Jérôme 60° latitude Nord

The novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1927, beating notably L’Imposture by Georges Bernanos, which had been ardently championed by Léon Daudet. Maurice Bedel’s victory owed something to happy chance. Unknown in literary circles, he is said to have submitted his manuscript after inquiring, almost naively, with the cashier at the Gallimard bookshop on Boulevard Raspail; he was directed to Roland Saucier, the shop’s manager, who passed the text on. A few months later Bedel learned it would be published — and soon after, that he had won the Goncourt.

Trained as a physician, with a thesis on periodic obsessions, Bedel was also a novelist, traveler and essayist who had first published poetry under the pseudonym Gabriel Senlis. Jérôme 60° latitude Nord is less a Nordic novel than a fantasy of observation: a journey through an imagined Norway, blending social satire, ethnographic curiosity and comedy of manners in matters of love. The plot takes its hero to Christiania — the former name of Oslo — where the sense of displacement owes as much to the landscape as to local romantic customs.

The Goncourt success was not without reservations. Bedel was accused of owing a debt to Morand or Giraudoux, and above all of a portrayal of young Norwegian women judged frivolous, even indiscreet.

Bedel, for his part, found an unexpected new presence in the twenty-first century with the publication of his Journal de guerre 1914–1918, unpublished for nearly a century. Begun on 1 August 1914 in a mood of patriotic fervor, the diary closes on a dark, almost testamentary note of lucidity: “Les temps sont noirs. L’horizon est barré. Il ne faudra pas que l’on croie dans cent ans que c’était gai, la Victoire.”

From the “Prix Goncourt” library of Gérard Pouguet, with bookplate.