Pierre Mac Orlan

Pierre Mac Orlan , of its true name Pierre Dumarchey (1882 - 1970), is a French, creative writer of an imposing work, a great homogeneity in spite of the diversity of the forms in which it appears and of the topics that it approaches. Novel with the song, test with poetry, its work is organized around some key concepts, the first of which an original and poetic access of the contemporary existence: the fantastic social one.

Biography

Pierre Dumarchey, alias Pierre Mac Orlan was born with Péronne, in the Somme, on February 26th, 1882. He died out eighty eight years later, on June 27th, 1970, with a hundred and fifty kilometers of his birthplace, in the house of Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin (Seine-et-Marne) in which he lived since 1924. Meanwhile, he lived or passed by Montmartre, Rouen, London, Palermo, Bruges, Brest, Mainz, etc Of these cities crossed essentially before the First World War, he drew the matter of one hundred thirty books and sixty five songs.

Pierre Dumarchey (1882-1905 approx.)

To evoke the first years of the life of Pierre Mac Orlan concerns the challenge: the elements which one has on this subject are lacunar, and Pierre Mac Orlan showed himself not very eloquent on the subject: “Which is it? ”, wonders Bernard Baritaud, “Pierre Mac Orlan or Pierre Dumarchey? First remained singularly discrete on the second. One will hardly advance in, as of its youth, it systematically got busy to erase it, to gum it, with the profit of a literary personality to the whimsical name whose past coincided marvelously with its work”

It is however necessary to be delayed there, because it is during this period which Mac Orlan will make what it enjoyed to call its “sentimental education”, that its sensitivity will take its final form, and that it will make the crop of memories which will be used to him as materials to write the majority of its novels as well as the totality of its songs.

In spite of the blur which it voluntarily maintained around its years training, one knows however that the mother of Pierre Dumarchey died whereas it was very young (in 1889, one supposes), that it had an younger brother, Jean, born in 1887, that his/her father, Pierre Edmond Dumarchey, exerted, inter alia, the occupation of police superintendent and that this last did not have with his/her oldest son of the reports/ratios of most cordial. Was this for this reason, or was this because of a reverse of fortune which he entrusted, about 1894, his/her two children with the guard of their uncle, inspector of the State education to Orleans?

Orleans (1894-1899)

In the city of the edge of the Loire, Pierre Dumarchey made of (poor) studies, meets the young person Gaston Couté, who makes him discover the work of François Villon, which will remain one of his major references throughout his life, just like of its great passions the Rugby will remain one, of which he discovers the joys also at that time. He writes songs which he sends to his idol: Aristide Bruant, and dreams of Paris, especially of Montmartre.

It is supposed that it is in reference to the town of Orleans which the name that Pierre Dumarchey will choose itself later will be Mac Orl (E) year (S) (the interested party will prefer to call upon, as an explanation, the memory of a quite improbable Scottish grandmother).

Paris (1899-1901)

After a short stay with Rouen, in the capacity as pupil to the Teacher training school (his/her uncle had decided it to become teacher), incompetent to resist the call of the Parisian Bohème, Pierre Dumarchey leaves his studies in plan, and in 1899 it goes to Paris where it hopes to be able to be made a name as an artist quickly: it decided that he would be painter.

Very quickly, it realizes that the Bohemian one, once removed from its literary tinsels, is only one modest manner to indicate a social situation which oscillates between precariousness and misery. Rather misery, moreover, in what relates to it: he always does not eat with his hunger, spending his days to be sought dispatch it which will enable him to find a bed for the night.

In company of his Jean brother, who accompanied it in his tour, and which is not deprived of talents for the drawing, the painting and the punch, Pierre Dumarchey attends the shady mediums of the Montmartrean suburbs, fauna where the artists and the hooligans (which are sometimes the same ones) mix, one-eyed tenants of hotels, occasional prostitutes or full-time, upholders, etc This Lumpenprolétariat picturesque and dangerous that one will find later, in its novels and its songs, as opposed to what one thinks sometimes, Mac Orlan forever liked it, and the glance that it carried on him was as stripped of tenderness as of indulgence: its attitude will be that of the " comprehension loyale." Nothing less, but nothing more.

