On Leave (21 page)

 

DA:

 

Qu'importe Daniel que tu parles

Qu'importe la musique lointaine

Si tes amis sont couchés par balles

Sur la page de ton prochain poème

(Who cares about your words, Daniel

Who cares about the distant tune

If your friends are put down by bullets

On the page of your forthcoming poem)

Yes, under the Occupation, in 1944, poetry was peculiarly important. I gave it up because I was troubled by its ineffectiveness in the world of today.

MP:
You could express yourself more effectively as a journalist?

DA:
I wrote journalism of the most polemical kind until I could no longer find an organ that matched my convictions. I've not known where to carry on the fight for two years now. I found a refuge only in some Italian and Polish papers.

MP:
Is that why you suddenly decided to publish your book?

DA:
Yes, a book is the only place you can express opinions freely in France. As in the nineteenth century, I've come to literature as a mode of action. I'm not out to make a literary career.

MP:
But to make an impact on public opinion?

DA:
More than that. I want to act. To be a man of action with a pen in my hand, because at the moment that is the weapon that I have.

MP:
What kind of action are you calling for now, through your book?

DA:
Last January I went to Gare de Lyon with a friend at the end of his leave from Algeria, and I witnessed the scene that constitutes the last chapter of my book: the troop train slowly moving away, with soldiers leaning out the windows over an empty platform. It struck me that this generation had nobody to speak for it. It's an aspect of the Algerian issue that nobody sees as urgent: the drama of a generation that is losing the best years of its life, as one of my characters says.

MP:
But you're not going to tell me that you turned yourself into a novelist overnight! It seems to me that you've been writing in secret for many years in preparation for this moment, like learning to swim in case you get shipwrecked.

DA:
Literary modes of action do indeed constitute an emergency exit, a rescue vehicle, for what Roger Vailland calls a “man of quality.” To be a “man of quality” in that sense means to act at all times by the most appropriate means in support of a few broad ideas to which you are attached.

MP:
What are the broad ideas to which you are attached?

DA:
First, that half the planet's population goes hungry.

MP:
The same idea tortured Romain Rolland.

DA:
Yes. There's a problem, first of all, in the distribution of wealth, and especially with the maintenance of production. Even though the problem of hunger is not so acute in some countries, the system by which goods are allocated falsifies human relationships.

MP:
Is that what you think important to change? Will your next books be focused on that topic?

DA:
Obviously, to my mind, since these problems are constant preoccupations, they cannot but be present in everything I write. At the moment I'm finishing a long novel,
Le Retour d'Arcole
(“Return from Arcole”); it's the story of a group of decommissioned Resistance fighters looking back on a revolutionary adventure that never happened. But beyond their individual stories the constant theme of the book could be summed up by the lament that any one of the characters, whatever his position, could utter: Our lives are not what they should be!

 

Published in
Arts
, May 1957

 

THE WORKS OF DANIEL ANSELME

A l'heure dite
. Paris, G.L.M., 1948 (46 pp.)

Contribution to
Hommage des poètes francais à Attila Jozsef
. Paris, Seghers, 1955

La Permission
. Paris, Julliard, 1957

Les Relations
. Paris, Laffont, 1964 (339 pp.)

Une Passion dans le désert
. Catalogue of an exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Germain, 1965

“Pennaroya,” in
Quatre Grèves significatives
. Paris, Epi, 1972

Le Compagnon secret
. Paris, Laffont, 1984. Reprinted 1997 (259 pp.)

James Jones,
Le Pistolet
(
The Pistol
). Translated from the English by Daniel Anselme. Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1960

WITH JEAN LAUNAY

Vilain contre ministère public
. Script of a television serial. Paris, Laffont, 1969

 

Faber and Faber, Inc.

An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 1957 by René Julliard

Translation and introduction copyright © 2014 by David Bellos

All rights reserved

Originally published in 1957 by Éditions Julliard, France, as
La Permission

Published in the United States by Faber and Faber, Inc.

First American edition, 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anselme, Daniel.

    [Permission. English]

    On leave: a novel / Daniel Anseleme; translated from the French by David Bellos. — First American edition.

        pages  cm

    Includes an interview by Maurice Pons with the author (1957).

    ISBN 978-0-86547-895-4 (hardback) —

    ISBN 978-0-86547-896-1 (ebook)

    1. Algeria—History—Revolution, 1954–1962—Fiction. 2. Soldiers—France—Fiction. 3. Psychic trauma—Fiction. I. Bellos, David, translator. II. Title.

PQ2601.N69 P413 2014

843'.914—dc23

2013034994

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eISBN 9780865478961

*
Sidi Bel Abbès, a small town south of Oran, was the home base of the French Foreign Legion from its inception in 1843 until 1962.