Gustave Roud, Air of Solitude Followed by Requiem

Our lives are Swiss, — So still, so cool... Antonio Rodriguez According to the legend common since his death, Gustave Roud (1897-1976) was the reflection of the character who wanders through his lyrical prose, the transparent double of the “poet” described in his books. As a figure isolated in his Swiss village, in his “air of solitude,” he supposedly maintained ties only through correspondence, a few rare visits from friends, walking in the plains, and writing : “Come. No one is here. I am alone with the birds.” His poetry would thus have an autobiographical basis, almost documentary in relation to the “remote countrysides.” Little inclined to travel or to develop an imagination of the exotic, his poetry’s spiritual impact is rooted in the surrounding landscapes in order to flush out the “scattered features” of a profane Eden – following Novalis’ injunction, for henceforth “Paradise is dispersed throughout the earth.” The legend of Gustave Roud might therefore summon forth, in an entirely different context, the figure of Emily Dickinson, calling upon the ideal of a life of secular withdrawal from the world, entirely dedicated to poetry, by a discreet man inhabited by a fire as humble as it is sacred. Quite curiously and purely by coincidence, one of Emily Dickinson’s poems might indeed sum up the legend constructed around Gustave Roud: OUR lives are Swiss,— So still, so cool, Till, some odd afternoon, The Alps neglect their curtains, And we look farther on. Italy stands the other side, While, like a guard between, The solemn Alps, The siren Alps, Forever intervene! For him, it is not the Alps that intervene, but instead a “windowpane unbreakable and pure” which authorizes the fleeting glance elsewhere, yet without granting access to that imagined Italy: “How our hands resemble one another! How easy it is to speak to men, how little then do they ask to recognize you! For I am one of you, am I not?” (p. 152) Gustave Roud made all of French-speaking Switzerland dream poetically upon itself, the land that welcomed European Romanticism from Rousseau to Byron, from Lamartine to Shelley. His poetry could seem idyllic, sustained by an ethereal figure of constantly conflicted desires (more or less unspeakable, always displayed), and a moral, sacrificial figure inspired above all by Novalis and Hölderlin. The legend does not prove completely false, but it remains terribly biased and incomplete. It leaves us relating to his work and his trajectory in a much more lackluster way than the breadth and embodiment of his project allows. Since the year in Switzerland consecrated to his work in 2015, reading Gustave Roud has been altered by critical work led by the University of Lausannei, and these new readings, more open and more charged than before, can henceforth be undertaken in different languages. The English translation gives us the opportunity to discover his intoxicating and pure world in a new way, through our present concern for the careful translation by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds. Also, we must speak of the wild desire of his work, of its necessity before life, no longer simply hinting at it at the edge of conversation, hardly daring to call it a “difference” without recognizing in it a central theme and impetus of his esthetic. The whole work is built on difference and the search for affinity. Let us not reduce such a deviation to mere homoerotic orientations, for this “difference” is larger in scope: it concerns the family legacy, religious practice, political commitments. And this threshold provides the dynamics of a celebration of daily life through imagination, and of the will to link men together through rhythm. We are not reestablishing the legend, to the extend that Gustave Roud, in his life as in his work, inaugurates a gesture that is a great deal more embodied, more overflowing, more excessive especially, than the usual image would have it. He gazes fixedly at his Italy, an Italy of sharing and purity: “Yet one day I did discover that there was another purity, that of human innocence. / I was saved by a glance.” (p. XX) It is not the spirit, the idea or abstract beauty that sustain purity, but the human gaze, eyes that cross paths and understand one another. The lyrical scope of his writing leads him to deploy the embodied forms of an intense experience of reality: the flash of an instant allows for the rediscovery of an order in the world’s chaos. His poetry thinks, but not intellectually or abstractly ; it thinks outward from the changing imagination of its time: between self-destruction and reconstruction, between roots and movement, between spiritual progress and rural primitivism.” His work incorporates a reverie and an esthetic of tension, just as his life is made of numerous insurmountable paradoxes hardly