The Man Who Lost Himself. Beaunier André

The Man Who Lost Himself

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INTRODUCTION

L’Homme qui a perdu son moi by André Beaunier, here translated as The Man Who Lost Himself, was originally published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1911. That translation of the titular phrase is a trifle oversimplified because English cannot quite reproduce the ambiguity of the French “L’Homme,” which can be construed as “the man” with reference to an individual or “Man” in the sense of humankind. The “a” in the title derives from the second significance, suggesting that the story of the particular individual whose “loss” of himself is described and analyzed can be seen as emblematic of the entire race having, in a sense, lost its “self.”

André Beaunier was born in Evreux in 1869 and educated at the Lycée Henri IV and the École Normale Supérieure. His literary ambitions took time to bear their first fruit, but eventually made him one of the most respected critics of literature and drama in Paris, working in the former capacity for the Revue des Deux Mondes and in the latter for the Écho de Paris. He was the literary critic most esteemed by Marcel Proust, who regularly sought his advice about his works in progress, and he was also a close friend of Paul Bourget—the dedicatee of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi—with whom he wrote a comedy drama in collaboration. After publishing his first novel, Les Dupont-Leterrier in 1900—a reaction to the Dreyfus affair—Beaunier maintained a prolific level of publication until his death in 1925, averaging more than two volumes a year. Although many of those volumes were collections or extensions of his journalistic work, he also produced numerous novels and extended biographies.

In general, Beaunier’s career trajectory seems to have been uncommonly untroubled; he was sufficiently well off while serving his long “apprenticeship” never to have to endure the financial hardships suffered by many would-be writers, and he was not only old enough to avoid conscription during the Great War of 1914-18 but had the rare privilege of being able to keep on working and publishing throughout the conflict. That lack of conspicuous misfortune and strife, as well as a hostility to political radicalism that was not unconnected with it, has undoubtedly contributed to the relative lack of attention paid by literary historians to his life and works, but it is doubtful that he would have considered his life to have been free of difficulty. His fiction strives hard to suggest—presumably sincerely—that he was by no means unfamiliar with suffering, albeit of a strictly cerebral variety, and that he had endured the torments that writers are supposed to undergo in order to fuel their inspiration.

Before his career got off the ground Beaunier had a strong interest in art criticism, and once planned to write an encyclopedic history of art, but eventually reduced his ambition to a more realistic scale, producing a theoretical work on L’Art de regarder les tableaux [The Art of Looking at Paintings] (1906), published in the same year as Souvenirs d’un peintre [A Painter’s Memoirs], based on the life of Georges Clairin. His sweeping general interest in esthetics also embraced music, and his principal claim to fame in the Parisian literary community at the outset of his career was that he was Isadora Duncan’s lover—or one of them, at least—during the interval she spent in Paris in 1900-02; a remarkable circumstance that the dancer felt obliged to explain in her autobiography, where she observed that although he was short, fat and bespectacled, she loved his intelligence.

Given that L’Homme qui a perdu son moi features a spectacular improvisatory dancer in a key symbolic role, it is probably worth noting that Beaunier almost certainly saw performances by the other two famous exponents of that art who were contemporary with Isadora Duncan, and were subsequently reckoned to be her great rivals: Loie Fuller, who had her own tent at the 1900 Paris Exposition and took Duncan away from Paris to tour with her in 1902; and Maud Allan, who was also resident in Paris in the early 1900s, and whose notorious “Vision of Salomé” he would undoubtedly have made the effort to see. (Isadora Duncan remarked that the only time she saw ever Beaunier in tears was when he heard news of the death of Oscar Wilde).

It might also be relevant to a reading of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi that approximately two years before he began writing it, in 1908, Beaunier had married another famously beautiful artiste, the opera singer Jeanne Raunay (1868-1942). She was the daughter of the historical painter Jules Richomme—Raunay was a stage name—and she promptly retired from performance following her marriage and was known thereafter as “Madame Beaunier.” After her husband’s death she took up writing herself, signing herself Jeanne André-Beaunier.

The direction that Beaunier’s career would eventually take was effectively fixed when he obtained his first notable success with his fourth book, La Poésie nouvelle [The New Poetry] (1902), a detailed study of the Symbolist school that was described by Stuart Merrill as the best book on that topic. Although he was only a little younger than many of the Symbolist poets who comprised the school between 1885 and 1900, by the time Beaunier began publishing prolifically himself the bandwagon had passed, and his name is usually associated with Symbolism as that of an observer rather than a practitioner. He was, however, strongly influenced by the school and applied its methods conscientiously in many of his novels, including and especially L’Homme qui a perdu son moi.

Symbolism was primarily a school of poetry, although its philosophy and techniques overflowed prodigally into short fiction via prose-poetry, but the ornate and highly-structured prose favored by the Symbolist method is difficult to accommodate to the novel, whose fundamental narrative technique is naturalistic; wholeheartedly Symbolist novels are scarce and often somewhat misshapen. Many of the leading figures in the field never attempted a novel, and those who did often produced bizarre patchworks like Gustave Kahn’s Le Conte de l’or et silence (1898; tr. as The Tale of Gold and Silence), but symbolism as a device rather than an overriding esthetic philosophy had always featured significantly in serious novels, including those of the most determined Naturalists, and although Symbolism and Naturalism were often regarded as rival Schools in the 1890s there was no real opposition between them. Paul Bourget had also been one of the prominent literary critics to analyze and praise the “poésie nouvelle,” and his novels routinely used symbolic devices, although he became the central figure of a new school of “Neo-Naturalism,” characterized by the intensity and supposed sophistication of its focus on the psychology of its protagonists. The first three chapters of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi have strong affinities with Bourget’s narrative method, and it is only in the concluding chapter IV—which begins, tellingly, with an interpolated fabular narrative—that Symbolist technique takes over, corresponding with a watershed in the protagonist’s descent into madness.

Beaunier’s previous novels had used similar strategies of hybridization, the fabular element being most pronounced in his fourth novel, Le Roi Tobol [King Tobol] (1905), in which the protagonist is commissioned to find the secret of happiness, and is forced by a series of exemplary adventures to conclude that both individual and collective human happiness are impossible of attainment, although parrots might be better situated because of the limitation of their desires. L’Homme qui a perdu son moi is, however, more ambitious than his previous works in its scope and, even more conspicuously, in its passion. Although the protagonist is ostensibly presented as a horrible warning rather than a shining example, only gradually repenting ideas that the narrative voice ostentatiously represents as abhorrent, every sympathy is claimed for him, and the novel has admitted autobiographical elements that confuse its supposed moral and give rise to serious doubts about the narrative voice’s reliability.

Even as an account of a particular individual who “loses” himself, the story of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi has intriguing paradoxicalities, but in vaguely attempting to make that story emblematic of a historical mis-step on the part of the human race (or, at least, its French lapsed Catholic component) the paradoxicality moves so close to manifest absurdity as to become an interesting specimen of psychological eccentricity. The means by which the novel’s protagonist contrives to drive himself to madness and despair is becoming a scientist, and thus forsaking the religious faith of his childhood, gradually retreating from all rewarding human contact into a cold and lonely condition of pure cerebration, from which return

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