Raymond Radiguet (; 18 June 1903 – 12 December 1923) was a French novelist and poet. His two novels, noted for their explicit themes and unique style and tone, were praised by many of the greatest writers of the time. He died unexpectedly at the age of twenty.
Early life
Raymond Maurice Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, close to Paris. He was the eldest of seven children born to Maurice Radiguet (1866-1941), a successful caricaturist, and Marie Radiguet (née Tournier, 1884-1958), who taught at a boarding school. When asked for news of his mother, Raymond would reportedly say: "I don't know. I never see her face. It's always lowered as she ties the shoes of one of my brothers or sisters." His father was a much more significant presence in his life, and Maurice Radiguet's mixture of permissiveness and near-rivalry with his eldest son heavily influenced the paternal dynamic in Le Diable au corps.
On his mother's side, his family hailed from Martinique; his maternal grandfather had died in a shipwreck off the coast of Havana.
Raymond's paternal relatives were mainly involved in the sciences. His great-grandfather had founded Radiguet & Fils, a company that manufactured precision scientific instruments. The management of this firm stayed in the family for several generations.
Radiguet's earliest memory, as he recounted it later in the autobiographical Île de France, Île d'Amour, was of precocious sexuality: "I see myself, two years old, led by my nurse each morning to the girls' boarding school where my mother had graduated four years earlier. This gentle warmth of knees and breasts, I have never been able to recover it since, as I experienced it at the moment when I felt these caresses, so different from those of my mother or my nurse."
In the same work, he sets down two childhood memories of death. In one, also drawn on at the beginning of Le Diable au corps, a neighbor's maid commits suicide by throwing herself from a rooftop. In the other, a moment of erotic fascination gives way to horror as, watching a young couple on a swing, he sees the woman fall and break her neck: "Image worthy of a Greek tragedy."
In 1917, he entered the Lycée Charlemagne on a scholarship. Once there, however, he began neglecting his schoolwork in order to pursue his own interests in classic literature, and was eventually expelled.
His first published poem, again under the pseudonym of "Raimon Rajky," was "Aiguilles des secondes," which appeared in the September 1918 edition of L'Instant; his first publication under his real name was "Ligne d'horizon," which appeared two months later, in Le Canard enchaîné; in December, he published a short story, "Tohu," in the avant-garde journal SIC. In February 1919, he met Max Jacob, with whom he became close at this time. ("Une famille transporte un édredon rouge comme vous transportez votre cœur.")
Radiguet's relationship with Jean Cocteau began in 1919. Despite Cocteau's characteristically dramatic account of their first meeting, it is uncertain at which literary soirée they actually made first contact. On Radiguet's first being introduced at Cocteau's home, the butler announced him this way: "Sir, it's a child with a cane."
In early 1923, Radiguet published his first and most famous novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh). Its scandalous content, along with its autobiographical rapports, set off a literary cause célèbre. The novel was a great commercial success; cleverly marketed by Bernard Grasset of Éditions Grasset, it sold over 100,000 copies in three months. The novel tells the story of a young married woman who has an affair with an adolescent boy while her husband is away fighting at the front. Its plot, along with its narrator's cynical treatment of the war as "four years of summer vacation," tapped into an unacknowledged but profound national anxiety over the fidelity of soldiers' wives, some of whom had staved off loneliness through affairs with older men or adolescent boys. According to Radiguet family friend Yves Krier, it was Maurice Radiguet that Alice Serrier (née Saunier), the model for the character of Marthe, initially intended to seduce. Alice Serrier's husband, Gaston Serrier, was a soldier in the war. The scandal followed the couple for decades, and the paternity of their child was called into question by the press. Gaston always maintained his wife's fidelity.
By the age of 20, Radiguet was drinking extremely heavily and working on his second novel Le bal du Comte d'Orgel (Count d'Orgel's Ball). This novel, also dealing with adultery, was only published posthumously in 1924, and also proved controversial; Critics are divided on the merits of Radiguet's poetry and the seriousness of his poetic efforts. Clément Vautel, writing in 1925 in response to Le Figaro<nowiki/>'s review of Radiguet's poetry collection Les Joues en feu (Cheeks on Fire), referred to the poems as "pretentious absurdities that they want to make us admire at all costs." Roger Martin du Gard criticizes those who, patronizingly in his view, praise Radiguet's poetry for its precociousness and redolence of childhood, and offers this assessment: "Radiguet, in his poems, seems not to have sacrificed himself nor to have submitted himself to the old rules of the game. The lack of composition is marked [...] All his poetry is made of faux pas, of naïvetés [...] Lovely freshness, certainly, but moments of clumsiness and negligence, feigned or not, as well as frequently irritating inversions, forbid, once the first surprise has faded, an unrestrained admiration."
