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A Childhood Home
I was looking for a “childhood home,” I’d explained to the real estate agent: not a vacation villa, not a “fixer-upper” ruin, not a “designer house,” not a “quirky property,” one of those sheepfolds or silkworm farms converted into a home where you knock your head on livestock-height doorframes.
No, I wanted a house where I could invent some roots for myself, and also a house in a living village, where you can do your shopping in the grocery store and have a drink at the café, in the Provençal part of the Drôme region, where I’ve had friends for a long time. So I visited this former coaching inn, ventured briefly into the small vegetable garden at the back, with its views across to the summits of the Miélandre and the Grand Ruy, and ascended the stone staircase to the bedrooms and a dusty attic. Of course, I’d found it; this was my childhood home. A solid, thick-walled two-story building a couple of hundred years old, in the heart of the hamlet of La Paillette in Montjoux, very close to Dieulefit.
Tina, the owner, was a ceramicist. She was also German. She’d lived there for nearly two decades until, at sixty-five, she felt the work was asking too much of her muscles and her back, and it was time she went to paint watercolors in Granville. Her work with clay channeled Nicolas de Staël dabbling in enamel, and a horizontal strip on the roadside façade of the house was covered with glazed ceramic plaques screwed to the wall at eye level. When she left, she took all but one of them with her. It was her gift and her mark, which I promised to preserve.
When the last plaque at the far right-hand end was removed, a name appeared, capital letters carved with a sharp point into the greige render: andré chaix. On closer inspection, the r of andré is a scaled-up lowercase letter. When we sit out having lunch in this courtyard in the cool shade of the big plane tree, we can hardly make out the letters. I doubt that the wall, which is bare stone in places, has ever been re-rendered. I got used to this name on the wall and eventually forgot about it.
I know a few people named Chaix. Particularly the novelist and translator Marie Chaix: she was the partner of Harry Mathews, the Oulipian writer and a great friend of Perec. But the name Chaix was that of her first husband, Jean-François, who was from the Savoie region, and she had kept it as her surname. Just like her elder sister Anne Sylvestre, she refused to bear her father Albert Beugras’s name. Beugras, who’d been Doriot’s right-hand man, had fled to Germany at the end of World War II, been imprisoned by the Americans and protected by their secret services. When they finally agreed to hand him over to the French authorities, Beugras narrowly escaped the death penalty. Marie describes all this in her novel The Laurels of Lake Constance, which was subtitled Chronicle of a Collaboration in the original French. That’s a digression — the first of many — but its relevance will soon become clear.
This was early March 2020. A few friends and I had set up a writing residence at La Paillette when the threat of lockdown became a reality. We decided not to return to Paris in some instances or to Nantes in others, but to continue our work here. The page proofs of The Anomaly reached me thanks to a masked courier, virtual meetings proliferated, the expressions “face-to-face” and “in real life” took on new significance, and everyone made themselves fabric face masks. What was the point of going home?
On the small village square, next to the bakery and a few meters from my home, stands a monument “to the memory of the children of Montjoux who died for France.” The wars were long ago, these deaths forgotten, and, in that strange spring of 2020 when time was suspended by the pandemic, I must have walked past the monument on twenty different mornings, laden with bread and croissants, indifferent and in a hurry. One day in, I think, May, a name caught my eye: chaix andré (may 1924 – august 1944). The dates said it all: Chaix had been in the Resistance, most likely the maquis, a young man with a short life, like so many others.
I didn’t know anything about him, and several months went by before I saw him as the possible subject of a book.
I asked some questions, gathered fragments of collective memory, and learned something about who he’d been. A lot of the information in this inquiry was given to me by chance, almost by miracle, and I very soon knew I wanted to tell André Chaix’s story. No doubt all lives are novelistic. Some more than others.
In his letters to Lucilius that explain the essence of Stoicism, Seneca describes someone at the bedside of an ailing man. Is he a friend who wants to be there in the final moments or a vulture with his eye on the dying man’s estate? “The same act may be either shameful or honorable,” Seneca replies. All that matters is the intention. I’ve examined my own. I’m not André Chaix’s friend; in fact, would I have succeeded in being one, given that there’s hardly anything to connect us?
Just a name on a wall.
I feel uncomfortable leaving that small phrase on a line by itself. A one-line paragraph is always a literary decision, sometimes an aestheticizing device, and I’m suddenly afraid that there’s insincerity behind this stylistic effect, when the best style should ensure its own invisibility. Forgive me in advance if I come up with blundering sentences, inappropriate or affected turns of phrase, or metaphors that run aground in lyricism or pomposity. I’ve tried not to, even though I sometimes wanted to.
I haven’t written a “novel,” the “André novel.” I haven’t addressed him as if he were alive; I haven’t chatted to him casually through the book as if he were a friend. That would have been an artificial exercise, and the artifice would have been inappropriate. True, I occasionally allowed my imagination to talk, but I would have found it obscene to invent, and I felt more comfortable traveling around this era that I didn’t know but that was formative for me. I wanted to take you there and share with you the things I learned while I was writing. I also wanted the book to include images, photographs, so that André, his girlfriend, Simone, and a few others could have faces and bodies in your mind because they do in mine. Postcards and posters to conjure places and the period. If I had a recording of André’s voice, I would publish it for people to hear.
Nor am I a historian, and yet this is very much History because André was one of its actors, heroes, and victims. I wasn’t writing a dissertation, I didn’t bury myself in secret archives, and I’d like to thank everyone who helped me find answers to my sometimes naive questions. In places I’ve used my own words to rephrase things I read in books and newspapers, heard in radio reports, or saw in documentaries. I may use too many quotes, but that’s a way of appropriating, or not paraphrasing, other people’s excellent formulations.
Forgive me also for the occasional mistakes, because of course there are some: memories can falter, accounts contradict one another. Please believe that, despite all this, I tried not to cheat.
The year 2024 is the centenary of André Chaix’s birth and is eighty years since he died. But looking at the world as it is now, it seems obvious that we still need to talk about the Occupation, collaboration, fascism, racism, and othering to the point of complete destruction. So I didn’t want
this book to skirt around the monster against which André Chaix fought, I didn’t want it to fail in giving a voice to the ideals for which he died, and I didn’t want it to miss an opportunity to question our innermost nature, our need to belong to something greater than ourselves, which brings out the best and the worst in us.
I won’t say that this book was an “obvious choice,” an “obligation” or an “obsession.” Franz Kafka told his friend Oskar Pollak that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.” He’s referring to reading more than writing. Let’s just say that talking in simple terms about André Chaix became something I needed.
I can’t find a way to think about death, my death; I can’t tame the idea and finally give some meaning to a life that doesn’t have one. I must have hoped that a respectful, honest, and circumspect book about this young man and what I think I know about him — and about myself — would be a milestone along this route.