L’Oncle Henri
One of 13 deluxe copies on vélin pur fil, including 3 hors commerce copies, this copy no. III.
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour le docteur Pierre Renard en souvenir de la première visite qu'il me fait, Marcel Jouhandeau.”
Guéret still feels shame over its unworthy son, Marcel Jouhandeau. The small town in the Creuse harbors an undisguised resentment toward this acerbic novelist, who caricatured it mercilessly under the name he gave it in his writings, Chaminadour-la-Bienheureuse (in La Jeunesse de Théophile, Les Pincengrain, Tite-le-Long).
His native town has thus made little effort to honor the memory of this novelist, an antisemite at his worst, but whose scant affection for his hometown can nonetheless be found in his portrait of uncle Henri, alias Henri Blanchet, who ran the Café du Commerce in Guéret and whom Jouhandeau met again in Paris after settling there in 1908. The volume brings together L’Oncle Henri, Tante Marguerite and Le Petit Jean, the latter being Henri’s son, imprisoned at Fresnes for desertion.
The memory of the uncle is one of social decline, depicted through his lodgings and destitution: “never had I witnessed poverty so closely, never had I come upon a man so utterly abandoned by Earth and Heaven, and even by himself.”
A rare title in a deluxe-paper issue.