Roger Vailland
Caricature of Roger Vailland
Born	Roger François Vailland (1907-10-16)16 October 1907 Acy-en-Multien, Oise, France
Died	12 May 1965(1965-05-12) (aged 57) Meillonnas, Ain, France
Resting place	Meillonnas cemetery
Education	Lycée Henri-IV; Lycée Louis-le-Grand
Alma mater	University of Paris
Occupations	Novelist journalist essayist playwright screenwriter
Spouses	Andrée Blavette (m. 1936; div. 1954) Élisabeth Naldi (m. 1954)
Writing career
Pen name	Georges Omer; Robert François; Étienne Merpin; Frédéric Roche
Language	French
Period	1923–1965
Genres	Novel; essay; journalism; drama; screenplay; travel writing
Notable works	Drôle de jeu (1945) Beau Masque (1954) 325 000 francs (1955) La Loi (1957) La Fête (1960) Le Regard froid (1963) La Truite (1964)
Notable awards	Prix Interallié (1945) Prix Ibsen (1947) Prix Goncourt (1957)
Literary movement	Le Grand Jeu

Roger François Vailland (French pronunciation: [ʁɔʒe vajɑ̃]; 16 October 1907 – 12 May 1965) was a French novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. His published work includes nine novels, three plays, political and literary essays, travel books, film scripts, war reporting, an extensive body of journalism, correspondence and a posthumously published private journal.^[1]

As a schoolboy in Reims, Vailland helped form the Phrères Simplistes, the group from which the avant-garde magazine and collective Le Grand Jeu developed. He proposed the magazine's title and played a substantial part in devising its editorial programme. Although the Grand Jeu belonged to the wider surrealist milieu, it remained independent of the organisation directed by André Breton.^[2][3]

Vailland began working for the Paris press in 1928 and became a senior reporter for Paris-Soir. During the 1930s he travelled widely, wrote serial fiction and film criticism, cultivated the public manner of a dandy and used opium regularly. During the Second World War he underwent treatment for addiction, joined the French Resistance and began writing fiction in earnest. His first novel, Drôle de jeu (1945), drew on his experience of underground resistance and won the Prix Interallié.^[4][5]

Vailland formally joined the French Communist Party in 1952, after several years as a fellow traveller, but became disillusioned following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He gradually withdrew from the party and ceased renewing his membership in 1959. His novel La Loi won the Prix Goncourt in 1957. His later work continued to explore political power, social class, libertinage, rules and games, and the pursuit of what he called individual "sovereignty".^[6][7]

Early life and education

Vailland was born in Acy-en-Multien, where his father owned a surveying practice. The family moved to Paris in 1910, and Vailland entered the Lycée Henri-IV in 1918. In 1919 they settled in Reims, then undergoing reconstruction after the First World War.^[1]

His father encouraged his interest in geometry, the natural world and literature. Vailland read writers including Plutarch, William Shakespeare and the stories of the One Thousand and One Nights. His philosophy teacher René Maublanc encouraged his early writing and helped him publish juvenile poems in the Reims literary review Le Pampre.^[8]

In 1925 Vailland received his baccalaureate in philosophy and entered the hypokhâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, intending to prepare for the entrance examination to the École normale supérieure. He later studied at the University of Paris and completed a philosophy degree in 1928.^[1]

The Phrères Simplistes

Before René Daumal arrived at their secondary school in Reims, Vailland, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Robert Meyrat had produced six issues of a handwritten review called Apollo. Daumal joined them and introduced the others to Alfred Jarry and pataphysics. They read the nineteenth-century poètes maudits, especially Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval and Arthur Rimbaud, and wrote poetry of their own.^[9]

The four called themselves the Phrères Simplistes, sometimes translated as the "Simplist Phraternity". The altered spelling of frères combined schoolboy wordplay with the suggestion of a spiritual brotherhood. Simplism was meant to preserve the imaginative freedom of childhood against what its members considered the adult world's subjection to logic and utility, and to recover a unity preceding distinctions such as dream and waking or visible and invisible reality. Pierre Minet was also associated with the wider Simplist circle.^[10][11]

The Simplists created pseudonyms, rites and private sacred figures. "Saint Pliste" was their patron, while "Bubu", a grotesque infant partly derived from Jarry's Père Ubu, served as a talisman. Vailland used the name "Dada"; Gilbert-Lecomte was also known as "Rog Jarl", Daumal as "Nathaniel", and Meyrat as "La Stryge". At times they described themselves as one angel divided among several bodies. They also produced the short-lived Bubu-Magazine.^[10]

