Jean-Pierre Martinet, The High Life, Trans. by Henry Vale, Wakefield Press, 2012.
Adolphe Marlaud’s rule of conduct is simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible. For Marlaud, this involves carrying out a meager existence on rue Froidevaux in Paris, tending to his father’s grave in the cemetery across the street, and earning the ghost of a living through a part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however, take into account the amorous intentions of the obese concierge of his building, who has set her widowed sights on his diminutive frame, and whose aggressive overtures will set the wheels in motion for a burlesque and obscene tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet into English. It is a novella that perfectly outlines the dark fare of Martinet’s vision: the terrors of loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations, the essential humiliation of the human condition, and the ongoing trauma of twentieth-century history.
Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944–1993) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely regarded as his masterpiece, the psychosexual study of horror and madness, Jérôme. Largely ignored during his lifetime, his star has only recently begun to shine in France, and he is now regarded as an overlooked French successor to Dostoyevsky. Reading like an unsettling love child of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jim Thompson, Martinet’s work explores the grimly humorous possibilities of unlimited pessimism
Adolphe Marlaud narrates The High Life ('la grande vie'), but his is anything but. Diminutive-sized -- under five feet tall -- he lost his mother as an infant (she died in Auschwitz), and his father a decade later, when he was still very young. Physically, Adolphe seems stunted in that pre-teen age. He lives across from the Montparnasse cemetery, from which he watches over -- often through a mounted telescopic sight (which pares down the world to the simplest: "A circle, a cross. Absolute concision. Void") -- his father's grave. For as long as he has a job, it is part-time, at a local funerary shop. Adolphe has reduced his ambitions and activity to a minimum:
My rule of conduct was simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible.
He claims to want to go unnoticed, but then goes sniffing around the younger women in mourning who visit the shop where he works. Unsuccessful in his own efforts to approach women, he is overwhelmed when one sets her sights on him: concierge Madame C. -- "that mass of darkness, that devourer." A huge woman, she takes complete control over him during the sexual act, which is -- very well -- described as though she were consuming him.
It's no surprise that Adolphe also finds the sexual act to be like being expelled from within her -- like being born. Adolphe clearly has mommy-issues. Daddy issues, too: as his name and date of birth suggest -- to name a child born in France in 1942 'Adolphe' was a very loud proclamation of allegiances -- Adolphe comes with considerable baggage; those rumors about his father betraying his Jewish mother certainly must weigh heavily on him, not helped by the fact that his father abandoned him (by dying) before he reached adolescence.
The High Life is barely a short story -- twenty-six pages -- but justifies its stand-alone presentation, in a volume padded slightly by translator Henry Vale's helpful introduction about this author who is so little known (and was previously untranslated into English). The "absolute concision" makes for a small-size volume, a beautiful little pocket-fitting one, but the content also packs enough of a punch to warrant such a presentation. Martinet's book is bleak (as, apparently, were his others), but he knew how to write.
There are some nice literary touches, too, suggesting the very solid grounding of Martinet's writing: Madame C. likes to read, so Adolphe gives her several books -- both suggesting his own literary interests and illustrating the gulf between him and the concierge (who, to put it mildly, doesn't quite 'get' these works) -- and as he declines ever more rapidly, it's words from Strindberg's Inferno that come to his mind.
The High Life is just an amuse-gueule as far as Martinet's writing goes -- well, less amuse than a bracing shot of hard liquor, perhaps -- but it's a fine, small piece of work, and certainly leaves the reader with a (slightly wary) appetite for a larger portion. - M.A.Orthofer
What a world, Mesdames et Messieurs. What a world. Like a festering, rotting pighead in space. And us? We’re the fat, and ever-fatter, maggots that feed upon it. Sometimes, quite often in fact, I see people smile, and I have to wonder ‘are they mad?’ Or am I mad? Don’t they see? Maybe that’s the way: close your eyes and smile. I’ve always known that our planet is a horror show, and so nothing surprises me. Take the men in the entertainment business, those men that are currently being outed for years of sexual harassment or misbehaviour…am I shocked? I am profoundly not shocked. It is as I expected. It is simply the case that we are looking now, yes, we are looking at them and inevitably we are finding brutality, misery, and a host of other horrible things. The whole world, I tell you, is like this. Peer into any corner, shine a light on it, and you will see the filth. Take off your gloves and draw your finger along the surface and tell me how it feels. Greasy and unpleasant, isn’t it?
