that Meaulnes discovers, for which Fournier uses the French word
domaine
.
³
As Davison points out, both terms,
grand
and
domaine,
here carry overtones and shades of meaning that are not conveyed by any single word in English. As a result, he decided, first, to retain the French expression ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ both as the title of the book and as the name of its central character; and secondly, to use the English word
domain,
while describing it as ‘a literal, if not exact, translation’.

There are, clearly, difficulties in translating any literary work, but I think that both Fowles and Davison have tended to exaggerate the problems in this case. As I said,
Le Grand Meaulnes
is a novel that has attracted a cult following. For those who read it in French, the language of the book, the atmosphere of the book, the very words of the book acquire a peculiar resonance, an indefinable poetry that seems to exclude any form of re-expression. ‘Le domaine mystérieux’, Tetrange domaine’ and, most of all, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ are beyond translation: read Davison’s first note, in which he finds not only ‘tall’ and ‘great’ in this particular
grand,
but also ‘the big, the protective, the almost grown-up… in schoolboy parlance, good old Meaulnes’ and, ‘in retrospect’, the image of someone ‘daring, noble, tragic, fabulous
⁴
… No wonder he throws up his hands in despair and decides not to translate the phrase at all, using the French word throughout his version.

Yet, as Davison himself admits, some of the meanings evoked
by the words
grand
and
domaine
only attach to the phrase ‘in retrospect’, after one has read the Alain-Fournier’s book. Similarly, for some readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the mere phrase ‘The Great Gatsby’ may have a powerful connotative charge. So if these everyday words,
grand
and
domaine,
have acquired such a charge in the context of this book, to the extent that they appear untranslatable, this must be because they are part of a whole in which the narrative and the language it uses combine to move the reader in a particular way. The words that designate the hero and the place where he had his adventure acquire their poetic charge from the context of the novel, not the other way around.

For that reason, I have decided to translate these expressions into plain English: Meaulnes is ‘The Great Meaulnes’, the
domaine
is the ‘estate’. I assume that my English readers will be able to get over the tendency to call the central character The Great Moan, and that they will realize that a country estate in the Sologne is not the same as one in Hampshire or Shropshire. In short, though, I have decided simply to ignore these two cruxes that seemed such a problem to Davison and to hope that the rest of my translation will, at least to some extent, convey what Fowles calls Fournier’s ‘very simple, poetic manner’.
⁵

In fact, Fowles goes on to mention certain negative characteristics of Fournier’s style: his simplicity which is at times naivety, his repetitions… He might have added Fournier’s fondness for suspension points, as well as for sentences and even paragraphs beginning with ‘and’. There is also the typical Fournier sentence, with its subordinate clauses separated by commas, giving a nervous feel to the writing: