Paul Léautaud had informed journalist Robert Mallet that he would not respond to his invitation. That he should not be counted on to come to the party on the air and that he was in no way a scoundrel. And then, one morning in 1950, the air of nothing, the pillar of the Mercure de France shows up at the studios of the French Radio Broadcasting. Grated overcoat, fogged eyes and that old soft hat on which a pair of buttocks would not want to sit. He suddenly says he is ready to speak.
Read also: Paul Léautaud seen by André Billy: "The one who received his visitors from the Mercure on all fours"
"Before you arouse or rather resuscitate your most distant childhood, begins the interviewer, your almost misty childhood, I would like you to specify the origin of your family. (…) You are generally considered to be a Parisian, but your father was provincial, I believe? ” Léautaud does not take long to cheer up. He actually mentions his father, a failed actor who became a fan at the Comédie-Française, and his mother, "a woman named Fanny", who abandoned them eight days after his birth. A woman at the center of Le Petit Ami, an autobiographical novel that caused a sensation when she left in 1903 and for which we promised her the Goncourt ... But it was quickly bigger fish that passed through her pan.
Cane blows
Léautaud "still saw a few things in his life" before confining himself with his guenon Guenette and his cats in his pavilion at Fontenay-aux-Roses. He knew people, collected a few ideas, went through many circles. "Curious on the inside, always seeming to sleep but seeing and hearing everything", the writer has the gift of murderous projection. Flaubert? Very little for him - "I don't like the way his sentences sound." The poetry of Paul Valéry? "I'm not interested at all, it's manufacturing. I always say it, there is not, for me, in all the work of Valéry, only one verse which is worth that of Verlaine: "Hope shines like a sprig of straw in the stable". »
Léautaud punctuates sometimes his sentences with strokes of the cane on the floor, sometimes with an indescribable laugh, without epithet, a laugh which will almost alone make him famous.
Because the whole of France rushes to the transistor. "It is said that the streets are empty at the time of the interviews and that, from Charles de Gaulle to the students who crowd in the bars of the Latin Quarter, all listen with delight to this formidable little old man attacking the most illustrious glories of literature French ”, wrote the editor Édith Silve. We have never heard in the post such freedom of tone, such alertness of mind.
At the time, the rare writers who bowed to the radio exercise received the questions in advance and came to read their answers on the microphone. He prefers to rely on improvisation. Beneath its exterior of old dry fruit, it is resolutely modern, pushing far, far away provocation. To the point that an MRP deputy was publicly upset the following year: "We recently heard for weeks a critic, whose name I learned by listening to him on the radio, ranting, dealing with all the possible names his contemporaries and pretend to please only in the animal society. I do not think it essential that such reflections be produced on French radio broadcasting. ”
The Socialist Minister of Information replied shortly after: "I believe, and a very large correspondence confirms it, that it is to the credit of Radio broadcasting to have given Mr. Paul Léautaud a wider audience than that of the Mercure de France and that it is not useless that, emerging from a sometimes excessive conformism, voices like his can be heard. ”
These famous interviews, excessively unconventional, appeared in a box of ten CDs at Frémeaux & Associés, a few years ago. Here they are now available for free and in full on the France Culture website. Thirteen hours of listening. A makeover.
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