The world is a blocked sink, and I refuse to put my hand in there and rummage around in the dirty water, amongst the soggy, disintegrating scraps of food. So I read. I withdraw into another world. Is it a better world? If it is, it is only by virtue of not being real, of not actually existing, so that there’s no chance of encountering the awful people who inhabit it. I take my solace where I can find it. I take it by degrees. Often, I’m not even reading. I simply hold the book before my ghoulish face as a kind of barrier, a protective screen. People tend to leave you alone if you look as though you are reading. But there are those who ask: what are you reading? Usually on trains. Sitting next to some enormous old woman who wants desperately to tell you about her gay nephew or her wretched granddaughter’s wedding. I, of course, tell the truth. I say: it’s a book about pushing an eyeball up a girl’s ass; or, it’s a book about trying to fuck a bear, only the bear has a flaccid cock; or, it’s a weird little book about a weird little man who works at a funeral parlour and fantasises about killing people.
“Dark, yawning grave, ogre’s vagina, tomb of sleep and night, night of marshes, marshes of silence, silence of death.”
The weird little book is called The High Life, and it was written by Jean-Pierre Martinet. You might think, upon finishing it: what a nasty slug he must have been to have conjured up something like that. Well, I don’t know anything about him. All people are ghastly so Martinet must have been too. I will deal with the major characters soon, if anything about them could be said to be major, but first let me say something about the minor ones: they’re vermin. The owner of the funeral parlour, for example, watches the narrator, Adolphe Marlaud, choke ‘with an irritated look’; a twelve year old girl, whom Marlaud attempts to prey upon, enters the parlour and starts to trash it; an old woman seems ‘beside herself with joy’ at telling the misfortunes of another; and Adolphe’s father, it is revealed, shopped his Jewish wife, the narrator’s mother, to the Gestapo. There are others, but I am sure you get the picture. The High Life is only twenty-eight pages long, but each page is packed, like a neglected baby’s soiled nappy, with filth of various kinds and consistencies.
Death is fairly prominent. I’ve already mentioned the funeral parlour and the mother whose fate was to be gassed at Auschwitz by the Nazis. But there is more: ‘abandoned corpses, partially decomposed young girls, mauve and green and white, calves murdered with the blows of a cleaver, at dawn, under a drizzling sky.’ What else? Adolphe’s lover attempts suicide; and Adolphe himself, as suggested earlier, develops a murderous impulse, offing the odd dog and cat along the way. But this – death – is perhaps the least disgusting aspect of the novel, if you want to call this dribble of piss a novel. The references to death barely tickle the nostrils, in the grander scheme of things. I’ve read worse; you’ve read worse; we’ve all most probably seen and thought worse. It’s the dreary relentlessness, the never dispersing, subtle smell of recently emptied bowels, that starts to unsettle the stomach. Even the style of the book is crude, with references to ‘shit, ‘jerking off,’ and ‘cum on the walls.’
One doesn’t get to know Adolphe, in the Tolstoyan tradition. He is, in truth, barely alive as a character. Although that is the point, you might argue. ‘People generally called me a creep, or compared me to a bug,’ he says of himself; and bearing in mind his actions this actually undersells his unpleasantness. Marlaud is, in any case, very self-aware; he is not at all fooling himself. Martinet goes to great lengths to promote his character’s disagreeableness, and, although one wouldn’t call it sympathising, his woes. He is, first of all, only four feet tall [while his lover, incidentally, is over six feet in height]. He is a ‘runt,’ with a ‘urinous complexion’; he is a man so ‘ugly, so miserable’ that he has become a ‘lover of shadow and silence.’ You might want to make complex psychological deductions based on all this, but, quite frankly, I don’t have the inclination or energy. What struck me most, and what is in fact the novel’s main source of entertainment, was Martinet’s enjoyment, the glee he clearly felt in coming up with creative ways to describe, in piling on, the misery.