In 1901, two years after its arrival in Paris, overcome by misery, Pierre Dumarchey throws sponge: while his/her brother, perhaps following a murder, enlisted in the Foreign legion, it returns to Rouen.

Rouen (1901-1905)

“ At that time, after two last years in Paris, at the bottom of the Montmartrean dead ends, I had finished my sentimental education. The quality of this education was not quite rare, but it was enough final to protect me, randomly of the small daily events of my life.

to live, I was sometimes corrector of printing works, sometimes, more simply, content of copy, according to the need for the traffic. This trade brought back four francs per day to me. And it was very well when I appear it with the results of my other attempts in the field of remunerated work. ” (Pierre Mac Orlan, “Rouen”, 1966)

The life of Pierre Dumarchey in Rouen is divided between this food work and of the night exits which are transformed sometimes into drifts which are not without pointing out those that one half-century the Situationnistes will try out later. There as in Paris, its way crosses that of more or less equivocal individuals, the first of which a certain Star, who will become the model of characters among most worrying of his novels.

But it also meets, in addition to the journalist Paul Lenglois, who will remain his friend until his death in 1951, and which appears in the song “Jean of the Providence of God”, a student, Robert Duquesne, author of a novel entitled Mr Homais travels . We are in 1905, Pierre Dumarchey has just finished his military service, and when he illustrates the work of his comrade he signs his collaboration of the name of “Pierre Mac Orlan”. It is the first time that this name is printed.

Pierre Mac Orlan (1905-1970)

Return to Paris: the Boat wash-house and the Nimble Rabbit (1905-1908)

Pierre Mac Orlan (we will call henceforth it this name) always knows conditons of life precarious. He episodically occupies in Montmartre a room in mythical the Bateau-Lavoir, where he becomes acquainted with the painters Vlaminck and Picasso, of the poets max Jacob and André Salmon, of some others which did not leave a name in the history of art or the literature. He will bind later friendship with Guillaume Apollinaire.

The evening, in company of some of his friends artists, he attends the cabaret of Frederic Gerard: The Nimble Rabbit, on the gold book of which max Jacob will write one evening this quatrain:

Paris, the sea which thinks brings
this evening with the corner of your door
O tavernier of the quay of the Fogs
its shower of foam

… Whose last but one towards will give its title to most known, if not with more read, of the novels of Pierre Mac Orlan.

He still seeks to live of his painting, with always also little success, discovers the work of Kipling (he will be deeply and durably touched by the Light which dies out ).

He travels also much at that time: Italy (Palermo, Naples), Belgium (Bruges, in particular), Marseilles, Tunisia… It is in company of a “easy woman of letters” that it achieves certain these voyages, in the capacity as “private secretary”. Of which act .

Painting with the writing (1908-1914)

It is the writer Roland Dorgelès, whom Mac Orlan had met in Montmartre and which had become his/her friend, who presents it to Gus Bofa, then editor association of the newspaper the Laughter . The legend (carefully maintained by Mac Orlan) wants that the illustrator, to whom Mac Orlan presented caricatures of his composition, was struck, not so much by the drawings, which he considered bad, that by the legends which accompanied them. He would then have convinced Mac Orlan to give up his ambitions in the Art schools to devote itself to the writing of humorous tales which he proposed to publish in the Laughter .

Thus Pierre Mac Orlan signs his first texts, which are worth a beginning of notoriety to him.

A collection of its tales is born in 1911 ( Legs in the air ), followed the following year by a first novel, with the squeaking humor, which definitively devotes it as writer: the House of the return nauseating .

Its personal situation is stabilized at the same time as its professional situation: he marries in 1913 Marguerite Luc, daughter-in-law of Frederic Gerard, the tenant of “Nimble Rabbit. ” It is the one half-century beginning of an often stormy life of couple.

