Giono and Melville: A ‘voyage imaginaire’ through nineteenth-century England

Giono and Melville

The opening paragraphs of Pour saluer Melville follow the conventions of the literary preface, in establishing Giono’s long-time enthusiasm for his subject. Thus, while noting that his translation of Moby Dick was begun on 6 November 1936 and completed on 10 December 1939, he emphasises that ‘bien avant d’entreprendre ce travail, pendant cinq ou six ans au moins, ce livre a été mon compagnon étranger’ (Giono, 1974: 3). Initially, Giono is drawn to the similarities between the rugged natural landscape of Haute Provence around Manosque and the depiction of the ocean in Melville’s novel:

Je l’emportais régulièrement avec moi dans mes courses à travers les collines. Ainsi, au moment même où souvent j’abordais ces grandes solitudes ondulées comme la mer mais immobiles, il me suffisait de m’asseoir, le dos contre le tronc d’un pin, de sortir de ma poche ce livre qui déjà clapotait pour sentir se gonfler sous moi et autour la vie multiple des mers. Combien de fois au-dessus de ma tête n’ai-je pas entendu siffler les cordages, la terre s’émouvoir sous mes pieds comme la planche d’une baleinière; le tronc du pin gémir et se balancer contre mon dos comme un mât, lourd de voiles ventelantes. Levant les yeux de la page, il m’a souvent semblé que Moby Dick soufflait là-bas devant, au-delà de l’écume des oliviers, dans le bouillonnement des grands chênes. (1974: 3)

Yet it is not only this deft conflation of the ocean with the Provençal landscape that justifies Giono’s passion for Melville. For, ‘cette poursuite dans laquelle Melville m’entraînait devenait plus générale en même temps que plus personnelle’, awakening both timeless universal concerns and the preoccupations of the moment:

Il y a au milieu même de la paix (et par conséquent au milieu même de la guerre) de formidables combats dans lesquels on est seul engagé et dont le tumulte est silence pour le reste du monde. On n’a plus besoin d’océans terrestres et de monstres valables pour tous; on a ses propres océans et ses monstres personnels. De terribles mutilations intérieures irriteront éternellement les hommes contre les dieux et la chasse qu’ils font à la gloire divine ne se fait jamais à mains nues. Quoi qu’on dise. Quand le soir me laissait seul je comprenais mieux l’âme de ce héros pourpre qui commande tout le livre. (1974: 3–4)

For, ‘l’homme a toujours le désir de quelque monstrueux objet. Et sa vie n’a de valeur que s’il la soumet entièrement à cette poursuite’ (1974: 4). And there is something of Ahab in everyone, hidden in their secret lives:

Nul ne sait qu’il est parti; il semble d’ailleurs être là, mais il est loin, il hante les mers interdits … Tel est le secret des vies qui parfois semblent nous être familières; souvent le secret de sa propre vie. Le monde n’en connaît que la fin: l’épouvantable blancheur d’un naufrage inexplicable qui fleurit soudain le ciel de giclements et d’écume. (1974: 4)

Giono encountered Melville as he had encountered the Bible, Virgil and, indeed, English – as an autodidact, and the interesting thing about autodidacts is that, contrary to Sartre’s example in La Nausée, they do not proceed with their self-education systematically, but rather in a random, magpie-like fashion, which transgresses all the rules of the canon and national cultural boundaries. In the same way that the autodidact Céline resurrected the Hungarian medical pioneer Semmelweis and introduced echoes of Dickens and Wells into interwar French fiction, it is entirely fitting that the ‘discovery’ of Melville should be the work of an author approaching literature as an outsider.

Giono’s references to the monsters which haunt us in peacetime and in war are deeply felt and reflect a major crisis in his life at the time of writing the Melville novel in 1940. His militant pacifism, which had begun with his experiences in the infantry in the First World War, had proved ineffectual in preventing war in 1939, leading to the dissolution of the ‘Rencontres du Contadour’ and to his own imprisonment for alleged anti-militarist propaganda in the Fort Saint-Nicolas in Marseille during the autumn of that year. At the same time, his literary career had reached a hiatus: well-established and popular as an author of Provençal peasant novels, beginning with Colline, of 1929, Un pain de Baumugnes, of the same year and Regain, of 1930, he realised by the end of the 1930s that he was in danger of being compartmentalised into a southern, rural and popular cultural stereotype, and felt the need for a new direction for his work. In a sense, the rapid composition of Pour saluer Melville, which took him only two months (see Godard, 1974: 1095), can be seen as both reflecting and facilitating the passage from the ‘old’ Giono to the ‘new’, beginning with Le Hussard sur le toit, of 1951.

