Eric Jourdan

Les mauvais anges is the story of teenage cousins Pierre and Gérard whose friendship develops into a passionate and all-consuming love affair during one of those idyllic long summer holidays in the country that French fiction does so well. With hindsight, one of the most remarkable things about it is that it was written when Jourdan was only sixteen (but that probably didn't seem so odd in 1955, given that an eighteen-year-old had taken the world by storm with Bonjour Tristesse the previous year).

One of the least remarkable things about Les mauvais anges, sadly, is that the book's "immoral content" immediately drew the attention of the authorities. France didn't exactly have literary censorship in the 1950s, but the committee that examined the book was able to ban booksellers from displaying the book or selling it to minors, so it was effectively killed, apart from translations and a few limited editions published by private subscription. A second attempt to publish it failed in 1974, and it was only with the 1985 reissue that you could buy it over the counter. (The introduction of the French edition speculates that the extreme length of this ban was at least partly due to defeatism or lack of interest from Jourdan and his French publisher - after all, they could have pointed to what Genet had got away with doing in print without any official interventions...).

So, how does it hold up? Not surprisingly, the many critics who contributed fore- and afterwords to the two editions I have all see it as a triumph of lyrical, passionate writing, a milestone in gay literature, etc. Up to a point, they are right. There is a freshness and originality, especially in the early chapters where the boys are discovering the nature of their attraction for each other, that really stands out. It is pretty obvious that Jourdan didn't have any good models to work from, and was forced to do without the repertoire of clichés we might expect. It is a stunningly vivid description of two teenagers with nothing else in their heads apart from sex, sex, sex and sex. But, as the book progresses, Jourdan seems to run out of steam a bit. He doesn't really manage to turn Pierre and Gérard into clearly distinct characters. They swap roles and attributes all the time, until you are puzzled to tell which is which. When one of them observes "We are Romeo and Romeo, we are Tristan and Tristan" I felt that he had hit the nail on the head. He could equally well have said "We are Narcissus and Narcissus."

The other thing I didn't get on with in the later part of the book is the eroticisation of violence that increasingly takes over the plot. And that's largely a matter of taste. There are valid reasons for putting rapes and beatings into a novel, and there's a case for using the description of violence as a metaphor for sexual passion, but when it goes too far - as it does here - it can easily become repulsive. And it leads Jourdan into an ending that I don't suppose anyone much over the age of seventeen can take seriously as a Grand Tragic Finale.… (more)