It is the war! (1914-1918)

Pierre Mac Orlan is in holiday in Brittany at the time when he learns that the war is declared. Mobilized on August 2nd, 1914, it joined the 69e of infantry, with Toul. It is wounded on September 14th, 1916, close to Fibula, a few kilometres from its birthplace. Extended in a ditch, it must have the life saves with “Merry”, in other words one of these rebels, often of taken again justice, which compose the battalions of Africa. “Mac Orlan will be eternally grateful with these soldiers of the sections of discipline which were the brothers of misfortune of the legionary Jean dumarchey”, written Jean-Claude Lamy.

Mac Orlan turns over to the civil life decorated with the Military Cross. Of this experiment of the face, it will preserve a memory intense and ambiguous, mixture of fascination and dislike for this “ extraordinary time when several million men was transformed into active adventurers , made hundred times the sacrifice of their life, their affections, of what they had been and of what they could become ”. It does not remain about it less, will estimate it, that a “ match of a man of seventy kilos against a shell of the same weight is, without discussion, one of the most stupid inventions of our time. All the war of 1914 is established on these proportions. This experiment shows at the men a worrying unconsciousness ”.

At all events, the writer forever expressed the desire to renew the experiment and in his Small handbook of the perfect adventurer , appeared in 1920, it praises happinesses of the adventure passivates , that which one tastes sitted in his armchair, in opposition to dangerous uncertainties which are the usual batch of the active adventurers .

Writer and international reporter (1918-1937)

The years of post-war period are years records for Pierre Mac Orlan: its literary reputation grows thanks to the publication of novels such as the Negro Léonard and Maitre Jean Mullin (1920) (which is worth to him the compliments of Marcel Proust, and of which Antonin Artaud appreciates “fascinating it almost logical seal of unreality”), Riding Elsa (1921), Marguerite of the night (1924), the Quay of the fogs (1927), etc In parallel, he becomes artistic director of the Editions of Art of the Rebirth of the Book and, when he is not sent abroad to bring back reports of them, it runs in company of his wife of the peaceful days in the house of Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin which it finished restoring in 1924.

In its quality international reporter, recruited at the same time as some other writers by Pierre Lazareff, Mac Orlan goes in particular to Germany, where it gives an account of the German Révolution, and where it turns over regularly until 1937, observant lucid of the degradation of the social situation and anxious witness of progress of the Hitlérisme.

It is also sent in Tunisia to make reports on the Foreign legion, in England to cover a sordid news item, which enables him to study the methods of Scotland Yard, in Italy where, in 1925, it makes an interview of Mussolini. One will quote finally a series of article devoteds to an aspect little known of the American Prohibition: “the Avenue of rum” and its pirates (see the collection of reports published under the title of: the Mystery of the trunk n°1 .)

From these reports, Mac Orlan will also draw the matter from several novels: thus Camp Domineau (1937) for the reports on the Legion, or of Dinah Miami (1928) for the reports on Prohibition.

This time marks another upheaval in the life of Pierre Mac Orlan: the death of his/her younger brother. Jean Dumarchey, become one remembers it legionary at the beginning of the century, was releasable at the time when the First World War burst. He will go to the face, will be wounded, will turn over nevertheless to fire. The legionary Dumarchey, anarchist in the heart, allergic to the discipline, hermetic with propaganda, never had illusions on the reasons for which one asked him to make the war: “ I saw the people being made kill without conviction , wrote it in a disillusioned letter with his brother, for a cause which it did not include/understand and which it will not probably never include/understand . ” He dies into 1929 of the continuations of a brain hemorrhage.

With the disappearance of Jean broke the only bond which attached Pierre in the name of “Dumarchey. ”

Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin (1) (1938-1950)

The Second world war appears in Mac Orlan like a monstrous nonsense, and pushes it to ignore a little more topicality of its time and to work with working of its memories, which are attached to a world whose bombardments finished destroying the material decoration, and whose future is announced as being in fundamental rupture with all that it had been until there: “ a man who was twenty years old when Stendhal wrote the history of Fabrice del Dongo , will note it in 1961, a man who was twenty years old when Villon intended to sound the small bell of the Sorbonne were not very different from what I was when I was twenty years old. But I cannot resemble any more the man who will be twenty years old in one half-century ”.

