The novelist of "La Maison des Atlantes," elected to the Académie Française in 2001, died Wednesday at the age of 84. Jérôme Garcin profiled him in "Littérature vagabonde." We reprint it here.
Son of Antoinette Pietri, a saleswoman in a department store, and Pierre Rinaldi, a communist, resistance fighter and deportee, Ange-Marie, known as Angelo, was born in Bastia on June 17, 1940, on the threshold of a war during which the legendary maquis well deserved its figurative meaning and, dominating the dead, the glory attached to it. The author of "The Education of Forgetting" is the child of an island and of rebellion (has one ever existed without the other?). He has retained, from his geographical, political and social origins, a disposition towards sedentary lifestyle, a propensity for pankration, and the conviction that living by one's pen is a luxury always threatened by misunderstanding.
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Writer and critic Angelo Rinaldi has died at the age of 84. He was known for his memorable and unjust accusations.
His grandmother could neither read nor write. In the sylvo-pastoral, Italian-speaking Corsica of yesteryear, which had entered the French language late and with suspicion, culture was a superfluous splendor, science as improbable and distant as the Continent. In "this land of roughness and brambles where I grazed myself with every movement of body and soul," the Bastia high school student's only privilege was to be able to read without paying at the Costa bookstore and to frequent the municipal library where he drew from this gold mine: the legacy of Cardinal Fresch. "It was very poetic," he recalls, "to leaf through a copy of Machiavelli's 'The Prince,' which had been lying on a pope's nightstand. Thanks to Aretino's erotic sonnets, I made dazzling progress in Italian. In fact, I devoured everything that fell into my hands." » At fourteen, he chose as his vade mecum "The Tragic Feeling of Life" by Miguel de Unamuno, and discovered Paris in "The Human Comedy." At the age when his friends were packing their bags and dreaming of making their fortune on the other side of the Mediterranean, he was already certain that, while one should have no illusions about life, it is nevertheless advisable to have read everything before the age of twenty-five. Afterward, one revises.
Having fulfilled his contract as a reader, Angelo Rinaldi left in the early sixties for the Côte d'Azur where, as a form of university, he learned the whims and virtues of the typewriter in the offices of "Nice-Matin". All at once, he discovered that a run-over dog was not an accident but a column, that a bribe was the preferred alcohol of the notables, that the courthouse and the hospital emergency room were the greatest news factories, and that writing quickly and well an article on a subject of no interest for an audience that demands facts, not style, was the best initiation to journalism, that is to say, to writing.
Since he left it at the age of eighteen, Angelo Rinaldi has never returned to Corsica, except to his books and their outbuildings: the Café de l'Empire before closing, the back shop of the Dames de France, the Villa des Palmiers where Pliny's roses bloom, the gardens of the Italian consulate which smell of mimosa, and the scrubland where the shepherd Restitude guards the goats while holding back his tears.
"My favorite time is around two or three in the morning."
There, between sea and hills, the writer counts only tombs, the memory of a country "where the most intense moment of social life consists of hemming the sheets of a dead man", some remorse ("the only way, on earth, to keep the past in the present", he writes in"The days don't go by for long" ), and two distant aunts whom he talks to on the phone about his Parisian life - it's a way of prolonging the fever of the adolescent on the road who gives news to the parents who stayed at home, and lies a little to reassure them, and embroiders a little to reassure himself.
His Corsica is a memory that he does not waste, that he no longer refers to in his books except by calling it the island, to which he returns at the rhythm of long, hilly and winding sentences like the Nebbio countryside, thus offering the reader the opportunity to wander there in complete freedom and the novel to respect not the constraint of reality, but the rule of truth.
For a long time, Angelo Rinaldi maintained the illusion of being a prisoner of water in his apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. After that, he conceded a few principles to dry land. Today, he lives near the Place de la République and, tempering only the rigors of confinement with the pleasures of conversation specific to the capital, cultivates with manic care his dual nature, insular and celibate.