Consider the sex scenes with Madame C. Martinet, as Adolphe, writes about ‘her monstrous breasts unfurling upon me with the muted rumbling of an avalanche.’ And I must confess to having laughed a little. Likewise when she is said to have ‘ejected me from her tremendous vagina, leaving me on the floor like a dispossessed king.’ If there is a weightier concern, a serious point to all this, a transcendent theme, then it is in relation to power, specifically abuse of power or the feeling of powerlessness. Madame C. takes Marlaud, not against his will, but not exactly willingly either. She overpowers him, with her large body, but with her personality, with force of character, with desire, also. When Adolphe buys a gun to shoot the cats that bother his father’s grave – a man who, remember, denounced his own wife – he finds that he suddenly feels in control, even God-like. ‘I had no idea there was such strength in me,’ he says when he offs some butterflies. Which is funny, certainly, but sad and alarming too, for it seems to me that, as we as a species inch ever closer to collapsing under the weight of our own faeces, it says something revealing about how we have got ourselves in this position in the first place. - booksyo.wordpress.com/2017/11/12/the-high-life-by-jean-pierre-martinet/
My rule of conduct was simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible.
Adolphe’s boring routine is disrupted when the morbidly obese concierge of his building, a widow known as Madame C makes it clear that they will be lovers.
It was a hostage situation. Maybe Madame C was part of a Palestinian commando group.
The widow will not be refused and so mild-mannered Adolphe whose timidity dictates his actions finds himself in this strange relationship as a “phallus man” with Madame C dominating their relations and Adolphe submitting with mixed feelings. He tries to share books which she rejects, she confides that she reads everyone’s mail (“you wouldn’t believe the filth I read.“) A crisis emerges when they attend the cinema together:
One evening Madame C wanted us to go out together to the movies. I wasn’t that keen on being seen with her, but as she insisted, I ended up giving in. It was a porno that someone had recommended to her, Barbara Broadcast, which they were playing at the “Maine,” just behind the lodge. I personally don’t have anything against pornos–quite the contrary–and I obediently followed Madame C. After all, a bad porno is better than a good film by Lelouche, or racking your brains over whether Romy Schneider is going to have an abortion or not in Sautet’s latest film.
The High Life, from Wakefield Press, is a slim volume. The story itself is a mere 26 pages, but don’t let the brevity deter you. Author Jean-Pierre Martinet packs a lot of subversive material into a story that another author would stretch out to 300 pages: the sordid history of collaboration, the sexual urges of a timid, unattractive man, and the pathological relationship between Adolphe and his obese mistress. The depths of the story ripple out far beyond the 26 pages. But at the same time I’ll include a few warnings for any potential readers: at one point, Adolphe attempts to serve a pert 12-year-old girl in the shop. In the hands of another author, Adolphe would be the sexual predator, but in this case, the 12 year old makes mincemeat of a drooling Adolphe. Other scenes hint as the repulsiveness of sex between Adolphe and Madame C, but I’ll emphasize hint. I found myself unfolding these scenes but then I folded them back up again–I didn’t want these images of “the ogre’s vagina,” placed by the author in my head any longer than necessary. And finally, animals do not fare well in this tale.
My edition includes an introduction and a bio of the author who apparently only wrote a handful of novels. Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944-1993) also owned a bookshop (which failed) and I immediately felt a connection with him for stocking the shelves with “classic crime fiction.”
Overall, I loved this transgressive story for its bleak, black, subversive humour and rather nasty outlook on one pathetic, twisted man’s life. Plus, Martinet could write. Here’s Adolphe chatting up a young widow:
I could have talked forever, the young woman didn’t know how to get rid of me, my tongue swelled in my mouth, it swelled enough to choke me, and my boss was obliged to chase me off into the back room, giving me little kicks, like I was some poodle that has had an accident in the living room. - swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/the-high-life-jean-pierre-martinet/
Ah, a new literary hero in the making - for me! The late Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944-1993) had written a perfect little gem of a book called "The High Life." It is a about a man who works at a cemetery who has an over-weight woman with a certain sexual passion for him. And by the description of it, the romance doesn't sound so hot. But its the main character's inner-life that is fascinating. His obsession of taking care of his father's grave, which by including having his rifle aimed towards the grave site to keep away cats, etc.