It is therefore by no means coincidental that Giono should choose to depict Melville in 1849 as being at a similar turning-point in his career, with a similar anti-militarist activism poised to mire him in controversy. The book Melville has come to London to find a publisher for, White Jacket, is a bitter denunciation of cruelty in the United States Navy, experienced at first hand on board the USS United States, and later transposed into the posthumous Billy Budd, Sailor, of 1924. At the same time, Melville had achieved moderate, even international, fame for his early novels, especially Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which, in spite of the broader range visible in both Mardi (1849) and Redburn (1849), typecast him as securely as an adventure novelist of the South Pacific as Giono was labelled a Provençal regionalist. Thus, one of the major themes of Pour saluer Melville is Giono’s attribution to his hero of his own compulsion and responsibility to undertake a work in a different direction: a compulsion and pressure symbolised in the case of Melville by his continuing struggle, like Jacob’s with the angel.

Finally, it is important to emphasise that Giono’s translation of Moby Dick and Pour saluer Melville both appeared in 1941, published by Gallimard, under the German Occupation and the Vichy regime, at a time, before Pearl Harbour, when neither Germany nor Vichy France were at war with the United States and when American culture was still officially acceptable. In this context, the publication of the first translation of Moby Dick and what appeared to be a fictionalised essay on its author were not officially liable to censorship: indeed, Giono’s public stance during the Occupation and some of his published statements strongly endorsed the ideology of Vichy and earned him the same problems during the épuration as he had experienced at the beginning of the war (see Emery, 2008; Golson, 1998). In spite of Pour saluer Melville being rooted in mid-nineteenth century England, and without constituting ‘littérature de contrebande’ (although the heroine’s role as a smuggler is intriguing in this regard), it nonetheless lives under the shadow of the ‘années noires’ and its historical complexity derives in large part from its status as a fantastical or imaginary journey.

The ‘voyage imaginaire’ through Victorian England

In his description of the journey made by Melville by mail-coach from London to the west of England, Giono makes use of an established and very old fictional genre, the ‘voyage imaginaire’, defined by Arthur J. Tieje as ‘one of five minor forces in fiction … consisting in an unrelated series of adventures, determined by a purpose either satirical … diverting … or reformatory’ (quoted in Gove, 1961: 7), and related to the ‘extraordinary voyage’. The imaginary, or extraordinary, voyage in literature, of which perhaps the two most durable examples are Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and the novels of Jules Verne, thus points in two directions: towards the modern adventure novel, in which the fictional mechanism overlays the often seemingly authentic exotic setting; or towards an overtly fantastical world, albeit with important implications for our own, which accounts for the genre’s affinity with its two technical sub-categories of ‘féerie’ or ‘utopia’, both of which, incidentally, drive Céline’s fiction and pamphlets. One common feature of the ‘voyage imaginaire’, however, is that, like its cousin the ghost story, it seeks to establish its realist credentials before luring the reader, often subtly, into a world which transcends that reality.

It is this, essentially, that governs the structure of Pour saluer Melville, although a clue as to the fantasy to come is provided at the very beginning of the narrative proper, where Giono’s narrator announces that ‘Quand, en 1849, Melville revient en Amérique, après un court séjour en Angleterre, il rapportait un étrange bagage. C’était une tête embaumée; mais c’était la sienne’ (Giono, 1974: 5). Here, Giono is playing upon the ambiguity of ‘embaumé’, meaning ‘embalmed’, as in the shrunken heads of the South Pacific, and ‘perfumed’, denoting the aura which still emanates from him when he returns from his passionate adventure in England. The first part of the novel, however, follows a fairly conventional, and mostly accurate, biographical sketch of Melville until his journey to London in 1849, recounting his childhood and education – not dissimilar, in some respects, from Giono’s own – and his early sea voyages, especially his four years to the South Pacific on the whaler Acushnet (Giono, 1974: 12). As Henri Godard notes in his commentary for the Pléiade edition, Giono was reliant on two English-language biographies which had appeared in the 1920s, Raymond M. Weaver’s Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, of 1921, and John Freeman’s Herman Melville, of 1926 (Godard, 1974: 1101), although he was probably made aware of them by his American collaborators, Katherine Allan Clarke and Mrs Clarke Mullen (Giono, 1974: 77). Only one episode appears to be totally invented by Giono, which concerns Melville’s mother’s plan to make her son responsible for the cultivation of an apple orchard and the rearing of a pig, the profits from which he will be able to keep for himself.

It is with Giono’s narration of Melville’s arrival in London in November 1849 that the ‘voyage imaginaire’ begins to appear for the first time. In the first place, Giono grossly expedites and compresses Melville’s visit to the capital. In Giono’s account, Melville signs the contract for the publication of White Jacket with the publishers Bentley at their first meeting, where they fall over themselves to be as accommodating as possible, and it is this unexpected success that leaves him at a loose end in England until his ship departs three weeks later. In fact, the English publishers were considerably more reticent and required a much longer period of negotiation. Moreover, once the contract was finally signed, Melville travelled to France, Belgium and the Rhineland, before returning to London for a final period of 13 days (Godard, 1974: 1103). By side-stepping these factual details of Melville’s journey, however, Giono is able to find an unexpected window of three weeks, from 6 to 26 November, in which his hero can wander freely, liberated from the constraints of factual biography and, in some cases, geography.

