Books 3: Noveau Roman & Nouvelle Vague

A little pretentious perhaps, and a little misleading as some of the writers were English and American, but the French do love their labels and even the english authors were first published in France. I was never a great reader of the French 'New Writing' although Robbe-Grillet amd Marguerite Duras caught my attention at the end of the fifties, but this was mainly because of the influence they had on the cinema. Even before I became a serious collector I was again drawn to the movement because of the very specific publishing houses that made these works, and associated authors, available to British readers, and again the first publications came from France.

Although the genuine french nouveaux romans were first published in french for a french public, the exciting new english and american writers were also published in France by the legendary Obelisk and Odyssey Press. In the days before the internet, and with stultifying censorship laws, the only certain way to access the books was to take a trip to Paris and attempt to sneak them back home past the customs.I made my pilgrimage in 1963 and got a handful of titles, but by then it was largely redundant and mainly done as a rite of passage, as American and UK publishers were making them available despite the opposition of the Government.

In America it was the Grove Press that defied the censors, not always successfully, and in the UK it was the magnificent Calder publications that opened up a whole new world. The astonishing Calder catalogue gave us not only the original noveau roman titles in translation, but also the hitherto supressed or ignored British and American writers that emerged in that heady post war period. 

Although as I've indicated elsewhere on this site we had our own movement in literature, theatre and cinema, the  more esoteric french led movement in those fields was equally vibrant, and by the sixties there was even some overlap in the cinema with directors like Peter Brook and Tony Richardson becoming involved, and the great Jeanne Moreau  seemingly ever present. The classic new wave French cinema of the late fifties and sixties was not really inspired by the new writing, but ran parallel to it with some directors like Godard combining both, although he explicitly distinguished Nouvelle Vague from other movements. 

As another example of labelling shorthand, the leading new wave directors - Chabrol, Trauffaut and Godard -  were often referred to as the  'Right Bank' group, while the new- writing inspired film makers were known as the 'Left Bank'; this latter group was never in opposition, but simply reflected a slightly older generation that was based more in literature than cinema, whereas the nouvelle vague auteurs were inspired by cinema itself and were nurtured in the 'Cahiers Du Cinema' school of critical theory from the mid-fifties.

 Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Renais played a major role in the cinematic expression of the new writing, but ironically it was in Italy that it found perfect form as the great Antonioni moved on from a flirtation with neo-realism to produce a run of five masterpieces of 'Alienation' cinema that consolidated the fifties new writing and  new cinema, and defined the first half of the sixties.