Tender Shoots

AFTERWORD BY MICHEL DÉON

PAUL MORAND was thirty-three when Gallimard published Tendres stocks (Tender Shoots) in 1921, a debut that may seem tardy in these days of untold geniuses of eighteen, and younger. The three novellas that make up this slim book date, in fact, from a few years earlier and we may not be incorrect in thinking that Morand kept them on his back burner, polishing and improving them, precisely in order that they should appear effortless.

Are they, in any case, novellas? No, not really, not in the true sense of the word, and I would feel more inclined to place these first three trial attempts, by a writer who had not yet found his path, among the ‘portraits’ that he may have considered as an exercise in style, a sort of trial gallop before the future work of his full maturity. Proust was dazzled, as was the high-priest of Surrealism, André Breton, who would later feel disillusioned when his followers supported Moscow.

The astonishment aroused by Tendres stocks was huge. Europe was emerging from an appalling war, gathering its breath to overturn the idols of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Morand burst forth without warning, accurate, fluent, clever, poetic, cruel. The early years of his life as a diplomat had shunted him between Rome, Madrid and London until he had acquired sufficient know-how to have himself recalled to Paris and to spend the last year of the world war under the command of the most brilliant operator in French politics — Phillipe Berthelot. The names of his friends were Giraudoux, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and, even more so, le tout-Paris, including a few ladies of already mature age who held open table at the Ritz, at Meurice’s, chez Larue or Maxim’s. Here they talked of politics, here they swapped the latest gossip and even the substance of the top-secret government meeting held that very morning. At those luncheons Morand would meet the woman who was to become his wife, Hélène, Princesse Soutzo, half-Greek, half-Romanian, to whom he was deeply unfaithful but whom he would also deeply mourn when she died.

All these fortunate circumstances helped mould a man who was not just someone always in-the-know, but who was also a citizen of the world, an inquisitor, a voyeur and a collector of civilizations. From 1918, once peace was declared, he would parade his curiosity more or less everywhere, resign from the diplomatic service, only to return once more, nevertheless, in 1939, as Président de la Commission du Blocus in London, a rather amusing about-turn for a man who, during twenty years of leisure activity between the two wars, had never stopped roaming the planet and bringing home books about ‘things seen’—Rien que la terre, Londres, Bucarest, New York, not forgetting his writings about China and both the Americas. A compulsive!

There is no reason for what followed to feature in this brief sketch of such a protean figure, apart from the fact that the three portraits etched in Tendres stocks herald works of fiction that bided their time impatiently, waiting for peace and the freedom to unleash their creator. Everything is in fermentation, including an unsparing self-portrait, L’Homme pressé, in which those who were close to him, as well as his readers, would identify him before the time came for him to bid farewell to everything that he loved, which he did in Venises (Venices, published in Euan Cameron’s translation by Pushkin Press), but also in the profoundly moving Le Flagellant de Séville which, regardless of its author, deserves to be ranked among the masterpieces of the twentieth century, as a masterpiece for all time.

Let there be no mistake — Morand was still writing about himself, just as he was in Tendres stocks.

2011