A further, apparently minor, divergence from the factual biography concerns where Melville lives in London. Melville actually stayed in a modest boarding house on Craven Street, between the Strand and the Thames (Hoare, 2015), whereas Giono puts him in a hotel, complete with restaurant and parlour, and, most significant of all, its own stables and a view from his window over the roofs of Holborn (Giono, 1974: 23), north-east of the Strand. It is the stables which prove to be the crucial stage in the series of accidents which will lead him on his journey to the west. Suddenly inspired, Melville leaves his room and goes to talk to the grooms in the stable-yard. One in particular proves helpful:

Si tu avais dix jours de libre, toi, qu’est-ce tu ferais? – Ça dépend, dit l’autre; dans votre supposition, est-ce que j’aurais des sous ou pas un rond? – Mettons que tu aurais cinq livres, dit Herman. – Cinq, dit l’autre, alors c’est tout cuit, je partirais tout de suite pour Woodcut – Qu’est-ce que c’est Woodcut? – Un patelin, pardi. – Où ça perche? – Oh! c’est du côté de Berkeley, là-bas, au-dessus de Bristol. (1974: 22)

Woodcut, where the groom’s sweetheart Jenny lives, appeals to Melville and he decides to leave the following day, to the enthusiasm of his new friend: ‘Si vous y allez, entrez donc chez ce cochon de Josué à l’Old Sea Fish. Vous lui direz qu’il vous donne un rhum comme pour Dick. Comme pour Dick, vous lui direz’ (Giono, 1974: 23). In accordance with one of the conventions of the ‘voyage imaginaire’, the initial geographical reference to Berkeley, with its castle overlooking the Severn Estuary, is entirely accurate, and looks forward to the end of the narrative, but ‘Woodcut’ is entirely invented and probably derived from the illustration engraved on wood, the ‘wood-cut’. More intriguing, of course, are the fictitious clues as to the origins of Melville’s masterpiece: the biblical name of Joshua, the name of the inn, the Old Sea Fish, and the name of Melville’s guide, the ostler Dick. In other words, this chance encounter is engineered by Giono to both send his hero on his way to the west of England, and to begin to enter the textuality of Moby Dick itself.

The next stage in the chain of accidents which take Melville into an imaginary world concerns his choice of mail-coach, although the significance of the choice does not become apparent until it is explained by Adelina White en route:

Il se renseigne pour Woodcut. La voiture partait le lendemain à six heures du matin d’une petite écurie derrière Grays Inn. Il lui faudrait demander la malle de Bristol; aller avec elle jusqu’à Cricklade. De là, prendre la malle de Monmouth jusqu’à … Tout ce qu’on lui racontait était plein de routes, d’embranchements, de monde qu’on quitte perpétuellement par des traverses. (1974: 32)

What Melville does not know and what makes his encounter with Adelina inevitable, is that on Tuesdays the direct Bristol mail coach leaves from Hatton Garden, while the one leaving from Gray’s Inn diverts through the hamlet of ‘Quatre-Champs’ in the Thames Valley, where there is a fair. Since Adelina’s mission involves her meeting her contact at the fair, she has deliberately taken that particular coach, while Melville has blundered into it by accident.

In any case, by the time of Giono’s narrative in 1849, the mail-coach was fast on the way to becoming an anachronism, although not by any means entirely extinct. Travellers from London to the west of England were increasingly choosing Brunel’s Great Western Railway, which had opened a direct service to Bristol in 1841, Instead, Giono has opted to set his ‘imaginary journey’ in an England of a generation earlier, derived more from The Pickwick Papers than from the Age of Steam. Moreover, the mail-coach, with its jolting, bucking motion and with most of its passengers seated on the roof, becomes an evocative image of sea-travel, ideally suited to the ‘inland voyage’ of a mariner anxious to waste time. It is precisely in order to establish the equivalence between coach-journey and the sea-voyage that Giono has Melville ditch his smart London clothing ² in exchange for authentic second-hand seaman’s garb purchased ‘chez un brocanteur de Limehouse’ (1974: 23): smooth seaman’s trousers, a woollen sweater, still smelling of Benares, an old pea-jacket, marked with all the personality of a former owner, and elephant-skin Chinese slippers (1974: 23–5). So enticing are these new clothes, that he changes them for his old ones there and then and leaves the shop ready for his voyage: ‘il est en train de repartir à zéro’ (1974: 24). All that remains to test the effectiveness of his disguise is to enter a ‘bistrot de marin’ nearby (1974: 29), where he is welcomed by the landlord as a sailor who has spent time in the Far East and consumes two helpings of ‘riz aux crabes’ (1974: 29).