Paris is now his Corsica. "I was born, " he confessed to me one defiant day, " in the third arrondissement." There, true to his origins, he flees the sun, never takes vacations, refuses dinners in town, unplugs his phone every other day (no point trying your luck with the numbers dropped in "Les Dames de France": Odéon 61 24, or in "La Confession dans les collines": Bolivar 14 50, these are feints to eliminate bores), ignores the use of the radio, the use of television and believes that happiness, or what comes closest to it by default, is to remain cloistered in his apartment, among books and cats. He loves the latter for their delicate presence and, until death, which freezes them without having aged them, their immutable beauty. It is surprising that he forgot the dear felines in his epitaph, written with a chisel: "He stayed at home, and he worked. And he forgets nothing of what he did not experience."
Behind closed curtains, sitting upright on a chair that forbids abandonment, facing a 1900 inkwell that he does not use but caresses with his gaze, claiming that small abandonments lead to large ones and arguing that grammar must be respected, he writes in a tie. "I need, " he says , "to be dressed as if I were going out. I believe that our dress necessarily influences our work. I like the story of this English officer, stationed at the foot of the Himalayas, who wore a tuxedo to dine alone." He himself pushes the observance of etiquette to the point of ordering a taxi to go, after the offices closed, changing an adjective and striking out a semicolon in his column in "l'Express"; to the point of demanding an air-conditioned master car to accompany, in the middle of summer and behind tinted windows, a sick Persian to the vet. But it's by metro that he goes to his judo session every Friday. Indeed, no one among his enemies is unaware that the critic of "L'Express" is a black belt. He tightens it a little more every day, while his colleagues, ignoring the effects of complacency, are gaining weight.
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Writing has its protocol, reading, its ritual. When night falls, the writer enters into books (with a predilection for correspondence, autobiographies, intimate texts) and his memories. “My favorite time is around two or three in the morning. Then, every minute is stolen from sleep, and I feel like I’m breaking a taboo. I remember my mother shouting from the back of the apartment: “But when will you turn off the light?” I continue reading, sometimes until dawn, but there are no more voices to reprimand me.” One thinks of the character in “Confession” in the hills who douses himself with eau de Cologne before going to bed because, he thinks, one also meets people in dreams. Tie-tied at his desk, perfumed in bed: this man is considerate, he puts all the chances on his side.
By spending so much time, while Paris is asleep, with the great minds and great styles, Angelo Rinaldi has ended up establishing criteria by which the daytime critic judges the works of his contemporaries. He is said to be intractable, but he is rather overwhelmed. Convinced that literature is the taste of a minority and himself practicing a magnificent prose applied to the time of memory (it embraces its meanders, illuminates the details, prolongs the secrets) and on which vogues have no hold, the critic forgives nothing of his time. One day, we will read all of his literary chronicles as the glossary of linguistic tics, syntactic sloppiness, intellectual fashions, academic vanities, ideological impostures, calculated plagiarisms and gregarious counterfeits of our fin de siècle. With aplomb, the assassin swears that he does not want his victims, countless over fifteen years in the profession. His severity, which is only the social translation of clairvoyance, adds to his solitude. He regrets, like Marc in "Les jours ne s'en vont pas longtemps," that most of his contemporaries do not have "a talent equal to the affection that their human qualities inspire in us." He compares himself to the Zouave of the Pont de l'Alma, to whom, philosophical and patient, it sometimes happens, with winter, that a masterpiece wets his feet.
From not being loved, he derives no vanity, only a few material advantages: importunates do not bother him, prevaricators no longer seek to bamboozle him, invitations from society people and courtesy cocktails hardly clutter his daily mail, there is only room for a handful of friends, solid as bronze. In literature, the man laughs at strategies, and persists in believing that a text carries itself. He remains the anxious and penniless local who sent his first manuscript by post from Nice in 1968 to Maurice Nadeau, then director of "Lettres nouvelles", who accepted it enthusiastically. On the threshold of "La Loge du gouverneur", dropped like a letter on a doormat, this note from Svevo to Larbaud: "In the heart of a man, there is only room for one novel." He has always remained faithful to this epigraph.
