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A Dream of Boyhood

In the 1960s there was a junk shop in North London that made you shiver, its two front windows filled with guns and knives. Inside were knock-off watches and electrical goods of all descriptions, manky fur coats and pearl necklaces scattered among the heavy wardrobes and piled-up chairs. The proprietor, Mr Caesar, was usually at his counter, perhaps arranging a selection of rings or cigarette boxes. Slipping past him, I’d go into the back room where all the best items were kept, R & B vinyl albums ‘imported’ from the States and books, heaps of musty old books piled up in gaping suitcases. But one afternoon, as if it had been waiting for me, I found a brand-new Penguin with two titles: Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Domain). I’d never heard of the author but the blurb on the back claimed that this was ‘one of the greatest French novels of the century – the only novel of a brilliant young man who was killed in action in 1914 at the age of 27’.

The note on the first page told me that the author, Alain-Fournier, was christened Henri-Alban Fournier. (I found out later that he adopted his pen-name in 1905 when he began to work as a journalist and wanted to avoid being confused with a racing driver.) As for his eponymous protagonist, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce his name. Should it sound like the English word ‘meal’, or ‘moan’?

Behind me, an argument had broken out, then Mr Caesar began to shout at someone in Italian. I had only recently arrived in London from the sticks and was still a teenager though, in many ways, even younger than my years. I skimmed the first few pages.

The narrator, François Seurel, timid, lonely and a compulsive bookworm, is 15 and at school in the village of Sainte-Agathe, where his father teaches the upper and lower forms and his mother looks after the youngest boys. A new

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In the 1960s there was a junk shop in North London that made you shiver, its two front windows filled with guns and knives. Inside were knock-off watches and electrical goods of all descriptions, manky fur coats and pearl necklaces scattered among the heavy wardrobes and piled-up chairs. The proprietor, Mr Caesar, was usually at his counter, perhaps arranging a selection of rings or cigarette boxes. Slipping past him, I’d go into the back room where all the best items were kept, R & B vinyl albums ‘imported’ from the States and books, heaps of musty old books piled up in gaping suitcases. But one afternoon, as if it had been waiting for me, I found a brand-new Penguin with two titles: Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Domain). I’d never heard of the author but the blurb on the back claimed that this was ‘one of the greatest French novels of the century – the only novel of a brilliant young man who was killed in action in 1914 at the age of 27’.

The note on the first page told me that the author, Alain-Fournier, was christened Henri-Alban Fournier. (I found out later that he adopted his pen-name in 1905 when he began to work as a journalist and wanted to avoid being confused with a racing driver.) As for his eponymous protagonist, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce his name. Should it sound like the English word ‘meal’, or ‘moan’? Behind me, an argument had broken out, then Mr Caesar began to shout at someone in Italian. I had only recently arrived in London from the sticks and was still a teenager though, in many ways, even younger than my years. I skimmed the first few pages. The narrator, François Seurel, timid, lonely and a compulsive bookworm, is 15 and at school in the village of Sainte-Agathe, where his father teaches the upper and lower forms and his mother looks after the youngest boys. A new boarder arrives, Augustin Meaulnes, almost too old for school at 17 and tall. Straightaway he goes up to the attic, finds some abandoned fireworks, brings them down to the yard and sets them alight with a box of matches from his pocket. ‘Two great bouquets of red and white stars soar up from the ground with a hiss’ and Meaulnes takes Seurel’s hand and pulls him clear just in time. It’s quite an entrance and I was wondering if this was what made him grand when, a few pages further on, I came across a helpful footnote from the book’s translator, Frank Davison.

No English adjective will convey all the shades of meaning that can be read into the simple word grand which takes on overtones as the story progresses. Le grand Meaulnes can mean the tall, the big, the protective, the almost-grown-up, even the great Meaulnes – or in schoolboy parlance, good old Meaulnes. But when the book has been put down, the phrase evokes in retrospect the image of someone not only tall or big but also daring, noble, tragic, fabulous . . .

