Roger Grenier
French author, Resistance fighter, editor and friend of Camus who mused on ‘The Difficulty of Being a Dog’
ROGER Grenier, who died last month aged 98, was a man of letters, the author of more than 30 novels, collections of essays and memoirs, and of an intellectual biography of Albert Camus (1987), and an editor at France’s leading publishing house, Gallimard; he was also the author of Les Larmes d’Ulysse (1998), translated into English by Alice Kaplan as The Difficulty of Being a Dog, a charming meditation on the relationship between man and man’s best friend.
Camus, with whom Grenier had worked post-war at the newspaper Combat, had promoted a brand of journalisme critique, which combined accurate reporting with explicit awareness of the moral or philosophical consequences of situations and events, and it was this idea that would underpin most of Roger Grenier’s work.
The French sometimes refer to dogs as betes de chagrin, because they remind us of loss, and Grenier’s little book was built around his fond memories of his own dog, Ulysse, their strolls along the Rue du Bac and the Boulevard St Germain, and his dreams after the dog’s death.
In The Difficulty of Being a Dog, Grenier evoked Homer’s eponymous hero who wipes away a tear when his dog, “the hound, old Argos”, so old that he can only weakly thump his tail, recognises his master upon his return home, even though Ulysses is in disguise.
He recalled dogs belonging to such diverse figures as the German philosopher Schopenhauer (who alternated portraits of his dogs with those of great philosophers on his walls); the writer Raymond Queneau (who refused to accept a literary award because his dog had died); Sigmund Freud (who was saddened when his pet Lun refused to come near him when he was dying of throat cancer); and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (whose spaniel, Flush, sidelined and jealous during her romance with Robert Browning, inspired Virginia Woolf to write a doggy “autobiography”).
Along the way Grenier recalled that in the old Soviet Union, having a dog was seen “as a sign of individualism, selfish introversion”, while Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish slave labourer under the Nazis, recalled the comfort that he and his companions derived from a stray which came to live with them.
While their German guards regarded them as animals, “for the dog”, Levinas wrote, “there was no doubt we were men”. On a lighter note, Grenier recorded the Edmund Wilson/F Scott Fitzgerald song, a favourite at Jazz Age parties: “Larger than a rat! / More faithful than a cat! / Dog! Dog! Dog!”
For human beings, Grenier observed, a dog “is a protection against life’s insults, a defence against the world, the somewhat vain conviction of being truly loved, a way of being both less alone and more alone”.
For a canine, however, too close a proximity to humans can lead to unhappiness: “Everything is a sign: a cough, a glance at a watch… Every minute carries its ration of anguish.”
Roger Grenier was born in Caen, Normandy, on September 19, 1919 and brought up in Pau on the northern edge of the Pyrenees.
His parents were opticians and, as he recalled in Dans le secret d’une photo, (2010, translated as A Box of Photographs by Alice Kaplan), keen photographers.
His father had a large, folding Kodak, his mother a smaller Zeiss and he, aged 10, a Baby Box.
During the war, he attended classes of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne and, while there, was recruited into the Resistance by a girl he had got to know because she had a Leica.
During the Liberation of Paris, out on the streets with his camera, Grenier was captured by retreating German soldiers and was only saved from summary execution b y the intervention of a passer-by.
After liberation, Grenier joined Albert Camus at Combat, covering the so-called epuration legale (“legal purge”) trials instituted by the French provisional government of alleged Vichy collaborationists.
The trials inspired his first book Le Role d’accuse (1949), in which he observed: “Through the punishment of collaborators the country is washing away its shame and indeed pretending never to have known shame, since it is setting itself up as a deliverer of justice.”
Few writers, he noted, had cared to “reconstruct that strange war where your adversary was not separated from you by a no-man’s-land, but would be seated at the next table in a cafe, come into your shop, or occasionally politely stand aside to let you pass”.
Grenier went on to work as a journalist for France-Soir ,as a radio host and as a writer for television and cinema.
From 1964 until his death he was a member of the board of Gallimard, becoming friends with such figures as Joseph Kessel, William Faulkner and Yukio Mishima.
In 1952 he was appointed a Regent of the College de ’Pataphysique, a society, founded in 1948, “committed to learned and inutilious [ie useless] research”.
His speciality was listed as Hemerographie & Hemerodromie, of which there does not appear to be an English translation.
In 1985 Grenier won the Grand Prix de l’Academie francaise for his literary output, which included novels such as Le Palais d’hiver (1965), Cine-roman (1972), which won the Prix Femina, and Le Miroir des eaux (1975), which won the Prix de la nouvelle de l’Academie francaise.
His last work, translated into English by Alice Kaplan as Palace of Books (2014), was a defence of reading well.
Grenier was twice married and had two sons.