Background
Marie-Claire was born in 1932 in Aubin, France. In childhood she was suffering from a bone disease and for quite a long time had to be immobilized. When the Second World War started her family was evacuated to Paris.
1997
1997
Marie-Claire with her husband Alain Bancquart
2 Rue de l'Éperon, 75006 Paris, France
In Paris, Marie-Claire studied at The Lycée Fénelon.
45 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Marie-Claire attended the École Normale Supérieure.
Marie-Claire was born in 1932 in Aubin, France. In childhood she was suffering from a bone disease and for quite a long time had to be immobilized. When the Second World War started her family was evacuated to Paris.
In Paris, Marie-Claire studied at The Lycée Fénelon. After that, she went to The École Normale Supérieure. The future poet graduated in 1952.
Marie-Claire Bancquart started writing poetry when she was about eighteen or twenty years old. Her first collection Mais appeared in 1969. Over the course of her life, she published over two dozen collections of poetry.
Énigmatiques (1995), one of the volumes of Bancquart’s poetry, “offers a long, loosely constituted suite of untitled and unrhymed free-verse poems,” observed Michael Bishop in World Literature Today. Bishop called the poems “at once speculative and combative, but beyond this even, it wills itself into a manner combining a giving of the world, its minima, its ordinariness.” Bishop concluded. Énigmatiques is “a line book from one of our fine poets.”
In addition to poetry, Marie-Claire wrote a number of novels, critical books, and essays. In her works she studied France, the surrealists, and other less experimental writers.
In 1979 Bancquart published Images Littéraires de Paris fin-de-siècle, which Eugen Weber in the Times Literary’ Supplement called “a fascinating essay about life in Paris, as lived by selected characters of some books about that city, running roughly from the mid-nineteenth century (Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education) to its end (Claudel’s La Ville).'' Weber observed that “Bancquart provides splendid social geography of Paris life,” but he felt that more information, such as details about servants, traffic, and sanitation, was needed. Weber praised the extensive research and thought put into the book, noting that this “must be a good book that raises so many questions in the reader’s mind. There is a lot of research in it and a lot of thought; and whether you agree with all of them or not, it is full of ideas.”
In 1992 Marie-Claire Bancquart together with Pierre Cahnè wrote Littérature française du XXe siècle. It's a history of French literature covering the years between 1884 and 1975. Anna Otten, reviewing the book in World Literature Today, called it an "outstanding reference book," noting that the authors used "brilliant judgment, clear diction, and unfailing willingness to explicate difficult models and theories for the reader." Littérature française du XXe siècle is organized into several subject areas, including naturalism, impressionists, symbolism, the image of French society at the beginning of the new century, women writers, and the New Novel. Under each topic, several French writers and their work are examined. Otten wrote that Bancquart and Cahnè successfully convey "the most essential characteristics of the work of the authors included," consequently, “the reader does not drown in information yet still has an excellent overview” of the twentieth-century French literature.
Besides, Marie-Claire had extensive interest and involvement with Anatole France, a French writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1921. She was the editor of a four-volume edition of France’s novels and short stories and edited several volumes of France’s works.
In a Times Literary Supplement article about several books published on the 150th anniversary of France’s birth, critic David Coward singled out two books edited by Bancquart, the fourth volume of France’s Oeuvres and her Anatole France. Coward noted that the fourth volume of France’s collected works is "meticulously edited by the indefatigable Marie-Claire Bancquart." In his review of Anatole France, Coward said: "Bancquart’s estimate of the man and his works is kept on a tight scholarly rein in the notes and notices to her stunningly erudite edition, but finds warmer expression in her excellent short guide which mixes comment with extracts from the works and reminds us that Camus, Giraudoux, and Queneau were among France’s admirers."
Additionally to her active and successful career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and critic Marie-Claire also taught literature at universities of Brest, Rouen, Créteil, Nanterre. In 1994 she became a professor emerita in french literature at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Nonetheless, Marie-Claire was grown up Protestant and after her parent's divorce, she was converted into Catholicism, from the age of thirteen she no longer believed in God. In one of her interviews she told: "When I speak of God, it is the monotheistic God, the Judeo-Christian God which we learn of in Europe and in the United States. I am totally non-believing. So the idea of monotheism seems very primitive to me because the idea that we worship a God who allows everything to happen, including illness and war, seems to me absolutely horrible. When I speak of God, it is in this spirit. But to me, the Christian religion is mythology, like any other, like Greek or Latin mythology, which appears quite often in my poems: I think about it for my writing, my work. As I don’t believe in God, as I don’t believe in the incarnation, I don’t speak of Christ. I speak of Jesus, who died, and is mythological."
Quotations:
"I think my poetry, and the poetry of many others, comes out of our hearts, the sounds we make, the physical movements of our writing. I am very attached to the idea that in our hearts we have things that are exposed, naked things that we cannot see."
" A poet cannot live in a paradise and have any relation to life; there is always illness, always problems, always, and perhaps some problems are not very serious, but what is serious is the violence which exists in death, which is very hard not to think about."
"...words are imperfect. They are also mortal: written texts, quite a few written texts, have disappeared, such as the Etruscan writings. Perhaps our present-day language will amount to the same thing, and our written words will eventually die, too. Therefore we must not create the illusion such as the one held at the end of the 19th century which was that written texts were immortal. Above all, they thought that texts were the way man achieved immortality. All we can hope is that our writing will last for some generations after us, but not forever."
Marie-Claire Bancquart was a self-aware woman. Her poetry is known for its visceral nature, often exploring the interior of the human body as a means of exploring emotion and humanity.
In 1955 Marie-Claire married French composer Alain Bancquart.