However, the itinerary of Melville’s entirely fictitious journey from London to Berkeley is by no means made up: he follows one of the many coaching routes to the west, essentially along the Thames Valley and over the Wiltshire Downs, to Cricklade, a known junction for coaches going south-west to Bristol or north-west and west to Gloucester and Wales. ³ Rather, the imaginary nature of the journey consists in the dislocation and compression of the topography, the introduction of unidentifiable spaces, like the inn and fair-ground of ‘Quatre-Champs’ and the Queen Elizabeth inn where the coach overnights before Cricklade, and, like the absence of rail travel, the deliberate regression of the chronology to an earlier, more romantic, period. These apparently minor divergences set the space for the more fantastical, and most personal, episodes in the fog outside ‘Quatre-Champs’ and the walk in the downs near the Queen Elizabeth.

Giono’s immediate concern is to establish the journey as a sea-voyage, with Melville, as we have seen, perched on the ‘impériale’ like a steerage passenger in the prow of a vessel. For this reason, the mail-coach, like a sailing-ship leaving harbour, is suddenly on the high seas, or, in this case, in open country:

les quatre chevaux prirent un très beau galop sur la route d’Eton. Les prairies étaient couvertes de givre. On ne voyait les verdures grasses de l’herbe qu’à travers mille scintillements des plumes de paon. D’énormes bosquets de sycomores sortaient du bleu de la brume, s’avançaient, dressant d’immenses rameaux… (1974: 35)

In fact, Gray’s Inn in 1849 was in the centre of the extensively developed Victorian city, some four kilometres from the nearly constructed Paddington Station, entirely absent from Giono’s narrative except as a passing reference to a ‘bourg’ where the coach picks up mail (1974: 36). The first incursion of the ‘voyage imaginaire’ in its guise of topographical dislocation occurs before the mail-coach has even reached the Thames Valley and its first lunch-time stop, when the narrative lurches into the Gothic:

La voiture allait au pas dans un pays montueux vers un passage entre deux collines. La route était enfermée de tous les côtés par des forêts de hêtres … De l’intérieur du coupé on frappa à la vitre puis on l’ouvrit. ‘Jack, dit une voix de femme, arrêtez-vous un instant à l’embranchement du chemin de Dartmoor’. (1974 : 38)

And Giono adds to the desolation even more: ‘Le pays était triste et pauvre. Le chemin de Dartmoor n’était rien qu’un sombre couloir boueux dans les bois’ (1974 : 39). We have left the England of Mr Pickwick for that of Sherlock Holmes – both far removed from what, in 1849, would have been the nascent suburbs accompanying the railway from London to Maidenhead.

After the pause at the ‘chemin de Dartmoor’, the journey breaks down into eight stages: the remainder of the morning before they reach the ‘grande auberge’ ‘au fond de la vallée où l’on rejoignait la Tamise’ (1974: 42); the afternoon spent travelling to the inn at ‘Quatre-Champs’, situated beyond Marlow (1974: 45), where they stay overnight and where it is fair day – one of the series of Michaelmas Fairs held throughout the country for livestock sales and accompanied by ‘mops’, or hiring fairs for labourers or servants; the following day’s ride from ‘Quatre-Champs’ to the Queen Elizabeth inn, beyond Henley, but too far from Cricklade to reach before nightfall (1974: 54), during which Melville and Adelina take the magical walk in the mist into an entirely imaginary country; the four-hour journey the following morning from the Queen Elizabeth to Cricklade (1974: 61); the day’s wait until the following morning in Cricklade, during which Adelina initiates Melville into contemporary British politics; and finally, there is the episode which concludes the journey, if not the novel, which takes place at four o’clock on the following afternoon, on the ‘grande lande qui domine l’estuaire du Severn. La terre, absolument nue, déserte, ondulée, couverte de bruyère, s’étendait à perte de vue de tous les côtés sauf vers l’ouest où tremblait la verdure glauque du canal de Bristol’ (1974: 67), and where Melville and Adelina part.

Giono’s construction of this itinerary is remarkable, not merely for the shifting historical periods in which it appears to take place, but, as we have seen, the acceleration and compression, followed by periods of elasticity, the importation of topographical features from other regions, often emphasising the wildness and bleakness of the terrain and the introduction of invented, or at least unidentifiable, locations, like the two inns, staples of the ‘voyage imaginaire’ or ‘littérature fantastique’. The purpose this serves, of course, is to make credible the two set-piece dialogues between Melville and Adelina, which rely on the crossing of a ‘barricade mystérieuse’ between reality and the imagination and, respectively, allow Giono to explore the topics of artistic imagination and political radicalism.

