Romain Slocombe
Monsieur le Commandant is the story of a French Academician, belonging to the extreme right and a rabid anti-semite who, having fallen in love with his German daughter-in-law, a young actress, discovers that she comes from a Jewish family. The story takes place in the late thirties and then during the occupation of France by the Nazis ; the situation becomes a matter of life and death for the young woman, and a tragic dilemma for the old fascist writer, in the face of the contradiction between his belief in Maréchal Pétain with his policy of collaboration, and his forbidden love for his daughter-in-law, whom he tries to protect from the Gestapo, as she is a hidden Jewess who has chosen not to wear the yellow star.
Please tell us about the advice your publisher gave you before you wrote the book.
I was completely free. The only rule I had to follow, was that the book would be in the form of a letter, since this was the principle of the collection « Les affranchis ». Other authors writing for that collection were inclined to create letters to people they really felt connected to (a deceased elder sister, an unborn child, a father etc.), I’m practically the only one who decided to write proper fiction. The book was very well received by the editor and the publisher, who felt they had a really strong story there. And in France it became a best seller, with about 30, 000 copies sold of the original edition and now even more in paperback form. It has already been sold in several countries.
This was inspired by your mother's story, so can you tell us a little bit more about this.
My mother was British and married my father in France in August 1940 just after the fall of France. She chose to hide the fact from her husband’s parents, whom she was introduced to in 1938, that her own mother, born in Russia, was Jewish. Perhaps she feared anti-semitism, which was quite strong in France at the time. My parents fled to America, where my father enlisted in the US army and later took part in the invasion of Germany and liberation of Prague. Anyway, when I was young I had no idea that my Russian grandmother — who had spent the war in London under the Blitz and was married to the then famous journalist George Slocombe — was Jewish. This I discovered on my own, when I was over twenty years old. What inspired me to write the novel Monsieur le Commandant, is the idea that my father’s parents — whom I never met because they died towards the end of the war — might very well have guessed that their daughter-in-law was Jewish but never said anything about it. So I chose to look at the situation from the side of her French in-laws. How does it feel when one is perhaps more or less an anti-semite (I had found some of their private correspondence which led me to think so), and sees one’s son married to a Jewess ? And then, I had also vaguely heard about the true tragic story of a Frenchman who wrote a letter to the Gestapo to denounce his daughter-in-law, a young Jewish artist, and got her sent to Auschwitz from where she never returned.
How much research was required to capture the time in which the book was set?
I read dozens of books and magazines of the period (which I had collected long ago for reference, as I used to work as an illustrator). I found some real stories too on the Internet, private family stories about Jews being arrested by the French, particularly by the « anti-Jews brigade » of the political police. The magazines gave me priceless information about life in Paris in the late thirties and during the German occupation : receptions given at embassies, the restaurant of the Ritz, the office of the prefect of Police, etc. The most difficult was to really get the political reasoning that stood behind the French collaborationists’ attitude during the war. How they could justify their choosing Hitler against the English. I also found lots of anti-Jewish articles, which I used in my book without changing a word. Another important thing was to respect the style of the period, particularly as the narrator is a French academician. So at the time when I was writing the book I read only French novels of that period - by François Mauriac, Pierre Benoit, Jean de la Varende, and so on. Writers who were close to Paul-Jean Husson politically. I also read a book of interviews of Paul Claudel, who was a Catholic mystic, like my character Husson. All this was with the aim of getting the right feeling. I also found some gruesome information about the tortures and assassinations performed by Pétain’s Militia, by corrupt members of the police within the gang of the « French Gestapo », which I used in a very violent scene towards the end of the book.
How can people who are not that familiar with this period in history enjoy this book?
I tried to be as clear as I could about the historical succession of events, so that even the reader who doesn’t know much about French history, can understand it all the same. And it is more of a personal, family drama anyway, so I believe it can touch all sorts of people. In France it appealed to a very wide audience, regardless of age. And the « message » of the book, if there is any, is something that every one can understand. It is the story of a man who destroys his own family because he is the victim of an ideology filled with hate and prejudice.
You started out as an illustrator of graphic novels so at what point did you turn to writing?
I wrote my first novel in 1983, called « Phuong-Dinh Express », a sort of punk graphic novel which I illustrated myself and which was published by Les Humanoïdes Associés, a comic book publisher who also did fiction. They published Hubert Selby Jr, and Eric Ambler… At the time I used to do a lot of illustration, book covers, advertising, etc., and had no idea that one day I’d really turn into a writer. I did a few little novels for the young, and then I wrote a novel for the « Série Noire » crime fiction collection at Gallimard. The story was set in Tokyo, where I used to travel often, and had quite a lot of success. From that time until now, I’ve been writing more than one novel per year.
You write for both the young and old, so do you have a preference?
I enjoy both, actually. It takes less time to do a little crime fiction book for the young, of course. I believe it is extremely important that the young should understand as soon as possible how much fun it can be to read a good story instead of sitting in front of a TV screen or some game on a computer… So I try to write really good, thrilling stories for them. But my main activity is writing for adults. I try to set a slightly more difficult goal for myself each time.
Who are your favourite reads?
There are so many… Les Liaisons dangereuses (Laclos). A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway). Dalva (Jim Harrisson). The Last Good Kiss (James Crumley). Rue des boutiques obscures (Patrick Modiano). Jules et Jim (Henri Pierre Roché). The Ministry of Fear (Greene). Witness (Whittaker Chambers). And Georges Simenon, Henry Miller, John Dos Passos, Ryû Murakami, Junichirô Tanizaki, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, John Fante, and dozens of others which I forget…
What is your writing process?
I do quite lot of research before and whilst writing. Once I’ve got the basic situation, the names of the main characters, the first sentence of the first paragraphs, and a bit of time in front of me, I begin writing the novel. Only 2 or 3 pages per day at the beginning. I work between noon and 5 or 6 PM, and skip lunch. I try to write every day on a regular basis, for two or three weeks, then I stop for a few weeks because I have other things to do and must go back to Paris (I write my novels in my country house in Normandy, and can’t write them anywhere else, the words wouldn’t come into my head). Towards the end, the book sort of writes itself ; I’m just the typist then, and I can write up to 15 pages per day. When the book is finished I have it read by the editor and wait for her, or his (but usually my editors are women), reaction. In general they just point out the bits that are too long. So I trim them — even if I liked them — because I know that when the editor found it too long the reader might get bored by that particular bit and the reader must never be bored. I’d say I respect about 95% of the editors’ suggestions. But that’s because I only work with good editors whom I can trust.
What is next for you?
My new novel « Première station avant l’abattoir » (First station before the slaughterhouse) has just come out at Editions du Seuil. It’s a sort of espionage story set in Genoa in 1922 at the time of the rise of Italian fascism. Ernest Hemingway, Benito Mussolini, and the master-spy and adventurer Sidney Reilly are among the main characters. I’m presently writing a new novel for Editions NiL / Robert Laffont, about a defector of the Russian secret service trying to escape from Stalin’s killers. It will come out in September 2014..