However, Mac Orlan remains with the listening of the technical innovations of which its time is prodigal: for a long time already, it had included/understood the importance which the cinema and the gramophone would take. It is also interested in the radio for which it writes chronicles and takes part in emissions.

Television even does not leave it indifferent: it will buy as of the moment that they will be available a television colors. But will be in order to better distinguish the shirts from the players during the Sunday diffusions of the matches of Rugby.

The honors (1950-1968)

In 1950, Pierre Mac Orlan is elected, unanimously, member of the Académie Goncourt (it takes again the cover of Lucien Descaves). He will praise himself to be the only member of the prestigious institution to open itself when one strikes with his door.

If it were made request to enter to the Goncourt Academy, one cannot say in so far as Mac Orlan scorned the distinctions, and it is with an obvious pleasure that it receives in 1967 that until it waited since of the years: badges of commander of the Legion of honor, decreed by Georges Pompidou on a proposal from the minister the Culture Andre Malraux, for a long time an admiror of the work of the patriarch of Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin. Distinction delayed a long time by the fact that Mac Orlan had published, in the years 1910-1920, various erotic works.

Lastly, in 1968, Mac Orlan joined Boris Vian and Raymond Queneau with the Collège of “Pataphysique, where it enters in the capacity as Satrape, which had to point out its years rouennaises to him whole beginning of the century, when the knowledge of the work of Alfred Jarry was worth patent of admission in the small band to which it belonged.

Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin (2): the last years (1963-1970)

After the death of his wife, on November 10th 1963, Mac Orlan hardly leaves the house than he lives since 1924. It receives on the other hand visits, for example of Georges Brassens, which will have this pretty word in connection with Mac Orlan: “it gives memories to those which do not have any” and of Jean-Pierre Chabrol, who lives Saint-Cyr military school. Mac Orlan, sometimes, leaves its accordion and sings some of the songs which he writes since the beginning of the Fifties, and which evoke the world of before the cataclysm of the First World War, unless it entonne an old military marching tune.

The old man appears poor, by the friends are moved some. Actually, thanks to the royalties whom it perceives for his books, and especially his songs, Mac Orlan is largely with the shelter of the need. But the writer saw chichement, in an economy which lorgne towards avarice. It is that all its life, will entrust it, it lived with the belly the fear of knowing the hunger again, with which it had made knowledge during the Montmartrean years of the end of its adolescence.

The fear leaves it at the same time as these memories of which it was if prodigal on June 27th 1970.

Among its last wills, it expresses the desire that “ each year a bearing price name is allotted to Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin (paid expenses) with a writer of value, preferably old and in difficulty with the life or a painter offering a similar situation ”.

Pierre Mac Orlan of the Goncourt Academy, 1882-1970, is buried with the cemetery of the village where it had chosen to live forty-five years earlier.

Principal works classified by kind

Concerning the tests and poetry, is indicated only the final editions. Were not mentioned, not to weigh down an already bulky list, the dates of the first publications of the texts collected later in volumes.

As regards the classification by kind, one will keep present at the spirit this warning of Raymond Queneau: “ the work of Mac Orlan is singularly homogeneous, of the poem to the test, the song to the novel, it has only one step to cross which it crosses constantly . Sentimental Inflation, poem, are a fictionalized test ; Simone de Montmartre, poem, are a novel . Such or such novel as well does not prove it poem as documentary, and such test of documentary aspect a true novel ” (Foreword with the Complete Œuvres of Pierre Mac Orlan, I, p. XVIII)