Love and politics

Pour saluer Melville is first and foremost a love story: delicate, moving and profoundly felt. Melville’s first encounter with Adelina is through her voice: her request to the coachman to stop on the Dartmoor turn-off and her low conversation with the two ragged emaciated figures who emerge from the woods to greet her. As Melville reflects, ‘Cette voix avait de l’âme’ (1974: 40) and ‘il lui semblait qu’il la connaissait; qu’elle devait avoir un visage donné d’avance et qui ne retient rien pour lui-même. Cette âme à fleur de voix devait sûrement faire confiance à tous’ (1974: 41). Later, Melville admits that her voice alone had already revealed her peasant origins: ‘Je suis une paysanne, dit-elle. – Je le savais, dit-il. – Ça se voit ? – Non, ça se sent … Il y avait de la terre dans votre voix’ (1974: 64) – a factor that places her at the centre of Giono’s own cultural and political concerns in respect of the terroir of his native Provence. Melville’s first view of Adelina confirms the ‘coup de foudre’ already triggered by the sound of her voice:

Ses sourcils montaient vers les tempes; son nez fin descendait très bas avec une sorte de ruse, mais elle releva les yeux et il fut encore ébloui par la couleur sans nom . Il vit qu’elle avait un front un peu rond avec un gonflement comme une amande au sommet du nez et que, malgré toute cette intelligence, ses narines étaient d’une exquise tendresse. Elle était légèrement et très bien fardée et ses joues apparaissaient nacrée sous un peu de rouge. Enfin, il prit conscience de la beauté complète de ce visage quand il eut l’audace de s’apercevoir que ses lèvres étaient charnues et luisantes. Il éprouvait un sentiment de très grande tranquillité, un repos de l’esprit et du corps, un bien-être comme si enfin la vie était devenue confortable. (1974: 46–7)

Both lovers recognise that they have an immediate deep affinity, grounded in their shared use of disguise – he as a sailor, she as a respectable ‘bourgeoise’, but also as a figure from his past and imagination: ‘Je vous ai reconnu hier soir, vous ne pourrez jamais vous déguiser; vous…’ (1974: 48). It is this which enables them to cross together the ‘barricade mystérieuse’, strangely evocative of the passage to the ‘fête étrange’ in Le Grand Meaulnes, and to share Adelina’s passion for the injustice in her native Ireland, but it is also a factor which renders the relationship not merely heightened, but transient – hence the invocation, at the height of the magic walk in the countryside outside the Queen Elizabeth, of Poe’s ‘plus jamais’ (1974: 57) and Melville’s injunction that ‘Plus jamais! Si nous voulions partir d’ici maintenant, ce serait de partout au péril de notre vie…’ (1974: 58). This introduction of Poe’s ‘Nevermore!’ looks forward to their parting on Berkeley Heath and to the abrupt cessation of their correspondence just before the publication of Moby Dick, presumably caused by Adelina’s death from consumption.

What gives this romantic theme such intensity is the fact that it was drawn from Giono’s personal experience, and that Pour saluer Melville was written at the beginning of his 30-year affair with Blanche Meyer, the young wife of a notaire in Manosque (see Stevenson, 2007). As Patricia A. Le Page discovered in 2004, Giono, in his correspondence with Blanche Meyer, makes explicit both the origins of the name of the heroine of Pour saluer Melville, her shared identity with his lover and the transposition of episodes from their affair into the novel:

Sans toi c’eût été une sèche biographie. C’est devenu une miraculeuse histoire entièrement inventée … Et c’est toi. Toi tout à fait. Tu y es d’ailleurs. Tu t’appelles Adelina White (White veut dire en anglais Blanc, Blanche … Tu vas voir, tu vas nous y voir tel que nous étions à nos premières promenades dans les jardins d’Armide. (Le Page, 2004: 78)

In other words, not only does this comment confirm the closeness of Giono to his fictional, but real, creation, it also reinforces the novel’s status as a work of ‘contrebande’ – at least in the context of his local personal relationships, if not immediately politically, while also introducing the colour of Moby Dick.

Adelina’s magic on Melville is worked, however, by her status as a political heroine, and the novel binds love and politics closely together. The theme of radical politics is introduced early on in the narrative, when Giono, after referring to Melville’s ‘indignation’ at the harsh treatment of sailors expressed in White Jacket, and his courageous acceptance of the scandal the book’s publication will provoke, comments:

Il est un homme de cette démocratie que Whitman va chanter dans le second verset de ses Feuilles d’herbe …

Courage yet my brother or my sister

Keep on! Liberty is to be subserved whatever occurs. (1974: 19)

He notes that Melville’s arrival in Europe occurs the year after the 1848 Revolution in France: ‘Dans toutes les classes sociales du people des États-Unis, on s’exalte avec les Français. C’est un amour exclusif et passionné’ (1974: 19), and recalls that:

À la fin de poème qu’il va intituler France, Whitman appellera la France ‘Ma Femme’

‘I will yet sing a song for you, Ma Femme’

parce que c’était la terre de la liberté. (1974: 20)

This radical resurrection of the spirit of 1848 and France’s historical connotation with freedom, which fits by no means comfortably with the ethos or ideology of Vichy, is compounded by one of the most recondite historical references in French fiction, namely to the Irish famine of 1846–8 and the great Chartist rally on Kennington Common on 10 April 1848. Both strands of what is essentially the same story are introduced obliquely during the unscheduled halt on ‘le chemin de Dartmoor’ on the first morning of the journey, when the two men who meet Adelina, the old man called Ardan and the waif-like Christofer, respond passionately to her mentioning of the names of ‘Michael O’Brien’ and ‘Feargus O’Connor’: ‘Vous savez bien qu’il ne pouvait pas être autre chose qu’un O’Brien. Auriez-vous préféré qu’il soit un Feargus O’Connor? – Que celui-là soit maudit, missis; je vous demande pardon’ (1974: 39).

It is not until later, during their long second conversation, which takes place near Cricklade, that Adelina fills in the background for her companion:

Êtes-vous au courant de ce qui s’est passé en Angleterre l’an dernier? – À quel sujet ? – Je vais vous dire: vous souvenez-vous de la famine de 46? – Très bien. J’ai vu arriver chez nous les bateaux d’émigrants et j’ai porté moi-même certaines marmites de soupe. – Rien n’a changé. – Je le supposais. Un peuple tout entier ne s’arrête pas brusquement de mourir de faim. – Non, mais il s’arrête plus vite si on pense aux bouches vides et si on travaille à les remplir au lieu de passer son temps à philosopher sur les enseignements d’Adam Smith et de Ricardo … Vous avez vu les bateaux d’émigrants; nous avons vu des charretées de morts jetés dans les fosses; mais pendant deux ans les bateaux anglais n’ont pas cessé malgré tout d’emporter hors du pays les riches moissons de blé pour aller les vendre sur les marchés étrangers, au plein moment de la maladie de la pomme de terre, quand les malheureux paysans pleuraient de faim, assis sur les barrières de leurs champs pourris. Les ministres avaient peur des économistes … (1974: 62)

Even with the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, nothing has changed: ‘On fit venir le blé des Indes, mais on donna la distribution des vivres à des commerçants ordinaires qui firent fortune en spéculant (1974: 63). This social and economic disaster coincided with the growth of the Chartist Movement, which had its last and greatest mass-meeting on ‘Kensington’ (sic) Common, presided over by ‘Smith Michael O’Brien’ and ‘Feargus O’Connor’:

Je ne sais pas qui a raison de Feargus O’Connor ou de Smith Michael O’Brien. Tout ce que je sais, c’est que O’Brien a été fait prisonnier dans un champ de choux et qu’il a été condamné à mort … La peine d’ailleurs a été commuée … Le père d’O’Brien est à Dartmoor – Et ce jeune homme qui vous regardait avec tant d’âme? – C’est son autre fils, Christofer. Moi, dit elle, je fais la contrebande du blé pour l’Irelande qui meurt de faim (1974: 63–4)

In fact, Giono’s account is by no means coherent or entirely accurate: apart from the misspelling of ‘Kennington’ as ‘Kensington’, the names of the protagonists are garbled, and, whilst ‘Feargus O’Connor’ may be a reasonable transcription of ‘Feargus Edward O’Connor’, ‘Smith Michael O’Brien’ deforms his real name of ‘William Smith O’Brien’. These apparent errors are not particularly significant and form part of that sub-genre of the ‘voyage imaginaire’ which is the fictional biography, represented in France, for example, by Blaise Cendrars’ portrait of the Californian gold-prospector John Augustus Sutter in L’Or, of 1925, or Céline’s homage to Ignace-Philippe Semmelweis, under the name of Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis, in his medical doctoral thesis of 1924. What is more significant is that Giono chooses not to fill in the gaps and to leave the history deliberately vague. In fact, the careers of O’Brien and O’Connor were not intertwined: O’Brien was a member of the Young Ireland movement, who was convicted of sedition in 1848 and sentenced to death, although the sentence was commuted to transportation in Australia – and not, as Giono has it, imprisonment in Dartmoor – from which he was released in 1854. O’Connor was an Irish Chartist leader and, like O’Brien, a member of the Westminster parliament – from 1832 to 1835. The potential for conflict with O’Brien came with the Kennington Rally of 1848, in which O’Connor, bending to pressure from the Prime Minister Lord John Russell and fearing mass casualties, called off plans for the Chartists to march from Kennington to Parliament in order to present their petition: a concession seen by his radical enemies as a betrayal. The significance of this bizarre episode in a fictional biography of Herman Melville, written at the beginning of the Occupation in France, is not so much the imprecision or inaccuracy as the fact that it is there in the first place, and it raises covert themes of exploitation, parliamentary duplicity, collaboration, protest and betrayal, of which Giono was, as a life-long anarchist, well aware and which were by no means out of place in the France of the late 1930s or early 1940s. Indeed, the most effective way in which Giono, deeply scarred by his experience as a political prisoner in the autumn of 1939, can introduce these radical themes in Occupation France is ‘en fraude’, as part of an fictitious narrative of an imagined nineteenth-century England. Nevertheless, these radical shadows are merely part of a wider reflection in Pour saluer Melville on creativity and the nature of artistic vocation.

