PONDERING

I have been pondering the publication dates of various novels of note which take place in a single day. They are few. One, which first appeared on the 14^th May 1925, is Mrs Dalloway  by Virginia Woolf. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. During the course of the day Mrs Dalloway, at a party she has organised, she hears of the suicide of one of the characters, an emotional casualty of the Great War. She gradually comes to admire the act of this stranger. She considers it an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness. Mrs Dalloway is described as being 51 years old. Mrs Woolf committed suicide at age 59 in 1941 during the second year of World War II.

The tragedies of war prompted another personal memory. When I was a pupil at the Lycée Henry IV, annex de Montgeron, I was given a book to read by my home room teacher Mademoiselle Corteggiani  entitled Le Grand Meaulnes.  This was in 1955. I was just thirteen years old. Here is a class photograph taken some time at the end of the school year in 1956. It must have been taken in later spring of ’56 as my family returned to the United States in July of that year. The man sitting next to Mlle Corteggiani is M. Leclerc, our science and maths teacher. 

But I digress. 

Le Grand Meaulnes is a novel by Alain-Fournier. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood. It is considered one of the great works of French Literature. I was immensely impressed by the story, or rather immersed in its world. There were a lot of things I did not fully understand, but there is no denying the lingering memory still present in my brain.

Fournier

Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier born 3^rd October 1886. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) In 1914, Alain-Fournier started work on a second novel, Colombe Blanchet, but this remained unfinished when he joined the army as a Lieutenant in August. He died fighting near Vaux-lès-Palameix (Meuse) one month later, on the 22nd of September 1914. His body remained unidentified until 1991, at which time he was interred in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne. Much of the story of Le Grand Meaulnes draws on Fournier’s own short life. What makes the memory stronger is that I was born exactly 38 years after his death on the Meuse. Again I ponder, what has that got to do with anything? The brain is a strange instrument. Little things like time and date seem to carve themselves into our cells and somehow link our lives with other events occurring at the same date and time. That little boy, 2^nd row from the top and second from the left, was going through that mysterious world between childhood and adulthood at the time. It’s still a mystery.