Lettre signée à Bernard Quilliet

“Dear Bernard, If you’re in the mood, on Tuesday the 10th from 9 p.m. onward, I am organizing (perhaps too grand a word!) a ‘concert of recorded music.’ I would be happy to see you there.’ […]”

In the early 1950s, Georges Perec was a knowledgeable and passionate amateur of jazz, and also of classical music, which he discovered at his adoptive parents’ home and through his cousin Ela, a pianist. So much so that, in his first university year, he organized several evenings of “recorded music” to introduce his friends to the composers he loved. Here he invites his former Hypokhâgne classmate, Bernard Quilliet, to join him on Tuesday, 10 January 1956, in the small maid’s room he occupied above the family apartment.

On the program: “Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht [and] Pierrot Lunaire; Berg: Wozzeck [and] the Violin Concerto ‘To the Memory of an Angel.'”

Two composers of lasting importance to Perec throughout his life as a music lover. Twenty-five years later, in a long interview with Claude Maupomé (“Musique et image, comment l’entendez-vous,” France Musique, 1980), Perec discussed his relationship to classical music, mentioning Schoenberg and Berg — whom he regretted, for obvious reasons, not being able to work into La Disparition — unlike Mozart and Don Giovanni, whose Italian passages spoken by the Commendatore (transformed into “Commandant”) he did manage to include in order to “satisfy his constraints.” Perec could not read music, but was a “great consumer” of it: “One of my cousins introduced me to Mahler, Verdi, Brahms… Some music gives me a feeling of eternity. My work as a man of letters — a more precise term than writer or novelist — later led me to listen to FIP for long stretches… which served as background sound. A leisure activity. Every evening, or three times a day!”

Perec described the importance of music to his work of memory, notably when explaining the writing and production of Les Lieux d’une fugue, written and produced for the INA in 1976. The story is simple: on 11 May 1947 — Perec was eleven years and two months old — he ran away from the apartment of David and Esther Bienenfeld, his uncle and aunt at 18 rue de l’Assomption, with whom he had lived since 1945. This was an episode the writer had kept buried in his memory, which suddenly resurfaced years later while walking along the Champs-Élysées, near the small square where a stamp market was held and where he had once sat down. The text was published in the collection Je suis né, and Perec made a 41-minute short film from it, narrated in voice-over and entirely accompanied by the music of Schumann. “Without that music, the film could not have existed. I wanted continuous music to accompany it. I wanted it to feel as though it had been made with me, so I chose a piece my cousin used to practice when I was ten. She was practicing the Kreisleriana, a very difficult piece…”

Perec elaborated on his relationship to the two composers he presented at this January 1956 evening, Berg and Schoenberg, and especially the latter’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), a string sextet composed in 1899. An early work (Schoenberg was twenty-five), written in three weeks, it is considered a peak of post-Romantic music, of great expressive intensity. “These are pieces of music that seem to be waiting for images, or at least music onto which I would like to place images… to make them infinitely more beautiful if the images were built from them… A friend of mine wanted to call his film La Nuit transfigurée, but the theme did not correspond at all — for me — to what was happening in that music. I hope I will one day get to make films again… I could easily see Schoenberg accompanying a detective film. It’s an extremely Romantic piece, especially one passage, a particular snap of the strings… that moves me almost physically, a bit like the enormous chord when Wozzeck drowns, in Berg… A good deal of this post-Romantic music I discovered when I was eighteen, let’s say between sixteen and twenty; it has stayed with me ever since.”

Let us note finally that in 1964 Perec published a story, co-written with Jacques Lederer, devoted to Berg: Wozzeck ou la méthode de l’apocalypse.

Finally, Perec tells his friend that he has not been able to finish his play: “what has not yet been transcribed is more or less illegible to me; I especially loved this exchange:

— Why don’t you go with Totote?

— Me? But I’m not a character out of Molière!

Now that’s burlesque, and true burlesque at that! See you Tuesday, I hope,

With all my friendship. Georges.”

At this date, the paths of the two friends had diverged: the 1955 Hypokhâgne year had ended in failure, and since October, Perec had been enrolled at the Sorbonne, attending only sporadically. With Quilliet, he continued his literary experiments, after several abandoned attempts at plays and a comic strip for which Perec never finished the dialogue. It was with Quilliet that Perec made his first genuine literary attempts, particularly in the burlesque genre they both loved. “In class, Georges sat next to a ‘bica,’ that is, a student in his fourth year of preparatory classes at Saint-Cloud; his name was Bernard Quilliet, but he was known as K. Like Georges, K. wanted to be a writer and intended to produce his first masterpiece within the year…” (Bellos, p. 96). Setting literature aside, Quilliet went on to become one of the foremost specialists of sixteenth-century France, professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Paris VIII.

This letter shows how much Perec and Quilliet, as their correspondence makes clear, continued their friendship and, above all, kept nurturing their literary ambitions, which neither wished to abandon. In January 1956, Perec would write his very first work of fiction, Les Errants — now lost — before turning to drama, tragedy and burlesque plays throughout the year, culminating in Manderre, completed at the end of the year, his first fully constructed work. He would announce its composition to the same Quilliet in December 1956.