Iconic Writer
Recommended Viewing:
Essential viewing is the 1947 film adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh starring
Micheline Presle and Gérard Philipe. Rare copies are available @ amazon.co.uk
© Paramount Pictures.
Raymond Radiguet:
Biography >>
The Devil in the Flesh >> Jean Cocteau's Radiguet Biography >> Jean Cocteau ~ Album Masques Book with some rare photos of Radiguet - View >> Jean Cocteau >>
Alain Fournier >> Andre Gide >>
Links >>
Posters available at Allposters.com
>>
Advertise here >>
Raymond Radiguet Books and Dvds available @ amazon.com
Raymond Radiguet (1903 - 1923) ~ Biography
To my mind, there are two really great adolescent novelists in the 20th century. They were French and between them produced three completed novels before their early deaths. One was Alain-Fournier and the other Raymond Radiguet.
Radiguet invaded Paris in his adolescence, as Rimbaud had done years before, and at once settled into a bohemian existence there. Since he had come from the suburb of Parc-de-St.-Maur, on the Marne, he became known in Montparnasse as "the miracle of the Marne."
Radiguet soon met the poets Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau, as well as other avant-garde writers. The poems Radiguet had written at 15 were collected in Les Joues en feu (Cheeks on Fire) in 1920; almost cubistic in tone, they yet have a restraint suggesting the classical. A revised edition, containing some new material, appeared in 1925 2 years after Radiguets death.
Meanwhile, The Devil in the Flesh came out the year he died, and Count d'Orgel Opens the Ball a year later, 1924. These novels, which stand high among the world's few masterpieces of adolescent writing, derive partly from famous models: The Devil in the Flesh is a modern version of Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, and Count d'Orgel is a variant of Madame de la Fayette's La Princesses de Cleves.
Radiguet died of typhoid fever at 20. I've been to his grave in the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery. His funeral was arranged by the celebrated Coco Chanel. It's a quiet, almost forgotten, corner of the cemetery, eclipsed by the momentous Oscar Wilde grave and the vandalised chic of Jim Morrison's. A lonely, lonely spot for this writer forever slender, forever young.
More on The Devil in the Flesh here. In Count d'Orgel Opens the Ball, Madame d'Orgel returns the love of Francois de Seryeuse, and although they never meet in the flesh, the woman feels guilty and confesses to her husband, the count, who passes off lightly and speaks of the ball he and she and Francois are about to attend. Radiguet, in his notes for the book, said that he wanted to write a novel in which only the psychology would be romantic; the imagination would operate not in relation to external events, but in analysing the emotions. With this in mind, Radiguet succeeded, in Orgel, in writing an almost-classical novel, with perhaps too many epigrammatic intrusions. The directly expressed emotions in The Devil in the Flesh are far more effective, and they remain a miracle of adolescent writing. The book has been superbly translated by Kay Boyle.
Source: Twentieth Century French Literature
The Devil in the Flesh Book (1923) ~ Buy
Book Available: amazon.co.uk
Film DVD Available: amazon.co.uk (direct link)
Links
Raymond Radiguet:
Biography >>
The Devil in the Flesh >> Jean Cocteau's Radiguet Biography >> Jean Cocteau ~ Album Masques Book with some rare photos of Radiguet - View >> Jean Cocteau >>
Alain Fournier >> Andre Gide >>
Links >>
Posters available at Allposters.com >>
Advertise here >>
Raymond Radiguet Books and Dvds available @ amazon.com
