Marcel Arland was a French novelist, literary critic, and journalist. He was an intellectual and a literary leader during the 1920s - 1970s.
Background
Arland was born on July 5, 1899, in Varennes-sur-Amance in Haute-Marne, between Paris and the eastern border of France, to Victor and Noemie (Vincent) Arland.
His father died when he was three years old, and Arland and his older brother were brought up in a strict religious environment by their mother, with influences from both sets of grandparents. Arland was a solitary child and did not become close to his brother until his teen years. He withdrew to the woods surrounding his home and found his company in books.
Education
Arland received his baccalaureate from College of Diderot in 1918. During his years of study he read the French authors who would influence him, particularly Stendhal and Baudelaire.
In 1919, Arland moved to Paris. There he joined literary circles where he met such luminaries as Marcel Proust, Francois Mauriac, Jean Giraudoux, Roger Vitrac, and Blaise Cendrars. Arland took courses at the Sorbonne but halted his academic career after receiving a license-es-lettres. He plunged into the works of Nietzsche, Dostoevski, and Andre Gide, taking his first steps toward a literary career.
Arland became literary editor of L’Université de Paris in 1919. In 1920, he founded the review Aventure, which was linked to the Dada movement and whose purpose was to present the avant-garde during a time of artistic conformity. Three issues of Aventure were published when Arland and Andre Breton’s followers in the Dada group took differing positions. Arland then began a new publication, Des (“Dice”). In 1921, he met Andre Malraux, author of the widely acclaimed La condition humaine (“Man’s Fate”), published in 1933. The men became and remained friends until Malraux’s death in 1976. They shared a value of independence, both in their work and from literary groups.
Arland published his first article in 1924, titled “Sur un nouveau mal du siecle” (“On a New Malaise”). This was Chateaubriand’s term for the existential malaise of the post-French Revolution generation.
In 1925 Arland began a long association with La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF).
Following his marriage to Janine Beraud and the birth of his daughter in 1930, Arland left Paris to settle with his family in the countryside town of Port-Cros, where he began to concentrate on short story writing.
The draft brought Arland into World War II. He served as a sergeant in Langres, Nantes, and Algeria, and returned to occupied Paris in 1940.
Following the war, Arland concentrated on writing essays. He published Avec Pascal in 1946, and Marivaux in 1950. His Lettres de France, published in 1951, is a collection of articles he had contributed to La Gazette de Lausanne. He dedicated to his wife his examination of life, La Consolation du voyageur.
Arland’s friend and editor of Nouvelle Revue Française, Jean Paulhan, had refused to publish La Nouvelle Revue Française under German control during the occupation and had been replaced by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an appointment of the Vichy government. Arland met Drieu La Rochelle upon his return to Paris and made small contributions to the review but left because of Drieu La Rochelle’s right-wing politics and beliefs in Nazi doctrine.
The Nouvelle Revue Française failed under the leadership of Drieu La Rochelle and closed in 1943. It was revived in 1953 as Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, and Arland and Paulhan were offered a joint leadership role. The review reclaimed its original title in 1959. Following Paulhan’s death in 1968, Arland continued alone, and his last article as editor was published in 1977, the year in which he published his collection of memoirs, Avons-nous vécu? Arland brought experience and dedication to Nouvelle Revue Française.
Arland evaluated Drieu La Rochelle and other contemporary writers, including Radiguet, Bernanos, and Saint-Exupery, in his essay collection La grace d'écrire, published in 1955. The book followed the format of Arland’s Les Echanges, published in 1946, in which he examines writers, including Racine, Mme. de La Fayette, Fenelon, Choderlos de Laclos, Marivaux, and Benjamin Constant, their gifts, creative abilities, and motivations.
Arland was critical of the influences of Dadaism and surrealism on the literature of the years following World War I and hoped to direct young authors toward less conventional, more sincere writing.
Membership
Arland was a member of the Academie Française.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“Arland’s stories are imbued with a sense of loss and mortality, a nostalgia that is not so much sentimentality as a surrender of the desire to understand. Each story is marked with some incident, some motif, that cuts crisply through the fabric of emotional reminiscence.” - A Times Literary Supplement reviewer
“Arland began his career as a writer within the realm of revolt. Confronted with a Europe shaken by World War I, he wrote to contest static society and art. Constantly tom between order and anarchy, destmction and the desire for harmony, Arland’s literary work is both modern and classical. He preferred the form of the recit, which usually concentrates on few characters and only one or two problems, to that of the novel, more fully developed and complex. The recit was a better means of expressing inner conflicts and displaying his gift for psychological analysis.” - Ranwez
Connections
Arland married Janine Beraud in 1930. They had a daughter, Dominique.