The circle experimented with dreams, intoxication, trance, somnambulism, mirrors, sensory deprivation, supposed extrasensory perception and collectively induced states of depersonalisation or "doubling". Maublanc encouraged experiments in "paroptic" or eyeless vision. Some of the practices involved toxic substances, asphyxiation or other physical risks. The most detailed surviving accounts concern Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte and Meyrat, but Vailland belonged to the circle in which the experiments and their shared vocabulary developed.^[12][11]

Le Grand Jeu

During 1927 the former Simplists planned a magazine provisionally entitled La Voie ("The Path"). Vailland opposed the publication of a conventional manifesto, arguing that Simplism was a manner of seeing and living rather than a literary or philosophical theory. He proposed that each issue should combine a sustained treatment of a central subject with poetry, prose, commentary on current events, reviews of books, theatre, cinema and other journals, and work by visual artists. The magazine followed this plan closely. Vailland also proposed its final title, Le Grand Jeu ("The Great Game").^[13]

Vailland's plans for the review joined political revolt to the transformation of individual consciousness. He regarded Communism as the political doctrine closest to Simplism, but warned against uncritical submission to the French Communist Party. He also advocated a position less aggressively anti-religious than that of Breton's Surrealists and proposed that the magazine recognise affinities between its experiments and mystical traditions preserved within established religions. Among the subjects he envisaged for the review were revolt, individualism, happiness, mysticism and Communism.^[13][6]

The principal Paris members of the Grand Jeu were Vailland, Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, the poet and critic André Rolland de Renéville, and the Czech painter Josef Šíma. Three issues appeared, in June 1928, spring 1929 and autumn 1930. The magazine combined poetry, fiction, criticism, visual art, psychical research, altered states of consciousness, Hindu philosophy, Western mysticism and revolutionary politics. Its recurring subjects included revolt, poetic experience and myth.^[14][15]

Vailland contributed literary, film and cultural criticism. In "La Bestialité de Montherlant", published in the first issue, he described apparently fixed forms as entering an accelerating process of metamorphosis until the individual was broken open and carried away by a larger flux. Donna Roberts interprets the passage as an expression of the Grand Jeu's "philosophy of participation", which challenged fixed boundaries between subject and object, the individual and the collective, and separate forms within the natural world.^[16]

Within the group, Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte developed the most sustained engagement with Sanskrit, Hindu non-dualism and the writings of René Guénon. Vailland's best-documented contributions lay in editorial planning, political discussion, journalism and polemical criticism, although he shared the collective's language of metamorphosis, revolt and the surpassing of the isolated individual.^[17][18]

Journalism and the 1930s

In July 1928, through the intervention of Robert Desnos, Vailland was introduced to Pierre Lazareff and hired by the daily newspaper Paris-Midi. He initially covered general news and crime. Journalism remained his principal source of income for approximately twenty years, and he continued contributing articles to newspapers and magazines throughout his life.^[23][24]

He used the bylines Robert François, Georges Omer and Étienne Merpin in his journalistic work. The Maitron also records his use of the pseudonym Frédéric Roche for a series published in Le Droit de vivre in 1936.^[24] Raymond Spiteri dates his adoption of the name Georges Omer to October 1928, shortly after the articles on Chiappe.^[25]

After Paris-Midi was absorbed into Paris-Soir, Vailland became a senior reporter. He covered international politics and travelled on assignments to countries including Ethiopia, Greece, Turkey, Sweden and Portugal. In 1939 he worked as a judicial reporter.^[1]

The press also provided a venue for his early narrative writing. He participated in the collective adventure serial Fulgur and published Leïla ou les ingénues voraces in 1932 and La Visirova in 1933. The latter two drew on his foreign reporting and placed ambitious or socially mobile women at the centre of their narratives. Other serial works included the historical narratives Un homme du peuple sous la Révolution, written with Raymond Manevy, and Cortès, le conquérant de l'Eldorado.

Vailland wrote extensively about cinema for Paris-Midi and, for a period, Cinémonde. His criticism treated film not only as an art but as a social institution, describing cinemas, audiences, production conditions and the new culture surrounding performers. He praised filmmakers and actors including Luis Buñuel, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton and Greta Garbo.^[26]

During the 1930s Vailland cultivated the appearance of a dandy while using opium regularly. His secure journalistic income allowed him to sustain the habit without the immediate destitution experienced by Gilbert-Lecomte. He met the cabaret singer Andrée Blavette in 1935 and married her the following year.^[5][1]

Occupation, Resistance and war reporting

After the defeat of France in 1940, Vailland moved to Lyon, where Paris-Soir had relocated. His initial political response to the occupation was unsettled. Alain Georges Leduc's entry in the Maitron records that Vailland briefly entertained accommodationist ideas, expressed a qualified approval of Marshal Philippe Pétain and considered writing for Marcel Déat before turning towards the Resistance.^[24]

In 1941 and 1942 he underwent treatment for opium addiction and settled at Chavannes-sur-Reyssouze in the Ain. During 1942–43 he joined a Resistance intelligence network connected with the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action, in which Gaullists and Communists worked together.^[24][1]

