Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
‘A Shropshire Lad’ A. E. Housman 1859-1936
Here’s a list.
George Butterworth
Enrique Granados
Franz Marc
Henri Gaudier Brzeska
Egon Schiele
Isaac Rosenberg
August Macke
Guillaume Appolinaire
Rupert Brooke
Julian Grenfell
Hedd Wyn
Wilfred Owen
Edward Thomas
Alfred Joyce Kilmer
Alain-Fournier
All of the above - artists, musicians and writers were killed during World War One - most of them in combat. The flowers of a generation were mown down before they reached their prime, and before anyone could know what was lost by their passing. For some of them like Wilfred Own, their work came out of their war time experiences and serves now to remind us of the pointlessness of war and the fate of their lost generation. For others, the work they have left is a testament to a time before we forfeited our innocence in The War To End All Wars.
For me, Edward Thomas, George Butterworth and Alain-Fournier sit firmly in that latter category. When I was a bookish teenager, Alain-Fournier’s only novel ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ was a must read. I still have my Penguin Modern Classics copy and my recollection is that I also read it in French although the French copy has disappeared in the intervening decades.
Butterworth’s settings of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ or Edward Thomas’s ‘Adelstrop' unconsciously remind us of a bucolic innocence before the world went mad. ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ on the other hand is a Russian Doll. It is a book that harks back to another time and it is also about someone yearning for a lost time. Very meta.
The title has caused successive translators no end of difficulty and it’s usually abandoned in favour of ‘The Lost Domain’ which evokes its theme. Meaulnes is the surname of a charismatic boy who arrives at the narrator’s village school and immediately earns the nickname ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ - he’s tall, enigmatic and independent. The other boys either worship him or are jealous of him. Meaulnes doesn’t care what they think.
Like François Seurel the narrator of LGM, Henri-Alban Fournier was the son of village schoolteachers and its setting evokes La France Profonde before the advent of the motor car. There is an early description of the country boys who come to the village school from the outlying farms - their smocks were permeated with the odours of stable and hayloft. That reminded me of Houseman’s line ‘There’s men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold…’
Then later, François tells us that in winter the schoolroom smells of scorched wool from the jackets of those who got too close to the cast iron stove. My very first village school had one of those…
‘Drawing down the moon’ by Samuel Palmer 1805-1881
The core of the story is when the seventeen year old Meaulnes absconds from school, gets lost and finds himself caught up in a fête galante arranged to celebrate a wedding. The fête takes place around a decaying chateau filled with laughing children, innocent country folk and a mysterious acting troupe. Meaulnes sees a beautiful girl called Yvonne and when he makes advances to her she repulses him saying ‘We are both children’. This sets the tone for Meaulnes’ life. For him, Yvonne is an enchanted princess, the ruined chateau and its demesne are a lost paradise. Meaulnes imagines himself living there as an adult with Yvonne as his wife. It is of course not to be. It’s a mythical scene out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
The story is autobiographical. Yvonne’s words in the book were said to the eighteen year old Alain-Fournier by a young woman he saw one day on the steps of the Seine embankment. He follows her home (it’s a Dante and Beatrice moment) and eventually gets to speak to her. “What’s the use” she says 'We are two children”. For eight years Alain-Fournier was obsessed by the real Yvonne who left Paris after their meeting. He eventually sees her again when she has married - by which time he has immortalised in his only completed novel.
In August 1914, in the first rush of patriotism after the outbreak of the war that was going to be over by Christmas, Alain-Fournier joined the French Army. A month later on the 3rd October 1914 he was dead - shot by a sniper. His body lay in a mass grave until 1991 when it was disinterred, identified and re-buried.
Penelope Fitzgerald said that ‘Le Grand 'Meaulnes’ is a treasure box for source hunters. The novel is coloured by fairy tales, the comedia del arte, boys’ adventure stories, symbolism and romanticism. In turn its influence can be seen in ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Go-Between’.
I think I was eighteen when I read it first and my French has never be so good since but it certainly bears re-reading. When the ground of adulthood is steady under one’s feet, thankfully one is less likely to be swept away by the romance but more able to appreciate the bitter sweet moments of young love - thankfully at a distance.
I can recommend The Centenary edition of ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ with an introduction by Hermione Lee. She adds depth to what is sometimes seen as a simple tale of lost love and innocence.
I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour…
From ‘Strange Meeting’ by Wilfred Owen 1893-1918
No cooking this week. I’m away from home having too much fun.