A Man of Parts

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 362, 31 May 1946, Page 23

A Man of Parts

who was known before the war for drawings with such subjects as frustrated people walking down lonely streets pursued by a little yellow devil is in the United States now, and we had a talk with him a few days ago at the Coffee House Club, New York, just before he started on a tour of the interior. He lectures as and is known as Vercors, a name he made famous by his writings during the German occupation of France -a peculiar case of a second artistic identity swallowing a fairly well-estab-lished first. Bruller, or Vercors (he has, or had, also a third name, since he lived through the occupation as Jean Desvignes), is a slight, bright-eyed man with delicate features and hands, dark hair, and a look of being about ten years younger than he really is. He was born on February 26, 1902, the centenary of Victor Hugo’s birthday, a detail he considers significant. He became the best-known unknown writer of France after publishing, in February, 1942, the fifteen-thousand-word novella Le Silence de la Mer, for which he used the Vercors signature for the first time. It was the first book to appear in France without the knowledge of the occupants, and most critics, in and out of France, considered it a remarkably good one. What Frightens Him Most Before Bruller was a painter, he was an electrical engineer. His lectures are not about the Resistance in France, which for him-is just something that happened, but about the danger of the »* BRULLER, a French artist

atomic bomb. A feature of the contems porary world that particularly frightens him is 'the progressive indifference of human beings to the concept of death. "When I was a boy in Paris," he told us, "my mother talked for years about the tragic end of two balloonists who had fallen into a city street. ‘She remembered all the details. It had happened before I was born, but when I was ten years old she was still talking about it, I will never forget it. And now what newspapers would give more than a couple of lines to such a small accident? We.are so inured to the terrible that the deaths of five million Jews in Poland hardly interest us. The danger of the bomb lies in this collapse of the overe burdened imagination." Bruller, who was just too young for the other war, performed his military service as a lieutenant in Tunisia in the early "twenties. Like most young intels lectuals of his time, he was a Pacifist and in pre-Nazi days favoured a Franco German rapprochement. He believes that there is no hope of such friendship now. After the 1940 armistice (he had, of course, been called back to the Army in 1939), he was so disgusted with the world that he felt he never wanted to draw again. So he hired out as a journeyman carpenter in a country town near the place where he was demobilised, which was in the Vercors region, He got drawn into the nascent Resists ance. First he passed messages and that sort of thing for the French branch of the British Intelligence Service. Then, in the fall of 1941, while on a visit to Paris, he met a friend who knew a patriotic editor who was planning a clandestine intellectual review. The friend asked Bruller for a manuscript, and Bruller started to write one. It turned out to be Le Silence de la Mer, By the time he had finished it, the editor had been arrested and executed. So Bruller, on top of his other troubles, suffered the torment of an author with — a manuscript and no way to utter it. He decided to get it printed and distributed as a book, and he actually did so. In fact, he founded a clandestine publishing house, Aux Editions de Minuit, which functioned throughout the occupation and printed forty-odd books, including a translation of John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. The secret of Bruller’s identity was so well kept during the occupation that even his wife didn’t know he was Vere cors. He got a lot of work done-an-other novella and a flock of short stories, articles, and poems, which were published, and about a third of a full-length novel. No publishers’ cocktail parties, no lectures, no literary controversies, nothing to distract him from his work except the Gestapo.