containable in the image of the poet-recluse. A sensitive man, highly educated, this poet was hardly shut within his home, in the family domain, even if the city did not attract him; he remained a tireless walker, going out to meet others, sometimes playing on a certain distinction proper to the man of letters or the landowner, escaping from the farmer’s cycle, while nonetheless magnifying them esthetically. He whole body of work is built on the terrible divide between the attachment to the surrounding land and an esthetic detachment from rural custom, between a desire for masculine bodies and an art which articulates their parts, their limits, towards an indefinite space of exchange. Thus, the description of landscapes and farmers, who are the human extension of the landscape, offers up a quest for a “poetic place” in which the energies of the body and the spirit confront, combine, liberate one another. The landscape becomes body, while the body itself becomes landscape, like that “valley where I advanced among the invisible shoulder-blows of the wind.” (p. XX). In contact with the principal Swiss publishers, Gustave Roud became, after the war, an unavoidable figure for the young poets of French-speaking Switzerland, who came to him and climbed even to the village of Carrouge in the vaudois Jorat to 2 receive his recognition: this was the case for Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Chessex, Maurice Chappaz and the main poets of this part of Switzerland, which is a land of poetry. Amidst the countrysides of the Vaud, his literary esthetic magnified his passion for the bodies of peasants through a poetic prose as ardent as it is restrained, seeking a “human paradise,” influenced by Rimbaud, Claudel and the Greek ideal. It turned away from Lake Léman and the Alps above all, celebrated by the Swiss master of the period, C. F. Ramuz. As a writer-photographer, the protocol of his views, ample and controlled, unfolded across fifty years, with a surprising feel for experimental technique, and a European, if not world esthetic of the athlete (for him, the athlete of the fields), tied to, but also in contrast with his poetry more marked by a certain estheticism. The books translated here are those of the mature writer, which progressively turn away from desire to explore death more radically. They are written in poetic prose with a particularly rhythmic and supple syntax, thus following Mallarmé’s legacy as opposed to Surrealism or else the first minimalists. If Gustave Roud wrote some verse, it remains less intense than his prose. One must read this prose as the starting point of a body of work now in the process of being gathered together, work of great variety, as indicated, for example, by the monographic website devoted to him.ii His poetic prose has the density of a center, created layer by layer. Thus, the writing of Requiem, for instance, took several decades ; the author writes them, reworks them, sometimes publishes a part of them, assembles them, removes parts of them. Such a writing dynamic thrills critical adepts of manuscripts and editions, but it could quite simply impress the reader: these texts, so assured, so polished by time, are far from defined as totally stabilized prose works ; they remain in movement, in formation, in search of themselves and of the dream of an even more ideal poetry. Besides an extremely elaborate syntax, Gustave Roud likes to make the language ring out as he depicts sublime rural tableaux. We thus find a country totally transformed poetically, when everday activities become the gestures of a possible harmony with the world, always threatened by smallness, solitude, confinement: “Long ago I held the belief for many years that winter, in separating him from the world, restores man to himself.” (p. XX). In Requiem (1967), the countryside takes on a new substance in the search for the dead mother. Always, Gustave Roud’s prose have sought to reconcile opposites, to overcome that which was divided, to the extent that all distance becomes for him an irresistable call. The mother’s death led the author to constitute a poetic whole through time, across more than thirty years, not without the encouragement of his friends who saw him grow weak in the last years of his life, who saw him doubt his gestures more and more, but persevere in them. This dialogue with his mother is built also with what remains alive in him and in men, an intense search for harmony with that which should be in harmony, as well as a crossing of time between the moment and memory, between the ephemeral and the eternal: “Already (but this word outside of time just died) from the most faraway region of the chasm an echo struggles to answer, more fragile than a young sprout out of the loam of silence, in the light of eternity.” (p.

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