Helene - Tapa dura

In 1921, when he would have been thirty-three, Jouve met Blanche Reverchon, nine years older than he and a doctor and practicing psychiatrist. They married in 1925; that year he rejected as unsatisfactory, as not worth preserving everything he had published until then: about twenty different works, the effort of about twenty years. His relationship with Blanche Reverchon, which continued until her death in 1974, transformed his life, his inner life above all. From his position of a Christian mystic he came round to beholding that inner life as grounded in the Freudian unconscious, where the essential drama is the conflict between Eros and Thanatos.
In that same year, 1925, began to appear the prose writings informed and animated by his new vision. Four novels and a final volume of shorter fiction, extending from Paulina 1880 to La Scene capitale (1935), make up Jouve's narrative oeuvre.
The novella published here under the title Helene (and which was originally titled Dans les annees profondes) is the conclusion and, it is generally agreed, the high point of Jouve's achievement as a writer of fiction. Helene is the story of the passion of a sixteen-year-old boy for an older woman. Their adventure, unfolding within an atmosphere of myth, culminates in Helene's death in her young lover's arms at the climax of the sexual act. Never, as David Gascoyne observed, did "the theme of the interrelation between love and death that predominates throughout Jouve's writing [find] better expression than here."
Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976) has come to be regarded as one of the outstanding - and one of the most European-French writers of the century. Amongst us he has been largely neglected up until now: some of his poems have been made into English, notably by Gascoyne and by Keith Bosley, and published here and there over the years; his wonderful Mozart's Don Juan has passed practically unnoticed; and of Jouve's fiction nothing has appeared in our country beyond the novel Paulina 1880, brought out in 1973 following the release of the film adaptation of the book.
The Marlboro Press plans in 1994 and 1995 to publish translations of Jouve's full-length novels: Le Monde desert, Hecate and Vagadu, and to reissue Paulina 1880.