The translator Henry Vale compares Martinet as a mixture of Céline and Jim Thompson - and that is actually quite right. This is a very intense short story that doesn't waste one word. And special nod must go to the great Wakefield Press for not only putting this book out - but the design of it is top-notch. A beautiful object of a book about a rather indecent man. Perfect combination! - Tosh Berman
“Dear Lorin,” the note read, “I saw this book and thought you might like it, even though it is full of despair.” The book in question is Jean-Pierre Martinet’s 1979 mini-novella The High Life, newly translated by Henry Vale. The narrator, Adolphe Marlaud, is a midget who lives next to the Montparnasse cemetery. He works in a funerary shop, where he passes the time making advances (unwanted) toward the grieving female customers; evenings he spends in the arms of his concierge, an older (and much bigger) woman whom he calls Madame C. Then one night Madame C suggests that they see a pornographic movie, and the drama begins—except, as Marlaud observes, “There’s no drama with us, messieurs, nor tragedy: there is only burlesque and obscenity.” Many thanks to Matt Bucher, administrator of the David Foster Wallace listserv wallace-l, for turning me on to The High Life (even though it is full of despair). —Lorin Stein www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/05/31/what-were-loving-illuminations-and-despair/#more-53592
excerpt:
I spent the whole afternoon thinking over my horrible situation. My dull life, my poor life sleeping under a mossy stone, was now turned upside down, at one go, Madame C. wouldn't give up her prey now. The little blue cat would no longer have the right to go play anywhere else but her place. I shouldn't have let myself get cornered so easily, of course, but how could a little runt, a four-and-a-half-feet tall (in heels) runt barely weighing eighty-five pounds resist a mass of over two hundred pounds swooping down on him with the suddenness of a ground swell? It's like how a crab can sleep peacefully in a rock crevice, and then the fisherman drives it out and sentences it to mill about among its peers before being boiled alive. Leave rue Froidevaux? It was out of the question. I could never live anywhere else. Yet I hated that street; but I walked along it as if within myself. It was the joyless street. It was my prison, walled in on the right by the horrible place Denfert-Rochereau, the ugliest square in Paris, with its stupid greenish lion squatting for all eternity. Unless I was going to the movies, I never went beyond square Georges-Lamarque and the statue of Ludovic Trarieux (1840-1904). To the left, avenue du Maine, its racket, its flashy vulgarity, and, all the way at the end, that Tour Montparnasse, whose ugliness chilled my heart every morning, and which I often imagined in flames, at night, before falling asleep. Facing it, the cemetery, that cemetery Strindberg had so loved. I had my routines on that street. Every morning, around ten o'clock, I would pace up and down, in both directions, rue Emile-Richard, which divided the cemetery in two. I called it boulevard Ossements, in homage to Leo Malet. I tended my father's grave with the utmost care. The flowers were replaced regularly. I wouldn't tolerate any animal coming to walk within this sacred area. Especially cats. They should not allow cats in cemeteries. I had bought a marine telescope to watch the beloved grave from my place. My plan was to acquire a rifle with telescopic sight before long, the latest model, equipped with a silencer, to shoot down any animal that might come along and soil the grave of Rene Marlaud (1902-1953). To that end, I put aside a considerable portion of my salary every month. I wouldn't have any problem getting a gun license, thanks to a friend of my father who became my guardian after his death. Rene Marlaud (1902-1953) deserved nothing less. He'd been a model state servant. It was from him that I'd gotten this almost pathological taste for a job well done. He had taken part in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, in 1942. A police officer highly rated by his superiors, he had taught me what it was to be a man with a sense of duty. I was nine when he died, in 1953. Some years later, they gave me to understand that he'd killed himself, but it was never proven.
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