‘La lutte avec l’ange’ and artistic destiny

If the significance of Adelina White lies in her initiation of Melville into the affective world of love and politics, he reciprocates by treating her to a master-class in artistic sensibility and imagination and sharing an insight into the constant demands of an artistic vocation. Her lesson begins with an induction into ways of seeing. As they sit on the top of the swaying coach on the ‘plateau triste et nu’ (1974: 51) between Marlow and the Queen Elizabeth inn,

il montra une échancrure de ciel entre deux accumulations de nuages neigeuses. Elles avaient la forme d’une feuille; elle était d’une verte nocturne et l’on voyait la profondeur des espaces se creuser à travers la couleur. ‘Vous souvenez-vous d’avoir tenu dans vos mains une feuille de laurier? – Oui. – Vous souvenez-vous de la couleur de la feuille? – Oui. – Sombre comme la nuit? – Oui. – Mais quand même verte? – Oui. – Comme si ces gouffres extraordinaires s’ouvraient dans la feuille? – Oui.’ (1974: 52)

Later, as they approach the woods,

Avait-elle jamais vu un bois comme il le lui faisait voir? ‘Non’. Il le lui tournait sens dessus dessous, l’envers, l’endroit, l’orient, l’occident, les mystères du nord et du sud, la mousse, le champignon, l’odeur, la couleur. ‘L’aviez-vous vu? – Non. – L’avez-vous vu? – Oui … Il la faisait vivre dans son domaine’. (1974 : 53)

From ways of seeing, it is a mere step to ways of imagining, which forms the subject of the second class and which takes place beyond the Grand Meaulnes-like ‘barricade mystérieuse’ (1974: 56) in the fog of the meadow by the Queen Elizabeth. In the mist, Melville conjures up an entire imaginary town, the microcosm of the ‘imaginary journey’ itself, perched on the mountainside in a piercing blue sky (1974: 57). Yet access to this imaginary town is not the exclusive preserve of the artist and can be taught, just as a child can be taught to assemble building blocks:

Avez-vous jamais joué aux cubes quand vous étiez petite? Et bien, les maisons sont comme ces cubes avec lesquelles vous vous amusiez et elles s’étagent de palier en palier sur la montagne … Les hommes et les femmes du monde entier ont construit peu à peu en eux-mêmes cette ville pierre à pierre et fleur à fleur. Et ils ont construit cette montagne vivante qui sait jouer au ‘bonheur surprenant’, au jeu du ‘plus jamais’. (1974: 58)

In other words, Melville is introducing Adelina to a highly democratic artistic process, by which, if one can but learn to see, the world of the imagination becomes alive.

In a sense, Adelina and Melville are engaged in the same democratic endeavour – Adelina to liberate, or at least feed, Ireland, and Melville to release the powers of the imagination. Neither mission, however, can be conducted without risk or cost. Adelina gives up her life as a bourgeois society hostess, the wife of a successful and politically ambitious lawyer, and, it is strongly implied, eventually dies prematurely of that most romantic of diseases, consumption. Melville himself labours under the weight of his artistic vocation, which cuts him off for ever from the comfortable life of the professional commercial writer, and engages in a literal personal struggle with an angel who is a physical, tangible presence in his life and who reappears in London just as he is buying his seaman’s ‘disguise’ in Limehouse:

‘Alors, te voilà revenu!’ dit-il. La bataille avec l’ange a recommencé. Il s’était toujours douté que ce n’était qu’une trêve. Il n’a jamais rien dit à personne mais, depuis qu’il a quitté la mer, il a eu souvent des bagarres secrètes avec le porteur d’ailes. Seul, dans la pièce où il écrivait, pendant qu’il était penché sur la page, l’autre lui a souvent sauté sur les épaules. (1974: 26)

The angel is expressly Melville’s artistic conscience or, rather, compulsion to greatness, which precludes the easy path to commercial literary success:

Combien de fois me l’as-tu répété qu’il n’y a pas de petit boulot? Mille fois, cent mille fois, tout le temps; tu ne m’a pas laissé manger un seul bifteck aux pommes, tranquille. Mon boulot de poète, puisque tu dis que j’en suis un, mon petit boulot de poète. Faire des livres que je sais faire; chacun sait ce qu’il sait faire. Faire ce qu’on me demande, ce qu’on m’achète, parce qu’on sait que, dans cette branche, je suis un bon ouvrier, que je connais mon métier. Je donne exactement ce qu’on attend que je donne. Quoi? Le contraire? Il faut que je donne le contraire de ce qu’on attend? (1974: 27)

Behind Giono’s fictional Melville, about to embark on the revolutionary novel which will remain largely undiscovered for 90 years, it is difficult not to see the author himself, well-versed in giving the public the Provençal stories they now expect, drawn in new directions, of which Pour saluer Melville is the first signpost.

It is highly appropriate, therefore, that the parting of Adelina and Melville and the ending of the ‘imaginary journey’ should be sealed with the final appearance – indeed, apotheosis – of the angel, now visible to both lovers. As Melville concludes:

Être poète, voyez-vous, Adelina, c’est précéder le destin des hommes. Il ne suit pas; il n’est pas contre; il précède. Et il ne sert pas. Il y a dans cette nécessité de suffisantes raisons de malheur …

Il montra l’herbe couché derrière eux.

‘N’est-ce pas l’empreinte de quelqu’un d’énorme qui vient de se poser derrière nous?’

‘Oui, dit-elle, en effet, et on dirait que cette empreinte s’est faite pendant que vous parliez.’

‘Et bien, regardez là-haut maintenant !’

D’admirables nuages s’étaient élargis comme des ailes d’un oiseau qui plane.

‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ dit-elle.

Il bassa la voix:

‘Un ange.’ (1974: 71)

In other words, in his use of the biblical legend of Jacob and the angel in Genesis 33, Giono is tapping into the same allusion to metaphysical, political and aesthetic defiance as that exploited by Malraux in Les Noyers de l’Altenberg, of 1943, which remains the sole volume of his projected novel-cycle La Lutte avec l’ange.

Conclusion

By any standards, Pour saluer Melville is an extraordinary work, both in the context of Giono’s own literary career and in the cultural history of the interwar years and the Occupation. Katherine Allen Clarke, who, as we have seen, was the source of much of Giono’s documentation, is undoubtedly right in noting the importance of Giono’s own prison experience in 1939 for the novel, which goes beyond the apparent transposition of his own incarceration in the Fort Saint-Nicolas into O’Brien’s invented imprisonment in Dartmoor and places the theme of reclusion at the centre of what he called ‘my prison book’ (Clarke, 1962: 480). Moreover, it was his imprisonment, including a period of solitary confinement, which emphasised the rare value of imagination, noting ‘On ne peut savoir comme une baleine est précieuse en prison’ (Godard, 1974: 1104). It is this release of the imagination which enables Giono to undertake this short, but complex, novel, in which he is able to transpose his own personality, his love-affair with Blanche Meyer, the transition in his literary career and, more elusively, the political situation in which he found himself in the opening period of the Occupation, in which, in spite of his incontestable adoption and endorsement, as Golson demonstrates, of certain areas of Vichy policy, he could still evoke the Whitmanesque principles of liberty and celebrate the French Revolution of 1848, English Chartism in the same period and Irish rights.

A love story, a reflection on justice and freedom in a time of authoritarianism, smuggled like Adelina’s corn as democratic contraband, the real originality of Pour saluer Melville, however, lies paradoxically in its bogus literary-historical scaffolding. If Giono has created a fictitious Melville, modelled in his own shape, he provides an accumulated and no less fictitious trail of evidence leading to the writing of Moby Dick itself: the biblical names of the various innkeepers on Melville’s journey; the ‘clues’ provided by the ostler ‘Dick’ and the inn of the Old Sea-Fish at Woodcut; the accumulation of references to whiteness, from his fantasy of buying a white top-hat to provoke London society (Giono, 1974: 22) to the pivotal figure of Adelina White. In other words, Giono’s passage from writing ‘several folkloric stories, which he felt he could manufacture like little buns’ (White, 2017: ix) to the Stendhalian Angelo cycle and ‘his enigmatic, granitic Un Roi sans divertissement, a more ambitious novel than anything he had penned previously’ (2017: ix–x), takes place through the elaboration of an almost Borgesian labyrinth of re-written and imagined biographical data which go to serve as the fictitious basis of Melville’s great novel and which constitutes his ultimate liberation – from the rut of the past and the persecution of the angel. It is this that is the true meaning of the title, Pour saluer Melville: a self-portrait of the artist on the lines of Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, a homage to the greatest of nineteenth-century American novelists, but, above all, the answer to the question: ‘How to salute Melville?’ – the answer being, of course, by crafting a work of the imagination as devious and as true as Moby Dick itself.