Background
Born in Guéret, Creuse, Marcel Jouhandeau grew up in a world of women presided over by his grandmother.
Born in Guéret, Creuse, Marcel Jouhandeau grew up in a world of women presided over by his grandmother.
However, in 1908 he left for Paris where he studied first at the Lycée Henri-IV, and then at the Sorbonne where he began to write.
In 1912 he became a professor in a school at Passy. As a very young man, Marcel Jouhandeau discovered his homosexual feelings, which provoked great guilt as offensive to God. Still, his feelings of shame did not prevent him from engaging in numerous homosexual acts and his whole life alternated between a celebration of the male body and mortification of sexuality.
In 1914, during a mystical crisis, he burned his manuscripts and attempted suicide.
Once the crisis had passed, he turned again to writing and created the village chronicles which brought him his first literary successes. During World War I, he was initially a secretary in his hometown of Guéretired
In 1924 he published Pincegrain, a barely disguised chronicle of the inhabitants of Guéret, which shocked the people of the town. His voyages became an opportunity for him to give himself over to his love of men, as he recounted in the Amateur d"imprudences.
She hoped to rid him of his homosexual leanings.
Following the death of Élise in 1971, Jouhandeau finished his last days in Rueil-Malmaison with Marc. Jouhandeau has been described as antisemitic. He wrote an anti-Jewish lampoon, Le Péril Juif, in 1938.