My Friend, Jean Malaquais: Difference between revisions

{{hatnote|Preface to ''The Joker'' by Jean Malaquais.<ref>From {{cite book |last=Malaquais |first=Jean |date=1974 |title=The Joker |url= |location=New York |publisher=Doubleday |page= |isbn= |author-link= }} Reprinted by Project Mailer with permission of the estate of Norman Mailer. ([[74.14]]). The notes that follow are Mailer's.</ref>}}

[[File:Malaquais.jpeg|thumb|Jean Malaquais]]

I did not like this book twenty years ago, and thought it disappointing. Since I had learned as much about writing from the author as from anyone alive, large demands were put upon the manuscript. Jean Malaquais was not only my good friend, perhaps even my best friend, but my mentor, more — he had had more influence upon my mind than anyone I ever knew from the time we had gotten well acquainted while he was translating ''The Naked and the Dead'' into French. Part of the friendship rested on his candor. He is hardly rich now, and he was poor then, as only a French intellectual who teaches an evening course at the New School can be bread-crust poor in New York, and he made no pretense — he was not in love with ''The Naked and the Dead''. No, he was doing the translation because he needed the work. It proved a munificent sum. The publisher was giving him $2,000, and in the course of the year, I added another $1,000 out of shame. I had never seen a man work so hard at a job for which he did not have respect. In the year it took him to make that translation, he must have worked eight hours a day, five or six days a week; he was a perfectionist and a French stylist, and hated my prose in that book with much detailed justice: he would draw vectors across the pages to show how sloppily I had repeated or worse, ''ideas'' — how he detested anything slovenly in literature! He had, after all, fashioned the style of his own French prose out of the hungriest inner disciplines. Like Conrad, he was Polish, and also began to learn the language in which he would write only after he was out of his adolescence. Conceive of such hungry disciplines when he was a young emigrant from Warsaw who worked in French mines and came to clarify the literature of his new tongue by spending fourteen hours a day in the Bibliothèque Nationale in order to keep warm — it was cold on the winter streets of Paris in the years of the Depression — yes, learned his French by reading and writing in that library with all his imagination, ambitions and privations going into it, and took a post-graduate course in the hierarchical elegance of the tongue by being secretary to Andre Gide for a period, indeed met his future employer by composing a furious letter on the spur of reading a casual piece the author had done for a literary review.<ref>I think it is worth printing Malaquais’ corrections (by way of a recent letter) to a few of my biographical facts. “The library was la bibliothèque Sainte-Genevieve, the only one in Paris that stayed open till 10 P.M. I’d remain there all day long (10–12 hours), often without a meal. At closing time I’d go to Les Halles where, with some luck, I’d be unloading crates of cackling poultry or frozen cabbage. Still, job or no job, I could always grab there an apple or a couple of carrots to keep the man alive.”</ref>