Tree-lined avenues and silence

Despite his associations with the surrealists and with the philosopher-poets Eugène Guillevic and Francis Ponge, Jean Follain (1903–71) resists easy labelling. While his works may be less familiar to us today than those of many of his peers, his control of irony and his innovative renderings of moments of everyday life make him acutely contemporaneous in the twenty-first century. Follain’s first full collection of poems, La Main chaude, was published in 1933, by which time he had left his native Normandy for Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life working as a lawyer and writing books. Two world wars have left their traces on the deceptively calm surfaces of his dozen collections, which include work in prose such as Canisy (1942), a Proustian description of his rural childhood, Chef-lieu (1950) and Paris (1935). Late one night in 1971, shortly after he had been awarded the Grand Prix de Poèsie de l’Académie française, he was struck by a car near the Tuileries and died.

Kathleen Shields’s translation of Paris 1935, the first complete English edition, is an incentive to rediscover and celebrate a poet of subtle, if often devastating, lyrics and prose. Its prose vignettes have a predecessor in Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris (1869): people, places and things are similarly caught on the fly with apparent artlessness. Recalling the methods of impressionism and photography, where the artist is unseen and the subject unposed, Follain is the flâneur-voyeur lurking behind a screen of impersonal pronouns: “they”, “you”, “one”. Now and then we catch a glimpse of him, as in this description from a section titled “The Sentiments”: “In certain bedrooms where people make love there is always someone waiting. When you go into others a musty smell catches your throat, so tragic when the woman living there takes off her shabby black clothes”. Anonymity suited Follain, with his penchant for tonal evenness and understatement (not for him Baudelaire’s highs and lows). His noncommittal approach and his impersonal yet empathic gaze are also visible in “Women”:

In the beginning they all look the same and you tell yourself that it’s more important to get to know the city first and that one day you’ll meet them and get to talk to them. Later when years have passed, you notice the gentle breath of one of them as she arranges her hair in a mirror in the street […] Many middle-class girls hide a life of passion secretly within themselves. With clean bodies and a jaunty step, they cross the parks, their nails neatly manicured and varnished with a tiny brush. They’re going to meet their lovers in anonymous bedrooms.

This is typical Follain, tantalizing with its details (how does the watcher know where the girls are going?). Early-twentieth-century images of city women – at their toilettes, ironing, stitching, loitering – flicker through our minds as we read. Follain, like Degas or Bonnard, is drawn to women from modest backgrounds, the “decent poor” whom he occasionally sets, if only syntactically, alongside “great nobles who had special uniformed guards to protect their residences”. There is irony in unemphatic juxtaposition, observant of social differences, but not judgmental. “Let the photos speak for themselves”, as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Follain’s contemporary, said. In “Prosperous Districts”the class consciousness is more overtly sardonic:

In the morning inside an imposing residence, through beautifully transparent glass, you can see the slender tree branches quivering and waving on the wide avenue. Many businessmen get out of bed in a saffron dawn to inspect their teeth, holding a mirror over their ageing palates; as they wash following a strict routine they feel the coolness of silent water, the smoothness of marble and the sharpness of the blade.

Much of any Follain description hides under the lovely surfaces: “beautifully transparent glass” acknowledges the long hours of maids; the taken-for-granted tree-lined avenues and silence are Parisian luxuries; the nimble jeté from “saffron dawn” to “inspect their teeth” is, on several levels, biting; well-sharpened blades left in plain sight surely whisper “crime”.

But the reader is left to her own deductions. Paris 1935 is a cornucopia of telltale particulars, described with little fuss, easy to glide over: the “painted rose decoration above a brothel door … the obscure graffiti on a church … the thickly carpeted stairs to their doctor … the rag-and-bone man full of warm wine … unkempt old priests picking up shiny objects”. Kathleen Shields’s exemplary translation of Paris’s human comedy is a marvellous addition to the literature of a mythic city.

Beverley Bie Brahic’s new poetry collection, Apple Thieves, has just been published; her most recent translation is Charles Baudelaire’s Invitation to the Voyage, 2021

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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