Roger Bésus

Roger Bésus , born with Bayeux in 1915 and died in Rouen the February 17th 1994, is a writer and Sculpteur French.

Roger Bésus passes his childhood and adolescence to the Havre. He adds to his community activity of engineer of Public works of State, initially that of novelist, then that of sculptor.

From 1947 to 1971, it published eighteen novels. Its novel was compared, by Albert Béguin, with that of Georges Bernanos; it could also be close to that of William Faulkner: typical characters of a quite precise social class and one time whose analysis is often pushed to the extreme by cruel dialogs or a pitiless stream of consciousness. Itself claimed Dostoïevski “by my manner, writes it on April 10th, 1970, of going to the beings, encircling them in their contradictions”.

Like Faulkner or Balzac, it with the ambition to paint a total company. Prefacing - once in a while does no harm - its twelfth novel, For the Love , it indicates its goal clearly: “The end, here as in the life, it is totality. Totality to be it, in the totality of the world. Not romantic company worthy of this name which does not try to create both”. Roger Bésus, then noted Jacques Vier , “built with blows of axe of the spiritual communities whose members initially swear to see themselves assembled. With or without the Church, if not against it, one sees it occupied drawing a mystical body from the strangest bringings together”.

In 1977, Roger Bésus ceases publishing and is discovered one second vocation to which it is given with the same serious one and the same heat, while continuing to hold its newspaper regularly. It is a new life. Already, in April 1975, he wrote: “my passion for the sculpture believes in an unimaginable point. I feel sculptor…” It immediately took the route of the figurative sculpture, then fallen in discredit with the profit from compressions from a César Baldaccini or stackings of a Arman, in a word of what it names “the anti-sculpture”, not without adding “that at the bottom, one can prevent oneself from saying only what one creates today, it is not a question to compare it with what is created in the moment even around, it acts to introduce it into the line of works of all times”.

Its house of Bierville of which it transformed a part into workshop, “it enters in sculpture, engaging in this new career as if it had eternity”, writes his/her friend and testamentary executer Evelyne Corronc, and works will follow one another quickly: busts of Christian Dédeyan, Louis Leprince-Ringuet (1979), of Paul-Emile Victor (which will be deposited with the Base the Antarctic Dumont d' Urville in Ad3elie coast), of the Colonel Rémy (1981), Mgr Ducaud-Le Bourget (placed in the church Saint-Nicolas-of-Hanging-post), Varende (1987), Mgr Lefebvre and well of others.

“Its sensitivity of writer, noticed the art critic André Ruellan after his death, referred on the busts and the bodies of which it collected the expressions and of which it expressed the beauty without worrying about the modes or the tendencies, but with the honesty of a man of good and intelligence”.

Roger Bésus died in Rouen on February 17th, 1994. On its tomb, at the cemetery of the West with Bayeux, were placed, with its request, its self-portrait and the work which it had entitled That which cannot forget .

Its Journal - of which it had prepared itself besides the edition - was published after its death. From 1999 to 2006, seven volumes are already appeared, covering the period 1958-1972, to which came to be added, in 2005, the Journal of a sculptor . It is to say that this Journal form already an important sum. Selected titles - as With Contre-Courant (1962-1964) or Exile (1964-1966). - often speak about themselves. More and more, Bésus will be locked up in a solitary work, “blackening thousands of pages without worrying to know if it will still have readers” and denouncing “the rotting of a world without heart, of a humanity without love”.

The reader finds his friendships and his admirations there: the painter Michel Ciry, the type-setter Alfred Desenclos, literary critic Jacques Vier, Renee Benoit, the sister of the novelist, Marcel Clement, Jean Guitton, the poet Charles Quintrec or Balzac the Philippe Bertault to which, in 1957, it dedicates Abandoned the , its fifth novel, and well of others. It would be necessary to also speak about its détestations, to start with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; Marx and the Marxism - “couldn't one say, notes on June 4th, 1970, which Proudhon is in Marx what is the free man with the robot? ”; the father Teilhard of Chardin and its epigones; Edgar Faure, the “grave-digger of education”. One will discover there also his great sensitivity to the beings, the objects, nature, his native Normandy, like when it describes the birth of the day or that of spring…

Roger Bésus was a man of a great intellectual courage and an exemplary probity, a spirit open and curious about all things, endowed with an insatiable appetite of knowledge. Novels, newspaper, sculptures compose a public life extraordinarily filled. Its novels, with the first access, submerge you by their intensity and vital heat their characters, reflections of the thought and concerns for their author. Its Journal is a glance on the life: friendships, admirations, judgments, antipathies, follow one another, day after day with courage and clearness. As for its sculpture - 120 works - its justification is obvious with the first glance.

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