Savannah (French Literature) - Softcover

Rolin, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628973668 ISBN 13: 9781628973662

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021

Synopsis

Savannah is a starkly tender and intimate recollection by French writer and journalist Jean Rolin of his friendship with British Vogue photographer Kate Barry. Both humorous and insightful, it in many ways serves as the epitaph to her life, which ended in a fall from her fourth-floor apartment in France. Barry was a very close friend of Jean Rolin, and together the two of them made a trip to the United States to retrace the footsteps of Flannery O'Connor, a Southern writer for whom Kate was deeply impassioned. In 2014, after Barry's death, Jean Rolin wanted to revisit this trip and reconstruct the memory of their journey in her absence.

As he recreates his roadtrip over the course of this book, which ends, fittingly, in Savannah, Rolin evokes landscapes, characters, and a uniquely Southern atmosphere that underscores the relentless passage of time. Juxtaposed against the themes of loss and mortality, Jean Rolin evokes with light touches the figure of Kate. His incredible descriptive talent shines through in vivid descriptions of the South; he approaches his travel memoir with the accuracy of a documentary and the vibrant writing of a poet, and his memories of Kate are preserved beneath the motif of sucking the marrow out of life and keeping death at bay.

About this title

About the Author

Jean Rolin, born in 1949 in Boulogne-Billancourt, is a writer and journalist. His novel The Explosion of the Radiator Hose was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011. He was awarded the French Language Prize in 2013.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Even before the plane took off, Kate had already begun filming the safety instructions for the seat belts, oxygen masks, and emergency exits as they were appearing on the screens attached to the back of the seats. Aside from this peculiarity, the other passengers were equally as interested in knowing the protocol in case the plane had to land on its belly in the ocean, despite the fact that everyone, just like herself, had seen it a countless number of times without ever really stopping to look at the images on the screen.

She’d done the same thing before, during a stay in Morocco with a miniature camera, compulsively filming not what was happening around her, but instead, down around her feet, making images of floors and shoes (in particular her own) omnipresent in these short, two-or three-minute film sequences. This was her modus operandi, except when filming in a car in which case she’d film all around her. Sometimes, when we’d walk together, she’d get out her camera to film the decor and even some of the characters around us, yet rarely focusing on their faces. Even when she spoke to someone―me for example―she’d normally film their feet or legs. It seems that the only notable exception to this rule―at least in the sequences filmed in Georgia (apart from a series of interviews carried out on the bank of River Street in Savannah for some sort of fundraiser)―was when Kate would film her own reflection, or both of our reflections together, in the rearview mirror, in the window of a museum, or, her favorite, in a puddle, the surface of which is sometimes crowned with the reflection of a palm or the foliage of some other tree.

Now, concerning the involvement of Flannery O’Connor, even those who haven’t read her work are quite certain that when she was five years old, she already had in her possession a bantam hen that exhibited the unique ability to walk backward. This claim is undeniable: its existence is attested to by a short film made at the time by Pathé News, which anyone can now access via the internet by typing the keywords “Bantam/Flannery O’Connor,” preferably in that order. The film is generally associated with a text published in 1961 by Flannery in the magazine Holiday; a text in which she revisits the episode of the reversing hen and its filming by Pathé News, before going into her predilection, equally reflected in her letters, for various species of poultry, especially peacocks. To what extent did this story of the hen and the raising of peacocks influence Kate’s keen interest in the person and work of Flannery O’Connor?

I don’t have an answer to this question, no more now than I did at the time of her death. Even though I’ve reread all of Flannery O’Connor’s books since then (in particular, the volume of her correspondences, the pages of which Kate had dog-eared and numerous passages of which she had underlined in pencil), I haven’t been able to figure out exactly why she was so taken with this author to the point of considering making a film about her, dragging me into her travels to Savannah in 2007 where Flannery was born, and then from there to Milledgeville in middle-of-nowhere Georgia where she’d lived most of her brief life and composed almost the entirety of her work.

