FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT AND FRIENDS FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT AND FRIENDS MODERNISM, SEXUALITY, AND FILM ADAPTATION R O B E R T S T A M RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS new brunswick, new jersey, and london library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Stam, Robert, 1941– François Truffaut and friends : modernism, sexuality, and film adaptation / Robert Stam. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978–0–8135–3724–5 (alk. paper) isbn-13: 978–0–8135–3725–2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Truffaut, François—History and criticism. 2. Roché, Henri Pierre, 1879–1959. Jules et Jim. 3. Roché, Henri Pierre, 1879–1959. Deux Anglaises et le continent. 4. Jules et Jim (Motion picture) 5. Deux Anglaises et le continent (Motion picture) I. Title. PN1998.3.T78S74 2006 791.4302’33’092—dc22 2005011271 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2006 by Robert Stam All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. manufactured in the united states of america CONTENTS List of Illustrations vi Prelude vii 1. The Origins of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim 1 2. The New Wave and Adaptation 9 3. The Prototype for Jim: Henri-Pierre Roché 15 4. New York Interlude 21 5. The Don Juan Books 27 6. The Prototype for Jules: Franz Hessel and Flânerie 37 7. Hessel as Novelist 47 8. Hessel’s Parisian Romance 53 9. The Prototype for Catherine: Helen Grund Hessel 57 10. L’Amour Livresque 63 11. The Polyphonic Project 69 12. Jules and Jim: The Novel 75 13. From Novel to Film 81 14. Disarming the Spectator 91 15. Polyphonic Eroticism 113 16. Sexperimental Writing: The Diaries 117 17. Sexuality/Textuality 125 18. The Gendered Politics of Flânerie 133 19. Comparative Écriture 137 20. Two English Girls: The Novel 151 21. Two English Girls: The Film 177 22. The (Various) Men Who Loved (Various) Women 195 Postlude 209 Time Line 211 Notes 215 Index 229 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. François Truffaut and Jean Cocteau xv 2. Truffaut’s beloved Bazin 3 3. French prosody in The 400 Blows 7 4. Five-way portrait of Henri-Pierre Roché 16 5. Five-way portrait of Marcel Duchamp 24 6. Roché at the time of Don Juan 29 7. Truffaut filming The Woman Next Door 31 8. Two English Girls 35 9. Walter Benjamin 40 10. Helen and Franz Hessel 70 11. The etiquette of the encounter 77 12. Truffaut with Jeanne Moreau 83 13. The centrality of games in Jules and Jim 93 14. Catherine on the brink 104 15. The threesome at the beach 107 16. The face of disillusionment 111 17. Helen Hessel au naturel 141 18. Anne and Claude 171 19. Claude and Muriel 185 20. Love under the sign of mimesis 192 21. The wandering eye 197 22. The Man Who Loved Women 201 23. Genevieve in The Man Who Loved Women 206 PRELUDE I t is by now a well-known fact that Truffaut’s Jules and Jim—per- haps one of the most poignantly memorable films ever made—was an adaptation of a book by the French novelist Henri-Pierre Roché. The very mention of the film’s title conjures up indelible images of the famous love triangle of Catherine and Jules and Jim. The char- acters and events of the film, we now know, were based on a real-life ménage à trois, to wit, the romantic triangle, begun in the summer of 1920, that involved Roché himself (the model for “Jim”), along with the German-Jewish writer Franz Hessel (“Jules”) and his wife, the journal- ist Helen Grund (“Kathé” in the novel, “Catherine” in the film). Their lives, it turns out, were even more audaciously experimental than those depicted either in the novel or in the film. The story of the ménage is featured not only in the Roché novel and the Truffaut film but also in a larger transtextual diaspora that includes other novels and books by Roché and by Hessel, along with the intimate diaries of Roché and Helen Grund Hessel, published in 1990 and 1991, respectively. The dia- ries, together with these other materials, form part of a vast intertextual circuit. Each textual “stratum” offers still another layer of information relevant to the complex interplay of four distinct sensibilities, all mull- ing over the same nucleus of feelings and events. Although each text is on one level autonomous and self-contained, on another level each forms part of the transtext of this larger body of work. It is this larger transtext that forms the subject of François Truf- faut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation. The book addresses the multifaceted relation, at once personal and artistic, between François Truffaut and Henri-Pierre Roché and, through and beyond them, the work and lives of many others, especially Franz Hessel prelude and Helen Grund. Along with Jules and Jim I study another Roché novel adapted by Truffaut—Two English Girls—and The Man Who Loved Women in the much