Devenir !

After graduating from the École des Chartes, Martin du Gard embarked on an ambitious novelistic project, Une Vie de saint, on which he worked at length. In the winter of 1908, he read the first volume to a friend whose judgment he particularly valued. The reaction was disastrous, so much so that he abandoned the project and spent several months in discouragement, convinced he would remain “forever incapable of writing anything worthwhile.”

In the spring, he decided to attempt an almost therapeutic experiment: to write quickly, without ambition or prior construction, simply to recover the ability to write. He left with his wife and their one-year-old daughter for Barbizon, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau: “And there, in two months, straight from the pen, I scribbled out this book,” which he then brought to Paul Ollendorff. The publisher agreed to bring it out, but at the author’s own expense: the young writer had to pay 1,400 francs to see his novel published, which appeared on 4 June 1909. Devenir! is a novel about a man who fears he is a failed writer.

Martin du Gard sent copies to some sixty chosen recipients. It was a fiasco; to his friend Marcel, he lamented that only six letters had come back to him.

“It is a complete fiasco.” But the last reply saved him: Romain Rolland, future Nobel laureate in 1915, encouraged him. Martin du Gard then set to work on Jean Barois, which would be published by the fledgling Nouvelle Revue Française in 1913.