How to succeed
Anthony Lopez
Raymond Radiguet Margaret Crosland (Peter Owen £4.95) Radiguet is the romantic biographer's dream, the precocious poet who dies young. He wrote a best-selling novel, Le Diable au Corps, and died within a year of its publication. Add to that a reputation for bisexuality, and the society of Cocteau, Satie. Aragon, Apollinaire, Jacob, Breton, and it is obvious that he is 'hot stuff' in biographical terms. Margaret Crosland, thankfully, keeps a well considered detachment when dealing with the sensational. Though the points are made, she does not dwell too long upon similarities with Rimbaud, or on Radiguet's affair with Cocteau.
Le Diable au Corps is the story of a love affair between a schoolboy and a married woman whose husband is away at the front. Published soon after the First World War, it was seen by many as unpatriotic, and as a slight on the armed forces. Its hero was a corrupt youthful seducer; it could have been a textbook for idle truants. The novel was the subject of the first 'hard sell' publicity campaign in France. The publisher, Bernard Grasset. produced bookshop displays. posters, and advance notices. Crosland quotes him thus: 'I did not say, "I have found a great novelist . .." I simply said, "I have discovered a seventeen-year-old author." 'The book was a great success and soon became a classic, achieving both public appeal and high Critical acclaim. Radiguet became rich, chose to live in an expensive apartment and grew away from Cocteau.
Margaret Crosland also prints Radiguet's more unfamiliar work. There are a couple of poems, two short stories, two notebooks and a strange critical, introspective work called 'Rule of the Game', which seems by far the most interesting. Written before the novel. it is a study of the work Radiguet had read and an attempt to understand the achievements of his predecessors—how success affected them and how he himself should proceed with his ambitions.
The short stories are slight and the poems. preoccupied as they are with classical conceits and typographical extravagance, even slighter, clearly derivative. Radiguet seems to have set himself the task of reproducing the style of his elders consciously, as a discipline. He settled for a simple 'banal' style which is evident in the notebooks. By framing these fragments with the story of Radiguet's life, assessing the influences with reason and taste, Margaret Crosland provides an excellent introduction to Radiguet's work. The book is illustrated with a portrait and photographs, and includes a select bibliography.
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