The Devil in the Flesh (15 page)

In the narrator’s self-proclaimed Don Juanism, his initially chaste adoration of Marthe to the exclusion of friends and family, his growing devotion to the sensual refinements of a consuming passion, and the gradual appearance of little acts of deception and cruelty, it is possible to see an implicit criticism of a society that holds male-female love as its highest ideal. For the world he describes in his sometimes acerbic poetic voice is not noble, its expressions of love are far from courtly. Yet if the narrator despises the people and institutions around him, he does little to offer an alternative. In a sense, with his intelligent but precocious theories about life, he is the truth that lies behind society’s mask. It was perhaps this that most scandalized the French public when
Le Diable au corps
was first published, and which still has the power to unsettle. Radiguet does more than hold up a mirror to society: he forces it to look at its own reflection.

By the author’s own admission, the setting of the novel,
its tone, is deliberately uncluttered in both style and detail. He appears not to have wished to distract from the depths and shallows of the main character, through whom he usually (but not always) speaks. The backdrop is Paris during the last two years of the Great War, or more particularly what Montherlant described as its “voluptuous suburbs”—although the voluptuousness that is presented to us is not to be found in lengthy descriptions. A few scenes stand out, recalled with a detached, impeccable eye: the demented maid on the roof, the fire of olive branches, the incident with the picnic basket, the wretched train journey back from Paris at night. Yet these smoulder, not blaze in the memory; their role is secondary, as if to underline the narrowness of a petit-bourgeois existence that follows its course while, all around, Europe is engaged in slaughter. The other characters are dealt with brusquely, even harshly: the narrator’s morally vacillating father, who seems proud of his son’s conquests; his respectable mother, almost indistinguishable from the minor characters; the inept, cuckolded Jacques. Even Marthe, the Virgin on her pedestal, is gradually and inexorably reduced to a form of Emma Bovary, who talks of duty while committing adultery, paints watercolours and reads Baudelaire but puts all her efforts into pleasing her lover, and who, in a curiously old-fashioned nod to convention, Radiguet kills off shortly after the birth of her child, an exit not offered to the narrator.

Yet in a sense the narrator has no need of an escape, because he has never really been involved. In the foreground is his all-pervading world-weariness, what twenty years later Émile Cioran would call
l’ennui de la clarté
—the ‘boredom of clarity’ that afflicts the French nation, which,
since its triumph during the Enlightenment, an era when it justifiably called itself great, has declined into a decadence of understanding everything, a permanent state of
cafard
, or depression, where philosophical and heroic ideals have given way to the worship of sensual pleasure, the gratification of desires. Hence perhaps Gracq’s subtle reference to the student riots of 1968, one of whose slogans was: “Under the paving stones, the beach”.

From this arises a creature that at the time had no name, and which, like Radiguet’s depiction of adolescence before the concept existed, appears to be another example of his genius for seeing what was to come. In the narrator, it is as if we are witnessing the birth of the Self, which was to grow to a position of such omnipotence in the twentieth century. During the same period that Freud was making his discoveries about the human psyche, and Jung was elaborating his concepts of the collective unconscious and the undiscovered self, the seventeen-year-old Radiguet was producing a portrait of this Self and its powers of destruction. Everything in the novel is subordinated to the narrator’s sovereign subjectivity; as the eldest of a large family (like the author himself), he has something of the world view of an only child. At one point, describing how he pastes together a photo of Marthe that he has inadvertently torn up, he makes the revealing comment: “I had never exerted myself so much over anything”. The world revolves around the narrator; every event, character and idea passes through the filter of his judgement; most conspicuous among the things that are filtered out are the unpleasant remedies for the pain caused by his egotism. Yet perhaps he sets them aside for later—Radiguet implies that this possibility is not excluded.

Le Diable au corps
is a tragic story on several levels. It describes the personal tragedy of two young people thrown together by circumstances, and swept away by a passion that they are neither mature enough to understand nor strong enough to control, and which leads to the premature death of one of them and the metaphysical death of the other. It also depicts the tragedy of their families, caught up in their tragedy. It describes the tragedy of a nation at war, a nation that has declined from its position of intellectual pre-eminence into a slough of cynical sensuality that is embodied by the central character, and which seems fated to govern its response to the next war.

But perhaps most poignantly it relates the tragedy of the author himself, who, along with his limpid, apocryphal tale of a life and a society in decline, was subjected to the ordeal of a strident publicity campaign. The process of lionizing any artist, particularly a young one, is demeaning to all concerned. In Radiguet’s case it may have been fatal. Contemporary accounts suggest that while outwardly enjoying fame, he was as conscious of its price as he was of the fact that the writer is always an outcast; at one point in the novel he refers to the ‘curse’ of true poetry. For, as Thomas Mann wrote of the young poet in
Tonio Kröger
, people are “troubled by the sign on his brow”. And it is in this same novella by Mann that we find a fitting epitaph for Raymond Radiguet:

CHRISTOPHER MONCRIEFF
Toulouse January 2010

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