broader intertext of a proliferating and variegated spectrum of texts generated by the three principals, all of whom were prolific writers and all of whom wrote about the ménage itself. Although the book focuses primarily on the four figures already mentioned, it also touches on the people and movements to which they were connected. Thus the story of their lives and writings leads us to Franz Hessel’s friendship with Walter Benjamin, to Roché’s with Marcel Duchamp, and to Helen Grund’s with Charlotte Wolff. These corollary figures lead us still farther, to the various movements in which these artists and writers were enmeshed, to Old World flâne- rie and the arcades of Berlin and Paris, to “New York Dada,” and to the transnational worlds of bohemian sexuality—what has sometimes been called sexual modernism—in all these metropolises.¹ Our discussion of these texts and relationships takes place against the backdrop of the sexual politics of bohemia during no less than four moments and sites of artistic efflorescence: the turn-of-the-cen- tury Belle Époque (the period of Roché’s affair with the Hart sisters, which generated his novel Two English Girls and Roché’s first meet- ing with Hessel); the period of World War I and the exile art of “New York Dada”; the entre-deux-guerres period of the “historical avant- gardes,” an epoch of relative freedom and creativity in both France and Weimar Germany (the period of the ménage that generated Jules and Jim; and the postwar period of the French New Wave, existen- tialism, and the nascent international counterculture (the period of the Truffaut films). Since the three principals lived at the epicenters of various avant-gardes, located in some of the capitals of modernity (Paris, Berlin, Munich, and New York), I hope to illuminate in this study some of the lesser-known corners of artistic modernism. In terms of Paris, specifically, we find that each epoch had its bohemia and even its favored neighborhoods. In the time of La Belle Époque, the period of the events portrayed in Two English Girls, the Butte de Montmartre and the “Lapin Agile” were the center of a vibrant avant-garde, where Apollinaire, Picasso, and Braque reigned supreme. (All three, as it happens, were friends of the gregariously ubiquitous Roché.) In the 1920s the center of gravity shifted to Mont- viii prelude parnasse, and cafés like Le Dome, La Coupole, Le Select, La Rotonde, and La Closerie des Lilas, where figures like Sergei Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau dominated the scene, and where the members of the ménage first met. Montparnasse was home to Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Picasso, and Max Ernst, all friends, once again, of Roché. The French New Wave, finally, inherited the postwar bohemia of St. Germain des Prés, where figures like Juliette Gréco and Boris Vian, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court in cafés like Café de Flore, Deux Magots, and Brasserie Lipp. And although Truffaut was not in any way an official member of the 1960s counterculture, he indirectly helped shape its sensibility. In some ways a conservative figure, Truffaut was influenced, nevertheless, by the “historical avant-garde” of Jean Vigo and Luis Buñuel, and he knew and befriended Jean Cocteau, opposed the war in Algeria and the firing of film historian Henri Langlois from the post of director of the Cinémathèque Française, and protested the banning of the Maoist newspaper La Cause du peuple. And like the members of the counterculture, Truffaut preferred constructed, cre- ative families—like those ephemeral families summoned up by the filmmaking process—to biologically inherited nuclear families. Like Paris and Berlin, New York took on the status of an urban myth linked to modernist experimentalism. Andrea Barnet describes the atmosphere in Greenwich Village at the time of Roché’s sojourn during World War I: “In Greenwich Village, cradle to the avant-garde, the dream of a cultural revolution was ubiquitous. Creative dissent, whether expressed as artistic innovation or as liberating lifestyle, was the revolutionary cri de coeur; sparkling talk and racy innuendo were the fashion. Sexual relations between men and women were lusty and unbinding. In bars and crowded basement restaurants, literary salons and former stables turned into ateliers, the talk was of Freud, free love, feminism, homosexuality, modern art, birth control, personal fulfill- ment, and radical politics.”² New York in the period of Roché’s visit featured a cosmopolitan array of European and American modernists. The city became a tem- porary home to French-based figures like the composer Edgar Varèse, the originator of la musique concrète; to Francis and Gabrielle Picabia; and to poet/actor/boxer/womanizer Fabian Lloyd (a.k.a. Arthur Cravan, the putative nephew of Oscar Wilde), who had earlier been a part of ix