I do remember that at the time Kate and I met―and therefore well before she discovered the stories of peacocks and farmyards in The Habit of Being―animated with the recent and unfailing enthusiasm that I was feeling for Flannery O’Connor, I read the short story entitled “The Lame Shall Enter First” taken from the collection Everything That Rises Must Converge to her. Out of all of her works, it seems to me to be one of the most beautiful, and also one of the darkest and most despairing. It’s a work that leads its atheist and agnostic readers―her bewilderment for whom inspired exceeding sarcasm in her letters―to ponder the true nature of one’s faith, or the reflection of such in her work: this faith, so ardent, that she always claimed openly and passionately for herself as a Catholic writer, one of strict obedience in total accord with all the dogmas of the Roman Church (her love of peacocks was, in part, due to the fact that the eyes of their feathers when fanned out evoked in her the innumerable eyes of the Church).

I recently read the following from Guy Goffette in his preface to The Complete Works of Flannery O’Connor, published in his collection Quarto: “As a fervent Catholic, she never compromised with the devil, an act which leads the world to its ruin.” Now, all things considered, even if Kate herself was far from being a fervent Catholic, it was, nonetheless, perhaps in this intransigence that we must look for the origin of the brotherly (or sisterly) sentiment that Flannery inspired in her.

There were thirteen sequences filmed by Kate during the Paris-Atlanta flight. Strung together, they last a little over twenty minutes. Sometimes, the clips show the sky and the wing of the plane, at other times, the chair neighboring Kate’s in which a little girl is asleep, and more frequently, the monitor screen where the flight trajectory is displayed on a map marked by a few names: Terre-Neuve, Halifax, Grand Manan Island, Great Egg Harbor, Atlantic City, Savannah River, Lake Sinclair, Augusta. During a brief conversation with me, Kate asks what we are going to do in Savannah. Out of unwillingness―and for a bit of fun―I list off different objectives of this trip, all of which I knew full well were not the same as her’s . . . “See the ocean, watch the birds, observe the comings and goings at the harbor,” before resolving myself to stutter out a sentence, nearly imperceptible, in which Flannery’s name could be heard. Kate’s tablet displays a copy of Libération dated August 26, 2007, with the headline, “Don’t Mess with Cécilia.” Kate perused it and stopped on a page in the middle to scan through an article, which by happenstance, was devoted to an event that happened in Milledgeville―the little town of Georgia where the O’Connor family farm is located. The article was about a barber who may have murdered someone, unless he was the victim of a murder―I can’t remember anymore. At that very moment, according to the map, the plane was flying over Great Egg Harbor. Later, the screen displayed the names of Dublin, Athens, and Macon, evidence that the plane was getting ready to land in Atlanta. Kate, who was in the middle of reading an article entitled “Ramses II, Our Contemporary” in the Paris Match, asked me, “Why did Ramses II have red hair?”

“What do you think about that?” Kate was already aware that it was going to be “very, very hot” in Savannah― “Ninety-five degrees!”―and that we have to “enjoy the fresh air,” so abundant in the plane’s cabin. In the last sequence filmed during the flight, the little girl who was sitting in the seat next to her, now awake, shows pictures of her cat on her cellphone. Kate asks her its name and both of them laugh―Kate’s laughter is like a waterfall compared to the that of the little girl.

The filmed sequence shows Kate’s feet, wearing her usual boots that she bought in England, walking on the ground of polychrome marble (or of a smooth and shiny material imitating polychrome marble) of what can only be the lobby of Atlanta’s airport. The flight for Savannah is announced with an important delay, apparently due to atmospheric disturbances.

Kate, exceptionally, films a close-up of my face. This sequence is disrupted by a loud signal tone repeated at regular intervals and coming closer until becoming deafening, the source of which remains invisible. Seven years later almost to the day, after getting off a Paris-Atlanta flight in transit towards Savannah, walking on the same ground of polychrome marble, and being welcomed by the same noise, I noticed that it was coming from an electric vehicle charged with the transport of baggage, or more likely, since it has seats, the transport of persons with limited mobility―like the obese, of which the South of the United States contains a vast proportion.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1628973668
• ISBN 13: 9781628973662
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80