Charles-Louis Philippe, French novelist, was born in Cérilly, Allier

Cérilly, Allier

Cérilly is a commune in the Allier department in central France.It is in close proximity to the largest and oldest untouched oak forest in western Europe : the Forest of Tronçais. Many oak trees exceed 250 years in age...

, Auvergne

Auvergne (région)

Auvergne is one of the 27 administrative regions of France. It comprises the 4 departments of Allier, Puy de Dome, Cantal and Haute Loire.The current administrative region of Auvergne is larger than the historical province of Auvergne, and includes provinces and areas that historically were not...

, on 4 August 1874, and died in Paris on 21 December 1909.

Life

Son of a village clogmaker, Charles-Louis Philippe rose from his modest background first to Secondary education via a grant, then to the world of letters. But he remained attached to the class of his birth. He wrote to the bourgeois writer and politician Maurice Barrès

Maurice Barrès

Maurice Barrès was a French novelist, journalist, and socialist politician and agitator known for his nationalist and antisemitic views....

 : « My grand-mother was a beggar, my father, who was a proud child, begged before he was old enough to work for his bread. I belong to a generation which has not yet passed through the world of books. (...) I must remind you that there are in me more imperative truths than those you call ‘French truths’. You separate nationalities, that’s how you differentiate the world, but I separate by class. (...) We have been walled up like the poor, and sometimes when Life came knocking, it was carrying a big stick. Our only resource was to love each other. That’s why my writing is always more tender than my head tells me to write. I think I am in France the first person from a race of the poor to enter the world of literature. »

Philippe passed the Baccalaureat in science in 1891, but failed in his attempts to enter the specialist colleges in Paris (École polytechnique, École centrale). He eventually obtained a modest office job in the administration of Paris, which allowed him to settle in the capital and pursue his vocation as a writer. Among his literary friends and admirers would be Paul Claudel

Paul Claudel

Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism.-Life:...

, Léon-Paul Fargue

Léon-Paul Fargue

Léon-Paul Fargue was a French poet and essayist.He was born in Paris, France on rue Coquilliére. As a poet he was noted for his poetry of atmosphere and detail. His work spanned numerous literary movements...

, André Gide

André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...

, Jean Giraudoux

Jean Giraudoux

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy...

, Francis Jammes

Francis Jammes

Francis Jammes was a French poet. Coming from an ancient family, he spent most of his life in his native region of Béarn and the Basque Country and his poems are known for their lyricism and for singing the pleasures of a humble country life...

, Valery Larbaud

Valery Larbaud

Valery Larbaud was a French writer.-Life:He was born in Vichy, Allier, the only child of a pharmacist. His father died when he was 8, and he was brought up by his mother and aunt. His father had been owner of the Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water springs, and the family fortune assured him an easy...

.

Works

After a short period writing poetry, he turned to fiction, publishing a collection of overheated tales of “poor love” (Quatre histoires de pauvre amour, 1897), then two sentimental portraits of village girls (La bonne Madeleine et la pauvre Marie, 1898), and a lyrical evocation of his own childhood and youth (La Mère et l’enfant, 1900). A brief liaison with a prostitute inspired his best-known novel, Bubu de Montparnasse (1901), which earned him critical as well as popular attention. A provincial novel followed : Le Père Perdrix (1902) recounts the painful old age of a blacksmith, and explores the small-town class system. Marie Donadieu (1904) returns to Paris to tell a passionate love story tinged with individualism inspired by Nietzsche. Croquignole (1906) evokes the stifling office atmosphere Philippe knew well, and which his hero escapes, but briefly, through an inheritance. Despite some strong support (notably from Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau was a French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde...

), the last three novels failed to win the new Prix Goncourt. He turned next to a fictionalised life of his father (Charles Blanchard), but abandoned what was to be a kind of hymn to work shortly before his sudden death, from meningitis, in December 1909. In his last years he had also written 50 entertaining short stories for a large-circulation Paris paper, Le Matin, which were published in volume form after his death (Dans la petite ville, 1910, Les Contes du Matin, 1916).

Thanks to the efforts of Gide, other occasional writings and two volumes of letters were published between 1911 and 1928 : Lettres de jeunesse (1911), Chroniques du Canard sauvage (1923), Lettres à sa mère (1928).

L’Association internationale des Amis de Charles-Louis Philippe has existed since 1935 to promote knowledge of his life and work through an annual Bulletin. Secretary : d.roe@leeds.ac.uk.

Of Philippe in English

Most of Philippe’s works listed above are still readily available in French. However, although three novels, Bubu de Montparnasse, Le Père Perdrix and Marie Donadieu, have been published in English translations, all are long out of print. Though T.S. Eliot prefaced the first English translation of Bubu de Montparnasse, little has been published on Philippe in English, and nothing in book form.

• Bubu of Montparnasse, Charles-Louis Philippe translated by Laurence Vail, with a Preface by T.S. Eliot, Crosby Continental Editions, Paris (1932). New Edition, Shakespeare House, New York (1951).

On Philippe in English (or translated in English)

• Georg Lukács, translated by Anna Bostock, Soul and Form, The Merlin Press Ltd, The UK,(January 1, 1991) 978-0850362510. « A influential collection, first published in 1911, established Lukács as a critic. Here he considers the role of the critical essay and its relation to great aesthetics and reviewing philosophers and writers, Plato, Novalis, Kierkergaard, Olsen, Storm, Stefan George, Charles-Louis Philippe, Beer-Hofman, Lawrence Sterne, Paul Ernst. »
• Georg Lukács, translated by Anna Bostock, Soul and Form; New Edition with an Introduction by Judith Butler, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (Editors), Columbia University Press, New York (January 19, 2010) 978-0231149815.
• Georg Lukács, translated by Anna Bostock, The Theory of the Novel, The Forms of Great Epic Literature examined in Relation to Whether the General Civilisation of the Time is an Integrated or a Problematic One; The Merlin Press Ltd, The UK, (Reprint 2000-1962), ISBN 0850362369. A Historical-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, first published in 1914; in The Chapter II, The Problems of a Philosophy of the History of Forms, the Philosopher quotes briefly his Soul and Form on Philippe's Works by these words : « once, speaking of Charles-Louis Philippe, I called such a form ‘chantefable’ »; (Free Source: marxists.org).
• Georg Lukács, translated by Anna Bostock, The Theory of the Novel; New Edition, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (January 15, 1974) 978-0262620277.

Other Contributions:

• Grover Smith (Yale University), Charles-Louis Philippe and T.S. Eliot, Duke University Press, (1950); Online JSTOR Archive.
• Gene J. Barberet (University of Connecticut), André Gide and Charles-Louis Philippe, American Association of Teachers of French (1955); Online JSTOR Archive.
• Gene J. Barberet, Charles-Louis Philippe, Fifty Years After, Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1960); Online JSTOR Archive.