Death
thumb|Tomb of Raymond Radiguet, Poet and Novelist, Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
On 12 December 1923, Radiguet died at age 20 in Paris of typhoid fever, which he contracted after a trip he took with Cocteau. According to his friend Jean Hugo, Radiguet "had fallen ill at the hôtel Foyot, rue de Tournon, where he had a room above the celebrated restaurant. A charlatan, Dr. [Albert] C[apmas It has been suggested that Cocteau's jealousy over Radiguet's engagement to Perlmutter caused him to neglect his care; Cocteau's failure to watch over Radiguet during the last night of his illness, and then to attend his funeral, formed, "in the early months of 1924, a kind of scandal one only spoke about in hushed voices," according to Valentine Hugo, writing on the thirtieth anniversary of Radiguet's death.
In a letter of December 15 to Francis Poulenc, Maurice Radiguet wrote: "The evening before his death, as delirium alternated with rare moments of lucidity, he turned towards Cocteau and said: 'You know ... tomorrow I will be dead [...] Yes, yes, I know it well, I will be dead ... I will be shot by the soldiers of God.'" In reaction to this death Poulenc wrote, "For two days I was unable to do anything, I was so stunned". Several other friends of Radiguet's reported premonitions prior to his death. Jean Hugo writes that during a séance, a spirit giving its name as "Beauharnais" (Radiguet traced his ancestry back to a relative of Joséphine de Beauharnais
In her 1932 memoir Laughing Torso, British artist Nina Hamnett describes Radiguet's funeral: "The church was crowded with people. In the pew in front of us was the negro band from Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Picasso was there, Brâncuși and so many celebrated people that I cannot remember their names. Radiguet's death was a terrible shock to everyone. Coco Chanel, the celebrated dressmaker, arranged the funeral. It was most wonderfully done."
Radiguet left behind plans for a novel based on the life of the poet Charles d'Orléans.
Legacy
thumb|Avenue Raymond Radiguet, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés.In 1945, Stead and Blake wrote that admirers of Le Diable au corps "include the most discriminating of critics." Aldous Huxley is quoted as declaring that Radiguet had attained in his short life a literary control that others required a long career to reach. François Mauriac said that Le Diable au corps is "unretouched and seems shocking, but nothing so resembles cynicism as clairvoyance. No adolescent before Radiguet has delivered to us the secret of that age: we have all falsified it."
Radiguet is the last entry in André Gide's Anthologie de la Poèsie Française; Gide selects for inclusion "Amélie" from Devoirs de vacances and "Avec la mort tu te maries..." from Les Joues en feu.
Numerous portraits of Radiguet exist, by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Man Ray, and Valentine Hugo, along with many drawings of him by Jean Cocteau.
An avenue in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés is named after him.
Bibliography
- Les Joues en feu (1920) – poetry, translated by Alan Stone as Cheeks on Fire: Collected Poems
- Devoirs de vacances (1921) – poetry (English translation Holiday Homework)
- Les Pelican (1921) – drama, translated by Michael Benedikt and George Wellworth as The Pelicans
- Le Diable au corps (1923) – novel, translated by Kay Boyle as The Devil in the Flesh
- Le Bal du comte d'Orgel (1924) – novel, translated by Malcolm Cowley as The Count's Ball
- Oeuvres completes (1952) – translated as Complete Works
- Regle du jeu (1957)
- Vers Libres & Jeux Innocents, Le Livre a Venir (1988)
Film adaptations
In 1947, Claude Autant-Lara released his film Le diable au corps, based on Radiguet's novel, and starring Gérard Philipe. Coming just after World War II, the movie caused controversy in its turn. Among the other cinematic versions of Radiguet's story, the heavily adapted version by Marco Bellocchio, Il diavolo in corpo (1986), was notable as being among the first mainstream films to show unsimulated sex.
In 1970, Le Bal du comte d'Orgel was adapted into a film, starring Jean-Claude Brialy as Comte Anne d'Orgel. It was the last movie directed by Marc Allégret.
In 2000, Radiguet's life and work were examined by Jean-Christophe Averty in Les deux vies du chat Radiguet, for the TV series Un siècle d'écrivains.