La Boîte à pêche

A magnificent preface by Joseph Kessel, entitled “Hommage à Maurice Genevoix.” This is a rare text in which one academician recognizes in another the echoes of a shared inner struggle. Both men were veterans and writers of the Great War — Sous Verdun for Genevoix, L’Équipage for Kessel — and both had passed through fire before turning to literature. What is striking here, however, is less their shared experience of combat than their deep and mutual recognition of a vocation as a writer born of ordeal. Kessel rightly rejects the easy labels of “regionalist novelist” or “poet of the soil”:

“The enlisted soldier did not give rise to a nationalist writer or a revolutionary polemicist. Nor did the ‘regionalist’ and rural novelist, retired to his province, become a theorist of rootedness or an anachronistic apostle of the return to the land. […] Maurice Genevoix simply recognized, under the shock of war, the vocation that he would go on to broaden from age to age, from book to book, wherever he found himself: that of the poet of all natural harmonies.”

Kessel adds, in an illuminating reading of Raboliot, that the forest paths of the novel are not so far removed from the trenches of Les Éparges. Hunting, the stillness of the watch, the trajectories through the woods, retrospectively take on the form of an extension of the war, transposed into nature, stripped of the uniform but not of the latent danger, nor of the vital tension. It is here, for Kessel, that Genevoix’s greatness lies.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix, at “Les Vernelles” (bookplate).