Obituaries: Jacques Laurent
In October 1981, a week before the French presidential elections, Jacques Laurent, who has died aged 81, had dinner with François Mitterrand and a few of his friends. He complained that he was always referred to as a right-wing writer and asked why this should be. "Because you worked for Vichy and you were in favour of keeping Algeria French," replied Robert Badinter, the future justice minister. According to Laurent, at this, he and Mitterrand exchanged amused glances; Badinter had effectively provided a portrait of France's next president as well.
Laurent worked for the wartime Vichy collaborationist government - as did Mitterrand. They got on well and might have met before the war when Laurent frequented the Brasserie Lipp, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, with other young far-rightists. Laurent had many contacts with right wing extremists in the conspiratorial La Cagoule group which had been defended in court by his father, Laurent-Cély (to give him his full name).
Since Laurent was a follower of the far-right Charles Maurras, his connection with Vichy was natural. But with Laurent there were always surprises. In 1944 he seems to have been among those who negotiated between the leader of Vichy, Marshall Pétain, and the Free French. The failure of those talks led Laurent to join a resistance group. The episode remains mysterious, but enabled him to avoid postwar retribution.
I knew Claude Martine, who became Laurent's first wife, and thus met him in 1947 and 1948. He was writing a novel, but the book he gave me was about France's position in Europe and the author's name appeared as Albéric Varenne. Laurent explained that in France you were expected to write only one sort of book, so that if you changed your role as an author you had to change your name.
I only appreciated this later when Martine gave me a lift in a magnificent Buick. She explained that Caroline Chérie was a best-seller - it also became a 1950 film. I then realised that Jacques Laurent was also Cécil de Saint-Laurent, the best-seller's author. (He had also been writing pseudonymous detective novels). His finances transformed, he completed two novels, which had a limited success and then for 17 years Jacques Laurent wrote no novels, although Cécil continued on his profitable way.
He had two enemies. One was Jean-Paul Sartre and his intellectual dominance (Laurent used the word "terrorism"). He wrote a devastating pamphlet, Paul et Jean-Paul (1951), which argued that the prevailing Marxism and existentialism were designed to reduce the writer to "revolutionary worker". In 1953 he founded a revue, La Parisienne, as an answer to Sartre's Les Temps Modernes. By being open to all literary genres the right checked the left in the name of artistic autonomy and quality.
The second enemy was Charles de Gaulle. Laurent had ignored him when writing about France in 1940, but when François Mauriac published a hagiographic account of de Gaulle in 1964, Laurent responded with two violent attacks on the president. This landed him in court where he was ordered to remove 20 pages of his Mauriac Sous de Gaulle.
He opposed de Gaulle giving independence to Algeria and showed sympathy for the French settlers's secret army which committed violence inside France. He maintained the Vichy accusation that de Gaulle was a British creation in 1940, but his arguments in favour of a Pétainist resistance to the Germans are more readily accepted today.
After a visit to Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, which resulted in an anti-communist book and a violent attack on the French intellectuals for supporting north Vietnam, Laurent returned to novel-writing and produced his finest work. Notable are the Prix Goncourt-winning Les Bêtises (1971) and Les Miroir aux Tiroirs (1990). The first, beginning with an account of the war and of adventures with the resistance, becomes a study in the inadequacies of autobiography and narrative. The later novel is a study of a man's relations with a number of women, while retaining his idea of freedom. Both are witty and picturesque. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1986.
Laurent's writings are carefully constructed. Yet he could be very careless in the actual writing. He would, for example, ask Claude Martine to write a passage while he did something else. She used to say that she would describe a female character and go into great detail concerning her clothes. He would then take up the story and promptly undress the character.
For a time, from 1954, Laurent owned and edited the weekly Arts magazine. Interested in the cinema, he entrusted film reviews to such people as future film-makers Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer. He wrote several film scripts. The Caroline films, mixing historical drama and eroticism, were a great success, and Lola Montès (1955) and his adaptation of Stendhal's De L'Amour (1954) were well received. His one venture into film production, 48 Heures d'amour (1968), was a failure.
Laurent was one of the rightist writers who were referred to as the Hussards, but he was very different from the others. He had a lively sense of humour. After the death of Gide, a telegram was sent to François Mauriac which read, "There is no Hell. Have a good time. André." It was widely assumed that it was sent by Laurent. He would answer questions as his interviewer hoped he would. He explained to an English journalist that he changed his girlfriends according to colour - thus a black woman would be succeeded by a blonde Swede. He told a serious questioner about the Brasserie Lipp that he could remember when customers were looked after by a groom, who was a dwarf.
For years Laurent appeared to be a spent force, spending days chez Lipp. Then suddenly he would produce a book. His last novel was Moment Particuliers (1997). Last October, after his third wife, Elizabeth, died he published a letter to her, describing the happiness of their life together over many years. He insisted that Figaro should publish a photograph of them in bed together. His conclusion was that, with her gone, life had become a nightmare.
Jacques Laurent-Cély, writer, born January 5, 1919; died December 29 2000.