Very occasionally the most interesting and surprising memoirs are not about famous writers, composers or painters but rather about people who moved in their circles. Les Plaisirs et les Jours de Jacques Guérin, an evocation of the industrialist (he was the president of the very successful perfumery Maison d’Orsay) and avid book collector Jacques Guérin by Carlo Jansiti is precisely such a book and is an unexpected delight.
Italian-born Jansiti, who was writing a biography of the novelist Violette Leduc, first met Guérin, a close friend of Leduc’s, in 1986, when Guérin was in his mid-80s, and continued to visit and stay with him regularly on his property in Luzarches (30 kilometers north of Paris) until the older man’s death at the age of 98 in 2000.
No clue is given as to why it has taken over a quarter of a century since Guérin died for this book to be published – it is clear from the verbatim conversations Jansiti recounts that he was already intending to write it when the two met in the final years of the 20th century.
While much of the fascination of this biography/memoir revolves around the extraordinary array of people Guérin knew, with the span of his life covering the whole of the 20th century, his own story is poignant: for all the material wealth that his family enjoyed, his early life was marked by emotional neglect. He and his brother Jean (who later became a painter) were born out of wedlock, and their father, the rich shoe magnate Gaston Monteux, who was already married with a family of his own, refused to recognize them as his children.
Their mother, Jeanne Marie Louise Guérin, was always a distant figure, showing more affection for stray cats than her own sons. She preferred to live a glamorous life in Parisian social circles, leaving her children to be brought up by governesses. Early on, Jansiti wryly observes that throughout his life Guérin continued to love his mother far more than she ever loved him. This sense of rejection led him to empathize with writers who themselves had been abandoned by one or both parents, such as Leduc (famously author of the autobiographical La Bâtarde) and Jean Genet. His friendship for both Leduc (who maintained a hopeless passion for him) and Genet, whose early manuscripts he had bought to help sustain the impoverished writer in the early years of his career, came to sudden ends. Jansiti’s knowledge of Guérin’s character leads him to acknowledge that the blame for these breakups lay probably in each case with both parties.
Both Jacques Guérin and his brother Jean were gay. Jean, who was introduced to the dubious pleasures of opium by Jean Cocteau, never quite escaped his addictions. He moved with his American partner Walter Shaw to the United States and died in 1966. Jacques also had an American lover, the novelist Glenway Wescott, between 1928 and 1933, before meeting and living with the milliner Jean Boy in Luzarches until the latter’s death in 1980.
Jansiti charts Guérin’s many friendships with warmth and empathy, among them the interior designer Madeleine Castaing; Ninette Linder, who died in a seeming double suicide with her violently jealous husband Max Linder; Cocteau; and composer Erik Satie. The friendship that Guérin formed with the widow of Marcel Proust’s brother Robert is particularly touching, as she was neglected first by her husband and then by her daughter. Guérin stepped in to help her with her debts.
Guérin amassed a huge collection of books and manuscripts, and it is thanks to him that many first editions and manuscripts, including those by Proust, and indeed Proust’s bed (which eventually was accepted by the Carnavalet Museum), were saved for posterity.
For all the friendships that Jacques Guérin enjoyed, this wonderful memoir is perhaps the greatest tribute that he could receive, the mark of a kinship that enabled him to tell his story during the last years of his long life. The book ends with Carlo Jansiti describing how at Guérin’s funeral he managed to slip a bouquet of violets into his friend’s grave before he was buried beside Jean Boy, his partner of nearly 50 years.
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