Since then, Angelo Rinaldi has published eight other books. He doesn't want to hear the word "work" in connection with himself. He never talks about a book project: for him, eternity is a big word that doesn't go beyond the present moment. "I've always lived from day to day, and I also have a strong enough sense of the fragility of all things to spare myself at least this ridicule." With a paradoxical obstinacy, he uses the "I" to spare himself from having to talk about himself. For the islander, whose own life is indifferent, it is the best way to escape; and for the bachelor, the only way to invite his readers to come along for the journey. A journey of no return, which repeats itself endlessly: from the hometown to the dream city; from the island, where the most beautiful houses are tombs, to Paris, where the most welcoming are the least frequentable.
With the narrator, often an orphan, always young, a bit of a rogue and a bit awkward, we enter each time into the world of the margins, of endless nights where the poor wander, of shady cinemas, of howlers without an audience, of gay clubs, of hotels that are both boarding houses and slack. From novel to novel, Angelo Rinaldi signs unforgettable portraits of concierges (Mme Athalin in "Les Jardins du consulat", Maguy Thomson in "Les jours ne s'en vont pas longtemps"), of toilet attendants (Alice le Corguillié in "La Confession dans les collines"), and of brothel owners (Mme Casalda who officiates above the Empire, Mme Francavilla who reigns over Lardennois where she reads the future more in feces than in coffee grounds).
Rinaldi, or the art of attracting confidences
It is with these watchmen of the lower echelons of humanity that the narrator finds affection and, sometimes, a trace of the haunting memory of maternal love. And it is in the company of a few elegant and undignified old ladies that the provincial is initiated into the customs and traditions of the capital: Consuelo, who receives at Maxim's; Nina Salisachs, a Russian dowager who exercised her talents during the Occupation; the Berger, a blind actress, "a sibyl awaiting offerings in the gloom of the cave"; or Mariemaine de la Prazière, a penniless princess and former resistance fighter who welcomes the narrator into her manor house in Touraine - a region, incidentally, where the Balzacian Angelo Rinaldi has already located, among castles and vineyards, the place of his retreat.
It is, like all his journeys, imaginary. For it is in Paris, and in Paris only, that the islander feels free. A freedom he would never have known if he had remained in Corsica, described in "The Governor's Lodge" as a "rat trap" . If he allows himself - in pain and after having repeatedly rejected the idea of packing his suitcase - an annual weekend away from his apartment on Rue Meslay, it is to go to Rome where, in the working-class district of Trastevere, he hears a dialect that reminds him, from a distance, of that of Bastia. Back in Paris, the glass roof of the Gare de Lyon suddenly seems to him "as beautiful as Chartres Cathedral" . He then finds his cats, his dictionaries (from Littré to Dupiney de Vorepierre), and his dear neighbors, the streetwalkers of his neighborhood whose efforts at seduction and improbable income he says he shares: "To captivate the reader, the journalist has a quarter of an hour, no more and no less than the ladies of rue Blondel ."
In the metro, in the gym, on the terraces of the cafés where, as Aragon assured, "those who have no love" live, Angelo Rinaldi has no equal in attracting confidences: the humble, the disinherited, the desperate guess the wounded friend, sense the distant brother who has forgotten nothing. Perhaps they also suspect, behind the man in a hurry who abuses coffee and cigarettes but is not stingy with tenderness, the great writer who will become attached to them, and will transform their painful life into a romantic destiny. Rinaldi, who lives in a perpetual state of precariousness, is part of the family. Every month he buys "Macadam", the newspaper for the homeless, where he recently unearthed the detective novel of an author who, "despite having five plays and five prose works to his credit, is nonetheless on welfare." And he walks, his monthly magazine under his arm, to the cat cemetery, between Neuilly and Villepinte, where sleep, as well as in his books, those who made him so happy and never betrayed him.