Novels and news

the Legs in the air 1911
the House of the Return nauseating 1912
the Force laugh 1913
U-713 or the Gentlemen of misfortune 1917
the Song of the crew 1918
Bob bataillonnaire 1919 (begun again and supplemented in 1931 under the title Bataillonnaire )
Clicks It Coffee Ewe, history of a center of intellectual rehabilitation 1919
Chronique of the desperate days 1919
The Negro Léonard and main Jean Mullin 1920
On board of the Star Matutine 1920
the conquering Animal 1920
Riding Elsa 1921
Mischievousness 1923
international Venus 1923
Marguerite of the night 1925
Customers of the Good yellow Dog 1926
Under the cold light 1926
the Quay of the fogs 1927
Dinah Miami 1928
Truths Reports of Fanny Hill 1929 (begun again and supplemented in 1952 under the title the dice pipes or the adventures of Miss Fanny Hill )
the tradition of midnight 1930
will bandage It 1931
Quartier reserved 1932
Filles and Ports of Europe 1932 (first version of what will become Miss Bambù in 1950)
the Night of Zeebrugge 1934 (republished under the title the Ball of the Bridge of North in 1946)
the Killer n°2 1935
the Camp Domineau 1937
the Crossroads of the three knives 1940
the Anchor of mercy 1941
Picardy 1943
the Cross, the anchor and the grenade 1944

Tests, memories, reports

the Small handbook of the perfect adventurer 1920
Offensives of spring 1920
Gus Bofa 1929
Servants of shade 1930
the Battalion of the bad chance 1933
Berlin 1935
Matter of infantry 1936
Vlaminck, paintings. 1900-1945 1947
Praise of Gus Bofa 1949
the Bands 1950
Billhook 1951
Utrillo 1952
the deaf Lantern 1953
the Memorial of the small day 1955
Vlaminck 1958 (text different from that of the Vlaminck of 1947)
the Small bell of Sorbonne 1959
Masks to Measure 1965
Cities 1966
the Mystery of trunk n°1 (four reports of 1924 to 1934), (posthumous, 1984)
abolished Images (selection of rare texts of Pierre Mac Orlan) (posthumous, 2005)

Poetry

complete Poetries documentary 1954

Songs

Mac Orlan with the cinema

“ If I could all start again, I would not write any more books, I would make films ” (Pierre Mac Orlan.)

Inhuman the , carried out by Marcel the Herbarium (1924), scenario Co-writing by Pierre Mac Orlan, Georgette Leblanc, Marcel Lherbier
Will bandage It , adapted and carried out by Julien Duvivier (1935)
Quai of the fogs , realized by Marcel Carné (1938), scenario of Jacques Prévert
François Villon , realized by André Zwobada (1945), scenario of Pierre Mac Orlan
Marguerite of the night , realized by Claude Autant-Lara (1956), scenario of Ghislaine Autant-Lara and Gabriel Arout

Bibliographical references

works of Pierre Mac Orlan belong to the catalog of the editions Gallimard.
Small Mac Orlan illustrated , Museum of the Countries of Seine-et-Marne, 1996
Bernard Baritaud, Pierre Mac Orlan, his life, its work , Droz, Geneva, 1992
Jean-Claude Lamy, Mac Orlan, the motionless adventurer , Albin Michel, Paris, 2002
Pierre Mac Orlan, Romance maritime , texts selected and presented by Brown Dominique the, Bus one, Paris, 2004
Pierre Mac Orlan, complete Works , “the Circle of the biliophile”, Geneva, 1968 (25 vol.)

External bonds

Committee Mac Orlan
Mac Orlan on television (files of the INA)
(in) Year article butt Mac Orlan by Andy Merrifield in The Brooklyn Rail
the erotic Work of Pierre Dumarchey

As a conclusion

The work of Pierre Mac Orlan must be expensive with any man who, so much is not very lucid not only over his time, but also on the history in general, did not preserve any less for that a love refined for all the resources of the imaginary lives and the virtues of a reactivated memory. Current times are not tender for them: also the reading of Mac Orlan is essential it on them as with all those which, neglecting the literary modes, want to know a writer of a quality and a force such as they enable him to transmit to people of tomorrow meditations on the things of yesterday which thanks to him remain always current and always worthy to move and to worry. This world disappeared from bad lots and worrying characters will take seat beside that of freed from Pétrone: time does not change anything with the thing. Any writer worthy of this name gives of his time an at the same time true and poetic, durable and made iridescent image chosen: it is what Pierre Mac Orlan. did| Raymond Queneau |Preface with volume I of the complete Œuvres of Pierre Mac Orlan

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