Robert Merle

Robert Merle: The Professor Who Wrote Everything

He finished a thirteen-volume novel cycle at the age of ninety-five. Before that he had won the Prix Goncourt with his first book, put himself inside the skull of the commandant of Auschwitz, invented talking dolphins for a Cold War satire that Hollywood filmed with George C. Scott, and translated *Gulliver's Travels* into French. *Le Monde* called Robert Merle "France's greatest popular novelist." *Le Figaro* noted, more revealingly, that he was one of the very few French writers to win both large sales and critical admiration. He spent sixty years refusing to choose between them.

Tébessa

Merle was born on 28 August 1908 in Tébessa, in French Algeria. His father, Félix Merle, was an Arabic interpreter, killed in 1916 at the Dardanelles. Mother and son moved to Paris, where the boy passed through a succession of lycées and then the Sorbonne. He became a professor of English literature, teaching at several universities before the war, and remained a scholar all his life: his biography of Oscar Wilde appeared in 1948 and was enlarged in 1955, and he produced translations, including Swift's *Gulliver's Travels*.

The academic career explains a great deal about the novelist. Merle came to fiction late, at forty-one, with a philologist's ear and a researcher's habits already fully formed.

Zuydcoote

In 1939 he was conscripted as an interpreter attached to the British Expeditionary Force, and in May 1940 he was on the beach at Zuydcoote, on the edge of the Dunkirk evacuation. He described it afterwards as "a blind and abominable lottery" — men who lived and men who died sorted by nothing at all. He was captured, held at Stalag VID in Dortmund, escaped, and was retaken at the Belgian customs post. He was repatriated in July 1943 and later received the Croix du Combattant.

*Week-end à Zuydcoote*, published in 1949, was his first novel and an immediate sensation. It won the Prix Goncourt. Fifteen years later Henri Verneuil filmed it with Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the picture was a substantial commercial success that raised both men's standing further. The book's power is its refusal of the heroic frame: Dunkirk from the sand, without the myth attached.

Inhabiting the Murderer

*La mort est mon métier* — Death Is My Trade — followed in 1952 and remains his most disturbing book. It is a first-person account by a figure closely modelled on Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz: a narration from inside the mind of an ordinary, dutiful, entirely unimaginative man who organised industrial murder because it was his job. Merle wrote it seven years after the war, before the vocabulary for discussing such a consciousness existed, and he wrote it without editorial intrusion, letting the narrator condemn himself by the flatness of his own voice. It is a technically hazardous strategy and a considerable feat of nerve.

Dolphins and the End of the World

Then he went in a different direction, and kept going. *L'Île* appeared in 1962 and was adapted as a miniseries in 1987. *Un animal doué de raison* (1967), inspired by John Lilly's research into dolphin cognition, is a Cold War satire about talking dolphins turned into instruments of state; Hollywood filmed it in 1973 as *The Day of the Dolphin* with George C. Scott. *Malevil* (1972), a post-apocalyptic novel about survivors in a fortified château, was filmed in 1981. *Madrapour* and *Le propre de l'homme* (1989, televised in 1996) followed.

He was politically engaged throughout. Merle sympathised with the French Communist Party until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended the affair; around 1965 he translated Che Guevara's diaries and wrote *Moncada: premier combat de Fidel Castro*. He was unimpressed by May 1968, remarking that the only thing of value to come out of it was the liberation of sexual relationships.

Fortune de France

At sixty-nine, an age when most novelists are consolidating, Merle began the work that made him a household name. *Fortune de France* appeared in 1977, conceived as a standalone novel; readers clamoured for more, and he kept going for twenty-six years, finishing the thirteenth volume in 2003 at ninety-five.

The cycle runs from 1547 to 1661, through the French wars of religion and into the reign of Louis XIV, narrated by a Protestant physician and occasional spy, Pierre de Siorac, for the first six volumes and then by his son Pierre-Emmanuel for the remaining seven. What sets it apart is the language. Merle, a genuine scholar of the subject, wrote in archaic French laced with the regional dialect of the Périgord, on the conviction that the atmosphere of an era cannot be conveyed without the quaint usages and local speech of the time. He also subordinated dramatic invention to historical accuracy, which put him, as he saw it, nearer to Flaubert than to Dumas — though critics called him the Alexandre Dumas of the twentieth century anyway. By 2014 the series had sold more than five million copies in France. Pushkin Press began issuing English translations in 2014, beginning with *The Brethren*, and published four volumes by 2018.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The quality is range founded on scholarship — an unusual combination, because range in a novelist is normally purchased by working shallow. Merle did the opposite. Each of his shifts of subject rests on real study: Lilly's cetacean research behind the dolphin novel, the documentary record of the camps behind *La mort est mon métier*, and, for *Fortune de France*, a command of sixteenth-century French and Périgourdin dialect deep enough that he composed thirteen volumes in it. That is a philologist's achievement carried out inside a popular novel, and it is why *Le Figaro* could observe that he was one of the very few French writers to hold both the mass audience and the critics. The *Wall Street Journal* praised his thorough research, depth of understanding and popular touch, and his particular gift for the texture of everyday life alongside high politics. Five million copies of one historical cycle in a single country is a hard number.

The counter-case is that Merle invented nothing formally. He was a superb executor of existing modes — the war novel, the speculative satire, the historical romance — not a writer who changed what fiction could do, and no serious critic places him among the century's French innovators. The middle-period science fiction has dated in ways the historical work has not; *Un animal doué de raison* now reads as a period piece about a period anxiety. And the very fluency that let him move between genres has been used against him, as evidence that he was a professional entertainer with a doctorate rather than an artist with a vision. The fair verdict is that his genius was of the craftsman's kind, exercised at an exceptional level of preparation and sustained over an implausibly long working life — the ninety-five-year-old finishing his thirteenth volume in sixteenth-century dialect is the case, made in one image.

Legacy

Merle married three times and had four sons and two daughters. He died of a heart attack on 27 March 2004 at Montfort-l'Amaury, aged ninety-five. In France the *Fortune de France* books remain steadily in print and steadily read; elsewhere he survives mostly through the films — *Weekend at Dunkirk*, *The Day of the Dolphin*, *Malevil* — which is a strange fate for a man whose deepest achievement was a matter of vocabulary. The English-language rediscovery that Pushkin Press began in 2014 stalled after four volumes. Nine remain untranslated, which means most of the anglophone world has still never met the writer *Le Monde* called France's greatest popular novelist.

Achievements

• Prix Goncourt — 1949