HALF-WAY THERE? NOT REALLY!
/We are all currently “sheltering in place” because of the Coronavirus. Yesterday I got sad news from France. One of the main contributors to my source material just lost his 94-year-old paternal grandmother to the virus. In reflecting on this, I realized that she was a contemporary of the characters in Duty of Memory. So few of that generation are left to tell the story. The realization hits me with an urgency to finish telling this story. So many times while writing a passage, I say out loud, “ I wish Daddy was here so he could answer my questions.” Since I began researching the novel almost three years ago, we have lost two of the eyewitnesses to his story that I met in 2017. Lost with them is the chance to hear the story from those who were actually there.
So many of the WW2 veterans, including my father, didn’t talk much about the war. As a result, there are many families who don’t know the personal stories.
The French experience during the war was unique. Because of the Armistice following the Battle of France it became a divided country. There was almost a civil war atmosphere with the division between the occupied zone of northern France and the Nazi collaborators of the Vichy Government to the south. In retrospect, it is easy to see the Vichy Government as the '“bad guys,” and perhaps they were.
But put yourself there, and ask yourself: what would you really do? Would you resist or collaborate?
Watch Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and then ask yourself the question again.
A clock strikes somewhere.
He starts, rouses himself. “What! can it be that late? Impossible, it must be fast!” Drawing a breath, George Jauneau raises his head and looks out the window. Seeing the darkness gathering, he quickly clears his workstation and hurries away, locking the door of the laboratory behind him.
As he rushes from the Weeks factory building, he meets no one; all the doors are shut and the stairs are deserted. This is not an unusual situation for George as he leaves work. Ever since the Parlement français had bowed to pressure from the workers and enacted a law limiting the work week to 40 hours, he is often the last to leave the building. The 33-year-old activist smirks at the irony. He had campaigned hard, alongside his father, in the Radical Socialist Party movement to get this enacted; nonetheless he enjoys his work as a chemical engineer, and he has no wife to hurry home to. But tonight, he has a soupçon of escape from his familiar solitude—a business meeting—communist business.
He walks out into the streets just as shop windows are beginning to glow. Picking his way to the bistro, preoccupied with many thoughts, he stops and stands motionless for a few moments, without being aware of it. The people who pass along the sidewalk, moving vaguely under the trees, are only shadows with muffled voices, silhouetted in the pale glow of streetlamp globes.
When he reaches the corner at the juncture of the sidewalk that leads to the door of the bistro, he stops again, “Ah, I wish I knew,” he whispers pensively. “I do wish I knew what she thinks of me.” He stands for more than a minute and with studied deliberation he critically views the reflection of his sharp features and high cheekbones in a café window.
He is fond of making fun of his own face, particularly his conspicuously aquiline nose, though, in truth, he seems proud of it, especially when he receives one of the frequent comparisons to the British actor, Basil Rathbone. “A regular Roman nose,” he would say, “I’ve the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period.” His prominent Adam’s apple would bob below his sharp chin, and his lips, as thin as two threads, would curl into an infrequent, crooked smile; that smile that seldom reaches his small, quick eyes, shining like two bright points. There is something suspicious, and ironical in those eyes; something which gives him an ominous and portentous appearance.
He passes a hand over his cheek and rubs the network of fine wrinkles around his eyes. “They make me look older than I am. Do I look as if I am her father?” He shrugs, picks an imaginary hair off his lapel and resumes his journey to the bistro.
The hammering of his heart builds as he pushes open the door, and after an instant's hesitation, enters the smoke-filled room, thick with the smell of perfume and perspiration. As expected, he finds it crowded with noisy customers laughing boisterously.
He turns sideways to work his way across the bare floors of the long, narrow room. Pushing through the crush, bumping into knots of people clustered here and there as he goes. He brushes past a group of students, a couple of smartly dressed women sipping glasses of wine, and a pair of low-voiced lovers whose coffee cups remain untouched on an iron-legged table topped with bare marble, yellowed with age and use. A sense of unreality wells inside. Years ago, it had been his habit to escape into the anonymity of a crowd such as this—souls with no real home life—living in the bistros, rendezvous with their friends to gossip and drink infinite bottles of wine. One can find these people in every bistro and café in every city. But he no longer looks for that kind of retreat.
Above the sound of the crowd he hears the voice of his friend, Jean Crouet, call his name. “Georges.” He waves. “Over here.”
Above is the opening of a chapter I wrote yesterday about a real-life character, Georges Jauneau. He was a communist. I grew up in a time when Americans feared nothing more than communist. But Georges Jauneau was a hero of the French Resistance. In fact, a lot of heroes of the French Resistance were communist. I grew up in a time when Americans viewed French Resistants as heroes.
Duty of Memory is a book about the real people behind the French experience of WW2. I hope I can do it justice.
This week, I reached a word count of 51K. My goal is to have a first draft of around 100K, with the goal of editing it down to around 90K. So my first draft is 50% finished. But most of the hard work comes during the editing process. With the first draft, I can pretty much write with abandon—let my characters go where they want. But in the edits, I have to, as Stephen King says, “kill my darlings.” No matter how much I might love a sentence, a paragraph or even a character, if it doesn’t work for the story, it has to go. Je suis triste.