The note also informed me that Meaulnes is pronounced like the English word ‘moan’, for which I was grateful as I was still trying out other possibilities: ‘melon’ for instance, and ‘meow’. Presently, when all was quiet again, I ventured back into the main shop where a rather rumpled and distracted Mr Caesar accepted a shilling for the book – a bargain because the price on the back cover was 4/6d. On the front cover was a detail from Sisley’s Small Meadows in Spring, showing a young girl with two indistinct figures behind her, a grassy path and some tall trees, only just coming into leaf – a painting I felt sure I’d seen at the Tate. So not quite a Boy’s Own world then and, despite its period setting – the tail end of the nineteenth century – neither sentimental nor nostalgic. The writing was much too immediate for that, depicting a world of straw-littered classrooms and outside washrooms. Although I hadn’t been sent away to boarding-school, my years at the local girls’ grammar made it easy to empathize with these boys’ impatience with confinement, chores and rotas, and the way their mutual dependencies could suddenly turn into rivalries. Back home, I carried on reading. Seurel stands by while the charismatic Meaulnes disrupts the school’s previously quiet world, then vanishes one evening with a horse and cart. He is missing for three whole days, yet when he returns on the fourth, the coldest of that winter, he won’t explain where he’s been. Finally, weeks later, he confides in Seurel. After an arduous journey by night through unfamiliar snow-bound lanes and fields, half-frozen and completely lost, he had found himself at a magical location – the domaine. Once more the translator provides a footnote.

Domaine is another portmanteau word for which it would be hard to find an English equivalent. ‘Country estate’ has inappropriate connotations. ‘Demesne’ fits in some ways but it is a word not commonly in use. To the characters in the story, domaine would be an everyday word suggesting a fairly important private property attached to a manor house or château; at the same time it could have the broader, vaguer meaning usually associated with our use of the word ‘domain’. The author in fact does use it repeatedly with this less precise, more poetical meaning in mind.

Arriving there, the exhausted Meaulnes has the impression of a house long since abandoned – broken windows, missing doors – yet he feels ‘an extraordinary sense of well-being, an almost intoxicating serenity’. A group of excited children pass by, discussing their plans for a celebration. ‘They’ve given us carte blanche,’ they say, and Meaulnes is astounded. A place run by children in ‘of all places for a fête – this wilderness’. Skirting a courtyard crammed with wagonettes and old-fashioned coaches, he climbs over a wall then slips through an open window and falls asleep on a four-poster bed ‘heaped with old books in gilt bindings, lutes with broken strings, candelabra – all thrown down pell-mell’. Later, wrapped in a borrowed vintage cloak drawn close over his schoolboy’s smock, he sits down to a feast. It seems the celebrations are to welcome a bride to her wedding and there is a wonderful otherworldliness about the proceedings. Besides the children, his fellow guests appear to be elderly villagers behaving as indulgent grandparents or actors playing at being guests. A strangely unconvincing Pierrot takes charge of games and there is music and dancing, masquerades and a magic lantern show, but no sign of the bride or groom. Undeterred, the party continues and the next day, dressed in a silk waistcoat and top hat, Meaulnes meets a slender blonde girl on a pleasure boat and is instantly smitten. ‘She was quivering at his side like a swallow which had come to rest for an instant but was already trembling with the wish to resume its flight.’ They talk and she draws away. Ashore, they talk again and, emboldened in his carnival clothes, feeling himself to be more charming than usual, more mature, he tells her she is beautiful. This time she leaves him with her name – Yvonne de Gallais. Shortly afterwards, her distraught brother, Frantz, the would-be bridegroom, turns up and announces that the wedding is cancelled, the party over. Yvonne and the missing bride (who appears in the final chapters) are such elusive models of girlish sweetness and charm that they seem merely tantalizing ideals, existing as such only in the schoolboy longings of Meaulnes and Frantz. It’s the faithful acolyte, Seurel, riven by jealousy yet standing by once more as the tragic ending unfolds, who gains a more adult understanding of the situation and, of course, himself. The novel has sometimes been compared to James Barrie’s Peter Pan, and there are obvious parallels; in both books there are boys who are either unwilling or unable fully to grow up. However, this is not a book for children: far from it. The magic here lies in the narrative and its setting, the lyricism of the writing, and the delicate relationship of aspirations to actuality. The fabulous fête, as its author explained, is set within ‘a really quite simple story which could very well be my own’. Like Seurel, he grew up in a small country school run by his father. Like Meaulnes, he rebelled against the boredom of learning by rote, the endless preparation for tests and exams. Like Frantz, he was impetuous and romantic, having many short-lived affairs before being reported missing while on patrol near Verdun. His novel wasn’t my only great discovery in Mr Caesar’s junk shop. It was there that I bought my first typewriter, an ancient Olivetti, which I managed to obtain just before the shop was closed down by the police. Although that Olivetti disappeared many years ago, a much-cherished Le Grand Meaulnes still sits on my bookshelf, a novel that somehow manages, on each rereading, to become even more extraordinary than before.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2015


About the contributor

Linda Leatherbarrow was born in Dumfries where a young James Barrie once played with his special friends at Moat Brae. The house and its garden – its ‘enchanted land’ – are currently being restored and will soon be open to the public.

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