Fontenoy Ne Reviendra Plus Renaudot Essai 11

FONTENOY WILL NEVER RETURN
"As I come from a time, a world in fact, where everyone swore to stay eternally true to their convictions, I have often wondered why so many energetic figures then rather swiftly turn the page on their youth. This question - what drives a man to change camps, to switch, for example, from the staunchest left-wing leanings to the most inclement right-wing views? - eventually became an obsession. I would have used it as the material for a pamphlet but I wanted to reach a wider audience than merely preaching to the converted. Which is why I resuscitated a writer from the last century, Jean Fontenoy who, to use Malraux's words, was always where it mattered most, at least during his twenties: The Great War, Dada, October, Maiakovski, Lenin and Trotski, Moscow and Shanghai, etc. Now, this man who was born to poverty and whom the Republic brought distinction, whose books seduced everyone from Kessel to Colette and Blanchot to Céline, suddenly turned to Fascism against all expectations (he had denounced the Nazis as early as 1933). A few years later, not without logic (and also out of loathing for cowardice), the only option open to him was to commit suicide in a Berlin besieged by the Red Army.
Be that as it may, the only reason I wrote Fontenoy will Never Return was to understand what we are made of and what determines our destinies. And our rejections."
Gérard Guégan
Gérard Guégan's new book is neither factual account nor biography but is carried by such a novelistic central figure with such a tragic fate that it should primarily be compared to and identified with literature. It is Fontenoy's novel. His commitments and loves, his obsessions and disguises, the story of a man whom people long both to meet and to escape, to love and to leave, just as he never stopped leaving himself.
Before this book by Guégan, it is most likely Brice Parain who gave us the most accurate feel for Fontenoy: "There was Jean (Fontenoy). I haven't had any other friends because the other people I've known were or are less honest than him, what I mean by that is more 'accommodating' at heart. Accommodating he could be, as you rightly say, but he didn't cheat with literature, or poetry, as you would like him to have done, he chose to become scum rather than one of Paulhan's protégés, which is quite something."
Gérard Guégan is a writer, journalist, editor and translator and has had some thirty books published, including novels and works about film, but also political essays and the song Mao Mao for Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. He most notably set up the review Subjectif, has translated Bukowski, set up the publishing company Les éditions Champ Libre and relaunched another, les Editions du Sagittaire. In his day, he was also an actor and director; he directed five films and played opposite Brigitte Fossey in La Croisée.