The autobiographical trilogy is published for the first time in Spain Life, nothing more… by the unjustly forgotten French writer Julien Blanc. His second installment, Smart guy, get your backpack ready, It is fierce and exciting; a great work.
We live in cheesy times. The only consolation left to us as readers (or authors) is that the shelf life of poshlost, or sentimental trash, is relatively short: the prudish, however much it may be judged upwards by the critics of the moment, does not pass the test of time, while the violent and exultant survives forever. The French author Julien Blanc may have been ignored by academia and the market, and died before being recognized as the master that he was, but his works reach us today full of gravity and heart, intact, majestic.
The author was born in 1908 in Paris, fatherless, and his Irish mother died when he was eight. Things were looking bad, and would get worse. The boy spent time in various orphanages and reformatories, which he combined with brief stays with relatives (his Dickensian aunt, whom we readers have learned to detest); he did all kinds of jobs, and also committed petty theft, for which he would be imprisoned more than once. In 1927 he enlisted in the colonial infantry, but changed his mind shortly after (his imaginative and independent nature did not make him suitable for military life) and deserted.
In 1935, he went to Barcelona to escape his fate, but shortly afterwards the Francoist army revolted. Blanc enlisted in the anarchist troops, where he worked as a stretcher-bearer.
He was caught, inevitably. He was locked up in a military prison, and from there to the feared Bat of Af, or the African Battalion of the French Army, to serve his sentence. In 1935, already free, he went to Barcelona to escape his fate, but luck followed his lead: shortly after, the Francoist Army revolted. Blanc enlisted in the anarchist troops, for which he carried out work as a stretcher-bearer, while trying to obtain his high school diploma.
Upon his return to Paris in 1939, the young man began to publish fiction, without apparent impact, while working as a proofreader at the prestigious The New French Review. There was a moment of enlightenment worthy of a novel: the editor of the magazine, Jean Paulhan, who knew of his employee’s past and present sufferings, said to him one day: “You are wrong in your obstinacy to write works of fiction. There is your life, spit it out and then you can go back to the novel.” Blanc listened to him and began working on the trilogy. Life, nothing more (Seule, la vie…), one of the most brutal autobiographical sagas that the person writing this has had the opportunity to read.
For a moment, after the publication of Smart guy, get your backpack ready (1947), it seemed that the zeitgeist It was going well for him: the novel was a finalist for the Prix des Critiques (which he won) Plague, by Albert Camus) and received the Prix Sainte-Beuve, whose jury was composed of people like Raymond Queneau or Maurice Blanchot. But the writer only managed to publish the third part (The Time of Men, (forthcoming in El Paseo) before dying, unknown and consumed, in 1951.
Aside from the tremendous story, there is the prose, a strong and at the same time empathetic voice that looks at the suffering and cruelty of men, without any pretentiousness or exemplary intention.
Why is the trilogy so formidable, and especially the second volume? The French press has not ceased to praise it since its reissue, emphasizing what I myself pointed out at the beginning of the piece: aside from the tremendous story – Jean Genet’s life seems placid compared to it – there is the prose, a strong and at the same time empathetic voice that looks at the suffering and cruelty of men without costumbrist affectation or exemplary intention.
Blanc speaks to us of shame; of the purity he never had; of the “madness of pretending” (which in turn is “a defensive reflex”); of hatred (“it is not wrong to fight against idiots”), often anti-bourgeois; and of how, faced with the repulsive canker sores of his patients —Blanc is a battalion nurse—, “I learned forever to love intensely that which is forced to live in the shadows.” Throughout his pages there are moments of immense beauty, which take on a new intensity and meaning in the landscape of military cruelty, and the same happens with the spiritual reflections, focused on the efforts made by the young Julien, a proto-artist, to maintain his brilliance and not fall into despair.
This is, in short, the best memoir you haven’t read yet, and one of the great books of 2024.
Julien Blanc
Translation by Luisa Lucuix Venegas
The Editorial Walk, 2024
360 pages. 21.95 euros
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