Through this activity Vailland met Daniel Cordier, the secretary of Jean Moulin. According to later biographical accounts, a copy of Stendhal's unfinished novel Lucien Leuwen that he encountered at Cordier's residence helped release his own long-blocked ambition to write a novel. Cordier subsequently recognised himself in "Caracalla", the young Gaullist leader in Drôle de jeu, and adopted the name as the title of his memoirs.^[27][28]

After being cut off from his network in 1944, Vailland began writing Drôle de jeu at Chavannes. Published in 1945, the novel used the daily routine of an underground intelligence group to explore courage, secrecy, political commitment, pleasure and betrayal. Its central figure, Marat, drew upon Vailland's own position as a journalist turned information agent, while Caracalla was based partly on Cordier. The novel received the Prix Interallié.^[1][27]

During the liberation of France and the Allied advance into Germany, Vailland worked as a war correspondent for the newspapers Libération and Action. His reports were also published in such books as La Bataille d'Alsace, La Dernière Bataille de l'armée De Lattre and Léopold III devant la conscience belge. A selection edited by Marie-Noël Rio appeared posthumously in 2026 as Les Ruines de Berchtesgaden.^[29]

Post-war literary and political career

The success of Drôle de jeu began the most sustained period of Vailland's literary career. It was followed by Les Mauvais Coups (1948), a study of a destructive relationship; Bon pied, bon œil (1950); Un jeune homme seul (1951); Beau Masque (1954), which concerns factory life, union organisation and class conflict; and 325 000 francs (1955), centred on a worker's attempt to escape his condition by submitting himself to an extreme regime of industrial labour.

Vailland continued writing for progressive newspapers and periodicals, including Action, Libération, La Tribune des nations, Les Lettres françaises and Réalités. René Ballet, who edited two large posthumous collections of this journalism, argued that newspaper work taught Vailland to seize upon the gesture, expression or observed detail capable of summarising an entire situation.^[4]

In 1948 Vailland published Le Surréalisme contre la révolution, a polemic written the previous year. From his increasingly Communist perspective, he argued that post-war Surrealism had become politically ineffective and had been accommodated by the bourgeois culture it claimed to oppose. The pamphlet renewed his old dispute with Breton, who responded by drawing attention again to Vailland's 1928 praise of Chiappe.^[30]

After travelling through Southeast Asia, Vailland settled with Élisabeth Naldi at Les Allymes, near Ambérieu-en-Bugey, in 1951. Life in the Ain brought him into sustained contact with industrial workers, trade unionists, farmers and Communist activists. These experiences informed the factory and regional settings of Beau Masque and 325 000 francs.^[1][6]

Vailland formally joined the French Communist Party in 1952. During the same year his anti-war play Le Colonel Foster plaidera coupable was prohibited after one performance, and he was arrested by the Egyptian authorities during a reporting trip. He later published Choses vues en Égypte.^[1][31]

Vailland married Élisabeth Naldi in 1954, after his divorce from Andrée Blavette, and the couple settled at Meillonnas. His political commitment informed several novels of the period. Beau Masque depicts a strike and the relation between personal love and collective solidarity; 325 000 francs examines piecework, bodily exhaustion and the failure of individual economic advancement. Vailland did not hold office within the Communist Party, and his relation to party doctrine remained mediated by his own ideas of discipline, freedom and sovereignty.^[6]

The revelations about Stalin made at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, caused a profound political crisis for Vailland. He signed a protest against the intervention and gradually withdrew from organised party activity. He remained a member through 1958 but declined to renew his card in 1959. His departure did not amount to an abandonment of the political left; class, labour, capitalism and collective action remained important in his later writing.^[6][1]

In 1957 La Loi, set in Apulia in southern Italy and structured around a local game of domination, won the Prix Goncourt. Vailland's final novels were La Fête (1960), which places the making of a novel beside an erotic pursuit, and La Truite (1964), whose central character manipulates the networks of money and desire surrounding her.^[1]

Vailland continued to report and travel. In 1961 he attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The following year he travelled to Hollywood with René Clément while working on the film Le Jour et l'Heure.^[28] His final published article, "Éloge de la politique", appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in November 1964.^[4]

Writing and themes

Theatre

Vailland wrote three principal plays. Héloïse et Abélard received the Prix Ibsen in 1947. Le Colonel Foster plaidera coupable, which opposed the Korean War, was prohibited after its first performance in 1952. Monsieur Jean (1959) offered a modern treatment of the figure of Don Juan. He also discussed the construction of dramatic situations in the essay Expérience du drame (1953).^[31]

Other dramatic work included the radio play Appel à Jenny Merveille and Batailles pour l'humanité, a large-scale political spectacle presented in 1954.

