Raymond Radiguet

Raymond Radiguet (French: [ʁɛmɔ̃ ʁadiɡɛ]; 18 June 1903 – 12 December 1923) was a French novelist and poet. His two novels, noted for their explicit themes and unique style and tone, were praised by many of the greatest writers of the time. He died unexpectedly at the age of twenty.

Raymond Maurice Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur, Val-de-Marne, close to Paris, the eldest of the seven children of Maurice Radiguet (1866-1941), a successful caricaturist, and Marie Radiguet (née Tournier, 1884-1958), who taught at a boarding school. When asked for news of his mother, Raymond would reportedly say: "I don't know. I never see her face. It's always lowered, as she ties the shoes of one of my brothers or sisters." His father was a much more significant presence in his life, and Maurice Radiguet's mixture of permissiveness and near-rivalry with his eldest son heavily influenced the paternal dynamic in Le Diable au corps.

On his mother's side, his family hailed from Martinique; his maternal grandfather had died in a shipwreck off the coast of Havana. The French West Indies were a lifelong fascination for Raymond (see the character of Mahaut in Le Bal du comte d'Orgel), and it has been suggested that his mother's fear of water, stemming from her father's death, was at the origin of Radiguet's poetic preoccupation with the beach. Cocteau claimed that Marie Radiguet's extraction explained the temperament of her son, who "sleeps during the day, smokes and loves sugar."

Radiguet's earliest memory, as he recounted it later in Île de France, Île d'Amour, was of precocious sexuality: "I see myself, two years old, led by my nurse each morning to the girls' boarding school where my mother had graduated four years earlier. This gentle warmth of knees and breasts, I have never been able to recover it since, as I experienced it at the moment when I felt these caresses, so different from those of my mother or my nurse."

In the same work, he sets down two childhood memories of death. In one, also drawn on at the beginning of Le diable au corps, a neighbor's maid commits suicide by throwing herself from a rooftop. In the other, a moment of erotic fascination gives way to horror as, watching a young couple on a swing, he sees the woman fall and break her neck: "Image worthy of a Greek tragedy."

In 1917, he left the municipal school of Saint-Maur to attend the Lycée Charlemagne on a scholarship. There, he began neglecting his schoolwork in order to pursue his own interests in classic literature, and eventually dropped out in order to make a career in journalism. His father, concerned about his academic indifference, had him enrolled in classes in Latin and Greek, but Raymond was more interested in the grand siècle (La Princesse de Clèves was an especially formative text) so he neglected these as well.

Radiguet found his first literary connection in André Salmon, editor of L'Intransigeant, to whom he brought several caricatures signed "Rajky." Some of his biographers have concluded, from his poor grades in art and the crudeness of his surviving drawings, that these caricatures were his father's work. Salmon helped him find work at several newspapers; years later, recalling his impressions on first reading Radiguet's poetry, he wrote: "No question of a new Rimbaud. All the same, standing before one, a boy of fifteen already endowed with an indisputable poetic conscience..."

His first published poem, again under the pseudonym of "Raimon Rajky," was "Aiguilles des secondes," which appeared in the September 1918 edition of L'Instant; his first publication under his real name was "Ligne d'horizon," which appeared two months later, in Le Canard enchaîné; in December, he published a short story, "Tohu," in the avant-garde journal SIC. In February 1919, he met Max Jacob, with whom he became close at this time.