Literature

Born on February 4, 1900, Jacques Prévert would have been one hundred years old this year. Poet, scriptwriter for Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, a friend of Picasso and of Montand, he was one of the key figures of the post-war cultural scene in Paris. Yet while the lines that made him famous ("Bizarre, bizarre, you said bizarre", "You have beautiful eyes, you know") and his songs ("Dead leaves are picked up by the shovel, memories and regrets too"...) still linger in the memory of all Frenchmen and women, people have somewhat forgotten what sort of man Prévert was and the very particular place he occupies in French literature. The biography just published by Yves Courrière on the occasion of the poet’s centenary meets this need by bringing back to life, through a fascinating and well researched account, the man, his generation and his world.

Prévert’s world was that of working

class Paris and its Parisian street urchins. Product of a slightly Bohemian and anarchist fringe, all his life Prévert remained a "cross between a street urchin and a Montmartre kid", in spite of the firm friendships he made among the Parisian cultural elite. As Yves Courrière reminds us, his admission into fashionable coteries, be it the surrealists of the Rue du Château or the literary cabarets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was not a foregone conclusion. Long kept at a distance by the "gendelettres" (literary types) who deemed his poetry "loathsome" because it appealed to the common people, Prévert entered literature by the back door and made his reputation only in 1946 with the phenomenal success of Paroles. "And this was an intellectual shock only rarely experienced previously," writes Courrière. "First and foremost in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where a youth, cowed by four years of Occupation, set out to express its thirst for freedom. Prévert, through his anarchism, responded to the aspirations of these young people. Here was a man full of rebellion, a man after their own heart, who respected nothing except the condition of the very poorest, of the most deprived and who, above all, spoke the language of the streets..."

Jacques Prévert, is, more than anything, a language - that is the main lesson of this biography. A language, a vigour, which made his poetry a success, but also the very many screenplays he wrote, and by which the popular subconscious still remains profoundly marked.

Jacques Prévert, by Yves Courrière, pub. Gallimard, Paris 2000.
718 pages, 25.15 Euros* (165 Francs).

* 1 Euro = 6.55957 Francs.