Cinema

Vailland's involvement with cinema began with the criticism he wrote for Paris-Midi and Cinémonde between 1928 and 1931. He was particularly interested in the social life of the cinema: the composition of audiences, the economics of cheap screenings, new technologies and the public manufacture of film stars.^[26]

The director Louis Daquin brought him into screenwriting during the late 1940s. Between 1947 and 1965 Vailland worked on approximately ten produced screenplays and numerous unrealised projects, chiefly adaptations of novels. He acknowledged that screenwriting was often undertaken for financial reasons and was frequently dissatisfied with the completed films because the division of labour limited the writer's control.^[26]

His film work included:

• Les Frères Bouquinquant (1947), directed by Louis Daquin
• Le Point du jour (1948), directed by Daquin and written with Vladimir Pozner
• La Grande Lutte des mineurs (1948), a militant short film concerning the miners' strike^[34]
• Bel-Ami (1955), directed by Daquin
• Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959), directed by Roger Vadim
• Et mourir de plaisir (1960), directed by Vadim and adapted from Sheridan Le Fanu
• La Novice (1961), directed by Alberto Lattuada
• Les Mauvais Coups (1961), directed by François Leterrier
• Le Jour et l'Heure (1962), directed by René Clément
• Le Vice et la Vertu (1963), directed by Vadim
• 325 000 francs (1964), a television adaptation directed by Jean Prat

Several of Vailland's novels were adapted without his participation, including La Loi by Jules Dassin in 1958, Drôle de jeu by Pierre Kast and Jean-Daniel Pollet in 1968, Beau Masque by Bernard Paul in 1972, and La Truite by Joseph Losey in 1982.^[26]

Personal life, death and archives

Vailland married Andrée Blavette in 1936. They separated in 1947 and divorced in 1954. He met Élisabeth Naldi in 1949; they lived together at Les Allymes from 1951, married in 1954 and settled at Meillonnas.^[1]

Vailland died of lung cancer at Meillonnas on 12 May 1965, aged 57, and was buried in the village cemetery.^[1]

Élisabeth Vailland, René Ballet and other friends supervised much of his posthumous publication. A twelve-volume collected edition appeared from Éditions Rencontre in 1967–1968. Élisabeth later donated his archives to the city of Bourg-en-Bresse. The association Les Amis de Roger Vailland, founded in 1982, is based at the Médiathèque Élisabeth et Roger Vailland and promotes the study and publication of his work.^[35]

Selected works

References

Sources

• Chaleil, Max, ed. (1970). Roger Vailland. Entretiens, no. 29 (in French). Subervie.
• Cordier, Daniel (2009). Alias Caracalla: mémoires, 1940–1943 (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 978-2-07-074311-7.
• Courrière, Yves (1991). Roger Vailland ou Un libertin au regard froid (in French). Paris: Plon. ISBN 978-2-259-02331-3.
• Duncan, Dennis (2015). "Introduction". Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu. Atlas Press. pp. 7–28. ISBN 978-1-900565-67-7.
• Petr, Christian (2005). "Le saut de l'ange de Roger Vailland, du Grand Jeu à Paris-Midi". Mélusine (in French) (25). L'Âge d'Homme.
• Petr, Christian (2011). "Roger Vailland communiste, ou l'importance d'être constant". Itinéraires (in French) (2011–4): 47–67. doi:10.4000/itineraires.1371.
• Polizzotti, Mark (2009). Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (Revised and updated ed.). Boston: Black Widow Press. ISBN 978-0-9795137-8-7.
• Roberts, Donna (2018). "The Vertiginous Pursuit of the Grand Jeu: Experimental Metaphysics, Paramnesia, and Creative Involution". In Bauduin, Tessel M.; Ferentinou, Victoria; Zamani, Daniel (eds.). Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. pp. 39–56. doi:10.4324/9781315146652-4. ISBN 978-1-138-05433-2.
• Spiteri, Raymond (2011). "Surrealism and Its Discontents: Georges Bataille, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and the 1929 Crisis of Surrealism" (PDF). French History and Civilization. 4: 145–156.

Further reading

• Vailland, Élisabeth; Ballet, René (1973). Roger Vailland (in French). Paris: Seghers.
• Bott, François (1969). Les Saisons de Roger Vailland (in French). Paris: Grasset.
• Picard, Michel (1972). Libertinage et tragique dans l'œuvre de Roger Vailland (in French). Paris: Hachette.
• Brochier, Jean-Jacques (1962). Roger Vailland, tentative de description (in French). Paris: Éric Losfeld.
• Leduc, Alain Georges (2008). Roger Vailland, un homme encombrant (in French). Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 978-2-296-05564-3.

External links

• Les Amis de Roger Vailland
• Roger Vailland in the INA audiovisual archives